Drone War: Evolution In Ukraine
Largely tracking with the race to deploy combat air power in World War One, drones are now an essential component of the combined arms recipe.
As a blogger, it’s always nice to have analysis receive real-world empirical support. Ukraine’s ongoing attacks on Crimea and targets deep inside Putin’s empire are doing much to support my case that 2024 will see Kyiv go on the attack again rather than play positional warfare with Moscow.
Another warship sunk by drones off Crimea’s coast and a massive attack by cruise missiles against ruscist bases on the peninsula are a couple highlights from the past week. A third was another brutal failure of an orc attack south of the frontline town of Novomykhailivka featuring a dozen armored vehicles and their occupants getting torn apart by first person one way attack drones.
The repetitive stupidity of ruscist officers is getting so egregious that official media accounts for Ukrainian brigades winning these fights can get a little snarky, with justification. After the 72nd Mechanized Brigade Posted a compilation video of drones armed with anti-tank rocket warheads acting like long-range precision bazookas, the 46th Air Assault Brigade near Marinka, further north, confirmed they were seeing the same behavior.
Their explanation: orc officers are dominated by a Soviet mindset that assumes Soviet women will always produce more cannon fodder. An irony of people calling the Soviet Union “communist” or “socialist” is that it never was either. The USSR was a classic European empire, its leaders always bluffing that contact with Asia and surviving Hitler made them tougher than those soft Western Europeans. Just like its cousins, the Muscovite Empire of Peter and Catherine evolved an effectively religious interpretation of its existence to justify the brutality it inflicted on occupied peoples from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Ukraine still exists today in large part because of the valor of its defenders, but right along with the drip-feed of modern military gear from its partners the pervasive Soviet mindset among the ruscist officer corps has played its own role. This does not mean, unfortunately, that the clay-footed orc military machine doesn’t have a fist of stone you’d do well to evade rather than take a hit from.
Moscow’s forces are advancing in Ukraine at several points, creating pressure on frontline Ukrainian units that inflicts casualties and drains scarce artillery supplies. That’s why it’s so very fortunate that Ukraine has continuously improved its drone war, to the point that highly-mobile groups of drone operators are stopping ruscist ground attacks before they reach the front lines.
Much as the portable machine gun made distributed teams of infantry an order of magnitude more dangerous in the early twentieth century relative to the nineteenth, drones are democratizing fire support to a degree modern military officers around the world are likely unable to fully grasp. And for much the same reasons their predecessors failed to cope with technological changes that made the First World War such a slog.
This is unfortunate, because the drone war is following much the same pattern as the evolution of crewed aerial combat over a hundred years ago. Drone warfare in ten years is unlikely to much resemble what is happening in Ukraine today, where over-clocked commercial drones packing small payloads fly through gaps in tank defenses to render the most powerful ruscist armored vehicles scrap.
But in an abstract sense, the challenges drone operators are dealing with today are universal: how to deliver firepower where it is needed so that personnel on the ground can move without coming under overwhelming attack. Today’s drones take advantage of networks and human cognitive abilities in a manner tomorrow’s missiles also will, with a drone and a guided missile being essentially the same weapon with different flight characteristics.
What is being born on the battlefields of Ukraine is a new age of cybernetic warfare, human-machine fusion that takes advantage of each type of cognition’s inherent strengths to offset notable weaknesses. In ten years or so soldiers on the ground are simply going to see something they need destroyed, send an image and its coordinates to an AI-supported target management system, and be able to expect a projectile of the appropriate size and type to arrive in seconds to minutes.
In this world cover, concealment, decoys, speed, optics, networks, and enough protection to keep people alive when their vehicle or position takes a hit are key to victory. Just like sending dense masses of flesh into machine guns and barbed wire proved a ridiculously inefficient way to take ground, so is driving a dozen armored vehicles in a single column across several kilometers of open country.
This does not mean that tanks or other armored fighting vehicles are obsolete. Cold War models lacking effective defensive upgrades are, and this is what both Moscow and Kyiv are mostly forced to fight with. The same is true of crewed aircraft - they will always have a role to play, but it is going to have to shift.
