Background: So throughout history, generals have faced a tradeoff between concentrating their forces and dispersing their forces. There are pros and cons of each. But depending on the period in history, and the war, the balance tends to favor one or the other, to varying degrees. E.g. in most ancient warfare the correct strategy was to concentrate almost all of your forces in a single giant army, which would then have a huge battle against the enemy’s giant army. But in WW1, the opposite was true; both sides spread out their forces to such an extent that a ‘front line’ developed with trenches and artillery and so forth stretching across the entire continent.
Anyhow, it seems empirically that the war in Ukraine has seen the balance shift towards more dispersion. The attacking Russians have learned to send a constant trickle of small squads, rather than concentrating columns of tanks to attempt a breakthrough. People say that this is because scout drones detect concentrations instantly, before they even reach the front line, and enable such concentrations to be destroyed by long range fires, often before they reach the front line.
What puzzles me is that I have a theoretical argument for why the opposite should be happening. Probably the theoretical argument is wrong, but maybe it’s a sign of things to come. Here it is:
Above we mentioned that drones have made time-till-detection of concentrated forces go down, enabling them to be destroyed by long-range fires. An important backgound assumption, I’m guessing, is that long-range fires are more cost-effective against concentrated forces than against dispersed forces. This is most obviously true with artillery; damage per shell scales linearly with the amount of enemy forces in the area where your shell might land. And artillery since WW1 has been the king of the battlefield, responsible for most of the deaths and a large portion of the budget.
Well, artillery is in the process of being eclipsed by bomber drones. Already they account for something like 5x more kills than artillery, whereas before artillery was the dominant killer, so this revolution has already happened but it’s going to continue to intensify.
My guess is that the bomber drones will continue to get longer-ranged until they significantly outrange artillery.
Importantly, bomber drones’ cost-effectiveness does NOT scale linearly with the amount of enemy forces in the area you are hitting. Because they are smart weapons—they can hit an individual soldier almost as well as they can hit a squad, they can hit an individual vehicle almost as well as they can hit a column.
So… maybe concentrating forces will soon turn out to be a good idea again? Because if the main threat is enemy drones, who will instantly detect you and then hit you with bombs/kamikazes before you even get into artillery range, maybe you don’t take less damage in expectation by splitting up into loads of small squads dispersed across the front? (Whereas with artillery, this would drastically reduce the amount of damage you take) Unless maybe the squads are so small that they can actually escape detection for a significant period of time. But probably as drones become better and more numerous this possibility will be closed off; everyone will be spotted all the time, and so the way to advance will be to use your own drones to destroy the enemy before they use theirs to destroy you.
Basically, I’m imagining a near future where the dominant strategy is to concentrate your forces into a big column and push towards the enemy. The primary weapon of your force should be long-range bomber drones; the idea should be that you destroy the enemy at a distance before they can send their own drones against you. If they disperse their forces, you can defeat them in detail. Both sides will have fighter drones to defend against the bomber drones; if one side concentrates forces and the other side doesnt, then small flights of bomber drones from the dispersed groups will have to try to attack a large concentration of fighter drones, meanwhile large swarms from the concentrated group get to overwhelm small flights of fighter drones defending the dispersed groups.
I’ve said this before but the analogy might be to naval warfare in the Pacific in WW2. A single battleship could beat a dozen carriers—if it got in range. Which it never would. Carriers would sink them before they got in range, pretty reliably. So in practice battleships were much less cost-effective than carriers. And in practice, concentrating all your carriers into one fleet was better than dispersing them into a bunch of individual ships, because of basically the bomber-fighter dynamics described above.
So if this theory is correct, how do we square this with the reality / empirical evidence, in which the opposite seems to be happening and both sides are dispersing forces maximally?
Well, in order to do the concentrated attack, you really need to have most of your force be long-range bomber drones & associated launchers etc. Because they are things that will actually do the fighting, and you are relying on them to hit the enemy before they hit you. Also the range really has to be long—it has to comfortably outrange artillery, otherwise your concentrated forces will get cost-efficiently wrecked by artillery as has happened the past few years in Ukraine. I think these are sufficient explanations probably.
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.
I believe the answer lies in the asymmetrical relationship between drone offense and defense. It is very hard to take out drones, far harder than shooting down an airplane. And more expensive. While many defenses have been researched and some demonstrated, I am not aware of any major defense that is the equivalent of a castle vs soldiers in drone defense, nor of many drone vs drone dogfights. Missiles and projectiles and a few emp weapons are the main forms of defense, not drone fighters shooting down drone bombers.
So gathering up into a big column, right now, multiplies the value of a drone bomber’s explosives.
I assume that as defenses appear this will change. But I have also seen a lot of defenses talked about, and never make it into wide deployment.
There are also cost factors at play where missiles to shoot down drones are multiple times the cost of the drone.
I agree that drone fighters don’t exist now. I predict that they will in the future, because it seems to me to be a better way to defend than e.g. autoturrets (only defend a small area, hard to concentrate forces, vulnerable to defeat in detail) missiles (too expensive against small drones) and emp weapons (future drones will be hardened)}
I disagree that gathering up in a big column multiplies the value of a drone bomber’s explosives. Drone bombers usually dive right onto the target and kamikaze/suicide; unless your column is extremely densely packed, a drone that misses won’t accidentally hit something else. By stark contrast with artillery, which is so inaccurate that you probably need to barely be within LOS of another vehicle in your column, else you risk multiplying the expected effectiveness of each artillery shot.
