Drone Technology in Ukraine – Automation, Lethality & The (Scary) Development Race

In early 2023 I covered the
evolution of small drones in Ukraine when the technology level and
production rates were already scary. But now just over a year later the leaps in
quantity and capability have been immense. Production targets have ramped up, in some
cases by more than an order of magnitude. And even as the quantities have ramped up, the
technology involved has continued to get better. And with no sign of that breakneck engineering
and industrial evolution slowing down, I think it's time to ask
some important questions. How are we seeing these small UAS evolve in
Ukraine, what impact are they having on the war? And what might it mean for the rest
of the world when this technology and the tactics developed for its use
inevitably start to go global? To do that, as normal I'm going to
break this up into a couple of segments.

We'll start with an overview of some
of the most common types of drones that are operating in Ukraine
and how they may be getting better. Looking at how some of these drones
are evolving in terms of their sensors, range, targeting, lethality or
counter-measure resistance. Then we'll go to the second
scary part of the picture, because drones are not just getting
deadlier, they are getting more common. So I'll cover some elements relating
to production estimates and techniques, before closing with a zoomed out look at
just how impactful these systems have been, and what their role
might be going forward. Some quick caveats then in
terms of scope and content. Firstly, while there are a huge array of
drones out there, to keep things manageable I'm going to focus just on smaller Unmanned
Aerial Systems [UAS] that are used in attack roles. So bomber drones, FPVs, loitering
munitions and one-way attack systems. I've talked about dedicated ISR drones like the
Russian Orlan before, so they won't be in this episode. Nor will naval or ground drones that
very much deserve their own billing.

I also need to flag that drone technology
and the tactics for using them in Ukraine are evolving incredibly quickly,
and some of the very latest technical and tactical developments
are usually fairly sensitive. So I'll generally try and focus on examples
that are at least a month or two old, because I want to put together
a high level picture here, not a how-to guide for example on how
to build a more jam-resistant FPV drone. OK, so let's do some quick categorisation of the
sort of drones we are going to be talking about today. Ranging from small ISR platforms, all the way
through to long-range one-way attack drones.

Your smallest ISR drones are usually going
to be quadcopters, sometimes octocopters, think your off-the-shelf DJI Mavic 3
or equivalent for example. And while they're probably intended to be
reusable, they are cheap, relatively short ranged, and a lot of times they are being used for
things like increasing situational awareness, identifying attacks, calling in
and correcting artillery. And giving even relatively
low echelon units the ability to metaphorically see what is
on the other side of the next hill. Weaponise one of those
quad or octocopters and you might have yourself what are sometimes
called "drop drones" or "bomber drones". These keep the same fundamental
characteristics as the base system, so intended re-usability for example, but
they add a small payload to be used in attacks.

For example knocking out disabled vehicles
by dropping grenades through hatches. There is of course a massive
variation in scale and cost here, ranging from off-the-shelf hobby
drones dropping hand grenades, all the way through to purpose-built monsters
capable of carting around artillery projectiles, but the basic concept is broadly similar. FPVs, or First Person View drones, are also generally quadcopters,
but with a different piloting method. These originally developed
out of racing drones, so compared to the more
reconnaissance-focused quadcopters they tend to be much faster, require a lot more in
terms of pilot skill, and are also often a lot cheaper. A lot of these systems tend to be intended as
single-use attack options against tactical targets. So you are still operating in
a relatively close range bracket, 10 kilometres for example is
a pretty long range FPV strike, but you're probably doing it with a
lower cost, a bigger boom, single use only. Although as always those points
should come with a giant asterisk, because there are FPV designs out there that
are designed to operate as reusable bombers.

Loitering munitions in Ukraine,
like the Russian Lancet, tend to represent a bit of
a step change from the FPVs. The designs are usually fixed wing, not
quad-rotors, so optimised for speed and range. And are often going to be
used by specialised teams at ranges of tens of kilometres
to hit point valuable targets. Lancet and some of its
Ukrainian equivalents for example are perhaps best known
for their counter-battery role. Hunting enemy artillery systems that aren't
exactly going to be parked in a frontline trench. Finally, you have long-range strike
or one-way attack drones. Here you are still mostly looking at fixed-wing
designs that are intended to be single use only, but the range, payload and intended
target type are all going to be different.

We are talking ranges in the hundreds
of kilometres, not tens of kilometres. Targets that are operational or strategic in nature,
think fuel refineries or air bases for example. And usually a larger payload to
reflect both the different target type and the fact you are probably not
going to get pinpoint accuracy. The Iranian-designed
Shahed 136 probably fits into this category, along with
a number of Ukrainian designs. And you can see them as representing a sort of
bridge between the other cheaper drone systems, and traditional long-range
munitions like cruise missiles. Compared to a cruise missile, the
one-way attack drones we've seen so far tend to be much slower,
have smaller warheads, and be missing a lot of the
technological bells and whistles.

But they also tend to be available at a fraction
of the cost while being much easier to produce. OK, so now we do get to the scary part where
we start talking about how these systems, which are increasingly
everywhere and very affordable, are also continuously evolving and have become
more dangerous even just over the last year. But in order to give an
overview of some of the factors that might be making drones in
Ukraine more dangerous over time, what I thought I'd do is take
a concept that we've looked at before, the survivability onion,
and flip it around a little. The survivability onion usually
just describes all the things that have to go wrong sequentially for you
to get killed in your vehicle on the battlefield.

You have to be somewhere the enemy
is a) looking and b) can reach. And then you have to be seen,
identified, targeted and hit by something that is lethal enough to penetrate
your defences and do significant damage. So in order to identify some
changing trends in drone lethality, we're going to take that same
concept and sort of flip it around. Instead of a survivability onion
we have a much tastier (and more traditionally Australian)
lethality Lamington. A layered list of the characteristics your system is
going to need to maximise the probability of a kill. You need the sensors to see a target, the range to
reach it, a guidance and targeting system to hit it, and enough of a payload to make sure
they know that they've been hit.

And of course you want your
system to be as resistant as possible to whatever counter-measures or
defences your opponent might be using to maximise the probability that you
make it to the end of that process. We've observed technical changes in Ukraine
that impact each layer of the Lamington. So now what I'll do is go
through some of them in sequence.

OK, so step one for our hypothetical
drone system is finding a target. And here the war in Ukraine has already witnessed
some pretty significant technical improvements, particularly when it comes
to night operations. While we talk about flocks of drones being an
omnipresent fact of life on the Ukrainian battlefield, the reality is there's actually
a lot of conditions during which a lot of the systems out there
just can't operate effectively. Bad weather can be even more of a problem
for a lot of UAS than it is for manned aircraft. And while already in 2022 a lot of the
larger and more expensive drones were equipped with things like
thermal and night vision optics, for the vast majority of
FPVs and quadrotors out there the sensor suite on board, which would
often be just a simple visual camera, didn't operate effectively in
low light or night-time conditions.

Indeed, what you get with a lot of
FPV drones is visual spectrum only, just like the Mark 1 eyeball, only with
resolution levels reminiscent of the Xbox 360, and a level of grain and interference that wouldn't
look out of place in an old analogue TV broadcast. The obvious tactical adaptation
that that sort of limitation imposed is that in environments where the opponent
has the ability to fly a lot of these drones, we have seen reports of
Russian and Ukrainian forces doing for example a lot of their low-level logistics
and resupply operations and manoeuvre at night. Now of course there were
still small drones and ISR assets that could see you even if
you were manoeuvring after sundown. As well as the quite advanced sensor
packages on things like the TB2 drone, smaller tactical level UAS also
had some night vision capability.

Off-the-shelf DJI drones for example
have some thermal options, the 30T and the 3T being
some of the most common. And that was fine if your goal was to
see enemy units manoeuvring at night and do something like
call in artillery on them. Because unguided artillery shells don't
tend to care about the ambient light level when they are addressed to
a particular set of grid coordinates. But that arrangement brings
with it two limitations. One, if there is a target type that you would
rather engage with something like an FPV as opposed to artillery, perhaps for example
because you are short of artillery ammunition, that might be difficult to do
when the FPVs can't fly at night, and so you either inefficiently task artillery to
deal with the problem, or you let the target go. The other limitation was that
thermal-camera equipped drones were generally just much more expensive
than those that didn't have that level of bling. Which means both a) probably
not everyone gets to have one. And secondly, if you want to
make cheap FPVs thermal capable you probably can't do it by
adding those sort of thermal optics otherwise your cheap FPV isn't
going to be so cheap anymore.

