The US is making a big mistake giving up on the EV chain. In doing so it is ceding drones and robots, which are key to future wars and economies.
The countries that it is currently waging economic war against should instead be engaged in creating an alternative to the Chinese supply chain. For example, it is currently disassembling the automotive supply chain that included Canada and low-cost Mexico, but it should be doubling down on that.
Also, if we keep buying Chinese EVs then in a possible war with China all they will have to do is turn on some power-mosfets in the battery circuit and they turn entire cities into smoke.
Probably not. Nuclear deterrent is just that, a deterrent. Once it's used, it's done. I don't think either side would use it on a "that's not fair" play - they'd really be reserved to respond/prevent/equalise some event/situation that would cause them to lose a war.
The US makes small volumes of incredibly expensive drones because it suits how their suppliers want to guarantee contracts for big budgets.
What this conflict has shown is you need constantly supplies of basically garage-band single use drones that can be carried en-mass on the battlefield, which is a big change in the model.
One aspect of drone wars that I have been observing also is the importance of naval drones. For example, Ukraine successfully used it to scare away the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet; now drug lords in Colombia are already using them to send drugs to Europe.[0]
A plausible next step would be, if not already done, to have a fleet of small but powerful naval drones that act as sea buoys to sweep the sea for submarines - this would have the potential to complete change submarine deployment strategy.
Especially for countries with massive borders, including maritime borders, a fleet of aerial and naval drones will seem indispensable if nothing else for deterrence.
I can't wait to see when the narcosubs are driven via long fiberoptic cables with an occasional surfacing for GPS lock. The sea floor between caches is just going to be littered.
Long distance communication with submarines is difficult but not impossible, there are four extra low frequency transmitters in the world to send signals in nuclear doomsday scenarios.
For shorter distances, there are acoustic and optical devices, and near surface some low frequency radios can be used.
“Communication” does not mean “can be used for command of a remote device”. The bandwidth is so low as to make it impractical (bytes per second or minute (in the case of ELF)), in addition to being one-way comm. You’re not remotely driving a boat with that.
I’d be amazed if the use case were exactly the same, such that low bandwidth communication were equally useful in both cases, yes. Beside the fact that Voyager 1's 160 bits/s would be luxury for an underwater craft using VLF or ELF.
And it apparently bears repeating: communication with a submarine using VLF/ELF is one-way. Such is not the case with a spacecraft, even if the latency sucks.
A network of underwater sensors are already a thing.
Otherwise sure, drones will be everywhere soon. And since radio can and will be jammed, they already can autonomous find and kill their targets. Or whatever the AI classifies as enemy. Autonomous killer drones in our life time, yeah.
It's not just about the bridge, and the drones aren't necessarily underwater. Some are basically jet skis. Ukraine has used them to blow up several large Russian ships, and denied Russian access to much of the Black Sea.
Id take Ukrainian claims of disabling the black sea fleet with a large grain of salt, especially since theyre also claiming to be routinely shooting down black sea fleet fired kalibr missiles.
I do not think they are a key and war hasn’t been won with them yet. More of a tool in a toolbox assortment of weapons in war.
They bring up Ukraine and Russia but that war is ongoing so merely battle wins.
There are plenty of gps denial areas the military uses for training from small to over multiple states worth of area.
“The Archer sells for about $2,000 each, making it one of the most affordable models. But Neros produces only about 1,500 Archers per month in a factory where 15 workers assemble them by hand.”
idk, using such long and dragged out conflicts as proof of drones superiority seems to me like going to a U8 soccer tournament and deciding that the best way to win a soccer game is have your entire team form a death ball.
Drones are a low cost, low intensity projectile. Similar to a missile. It has utility. But as we can see, you don't win a war with just projectiles otherwise these conflicts would've been long over.
Well, since both sides are using drones heavily, why should one side have already won?
In any case, drones and artillery are responsible for most kills. But to hold the land you still need boots and tanks on the ground. But they can also be soon replaced by drones. Or rather, there will be more and more of them and fewer humans with the main job of controlling and directing them.
But does US really have more technological sophistication and will it make a difference?
Some of the smartest people I've encountered in academia were Chinese. One Chinese guy was so smart that it left my professor (and me) puzzled about the speed at which he could absorb complicated concepts. I also see Chinese people and institutions on many research papers these days. Imho, it is foolish to rely on Western military supremacy, as if that were a thing.
The First Opium War is the best example I could find: a small expeditionary force ran circles around a peer country's army for more than a year and crippled it thanks to total naval superiority and qualitatively better artillery and rifles.
The conquest of Aztecs is another example: Spain annihilated a country with twice the population. Though they cheated with bioweapons of course.
Unless autonomous drones happen, Russia has proved fiber drones are the way to go.
Not saying jammers wouldn’t be needed, but Russia had a lot of success using fiber drones to retake Kursk.
Autonomous drones are an inevitability. Enormous force multiplication is available with autonomy. We're talking about a few people, or perhaps one person, defeating battalions.
The truth is autonomous weapons have been in use for a long time now. Mark 60 CAPTOR anti-submarine mines (circa 1979) autonomously identified enemies and launched a torpedo to destroy submarines.
Probably trained for a specific location and targets but if you see how fast people adapt in the war of drones, I feel drones would need constant updates which might not be possible in certain frontlines.
