I listen to defense experts talk on Youtube as a weird form of relaxation.
IMHO multirotor helicopter-style drones probably will not produce a revolution in military affairs and probably will not seriously threaten Israel because drone defense is likely to improve drastically over the next 3 years and Israel’s enemies cannot acquire sufficient drone offensive capability over those 3 years.
Ordinary rapid-fire guns that have been widely deployed for decades are very effective against drones provided that technology can be deployed to make human gunners or automated gunners better at detecting and aiming at drones, which should take less than 3 years to develop and deploy because the Pentagon and other militaries are prioritizing drone defense and because there is no way to make a multirotor helicopter-style drone that is not loud. I.e., anti-drone technology will use sound to locate the drones or to help human gunners locate the drones.
If there is interest I can probably produce a Youtube title or 2 to back up the words in this comment. They will tend to be hour-long videos, but maybe if there is strong interest I can find the position in the video where I heard a defense expert I respect explain about the sound of the drones.
Drones might turn out the be the cause of death of 100s of 1000s or even millions of people in the near future, but those will be residents of poor countries and badly-governed countries where the government does not have access to the aforementioned anti-drone tech and countries that are in a state of civil war, i.e., almost certainly not Israel unless Tel Aviv becomes much less effective at defense and geopolitics.
Thanks! I’d be keen to see (1) evidence of prototype auto turrets that can shoot down small kamikaze drones way more reliably than trained humans with shotguns can (because trained humans with shotguns aren’t nearly reliable enough) with discussion of timelines till the system is ready for mass production, and (2) a discussion of economics, e.g. how much would it cost to produce ten thousand such auto turrets? (My initial guess at how many would be needed to defend Israel’s perimeter. Ukraine would need an OOM or two more.) Got any links, or wanna make the argument yourself?
Oh, also, minor thing that isn’t particularly relevant: The 40km drone I heard about wasn’t a quadcopter, it was fixed-wing. So, it could probably “go quiet” during the terminal dive towards the target. However, I buy your overall claim that it should be possible to after a few years of R&D make autoturrets that cost-efficiently defend against ~all small drones. (Physics based argument: You don’t have to fly, so you can rest your weight on the ground, so you can have more weight, so you can have armor, bigger guns, etc. for the same amount of money. You lose mobility but for defense that’s probably fine.)
My guess is that it would take at least some tens of billions of dollars to develop effective anti-drone tech, but one of the experts I listen to, namely Justin Bronk in this interview, confidently asserts that the Pentagon is hyper-aware of the drone threat and is more than willing to spend whatever is necessary to develop countermeasures or at least that is my recollection from having watched the interview a month or 2 ago.
I’m very much lacking in confidence in my assertion that it will take about 3 years till the US is able to deploy effective anti-drone tech and am not remembering where I get the information that I base that estimate on except to say that if there actually is not-entirely-flimsy evidence which I used to arrive at the estimate, then that aforementioned interview is probably the source of it and is also where I got the insight that the sound produced by drones will probably prove central to effective anti-drone tech.
OK, thanks. I’m halfway through the interview so far and am not convinced. He doesn’t really address my cruxes, e.g. he doesn’t provide (1) or (2) above as far as I can tell, or anything close. To be clear, I agree that anti-drone defenses should be heavily prioritized and mass-produced, and that after some number of years they will ‘catch up’ to today’s drone technology and be a reasonably effective counter to it. I describe what this world looks like in this post btw. But on the current margin, both small drones and defenses against such seem woefully under-invested-in by Western militaries. Like, several orders of magnitude less spending than would be optimal. It’s embarrassing that Ukraine is producing millions of drones a year, and the USA is producing… thousands? Tens of thousands?
That said, I do also think that the main war the US needs to gear up for is a war over Taiwan, and that war to me seems like one that will mostly take place in the sky and seas surrounding the island, and hence won’t see much role for small drones, or ground forces in general.
This soldier spent 2 years fighting for Ukraine, including 6 months recently as an operator of FPV drones, and he is also skeptical that drones will revolutionize military affairs during the next few years. I don’t recall anything about his arguments, but my recollection is he does provide some argumentation in this interview.