It’s the way modern military forces are structured and organized is going to have to change in the biggest way. The old 19th century legacy of big, uniform mass armies commanded by generals bedecked in medals is only going to get people killed. The traditional class divide between officer and enlisted is also a relic that breeds vulnerability and rigid thinking.
In the past I’ve likened warfare to cooking, and the comparison only gets more accurate the more I think about it. Miss even a single ingredient and a weakness is generated that only the weakest or least competent opponents will fail to exploit. War never changes, but warfare is always evolving.
The real trick of effective policy in any domain is to work out the principles that don’t change fast and structure institutions around them. How much information a human brain can process, the need for consistent yet flexible leadership to maintain group coordination, and the fact of every action coming with direct and indirect costs are among them.
I’ll focus on more on drones after giving the usual overview of the last week of fighting in Ukraine. But as I’ve mentioned leadership, it’s probably necessary to mention the kerfluffle over the past week with respect to the maybe-maybe not replacement of Zaluzhnyi, Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief, by president Zelensky.
Long story short, for anyone not following the drama day by day, over the past week Ukrainian and US media have been buzzing about allegations that Zaluzhnyi has been fired. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, a classic grade-inflated Ivy league grad who latches on like a leech to the right politician until their loyalty is rewarded with a job they are absolutely not cut out for, even made a point of publicly stating that the US government has no role in the matter. Which in Beltway speak basically means that the US wants to see someone’s head roll in Kyiv.
The facts as they stand are this: Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi met, and afterwords members of each man’s staff began implying to media sources that Zaluzhnyi’s resignation was discussed as well as other positions he might like to hold. And that’s all anyone actually knows. Media outlets took this partial story and ran with the most eye-catching narrative, portraying the meeting as ending in Zaluzhnyi’s dismissal, something denied by the Ukrainian government immediately after.
Tension between the two leaders has been a focus of increased media attention ever since midsummer, when Zaluzhnyi first openly admitted what observers had widely agreed was underway: a shift in Ukrainian operations away from the expectations most had going into the 2023 summer campaign. Always eager for the most salacious story it can extend the facts to support, a news outlets is almost guaranteed to spin normal disagreements between professionals into something more.
That such exist is the nature of life. However, the media rarely gets the full implications right, and clever policymakers are adept at feeding journalists just enough information to send them into a tizzy at strategic moments.
The facts as they stand could absolutely mean what the media insists - but nuance seems missing in the coverage. I’d suggest that most observers are getting carried away with suggesting that Zaluzhnyi is being fired when he could simply be moving to a newly-created senior position.
Zelensky is advised by a slew of specialists from every department imaginable on his War Staff. Much of day to day work was likely thrown together during the initial all-out assault and is no longer efficient. As new technology and tactics have had an impact on the battlefield, change in how the national leadership operates has become ever more important.
Were I in Zelensky’s position, I’d be sorely tempted to create a new structure for managing the armed forces going forward. The role that Zaluzhnyi now holds would shift to work more intimately with the Office of the President and directly connect it to the rest of the general staff. Most of the day to day military management functions Zaluzhnyi now performs - and the man himself - would be placed in a new position that unites all aspects of the war economy from factory floor to frontline bunker.
Zaluzhnyi is, by all accounts, a popular commander among Ukraine’s personnel in the field. He’s also a well-known and respected face in the international military community supporting Ukraine. His ability to effectively communicate what Ukraine needs to fight and win is not something Zelensky will lightly cast aside, especially since that would immediately create a powerful political rival.
With Zelensky this week making a case for widespread leadership changes, I strongly suspect that Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi are both deliberately fanning rumors of the latter’s dismissal when the plan is to promote him as part of a major reset. Why? Two reasons: first, to demonstrate that both have widespread support among the general public; second, to see what those observing them do.
