Highly recommended video on drone development in the Ukraine-Russia war, interview with a Russian private military drone developer.
some key takeaways
Drones now account for >70% of kills on the battlefields.
There are few to none effective counters to drones. The on
Electronic jamming is a rare exception but drones carrying 5-15km fiber optic cables are immune to jamming. In the future AI-controlled drones will be immune to jamming.
‘Laser is currently a joke. It works in theory, not in practice. Western demonstrations at expos are always in ideal conditions. ’ but he also says that both Russia and Ukraine are actively working on the technology and he thinks it could be an effective weapon.
Nets can be effective but fiber-optic drones can fly very low and not lose connection are increasingly used to slip under the nets.
Soldiers are increasingly opting for bikes instead of vehicles as the latter don’t offer much protection to drones.
The big elephant in the room: AI drones.
It seems like the obvious next step—why hasn’t it happened yet?
‘at Western military expos everybody is talking AI-controlled drones. This is nonsense of course’ Apparently the limitation is that it’s currently too expensive to run AI locally on a dronebut this is rapidly changing with new nVidea chips. He expects chips to become small and cheap soon enough that AI drones will appear soon.
There is a line of ‘Vampire’ drones that are autonomous and deadly but use older pre-programmed tactics instead of modern AI
One of the most lethal tactics is drone mining: let a drone lie in wait somewhere in the bushes until a human or vehicle passes by.
This tactic was pioneered by the Ukranians. ” Early on, soldiers would try to scavenge fallen drones… then Boom” .
Western drones are trash compared to Ukranian and Russian forces
Swishblade, Phoenix Ghost and a consortium of Boeing designed drones are ineffective, fragile and wildly overpriced. Apparently, the Ukranians have stopped using Western drones opting to focus solely on domestically produced variants.
The only western weapon the Russian drone dev was impressed by is Starlink.
Apparently, Starlink is the reason Ukraine has been succesful with its naval drones. ‘we have the boats, we just don’t have Starlink’
One point of optimism: ” you know what’s the difference between Russian and American military exercises? In the Russian exercises Russia always wins, in the American ones NATO occasionally loses.′
The Russian drone dev admits Ukraine is ahead of Russia in drone innovation, mostly due to their ecosystem of private enterprise drone manufacturers outpacing slow government run Russian military contractors—but the difference is small and Russia is only a couple month behind.
For instance, at Kursk, Russian forces massively deployed the fiber-optic jammer-resistant drones surprising Ukranian forces.
″ At the start of the war a 1000 drones was a lot. Now a single assembly line can produce 40,000 drones a month”
′ The drones we produce today are slapped together. The first thing that will happen after this war is over is that drones will be redesigned from the ground up’
China
Electronic components forming the drones come predominantly from China. China officially prohibits export of weapons to Russia-Ukraine war but unofficially condones the large-scale smuggling of material across the Chinese-Russian border.
China is producing their own variants of the Ukrainian and Russian drones, apparently much faster than the West.
′ Chinese chips are only a little worse than Western chips but a ten to hundred times cheaper’
′ Chinese has nearly caught up with the West technologically, maybe half a step behind’
Chinese manufacturing and technological prowess is strong but they produce their military material like toys—they don’t have the on-hands experience that Russia [and Ukraine] has.-
A friend in China, in a rare conversation we had about international politics, was annoyed at US politicians for saying China was “supporting” Russia. “China has the production capacity to make easily 500,000 drones per day.[1]”, he said. “If China were supporting Russia, the war would be over”. And I had to admit I had not credited the Chinese government for keeping its insanely competitive companies from smuggling more drones into Russia.
I think the comments are also worth a read. I want to share one particular comment here, which I think has a good explanation/hypothesis regarding the situation:
The scaling up of FPV drones for the Ukrainians was definitely the result of artillery and mortar ammo shortages. But that can’t be the only answer, as Russia never suffered that degree of shortage and they’ve gone as hardcore into FPV drones, if not more so, than the Ukrainians.
I think the biggest problem relying on artillery and mortars in THIS war is the ultra static nature of it. With the lines barely moving, it’s very hard to create an artillery or mortar firing position that has decent survivability. Enemy recon drones, which can’t be jammed or shot down easily (as most use freq hopping, fly at altitude, have limited radar signatures, etc), they are prowling the tactical rear areas. Since the start of the war, indirect fire has had to greatly disperse, especially artillery, which operates as single guns now. They can’t even do “shoot and scoot” for survivability, since moving is where most of them will be caught. And if they fire, then counterbattery radars will detect their location. What most are doing is having to dig into treelines, at the least using maximum camouflage, if not building overhead cover, making it much more difficult to take them out with counterbattery.