Also, I would say drones have already revolutionized military affairs. 70-90% casualties caused by drones? Despite the war being a static war of attrition with large amounts of artillery on both sides, the kind of situation that historically would have led to artillery being the star of the show? (As indeed it was in the first year or two of the war)
Just imagine if you could teleport the UAF of today back into summer ’22. They’d absolutely wipe the floor with the Russians. Likewise Russia would have achieved their original maximalist objectives if they began the war with the force they have today.
I agree that multirotor helicopter drones have fundamentally transformed the war in Ukraine.
I am willing to believe 70-90% Russian casualties as being caused by these weapons, but the fraction of Ukrainian casualties will be significantly lower even though Russia has been innovating furiously with drones because Russia is less constrained in supply of artillery shells. “While estimates vary, a common figure cited is a 5-to-1 or even higher ratio of shells fired by Russian forces compared to Ukrainian forces in some areas” (Google Gemini which has a knowledge cutoff date of Jan 2025).
Relevant to your original question (many levels of indentation ago) particularly the part about Israel’s vulnerability, is still think the crux is that countermeasures will probably reduce very significantly the effectiveness of this class of drones over the next 3 years at least in areas protected by well-funded militaries that are not in a state of civil war. The tech does not seem to have as much potential to stay very important as for example the fuzed artillery shell, which has remained very important for over 100 years because it is relatively difficult to develop countermeasures for it.
Aside from the sound issue already discussed, weapons makers will probably be unable to make the class of weapon we are discussing much faster than they already are (namely 50 to 120 km per hour) and if they do manage to increase the speed significantly, that will probably make the sound problem worse. In contrast, according to Gemini, during the terminal portion of its trajectory, a large artillery shell travels at 1080 to 2160 kilometers per hour.
Correct, the video someone elsethread shared had a guy saying 90%ish of the Russian casualties were drones but only a slight majority of Ukrainian casualties were from drones. Still supports my overall point though—Russia has a very artillery-heavy force, no one can claim that they didn’t invest enough in artillery, and yet still they are getting more kills with their hastily-assembled drone force.
I agree drones aren’t going to get much faster or quieter. I think their range and EW-resistance will continue to improve (e.g. due to AI) but other than that they’ll stay pretty similar to today. Oh, the price might go down too once they are produced at even greater scale.
They won’t rely on dodging autoturrets to hit targets; they’ll rely on overwhelming. Suppose you have a perfect autoturret that never misses, but N drones are flying at it simultaneously. What is the smallest N such that at least one drone will get through? I’d be interested to see an analysis that takes into account typical drone speeds, turret rotation/targeting times, and typical distance the drones can creep up before being fired upon (depends on terrain).
When you imagine a force overwhelming a position using very many drones, are you imagining one human per drone or are you imagining most of the drones (or more precisely, most of the drone flying time in “drone hours”) being flown by AI?
I would imagine that by the time a drone doesn’t need a human operator for most of the time it is in combat, lots of other things about war will have changed, e.g., whether an infantry soldier is obsolete.
Could be AI, human pilots, or a combination of both, the basic math doesn’t change. (Even if every drone needs a human pilot, it would totally be feasible to concentrate hundreds or thousands of fiber optic drones on a position.)
The time when drones don’t need human operators for most of the time in combat may be sooner than you think. Consider how Waymos operate autonomously but can call in a human operator to take over if they get stuck. I imagine something similar could happen for drones, where e.g. a group of N drones fly in a flock/swarm from point A to point B fully autonomously, and when they are approaching the target a human operator looking through their cameras paints the targets (yes, that’s a soldier, yes, that’s a tank, yes, you are clear to engage) and the AI does the rest.
IIRC even more autonomy than that is already being trialed, I think I heard about a prototype that goes into some sort of ‘autonomous seek and destroy mode’ where it just roams around completely disconnected from its human operators and attacks any targets it recognizes.
I agree that lots of other things about war will change due to AI, but the importance of drones, I think, is not going to go down thanks to AI.
the importance of drones, I think, is not going to go down thanks to AI.
I agree. What I tried to say though was that my guess is that for drones to stay as effective as they currently are for 5 years would require AI capable enough that it would transform so many aspects of society that for us in 2025 to try to project out that far becomes futile.
Thanks. I skimmed the transcript and didn’t see any mention of drones, though I was only skimming so perhaps I missed it. I’m lazy right now and not particularly motivated to dig deeper but if anyone has a timestamp I’d be grateful.