Anyone who starts running around jockeying for position in a post-shakeup system reveals their ambition. The average soldier on the ground will probably feel less happy about life if Zaluzhnyi is indeed fired, but in truth their lives depend on more mundane matters like having enough ammunition and rations to make it through the rest of their shift at the Zero Line. Squabbles of the gods are entertaining, at times unnerving, but other matters predominate.
And with respect to the US response to the rumors, the fact that Sullivan commented on them at all is a tell for a functionary like him. The public genuflections about having no right to comment on Ukrainian internal matters doesn’t square with a slow buildup of stories in elite-facing media outlets like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time that have begun to consistently snipe at Zelensky. A key part of the Democrat-adjacent media’s attempts to insulate Biden from failing to deter or help Ukraine win this war is finding a scapegoat that isn’t him for the war not being over.
Zaluzhnyi is a desirable scapegoat for Bidenworld because it was apparent from coverage that began about a month into the summer fighting that the Pentagon felt Zaluzhnyi hadn’t fought the way they preferred to see. Ukraine was given just enough modern gear over the winter and spring of 2023 that if it had thrown every body and tank into a massive frontal assault on the Surovikin Line the effort might have reached Melitopol before bogging down. That would have, in Beltway thinking, led to peace talks.
The failure to follow up the initial push to supply Ukraine with Leopard tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and other similar gear implied that D.C. wanted Kyiv on a short leash. You simply don’t expect you ally to stake everything on one narrow operation without providing the depth of support required if things go wrong- including ATACMS missiles and 155mm cluster warheads for standard artillery before the fighting intensifies. The best explanations are rank incompetence or a covert desire to nudge the conflict into another deep freeze.
So when Zaluzhnyi saw the casualty rates from the first week of fighting, he did the wise thing: shifted approach to preserve Ukraine’s forces while still making a credible push to stretch Moscow’s defenses and see if they cracked under lesser but more sustained pressure. That’s why Ukraine still has most of the gear it got in 2023 - the majority no longer often appearing on the front lines as it is presumably refitted to deal with the drone threat.
Senior US officials have never forgiven Zaluzhnyi for what they perceive as unreliability. The US media pushing a narrative of divisions between he and Zelensky is a classic game - one just has to hope it didn’t take on a life of its own at some point and provoke a real fight. By pitting the two against each other public perception in the USA is being trained to see Ukraine’s cause as hopeless and a deal with Putin the only hope.
I suspect that Ukraine’s leaders are wise at this point to America’s two-faced double-dealing and have chosen to reorganize internally without consulting D.C., something that would no doubt annoy the White House and Pentagon. If so, good: the less Biden’s people know about what Ukraine plans to do next the better.
In addition to pushing Zaluzhnyi into a new and more senior position, I’d also create a separate command specifically focused on the liberation of Crimea. To this would be allocated most of Ukraine’s professional forces and the best equipment. Another command would focus on holding Moscow’s forces back and bleeding them step by step in Donbas, while a third would handle the border from Kharkiv to Poland, a fourth the defense of the skies, and a fifth operations inside Muscovite territory.
We’ll see what Ukraine does - I can’t do more than speculate, of course and it could well be that Zaluzhnyi is on the outs with Zelensky exactly as the story is being told. But more than that is happening, of that I’m completely certain - Zelensky alluded to big changes in the works just the other day.
February On The Fronts
As I mentioned before, Ukraine has been ratcheting up its strategic strike campaign, with excellent results. Refineries deep in ruscist home territory keep getting struck by drones, some of them just damaging equipment but others sparking major fires.
From Rostov in the south to St. Petersburg in the north Ukraine’s drones slip through Moscow’s air defenses with apparent ease. There is no information on how many fail, of course, but the low cost of one-way attack drones and their ability to slip through ruscist jamming means that the cost ratio cuts against the defender with more territory to cover.
Another of the surprises of this war has been the relative ineffectiveness of Moscow’s S-400 system. Billed as something like an air defense superweapon, Ukraine has managed to blind the one guarding Crimea with HARM radar-seeking missiles and special forces raids then hit at least one if not more launchers with cruise missiles. Multiple raids with cruise missiles have broken through the ruscist air defense network in the supposed fortress of Crimea.
