Given the current concern around drones, it seems worth surveying possible countermeasures in a reasonably systematic way, looking at each category of possible solution and listing the pros and cons of each. Now, this is a big and rapidly-evolving area, and I'm not a specialist in it. But I have done some looking around, and it seems worthwhile to bring this up as a counter to a lot of the triumphalism around drones these days.
First, I'm going to limit the scope here to direct measures aimed at a non-cooperative drone. There are a lot of ways of reducing the drone threat that fall outside this purview, from blowing them up before they launch to compromising their software to simply not being within range, but that gets even more complicated and messy. Second, it's worth pointing out that there are many different scenarios where drones may need to be dealt with, and that some systems may work well in certain situations but not in others. For instance, broad-spectrum RF jamming is absolutely standard on the battlefield, but is not a particularly good first-line solution if you're trying to defend the White House.
Electronic Warfare
This category covers jammers that are intended to interfere with the link between the operator and the drone. This was one of the main countermeasures to the first guided missiles, and remains vital today.
Pros: The systems exist today, and are currently fielded. Extremely effective against civilian drones, less so against datalinks designed for jam resistance, although even these are not immune. Marginal cost of use is effectively free.
Cons: Doesn't work against drones that are autonomous or guided by wires/fiber optics, which are starting to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine today. Might interfere with legitimate use of the RF spectrum, so not a first-line choice for protecting a base in the US.
Lasers
A laser, designed to focus visible or near-IR light onto a target and melt a hole through it so it falls out of the sky. These have gone from the lab to the field over the last decade, and have reportedly been used to shoot down drones by the US Army and probably others.
Pros: Extremely high precision, costs pennies per shot. Systems have begun fielding.
Cons: Limited range (<10 km), takes some time to kill a target so it works best against slower drones. Concerns about eye damage if used near civilian population, although these might be solvable with careful wavelength selection. Systems themselves are fairly expensive and not yet widely available, although this could change soon. Doesn't work well in bad weather.
High Power Microwaves (HPM)
Instead of using a laser to melt the target, why not use a burst of microwaves to fry it in midair? These are slightly behind lasers in deployment, but offer similar possibilities in terms of rapid response and low cost per shot. A few handheld systems, modeled on rifles, have been deployed in Ukraine, while larger systems capable of dealing with multiple targets are under development.
Pros: High precision, costs pennies per shot. Very effective against civilian-grade drones. Available as a secondary capability on high-power modern radars.
Cons: Bigger, automated systems are not yet fielded. Unclear how easy it is to harden drones against HPM attacks, or what sort of collateral damage they might do.
Guns
Basically, a device that shoots out a projectile which kinetically disrupts the drone, either by hitting it or by exploding nearby and peppering it with shrapnel. Simple, reliable, and can take advantage of automation to dramatically increase accuracy.
Pros: Relatively low cost per shot (dollars, most likely, although this can get much more expensive if advanced ammo is used). High probability of kill, useful against other targets.
Cons: Limited range, as the shells can't be controlled after being fired. Serious concerns about collateral damage, and while fancy self-destroying ammunition can mitigate this, it can't solve it entirely.
Active protection system
A cousin to the gun, this is a short-range system intended to take out things like anti-tank missiles and RPGs. These have been reasonably common on western tanks for the last few decades, and are mostly listed here for completeness.
Pros: In widespread service. Reportedly quite effective, although some drones have snuck through after being filtered out due to low speeds.
Cons: Tends to cause a lot of collateral damage. Extremely limited coverage area (basically, one tank/vehicle). Expensive projectiles.
Obstacles
Nets and the like that keep drones (at least small, slow-flying ones) away from the target. Can either be emplaced on a specific vehicle/target or to protect a route.
Pros: Cheap, quite effective.
Cons: Takes maintenance, kind of an eyesore, limited coverage area.
Missiles
An F-15 loaded with APKWS
This is an extremely broad category, as it covers everything from existing SAMs like Standard to an FPV drone modified to attack other flying things. Obviously, using a million-dollar Standard against a $10,000 drone is probably not good economics, so there's been a lot of work on cheaper weapons in the last decade or so. The standout among currently-fielded missiles for anti-drone work has probably been APKWS, a laser-guided version of the standard 70 mm rocket that costs about $30,000 all-up, a third that of any serious competitor. But this is still a pretty capable weapon, and we should expect the development of cheaper missiles for lower-performance targets in the next few years. And given that I'm using a broad definition of missile here, this could be as simple as "high performance drone plane that crashes into other drones, hopefully in a way that minimizes the danger to people on the ground in the middle of the city".
Pros: Very effective, greatest control over engagement conditions to minimize collateral damage. Support system cost can be relatively low, as more capability is built into the missile.
Cons: Highest cost per shot by far.
One last note is that cost per shot isn't necessarily the best metric to use, because not all systems face the same threat profile. If you're on the front lines in Ukraine and deal with a dozen drones a day, then cost per shot is going to dominate. But a lot of users are not on the front lines in Ukraine. The DoD has said it saw 350 drone incursions over 100 US bases. Maybe it makes sense to roll out lasers at a few of the highest-threat ones, but in a lot of cases, a system with a $100,000 base station firing a $10,000 missile once a year is preferable to a million-dollar laser.