The host definitely says that the guest (the soldier) was a drone operator or worked on a team the purpose of which is to operate drones during the first 3 minutes: I re-listened to that much before I wrote my description. The word “drone” was definitely used.
But on the current margin, both small drones and defenses against such seem woefully under-invested-in by Western militaries. Like, several orders of magnitude less spending than would be optimal. It’s embarrassing that Ukraine is producing millions of drones a year, and the USA is producing… thousands? Tens of thousands?
I would expect advanced drone programs of the US military are heavily classified. What makes you believe that the numbers you have access to show the true investment the US military is making in it?
Idk, but I have talked to some people in the USAF and the stories I hear are discouraging. Also I hear that the cool US drone startups sent their stuff to Ukraine and were humbled, the FPV kamikaze designs that actually worked best at scale were mostly homebrew by volunteers. Also, in general, I have come to strongly suspect that classified US military R&D programs are wasteful boondoggles just like the nonclassified ones; the tech is probably pretty great in some sense but (a) takes several times longer to develop than SpaceX would take if they ever became a weapons manufacturer and (b) costs orders of magnitude more. Like, Boeing is responsible for some military R&D and also for the atrocious Starliner system. Why should we think they are doing a much better job for the military than they are for NASA?
Your original comment suggested that part of the problem is underinvestment by the US military. Underinvestment is a different problem than defense contractors like Boeing being slow and expensive.
Apart from that, the old defense contractors aren’t the only ones. Anduril seems to work both on drone defense and building drones. Palantir seems to do something drone related as well (but it’s less clear to me what they are doing exactly).
It might be that the key problem isn’t in spending more money but in reducing the bureaucracy and the criteria that the drones need to hit.
Both problems are severe. Not enough money is being spent on drone procurement, and what money is being spent is being spent inefficiently. I make no claim about which is worse.
IMO it is too soon to tell whether drone defense will hold up to countercountermeasures.
It’s already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
Once sound becomes the primary means of locating drones, I expect the UAS operators to do everything they can to mask the acoustic signature, including varying the sound profile through propeller design, making cheaper drones louder than high-end drones, and deployable acoustic decoys.
Guns have short range so these only work to defend targets fairly close to the system. E.g. Ukraine’s indigenous Sky Sentinel (12.7mm caliber) has a range of 1.5 km and a sufficiently large swarm of FPVs can overwhelm one anyway. For longer ranges, larger calibers are needed, and these have higher costs and lower rate of fire. Skyranger 30mm has a range of 3 km but the ammunition costs $hundreds per round.
I agree that Israel will probably be less affected than larger, poorer countries, but given that drones have probably killed over 200,000 people in Ukraine even a small percentage of this would be a problem for Israel.
Drone countermeasures are an idle hope. The only real counter to drones is more drones.
Lasers, shotguns, tank redesign [no holes!], nets, counter-drones, flak etc will all be part of the arsenal surely but thinking drone countermeasures are going to restore the previous generation’s war doctrine is as silly as thinking that metallurgy innovations will reverse the gunpowder age.
The future present of warfare is drones, drones, drones.
Consider though that if a defense contractor were able to reduce the noise of a helicopter enough to matter militarily, the Pentagon would have poured many billions into that contractor, especially during the Vietnam War during which helicopters were relied on very extensively. Also, the main constraint on the use of civilian helicopters is probably complaints about the noise. And the fans at the front of engines of airliners is responsible for producing most of the thrust on the airliner, and there have been large economic incentives to make those quiet (to eliminate the copious restrictions on airliners designed to limit noise) and although airliners have gotten quieter, they remain quite loud, loud enough to detect and triangulate with arrays of microphones many many miles away. (The reason the are called “fans” and not “propellers” is merely the number of blades.)
Remotely-piloted gliders or glide bombs of course don’t have much of a noise signature, which is why I have tried to be careful in my comments to restrict the scope of my statements to multirotor helicopter-style drones.
Yeah I agree that the physics favors the autoturrets over the drones. I don’t think there will be silent drones and even if they are, visual identification will probably work well enough anyway. (There will totally be fixed-wing drones that turn off their propellers and glide silently towards the target btw...)
