(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Drone wars [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-07 Last year the first videos appeared with Ukrainian FPV drones dropping small grenades on Russian soldiers. At that time, it was easy to dismiss drones as irrelevant because the impact of drones was small and inconsequential in the war. Now a year later however, that has completely changed. Based on recent tallies, drones now destroy more Russian equipment than all other weapons combined. The question now is what the next step is in the evolution of the drones in this war. Extrapolating from the change in impact over the last year, drones could dominate the battlefield within a couple of months. On the other hand, armies adapt so they will be a huge effort in developing/deploying anti-drone weapons which would mitigate/negate the impact of drones. In this diary I try to explore which of these two scenarios is the most likely (spoiler alert: I think drones will dominate the battlefield, and render tanks, IFVs and possibly artillery mostly irrelevant at the front lines within a year) To prevent this diary from getting excessively long I will focus on the Quad-copter style drones and mostly ignore the drones with wings. The first step is to explore what the advantages and disadvantages of drones are in comparison to other weapons. Drone advantages: Drones are a great combination surveillance and precision guided munition in a single device. The result of this combination is a shortening of the kill-chain chain from minutes/hours to a few seconds. Using an FPV drone has almost no risk for the controller, so drones can be used at any scale without having to worry about the number of casualties. Drones are incredibly cheap compared to other precision guided munitions. A simple drone costs about $1000, which is 50 times cheaper than precision shells, which opens the possibility to use drones to kill individual soldiers at scale. My thinking is that if an army can take out a soldier for $50,000 or less at scale then that army will win this war ($50B would take out 1M enemy soldiers). This means that you can lose about 50 drones for each soldier killed/wounded. A couple of months ago people were shocked about an article that claimed that Ukraine was losing 10,000 drones per month. However, losing 10,000 drones per month is only $10M worth of equipment which is equivalent to the cost of a few armored vehicles. Both Russia and Ukraine can lose 10,000 drones or more per day without having a significant impact on their financial resources. without having a significant impact on their financial resources. Building drones is relatively simple and safe from attacks as it doesn’t require large factories or equipment. A simple workshop with 2550 people can easily assemble 100 drones a day. A couple dozen of these workshops can assemble thousands of drones a day. Because drones are mostly plastic, it is relatively easy to mass produce with relatively simple equipment. Drones do not rely on the easy-to-jam GPS system for targeting. FPV drones are extreme agile and can fly through very small openings if needed. Any opening regardless of the angle that is large enough for a human is large enough for a drone. This makes it very difficult for the defender to protect itself against a suicide drone. Drone disadvantages: Drones require an electronic communication channel back to the controller that can be jammed. A jammed drone is useless and may drop to the ground as result. This disadvantage is however not a big as it seems for several reasons: Commercial drones all use the same standard frequencies to control the device, which is easy to jam. However, it is not a big engineering effort to improve the robustness of the communication channels by using multiple non-standard frequencies. With other improvements like dynamic directional antennas or an (infrared) laser-based communication through a relay-drone away from the front line it would be nearly impossible to jam the drone communication channel. Drones can be supply with a feature that can lock on a target (image) from a distance and then destroy that target autonomously. After the target lock there is no need for the communication channel and the drone can therefore not be jammed anymore. This functionality is relatively easy to implement in software as the initial image recognition is done by the controller. Jamming (EW) equipment is easy to detect as it tells the entire world where it is by sending jamming signals. It should be easy to destroy this EW equipment with drones that can lock on a target from a distance. Quad-copter drones are limited in the distance they can fly and be controlled. Therefore, they can only be used at the front-line. Any action more than a few miles away from the front-line requires a different weapon. Drones are very flimsy. An encounter with any object will destroy the drone. Based on the pros and cons, it is obvious that the pros massively outnumber the cons. The only option for the defender is therefore to destroy the drone before it gets to the target. I have been thinking about this, but because drones are so cheap, which means that any counter measure must be equally cheap, I cannot think of any good option to stop these FPV drones in a cost-effective way. Possible counter-drone options: Improve the EW equipment. As I outlined earlier, EW devices are vulnerable to attack drone, and also there are options to make the drone’s communication channel robust enough that EW will not affect it. Provide infantry with a special shotgun style anti-drone gun to counter anti-person FPV drones. The problem with this option is that a soldier must be 100% effectively in destroying attacking drones. Because it is difficult to see a small drone that is more 100 yards away, a soldier only has about 2-3 seconds to destroy a drone. If the attacker lines up two or more drones (remember the attacker can lose 50 drones for each kill) it will be impossible for a soldier to counter that. A group together could theoretically protect itself against a drone swarm-attack but would then be vulnerable to cluster munition or HIMARS attacks. Develop an automatic gun that detect drones and shoots them. The detection part is the most difficult as drones are small and therefore require a very high resolution radar, or a high definition visual, thermal, or acoustic detection mechanism. This is not something that is easy to design, as the device will only have a few seconds to detect and destroy the attacking drone, so developing that will take a significant amount of time. It will also have difficulties to protect against multiple simultaneous drone attack. In addition there are also multiple, much easier to develop, counter-counter measures that can implemented on the drone side. In stead of flying in a straight line the controller could be trained to randomly change direction when attacking. The detection mechanism of the automatic gun can be blinded by shooting flares or firecrackers (acoustic system). Lastly this solution will probably not be a system that infantry can easily carry with them. A Gepard style antiaircraft-gun can shoot down a Shahed drone, but that drone is massive in size compared to a FPV drone. I doubt that the Gepard radar can detect an FPV drone quick enough to respond. In general, a Gepard would have the same problems as the previously mentioned automatic gun. In another thread somebody suggested to use an EM pulse to destroy the drone’s electronics. A device that can create an EMP strong enough to destroy a drone at a distance will also destroy any electronic equipment nearby. This theoretical device would likely take some time to develop and too large to be carried by infantry. Also counter-counter measures would be much easier to develop, as you effectively only need to protect (beefed-up Faraday’s cage) the electronics of the drone against the EMP. None of the anti-drone option I can think of are My conclusion other is that I think that drones will dominate the battlefield on the front-line within a year. A lot of expensive weapons like tanks, IFVs and artillery will get a secondary role. Types of drones that I envision will be used by next year (other than currently used): [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/7/2198025/-Drone-wars?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/