There is something new in the air in military affairs. Inexpensive and deadly small drone helicopters are revolutionizing conventional warfare. In a refreshing departure from journalistic malpractice, the New York Times recently ran a detailed feature article describing the growing significance of drone warfare in the fighting in Ukraine. The article reported that currently about 70% of all casualties in the Ukraine war are inflicted by drones. In this coffee break I will take a broader view of the advent of unmanned weaponry and consider its future implications.
The Drone Explosion
Drones are experiencing an evolutionary explosion as they invade every domain of military conflict. In the air, on land, at sea, and even in space, drones promise to change dramatically the character of armed conflict. I won’t try to catalog all the categories of current drone life forms, but they are clearly evolving in unexpected ways.
The Orwellian possibilities are not difficult to imagine
Enabling Technologies
The reason why drones are evolving so rapidly and unpredictably is that both microchip power and AI software technology are on exponential growth curves. The cheap and capable cameras and processors in our phones are providing the eyes and brains for inexpensive drones. At the same time, fierce competition in AI development is pushing out the frontiers of machine vision, problem solving, and adaptive behavior for drones. Weapons designers can now use COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware and software that dramatically reduces the cost of drones. Moreover, the ability to upgrade the “intelligence” of drones via software downloads means that, unlike conventional military hardware, the capabilities of a drone arsenal can continue to grow after the hardware is deployed.
The Power of the Swarm
Quantity has a quality all its own. — Joseph Stalin
On the battlefields of Ukraine, $5,000 drones have destroyed U.S. supplied M1 Abrams tanks costing $7 million. Because a drone can attack the weakest points of a tank, where the armor is thinnest, a single drone can usually achieve a mobility kill, preventing the tank from moving. Then follow-on drone attacks can completely destroy it. Vehicles with less armor are usually destroyed by a single drone impact.
Although many measures have been taken to counter the drone threat, these have been largely ineffective. Jamming the signals controlling drones doesn’t work with drones controlled over fiber optic cables or drones using machine vision for terminal guidance. Active protection systems (APS) designed to intercept drones are costly, dangerous to friendly forces, and unreliable. Moreover it is impractical to retrofit APS to all vehicles on the battlefield. Improvised “turtle tanks” covered with external sheets of armor can survive a few drone hits, but drones can find gaps in the armor or drop mines in front of them.
The cost-effectiveness of military drones overwhelmingly favors their increasing usage. In the Ukraine war, drones are so plentiful that they are often used to attack small groups of infantry, and sometimes individual soldiers.
Here is a list of the drone types in use in this war
| Country | Drone Name | Type | Description | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ukraine | UAS SETH | Combat Drone | Homegrown drone resembling the Shahed for front-line strikes. | Business Insider |
| FPV Drones | Loitering Munition | Commercial drones modified for kamikaze-style attacks. | Wikipedia | |
| Dragon Drones | Incendiary Drone | Dispenses molten thermite to destroy enemy fortifications. | Wikipedia | |
| Corvo PPDS | Recon/Attack | Flat-packed Australian drones used for various missions. | Wikipedia | |
| DJI Drones | Commercial Drone | Used for surveillance and targeting. | Wikipedia | |
| Russia | Shahed-136 | Loitering Munition | Iranian-designed drone used for deep strikes. | Wikipedia |
| ZALA Lancet | Loitering Munition | Precision drone targeting artillery and defenses. | Wikipedia | |
| FPV Drones | Loitering Munition | Commercial drones modified for kamikaze-style attacks. | Wikipedia | |
| Dragon Drones | Incendiary Drone | Dispenses molten thermite to destroy assets. | Wikipedia | |
| DJI Drones | Commercial Drone | Used for reconnaissance and targeting. | Wikipedia |
The OODA Loop and the Kill Chain
The great intellectual achievement of Colonel John Boyd was a universal model of competitive dynamics in armed conflict. Boyd determined that the essence of any fight was the execution by each combatant of a series of steps he called the OODA loop. Each fighter Observes the situation, Orients new information relative to his intentions, Decides on an action, and Acts on the decision. All other things being equal, the combatant who can execute the OODA loop faster than the opponent will win the fight. The genius of Boyd’s model is that it extends across the entire spectrum of conflict, irrespective or scale or complexity, from boxers in the ring to competing companies in a market, to opposing armies in the field.