However, there is only a certain number of hiding spots they can do that. I heard a report last fall about how the Russians in the Pokrovsk sector, despite having ample artillery ammo, had their fire rates drop, because as they were advancing, their artillery could not find and occupy enough hidden firing points to adequately support ground operations. It will be just as hard with mortars, if not harder, because even more enemy recon drones (including those belonging to the enemy’s small unit level) can reach into their range to see.
Whereas, drone operators are much harder to perform the equivalent of counterbattery, especially destructive (actually hitting them). While artillery and mortars are next to impossible to stop once they’re airborne, for drones its often the opposite, it’s not even worth trying to go after the drone operators, they’re too hard to kill, whereas its much easier to try to down the drone using EW especially, or using some sort of passive system, like C-UAS cage. Or active systems, to include dudes armed with shotguns, other drones, or even hard kill remote gun systems that the Ukrainians and Russians haven’t developed/fielded much of.
I’m personally convinced that the ultra static nature of the Russo-Ukraine War is mostly responsible for most of these novel TTPs. And why a lot of this isn’t applicable outside Ukraine.
Very interesting! But I’m not convinced. Some speculation to follow:
In a more dynamic war of maneuver, won’t finding/locating your enemy be even more of an issue than it is today? If there are columns of friendly and enemy forces driving every which way in a hurried confusion, trying to exploit breakthroughs or counterattack, having “drone superiority” so that you can see where they are and they can’t see where you are seems super important. OK, so that’s an argument that air superiority drones will be crucial, but what about bomber drones vs. drone-corrected artillery? Currently bomber drones have something like 20km range compared to 40km range for artillery. Since they are quadcopters though I think that they’ll quickly be supplanted by longer-ranged variants, e.g. fixed-wing drones. (Zipline’s medical supply drones currently have 160km range) So I think there will be a type of future platform that’s basically a pickup truck with a rail for launching fixed-wing bomber drones capable of taking out a tank. This truck will be to a self-propelled artillery piece what a carrier is to a battleship: Before the battleship/artillery gets in range, it’ll be detected and obliterated by a concentrated airstrike launched from the carrier/truck. As a bonus the truck can also carry and launch air superiority drones too. Like the Pacific in WW2, most major battles will take place beyond artillery range, between flights of drones launched by groups of carriers/trucks. Oh, and yeah another advantage of the drone carriers vs. the artillery is that they are much, much cheaper & also can potentially take cover more easily (e.g. if your column of trucks is spotted, your men can get out and take the drones into the basements of nearby houses and continue to fight from there, whereas you can’t hide your artillery in a basement.)
Also: The ultra static nature of the Russo-Ukrainian war is generally thought to be because of drones. The reason it’s been a stalemate is that drones currently favor the defender, because they make it easy to spot and attack enemy concentrations well before they even reach the front lines. The attacker can’t do traditional attack tactics anymore. (i.e. accumulate forces in secret behind your lines, across from a weak spot in enemy line, then charge and break through, then exploit, hoping to encircle pockets of enemy forces. Recent successful example: Kharkiv offensive.) There are many, many examples of columns of vehicles being obliterated by drone-corrected artillery, drones, land mines, and drone-laid land mines, before even reaching the front lines. So current offensive tactics have shifted to a sort of piecemeal thing where you send in a constant trickle of troops, often on foot, to gradually erode the enemy line primarily not by doing any shooting themselves but by forcing the enemy to kill them and thereby reveal their positions and get hit by artillery and drones. And this sort of thing is inherently extremely slow and defender-advantaging.
The YouTube channel was banned last week for being suspected propaganda because he used to work for state media channel RT. This is pretty sad to me because the content was very informative with slight if any pro Russia bias. AFAIK the only place he posts now is telegram https://t.me/RealReporter_tg
Oh wild. It’s clearly propaganda. But also incredibly valuable information. itsThe West would so well to listen carefully to what adversaries are saying. They are certainly listening carefully to us!
One of the most lethal tactics is drone mining: let a drone lie in wait somewhere in the bushes until a human or vehicle passes by.
Fucking campers, man.
‘at Western military expos everybody is talking AI-controlled drones. This is nonsense of course’ Apparently the limitation is that it’s currently too expensive to run AI locally on a drone but this is rapidly changing with new nVidea chips. He expects chips to become small and cheap soon enough that AI drones will appear soon.
Honestly not surprising, you’d need a mix of powerful but cheap chips and still quite light AI to make it work on device. And the problem would also be, if the AI is too simple, there’s higher risk of friendly fire. Am reminded of that classic Philip K. Dick story, “Second Variety”, where the basic autonomous drone model is essentially just a small ball full of blades that kills anyone who comes close enough, unless they carry some special radioactive plaque that deters them. That sort of IFF system might in fact be cheaper and simpler to work with than an AI fully capable of doing it on its own reliably.
