Recently the commentator Simplicius wrote a piece about drone technology which I considered to be a little simplistic and too much of a “forecasting in a straight line”. I left the following comment:
I see drones following the WW1 aircraft model, we have had observation drones, large attack drones (Reaper), and now FPV drones (both wireless and wired). The next step is fighter-bomber drones and interceptor drones, which are used to destroy the other side’s drones. A drone “air cover” together with rapid fire short range systems - the equivalent of anti-aircraft gunnery. Battery technology will continuously lengthen the time that an electric drone can stay in the air, for both attack and defence drones.
The Russians have also started to focus on the destruction of the observation drones that provide targeting information to the FPV drones, and on the drone crews themselves. The electro-magnetic signature of drone crews will become a target for loitering munitions. This area will get more and more intense, and being a drone crew may become an extremely dangerous job.
Nothing ever develops in a straight line, and the above analysis is following straight lines. A concomitant issue is which nation has the greatest ability to churn out huge numbers of drones of all sizes - a country beginning with C and ending in A; a major ally of Russia.
The satellites, AWACS etc. will all become very major targets - in the Ukraine War the West has the advantage that Russia will not destroy such assets. In a full shooting war they will be the first to go.
In this piece I will expand on that comment, traversing the possible parallels between drone and WW1 military aircraft developments. And also noting the differences. This will only be relevant to land-based military battlefield drones, not to sea-based or long range bombing and air defence warfare where drones may fill a very different role. This will cover the equivalent of ground attack specialized aircraft.
In WW1 military aircraft were used for reconnaissance missions from the very beginning of the conflict in August 1914. This was expanded to bombing in the fall of that year, and dedicated fighter aircraft started to be deployed in 1915.
The US MQ1 Predator reconnaissance drone entered service in 1995, and was later modified to carry two Hellfire missiles; with a range of 740 km and a loitering time of up to 14 hours. At 27 feet long and with a wingspan of up to 55 feet this was a big, expensive drone; about US$4 million a piece. It is no longer in service, being replaced by the bigger MQ9 Reaper that can carry 15 times the ordnance payload and cruise at three times the speed; 36 feet in length with a 66 feet wingspan; unit cost of US$30 million. It can carry up to 8 Hellfire missiles and even guided bombs, and the US has about 230 in service. Both the Predator and Reaper are medium altitude drones. The RQ4 Global Hawk is a high altitude ultra-long range drone; 48 feet long with a wingspan of 131 feet with a cost of US$130 million. Only 33 are currently in service and all will be retired by 2027. They are being replaced by the “stealthy” RQ180 which each costing in the region of US$500 million.
The Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk were developed during a period when the US military was fighting enemies that had little or no air defence systems; against a peer competitor such as Russia or China they would be blown out of the sky. Hence the development of the “stealthy” RQ180, but at an absolutely prohibitive cost. Iran shot down a Reaper, and Ansar Allah shot down seven within a six week period with quite simple surface to air missiles. Since late 2023, Ansar Allah have shot down about 15 and they are not exactly a peer competitor. The whole US drone program is invalidated by modern, not that advanced, working surface to air missile systems.
What we see in Ukraine is very different, driven by technological and manufacturing leaps in the civil drone market that provide extremely cheap and highly plentiful drones. The cheapest are the “First Person View” small FPV drones, many of which cost only a few hundred dollars and carry relatively small payloads delivered by the drone itself; the drone becomes the guided bomb. Or even smaller anti-personnel payloads such as grenades dropped from the drone. Instead of a relatively small number of colossally expensive drones, millions of much simpler drones. Russian FPV drone production is running at up to 2 million per year. Such drones can even be put together at the front, and launched from pretty much anywhere; in many cases cheap commercial drones modified to drop small anti-personnel charges or to act as a guided bomb for cars, SUVs etc. and lightly armoured vehicles. It is these sheer numbers that are creating a kill zone both at the front line, and in the immediate logistics corridors used to supply the front. At such a low cost, the use of a single drone to kill an individual soldier is cost effective. Soldiers end up desperately hiding from the drones in buildings and wherever else they can find cover, as with this episode in Pokrovsk.
The problem for the Ukrainians is that the drone operator can call in guided shells and bombs to obliterate targets that he himself cannot destroy. Russia has massive air and artillery supremacy. The Russians have also equipped their armoured vehicles with anti-drone cages, sometimes of quite massive scale, and have shown the ability of such vehicles to withstand many, many drone hits. Logistics vehicles have to drive at high speed, and drop soldiers and supplies off away from the front. Highways end up being covered by mile after mile of anti-drone nets.
The Russians are also world leaders in electronic warfare, and Ukrainian drone operators have noted the reduction in the useful range of their drones due to massive Russian signal jamming. The next stage was drones controlled via very thin fibre optic cables that spool out from the back of drones; unaffected by signal jamming.
All of this has lead to extremely difficult battlefield conditions that greatly reduce the usability of previous battlefield tactics, such as massing forces for overwhelming local superiority for breakthroughs and fluid armoured vehicle warfare. Instead, the battle field has been one reduced to smaller and smaller groups of soldiers supplied by logistics chains that include many cheap civilian vehicles, much on foot logistics and even supply by drone. But how much is this specific to the particular Ukraine battlefield currently being contested, the nature of the conflict, the Russian strategy, and the current development of drone technology and drone counter measures?
