[palata]

Hmm maybe I'm not being very clear, I didn't want to write a 20 pages essay :-). I was saying that I don't think it's a particularly efficient way to approach defense.

My point was that Ukraine doesn't buy 2 millions civilian drones and use them as killer drones. Ukraine is actually producing killer drones.

If you are good at producing civilian drones, it doesn't mean that you are good at producing killer drones because the specs are pretty different. If you subsidise heavily a civilian company making survey drones, for instance, and then try to attach a bomb to those and send them in a war zone, they won't do much today. In the end you will have subsidised work that went into making a drone that can make hundreds or thousands of flights during its lifetime, never fall from the sky, lands smoothly, doesn't make too much noise, follows drone regulations in civilian spaces, etc. But none of that work is useful for a killer drone (that has a lifetime of 25min in a war zone). On the other hand, your civilian drones will not have the ability to lock a target and crash into it, fly in GPS-denied environments and a jamming-resistant radio.

[hkpack]

Ukraine is absolutely buying all the civilian drones it can get, especially the larger ones with good optics.

One of the previous defense minister was skeptical of their utility too and called them “wedding drones”, and now you can see very frequently in war footages mentions how they are using “wedding drones” in this or that reconnaissance or surveillance operation.

You absolutely need tens of thousands of drones in the air all the time to support modern warfare.

And drones are being hunted by other drones too, so they don’t last very long.

“Millitary grade” digital communication and encryption is not that important as the scale itself.

[umbra07]

Yes, but that is simply because they don't have a better choice.

Given the choice between a $200 DJI and a $100 homebuilt "killer" drone, you would probably want 2x of the killer drones. However, if your bottleneck is your manufacturing capabilities instead of your money, then you might be forced to use the DJI drones instead of the custom killers.

[hkpack]

It is more complicated than that as the roles are very different and you need both. You just cannot substitute one for the other.

DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on.

Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the video data is a significant chunk of the total personnel in this war.

Without having that, killer drones are not effective, since they are very short-lived, have very poor cameras and power characteristics. It is very difficult to find enemy with self-made drones.

So I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly into a cheap mass produced war-time surveillance drone with minimal effort.

The same goes for software - both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".

[palata]

Hmm, I feel like you get back to "Ukraine needs everything it can get". Sure, but that's not my point.

For your wide area monitoring, you don't want your radio to be jammed because it makes it useless. So if you think about building your equipment, you'd rather build jamming-resistant radios, right?

> I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly

It could potentially be repurposed relatively quickly if it was well designed. But what tells you it will be? Most software is not very well designed, and in the western drone industry it's particularly right, in my experience. If you subsidise a company to make military drones and they write bad software, you will still end up with a military drone ("the software is bad but it lasts 25min most of the time"). If you subsidise a company to make survey drones in the hope that their design will be good enough to be quickly ported to military needs...

> both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".

I highly doubt that. Civilian radios are easily jammed.

[hkpack]

The reality is very different.

In practice, jamming of wide area is not a solved problem. It is easy to jam GPS because its signal is already weak, or a cell phone in a city, but it is very difficult to jam a drone in the sky which have a line-of sight to the antenna or a retranslation drone. Also all modern cheap drones have a way to switch frequencies if one gets jammed, and jamming all frequencies is also very very difficult.

You either need to have a very big powerful machinery - which is very easy to detect location of and send a HIMARS rocket. Or a huge number of smaller devices, which is impractical as you don't have power in trenches.

So in practice, drone jamming is only effective in the last 100-200 meters from the target (if it is a vehicle with power source) which doesn't really matters for surveillance drones as they do their job from the distance.

> Civilian radios are easily jammed.

In theory, in practice on the battlefield, when drones can switch frequencies on the go - very very difficult with the exception of the last hundred meters.

Because of this, modern killer drones now have a primitive "AI" to lock on the target on the last meters of approach.

[palata]

Thanks, that's interesting!

[dani__german]

tell me more about the video streaming and communication aspects of this. Just skype (haha), zoom, and text messaging/phone calls?

[officeplant]

There's been images showing both Ukraine and Russia using Discord. IIRC including video streaming drone kills. Not sure if anyone is piloting over the streams.

[cutemonster]

Thanks for explaining!

I think the article says that the factories are important too, and can be altered to produce these different drones much faster than if starting from zero.

And having one's own already verified and certified backdoor free electronics, rather than buying from what might turn out to be the adversary