Comments
I think you are a not completely correct with section on guns. Lot of modern anti-drone guns uses AHEAD ammunition, which is pretty expensive, one burst of Skyshield is about 10k, so on level of cheaper missiles.
It would be better to split this category into "traditional guns", like e.g. Stryker M-SHORAD, Hybneryt, Proteus (which really are dollar per shot) and the high-end systems using AHEAD ammunition like e.g. Skyshield, Skynex, RAPIDfire, Tridon Mk.2 etc. because they are two distinct categories.
One step closer to making Dune-style combat a reality!
If more expensive ammo allows for less shots per kill you may come out AHEAD, it isn't just the cost of the shells but also the logistics to get them to the front.
I have updated the parenthetical on the gun to mention that it can be more expensive with advanced ammo, which is something I missed. I suspect the cost for AHEAD is because of limited production runs rather than something totally inherent in the concept.
Seema rather difficult to be triumphalist about drones in Ukraine these days. They are directly responsible for 2/3 of battlefield casualties, not even counting recon, artillery spotting, or all kinds of support roles from mine laying to supply and medevac.
I think the question is whether drones will be this decade's:
Given the success Israel and Ukraine have had on deep strikes with drones already smuggled into their opponent’s country, and the comparative porosity of American borders, I’m not so sure about this.
Like, what are the odds China hasn’t already smuggled in a semi trailer or two of drones to deploy in Minot or Barksdale if things really get hot?
@Doctorpat
I think part of the problem is that “drone” covers everything from a quadcopter that it can buy on Amazon for $250 to the Global Hawk.
If I had to bet, the quadcopter end of the spectrum is probably in the canister shot category, or perhaps a bit short of that. They just occupy a weird place on the price-performance curve for top tier militaries.
@Anonymous I am not saying that AHEAD is not the future, but it is expensive right now.
@redRover
"Like, what are the odds China hasn’t already smuggled in a semi trailer or two of drones to deploy in Minot or Barksdale if things really get hot?"
Then it is one off saturation attack where lasers will not really help you a lot, because they will shoot couple off them until they reach the destination. Against that it will be far better to have one Iron dome battery for each major military base.
Lasers are good in extreme atrition war, e.g. fighting Houthis in Red Sea, because not only that using ESSMs is not good deal, but even US way (APKWS) or Italian way (76mm OTO Melara goes brrrr) is too expensive. Then having 300kw laser that will shoot down anything in 50km radius for pennies is very good deal.
@Doctorpat
That's a good way of putting it, along with the additional question of "where along the submarine adoption curve are we?" To be honest, I don't know. I'm reasonably bearish on small strike drones because I suspect some of the systems listed here will make the cheap ones effectively obsolete.
@Redrover
I think the odds of China doing that are pretty low. Two factors separate China from Israel and Ukraine on this: first, the secret in the actual cases didn't have to hold for very long, and second, the Chinese are not in a shooting war with the target, which both Israel and Ukraine were. Getting caught with your hand that far in the cookie jar (and that kind of thing is well outside the norms of spycraft) by someone who isn't already shooting at you is pretty bad for your diplomatic position. And you have to trust that nobody slips up for years, not weeks/months.
@Stupidbro
You clearly do not understand lasers. No way a 300 kW laser has 50 km range. My math says more like 15. But it also says that at short range, it goes through a lot of plastic very, very fast. I'd guess that the time taken to kill a drone is a second or less, possibly much less depending on pointing speed. And if your drones are capable of less than 100 mph/50 m/s, then that's a pile of dead drones that are equal to what you could expect before Iron Dome runs out of ammo.
@bean
Conceded as it relates to Ukraine, and I suppose it was letting the lurid get ahead of the likely.
However, I believe Israel had done a great deal of preparatory work before commencing hostilities against Iran. (Though on the other hand they’ve always been in at least a moderately warm conflict with Iran).
All that being said, I think the basic threat type (short range drones launched in the rear, rather than long range strikes by higher capability drones) seems like it still points towards higher capability systems even in low threat areas.
@redRover
I'd bet that there wasn't any specific hardware in Iran until maybe days before the attack. Planning definitely happened earlier, but frankly if Iran had found out and started talking about "the Zionists were going to put a drone base near Tehran", I would have guessed that they were making things up.
I see your point, but don't think it means lasers absolutely everywhere. The DoD has reported drone incursions at 100 bases, and if China tries this against 100 bases, they'll definitely get found out. Should Minot, Barksdale and Whitman get several lasers each? Yes. Does this mean that there's no room for a smaller base to get a cheap anti-surveillance counter-drone system? No, those still have their place.
Thinking this over more, I think my initial point on per-shot costs in the OP might still be pretty strong, depending on exactly what the costs are. Yes, dealing with a saturation attack will mean parking more capital in the anti-drone system than you would if the only mission is to shoot down the occasional wanderer, but that can still make sense depending on the exact costs. If counter-saturation takes 40 interceptors on standby and we don't expect China to get in position with a truck full of drones more than once, my $100k base/$10k drone system still looks pretty competitive to a million-dollar laser.
Unless I'm Canada or Mexico, the only inland target I think worth attacking with drones would be the B-2 bomber base. (Or B-21 as they start to come into service.) Stop any immediate response by these very long range and dangerous aircraft. It might be nice to hit the B-1s and B-52s as well, but those are much easier to defend against in whatever place the Evil Plan is underway.