Make no mistake, it'll probably still be
cheap compared to many of the other weapon systems on the battlefield,
but is it really the quintessential Ukraine War experience
if you are not touching off multi-million dollar armoured vehicles with
something that cost a couple of hundred bucks? And yes, I am joking around a lot, but it's mostly to
distract from the fact the next bit is kind of terrifying. As we go into 2024, I think there are plenty
of signs that more and more drone systems, including relatively cheap FPVs,
are going to be capable of operating at times that were previously
at least if not safe, maybe safer. We've seen more and more FPVs,
loitering munitions and drop drones that integrate thermal
cameras into their designs. And you also see some innovative approaches
like the one mentioned on the right there. That's a post by the Ukrainian organisation
Wild Hornets that manufacture FPV drones, showing off what they describe as "An affordable
solution for night-time FPV drone operations." And when they say that, they don't mean
it in the corporate buzzword sense, they actually mean affordable
as in 50 dollars US per unit.

At $1,000 for a thermal camera, you might
be tripling the cost of your average FPV. At $50 per drone, it's only a 10% premium for
giving something the ability to operate at night. And at that point wide-scale adoption
might start to make a greater degree of sense. So at the big picture level,
what's changed and what matters? Basically if in 2022 thermal or night vision was
an expensive, rare capability for small drones, in 2024 the direction of travel has been
towards cheaper and more common. All else being equal, you should expect that
means that in the future there will be more drones out there capable of identifying more
targets during more hours of the day. The protection that night-time provided (which
was already highly imperfect) is likely to be reduced, and the military-industrial complex as
a whole will take one more gigantic step towards what I can only assume is the
ultimate goal of equipping every drone with a mechanical equivalent of the Eye of Sauron
for less than the cost of a Happy Meal.

OK, so increasingly drones can solve problem
number 1 of needing to be able to see a target, what about actually being able to reach it? After all, just because I can see the top of
a mountain doesn't mean that I can climb to it. The war in Ukraine has arguably really highlighted
the value of weapons with longer reach. Exploiting the limitations of
your opposing systems reach has also been one way commonly
used to protect important targets. When the Russians pulled
a lot of their ammunition depots out of HIMARS range, that
was a range-based adaptation. And while yes, there are some limitations
on the ability of forces to just move everything of note out of opposing range
(good luck shifting an oil refinery for example), particularly in the earlier stage of the invasion,
a lot of the cheaper drone systems out there had comparatively limited
endurance and practical range.

Now while there is always
a lot of uncertainty in this analysis, here I just want to flag there's
more uncertainty than normal. But if you've gone through some of
the relevant publicly released interviews and reviewed a lot of the drone footage out there
that has been geolocated from 2022 and 2023, one thing you might notice
is that as time has gone on the number of attacks being launched by small UAS,
like FPVs, at longer and longer ranges has increased. And we have seen that trend towards
increased practical range play out across a range of systems
with various effects.

For an FPV drone it might mean being able to hit
relatively short-range artillery systems like the TOS-1A. I think we've actually seen
videos of two FPV strikes on those systems in the last
week at time of recording. But also they are used in
more of an interdiction role, where you are attacking supply trucks or
reinforcements trying to move up to the front line. Meanwhile for a system like Lancet
that started with a double digit range, enhancing it considerably might mean
putting longer-range artillery systems, or things like forward air strips
that were out of range in range. With unfortunate results
for example for the occasional Ukrainian MiG-29 airframe
that's been caught out of position.

In a sense, when you see the
range of these systems improving, often there are two different
elements that are moving together. First are the improvements to the physical performance
of the system, how far can it physically fly? In that sense the move
from off-the-shelf drones to more dedicated military
models has a lot of potential. Compared to a civilian version, a military FPV might
have a lot of shit you don't strictly need stripped off. It doesn't need to last particularly long or look
particularly good, so you can make some economies there. And to an extent you can also always
just add more fuel tankage or battery. Problem two then is trying to find a way to
control said drone when it does fly further. Here again from a mechanical perspective, there
are a couple of related but still distinct problems. Firstly, you just need an underlying signal strength
and quality that lets you reach the requisite distance. Especially in a battlefield context where both sides
are likely to have EW guys roaming around the place doing their best to do selective violence to
different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The second problem is just
maintaining signal line of sight. With all due respect to the
flat earthers out there, the earth isn't. So all else being equal, the
further a drone flies at low altitude the more likely it is that a bunch of dirt, rock and
burnt out tanks get between it and the transmitter. And while you can compensate to an extent by
increasing altitude to maintain line of sight longer, that also leads into a phenomena we've seen
in lots of videos of FPV and other drone attacks where during the final
terminal phase of an attack the drone dives towards the ground
(because that's where the target is) and you can physically see the signs
of the signal breaking up in real time. To an extent, a good FPV operator
knows that disruption is likely to come and can pre-aim the drone so
it's going to make the hit regardless.

But it's still a factor relating
to signal range and quality that can significantly impact just how
effective these weapons practically are. OK, so how do you then
increase the range of the signal? Well, one approach we've seen used
is the employment of repeaters. Where you might have one or more
drones that instead of carrying munitions or a sensor package is carrying a signal
repeater. These then can form an aerial relay. Noting there's no reason you have to put them on the
drone, you can have ground-based repeaters as well. But putting them on the drones has an obvious
advantage from a line of sight perspective.

Now, instead of having to send a signal
to the drone that's making the attack, you just have to reach the repeater,
which then has to reach the next repeater, which can then reach the
drone that is making the attack. If you think of this from a line of sight
perspective, a repeater that is relatively close to the site of the attack is less likely,
all else being equal, to lose sight of an FPV making
an attack in its terminal phase. And so an operator might be more able to
make those last-minute flight path adjustments that lead to a hit rather
than a swing and a miss. Repeaters also have potential implications for the
survivability of the drone operators themselves. It means you might not need
the drone operator metaphorically kneeling in a front-line trench in order to get the
maximum possible reach out of their drones.

Instead you can send the repeaters forward while
the operators are sheltered in a position further back. Depending on the particular
set up and opposing capabilities, you might still have a signature problem
from a concealment perspective. But you may still end up being more survivable
as a drone operator using this sort of system. Another thing to note here is that the
repeater drone and the drones it is controlling don't have to be the same design,
in fact that might be a disadvantage. I feel like I can talk about this case because
it has a casual 732,000 views on Twitter, but recently there was a case of a
Russian serviceman describing a situation where Ukrainian drone operators
allegedly attacked a position using a larger so-called
"Queen" drone with a signal repeater controlling a bunch
of smaller, cheaper FPVs. The possibilities of that sort of
configuration are obviously massive, because there's a lot of signals equipment
you could fit on a larger drone that you can't (and probably don't
want to) try and fit onto an FPV. A large enough quad or octocopter
for example, might be able to carry a satellite internet terminal
worth thousands of dollars, which would not exactly work from any
perspective if you tried it with an FPV.

Plus of course in this environment
a lot of the most expensive equipment is concentrated on a
reusable system, the Queen drone, rather than the disposable systems, the
FPVs that are going and slamming into things. If the Queen isn't
shot down it can be recalled and then sent out again with
a new wing of supporting attack drones. It's worth noting that this idea of
a Queen system providing information and controlling other systems
in a flock is not at all new.

You could argue that the pairing of ISR drones and
loitering munitions already to an extent fits that definition, with the ISR drones generally carrying the more
expensive sensor and communication package and the loitering munition carrying the warhead
and a Mad Maxian desire to be "witnessed". Back during the Cold War for example,
the Soviets introduced the P-700 with the highly creative NATO
reporting name "Shipwreck", which had an attack mode where a flight
of missiles directed towards an enemy fleet would have a single missile
act as the target designator. That Queen missile would climb to a higher
altitude so it could better see the potential targets, and communicate via data link with the
others that were hiding closer to the deck. If the Queen, perhaps owing to its higher altitude
and more exposed position, were shot down a drone would be promoted to Queen duty, climb to
altitude, and resume where the previous missile left off. Here there was no physical difference
between the different P-700s in the salvo. But you still have a split between
attacking missiles and a coordinating or target designating missile in order to help
solve the underlying line of sight issues.

