DRONESWorld War I Was the Crucible of Air Power. Ukraine Looks the Same for Drones
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?
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 generalizing 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.
