So looks like the Age of Drone Warfare has fully arrived.
Basically Azerbaijan just won a war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh and surroundings, land that Azerbaijan lost to Armenia in the early 90's war using drones. Unmanned Turkish drones carrying 4 guided missiles each were very effective in taking out Russian anti-aircraft batteries. Azerbaijan also has Israeli drones.
In one clever ruse, Azerbaijan disguised some ancient planes they bought from Ukraine as modern drones, outfitted them to fly unmanned and flew them low over their enemy. When Armenians attacked those aircraft, the real Azeri drones way high up locked in on exposed Armenian anti-aircraft position and took them out.
Turkey tested out these drones and strategy in northwest Syria in the past year or two. But this seems to be the first full hi-tech drone war.
Azerbaijan also used small special forces groups, much as the US did in Afghanistan to take over high points and surround and cut off nearby towns. One report said that Azerbaijan captured so much abandoned Armenian equipment and faced such small losses that they might be the first army to ever end a war with more military hardware than when they started.
Background:
Azerbaijan piled up oil wealth the past couple decades. When I was there two years ago, Baku had a lot of new gleaming buildings, a showcase park up on a hill overlooking the Caspian Sea, good roads and infrastructure. Except for a dictator who took over from his father and then installed his wife as one VP, things have been going well in Azerbaijan.
Armenia is scragglier and poorer, getting buy more with agriculture and mining.
Large protests overthrew the corrupt gov't 3 years ago, and now there's a fledgling reform democracy.
The initial war broke out in 1988 in the late Gorbachev days and two parts of the USSR fighting each other was a harbinger of the break-up of the Soviet Union. After the USSR collapsed the war in N-K raged until 1994 when Azerbaijan conceded having lost 1/7th of their territory. Nagorno-Karabakh (the Karabakh highlands) and an equal chunk of Azerbaijan land surrounding N-K, a lightly populated buffer zone that linked N-K with Armenia.
Under the Russian peace deal, Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians (the self-proclaimed Republic Artsakh) hang on to most of Nagorno Karabkh -- whatever they didn't lose in the war. But all the surrounding buffer land returns to Azerbaijan control. Armenian refugees leaving those lands are stripping everything of value and many even burning their houses as a parting gesture. There really should have been a mechanism so that they got some small compensation for their houses. Most are poor rural folk homeless and heading to the N-K capital Stapankert or to Armenia proper, uprooted from their land and lives without much warning.
2000 Russian troops are being deployed to monitor the peace and ensure the Lachin corridor, the roadway from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia remains open and safe. Otherwise N-K becomes a disconnected exclave surrounded by Azerbaijan, and easily choked off of supplies.
Winners:
Azerbaijan and Turkey
Losers:
Armenia and to a lesser extent Iran
Other:
Russia concedes Turkish influence in the Caucasus, but also gets to embed its military in another Transcaucus country. Russia fosters more Armenian dependence, but also anger for not taking a bigger role and promoting the peace deal in which Armenia loses. But also Russia keeps its good relationship with Azerbaijan. A canny in-between play from Putin. Though those pesky Turks and their hi-tech drones are a long term worry.
Poll
5 (45.5%)