So we probably shouldn't be that surprised
more than 2 years into the invasion of Ukraine that this old concept is being
leveraged to deadly effect. So in summary (and as
always this is oversimplifying) if in the early stages of the war the norm was
for small drones to attack front-line targets and face significant line of sight issues, in 2024 the meta (if you will) increasingly
involves long-range interdicting strikes supported by technologies that mean that range and
line of sight are no longer always as much of an issue. The reason that matters is because
it establishes more and more tactical and operational
use cases for these systems. At 2 or 3 kilometres,
your anti-armour FPVs can supplement the role of
something like a Javelin missile. But if you start reaching out to
10 kilometres, you're playing in territory that might normally be serviced
by indirect fire options, artillery. And once you have loitering munitions
that might be able to go out 70 kilometres, you are playing in territory
that was previously dominated by long-range precision
rocket artillery and air support. That's obviously a factor on the battlefield,
because you are putting more and more of the tactical and operational
depths at risk from systems that might be able to economically engage targets that
are not worth dumping an entire battery of MRLS on.

It may also raise questions in some armies as to
who should control these longer-range fire systems? Because suddenly you might have a cheap system
whose primary target is tanks and armoured vehicles, so you think it belongs
wherever the ATGMs go, but it has a range bracket that's much, much
longer than your traditional platoon-level asset. You have a family of weapon
systems here with the potential to, for lack of a better word, democratise
access to long range precision. And it may not be fully understood just yet
what all the implications of that are going to be. But moving on, what all those changes
have basically done at this point has increased the odds that our drones
will find a target and then be able to get to it.

The next step, and a pretty important
one at that, is actually hitting it. Even though you can argue that drop drones, loitering
munitions, FPVs are all precision weapon systems. They all after all have guidance systems
and tend to go after point targets, even if the guidance system in question is
often just the brain of the pilot at the controls. It's important to understand that in practice the
evidence suggests that these things do miss a lot. And it's an area where I think
it's pretty logical to assume that the video evidence available
to us is probably a bit skewed. Sure, we do get videos of drones and loitering
munitions appearing to miss their targets fairly often. Just like people on social media who
might love to post images of the fast car, the fancy vacation or gourmet dinners while conveniently leaving out
images of their credit card statements, in drone warfare it's the operator who holds the
footage and makes the decision on releasing it. And so you probably
get to see the $500 drone slamming into the $20 million
air defence system or totalling a T-90M.

And what you don't see are the
drones that miss, or are jammed out, or miss, or suffer
technical failure, or miss. Remembering of course that a lot of these
systems are hard to fly, built by the lowest bidder, and often provide the operator
with a solid potato-tier video feed. One trend we've seen which might have
an impact on that particular problem is the increased utilisation of machine assistance
for target identification and also for guidance.

These sort of visual targeting solutions
for example might include a system that looks at a video feed and flags
things that might be a potential target and/or once the target has been selected
and designated by a human operator allow the weapon to guide in
without further human assistance. Russian sources for example often claim that the
latest versions of the Lancet loitering munition are capable of autonomous
or semi-autonomous guidance. Basically the system can look at its surroundings,
identify things that look like a tank, an infantry fighting vehicle or
a piece of farm machinery, say, "Hey, I think that thing over
there might be a target." And then, depending on
the exact autonomy settings (the information available is
very vague at the moment) either with or without a thumbs up from a
human, go in and engage one of those targets.

The exact answer to the
question of how autonomous systems like Lancet can be
is still very much contested. You have claims that run the full gamut from
the system is just highlighting potential targets to give the operator a clue as to
what he might want to fly into, all the way up to this is an AI-powered
super drone that can recognise a Ukrainian tank that the human eye would never spot
and then autonomously guide to it. But while there's a lot of debate about how
autonomous exactly systems like Lancet are, we do know we've seen a significant
amount of footage from Russian sources of Lancet attacks being launched with some sort
of mechanical assistance appearing to be in play. At the moment at least the evidence seems
to suggest that the systems that are out there, including the one on Lancet,
isn't exactly perfect. Think more 10% Skynet, 50% chatGPT, and 30% that New Zealand
supermarket AI that suggested people put mosquito repellent on their potatoes
or turpentine in their French toast.

OK, so to make this just a little bit more
real, what I want to do is now dissect some stills taken from the footage of a
recently documented Russian Lancet attack. This is footage released by a
pro-Russian source that appears to show at least some autonomous
targeting assistance being used. And I think it demonstrates
both the strengths and also potential weaknesses of systems
like this, at least right now. We'll start with this image I have on screen
there from relatively early in the video, and while those of you on mobile phone
screens might be struggling a little bit, I think most humans would be able
to parse this image pretty successfully. That large object at the
end of the tread marks that looks awfully like an armoured vehicle
is in fact an armoured vehicle.

I don't know about you, but for me it was the
turret and main gun system that kind of gave it away. All of the stuff immediately
surrounding the vehicle, including the bit I've highlighted for reasons
which will become obvious in a moment, lack those same obvious
visually identifying features and are probably not the primary
target for this sort of system. Next we have a still,
seemingly taken from the sequence where the loitering munition
is approaching the potential target. At this point you see a green bounding box
appear on the right hand side of the screen, which suggests that maybe
the automated targeting system is identifying another
potential target off to the right.

But the munition, still potentially
under operator control, continues towards that original target we were
just looking at a top down image of before. And indeed you can see that central
crosshair over that target at this point. And as the munition approaches
that target, the expectation is probably that the automated system will kick in, identify
the target, and assist with the final approach. So of course the munition races towards
the target and then proceeds to not identify it. Instead, you can see
it throws a bounding box around what appears to be an object
that the potential target is hiding behind. We can go into theories about why that
misidentification may have been made, but the fact is it happens, with negative
consequences for the engagement. Basically the machine was fed a real life version
of one of those visual CAPTCHA problems and it appears to have proceeded
to fail in spectacular fashion. Other footage I've looked at has shown
cases of vehicles being correctly identified as potential targets, but also
bounding boxes being thrown around things that are very
obviously not military equipment. And other cases where military
equipment that is fairly obvious doesn't get the automated
target recognition treatment.

And some observers have
noted that after a rush of videos that appeared to show Lancets
being used with this sort of autonomous or semi-autonomous
targeting system, it's been comparatively rarer or
absent in more recent releases. Potentially suggesting (although
this is very much straight guesswork) that potentially the feature got
some battlefield beta testing, attracted a little bit of
customer feedback so to speak, and may now be in a
revision and iteration phase. But here's the thing,
there is every reason to believe that better versions of this technology
are coming, and coming quickly. We'll probably talk about this more in the
future, but when you are trying to make an AI-driven visual targeting solution work,
there's a couple of components that go into it. And some of those components
are the literal components, the things that give it the computing power
it needs to make the solution work. That compute is already lighter and cheaper than
it has been at any other point in human history, and it's only going to
get lighter and cheaper.

There was some reporting I saw
that suggested that some Lancets might be using NVIDEA Jetson TX2 modules
to provide some of that compute. I did ask some people who keep
a downed Lancet as a sort of office pet whether or not it contains such
a module, but the version they have appears to be a pre-autonomy version,
so I can't confirm one way or the other. But as a hypothetical exercise,
that sort of embedded AI computing device only goes for
a couple of hundred US dollars. And the hardware that's available and the
price point it's available at is improving quickly.

Another main input to
getting good outcomes out of AI is to have a lot of good data to train it on,
and the opportunity to iterate and develop. And so whether the rest
of the world likes it or not, the war in Ukraine, where drones are being
used on a massive scale in combat conditions, might become a sort of nursery/training
ground for the targeting AIs of the future. It's also concentrating a lot of resources,
human and financial capital, potentially creating that sort of precinct of capability,
that sort of rapid development environment, where you have the full array of
engineers, specialists and end users concentrated, communicating and capable
of rapid development and iteration. So in broad summary strokes,
if in 2022 and early 2023 drone targeting in Ukraine was mostly
a matter of pilot skill, experience, intuition and occasionally just hoping that you didn't
lose signal at an inopportune moment, in 2024 more of the options
we are seeing deployed include at least some
degree of computer assistance.