But even if you have a perfect autoturret, it can probably only take out, like, 10 drones before one gets through and kills it. So your autoturrets can’t cost more than 10x the cost of a drone… so, like, $10k. Also, even if you have a $5k autoturret that can reliably take out 10 drones before they close the distance, the drones are way more mobile and so can concentrate force, retreat, etc. and thus will have a huge role to play even if they generally stay away from autoturret-defended areas & even if every vehicle has an autoturret on it.
So I think drones are well worth investing in on the current margins, even if we assume that autoturret tech will advance by leaps and bounds and achieve perfection in the next few years. Which is a very generous assumption.
It’s already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
Is it generally useful to lob a grenade into a general area, though? Unless that area is pretty densely covered with things you want to hit with a grenade, it seems like you usually just waste a grenade.
In ww2 the Americans thought they had bombsights for high-altitude bombing with 23m CEP, but actually they were more like 370m CEP. (according to quick google). So, terribly inaccurate. I wonder if modern computers and sensors could enable significantly more accurate bombing. (Sensors to pinpoint your position relative to the target + to judge wind conditions, computers to simulate bomb trajectories). I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is yes.
Nor would I. In WWII bombers didn’t even know where they were, but we have GPS now such that Excalibur guided artillery shells can get 1m CEP. And the US and possibly China can use Starlink and other constellations for localization even when GPS is jammed. I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
The Interwebs seem to indicate that that’s only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS. And that’s a $70,000 shell, with the cheaper PKG sounding like it’s closer to $15,000, and a plain old dumb shell being $3,000. Which seems crazy, but there you are.
Anyway, guiding a ballistic shell while riding it down into the target seems like a pretty different problem from figuring out when to release a bomb.
I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
… but I don’t think a hand grenade is typically an anti-building munition. From the little I know about grenades, it seems like they’ll have to fix the roof, but unless you’re really lucky, the building’s still going to be mostly usable, and, other than hearing loss, anybody inside is going to be OK unless they’re in the room directly below where the grenade hits, and maybe even then.
If you’re attacking buildings, I suspect you may need a bigger drone.
The Interwebs seem to indicate that that’s only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS.
Good catch.
Agree grenade sized munitions won’t damage buildings, I think the conversation is drifting between FPVs and other kinds of drones, and also between various settings, so I’ll just state my beliefs.
Fiber FPVs with 40km range and 2kg payload (either kamikaze or grenade/mine dropping), which can eventually be countered by a large number of short range guns if they fly at low altitude. It’s not clear to me if the 40km range ones need to be larger
Heavy bomber drones can be equipped with fiber (or Starlink for US allies) and carry 15kg+ payload, enough to damage buildings and sensitive industrial equipment. They can do this while flying above the range of small guns and need dedicated antiaircraft guns
Fixed wing can carry even larger payloads with longer range and higher altitude, but are still pretty slow, except for the ones with jet engines
Drones equipped with GPS will know their position to within ~10 meters like the GPS only variant of Excalibur. It seems possible to constrain the payload’s horizontal velocity by 1 m/s on average, and the drop time from 1500m is 17 seconds, giving an error of 17 m. The overall error would be sqrt(10^2 + 17^2) = 20 m. If GPS is jammed, it’s not obvious they can do the first part, but probably they can still use cameras or something
All of the above are extremely threatening for both organized warfare and terrorism against an opponent without effective cheap air defense.
Even with the next evolution of air defense including radar-acoustic fusion to find threats, the limited reliability of ~all types of existing air defense and large number of drone configurations makes me guess that drones will remain moderately threatening in some form. Given that Hezbollah was previously firing unguided rockets with CEP in the hundreds of meters, some kind of drone that can target with CEP around 20 meters could be more cost effective for them if they cannot procure thousands of cheap guided missiles. If they could drop six individual grenades on six people from a bomber drone even in the presence of air defense, that would be even more effective, but it seems unlikely
Excalibur is made by the US, which has no incentive to reduce costs, and so its $70k price tag is more of a “maximum the army is willing to pay” situation. This is true to some extent with Skyranger so maybe someone motivated will build smart ammunition that costs $40 per round and make it cost effective.
I want to revise my statement that “I listen to defense experts talk as a weird form of relaxation.” Actually what I listen to are geopolitics experts, who often have hours-long conversations specifically about military matters. Here are some suggestions:
I listen to defense experts talk on Youtube as a weird form of relaxation.