I suggest the risk is more from a shipping container in a commercial port suddenly attacking the US Navy. Seattle, San Diego, Honolulu, Yokosuka. Small drones can't sink or seriously damage a warship, but they could wreck the air wing on a carrier deck, or smash the flat panel radars on the escorts.
@bean
Ok, then it makes slightly more sense, but then there is a problem that drones that slow (like quadrocopers used by Ukraine) can fly 1 meter above the ground, so you would need to find a place where you can see anywhere arond the base, so more realistically you would need 3-4 these lasers.
@bean
"if Iran had found out and started talking about “the Zionists were going to put a drone base near Tehran”, I would have guessed that they were making things up."
To be far if current administration started talking about “the China were going to put a drone base near San Antonio”, would anyone even be bothered by it? I think the world changed a lot and things that were couple years unthinkable and made a huge international backlash are now just normal. I do not think that if tomorrow someone finds 4 containers full of drones near US military base it would end by anything more than couple of angry tweets.
@Hugh Fisher
I would personally say that there is a large amount of inland targets you could attack to heavilly cripple USAF: 1) AWACS and Global Hawks fleet, 2) TANKERS FLEET, that is huge (and as a bonus, they are usually not stored in hangars), 3) radar instalations in mainland. And these are only the military targets. The supply chains of weapons are fragile, if you burn down one carefully selected factory you can stop JASSM production for a year.
@Hugh Fisher
I'll just say those things are surprisingly resilient. So if your plan is to disable escorts that way...might want to come up with a better plan.
Also, there's a thing I notice a lot here where a lot of people are discussing drones and thinking of effects that drones can achieve kinematically, when many of these effects are possible already via cyber fires in some cases with a lot less effort.
@redRover
Or even, in some of the more breathless discussions, in ways indistinguishable from the P-1 Strela, introduce in 1955!
@StupidBro, there's a difference between we could do this and we should do this. I think (unless you're Canada and Mexico) a sneaky Ukraine/Israel style drone attack is not worth it for most targets.
Suppose I, as head of the Emutopian Evil Strategy department, are working on how Emutopia can invade the neighbouring country of Kiwiland. Our plan is for a quick invasion in numbers, achieve our goal, and then declare a ceasefire and call for negotiations. Our priority is to stop the USA from intervening in the early stages.
Any sneaky drone attack on the US mainland is difficult to set up. We have to establish local operation centers, arrange to smuggle in high explosive payloads, probably bribe or blackmail some locals. The more we have to do, the more likely it is that someone, somewhere, will make a mistake and that leads to the whole operation being detected.
One sneaky drone strike on the B-2 base is expensive and risky, but the payoff is worth it. We don't really have any other way to defend ourselves against B-2 strikes, and they could be hitting us very hard on day one.
AWACS and tankers are vulnerable, but there are a lot of them at many different bases. We'd have to set up a lot of sneaky drone attacks, vastly multiplying the chance of something going wrong - which in turn vastly multiplies the chance that we won't get the B-2s.
And there are even more AWACs and tanker aircraft in NATO and allied countries like Japan. In a pinch, they would be available to the USAF. It wouldn't be ideal, there would be arguments and delays, but it would work. So we're taking a massive risk for very likely not much effect, even if we successfully hit half the bases in the USA.
The alternative to the sneaky drone strike is just to buy long range SAM batteries, or long range AAMs for our fighters. Which are all useful things we would want anyway. A sneaky drone strike only works once. A SAM battery keeps on being useful even when the enemy knows about it.
I did list Canada and Mexico as exceptions, where presumably the goal would be to invade the USA itself.
(And I suggest changing your handle, nick, alias. As an Australian I appreciate self-deprecating modesty, but I think you are overdoing it by calling yourself "stupid".)
@Stupidbro
Lasers, being LOS weapons, are always going to have some limits regarding range, and that might require multiple lasers for many bases, although it's worth noting that the high-value stuff tends to be concentrated and there's no particular reason you can't put the laser on a tower. That said, I'm not sure flying at 1' is actually all that practical because at that altitude you run into everything. And yes, you can climb above each one, but that's going to really slow you down and require that you get the "not running into things" rate very close to 100%. And frankly I'm not sure how good a drone's camera will be at spotting, say, an anti-drone net. (Actually, I'm now wondering if something like the old Unrotated Projectile might not be a good idea for dealing with drones. )
I have no clue what would happen right now. Nor does China. It could be angry tweets, or it could be the US getting serious. Not sure that's a risk worth taking. (Note that it might be if China is planning to kick things off, but that's rather different from "they are in the country now".)
@Hugh
You're right about the size of the tanker fleet, less so about AWACS. There's less than two dozen of those, and almost all of them are based at Tinker, except for two squadrons in Alaska and Japan. Obviously, some are deployed, but you could do a lot of damage to US air power that way.
@Hugh Fisher
The problem with your asumptions, in my opinion based on the Ukraine reality, is that half of the problems you mentioned does not exist.
There is one problematic part of this operation: Get the containers into the US. If you have them in some base (even one) in the US then there is nothing hard on getting them to the military instalations. The drivers in the Russia even did not know about what they were transporting. You do not need to make a local operation centers, you do not need to bribe people across dozens of US states. You need one thing: Find out how to safelly get into the US couple of ISO contatiners. That is why are these attacks so scary.