When we superimpose the graphic of the OODA loop on a diagram of the current drone attack kill chain, it becomes clear that removing human decision input from the engage step of the chain accelerates the OODA loop and confers competitive advantage. This is the cause of the evolutionary pressure that will drive drone developers and operators to give engagement authority, the license to kill, to AI-guided drones.
Drones Alone (aka Skynet)
The complete replacement of human combatants by drone forces is a technologically feasible end state for the evolution of drone weaponry. There is no reason why the command hierarchy of human armed forces cannot be emulated and improved upon by appropriate software, with every level of operational units responsive to commands from above it and directing the levels below. The greater decision-making bandwidth of automated control nodes would likely result in a highly efficient and flexible organization of forces. Thus, under competitive evolutionary pressure, it is likely that the current hybrid human/drone order of battle will steadily shift its composition toward a full drone force, with considerable autonomy, operating under high-level human directives.
An obvious danger of fully automated military forces is departure from human control. The depiction of AI-directed killing machines turning against their human creators is now a staple of dystopian science fiction. Accordingly, considerable design effort will be devoted to to preventing runaway drone forces. However, given the likely self-generating and adaptive character of future AI software, the reliability of such absolute control would be uncertain. Unfortunately, like the advent of nuclear weapons, the genie of drone warfare is out of the bottle. Civilization faces a new danger from technological innovation again outpacing the creation of the political structures required to govern it.
Conclusion
The rise of the drones conforms to a pernicious behavioral equation that threatens the modern world:
Technological Ingenuity + Organized Irresponsibility = Growing Risk of Disaster
The ingenuity of a highly trained, funded, and motivated global STEM workforce is creating a steady stream of unprecedented innovations in weaponry. Powerful corporate and government entities are funding and deploying these weapons irresponsibly, heedless of the long-term dangers. The result is unsustainable compounding of risks to the world, risks that may lead to human extinction. To paraphrase John Donne: Ask not for whom the drones swarm. They swarm for thee.
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And when these instruments of death and surveillance are perfected in foreign battlefields, they will be made available to local police, as they have been in the past; scenes I’ve seen of police conducting crowd control remind me of of storm troopers from Star Wars with all their protective uniforms, shields, weapons, and drones flying overhead.
Maybe I’m being naive but I think us lowlifes will have soon hacked them plus developed our own drones.
Targeting a key person is likely to lead to societal change much faster than 100 of us nobodies.
You are being naive, I’m afraid.
When Russian EW today can already potentially hack or jam transmissions to and from all drones but those on a fiberoptic cable–a tether, in other words, that very much limits their range–where the technology is going in warfighting terms is autonomous AI-controlled.
As Haig Hovhaness writes above, I see, bringing up the OODA loop also. He’s right.
How will you hack non-radio-controlled autonomous AI drones?
In this connection, I pushed this video yesterday, so I’m sorry to be a bore but —
Slaughterbots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
Note that as Dr Stuart Russell says at the end, all the component technologies are available now–and the video was made in 2017.
Now, granted, potentially two technologies can disrupt electronic devices, including microprocessors, without directly affecting humans.
[1] EMPs: bursts of electromagnetic radiation that disrupt or damage electronic circuits, sometimes generated by natural phenomena like lightning or artificially through devices such as EMP generators. While EMPs can disable electronics, they don’t harm humans because the energy levels are not sufficient to affect biological tissues.
[2] High-Powered Microwave (HPM) Weapons: These devices emit focused microwave energy to disrupt or destroy electronic systems. They are designed to target specific electronics without causing harm to humans in the vicinity.
But note that both of these require serious heavy-duty kit (at least at present) and are essentially pulse-based, not continuous.
You wonder what would have happened if Luigi had used a drone to make his kill. Stopping a guy with a gun is one thing and body guards help here. But stopping a drone is quite another matter altogether.
stopping a drone is … another matter altogether.