Then this week Ukraine decided to launch what appears to have been its single-biggest air strike yet. Moscow reports twenty weapons launched with all shot down, while footage from the ground indicates at least five strikes. One or more hit a major air base, destroying several aircraft and a command bunker that supposedly sheltered a senior officer.
Ukrainian sources suggested that most or all of Ukraine’s surviving Su-24 bombers, a swing-wing jet from the Cold War with the same role as the US F-111 or European Tornado, fired up to a couple dozen missiles and drone decoys - probably more of the latter. Backed up by MiG-29s firing HARM missiles at radars in their path, enough Storm Shadow/SCALP weapons made it through to inflict another humiliating defeat on the S-400.
Of course, like any defense system, it will always be vulnerable if left without the proper support. With ruscist A-50 AWACS patrols keeping well out of even theoretical Patriot range from any front line, Ukrainian raids on Crimea won’t be detected as far out as they need to be for the S-400’s vaunted 300km+ range to matter. The result of this performance loss will be more and more hits on things that matter to Putin’s occupation.
Removing all ruscist combat aircraft from Crimea means that any trying to reach the Dnipro front or western Black Sea have several hundred additional kilometers to fly. That reduces how quickly and often orcs on the ground get air support, rendering Crimea even more vulnerable.
In other good news for Ukraine, two additional air defense batteries capable of “intercepting anything,” according to Zelensky, are now on duty. While no specifics were offered, it stands to reason that these are Patriot or SAMP/T systems, of which two of the former were promised during a diplomatic flurry last fall. I’d bet that at least one is now on duty protecting the critical city of Dnipro, one of the most important logistics nodes in Ukraine. The other could be near Kharkiv, finally offering Ukraine’s second biggest urban area protection. We’ll see what Moscow does to try and blow them up.
Another ruscist Sukhoi was shot down behind the lines in occupied Luhansk recently, so it’s also possible that Ukraine has one battery roving around behind the front looking for opportunities to mount ambushes. There is additionally talk of Greek stocks of Soviet-era gear, including S-300 surface-to-air missiles that Ukraine needed a year ago, being sent to Ukraine. If so, that would restore the potency of an air defense system that, unlike the S-400, does not appear to have been dramatically oversold.
Topping things off in the emerging air campaign, the Netherlands is increasing the number of F-16s it plans to send to Ukraine by six. It’s starting to look like the entire Dutch F-16 fleet, at 42 strong, will eventually move to Ukraine, joined by Dutch and Norwegian jets to make at least five dozen, enough for three squadrons. They might be old and used, but it they’ve been updated with high-quality radars and AIM-120D model AMRAAM missiles, they’ll serve.
There’s also been more chatter about Ukraine receiving A-10s that the US has been trying to get rid of for years. While highly vulnerable to ruscist air defenses, so is the Su-25 that most Ukrainian ground attack pilots fly right up to the edge of the front lines. And the A-10, unlike the Su-25, could be sent with missiles that have a long enough range to let them hit targets close to the front lines from a safe distance behind, assuming F-16s and Patriot systems are on duty to ward off ruscist interceptors. It’s not an essential move, but if the capacity exists to train a batch of Ukrainian pilots it ought to be used. Once Crimea’s air defenses are down and F-16s own the skies, even the venerable A-10 could find a use supporting a beachhead.
At sea, Ukraine’s lack of any major crewed vessels is so far more than offset by the brilliant use of home-designed naval drones. At least two, possibly as many as six, tracked down and outright sank a patrol boat carrying anti-ship missiles that could threaten shipping in the western Black Sea. The ability to routinely deploy flotillas of attack drones off the Crimean coast is another sign of the danger Putin’s forces are in along the southwestern fringe of the empire.
Soon, if Ukraine chooses to it will be able to cut off the shipping lane from Rostov-on-Don out into the Black Sea. While Kyiv is unlikely to take this step any time soon, just demonstrating that it can will force Moscow to spend time and effort bolstering defenses in an area that the occupation of Crimea was supposed to render secure for all time. Needless to say, if Ukraine can reduce the land-based anti-ship missile complex in Crimea, force ships and aircraft to abandon the peninsula for the Caucasus, and crush the air defense system, it can land forces almost at will.