Whether that just be in the area of
target identification and recognition, or in the field of semi- or
fully-autonomous terminal guidance. And as to why developments
like that might matter, I think we're only now starting to
unpack the potential implications. Camouflage and concealment may become
even more difficult if you need your scheme to fool both the human operator and
the automatic recognition system. The need to have a highly skilled
loitering munition or FPV operator might be somewhat reduced, which matters
a lot given just how difficult training can be and the premium that is currently
being placed on skilled operators.

Plus, and perhaps most frighteningly,
it might offer a partial answer to jamming. Because even if electronic
warfare can successfully disrupt communication between an operator and
their drone, that's not going to stop the attack if the drone is capable of autonomously
identifying its own targets and guiding into them. OK, so at this point the drones have
been able to find a target, reach the target, and then with a little bit of
mechanical assistance hit the target, let's now talk about the element that
actually makes that hit mean something, the payload the system is carrying
and just how lethal it is. After all, without an effective payload,
slamming a drone into something like a tank is probably going to be about as effective
as throwing a bike at a battleship. And here's where lethality ties into the
purpose that drones can actually fill. With just about any weapon system, there are
going to be certain targets it's designed to service and others that it doesn't really
provide an effective answer for.

A machine gun isn't an anti-tank weapon, and a Javelin missile is going to
struggle against infantry in the open. So an evolution in drone
payloads isn't just about making them more effective
against certain sorts of targets, it's about broadening the sort of missions
they can do and targets they can service. At 1 kilo of payload you are probably talking about
infantry or vehicles with the hatches left open. 2.5 kilos plus and you start to have more
anti-armour options available to you.

And once you start getting into
serious double-digit figures, your drone might be able to do its bit for
the global emissions reduction movement by pro-actively imposing an output
restriction or two on opposing oil refineries. In 2022, while there were some units operating
specialised heavier drop drones even at that time, most of the drop drones we saw
operating and the first generations of FPVs that started to come through
were mostly using very light payloads. There were a lot of systems I saw at that time that
were often using effectors in the 1 kilo or under range. Perhaps the quintessential examples
here were either literal hand grenades, or adaptations of the famous VOG.
The VOG, often specifically the VOG-17 version, is a lightweight 30mm high explosive
projectile primarily intended for the AGS series of
automatic grenade launchers. A wooden case of these things
from some manufacturers would contain about 108 grenades and weigh
55 kilos, with a lot of that being packaging.

The actual rounds themselves from memory
are about 350 grams, so about 0.75 of a pound, and particularly when you are
only dropping them in singles, you are only really going to do damage to light targets,
and even then only with a direct or very close hit. But everyone uses them because with a 3D printed
tail kit they could be dropped relatively accurately, and because the Soviet Union was kind enough to
leave an absolute shit ton of these things behind. American 40mm grenades would
be another more lethal option, but were only available
in much smaller numbers. In 2022 through 2023,
the path of drone evolution created a number of FPV designs that
were capable of carrying heavier payloads.

Some of the most common payloads
here, for obvious reasons, were RPG-7 warheads, things like the PG-7VL . So now you have a munition that is, yes,
heavier and requires a chunkier drone to carry, but is a) designed to act as an anti-armour weapon, meaning you probably can graduate
from killing golf carts to BMPs. And of course, like the VOG 30mm, the Soviet Union built a shit ton of these
things and there's plenty of them available.

That availability was important not just in a
quantity sense, it was also important in terms of making sure that drone operators could
actually get access to the munitions. This was stuff that might already be being
pushed down the logistics chain anyway, there are a lot of units
with RPG-7s out there, and so you just have to nicely ask the supply
officer to let the drone units borrow a few boxes. A heavier option again that
we saw for the chunkiest of FPVs and also some loitering munitions
were tandem charges.

This would be something a
bit heavier again like the PG-7VR, which basically gives you two charges,
and one of the main useful benefits of that is making the warhead much more
effective against explosive reactive armour. Which obviously has utility in Ukraine
where 90% of every vehicle upgrade package seems to consist of covering an object
in as many ERA blocks as will fit. So that's already a scary enough evolution,
but obviously designers don't stand still. And so I'd argue we've seen at least three
parallel tracks of continued development when it comes to increasing the
lethality of combat drones in Ukraine. The first is just continued experimentation
with larger and larger payloads. Because one of the simplest expedients
for increasing the damage something does is either making it make a bigger boom,
or having it make more booms. So one of the responses
might be to come up with somewhat chunkier drones that
can handle the additional payload. And some designs capable of doing so
already existed before the full scale invasion. That image you see there on the right
for example is a shot that was put up by the Russians of a captured
Ukrainian drone allegedly.

There it looks like the payload
is actually three PTABs, which is a roughly 2 kilogram anti-tank bomb
originally designed during the Second World War. That implies a payload of at least 6 kilograms, and we're pretty confident there are designs
out there that can do considerably more. And this movement towards higher payload
capacity isn't just something we've seen with drop drones or FPVs, we've seen
it in other systems categories as well. The Russians have increased the
warhead size on the average Lancet that you see used in Ukraine by
several times over since 2022. And if you look at some of the
long-range strike drones Ukraine is using, again, heavier warheads have
become increasingly available. And recently it's been reported
the Russians may even be following this same evolutionary path
with some of their cruise missiles.

When the Ukrainians recently
broke open a crashed Russian X-101 cruise missile,
NATO reporting name AS-15, they found that it looked like the Russians
had pulled out some of the fuel tankage to replace it with a second warhead, adding
roughly another 400 kilos of payload to the thing while sacrificing range that realistically the
system didn't need to hit targets in Ukraine. The logic in all of these cases
is at least somewhat similar. If you are going to invest
a lot of money and resources into either smashing an object into
something or using it to bomb something, you want it to be effective when it
does so, and all else being equal, bigger boom often equals bigger effect. Of course for any given target type there is an optimum
amount of boom and it is possible to go too far.

Recently Russian TV showed
Sergei Shoigu touring an arms plant. During which one of the weapons showed
off was the FAB-3000 3 ton aerial bomb. This fragile masculinity special is
obviously a very dangerous weapon, but there are serious questions over whether
or not it would actually be practical or efficient. Its range as a glide bomb is questionable,
the ability to mount this thing under anything less than a dedicated
bomber aircraft likewise questionable. And it's likely to run face first
into that basic physics problem wherein doubling the amount of explosive
yield does not in fact double the blast radius. So the trend towards increasing
payloads probably has a limit. And the dedication of resources to extremely large
systems like FAB-3000 is probably questionable. Although to be fair, probably
not historically surprising given that after America spent a
portion of its very large military budget to develop and field the 9.8 ton GBU-43 MOAB,
sometimes referred to as the "Mother of all Bombs", Russia dedicated a portion of
its much smaller military budget to building an even larger one which
it dubbed the "Father of all Bombs".

A totally efficient and
not at all wasteful exercise. The second big trend is not so much
to increase the size of the payloads, but rather to change
the nature of the payload. This potentially offers
the option to take a drone and optimise it better for certain target
types without increasing its size or cost. If you swap out the anti-tank RPG warhead on
an FPV with a thermobaric payload for example, that might be much more
effective against targets in buildings or enclosed spaces
without any increase in weight. Air bursting and enhanced
fragmentation projectiles might be more effective against
infantry targets in the open. And of course there are a variety of
specialised anti-armour munitions available.

There's always been a degree of this sort
of munition to target matching going on, and there are a bunch of
off-the-shelf munitions that you can potentially bolt to a drone
to get alternative effects. But as the war has gone on we've seen more focus
placed on dedicated munitions for drone operations. This is the process where we see more
and more munitions that have either been substantially modified for drone use or
designed and built from scratch for drone use. Although in some cases even
those "scratch built" munitions will include some recycled
or re-purposed components. In 2023 Ukraine announced that they were creating
a new category of ammunition for drone operations. Which sort of puts the
organisational scaffolding in place for getting better at designing
and procuring drone munitions and allowing drone units to
order and be supplied with them. Military supply systems are often
like engaging with customer support, which consists of nothing
other than the automated options. You can press 1 for VOGs,
2 for RPG 7s, 3 for 152mm shells, or press 4 to hear
options 1 through 3 again.