Outside of the US, only the European countries have a larger tanker fleet and it is still not that much, +-70 full size tankers and +-160 A400M which are problematic because they are turboprop. The US needs hundred of tankers for war in South China sea. And the biggest problem is that at least in the EU there is now conclusion that in the Chino-US war Europe will be militarily neutral until the Chinese will land at Alaska (this is hyperbole). And this will not change in the next ten years even if the US re-elected Reagan at 2028.
AWACS is the exact same song, only Japan has a noticible AWACS fleet outside the US and Europe and that is only E-2s.
There could be a lot of Switchblades fired from a roof of one 20ft ISO container, so you need one for base. You would need 20-30 containers and even if half of the targets were destroyed you would still criple USAF to not be able to have a war in South China sea. And 20 trucks is about the number used in Ukrainian "pavučina" operation, so it is not some high number.
@Hugh Fisher
To my alias: I use StupidBro often and it is result of humor between me and my brother, if it was offensive to someone I can change it.
@bean
If we are talking about small quadrocopers I think that flying autonomously and dodging the obstacles is a current capability and I am pretty sure that you can teach them how to detect anti-drone net. But 10m high anti-drone net around the base forcing attackers to fly higher would probably solve it.
I don't actually think an inside-the-country drone strike is all that risky. You'd stockpile the (mostly, perhaps entirely, legal) "precursor" tech, which could even be bought in-country; you'd only need to smuggle either a few sensitive components or none at all if you were willing to accept relatively poor quality. You'd have the various components procured by agents or even unwitting accomplices and the attack plan would only be delivered to assets when you were actually ready to carry it out (so that ~no agents on hostile soil would be aware of the scheme).
Suffice to say that I think netting or similar unhardened shelters are badly needed, particularly for valuable assets (bombers, tankers, AWACS). It seems to that unhardened shelters are valuable for denying enemy intelligence from recon satellite imagery anyway, letting you play shell games with aircraft.
I'm not exactly a drone minimizer - I definitely suspect that drones will change the face of warfare (again) - but I also think that the countermeasures mean that they won't be quite the overwhelming revolution in military affairs that some predict. The APKWS and similar systems seem very promising to me as a solution for larger drones and cruise missiles.
I wonder if the upshot of counter-drone lasers (plus drone surveillance, laser-guided munitions, and cheap, distributable IR sensors) means that we will see future waves of drone/missile attacks that coincide with poor weather, where lasers and optical sensors are degraded. It's possible that this is happening now, I haven't been checking to see if Russia/Ukraine have been launching their missiles around it, although I do believe it factors into frontline troop operations.
@StupidBro Japan also has four E-767, along with the E-2s.
@Emilio
You are completly right, also Australia and South Korea have a large AWACSes. The thing is that these countries have tiny fleets and can realistically give one AWACS to the US if they need it, so it really will not help if 17 out of 19 US AWACSes blew up at Tinker AB.
The US Navy has E-2s on every carrier so taking out all the E-3s won't mean the US has to borrow from allies.
@Hugh Fisher,
I think an issue that hasn't been raised is that IF Emutopia was launching an attack on Kiwilandia and needed the USA to stay at home until it was finished, one thing they do NOT want to do is kick uncle sam in the B21s just when he's looking for an excuse to intervene.
So said drones would have have "Property of Pandastan" written all over them, and several programed to safely land in front of news reporters and internet influencers so that the media knows exactly who is responsible before the USAF knows there was an attack.
This is helped immeasurably by the way that all the components in said drones were actually made in Pandastan in the first place.
Very different from Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Iran where the revenge attack would have been launched against Ukraine or Israel respectively regardless of evidence linking the attack to anywhere else.
So too, if an airbase in (spins roulette wheel) India gets dronestruck from carrier trucks tomorrow, there are probably a couple of likely suspects and so we'd expect false flags (suspected or real) to be a major factor.
@Pete Hegseth (Anonymous)
E-2s are really not a substitute for E-3 or E-7 :D
@StupidBro, now you are being stupid.
A navy E-2 is not a direct 1:1 replacement for an E-3 or E-7, sure. But it is a very capable AWACS aircraft. Is an E-2 half as good as an E-7? Two-thirds? I don't know, I doubt anyone does, but we do know from various air conflicts dating back to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s that having one aircraft with a longer range radar staying high and back to concentrate on "the big picture" is a good thing.
In the context being discussed, where the USAF loses a good chunk of its own AWACS aircraft, having E-2s will still give the USAF a large force multiplier effect.
@DoctorPat
I've been assuming that the sneaky drone attack would be launched by someone convinced that the USA would get involved no matter what. Would be nice to think that other people learned from the history of Pearl Harbor that attacking the USA just because you think they might get involved is a Bad Idea.
But yeah, I can see the drones and misdirection being used by a country that does want to kick Uncle Sam but not start a full-on conflict. A country that had, purely hypothetically, recently been bombed by the USA and couldn't hit back any other way might decide on a sneaky drone attack with purely symbolic value to make the news.
@Hugh Fisher
I am definitively stupid, but sometimes it is just me using too much hyperboles. 1) I actually do not think that chinese attack would destroy all US AWACS. 2) I do not think that US would not somewhere get couple of them. 3) I do not think that E-2 or space based assets can not particullary replace them.