Putin’s desperation for something he can call a win is palpable. Across the long front line his troops continue to mount attacks that do no more than push Ukrainian forces back another tree line while exposing the orcs to hellfire. In Krynky Ukraine has begun to expand its perimeter despite Moscow throwing wave after wave of soldiers at Ukrainian positions. 70% are destroyed, an astonishing casualty rate even for a war when plenty of units have lost half their personnel in heavy fighting before being withdrawn to recuperate.
Drones fly thick here, and ruscist electronic warfare isn’t performing as well as it once did if the success of Ukraine’s short-range converted hobby drones are anything to go by. Electronic warfare depends on overwhelming hostile signals or interfering with them; the first approach requires a lot of power, the second takes finesse and specialized gear.
Both aspects are important; neither is foolproof. The enemy is always able to shift what frequencies it uses to communicate, in NATO-standard systems these jump so often you have to use blanket jamming to knock them out. The trouble with that is that your own communications are certain to be affected. So specialists on both sides are locked in a constant adaptation battle, one Moscow seemed to threaten to lead for a time but now looks to be badly losing.
Elsewhere Moscow’s 2024 winter offensive grinds on, the failure to destroy the Orihiv bulge Ukraine carve into the Surovikin Line this summer illustrated by Zelensky visiting the town of Robotyne, which Moscow has tried and failed to reclaim. Elsewhere on the Azov front there have been scattered engagements and a fairly tough jab north from Pryiutne, but none have moved the lines much.
On the Vuhledar-Novomykhailivka-Marinka arc Moscow continues to attack in an effort to push Ukraine from heights in the area. Moscow apparently wants to push Ukraine back from a key railroad line as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ukraine slowly pulls back 5-6km while keeping the defense anchored on Vuhledar. Still with the orcs here playing at human wave tactics and Ukraine having three well-regarded brigades holding the line, Kyiv might be able to stand firm.
The Kupiansk and Bakhmut sectors have also been hot, but there has been very little movement confirmed. Of particular note in Kupiansk has been an apparent uptick in ruscist air strikes, Moscow aided much when it comes to generating sorties by the proximity of its home turf.
Avdiivka has once again become the most critical sector for Ukrainian troops over the past week, with Moscow pouring on air strikes and infantry attacks on the town itself, attempting to storm into it from the north and south. And here the enemy has managed to have enough success that Ukraine now has to choose whether to dispatch reinforcements to beat back the orcs or pull the hard-fought 110th and 116th Mechanized Brigades and their supporting independent battalions back.
Unlike Bakhmut, losing Avdiivka will not open the door to a major ruscist push anywhere else. Over the past few months Ukraine has apparently set up a series of defense lines in the east, including one intended to prevent a ruscist push north from Avdiivka towards the Bakhmut front. As for myself, drawing Moscow into house-to-house fighting in parts of Avdiivka while slowly pulling back seems the wisest choice. Rigging structures to explode is usually effective at slowing the enemy down.
Ukraine is unfortunately dealing with major shortages of artillery ammunition, however. Moscow is too, with the North Korean shells it has received of notably low quality and so bursting barrels more often, but it has thousands of Soviet guns to play with. Ukraine has only hundreds, so even if they have a longer range silencing all of Moscow’s is a difficult task - especially if short on ammo. More production is coming online in the USA and abroad, but Israel’s wars aren’t helping keep supplies to Ukraine rolling, that’s for sure.
The arrival of a new kind of HIMARS-compatible rocket with a range of 150km in exchange for a somewhat small warhead ought to put substantially more pressure on Moscow’s fuel and ammunition supply chains. But there is a reason that Ukraine is pushing to radically scale up its production of drones in 2024. They have become inexpensive precision weapons that go a long way towards restoring the infantry’s ability to combat armored vehicles.
