The chances of the vision you’re espousing being viable (autonomous air based drones replacing the majority of all existing army units in the near future) is extremely low.
I think you’re looking at a war between two seconds rate armies, which have not adapted to a new technology and are suffering a large rate of attrition due to it, and assuming based on that that such a system is unbeatable.
I’m not going to go into detail about all the issues with this article, I’m just going to focus on one specific issue.
If you manage to build this entire system, how would the US respond?
With ease.
The phalanx is a gun designed to track and shoot down cruise missiles. It fires bullets at a speed more than 300 times faster than a drone. It can track this stuff incredibly accurately since it’s designed to be accurate enough to directly hit a jet powered missile moving 20 times faster than a drone. It can target at 115 degrees/sec, and usually engages targets at 2000 yards, but has a much higher maximum range. It can fire approximately 1000 bullets before being reloaded, and has a rate of fire of 3000 bullets/seconds.
At a distance of 1000 m a phalanx bullet takes less than a second to arrive. In that time, given costs of accelerating and decelerating, a drone could maybe get half a metre of uncertainty via jitter, at huge energy cost, something easily handled by firing 5 bullets instead of 1 (something the phalanx is already designed to handle).
The phalanx weighs about 6 tons, and has been adapted for land based use. If drones became a serious threat it could easily be mounted on tracks and provide defence for an armoured brigade over a range of a few thousand metres. It would shoot down any drone pretty much as soon as it came in range. In practice the Phalanx is probably overkill designed as it is for cruise missiles, but smaller cheaper systems could easily be developed.
The US army is not going to just obsolete all it’s existing equipment because you’ve come up with some new technology.
Also I think you’ve seriously underestimated how much these drone armies you’re trying to create will cost. Commercial drones are cheap, but not very useful once you buy an even cheaper jammer. Military grade equipment is expensive because it has high performance requirements, and is developed inefficiently for various reasons which drones don’t magically fixes. Once you add high performance P2P links, some powerful GPUs, large batteries to run these GPUs, loads of custom software running on these drones, all the infrastructure this stuff will need, etc. you’ll be looking at something no cheaper than existing weapons systems. But unlike existing weapons system which are designed to be hard to destroy, these things are basically sitting ducks. You could send a swarm of this stuff against an enemy battalion and within a few seconds a few million dollars of hardware would be shot straight out the sky.
Are bits of this valuable? Possibly. Cheap drones are likely to be used for reconnaissance, but they only have about 30 minutes of range before needing recharging, and will have to stay well away from enemy jammers, so are hardly a game changer, just another tool in the toolbox, to be used at the right times. Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they’re more expensive than ATGMs, and easier to defend against using existing ADS like trophy.
And as for other stuff, like missile carrying drones. That stuff literally already exists, and is widely used. The drones are just jet engines instead of quadcopters as quadcopters have terrible range, terrible speed, terrible payload, and missiles are heavy and expensive. JDAMs are commonly used on bombs weighing 500 pounds. The Quadcopter that could carry that would be massive, slow, expensive and could be shot down by anyone with a rifle.
For the phalanx or similar—check this link this link. The consensus seems to be that the gun can’t take out multiple missiles.
“We’re gonna assume that by “missile” you mean a trans-sonic rocket propelled guided warhead, which is incapable of significant evasive or deceptive course changes within the last 1500 meters of its approach. We’re further going to assume that by CIWS you mean a guns only Phalanx installation or foreign equivalent, firing 4200–4500 rounds per minute of 20mm kinetic energy projectiles at 1200 meters per second. The unit would have the standard assemblage of radars and fire control.
A typical Phalanx installation has about a eighty percent chance of destroying two of these missiles if they are detected within ten seconds of each other in an unobstructed field of fire. If the missiles are “jinking” to avoid destruction, the chance of getting both with one Phalanx unit drops to thirty percent. If the missiles enter the kill zone more than ten seconds apart, the kill rate climbs to well over ninety percent.”
Wikipedia gives a Javelin (surface to air) with a max speed of “Mach 1.7+ approx.” EDIT the ground one is much slower, probably because its has more penetrating power. I don’t think we need that against the gun, it is not as armored as a tank.