IMHO multirotor helicopter-style drones probably will not produce a revolution in military affairs and probably will not seriously threaten Israel because drone defense is likely to improve drastically over the next 3 years and Israel’s enemies cannot acquire sufficient drone offensive capability over those 3 years.
Ordinary rapid-fire guns that have been widely deployed for decades are very effective against drones provided that technology can be deployed to make human gunners or automated gunners better at detecting and aiming at drones, which should take less than 3 years to develop and deploy because the Pentagon and other militaries are prioritizing drone defense and because there is no way to make a multirotor helicopter-style drone that is not loud. I.e., anti-drone technology will use sound to locate the drones or to help human gunners locate the drones.
If there is interest I can probably produce a Youtube title or 2 to back up the words in this comment. They will tend to be hour-long videos, but maybe if there is strong interest I can find the position in the video where I heard a defense expert I respect explain about the sound of the drones.
Drones might turn out the be the cause of death of 100s of 1000s or even millions of people in the near future, but those will be residents of poor countries and badly-governed countries where the government does not have access to the aforementioned anti-drone tech and countries that are in a state of civil war, i.e., almost certainly not Israel unless Tel Aviv becomes much less effective at defense and geopolitics.
Thanks! I’d be keen to see (1) evidence of prototype auto turrets that can shoot down small kamikaze drones way more reliably than trained humans with shotguns can (because trained humans with shotguns aren’t nearly reliable enough) with discussion of timelines till the system is ready for mass production, and (2) a discussion of economics, e.g. how much would it cost to produce ten thousand such auto turrets? (My initial guess at how many would be needed to defend Israel’s perimeter. Ukraine would need an OOM or two more.) Got any links, or wanna make the argument yourself?
Oh, also, minor thing that isn’t particularly relevant: The 40km drone I heard about wasn’t a quadcopter, it was fixed-wing. So, it could probably “go quiet” during the terminal dive towards the target. However, I buy your overall claim that it should be possible to after a few years of R&D make autoturrets that cost-efficiently defend against ~all small drones. (Physics based argument: You don’t have to fly, so you can rest your weight on the ground, so you can have more weight, so you can have armor, bigger guns, etc. for the same amount of money. You lose mobility but for defense that’s probably fine.)
My guess is that it would take at least some tens of billions of dollars to develop effective anti-drone tech, but one of the experts I listen to, namely Justin Bronk in this interview, confidently asserts that the Pentagon is hyper-aware of the drone threat and is more than willing to spend whatever is necessary to develop countermeasures or at least that is my recollection from having watched the interview a month or 2 ago.
I’m very much lacking in confidence in my assertion that it will take about 3 years till the US is able to deploy effective anti-drone tech and am not remembering where I get the information that I base that estimate on except to say that if there actually is not-entirely-flimsy evidence which I used to arrive at the estimate, then that aforementioned interview is probably the source of it and is also where I got the insight that the sound produced by drones will probably prove central to effective anti-drone tech.
OK, thanks. I’m halfway through the interview so far and am not convinced. He doesn’t really address my cruxes, e.g. he doesn’t provide (1) or (2) above as far as I can tell, or anything close. To be clear, I agree that anti-drone defenses should be heavily prioritized and mass-produced, and that after some number of years they will ‘catch up’ to today’s drone technology and be a reasonably effective counter to it. I describe what this world looks like in this post btw. But on the current margin, both small drones and defenses against such seem woefully under-invested-in by Western militaries. Like, several orders of magnitude less spending than would be optimal. It’s embarrassing that Ukraine is producing millions of drones a year, and the USA is producing… thousands? Tens of thousands?
That said, I do also think that the main war the US needs to gear up for is a war over Taiwan, and that war to me seems like one that will mostly take place in the sky and seas surrounding the island, and hence won’t see much role for small drones, or ground forces in general.
This soldier spent 2 years fighting for Ukraine, including 6 months recently as an operator of FPV drones, and he is also skeptical that drones will revolutionize military affairs during the next few years. I don’t recall anything about his arguments, but my recollection is he does provide some argumentation in this interview.
