Cheap drones are far easier to destroy than pretty much anything else on the battlefield, and are highly susceptible to electronic measures. Their only advantage is they are cheap, and current tactics and equipment hasn’t yet adapted to them. Once every vehicle contains a cheap jammer, and every unit carries them around, the cheapest drones will be far less useful (except for reconnaissance).
You suggest various countermeasures, but these end up taking us back to where we started. For example you suggested reconnaissance drones communicate via missiles. There is no way to do that for a few hundred dollars, we’re going to be talking about 10s of thousands of dollars and a much larger drone.
At that point it sucks if 50,000 dollars of reconnaissance drone is shot straight out of the sky by a cheap bullet. So you have to have some combination of armoring it, making it fly higher, giving it various countermeasures, making it fly faster, camouflaging it, etc.
Your 50,000 dollar missile carrying reconnaissance drone is also quite heavy. How long can it fly without recharging? 20 minutes? Adding more batteries barely helps because it just makes it heavier, and takes even longer to recharge. Kind of sucks to pay so much money for something which is only available 20% of the time. It’s range is also far too short for it to reach the front lines by itself. It’s going to need a mobile forward operating base with a huge battery or a generator pretty close to the front lines. Not a great place for delicate, poorly defended, expensive equipment.
All these things push you to get a petrol or diesel engine, and scale it up.
Suddenly you’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars and have a platform not very dissimilar to ones that have existed for years.
Ok, you might say, but what if we have autonomous drones that lock onto a target from a distance, fly straight towards them, and blow them up? That won’t be vulnerable to electronic countermeasures, and so can stay cheap.
We’ve had them for years. They’re called ATGMs or Manpads.
Cheap drones are far easier to destroy than pretty much anything else on the battlefield, and are highly susceptible to electronic measures
So the OP addressed this, and I believe the OPs described mitigations will make the drones almost completely immune to electronic measures:
All units are expected to communicate with point to point links (e.g. laser) and are hardened to varying degrees against microwave attacks. Given they are autonomous this would make jamming very difficult and electronic warfare not very effective.
Laser light between drones is not easy to jam, it can be done by shining a brighter laser on the receiving drone at the same frequency, but that requires the defense system to be tracking the drone.
This will also not stop the drone, see “given they are autonomous”. This means that the drone has circuit cards that likely host a multimodal transformer neural network that analyzes video frames for valid targets. Once a target is found, coordination is needed to deploy the optimal weapon on a given target and to avoid wasting munitions such as multiple suicide drones attacking the first infantry soldiers perceived.
But without coordinating the drone still fly and still fight, just less effectively.
Note that the reason why the drones are difficult to attack with microwaves would be the use of metal shields over the electronics, forming a faraday cage. Theoretically this defense is perfect, although in reality there have to be things like exposed gps antenna and camera sensors.
Finally I think you are not fully updating on the consequences of drones as seen in an actual battlefield. In reality drones are so fast that were they autonomous and built in greater numbers, I suspect they would be strictly dominant against most land forces. Any defense you propose is too expensive when there are hundreds to thousands of drones in low flying swarms, traveling at 100-300 mph. They also can react extremely quickly and the drone commanders can order them to concentrate forces in key areas, bypassing defenses and defeating conventional ground forces.
LOL … ”make a meme picture based of the very common one of a man looking at another women when holding his gf hand. The situation is where you write a blog post, someone criticized it, and rather than replying you wait for someone else to defend it well. There are exactly two texts, one on each women. The text on the other women, in the foreground on the left is “wait for someone else to defend it” The text on the girlfriend on the right is “defend your own post”
<Drone wars are ahead of meme wars for the moment>
Thanks for the detailed and well thought out replies! I was about to make most of the same points you make, and you have done a good job of making them for me.
Now I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing incremental changes here, and more uses of drones and autonomy, but I don’t think this is going to rewrite the rules of war anytime soon.
Drones already rewrote the rules of warfare. The recent invasion of Ukraine would have gone very differently without drones. Primary effect they are having is on sensors/surveillance; every assault is seen building up miles before it reaches the front line, and artillery is targeted on it in real time. Big buff to artillery and big nerf to armored assaults.
Secondary effect is kamikaze drones—now the #1 weapon by monthly kills maybe, or maybe #2 after artillery. It says a lot that I’m not even sure which is doing more killing now, since artillery is far and away the obvious contender for a static conflict. Even ww2 which was mobile saw most deaths from artillery I think.
Special mention to naval and long-range drones (bayraktar, shahed, etc.) which are not exactly revolutionizing anything but which are having a noticeable effect.
All in all I think yes the war has been revolutionized by drones. But the biggest changes are yet to come.
Elaborating: Current assault tactics (pioneered by Wagner) involve sending in a steady stream of small (<10-man) teams to go forward & get killed, so that enemy positions are revealed to overhead drones and can be destroyed by artillery and other drones. This sort of constant piecemeal infantry pressure is night and day different from the armored columns we saw in Desert Storm and 2003 iraq invasion and early 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s also different from the bombardment + human wave assaults from previous static wars like WW1 and Korea and Iran-Iraq.
I believe it will, but not in the way described here. What drones facilitate is terrorism, and maybe assassinations. If developed to fruition, they would “rewrite the rules” of irregular, asymmetric warfare.
To elaborate, it’s pretty easy to kill someone important if you are willing to be arrested/executed afterwards; the main thing a suicide drone might enable is killing someone important and being able to escape afterwards. This could already be done with dupes, like the 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, but I think the nerve agent involved was more expensive than a handmade gun.
Just realised I misunderstood this section of the post, going to delete, rewrite and repost.