Now it might be more possible to streamline
that process from an organisational perspective, but we'll see how things
actually play out in 2024. The move over to purpose-built or
more significantly modified payloads has a number of potential
benefits for drone operations. And it must be said, potentially a lot of
drawbacks for those being targeted by them. Purpose-built munitions might
be more stable and predictable. If they are being used for a drop drone for
example, they might improve safety and handling so you don't have troops having
to cut open cluster munitions in order to ad-hoc
munitions for their drones. It's worth noting that converting regular
munitions into drone-carry munitions can be a dangerous and difficult process,
sometimes people are injured or killed. Sometimes munitions fail on impact,
and so the extra safety and reliability you might get with a purpose-built
option really does mean something. And for a lot of systems you might just see
increased yields for no increase in weight. To illustrate that, imagine an
early ad-hoc strike drone concept where the way you gave the thing its boom
was by integrating an artillery shell.

You have lots of shells so
you just create an empty space, plop in the shell, fuse it
appropriately and off you go. The issue however, is that most of the weight of
an artillery projectile isn't the explosive charge. A lot of the mass in your average
152 or 155mm projectile is just metal, the structure of the projectile
that is designed to survive the very violent experience of being fired
out of a metal tube at very high velocity. Which as a propulsion method for a
warhead is much, much more traumatic than being gently carried aloft
and then to target by a drone. So a purpose-built warhead
for a long-range strike drone might have a lot less casing
and a lot more actual charge. There also just might be a push because of the sheer
scale of the number of munitions being demanded.

The Soviet Union and other producers did leave
behind a truly mind-boggling amount of munitions. But as hard as burning through the old Soviet stocks is,
in Ukraine they are certainly giving it a red-hot go. So you have producers and
organisations springing up to try and do dedicated drone
munition production at larger scale. Recently for example there was an article covering the Steel Hornets, which is an organisation in
Ukraine which is described as functioning like a sort of
Amazon for drone munitions. Units can reportedly place orders for
all sorts of specialised drone payloads, including some very nasty
looking anti-personnel options. And those are then, after some obvious
security checks, boxed up and shipped out.

So to summarise: if the old
archetype for drone munitions was a small existing
general purpose munition, the new overly-generalised archetype would be payloads that are larger,
more specialised, and purpose-built. And as for why that matters, hopefully it's
obvious for both Ukraine and the wider world. In 2022, 2023 and early 2024 we have
already seen drones be terrifyingly effective. Drones and loitering munitions
account for a significant proportion of visually confirmed artillery losses,
and have inflicted a lot of visually confirmed damage
against a lot of target types. But a lot of that observational baseline
we are getting was probably established using munitions that were
not optimum for purpose. I think it's logical to assume that Russian
Lancet teams would have inflicted greater losses on Ukraine for example,
if they had started in February 2022 universally equipped with
the larger warhead version.

You can filter through huge volumes
of Russian and Ukrainian video of drone attacks where with a different
payload the result might have been different. And I think it's also safe to assume
that when other major militaries start equipping with these sorts of systems in earnest,
Uncle Sam is not going to be buying a version where someone has duct taped a
$15 grenade to the bottom of a $500 drone. No, your future hypothetical Drone Optimised
Payload Effector – Army Future, or DOPE-AF, might add a zero or two to the price
of your average Ukrainian option, but we probably have to model in the fact
that they might be much more lethal for it. As drones have evolved they've flown further,
found their targets more effectively, and done more damage
when they get there.

Which is all of course
horrifically terrifying, and logically brings us to the
question of how to stop them. And in Ukraine, just as the
UAS have continued to evolve, so too are the counter-measures
being relied on to defeat them. During the years of fighting in the
Donbas pre-full scale invasion and during the early stages
of the full-scale invasion, you saw a number of reports
of drone operators claiming to suffer because of counter-measure options that were
provided by the drone manufacturers themselves.

You can think of this essentially as a
software-based counter-measure system, where a manufacturer has decided that they
don't want their drones to be used for warfare or other such purposes, might for example
offer a system like the old DJI Aeroscope. Which was marketed to law
enforcement and enabled an operator to see both nearby DJI drones and
also the location of their operators. The Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister
would then complain about the Russians using the Aeroscope system to
hunt down Ukrainian operators. DJI would then later
discontinue Aeroscope. But that's certainly not the end for
manufacturer built-in counter-measures. In the US for example, the FAA
has steadily moved towards a world where the manufacturers of many drones are required
to build in a remote identification broadcast system. Relying on the software and
hardware of the drone itself to provide one of the counter-measures
against potential misuse. However in 2024 you won't really hear anything
about any of these systems or options in Ukraine. Based on the evidence we have, they don't really
seem to be a problem for drone operations now.

Although for hopefully obvious reasons, I won't
go into any detail about how that's been done. You could probably argue that this sort of
evolution provides a little bit of a warning to governments and security agencies
that are relying on this sort of approach to answer the potential security threats
drones might pose domestically. And it helps highlight the difficulty the
manufacturer of something like a drone might face controlling their product after it's sold,
as opposed to a service like Starlink. With a system like Starlink
the customer buys a terminal. But the terminal can't magically provide internet,
it can only do that by communicating with satellites, and the satellites
are still controlled by Starlink. And what that means is that
if Elon Musk and SpaceX decide to shut down Starlink service in a particular
area, you probably can't get around that problem by messing with your terminal,
you'd have to mess with the satellites.

And those are significantly harder
to physically reach and tamper with. A drone by contrast, is going to be
intrinsically mechanically functional. Even if you write a line in its code saying
it shouldn't be operable in particular areas, say around sensitive
military and civilian sites, the drone is physically capable of getting there,
it's just a line of software telling it not to. And if hypothetically for some reason that
block of code was ever to change or disappear, then the system would
likely be physically capable of doing a couple of loop-de-loops
over places it really shouldn't be. That's a concern with
potentially global implications, but for now let's focus on the
counter-measure picture in Ukraine. In the absence of
manufacturer-provided options, the most common answer to drones
in Ukraine has been electronic warfare. You could say that over the last 2 years
the frequency of electronic warfare in Ukraine has constantly changed, but I'm
not sure we could handle a dad joke that bad.

Jammers have proliferated to the point where
we've seen them strung along supply lines, mounted on armoured vehicles,
or even kept in trench systems. At the extreme end, recently we
even got images of this monster here. Where reportedly what the Russians
did was put a pallet on top of a tank, and strapped to that pallet
a variety of jammers and electronic warfare equipment,
batteries and a diesel generator. While the reporting is purely
anecdotal, it's suggested the thing did manage to bring down
more than a few FPVs. But in the end, as the image suggests, the boom box jammer approach ultimately
wasn't enough to save the vehicle. And while the balance,
especially at the local level, can swing continuously between
the jammer and the jamee, we have seen a variety of different approaches
used by drone and loitering munition manufacturers to try and get around
at least some of the EW problem.

One very strange solution we've seen
is actually a very low-tech one. This was a Russian drone
which was reportedly captured which seems to have followed the basic line of thought
that if EW systems inhibit your wireless signals how about you just
don't use wireless signals? Instead this drone had a reel of
fibre optic cable connected to it and seems to have been intended to
just literally spool out a line as it flew in order to maintain a
connection to the operator. Well that may sound promising,
because no one's found a way to jam a wire yet short of,
you know, cutting it. And wire-guided weapons very much are a reality
with some other systems like ATGMs and torpedoes. There are some pretty obvious
drawbacks to try to operate FPVs this way. We've only seen one
example so far, and it failed. So we may not see other
producers race to emulate a system that shares characteristics with a kite
and has a 0% success rate. Instead what we've seen more of is a constant
shift in the frequency that drone operators use, coupled with methods of guidance and
targeting that might be more jam resistant.