Also, I would say drones have already revolutionized military affairs. 70-90% casualties caused by drones? Despite the war being a static war of attrition with large amounts of artillery on both sides, the kind of situation that historically would have led to artillery being the star of the show? (As indeed it was in the first year or two of the war)
Just imagine if you could teleport the UAF of today back into summer ’22. They’d absolutely wipe the floor with the Russians. Likewise Russia would have achieved their original maximalist objectives if they began the war with the force they have today.
I agree that multirotor helicopter drones have fundamentally transformed the war in Ukraine.
I am willing to believe 70-90% Russian casualties as being caused by these weapons, but the fraction of Ukrainian casualties will be significantly lower even though Russia has been innovating furiously with drones because Russia is less constrained in supply of artillery shells. “While estimates vary, a common figure cited is a 5-to-1 or even higher ratio of shells fired by Russian forces compared to Ukrainian forces in some areas” (Google Gemini which has a knowledge cutoff date of Jan 2025).
Relevant to your original question (many levels of indentation ago) particularly the part about Israel’s vulnerability, is still think the crux is that countermeasures will probably reduce very significantly the effectiveness of this class of drones over the next 3 years at least in areas protected by well-funded militaries that are not in a state of civil war. The tech does not seem to have as much potential to stay very important as for example the fuzed artillery shell, which has remained very important for over 100 years because it is relatively difficult to develop countermeasures for it.
Aside from the sound issue already discussed, weapons makers will probably be unable to make the class of weapon we are discussing much faster than they already are (namely 50 to 120 km per hour) and if they do manage to increase the speed significantly, that will probably make the sound problem worse. In contrast, according to Gemini, during the terminal portion of its trajectory, a large artillery shell travels at 1080 to 2160 kilometers per hour.
Correct, the video someone elsethread shared had a guy saying 90%ish of the Russian casualties were drones but only a slight majority of Ukrainian casualties were from drones. Still supports my overall point though—Russia has a very artillery-heavy force, no one can claim that they didn’t invest enough in artillery, and yet still they are getting more kills with their hastily-assembled drone force.
I agree drones aren’t going to get much faster or quieter. I think their range and EW-resistance will continue to improve (e.g. due to AI) but other than that they’ll stay pretty similar to today. Oh, the price might go down too once they are produced at even greater scale.
They won’t rely on dodging autoturrets to hit targets; they’ll rely on overwhelming. Suppose you have a perfect autoturret that never misses, but N drones are flying at it simultaneously. What is the smallest N such that at least one drone will get through? I’d be interested to see an analysis that takes into account typical drone speeds, turret rotation/targeting times, and typical distance the drones can creep up before being fired upon (depends on terrain).
When you imagine a force overwhelming a position using very many drones, are you imagining one human per drone or are you imagining most of the drones (or more precisely, most of the drone flying time in “drone hours”) being flown by AI?
I would imagine that by the time a drone doesn’t need a human operator for most of the time it is in combat, lots of other things about war will have changed, e.g., whether an infantry soldier is obsolete.
Could be AI, human pilots, or a combination of both, the basic math doesn’t change. (Even if every drone needs a human pilot, it would totally be feasible to concentrate hundreds or thousands of fiber optic drones on a position.)
The time when drones don’t need human operators for most of the time in combat may be sooner than you think. Consider how Waymos operate autonomously but can call in a human operator to take over if they get stuck. I imagine something similar could happen for drones, where e.g. a group of N drones fly in a flock/swarm from point A to point B fully autonomously, and when they are approaching the target a human operator looking through their cameras paints the targets (yes, that’s a soldier, yes, that’s a tank, yes, you are clear to engage) and the AI does the rest.
IIRC even more autonomy than that is already being trialed, I think I heard about a prototype that goes into some sort of ‘autonomous seek and destroy mode’ where it just roams around completely disconnected from its human operators and attacks any targets it recognizes.
I agree that lots of other things about war will change due to AI, but the importance of drones, I think, is not going to go down thanks to AI.
I agree. What I tried to say though was that my guess is that for drones to stay as effective as they currently are for 5 years would require AI capable enough that it would transform so many aspects of society that for us in 2025 to try to project out that far becomes futile.
Thanks. I skimmed the transcript and didn’t see any mention of drones, though I was only skimming so perhaps I missed it. I’m lazy right now and not particularly motivated to dig deeper but if anyone has a timestamp I’d be grateful.