What I think is that if China somehow destroy e.g. 17 out of 19 US E-3s that it would massively cripled USAF capability to fight war in South-east Asia. They would definitely somehow improvise, but large AWACS are essential part of western doctrine and it is nearly impossible to fully substitute them. And I would probably attack Tinker base more likely than Whiteman.
@Hugh Fisher
It's amusing to think that Japan might have done Pearl Harbour with all their planes painted with Hammer and Sickles to send the USA off against the wrong enemy...
But even with such a surprise attack, a couple of Japanese planes were going to be shot down, and you can't expect a shot down Japanese pilot to convincingly play a Russian for too long.
Not to mention the fact that a Zero didn't look like a Ilyushin Il-2.
And culturally, I don't know how well IJN would go with concealing their identity and pretending to be one of the lower orders.
It seems worth pointing out that we use the E-3 fleet hard, and don't keep 17 of 19 parked at Tinker. I know some people from that community, and can ask for estimates tomorrow.
I asked around, and apparently more of the E-3 fleet than I realized is at Tinker at any given time, because they are old and frequently broken. Well over half, don't know exact specifics. But I do think some of them are hangared for maintenance (but obviously can't be flown tomorrow).
"War elephants. Spectacular at first, and effective against amateurs, but against disciplined troops who’ve been trained in techniques for dealing with them they really aren’t worth the expense."
I don't think this is likely true. Both the Ukrainians and the Russians have faced this threat for literal years, a super highly motivated to find a solution, and ... not so much. It dominates the battlefield like nothing since the invention of artillery. It causes most casualties. It dominates strategy. And yet years later neither side can find a solution.
If I was making armored tanks, I'd find a new line of work.
Kit:
The Russian (and presumably Ukrainian, but I'm going off of what's reported on Ukrainian drone ops) electronic warfare measures are extremely effective against drones - that's part of what's motivated the switch to fiber-optics, as I understand it.
The problem isn't that countermeasures didn't work, it's more that drones are extremely cheap to just procure anyway, since there will ~always be edge cases where EW weapons are ineffective.
It seems like the large-scale use of fiber-optics is still relatively recent, so I think it's too soon to deduce exactly how things will break down in that regard, but they already have disadvantages compared to radio-controlled drones.
Now, I'm not saying that drones will be useless going forward - I think they definitely change the battlespace considerably. I just don't think that drones will be the only useful weapon going forward, either - the Russians and Ukrainians are still using tanks!
Suvorov:
The Russians don't use tanks "very often". Not zero, but not very often.
"They almost don’t use aviation."
https://www.twz.com/news-features/inside-the-fight-to-stop-russias-biggest-advance-in-a-year
Drone saturation near the front line often forces Ukrainian soldiers to walk up to 20 km to reach positions undetected. Russian logistics are reportedly worse, so they are now using pack animals for resupply.
https://militarnyi.com/en/articles/the-kill-zone-of-modern-warfare-size-and-structure-control-and-means-of-destruction-survival-and-shifting-the-lines/
@Bean
I do not find this so much surprising. There is not so many places to have E-3s deployed if nothing is happening. There is more E-3s in Europe than in the US. And in South-east Asia and Middle-east you can use carrier E-2s or allied AWACS for emergency until E-3 arrive.
@Kit
“They almost don’t use aviation.”
That is true, but you are missing the reason. Russian air force (except Su-25) is basically unable to do any land-attack mission except of striking some pre-known coordinates. Even the things which were done in 90s by Panavia Tornado and F-111 Aadvark are mostly unfeasible for modern Russian aviation. The second problem is that most operation happends during night or rain when Russian fighter jets are not really doing well.
On the other side, Ukraine did not have something that would anyone in the NATO considered working Air Force before war and now it has some 40 years old F-16 last modernized 20 years ago. And they have freshly trained pilots. So both parties are not really in position to use air force.
And this is the biggest problem of doing some broad conclusions about future of drone warfare from War in Ukraine. The main weapon in fighting drones, in my humble opinion, will be the air force and in War in Ukraine both parties have really terrible air forces. E.g. delivery of just two Saab 340 AEW&C was a game changer for Ukrainian defense against drones and these are very-low cost, 30 years old and without major upgrades. How big gamechenger would be E-7 Wedgetail with working air force and APKWS rockets...
@Kit
I think it's worth noting that neither Russia nor Ukraine is really a first-rate technical power with lots of skilled engineers to throw at this kind of problem. They're both fighting for survival, and the return on throwing engineers at other problems is higher in the short term. All the directed energy stuff is the kind of thing that neither side can really develop themselves, and which is still not in wide enough service to have reached them second-hand. I suspect this war will be seen as the heyday of the drone, before the full suite of countermeasures is assembled and it becomes a normal part of the arsenal.
@StupidBro
There are lots of people who would like to have AWACS coverage. The person I talked to said it was mostly driven by maintenance issues, which are apparently horrible.
And AIUI, Russian glide bombs are/were a significant portion of the deep strike capability. Operating forward is harder, but that's probably a combination of limited competence and not having the full suite of SEAD tools the US and its allies do.
@Kit
Re: the TWZ interview, that should be taken in context of, essentially, a single battle on a single front. The Ukrainians have complained before about how effective Russian aviation is; the fact that the Russians aren't committing air assets to this front at this time doesn't mean that aircraft are obsolete, particularly when they have been used effectively by both sides throughout the war.