I don’t doubt that a fixed gun can take out drones, but its missiles vs gun that matters here. At 115 degrees per sec, 2 Javelin 120% apart going Mach 1.7 is going to be a serious problem for it. I get a cost quoted of about US$5M for the land based gun vs $78K for the missile. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/03/02/us-uk-javelin-missile/
If it was made cheaper, would it be less effective? Also note that the land based system needs to withstand armor piercing rounds from the heaviest gun something like this drone could carry. Sure you could destroy the drone but probably not before it can get some rounds off. Especially if it engaged from >1500m out. That drone could also carry the Javelin and I doubt someone (soldier) could shoot it down easily.
Like everything you have layers of defence. Phalanx takes out all drones in an area. Against any ATGMs you use trophy or an equivalent ADS.
Also once you have a javelin/anti armour carrying drone it’s going to set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars and be a suitable targets for iron dome style defences, which can cover a larger area and where each missile costs some 75000 dollars.
“The system is currently incapable of defeating kinetic energy anti-tank weapons.”
So a Javelin type missile that released a rail gun type slug when on the outside of the Trophy defense range would destroy the target.
“In the ATGM’s case, the EFP will affect the shaped plasma jet, dramatically decreasing its penetration ability.”—This sounds a normal missile will still cause damage, and since Phalanx is not as armored as a tank, probably destroy it.
I don’t see why https://newatlas.com/drones/huntress-turbojet-drone/ should cost >$100K when mass produced. In the context of this article, before we talk about strengths/weaknesses of Iron dome type defenses, the vast majority of countries don’t have them currently deployed and can’t afford to.
When is talking about kinetic energy weapons it’s referring to armour piercing sabots, because that’s what needed to pierce tank defences. I don’t know how effective ADS would be against other kinetic energy weapons because there’s never been any need to try, they’re useless against tanks.
These rounds are so heavy, and fly so fast, that’s it’s practically impossible to fire them from anything weighing less than a few tons. Not relevant for a drone/Javelin.
Also notice how you’re creating epicycles upon epicycles here. A drone that fires a Javelin, that fires a railgun, to defeat an existing fairly straightforward defence. Each of those is going to be an impressive technical achievement, the entire package is going to take a while to iron out the kinks, and is going to be expensive. If drones are so powerful they’re going to completely replace existing armies, I wouldn’t expect all the epicycles.
A single javelin missile on its own costs more than an iron dome tamir interceptor, so becomes a valid target for existing SAM defences.
Sure it might be existing ADS defences aren’t enough to defend something like the phalanx, but there’s lots of implementations out there, and the trophies characteristics were chosen because it was sufficient to protect tanks. Could trophy be modified to protect more delicate equipment, or could something like the Iron Fist work? I don’t know, it’s never been tested because it’s never been necessary.
As for the drone you linked—it contains a turbojet. I cannot find any production turbojet with hundreds of kilos payload plus strong performance characteristics selling for less than a few hundred thousand dollars.
Finally I think all of this is mostly irrelevant. The phalanx consists of two parts—a relatively long range, delicate and expensive radar, and a pretty robust, shorter range, cheaper M61 Gatling gun + turret.
On a ship they’re colocated because that makes sense given limited space. But most land based SAMs separate the radar and missile launcher.
I expect that if drones ever become a serious threat will see the proliferation of lots of Gatling guns mounted on tanks and other vehicles, linked to a decentralised radar system combining lots of different radars of different specs. The radars will generally be deployed further behind the front line, (although some cheaper short range ones might be mounted on tanks) and will give targeting information to the guns scattered across the front line which will take out the drones.
The guns are much less vulnerable, and less expensive so don’t make good targets. The radars are very expensive but much further behind the front line, out of range of cheaper drones and well defended by both guns and missiles against more expensive solutions. And taking out a single radar just degrades performance, doesn’t take down the whole system.
This will be expensive and complex to develop but far quicker than your autonomous drone army, since all the pieces are already in place.
