I haven’t covered Russia-Ukraine much from a technical perspective, but recently SchlomoTube shoved this into my face and I felt the need to cover it. They start out by pointing out that, contrary to what retards on the internet think, UAVs are easy to kill.
A report in May found Ukraine was losing more than 10,000 drones per month. My next guess says ‘swarms of drones are the future of war.’
I’m not editing these two sentences together. CNN host Fareed Zakaria really transitions from “here’s why drones are failing, now here’s my guest in denial.”
Swarms of drones may be the distant future of war. The current of war is drones getting holocausted. Methinks that drones, at least without an unimaginable technological leap, are more of a trend. They are the bell bottom jeans of modern warfare.
That’s overly harsh. Short range quadcopters are similar to neural net AIs, in that, while they are enormously overhyped, they do serve a valid niche. As a result, it’s hard to make blanket statements without writing a dissertation length piece.
The cliffnotes are: they have extremely short range and endurance, typically of less than 30 minutes and 10 kilometers, and they exist almost entirely to let infantry or artillery observe a tiny area for a brief moment from another vantage point. They aren’t worthless by any stretch of the imagination, nor are they particularly revolutionary. They are analogous to sniper teams, in that they provide value while still being somewhat niche. It’s definitely not a dumb move to have a few of these things, train a few operators, and let the infantry figure out when to use them at their discretion.
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schimdt’s statement however, that “swarms of drones are the future of warfare,” was idiotic right from the start, and displayed a fundamental lack of understanding. First of all, it assumes that you are putting weaponry on these quadcopters. Considering the already limited range and endurance, we need to cut into that even more in order to carry so much as a single small mortar. 
Occasionally they put a bunch of rifle grenades in there to mix it up. Notice how the two UAVs above and below don’t appear to be carrying large cameras on them? That’s because their payloads are so small that you can’t carry much more than a webcam if you’re also carrying these weapons. Good luck loitering in the area for long with a drone that can barely get airborne with the payload, and had a 30 minute endurance while carrying nothing.
Putting a tiny grenade on a quadcopter, then sending it on a kamikaze mission to an area where you think you see the enemy, essentially turns it into a weird sort of artillery shell. Theoretically we’re trading massive amounts of firepower for some potential added precision. That may be worth it in some cases, but it’s not like enemy troops are just walking around out in the open not wearing camouflage. If they were doing that, you could just fire airburst artillery in their general direction and you wouldn’t need any precision.
Just like artillery, these quadcopters also place a strain on your logistics, since they must be transported from somewhere, batteries included, to the frontline. Probably even further than artillery shells, since they have such short ranges. That strain gets increased when they get shot down or disabled in such astonishingly high numbers.
This is the “future of warfare.” We know that because Eric “I’m CEO Bitch” Schmidt told us.
(3:45)
Eric Schmidt: One of the things that I learned was called a kamikaze drone, which was a $400 Chinese drone that carries a small payload.
CNN shows the below footage as this narration plays. Presumably it’s of the Chinese made drone that Schmidt is talking about.
You’ll notice that it is beyond tiny. It’s not clear that this thing could carry even a grenade, let alone for any significant range, but let’s say that it’s a flying hand grenade with a webcam and a 10 km range. Considering that, should you find the enemy, you can usually direct artillery to bombard them, adding the grenade would turn this into a niche harassment tool at best. You may also be wondering what the point is anyway, since the range is so small you need to already know where the enemy is to within a very small area, probably something like 100mx100m, and, again, the troops will probably be camouflaged and hidden in trenches, so you won’t find them anyway.
It moves so fast you can’t shoot it down. I had thought that was the innovation of the war.
Ah, but the advantage is that you can’t shoot down this quadcopter, unlike bullets, missiles, rockets, artillery shells, and bombs.
Okay, maybe you can’t shoot those down either, at least not with any reliability, and maybe you can shoot down the flying grenade, albeit not with 100% success, but especially if it’s loitering in the area which it needs to do to find you which is the entire point versus an artillery shell. But trust me, swarms of these things will truly revolutionize modern warfare.