The front line has been within the highly urbanized, forested rolling hills of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zhaporizhzhia, Sumy and Kharkov oblasts. In addition, especially in the former two, very strong fortifications and mine fields have been built up over a decade of conflict. Such areas massively favour defence and produce a relatively static front line that moves quite slowly. Such conditions are perfect for drone operators that can find a surfeit of protected areas to hide in, and for the relatively short range FPV drones.
But the Russian forces are beginning to reach the edge of this urban, forested area of rolling hills and the Ukrainian “Maginot Line” of strong fortifications. Beyond these lies the much flatter and much less urbanized Ukrainian steppe, covered with farmer’s fields rather than forests. Many less protected areas for the drone operators to hide in, and many less emplacements, towns and villages, and minefields to delay the attacking Russians. In such an environment it is also much easier to see the drones coming, especially with modern optics. If in such circumstances the front becomes more fluid, the drone operators may have to spend a lot more time changing position as against operating their drones; with fixed dug in positions becoming a rare luxury.
We are now coming to the end of the summer, with the perfect weather for drones. They do not do well in rainstorms, nor with mist and fog, nor during snow storms. FPV drone performance is also severely limited by sub-zero temperatures; the norm for a Ukrainian winter. Not only does battery life get reduced, but other components degrade faster and the drone can become rapidly iced up. In winter, much of the tree cover also falls away, removing the natural camouflage that drone operators utilize. The next months will show how much the drone weapon is reduced by inclement and cold weather conditions. The Russian Army has a very long history of successful winter campaigns.
The Ukraine War is a limited proxy conflict, where a very significant number of intelligence, surveillance and communications assets are off-limits to Russian attack. Such as Western satellites, AWACS, long-range surveillance drones, intelligence integration centres, and low altitude internet providing satellites. The result is that the Ukrainian Army operates with a very high degree of visibility of Russian troop deployments, down to a quite localized degree. Such a rich intelligence environment is a boon to drone operators, who can be concentrated near known Russian troop concentrations and be directed to the best local areas to send their drones.
In a peer-to-peer war, those intelligence, surveillance and communications assets would be some of the first targets to be destroyed. The “networked” all-seeing war may very quickly turn into a relatively old-fashioned non-networked war. How would the drone operators know where to go to engage the enemy? The factories that produce the drones would also be very directly targeted, as is now happening in Ukraine (but not the factories outside Ukraine). Drone production can be disseminated into much smaller units, but such dispersion can also greatly reduce production levels.
The Russian military enjoys overwhelming superiority in the air, with respect to artillery, tanks, and even now lightly armoured tracked vehicles. The Ukrainians have been forced by necessity to rely so heavily upon drones; would it be the same if they were not deficient in so many other areas?
Russia is fighting a parsimonious war, limiting its costs in both financial terms and the lives of its soldiers. It is a war of careful attrition, designed to limit Russian losses and costs while creating much larger Ukrainian losses; one that has been very successfully executed. Such a strategy tends to produce the relatively static battlefield that favours drone usage, a battlefield that is situated in a heavily urbanized environment, with rolling hills and much forest cover that has been heavily fortified in over a decade.
As the Ukrainian Army dwindles in manpower and capability, and the battlefield moves to the steppe, will the Russian tactics change? If so, this may become a very different war that is not so kind to drone operations.
The Russians have also brought in new tactics that are making life increasingly more difficult for the Ukrainian drone operations. As well as massive signal jamming, the Russians are targeting the bigger surveillance drones that the FPV drone operators rely upon for providing target information; somewhat blinding the FPV drone operators. In addition, the Russians are getting better and better at locating and destroying the drone operators themselves. It takes time to get really good at operating drones in the battlefield, so the ability to kill the experienced operators - even if those operators are replaced with new ones - will tend to degrade the drone weapon.
We have already seen drones being used to knock other drones out of the sky. How long will it be before we see specialized hunter-killer drone fighters, equipped with their own guns etc. to take down the FPV drones before they have a chance to do any damage? Drones full of sensors that will fly low to identify drone operator locations and call in artillery, bomber and drone strikes? How long before we see dogfights between fighter drones?
Individual soldiers are now being equipped with automatic shot guns to have a go at FPV drones. What about the development of anti-drone vehicles with jammers, high speed cannons, lasers and machine guns, rockets etc? Could logistics chains start using the convoy method of protecting convoys of trucks with numerous anti-drone vehicles? Specific areas of concentration protected by static and dynamic anti-drone devices?
In environments that have not been nearly completely denuded of enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft systems, the current longer range Russian drones such as the Geran-2 would not be finding it so easy to reach their targets. Radars optimized for smaller targets, and air platforms that can match the slower speeds of the drones (defensive drones?), and smaller shrapnel type missiles and air burst shells are all technologies that can be developed against the Geran-2 type drones. A peer to peer conflict would be very different to the Ukraine War.
It is still very early on in the usage of drones in military conflict and we do not have full visibility into what the future directions, and counter-measures, may be. At the same time the specificities of the Ukraine limited war in a highly urbanized, fortified and hilly area may create a highly conducive environment for drone operators that other environments may not. We must always be careful of extrapolating in a straight line and extrapolating from the specific to the general. Drones do represent a major challenge to traditional military tactics, but they may not be as revolutionary as some expect them to be.