Attribution for a drone hit — not just how do the authorities prove responsibility, but how do they even know who did it — is potentially more difficult, too.
Wilkerson in the latest Nima interview tells he’s heard that Russia has now learned (or is learning?) how to hack Ukraine’s drones to attack the AFK. He said he hears it from knowledgeable sources.
Shotgun is the universal small drone hacking tool.
Pictures of troops on the front now frequently show individuals armed with what are essentially “duck guns.” A fast handling semiautomatic shotgun is indeed good – if not perfect – anti-drone medicine.
See also Michael Greer’s Retrotopia where there’s a chapter having fun with drone issues.
On a sidebar related to the limited range of fiber-optic drones, how long before we see a “master” drone that lands outside EMP range to launch a swarm of fiber-optic controlled ones….
Sidebar 2: After the tank is disabled, why waste money on more drones? Pounding it to death with artillery is cheaper and it’s not like it’s going anywhere. Time the artillery right (with a recon eye-in-the-sky drone) and one can get a nice twofer of beating up a recovery vehicle and crew as well.
Not only that they use “duck guns” (though no punt guns, yet), but they call their targets “birdies”, and occasionaly take photos with prey lined up on the ground. They lack retriever dogs, and feathers in hats, though.
On a sidebar, there are already experimenatal “mother” drones that carry signal repeaters and few birdies. Optical umbilical cord would add too much weight, and potentially drag the mothership down.
Sidebar 2: Regular unguided artillery shell is comparable in price with kamikaze drone (Russian one that is, NATO stuff is more expensive, because capitalism), and it would take a few to score a hit. Also, it’s not just a matter of price, but what is available at the moment.
If they get to where they’re fielding troops who effectively can shoulder punt guns* then things are gonna get REALLY bad! ;-)
Googling arty rounds … I’ll plead “I thought they were cheaper!” But yup, capitalism. And the Russian rounds don’t look to be too much cheaper either. I think we’re still talking bigger boomstuffs, though.
And I’ll still stand by the “benefit of a twofer” comment because “burst radius.” :-P
*or worse, set them up as underbarrel add-ons to the AK-12…..
I can’t recall where I saw it but there’s been some pushback against the 70 percent claim. The argument was that Ukraine now gets more success from drones because they’ve run out of artillery shells and weapons. And in Russia’s case the overwhelming 10 to one superiority of their artillery suggests that shells are still killing most AFU soldiers even if drones destroy many vehicles.
Of course robot weapons undoubtedly will come to dominate if the unusually retro style of war in Ukraine spreads elsewhere. But the Russians are holding back from the “total war” which would no doubt finish off Ukraine rather quickly. They have also refrained from shooting down the NATO spy planes that are helping Ukraine with their robots.Conditions in Ukraine are a one off and in any case they are still losing the war.
70%! It was the NYTimes, the paper has little regard for context.
For the soldier drones are just another tool to blow up human bodies or materiel.
I have heard Russians issuing 10 Ga shotguns with heavy shot loads. There is jamming, supposedly quite successful for Russians and there is tracking down the operators, and applying indirect fires..
As with everything in human endeavor there will be countermeasures and refinements.
Based on videos, Russian are using whatever shotguns they could lay their hands on, and most look like 12-gauge to me. They have developed special ammo with kevlar thread (resembling oldschool chain shot), but I believe soliders in the field are using whatever load they could get their hands on.
All good until there are 5 drones to one man.
Like Carolinian, I think that the 70% number is sus, but there’s no question that drones, from cheap and simple FPV drones through intermediate ones like Lancet or Orlan on up to the big and complex ones, like the US Global hawk or Reaper, and the Russian Okhotnik are changing the mechanics of the battlefield, making it even more dispersed. I don’t think we have much of an idea where things will end up – our understanding of serious drone usage is likely around, say the understanding of military aviation in 1917, lots of changes still to come.
” fiber optic cables or drones using machine vision for terminal guidance. ”
For Skynet/ED-209 OCP fans, this is the killer-app. Un-jammable deployment of drones.
And lemme guess….the country (by far) that makes the most fiber and the most cheap, disposable CPUs rhymes with China.
