Going after Drones

[727Sky]

About the time everyone gears up for drone warfare a game changing development will come along and make the drones almost useless IMO

Britain’s new Rapid Destroyer weapon could change the war in Ukraine overnight. Using invisible radio waves, it blasts Russian drones out of the sky—fast, cheap, and unstoppable. Is this the future of warfare? And can it crush Putin’s drone strategy for good?

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[FCD]

The problem with Area Denial weapons like these is, they're very expensive compared to the threat they are defending against, AND they have to be where the threat is.  They look cool in promos, but they have a very short effective range...and they have to.  You wouldn't want a device like this taking out your own devices at some distant location.  There are longer range weapons, like lasers, but these are orders of magnitude more expensive and require gobs of power (thus fuel in some form).  They're also a lot more fragile, so you can't go bouncing across rough terrain for days or weeks and keep them calibrated.

I almost chuckle a little bit when I think about how the defense industry seemingly just completely missed the drone threat.  The MIC is geared toward big threats; they never anticipated a small disposable threat.  And the hell of it is, we haven't even seen the "real" drone threat yet.  People see drones being employed in Ukraine by both Russia and Ukraine and they think they're seeing the end-game for drones.  Far from it.  These are individual drones.  The much bigger threat is drone "swarms".  They don't even have to be offensive drones either (i.e. drones which drop an explosive or have guns).  In the case of swarms, the drone itself becomes the weapon.  They can sit and wait, then lift off when a threat shows up.  Helicopter gunships?...denied.  Ground Attack/Support aircraft?...denied.  Medivac?...denied.  

And now, with the new multi-device control technology, one operator can pilot hundreds, or even thousands, of drones from a single controller and control location.  And people forget, the drones have to get from the manufacturer to places like Ukraine or Russia.  But against an adversary like China, for example, an aggressor/defender would be up against the actual manufacturer of drone tech where this delivery and lead-time isn't an issue.  They're cheap, you don't have to feed them, and they don't get lost.  They don't have morale issues, they're ready 24x7, and they only take a minute or so to mobilize. 

All of these factors contribute to a very serious and very real threat.  And even beyond that, the mere "threat" of this type of warfare will demoralize any opponent's troops on the ground.  You can find hundreds of videos where they ask the guys on the ground in Ukraine what they fear most.  They'll say two things...artillery...and drones.  And if you look at some of the videos of the lengths troops on both sides have gone to in order to defend against drones, it will quickly tell any interested party just how much of a threat these drones pose.  You'll see entire columns of armor with makeshift wire fabric netting (chicken wire, etc.) draped all over the tops of them, and similar protections over fighting positions.  At first glance, one might think...'okay, so what?'.  Well, all these protective measures seriously impair much of the sophisticated electronic targeting radars, gun movements and/or personnel access.  Plus, these drones are laser-beam accurate.  With a fired weapon there is an element of luck hitting that key spot on a tank or vehicle.  Not so with a drone.  They can get right down on top of the vehicle and drop a munition on the exact spot to disable it.  What this translates into is eliminating the need for much larger explosives.  Now much smaller, more portable, explosives (something as simple as a single hand grenade) can completely take out a 30 ton piece of tracked armor such as a tank.

And, if you watch some of these drones in action, the operators are smart.  They've learned they don't have to completely destroy something like a tank.  All they have to do is 'de-track' the tank and it has been taken out of the fight.  It's "DRT" (i.e. dead right there), a sitting lame duck which can't even move enough to get out of the way.  Can these vehicles be repaired and returned to service?  Sure, but it takes time, adequate spare parts, and the people performing these repairs are out in the open, sitting ducks for subsequent attacks.

I will freely admit, even I underestimated just how effective drones could be debilitating and demoralizing an opponent.  At first, a few years ago, I just thought drones were a battlefield novelty.  But, when seriously employed in large numbers, drones are actually changing the battle-scape and as it stands right now there's not really any effective defense against them (not without screwing up your own battle plan).

Very interesting subject!  Thanks for posting, 727Sky!

[FCD]

I watched the second, longer, video in some more detail.  It pretty much confirms all the things I was saying above, although it's presented from a Russian offensive perspective.  (There's also a Russian propaganda element there too).  I love how the guest repeatedly thanks the west for supplying all the military hardware to Ukraine which, in his words, affords them the opportunity to study it and figure out how to destroy it.  Hint, hint, Sergey...that military tech we sent over was mostly obsolete stuff leftover from previous conflicts; trust me, it's not the latest stuff!  But, the point remains, something the guest, Sergey, confirms over and over...military brass and leadership completely overlooked the drone threat, dismissing it as "toys" being used in the big boy battlefield.  They were wrong.  And, they still haven't embraced it fully, which explains why it's all these small startups who are getting all the drone business.  This is true in the west also, military leadership just doesn't take the drone threat seriously.  Maybe the are starting to now, but up to this point they've just dismissed it in favor of big heavy armor and aircraft.  Why?  Likely because there's way more profit in these types of systems, thus more room for massive graft and fraud which is a disease that knows no borders or ideological boundaries.  I mean, just look at the "drones" of western militaries; they're HUGE!

I kind of chuckled a bit about the emphasis Sergey put on 'fiber optic' drones.  What he was in essence saying was that Russia has all but surrendered to Ukrainian electronic countermeasures.  They've fallen back onto using the fiber optic drones to go after the electronic countermeasures first, paving the way for their other drones to move in.  I thought this was an interesting perspective, especially coming from an advanced military like Russia's.  It also underscores just how difficult drones are to defeat, and just how much of a real threat they actually pose.  Now, most of Sergey's dialog was geared toward the offensive use of drones, so he didn't spend a lot to time discussing the opposite side of the equation, defensive use.  In any case, it's clear how much of a morale killer drones are for any military.

The big challenge (probably the biggest) is that you can't really defend 100% against drones without degrading your own offensive, and even defensive, capabilities in the process, sometimes seriously.  The civilian population is also at risk.  Someone can come up with systems which will provide 100% drone area denial, absolutely.  However, in doing so, they would also paralyze the activities they are trying to protect from operating successfully (or at all).  So, it's a double edged sword, and the worst part is...drones are cheap.  With a few hundred thousand dollars of drones a person who knows what they are doing could effectively ground billions of dollars air assets.  In the military there is a common saying, "force multiplier".  There's lots of different ways to present the effectiveness of a force multiplier, but the most common is to express it as a ratio.  For example, one troop armed with widget (x) will require a force of say (50) troops without that same widget to defend against it.  The drone actually leverages this force multiplier concept almost exponentially.  And this doesn't even take into account the mental toll drones impose on troop morale.  So, a fighting force becomes progressively less effective over time due to the growing fear of being targeted by these devices.  And if you stop to think for a moment about it, it's easy to understand why.

Historically, one of the most feared weapons on the battlefield is artillery (mortars, artillery, etc).  It is feared so much because it's so random.  One moment life is good, and the next moment there's a giant hole in the ground where your buddy was standing.  If there's an artillery headed for your immediate area, one of the more common defensive tactics was to jump into a hole where a previous round struck as they seldom strike in the exact same spot twice.  Now let's consider the drone.  Unlike the arty round, the drone can move laterally, AND it can see you.  So, you move, and it moves; you move again, and it moves again.  It's like an angry hornet chasing you, but this 'hornet' is going to do a lot more than just sting you!  When you think about it in that light, you can gain a better perspective.  Put another way, with artillery the only intelligence is at the originating end, not the receiving end.  With a drone the technology allows the intelligence to exist at the receiving end.  That's a paradigm shift in terms of difference.