The Evolving Drone War
One of the most compelling books I’ve read lately is Adaptation Under Fire, an excellent overview of how American military officers fare when forced to change after a major screwup. Or, as is the standard case once they become generals, utterly fail to.
Since the Second World War the military establishment at the highest levels has essentially crystallized, becoming rigidly bound to a philosophy of warfare that lacks real scientific grounding. Myths still get taught to generations of officers because the US military, for all its talk of global dominance, has not been truly put to the test since World War Two.
In this the military is only one of many institutions presently failing under the strain of the Digital Revolution. Always fundamentally part of the broader Western intellectual milieu, Soviet military thinking is just as bad. The fact that it is failing so miserably on a daily basis in Ukraine masks the equally dangerous delusions at the heart of US military thought. Each shares the same fundamental flaw: a failure to reason up from the perspective of the smallest portion of the grand system that defines any war.
At the core of every fight are living, breathing people who aim to complete a mission each day without getting badly hurt. To win a war means putting boots in places the enemy needs to continue fighting. Literally all of the technological, personnel, and even ideological systems in a war boil down to supporting efforts in pursuit of this goal.
Sky, sea, space, cyber - all domains are subordinate to the pre-eminent one: the ground. And even in this domain, all the coordinated movements of hundreds of thousands of individuals is geared towards a single purpose: getting them someplace intact.
This creates a paradox: flesh is weak, but indispensable. A war of robots and drones will lead to each side’s programmers and factories coming under attack until one isn’t able to field new ones any more. Make whatever tools of destruction you like, it’s still people using them for a human purpose.
What this means is that, at a fundamental scientific level, all warfare comes down to having effectively more shooters and spotters working than the other side. In centuries past once you located an enemy army you then had to maneuver cannons and ranks of drilled soldiers with muskets into positions where they could pound the other side harder than your forces got smashed in return. Once the butcher’s bill had been paid, one side’s officers reluctantly ceded the field and admitted defeat.
The Industrial age brought cheap explosives and rapid-firing rifles to the battlefield. Where dense ranks of musketeers backed by cannons had before been the most efficient way to control a desired place, now dispersion became essential. Soldiers had to ditch bright coats and hide their cannons; soon they were seeing balloons rise over the enemy’s lines to let newer, more powerful guns strike places the other side’s people thought were safe.
Warfare is always evolving, but like science advances tend to come over the graves of the last generation’s experts. This is because at a deep level, reality is defined by what our peers say is true. Usually this matches up well with the actual physical reality we encounter in our daily lives, but not always.
All too often people with the power to do so try to make others accept the reality those with wealth, authority, or celebrity would prefer the rest of us believes exist. In every military establishment since the dawn of modern-style mass armies controlled by a central state, a leading clique has emerged that sooner or later fails to comprehend that their vision of reality is flawed.
The result is often epic defeat on the battlefield when their theories are put to the test. Ukraine’s successful defense against Putin’s genocidal assault has perpetually thrown the assumptions made by military officials in both Moscow and D.C. into chaos.
But that should come as no surprise: no American military officer has fought a war like this. And throughout most of American military history mid-level officers responsible for operations and lower-level ones focused on what they call the tactical level have been forced to radically change after battlefield catastrophe discredited the old ways.
Fortunately for Ukraine, the ruscist officer corps is even less able to adapt than American generals. The constant loss of hundreds of soldiers and dozens of armored vehicles day in and day out with little to show for it indicates how distant Moscow is from the average orc in the field. That isn’t to say that Putin’s military can’t develop an effective solution given time - but it’s more likely to take the form of overwhelming firepower than innovative battlefield tactics.
On the other hand, Ukraine is teaching a master class to the world in how to adapt on the fly. Remarkably, it’s able to do this despite much of its own military being impacted by the legacy of Soviet thought.
Though victory in war will always be defined by the ability to send people wherever the victor desires without meaningful interference by the vanquished, in point of fact the personnel on the front line don’t technically have to be armed to do their job. As a scout you are taught early on that it’s your radio, not your personal weapon, that makes you lethal.
