"Early in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, many Armenian soldiers seemingly expected to fight a similar war to the one they had won in 1994," says an article about the brilliant victory of Azerbaijan in the Second Karabakh War, published in The Forbes, Report informs.
According to the article, 'the Armenian forces were utterly decimated by their Azerbaijani adversary, which had adequately prepared itself for tomorrow’s war rather than a repeat of yesterday’s war.'
The article stresses the role of advanced drones, which ensured Azerbaijan's advantage over its enemy.
"Azerbaijan used the Harop drones to devastating effect against Armenian air defenses. The tactic and its execution was genius in its sheer simplicity. Baku converted vintage Soviet-built Antonov An-2 biplanes into remote-controlled decoys that took to the skies and fooled the Armenian S-300s into activating their radars, thus enabling Azerbaijan’s Harops to locate and destroy those high-value targets with pinpoint accuracy and efficiency," the article notes.
It further reads that during the conflict, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev credited his armed force’s Turkish TB2s with destroying $1 billion worth of Armenian military equipment. That probably wasn’t an exaggeration since approximately 240 Armenian tanks were reportedly destroyed.
"It may take some years of retrospective analysis to conclusively determine just how substantively Azerbaijan may have been among the first to demonstrate how in this 21st century, small nations can increasingly deploy such advanced weapons systems to compensate for their size and decisively prevail against otherwise equal or even more powerful opponents," the article says.