Russia's use of mass drone strikes in Ukraine may be a portend of future warfare. Al-Jazeera. Though drones have been used in the Ukraine war for some time now, Russia's use of mass waves of suicide drones is new. They have used those Shahed-136 drones, which have been supplied by Iran, to strike at Ukrainian power systems. The drones are small, cheap and carry 80 to 90 pounds of explosives. The drones are hard to take down by traditional air defenses due to how small they are and how low they fly, which makes them hard to detect by radar. Small arms fire can take the drones down but doing so is dangerous as they often explode. The drones only cost around $20,000 allowing them to be deployed in massive waves.
National Police officers shooting down an Iranian drone.
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) October 17, 2022
WE NEED AIR DEFENSE! pic.twitter.com/AvdviH6RhE
My Comment:
I have to admit that I was originally skeptical that Russia was even buying these drones as I thought they had this ability already. But I was pretty wrong there as these drones have proven to have a major impact on the battlefield. They have been an absolute pain for the Ukrainians to deal with and so far they have not found an answer.
The problem is that these drones are small enough and fly low enough that traditional anti-air weapons don't really work for them. They don't show up on radar and larger air defenses can't really target them. That leaves machine guns and small arms, which are effective enough if you can hit them, but even then it's not great because then the drone just blows up randomly, which can end up causing damage to the objective, or the defensive troops, or even civilians if they are unlucky.
The real gamebreaker here is the cost. These drones cost essentially nothing. $20,000 is almost nothing in terms of military accusation and they are a hell of a lot cheaper than missiles or bombs. And those missiles and bombs are more vulnerable to air defenses.
How effective are these drones? It depends on what you are asking them to do. I don't think that these drones could blunt an infantry assault and armor would probably be able to resist them fairly easily. But for softer targets they are effective enough. They seem great for targets like barracks, trucks, bridges and other "soft" targets.
The lack of use against infantry and vehicles means that this isn't going to be a wunderwaffe for the Russians. They are using them effectively but their problem is a lack of troops, not a lack of weapons. Mobilization will have a lot more to do with any success they have than their use of drones.
I do think that Russia's targeting of energy infrastructure, using these drones and other weapons, is a winning strategy. I never understood why the Russians didn't do this from the start of the war. Doing so will hurt the ability of Ukrainians to move troops and weapons and cutting off Ukrainian civilians from heat and water might encourage them to petition their government to sue for peace. They absolutely could have done this without drones, but I think the drones made it a lot cheaper in terms of money, supplies and lives.
I do think that people will learn from these attacks and in future wars these drone swarms will be a lot more common. Why wouldn't they? These kamikaze drones are cheap and effective and pretty much any military can operate them.
What scares me about this is the fact that terror groups could gain access to this technology. Indeed, ISIS used drones in the war in Syria, though their efforts were pretty amateurish, dropping hand grenades from drones and such. But if they were to get their hands on a dozen or so of these drones or similar technology, they could inflict a huge amount of damage without much cost. Indeed, it would probably be a lot easier to inflict heavy casualties with a small drone swarm than it would be to do so with gunmen.
I also think that people are studying how to defeat these drones. Right now I think that the answer is probably electronic warfare. If these drones could be jammed they could simply fall out of the sky. You would still have to problem of a lot of drones laden with explosives crashing out of the sky, but it would be a lot better than the targets being hit. The problem there is that the US has fallen behind on electronic warfare, unlike the Russians who are pretty good at it. It's something they need to focus on right now because eventually we are going to face these kinds of drones in combat.
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