A tank at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion doesn’t look not even close to what they look now with all the anti drone add ons.
Fiber optic is just an adaptation. The war has been full of them. The logical end step seems to be autonomy. There is nothing special about fiber optic, it’s just a way to avoid EW.
It had a lot to do with it. Kursk was a heavily forested area where the Ukrainians largely had small troop deployments hiding under tree cover where fiber optic drones would hunt them down.
There are thousands of videos of this in Kursk alone.
Ukraine are able to set up "shielded corridors" to protect critical supply roads from fiber optic drone attack behind the front lines in the donbass but in kursk they were exposed and defenseless.
The Pentagon has recently recognized small drones as 'consumable commodities' like bullets and grenades so there is a role for them to play but U.S. military isn't about to pivot to a strategy of winning wars with swarms of cheap quadcopters. The core of American military power is firmly rooted in long-range kill chains, which is about finding a target to take out (often far in advance of the operation) and then precisely killing it from far away.
I'm pretty intrigued by companies like Anduril. I don't know much about them. But the idea that we apply more "tech startup" business models to defense doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
My sense is that the existing defense contractors are old, slow and expensive (and conditioned to take huge sums from the government for developing future tech.)
In fairness, I'm not at all knowledgable about the industry. Just my impression of things. But it is hard to not be happy to see new entrants to any important market.
Even if we ignore the more controversial debate around Aircraft Carriers vs masses of Chinese road mobile antiship missile systems, doubling down in 2025 on high end cruise missiles that cost $2-4M each is probably the first thing that will look like a dumb choice when we look back in a decade.
I see them mainly used (eg Ukraine war) to annoy the other party with many military insignificant attacks on civilians. Very sad but not something that actually wins wars.
In the Ukraine war big troop concentrations have become almost impossible because the thousands of spotter drones in the air at any moment will spot them almost immediately, and provide accurate targeting information to (rocket) artillery within seconds.
FPV drones with a hand grenade strapped to them will finish off any stragglers. Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks, and can be used to deploy new minefields without having to risk soldiers out in the open.
So perhaps they are not (yet) key to winning a war, but they are certainly already key to not losing. There's a very good reason Ukraine is ramping up drone production to several million per year. Convert that to drones deployed per day and use your imagination to come up with uses for 30000 kamikaze drones per day.
> Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks
At that point it seems like it's basically a very slow moving missile, except it's steerable by a human operator.
I was under the impression that the value of these weapons was mostly in their simple construction from readily available parts (cheap ammunition and grenades instead of expensive purpose made javelins). Doesn't that kind of go away if you start to "innovate" with them?
If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
> If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
Well a Javelin costs[1] around $200k, so if the alternative is just $30k then that seems like a great deal just there.
But a drone offers different capabilities. In particular they can hunt to some degree and you can launch one without immediately giving up your position. That means it's much safer for the operators.
Against distant but more stationary targets, one can take more time to navigate them close to critical weak spots, so you potentially need much less explosives to get the job done. Just look at what Ukraine did against those bombers[2] in Russia. Less explosives means you can make a smaller drone which is less detectable, harder to counter and easier to carry.
According to the internets, Ukraine is pumping out drones at about $300 to $500 at a rate of several tens of thousands per day. Of course a missile is faster and has bigger payload, but as a sibling comment mentioned, a javelin missile is about 500x more expensive than these cheap drones and can only hit target per missile. I can think of many scenario's where having a few hundred drones available to hunt down individual soldiers would be much more valuable that having a single javelin.
The low cost and extremely high effectiveness of a drone is very useful.
Also missiles are normally tens of thousands to millions of dollars each, depending on size, launch method, etc. ATACMs is around 1.5mil. A Patriot missile vehicle is around $4 million just for the launcher. A Griffin missile is $127,000.
ATACMs and others are large missiles with complex guidance systems. Sometimes maybe an optical guidance module.
FPV drones and basic quadcopter are low cost, man operated, and all of the previous counter threats are for the missiles etc mentioned above. Nothing this slow, or this small.
Most suicide drones are far less complex (but that is increasing), much smaller, with human and sometimes image recognition and INS guidance. Sometimes fiber optic tethered (where possible) to counter the electronic warfare counter measures.
Many of these drone systems are also open source. A lot of COTS or 3d-printed components (use-once).
It's just different types and scales of systems solving completely different types of problems, with completely different logistics requirements.
What this really comes down to is that fpv drones are a low cost, low risk, delivery method for certain classes of munitions. Give the size and low cost, it's like going from fighting humans to fighting swarms of stinging insects. No one really has solid defenses for this type of threat yet. Also including small to medium quadcopter platforms for ISR.
The fiber optic FPV drone was an innovation and it's extremely cheap to build?
I don't think it's only been about cost, it's been about devastating effectiveness, they just happen to be much much cheaper than basically anything they destroy.
Necessity is the mother of invention, Ukraine is developing these things and innovating for actual survival, we're not talking about engaging lockhead martin on a 20 billion dollar budget.
It wouldn't necessarily, but innovation would separate the product from the commoditized nature of regular consumer drones, which I postulate is what made them cheap. Suddenly you need a special military drone, and that could end up being a moat Lockheed would charge you 20 billion for.