Likewise with tanks: in the interview, Dmytryk reveals that they fill a niche role within the Russian tactic, as the foremost point in an advance, opening the lines for exploitation by infantry - which is the classic role of the tank!
You've appealed to the Russian and Ukrainian experience on the front, but this actually goes to show that tanks are still quite valuable, even if drones increase the effectiveness of infantry against them. Indeed, if tanks were in fact obsolete, Russia would pivot away from procuring them; instead, the Russians are (supposedly, anyway) ramping up tank production, possibly to restore their stockpiles because they assess they will be useful in a future war.
Now, your point about the problems reaching the front I think actually reveals a way in which drones may be in the long run even more significant even than as munitions: for ISR. I suspect that's also part of why the Russians use tanks rarely, since concentrations of force risk being spotted by drones and then struck, possibly by drones but also by conventional weapons such as ballistic missiles. Under a persistent ISR stare, you don't concentrate forces (of any kind).
However it's also worth noting that Ukraine has an ISR picture from NATO that would be challenged in a peer war (Russia's not shooting down our satellites, AWACS, JSTARS etc.)
@StupidBro: I think air cover will be important against "one way munitions" like the Shahed but I can't see fast movers being very useful against small, slow quadcopters-with-RPGs.
If you are using a $100M jet, that costs $25,000 per hour of flight time, guided by a $1B AWACS that cost $50,000 per flight hour, to shoot down armed quadcopters ... that's pretty tough.
The Ukrainians have been using crop dusters with a dude and a shotgun in the back. That's also pretty tough.
The correct answer is to use a faster quadcopter in suicide mode guided by AI, but that's not currently super effective and stll probably costs more than the quadcopter that's attacking.
Drones are producing 70% of all casualties in the war. That's more than infantry, artillery, air strikes, and land mines all combined and doubled!
Does anyone here think we can produce more drones per day than China?
@Suvorov
If you considered it an current Ukraine-Russian positional warfare then air force is not really usefull on the front, but because the front looks like it looks like.
Just imagine that now the USA would do the offensive in Ukraine. First, there would be F-35s in the air (maybe even just on Ukraine controled territory). Modern AESA radars are more than capable of seeing quadrocopters from dozens of kilometers. AESA radars on F-35 and Typhoon (British variant) can also work as extremely powerfull directed jammers, so they will jam all the drones. The quadrocopter will be seen immediatelly after launch and get StormBreakered. EW suit can locate the command station of the drones and StormBreakered it. If you switch on radar stations or some more powerfull data link to get through jamming you will immediatelly get AARGMed.
@kit
You need to have between 1-2 advanced AWCACS airborne at the battlefield size of front on Ukraine. And unlike popular beliefs the drones that are used in Ukraine are pretty expensive. Cost for drones with fiber optic cables are between 2-5k dollars. Military datalinks are even more expensive and the ones without will be just jammed out of existence. And you can Stormbreaker command centers out of existence.
If we are talking about long-range loitering munition, then it is completely different. Shaheds cost about 100-200k per drone, so it is pretty cheap to shoot dozens of them out of one airplane that costs 20k per hour by rockets that costs 15k each.
@Kit:
The 70% of casualties number I believe is for a given period of time, and will likely fluctuate. (They also include drones generally, that's not a statement about FPV drones alone, as I understand it.) It doesn't surprise me that the numbers are very high when the lines are static and both sides have burned through large stockpiles of shells. But those numbers might look very different in different circumstances.
And speaking of different circumstances: the drone war in Ukraine will not fully translate over into any Pacific War, since most drones used in Ukraine are too short-ranged to reach Taiwan, let alone US fleets operating well offshore. Weapons like the Shahed will be more relevant, but against stationary ground targets. A carrier battle group will likely be operating at least 600 - 800 miles from the Chinese mainland, meaning Shahed launches will take six to eight hours to reach that, if that is their target target - in which time, even at a leisurely 25 miles per hour, the carrier battle group will be 150 or 200 miles away from where they were when the Shaheds were launched. This doesn't mean that a cheap "drone"/cruise missile like the Shahed is useless at all, but it does mean the Chinese can't just rely on printing cheap drones to win a Pacific naval war. They'll need expensive kit: antiship missiles, search/patrol aircraft, etc.
Much more relevant to the Pacific theater in my mind, is the results from Ukraine of what I believe bean has been calling "unsubmerged torpedoes" or something similar: drone suicide attack boats, and stealthy cruise missiles. The results in both cases are, I think, very bad for China: drone suicide vessels are short-ranged but have been at least somewhat effective against Russian ships, making them potentially decent defensive weapons for Taiwan, but not particularly helpful against the distant American carrier group.
Similarly, stealthy Western cruise missiles were able to strike targets that should have been covered by Russian air defenses. Given the quality of Russian air defenses (which is actually good! They've been effective against Ukrainian aircraft!) I think that China should be very concerned about American LSRAM and JASSM strikes against ships and surface targets.
