Some napkin math & additional musings. I should say I’m not an expert nor am I devoting any significant amount of time to this so my conclusions are not even close to confident. This is all extremely lazy speculation.
Google AI summary tells me: Grad rockets have max range 40km with CEP of about 100m. Conventional artillery (Krab system in particular) has 30km range but 40km with fancy rocket-assisted projectiles, with CEP of about 50m. Assuming this is representative...
Same source says a single artillery shell costs in the low thousands of dollars. Ouch.
This is not looking good for artillery. Similar googling suggests that Zipline medical supply delivery drones today have something like 80-150km round-trip range; if they were one-way kamikazes their range would presumably be at least double. And they cost something like $10k each. They can carry about 2kg payload though, not very much. The explosive charge in a typical artillery shell is like 6 − 10kg of explosive. So, maybe redesign the drones to sacrifice a little range and reusability, but carry a larger explosive payload? Probably pretty doable. End result is a kamikaze drone that costs as much as, say, 4 artillery shells, but has a CEP of 1m and about double the range. And it can be launched from a truck-mounted launcher. So bolt a bunch of launchers to a bunch of pickup trucks, and load them up with drones, and now you have your dirt-cheap equivalent of aircraft carriers for land warfare.
Against a single soldier operating alone, the CEP advantage means that the drone will be orders of magnitude more cost effective. I think you’ll need quite densely packed enemy forces for the artillery to be more cost-effective than a swarm of drones. Like, maybe if 100 soldiers are walking across the same field together, all within the same 50m radius? Then maybe it’s about even. You probably need like 1000 soldiers in the field for artillery to be superior to drones?
Against vehicles, let me see… let’s suppose the vehicles are traffic-jammed due to a roadblock or wreck or something, so every 10m stretch of road contains a vehicle. Then… heck even under these conditions, it seems like you’ll achieve more destruction by sending 1 drone than by sending 4 artillery shells. Probably all 4 shells will miss the road entirely. In general perhaps, artillery only wins if each individual shell has a 25%+ chance of hitting something valuable.
All that assumes that the drones aren’t being shot down en route, of course. Artillery shells are genuinely harder to shoot down than drones, by a lot, and that’s a big advantage. On the other hand, drones have longer range… so I think that’s about what the crux will be. Which is more important, immunity to AA, or range?
I think the answer depends on whether AA is ‘good enough’ against drones. In ww2, AA was not ‘good enough’ against planes, in the following sense: The amount of AA a fleet could carry was woefully inadequate to prevent that fleet from taking lots of damage from an airstrike launched by a similarly-expensive fleet. (In many of the carrier battles of WW2, both sides’ squadrons would reach the enemy and do significant damage despite all the AA mounted on the carriers and supporting vessels, and despite the defending fighter planes)
My guess is that AA will not be good enough against drones, but I’m not confident. The reason I think this is that drones are very cheap relative to the cost of the targets they’ll be attacking. E.g. a truck with four soldiers in it represents something like $500k, bare minimum. (100 for each man + for the truck). Say it has an autoturret on the roof. Well, it needs to be able to reliably defeat, like, $200k worth of attacking drones. So a swarm of ~20. That seems hard. It simply doesn’t have the time to swivel and shoot them all down before they close the distance. (quick check: Say they travel at 100km/h. Phalanx CIWS has something like 1.5km max range. So they have something like… 45 seconds to shoot down all of them? Except the Phalanx CIWS is mounted on ships, it is too big to be mounted on a truck. Plus it probably costs millions of dollars. … yeah idk but it’s looking rough for our hypothetical truck.
And this is making it hard for the drones, by making the target really cheap yet still defended by autoturret. Against conventional militaries there would be much juicier, much more expensive targets—such as a Krab SPG artillery system, which costs about $10M. So instead of having to reliably defeat about 20 incoming drones, it would need to reliably defeat 400. No way.
Point is, I think that while autoturrets will be really valuable and important, I think that the overall dynamics will be similar to WW2 naval combat, in that two similarly-sized forces launching flights of bomber drones at each other will both score serious hits and both do devastating damage despite all the AA present. The main way to win will be to (a) have lots of fighters to intercept the enemy bombers before they arrive, and more importantly, (b) hit them with your bombers before they can hit you with theirs.
Which is why range matters so much, and why artillery will lose. Less cost-effective in a slugfest (unless the enemy is incredibly densely packed, which they won’t be) yet also shorter range so you probably won’t even get a chance to shoot. Only advantage is that their shots can’t be intercepted, but that’s not enough to compensate for the disadvantages.