Finally you claim iron dome is out of reach of most countries, but most countries do have SAM systems of various sizes. Iron dome is unique in it’s ability to target SRBMs, and reflects the trade offs needed for that, but drones are much simpler to take down, and countries that deploy SAMs capable of taking down modern fighter jets could easily deploy ones capable of taking down drones. Tamir is just a good example since I know it’s cost and it’s not that expensive.
I think you’re really really badly off base, and let me show you why:
That’s what they are capable of under human control. The actual drone hardware is under $1000.
None of your radar proposals are any use. The drones will fly inches from the ground and are a lot of plastic, and their speeds are low, and will keep terrain between them and the enemy. These are generally not going to be detectable on radar until it’s too late. Radar is not effective now.
The biggest objection to why you won’t see these drones immediately is you need powerful onboard GPUs to run a realtime AI control model to get human (or insect) level flight control, and to actually coordinate a drone assault you essentially need much more expensive “mother” drones that have combustion engines and racks of GPUs running a transformer or newer model.
What needs to happen is the drones can implement strategies with respect to waypoints, and as the drone encounter possible enemy forces their models need to select and upload to the mesh network high resolution pictures of what they perceive, as well as lots of compressed metadata.
The model aboard the “mother” drone—or human commanders—have to decide on a tactical solution to engage the enemy assets they can see/estimate exist. Each of the objections you mention has a tactical solution, and in most cases it will be hugely asymmetric, killing armored vehicles and trained soldiers for a fraction of the cost. It will never be 1 drone against a defense, but enough drones calculated to overwhelm the known defenses.
For example, if the approach path chosen, hugging the terrain, exposes the drones to 3 phalanx guns, and there is a total of 5 seconds of exposure time, and the gun can change targets every 250 ms, then up to 60 drones can be engaged.
If 70 drones are sent, is the cost of 70 drones worth trading for 3 armored vehicles? It the answer is no, you don’t engage and instead seek weaker targets like supply trucks.
I feel like the goalposts keep changing. This is not what was described in the original post.
So a few questions:
How do these drones communicate? Low on the ground P2P communications will have awful range, as will most low energy communication systems. Are they so autonomous they don’t need to communicate at all?
What’s their range? Existing drones only fly for about 20 minutes, and at a speed of about 70 km/h. Their range is usually about 10 to 20 km. Flying low to the ground and having to navigate will imply much lower speeds, and less efficient flight, as will having to run a powerful GPU, and whatever communication system you end up using. They also have to carry a payload capable of destroying a tank. Unlike in Ukraine that requires getting past the ADS (e.g. trophy), so is going to be more sophisticated than a grenade.
Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce. Drones are only effective because tanks have weak spots where it was considered to be too unlikely that an enemy could target, and it turns out that assumption was wrong. The next generation of tanks will likely not leave such weak spots, possibly by using lots of slat armour, requiring far more sophisticated—and heavier—solutions to destroy a tank using a drone.
Now for this to revolutionise warfare requires that your drone + payload can be mass produced cheaply, but everything above seriously cuts into that. You need sophisticated communication systems, battery, navigation systems, payload etc. if each unit costs 100,000 dollars instead of 1000 dollars, sending 70 to destroy 3 tanks is much less valuable a proposition.
What’s their range? Existing drones only fly for about 20 minutes, and at a speed of about 70 km/h. Their range is usually about 10 to 20 km. Flying low to the ground and having to navigate will imply much lower speeds, and less efficient flight, as will having to run a powerful GPU, and whatever communication system you end up using.
> Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce.
Standard package. Switchblade 600 has the same warhead as the javelin missile. It’s listed at 33 lbs.
Tanks have a lot of weak spots, for instance from this video you can just look for yourself at the very thin plate on the Abram’s roof that appears to just be rolled homogeneous steel. It would be pretty difficult to armor tanks to withstand attacks from all sides, for one thing someone will just build slightly larger drones.
You need sophisticated communication systems, battery, navigation systems, payload etc. if each unit costs 100,000 dollars instead of 1000 dollars, sending 70 to destroy 3 tanks is much less valuable a proposition.
Currently the cost when built without the inefficiencies of USA contractor system is under $1000.
from the article : “A simple FPV drone costs perhaps $400”
These have every element you mentioned except the GPUs for full autonomy.