@StupidBro: I share your confidence that American air power would, at least in the short term, break up the positional warfare on the front in Ukraine. However I'm not sure about your specific examples: * I am not sure that hitting single quadcopters/quadcopter operators (remember, a "command center for drones" could be a single guy) is actually a good or sustainable use for American precision-guided munitions (agree with you on APKWS for Shaheds, tho!) * I don't share your confidence in the AARGM, given that the Russians were reported in 2023 by RUSI to be shooting down "most" HARMs fired by Ukraine. I'm not saying it's useless, but the Russians have countermeasures. * It's unclear to me if the F-35 can innately jam quadcopters; I agree that the AESA is a very powerful and flexible tool but I'm not sure it its designed to operate in the same frequency bands as quadcopters - it doesn't look like it is supposed to, but I'm not sure how flexible it can be, and haven't done a deep dive into it. If anyone knows and can talk about it, I'd be interested to learn.
With drone countermeasures, a criticism of the US military (and most other western militaries) is not that they're preparing for the last war, it's that they are preparing for the war ten years from now.
Lasers/Directed Energy Weapons almost certainly will be the preferred drone countermeasure of choice ... but they're not available now. The Ukrainian cropduster relying on Pavel with a shotgun is very crude in comparison, but at least the Ukrainians have them. If US ground forces suddenly found themselves in a conflict, PowerPoints about the future of laser SHORAD won't help.
@Suvorov
"Given the quality of Russian air defences (which is actually good!"
"Russians were reported in 2023 by RUSI to be shooting down “most” HARMs"
Russian air defense is good and not good at the same time. As everything in Russian army, they have decent technologies that they inherit from Soviet Union. KUB, BUK, S-300 have lots of problems (the biggest is that they are very unreliable), but ,paired with enormous quantity that Soviets made, it makes a good air defence against planes. They shoot lot of interceptors, they explode somewhere where the plane is and some fragment from their ridculously massive warheads will hit the plane.
The bigger problem is with modern technologies and anti-missile defence. The problem is that Russia is very bad at electronics. After Ukraine started to use cruise missiles it was found that Active radar homing interceptors of S-400 are completely useless. The old semi-active ones work, but the target is too small to be actually hit by fragments from explosion far away. I have never heard there would be some problems with Russian shooting down any missile, particullary HARM and this is area I am very well informed on. HARM was a big letdown in war on Ukraine but not because of the missile. There is no way how to give any information from MiG to HARM if they are in the air, so you needed to shoot it in the direction where you thought the enemy radar is and hope that it is online.
I would not completely agree with you in Chinese question (I agree with 90% of your points, but not with conclusion). The thing I see with many people in Western european militaries and even more in US military is that they extremely overestimate Russian capabilities (good job, Russian propaganda) and at the same time extremely underestimate Chinese capabilities.
The air, drone and missile defence is mostly about electronics and I do not think that we are far ahead against China. Based on newer sources it is probable that J-10 did not shoot down Rafale, but the Pakistani-India war still showed that the Chinese can do modern weapons. And I do not thing that things like semi-submerged drones would work against China. I think the only chance for US to win war in the Pacific are submarines (if Trump will not piss of Macron so much, that he will sell Captor-4 sonar and Barracuda submarines to China) and that is the one weapon we have find exactly zero information from Ukraine conflict.
@Hugh Fisher
The problem is, in my opinion, who exactly have these capabilities now and how would US forces find themselves in this situation? You can not say: "What would US Army do if it was in situation of Ukrainian army?" because the plan A is to never get into the situation of Ukrainian army. And US Army had some defence against drones better than cropdusters including M-SHORAD, M-LIDS, MADIS and Coyote. There are also Apaches and F-16s that, in case of Israel, proved to be the ultimate anti-drone weapon.
RUSI sent guys over and talked to Ukrainians, I think they know what they are talking about. The same report also discusses the effectiveness of Russian air defenses against GMLRS, so I doubt the problem is that the Russians are assuming errant HARMs are being intercepted.
Do you have a source for this? RUSI's "Meatgrinder" report also discusses Russia making a hit with an active missile (at least I assume it's active given the context of a "post-apex lock") which doesn't sound "completely useless" (although it's not clear in their report which system fired the missile.)
I agree that Chinese stuff is likely on par or nearly on par with US kit in many areas. I also agree that submarines are a very potent weapon, but if you do napkin math on the B-1 + LRASM combo you'll start to wonder if the States couldn't win a war by just spamming LRASMs until we sink every single Chinese ship. (The main problem with that is the slow procurement rate of the LRASM, unfortunately.)
About drones in Ukraine
They cause 70% of casualties. People who think this is not a revolution are missing that number, which is more than double all other causes combined. Revolution.
@Suvorov
My main source on Ukraine is ATM (semi-official source of Czech army and it is very good on situation in Ukraine and Russian army), where there were three articles at 2024 about current situation of Russian air defence and impact on Czech armed force. There are some czech online sources that use it as a source but there are usually not many deep informations from it, so the articles are more like: "S-400 is a disaster".
If I know Russia completely abondoned using S-400 interceptors in the missile defence of S-400 radars and paired them with a between 1-3 Tor systems (because somehow 40 years old Tor is better than its succesor Pantsir). So the current tactic is, that if the Ukrainians fire a missile on S-400 it immediately send the informations to Tor tracking radar and then shoots down its own. Russian then drive slowly the radar couple hundred meters away without doing all of the packing. At the overhelming majority the HARM even fails to lock (because it did not get any prior information on radars location) or it locks on Tor search radar or hit the original location. Tor is relativelly capable to shoot it down in very short range.