And as I originally said, if this is indeed how it all plays out… then I think concentrating forces is going to come back in style. Put half your army in one big blob and push them across the map towards the enemy, leaving the entire rest of the line to be lightly manned by the rest of your forces. If the enemy stupidly keeps their forces dispersed, your blob will just steamroll everything in its path, large swarms of drones overwhelming anything at 80km distance from the edge of the blob. (If they counter with more expensive rocket artillery systems like HIMARS with ATACMS (300km range), then just get bigger more expensive drones with longer range too. An ATACMS missile costs about a million dollars. Perhaps the price can be brought down with improved procurement practices… because otherwise it wouldn’t be cost-effective against the type of dirt-cheap drones&trucks force I’m describing even if said force didn’t bother to defend itself at all.)
If the enemy builds a similar force to you, and concentrates to a similar degree, then your two blobs meet in a gigantic pitched battle. The sky fills with dogfighting drones; fiber optic cables fall like snow on the fields. (Though actually perhaps by this point they’ll use laser links instead?)
Vignette:
We couldn’t sleep much the night before the battle. Word was that the enemy was gathering their forces about 300km away, intending to stop us before we crossed the river. Our job was to drive 200km to the river and then destroy everything within 100km radius so that the engineers could safely build the bridges. They were probably going to try to stop us. We packed up our sleeping bags, mounted our trucks, and rolled out.
As we drove we passed the occasional bombed-out vehicle. One patch of road was littered with drone bits, presumably the remnants of one of yesterday’s fights. On our screens we tracked the progress of the battle; we weren’t ordered to launch anything yet though. By noon we made it to the river. Well, we never actually saw the river ourselves, though others in our area did. Already when we arrived we got word that the enemy swarm was en route and would hit in half an hour. We stopped in our designated field, erected our launcher, and let fly. Within ten minutes we had launched everything we had. Now it was up to the AIs and the FPV pilots, operating from datacenters and VR headsets way in the rear, connected by laser links and fiber optics, to do the fighting. But it was still up to us to do the dying. Fifteen minutes left, we were told. Time to disperse, conceal, escape. We left the truck in the field, set the autoturret to “kill anything in the sky,” and hid in the basement of a nearby house. The sky itself seemed to hum with the noise of the drones.
When we came out, our truck was a burning hulk. Command was telling us to get to the intersection ASAP to unload the reinforcement-drones and launch the next wave. The bombardment was still ongoing in other areas, but thankfully it was just smoke, not explosions, where we were. It was still insanely loud though, a continuous rumble of bombs going off.
Fortunately our area didn’t get hit again that day. We’re told our bomber wave had been more successful than theirs. More reinforcements kept arriving and launching more drones. Around midnight we got the news: Enemy withdrawing beyond range, you may rest for the day. Victory.
Some napkin math & additional musings. I should say I’m not an expert nor am I devoting any significant amount of time to this so my conclusions are not even close to confident. This is all extremely lazy speculation.
Google AI summary tells me: Grad rockets have max range 40km with CEP of about 100m. Conventional artillery (Krab system in particular) has 30km range but 40km with fancy rocket-assisted projectiles, with CEP of about 50m. Assuming this is representative...
Same source says a single artillery shell costs in the low thousands of dollars. Ouch.
This is not looking good for artillery. Similar googling suggests that Zipline medical supply delivery drones today have something like 80-150km round-trip range; if they were one-way kamikazes their range would presumably be at least double. And they cost something like $10k each. They can carry about 2kg payload though, not very much. The explosive charge in a typical artillery shell is like 6 − 10kg of explosive. So, maybe redesign the drones to sacrifice a little range and reusability, but carry a larger explosive payload? Probably pretty doable. End result is a kamikaze drone that costs as much as, say, 4 artillery shells, but has a CEP of 1m and about double the range. And it can be launched from a truck-mounted launcher. So bolt a bunch of launchers to a bunch of pickup trucks, and load them up with drones, and now you have your dirt-cheap equivalent of aircraft carriers for land warfare.
Against a single soldier operating alone, the CEP advantage means that the drone will be orders of magnitude more cost effective. I think you’ll need quite densely packed enemy forces for the artillery to be more cost-effective than a swarm of drones. Like, maybe if 100 soldiers are walking across the same field together, all within the same 50m radius? Then maybe it’s about even. You probably need like 1000 soldiers in the field for artillery to be superior to drones?
Against vehicles, let me see… let’s suppose the vehicles are traffic-jammed due to a roadblock or wreck or something, so every 10m stretch of road contains a vehicle. Then… heck even under these conditions, it seems like you’ll achieve more destruction by sending 1 drone than by sending 4 artillery shells. Probably all 4 shells will miss the road entirely. In general perhaps, artillery only wins if each individual shell has a 25%+ chance of hitting something valuable.
All that assumes that the drones aren’t being shot down en route, of course. Artillery shells are genuinely harder to shoot down than drones, by a lot, and that’s a big advantage. On the other hand, drones have longer range… so I think that’s about what the crux will be. Which is more important, immunity to AA, or range?
