UKR almost feels like yesterday's drone war. It seems pretty obvious purpose built murder bots by technologically capable powers like PRC would be fully autonomous and expendable like actual munitions. Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds. Don't even bother to reusable / save material. Just send them out to indiscriminately detonate like cheap smart munitions that they should be.
Strategic depth is a factor. In the Israel/Iran war, Iran's Shahed drones weren't useful due to the large distance. They could be shot down at a leisurely pace. If Iran was fighting a nearby country like Iraq, it would be a very different story. On the other hand, Israel made use of surveillance drones inside Iran, but only due to methods employed to shrink the strategic depth, either by smuggling them into Iran, or doing a clandestine launch from allies like Azerbaijan. But obviously, such tactics are not durable in a war of attrition, and they're not applicable to high-volume Shahed-like suicide attacks.
In the Pacific theatre, Taiwan is very close to China, so possibly, attack drones will be useful similar to the Ukraine/Russia war.
There are also many different types of drones being employed. The short-range small quadcopters, all the way up to large Predator drones. Shaheds are kind of in the middle in terms of size. The boundary can be blurred too between loitering munitions (Switchblade) and drones.
For the suicide quadcopter drones, there is a realization that Skynet is the next step in the arms race. Full edge autonomy over the kill chain. No need for data link (susceptible to electronic warfare) or trained pilots or added round-trip latency.
Anti-drone tech is also changing. Interceptor drones, net-dropping drones, ground-based laser, electronic warfare, and small guided ground- or air-launched interceptors.
Also have to consider the combined arms picture, none of this can be reasoned about in a vacuum.
But I suppose my main takeaway is - no two theatres are the same, AND there is a diversity in drones. So to collectivize a takeaway around "drones" would be a reasoning error.
One thing will be certain when it comes to wars between nearby countries. You need to knock out the enemy's industrial production quickly with bombers. Or have your own industrial production that can maintain pacing and avoid culmination in a war of attrition.
My comment was more specific to the article, i.e. counter "SMALL" UAS / tactical / infantry battlefield scale.
Pacific theater / operation/strategic scale, IMO bigger drones and traditional loitering munitions kind of just blend together. A shaheed is just a poor man's cruise missile. Iran didn't have #s or ability to coordinate / mass #s for any strategic effect. I think Israel has like magazine depth of ~800 interceptors for low tier / subsonic threats and 1000s in stockpile. Iran was (E: *NOT) capable of saturating that.
Depending on relative size / force balance, can still drag on war of attrition after factories turn with sufficient stockpiles. I'm kind of thinking nation state actors, the hedge is really storing a few 10-100,000 loitering munition tier drones in tunnels to ensure some sort of conventional MAD with neighbours. But really that's for... competent / connected nation state actors who has backup ISR, i.e. piggy off US/ eventually PRC global ISR for targeting. I imagine a resourced nation can build out shaheed tier manufacturing underground.
Incidentally, we had news earlier this year that PRC/Polytech is acquiring 1M, as in 1,000,000 loitering drones. Presuming shaheed tier (2000km sky moped) since Polytech has show shaheed clones in past. That's enough to easily saturate all defenses in first island chain even if US+co prepositions every piece of interception hardware ever made or plan to acquire in next 10+ years. That's strategic level shaheed spam.
My main takeaway is cheap loitering munition/drones can reasonable replace potentially short range fires (~2000km), if there's enough of them to casually bleed interceptors, AND if there's survivable theater level kill chain. Last part is really... what separates Ukraine, Iran... maybe Russia's current... hobbyist tier efforts. RU launching 500+ salvos are still trying to evade anti air, with many interceptions because they don't have ISR / killchain to eliminate antiair. It's easy to build a lot of shooters, it's hard to build out the sensors to hit important things. In a highend fight, at least one side (and possibly both) side is going has the ISR and magazine depth to ensure antiair becomes irrelevant and then it will be matter of munitions + concrete attrition math
I'm fully agreeing with your assessment (see my squad-level-airpower comment beside here), however I think there'll probably be cheap-enough counter-measures, like the latest CV-90 variation that has anti-drone munitions and built-in sensors to detect them at close quarters.
I think we're due to a cambrian explosion of drone types and counter-measures in the coming decade, in your mass-drone scenario I think smaller drones will probably be possible to counter with cheap "technical"-like vechicles armed with cheap enough sensors/radars and automatic-/machine- shotguns (there has always been experiments but no pressing use for them in the past).
I think the even broader answer to battlefield level drones is... to establish stupid levels of decisive overmatch where cheap drones can't be effectively operated at scale, i.e... IDF vs Hamas. If one can afford it, to spend much more to shape battlefield to deny cheap drone usage. But there's probably not many that can afford it.
My main uncertainty is how likely performant autonomous drones will proliferate. The skill ceiling to train someone with fingers to fly a drone is lower than developing autonomous targeting software for potentially specific battlefield conditions. Maybe short/medium term will be technically beyond irregular forces skill ceiling and their 2 guys who read AI for dummies. Maybe it will be COTS tier and anyone can pull out the companion app, tap human, male, Caucasian, or passenger jet, airline, engine nacelle.
The problem with Shaheeds and other slow air like them is they're not substantially different to the type of vehicle which would be needed to intercept them.
So a stockpile of Shaheeds can be largely countered by launching something very similar provided you can detect it. You could very much imagine having a vehicle which can simply leave the payload behind for better air speed when used in interception mode.
This is quite different to most conventional missile threats where the time between detection and interception, as well as the performance characteristics, necessitates extremely high performance interceptors.
An analogy would be that you can hit a baseball with a bat, but not a bullet even though they're both just ballistic projectiles.
Interceptors being more expensive is a big problem. The only solution I can think of is ground-based lasers, which cost a few dollars per shot. If they can be protected.
Other than that, you either need the X-factor of intelligence and air superiority, which bypasses the problem by taking out bottlenecks like TELs and supply chains. Or, have more industrial production. If you have neither, you're in trouble.
A mostly independent thing countries can do is have better home-front resiliency, which is a kind of defense in depth against suicide attacks. Taiwan needs this. Get everyone a bomb shelter.
> Interceptors being more expensive is a big problem.
Yes, but they do not have to be. Shaheeds are slow, easy to detect and track and not maneuverable. They could be intercepted by very cheap short range systems.
What makes interceptors expensive are requirements to counter stealthy, maneuverable targets with very high success probability (i.e., when you consider a leaker to be catastrophic). Nether of this applies to current UKR threats. At least not yet.
Ample footage from Ukraine has shown that drones are very effective at getting into shelters, foxholes, and other enclosed spaces. Doesn't even have to be all that powerful of a boom, just enough to rattle everyone's cages enough to take them out of the fight for a little -- the next wave of drones will finish the job.
On paper, shaheed tier drones can be upgraded with better compute to fly much more complex (i.e. close terrain hug) which exponentially drops chance to intercept by forcing defender to increase/scale IADs density/complexity. Analogy cruise missiles -> LO/stealth cruise missiles with more complex compute and flight profiles, they're still subsonic and "easy" targets when detected, but make detection hard because scaling detection = scaling more nodes i.e. Same # of munition requires #^2 sensors to detect. Another analogy is urban tag, instead of slow player screamingly loudly at fast defenders, drone is sneaking to target quietly and defenders suddenly needs more eyes for same catches, perhaps not affordably more.
IMO the _current_ problem with subsonic / shaheeds tier munitions, at least the one's being being used is they seem to have very basic navigation capabilities field by forces that don't have ability to plan better missions. VS defenders being supported by US/NATO with high end ISR that dramatically improve intercept planning/chances. Again, IMO the latter is what makes or breaks, affordable theater level shaheed spam. These are glorified mopeds + smart phones. On paper most countries can have 100,000s of them. But to use them effectively and even _more_ economically, need highend ISR+killchain to employ fraction of munitions (or some other platforms) for initial SEAD / dismantle IADs and eliminate future intercepts. AKA closer to US/PRC tier of C4ISR which will ramp into another gear once mega-constellation based. Which is out of reach for most countries, unless they strategically align to "unlock" "smarter" munitions.
I think because drones impact at the time is because it's filling an previously untapped niche with a cheap and ridiculously useful alternative.
In my mind I'm calling it "squad-level-airpower" , regular airpower started with spotters, then fighters and CAS in WW1. By WW2 it had expanded the role to achieve operation and theater levels goals, and finally with nukes also a strategic level, and still remains required to achieve goals on larger levels.
However with air-defences creeping down to MANPADS, CAS became more problematic and adding then the cost of planes and pilots made it far from universally useful in a close war.
Drones being man-luggable and -operatable and cheap with hardly any infrastructure more or less flooded a that useful niche, and it's not like that niche was unsurprising, just not successfully exploited previously as the US army tried with the VZ-1 and HZ-1.
Like you mentioned with the Iran conflict, classic air superiority still holds the crown to achieve larger goals on strategic levels (even if drones helped out on an tactical level).
I've been trying to judge this impact on doctrine and procurement but these things are hard to judge when it's happening. Hindsight is cheating ;)
It's huge, though. Many tiers of equipment, doctrine, vehicles, product time to market improvements, RF equipment, radars, stealth tech, software, battle drills, and even new job specializations of various levels. It's intense, and a constant iteration cycle at a pace we haven't seen for at least a long time, but possibly forever.
One possible future is that wartime casualties decrease because humans in the field are just completely useless. Accompanying this positive development will be the negative tail risk of exinction.
American military doctrine seems to include the assumption that you will always have the manufacturing capacity and the supply lines to get all the materiel you need to the front, that you'll be bottlenecked by something else like manpower.
This works pretty well for fighting limited wars where part of the justification is to develop and maintain military readiness. Would it still be true in a large scale war against China - could you pump out a million drones a day - or would you wish for a doctrine that included reusable drones?
(That I know of, their awareness of high-capacity supply line issues goes back to at least the Civil War.)
Historically, the US military had a considerable industrial base of its own - arsenals, navy yards, etc. - which could manufacture anything from a pistol cartridge up to an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, Congress shut all of that down in the later 1900's, in favor of defense contractors. Gov't-owned facilities just couldn't compete at greasing Congressional palms.
In Pacific war... with standoff distances involved most of determinant fighting all going to be one way trip, i.e. 2000km+ = disposable. I suppose question is how much US can value engineer their stand off missiles, which will inevitably have more requirements than PRC because when US moving shit across salty ocean, each shot is logistically more expensive. PRC can just haul them out of conditioned depots and get firing.
And how many US can actually produce, i.e. bluntly, US military has _never_ fought any adversary on the scale of modern PRC. WW2 JP+DE had like <50% of US economic and industrial power, while being ganged up by multiple other allies with reasonably large militaries. Peak cold war USSR also similar scale (1/2 US) and realistically US war plan for NATO invasion was to stall and nuke the Fulda gap. Asymmetrically stomping Iraq still took 5 carriers on high tempo operations (not sustainable for more than 1-2 months), favourable coalition basing, completely compromised IADs... multiple months to dismantle power charitability 1/100th size of modern PRC. Even Korean war vs peasant PRC fought US+UN to stand still. Vs modern PRC with 150% US GDP by PPP and and industrial gap like current shipbuilding #s, in their backyard, I suppose the answer is, get defense spending back to 10%-15% of GDP (at least Korean or Vietnamese wartime economy) and go figure out form there.
Another way of putting that is that for all that people love to point to gunship diplomacy, the US is if anything more fond of using diplomats to aid our military than the other way around.
I think something to keep in mind, the US hasn't fought a war on the home front since 1865. The Spanish American war, WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq - none of these were fought on American soil, with the exception of Pearl harbor, which was a navy base, not a major manufacturing site. So we haven't really had to reckon with what happens if our homeland is under fire - sure, we drilled for it during WWII, worrying about Nazi bombers and Japanese sabotage but neither actually happened.
It doesn't look like our wars are going to get closer anytime soon, but modern planes and rocketry have much greater range than in the 1940s the last time we were at war with countries with significant resources. If we ever come head to head with China, their missile capabilities could be a real concern.
The US would loose a war against China simply because China can outproduce the US many times over. I have no idea why the US keeps teasing a war with China, a war they would most certainly loose. What is the point?
Can China protect their relevant industrial base from being quickly degraded by intelligence + bombers? In WW2, Japan had no power projection into the US mainland, so the industrial base of US sealed the deal.
Most likely yes, simply by the scale of their industrial base and military strength. No way the US can significantly degrade Chinese industrial base in a war scenario without using massive amounts of nukes and I don't think even Trump is that insane.
This appears to assume a lack of intelligence such that the entire industrial base needs to be targeted. But only a relatively small subtree of the industrial base is relevant, and you don't necessarily need to degrade the whole subtree, it can be sufficient to degrade key nodes that create supply chain bottlenecks. I'm not saying it can be done, but I am unpersuaded that it can't.
The problem is that the exact same can be said of the American industrial base and the American industrial base is much smaller than the Chinese one so it would be far easier to wipe out.
Wiped out with what aircraft carriers and with what air superiority? China has limited to no power projection into US mainland aside from ICBMs which are scarce. US has B2 bombers they can send over China. US has multiple nearby countries they can use as a staging ground for their F-16 and F-35s. They can send sorties over and over into China and drop thousands of JDAMs onto selected targets. China can't do anything like that. China's SRBMs and navy and airforce are a threat to Asian countries but not the US.
B2 stealth will not serve you in the middle of a sensor (radar) network. And taking it out with radiation seeking missiles may not be a reliable counter. They almost certainly have a network of passive radars and disposable emitters.
Recent war games paint a dire picture in a near-term hypothetical conflict with China over Taiwan.[0] They show the US tenuously holding Taiwan at the cost of two aircraft carriers, several dozen other ships, hundreds of aircraft and the depletion of hundreds anti-ship missiles that have a production lead time of months to years and measly annual production rates.
At the same time China continues to stockpile commodities[1] and holds an overwhelming advantage in ship building production capacity over the US[2].
America may currently have an advantage in power projection over China, but they lack the industrial base to sustain any sort of attack as their ship building and missile building capacity is completely atrophied. China just needs to hold the line in the first conflict with the US and then they can quickly rebuild what they lost and launch barrages of drones at Taiwan.
As for how China can disrupt American industrial capacity? At first it will probably be a combination of unorthodox techniques including cyberattacks, agit-prop disruption techniques with social media, 5th column disruption like what we're seeing in Russia, and perhaps more exotic things like autonomous submarines that launch drones to attack infrastructure near the coast, or perhaps more of those balloons that they were using for surveillance but instead of surveillance equipment they'll contain drone swarms to be released over vital infrastructure or tinderbox forests.