I think that B-1 and LRASM is genius combo. But I do not think it would be just as easy as shooting down Chinese ships from 600 km distance. If you let them to have AWACS planes over the fleet and fighter jets in 200 km radius they will just shoot down most of the LRASM by their air force. So it will definitely also need for Chinese to not get total aerial dominance over battlefield.
@Kit
About the IEDs in Afghanistan. They cause 70% of casualties. Revolution.
@stupidbro
Maybe they are. In a non-conventional war, fighting gorilla warriors all day long, it would not surprise me if IEDs were revolutionary. And in a more classic, stand up conventional war, that drones are a revolution.
Both kinds of wars have new technology and new tactics, and neither one seems to emphasize the tank, the jet fighter, or artillery. Which is too bad if want America to win, since we are really good at those.
@StupidBro
Interesting, thanks.
What you are describing (to me) sounds like the Russian integrated and layered defense IADS working as designed. In a layered integrated air defense system, point-defense weapons (like the Tor) defend high-priority targets. The Tor was designed from the get-go to shoot down guided munitions, and it makes sense to preserve larger and more expensive munitions for larger and more expensive targets (such as aircraft).
And as a point of fact, I'm not sure that, as deployed, the Pantsir is really "newer" than the Tor, except in branding. The Pantsir is the successor to the Tunguska which is actually older than the Tor. The Tor itself has been upgraded since its introduction, but retained its name. Wikipedia, citing Oryx, reports that the version most commonly lost in Ukraine is the Tor M2, which was announced in 2007 - making it roughly contemporary to the Pantsir (if not later - the Pantsir was designed in the 1990s but entered service in 2012, so the Tor M2 may in fact be more modernized than the original Pantsir design). Although the Pantsir has had upgraded variants designed as well, Oryx indicates that it is the original version of the Pantsir that has been lost most frequently in Ukraine. Thus it appears to me that the Tor and Pantsir actually deployed in Ukraine are roughly contemporaneous in modernization.
Yes! I imagine the Gunslinger will complicate that.
@Suvorov
"and it makes sense to preserve larger and more expensive munitions"
This is really not the case. The 9M96 interceptor was meant mainly for aerial defence against missile strikes. And it just does not work, which was shown multiple times by S-400 destroyed by just one missile after firing multiple interceptors. And it is really not likely that Russia would be trying to spare the ammunition, because they use between 4-12 Tor interceptors on each HARM and still some pass through, but they either hit a ground or hit a Tor.
This is more complex and not really solvable problem for Russia air defence, because the core of the problem is that you need to completely change the technology. You need a missile that have working active homing -> you need to have good electronics -> it is Russia. Current improvisation works against Ukraine, but would be pretty useless against USAF with lot of modern missiles that can track the target even after they switch off. Especially if you ad jamming.
To Pantsir vs Tor. Of course Tor has modernisations but it is still very simillar system to the original one. Pantsir was biggest letdown of Russian military technology. But it proves the biggest problem of Russian army: The things that works well are modernized things from the Soviet Union.
@Kit
To your arguments:
Fighter jets:
A) Ukraine is trying to get as much western fighter jets and AWACS as possible.
B) Israel bullied Iranian drones so much with their fighter jets and attack hellicopters that they after couple of days stoped to use them and used only the oldschool balistic missiles (because, unlike drones, they at least sometimes pass through the air defence)
Artillery:
In War on Ukraine artillery is resposible for between 70-80% of casualities, maybe not in the last month, but in total. Ukraine plans to build 480 Bohdana howitzers for this year with another hundreds supplied from allied nations. So they are probably still pretty usefull.
Tanks:
Yes, tanks are now not really used a lot, but mainly because the conflict is now basically a static trench war. That is like to argue that tanks were not usefull in ending years of Irag-Iran war, so they definitely would not be usefull in War in Persian gulf (something that lot of people were saying at 1991).
@StupidBro
The 9M96 is a dual-role weapon, as I understand it.
RUSI notes that Russia has typically had an adjustment period to new equipment - for instance they went from having a very poor performance against the GLMRS to intercepting a fair number of the munitions. Similarly we know that they can intercept the ATACMs ballistic missile but do not always do so successfully. This is also true of the Patriot - the correct conclusion here is not that the Patriot (or S-400) "does not work" and more that there are limitations on its performance, which is true of all equipment. It seems quite possible to me that the S-400 (and Pantsir) are disappointing relative to their expected performance, but without knowing the exact parameters of each engagement I would hesitate to declare a specific missile as inoperable or useless. My priors are that Russian equipment varies considerably based on the circumstances, with it increasing in effectiveness over time throughout the duration of the war as it adapts.
Now, with that being said, given the range of the claimed engagement I referenced, I would bet that the missile RUSI mentioned is not the 9M96 but rather perhaps the the 40N6E, which also has an active radar seeker. Quite possible the 9M96 is a dud but that Russia has other active guided missiles that are still effective.
The HARM (although it doesn't have the cool new millimeter wave radar) remembers the target location after it is switched off, and the Ukrainians are now flying with modern jamming equipment. I'm interested to read more about the F-16's performance; it seems little is reliably known so far.
Now, we know from the F-35 deployment to Spangdahlem in 2022 that Russian air-defense radars aren't necessarily properly identifiable even by the latest US military aircraft, so while I share your general confidence in the effectiveness of US air power I don't share your confidence that Russian equipment would be "useless."
I'm not sure it would be wrong to describe the Pantsir as a modernized Tunguska?