And ok, it’s consumer grade, let’s go to milspec, and suppose it does cost 100k a drone*. Well, how much does 3 tanks cost? Each Abrams is listed at 24 million dollars (present day export cost). So 70 drones will be 7 million dollars, killing 72 million in tanks and 9 crewmembers who needed time and money to train, and who will have lost their combat experience.
Note the drones don’t lose their combat experience when destroyed because you can stream the weight deltas from the mother drone to satellite and rehost it on replacement hardware when it gets destroyed.
And as I mentioned:
The biggest objection to why you won’t see these drones immediately is you need powerful onboard GPUs to run a realtime AI control model to get human (or insect) level flight control
Yes that will reduce battery life, and the bigger issue is cost. However the model I am proposing is to use a small GPU on each drone, and:
and to actually coordinate a drone assault you essentially need much more expensive “mother” drones that have combustion engines and racks of GPUs running a transformer or newer model.
Keep all the intelligence in the mother drone, which can be shot down.
* Switchblade 600s are listed at 80k each, are anti tank, and have some level of autonomy.
The mother drone produces the tactical plan and gives the plan to every drone in the swarm. It doesn’t need to have los to execute it although there would be a lack of flexibility during the attack.
The tactical plan would consist of things like waypoints, references images for positioning, and targets. Each drone for that hypothetical “70 vs 3 tanks” engagement has a track to follow, a period of exploiting the terrain, a maximum speed final approach, a specific place on a specific tank to target etc.
The plan can fail if say the target vehicles have moved and additional guns are brought in but the entire process will be a few minutes.
Getting the plan would be done with disposable scouts, these are mid altitude drones with a good laser link to the mother. They upload images of the target area before the shots to shoot them down hit.
Ultimately you are not going to beat this with conventional forces with more air defense. You need a rapidly relocatable force to counter drone swarms that is cheap. Meaning a defense in depth with your own drones.
On the assumption we have self navigating drones that can detect the weakest point in a tank as soon as it gets live of site, and head straight towards it, we would presumably have developed the ability to detect such drones via cameras on the tank as soon as they have line of site.
Than all you need is a bunch of pretty weak guns on turrets mounted on the tank to shoot the drone as soon as they are detected.
Most of these pieces already exist—modern Merkavas have cameras with 360 degrees view, the software to detect a moving drone quickly from a camera is pretty trivial, hardest part is avoiding false positives, but that seems easier than navigating, software to control guns and track targets has existed for a long time.
I assume that mounting a m16 style gun on a turret with 360 by 180 degrees rotation, and sub second rotation to any position is fairly straightforward. Imagine a few of these mounted along the sides of a tank. Most of the time they’re lying flat for protection but can shoot a drone within a second of it becoming visible.
A drone moving at 70 km/h would take 5 seconds to cover the last hundred metres to a tank, plenty of time to shoot it down.
This is mostly proven technology—it’s basically what trophy does, just we can use cheaper bullets against unarmoured drones, and use the theorised AI advances to use cheap cameras instead of more complex solutions, and the ability to distinguish enemy targets that are less obviously projectiles.
The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:
(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else
(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have. None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think. The issue isn’t that you can’t strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones. The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated. To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.
Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield.
(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters. What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield. Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield. This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.
the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.
I expect that if drones ever become a serious threat will see the proliferation of lots of Gatling guns mounted on tanks and other vehicles, linked to a decentralised radar system combining lots of different radars of different specs.
Yes—fair enough and I hope you are right—I would be happier if defense wins too. I hope soon Europe/USA develops such a system, including the ability to mass produce it in the quantities needed.
Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they’re more expensive than ATGMs,
That is not true at all, anti-tank fpv cost is about 1⁄100 of a Javelin missile. It is not obvious how much autonomous guidance would add to a drone cost, but probably less than 10000%.
Why compare with a Javelin, and not e.g. a Kornet which exports for 25,000 dollars (similar to a top range GPU), and can be produced for much cheaper (as evidenced by the fact Hamas is perfectly capable of producing them).
