| A reminder that both Ukraine and Russia in the war use drones because they do not have the actual tools they want to use for that job An artillery shell is like $800. THAT's the competition for an FPV drone. Drones have an advantage that they are cheap precision, which makes for great propaganda videos when you fly one into someone's face, but the cheap drones have limited effectiveness, and there's tons of downsides like needing dirt cheap parts (IE dependence on China) and needing trained operators and iffy effectiveness. Those drones you see made out of cheap 3D printed parts are mostly about harassment and both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam and not particularly effective as weapons (great for ISR though). They've only been useful on very soft targets. No, $800 drones are not taking out tanks, not in a meaningful quantity. The war in Ukraine is still showing that the majority of tanks (and people) still die to mines and artillery. Things like a cheap BONUS round would be a real killer. By the time you harden a drone against EM warfare and get it big enough to carry a warhead actually able to take out a hardened target, you have a shitty cruise missile, and it costs as much as other options. There is something to the drones running fiber optic cables, but it might also just be the next tick in the tick-tock of warfare evolution. Everything you do in war, every new system or trick or action causes a reaction. Russia's Lancet, which is an actual somewhat cheap loitering munition that actually can harm a tank (sometimes?) is tens of thousands of dollars. Tiny drones are not a revolution. They are an iteration on the concept of a hand grenade. Just like hand grenades, they do not revolutionize warfare. And that's in an airspace that neither Russia nor Ukraine has strong control over. China and the USA do not intend to have "contested" airspace in any war, and are building thousand strong air fleets to that end. Consider that China is still investing in the same kind of war theory that the US insisted the past 40 years: Stealth, battlespace management, air power. If they had good evidence any of those things were bad plans, why would they do that? China seems to think that say, stealth is not defeated by cheap cameras and AI. If you don't understand how they came to that conclusion, you should consider you might not know as much about Stealth plane doctrine as you think. There's already been failures trying to do things "Cheap", because of normal and expected battlefield conditions. The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision, and it utterly failed because Russia has respectable Electronic warfare capabilities. Jamming is primarily physics, so overcoming it is either a big fuck off transmitter and reciever setup, or trying to pretend to not be doing anything by being spread spectrum and bouncing around enough that it's hard to keep up or even know you are there. Both options are expensive. Meanwhile, anything GPS guided is doomed to fail. By pure physics reasons, it's really hard to make something resistant to GPS jamming. Again, we haven't even seen the first major tock to the tick of deploying drones at scale. You can expect SPAAG to be cool again! Maybe US will build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M163_VADS again; Anything with a dirt cheap weapon and whatever off the shelf radar we have. Right now Ukraine and Russia are still in the "No real defense" spectrum, but nobody else intends to be there. |
Russia uses plenty of artillery shells daily even today. Its own production easily outpaces NATO countries and they buy a lot from NK in addition to that.
Though they try to increase amount of "smart" munitions like Krasnopol, since they can be more cost effective than "dumb" shelling when you have guidance from drones.
>both Ukraine and Russia know they are easy to jam
Tell that to fiber drones. They are used in such large amounts that entire fields get covered in fiber. Even radio controlled drones quickly evolve with wing-based drones acting as re-translators and carriers.
And in the near future (year or two) we will see mass adoption of drones which are able to fly autonomously with on-board computer vision. Initially it will be just guidance during final stages after the target is locked, but later we will see drone swarms launched into the enemy's direction which autonomously search and destroy everything what moves.
>They've only been useful on very soft targets.
Sure. And this is why on both sides shiny tanks and MRAPs from parades and military exercises now look like Mad Max vehicles.
>The Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb program was about taking dirt cheap iron bombs and slapping commodity electronics on it for cheap precision
Meanwhile Russia found a huge success with its UPMK-modified FABs.
The situation may change significantly if an effective and cheap (kinetic or laser) anti-drone defense is developed and mass-deployed, but for now the sword is much stronger than the shield.