‘When I heard the enemy’s … loitering munitions flying overhead, we had seven seconds to run or die.’[1] 
– Anonymous Armenian soldier, 2022

‘Seven seconds is a remarkably short time for a semi-autonomous weapon system to identify the target, verify a match with its targeting parameters, and strike.’[2] 
– John Antal, 2022

War is ‘both timeless and ever changing.’ [3]  
– United States Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1, Warfighting, 1997

7 Seconds to Die: A Military Analysis of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, September – November 2020, by Colonel John Antal, US Army (Retired), describes both the unchanging nature of war – violent, interactive, and fundamentally political – and the changing character of war – realised through evolving means, methods, and trends in combat, which dramatically upset the equilibrium, but not the violent nature, of war.[4]

The character of war, interacting with a ‘myriad of conditions,’ can and does change.[5] Through war’s character, ‘the means and methods we use [in war] evolve continuously.’[6] The character of war ‘varies just as the character of humans vary.’[7]

Antal served 30 years in the US Army, including commanding tank and combined arms combat units at platoon, company, battalion, and brigade level. Since retirement in 2003, Antal has published fourteen books and hundreds of articles on military history, military technology, and leadership.

Concentrating on Antal’s analysis of the changing character of war in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, this review draws two themes from 7 Seconds to Die:

1. Is the tank dead?
2. Combined arms tactics.

Importantly, 7 Seconds to Die enables military and security professionals to absorb lessons on the changing character of war ‘at low cost and without risk.’[8] Lessons on war, for our profession, are vital as explained by former United States Secretary of Defense and retired General James Mattis, USMC. In Mattis’ view, we must continuously educate ourselves as military and security professionals:

We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. “Winging it” and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession.[9]

As Antal warns, ‘every war has its unique elements and any system that generates advantage in one conflict can be countered in the next.’[10]

The nature and character of war

War’s timeless and unchanging nature is ‘violent, interactive, and fundamentally political’, defined as a brutal ‘struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other.’[11] As Clausewitz notes, the ‘political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose.’[12]

The distinction of war as a ‘political act mandates that the means of violence must be justified by the desired policy ends.’[13] Without ‘justification through policy, and thus strategy, war carried out is senseless violence and blatant disregard for human life and national resources.’[14]

War’s character ‘describes the changing way that war, as a phenomenon, manifests in the real world’, including the ‘tools we use to make our social interactions.’[15] As war is a ‘political act that takes place in and among societies, its specific character will be shaped by those politics and those societies.’[16] This means that the changing character of war: 

…may be gradual in some cases and drastic in others. Drastic changes in war are the result of developments that dramatically upset the equilibrium of war such as the rifled bore, mass conscription, and the railroad.[17]

Having examined the unchanging nature of war and the changing character of war, this review now examines the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. 

Background: Nagorno-Karabakh

In 1988, ethnic Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh demanded the transfer of what was then the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) from Soviet Azerbaijan to Armenia. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, tensions grew into an outright war.

When fighting ceased in 1994, Armenian forces, wholly or partially, controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, and seven adjacent districts.[18] More than a million people were forced from their homes. Azerbaijanis fled Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent territories, while Armenians left homes in Azerbaijan.[19] Armenia, the victor, lost nearly 30,000 civilian and military casualties. Azerbaijan, the loser, lost up to 80,000 civilian and military casualties.[20]

From 1994 until 2020, intermittent deadly incidents, including the use of attack drones, heavy weaponry, and special operations forces demonstrated the ever-present risk that war would reignite. In April 2016, four days of intense fighting at the line of contact (LOC), between Azerbaijan to Armenia, shook the region and killed hundreds on both sides.[21]

On 27 September 2020, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War began. Six weeks of conflict, between ‘near equally matched foes,’ with over 170 civilians and 7,000 military killed, ended on 10 November 2020 with a ceasefire brokered by the Russian Federation.[22] Under the agreement, Azerbaijan now fully controls the seven districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. These seven districts were previously held by the now decisively defeated Armenia. Azerbaijan also holds a substantial part of Nagorno-Karabakh itself.[23] The remainder is patrolled by a Russian peacekeeping force but still governed by self-proclaimed local authorities.[24] 

Between 13-14 September 2022 and then on 28 September 2022, conflict returned in areas along the 200-km Armenian-Azerbaijani state border. This conflict claimed the lives of over 200 Armenian and 80 Azerbaijani troops.[25]

Next, concentrating on the changing character of war, this review draws two themes from 7 Seconds to Die, on the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War: (1) is the tank dead? and (2) combined arms tactics.