The host definitely says that the guest (the soldier) was a drone operator or worked on a team the purpose of which is to operate drones during the first 3 minutes: I re-listened to that much before I wrote my description. The word “drone” was definitely used.
I would expect advanced drone programs of the US military are heavily classified. What makes you believe that the numbers you have access to show the true investment the US military is making in it?
Idk, but I have talked to some people in the USAF and the stories I hear are discouraging. Also I hear that the cool US drone startups sent their stuff to Ukraine and were humbled, the FPV kamikaze designs that actually worked best at scale were mostly homebrew by volunteers. Also, in general, I have come to strongly suspect that classified US military R&D programs are wasteful boondoggles just like the nonclassified ones; the tech is probably pretty great in some sense but (a) takes several times longer to develop than SpaceX would take if they ever became a weapons manufacturer and (b) costs orders of magnitude more. Like, Boeing is responsible for some military R&D and also for the atrocious Starliner system. Why should we think they are doing a much better job for the military than they are for NASA?
Your original comment suggested that part of the problem is underinvestment by the US military. Underinvestment is a different problem than defense contractors like Boeing being slow and expensive.
Apart from that, the old defense contractors aren’t the only ones. Anduril seems to work both on drone defense and building drones. Palantir seems to do something drone related as well (but it’s less clear to me what they are doing exactly).
It might be that the key problem isn’t in spending more money but in reducing the bureaucracy and the criteria that the drones need to hit.
Both problems are severe. Not enough money is being spent on drone procurement, and what money is being spent is being spent inefficiently. I make no claim about which is worse.
IMO it is too soon to tell whether drone defense will hold up to countercountermeasures.
It’s already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
Once sound becomes the primary means of locating drones, I expect the UAS operators to do everything they can to mask the acoustic signature, including varying the sound profile through propeller design, making cheaper drones louder than high-end drones, and deployable acoustic decoys.
Guns have short range so these only work to defend targets fairly close to the system. E.g. Ukraine’s indigenous Sky Sentinel (12.7mm caliber) has a range of 1.5 km and a sufficiently large swarm of FPVs can overwhelm one anyway. For longer ranges, larger calibers are needed, and these have higher costs and lower rate of fire. Skyranger 30mm has a range of 3 km but the ammunition costs $hundreds per round.
I agree that Israel will probably be less affected than larger, poorer countries, but given that drones have probably killed over 200,000 people in Ukraine even a small percentage of this would be a problem for Israel.
Drone countermeasures are an idle hope. The only real counter to drones is more drones.
Lasers, shotguns, tank redesign [no holes!], nets, counter-drones, flak etc will all be part of the arsenal surely but thinking drone countermeasures are going to restore the previous generation’s war doctrine is as silly as thinking that metallurgy innovations will reverse the gunpowder age.
The
futurepresent of warfare is drones, drones, drones.Consider though that if a defense contractor were able to reduce the noise of a helicopter enough to matter militarily, the Pentagon would have poured many billions into that contractor, especially during the Vietnam War during which helicopters were relied on very extensively. Also, the main constraint on the use of civilian helicopters is probably complaints about the noise. And the fans at the front of engines of airliners is responsible for producing most of the thrust on the airliner, and there have been large economic incentives to make those quiet (to eliminate the copious restrictions on airliners designed to limit noise) and although airliners have gotten quieter, they remain quite loud, loud enough to detect and triangulate with arrays of microphones many many miles away. (The reason the are called “fans” and not “propellers” is merely the number of blades.)
Remotely-piloted gliders or glide bombs of course don’t have much of a noise signature, which is why I have tried to be careful in my comments to restrict the scope of my statements to multirotor helicopter-style drones.
Yeah I agree that the physics favors the autoturrets over the drones. I don’t think there will be silent drones and even if they are, visual identification will probably work well enough anyway. (There will totally be fixed-wing drones that turn off their propellers and glide silently towards the target btw...)
But even if you have a perfect autoturret, it can probably only take out, like, 10 drones before one gets through and kills it. So your autoturrets can’t cost more than 10x the cost of a drone… so, like, $10k. Also, even if you have a $5k autoturret that can reliably take out 10 drones before they close the distance, the drones are way more mobile and so can concentrate force, retreat, etc. and thus will have a huge role to play even if they generally stay away from autoturret-defended areas & even if every vehicle has an autoturret on it.