It is unlikely that America will risk sending any B-52s over China and it's also unlikely that F-35s will pose any long term risk to Chinese industrial capacity given the brittle F-35 supply chain.
A war with China will be about whoever can produce more cheap weapons faster while deploying them in unexpected ways and China without a doubt wins that race.
An effective attack against Chinese mainland by US forces would be the trigger for nuclear war. The century of humiliation has cemented a "never again" attitude.
Also, Aircraft carriers are vulnerable to mass missile attacks, and land bases in the Philippines, Japan or Taiwan are within missile range.
Unlikely. Israel, a nuclear power by 1973, was attacked by multiple countries, and did not launch nukes. Russia, another nuclear power, is receiving attacks from Ukraine on a daily basis, and is not launching nukes.
As much as nuclear powers want you to think they will use them if you resist their goals, nukes only come into play when state survival is at risk, not when belligerents pursue limited goals. The US will never pursue the defeat of China. They will manage escalation. They will pursue the limited goals of status quo maintenance and a quick resolution, which can include bombing industrial production nodes to signal that China will lose a war of attrition, forcing it to call off an attack on Taiwan.
The key word was "effective". Ukraine's attacks haven't had any meaningful effect on the war. I would have no doubt that if Israel lost any of the conventional wars with it's neighbors, nuclear weapons would have been launched.
The original post was postulating that American bombers and intelligence could destroy China's production base. If US attacks did destroy a significant portion of China's factories, and production facilities, I have no doubt the war would become nuclear.
Israel was losing the Yom Kippur war until Kissinger's resupply effort. They didn't use nukes. Probably because Egypt signalled they were going for limited objectives. Israel's home front was also attacked unprovoked with Scud missiles by Saddam as a desperation measure during the Gulf War. No nuke usage.
Any US attack on China's industrial base would have similar signalling to control escalation risk. It would probably be limited to key nodes in the missile or drone supply chain rather than attacking the entire base. China likely wouldn't use nukes because they are also worried about the same escalation risks as the US. They will know the US is pursuing limited objectives. The US will probably tell them this through a deconfliction line, as well as publicly. If China does use nukes, it'll likely be limited with the goal of escalating to deescalate.
None of these decisions are easy and I agree there are significant risks. But I wouldn't rule it out, especially if the alternative is to lose a war of attrition and have your influence rolled back.
Does it keep teasing a war with China - seems like China keeps teasing an attack on Taiwan and the US is deliberately ambiguous on how it would respond to such an attack.
I think all this talk of who would win often ignores that factor to. There is no realistic total war scenario between China and the US - China doesn't have any desire or capacity to role tanks into Washington and the US doesn't have any desire to role tanks into Beijing.
The war, if it comes will be China trying to take control of Taiwan and the US intervening on the side of Taiwan. Victory for China looks like Taiwan under PRC rule, victory for the US looks like Taiwanese independence.
With that in mind "all" the US needs to be able to do is make the cost of the invasion/maintaining the supply lines too high. If I was China the drones I might worry about the most would be underwater!
>Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds.
"Sir, we have successfully culled the enemy deer population by 30%. Thei Department of Wildlife is issuing no further permits for this season, and their hunters are emotionally devastated. The impact on their civilian morale cannot be overstated. Where should we direct our next billion dollars? I was thinking maybe drones with long-range microwave to boil off their swimming pools...?"
I don’t know if that would matter in an actual war between china and the US but sending explosives at anything that’s warm sounds like a war crime. That would probably violate proportionality.
TBH once these platforms become deployed, noncombatants are signing their own suicide note even being close to battlefield. I imagine rules of engagement, expectations on civilians will simply change/devolve, i.e. most you can expect from "responsible" users is some map coordinates for murder bot no man's land where they shouldn't be. This without even mentioning we'll likely also see loitering drones hibernate as proximity mines / area denial munitions if they don't find targets. It will get very, very messy.
No? Modern artillery shells cost 5-10k per (50-70k for guidance kits + programmable) and kill at medium distance, with entire logistic park (including self propelled) and isr chain for proper deployment. It's a different tier / type of capability. It kills lots/plurality of casualties... and historically... relatively cheaply. Autonomous drones potential for scenarios like close quarters, interiors, entrenched positions. Depending on battlefield transparency you can autonomously transport a shitload drones to frontlines and have them hunt / deny difficult targets that artillery can't effective engage. Drones that don't find target can area deny by being proxy mines for limited time etc etc. All potentially much cheaper once you eliminate 1 drone 1 operator constraint.
And the drones which can do this cost (???) with a range of (???) and a flight time of (???).
The problem with the "drones will do it!" narrative people put out there is that it's anything and everything but what the drone is, what it weighs, it's volume and current production are all absent figures which simply fill in as "better then whatever you just said".
For example, a reasonably portable drone capable of ISR and limited infantry scale strike would be the Switchblade 300, already provided to Ukraine. This has a range of 30km a top speed of 161km/h and 20 minutes of flight time, with a 1.6 kg explosive payload - which is respectable. You could carry quite a lot of these to the front if you wanted to.
That particular system cost about $50,000 a unit - optimistically. It's likely that price could be bought down, but it does include the drone, launcher and ground control system. A reasonable price today would be closer to $15,000 judging from more recent products being offered.
If I hunt around a little then locally I could buy something like this[1] locally for $1,300 which has a 1kg drop payload...but only 10km of range, and a 45 minute flight time - and let's remember better radios will eat into that payload and flight time.
Now obviously different drones can do different things, but the core point is the same: drones don't magically not have logistical "mass". You can't fly a bunch of drones to the front for free - you need to either recharge or refuel them at the destination. Which means you need to stockpile them. Which means they can be spotted and destroyed on the ground. The loiter times aren't "days", they're still better measured in minutes counting hours at most.
All of these disadvantages apply to artillery too, of course but the point is that once you start considering the actual range brackets involved and the parameters of real systems built with current technology, including limiting technologies like energy storage, payload and physics of real explosives, the generic superweapon slips away. Ukraine is using a lot of drones because Ukraine can buy drones but can't easily get artillery and gun barrels for it. But Ukraine was also having a lot of trouble with Russia's considerable artillery advantage up until quite recently, and still is because of North Korean shell resupply.
The word "drone" gets substituted in for a superweapon fulfilling every role perfectly, with no actual physical parameters which would make it imperfect - and that type of thinking should give a lot of people pause particularly in the context of Ukraine where any number of systems have had their moment in the spotlight before either falling out of favor due to adaptation or simply no longer being the most applicable to the task (i.e. the various anti-tank weapons are still doing excellent anti-tank work...there's just very few Russian tanks any more).
Original comment is about article content - "SMALL" UAV, i.e. tactical / infantry / battlefield level. As in the small UAV war in UKR frontlines that US marines is training for is against likely obsolete platforms because UKR is not capable of developing anything more advanced, like next gen autonomous switchblade tier+ munitions that can be massed at scale due to obscenely low prices and minimal operator / controller requirements.
A more reasonable price floor would be $300-500 for a performant 5-8 inch drone comparable to kamikaze drones in UKR. In case of PRC, mass produced in modern factories, developed by resourced military R&D, value engineered/acquired with almost no margins etc etc, instead of improvised in small workshops and software tweaked by hobbyist like UKR. For reference large 30kg industrial DJI Agras agriculture robot with AESA radar cost 8k factory direct in domestic PRC market. Not many operators can afford to mass switchblade at US prices with US MIC markup (I'm guessing including US).
When I say proximity mine, I mean small drone parks itself in some nook in lower power model, it's possible to run camera/sensors for days tied to purpose designed commodity hardware/SoC/ASIC, i.e. yolo/edge algo detects a heat signature that's roughly human, drone turns on and hunts it. It's a glorified flying claymore. Can even fall back as dumb claymore. IMO in near term against highend forces, those are the kind of drones marines will likely face - if conflict somehow devolves into point where tactical level drones are being used at all. TBH something has likely gone very wrong higher up in the force spectrum / strategic / multi domain levels if conflict devolves into small tactical drones, i.e. mop up survivors. The real fight is probably already over before that point.
For infantry it is now as indispensable as an automatic rifle, grenades, radios, and so on. Fighters in Ukraine without drone support are at significant disadvantage.
Even bubba's pissin hot 3.5 magnum bird shot is probably not getting above 300 or 400 feet vertical for starters, and then you've either got to deal with hitting it dead on with a tight pattern wad or accepting that the shot is going spread enough to make it unlikely to hit it. So far as I have ever seen the energy in a shot shell wad dissipates much faster than a regular bullet, and I think you're better off trying to hit it with a regular old 556.
Following on to this, I would not be remotely surprised if drones continue to be a threat to see something like a man portable gepard hooked up to an EW system, as given the speed those things move and how hard even hitting regular old Canadian Geese or errant clays under non-combat situations, I don't know how you would economically fight drone swarms short of a mini Phalanx CIWS or something.
Maybe ironically, I wonder if we won't see things like the Bofors 40mm guns continue to be prolific if they get successfully retasked to fighting drones (and they would end up like the M2, fighting long after it was initially conceived).
For the smaller drones it's an even more rapidly evolving, high-tech arms race. AFAIU, over the past year most of the battlefield drones have switched to kilometers-long fiber optic tethers to avoid electronic jamming. I dunno what all the defensive measures are, but one is using other drones to cut the cable. I think they may also be using directed energy weapons, now, though not sure how widespread that is.
Current method from public posts seems to be run on GPS and remote data link until jamming bubble is hit, then transition to visual/thermal/radar recognition of target for terminal approach.
Jamming only covers a small area (yes, some areas will have overlap), or a narrow movable cone. Both systems can be overran by the above method, or by swarms overriding directional electronic attack
EOS (Aust) sent 160 of these to Ukraine to be mounted on M113 carriers and Kozak MRAPs. Could also be put on the back of a Toyota Hilux or other technicals.
They use a Bushmaster 30mm cannon with proximity fuse HE rounds so they don't need to hit the drone dead on.
On this particular note, both Ukraine and Russia have developed anti-drone sabot rounds that fire from the respective cartridges their infantry service rifles are chambered for. I do not know their efficacy however.
Drones are most effective as tools of psychological warfare I think. Infantry in a trench can maybe disable a wave or two of drones before becoming overwhelmed, but the drone operator can remain safe and calm in their bunker kilometers away. Most drones don’t make it on target or even inflict lethal injury but their presence or the threat of their presence constantly draws the enemy’s attention away from your units. In Ukraine soldiers seem to worry much more about drones more than small arms or indirect fire. And both sides use this to influence the tactical decision making of their enemies.
The Ukrainians report that about 70% of their kills are now by drones.
Current Ukrainian drone production rate was 1.7 million last year. Target for this year is above 4 million.[1] Russian comment: “Their reconnaissance drones are in the sky 24/7, and any movement on our part is immediately met with a massive wave of [first-person-view] drones.”
Tactics when you have large numbers of expendable drones are totally different from the old days of snooping around with a few drones.
There is this interesting arms race here with drones and unit size, yes?
If you can get any large group together, then a drone will come for it. So, there is a balance between the size of a group and the cost of the drone that the enemy is will to spend (+ estimated failure rate).
As drones get cheaper and more efficient at killing that number of soldiers worth killing approaches 1. Meaning that group and unit cohesion at the 'front' goes to 0. The 'long term' dynamics are stunning.
I cannot imagine the psychological horror of being sent with little training (because why bother for either side) into the theater all alone without any officer supervision or buddies. You'd have a radio that gets jammed, maybe, some bivouac supplies, bad food and water, a gun of some sort hopefully, and time, terrible time. The veterans, what little there are, would tell you that if you hear a drone, you're dead already. You'd have nothing but superstition to go on. You'd just sit there in the heat or cold, waiting on a radio signal, knowing that your side will shoot you too if you 'missed' the call to attack. And you'd wait and wait. If your buddy came over, or a lieutenant, to check in on you then you're at higher risk of being droned. You'd have only your frightened thoughts to keep company and solace with.
Morale? what morale? That is carnal house. There is no 'army' in the field, you command nothing but the slaughter of young boys to an indifferent AI god.
To some degree, having AI drones fighting off against AI drones can't come fast enough.
Drones are ammo now, not assets. The old USMC manual stresses retrieving the expensive US drone, cleaning it, and putting it back in its protective case. Ukraine expects to produce 4 million drones this year, and most of them will be expended.
Everybody in that war is getting good at building trenches with top cover for drone protection.[1] Camo netting up top can help. But the dug-in troops can't accomplish much
beyond survival. This war is static but deadly.
There are entire subreddits dedicated to actual footage of drone effectiveness on the front lines... It's definitely not just psychological warfare. In some cases, the fiber optic lines crisscross fields so densely it looks like spider webs.
Or subreddit DroneCombat for drone specific posts, very NSFW too. And then UkraineWarVideoReport has a bit wider range or reports and links, so unlike those other two it's not combat footage only.
Is there a pro-Russian one? Any reporting or combat footage, at least what's been posted on Reddit, has been pro-Ukranian, and the Ukranian losses are underreported.
It's not warmongering though; Ukraine never asked for it, it's a war of aggression from the Russian side. I also don't think the soldiers depicted asked for any of that, but I doubt they were offered much of a choice in the matter.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/ is in the top 10 subscribed substacks. He posts videos supporting points he makes, and you can find drones attacks. His analysis and predictions are more accurate than pro-Ukrainian pundits, and draws on information from within Ukraine (speeches at the Rada, Ukrainian commander interviews, posts) and Russia.
I would think drones carrying cluster bombs would be effective. More targeted in their destruction. No need to scatter bomblets over a quarter of a mile, just 10 or so around a tank.
If you have seen videos from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially over time, you can see the evolution of tactics.
For example with tanks, they...
- strap artillery shell to the drone and fly it into the tank
- drop a standard grenade into the hatch after the crew has fled
They don't need to drop munitions like cluster, they strap several on and drop them one at a time. They have become quite skilled and accurate, even from 100+ meters up in wind
There are places in Ukraine where it looks like giant spiders live there, due to all the fiber optic cables from drones left on the battle fields
The fact that we have not yet seen a high-profile political assassination by drone, particularly from the "death from above" method, absolutely _boggles_ my mind, and I don't think we get out of this decade without that occurring, and I'm not particularly sure what sort of counter-measure you could reasonably put in place to stop that. The 2030s are going to be messy.
It's a matter of time; that said, all high profile open air whatsits have anti-drone detection and countermeasures in place. The Ukranian invasion is one of attrition, where both sides try to limit expenses; this isn't the case for e.g. the US president's protection, where they can afford to deploy millions in countermeasures.
