UKR almost feels like yesterday's drone war. It seems pretty obvious purpose built murder bots by technologically capable powers like PRC would be fully autonomous and expendable like actual munitions. Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds. Don't even bother to reusable / save material. Just send them out to indiscriminately detonate like cheap smart munitions that they should be.
Strategic depth is a factor. In the Israel/Iran war, Iran's Shahed drones weren't useful due to the large distance. They could be shot down at a leisurely pace. If Iran was fighting a nearby country like Iraq, it would be a very different story. On the other hand, Israel made use of surveillance drones inside Iran, but only due to methods employed to shrink the strategic depth, either by smuggling them into Iran, or doing a clandestine launch from allies like Azerbaijan. But obviously, such tactics are not durable in a war of attrition, and they're not applicable to high-volume Shahed-like suicide attacks.
In the Pacific theatre, Taiwan is very close to China, so possibly, attack drones will be useful similar to the Ukraine/Russia war.
There are also many different types of drones being employed. The short-range small quadcopters, all the way up to large Predator drones. Shaheds are kind of in the middle in terms of size. The boundary can be blurred too between loitering munitions (Switchblade) and drones.
For the suicide quadcopter drones, there is a realization that Skynet is the next step in the arms race. Full edge autonomy over the kill chain. No need for data link (susceptible to electronic warfare) or trained pilots or added round-trip latency.
Anti-drone tech is also changing. Interceptor drones, net-dropping drones, ground-based laser, electronic warfare, and small guided ground- or air-launched interceptors.
Also have to consider the combined arms picture, none of this can be reasoned about in a vacuum.
But I suppose my main takeaway is - no two theatres are the same, AND there is a diversity in drones. So to collectivize a takeaway around "drones" would be a reasoning error.
One thing will be certain when it comes to wars between nearby countries. You need to knock out the enemy's industrial production quickly with bombers. Or have your own industrial production that can maintain pacing and avoid culmination in a war of attrition.
My comment was more specific to the article, i.e. counter "SMALL" UAS / tactical / infantry battlefield scale.
Pacific theater / operation/strategic scale, IMO bigger drones and traditional loitering munitions kind of just blend together. A shaheed is just a poor man's cruise missile. Iran didn't have #s or ability to coordinate / mass #s for any strategic effect. I think Israel has like magazine depth of ~800 interceptors for low tier / subsonic threats and 1000s in stockpile. Iran was (E: *NOT) capable of saturating that.
Depending on relative size / force balance, can still drag on war of attrition after factories turn with sufficient stockpiles. I'm kind of thinking nation state actors, the hedge is really storing a few 10-100,000 loitering munition tier drones in tunnels to ensure some sort of conventional MAD with neighbours. But really that's for... competent / connected nation state actors who has backup ISR, i.e. piggy off US/ eventually PRC global ISR for targeting. I imagine a resourced nation can build out shaheed tier manufacturing underground.
Incidentally, we had news earlier this year that PRC/Polytech is acquiring 1M, as in 1,000,000 loitering drones. Presuming shaheed tier (2000km sky moped) since Polytech has show shaheed clones in past. That's enough to easily saturate all defenses in first island chain even if US+co prepositions every piece of interception hardware ever made or plan to acquire in next 10+ years. That's strategic level shaheed spam.
My main takeaway is cheap loitering munition/drones can reasonable replace potentially short range fires (~2000km), if there's enough of them to casually bleed interceptors, AND if there's survivable theater level kill chain. Last part is really... what separates Ukraine, Iran... maybe Russia's current... hobbyist tier efforts. RU launching 500+ salvos are still trying to evade anti air, with many interceptions because they don't have ISR / killchain to eliminate antiair. It's easy to build a lot of shooters, it's hard to build out the sensors to hit important things. In a highend fight, at least one side (and possibly both) side is going has the ISR and magazine depth to ensure antiair becomes irrelevant and then it will be matter of munitions + concrete attrition math
I think because drones impact at the time is because it's filling an previously untapped niche with a cheap and ridiculously useful alternative.
