“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.
It’s fascinating in a certain way. Massing dudes armed with the spear, one of the most basic concepts for a weapon possible, remained viable for millenia; but massing tanks and planes, which are marvels of advanced engineering, has been made obsolete in a century. XX and XXI century progress has been absurd.
Modern military doctrine was really defined by Nazi operations in WW2, but what’s missed is that the Nazis failed (and for good reason). The depth of supply lines required for an occupation (not just a decapitating strike like France) are immense and infeasible. That’s been proven time and time again by both the US and USSR, and now by Russia.
After the attempted decapitation strike on Kyiv failed, the Russian offensive faltered and had to regroup.
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.
There are no real game changers, only smaller steps of adaption. You won’t suddenly stopping using soldiers because drones are better. You will equip the soldiers with with more capabilities to defend drones.
Drones aren’t efficient in Ukraine on both sides because they are more capable but because neither side has much in terms of defenses against drones.
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.
Tbf, modern US tank doctrine was already revised prior to this such that they’re used supporting infantry, not in use in armored brigades like the gulf wars.
A report by Natalia Bugaynova on the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) now says that the infamous pictures of rows of destroyed Leopard tanks and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV) that marked Ukraine’s disastrous counteroffensive were owing to the Western/NATO warfighting style that it trained the Ukrainian army in.
“(Large-scale) mechanized breaches that NATO trained Ukraine’s counteroffensive brigades to execute are incredibly difficult and are not the only option available to Ukrainian forces,” said her report on ISW.
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/ukraine-dumps-nato-us-military-doctrine-russias-impregnable/
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.
Drones don’t conquer areas. Drones don’t search for explosives or hidden defenders. So no, this will not change the number of soldiers but just be an andditional wave before them taking over the job that precision-guided artillery is fullfilling now.
Also there are only very few situations where a new type of weapon actually replaced older ones. Not without decades and decades of the existing ones being adapted to new tech and tactics.
Your “we don’t need forward deployments other than limited air defense anymore”-argument is the same wrong simplification we heard about the end of tanks after every single bigger engagement since ww1.
You think they can make a machine do parkour, and they can make a machine navigate collapsed buildings, but they won’t be able to make a machine that can clear a building?
No, they actually can’t, they can make a drone that can parkour a know course. On a good day an unknown course strictly comprised out of known parts. The more autonomous the task, the harder it gets.
Contrary to public believe A.I. isn’t actually intelligent but really dump. They can only work well with permutations of known things but are still rather helpless when confronted with unknown factors.
We’ve been using drones to search buildings for like 15 years already? Sure troops will be needed to secure a population, but drones will be the front line.
And the end of tanks since WWI… where tanks were first introduced? Wut.
Yes… since WW1. After exactly any war people where eager to proclaim the end of tanks as warfare had obviously adapted and they were far to expensive and ineffective. Every single time. But the reality is: no one cares about the cost or efficiency as long as there isn’t a replacement that can fullfil their vital role. And so the tactics and some details were adapted instead.
The same is true for drones. It doesn’t matter what they can do. They can’t fullfill the same role as infantry so they will not replace infantry but will be adapted for more use cases by infantry instead.
PS: I’m obviously speaking about land based warfare here. Air combat is a different thing and much easier to adapt drones to (traversing terrain is one the most obvious issues of a drone -even more so when it has to identify all terrain for autonomous operation- that mostly does not exist in wide open spaces). So you will see a dozen pilots being replaced by 2 and a swarm of drones carrrying weapons and equipment or carrying out objectives. But you will not see the same for infantry for a very long time because somewhat autonomous operation in the chaotic terrain of ground combat is still science fiction. And non-automonous drones will be defeated by infantry using EW, not by anti-drone drones.
No drones won’t be the frontline. You cannot use drones to physically hold an area, and they can be rendered useless in inclement weather or by signal jammers.
Not to mention, if you need to actually clear houses out like the U.S. did in Fallujah, you would needs tens of thousands of men. No amount of drones would suffice to replace them for this task.
And yes. People have been saying the tank is obsolete in almost every conflict it has fought in. Including the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The drone has not made anything obsolete, but it has changed how effectively you can use soldiers and equipment.
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