Seen this a few times and am surprised it's actually a viable solution. Used to be heavily into fpv a long time ago and remember MIT(?) had autonomous CV software that could easily navigate through thick forests that was open sourced, I think the only real use of onboard GPS there was "go from point A to B"
This was perhaps a decade ago mind you, people rocking DIY setups had fairly limited computing compared to what you can buy today. The PID needed for quads/hex/octos to stay aloft has trivial compute requirements.
you need to walk through the battlefield to trace it. you know, the one the drone just flew over.
they're pretty thin, and it's not hard for the operators to displace. even using other drones and AI to track refraction index of the fiber it's still a tall order. you'd probably have better luck shooting artillery at any large building or hedgerow nearby...
Yup, apparently some of these carry 50 kilometers of fiber optic cable. Max range limits their payload capacity though, but then, they can do reconnaisance and target painting with one, then send an automated jamming-resistant swarm to do damage.
They have strapped so many things to drones, you'd think they've tried about everything, then some new video comes out
Drones have evolved rapidly and come in all shapes and sizes now. The DJI Maverick image in people's head is only one modality, though by far the most common form factor
Those aren't artillery shells though, the explosive part of those weighs seven kilos, which is too much for the mass produced drones they use. As others mentioned, they use RPGs (3 kgs), mortar shells (~1.5 kgs), grenades (<1 kg), sometimes land mines, and specialized drone explosives for suicide drones.
I do like seeing the production facilities of these drones, how they simplified the designs but also made design decisions to deal with the scale, they're built so they can be stacked easily. Mind you, this is probably the case with these drone show drones too.
The bigger drones are sometimes used for dropping TM-62 anti-tank mines, which are about ten kilograms. An artillery shell would probably still be a poor choice though, considering the forces a shell is built to withstand. Adds a lot of extra weight.
Those must be HEAT rounds. An AP round would not have the velocity to do anything, anti-personnel would not penetrate tanks armor but would kill crew if dismounted or a hatch is left open
Old rpg rounds are cheap and top-down doesn't require much pen, making older stock more effective. Newish stock are tandem and would be even worse to try and counter from above (PG-7VR).
drones ain't psyops, mate. they're killing a ton of people in combat situations, and can do things like fly into a bunker or tunnel and get the inhabitants
Because they're incredibly fast, exceeding 40 meters per second. You can't fire a shotgun at 80 meters. A typical shotgun's effective range is only 40 meters, and once it's within range, you only have one second to fire.
Furthermore, drones are generally difficult to detect at 400 meters unless you're using a synthetic detection system. By the time you spot them, it's too late.
My experience is only with consumer drones, but you could fly over a target area and release an explosive before anyone heard that it was there, especially in a noisy environment. Above 100m, unless you're at high speed/power, most people won't notice a drone at all. It's often a change in speed/direction that gives them away, otherwise it will be past you before you first notice the sound.
Large scale swarms will probably never be a major issue for infantry. You have a finite number of drones, even at extremely high rates of production, spread across all things you want to target. Sending a swarm at individual infantry, or even platoons is just wasteful. At scale that's thousands of drones, per day, that you could have instead sent towards more valuable targets.
This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.
A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.
If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.
Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.
Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.
People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.
Edit:
I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.
As I understand it, currently all drones require a human operator who can only operate one at a time. And except for some special operations behind enemy lines, you must be fairly close to the target, as within a few km. The fiber optic ones, even closer
So your 50 drone swarm is going to need 50 operators, fairly close to the front. Who are also vulnerable to enemy counter drones and glide bombs - the latter is a real problem for Ukraine
I haven’t seen any evidence of a “swarm” on combat footage from Ukraine war, I have seen a few drones hitting a single target, especially armored vehicles in fairly quick succession, like a few seconds, It looked like independent operators all picking the obvious high value target, not some intentional “swarm”
Tech may change this in the future but we’re not there quite yet
First, you don't need AI operators, you just need a swarm. The operators are reusable!
>Ukraine reported the largest single-day drone attack by Russia on July 9, 2025, where Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones. This surpasses earlier attacks, including one on May 26, 2025, when Russia launched 355 drones.
With that many pilots, that is a swarm.
Next, analysis of last months AI driven attack was performed by many drones with no human terminal guidance - they were jammed and expected to be!
>“Our models are being trained to recognise targets to understand target prioritisation,” he says. “We do not have full autonomy yet. We use the human factor where we need to, but we are developing different scenarios for taking autonomy further.
> “We are also testing some autonomous drones, which we have not announced and are probably not planning to announce, but they have a high degree of autonomy, and they can potentially combine themselves into swarms. We are still facing technical problems and hurdles, but we already see a path forward on this.”
One Final Note - Most of the info you ever hear about military tech is only the things people are allowed to discuss publicly. The battlefield is also a hell of a lab, and 3d printers and open source flight software (and open source AI models) are amazing.
Those 725 drones were spread across a fairly big geographic area, and didn’t hit all at once. Also they operate more like cruise missiles, not the FPV drones it seemed like the article was referring too
“Swarm” to me means more than just number. It’s number, concentration, and tactics, like a swarm of bees… the problem is they are concentrated and hitting from many directions, While individually they are not that bad, when they use this tactic it is very effective, Which is how they can drive 500 pound bears away from their hive.
Otherwise “swarms” have been a thing for along time. Would you call an 19th century infantry regiment (let’s say about 600-1000 soldiers) a “swarm”. Or how about those formations of B17/B24s/Lancasteres in WW2 which would attack in similar numbers (hundreds). I would say no, partly because they didn’t use a swarming tactic
Argue about the definition of swarm (the distance between units and level of coordination) all you want, but ultimately it's irrelevant given the addition information.
Massive coordination is going into attacks across hundreds or thousands of Km. Multiple layers of drones, electronic warfare, recon, airspace deconfliction, etc. Highly orchestrated. Large numbers that are overwhelming systems designed to defeat them, like a swarm of locust.
Note that the one drone is not the other; when they talk about Russian mass drone attacks, they will refer to Shahed etc drones, which are autonomous, not unlike the WW2 V1 "drones".
But yeah, drone swarms with fewer operators will be, probably already is a thing. But what I've seen so far, they're just not very useful; drones look to be generally used on individual targets, if there's a bigger or more targets, they'll use something bigger like a HIMARS, glide bomb, or if it's closer by, an artillery strike.
Drone swarms primary purpose is to overwhelm defenses.
Many argue drone swarms require some level of orchestration and control, others say a certain level of automation is required.
I'm aware of the differences in many drone classifications.
HIMARS was made largely impotent by GPS jamming. Glide bombs have limited range (barring exceptions for stuff like JASSM-ER but that is massive increase in cost) and detection and fire by counter battery. Artillery strike requires fairly close proximity but a bit more of rocket assisted.
Spent time doing military things with a lot of ordinance and a lot of drones.
Ukraine is having pretty substantial manpower problems in its armed forces. If fully autonomous drones against mobile targets had been figured out, they would been deployed and there would be no need for the more expensive / shorter range fiber optic drones and you wouldn't hear about the manpower issue as much
If we were in a war with widespread conscription that needed self-driving vehicles, I'd bet we'd a) see a lot more investment in them and b) a lot less concern about edge cases.
I agree with you on almost everything. Where we differ is on the nature of money. I think the recent wars emphasize that the real bottleneck in war is no longer $$$, but the things those dollars represent. So for instance a million $1000 drones is, on paper, only a billion dollars. The bottleneck isn't the cost, but the production. And you can't just spin up production making millions per year, because you also need the raw resources - and you end up with this entire complex supply chain, all on top of finite raw materials, and then the logistics to organize everything. And in the case of a war scenario, this all needs to be organized in a disruption proof system. It's extremely complex and difficult, even if you have an infinite money machine.
And I think you would actually agree with this by taking a simple thought experiment. Imagine we have 1 soldier with a million dollars of training. And we give an opposing force the choice of eliminating that soldier, or eliminating 1,000 $1000 drones. Everybody is going to pick the drones, and it won't be even remotely close. In fact drop it down by an order of magnitude, 100 drones, and it's still not even close - even though the on paper value of that soldier is an order of magnitude higher. 10 drones is probably where it starts to get close, though I think it'd still lean heavily towards the drones.
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I would add that when a war becomes a late stage war of attrition, the value of infantry goes up. I am speaking in more general terms in a war where manpower is nowhere near a critical issue. In any case by the time manpower does become a critical issue, a war is usually already lost, even if it might be able to drag on for many months yet.
30% unit casualties causes the unit to be Combat Ineffective in the infantry role.
(Number of infantry x .3) = $DesiredCasualties
Let's say it takes 10 drones to kill a soldier, and each drone is $250/ea. That's $2,500, or the $KillCost
$DesiredCasualties x $KillCost = Dollar value needed to move an infantry unit into combat ineffectiveness
Looks like around 620,000 troops deployed by Russia so far.
620k x .3 = 186,000
186000 x $2500 = $465 million, bottom line price, in a crazy world where the starts align in many ways that aren't realistic, gives you a huge destruction in combat capability for less than $500mil.
For those following along, this is extremely overly simplified, but I hope it conveys both the huge military advantages drones provide as well as the political (less dead bodies to deal with, less broken soldiers sent home for treatment and decades of care) and economic advantages lethal drones in combat can provide.
And the enemy is using the exact same thing against you. Yet infantry will remain critical for claiming territory, clearing areas and more. As drones advance, war will probably become even bloodier. And drone operators that survive are already coming home completely broken men suffering from extreme PTSD.
Then factor on top of this logistics. You need to transport men, keep them fed, equipped, and more. You need to move a massive amount of stuff constantly in war, yet drones are going to be buzzing everywhere. So I think we're seeing the future of war now - slow, grueling, bloody wars of attrition.
And war where high prices tags are replaced by high costs in stuff, making it more apparent than ever that economies maximized through financial games and services are paper tigers when facing economies based on the production of tangible things.
I don't think they are, actually (using the same TTPs), nor would it make sense to.
Ukrainian drone doctrine is very different than Russian, and not just on paper, but how it is playing out.
This is for two main reasons: proximity to logistics for the defenders vs attackers, and existing military structures including vehicles and troop organizational structures (MTOE) that drone systems support or are supported by.
So I don't agree with your assessment there. It doesn't seem to match what's happening in the field with the type of drones used and the percentage of the classification of each type of drone system and purpose. These are quite different.
I also don't think it will be more bloody, but less over time. Much of the fight is in the electronic warfare arena and in air dominance across the vertical airspace. A colleague agrees:
Infantry are expensive to train correctly, to outfit, and supply. I think the total number of frontline combat troops will continue to go down as a fraction of overall troops, while increasing supporting positions for drones, communications, electronic warfare, and general battlefield logistics.
That article reads like typical NATO stuff which sounds great in practice but makes assumptions that don't exist, and are unobtainable (like air superiority), if you're fighting an enemy more sophisticated than guys running around in sandals with AKs. Here [1] is a report from somebody who worked with drones in Ukraine, and why he's exceptionally disillusioned with them.
I half wonder if what I linked to wasn't an indirect response to what you posted, as it was published only 3 days later, and is essentially that article's equal but opposite.
Soldiers adapt - deploying in groups of 3-4, moving along tree lines, and hiding in buildings/trenches. One of Patrick Lancaster's (an American journalist covering the war from the Donbas) videos has him hiding with a group of soldiers while a drone is overhead - the twigs and branches of the bushes and trees makes it impossible for a drone traveling at a moderate speed to see them, and would entangle the drone if it did attack.
Drones are being operated in layers based on range and capability. This applies to both long range / heavy payload drones and small / fast fpvs.
Long range, heavy payload, ISR drones with excellent optics and thermals are helping to spot targets from very far away that small groups of fpv operators can search and target.
Smaller drones must be somewhat closer, so this can't happen too far away from where are currently.
Depending on the terrain and what the enemy is using to adapt (like fiber optic tether for drones like a TOE missile, or like AI targeting and terminal guidance to counter controls + GPS jamming), fpv drones can be a liability (tree cover, rubble) or have a big impact.
What a lot of units are doing for tree cover is what is called a VT fuse for mortars or artillery. These can be configured to burst at tree height. Artillery/indirect often have coverage over top of drone units to cover their advance with smoke if need be, and much further range than FPV drone operations do without some sort of comms relay (could be another airborne drone relaying).
Yeah. Don't group up though. The first round of indirect fire is normally the most deadly.
It seems like you are making the point that there are large ranges of drones, and other weapons are required when drones are not effective, which I agree with. Drones aren't as cost effective as your earlier example of 12 soldiers being killed by a few drones. I can't find the interview, but a Ukranian drone operator said on average 15-20 FPVs were needed to wound/kill a soldier (80% are jammed). Just as it takes 1000 bullets to kill a soldier, it takes lots of drones (on average) to kill a soldier, making the cost-effectiveness worse.
I'm saying they're not acting alone, and alluding to battlefield conditions changing and combatants adapting as they have done since warfare started.
They are using Combined Arms doctrine to support their drones now. Instead of drones supporting everything else, everything else is in support of drones and drone dominance.
The supply chain and cost is a big part of it.
As both sides continue to develop new and better AI targeting systems, RF jamming will cease to be effective and they'll have to move to laser jamming of the optical systems. As that is no longer effective, swarm tactics counter the laser tactics. Currently counter-swarm attack methods for drone-swarms are being investigated, because nobody knows of a cost effective way to stop this. Even the drone supply chain is very easy to do much of very near the front lines. Carbon fiber and some heavy duty airframes are harder. It's SO CHEAP compared to any comparable weapon.
This is nonsense. Drones get all the attention because of the novelty and that they obviously have become very important, but you're being beyond hyperbolic. Artillery is still the king of war and responsible for something like 80% of all battlefield casualties. This has become even more true now with drones having eyes in the sky everywhere enabling artillery to become even more devastating.
The drone cost in hundreds of dollars , low hundreds , even optic one cost $300-400 at manufacturing.
Train a soldier is hundreds of thousands.
Manufacturing , both Ukraine and Russia , generally speaking technological midgets, producing as of today millions a year. Ukraines projected output is around 4 millions in 2025
China can easily produce tens of millions. Even if 1 out 4 hit your target , that’s any army of any size in the world obliterated without new recruits.
Reports (caveat: biased, pro-ukranian reports) are though that Russian soldiers barely get any training, I doubt they are worth that much. Even at the start of the war, there were stories that they had to buy their own shoes.