Two generals told me yesterday that I’m wrong, and what they really need are cruise missile drones which can go really far with wings and carry more payloads.
You need cruise missiles. Not “cruise missile drones,” just good old fashioned cruise missiles.
And TV guided missiles are not a new thing either. In fact, they date back to WWII.
I often find it frustrating when talking about drones, because dipshits like Eric Schmidt talk about them while forgetting all the things that the military already has, or never knowing in the first place. “Let’s put a TV camera on a missile,” sounds like a revolutionary concept, until you realize that it is decades old.
Similarly, we don’t need cruise missile drones when we already have cruise missiles. They are designed to skim as low to the ground as possible, have extremely minimal turning ability – which would simply add more drag for no return – and hit the known target. Adding a camera to something the size of a tomahawk and getting it to patrol high enough over an area to LARP like it can find things is a great way to massively reduce its effective range in exchange for having it shot down, wasting all the precious fuel onboard and giving us nothing.
I have to circle back to something that Schmidt said about Ukrainian drones earlier in the video.
Fareed Zakaria: How many drones are [Ukraine] using per month.
Eric Schmidt: They’re on pace for using a couple hundred thousand drones in a year. Most drones only survive one or two flights before they fail or they’re blocked. I was shocked at how good the Russians were at electronic warfare and jamming. Basically everything you send into this battlefield, which is quite narrow by the way, *blathers on* they jam everything. GPS is jammed, but also communications is jammed, so normal drones don’t work.
A couple hundred thousand drones per year, most of which survive only one or two flights before failing or being jammed out of the sky. Since even the most cheap Chinese drones are typically reliable enough to survive multiple flights, I’m guessing it’s mostly jamming that’s taking them out of action. That’s bad, but more important is the sheer quantity of waste.
To put the numbers into perspective, we’re talking about 550 drones lost per day, or about 17k per month. The US Military Industrial Complex is promising to increase its artillery shell production from 30k per month, to 70k per month. Currently, they produce barely more than one shell for every quadcopter that Ukraine sends to go up into the sky and get jammed, accomplishing next to nothing. This is not some sort of minor little project that is without opportunity costs.
Yet they accomplish so little that the only time you hear about drones is when some dipshit is bloviating about how they’re just seconds away from revolutionizing warfare. Few of the channels who talk about the war bother mentioning drones, except in passing.
But what if we could create a fleet of cheap, rugged, and most importantly long range drones? Then we could stage them from behind the frontlines, and have them fly massively past the frontlines. Unfortunately, they would still be subject to electronic warfare, and have the terrible visibility that a shitty little camera gives you from a plane. But, what if, and I know this sounds crazy, we just like PUT A FUCKING GUY IN THE PLANE AND THEN ACKNOWLEDGE THAT IT IS OKAY TO HAVE SOME GUYS DIE WHILE FLYING INSTEAD OF ONLY INFANTRY.
But we can’t do that. I mean sure, the US military lost 65k aircraft in WW2, and 11k in Vietnam. And sure, they produced about 325k aircraft during WW2. But to mass produce something that isn’t a crappy little gimmick done at the behest of billionaire nerds who think that drones are cool? Unconscionable.
Sure, Ukraine has such high casualties that they refuse to tell us what they are, and they’re clearly in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. Infantrymen, tankers, truck drivers, support, you name it. Hell, they’ve probably had hundreds of drone operators get killed. They are near the frontlines after all.
But those are just boring little infantrymen. Unimportant peasants. To have even 1,000 pilots die in cheap planes that, due to their nature, you can’t make any serious profits off of?
That’s a humanitarian crisis that we simply cannot accept. Remember, no matter how many soldiers die, dipshits think it’s really important to never have anyone die while piloting an aircraft. It’s suddenly massively more important once you get into the air, which is why we need to switch to making all these drones that can just be jammed out of the sky. It’s the current of warfare, just like bell bottom jeans were the current of fashion, for a while.