Obviously I consider this sort of thing generally a bad idea. But it’s clearly the direction this is going. I wonder how long before full drone-on-drone warfare.
A quick Google states that Ukraine produces about 4000 FPV drones a day. Alarmingly, the same Google search revealed that the total procurement of FPV drones at this moment by the British army is 450 FPV drones! Western militaries are completely asleep at the wheel.
The cynical amateur geopolitical analyst in me says also that this is why it’s so dumb of the West to let Ukraine fail. You got a perfect laboratory to experiment and develop this new type of warfare and then eventually you can cannibalize Ukrainian know-how for yourself and make leaps and bounds without losing a single soldier yourself. Even someone who was evil but cunning would see the benefits here. But of course the US right now are being run by a moron so it’s not surprising he misses this detail.
Highly recommended video on drone development in the Ukraine-Russia war, interview with a Russian private military drone developer.
some key takeaways
Drones now account for >70% of kills on the battlefields.
There are few to none effective counters to drones. The on
Electronic jamming is a rare exception but drones carrying 5-15km fiber optic cables are immune to jamming. In the future AI-controlled drones will be immune to jamming.
‘Laser is currently a joke. It works in theory, not in practice. Western demonstrations at expos are always in ideal conditions. ’ but he also says that both Russia and Ukraine are actively working on the technology and he thinks it could be an effective weapon.
Nets can be effective but fiber-optic drones can fly very low and not lose connection are increasingly used to slip under the nets.
Soldiers are increasingly opting for bikes instead of vehicles as the latter don’t offer much protection to drones.
The big elephant in the room: AI drones.
It seems like the obvious next step—why hasn’t it happened yet?
‘at Western military expos everybody is talking AI-controlled drones. This is nonsense of course’ Apparently the limitation is that it’s currently too expensive to run AI locally on a drone but this is rapidly changing with new nVidea chips. He expects chips to become small and cheap soon enough that AI drones will appear soon.
There is a line of ‘Vampire’ drones that are autonomous and deadly but use older pre-programmed tactics instead of modern AI
One of the most lethal tactics is drone mining: let a drone lie in wait somewhere in the bushes until a human or vehicle passes by.
This tactic was pioneered by the Ukranians. ” Early on, soldiers would try to scavenge fallen drones… then Boom” .
Western drones are trash compared to Ukranian and Russian forces
Swishblade, Phoenix Ghost and a consortium of Boeing designed drones are ineffective, fragile and wildly overpriced. Apparently, the Ukranians have stopped using Western drones opting to focus solely on domestically produced variants.
The only western weapon the Russian drone dev was impressed by is Starlink.
Apparently, Starlink is the reason Ukraine has been succesful with its naval drones. ‘we have the boats, we just don’t have Starlink’
One point of optimism: ” you know what’s the difference between Russian and American military exercises? In the Russian exercises Russia always wins, in the American ones NATO occasionally loses.′
The Russian drone dev admits Ukraine is ahead of Russia in drone innovation, mostly due to their ecosystem of private enterprise drone manufacturers outpacing slow government run Russian military contractors—but the difference is small and Russia is only a couple month behind.
For instance, at Kursk, Russian forces massively deployed the fiber-optic jammer-resistant drones surprising Ukranian forces.
″ At the start of the war a 1000 drones was a lot. Now a single assembly line can produce 40,000 drones a month”
A quick Google states that Ukraine produces about 4000 FPV drones a day. Alarmingly, the same Google search revealed that the total procurement of FPV drones at this moment by the British army is 450 FPV drones! Western militaries are completely asleep at the wheel.
′ The drones we produce today are slapped together. The first thing that will happen after this war is over is that drones will be redesigned from the ground up’
China
Electronic components forming the drones come predominantly from China. China officially prohibits export of weapons to Russia-Ukraine war but unofficially condones the large-scale smuggling of material across the Chinese-Russian border.
China is producing their own variants of the Ukrainian and Russian drones, apparently much faster than the West.
′ Chinese chips are only a little worse than Western chips but a ten to hundred times cheaper’
′ Chinese has nearly caught up with the West technologically, maybe half a step behind’
Chinese manufacturing and technological prowess is strong but they produce their military material like toys—they don’t have the on-hands experience that Russia [and Ukraine] has.-
I second the video recommendation.
A friend in China, in a rare conversation we had about international politics, was annoyed at US politicians for saying China was “supporting” Russia. “China has the production capacity to make easily 500,000 drones per day.[1]”, he said. “If China were supporting Russia, the war would be over”. And I had to admit I had not credited the Chinese government for keeping its insanely competitive companies from smuggling more drones into Russia.
