World War I Was the Crucible of Air Power. Ukraine Looks the Same for Drones

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 armored 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.

Bill Sweetman is a veteran, award-winning journalist and aerospace industry executive. His new book is Trillion Dollar Trainwreck: How the F-35 hollowed out the U.S. Air Force. This articlei s published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).