….but the reality is that the US won’t be facing these weapons in a Big Dog v. Big Dog fight over Taiwan. The Pentagon likely will face these drones in one of its many colonial brushfires (the mideast, narco militias, etc.)
They already are facing a drone force in the Houthis and had to remove the Harry Truman from the vicinity of the Red Sea because there was too much risk of it being sunk. So that element is already here.
For cheap kamikaze drones, rare and expensive Western weapons are just attractive targets. In future wars, cheap, mass-produced “disposable” tanks and armored vehicles will dominate the battlefield.
I suspect “speed is armor” strategy that was popular between world wars might be making a comeback. Watch the US trade its big gawky vulnerable HUMVEES for the M151A2 jeeps I used to drive. The Russians and their motorcycle assaults are evidence of this…
Along with the WWI German Sturmtruppen, small squads who’d assault trenches in little groups rather than the mass “OVER THE TOP!!” waves.
Everyone is focused on the terminator scenario, because the AIs / drones would be carrying weapons. IMHO, this is shortsighted, because a) the owners of said AIs are heavily incentivized to protect against it and b) the real danger is the OODA loop evolutionary optimizations feeding back into civilian (corporate) applications.
Pink slips, insurance and benefit claim denials, creative legal ploys to get around workplace safety and environmental constrains…. all just as lethal as a bullet.
And you know where the incentives for those scenarios are…..
When do you suppose the Luigis will start using drones in their work?
The invention of cannons brought an end to the age of castles. I think a lot about this regarding drones. I’m surprised there aren’t tighter controls.
Controlling large extreme tech like cannons and nuclear devices is easy, yet weapons of war are very common. Controlling things like small flying things or even handguns (think zip guns, not Browning .45 caliber automatics) is hard, particularly given ubiquitous 3d printing etc.
The invention of cannons brought an end to the age of castles.
Yup.
I think … about this regarding drones. I’m surprised there aren’t tighter controls.
Oh, they’re trying. As with the long bow, which aristocratic knights on horseback would have banned if they could, it’s hard to see that ‘they’ will ultimately be successful.
So, yes, the Luigis will eventually use it.
The end of a particular type of castles–the ones with tall walls. “Castles” continued to be built. They just looked different.
Regarding drones and static emplacements, I presume this will put an end to the ubiquitous trench and herald a return to the underground fortification — back to the Maginot line!
Actually, we are already there: this is exactly how Hamas (in Gaza) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon) thwarted the offensives of the Israeli army (which uses plenty of drones).
vao: this will put an end to the ubiquitous trench and herald a return to the underground fortification — back to the Maginot line.
Although current top-of-the-line nation-state kit —i.e. Oreshnik — can deal with anything like that, to a depth of a quarter-mile. Granted, only Russia has such kit currently.
I am simply amazed over how totally Oreshnik has vanished from Western media and consciousness like it had never dropped. Almost by the push of a button.
This unanimity cannot be explained merely by top down authority.
There is intimate understanding among the files and ranks of media.
Almost Bourdieu-like reflexes which are inoculated by education and upbringing.
p.s. Chomsky might not be right on every single matter, naturally. But his and Herman´s insight into propaganda are still as fresh as they were 40 years ago. Despite the so-called media change having taken place.
In principle, bunker busters achieve similar (though not as deep) effects (and they require a risky delivery by airplanes). Israel has them, and used them to destroy Hezbollah’s headquarters and kill Hassan Nasrallah.
On the other hand, the much less deep, unreinforced, but extremely extensive Hamas tunnels continued to be effective till the very last day before the truce, despite sustaining considerable damage.
Perhaps this will demonstrate again the predominance of the “Materialschlacht” in modern conflicts: belligerents must have a robust industrial capacity to produce truly many of those oreshniks and bunker-busters if they want to eliminate not just a few select targets, but also deal with the massive networks of underground facilities of an enemy… with the capacity to construct them.
A new weapon is always an equalizer for the person in a position of weakness under the existing regime. So, yeah, I would expect to see criminals, “Antifa” members, militias, etc., making use of this technology to level up their ability versus state agents of violence. Every technology ends up getting used by the people deemed “bad actors” by those in authority. Which is why things like encryption backdoors should never be allowed.
