In 201 B.C., Scipio Africanus, the general who defeated the Carthaginian commander Hannibal, marched triumphantly into Rome. Ahead of the general, whose purple toga streamed behind him, came spoils of war and captives; behind him marched elite troops in lockstep. This was the Roman triumph, or triumphus. The modern military parade as we know it began in 18th-century Prussia, marked by rigid drill routines such as the goose step, in which soldiers kick their legs forward with knees held straight. In France, a military parade fills the Champs-Élysées every July on Bastille Day. Russia holds a parade in Moscow's Red Square each May on Victory Day.
Across all eras and cultures, a military parade was never merely a drill ceremony of marching in formation. It was the most powerful political event for making a ruler's power visible. The perfectly synchronized movement of highly trained elite soldiers served to send a message of unity and loyalty inward, and of threat and warning outward. The very display of soldiers before a crowd was a symbol of national strength and of power. The protagonist of a military parade, in other words, was always human.
That formula, unbroken for thousands of years, was shattered on the 24th in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. At the parade marking the 35th anniversary of Ukraine's independence, there were no soldiers and no tanks. What crossed the city center was drones and robots alone. The world's first unmanned military parade had arrived. Ukraine had already become, in 2024, the first country in the world to establish an unmanned systems force as a service branch on par with its army, navy and air force. Four and a half years of war against Russia, fought at a disadvantage in strength, transformed the fundamental paradigm of its military.
The era in which the number of soldiers measured military power is drawing to a close. In modern warfare dominated by artificial intelligence and advanced weapons, unmanned forces are no longer the future but the present. For South Korea in particular, where a low birth rate has made the depletion of its conscription pool an urgent problem, maximizing unmanned capabilities is not a choice but a necessity. In an age of manned-unmanned teaming, where humans and machines defend a country together, it is worth wondering how the parade on South Korea's Armed Forces Day will evolve.