At this point it's not even so much about scale, but about intelligence - finding viable or valuable targets. A million FPV drones won't do much good if your enemy is >100 kilometers away. The Ukranian front line is over 1000 kilometers long, but viable targets are easily a hundred kilometers from that either side. And that's just around the front lines, picking off individual soldiers or hardware won't stop this war, not when thousands are recruited and trained every month. Which is why Ukraine has done some deep strikes, taking out trains, infrastructure, refineries, air bases, etc. If they can take out the Shahed drone production facility too, that'd be a huge blow. But again, it wouldn't stop this war, just slow down attacks on civilians.
you need at least ~16 years of food, water, and teaching to get something useful. ideally 18, sometimes as low as 12. and you can't refurbish ones that are missing parts or otherwise defective.
the 20k to run them through Basic Training is a pittance.
Some lives are worth more $$$ than others... CASEVAC for a single US soldier will tie up multiple individuals + follow up costs (full logistics + medical + compensation + benefits etc) = orders of magnitude more than few 1000 drones. Estimates for fully burden costs of severely wounded is 2-5m+ for lifetime.
Also, drones are currently being flown by soldiers in fpv goggles so swarm is not very practical. It will change once we have swarm software and there is a need for it.
Or just extend the logic to materiel instead of personnel, like Ukraine did with the airbase attacks earlier this year: for the price of a few dozen < $1k drones, you can eliminate $50M-$150M+ aircraft? The asymmetry is insane.
There's also nothing that practically stops those same tactics from being aimed at other soft infrastructure targets: electrical substations, telco facilities, water treatment facilities... the nightmare scenario is taking down transmission lines and switching stations outside, say, a large nuclear power plant during a heat wave. The nuke itself is hardened, obviously, but who cares if it can't transmit the power it's generating to the people that need it?
It also took 18 months to insert the people, set up the shell company, smuggle materials, manufacture, etc. It also had the advantage of surprise - the first such attack at such a distance from the front line. Is it unlikely such an attack will be replicated, just as a box-cutter hijack of 747s attack against buildings will not succeed again.
>This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
The issue in your logic is assuming Ruzzia/Kremlin uses same natural logic as the rest of the world, I talked with many Zed patriots, that country uses a non natural logic, Zed Logic. Add on top of the unatural logic, the brainwashing and the fact that most of thye soldiers are murderers and rapists from prisons and you get a lot of civilians killed or abused by this asshols for fun or other reasons that make no sense in a natural logic.
An example of Zed logic
When Ruzzia attacks some civilian infrastructure in Ukraine (like grain storage) then Zeds claim it is legal, but when Ukraine strikes a military ship Zeds claim this is illegal, it is terrorism because... ... the ship was outside the SMO (special military operation) that Putin decided to be.
I am not joking, the Zeds are full of this bullshit logic, something ie legal/correct is always dependent of who makes the crime, where the crime is happening, who is the victim.
Second best Zed logic shit I heard is "USSR was the best democracy ever, in the entire human history"
>This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
Dude, Russians literally post this stuff on their own social media accounts. The "munitions" in question are no more expensive than a basic frag grenade.
And what part of the Russian war effort has led you to the conclusion that they value productivity over terrorism and photo ops? The incentive structures of the Russian military are just oceans apart from anything a westerner would consider a proper functional military.
I have some clips for you. Does this look like the operations of a productive military to you? You have no clue, absolutely none at all. They do this shit kind of to their own soldiers, and you think they're above trying to terrorize Ukrainians into compliance?
Note: that last clip is very, very NSFL. For reference, naked and bound deserters were thrown into a dirt pit and fired upon with rifles (not killed, at least not in the video, but threatened essentially)
I can understand how a westerner who has never seen, even by proxy, the dregs of the Russian internet could conceive of just how fucked up Russian military culture is. But, like, none of this stuff is hidden. The brutality of what happens to people who disobey them is genuinely part of the image they want to portray to the world (and to themselves). And in this way they feel the need to make an example of the Ukrainians - who by the way Russian state media isn't shy about portraying as basically subhumans.
And there is far, far worse shit than this that never makes it out of Russian-language telegram channels.
Man. You sound diluted. Go see one month of Gaza and see how a real civilian targeted war would look like. If Russia would want to see terror they could create more civilian casualties in one evening than the entire war. In Ukraine civilians are not the target. In Gaza they are. Sponsored by the west.
The people on the ground know how the war is going - there are no more Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Winning attracts, and Russia doesn't need conscription. Amazingly, Ukraine is now recruiting 60+ year old men to fight.
https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-signs-law-allowing-over...
Like most, you're confusing conscription with mobilization, something the Western media conveniently repeatedly plays into.
Russia, and many other countries - like everywhere in Scandinavia, has compulsory military enlistment or conscription. But these people generally are not eligible to be sent abroad to participate in conflicts. Instead it's used for training. After that training they are then required to sign up for the equivalent of the US Selective Service where, after after some years (2 in Russia), they may be called up, or mobilized, for participation in any conflict. Russia carried out one very small scale mobilization very early on in the war. It led to hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country and was generally exceptionally unpopular. Since then their entire army has been 100% volunteer forces.
By contrast Ukraine immediately, after the war began, made it illegal for men of "fighting age" (18-60) to leave the country and declared a general mobilization such that any man of "fighting age" can be immediately mobilized and sent to the front. This had led to them at times literally dragging people off the streets, beating them into submission when necessary (with more than a few 'deaths in training'), giving then some performative training, and then sending them to the front. And the like the GP mentioned, they recently passed a law to allow even 60+ year olds to enlist, limiting potential medical exemptions, and more. In other words - they are simply running out of people.
So Russia has been essentially fighting a war of attrition against an endless hoard of people armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in the Western gear, directed by Western instructors, using Western intelligence, and winning. It's going to be difficult for any developed nation, including the US, to ever fight a real war like this - because people aren't going to tolerate general mobilization, let alone people coming back in body bags by the hundreds of thousands, for the sake of geopolitics half way around the world. Even Russia has managed to do so only by offering extremely high wages for their soldiers, but it's unclear what this will entail once the war winds down. Hopefully they have not found themselves in the US trap where they suddenly essentially have to always be at war to keep their economy chugging along.
>The Chechens most at risk of being coercively recruited are critcs of the authorites, family
members of vocal critcs, drug and alcohol users as well as members of the LGBT community.
The Chechen authorites have used coercive recruitment to get rid of what they call the
undesirables. In general, any deviaton from the norms and rules of Kadyrov’s leadership could
be used to coercively recruit Chechens. In this regard, the Chechen authorites use forced
recruitment as a form of punishment in Chechnya. Although certain groups can be identfied as
being more at risk than others, there is also a high degree of unpredictability and arbitrariness
in the actons of Chechen authorites in regards to coercive recruitment.
Chechnya has its own laws on just about everything. It's ruled by Islamic Law such that homosexuality, alcohol consumption, and even pork consumption are illegal there. They also have their own laws and culture with regards to war and were even completely excluded from the partial mobilization and allowed to do their own thing, as usual. It's a negligible part of Russia (about 1% by population) and not representative of Russian law or norms.
Even Olympic trap shooters miss their targets sometimes, and they fly ballistic trajectories after they call "pull". Expecting a soldier with 2 months training (best case) to hit an unpredictably flying drone that appeared out of nowhere with no warning as he's trying to take cover from mortar shrapnel is quite optimistic.
They do. There's a lot of videos of them being taken out with birdshot. I also saw one video about modding underbarrel grenade launchers to fire a shotgun cartridge.
yeah the window for a lot of those FPV drones is small. I'd still rather have the shotgun, but luck is a factor.
also doesn't help for the ones that are 300m straight up dropping bombs -- no buckshot will work that high up. maybe 50m at best, if you're very, very lucky with dispersion.
Back in 2014/2015 I was racing FPV drones. My most insane one could accelerate from stationary (on the ground) to doing 160kmh (100mph) straight up, in about 2 seconds. It wasn't much faster horizontally, but it'd top out at over 180kmh.
It probably does. But you've seen how fast these drones are right? It's the speed of aliens in the alien movie or a velociraptor from Jurassic park and much more maneuverable, smaller and can come at you from all dimensions.
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
These exist and have been used by Israel in Gaza. At least for now a remote operator has to give the OK to shoot, but the drone does the targeting itself. It's very Terminator-esque, a quadcopter with an automatic rifle that can autonomously navigate streets, loiter, and identify and aim at human targets.
I don’t know how you would actually defend but there is probably some selection bias too. The videos are published by the drone operators, they probably have an interest in publishing videos of successful strikes.
r/ukrainewarvideoreport has been full of it for three years, but mind the survivorship (well, opposite of that) bias - the Ukranian war propaganda / media machine only publishes successes, the Russian one is suppressed or simply not posted on Reddit. Just because you don't see failed strikes doesn't mean they don't happen. The vehicles have drone shields, the roads have nets, and there's heaps of electronic countermeasures in place.
That said, if you're out in the field and there's one above you, you're boned. Can't imagine the horrors of vibing, then having a grenade plop down next to you.
at a distance close enough to hit the drone it's shrapnel and explosives could probably hit you. and you're sitting on a big tank of flammable material.
it's like the dudes that throw their rifle at the drone 6 feet away, hit it, cause it explode... but they still take shrapnel to the head and neck anyway because it's only 6 feet away.
plus what happens if you miss?
and the ammo is big, heavy, and requires special tanks. non-starter of an idea.
Saw the importance of drone fighting in Pakistan's recent clashes with India.
They sent drones to big cities like Lahore/Karachi so IMO even Police and Civil Defense should also get these trainings.
So, what is the effective range of this handbook? Can it be used to intercept and destroy ruzzian Lancet drone? Is it single use handbook or can be reloaded?
Took them long .Drones are democratizing the battlefield and that is a welcome development.
In a future conflict America engages in,social media will be full of videos of Smiths from Iowa and Kansas being chased and blown by drones in some country in Asia or Middle East.
Isn't that how it goes nowadays too? The US pulled out of Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation and... didn't actually change anything there, the regime went back to the one from before.
I don't think that at this point there's ever any winning a war, not unless you brainwash three generations (NK) or genocide the population and remove any trace of them like in Gaza at the moment. And that's a relatively small stretch of land.
The manual from 2020 is available.[1] But nobody took drones that seriously back then. In that document, they're treated mostly as recon assets, not primary attack weapons.
The US military had almost exclusively considered drones as expensive systems like the Predator used for standoff ground fire support much like an attack helicopter, or for use in counterinsurgency like the Switchblade
But in their defense, they never anticipated having to fight a near peer adversary on land to the extent Ukraine has. But I would argue no one really saw this coming to this degree. The Bayraktar for instance, was much along the lines of US drone philosophy, costing several million a piece, The drones used in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict were mostly used along that philosophy as well
UKR almost feels like yesterday's drone war. It seems pretty obvious purpose built murder bots by technologically capable powers like PRC would be fully autonomous and expendable like actual munitions. Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds. Don't even bother to reusable / save material. Just send them out to indiscriminately detonate like cheap smart munitions that they should be.
Strategic depth is a factor. In the Israel/Iran war, Iran's Shahed drones weren't useful due to the large distance. They could be shot down at a leisurely pace. If Iran was fighting a nearby country like Iraq, it would be a very different story. On the other hand, Israel made use of surveillance drones inside Iran, but only due to methods employed to shrink the strategic depth, either by smuggling them into Iran, or doing a clandestine launch from allies like Azerbaijan. But obviously, such tactics are not durable in a war of attrition, and they're not applicable to high-volume Shahed-like suicide attacks.
In the Pacific theatre, Taiwan is very close to China, so possibly, attack drones will be useful similar to the Ukraine/Russia war.
There are also many different types of drones being employed. The short-range small quadcopters, all the way up to large Predator drones. Shaheds are kind of in the middle in terms of size. The boundary can be blurred too between loitering munitions (Switchblade) and drones.
For the suicide quadcopter drones, there is a realization that Skynet is the next step in the arms race. Full edge autonomy over the kill chain. No need for data link (susceptible to electronic warfare) or trained pilots or added round-trip latency.
Anti-drone tech is also changing. Interceptor drones, net-dropping drones, ground-based laser, electronic warfare, and small guided ground- or air-launched interceptors.
Also have to consider the combined arms picture, none of this can be reasoned about in a vacuum.
But I suppose my main takeaway is - no two theatres are the same, AND there is a diversity in drones. So to collectivize a takeaway around "drones" would be a reasoning error.
One thing will be certain when it comes to wars between nearby countries. You need to knock out the enemy's industrial production quickly with bombers. Or have your own industrial production that can maintain pacing and avoid culmination in a war of attrition.
My comment was more specific to the article, i.e. counter "SMALL" UAS / tactical / infantry battlefield scale.
Pacific theater / operation/strategic scale, IMO bigger drones and traditional loitering munitions kind of just blend together. A shaheed is just a poor man's cruise missile. Iran didn't have #s or ability to coordinate / mass #s for any strategic effect. I think Israel has like magazine depth of ~800 interceptors for low tier / subsonic threats and 1000s in stockpile. Iran was (E: *NOT) capable of saturating that.
Depending on relative size / force balance, can still drag on war of attrition after factories turn with sufficient stockpiles. I'm kind of thinking nation state actors, the hedge is really storing a few 10-100,000 loitering munition tier drones in tunnels to ensure some sort of conventional MAD with neighbours. But really that's for... competent / connected nation state actors who has backup ISR, i.e. piggy off US/ eventually PRC global ISR for targeting. I imagine a resourced nation can build out shaheed tier manufacturing underground.
Incidentally, we had news earlier this year that PRC/Polytech is acquiring 1M, as in 1,000,000 loitering drones. Presuming shaheed tier (2000km sky moped) since Polytech has show shaheed clones in past. That's enough to easily saturate all defenses in first island chain even if US+co prepositions every piece of interception hardware ever made or plan to acquire in next 10+ years. That's strategic level shaheed spam.
My main takeaway is cheap loitering munition/drones can reasonable replace potentially short range fires (~2000km), if there's enough of them to casually bleed interceptors, AND if there's survivable theater level kill chain. Last part is really... what separates Ukraine, Iran... maybe Russia's current... hobbyist tier efforts. RU launching 500+ salvos are still trying to evade anti air, with many interceptions because they don't have ISR / killchain to eliminate antiair. It's easy to build a lot of shooters, it's hard to build out the sensors to hit important things. In a highend fight, at least one side (and possibly both) side is going has the ISR and magazine depth to ensure antiair becomes irrelevant and then it will be matter of munitions + concrete attrition math
I'm fully agreeing with your assessment (see my squad-level-airpower comment beside here), however I think there'll probably be cheap-enough counter-measures, like the latest CV-90 variation that has anti-drone munitions and built-in sensors to detect them at close quarters.
I think we're due to a cambrian explosion of drone types and counter-measures in the coming decade, in your mass-drone scenario I think smaller drones will probably be possible to counter with cheap "technical"-like vechicles armed with cheap enough sensors/radars and automatic-/machine- shotguns (there has always been experiments but no pressing use for them in the past).
