Victory Through Tiny Air Power?

Honey, I shrunk the Billy Mitchell!

First-person viewer (FPV) suicide drones are taking the battlefield by storm. I suspect we are over-stating their value by freezing a moment in time when they are most effective. Not everybody can be a FPV drone operator.

Is everybody going to be in an MOS either shooting down enemy small drones or driving them to kill the enemy? I'm not persuaded of the need for that kind of focus by this statistic, even if accurate:

Innovations in doctrine, specialised units, and technological advances, such as fiber-optic guided uncrewed systems, have all contributed to the drone supplanting contemporary military platforms as the prime lethal threat.

Expanding the drone threat to include larger platforms, and the threat multiplies further. It is understood that Russia launched 10,500 glide bombs into Ukraine in March, a massive increase in firing rate from previous years.

With hundreds of tactical attack drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia daily, current understanding states that 70-80% of daily combat losses from both sides are now caused by drones.

One, that's interesting that glide bombs are lumped in with drones in the Definitions Section. Why not just define cluster munitions as mini-suicide drone dispensers? Add in anti-tank missiles and precision shells and bombs. The more the merrier! One shouldn't dilute the definition so much to make the argument, eh?

But more to the point and also requiring looking into the Definitions Section, did drones destroy targets all by themselves? Or did they finish off a target immobilized by other means. Did the drones immobilize a target that was ultimately destroyed by other means?

Back when artillery was the killer, nobody would say that other weapons and branches were supplanted by the big guns. It was all part of combined arms warfare. Artillery could not kill all the targets by itself any more than drones can without the support of infantry backed by artillery and protected by the fortifications and obstacles the engineers build.

And on offense, no matter how much you kill, somebody in armored combat vehicles and infantry backed by fires has to go and defeat the survivors. Then push forward to increase the ability of your own fires to kill and disrupt the enemy, and ultimately break through to do the real damage.

For some time now, we've been debating whether FPV drones are bringing a new era of warfare:

NATO armed forces have noticed the extensive use of FPV UAVs by both sides and large cumulative damage done and casualties caused by the UAVs. Warfare will never be the same.

Why will it never be the same?

Only twelve percent of those attacks led to the destruction of the target[.]

How does that compare to other weapons, which I devoted a post to asking?

I have no doubt drones will evolve from their initial cheap home-built models. And the evolution will be much more expensive. I think counter-measures will eventually be developed with equipment and tactics to reduce—but not eliminate—their good run right now.

Counter-measures will include fighter drones, as I suggested in Army magazine. Although ideally I'd want a wide-area shield that disables drone electronics.

Counter-measures will make the cheap drones far less effective, requiring more expensive drones to penetrate those counter-measures. Or at least mass quantities to get something through. And that imposes its own costs, including the difficulty of massing so many drones without being discovered and hit with precisely aimed dumb artillery barrages. And the logistics of sustaining such surge attacks will be daunting.

And one means of downgrading FPV drone effectiveness would be restoring maneuver to the battlefield. I suspect the static nature of the front right now magnifies the effectiveness of drones.

Basically, I don't think drones bypass the long race between weapons and counter-measures. Tank protection and the weapons that try to kill them is one narrow example. When tanks are used alone, they die—whether it was the British in World War II North Africa or the Israelis in their initial counter-attacks along the Suez Canal in the 1973 war. Combined arms warfare is needed to use tanks effectively.

Tanks are introduced. Anti-tank guns and anti-tank mines are developed. Engineers build obstacles. Guns get bigger. Armor gets thicker and angled. Shells get better. Tanks seek hull down positions with a good eye for terrain or engineering help. Anti-tank missiles and unguided rockets are developed. Tanks evade and fire back—including with "beehive" rounds that are giant shotgun shells. Artillery bombards suspected launch sites. Missiles get longer range, fire-and-forget, and top-attack abilities. Tanks get new kinds of dense armor, reactive armor, and active protection systems. Or simple metal screens as we see in Ukraine now, but which were used in Vietnam and even in World War I. Engineers learn to clear obstacles and mines. Suicide drones arrive.

And we see the beginnings of counter-measures to defeat drones with electronic counter-measures, cheaper air defense weapons, phone apps to track incoming drones, and "cope cages" on the tanks. Hell, Russia has introduced wire-guided FPV drones:

Russia has introduced a wire controlled UAV in order to have a UAV that is immune to electronic jamming. The new UAV has a spool containing ten kilometers of thin fiber-optic wire connected to a human-operated control station.

And of course, electronic counter-counter-measures to help the drones get through.

One of the strengths of the FPV drones is that when paired with recon drones they can quickly attack identified targets before they can move. Precision artillery more closely tied to recon drones could do this, too. Indeed, what if artillery can fire rounds with cameras solely used to spot targets? Could a carrier round dispense a dozen or more parachute-deployed cameras that can look for targets that the artillery unit could then quickly strike with precision rounds or simply precisely aimed dumb barrages?

FPV drones are a major part of the Winter War of 2022 right now. Clearly tanks (and other targets) must cope with FPV drones. But drones are a major factor now in part because Ukraine has fewer old school alternatives to them. And in part because they are new and we don't see many counter-measures.

Warfare is always changing with new weapons. But in many ways warfare remains the same. FPV drones have been added to the mix of combined arms warfare (or joint warfare, if you want to expand it—don't get me going on multidomain operations) where integrating what you have and breaking apart enemy cohesive use of all their weapons will define the effectiveness of FPV drones.

NOTE: I made the image using the Substack capability.