In my mind I'm calling it "squad-level-airpower" , regular airpower started with spotters, then fighters and CAS in WW1. By WW2 it had expanded the role to achieve operation and theater levels goals, and finally with nukes also a strategic level, and still remains required to achieve goals on larger levels.
However with air-defences creeping down to MANPADS, CAS became more problematic and adding then the cost of planes and pilots made it far from universally useful in a close war.
Drones being man-luggable and -operatable and cheap with hardly any infrastructure more or less flooded a that useful niche, and it's not like that niche was unsurprising, just not successfully exploited previously as the US army tried with the VZ-1 and HZ-1.
Like you mentioned with the Iran conflict, classic air superiority still holds the crown to achieve larger goals on strategic levels (even if drones helped out on an tactical level).
I've been trying to judge this impact on doctrine and procurement but these things are hard to judge when it's happening. Hindsight is cheating ;)
It's huge, though. Many tiers of equipment, doctrine, vehicles, product time to market improvements, RF equipment, radars, stealth tech, software, battle drills, and even new job specializations of various levels. It's intense, and a constant iteration cycle at a pace we haven't seen for at least a long time, but possibly forever.
American military doctrine seems to include the assumption that you will always have the manufacturing capacity and the supply lines to get all the materiel you need to the front, that you'll be bottlenecked by something else like manpower.
This works pretty well for fighting limited wars where part of the justification is to develop and maintain military readiness. Would it still be true in a large scale war against China - could you pump out a million drones a day - or would you wish for a doctrine that included reusable drones?
(That I know of, their awareness of high-capacity supply line issues goes back to at least the Civil War.)
Historically, the US military had a considerable industrial base of its own - arsenals, navy yards, etc. - which could manufacture anything from a pistol cartridge up to an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, Congress shut all of that down in the later 1900's, in favor of defense contractors. Gov't-owned facilities just couldn't compete at greasing Congressional palms.
In Pacific war... with standoff distances involved most of determinant fighting all going to be one way trip, i.e. 2000km+ = disposable. I suppose question is how much US can value engineer their stand off missiles, which will inevitably have more requirements than PRC because when US moving shit across salty ocean, each shot is logistically more expensive. PRC can just haul them out of conditioned depots and get firing.
And how many US can actually produce, i.e. bluntly, US military has _never_ fought any adversary on the scale of modern PRC. WW2 JP+DE had like <50% of US economic and industrial power, while being ganged up by multiple other allies with reasonably large militaries. Peak cold war USSR also similar scale (1/2 US) and realistically US war plan for NATO invasion was to stall and nuke the Fulda gap. Asymmetrically stomping Iraq still took 5 carriers on high tempo operations (not sustainable for more than 1-2 months), favourable coalition basing, completely compromised IADs... multiple months to dismantle power charitability 1/100th size of modern PRC. Even Korean war vs peasant PRC fought US+UN to stand still. Vs modern PRC with 150% US GDP by PPP and and industrial gap like current shipbuilding #s, in their backyard, I suppose the answer is, get defense spending back to 10%-15% of GDP (at least Korean or Vietnamese wartime economy) and go figure out form there.
I think something to keep in mind, the US hasn't fought a war on the home front since 1865. The Spanish American war, WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq - none of these were fought on American soil, with the exception of Pearl harbor, which was a navy base, not a major manufacturing site. So we haven't really had to reckon with what happens if our homeland is under fire - sure, we drilled for it during WWII, worrying about Nazi bombers and Japanese sabotage but neither actually happened.
It doesn't look like our wars are going to get closer anytime soon, but modern planes and rocketry have much greater range than in the 1940s the last time we were at war with countries with significant resources. If we ever come head to head with China, their missile capabilities could be a real concern.
The US would loose a war against China simply because China can outproduce the US many times over. I have no idea why the US keeps teasing a war with China, a war they would most certainly loose. What is the point?
>Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds.
"Sir, we have successfully culled the enemy deer population by 30%. Thei Department of Wildlife is issuing no further permits for this season, and their hunters are emotionally devastated. The impact on their civilian morale cannot be overstated. Where should we direct our next billion dollars? I was thinking maybe drones with long-range microwave to boil off their swimming pools...?"