On the other hand, I’ve read about some Russian soldiers using their shotguns to down enemy drones. If each tank or APC had a couple of automatic shotguns on the hull that could spray up at incoming drones, it might be of some help. If cheap enough to balance out the cost versus drone costs. But maybe that’s impractical.
Drones are just another technology. Remember how naval warfare was going to be impossible after torpedoes came out ? Remember how countries were going to surrender in the face of heavy city bombing ?
At the moment attack drones are all the rage because of an active war, but after the war work will be able to commence on defensive drones and we will be back where we were with another weapon with a reasonable balance in the field.
Drones aren’t just another weapon. They are smart and getting smarter. They will be increasingly capable of autonomous and coordinated action. The biological and intellectual limits of human soldiers have not changed in millennia, but drones will keep getting more potent. Pitting drones against each other will accelerate their improvement.
No weapon is smart. It’s just a sales-pitch. Guided weapons is more accurate term, but less buzzwordy. Soviet Union had weapons capable of autonomous and coordinated action, aka swarm, in 1980s (P-700 Granit).
What will be, we will have to wait and see. None of the technological Nostradamuses predicted accurately what we got now.
Autonomous missiles go way back before then (it seems to be the term du jour for what used to be called ‘fire and forget’ missiles). Leaving to one side various experiments with dogs or pigeons to guide bombs, the first was probably the US Mark 24 ‘Fido’ torpedo from 1943, which could be air dropped into the ocean could identify and home in on submarines. The SWOD-9 BAT was probably the first genuine autonomous air launched missile – dating from 1945. Like most such missiles subsequently, initial awe at their capability was tempered when they developed a habit of following the wrong target. There have been numerous autonomous missiles developed since then. What does appear to be new is a combination of better seekers with AI powered chips allowing better target acquisition. The problem is that these can only be ‘trained’ using existing data. Who knows, maybe these can be confused by the simple measure of using different paint schemes on vehicles. Nobody will know for sure until they are used.
Ultimately, an ‘autonomous’ drone is a slow missile with a smart guidance system. That’s all really, nothing very new about them. The to and fro of weapon technology is normal as every side develops weapons and counter weapons – this always accelerates during a conflict, but in the long term it rarely changes things that much. In the 19th Century everyone thought the torpedo was the death of the capital ship. We still have torpedoes, and they are autonomous these days (and have been for half a century), but we also still have capital ships.
The Russians actually had a few designs of what were claimed to be entirely autonomous aerial drones before the war, but they were quietly forgotten about within months of it starting – presumably because they didn’t work. Its very hard to replace the eyes of a direct operator.
A lot of people get carried away by the cost element. Yes, civilian drones with an RPG strapped on can cost very little, but its become pretty clear from Ukraine that these are only a threat outside core combat zones. Within the ‘hot’ zones, they can’t survive even fairly primitive electronic defences. So they have to be either fibre optic guided with the range limitations this implies, or they need to be militarily hardened, in which case they aren’t cheap anymore.
Its not even clear that propellor driven drones have much of a future in battlefields – all sides are working on integrated tracking systems with relatively cheap remote gun defences which will probably be able to intercept the majority of incoming slow drones. Which will bring us back full circle to fire and forget missiles again. War is, in all senses, a kinetic activity. It still mostly comes down to blood and steel. When technology makes a difference it is invariably ‘deep’ technology (such as integrated fire control systems), not snazzy missiles or other tech.
Power requirements are probably the main weakness of drones for extended deployment. A soldier can survive a long time on energy bars; a highly mobile drone will need fuel or recharging.
The enormous investments in battery technology in the automotive sector will give future drones longer operational endurance. Battery swaps can quickly return a drone to operation, and field-deployed solar, fuel cell, or conventional generators can provide recharging power.
Battery swap require drone getting back to base. The enormous investments can not change the natural laws, but can fill lots of pockets (which is what hype helps a lot with).
The eternal struggle between copter and fixed-wing: the latter being less versatile but more efficient. The new wrinkle being that quadcopters are vastly easier to hand-produce as little consumables.