Is the tank dead?

For Antal, this war ‘did not usher in an era that ended combined arms operations, nor did it announce the death of the tank.’[26] That said, Armenian ‘tanks, air defence systems, artillery, command posts, and soldiers were hit and destroyed by top-attack munitions, many of them autonomous.’[27]

In defence of the tank, Antal argues that ‘deterring war will require mobile striking power to generate dominant manoeuvre in an era of precision fires.’[28] Antal explains that to achieve dominant manoeuvre, we need a dominant tank working in tandem with precision fires that ‘automatically meshes with an array of flying drones and ground robotic systems, [and infantry], to return ground manoeuvre to the battlespace.’[29]

Antal emphasises that tanks ‘play a crucial role in war, but they must become more agile to survive…in a more lethal battlespace.’[30] He observes, for the tank, that ‘sticking to what works, and incrementally improving current equipment is usually a safer bet; until it no longer is.’[31]

Antal argues, for the future tank, that the threat of protected, intimate, and precision fires, requires design factors expanding from ‘firepower, mobility and protection’ to include nine-design parameters:

1. Firepower, including cyber and electronic warfare support measures.
2. Mobility, including optionally crewed or uncrewed systems.
3. Protection, including electronic jamming, multispectral smoke, multispectral camouflage netting, and radar absorbent paint.
4. Computing power and artificial intelligence, both embedded and external.
5. Reliability and maintainability.
6. Human factors, partnered with machine learning systems, to enhance cognitive capacity.
7. Networking, including systems-of-systems and ‘kill-webs’ to ‘disrupt, deflect and confuse’ and ‘target, track and fire’ multi-domain attacks.[32] Examples of kill-webs, enabled through a ‘network that targets, tracks and fires’, include the MK-15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS), Counter-Rocket, Artillery Mortar (C-RAM), and the Israeli-made Iron Dome air defence system.[33]
8. Stealth, ‘becoming invisible to the enemy is the ultimate form of deception,’ reducing ‘optical, thermal, electronic, and acoustic signatures.’[34]
9. Robotic systems, including decoys.[35]

Combined arms tactics

Antal observes that ‘this was the first war primarily decided by the cooperation of uncrewed weapons and human forces…guided by the general principle to use the best robotic weapon or human force for the circumstance.’[36] Azerbaijan ‘set the conditions with robotic systems, then finished the fight with soldiers.’[37] The ‘cooperation of robotic systems and human soldiers tipped the balance in Azerbaijan’s favour and took the Armenians by surprise.’[38]

Clausewitz wrote ‘the two factors that produce surprise are secrecy and speed.’[39] Colonel Robert Leonhard emphasised this point, stating ‘surprise consists of two distinct, even opposing ideas: the need for stealth (to delay detection) and the need for rapid action (to hasten contact).[40]

Further, Colonel Leonhard states that the ‘principle of surprise subsists through the concept that military forces are perpetually unready’.[41] Surprise is, therefore, a ‘condition in which a military force is contacted while in a relative state of unreadiness’.[42] This means surprise is a ‘temporal phenomenon…it results, either accidently or by design, from a failed time-distance calculation on the part of the surprised force’.[43]

Portending war’s ever-changing character, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War represents a ‘dynamic clash between attack and defence, the use of technology, and the conduct of cross-domain manoeuvre.’[44] In this environment, mistakenly, Armenia ‘developed a passive psyche focused on holding an area defence’.[45] Armenia was ‘out-fought, out-numbered, and out-spent.’[46]

These static defensive positions, the Bagramyan and the Ohanyan lines, created in the 26-years following the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, were ‘not ready…[and] were not camouflaged, prepared or properly defended’.[47] Azerbaijan’s combined arms tactics ‘destroyed the Armenian ability to conduct combined arms counterattacks.’[48]

Importantly, the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), which in 2002 evolved into a military alliance, included Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and ‘provided Armenia with very little public support.’[49] Russia has ‘never considered Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Armenia and, therefore, an attack on Nagorno-Karabakh did not trigger the CSTO alliance.’[50] This meant that Armenia – victors in 1994 – became in 2020, static, moribund, and unimaginative.