Thanks to the modern world of global positioning satellites and robust communications networks, you don’t even need to pack a SINCGARS radio around to get a call for fire to someone with ordnance in a position to respond. In a world of shooters and spotters, decentralization, decoys, and other forms of deception are key to not getting blown up.
Ukrainian forces this summer learned how difficult it is to advance when your enemy can target your mine clearing vehicles with attack helicopters and hit vehicles damaged by mines with Lancet drones. They almost immediately turned these tactics back on the enemy, adapting commercial drones with bigger batteries so they could carry heavier payloads.
More times than I can count over the past year or so I’ve watched one poor orc have a grenade dropped in them by a drone hovering overhead. Now Ukraine is taking higher performance racing drones and using them to propel anti-tank warheads into the vulnerable rear and side armor of the most modern tanks with astonishing precision.
What’s happening is nothing less than a revolution in basic fire support. Instead of relying on a distant artillery battery or even a mortar platoon in your area, a small team can launch a drone that is as or more accurate to hit its intended target. Rather than wait for a tank to come in range of a shoulder-fired weapon, a drone can deliver a warhead to a helpless target.
Just like the machine gun made an infantry squad ten to thirteen strong into a force capable of annihilating a whole battalion of a thousand fighting US Civil War style, drones are giving that same group enough firepower to defeat half a dozen tanks, the weapon originally meant to break through machine gun nests, vulnerable infantry in tow. This represents a radical democratization of firepower that will undoubtedly trigger dramatic changes in how armed forces fight - if they’re smart.
That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that the specific drone technology used today may be totally obsolete tomorrow. Armed drones like the Bayraktar TB-2 were lauded at the start of the conflict, but today are used almost only for reconnaissance thanks to their vulnerability. Ukraine’s attack copter drones are eventually going to be put out of business by a defense system that combines optical sensors, AI tracking, and a gun.
Active protection systems have existed for years now, but they haven’t been widely installed on armored vehicles in NATO countries because of the cost and tactical shifts required. Still determined to pretend it’s 1944 and forever will be - until they lose a fight, anyway - American leaders in particular have downplayed threats from the sky under the standing - and almost certainly fatally flawed - assumption that the Air Force would handle all airborne threats.
This arrogance is part of what led to three American soldiers dying in Jordan on a base that was supposed to be secret. At the same time a US drone was coming into land, a hostile one attacked - a tactic used time and again in the Second World War. US short-range air defenses are automated, and had to be switched off while the friendly landed.
US Navy sailors had their own close shave this past week when a Houthi cruise missile came so close to a US destroyer that its own automated point defense system engaged. Had it been switched off or damaged, there would almost certainly have been casualties. And so far the Houthis have not been firing with the intent to overwhelm a ship’s defenses, otherwise they’d shoot off a hundred missiles and drones at once.
In the game these groups play with the USA, it’s drawing a kinetic response that they’re after. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and various militias in Iraq gain credibility when they lose a few people. They also distribute their weapons so widely that there’s no way to destroy everything. Bombing them is cathartic and lets politicians look tough, but never solves what is fundamentally a political problem.
The solution to most of the one-way drones now in use will likely be a combination of targeted electronic warfare and hard-kill protective systems. These have been focused on high-speed threats so far, and rely on radar systems which might not be effective against drones. Optical and possibly infrared sensors are likely the only way to go, low-level lasers being another possibility so long as the target can be struck and forced to detonate before taking out a vehicle.
But drones will not become obsolete: they will evolve. The distinction between drone and guided missile has always been hazy - the original weapon that an operator flew into a target via radio link was the German Fritz-X, used to destroy ships towards the end of the Second World War. Basically a remote-controlled airplane, the operator had to be close enough to see the target from the aircraft. But full-on TV-guided missiles have been around since the 1950s, a weapons officer on board an aircraft steering the weapon visually while watching a camera embedded in its nose.
Direct control of missiles became partially obsolete when microchips made it much simpler to have a seeker head tell the projectile how to move to get close to a target it was locked onto before firing. TV-guidance is still used in some missiles, however, and now thanks to cheap and robust networks someone with a laptop can control a lethal weapon from a bunker or moving vehicle.