Frequency selection, coordination and jamming
can be major factors in drone operations. If you jam a frequency your own guys are using,
you are going to bring down your own birds. Which reportedly has often
been a major problem in Ukraine, but is also one that I think other militaries, if given
the time and resources, might find some answers to. You can also have cases where
systems might be redesigned to operate on frequencies
that are less frequently jammed. Ukrainian media for example
claims that the country has produced a small counter-drone system that can
operate in the 850 to 940 MHz range. Which is reportedly a pretty
standard range for a lot of FPVs, but that same article points out that
there are Russian kamikaze drones that can operate on either
lower or higher frequencies. Those aren't really going to
care about this sort of system and only going to be vulnerable
to those that can hit the wider range.

Meanwhile, if you want to look at
longer-range one-way attack systems that don't require constant
user control but instead use GPS, or a Global Navigation
System of some kind, we've still seen a number of
approaches being used to protect those systems from just
being neutralised by jamming. The Iranian Shahed 136 for example, presumably to decrease its
vulnerability to things like GPS spoofing, doesn't have one GNS
receiver, it has multiples. And so if two receivers say that it's approaching its
target while one is convinced it's 100 miles off course, the majority is going to shout down the
problem child and try and continue to target.

If GNS is denied entirely, most long-range
attack systems include inertial navigation backup. Which is usually going to be
much less accurate than GNS, but will function even if
the system is being jammed. We are also seeing some reporting now that
things like long-range one-way attack drones might be using other
classical methods of navigation. These include terrain
recognition-based approaches where you are not reliant on
receiving a navigation signal, instead you are using your on-board sensors
to look at the terrain that you're flying over, comparing that to the database and mission
plan that's been pre-loaded into the system, and using that to find out
where you currently are. Tomahawk missiles from the
Cold War era had this sort of technology. And obviously even then you
didn't need a GPS connection to recognise a river,
a crossroad, or a mountain range.

While there are a lot of old approaches to navigating
in a spectrum-denied environment however, the thing we're seeing change now is
the degree to which new technology makes these approaches
cheaper and more accessible. The availability of commercial satellite imagery
for example, makes it much more practical to get a picture of the terrain all the way
between your launch site and the target. And memory, computing power and
good cameras are all much cheaper, more miniaturised and more accessible
than they were in the 1980s. This and other alternative navigation
options obviously aren't perfect, but they do point to the risk of
systems like one-way attack drones becoming more and more resistance to attempts
to counter them using electronic warfare. That of course does still leave the hard kill option
of just shooting down the incoming drones, but then you might run into issues like the
difficulty of getting sufficient geographical coverage, or shot exchange problems
if you do it using longer-range missiles.

So in terms of the big picture for the current war
in Ukraine, trying to assess where the status quo is in the race between counter-measures
and counter-measure resistance is harder than in some of the
other areas we've looked at. We know that approaches and
technologies used are constantly shifting, and we have some examples of
new jammers succeeding or failing. But getting good, at least semi-complete,
information on success rates is very difficult, and it would be quickly
outdated even if it was available. But one trend that does stand out
because it might have wider implications, is the reportedly greater application, even in the
case of relatively cheap one-way attack drones, of navigation methods that might not have
an easy electronic warfare-based answer.

A defender isn't going to be able
to move mountains, crossroads and river systems just
to fool a navigation system. And so the trend in 2024
and beyond might be towards more one-way attack drones with greater
resistance to existing EW counter-measures. And greater pressures for countries to
reconsider how their air defence systems might be configured to deal with
exhaustion or saturation-based threats from affordable
long-range attack options. And touching on the possibility of
saturation or exhaustion-based tactics brings us to another section, a key element to
what is making drones so dangerous in Ukraine, which has nothing to do with the
capability of the drones themselves.

And while this may be my bias talking,
one of those key factors is production. Ultimately sketches, CAD files and project plans
don't destroy tanks, physical weapons do. And so if you have a system
or technology that's well suited for quickly moving from that design,
to production, to the turret popping phase, that's potentially going to add
to its utility as a weapon system when you are a country in the midst of a war. And from that perspective,
drones have massive advantages and have benefitted from changing
design and production processes.

In 2022 and early 2023 for example, for a lot of
drone operators on both sides of the war in Ukraine the most common approach for getting
your hands on a lot of small UAS quickly was just to go and find a
commercially available civilian system, buy it in significant numbers, and
if necessary tinker with and modify it. As you'll see on screen there, I've
tentatively called this the adapted COTS phase. COTS stands for Commercial Off The Shelf.
And this approach was behind the massive surge of commercially available
quadrotor drones in particular that we saw move into
Ukraine and later Russia. The production and
scaling model is really simple because you are not doing
much production domestically. Instead you have some avid drone
enthusiasts in Estonia or Poland hypothetically, calling up retailers,
wholesalers or producers and saying that their drone club really needs,
you know, a couple of thousand extra Mavic 3s. The bit where the local production
comes in is in the adaptation part. And these are changes to the fully
assembled drone that are necessary to make it more
suitable for battlefield use.

In a basic observation role fewer
modifications are likely to be necessary. But if you're talking about making the drone
suitable as a weapon system in its own right, more modifications might be required.
For example, for some reason the DJI Mavic 3 doesn't come with a bomb carriage and
release mechanism as an optional extra. The advantage of this model is you might be
able to get a lot of drones relatively cheaply, have small organisations or field workshops
make the necessary field modifications, and be relatively confident the Russians aren't
exactly going to bomb the factories in China. The disadvantages however,
are that you are reliant on a foreign supply chain
and also on a civilian design. Civilian quadrotors have been used
in war, but they weren't designed for it. And so particularly when
you are talking about FPVs, and also to an extent the heavier
quad and octocopter bomber drones, we've seen increased reliance
placed on a new model.

This is where we are building drones that
are purpose built for a military environment, but we're doing it mostly using
commercial off-the-shelf components. Metaphorically we are no longer going
to Toys 'R' Us, buying a complete drone, and figuring out a way
to duct tape a munition to it. Instead you are going and buying critical
components: batteries, motors, flight controllers. And now, often in a slightly larger
workshop, what you are doing is assembling those components into a design
that you have come up with yourself, potentially with some
custom-built local components. The frame of the drone for example
might be locally manufactured to make sure you can fit your
chosen bit of ordnance to it. The advantage of this model is you
are still able to leverage someone else, often China's, productive
capacity and cost base. But now you are not as limited by the
design of the underlying drone in question.

You can mix and match
components and technical features, design with a purpose in mind and still
hopefully keep your system pretty cheap. Also because in industrial terms a lot
of the work here is relatively basic, it's still something that a relatively
small team in a volunteer organisation or small company
might be able to do in-house. If you want an imperfect analogy, it takes a lot
less skill and capital equipment to modify a car than it does to build one from scratch
down to its base components. The next potential evolutionary step
that we've seen some of in Ukraine and almost inevitably will see basically
everywhere on the global market, is various drone manufacturers moving
from just assembling various commercial off the-shelf components, to designing
and arranging the production of their own. In some cases this might be just
out of a desire to vertically integrate, remove reliance on supply chains you
don't control and potentially bring down cost.

But in other cases it's because
the underlying civilian product may not align with what you want
the military system to be able to do. To give one example, a lot of the
commercially available motors that you might use to power an
FPV or a larger loitering munition have a significant
problem: they are too good. A drone hobbyist probably doesn't want their new
toy to give up the ghost after 10 hours of service. And if you're a military or civilian
organisation using a larger ISR drone you might want to get thousands upon
thousands of flight hours out of that thing. But if you're talking about a one-way attack drone,
that thing has a destiny the moment it takes off. And the destiny in question is very likely
to either be detonation, the dirt, or both. So in that context it makes no bloody
sense to fit the thing with motors that are rated for hundreds
or thousands of hours.

Instead what you care about is
short run performance and price. There are plenty of other components that also
benefit from being custom built for a military context, but hopefully you get the picture:
there is a difference in some cases. And the introduction of
these more customised systems alongside continuing purchases, it must be said,
of those commercial off-the-shelf drones from before is part of the reason why we've been able
to see such a growth in scale on one hand, but also the development
of new capabilities on the other. Reflecting that, it has to be said
that the production methods used by Russia and Ukraine for
small UAS have changed over time. In Russia a lot of the effort has been, in true
command economy style, a top down effort. Which has the advantage of being
able to throw a lot of resources at a consolidated number of systems and
designs and get them produced in quantity. Russia for example has sunk a lot of
effort into scaling Shahed 136 production, Lancet production, and
some lighter systems as well.

