Drones are old technology. They have always been cheap, and everyone can manufacture them. You probably could, just by knowing a bit of EE and with some help from your friend who does computer science!
In Ukraine, current drones that are being used can be bought off-the-shelf for just a few hundred USD, or the DJI Mavic 3, at ~2,000$ USD. There’s also those expensive Bayraktar TB2’s that are comparable to US-made reapers used in GWOT, but those are vulnerable to the long reach of air defences because of their massive size.
Their specifications and operational capabilities are simple and easy to understand for all. Yet, they have completely modified the battlespace between two significant nations. The influx of anything from HIMARS to Leopards to M1 Abrams (probably excluding SEP v2 and SEP v3s) has not been enough to overcome the impact of the tiny drone – they are all targets for the drone. The scope of this piece will not explain how this has happened, however here is a decent summary by Warontherocks.
Have drones made the tank obsolete as many think, and has it rewritten rules of conventional battle? I’m not so sure.
I watched a brief and insightful interview with a US tank commander (10 yrs, served in all tank positions to provide him with an excellent logistical understanding of issues)
VIDEO SUMMARY
The question was ‘Are the Ukranians using tanks wrong?’ Because in some footage, incredibly expensive (~10M$) US tanks look like they’re all on their own when they are blown up.
The US commander states that this looks ‘un-doctrinal’; tanks on their own get blown up easily.
But the reason for this is because drones allow artillery as well as ATGMs (anti-tank guided munitions) to more easily spot and destroy tanks. Drones have made large armored assaults impossible. The enemy already finds out very quickly when you put a few tanks near the front, nevermind one. And when tanks are put into armored columns that drive forward in a massed push, minefields funnel columns, which are taken apart under a barrage of drone-spotted artillery.
The drone has pounded the ‘old’ WWII massed armored thrusts into the ground. Putting a few tanks together just makes them easier food for artillery, hence why the Ukranians and Russians have opted to split them off on their own.
Even more, the tank commander argues that because of this – we may see more isolated and individual formations emerge in the US military as a result of a reaction to this. He argues that right now, the top dog in warfare is the drone. And it only costs a few thousand USD at most.
Analysis
The perspective provided was fantastic, but I am skeptical that this is the end of drone and counter-drone doctrine.
There are many ways of spotting and detecting drones, only requiring old, unadvanced technology – right now. Using sound, heat (if drones are known for generating this), visible spectrum, radar, or a combination, we can detect drones easily by using old preexisting technology. You only need write the code to integrate the sensors. The costs of just a homemade drone-detecting radar? Just $2800. You don’t even need cutting-edge image-recognizing AI to detect drone signatures. Once drones are detected, shooting them down can be performed with a lot of different options. Particularly in my mind are tiny anti-air rover bots (‘AA rover’) that are essentially small drone-purposed tunguskas (SPAAG. There is no doubt that these rovers would shoot down drones immediately. You can also put guns on flying drones to perform anti-drone roles given with enough engineering, giving you an even wider bubble of protection. There just isn’t a need for 30mm cannons on a Tunguska-type SPAAG to shoot them down.
Nevermind the AA rover, just a soldier with a detection kit (sensor suite and some kind of a way to locate a target) and a shotgun could perform anti-FPV (suicide) drone protection.
There is probably no point in up-armoring the drones to defend against AA ‘rovers’ or anti-drone drones either. Targeting and precision is unlikely to be a challenge for our ground platforms, given how existing SPAAGs are able to target jets, with requirements of kilometers of range. Stationary or not, the caliber of an AA rover’s weapons can be made arbitrarily large – from 9mm to full-sized rifle cartridges or more. Although, upgrading the caliber of the weapon increases the demands on the rover’s systems, from stabilization to size, and can make the rover less navigable in difficult terrain. To protect drones from gunfire, very soon, you start to add kevlar and tape plate inserts onto the drone. Now you’ve reduced drone speed and increased its weight as the lower-shelf drones have become unsurvivable. Pretty soon, you’re flying a TB2 or an MQ-9 reaper, and you’re back to being shot down by anti-air missiles.