The chances of the vision you’re espousing being viable (autonomous air based drones replacing the majority of all existing army units in the near future) is extremely low.
I think you’re looking at a war between two seconds rate armies, which have not adapted to a new technology and are suffering a large rate of attrition due to it, and assuming based on that that such a system is unbeatable.
I’m not going to go into detail about all the issues with this article, I’m just going to focus on one specific issue.
If you manage to build this entire system, how would the US respond?
With ease.
The phalanx is a gun designed to track and shoot down cruise missiles. It fires bullets at a speed more than 300 times faster than a drone. It can track this stuff incredibly accurately since it’s designed to be accurate enough to directly hit a jet powered missile moving 20 times faster than a drone. It can target at 115 degrees/sec, and usually engages targets at 2000 yards, but has a much higher maximum range. It can fire approximately 1000 bullets before being reloaded, and has a rate of fire of 3000 bullets/seconds.
At a distance of 1000 m a phalanx bullet takes less than a second to arrive. In that time, given costs of accelerating and decelerating, a drone could maybe get half a metre of uncertainty via jitter, at huge energy cost, something easily handled by firing 5 bullets instead of 1 (something the phalanx is already designed to handle).
The phalanx weighs about 6 tons, and has been adapted for land based use. If drones became a serious threat it could easily be mounted on tracks and provide defence for an armoured brigade over a range of a few thousand metres. It would shoot down any drone pretty much as soon as it came in range. In practice the Phalanx is probably overkill designed as it is for cruise missiles, but smaller cheaper systems could easily be developed.
The US army is not going to just obsolete all it’s existing equipment because you’ve come up with some new technology.
Also I think you’ve seriously underestimated how much these drone armies you’re trying to create will cost. Commercial drones are cheap, but not very useful once you buy an even cheaper jammer. Military grade equipment is expensive because it has high performance requirements, and is developed inefficiently for various reasons which drones don’t magically fixes. Once you add high performance P2P links, some powerful GPUs, large batteries to run these GPUs, loads of custom software running on these drones, all the infrastructure this stuff will need, etc. you’ll be looking at something no cheaper than existing weapons systems. But unlike existing weapons system which are designed to be hard to destroy, these things are basically sitting ducks. You could send a swarm of this stuff against an enemy battalion and within a few seconds a few million dollars of hardware would be shot straight out the sky.
Are bits of this valuable? Possibly. Cheap drones are likely to be used for reconnaissance, but they only have about 30 minutes of range before needing recharging, and will have to stay well away from enemy jammers, so are hardly a game changer, just another tool in the toolbox, to be used at the right times. Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they’re more expensive than ATGMs, and easier to defend against using existing ADS like trophy.
And as for other stuff, like missile carrying drones. That stuff literally already exists, and is widely used. The drones are just jet engines instead of quadcopters as quadcopters have terrible range, terrible speed, terrible payload, and missiles are heavy and expensive. JDAMs are commonly used on bombs weighing 500 pounds. The Quadcopter that could carry that would be massive, slow, expensive and could be shot down by anyone with a rifle.
For the phalanx or similar—check this link this link. The consensus seems to be that the gun can’t take out multiple missiles.
Wikipedia gives a Javelin (surface to air) with a max speed of “Mach 1.7+ approx.” EDIT the ground one is much slower, probably because its has more penetrating power. I don’t think we need that against the gun, it is not as armored as a tank.
I don’t doubt that a fixed gun can take out drones, but its missiles vs gun that matters here. At 115 degrees per sec, 2 Javelin 120% apart going Mach 1.7 is going to be a serious problem for it. I get a cost quoted of about US$5M for the land based gun vs $78K for the missile. https://www.thedefensepost.com/2023/03/02/us-uk-javelin-missile/
If it was made cheaper, would it be less effective? Also note that the land based system needs to withstand armor piercing rounds from the heaviest gun something like this drone could carry. Sure you could destroy the drone but probably not before it can get some rounds off. Especially if it engaged from >1500m out. That drone could also carry the Javelin and I doubt someone (soldier) could shoot it down easily.
See this comment thread about jamming.