The weakness of that system that is sometimes
complained about in Russian language sources is that it can be a little bit slow
to adapt to changing battlefield demands. Which is a situation where you
can see volunteer organisations, small workshops and field modifications
still really proving their worth. The Ukrainian model by contrast is more
fragmented, albeit with some unifying efforts. You have a mixture of all sorts of start-ups,
foreign suppliers, volunteer organisations, small field workshops,
right down to individuals who just happen to own a 3D printer
and produce drone accessories. Ukraine to an extent has been able to standardise
things like pricing for systems like FPVs, but they haven't yet chosen to standardise
around particular producers or models.

Instead you have a lot of producers making
a lot of designs in a fairly artisanal fashion. And as some drop out
of business or can't keep up, they and/or their workforces are often consolidated
into those firms that remain as going concerns. In raw economic terms this model has the
potential to be less efficient than the Russian one, where a lot of physical capital
is thrown at a particular problem. But it does allow for some
pretty free-wheeling innovation and provides a sort of natural push to
a more distributed production network that all else being equal is probably
going to be more resistant to missile attack than concentrated production
in one or two mega-factories.

Which is of course a relevant factor for
Ukraine, and maybe even for Russia. Because ultimately this is 2024, and you
never know when someone is going to slam a remote-controlled Cessna strapped with a
bunch of explosives into your production facility. But one way or the other,
in both Russia and Ukraine, a lot of resources have been invested
in ramping up drone production. And the result has been
a massive increase in the scale of just how many of these
systems both sides have available.

In May 2023, RUSI estimated that Ukraine
was expending about 10,000 UAVs per month. That was already a very high number,
and probably meant that even at that point small drones were the most commonly used
precision weapon system on the Ukrainian battlefield. By the end of 2023 however
I was suggesting that number was probably outdated and
potentially several times too low. And now in 2024 we've had
multiple reports from Ukraine that the country is aiming to manufacture
at least a million drones domestically this year, is on track to do so, and aims to
import potentially a million more. Obviously the starting point for any claim
like this is to take it with a grain of salt. But it may give a good indication of the
sort of numbers that are now being aimed for. Even taking a lower end of those two
combined figures at 1.2 million per year, that's not 10,000 drones a month, it's 100,000. Essentially marking the transition from
Ukraine using a metric shit ton of drones to a metric deca-ton only a year later.

And while a lot of that volume
(and the Russian equivalent) is likely to be in the smallest
and cheapest systems, the FPVs, some of the stated goals we've seen for long-range
strike systems are also incredibly ambitious. Just one manufacturer of one Ukrainian
long-range strike drone for example, has publicly said that they can go from producing 100 a month
to 400 or 500 a month in relatively short order.

Provided, one assumes, contracts
and resources are forthcoming. And amidst all these figures I think
there might be a key takeaway. For Ukraine, and to a lesser extent also for Russia, the
availability of systems and munitions is a challenge. Air defence systems like Patriot and the
missiles to fire from it are in very short supply, as is artillery ammunition,
artillery barrels, armoured vehicles, and just about
anything else you care to name.

Small drones are about the only thing
that both Ukraine and Russia have a lot more of now
than they did a year ago. And against that backdrop, against
that context of a shortage in a range of other systems and munitions, you can see
why there might be more and more reliance placed on drones to fill certain battlefield roles.
In the end you fight with the systems you have. Which brings us to the end of the
discussion on the technical changes, and gets us to the final question: based on all of these
changes we've seen and expect to continue seeing, how impactful are drones in Ukraine today, and
how influential are they likely to be going forward? If you just track through a lot of the videos,
interviews and reports that come out of Ukraine, it's probably fairly easy to argue that
drones have helped make the battlefield incredibly transparent
and extremely dangerous.

Moving or concentrating forces is going to be difficult
when both sides have so many eyes in the sky. The already dangerous
artillery systems on both sides have probably benefitted from having
drones to spot targets and correct fire. And the threat posed by things
like FPVs and drop drones is such that if you are in a defensive position that doesn't
have adequate overhead cover or concealment nor adequate EW cover, somewhere where your
opponent has skilled drone operators present, then the threat is probably
constant and growing. But at the same time, there are still arguments playing
out over just how impactful drones have actually been. Recently for example there was an article
in the conversation by Paul Lushenko, an Assistant Professor and Director of
Special Operations at the US Army War College.

And he essentially argues (among other things)
that while drones have delivered some tactical and operational success for both Ukraine
and Russia, they've been strategically ineffective. To quote directly from the article, "Drones have not, and are not likely to,
shape the outcome of the war in Ukraine. They have not allowed Ukraine to
break its stalemate with Russia, nor have they encouraged Russia
to end its occupation of Ukraine." He also says, "The lesson from Ukraine
is that while drones have some value at the tactical and operational levels of war,
they are strategically inconsequential. They are not a magic bullet offering a game
changing capability to decide the fate of nations.

Instead countries must rely on
time-tested combined arms manoeuvre, wherein they integrate personnel and
weapon systems at a particular time and place to achieve a particular goal
against an adversary." One wonders if that means that almost no weapon
system can be considered strategically consequential, because they have to be used together
in combined arms for maximum effect. And even an extreme case like a nuclear
warhead realistically requires a delivery system. It also I think arguably under-explores
the potential impact of drones both on how combined arms operations
are conducted and also how viable they are. The article acknowledges for example
the role of Ukrainian drone operators in stopping the Russian advance on Kyiv,
saying that Ukrainian air reconnaissance units, "Used drones to interdict and
block a massive Russian convoy travelling from Chernobyl to Kyiv a month after
Russia's February 24 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It did so by destroying slow-moving
vehicles that stretched nearly 50 miles, causing Russia to abandon its advance." I don't think drones deserve sole credit
for that, but let's go with it for a moment.

I think you could argue that halting
Russian columns moving towards Kyiv were exactly the kind of tactical actions
that could be aggregated together to have operational and
strategic significance. Enough Russian tactical successes that
enabled an operation to take Kyiv successfully may potentially have ended up
having all sorts of strategic significance. Taking a capital is no small thing,
and it's difficult to assess what the full ramifications that would
have been for the stability of the Ukrainian government, foreign support,
or a range of other macro factors. As I said, I'll link the article in the description
and it's probably not the only one of its kind. But for what it's worth from my perspective, when you have an argument that a
weapon system isn't strategically decisive because the conflict it's being used in
is a balanced one without a decisive result, I think that's falling into the
trap of looking at the outcome of a conflict, as opposed
to the impact of a system.

Which among other things,
ignores the fact that a stalemate might in fact be a
strategically significant result. If one side would have lost a conflict,
but then because it deploys a new system is able to score a draw, I'd argue
that's still a pretty significant impact. And if both sides deploy a new technology
keeping them in a sort of balance, I don't think that takes away from the
impact and value that that system has.

This is one reason why I tentatively
suggest if you're trying to determine just how impactful a
new system or technology is, the best test might not be to look at how the
conflicts that system was used in played out, but instead what would have
happened if the decision to invest in that technology or system
wasn't made by one or both sides. For example, if you take a passage from
the article and swap around a few words, you could end up with something
that could have been written in 1916. "Despite these tactical effects and limited
operational gains, artillery is strategically ineffective. Artillery has not and is not likely to
shape the outcome of the war in Europe. They have not allowed the Entente
to break its stalemate with Germany, nor has it encouraged Germany
to end its occupation of Belgium.

To the extent artillery batteries
have been strategically consequential, the implications have been psychological." And you could make that argument
at the time because the Western Front, despite enormous quantities
of artillery being used, was a stalemate. Which would have ignored the fact
that artillery was part of the stalemate, and that if either the Entente or Central Powers
had entirely failed to invest in their artillery then I'd argue the war probably
would have swung massively and potentially strategically
decisively against them. So I'd suggest we then look at drone deployment
through that same sort of "but for" lens. What would happen if the investments
in drone systems hadn't been made? If not for the investments in drones, the battlefield
in Ukraine would be so much less transparent. It would presumably be easier to move
and concentrate forces and supplies. Spotting targets for indirect fires would be
more difficult, as would be correcting those fires.