I think the answer depends on whether AA is ‘good enough’ against drones. In ww2, AA was not ‘good enough’ against planes, in the following sense: The amount of AA a fleet could carry was woefully inadequate to prevent that fleet from taking lots of damage from an airstrike launched by a similarly-expensive fleet. (In many of the carrier battles of WW2, both sides’ squadrons would reach the enemy and do significant damage despite all the AA mounted on the carriers and supporting vessels, and despite the defending fighter planes)
My guess is that AA will not be good enough against drones, but I’m not confident. The reason I think this is that drones are very cheap relative to the cost of the targets they’ll be attacking. E.g. a truck with four soldiers in it represents something like $500k, bare minimum. (100 for each man + for the truck). Say it has an autoturret on the roof. Well, it needs to be able to reliably defeat, like, $200k worth of attacking drones. So a swarm of ~20. That seems hard. It simply doesn’t have the time to swivel and shoot them all down before they close the distance. (quick check: Say they travel at 100km/h. Phalanx CIWS has something like 1.5km max range. So they have something like… 45 seconds to shoot down all of them? Except the Phalanx CIWS is mounted on ships, it is too big to be mounted on a truck. Plus it probably costs millions of dollars. … yeah idk but it’s looking rough for our hypothetical truck.
And this is making it hard for the drones, by making the target really cheap yet still defended by autoturret. Against conventional militaries there would be much juicier, much more expensive targets—such as a Krab SPG artillery system, which costs about $10M. So instead of having to reliably defeat about 20 incoming drones, it would need to reliably defeat 400. No way.
Point is, I think that while autoturrets will be really valuable and important, I think that the overall dynamics will be similar to WW2 naval combat, in that two similarly-sized forces launching flights of bomber drones at each other will both score serious hits and both do devastating damage despite all the AA present. The main way to win will be to (a) have lots of fighters to intercept the enemy bombers before they arrive, and more importantly, (b) hit them with your bombers before they can hit you with theirs.
Which is why range matters so much, and why artillery will lose. Less cost-effective in a slugfest (unless the enemy is incredibly densely packed, which they won’t be) yet also shorter range so you probably won’t even get a chance to shoot. Only advantage is that their shots can’t be intercepted, but that’s not enough to compensate for the disadvantages.
And as I originally said, if this is indeed how it all plays out… then I think concentrating forces is going to come back in style. Put half your army in one big blob and push them across the map towards the enemy, leaving the entire rest of the line to be lightly manned by the rest of your forces. If the enemy stupidly keeps their forces dispersed, your blob will just steamroll everything in its path, large swarms of drones overwhelming anything at 80km distance from the edge of the blob. (If they counter with more expensive rocket artillery systems like HIMARS with ATACMS (300km range), then just get bigger more expensive drones with longer range too. An ATACMS missile costs about a million dollars. Perhaps the price can be brought down with improved procurement practices… because otherwise it wouldn’t be cost-effective against the type of dirt-cheap drones&trucks force I’m describing even if said force didn’t bother to defend itself at all.)
If the enemy builds a similar force to you, and concentrates to a similar degree, then your two blobs meet in a gigantic pitched battle. The sky fills with dogfighting drones; fiber optic cables fall like snow on the fields. (Though actually perhaps by this point they’ll use laser links instead?)
Vignette:
We couldn’t sleep much the night before the battle. Word was that the enemy was gathering their forces about 300km away, intending to stop us before we crossed the river. Our job was to drive 200km to the river and then destroy everything within 100km radius so that the engineers could safely build the bridges. They were probably going to try to stop us. We packed up our sleeping bags, mounted our trucks, and rolled out.
As we drove we passed the occasional bombed-out vehicle. One patch of road was littered with drone bits, presumably the remnants of one of yesterday’s fights. On our screens we tracked the progress of the battle; we weren’t ordered to launch anything yet though. By noon we made it to the river. Well, we never actually saw the river ourselves, though others in our area did. Already when we arrived we got word that the enemy swarm was en route and would hit in half an hour. We stopped in our designated field, erected our launcher, and let fly. Within ten minutes we had launched everything we had. Now it was up to the AIs and the FPV pilots, operating from datacenters and VR headsets way in the rear, connected by laser links and fiber optics, to do the fighting. But it was still up to us to do the dying. Fifteen minutes left, we were told. Time to disperse, conceal, escape. We left the truck in the field, set the autoturret to “kill anything in the sky,” and hid in the basement of a nearby house. The sky itself seemed to hum with the noise of the drones.
When we came out, our truck was a burning hulk. Command was telling us to get to the intersection ASAP to unload the reinforcement-drones and launch the next wave. The bombardment was still ongoing in other areas, but thankfully it was just smoke, not explosions, where we were. It was still insanely loud though, a continuous rumble of bombs going off.
Fortunately our area didn’t get hit again that day. We’re told our bomber wave had been more successful than theirs. More reinforcements kept arriving and launching more drones. Around midnight we got the news: Enemy withdrawing beyond range, you may rest for the day. Victory.