Musing on modern warfare:
Background: So throughout history, generals have faced a tradeoff between concentrating their forces and dispersing their forces. There are pros and cons of each. But depending on the period in history, and the war, the balance tends to favor one or the other, to varying degrees. E.g. in most ancient warfare the correct strategy was to concentrate almost all of your forces in a single giant army, which would then have a huge battle against the enemy’s giant army. But in WW1, the opposite was true; both sides spread out their forces to such an extent that a ‘front line’ developed with trenches and artillery and so forth stretching across the entire continent.
Anyhow, it seems empirically that the war in Ukraine has seen the balance shift towards more dispersion. The attacking Russians have learned to send a constant trickle of small squads, rather than concentrating columns of tanks to attempt a breakthrough. People say that this is because scout drones detect concentrations instantly, before they even reach the front line, and enable such concentrations to be destroyed by long range fires, often before they reach the front line.
What puzzles me is that I have a theoretical argument for why the opposite should be happening. Probably the theoretical argument is wrong, but maybe it’s a sign of things to come. Here it is:
Above we mentioned that drones have made time-till-detection of concentrated forces go down, enabling them to be destroyed by long-range fires. An important backgound assumption, I’m guessing, is that long-range fires are more cost-effective against concentrated forces than against dispersed forces. This is most obviously true with artillery; damage per shell scales linearly with the amount of enemy forces in the area where your shell might land. And artillery since WW1 has been the king of the battlefield, responsible for most of the deaths and a large portion of the budget.
Well, artillery is in the process of being eclipsed by bomber drones. Already they account for something like 5x more kills than artillery, whereas before artillery was the dominant killer, so this revolution has already happened but it’s going to continue to intensify.
My guess is that the bomber drones will continue to get longer-ranged until they significantly outrange artillery.
Importantly, bomber drones’ cost-effectiveness does NOT scale linearly with the amount of enemy forces in the area you are hitting. Because they are smart weapons—they can hit an individual soldier almost as well as they can hit a squad, they can hit an individual vehicle almost as well as they can hit a column.
So… maybe concentrating forces will soon turn out to be a good idea again? Because if the main threat is enemy drones, who will instantly detect you and then hit you with bombs/kamikazes before you even get into artillery range, maybe you don’t take less damage in expectation by splitting up into loads of small squads dispersed across the front? (Whereas with artillery, this would drastically reduce the amount of damage you take) Unless maybe the squads are so small that they can actually escape detection for a significant period of time. But probably as drones become better and more numerous this possibility will be closed off; everyone will be spotted all the time, and so the way to advance will be to use your own drones to destroy the enemy before they use theirs to destroy you.
Basically, I’m imagining a near future where the dominant strategy is to concentrate your forces into a big column and push towards the enemy. The primary weapon of your force should be long-range bomber drones; the idea should be that you destroy the enemy at a distance before they can send their own drones against you. If they disperse their forces, you can defeat them in detail. Both sides will have fighter drones to defend against the bomber drones; if one side concentrates forces and the other side doesnt, then small flights of bomber drones from the dispersed groups will have to try to attack a large concentration of fighter drones, meanwhile large swarms from the concentrated group get to overwhelm small flights of fighter drones defending the dispersed groups.
I’ve said this before but the analogy might be to naval warfare in the Pacific in WW2. A single battleship could beat a dozen carriers—if it got in range. Which it never would. Carriers would sink them before they got in range, pretty reliably. So in practice battleships were much less cost-effective than carriers. And in practice, concentrating all your carriers into one fleet was better than dispersing them into a bunch of individual ships, because of basically the bomber-fighter dynamics described above.
So if this theory is correct, how do we square this with the reality / empirical evidence, in which the opposite seems to be happening and both sides are dispersing forces maximally?
Well, in order to do the concentrated attack, you really need to have most of your force be long-range bomber drones & associated launchers etc. Because they are things that will actually do the fighting, and you are relying on them to hit the enemy before they hit you. Also the range really has to be long—it has to comfortably outrange artillery, otherwise your concentrated forces will get cost-efficiently wrecked by artillery as has happened the past few years in Ukraine. I think these are sufficient explanations probably.
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.
I believe the answer lies in the asymmetrical relationship between drone offense and defense. It is very hard to take out drones, far harder than shooting down an airplane. And more expensive. While many defenses have been researched and some demonstrated, I am not aware of any major defense that is the equivalent of a castle vs soldiers in drone defense, nor of many drone vs drone dogfights. Missiles and projectiles and a few emp weapons are the main forms of defense, not drone fighters shooting down drone bombers.
So gathering up into a big column, right now, multiplies the value of a drone bomber’s explosives.
I assume that as defenses appear this will change. But I have also seen a lot of defenses talked about, and never make it into wide deployment.
There are also cost factors at play where missiles to shoot down drones are multiple times the cost of the drone.
I agree that drone fighters don’t exist now. I predict that they will in the future, because it seems to me to be a better way to defend than e.g. autoturrets (only defend a small area, hard to concentrate forces, vulnerable to defeat in detail) missiles (too expensive against small drones) and emp weapons (future drones will be hardened)}
I disagree that gathering up in a big column multiplies the value of a drone bomber’s explosives. Drone bombers usually dive right onto the target and kamikaze/suicide; unless your column is extremely densely packed, a drone that misses won’t accidentally hit something else. By stark contrast with artillery, which is so inaccurate that you probably need to barely be within LOS of another vehicle in your column, else you risk multiplying the expected effectiveness of each artillery shot.