I think the even broader answer to battlefield level drones is... to establish stupid levels of decisive overmatch where cheap drones can't be effectively operated at scale, i.e... IDF vs Hamas. If one can afford it, to spend much more to shape battlefield to deny cheap drone usage. But there's probably not many that can afford it.
My main uncertainty is how likely performant autonomous drones will proliferate. The skill ceiling to train someone with fingers to fly a drone is lower than developing autonomous targeting software for potentially specific battlefield conditions. Maybe short/medium term will be technically beyond irregular forces skill ceiling and their 2 guys who read AI for dummies. Maybe it will be COTS tier and anyone can pull out the companion app, tap human, male, Caucasian, or passenger jet, airline, engine nacelle.
The problem with Shaheeds and other slow air like them is they're not substantially different to the type of vehicle which would be needed to intercept them.
So a stockpile of Shaheeds can be largely countered by launching something very similar provided you can detect it. You could very much imagine having a vehicle which can simply leave the payload behind for better air speed when used in interception mode.
This is quite different to most conventional missile threats where the time between detection and interception, as well as the performance characteristics, necessitates extremely high performance interceptors.
An analogy would be that you can hit a baseball with a bat, but not a bullet even though they're both just ballistic projectiles.
Interceptors being more expensive is a big problem. The only solution I can think of is ground-based lasers, which cost a few dollars per shot. If they can be protected.
Other than that, you either need the X-factor of intelligence and air superiority, which bypasses the problem by taking out bottlenecks like TELs and supply chains. Or, have more industrial production. If you have neither, you're in trouble.
A mostly independent thing countries can do is have better home-front resiliency, which is a kind of defense in depth against suicide attacks. Taiwan needs this. Get everyone a bomb shelter.
> Interceptors being more expensive is a big problem.
Yes, but they do not have to be. Shaheeds are slow, easy to detect and track and not maneuverable. They could be intercepted by very cheap short range systems.
What makes interceptors expensive are requirements to counter stealthy, maneuverable targets with very high success probability (i.e., when you consider a leaker to be catastrophic). Nether of this applies to current UKR threats. At least not yet.
> Taiwan needs this. Get everyone a bomb shelter.
Ample footage from Ukraine has shown that drones are very effective at getting into shelters, foxholes, and other enclosed spaces. Doesn't even have to be all that powerful of a boom, just enough to rattle everyone's cages enough to take them out of the fight for a little -- the next wave of drones will finish the job.
On paper, shaheed tier drones can be upgraded with better compute to fly much more complex (i.e. close terrain hug) which exponentially drops chance to intercept by forcing defender to increase/scale IADs density/complexity. Analogy cruise missiles -> LO/stealth cruise missiles with more complex compute and flight profiles, they're still subsonic and "easy" targets when detected, but make detection hard because scaling detection = scaling more nodes i.e. Same # of munition requires #^2 sensors to detect. Another analogy is urban tag, instead of slow player screamingly loudly at fast defenders, drone is sneaking to target quietly and defenders suddenly needs more eyes for same catches, perhaps not affordably more.
IMO the _current_ problem with subsonic / shaheeds tier munitions, at least the one's being being used is they seem to have very basic navigation capabilities field by forces that don't have ability to plan better missions. VS defenders being supported by US/NATO with high end ISR that dramatically improve intercept planning/chances. Again, IMO the latter is what makes or breaks, affordable theater level shaheed spam. These are glorified mopeds + smart phones. On paper most countries can have 100,000s of them. But to use them effectively and even _more_ economically, need highend ISR+killchain to employ fraction of munitions (or some other platforms) for initial SEAD / dismantle IADs and eliminate future intercepts. AKA closer to US/PRC tier of C4ISR which will ramp into another gear once mega-constellation based. Which is out of reach for most countries, unless they strategically align to "unlock" "smarter" munitions.
I think because drones impact at the time is because it's filling an previously untapped niche with a cheap and ridiculously useful alternative.
In my mind I'm calling it "squad-level-airpower" , regular airpower started with spotters, then fighters and CAS in WW1. By WW2 it had expanded the role to achieve operation and theater levels goals, and finally with nukes also a strategic level, and still remains required to achieve goals on larger levels.
However with air-defences creeping down to MANPADS, CAS became more problematic and adding then the cost of planes and pilots made it far from universally useful in a close war.
Drones being man-luggable and -operatable and cheap with hardly any infrastructure more or less flooded a that useful niche, and it's not like that niche was unsurprising, just not successfully exploited previously as the US army tried with the VZ-1 and HZ-1.
Like you mentioned with the Iran conflict, classic air superiority still holds the crown to achieve larger goals on strategic levels (even if drones helped out on an tactical level).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_VZ-1_Pawnee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Lackner_HZ-1_Aerocycle
I've been trying to judge this impact on doctrine and procurement but these things are hard to judge when it's happening. Hindsight is cheating ;)
It's huge, though. Many tiers of equipment, doctrine, vehicles, product time to market improvements, RF equipment, radars, stealth tech, software, battle drills, and even new job specializations of various levels. It's intense, and a constant iteration cycle at a pace we haven't seen for at least a long time, but possibly forever.
One possible future is that wartime casualties decrease because humans in the field are just completely useless. Accompanying this positive development will be the negative tail risk of exinction.
Somebody has to build the factories that build the robots, for at least a short time...
All for a reduction in casualties, though I'm terrified of a nation not having a Cost To Pay for war that isn't just in slightly hire taxes.
>Full edge autonomy over the kill chain.
I wonder how susceptible these would be to Potemkin targets (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank)
Things could get very MGS V very fast.
American military doctrine seems to include the assumption that you will always have the manufacturing capacity and the supply lines to get all the materiel you need to the front, that you'll be bottlenecked by something else like manpower.
This works pretty well for fighting limited wars where part of the justification is to develop and maintain military readiness. Would it still be true in a large scale war against China - could you pump out a million drones a day - or would you wish for a doctrine that included reusable drones?
> American military doctrine seems to include the assumption that ...
Since at least WWI, the US military has been very aware of their dependence on the industrial base:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower_School_fo...
(That I know of, their awareness of high-capacity supply line issues goes back to at least the Civil War.)
Historically, the US military had a considerable industrial base of its own - arsenals, navy yards, etc. - which could manufacture anything from a pistol cartridge up to an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, Congress shut all of that down in the later 1900's, in favor of defense contractors. Gov't-owned facilities just couldn't compete at greasing Congressional palms.
In Pacific war... with standoff distances involved most of determinant fighting all going to be one way trip, i.e. 2000km+ = disposable. I suppose question is how much US can value engineer their stand off missiles, which will inevitably have more requirements than PRC because when US moving shit across salty ocean, each shot is logistically more expensive. PRC can just haul them out of conditioned depots and get firing.
And how many US can actually produce, i.e. bluntly, US military has _never_ fought any adversary on the scale of modern PRC. WW2 JP+DE had like <50% of US economic and industrial power, while being ganged up by multiple other allies with reasonably large militaries. Peak cold war USSR also similar scale (1/2 US) and realistically US war plan for NATO invasion was to stall and nuke the Fulda gap. Asymmetrically stomping Iraq still took 5 carriers on high tempo operations (not sustainable for more than 1-2 months), favourable coalition basing, completely compromised IADs... multiple months to dismantle power charitability 1/100th size of modern PRC. Even Korean war vs peasant PRC fought US+UN to stand still. Vs modern PRC with 150% US GDP by PPP and and industrial gap like current shipbuilding #s, in their backyard, I suppose the answer is, get defense spending back to 10%-15% of GDP (at least Korean or Vietnamese wartime economy) and go figure out form there.
Another way of putting that is that for all that people love to point to gunship diplomacy, the US is if anything more fond of using diplomats to aid our military than the other way around.
Good question.
I think something to keep in mind, the US hasn't fought a war on the home front since 1865. The Spanish American war, WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq - none of these were fought on American soil, with the exception of Pearl harbor, which was a navy base, not a major manufacturing site. So we haven't really had to reckon with what happens if our homeland is under fire - sure, we drilled for it during WWII, worrying about Nazi bombers and Japanese sabotage but neither actually happened.
It doesn't look like our wars are going to get closer anytime soon, but modern planes and rocketry have much greater range than in the 1940s the last time we were at war with countries with significant resources. If we ever come head to head with China, their missile capabilities could be a real concern.
The US would loose a war against China simply because China can outproduce the US many times over. I have no idea why the US keeps teasing a war with China, a war they would most certainly loose. What is the point?
Can China protect their relevant industrial base from being quickly degraded by intelligence + bombers? In WW2, Japan had no power projection into the US mainland, so the industrial base of US sealed the deal.
Most likely yes, simply by the scale of their industrial base and military strength. No way the US can significantly degrade Chinese industrial base in a war scenario without using massive amounts of nukes and I don't think even Trump is that insane.
This appears to assume a lack of intelligence such that the entire industrial base needs to be targeted. But only a relatively small subtree of the industrial base is relevant, and you don't necessarily need to degrade the whole subtree, it can be sufficient to degrade key nodes that create supply chain bottlenecks. I'm not saying it can be done, but I am unpersuaded that it can't.
The problem is that the exact same can be said of the American industrial base and the American industrial base is much smaller than the Chinese one so it would be far easier to wipe out.
Wiped out with what aircraft carriers and with what air superiority? China has limited to no power projection into US mainland aside from ICBMs which are scarce. US has B2 bombers they can send over China. US has multiple nearby countries they can use as a staging ground for their F-16 and F-35s. They can send sorties over and over into China and drop thousands of JDAMs onto selected targets. China can't do anything like that. China's SRBMs and navy and airforce are a threat to Asian countries but not the US.
Sending B2's over china would be insanely risky.
B2 stealth will not serve you in the middle of a sensor (radar) network. And taking it out with radiation seeking missiles may not be a reliable counter. They almost certainly have a network of passive radars and disposable emitters.
Recent war games paint a dire picture in a near-term hypothetical conflict with China over Taiwan.[0] They show the US tenuously holding Taiwan at the cost of two aircraft carriers, several dozen other ships, hundreds of aircraft and the depletion of hundreds anti-ship missiles that have a production lead time of months to years and measly annual production rates.
At the same time China continues to stockpile commodities[1] and holds an overwhelming advantage in ship building production capacity over the US[2].
America may currently have an advantage in power projection over China, but they lack the industrial base to sustain any sort of attack as their ship building and missile building capacity is completely atrophied. China just needs to hold the line in the first conflict with the US and then they can quickly rebuild what they lost and launch barrages of drones at Taiwan.
As for how China can disrupt American industrial capacity? At first it will probably be a combination of unorthodox techniques including cyberattacks, agit-prop disruption techniques with social media, 5th column disruption like what we're seeing in Russia, and perhaps more exotic things like autonomous submarines that launch drones to attack infrastructure near the coast, or perhaps more of those balloons that they were using for surveillance but instead of surveillance equipment they'll contain drone swarms to be released over vital infrastructure or tinderbox forests.
It is unlikely that America will risk sending any B-52s over China and it's also unlikely that F-35s will pose any long term risk to Chinese industrial capacity given the brittle F-35 supply chain.
A war with China will be about whoever can produce more cheap weapons faster while deploying them in unexpected ways and China without a doubt wins that race.
[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w...
[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...
An effective attack against Chinese mainland by US forces would be the trigger for nuclear war. The century of humiliation has cemented a "never again" attitude.
Also, Aircraft carriers are vulnerable to mass missile attacks, and land bases in the Philippines, Japan or Taiwan are within missile range.
No it would not. You absolutely don't understand how the escalation ladder works if you think this.
An effective conventional strike against military targets on the mainland would be met with China's best conventional response.
Jumping to nuclear threats or use of a nuclear weapon shows weakness and terrible escalation management. Two traits china doesn't exhibit.
Unlikely. Israel, a nuclear power by 1973, was attacked by multiple countries, and did not launch nukes. Russia, another nuclear power, is receiving attacks from Ukraine on a daily basis, and is not launching nukes.
As much as nuclear powers want you to think they will use them if you resist their goals, nukes only come into play when state survival is at risk, not when belligerents pursue limited goals. The US will never pursue the defeat of China. They will manage escalation. They will pursue the limited goals of status quo maintenance and a quick resolution, which can include bombing industrial production nodes to signal that China will lose a war of attrition, forcing it to call off an attack on Taiwan.
The key word was "effective". Ukraine's attacks haven't had any meaningful effect on the war. I would have no doubt that if Israel lost any of the conventional wars with it's neighbors, nuclear weapons would have been launched.
The original post was postulating that American bombers and intelligence could destroy China's production base. If US attacks did destroy a significant portion of China's factories, and production facilities, I have no doubt the war would become nuclear.
Israel was losing the Yom Kippur war until Kissinger's resupply effort. They didn't use nukes. Probably because Egypt signalled they were going for limited objectives. Israel's home front was also attacked unprovoked with Scud missiles by Saddam as a desperation measure during the Gulf War. No nuke usage.
Any US attack on China's industrial base would have similar signalling to control escalation risk. It would probably be limited to key nodes in the missile or drone supply chain rather than attacking the entire base. China likely wouldn't use nukes because they are also worried about the same escalation risks as the US. They will know the US is pursuing limited objectives. The US will probably tell them this through a deconfliction line, as well as publicly. If China does use nukes, it'll likely be limited with the goal of escalating to deescalate.
None of these decisions are easy and I agree there are significant risks. But I wouldn't rule it out, especially if the alternative is to lose a war of attrition and have your influence rolled back.
Does it keep teasing a war with China - seems like China keeps teasing an attack on Taiwan and the US is deliberately ambiguous on how it would respond to such an attack.
I think all this talk of who would win often ignores that factor to. There is no realistic total war scenario between China and the US - China doesn't have any desire or capacity to role tanks into Washington and the US doesn't have any desire to role tanks into Beijing.
The war, if it comes will be China trying to take control of Taiwan and the US intervening on the side of Taiwan. Victory for China looks like Taiwan under PRC rule, victory for the US looks like Taiwanese independence.
With that in mind "all" the US needs to be able to do is make the cost of the invasion/maintaining the supply lines too high. If I was China the drones I might worry about the most would be underwater!
>Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds.
"Sir, we have successfully culled the enemy deer population by 30%. Thei Department of Wildlife is issuing no further permits for this season, and their hunters are emotionally devastated. The impact on their civilian morale cannot be overstated. Where should we direct our next billion dollars? I was thinking maybe drones with long-range microwave to boil off their swimming pools...?"
The large majority of drones used in UKR is already of the expendable munition-like type.