The Russians/Iranians have already invented an effective “drone swarm” tactic in the form of the ‘Geranium’/’Shahed’ . These are cheap, light, rather slow (propellor-driven) flying bombs with guidance technology not much better (although digitized) than a WWII “buzz bomb”. They are not a system involving “sensor fusion”, ” machine learning”, or autonomous swarming behaviour.
The former is an effective way of overwhelming, in large numbers, contemporary air defence tech that relies on fast, large, expensive interceptor missiles. The latter is currently a solution in search of a problem.
B-b-b-but muh sensor fusion on the 9th generated battlzone with integrated air defense systems and force multipliers! We can’t just put a heckin camera on the front of a slow moving cruise missile and fly it into the enemy. That’s not nearly kewl enough for CEO Eric Schmidt.
BTW, one of the obvious uses of drones is to just make a bunch of super cheap small plane sized drones and have them fly over the enemy, saturating the air defense systems. But that, again, doesn’t capture the imagination of CEO Eric Schmidt, so it’s apparently not an option.
Weird how these corporate guys have turned going to war as something only some kind of dumb faggot would do. But then I guess that today’s modern soldiers would prefer to fiddle with a bunch of Costco drones, while artillery shells rain down on them. So maybe it all evens out.
Notice how in 1944 when the Germans finally committed to a total war economy strategy that their aircraft production increased by 50%. This is with massive allied air bombardment. I suppose if you concentrate on killing civilians as per the british plan devised by that jew “Lord Cherwell” and don’t actually bomb the means of production this will happen. What was it Harris wrote? “German cities aren’t worth the bones of a single british grenadier”. THIS was the real holocaust of WW2 (as well as americans firebombing Japanese cities. Not to mention the nuclear attacks which were to satisfy the jewish lust for destruction).
Fast forward 2 years, and Russian drones overcame jamming by using fiber tethering, fly up to 30 kilometers and are forcing Ukrainian logistics and armor into extinction, as well as doing great damage to arty. Their jet planes also deliver about 100 kilotons of explosives per year, give or take, as GPS guided glide bombs, which pair very well with mass drone interdictions in their now-standard “pin and destroy” tactic.
Looks like an update is in order, especially covering Rubicon.
I do need an update, not so much for this article, but the one on the failure of Russian interdiction. While there are limitations on fiber optic UAVs, mainly that they cost more, they solve a lot of the problems of the old UAVs, and jamming wasn’t as big of a deal as I previously believed for various reasons. The real story of Russia-Ukraine is how successful these short range UAVs have been, when combined with artillery, in short range interdiction.
On the other hand, GPS guided glide bombs are doing the same job that short ranged cruise missiles with large explosive warheads would do, as there is nothing magical about the form of transportation. Ukraine has shot down a few Russian jets doing this mission, and it is entirely debatable whether it is justified to use our precious jets for this purpose, as opposed to designing and manufacturing larger cruise missiles. Then again, with cruise missiles the airframe is destroyed along with the missile, so there is some value in a bomb truck. That one is a little unclear.
Good comment though. I’ve been meaning to revisit this stuff, and have a few drafts of a “Meet the MIC” series on the backburner.