They coordinate with missiles to defeat countermeasure such as flares and chaff from slow moving aircraft (helicopters etc) by observing and transmitting the position of the target from somewhat further away and transmitting that info to their missile.
I think this is wildly off base.
Cheap drones are far easier to destroy than pretty much anything else on the battlefield, and are highly susceptible to electronic measures. Their only advantage is they are cheap, and current tactics and equipment hasn’t yet adapted to them. Once every vehicle contains a cheap jammer, and every unit carries them around, the cheapest drones will be far less useful (except for reconnaissance).
You suggest various countermeasures, but these end up taking us back to where we started. For example you suggested reconnaissance drones communicate via missiles. There is no way to do that for a few hundred dollars, we’re going to be talking about 10s of thousands of dollars and a much larger drone.
At that point it sucks if 50,000 dollars of reconnaissance drone is shot straight out of the sky by a cheap bullet. So you have to have some combination of armoring it, making it fly higher, giving it various countermeasures, making it fly faster, camouflaging it, etc.
Your 50,000 dollar missile carrying reconnaissance drone is also quite heavy. How long can it fly without recharging? 20 minutes? Adding more batteries barely helps because it just makes it heavier, and takes even longer to recharge. Kind of sucks to pay so much money for something which is only available 20% of the time. It’s range is also far too short for it to reach the front lines by itself. It’s going to need a mobile forward operating base with a huge battery or a generator pretty close to the front lines. Not a great place for delicate, poorly defended, expensive equipment.
All these things push you to get a petrol or diesel engine, and scale it up.
Suddenly you’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars and have a platform not very dissimilar to ones that have existed for years.
Ok, you might say, but what if we have autonomous drones that lock onto a target from a distance, fly straight towards them, and blow them up? That won’t be vulnerable to electronic countermeasures, and so can stay cheap.
We’ve had them for years. They’re called ATGMs or Manpads.
So the OP addressed this, and I believe the OPs described mitigations will make the drones almost completely immune to electronic measures:
Laser light between drones is not easy to jam, it can be done by shining a brighter laser on the receiving drone at the same frequency, but that requires the defense system to be tracking the drone.
This will also not stop the drone, see “given they are autonomous”. This means that the drone has circuit cards that likely host a multimodal transformer neural network that analyzes video frames for valid targets. Once a target is found, coordination is needed to deploy the optimal weapon on a given target and to avoid wasting munitions such as multiple suicide drones attacking the first infantry soldiers perceived.
But without coordinating the drone still fly and still fight, just less effectively.
Note that the reason why the drones are difficult to attack with microwaves would be the use of metal shields over the electronics, forming a faraday cage. Theoretically this defense is perfect, although in reality there have to be things like exposed gps antenna and camera sensors.
Finally I think you are not fully updating on the consequences of drones as seen in an actual battlefield. In reality drones are so fast that were they autonomous and built in greater numbers, I suspect they would be strictly dominant against most land forces. Any defense you propose is too expensive when there are hundreds to thousands of drones in low flying swarms, traveling at 100-300 mph. They also can react extremely quickly and the drone commanders can order them to concentrate forces in key areas, bypassing defenses and defeating conventional ground forces.
LOL …
”make a meme picture based of the very common one of a man looking at another women when holding his gf hand. The situation is where you write a blog post, someone criticized it, and rather than replying you wait for someone else to defend it well. There are exactly two texts, one on each women. The text on the other women, in the foreground on the left is “wait for someone else to defend it” The text on the girlfriend on the right is “defend your own post”
<Drone wars are ahead of meme wars for the moment>
Thanks for the detailed and well thought out replies! I was about to make most of the same points you make, and you have done a good job of making them for me.
Now I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing incremental changes here, and more uses of drones and autonomy, but I don’t think this is going to rewrite the rules of war anytime soon.
Drones already rewrote the rules of warfare. The recent invasion of Ukraine would have gone very differently without drones. Primary effect they are having is on sensors/surveillance; every assault is seen building up miles before it reaches the front line, and artillery is targeted on it in real time. Big buff to artillery and big nerf to armored assaults.
Secondary effect is kamikaze drones—now the #1 weapon by monthly kills maybe, or maybe #2 after artillery. It says a lot that I’m not even sure which is doing more killing now, since artillery is far and away the obvious contender for a static conflict. Even ww2 which was mobile saw most deaths from artillery I think.
Special mention to naval and long-range drones (bayraktar, shahed, etc.) which are not exactly revolutionizing anything but which are having a noticeable effect.
All in all I think yes the war has been revolutionized by drones. But the biggest changes are yet to come.
Elaborating: Current assault tactics (pioneered by Wagner) involve sending in a steady stream of small (<10-man) teams to go forward & get killed, so that enemy positions are revealed to overhead drones and can be destroyed by artillery and other drones. This sort of constant piecemeal infantry pressure is night and day different from the armored columns we saw in Desert Storm and 2003 iraq invasion and early 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
And it’s also different from the bombardment + human wave assaults from previous static wars like WW1 and Korea and Iran-Iraq.
I believe it will, but not in the way described here. What drones facilitate is terrorism, and maybe assassinations. If developed to fruition, they would “rewrite the rules” of irregular, asymmetric warfare.
What is an example of a terrorist attack drones enable where with the same cost and effort terrorists couldn’t do something similar already?
To elaborate, it’s pretty easy to kill someone important if you are willing to be arrested/executed afterwards; the main thing a suicide drone might enable is killing someone important and being able to escape afterwards. This could already be done with dupes, like the 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, but I think the nerve agent involved was more expensive than a handmade gun.
Ok, that makes sense, targeted killings from a distance greater than a sniper rifle does seem like a good choice for a drone.
Is this what you meant to say?
Just realised I misunderstood this section of the post, going to delete, rewrite and repost.