Say what you will about drones being terrifying, they are, but the idea of being ordered to assault a defensive line with 52 caliber 155mm howitizers terrifies me way more.
There is no defense against a 155mm shell that comes screaming out of the sky with no warning, all you can do is to stay very hidden until you are spotted and then NEVER stop moving once your location has been revealed to the enemy. The problem with this of course is that moving quickly near the enemy is a process of constantly rolling the dice about whether things are going to go south for you before you can react or not.
For example, in the process of trying to avoid an artillery barrage by moving quickly, one could easily run their entire formation straight into a machine gun nest with no cover around. Even if a catastrophe like that doesn’t happen you become far more vulnerable to drones when moving quickly than when hidden, entrenched or in a group of situationally aware troops.
Think about it as a russian, imagine sneaking through bushes and then cowering in a shallow trench with the knowledge in the back of your head that if a Bohdana anywhere within 30km gets the bead on you quick enough, you are toast if you don’t run and if you do run in a panic you are breakfast for Ukrainian FPVs.
All I know of artillery barrages is thankfully how artists and writers have attempted to portray them in the best way they can… and the only real thing I have taken away from those attempts to explain it come back to the same basic aspect that you can’t and really don’t want to know what experiencing sustained artillery is like until you experience it.
What is worse is after you have just been subjected to the physical experience of artillery as an annihilating force that has reoriented how you perceive your whole experience of reality everything sometimes doesn’t just oddly fall silent because the sound of heavy armor rumbling and squeaking, already far closer than you thought could happen, has filled the air. Barely holding down complete panic you creep towards the entrance of the basement you are hiding in and peak out noticing in your last moment the recon drone overhead and an Abrams barrel pointing right back at you below.
This is the most terrifying way to die even in an era of drones because there is no defense, you are like a bit of scum being steam cleaned off the side of a house by a process so much larger and more kinetic than you that any choice you make feels meaningless in a existentially lovecraftian horror way.
Drones are terrifying but this is what full scale war looks like, drones are part of an iron fist that makes the idea of wasting time shooting at the drones as terrifying as not shooting and hoping they don’t see you because of what the consequences are that do come to you when you reveal yourself to a nearby cannon.
Another way to say this is that as far as armies are concerned one of the primary roles of helicopters are for artillery spotting since the helicopter just needs a radio and a really good pair of binoculars to become a decisive tool for sustained artillery barrage. You can’t make an action movie scene about artillery spotting in a helicopter but as far as the people on the ground being spotted by the helicopter are concerned, that is an irrelevant point. A helicopter runs out of ammo quick, an artillery battery by definition does not. The same logic applies to drones.