The big contractors in every country seem to lean toward the longer range, longer flight-time niche and thus toward fixed-wing from what I’ve seen.
I don’t think that most militaries are ready for drone warfare, much less western militaries. Can you imagine the US pushing a small force into Mexico to take out a Cartel faction – only to discover that that Cartel has been heavily investing in drones? Is the US even investing in putting ‘cope cages’ on their tanks as part of a new standard doctrine?
If an intrusion like that happens, it’ll be with helicopters. I wonder how practical it would be to attack helicopters with fpv drones–I do remember there were incidents when Ukrainians attacked Russian helicopters with drones successfully.
Most militaries do a great job of being ready for the last war. It’s what the Big Brass grew up with, fought in, and were trained about. It’s even worse if the Big Brass was on the winning side.
Another sidebar – what about interceptor drones whose only job is to seek out evil drone life and boldly destroy them where no drone has destroyed before…. Simple crashing would suffice, no additional weapon needed.
I believe I also saw that birds of prey are being tested. “What’s your MOS*?” “I’m an 11F – Falconer.”
*Military Occupational Specialty – your job title.
Martyanov´s latest (I had posted it as an answer to ilsm on another topic) mentioned OODA & a Russian tank that withstood 18 (!) hits by drones:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/03/f-35-issues.html
tank see TC: 13:35
OODA see TC: 27:55
p.s. those “dogs” are seriously upsetting. They were even used a alien attackers by PRIMES´s TV´s sci-fi series (where I however found them less convincing precisely because they already are a real thing.)
https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt9686194/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_4
“War of the Worlds” with Gabriel Byrne
Everyone in the mediasphere has been talking about the various uses of of drones against military targets in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
No one in the West talks about Israel’s extensive use of these systems against civilian targets.
Should I be surprised?
Coming soon to a police force near you …
That sort of claim requires a link for substantiation. Yes, Israel famously used a drone to kill Hamas leader Sinwar. But “extensive use”? When Israel has been using ginormous US supplied bunker busters and blocking the entry of food, water and fuel? Killings by drone would seem to be marginal compared to that.
And it further seems odd, if Israel has such great drones, why Hamas is still standing. Why haven’t drones been able to hunt them down in the tunnel networks?
My apologies, I should have been more specific, UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), not ground or tunnel-capable robots. Having worked with the US Military in both testing and deployment of UAVs, I’m forgetting “drones” covers a lot of territory.
I could add links, but there would be a lot of them. NPR, The Economist, and BBC, for three examples, have posted a story or two of armed quadcopters being used against both Hamas and civilians. Al Jazeera has published many.
$500 drones, excluding the price of RPG-7 warheads duct-taped onto them.
DJI Drones (Mavic) used for reconnaissance and targeting, are also used for dropping grenades.
Russians don’t use Shahed-136 but Geran-2 (which is based on Iranian design, but has evolved over time).
I think the term “drone” is becoming more and more unhelpful. It incorrectly associates two things in people’s minds: MOBILITY* and AUTONOMY.
Autonomy is not doing diddly squat at the moment. In a decade or two (or five), sure.
Ultra-cheap mass produced tech–and secondarily satellite internet–is what is revolutionizing warfare in Ukraine. They are the classic “force multipliers”: displacing legacy tech because they cost 100x less to get the job done.
* Unmanned, usually flying as it is both effective and has seen by far the greatest gains in size and cost reduction.
No Making Shit Up. Autonomous drones have barely arrived in Ukraine. Most have human operators.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/battlefield-drones-and-the-accelerating-autonomous-arms-race-in-ukraine/
And Russia is the world leader in signal-jamming, including of GPS, so your claim re “the internet” is also false. Russia has even been able to jam Starlink.
What I think you mean is ISR, which is not “the internet”.
1) I don’t understand the first comment. I am also(?) saying the “autonomous” aspect is vaporware. The article reinforces that.
2) Starlink is still universally acknowledged as critically important to Ukrainian communications. Russia’s EW is formidable but (understandably) lags behind on the newer developments like Starlink and copter/drones.