Regarding glide bombs:
1. You can’t substitute them with missiles, actually. Even if we ignore defense economics, which obviously tell us that missiles will never be as cheap as glide bombs, and assume that somehow you were able to drastically lower the costs, you still have engineering constraints to contend with. That is, designing and fielding a missile capable of delivering an equivalent of FAB-3000 will be incredibly awkward. Let’s assume it’s gonna be a cruise missile, as fielding tens of thousands of heavy ballistic missiles per year will be prohibitively expensive on fuel costs alone. It will be a huge missile with an even bigger launcher. You will need to store them somewhere, and storing hundreds of 3 ton warheads packed together with all the fuel for their delivery is a great way to get your ammo dump blasted into the space. Incidentally, launches of such missiles will also be visible from the space, and missile itself will be screaming its presence in radar, heat and noise signatures, while is slowly trods its way through the skies. So it’s gonna be much easier to shoot down than existing cruise missiles. Milanion FP-5 “Flamingo” is exactly that kind of missile, albeit its payload is on the scale of FAB-1000. So imagine something even bigger, clunkier, noisier and slower. Incidentally, you can forget about shooting and scooting or camouflage, as the launchers and support vehicles are gonna be massive and easily detectable. In comparison, detached glide bombs have no heat sources, tiny radar signature , are silent and fast. Su-34 is very maneuverable, enough to defeat multiple Patriot interceptors at a time (there is a recording of transmissions from a Su-34 pilot as he does so). In fact, Ukraine destroyed more Su-34s on the airstrip than it intercepted in the air ever since they switched to glide bomb delivery.
2. But do you even need multi-ton warheads? You absolutely do, especially in Ukraine. Since most of their housing was built by Russians during Soviet era, it’s all thick reinforced concrete above the ground and cellars and tunnels below it, and is extremely sturdy (think Gaza tunnels, but underneath every house – and the house itself is a concrete fort). Infantry and drone teams sitting a Khrushchevka or Brezhnevka commieblock can shrug off all but the heaviest bombing. Sometimes it even takes multiple heavy glide bombs to take these things down. And you can’t expect multiple small payloads to effectively substitute for one big one.
3. Incidentally, that is the reason why battle for Bakhmut was the bloodiest and most expensive in terms of arty expenditure for Russians, and why storming Ugledar/Vuhledar failed so many times. Having no proper way to bring down enemy strongholds in concrete highrises and cellars ment expanding a huge amount of artillery ammunition trying to soften them up and then throwing infantry assaults (Bakhmut) or mechanised columns (Vuhledar) at them. With mass introduction of glide bombs, much larger urban centers (Avdeevka/Avdiivka, Chasiv Yar, Siversk, Pokrovsk-Mirnograd agglomeration) were captured significantly faster and at much lower costs in attrition, and expenditures of artillery ammunition.
Glide bombs are special because they deliver the heavy, concentrated, saturation bombing precisely at the rates and distances needed to break up the heavily fortified urban infantry positions under contested skies, which defined war in Ukraine. They also do so in the most cost-effective fashion. Their introduction was pivotal to Russian war effort, and their role is indispensable.
Part 4. On CAS and turboprop planes.
I do think that turboprop planes would be quite useful, but certainly not in “doing strafe runs and moving down enemy infantry columns with machine guns” role, because those columns don’t exist anymore. Since there are so many tools to punish force concentration now, Ukraine frontlines have extremely low density compared to previous large scale wars. You will have to strafe for 3 man teams, and all the methods developed to counter fixed wing drones will work just as well against CAS turboprop planes. Actually, they would work even better, as the planes are larger, easier to detect and harder to miss. Interceptor drones in particular would ravage those planes, as they are much cheaper than even MANPADs or ammo for machine guns, so the cost efficiency of the exchange would be off the charts.
Where I see the role for turboprops is as a platform to detect and intercept enemy drones (via machine guns and your own interceptor drones), as well as launching its own attack drones. You could fly those turboprops high and far enough so that cheap interceptors are inefficient against them and bait enemy to use expensive PAC-3s or analogs. Also, launching drones from the skyborn carriers would give them inherent advantages in the angle of attack, target visibility, and energy preservation. Interceptor drones are cheap and fast, but have very limited range, which would greatly expand if they can fly down instead of up. You could also use that turboprop as a networking node by strapping satellite internet dish on it and retranslating the uplink to ground forces and friendly drones in the air. And the turboprop plane itself can be remotely operated if the area is too hot.
So turboprops would absolutely be useful, but not for strifing enemy forces, rather by dropping FPV drones on then from 10 kilometers away, while shooting down hostile drones in the process.