And in a situation like that, where it
might be safer to concentrate forces and defending fires might be less responsive,
especially against dynamic targets, it might be that the balance between
attacker and defender in that scenario would look a little bit different from
the war in Ukraine that we see today. But for the range and accessible precision
that drones and loitering munitions provide, a lot more of the Ukrainian battle space
would be under considerably less threat.

There would be a lot of things out there
destroyed by systems like Lancet, or spotted by drones and then engaged by
longer range fire options that might have survived. Artillery tactics probably wouldn't have to
be optimised against a threat that didn't exist. And the forces might have been able
to skip certain tactical and operational adaptations that do come with a cost. In that sense you might see
parallels to the arguments around whether or not HIMARS
was actually effective. You could argue HIMARS and its Gimlers
missiles weren't particularly decisive because Russian forces were able to disperse
their ammunition storages or pull back their depots. But reframe that and you could
argue that Gimlers was impactful because it forced Russia to disperse
its storages and pull back its depots.

The costs imposed on
an enemy can be holistic, they don't have to take the form
of a burning piece of equipment. And to that I'd add if we are trying to
predict potential impact on future conflicts, we need to keep the scale in mind here, when HIMARS
first reached Ukraine it was a handful of launchers. Some NATO countries are looking at
building up arsenals of hundreds. When you are talking about drone systems
in Ukraine, a lot of these technologies were relatively embryonic in 2022,
and the numbers we are seeing now are still in many cases driven by
relatively basic production chains. So when you are trying to assess the
potential impact on future battlefields it might be worth asking not just how many
drones can Ukraine produce in 2023 or 2024, but rather how many could
countries like China, the United States, or the various EU members
produce if they really focused on it.

But even in the limited numbers available to
Russia and Ukraine, I'd argue that things like one-way attack drones have had operational and
strategic impacts, and not merely psychological ones. If not for systems like Shahed 136 and
Ukraine's various long-range attack drones, neither side would need to dedicate
manpower, equipment and munitions to forming things like drone hunter and
drone defence teams behind the lines to defend critical infrastructure,
government facilities, depots, air bases, ports, industrial
facilities, the list goes on. Those resources could instead be dedicated
to getting more effect at the front line. If not for Shahed 136, Ukraine's arsenal of air defence interceptors would
not be under the stress it is. And it might be safe to assume
that more launchers and munitions could then be dedicated for jobs like being pushed
close to the front line to hunt Russian glide bombers. And as a side note, while that might not in itself
make Ukrainian combined arms operations viable, I would argue it would dim further
the prospect of Russia ever doing the same.

Because Russia's prospects of ever
achieving the sort of air superiority that are usually associated with
successful combined operations (or at least successful combined
arms operations on a larger scale) is intrinsically tied to the capabilities and
endurance of the Ukrainian air defence system. The one that Shahed 136
is so critical in pressuring. Meanwhile, if not for
long-range Ukrainian attack drones, Russia would not be having to distribute
electronic warfare and air defence assets against thousands of square
kilometres of Russian territory. Because even relatively small
numbers of simple attack drones were capable of threatening targets like
air bases and oil refineries with significant damage. Without investment in drones there is also a
question of what could possibly have replaced them? Because one of the most significant
aspects of a lot of these systems (particularly things like FPVs) is just how simple
they are to access, manufacture and deploy.

It's relatively simple to say that both
Ukraine and Russia might benefit from having all sorts of additional capabilities
that help enable combined arms manoeuvre. The Russian Air Force could have been
much better equipped and trained for suppressing or
destroying enemy air defences. Ukraine might really want additional
air power of its own, things like F-16 or Gripen, either in a ground attack role
or to contest the Russian Air Force. But as we have seen, even
with a lot of resources pledged that can be very difficult
to do at scale and quickly. Over the time scale it has taken Ukraine
to go from flying zero F-16s to zero F-16s, FPVs have gone from being a rare novelty to the
most common precision weapon on the battlefield. And implicit in that is that
in a lot of times and a lot of places where Ukrainian or Russian forces are under
immense pressure and supply constraints, while drones may not have been a perfect
answer to the challenges they faced, they were often an answer.

The battlefield drones of the future,
even the FPV analogues, may not be as cheap as the ones
we've seen in Ukraine so far. There is some RUSI research out
there for example that indicates that in order to have a good chance
of knocking out an armoured vehicle an FPV probably needs some advanced features
like some of the things we've covered here. Jam resistant communications, the ability to carry
a higher payload, infrared or night vision sensors.

But you are still talking about systems that are going
to be considerably cheaper and more accessible than things like ATGMs, or even some of the
relatively fancy unguided artillery shells out there. In Ukraine I'd argue that's probably mattered. If for no other reason then it's
pretty difficult for hobby workshops and volunteer organisations
to manufacture Javelin missiles. If you broaden out the arguments to include sea
drones, the arguments could probably go further. There you could argue that
for a relatively small investment Ukrainian naval drones have been able to fundamentally
change how the Russian Black Sea Fleet can operate. And I've explored some
of the details of that theatre and the role naval drones have
played in it in a previous episode. But by now hopefully
you get the argument: yes, the war in Ukraine is
relatively static and attritional. No, drones haven't won
the war by themselves. And combining arms together including infantry,
armour, artillery and air defence assets just to name a few, obviously
remains absolutely central. But I don't think that should conceal
just how impactful drones have been, and the disruptive potential they have.

For both sides drones represent a small
minority of the total resources invested. And with them both investing
there is a sort of symmetry, although the scale of advantage to one side
or the other does change somewhat over time. But if tomorrow you Thanos-snapped all of
Ukraine's or all of Russia's drones out of existence then (while it's obviously
difficult to prove a hypothetical) I think the evidence suggests that would
have a pretty major impact on the war. For hard-pressed Ukrainian
defenders, it would strip them of situational awareness
and a critical weapon system. While for Russia, it would
significantly reduce their ability to leverage their advantage
in long-range firepower. Drones may not have won
the war in Ukraine for either side, but it's hard to come up with many systems
that have been as cost-effective in shaping it.

And going forward in
the short and medium term, I think the technology and its
battlefield potential may only grow. Tanks and artillery are fairly mature
technologies, militaries have had a long time to figure out how to
improve them and use them. But the technology and
tactics of these sort of battlefield drone systems is in many
ways evolving in real time. We'd seen hints of the potential pre-2022, but the war in Ukraine has put the
pace of development into overdrive. And so however scary and impactful
you think these systems might be now, when it comes to their future capabilities,
we may not have seen anything yet. And that fact may put militaries
around the world in a difficult position. If you stock up on systems now,
they may be quickly overtaken by future counter-measures and
new, more capable systems. But if you wait too long, you run
the risk of an opponent gaining a potentially significant advantage
for a relatively modest investment. The same sort of timing
imperatives apply when you are talking about the imperative
of defending against these systems.

Do you wait for example for
directed energy systems to mature? Or do you go all in on the
technologies that are available now? Whatever decisions are made
however, I think the reality is this technology can't be put back in Pandora's Box,
the lessons being learned can't be unlearned. And the supply chains and production
facilities that are springing up to sustain the war in Ukraine aren't just going to
suddenly disappear even if the war ends. Indeed, you may even see a scenario
where countries like Ukraine become major suppliers of these systems.

Because ultimately they and the Russians are
probably going to be the most experienced experts with some of the
hottest production lines. But for now it's probably enough
to observe just how important these systems have become in the war in
Ukraine, to note just how quickly they've evolved, and to wonder just what sort of
changes we are going to see in 2024. And alright, brief channel
update to close out. Firstly, I know this topic won
a poll a couple of weeks back, but thank you for giving me just a few
more weeks to massage the content a bit. One of the challenges in making a video like this is
just how expansive the underlying topic can be. But hopefully you are happy with
what I ultimately chose to cover. Going forward, the patron
topic poll is starting to wind down, so I'll start to finalise the results
from that in the coming week. And once that's done I'll start releasing
some of the results in future channel updates. Finally, for those of you who are interested
in the Perun Gaming side of things, I am told the new
PC has now been shipped.

So hopefully we see some return to that
sort of content in the coming week or two. Thank you as always for your ongoing
engagement, interest and support. And I hope to see you all again next week..

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