I don’t know if that would matter in an actual war between china and the US but sending explosives at anything that’s warm sounds like a war crime. That would probably violate proportionality.
TBH once these platforms become deployed, noncombatants are signing their own suicide note even being close to battlefield. I imagine rules of engagement, expectations on civilians will simply change/devolve, i.e. most you can expect from "responsible" users is some map coordinates for murder bot no man's land where they shouldn't be. This without even mentioning we'll likely also see loitering drones hibernate as proximity mines / area denial munitions if they don't find targets. It will get very, very messy.
If there is a hot war between them any notion of civilities like war crime rules will be out the window by day three
Only the losers get to trial for war crimes, so just don't lose.
lol
That's an artillery shell. You're describing an artillery shell. What kills cheaply and indiscriminately is an airburst artillery shell.
No? Modern artillery shells cost 5-10k per (50-70k for guidance kits + programmable) and kill at medium distance, with entire logistic park (including self propelled) and isr chain for proper deployment. It's a different tier / type of capability. It kills lots/plurality of casualties... and historically... relatively cheaply. Autonomous drones potential for scenarios like close quarters, interiors, entrenched positions. Depending on battlefield transparency you can autonomously transport a shitload drones to frontlines and have them hunt / deny difficult targets that artillery can't effective engage. Drones that don't find target can area deny by being proxy mines for limited time etc etc. All potentially much cheaper once you eliminate 1 drone 1 operator constraint.
And the drones which can do this cost (???) with a range of (???) and a flight time of (???).
The problem with the "drones will do it!" narrative people put out there is that it's anything and everything but what the drone is, what it weighs, it's volume and current production are all absent figures which simply fill in as "better then whatever you just said".
For example, a reasonably portable drone capable of ISR and limited infantry scale strike would be the Switchblade 300, already provided to Ukraine. This has a range of 30km a top speed of 161km/h and 20 minutes of flight time, with a 1.6 kg explosive payload - which is respectable. You could carry quite a lot of these to the front if you wanted to.
That particular system cost about $50,000 a unit - optimistically. It's likely that price could be bought down, but it does include the drone, launcher and ground control system. A reasonable price today would be closer to $15,000 judging from more recent products being offered.
If I hunt around a little then locally I could buy something like this[1] locally for $1,300 which has a 1kg drop payload...but only 10km of range, and a 45 minute flight time - and let's remember better radios will eat into that payload and flight time.
Now obviously different drones can do different things, but the core point is the same: drones don't magically not have logistical "mass". You can't fly a bunch of drones to the front for free - you need to either recharge or refuel them at the destination. Which means you need to stockpile them. Which means they can be spotted and destroyed on the ground. The loiter times aren't "days", they're still better measured in minutes counting hours at most.
All of these disadvantages apply to artillery too, of course but the point is that once you start considering the actual range brackets involved and the parameters of real systems built with current technology, including limiting technologies like energy storage, payload and physics of real explosives, the generic superweapon slips away. Ukraine is using a lot of drones because Ukraine can buy drones but can't easily get artillery and gun barrels for it. But Ukraine was also having a lot of trouble with Russia's considerable artillery advantage up until quite recently, and still is because of North Korean shell resupply.
The word "drone" gets substituted in for a superweapon fulfilling every role perfectly, with no actual physical parameters which would make it imperfect - and that type of thinking should give a lot of people pause particularly in the context of Ukraine where any number of systems have had their moment in the spotlight before either falling out of favor due to adaptation or simply no longer being the most applicable to the task (i.e. the various anti-tank weapons are still doing excellent anti-tank work...there's just very few Russian tanks any more).
[1] https://au.aeroodrones.com/products/aeroo-pro
Original comment is about article content - "SMALL" UAV, i.e. tactical / infantry / battlefield level. As in the small UAV war in UKR frontlines that US marines is training for is against likely obsolete platforms because UKR is not capable of developing anything more advanced, like next gen autonomous switchblade tier+ munitions that can be massed at scale due to obscenely low prices and minimal operator / controller requirements.
A more reasonable price floor would be $300-500 for a performant 5-8 inch drone comparable to kamikaze drones in UKR. In case of PRC, mass produced in modern factories, developed by resourced military R&D, value engineered/acquired with almost no margins etc etc, instead of improvised in small workshops and software tweaked by hobbyist like UKR. For reference large 30kg industrial DJI Agras agriculture robot with AESA radar cost 8k factory direct in domestic PRC market. Not many operators can afford to mass switchblade at US prices with US MIC markup (I'm guessing including US).
When I say proximity mine, I mean small drone parks itself in some nook in lower power model, it's possible to run camera/sensors for days tied to purpose designed commodity hardware/SoC/ASIC, i.e. yolo/edge algo detects a heat signature that's roughly human, drone turns on and hunts it. It's a glorified flying claymore. Can even fall back as dumb claymore. IMO in near term against highend forces, those are the kind of drones marines will likely face - if conflict somehow devolves into point where tactical level drones are being used at all. TBH something has likely gone very wrong higher up in the force spectrum / strategic / multi domain levels if conflict devolves into small tactical drones, i.e. mop up survivors. The real fight is probably already over before that point.
For infantry it is now as indispensable as an automatic rifle, grenades, radios, and so on. Fighters in Ukraine without drone support are at significant disadvantage.
Why doesn't duckshot make short work of these things?
Even bubba's pissin hot 3.5 magnum bird shot is probably not getting above 300 or 400 feet vertical for starters, and then you've either got to deal with hitting it dead on with a tight pattern wad or accepting that the shot is going spread enough to make it unlikely to hit it. So far as I have ever seen the energy in a shot shell wad dissipates much faster than a regular bullet, and I think you're better off trying to hit it with a regular old 556.
Following on to this, I would not be remotely surprised if drones continue to be a threat to see something like a man portable gepard hooked up to an EW system, as given the speed those things move and how hard even hitting regular old Canadian Geese or errant clays under non-combat situations, I don't know how you would economically fight drone swarms short of a mini Phalanx CIWS or something.
Maybe ironically, I wonder if we won't see things like the Bofors 40mm guns continue to be prolific if they get successfully retasked to fighting drones (and they would end up like the M2, fighting long after it was initially conceived).
For the larger drones, yes, Ukraine is seeing success with SPAAGs: https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/07/20/ukraine-drone-defense...
For the smaller drones it's an even more rapidly evolving, high-tech arms race. AFAIU, over the past year most of the battlefield drones have switched to kilometers-long fiber optic tethers to avoid electronic jamming. I dunno what all the defensive measures are, but one is using other drones to cut the cable. I think they may also be using directed energy weapons, now, though not sure how widespread that is.
Not all, long range attacks can't use that.
Current method from public posts seems to be run on GPS and remote data link until jamming bubble is hit, then transition to visual/thermal/radar recognition of target for terminal approach.
Jamming only covers a small area (yes, some areas will have overlap), or a narrow movable cone. Both systems can be overran by the above method, or by swarms overriding directional electronic attack
EOS (Aust) sent 160 of these to Ukraine to be mounted on M113 carriers and Kozak MRAPs. Could also be put on the back of a Toyota Hilux or other technicals.
They use a Bushmaster 30mm cannon with proximity fuse HE rounds so they don't need to hit the drone dead on.
https://eos-aus.com/defence/counter-drone-systems/slinger/
The US Army has this under development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSETxYGrxVw
On this particular note, both Ukraine and Russia have developed anti-drone sabot rounds that fire from the respective cartridges their infantry service rifles are chambered for. I do not know their efficacy however.
Drones are most effective as tools of psychological warfare I think. Infantry in a trench can maybe disable a wave or two of drones before becoming overwhelmed, but the drone operator can remain safe and calm in their bunker kilometers away. Most drones don’t make it on target or even inflict lethal injury but their presence or the threat of their presence constantly draws the enemy’s attention away from your units. In Ukraine soldiers seem to worry much more about drones more than small arms or indirect fire. And both sides use this to influence the tactical decision making of their enemies.
The Ukrainians report that about 70% of their kills are now by drones. Current Ukrainian drone production rate was 1.7 million last year. Target for this year is above 4 million.[1] Russian comment: “Their reconnaissance drones are in the sky 24/7, and any movement on our part is immediately met with a massive wave of [first-person-view] drones.”
Tactics when you have large numbers of expendable drones are totally different from the old days of snooping around with a few drones.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/12/45-million-...
There is this interesting arms race here with drones and unit size, yes?
If you can get any large group together, then a drone will come for it. So, there is a balance between the size of a group and the cost of the drone that the enemy is will to spend (+ estimated failure rate).
As drones get cheaper and more efficient at killing that number of soldiers worth killing approaches 1. Meaning that group and unit cohesion at the 'front' goes to 0. The 'long term' dynamics are stunning.
I cannot imagine the psychological horror of being sent with little training (because why bother for either side) into the theater all alone without any officer supervision or buddies. You'd have a radio that gets jammed, maybe, some bivouac supplies, bad food and water, a gun of some sort hopefully, and time, terrible time. The veterans, what little there are, would tell you that if you hear a drone, you're dead already. You'd have nothing but superstition to go on. You'd just sit there in the heat or cold, waiting on a radio signal, knowing that your side will shoot you too if you 'missed' the call to attack. And you'd wait and wait. If your buddy came over, or a lieutenant, to check in on you then you're at higher risk of being droned. You'd have only your frightened thoughts to keep company and solace with.
Morale? what morale? That is carnal house. There is no 'army' in the field, you command nothing but the slaughter of young boys to an indifferent AI god.
To some degree, having AI drones fighting off against AI drones can't come fast enough.
Drones are ammo now, not assets. The old USMC manual stresses retrieving the expensive US drone, cleaning it, and putting it back in its protective case. Ukraine expects to produce 4 million drones this year, and most of them will be expended.
Everybody in that war is getting good at building trenches with top cover for drone protection.[1] Camo netting up top can help. But the dug-in troops can't accomplish much beyond survival. This war is static but deadly.
[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-marines-trenches-drones...
There are entire subreddits dedicated to actual footage of drone effectiveness on the front lines... It's definitely not just psychological warfare. In some cases, the fiber optic lines crisscross fields so densely it looks like spider webs.
NSFW - https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/
Or subreddit DroneCombat for drone specific posts, very NSFW too. And then UkraineWarVideoReport has a bit wider range or reports and links, so unlike those other two it's not combat footage only.
[flagged]
Is there a pro-Russian one? Any reporting or combat footage, at least what's been posted on Reddit, has been pro-Ukranian, and the Ukranian losses are underreported.
It's not warmongering though; Ukraine never asked for it, it's a war of aggression from the Russian side. I also don't think the soldiers depicted asked for any of that, but I doubt they were offered much of a choice in the matter.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/ is in the top 10 subscribed substacks. He posts videos supporting points he makes, and you can find drones attacks. His analysis and predictions are more accurate than pro-Ukrainian pundits, and draws on information from within Ukraine (speeches at the Rada, Ukrainian commander interviews, posts) and Russia.
> pro Ukrainian warmongering people
As opposed to pro Russian peaceful people? What the fuck do I even read?
I would think drones carrying cluster bombs would be effective. More targeted in their destruction. No need to scatter bomblets over a quarter of a mile, just 10 or so around a tank.
If you have seen videos from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially over time, you can see the evolution of tactics.
For example with tanks, they...
- strap artillery shell to the drone and fly it into the tank
- drop a standard grenade into the hatch after the crew has fled
They don't need to drop munitions like cluster, they strap several on and drop them one at a time. They have become quite skilled and accurate, even from 100+ meters up in wind
There are places in Ukraine where it looks like giant spiders live there, due to all the fiber optic cables from drones left on the battle fields
The fact that we have not yet seen a high-profile political assassination by drone, particularly from the "death from above" method, absolutely _boggles_ my mind, and I don't think we get out of this decade without that occurring, and I'm not particularly sure what sort of counter-measure you could reasonably put in place to stop that. The 2030s are going to be messy.
It's a matter of time; that said, all high profile open air whatsits have anti-drone detection and countermeasures in place. The Ukranian invasion is one of attrition, where both sides try to limit expenses; this isn't the case for e.g. the US president's protection, where they can afford to deploy millions in countermeasures.
Less than 5 years is my guess, somewhere in the world.
> all the fiber optic cables from drones left on the battle fields
Are they tethered? I thought these were all radio controlled
Tethered to avoid jamming
Here's an post with a few pictures of the tangled mess left behind
https://bou.org.uk/blog-moreland-fibreoptic-drones/
Seen this a few times and am surprised it's actually a viable solution. Used to be heavily into fpv a long time ago and remember MIT(?) had autonomous CV software that could easily navigate through thick forests that was open sourced, I think the only real use of onboard GPS there was "go from point A to B"
This was perhaps a decade ago mind you, people rocking DIY setups had fairly limited computing compared to what you can buy today. The PID needed for quads/hex/octos to stay aloft has trivial compute requirements.
Won't the fibres leading up to the operator and revealing their location not a threat?
you need to walk through the battlefield to trace it. you know, the one the drone just flew over.
they're pretty thin, and it's not hard for the operators to displace. even using other drones and AI to track refraction index of the fiber it's still a tall order. you'd probably have better luck shooting artillery at any large building or hedgerow nearby...
Yup, apparently some of these carry 50 kilometers of fiber optic cable. Max range limits their payload capacity though, but then, they can do reconnaisance and target painting with one, then send an automated jamming-resistant swarm to do damage.
They switched to fiber optic tethers to avoid being jammed.
as far as i know, they don't strap artillery shells to drones, they too heavy. they strap shaped charges.
100s of videos of drones with arty shells can be seen on https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/
They have strapped so many things to drones, you'd think they've tried about everything, then some new video comes out
Drones have evolved rapidly and come in all shapes and sizes now. The DJI Maverick image in people's head is only one modality, though by far the most common form factor
Those aren't artillery shells though, the explosive part of those weighs seven kilos, which is too much for the mass produced drones they use. As others mentioned, they use RPGs (3 kgs), mortar shells (~1.5 kgs), grenades (<1 kg), sometimes land mines, and specialized drone explosives for suicide drones.
I do like seeing the production facilities of these drones, how they simplified the designs but also made design decisions to deal with the scale, they're built so they can be stacked easily. Mind you, this is probably the case with these drone show drones too.
The bigger drones are sometimes used for dropping TM-62 anti-tank mines, which are about ten kilograms. An artillery shell would probably still be a poor choice though, considering the forces a shell is built to withstand. Adds a lot of extra weight.