Like everything you have layers of defence. Phalanx takes out all drones in an area. Against any ATGMs you use trophy or an equivalent ADS.
Also once you have a javelin/anti armour carrying drone it’s going to set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars and be a suitable targets for iron dome style defences, which can cover a larger area and where each missile costs some 75000 dollars.
Trophy sounds less effective than phalanx for missile defense in this situation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)
“The system is currently incapable of defeating kinetic energy anti-tank weapons.”
So a Javelin type missile that released a rail gun type slug when on the outside of the Trophy defense range would destroy the target.
“In the ATGM’s case, the EFP will affect the shaped plasma jet, dramatically decreasing its penetration ability.”—This sounds a normal missile will still cause damage, and since Phalanx is not as armored as a tank, probably destroy it.
I don’t see why https://newatlas.com/drones/huntress-turbojet-drone/ should cost >$100K when mass produced. In the context of this article, before we talk about strengths/weaknesses of Iron dome type defenses, the vast majority of countries don’t have them currently deployed and can’t afford to.
When is talking about kinetic energy weapons it’s referring to armour piercing sabots, because that’s what needed to pierce tank defences. I don’t know how effective ADS would be against other kinetic energy weapons because there’s never been any need to try, they’re useless against tanks. These rounds are so heavy, and fly so fast, that’s it’s practically impossible to fire them from anything weighing less than a few tons. Not relevant for a drone/Javelin. Also notice how you’re creating epicycles upon epicycles here. A drone that fires a Javelin, that fires a railgun, to defeat an existing fairly straightforward defence. Each of those is going to be an impressive technical achievement, the entire package is going to take a while to iron out the kinks, and is going to be expensive. If drones are so powerful they’re going to completely replace existing armies, I wouldn’t expect all the epicycles.
A single javelin missile on its own costs more than an iron dome tamir interceptor, so becomes a valid target for existing SAM defences.
Sure it might be existing ADS defences aren’t enough to defend something like the phalanx, but there’s lots of implementations out there, and the trophies characteristics were chosen because it was sufficient to protect tanks. Could trophy be modified to protect more delicate equipment, or could something like the Iron Fist work? I don’t know, it’s never been tested because it’s never been necessary.
As for the drone you linked—it contains a turbojet. I cannot find any production turbojet with hundreds of kilos payload plus strong performance characteristics selling for less than a few hundred thousand dollars.
Finally I think all of this is mostly irrelevant. The phalanx consists of two parts—a relatively long range, delicate and expensive radar, and a pretty robust, shorter range, cheaper M61 Gatling gun + turret.
On a ship they’re colocated because that makes sense given limited space. But most land based SAMs separate the radar and missile launcher.
I expect that if drones ever become a serious threat will see the proliferation of lots of Gatling guns mounted on tanks and other vehicles, linked to a decentralised radar system combining lots of different radars of different specs. The radars will generally be deployed further behind the front line, (although some cheaper short range ones might be mounted on tanks) and will give targeting information to the guns scattered across the front line which will take out the drones.
The guns are much less vulnerable, and less expensive so don’t make good targets. The radars are very expensive but much further behind the front line, out of range of cheaper drones and well defended by both guns and missiles against more expensive solutions. And taking out a single radar just degrades performance, doesn’t take down the whole system.
This will be expensive and complex to develop but far quicker than your autonomous drone army, since all the pieces are already in place.
Finally you claim iron dome is out of reach of most countries, but most countries do have SAM systems of various sizes. Iron dome is unique in it’s ability to target SRBMs, and reflects the trade offs needed for that, but drones are much simpler to take down, and countries that deploy SAMs capable of taking down modern fighter jets could easily deploy ones capable of taking down drones. Tamir is just a good example since I know it’s cost and it’s not that expensive.
I think you’re really really badly off base, and let me show you why:
That’s what they are capable of under human control. The actual drone hardware is under $1000.
None of your radar proposals are any use. The drones will fly inches from the ground and are a lot of plastic, and their speeds are low, and will keep terrain between them and the enemy. These are generally not going to be detectable on radar until it’s too late. Radar is not effective now.