Once active protection systems become commonplace on armored vehicles attack drones will become more like missiles again. At first they’ll be faster and more maneuverable but still controlled by people - as AI improves a user will likely achieve a lock on a specific target beyond the range of its electronic warfare capabilities and leave the weapon to score the hit.
Ultimately, it might well be that a controller operates a single parent drone that acts as a signal relay to a large group of smaller ones that are constantly coming into and leaving its range. Requests for fire from troops on the ground will reach the control drone, operators will select the right attack drone to send. Either it gets a target pre-programmed or just flies to the target coordinate and looks for a laser signal bouncing off whatever ground forces want killed. Personnel on the ground could even just log into a nearby available drone and pilot it themselves, assuming they have the skill, or let it fly on a programmed pattern then select a target when one comes in sight.
What I don’t expect to see work out well is artificial intelligence choosing targets independently of user supervision. Moscow has already tried this on Lancet drones, but has not been able to broadcast footage showing any particular success. AI will always be extremely vulnerable to effective decoys, and no soldier on the ground will want to risk having a weapon flying around that might not be able to tell them from the enemy. Air to air missiles are highly sophisticated fully autonomous machines once locked onto a target and released, but I’m aware of no pilot who was ever comfortable having one fired by an ally at a hostile jet flying nearby.
Not to say that someone won’t try autonomous warfare, but they had better expect disappointment. Further evolution of drones is more likely, with operator skill mattering at each stage.
In terms of fire support on the ground, one-way drones sent up from a nearby ground launcher look set to replace mortars and shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons in the near future. A merging of anti-tank missiles and possibly short-range surface to air missiles with one-way attack drones is also possible, perhaps necessary to protect against larger drones that act like miniature combat jets and controlled by a crewed parent a couple hundred kilometers away.
Buddy drones, as these are called, will likely comprise up to half a combat squadron in the near future because they have a critical advantage over crewed aircraft: almost unlimited endurance. While a fighter or bomber can refuel in the air, crews can’t get proper rest in flight. A twenty-four hour round-the-world bombing mission is quite the ordeal, and crew members generally only do it if they can sleep in shifts.
But a drone doesn’t get tired: it can stay aloft so long as a buddy drone brings it fuel every so often, at least until a mechanical fault develops. Aircraft can fly hundreds of hours without that happening, and if there isn’t a living person aboard to lose if something goes wrong attrition isn’t such a bad thing.
For the record, if you want the solution to any future Chinese blockade of Taiwan, buy air defense drones capable of winning a fight for the seas off Taiwan’s southeast coast even when staged from the Mariana Islands and aircraft carriers near them. That’s the only way to counter China’s proximity advantage. Drones and submarines are what will clear the path for a maritime corridor.
In any case, don’t be surprised if by the 2040s the days of the hobby drone playing turret toss with T-90s is done. Tanks will be able to defend themselves, probably acting as mobile strong points infantry can rely on for close support as they clear an area of hostiles. The scouts providing overwatch will collect signals, pick the ones that need to die, and send a request for fire to the network.
For the time being, Ukraine needs a whole lot more simple drones, because they’re doing the trick. They look to be what may give Ukraine the battlefield edge it needs to start advancing again this summer, when all is ready.
Notably, Zaluzhnyi alluded to an effort to produce the technological and doctrinal basis for revamping Ukraine’s core ground forces with the drone war in mind. Most of Ukraine’s Air Assault brigades are apparently being placed in their own operational grouping, which could indicate that Ukraine will begin the process of splitting its army into two effective components: defense-oriented brigades staffed with mobilized personnel that rely on drones to hold the line in most fronts, and assault brigades that will carry the fight forward this summer with all the modern technology at Ukraine’s disposal at their back.
It’s even possible their target will be Crimea. The Kremlin is certainly afraid this is the case. That’s why one wave of poor orcs after another dies on the road to Krynky, annihilated by Ukrainians with drones.