I suppose my concern is that missiles and bombs probably aren't any more expensive to produce than these drones are. There's just a huge markup for military equipment. We are trying to solve a problem of capitalism (or the military industrial complex i suppose) through technology, and that rarely works. It usually just creates a new layer of incumbents that want another 20 billion.
They're cheap because there's just not a lot of stuff in them. They're a lot simpler than even a model airplane, just 4 or more motors with fixed pitch propellers. Before commercial drones people would just make their own in a garage.
> As the invasion enters a fourth summer, drones are currently thought to account for around 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian battlefield casualties.
Insignificant? Are destroyed strategic bombers insignificant? As well as huge amounts of armor vehicles so that now motocycles and other cheap vehicles are used instead. They pay significant role now, may be even more than artillery
They can be used to concurrently overwhelm air defences to improve the odds for more expensive cruise missiles.
Ukraine has used small drones to decent effect tactically to disable vehicles, and vice versa (less effectively)
You're probably mostly thinking about Shahads and similar alternatives to cruise missiles, but what's much more significant in Ukraine is the use of FPV drones on the front lines to attack armor, transports, artillery and individual trenches. They account for the biggest part of inflicted losses nowadays.
The majority of casualties on both sides are currently caused by drones.
Yes, Russia is also using them to terrorise civilians but they clearly have huge battlefield implications and any military not immediately addressing this issue is going g to go into their next conflict at a massive disadvantage
Not sure about winning but drones are the major factor in Ukrainian war. Style of warfare did change completely. You should probably listen to interviews with the soldiers on both sides. An eye opener.
As for attacking civilians being the goal:
[1] - "At least two people were killed, including a 22-year-old police officer who was named by authorities as Maria Dziumaha, and more than a dozen were wounded in the attacks, according to authorities..."
That is after more than 400 drones were used in the attack.
You're correct about the "military insignificant attacks on civilians".
The problem is that mainstream western news sources are not covering the daily reality of front-line fighting in Ukraine - where drones have become a whole new dimension of high-lethality micro-scale air power.
You must be reading other mainstream media than I do, because drone warfare has been covered extensively in what I read. Namely DR (Danish national media), Zetland and The Atlantic.
Drones don’t make as much sense if you have air superiority. Somebody like the US can carve holes in any frontline at will and create space for maneuver warfare. Drones only became important in the Ukraine war because neither side is able to establish air supremacy.
Very big if. The US is unlikely to have air superiority against a neer peer adversary.
And even with air superiority, the US hasn’t been able to win a single war since WW2 except 1991 Gulf.
Currently the US and Israel are failing to oust the Houthis from Yemen and Hamas from Gaza even with a massive multi year sustained bombing campaign from the air.
And certainly doesn’t make the components. The moment China cuts off electronics shipments to the US we’re going to see a drastic hiccup in the supply chain for high tech weapons. It’s probably a good strategy to tear the bandaid off ourselves and see what stops.
We shouldn't arrive to conclusions on the future of warfare based on what we see in Ukraine. It works there the way it does only because neither side has a viable air force. If one of them had, it could win the war simply by theatre isolation and no drones could help. Manned aircraft are only things immune to drones because they fly higher and faster than cheap drones can. Thus, drone proliferation increases US dominance in future wars, because drones greatly diminish value of eveything else except manned aircraft - which is precisely the field in which US dominates by the highest margin of all.
Especially funny was to observe how both sides stopped using tanks because their survivability - even that of "tracked garden shed" or "tortoise" varieties - is now nil. Where are the active protection systems pioneered by Soviet Union and propagandised all the way until today? Trajectory of an FVP is linear in the final second or so, and it is twice slower and a lot more fragile than an RPG round which was what active protection systems were supposed to protect from. Now suddenly, no one remembers of them anymore. Sounds like they were a scam all the way.
How would manned aircraft help defend against swarms of drones deployed by decentralized enemy units? Drones are manufactured out of people’s garages, you can’t just take out the source like you can take out an airfield. On the other hand, Ukraine disabled a significant number of Russia’s manned aircraft with surreptitiously deployed drones (Operation Spider Web).
Because with air force, critical asset is both people and planes. Just planes is not enough. You can't train pilots not having planes yes, but when you got planes, hard part starts, not ends. It will take many years to have prepared Ukrainian pilots to go into hostile airspace SEAD missions. No one except USAF can do it today. It requires very complex collaboration of many different assets in a manner that is incredibly lengthy and expensive to train for. This is why America leads in it: it has time, space, and cash. There's no way to shortcut it.
This is also why Russia concentrates on ground-based SAMs and it's air force is shit: because training SAM operators is cheap and quick. They provide good defence. Ukraine has the same, for same reason. So they are stuck hitting each other with drones because none can do an air offensive.
In light of my answer, only way it can help is direct participation with their own units, not just supplying equipment. This is a line West is not ready to cross. Especially since it will only have considerable effect if Westnern planes with Western crews operate over internationally recognised Russian territory (over Ukraine-controlled territory Ukrainian air force dominates as it is, over occupied territory, there are few military significant assets). It means going from a proxy war to a real war.
> over occupied territory, there are few military significant assets
Are you sure about that? I'd say that the war could be ended rather quickly if Russians were attacked the moment they set foot on Ukrainian land. Also, an air force could destroy supply lines going deep into Ukraine.