This was an excellent comment chain, even if I have some nuanced disagreements. I may reprint this as a kind of guest article.
Part 2. Sorry for typos, I’m phonefagging.
Regarding drones and EW. EW works decently well, but it’s nowhere near a silver bullet it might have looked like. Not only can’t all positions be covered by it (both due to availability and as it also shuts down friendly drones), but even when working as intended, what it does is turning ~80% of incoming guided payloads into unguided ones, while also lighting up your position for the enemy EM surveillance. Quite often, fiber guided FPV drones or conventional munitions are then dispatched to take out the EW emitter. The heavily uparmored and EW protected turtle tanks can soak up twenty times more FPV drones than takes to destroy a conventional tank, but that exchange is still cost-effective for the dronies. Additionally, if you are an infantryman with a portable EW that suppresses video feed in a 20 meters radius, if will save you from an FPV with an RPG warhead, but not from a Molniya with TM-62 strapped to it (even if that lands 20 meters from you, you are still getting a concussion).
The main drawback of fiber optic drones isn’t their higher price (as it’s still miniscule compared to price of their targets, and is offset by higher kill rate due to better videofeed quality and reliability, as well as an ability to sit in long ambushes). They are, however, heavier, less nimble and significantly harder to control, and are easier to intercept with counter-drone drones.
Regarding artillery interdiction – that is true, as an Orlan with laser designator + Kransnopols = a very fast and reliable killchain, and even a cheap Mavic works wonders in correcting artillery fire. However, artillery in and of itself became less and less relevant (at least in terms of volume delivered) as drone use increased. Even with drone correction, you are still lobbing mostly unguided shells with fairly high price and fairly low hit probability, and you wear down those tubes pretty fast, too. Strapping the same explosive payload on a Molniya or Leleka gives you significantly better precision and higher range, though at the cost of slower delivery and expendable fixed wing airframe. But better hit rate and moving away from logistical choice points like replacement tube availability is still worth it, and we will see it more and more moving forward.
Add to that the dedicated effort of dronies to hunt down arty (Rubicon took out 300 Ukrainian SPGs this year alone). As the range and availability of drones increase, they would increasingly push arty into irrelevance, at least in long positional warfare.
Which is incidentally why glide bombs are so important – unlike SPGs or missile launchers, you can’t take out either the glide bomb or its carrier from the sky with a Lancet or a long range fixed wing drone.
Part 3. The bigger picture here is that drone revolution has radically expanded capabilities of infantry (I count dronies as infantrymen). After proliferation of RPGs, ATGMs and MANPADs infantry already had a decent toolkit against both armor and CAS. Addition of drones and good networking made infantry that much more efficient by expanding its effective kill range to dozens of kilometers (hundreds if we count larger fixed-wing suicide drones) and allowing every unit to have independent air reconnaissance capabilities. Decently numerous, motivated, resourced and entrenched infantry can now take on much more heavily armoured and armed, more industrially and technologically advanced foes.
If that infantry defends a Soviet style fortress city and has AA and arty support, it is borderline impossible to dislodge by conventional means (at least without having overwhelming numeric superiority and taking massive losses in the process).
Even much more modestly resourced Hamas and Hezbollah infantry militias used those tools to a great effect against Israeli forces, grinding their mechanised pushes to a halt – and not for the lack of trying on part of IDF. If Hamas fighters would have had at least a half of what Ukrainian (or Russian) infantry uses, they would not just stop the IDF mechanized offensive, but wipe the floor with it. Same for Taliban and US army.
This leaves two main options on how to deal with such resistance – you either reformat your own army into infantry heavy force and accept high attrition, or saturation bomb the enemy population centers (with glide bombs if you don’t have air superiority) until his general population is dropping like flies and can’t support the war effort anymore. Russia did both to an extent, but leaned much more into option 1 (since they need to capture and hold ground, and are also more averse towards inflicting civilian casualties on muh brotherly Ukrainians), while IDF leaned almost exclusively into option 2.