Tanks, Troops in the Open Are Hit Within 10 Minutes: Ukraine Official
Tanks and troops out in the open in Ukraine can't go 10 minutes without being spotted and fired upon, Ukrainian official says
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The sheer number of drones operating in Ukraine, as well as battle-management systems that provide real-time imaging and locations, mean that troops and tanks out in the open have just minutes before they're targeted, a top Ukrainian military official says.
"Today, a column of tanks or a column of advancing troops can be discovered in three to five minutes and hit in another three minutes," Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy commander of Ukraine's HUR military-intelligence service, told The Wall Street Journal.
"The days of massed armored assaults, taking many kilometers of ground at a time, like we did in 2003 in Iraq — that stuff is gone because the drones have become so effective now," Bradley Crawford, a retired US Army sergeant who's an Iraq war veteran, told the newspaper.
Ukraine has been increasingly relying on cheap, first-person-view drones, or FPVs, to take out Russian military hardware.
While the exact number of drones deployed remains unclear, the Royal United Services Institute estimated earlier this year that Ukraine was losing about 10,000 drones a month, a sign of their widespread use.
Russia is meanwhile working to make a deadlier, more advanced version of Iran's Shahed-136 attack drone, The Washington Post reported based on leaked documents.
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Doesn't/won't drone and missile intercept technology keep up with the drones and missiles?
Obviously, ruzzia won't. They are shit, but I would assume the US Army is already finding solutions on how to counter this.
It's harder to intercept in general. In this case, drones have minimal radar and infrared signature and are extremely cheap...
It's impractical to spend a million dollars intercepting a drone that costs $500 to build.
Lasers or fast firing small calibre weapons can hit drones. We already have weapons with enough accuracy to hit drones, what's missing is a system to detect them. But with AI, cameras should be able to do that soon. Drones should then increase their camouflage. But they also are noisy, so sound detector might be another solution (probably not alone).
It will, eventually, but this stuff takes time.
The problem with drones is that they can be very small, and very cheap.
The first part makes them difficult to detect and target. The second part makes destroying them with, say, guided missiles, extremely inefficient. You can basically bankrupt your opponent by sending more drones then they have missiles to shoot them down with.
Creating hard counters to modern drones is going to require radical new thinking. I suspect energy weapons may end up playing a serious role in this regard.
I did see some stuff about lasers destroying drones
This war is going to change military doctrine entirely. The concept of large and expensive tanks and planes has been decinated by information age technologies at a tiny fraction of the cost.
It's fascinating in a certain way. Massing dudes armed with the spear, one of the most basic concepts for a weapon possible, remained viable for millenia; but massing tanks and planes, which are marvels of advanced engineering, has been made obsolete in a century. XX and XXI century progress has been absurd.
Modern military doctrine was really defined by Nazi operations in WW2, but what's missed is that the Nazis failed (and for good reason). The depth of supply lines required for an occupation (not just a decapitating strike like France) are immense and infeasible. That's been proven time and time again by both the US and USSR, and now by Russia.
After the attempted decapitation strike on Kyiv failed, the Russian offensive faltered and had to regroup.
I'd be curious to see how it plays out with the next major ground operation the US does.
I feel like neither Russia nor Ukraine having air superiority changes the dynamics quite a bit.
I have my doubts that the tactic would work as well if the target has more unfettered ability to bomb your potential staging areas.
I think the whole concept of air superiority is also under question.
How do you have air superiority when hundreds of drones can be launched without airfields or any real infrastructure required?
How do you gain it when SEAD type missions would be constantly needed against hundreds of drones which cost a fraction of the cost of the munitions used against them?
Thing is, modern drones that can take out tanks don't really need staging areas. You can fit one in your backpack and operate it out of a hole in the ground.
I remember drones being frequently brought up in Robert Evans' It Could Happen Here. Basically it was a run through of what might happen in a civil war in the US. He figured a population with guns would certainly hinder an army but drones would be the game changer.
With the freedom of the Internet though, open-source drone development might be able to achieve far lower costs than what government procurement can.
Hardening of communications isn't THAT complicated, after all.
There are no real game changers, only smaller steps of adaption. You won't suddenly stopping using soldiers because drones are better. You will equip the soldiers with with more capabilities to defend drones.
Drones aren't efficient in Ukraine on both sides because they are more capable but because neither side has much in terms of defenses against drones.
This is only continuing the trend started in ww1. The big paradigm shift of ww1 was that you can stop any number of men with machine-guns and artillery. So you need more space between the men. Tanks allowed to cover the men for an assault, so offensive could still be done.
Now, with the accuracy of the artillery and missiles and the drones to scout, tanks are also destroyed before they can accomplish their mission. So the no-man's-land is even larger than before.
It is an interesting challenge to overcome.
There are no more lines of battle. A drone could attack anywhere. A drone could drop a grenade bouquet down the hatch of oil tankers. It's weird the fighting is contained in Ukraine at all.
Tbf, modern US tank doctrine was already revised prior to this such that they’re used supporting infantry, not in use in armored brigades like the gulf wars.
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/ukraine-dumps-nato-us-military-doctrine-russias-impregnable/
Don't drones rely on wireless communication? Would it not be possible to one day make large "dead zones" many kilometers wide where drones can't operate because of some sort of signal interruption?
Some advanced stuff like F35 has EW mitigation and is designed to withstand some jamming.
Tiny little drones definitely don't have that shit. But they might one day.
autonomy
This is like WWI or more aptly the Spanish Civil War, giving us a taste of the next major conflict. Which will be nothing but drones clouding out the sun. They can make quicker decisions, carry bigger payloads, go longer and “save” soldiers lives. There’ll be little reason for forward deployments other than deploying air defense and limited support.
Drones won't get rid of men on the ground... But it gets to the point where a war is just sending men into a swarm of drones, and that just sounds unpleasant.
Drones don't conquer areas. Drones don't search for explosives or hidden defenders. So no, this will not change the number of soldiers but just be an andditional wave before them taking over the job that precision-guided artillery is fullfilling now.
Also there are only very few situations where a new type of weapon actually replaced older ones. Not without decades and decades of the existing ones being adapted to new tech and tactics.
Your "we don't need forward deployments other than limited air defense anymore"-argument is the same wrong simplification we heard about the end of tanks after every single bigger engagement since ww1.