Budget drones in Ukraine are changing the perception of war

The war between Russia and Ukraine turns many high-tech military systems into gilded trifles. That’s why both sides are increasingly relying on low-tech alternatives – blunt artillery shells instead of expensive missiles and drones instead of fighter jets.

“This war is a war of drones, they are a superweapon here,” said Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Newsweek Earlier this year.

In early May, Russia attributed the Kremlin bombings to drones sent by Ukraine to assassinate Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Ukraine denied this accusation. True, the mission to Moscow was fruitless, but it is surprising that it was a success at all.

Like fighter jets, military drones were cheap at first and then became more expensive. However, unlike the fighters, they fell in price again.

Drones fly slower than F-35s, carry smaller payloads, beckon with ground fire, and only last a few days before being shot down from the sky. But for the most part, the price is right: The Chinese DJI Mavic 3, used by both Russia and Ukraine for surveillance and bomb delivery, costs about $2,000. You can get 55,000 of them for the price of one F-35. In addition, they are much easier to maintain: when they break, you throw them away, and there is no pilot to be driven through the streets of the enemy capital.

Clouds of smoke rise on a flat-panel monitor over a hit target as a Ukrainian member of Task Force Adam operates a drone to locate Russian positions near the town of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, on April 16, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sergei Shestak/AFP/Getty Images

You can do a lot with 55,000 drones. Throw them at the enemy, and one in five will be able to break through. Put them together and toss them into a flock like the muttering of starlings and they’ll overwhelm the air defenses. Even individually, they can be formidable. One effective tactic is to place the drone to “idle” near the point where targets are expected to appear, and then rush there and drop a small bomb. Videos posted on social media allegedly show Ukrainian remote operators dropping grenades on Russian troops or through the hatches of Russian armored vehicles. This gives a lot of recoil, as is often the case with brand new weapons.

Over time, as a weapon system provokes countermeasures, its designers respond with improvements, and gold plating accumulates.

In 1938, one British Spitfire cost £9,500 to produce, which is equivalent to about US$1 million today. In the early 1950s, an F-86 Saber in the US averaged about $250,000 each, now about $3 million. The cost of the F-35, a modern American fighter jet, starts at $110 million. Take a look at the modern fighter: the hypertrophied product of the longest arms race since the dreadnoughts.

“In 2054, only one aircraft will be purchased for the entire defense budget,” Norman Augustine, a former undersecretary of the army, wrote back in 1984. “This aircraft will have to be split between the Air Force and the Navy 3-1/2 days a week, with the exception of leap year, when it will be available to the Marines as an extra day.”

Like fighter jets, military drones were cheap at first and then became more expensive. However, unlike the fighters, they fell in price again.

“Complex technologies have become more accessible, and with advances in AI and the potential to create crowds, there is more emphasis on quantity.”
— Kelly A. Greiko, Stimson Center.

Back in 1981, Israel sent modest surveillance camera gadgets into the war against Syria, and it had some effect. The US military embraced this concept, and in their hands these simple drones became Predators and Reapers, bomber-sized machines that flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, each costing millions of dollars (if not tens of millions). ). But a technologically powerful country should not consider the price; The United States, of course not.

“We’re a technology nation, we love technology solutions,” says Kelly A. Grieco, strategic analyst at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, DC. – It all starts with the Cold War: Looking at the Soviet Union, their advantage was in numbers and in their close approach to Germany, the famous Fulda Gorge. So we wanted technology to compensate for the Soviet numerical advantage.”

Much of the F-35’s value comes from stealth technology, which allows it to elude even highly sophisticated radars. The old dreadnoughts needed cannons of ever greater range – long enough to shoot beyond the horizon at last – so that the other side could not hold them at arm’s length and bombard them with shells the size of small cars.

The arms race tends to end when the long peacetime build-up finally ends, as happened in Ukraine.

“The nature of war has returned to quantity,” says Grieko. “Complex technologies have become more accessible, and with advances in AI and the potential to create crowds, there is more emphasis on quantity.”

A recent research paper she wrote with US Air Force Colonel Maximilian K. Bremer notes that China has demonstrated such capabilities, “including testing 48 loitering munitions loaded with high-explosive fragmentation warheads and launched from a truck and helicopter.”

What makes these things easily accessible – as opposed to nuclear and stealth technologies – is the Fourth Industrial Revolution: 3D printing, simple wireless connections, AI and the big data that AI consumes. All these things are on the open market.

“You can’t get the same advantage just by having the technology,” Griko says. “What will become more important is how you use it.”

One example of how experience has changed usage comes from the early days of the war in Ukraine. That country has had early successes with the Baykar Bayraktar TB2, a Turkish drone estimated to cost around $5 million each, about six times less than the American Reaper it broadly resembles. It’s not cheap, except for American standards.

Now militaries around the world are working on ways to shoot down small drones with directed energy weapons based on lasers or microwaves.

“At first, Bayraktar was extremely effective, but after Russia began to act alongside air defense, they became less effective by such a wide margin,” says Zach Kallenborn, a military consultant associated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington DC. This, he said, has led both sides to switch massively to cheaper drones, which are shot down so frequently that they can last 3 to 4 days. So what: this is good value for money for such cheap drones as the Ukrainian DJI, and for the new Russian equivalent of the Shahed-136 supplied by Iran.

Ukraine has also resorted to makeshift drones as an alternative to jet fighters and long-range missiles that Western donors have so far failed to provide. It recently launched such drones from its territory against targets hundreds of kilometers inside Russia; Ukrainian officials have said they are working on a model that will fly about 1,000 km.

Every military power is now looking at these numbers, not least the US and China. If the two powers ever clash, it will most likely be over Taiwan, which China says it will one day absorb and the US says it will defend. Such a vast maritime arena would be very different from the close-quarters land war now underway in Eastern Europe. Therefore, the current war cannot be a good guide for future ones.

“I don’t believe that drones will change the whole war. But even if they do, you will need to get them to Taiwan. And for this you will need [aircraft] carriers,” Kallenborn says. “And you’ll need a way to communicate with the drones. Repeaters are possible, but satellites are key right now, so China’s first step could be to destroy the satellites. However, there is reason to doubt this, because they also need satellites.”

In every arms race there is always one more step to take. Now militaries around the world are working on ways to shoot down small drones with directed energy weapons based on lasers or microwaves. The marginal cost of a shot will be low if you amortize the costs of developing, manufacturing, and deploying such weapon systems.

If such anti-drone measures are successful, future generations of drones will be immune to them. With gilding.