I think the only reason to be scared of Putin firing nukes is if he or the existence of Russia was threatened in some way. But he can stop this war any time he likes.
Good strategy is to just wear down till they run out of people able to fight. Ukraine is at about 10% of the way there. It won't take all that long - in any case, if Ukraine is to be defeated it will happen for demographic reasons (lack of births due to female emigration and men ageing out of service), not through combat attrition.
~20 years down the road when it happens, Russia will be so demographically weakened through it's losses it won't be of much threat to anyone.
US hardly makes anything. Ukraine desperately needs air defense missiles, perhaps they may get some next year. The same with munition, armored vehicles, jets...
Drones are massively key in a very unusual conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I wonder if other wars would find them useful.
For example, a recent article shared on HN highlighted that the cheap drones become useless once there is any signal jamming going on. Russia can't jam too aggressively as their own comms are not good enough to be useful in such an environment. But what about NATO? Would they just jam the EM spectrum to oblivion and render all these drones useless?
Not a great point of comparison, but Israel v Gaza seems to use next to no drones (certainly not the small cheap variety), and the little that is known of Israel v Iran also focused on big expensive manned and unmanned aircraft. Plus massive, enormous, eye-wateringly-expensive bombs. Not converted Mavic drones. To the extent that Iran used drones, reportedly they gave no tactical benefit, as they were all shot down long before they reached Israel.
Because low cost drones have been used since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, they are trained to use them. Also the quantity used is way higher than in other conflicts, lowering the price is more important.
There is also a need in adaptability. Delivering parts that meets a specific demand at a specific time is where 3D printing and diy drones shine and it's important in Ukraine frontline.
There is also a system in the way Ukraine is doing war that favorise diy drone. Basically, each units have a budget and you get more if your unit kill Russian soldiers/equipment. This in return give you access to more advanced drones.
I think today the drones are quite well equipped and the diy versions are less present.
> To the extent that Iran used drones, reportedly they gave no tactical benefit, as they were all shot down long before they reached Israel.
Israel is geographically a very small country with a rather unique situation, and has spent eye-watering amounts of money on its arms industry with significant help of the US and Europe. In addition, their defence was very good but not fool-proof. I'm not sure how many landed off-hand, but there was some serious damage. Other defences will likely be less effective.
I'm not so sure an effective missile/drone defence would work for most other countries: too much area to protect, too expensive for the advantage it gives. Protecting key cities/locations could perhaps be effective, but entire countries? Probably not.
Fibre optical drones have their own challenges. Can't easily loiter or backtrack due to issues with snagging, and their range is more limited.
Autonomous drones, likewise, have their own issues. Mostly they can't be equally dirt cheap, as they need to have all the electronics that make regular weaponry expensive.
This is silly. The future of warfare is clearly robots. The fact that Israel has an effective counter drone system that costs them billions to maintain doesn’t mean that drones are somehow ineffective.
If not now, soon.
The US is making a big mistake giving up on the EV chain. In doing so it is ceding drones and robots, which are key to future wars and economies.
The countries that it is currently waging economic war against should instead be engaged in creating an alternative to the Chinese supply chain. For example, it is currently disassembling the automotive supply chain that included Canada and low-cost Mexico, but it should be doubling down on that.
Also, if we keep buying Chinese EVs then in a possible war with China all they will have to do is turn on some power-mosfets in the battery circuit and they turn entire cities into smoke.
You think that wouldn’t escalate to nuclear exchange in days?
Probably not. Nuclear deterrent is just that, a deterrent. Once it's used, it's done. I don't think either side would use it on a "that's not fair" play - they'd really be reserved to respond/prevent/equalise some event/situation that would cause them to lose a war.
China killing millions of Americans as they cook in their batteries is different to a nuclear bomb or a biological weapon?
Hell it’s more attributable.
Don't ruin the dreams of the militaria romantics.
The US makes small volumes of incredibly expensive drones because it suits how their suppliers want to guarantee contracts for big budgets.
What this conflict has shown is you need constantly supplies of basically garage-band single use drones that can be carried en-mass on the battlefield, which is a big change in the model.
One aspect of drone wars that I have been observing also is the importance of naval drones. For example, Ukraine successfully used it to scare away the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet; now drug lords in Colombia are already using them to send drugs to Europe.[0]
A plausible next step would be, if not already done, to have a fleet of small but powerful naval drones that act as sea buoys to sweep the sea for submarines - this would have the potential to complete change submarine deployment strategy.
Especially for countries with massive borders, including maritime borders, a fleet of aerial and naval drones will seem indispensable if nothing else for deterrence.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drone-narco-sub-seized-first-ti...
If they’re that deep then they need to be autonomous because I don’t think there’s any way to reliably get a signal sub marine.
I can't wait to see when the narcosubs are driven via long fiberoptic cables with an occasional surfacing for GPS lock. The sea floor between caches is just going to be littered.
Long distance communication with submarines is difficult but not impossible, there are four extra low frequency transmitters in the world to send signals in nuclear doomsday scenarios.
For shorter distances, there are acoustic and optical devices, and near surface some low frequency radios can be used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
“Communication” does not mean “can be used for command of a remote device”. The bandwidth is so low as to make it impractical (bytes per second or minute (in the case of ELF)), in addition to being one-way comm. You’re not remotely driving a boat with that.
