“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes,” Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military-intelligence service, told The Wall Street Journal.
“The days of massed armored assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in Iraq — that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective now,” Bradley Crawford, a retired US Army sergeant who’s an Iraq war veteran, told the newspaper.
This war is going to change military doctrine entirely. The concept of large and expensive tanks and planes has been decinated by information age technologies at a tiny fraction of the cost.
I’d be curious to see how it plays out with the next major ground operation the US does.
I feel like neither Russia nor Ukraine having air superiority changes the dynamics quite a bit.
I have my doubts that the tactic would work as well if the target has more unfettered ability to bomb your potential staging areas.I can’t find the link, but I saw a video of a training exercise where an F-35 dropped a shit-ton of autonomous drones, and they circled until they each had an individual target, then plunged right into them.
Fuck that. You have zero warning because you can’t see the F-35 and you can’t see the drones until they turn your lights off.
Homies acting like the US hasn’t been bombing places with drones since 2003
Shaheds Russia is bombing Ukraine with right now are an Iranian copy of a captured Sentinel drone
These were different. Real small and about a hundred of them. Its a continuation of weapon system they used in Iraq, where a munition would be shot over a position and release a hundred little guided bombs. Now it’s just guided bombs and a shitton of the fuckers.
No I’m agreeing with you.
I’m responding to people sweating about these “new” capabilities like the US has been caught by surprise.
Yeah! That’s it!! Fucking wild!
Edit: wait till the end and you can hear the sound of unseen death
If the F-35 is operating within small drone range, it’s probably detectable on infrared tbh. If it’s a larger drone, then there’s not really much of an advantage of launching it by F-35 because you’d probably be outside of radar range anyway. The F-35 is most useful when it IS accomplishing the role of CAS because it has the benefit of a pilot.
As it stands, I feel like the primary role of jets today is to maintain aerial superiority to drop heavy bombs (which are far cheaper than building an equivalent drone).
It would release them about a mile out. I’ll see if I can find it. I sent it to a friend a while back.
That’s going to be easily within infrared detection distance, right? Sounds like it would only work against insurgents who don’t have access to advanced guided munitions.
Thing is, modern drones that can take out tanks don’t really need staging areas. You can fit one in your backpack and operate it out of a hole in the ground.
I’m not talking small airfield, more like the cache where you would actually keep and distribute the drones.
The whole thing falls apart of you can’t keep resupplying them, even if they don’t need much space to operate.Distributing modern drones isn’t any different from distributing guns or ammunition or food or supplies. They’re small, easy to pack, individually distributable, and require minimal infrastructure.
You might need a lot of infrastructure to launch a Predator, but I could build an FPV drone in my room.
Yeah, but in a warzone distribution of those things can be hard, and is only made harder by an opponent that can bomb you and you have minimal ability to defend or get warning.
You can’t just handwave logistics and supply line defense. At some point things get put on a truck and driven to where you hand them out. If the trucks get blown up or that distribution point gets bombed, you can’t hand out the drones, and if you can’t get them to troops it doesn’t matter if they would trounce a tank.
In Ukraine no one has air superiority, so both parties are facing similar logistics issues.
The next time the US does a ground invasion, it’ll invariably have air superiority because of navel missile assets and long range bombers being able to clear out defenses. So it’ll be curious to see how effective that will be at countering the drones.
If the US is fighting a peer war, how do you plan on them gaining aerial superiority and naval superiority? Ukraine’s operations in the Black Sea demonstrate that you can do the exact same thing you’re doing with drones in the ocean, and Russia/China both have hypersonic missiles for more distant naval assets.
Moreover, your ability to project with bombers only exists if you’ve taken out enemy anti-aircraft systems, so you would need air superiority in the first place. That’s not a given since F-35s are notorious for having incredibly finicky maintenance that reduces their uptime.
Wars are decided by logistics, so your statement that “if you don’t have logistics then drones are useless” is basically saying “if you’ve lost the war then you’ve lost the war.” Drones require far less logistical management than aircraft or ships or tanks but are easily capable of taking on any one of those things.
Well, for one I thought I was pretty clear in saying I wasn’t talking about the US fighting a peer war. That’s what I was specifically curious about how it would play out. Are smaller drone tactics like we’re seeing in Ukraine able to counter air superiorities ability to make a safe operating environment for troops and armor?