Those must be HEAT rounds. An AP round would not have the velocity to do anything, anti-personnel would not penetrate tanks armor but would kill crew if dismounted or a hatch is left open
Old rpg rounds are cheap and top-down doesn't require much pen, making older stock more effective. Newish stock are tandem and would be even worse to try and counter from above (PG-7VR).
The typical setup I’ve seen for FPV drones is RPG warheads or small mortar shells for drops. I’d love to see one drop 152/155mm shells though.
In some photos I have seen the charge looks like and RPG https://share.google/LUIxGYEC07ZDVMVgT
Problem is that munitions carried by drones are much weaker than artillery shells - more like grenades. On this page is a turtle tank that took 60 drone attacks to disable. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/western-analysts-find-li...
Russians are able to retrieve 80% of disabled armored vehicles to repair them.
A tank does not even notice cluster bombs - this type of bomb is effective against infantry and civilians.
10 or so wouldn't work on a tank. you need a shaped charge or EFP.
that might be a solution for massed infantry, but then again you can just drop a single mortar round, e.g. the Ukrainian "foot crusher"
Some more information about the psychological impact of drone warfare [0]
Massive stress factor when you are in the field leading to hyper vigilance when on leave (or at home) with lots of trigger events.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c23gjk7dlvlo.amp
drones ain't psyops, mate. they're killing a ton of people in combat situations, and can do things like fly into a bunker or tunnel and get the inhabitants
Because they're incredibly fast, exceeding 40 meters per second. You can't fire a shotgun at 80 meters. A typical shotgun's effective range is only 40 meters, and once it's within range, you only have one second to fire.
Furthermore, drones are generally difficult to detect at 400 meters unless you're using a synthetic detection system. By the time you spot them, it's too late.
My experience is only with consumer drones, but you could fly over a target area and release an explosive before anyone heard that it was there, especially in a noisy environment. Above 100m, unless you're at high speed/power, most people won't notice a drone at all. It's often a change in speed/direction that gives them away, otherwise it will be past you before you first notice the sound.
plus, speaking from military experience, people don't look up.
camp out at the top of a 5 story building and don't move or shoot and no one will even gaze at you. 300m straight up? might as well be in orbit.
FPV drones can hit 80mph+ / 128kmph+ , other drones can fly much higher than a shotgun can reach.
Also, swarms.
Large scale swarms will probably never be a major issue for infantry. You have a finite number of drones, even at extremely high rates of production, spread across all things you want to target. Sending a swarm at individual infantry, or even platoons is just wasteful. At scale that's thousands of drones, per day, that you could have instead sent towards more valuable targets.
This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
This is not true.
The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.
A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.
If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.
Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.
Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.
People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.
Edit:
I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.
As I understand it, currently all drones require a human operator who can only operate one at a time. And except for some special operations behind enemy lines, you must be fairly close to the target, as within a few km. The fiber optic ones, even closer
So your 50 drone swarm is going to need 50 operators, fairly close to the front. Who are also vulnerable to enemy counter drones and glide bombs - the latter is a real problem for Ukraine
I haven’t seen any evidence of a “swarm” on combat footage from Ukraine war, I have seen a few drones hitting a single target, especially armored vehicles in fairly quick succession, like a few seconds, It looked like independent operators all picking the obvious high value target, not some intentional “swarm”
Tech may change this in the future but we’re not there quite yet
You're very out of date.
First, you don't need AI operators, you just need a swarm. The operators are reusable!
>Ukraine reported the largest single-day drone attack by Russia on July 9, 2025, where Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones. This surpasses earlier attacks, including one on May 26, 2025, when Russia launched 355 drones.
With that many pilots, that is a swarm.
Next, analysis of last months AI driven attack was performed by many drones with no human terminal guidance - they were jammed and expected to be!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/ukraine-russia...
>“Our models are being trained to recognise targets to understand target prioritisation,” he says. “We do not have full autonomy yet. We use the human factor where we need to, but we are developing different scenarios for taking autonomy further.
> “We are also testing some autonomous drones, which we have not announced and are probably not planning to announce, but they have a high degree of autonomy, and they can potentially combine themselves into swarms. We are still facing technical problems and hurdles, but we already see a path forward on this.”
One Final Note - Most of the info you ever hear about military tech is only the things people are allowed to discuss publicly. The battlefield is also a hell of a lab, and 3d printers and open source flight software (and open source AI models) are amazing.
Those 725 drones were spread across a fairly big geographic area, and didn’t hit all at once. Also they operate more like cruise missiles, not the FPV drones it seemed like the article was referring too
“Swarm” to me means more than just number. It’s number, concentration, and tactics, like a swarm of bees… the problem is they are concentrated and hitting from many directions, While individually they are not that bad, when they use this tactic it is very effective, Which is how they can drive 500 pound bears away from their hive.
Otherwise “swarms” have been a thing for along time. Would you call an 19th century infantry regiment (let’s say about 600-1000 soldiers) a “swarm”. Or how about those formations of B17/B24s/Lancasteres in WW2 which would attack in similar numbers (hundreds). I would say no, partly because they didn’t use a swarming tactic
Read the Ukranian part I quoted.
Argue about the definition of swarm (the distance between units and level of coordination) all you want, but ultimately it's irrelevant given the addition information.
Massive coordination is going into attacks across hundreds or thousands of Km. Multiple layers of drones, electronic warfare, recon, airspace deconfliction, etc. Highly orchestrated. Large numbers that are overwhelming systems designed to defeat them, like a swarm of locust.
Note: These aren't the Warthunder forums.
Note that the one drone is not the other; when they talk about Russian mass drone attacks, they will refer to Shahed etc drones, which are autonomous, not unlike the WW2 V1 "drones".
But yeah, drone swarms with fewer operators will be, probably already is a thing. But what I've seen so far, they're just not very useful; drones look to be generally used on individual targets, if there's a bigger or more targets, they'll use something bigger like a HIMARS, glide bomb, or if it's closer by, an artillery strike.
Drone swarms primary purpose is to overwhelm defenses.
Many argue drone swarms require some level of orchestration and control, others say a certain level of automation is required.
I'm aware of the differences in many drone classifications.
HIMARS was made largely impotent by GPS jamming. Glide bombs have limited range (barring exceptions for stuff like JASSM-ER but that is massive increase in cost) and detection and fire by counter battery. Artillery strike requires fairly close proximity but a bit more of rocket assisted.
Spent time doing military things with a lot of ordinance and a lot of drones.
iPhones can run some AI models on device already. Expect this to change, rapidly.
Depending on what you're looking for, a Raspberry Pi has enough processing power to do object / target detection and the like already.
AI as we know it today is overkill for this application. Image detection and signal processing is enough for most.
Ukraine is having pretty substantial manpower problems in its armed forces. If fully autonomous drones against mobile targets had been figured out, they would been deployed and there would be no need for the more expensive / shorter range fiber optic drones and you wouldn't hear about the manpower issue as much
They haven't been figured out, yet.
They are absolutely on the way.
And full self driving is just a year or two away for the past 15 years
If we were in a war with widespread conscription that needed self-driving vehicles, I'd bet we'd a) see a lot more investment in them and b) a lot less concern about edge cases.
I agree with you on almost everything. Where we differ is on the nature of money. I think the recent wars emphasize that the real bottleneck in war is no longer $$$, but the things those dollars represent. So for instance a million $1000 drones is, on paper, only a billion dollars. The bottleneck isn't the cost, but the production. And you can't just spin up production making millions per year, because you also need the raw resources - and you end up with this entire complex supply chain, all on top of finite raw materials, and then the logistics to organize everything. And in the case of a war scenario, this all needs to be organized in a disruption proof system. It's extremely complex and difficult, even if you have an infinite money machine.
And I think you would actually agree with this by taking a simple thought experiment. Imagine we have 1 soldier with a million dollars of training. And we give an opposing force the choice of eliminating that soldier, or eliminating 1,000 $1000 drones. Everybody is going to pick the drones, and it won't be even remotely close. In fact drop it down by an order of magnitude, 100 drones, and it's still not even close - even though the on paper value of that soldier is an order of magnitude higher. 10 drones is probably where it starts to get close, though I think it'd still lean heavily towards the drones.
---
I would add that when a war becomes a late stage war of attrition, the value of infantry goes up. I am speaking in more general terms in a war where manpower is nowhere near a critical issue. In any case by the time manpower does become a critical issue, a war is usually already lost, even if it might be able to drag on for many months yet.
30% unit casualties causes the unit to be Combat Ineffective in the infantry role.
(Number of infantry x .3) = $DesiredCasualties
Let's say it takes 10 drones to kill a soldier, and each drone is $250/ea. That's $2,500, or the $KillCost
$DesiredCasualties x $KillCost = Dollar value needed to move an infantry unit into combat ineffectiveness
Looks like around 620,000 troops deployed by Russia so far.
620k x .3 = 186,000
186000 x $2500 = $465 million, bottom line price, in a crazy world where the starts align in many ways that aren't realistic, gives you a huge destruction in combat capability for less than $500mil.
For those following along, this is extremely overly simplified, but I hope it conveys both the huge military advantages drones provide as well as the political (less dead bodies to deal with, less broken soldiers sent home for treatment and decades of care) and economic advantages lethal drones in combat can provide.
And the enemy is using the exact same thing against you. Yet infantry will remain critical for claiming territory, clearing areas and more. As drones advance, war will probably become even bloodier. And drone operators that survive are already coming home completely broken men suffering from extreme PTSD.
Then factor on top of this logistics. You need to transport men, keep them fed, equipped, and more. You need to move a massive amount of stuff constantly in war, yet drones are going to be buzzing everywhere. So I think we're seeing the future of war now - slow, grueling, bloody wars of attrition.
And war where high prices tags are replaced by high costs in stuff, making it more apparent than ever that economies maximized through financial games and services are paper tigers when facing economies based on the production of tangible things.
I don't think they are, actually (using the same TTPs), nor would it make sense to.
Ukrainian drone doctrine is very different than Russian, and not just on paper, but how it is playing out.
This is for two main reasons: proximity to logistics for the defenders vs attackers, and existing military structures including vehicles and troop organizational structures (MTOE) that drone systems support or are supported by.
So I don't agree with your assessment there. It doesn't seem to match what's happening in the field with the type of drones used and the percentage of the classification of each type of drone system and purpose. These are quite different.
I also don't think it will be more bloody, but less over time. Much of the fight is in the electronic warfare arena and in air dominance across the vertical airspace. A colleague agrees:
https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/the-meaning-of-drone-enabl...
Infantry are expensive to train correctly, to outfit, and supply. I think the total number of frontline combat troops will continue to go down as a fraction of overall troops, while increasing supporting positions for drones, communications, electronic warfare, and general battlefield logistics.
Agree with your last paragraph 100% !
That article reads like typical NATO stuff which sounds great in practice but makes assumptions that don't exist, and are unobtainable (like air superiority), if you're fighting an enemy more sophisticated than guys running around in sandals with AKs. Here [1] is a report from somebody who worked with drones in Ukraine, and why he's exceptionally disillusioned with them.
I half wonder if what I linked to wasn't an indirect response to what you posted, as it was published only 3 days later, and is essentially that article's equal but opposite.
[1] - https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-he...
Soldiers adapt - deploying in groups of 3-4, moving along tree lines, and hiding in buildings/trenches. One of Patrick Lancaster's (an American journalist covering the war from the Donbas) videos has him hiding with a group of soldiers while a drone is overhead - the twigs and branches of the bushes and trees makes it impossible for a drone traveling at a moderate speed to see them, and would entangle the drone if it did attack.
Drones are being operated in layers based on range and capability. This applies to both long range / heavy payload drones and small / fast fpvs.
Long range, heavy payload, ISR drones with excellent optics and thermals are helping to spot targets from very far away that small groups of fpv operators can search and target.
Smaller drones must be somewhat closer, so this can't happen too far away from where are currently.
Depending on the terrain and what the enemy is using to adapt (like fiber optic tether for drones like a TOE missile, or like AI targeting and terminal guidance to counter controls + GPS jamming), fpv drones can be a liability (tree cover, rubble) or have a big impact.
What a lot of units are doing for tree cover is what is called a VT fuse for mortars or artillery. These can be configured to burst at tree height. Artillery/indirect often have coverage over top of drone units to cover their advance with smoke if need be, and much further range than FPV drone operations do without some sort of comms relay (could be another airborne drone relaying).
Yeah. Don't group up though. The first round of indirect fire is normally the most deadly.
It seems like you are making the point that there are large ranges of drones, and other weapons are required when drones are not effective, which I agree with. Drones aren't as cost effective as your earlier example of 12 soldiers being killed by a few drones. I can't find the interview, but a Ukranian drone operator said on average 15-20 FPVs were needed to wound/kill a soldier (80% are jammed). Just as it takes 1000 bullets to kill a soldier, it takes lots of drones (on average) to kill a soldier, making the cost-effectiveness worse.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying they're not acting alone, and alluding to battlefield conditions changing and combatants adapting as they have done since warfare started.
They are using Combined Arms doctrine to support their drones now. Instead of drones supporting everything else, everything else is in support of drones and drone dominance.
The supply chain and cost is a big part of it.
As both sides continue to develop new and better AI targeting systems, RF jamming will cease to be effective and they'll have to move to laser jamming of the optical systems. As that is no longer effective, swarm tactics counter the laser tactics. Currently counter-swarm attack methods for drone-swarms are being investigated, because nobody knows of a cost effective way to stop this. Even the drone supply chain is very easy to do much of very near the front lines. Carbon fiber and some heavy duty airframes are harder. It's SO CHEAP compared to any comparable weapon.
This is nonsense. Drones get all the attention because of the novelty and that they obviously have become very important, but you're being beyond hyperbolic. Artillery is still the king of war and responsible for something like 80% of all battlefield casualties. This has become even more true now with drones having eyes in the sky everywhere enabling artillery to become even more devastating.
I dropped something I think you should read from a former coworker:
https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/the-meaning-of-drone-enabl...
Somehow my autocorrect changed TOW missile to TOE missile.
Oops!
The drone cost in hundreds of dollars , low hundreds , even optic one cost $300-400 at manufacturing.
Train a soldier is hundreds of thousands.
Manufacturing , both Ukraine and Russia , generally speaking technological midgets, producing as of today millions a year. Ukraines projected output is around 4 millions in 2025
China can easily produce tens of millions. Even if 1 out 4 hit your target , that’s any army of any size in the world obliterated without new recruits.
Reports (caveat: biased, pro-ukranian reports) are though that Russian soldiers barely get any training, I doubt they are worth that much. Even at the start of the war, there were stories that they had to buy their own shoes.