In contrast, in developing cross-domain manoeuvre capabilities, the militaries of Azerbaijan and Turkey first worked together in 1992, and this ‘bond was strengthened following Azerbaijan’s 1994 defeat in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.’[51] Turkey ‘helped rebuild, retrain, reorganise, and professionalise’ the Azerbaijani military, ‘gaining from this arrangement through trade and profiting from the importation of natural oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan’s growing energy sector.’[52]

From 2016, with Turkey’s support, Azerbaijan developed, through cross-domain manoeuvre tactics, a synchronised, combined, and ‘blended’ system of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and precision strike, including:[53]

• Secure full motion video, high definition in real-time, for sensor-shooter integration, battle damage assessment, and fighting ‘an information-war campaign via social media [Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube] … [which] demoralised Armenian public support for their government [leading to surrender and capitulation]’ and ‘denied, exploited, corrupted and destroyed [Armenia’s] ability to use information.’[54]
• Turkish Space Agency low-Earth orbit satellites.
• World War II-era Antonov An-2M Colt biplanes, to deceive Armenian air defence radars.[55]
• Turkish Air Force Boeing E-7T Peace Eagle, Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C). This aircraft is also known as the Wedgetail (Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Air Force) and Peace Eye (Republic of Korea Air Force).
• Bayraktar TB2 uncrewed combat air vehicles (UCAV), ‘merging find capabilities with strike’, for real-time intelligence and battle damage assessment at a cost of US$1-2 million each .[56]
• Orbiter 1K a lightweight loitering munition, with 2-5 hours flight endurance, 100-kilometre range, and 3-kilogram payload, ‘designed for missions against non-armoured vehicles, logistics nodes, equipment, and human targets.’[57]
• Harop loitering munition, ‘combines the characteristics of a missile and an uncrewed air vehicle (UAV).’[58] The Harop, with nine-hour flight endurance, 1,000-kilometre range and 23-kilogram payload, is particularly useful for militaries ‘that do not have access to other long-range, precision-guided options.’ For Azerbaijan, the Harop targeted Armenian radar, air defence systems, command posts and convoys, followed by artillery, tanks, and infantry.[59]
• Light infantry special forces, ‘demonstrating two essential qualities… first a high level of interaction with other branches of the military. Secondly, the ability to perform tasks independently in the depths [up to 20 km] of the enemy’s [Armenian] defence.’[60]

Azerbaijan’s plan was ‘unrelenting tempo, precision, and lethality’, especially from the air, combined with the application of ‘precision fires to enable manoeuvre.’[61] Importantly, Azerbaijan ‘waged a high-speed air assault, but a deliberate slow-grinding ground attack, manoeuvring precision fires and the attacking with ground forces.’[62] This deliberate approach, ‘resulted from many factors: Armenian opposition; Azerbaijan Army training levels; minimisation of civilian and friendly casualties; successful drone operations; and political uncertainty in Russia’s next move.[63]

Azerbaijan targets prosecuted from the air, in priority order, were Armenian ‘air defence radars and systems, electronic warfare, command and control, artillery, rocket forces, tanks, armoured vehicles, logistics vehicles and sites, and then troops.’[64]

In other words, Azerbaijan sought to ‘blind the Armenian defence network, disintegrate the network, and then dismantle other systems.’[65]

Conclusion

Concentrating on Antal’s analysis of the changing character of war in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, this review draws two themes from 7 Seconds to Die: is the tank dead?; and combined arms tactics.

On the death of the tank, Antal concludes that the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War ‘did not usher in an era that ended combined arms operations, nor did it announce the death of the tank.’[66] That said, Armenian ‘tanks, air defence systems, artillery, command posts, and soldiers were hit and destroyed by top-attack munitions, many of them autonomous.’[67]

On combined arms tactics, Antal argues that ‘this was the first war primarily decided by the cooperation of uncrewed weapons and human forces…guided by the general principle to use the best robotic weapon or human force for the circumstance.’[68] Antal notes that Azerbaijan ‘set the conditions with robotic systems, then finished the fight with soldiers.’[69] The ‘cooperation of robotic systems and human soldiers tipped the balance in Azerbaijan’s favour and took the Armenians by surprise.’[70]

Finally, 7 Seconds to Die provides useful modern analysis of the unchanging nature of war and the changing character of war. This analysis reminds our military profession of our continuous responsibility to understand, prepare, and apply force within the context of war’s fundamentally unchanging nature and frequently changing character.