Conjecture about a war between the US and China is entirely out of scope. If the current war has shown anything, it’s that Russia isn’t actually in the class everyone assumed.
I remember drones being frequently brought up in Robert Evans’ It Could Happen Here. Basically it was a run through of what might happen in a civil war in the US. He figured a population with guns would certainly hinder an army but drones would be the game changer.
With the freedom of the Internet though, open-source drone development might be able to achieve far lower costs than what government procurement can.
Hardening of communications isn’t THAT complicated, after all.
This is only continuing the trend started in ww1. The big paradigm shift of ww1 was that you can stop any number of men with machine-guns and artillery. So you need more space between the men. Tanks allowed to cover the men for an assault, so offensive could still be done.
Now, with the accuracy of the artillery and missiles and the drones to scout, tanks are also destroyed before they can accomplish their mission. So the no-man’s-land is even larger than before.
It is an interesting challenge to overcome.
There are no more lines of battle. A drone could attack anywhere. A drone could drop a grenade bouquet down the hatch of oil tankers. It’s weird the fighting is contained in Ukraine at all.
There very much is a line of battle, it’s just that it’s 5km thick.
Drones behind the lines are like missiles or long range artillery. But they don’t prevent movement from the enemy.
Weapons and sensors will be developed to fight drones too. It’ll just take a few years.
This is like WWI or more aptly the Spanish Civil War, giving us a taste of the next major conflict. Which will be nothing but drones clouding out the sun. They can make quicker decisions, carry bigger payloads, go longer and “save” soldiers lives. There’ll be little reason for forward deployments other than deploying air defense and limited support.
Drones won’t get rid of men on the ground… But it gets to the point where a war is just sending men into a swarm of drones, and that just sounds unpleasant.
Don’t drones rely on wireless communication? Would it not be possible to one day make large “dead zones” many kilometers wide where drones can’t operate because of some sort of signal interruption?
Some advanced stuff like F35 has EW mitigation and is designed to withstand some jamming.
Tiny little drones definitely don’t have that shit. But they might one day.
autonomy
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The sheer number of drones operating in Ukraine, as well as battle-management systems that provide real-time imaging and locations, mean that troops and tanks out in the open have just minutes before they’re targeted, a top Ukrainian military official says.
“Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes,” Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine’s HUR military-intelligence service, told The Wall Street Journal.
“The days of massed armored assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in Iraq — that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective now,” Bradley Crawford, a retired US Army sergeant who’s an Iraq war veteran, told the newspaper.
Ukraine has been increasingly relying on cheap, first-person-view drones, or FPVs, to take out Russian military hardware.
While the exact number of drones deployed remains unclear, the Royal United Services Institute estimated earlier this year that Ukraine was losing about 10,000 drones a month, a sign of their widespread use.
Russia is meanwhile working to make a deadlier, more advanced version of Iran’s Shahed-136 attack drone, The Washington Post reported based on leaked documents.
The original article contains 382 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 46%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Doesn’t/won’t drone and missile intercept technology keep up with the drones and missiles?
Obviously, ruzzia won’t. They are shit, but I would assume the US Army is already finding solutions on how to counter this.
It’s harder to intercept in general. In this case, drones have minimal radar and infrared signature and are extremely cheap…
It’s impractical to spend a million dollars intercepting a drone that costs $500 to build.
Lasers or fast firing small calibre weapons can hit drones. We already have weapons with enough accuracy to hit drones, what’s missing is a system to detect them. But with AI, cameras should be able to do that soon. Drones should then increase their camouflage. But they also are noisy, so sound detector might be another solution (probably not alone).
Drone are super easy to detect with any basic SDR. Only the infrared line of sight beam riding drone and fully autonomous drones are immune
It will, eventually, but this stuff takes time.
The problem with drones is that they can be very small, and very cheap.
The first part makes them difficult to detect and target. The second part makes destroying them with, say, guided missiles, extremely inefficient. You can basically bankrupt your opponent by sending more drones then they have missiles to shoot them down with.
Creating hard counters to modern drones is going to require radical new thinking. I suspect energy weapons may end up playing a serious role in this regard.
I did see some stuff about lasers destroying drones