You'd be amazed to learn what we do with spaceships then!
I’d be amazed if the use case were exactly the same, such that low bandwidth communication were equally useful in both cases, yes. Beside the fact that Voyager 1's 160 bits/s would be luxury for an underwater craft using VLF or ELF.
And it apparently bears repeating: communication with a submarine using VLF/ELF is one-way. Such is not the case with a spacecraft, even if the latency sucks.
A network of underwater sensors are already a thing.
Otherwise sure, drones will be everywhere soon. And since radio can and will be jammed, they already can autonomous find and kill their targets. Or whatever the AI classifies as enemy. Autonomous killer drones in our life time, yeah.
Wide-band spread spectrum communications (CDMA) can't really be jammed.
Since the basis of this is in every smart-phone, its odd it isn't used in military UAVs.
It absolutely can be jammed, the same way other frequency hopping radios and systems can and do get jammed.
Of course they can be jammed, it's just harder and needs more power.
In the military cat and mouse game I don't think it will be an issue. Maybe that is why fibre was adopted instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueWhale_(UUV)
Ukraine has tried multiple times to blow up the Kerch bridge with underwater drones and have now largely given up.
Underwater drones are not anywhere near as relevant in this war as airborne drones.
It's not just about the bridge, and the drones aren't necessarily underwater. Some are basically jet skis. Ukraine has used them to blow up several large Russian ships, and denied Russian access to much of the Black Sea.
Id take Ukrainian claims of disabling the black sea fleet with a large grain of salt, especially since theyre also claiming to be routinely shooting down black sea fleet fired kalibr missiles.
I do not think they are a key and war hasn’t been won with them yet. More of a tool in a toolbox assortment of weapons in war.
They bring up Ukraine and Russia but that war is ongoing so merely battle wins.
There are plenty of gps denial areas the military uses for training from small to over multiple states worth of area.
“The Archer sells for about $2,000 each, making it one of the most affordable models. But Neros produces only about 1,500 Archers per month in a factory where 15 workers assemble them by hand.”
https://archive.is/UHvzt
idk, using such long and dragged out conflicts as proof of drones superiority seems to me like going to a U8 soccer tournament and deciding that the best way to win a soccer game is have your entire team form a death ball.
Drones are a low cost, low intensity projectile. Similar to a missile. It has utility. But as we can see, you don't win a war with just projectiles otherwise these conflicts would've been long over.
I think the point is that if one side hadn't adopted drones, they'd have already lost.
Well, since both sides are using drones heavily, why should one side have already won?
In any case, drones and artillery are responsible for most kills. But to hold the land you still need boots and tanks on the ground. But they can also be soon replaced by drones. Or rather, there will be more and more of them and fewer humans with the main job of controlling and directing them.
Wars are mostly about who has the largest manufacturing capability.
China will win this anytime.
Wars can be won on technological sophistication alone.
But does US really have more technological sophistication and will it make a difference?
Some of the smartest people I've encountered in academia were Chinese. One Chinese guy was so smart that it left my professor (and me) puzzled about the speed at which he could absorb complicated concepts. I also see Chinese people and institutions on many research papers these days. Imho, it is foolish to rely on Western military supremacy, as if that were a thing.
which wars were won where one side had the greater manufacturing capability and the other side achieved a decisive win with technological advantage?
I cant think of any.
The First Opium War is the best example I could find: a small expeditionary force ran circles around a peer country's army for more than a year and crippled it thanks to total naval superiority and qualitatively better artillery and rifles.
The conquest of Aztecs is another example: Spain annihilated a country with twice the population. Though they cheated with bioweapons of course.
They supply both sides of the ukraine/russia conflict and massively arming themselves at the same time.
Some time in the near future the west is in for a very rude awakening.
largest military manufacturing capability. Things are more complicated than your ability to make golf carts, electric cars, plastic molds, etc.
Unless autonomous drones happen, Russia has proved fiber drones are the way to go. Not saying jammers wouldn’t be needed, but Russia had a lot of success using fiber drones to retake Kursk.
> Unless autonomous drones happen
Autonomous drones are an inevitability. Enormous force multiplication is available with autonomy. We're talking about a few people, or perhaps one person, defeating battalions.
The truth is autonomous weapons have been in use for a long time now. Mark 60 CAPTOR anti-submarine mines (circa 1979) autonomously identified enemies and launched a torpedo to destroy submarines.
The drones Ukraine used in operation Spiderweb reportedly had "terminal guidance" software for the last mile of their mission.
A drone video intercepted by the russians was released showing this in action: https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/how_ukrainian_fpv_...
Probably trained for a specific location and targets but if you see how fast people adapt in the war of drones, I feel drones would need constant updates which might not be possible in certain frontlines. A tank at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion doesn’t look not even close to what they look now with all the anti drone add ons.
*for some tasks and mission sets
Are you implying Ukraine left Kurst because of fiber optic drones? Because I can assure you, that's got nothing to do with it.
I can also assure you that Ukraine using fiber topic, semi and fully autonomous drones with great effectiveness against the invaders.
I’m not implying that but it was one of the first places where they used it extensively.
Fiber optic is just an adaptation. The war has been full of them. The logical end step seems to be autonomy. There is nothing special about fiber optic, it’s just a way to avoid EW.
