It's the Pareto principle in action: done correctly, you can often get 80% of the effect for 20% of the cost.
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
It's the Pareto principle in action: done correctly, you can often get 80% of the effect for 20% of the cost.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Right now is probably the peak of cheap drone capabilities because most professional militaries have not really put serious effort into countering them. So this is pretty much their coming out party akin to when ATGMs and AShM armed FACs first made their combat debuts.
But just as with those previous wonderweapons, once sufficient effort and resources are put to countering them, their effectiveness plummets.
Hell, China is already selling everything a modern military needs to counter drones from jammers to lasers to gun based solutions. All anyone really needs to do is actually buy them in operationally relevant numbers.
But even with adequate defences, Drones will still remain relevant and deadly, just as ATGMs are still used today, but they just won’t be as disproportionately effective as they are now.
As such, over investing in cheap low end drones is a pretty unsustainable long term strategy.
But just as with those previous wonderweapons, once sufficient effort and resources are put to countering them, their effectiveness plummets.
Hell, China is already selling everything a modern military needs to counter drones from jammers to lasers to gun based solutions. All anyone really needs to do is actually buy them in operationally relevant numbers.
But even with adequate defences, Drones will still remain relevant and deadly, just as ATGMs are still used today, but they just won’t be as disproportionately effective as they are now.
As such, over investing in cheap low end drones is a pretty unsustainable long term strategy.
Drone footage from Kherson. An AFU column of 8 vehicles gets destroyed by Russian forces :
Extended and clean footage from the other side of the newly acquired soda water bottle; Shahed 136 drone (Geran 2) in Odessa and the aftermath. Target is reported to be Odessa port, other day a tug boat was also attacked. An other UAV, Mohajer 6 was also used for observation before the arrival of Geran 2's.
Extended and clean footage from the other side of the newly acquired soda water bottle; Shahed 136 drone (Geran 2) in Odessa and the aftermath. Target is reported to be Odessa port, other day a tug boat was also attacked. An other UAV, Mohajer 6 was also used for observation before the arrival of Geran 2's.
There are an order of magnitude more optical sats, compared to radar ones. So impact wouldn't be negligible.
Drones are such an interesting development to modern warfare, why use numbers of men when you can soften your target with barrages of these.
It is made possible by proliferation of electronics.
Agreed! cheap UAVs are in their golden age right now.
You can also see the US investing in it as well with Microwave, Laser, Counter-UAS UAS and whatever else exists. I fully expect that China and US will have this problem licked within this decade, and only highly sophisticated drones would be viable against their forces.
That is dramatic shift in sentiment because a few weeks ago mainstream media was telling me to no end that Iranian drone were "unreliable" and they were "falling from the sky."
For the purpose of immediate impact on the battlefield, I think Shahed-136 is best suited to be adopted en masse quickly. For the UCAVs they'll need to get Iranian munitions to arm those drones. Once the Russians integrate their own munitions they can do a tag team pair where the Kamikaze drones strike targets first and the UCAVs do follow ups to mop up.