Live Fast, Die Young

Do FPV drones kind of suck?

Ukraine has made the best of a bad situation by embracing First-Person View (FPV) suicide drones and using them successfully. But they are not the wonder weapon people are claiming. They burn brightly now, but they will flame out to become just another useful weapon that must be integrated with the other useful weapons not actually made obsolete by the cheap drones.

This is an interesting take on FPV drone value by someone who was on Ukraine's Donbas front with a drone unit:

Proponents of drones, especially in Silicon Valley, have claimed that drones might completely replace artillery.

Whether or not we believe these far-reaching claims, we’ve certainly all seen the videos on social media of these drones performing impressive, highly precise attacks. We’ve seen them striking a Russian tank on the move, flying through the open back hatch of an infantry fighting vehicle, or entering a building to surprise the enemy, sometimes literally, with their pants down. But those impressive strikes are rare exceptions. The cases when first-person view drones actually do that are few and far between.

I've noted that those impressive drone strike videos leave out the failures, distorting their record.

Success rates given out inflate FPV drone success by counting any drone that hits and detonates as a success; doesn't count refusals to launch strikes because of weather, readiness, and electronic warfare; doesn’t include the fact that "the vast majority of our sorties were against targets that had already been struck successfully by a different weapons system, most commonly by a mortar or by a munition dropped by a reusable drone"; doesn’t include loss of radio control that ends missions; and ignores that drone proficiency takes months of flying them.

I believe I've mentioned all but the refusal to launch strikes when unlikely to work and the frequency deconfliction problem, which is part of the loss of radio control that also includes enemy electronic warfare.

Also, fiber-optic FPV drones have their own limitations that prevent them from fully replacing radio-controlled drones.

Small FPV drones aren't magic. They require effort and manpower at the front:

A major limitation to the expansion of drone operations was the need for trained drone operators. These operators need dozens of hours of training before they are able to start operating these drones, and even more hours of actual use before they are able to make the most out of the system.

Drones don't save as many troops as you'd think. It isn't just taking one infantry and making him a drone operator. Now you need lots of support personnel to keep that single drone operator in action. And you still need infantry on the front to keep the enemy from just overrunning your drone operator bunkers.

I suspect the rise of FPV drones is in part driven by the static nature of the front, which allows small drone operators to reach the front line with short range drones and learn the terrain by repeated flights over the same terrain.

It takes a lot of trained troops to use FPV drones. Those small drones get me worried when AI flies the recon missions and attacks the enemy forces. AI will learn quickly and pass the knowledge on to future AI missions. But I don't assume counter-measures are impossible for that iteration of drone capabilities.

The bottom line of that drone user initially cited:

[If] a member of a NATO military were hypothetically to ask me whether NATO countries should acquire first-person view drone capabilities, based on my experience and given the current state of the technology, I would probably say no, whether they are radio-controlled or fiber-optic. The vast majority of first-person view drone missions can be completed more cheaply, effectively, or reliably by other assets.

And the logistics for sustaining FPV drones competes with logistics for other superior assets.

That's been a big part of my reason for being skeptical about FPV drones. Ukraine had no other options with artillery shortages and no air power. NATO states do.

I still think FPV drones can be part of a successful and expanded combined arms kit. Especially if AI takes over from human pilots, making them just ammunition. But we really need to breathe rather than scream like 'Tweens at a boy band concert.

I am prone to accepting this because it reinforces what I believe despite the breathless claims that these cheap FPV drones revolutionizing warfare. Counter-measures have to be factored in. But the reasons given for deflating their reputation make sense. We shall see.

Do read it all.

But if the small suicide drones become autonomous, that makes them another form of smart bomb, shell, or missile smart sub-munitions, no? As long as you have the persistent ISR web over the battlefield to find targets, which form of sub-munition—a swarm of small drone “sub-munitions” slowly flying or rapidly moving sub-munitions released from a single carrier casing—is superior?

Or maybe the line between suicide drones and loitering munitions is blurred to merge the best features of each. That particular weapon has a Hellfire warhead.

Persistent ISR makes the FPV drones effective. Just as NATO ISR made Ukrainian anti-ship suicide unmanned surface vessels (USVs) successful. Within certain definitions of "successful." When everything can take advantage of that ISR, small drones will simply take their place as another item in the combined arms kit.

NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.