It had a lot to do with it. Kursk was a heavily forested area where the Ukrainians largely had small troop deployments hiding under tree cover where fiber optic drones would hunt them down.
There are thousands of videos of this in Kursk alone.
Ukraine are able to set up "shielded corridors" to protect critical supply roads from fiber optic drone attack behind the front lines in the donbass but in kursk they were exposed and defenseless.
The Pentagon has recently recognized small drones as 'consumable commodities' like bullets and grenades so there is a role for them to play but U.S. military isn't about to pivot to a strategy of winning wars with swarms of cheap quadcopters. The core of American military power is firmly rooted in long-range kill chains, which is about finding a target to take out (often far in advance of the operation) and then precisely killing it from far away.
How many years did it take to take out bin laden?
I'm pretty intrigued by companies like Anduril. I don't know much about them. But the idea that we apply more "tech startup" business models to defense doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
My sense is that the existing defense contractors are old, slow and expensive (and conditioned to take huge sums from the government for developing future tech.)
In fairness, I'm not at all knowledgable about the industry. Just my impression of things. But it is hard to not be happy to see new entrants to any important market.
What’s it with all the LOTR nerds founding Defense startups by the way?
It's just Peter Thiel's companies. All these companies have an agreement with the Tolkien estate.
LOTR is fundamentally a war epic.
Kinda missing the point though if you're finding strength in industry
Tolkien having s tier names helps, they're just cool
The nerds are the ones bored with B2B SaaS.
Even if we ignore the more controversial debate around Aircraft Carriers vs masses of Chinese road mobile antiship missile systems, doubling down in 2025 on high end cruise missiles that cost $2-4M each is probably the first thing that will look like a dumb choice when we look back in a decade.
What wars are actually being won with them?
I see them mainly used (eg Ukraine war) to annoy the other party with many military insignificant attacks on civilians. Very sad but not something that actually wins wars.
In the Ukraine war big troop concentrations have become almost impossible because the thousands of spotter drones in the air at any moment will spot them almost immediately, and provide accurate targeting information to (rocket) artillery within seconds.
FPV drones with a hand grenade strapped to them will finish off any stragglers. Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks, and can be used to deploy new minefields without having to risk soldiers out in the open.
So perhaps they are not (yet) key to winning a war, but they are certainly already key to not losing. There's a very good reason Ukraine is ramping up drone production to several million per year. Convert that to drones deployed per day and use your imagination to come up with uses for 30000 kamikaze drones per day.
> Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks
At that point it seems like it's basically a very slow moving missile, except it's steerable by a human operator.
I was under the impression that the value of these weapons was mostly in their simple construction from readily available parts (cheap ammunition and grenades instead of expensive purpose made javelins). Doesn't that kind of go away if you start to "innovate" with them?
If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
> If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
Well a Javelin costs[1] around $200k, so if the alternative is just $30k then that seems like a great deal just there.
But a drone offers different capabilities. In particular they can hunt to some degree and you can launch one without immediately giving up your position. That means it's much safer for the operators.
Against distant but more stationary targets, one can take more time to navigate them close to critical weak spots, so you potentially need much less explosives to get the job done. Just look at what Ukraine did against those bombers[2] in Russia. Less explosives means you can make a smaller drone which is less detectable, harder to counter and easier to carry.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/29/how-this-us-made-176000-anti...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo
According to the internets, Ukraine is pumping out drones at about $300 to $500 at a rate of several tens of thousands per day. Of course a missile is faster and has bigger payload, but as a sibling comment mentioned, a javelin missile is about 500x more expensive than these cheap drones and can only hit target per missile. I can think of many scenario's where having a few hundred drones available to hunt down individual soldiers would be much more valuable that having a single javelin.
The low cost and extremely high effectiveness of a drone is very useful.
Also missiles are normally tens of thousands to millions of dollars each, depending on size, launch method, etc. ATACMs is around 1.5mil. A Patriot missile vehicle is around $4 million just for the launcher. A Griffin missile is $127,000.
Many of these drones in Ukraine are sub $1,000.
I guess the question comes down to why? Why is a ATACM 1.5 mil? Surely it doesn't cost that to produce it.
The followup then is, won't the contractor producing these drones simply elect to take a similar markup for their product?
Size, role, etc.
ATACMs and others are large missiles with complex guidance systems. Sometimes maybe an optical guidance module.
FPV drones and basic quadcopter are low cost, man operated, and all of the previous counter threats are for the missiles etc mentioned above. Nothing this slow, or this small.
Most suicide drones are far less complex (but that is increasing), much smaller, with human and sometimes image recognition and INS guidance. Sometimes fiber optic tethered (where possible) to counter the electronic warfare counter measures.
Many of these drone systems are also open source. A lot of COTS or 3d-printed components (use-once).
It's just different types and scales of systems solving completely different types of problems, with completely different logistics requirements.
What this really comes down to is that fpv drones are a low cost, low risk, delivery method for certain classes of munitions. Give the size and low cost, it's like going from fighting humans to fighting swarms of stinging insects. No one really has solid defenses for this type of threat yet. Also including small to medium quadcopter platforms for ISR.
> If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
Different mission profiles.
Don’t compare apples to oranges.
