Some experts on air power will tell you that Ukraine is not the best place to learn lessons. Neither side in Ukraine enjoys air superiority, retired Lieutenant General David Deptula of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute think-tank said last month. ‘We want to never find ourselves in such a situation’.
There’s always a need for balance between paying too little attention to lessons that challenge conventional thinking and generalising from a single type of conflict. That happened when the US Army and Pentagon bosses pushed the US Air Force into spending too much in 2008 to 2015 on drones that could be used only where an enemy couldn’t shoot at them.
But we seem to be seeing a new kind of air battle—lower, slower at close quarters and in a physical environment where fighter aircraft cannot intervene affordably or effectively. Could it be that Ukraine is to small unmanned systems what World War I was to aircraft?
It’s hard to overcome cognitive dissonance when you’re listening to speakers call for investment in aircraft engines that will cost well north of $10 million each, as I was last month at an Air Force Association meeting, and the overnight news was a devastating deep-strike attack on the Toropets ammunition depot. The attack involved detonations that triggered earthquake sensors and was carried out by drones that had propellers and snowmobile engines and flew flying just off the deck at 150km/h.
The impact of the unmanned was very apparent a few weeks later at the annual show of the Association of the US Army (AUSA). Not long ago, AUSA’s exhibitors filled the caverns of the Washington Convention Center with mine-resistant vehicles that looked like bank vaults perched on creaking truck chassis and loomed over booths full of plastic or ceramic armor, not to mention mine-resistant underpants. (Really.)
This year, much of the hardware was suspended from the ceiling and could fly. What wasn’t up there was variously designed to either control or manage said hardware or destroy or jam it. For a Brit of a certain age, it was inescapably a reminder of General Jumbo, a plump and geeky kid in the weekly Beano comic who commanded a miraculous army of miniature armed robots.
As with aircraft in World War I, drone operations in Ukraine started with artillery spotting before evolving quickly into direct attack with improvised weapons and then into finding targets well behind the front lines. And just as in World War I, the first air-to-air engagements have taken place, and defensive weapons are being employed on the ground.
Tiny-payload vehicles are shockingly lethal against expensive protected targets. From the start of Ukraine operations, it was clear that even grenades dropped from first-person view (FPV) commercial drones have effectively zero miss distance. They act as detonators rather than warheads, using the target’s fuel and ammunition to destroy it.
A new Royal United Services Institute paper makes the case that a future force will require a panoply of defensive systems to protect against drones. This will include short-range, mobile radar and electro-optical sensors, a countermeasures-resistant communications system, drone interceptors (such as Anduril’s tail-sitting Roadrunner) and missiles and guns with burst-at-range pre-fragmented ammunition. All this will require a software environment to identify and prioritise threats.
Killing drones may cost more per kill than the drone itself, but that is not the point. A ground force that cannot do it will either not survive at all or will spend so much time and effort moving, dispersing and adding passive protection to its equipment—like the Russian army’s cope cages and turtle tanks—that it will be ineffective.
Signs are emerging of a technological arms race in drone warfare, in which unmanned systems respond to anti-drone technologies by becoming more diverse and resilient and by sensing at greater range. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) at AUSA showed a concept for a system named Ariel, based on an automated mission manager that tasks individual anti-drone equipment automatically. Human controllers, seated at terminals in an armoured vehicle and communicating with the robotic systems via an airborne data relay, approve the mission plan. The Ariel system interprets the commander’s intent and tells the individual vehicles where to go and what to look for.
Different sensors need to be in different places for best performance, so the Ariel system envisages a common drone platform that can carry radar, passive electronic, optical or magnetic sensors or a communications package. IAI is working with startup Aerotor on the Apus 25, a quadrotor powered by a multi-fuel generator driving variable-pitch rotors. Free of battery limits, it has an endurance of up to nine hours. The Ariel system also includes unmanned ground combat vehicles, remote weapons stations on a small tracked vehicle.
You can extend the World War I analogy further and argue that Ukraine’s long-range attacks can be compared to the birth of strategic bombing. A retired USAF officer with experience in unconventional operations agrees that low-and-slow is a vulnerability in high-end air defense systems. Tracking low-altitude targets calls for Doppler processing pick out moving targets while ignoring ground clutter and slow-moving objects such as ground vehicles and birds. And that’s where low-slow targets can be a problem. The Doppler processing ignores them.
Ukraine’s drone attacks have been bolder since Ukrainian forces shot down two of Russia’s handful of Beriev A-50 airborne radars. Nonetheless an undisclosed number of Ukraine’s drones have been shot down. Ukrainian air defenses have also blunted Russian drone attacks. The crucial difference is that the Ukrainian survivors seem to be accurate enough to target specific aimpoints within sprawling energy and munitions storage facilities.
How this is done is not known, but one candidate is optical navigation—comparing visual images of the terrain with map databases. This is not unlike the software that journalism operations such as Bellingcat use to locate the sites where videos have been taken, and it has become much more accessible now that global terrain imagery is ubiquitous. Israeli missile-defense guru Uzi Rubin said a decade ago that ‘if you have an iPad, you have a guidance system’.
Whatever the technology, there is a lesson: I can lose a lot of cheap unmanned weapons, as long as the ones that get through can get close enough to detonate the enemy’s ammunition or fuel.