The biggest objection to why you won’t see these drones immediately is you need powerful onboard GPUs to run a realtime AI control model to get human (or insect) level flight control, and to actually coordinate a drone assault you essentially need much more expensive “mother” drones that have combustion engines and racks of GPUs running a transformer or newer model.
What needs to happen is the drones can implement strategies with respect to waypoints, and as the drone encounter possible enemy forces their models need to select and upload to the mesh network high resolution pictures of what they perceive, as well as lots of compressed metadata.
The model aboard the “mother” drone—or human commanders—have to decide on a tactical solution to engage the enemy assets they can see/estimate exist. Each of the objections you mention has a tactical solution, and in most cases it will be hugely asymmetric, killing armored vehicles and trained soldiers for a fraction of the cost. It will never be 1 drone against a defense, but enough drones calculated to overwhelm the known defenses.
For example, if the approach path chosen, hugging the terrain, exposes the drones to 3 phalanx guns, and there is a total of 5 seconds of exposure time, and the gun can change targets every 250 ms, then up to 60 drones can be engaged.
If 70 drones are sent, is the cost of 70 drones worth trading for 3 armored vehicles? It the answer is no, you don’t engage and instead seek weaker targets like supply trucks.
I feel like the goalposts keep changing. This is not what was described in the original post.
So a few questions:
How do these drones communicate? Low on the ground P2P communications will have awful range, as will most low energy communication systems. Are they so autonomous they don’t need to communicate at all?
What’s their range? Existing drones only fly for about 20 minutes, and at a speed of about 70 km/h. Their range is usually about 10 to 20 km. Flying low to the ground and having to navigate will imply much lower speeds, and less efficient flight, as will having to run a powerful GPU, and whatever communication system you end up using. They also have to carry a payload capable of destroying a tank. Unlike in Ukraine that requires getting past the ADS (e.g. trophy), so is going to be more sophisticated than a grenade.
Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce. Drones are only effective because tanks have weak spots where it was considered to be too unlikely that an enemy could target, and it turns out that assumption was wrong. The next generation of tanks will likely not leave such weak spots, possibly by using lots of slat armour, requiring far more sophisticated—and heavier—solutions to destroy a tank using a drone.
Now for this to revolutionise warfare requires that your drone + payload can be mass produced cheaply, but everything above seriously cuts into that. You need sophisticated communication systems, battery, navigation systems, payload etc. if each unit costs 100,000 dollars instead of 1000 dollars, sending 70 to destroy 3 tanks is much less valuable a proposition.
To a mother drone located farther from the enemy at higher altitude, but not high enough to be engaged. Using laser or directional (phased array) RF. This is how drones are fighting in Ukraine right now. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-military-reservist-describes-flock-ukrainian-fpv-drones-2024-1
Most drones are short range, yes. Some are hybrid with gas engines, like the mother drones or like the below, from https://news.mit.edu/2017/hybrid-drones-carry-heavier-payloads-greater-distances-0804 . These will have hundreds of kilometers of range.
> Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce.
Standard package. Switchblade 600 has the same warhead as the javelin missile. It’s listed at 33 lbs.
Tanks have a lot of weak spots, for instance from this video you can just look for yourself at the very thin plate on the Abram’s roof that appears to just be rolled homogeneous steel. It would be pretty difficult to armor tanks to withstand attacks from all sides, for one thing someone will just build slightly larger drones.
Currently the cost when built without the inefficiencies of USA contractor system is under $1000.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology/2024/02/05/cheap-racing-drones-offer-precision-warfare-at-scale
from the article : “A simple FPV drone costs perhaps $400”
These have every element you mentioned except the GPUs for full autonomy.
And ok, it’s consumer grade, let’s go to milspec, and suppose it does cost 100k a drone*. Well, how much does 3 tanks cost? Each Abrams is listed at 24 million dollars (present day export cost). So 70 drones will be 7 million dollars, killing 72 million in tanks and 9 crewmembers who needed time and money to train, and who will have lost their combat experience.
Note the drones don’t lose their combat experience when destroyed because you can stream the weight deltas from the mother drone to satellite and rehost it on replacement hardware when it gets destroyed.