Why would innovation mean more expensive?
The fiber optic FPV drone was an innovation and it's extremely cheap to build?
I don't think it's only been about cost, it's been about devastating effectiveness, they just happen to be much much cheaper than basically anything they destroy.
Necessity is the mother of invention, Ukraine is developing these things and innovating for actual survival, we're not talking about engaging lockhead martin on a 20 billion dollar budget.
It wouldn't necessarily, but innovation would separate the product from the commoditized nature of regular consumer drones, which I postulate is what made them cheap. Suddenly you need a special military drone, and that could end up being a moat Lockheed would charge you 20 billion for.
I suppose my concern is that missiles and bombs probably aren't any more expensive to produce than these drones are. There's just a huge markup for military equipment. We are trying to solve a problem of capitalism (or the military industrial complex i suppose) through technology, and that rarely works. It usually just creates a new layer of incumbents that want another 20 billion.
They're cheap because there's just not a lot of stuff in them. They're a lot simpler than even a model airplane, just 4 or more motors with fixed pitch propellers. Before commercial drones people would just make their own in a garage.
> As the invasion enters a fourth summer, drones are currently thought to account for around 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian battlefield casualties.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraines-...
Insignificant? Are destroyed strategic bombers insignificant? As well as huge amounts of armor vehicles so that now motocycles and other cheap vehicles are used instead. They pay significant role now, may be even more than artillery
Wearing down your opponent with consistent (relatively) inexpensive attacks does in fact win wars. Attrition works.
They can be used to concurrently overwhelm air defences to improve the odds for more expensive cruise missiles. Ukraine has used small drones to decent effect tactically to disable vehicles, and vice versa (less effectively)
You're probably mostly thinking about Shahads and similar alternatives to cruise missiles, but what's much more significant in Ukraine is the use of FPV drones on the front lines to attack armor, transports, artillery and individual trenches. They account for the biggest part of inflicted losses nowadays.
The majority of casualties on both sides are currently caused by drones.
Yes, Russia is also using them to terrorise civilians but they clearly have huge battlefield implications and any military not immediately addressing this issue is going g to go into their next conflict at a massive disadvantage
The title is, "Drones are the key to wining wars", not "Drones have won wars".
Read the article.
Not sure about winning but drones are the major factor in Ukrainian war. Style of warfare did change completely. You should probably listen to interviews with the soldiers on both sides. An eye opener.
As for attacking civilians being the goal:
[1] - "At least two people were killed, including a 22-year-old police officer who was named by authorities as Maria Dziumaha, and more than a dozen were wounded in the attacks, according to authorities..."
That is after more than 400 drones were used in the attack.
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/europe/russia-air-assault-ukr...
You're correct about the "military insignificant attacks on civilians".
The problem is that mainstream western news sources are not covering the daily reality of front-line fighting in Ukraine - where drones have become a whole new dimension of high-lethality micro-scale air power.
You must be reading other mainstream media than I do, because drone warfare has been covered extensively in what I read. Namely DR (Danish national media), Zetland and The Atlantic.
"Drones are key to not losing wars".
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Drones don’t make as much sense if you have air superiority. Somebody like the US can carve holes in any frontline at will and create space for maneuver warfare. Drones only became important in the Ukraine war because neither side is able to establish air supremacy.
Very big if. The US is unlikely to have air superiority against a neer peer adversary.
And even with air superiority, the US hasn’t been able to win a single war since WW2 except 1991 Gulf.
Currently the US and Israel are failing to oust the Houthis from Yemen and Hamas from Gaza even with a massive multi year sustained bombing campaign from the air.
Planes have never won a war.
And certainly doesn’t make the components. The moment China cuts off electronics shipments to the US we’re going to see a drastic hiccup in the supply chain for high tech weapons. It’s probably a good strategy to tear the bandaid off ourselves and see what stops.
We shouldn't arrive to conclusions on the future of warfare based on what we see in Ukraine. It works there the way it does only because neither side has a viable air force. If one of them had, it could win the war simply by theatre isolation and no drones could help. Manned aircraft are only things immune to drones because they fly higher and faster than cheap drones can. Thus, drone proliferation increases US dominance in future wars, because drones greatly diminish value of eveything else except manned aircraft - which is precisely the field in which US dominates by the highest margin of all.
Especially funny was to observe how both sides stopped using tanks because their survivability - even that of "tracked garden shed" or "tortoise" varieties - is now nil. Where are the active protection systems pioneered by Soviet Union and propagandised all the way until today? Trajectory of an FVP is linear in the final second or so, and it is twice slower and a lot more fragile than an RPG round which was what active protection systems were supposed to protect from. Now suddenly, no one remembers of them anymore. Sounds like they were a scam all the way.
How would manned aircraft help defend against swarms of drones deployed by decentralized enemy units? Drones are manufactured out of people’s garages, you can’t just take out the source like you can take out an airfield. On the other hand, Ukraine disabled a significant number of Russia’s manned aircraft with surreptitiously deployed drones (Operation Spider Web).
> neither side has a viable air force. If one of them had, it could win the war simply by theatre isolation
Ok, why isn't EU/NATO helping Ukraine with an airforce then?