I don’t know if that would matter in an actual war between china and the US but sending explosives at anything that’s warm sounds like a war crime. That would probably violate proportionality.
TBH once these platforms become deployed, noncombatants are signing their own suicide note even being close to battlefield. I imagine rules of engagement, expectations on civilians will simply change/devolve, i.e. most you can expect from "responsible" users is some map coordinates for murder bot no man's land where they shouldn't be. This without even mentioning we'll likely also see loitering drones hibernate as proximity mines / area denial munitions if they don't find targets. It will get very, very messy.
No? Modern artillery shells cost 5-10k per (50-70k for guidance kits + programmable) and kill at medium distance, with entire logistic park (including self propelled) and isr chain for proper deployment. It's a different tier / type of capability. It kills lots/plurality of casualties... and historically... relatively cheaply. Autonomous drones potential for scenarios like close quarters, interiors, entrenched positions. Depending on battlefield transparency you can autonomously transport a shitload drones to frontlines and have them hunt / deny difficult targets that artillery can't effective engage. Drones that don't find target can area deny by being proxy mines for limited time etc etc. All potentially much cheaper once you eliminate 1 drone 1 operator constraint.
For infantry it is now as indispensable as an automatic rifle, grenades, radios, and so on. Fighters in Ukraine without drone support are at significant disadvantage.
Even bubba's pissin hot 3.5 magnum bird shot is probably not getting above 300 or 400 feet vertical for starters, and then you've either got to deal with hitting it dead on with a tight pattern wad or accepting that the shot is going spread enough to make it unlikely to hit it. So far as I have ever seen the energy in a shot shell wad dissipates much faster than a regular bullet, and I think you're better off trying to hit it with a regular old 556.
Because they're incredibly fast, exceeding 40 meters per second. You can't fire a shotgun at 80 meters. A typical shotgun's effective range is only 40 meters, and once it's within range, you only have one second to fire.
Furthermore, drones are generally difficult to detect at 400 meters unless you're using a synthetic detection system. By the time you spot them, it's too late.
My experience is only with consumer drones, but you could fly over a target area and release an explosive before anyone heard that it was there, especially in a noisy environment. Above 100m, unless you're at high speed/power, most people won't notice a drone at all. It's often a change in speed/direction that gives them away, otherwise it will be past you before you first notice the sound.
Even Olympic trap shooters miss their targets sometimes, and they fly ballistic trajectories after they call "pull". Expecting a soldier with 2 months training (best case) to hit an unpredictably flying drone that appeared out of nowhere with no warning as he's trying to take cover from mortar shrapnel is quite optimistic.
They do. There's a lot of videos of them being taken out with birdshot. I also saw one video about modding underbarrel grenade launchers to fire a shotgun cartridge.
It probably does. But you've seen how fast these drones are right? It's the speed of aliens in the alien movie or a velociraptor from Jurassic park and much more maneuverable, smaller and can come at you from all dimensions.
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
I don’t know how you would actually defend but there is probably some selection bias too. The videos are published by the drone operators, they probably have an interest in publishing videos of successful strikes.
r/ukrainewarvideoreport has been full of it for three years, but mind the survivorship (well, opposite of that) bias - the Ukranian war propaganda / media machine only publishes successes, the Russian one is suppressed or simply not posted on Reddit. Just because you don't see failed strikes doesn't mean they don't happen. The vehicles have drone shields, the roads have nets, and there's heaps of electronic countermeasures in place.
That said, if you're out in the field and there's one above you, you're boned. Can't imagine the horrors of vibing, then having a grenade plop down next to you.
at a distance close enough to hit the drone it's shrapnel and explosives could probably hit you. and you're sitting on a big tank of flammable material.
it's like the dudes that throw their rifle at the drone 6 feet away, hit it, cause it explode... but they still take shrapnel to the head and neck anyway because it's only 6 feet away.
plus what happens if you miss?
and the ammo is big, heavy, and requires special tanks. non-starter of an idea.
Saw the importance of drone fighting in Pakistan's recent clashes with India.
They sent drones to big cities like Lahore/Karachi so IMO even Police and Civil Defense should also get these trainings.