And as I mentioned:
Yes that will reduce battery life, and the bigger issue is cost. However the model I am proposing is to use a small GPU on each drone, and:
Keep all the intelligence in the mother drone, which can be shot down.
* Switchblade 600s are listed at 80k each, are anti tank, and have some level of autonomy.
If it has line of sight to the drones, then it has line of sight to the target, and can be engaged by them.
The mother drone produces the tactical plan and gives the plan to every drone in the swarm. It doesn’t need to have los to execute it although there would be a lack of flexibility during the attack.
The tactical plan would consist of things like waypoints, references images for positioning, and targets. Each drone for that hypothetical “70 vs 3 tanks” engagement has a track to follow, a period of exploiting the terrain, a maximum speed final approach, a specific place on a specific tank to target etc.
The plan can fail if say the target vehicles have moved and additional guns are brought in but the entire process will be a few minutes.
Getting the plan would be done with disposable scouts, these are mid altitude drones with a good laser link to the mother. They upload images of the target area before the shots to shoot them down hit.
Ultimately you are not going to beat this with conventional forces with more air defense. You need a rapidly relocatable force to counter drone swarms that is cheap. Meaning a defense in depth with your own drones.
On the assumption we have self navigating drones that can detect the weakest point in a tank as soon as it gets live of site, and head straight towards it, we would presumably have developed the ability to detect such drones via cameras on the tank as soon as they have line of site.
Than all you need is a bunch of pretty weak guns on turrets mounted on the tank to shoot the drone as soon as they are detected.
Most of these pieces already exist—modern Merkavas have cameras with 360 degrees view, the software to detect a moving drone quickly from a camera is pretty trivial, hardest part is avoiding false positives, but that seems easier than navigating, software to control guns and track targets has existed for a long time.
I assume that mounting a m16 style gun on a turret with 360 by 180 degrees rotation, and sub second rotation to any position is fairly straightforward. Imagine a few of these mounted along the sides of a tank. Most of the time they’re lying flat for protection but can shoot a drone within a second of it becoming visible.
A drone moving at 70 km/h would take 5 seconds to cover the last hundred metres to a tank, plenty of time to shoot it down.
This is mostly proven technology—it’s basically what trophy does, just we can use cheaper bullets against unarmoured drones, and use the theorised AI advances to use cheap cameras instead of more complex solutions, and the ability to distinguish enemy targets that are less obviously projectiles.
The key piece of information missing from all your assumptions is you keep forgetting 3 things:
(1) drones, even 100k+ drones, are cheaper than anything else
(2) drone speed of 100-300 mph, and very low altitude flying, allow for new tactical possibilities the legacy assets do not have. None of the countermeasures you mention will work like you think. The issue isn’t that you can’t strap guns to existing armored vehicles and shoot down drones. The issue is that you cannot concentrate enough forces in one place with existing vehicles to not get annihilated. To stop drones you need defense in depth, multiple perimeters of interceptor drones in a relocatable swarm.
Last ditch guns are not going to save you, because drones can be relocated and concentrated into lethal numbers at the most promising locations on the battlefield.
(3) None of our armchair pontificating, yours or mine, actually matters. What matters is that drones are murderously effective on the battlefield. Historically there were arguments that sounded reasonable by cavalry officers and battleship admirals, long after the technology that replaced them was proven effective on the battlefield. This is what I think you should take away from this discussion: when a major change in technology like this arrives, or anything else, you should update on the data.
the subreddit r/combatfootage has hundreds of drone snuff videos if you wish to see people get murdered by drones, a lot of the data I am using for this analysis comes directly from there.
Yes—fair enough and I hope you are right—I would be happier if defense wins too. I hope soon Europe/USA develops such a system, including the ability to mass produce it in the quantities needed.
That is not true at all, anti-tank fpv cost is about 1⁄100 of a Javelin missile. It is not obvious how much autonomous guidance would add to a drone cost, but probably less than 10000%.
Why compare with a Javelin, and not e.g. a Kornet which exports for 25,000 dollars (similar to a top range GPU), and can be produced for much cheaper (as evidenced by the fact Hamas is perfectly capable of producing them).