This seemed like a drastic underestimate to me.
Adding context/(kind-of) counter argument from reddit (the link has a link to the main article and contains a summary of it):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1ll7ypj/article_i_fought_in_ukraine_and_heres_why_fpv/
I think the comments are also worth a read. I want to share one particular comment here, which I think has a good explanation/hypothesis regarding the situation:
Very interesting! But I’m not convinced. Some speculation to follow:
In a more dynamic war of maneuver, won’t finding/locating your enemy be even more of an issue than it is today? If there are columns of friendly and enemy forces driving every which way in a hurried confusion, trying to exploit breakthroughs or counterattack, having “drone superiority” so that you can see where they are and they can’t see where you are seems super important. OK, so that’s an argument that air superiority drones will be crucial, but what about bomber drones vs. drone-corrected artillery? Currently bomber drones have something like 20km range compared to 40km range for artillery. Since they are quadcopters though I think that they’ll quickly be supplanted by longer-ranged variants, e.g. fixed-wing drones. (Zipline’s medical supply drones currently have 160km range) So I think there will be a type of future platform that’s basically a pickup truck with a rail for launching fixed-wing bomber drones capable of taking out a tank. This truck will be to a self-propelled artillery piece what a carrier is to a battleship: Before the battleship/artillery gets in range, it’ll be detected and obliterated by a concentrated airstrike launched from the carrier/truck. As a bonus the truck can also carry and launch air superiority drones too. Like the Pacific in WW2, most major battles will take place beyond artillery range, between flights of drones launched by groups of carriers/trucks. Oh, and yeah another advantage of the drone carriers vs. the artillery is that they are much, much cheaper & also can potentially take cover more easily (e.g. if your column of trucks is spotted, your men can get out and take the drones into the basements of nearby houses and continue to fight from there, whereas you can’t hide your artillery in a basement.)
Also: The ultra static nature of the Russo-Ukrainian war is generally thought to be because of drones. The reason it’s been a stalemate is that drones currently favor the defender, because they make it easy to spot and attack enemy concentrations well before they even reach the front lines. The attacker can’t do traditional attack tactics anymore. (i.e. accumulate forces in secret behind your lines, across from a weak spot in enemy line, then charge and break through, then exploit, hoping to encircle pockets of enemy forces. Recent successful example: Kharkiv offensive.) There are many, many examples of columns of vehicles being obliterated by drone-corrected artillery, drones, land mines, and drone-laid land mines, before even reaching the front lines. So current offensive tactics have shifted to a sort of piecemeal thing where you send in a constant trickle of troops, often on foot, to gradually erode the enemy line primarily not by doing any shooting themselves but by forcing the enemy to kill them and thereby reveal their positions and get hit by artillery and drones. And this sort of thing is inherently extremely slow and defender-advantaging.
https://youtu.be/tgkP0W7OvMc?si=hoa0l2mu5B6aRbpy
Perhaps of interest, 16:33 the guy mentions the development of a new type of drone resistant “turtle” tank
The YouTube channel was banned last week for being suspected propaganda because he used to work for state media channel RT. This is pretty sad to me because the content was very informative with slight if any pro Russia bias. AFAIK the only place he posts now is telegram https://t.me/RealReporter_tg
Oh wild. It’s clearly propaganda. But also incredibly valuable information. itsThe West would so well to listen carefully to what adversaries are saying. They are certainly listening carefully to us!
Thanks for the alert Thomas. Subscribed.
Fucking campers, man.
Honestly not surprising, you’d need a mix of powerful but cheap chips and still quite light AI to make it work on device. And the problem would also be, if the AI is too simple, there’s higher risk of friendly fire. Am reminded of that classic Philip K. Dick story, “Second Variety”, where the basic autonomous drone model is essentially just a small ball full of blades that kills anyone who comes close enough, unless they carry some special radioactive plaque that deters them. That sort of IFF system might in fact be cheaper and simpler to work with than an AI fully capable of doing it on its own reliably.
Obviously I consider this sort of thing generally a bad idea. But it’s clearly the direction this is going. I wonder how long before full drone-on-drone warfare.
The cynical amateur geopolitical analyst in me says also that this is why it’s so dumb of the West to let Ukraine fail. You got a perfect laboratory to experiment and develop this new type of warfare and then eventually you can cannibalize Ukrainian know-how for yourself and make leaps and bounds without losing a single soldier yourself. Even someone who was evil but cunning would see the benefits here. But of course the US right now are being run by a moron so it’s not surprising he misses this detail.