So, what is the effective range of this handbook? Can it be used to intercept and destroy ruzzian Lancet drone? Is it single use handbook or can be reloaded?
Took them long .Drones are democratizing the battlefield and that is a welcome development.
In a future conflict America engages in,social media will be full of videos of Smiths from Iowa and Kansas being chased and blown by drones in some country in Asia or Middle East.
Readit News
In the Pacific theatre, Taiwan is very close to China, so possibly, attack drones will be useful similar to the Ukraine/Russia war.
There are also many different types of drones being employed. The short-range small quadcopters, all the way up to large Predator drones. Shaheds are kind of in the middle in terms of size. The boundary can be blurred too between loitering munitions (Switchblade) and drones.
For the suicide quadcopter drones, there is a realization that Skynet is the next step in the arms race. Full edge autonomy over the kill chain. No need for data link (susceptible to electronic warfare) or trained pilots or added round-trip latency.
Anti-drone tech is also changing. Interceptor drones, net-dropping drones, ground-based laser, electronic warfare, and small guided ground- or air-launched interceptors.
Also have to consider the combined arms picture, none of this can be reasoned about in a vacuum.
But I suppose my main takeaway is - no two theatres are the same, AND there is a diversity in drones. So to collectivize a takeaway around "drones" would be a reasoning error.
One thing will be certain when it comes to wars between nearby countries. You need to knock out the enemy's industrial production quickly with bombers. Or have your own industrial production that can maintain pacing and avoid culmination in a war of attrition.
Pacific theater / operation/strategic scale, IMO bigger drones and traditional loitering munitions kind of just blend together. A shaheed is just a poor man's cruise missile. Iran didn't have #s or ability to coordinate / mass #s for any strategic effect. I think Israel has like magazine depth of ~800 interceptors for low tier / subsonic threats and 1000s in stockpile. Iran was (E: *NOT) capable of saturating that.
Depending on relative size / force balance, can still drag on war of attrition after factories turn with sufficient stockpiles. I'm kind of thinking nation state actors, the hedge is really storing a few 10-100,000 loitering munition tier drones in tunnels to ensure some sort of conventional MAD with neighbours. But really that's for... competent / connected nation state actors who has backup ISR, i.e. piggy off US/ eventually PRC global ISR for targeting. I imagine a resourced nation can build out shaheed tier manufacturing underground.
Incidentally, we had news earlier this year that PRC/Polytech is acquiring 1M, as in 1,000,000 loitering drones. Presuming shaheed tier (2000km sky moped) since Polytech has show shaheed clones in past. That's enough to easily saturate all defenses in first island chain even if US+co prepositions every piece of interception hardware ever made or plan to acquire in next 10+ years. That's strategic level shaheed spam.
My main takeaway is cheap loitering munition/drones can reasonable replace potentially short range fires (~2000km), if there's enough of them to casually bleed interceptors, AND if there's survivable theater level kill chain. Last part is really... what separates Ukraine, Iran... maybe Russia's current... hobbyist tier efforts. RU launching 500+ salvos are still trying to evade anti air, with many interceptions because they don't have ISR / killchain to eliminate antiair. It's easy to build a lot of shooters, it's hard to build out the sensors to hit important things. In a highend fight, at least one side (and possibly both) side is going has the ISR and magazine depth to ensure antiair becomes irrelevant and then it will be matter of munitions + concrete attrition math
In my mind I'm calling it "squad-level-airpower" , regular airpower started with spotters, then fighters and CAS in WW1. By WW2 it had expanded the role to achieve operation and theater levels goals, and finally with nukes also a strategic level, and still remains required to achieve goals on larger levels.
However with air-defences creeping down to MANPADS, CAS became more problematic and adding then the cost of planes and pilots made it far from universally useful in a close war.
Drones being man-luggable and -operatable and cheap with hardly any infrastructure more or less flooded a that useful niche, and it's not like that niche was unsurprising, just not successfully exploited previously as the US army tried with the VZ-1 and HZ-1.