Arranging a drone detection bubble comes with challenges, mostly coding. You can place sensors on an AA rover for it to target drones on its own, although in heavily wooded areas, the rover’s sensors could be significantly limited and warning times reduced. It’s better to build a sensor network. By integrating loitering drones that follow you, they should be able to spot other drones. This targeting information needs to be shared with the AA rover. Wealthier countries can develop direct-energy weapons that would also make short work of drones. These options would be quiet and fast.
Just like that, you can build yourself a drone protection bubble! None of this is top-secret nor out-of-reach of a good group of undergraduate engineers. You should be able to detatch the rover from its base and just slap it on a tank. How would you get hit with an FPV drone again?
This isn’t even the end state of counterdrone warfare. Drones will suffer from compounding EW (electromagnetic warfare) capabilities in the near future. They are fundamentally weak to detection and kinetic weapons to begin with, and current options look at hacking drones or generating tons of noise that disrupt drone-to-operator communications. Since many drones are commercial off-the-shelf, they were definitely not been designed to resist determined hackers. While countries are looking at giving drones autonomy in order to disrupt some of these countermeasures by introducing machine learning (i.e. the Lancet drone), that doesn’t matter when they are vulnerable to just being shot with bullets or shotgun pellets. Until an option emerges that does the tried and true ‘shoot at it’, we are far from the end of the evolution of drone warfare.
Then what are drones good for? They would stay useful for surveillance, no doubt – and maybe we’ll use ground or air-based drone killers. I think the complexity only begins to run away and become unpredictable when we start doing drone-on-drone fighting. As drones then begin to push limits of aeronautical engineering as they have to shoot and fly, the complexity escapes accurate my analysis. We will definitely start putting bigger and better cameras and sensors on them however, and they will start getting forced to be bigger and bigger for that.
Iterated games
Early stages of counter-drone warfare can also be read in other contexts, including from iterated game theory. We have seen the first stage/implementation of drone warfare today. We have yet to see the ‘gamed’ response to it where we introduce countermeasures, and then the see counter-countermeasures from drone users.
So where does the situation evolve?
I would argue the situation eventually evolves to detecting drones and shooting drones with bullets and improving on systems that let you detect and shoot drones down. Or if capabilities evolve – damaging drones with EW, through microwaves or lasers.
How could drones evolve in response? Well, with respect to lasers, they may be able to opt for some kind of ablative or reflective shield. With respect to EM jamming and attacks, they may be able to use a forward-facing faraday ‘shield’ that absorbs electromagnetic disruption. With respect to detection, while there is no invisibility cloak, there are IR-cloaks.
Putting a fabric bag around a drone is truly bizarre and would interfere with the aerodynamics, but would make it IR-invisible, if drones emit enough IR.
The summary is that integrating sensor spectrums from sound, visible, or IR could seriously stymie drone operation.
Then, people might decide to start making stealthy radar-reflective drones, if that’s even possible, but we don’t try to make predictions beyond that point.
Implications
The evolution of drones is a demonstration of the missed capacity of the US DOD and its own bureaucratic weight. What anti-air systems were the Taliban using when the US military was in Afghanistan in order to contest air supremacy? None. None whatsoever. However, we still flew really, really expensive jets that were made to be stealthy and fight other jets.
The Pentagon tried to just repurpose a crop duster for Afghanistan operations (in comparison to an F-16, a crop duster is kind of free), but it suffered under paperwork and Congress killed it because the crop duster was manufactured by a foreign country. [citation]
What should have been a fun engineering afternoon modifying a Cessna turned into bureaucratic death. But the military – and no military – can just toy around with a Cessna anymore and ‘see if it works’.
However, it helps us understand how the US military (and nearly everyone else) would miss the crop duster as well as the drone. It’s not that the US military isn’t innovative enough or aggressive enough. Drones have been around for decades, and their technology has always been available.
Drones are so good against tanks because their implementation challenged the military structure.
The bloated institutional weight restricts innovation and mobility. And we over-engineer soldiers, planes, and missiles – provably for the wrong purpose and task.
Now, it is up to the most mobile military to learn or be forced to learn the facets of drone warfare.
Past Imperfect 