Because with air force, critical asset is both people and planes. Just planes is not enough. You can't train pilots not having planes yes, but when you got planes, hard part starts, not ends. It will take many years to have prepared Ukrainian pilots to go into hostile airspace SEAD missions. No one except USAF can do it today. It requires very complex collaboration of many different assets in a manner that is incredibly lengthy and expensive to train for. This is why America leads in it: it has time, space, and cash. There's no way to shortcut it. This is also why Russia concentrates on ground-based SAMs and it's air force is shit: because training SAM operators is cheap and quick. They provide good defence. Ukraine has the same, for same reason. So they are stuck hitting each other with drones because none can do an air offensive.
This does not answer the question, though.
In light of my answer, only way it can help is direct participation with their own units, not just supplying equipment. This is a line West is not ready to cross. Especially since it will only have considerable effect if Westnern planes with Western crews operate over internationally recognised Russian territory (over Ukraine-controlled territory Ukrainian air force dominates as it is, over occupied territory, there are few military significant assets). It means going from a proxy war to a real war.
> over occupied territory, there are few military significant assets
Are you sure about that? I'd say that the war could be ended rather quickly if Russians were attacked the moment they set foot on Ukrainian land. Also, an air force could destroy supply lines going deep into Ukraine.
Because they are scared of Putin firing nukes. Also training an air force takes alot of time and money, only USA and China can really do it tbh.
> Because they are scared of Putin firing nukes.
I think the only reason to be scared of Putin firing nukes is if he or the existence of Russia was threatened in some way. But he can stop this war any time he likes.
And what a good strategy be like?
Making Putin understand that this war leads him nowhere, without going as far as threatening the existence of Russia.
This means US/NATO planes above Ukraine are OK, but not above Russia.
And those planes should do what over Ukraine?
Put simply, bomb enemy ground forces.
Aha, US/NATO jets bombing Russians. Sure, seems like a solid plan.
Good strategy is to just wear down till they run out of people able to fight. Ukraine is at about 10% of the way there. It won't take all that long - in any case, if Ukraine is to be defeated it will happen for demographic reasons (lack of births due to female emigration and men ageing out of service), not through combat attrition. ~20 years down the road when it happens, Russia will be so demographically weakened through it's losses it won't be of much threat to anyone.
It is a good strategy only if you don't think about the lives lost.
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US hardly makes anything. Ukraine desperately needs air defense missiles, perhaps they may get some next year. The same with munition, armored vehicles, jets...
Drones are massively key in a very unusual conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I wonder if other wars would find them useful.
For example, a recent article shared on HN highlighted that the cheap drones become useless once there is any signal jamming going on. Russia can't jam too aggressively as their own comms are not good enough to be useful in such an environment. But what about NATO? Would they just jam the EM spectrum to oblivion and render all these drones useless?
Not a great point of comparison, but Israel v Gaza seems to use next to no drones (certainly not the small cheap variety), and the little that is known of Israel v Iran also focused on big expensive manned and unmanned aircraft. Plus massive, enormous, eye-wateringly-expensive bombs. Not converted Mavic drones. To the extent that Iran used drones, reportedly they gave no tactical benefit, as they were all shot down long before they reached Israel.
Because low cost drones have been used since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, they are trained to use them. Also the quantity used is way higher than in other conflicts, lowering the price is more important.
There is also a need in adaptability. Delivering parts that meets a specific demand at a specific time is where 3D printing and diy drones shine and it's important in Ukraine frontline.
There is also a system in the way Ukraine is doing war that favorise diy drone. Basically, each units have a budget and you get more if your unit kill Russian soldiers/equipment. This in return give you access to more advanced drones.
I think today the drones are quite well equipped and the diy versions are less present.
> Russia can't jam too aggressively as their own comms are not good enough to be useful in such an environment.
Russia makes use of fibre optic cable with some drones:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/03/08/russia...
Ukraine has developed countermeasures:
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukraine-discloses-new-meth...
So the "cable" consists of at least 2 components: a steel cable for strength and a communications fiber cable?
BTW is all this bio-degradable? What about clean-up after a war?
> To the extent that Iran used drones, reportedly they gave no tactical benefit, as they were all shot down long before they reached Israel.
Israel is geographically a very small country with a rather unique situation, and has spent eye-watering amounts of money on its arms industry with significant help of the US and Europe. In addition, their defence was very good but not fool-proof. I'm not sure how many landed off-hand, but there was some serious damage. Other defences will likely be less effective.
I'm not so sure an effective missile/drone defence would work for most other countries: too much area to protect, too expensive for the advantage it gives. Protecting key cities/locations could perhaps be effective, but entire countries? Probably not.
Reportedly (and I appreciate this is bordering speculation) the things that landed were actually not cheap drones but ballistic missiles.
Many drones use fiber optic cables to control them. Autonomous drones would solve this problem as well.
Fibre optical drones have their own challenges. Can't easily loiter or backtrack due to issues with snagging, and their range is more limited.
Autonomous drones, likewise, have their own issues. Mostly they can't be equally dirt cheap, as they need to have all the electronics that make regular weaponry expensive.
I think we are 1-3 years away from a capable autonomous drone with some AI capabilities built-in that can take matters into its own hands.
This is silly. The future of warfare is clearly robots. The fact that Israel has an effective counter drone system that costs them billions to maintain doesn’t mean that drones are somehow ineffective.