At this point it's not even so much about scale, but about intelligence - finding viable or valuable targets. A million FPV drones won't do much good if your enemy is >100 kilometers away. The Ukranian front line is over 1000 kilometers long, but viable targets are easily a hundred kilometers from that either side. And that's just around the front lines, picking off individual soldiers or hardware won't stop this war, not when thousands are recruited and trained every month. Which is why Ukraine has done some deep strikes, taking out trains, infrastructure, refineries, air bases, etc. If they can take out the Shahed drone production facility too, that'd be a huge blow. But again, it wouldn't stop this war, just slow down attacks on civilians.
training the soldier is only part of it.
you need at least ~16 years of food, water, and teaching to get something useful. ideally 18, sometimes as low as 12. and you can't refurbish ones that are missing parts or otherwise defective.
the 20k to run them through Basic Training is a pittance.
Basic/AIT in the US Army is closer to 50k-85k but can be a little higher for certain specialties.
Some lives are worth more $$$ than others... CASEVAC for a single US soldier will tie up multiple individuals + follow up costs (full logistics + medical + compensation + benefits etc) = orders of magnitude more than few 1000 drones. Estimates for fully burden costs of severely wounded is 2-5m+ for lifetime.
>Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
It's not, it forces your enemy to waste valuable resources on defending those civilian targets.
> assumes you care about the civilians
Also, drones are currently being flown by soldiers in fpv goggles so swarm is not very practical. It will change once we have swarm software and there is a need for it.
Or just extend the logic to materiel instead of personnel, like Ukraine did with the airbase attacks earlier this year: for the price of a few dozen < $1k drones, you can eliminate $50M-$150M+ aircraft? The asymmetry is insane.
There's also nothing that practically stops those same tactics from being aimed at other soft infrastructure targets: electrical substations, telco facilities, water treatment facilities... the nightmare scenario is taking down transmission lines and switching stations outside, say, a large nuclear power plant during a heat wave. The nuke itself is hardened, obviously, but who cares if it can't transmit the power it's generating to the people that need it?
It also took 18 months to insert the people, set up the shell company, smuggle materials, manufacture, etc. It also had the advantage of surprise - the first such attack at such a distance from the front line. Is it unlikely such an attack will be replicated, just as a box-cutter hijack of 747s attack against buildings will not succeed again.
>This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
The issue in your logic is assuming Ruzzia/Kremlin uses same natural logic as the rest of the world, I talked with many Zed patriots, that country uses a non natural logic, Zed Logic. Add on top of the unatural logic, the brainwashing and the fact that most of thye soldiers are murderers and rapists from prisons and you get a lot of civilians killed or abused by this asshols for fun or other reasons that make no sense in a natural logic.
An example of Zed logic
When Ruzzia attacks some civilian infrastructure in Ukraine (like grain storage) then Zeds claim it is legal, but when Ukraine strikes a military ship Zeds claim this is illegal, it is terrorism because... ... the ship was outside the SMO (special military operation) that Putin decided to be.
I am not joking, the Zeds are full of this bullshit logic, something ie legal/correct is always dependent of who makes the crime, where the crime is happening, who is the victim.
Second best Zed logic shit I heard is "USSR was the best democracy ever, in the entire human history"
>This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.
Dude, Russians literally post this stuff on their own social media accounts. The "munitions" in question are no more expensive than a basic frag grenade.
And what part of the Russian war effort has led you to the conclusion that they value productivity over terrorism and photo ops? The incentive structures of the Russian military are just oceans apart from anything a westerner would consider a proper functional military.
I have some clips for you. Does this look like the operations of a productive military to you? You have no clue, absolutely none at all. They do this shit kind of to their own soldiers, and you think they're above trying to terrorize Ukrainians into compliance?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/europe/russia-deserters-ukrai...
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1937075719428780250
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1935714762664693993
https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1932061484030267809
Note: that last clip is very, very NSFL. For reference, naked and bound deserters were thrown into a dirt pit and fired upon with rifles (not killed, at least not in the video, but threatened essentially)
I can understand how a westerner who has never seen, even by proxy, the dregs of the Russian internet could conceive of just how fucked up Russian military culture is. But, like, none of this stuff is hidden. The brutality of what happens to people who disobey them is genuinely part of the image they want to portray to the world (and to themselves). And in this way they feel the need to make an example of the Ukrainians - who by the way Russian state media isn't shy about portraying as basically subhumans.
And there is far, far worse shit than this that never makes it out of Russian-language telegram channels.
Man. You sound diluted. Go see one month of Gaza and see how a real civilian targeted war would look like. If Russia would want to see terror they could create more civilian casualties in one evening than the entire war. In Ukraine civilians are not the target. In Gaza they are. Sponsored by the west.
Or, they could just stretch out civilian attacks over time to keep up the pressure.
This puts pressure on Ukrainian leadership and citizens while minimizing outcry from global powers.
The X.com links don't work. The CNN article was on a video showing how Russians treat a deserter. Ukraine has 400,000 deserters, and forces men on the street into vans for conscription. https://www.ukrainemonitor.com/article/837248236 https://www.bitchute.com/video/4GlBx4Dgihge
The Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are volunteers, well paid (five times average salaries). https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0002tho
The people on the ground know how the war is going - there are no more Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Winning attracts, and Russia doesn't need conscription. Amazingly, Ukraine is now recruiting 60+ year old men to fight. https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-signs-law-allowing-over...
I don't understand why this is Amazing, Russia has 4x the population of Ukraine and they've been conscripted since the beginning.
What is amazing is that we've been at this point for years and Russia has only made teeny tiny amounts of progress.
Winter Bear? Paper tiger.
They never would have stood a chance directly against the US in a peer conflict.
Like most, you're confusing conscription with mobilization, something the Western media conveniently repeatedly plays into.
Russia, and many other countries - like everywhere in Scandinavia, has compulsory military enlistment or conscription. But these people generally are not eligible to be sent abroad to participate in conflicts. Instead it's used for training. After that training they are then required to sign up for the equivalent of the US Selective Service where, after after some years (2 in Russia), they may be called up, or mobilized, for participation in any conflict. Russia carried out one very small scale mobilization very early on in the war. It led to hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country and was generally exceptionally unpopular. Since then their entire army has been 100% volunteer forces.
By contrast Ukraine immediately, after the war began, made it illegal for men of "fighting age" (18-60) to leave the country and declared a general mobilization such that any man of "fighting age" can be immediately mobilized and sent to the front. This had led to them at times literally dragging people off the streets, beating them into submission when necessary (with more than a few 'deaths in training'), giving then some performative training, and then sending them to the front. And the like the GP mentioned, they recently passed a law to allow even 60+ year olds to enlist, limiting potential medical exemptions, and more. In other words - they are simply running out of people.
So Russia has been essentially fighting a war of attrition against an endless hoard of people armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in the Western gear, directed by Western instructors, using Western intelligence, and winning. It's going to be difficult for any developed nation, including the US, to ever fight a real war like this - because people aren't going to tolerate general mobilization, let alone people coming back in body bags by the hundreds of thousands, for the sake of geopolitics half way around the world. Even Russia has managed to do so only by offering extremely high wages for their soldiers, but it's unclear what this will entail once the war winds down. Hopefully they have not found themselves in the US trap where they suddenly essentially have to always be at war to keep their economy chugging along.
Pssst - Your 100% volunteer claim is wrong.
https://us.dk/media/vsxfb4vt/factfindingmission_russia-recru...
>The Chechens most at risk of being coercively recruited are critcs of the authorites, family members of vocal critcs, drug and alcohol users as well as members of the LGBT community. The Chechen authorites have used coercive recruitment to get rid of what they call the undesirables. In general, any deviaton from the norms and rules of Kadyrov’s leadership could be used to coercively recruit Chechens. In this regard, the Chechen authorites use forced recruitment as a form of punishment in Chechnya. Although certain groups can be identfied as being more at risk than others, there is also a high degree of unpredictability and arbitrariness in the actons of Chechen authorites in regards to coercive recruitment.
And the ones who tried to hide: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/26/austria-deports-ch...
Chechnya has its own laws on just about everything. It's ruled by Islamic Law such that homosexuality, alcohol consumption, and even pork consumption are illegal there. They also have their own laws and culture with regards to war and were even completely excluded from the partial mobilization and allowed to do their own thing, as usual. It's a negligible part of Russia (about 1% by population) and not representative of Russian law or norms.
Even Olympic trap shooters miss their targets sometimes, and they fly ballistic trajectories after they call "pull". Expecting a soldier with 2 months training (best case) to hit an unpredictably flying drone that appeared out of nowhere with no warning as he's trying to take cover from mortar shrapnel is quite optimistic.
Drone attacks in many ways. Some use suicide method that just ramming themself into you. Some just drop explosive from high above.
They do. There's a lot of videos of them being taken out with birdshot. I also saw one video about modding underbarrel grenade launchers to fire a shotgun cartridge.
A lot of US under barrel launchers have "factory" buckshot rounds.
M79/M203/M320/etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M576_40_mm_grenade
AK would be a different story, but Ukraine has a lot of 3d printers and those shells are one time use and not hard to make.
Those got lucky, lucky in that they detected them in the first place and that they were able to land a shot.
yeah the window for a lot of those FPV drones is small. I'd still rather have the shotgun, but luck is a factor.
also doesn't help for the ones that are 300m straight up dropping bombs -- no buckshot will work that high up. maybe 50m at best, if you're very, very lucky with dispersion.
A lot of these fpv drones are capable of 30mph. That’s not a lot of time to spot em and react.
Some of them can go 90-120mph (off the shelf). Custom FPV drones can go even faster - some fancy ones 330+ kph (200+ mph)
Back in 2014/2015 I was racing FPV drones. My most insane one could accelerate from stationary (on the ground) to doing 160kmh (100mph) straight up, in about 2 seconds. It wasn't much faster horizontally, but it'd top out at over 180kmh.
also.. detonating an explosive drone at only a few meters away is still likely to take you out...
Especially given they have anti-personnel shrapnel.
This is a quality discussion about this question:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/1b0u0k0/how_eff...
It probably does. But you've seen how fast these drones are right? It's the speed of aliens in the alien movie or a velociraptor from Jurassic park and much more maneuverable, smaller and can come at you from all dimensions.
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
Or even smaller drones with a single shot bullet, autonomous with enough intelligence to seek and target faces for their shot.
Covered in Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez
These exist and have been used by Israel in Gaza. At least for now a remote operator has to give the OK to shoot, but the drone does the targeting itself. It's very Terminator-esque, a quadcopter with an automatic rifle that can autonomously navigate streets, loiter, and identify and aim at human targets.
Judging by /r/CombatFootage/ you can't really do anything against them unless you wear a full EOD suit. Once you hear it you are already dead.
I don’t know how you would actually defend but there is probably some selection bias too. The videos are published by the drone operators, they probably have an interest in publishing videos of successful strikes.
Small arms fire can take out small drones.
I believe both Russia and Ukraine train some soldiers via shooting target/dummy drones and skeet.[1]
And there are videos out there of Ukrainians and Russians successfully shooting down fpv drones. [2][3][4]
(Content warning: war videos but there shouldn't be any gore in them)
[1] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1948675201983553864
[2] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1920365175766483080
[3] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1936508342622437560
[4] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1923488508015956341
We produce drones in Ukraine, yes, hit-rate is lower, but still worth it given cost.
I heard of Ukrainian drone operators that had +500 kills and that was a couple of years ago...
We're not likely to see the footage where someone destroys the drone
There's a lot of footage where incoming FPV drones are destroyed by different means.
r/ukrainewarvideoreport has been full of it for three years, but mind the survivorship (well, opposite of that) bias - the Ukranian war propaganda / media machine only publishes successes, the Russian one is suppressed or simply not posted on Reddit. Just because you don't see failed strikes doesn't mean they don't happen. The vehicles have drone shields, the roads have nets, and there's heaps of electronic countermeasures in place.
That said, if you're out in the field and there's one above you, you're boned. Can't imagine the horrors of vibing, then having a grenade plop down next to you.
> the Ukranian war propaganda / media machine only publishes successes, the Russian one is suppressed or simply not posted on Reddit
They are literally posted there, stop spreading fud.
Wouldn't a flame thrower be crazy effective against a drone ?
at a distance close enough to hit the drone it's shrapnel and explosives could probably hit you. and you're sitting on a big tank of flammable material.
it's like the dudes that throw their rifle at the drone 6 feet away, hit it, cause it explode... but they still take shrapnel to the head and neck anyway because it's only 6 feet away.
plus what happens if you miss?
and the ammo is big, heavy, and requires special tanks. non-starter of an idea.
You dont need to burn the drone but the fiber cable.
The sub is biased towards the successful attempts though
Got to imagine there are going to be a lot of well-paid PMC jobs for Ukrainian veterans in other countries that neighbor Russia after the war.
I also see Russia transferring all that drone experience and technology to America's enemies.
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https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2025...
this handbook is public but i cant find it. Maybe one of you has it? If so, can you send it? I would be very grateful
Saw the importance of drone fighting in Pakistan's recent clashes with India. They sent drones to big cities like Lahore/Karachi so IMO even Police and Civil Defense should also get these trainings.
Both India and Pakistan were surprisingly well-prepared for drone warfare in the recent exchange in May, for both offense and defense.
The US seems behind in comparison.
So, what is the effective range of this handbook? Can it be used to intercept and destroy ruzzian Lancet drone? Is it single use handbook or can be reloaded?
Took them long .Drones are democratizing the battlefield and that is a welcome development. In a future conflict America engages in,social media will be full of videos of Smiths from Iowa and Kansas being chased and blown by drones in some country in Asia or Middle East.
On the upside of drones, hopefully in the future war will just be among machines
It will just be like countries burning piles of money until one runs out.
Isn't that how it goes nowadays too? The US pulled out of Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation and... didn't actually change anything there, the regime went back to the one from before.
I don't think that at this point there's ever any winning a war, not unless you brainwash three generations (NK) or genocide the population and remove any trace of them like in Gaza at the moment. And that's a relatively small stretch of land.
This is a great post. I like this topic. I found many interesting things on this site. Thanks for posting this.
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Is the book actually available to read?
The manual from 2020 is available.[1] But nobody took drones that seriously back then. In that document, they're treated mostly as recon assets, not primary attack weapons.
[1] https://www.marines.mil/News/Publications/MCPEL/Electronic-L...
The US military had almost exclusively considered drones as expensive systems like the Predator used for standoff ground fire support much like an attack helicopter, or for use in counterinsurgency like the Switchblade
But in their defense, they never anticipated having to fight a near peer adversary on land to the extent Ukraine has. But I would argue no one really saw this coming to this degree. The Bayraktar for instance, was much along the lines of US drone philosophy, costing several million a piece, The drones used in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict were mostly used along that philosophy as well
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《Now