Like you mentioned with the Iran conflict, classic air superiority still holds the crown to achieve larger goals on strategic levels (even if drones helped out on an tactical level).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_VZ-1_Pawnee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Lackner_HZ-1_Aerocycle
It's huge, though. Many tiers of equipment, doctrine, vehicles, product time to market improvements, RF equipment, radars, stealth tech, software, battle drills, and even new job specializations of various levels. It's intense, and a constant iteration cycle at a pace we haven't seen for at least a long time, but possibly forever.
I wonder how susceptible these would be to Potemkin targets (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank)
Things could get very MGS V very fast.
This works pretty well for fighting limited wars where part of the justification is to develop and maintain military readiness. Would it still be true in a large scale war against China - could you pump out a million drones a day - or would you wish for a doctrine that included reusable drones?
Since at least WWI, the US military has been very aware of their dependence on the industrial base:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower_School_fo...
(That I know of, their awareness of high-capacity supply line issues goes back to at least the Civil War.)
Historically, the US military had a considerable industrial base of its own - arsenals, navy yards, etc. - which could manufacture anything from a pistol cartridge up to an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, Congress shut all of that down in the later 1900's, in favor of defense contractors. Gov't-owned facilities just couldn't compete at greasing Congressional palms.
And how many US can actually produce, i.e. bluntly, US military has _never_ fought any adversary on the scale of modern PRC. WW2 JP+DE had like <50% of US economic and industrial power, while being ganged up by multiple other allies with reasonably large militaries. Peak cold war USSR also similar scale (1/2 US) and realistically US war plan for NATO invasion was to stall and nuke the Fulda gap. Asymmetrically stomping Iraq still took 5 carriers on high tempo operations (not sustainable for more than 1-2 months), favourable coalition basing, completely compromised IADs... multiple months to dismantle power charitability 1/100th size of modern PRC. Even Korean war vs peasant PRC fought US+UN to stand still. Vs modern PRC with 150% US GDP by PPP and and industrial gap like current shipbuilding #s, in their backyard, I suppose the answer is, get defense spending back to 10%-15% of GDP (at least Korean or Vietnamese wartime economy) and go figure out form there.
I think something to keep in mind, the US hasn't fought a war on the home front since 1865. The Spanish American war, WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq - none of these were fought on American soil, with the exception of Pearl harbor, which was a navy base, not a major manufacturing site. So we haven't really had to reckon with what happens if our homeland is under fire - sure, we drilled for it during WWII, worrying about Nazi bombers and Japanese sabotage but neither actually happened.
It doesn't look like our wars are going to get closer anytime soon, but modern planes and rocketry have much greater range than in the 1940s the last time we were at war with countries with significant resources. If we ever come head to head with China, their missile capabilities could be a real concern.
"Sir, we have successfully culled the enemy deer population by 30%. Thei Department of Wildlife is issuing no further permits for this season, and their hunters are emotionally devastated. The impact on their civilian morale cannot be overstated. Where should we direct our next billion dollars? I was thinking maybe drones with long-range microwave to boil off their swimming pools...?"
Deleted Comment
Furthermore, drones are generally difficult to detect at 400 meters unless you're using a synthetic detection system. By the time you spot them, it's too late.
Also, swarms.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/1b0u0k0/how_eff...
Now imagine a swarm coming at you, each with explosives.
Deleted Comment
I believe both Russia and Ukraine train some soldiers via shooting target/dummy drones and skeet.[1]
And there are videos out there of Ukrainians and Russians successfully shooting down fpv drones. [2][3][4]
(Content warning: war videos but there shouldn't be any gore in them)
[1] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1948675201983553864
[2] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1920365175766483080
[3] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1936508342622437560
[4] https://xcancel.com/RALee85/status/1923488508015956341
That said, if you're out in the field and there's one above you, you're boned. Can't imagine the horrors of vibing, then having a grenade plop down next to you.
They are literally posted there, stop spreading fud.
it's like the dudes that throw their rifle at the drone 6 feet away, hit it, cause it explode... but they still take shrapnel to the head and neck anyway because it's only 6 feet away.
plus what happens if you miss?
and the ammo is big, heavy, and requires special tanks. non-starter of an idea.
Dead Comment
The US seems behind in comparison.
this handbook is public but i cant find it. Maybe one of you has it? If so, can you send it? I would be very grateful