So I think drones are well worth investing in on the current margins, even if we assume that autoturret tech will advance by leaps and bounds and achieve perfection in the next few years. Which is a very generous assumption.
Is it generally useful to lob a grenade into a general area, though? Unless that area is pretty densely covered with things you want to hit with a grenade, it seems like you usually just waste a grenade.
In ww2 the Americans thought they had bombsights for high-altitude bombing with 23m CEP, but actually they were more like 370m CEP. (according to quick google). So, terribly inaccurate. I wonder if modern computers and sensors could enable significantly more accurate bombing. (Sensors to pinpoint your position relative to the target + to judge wind conditions, computers to simulate bomb trajectories). I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer is yes.
Nor would I. In WWII bombers didn’t even know where they were, but we have GPS now such that Excalibur guided artillery shells can get 1m CEP. And the US and possibly China can use Starlink and other constellations for localization even when GPS is jammed. I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
The Interwebs seem to indicate that that’s only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS. And that’s a $70,000 shell, with the cheaper PKG sounding like it’s closer to $15,000, and a plain old dumb shell being $3,000. Which seems crazy, but there you are.
Anyway, guiding a ballistic shell while riding it down into the target seems like a pretty different problem from figuring out when to release a bomb.
… but I don’t think a hand grenade is typically an anti-building munition. From the little I know about grenades, it seems like they’ll have to fix the roof, but unless you’re really lucky, the building’s still going to be mostly usable, and, other than hearing loss, anybody inside is going to be OK unless they’re in the room directly below where the grenade hits, and maybe even then.
If you’re attacking buildings, I suspect you may need a bigger drone.
Good catch.
Agree grenade sized munitions won’t damage buildings, I think the conversation is drifting between FPVs and other kinds of drones, and also between various settings, so I’ll just state my beliefs.
Fiber FPVs with 40km range and 2kg payload (either kamikaze or grenade/mine dropping), which can eventually be countered by a large number of short range guns if they fly at low altitude. It’s not clear to me if the 40km range ones need to be larger
Heavy bomber drones can be equipped with fiber (or Starlink for US allies) and carry 15kg+ payload, enough to damage buildings and sensitive industrial equipment. They can do this while flying above the range of small guns and need dedicated antiaircraft guns
Fixed wing can carry even larger payloads with longer range and higher altitude, but are still pretty slow, except for the ones with jet engines
Drones equipped with GPS will know their position to within ~10 meters like the GPS only variant of Excalibur. It seems possible to constrain the payload’s horizontal velocity by 1 m/s on average, and the drop time from 1500m is 17 seconds, giving an error of 17 m. The overall error would be sqrt(10^2 + 17^2) = 20 m. If GPS is jammed, it’s not obvious they can do the first part, but probably they can still use cameras or something
All of the above are extremely threatening for both organized warfare and terrorism against an opponent without effective cheap air defense.
Even with the next evolution of air defense including radar-acoustic fusion to find threats, the limited reliability of ~all types of existing air defense and large number of drone configurations makes me guess that drones will remain moderately threatening in some form. Given that Hezbollah was previously firing unguided rockets with CEP in the hundreds of meters, some kind of drone that can target with CEP around 20 meters could be more cost effective for them if they cannot procure thousands of cheap guided missiles. If they could drop six individual grenades on six people from a bomber drone even in the presence of air defense, that would be even more effective, but it seems unlikely
Excalibur is made by the US, which has no incentive to reduce costs, and so its $70k price tag is more of a “maximum the army is willing to pay” situation. This is true to some extent with Skyranger so maybe someone motivated will build smart ammunition that costs $40 per round and make it cost effective.
I would like to practice your form of relaxation, do you have some channel suggestions?
I want to revise my statement that “I listen to defense experts talk as a weird form of relaxation.” Actually what I listen to are geopolitics experts, who often have hours-long conversations specifically about military matters. Here are some suggestions:
https://www.youtube.com/@DecodingGeopoliticsPodcast
https://www.youtube.com/@GeopoliticalFuturesGPF
https://www.youtube.com/@DAlperovitch
the interviews with John Mearsheimer on https://www.youtube.com/@DanielDavisDeepDive