Not Just Drones, but Massed Swarms of Them. Defenses Can’t Cope
An underlying principle is that any defensive system has a finite target-handling capacity, though it will vary with circumstances. An attacker can try to exceed this limit, forcing defenders to prioritize which targets to engage.
Second, an attacker can succeed just by continuing to fire weapons that cost as little as US$35,000, knowing the opponent must try to knock them down with interceptors costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. The defenses are eventually defeated through financial and material exhaustion.
Seeing this coming, defense establishments have been looking for new and cheaper ways to knock down drones. But no perfect solution has been found.
Directed energy weapons, the subject of great hopes, can be hampered by weather and other factors. A US Army directed-energy weapon, the DE M-SHORAD, has so far failed to meet operational expectations. One limitation on the capacity of such weapons is the interval needed for directing their energy on targets before slewing to a new direction. And their engagement ranges hardly compete with those of traditional interceptor missiles.
Guns are inherently limited by short range. Ammunition capacity can be a problem for them, too, as indeed can be ammunition cost. These point-defense systems can easily be overwhelmed by multi-directional simultaneous attacks.
Worse, all these defensive systems, which are not cheap, are themselves worthwhile targets for inexpensive drones.
Electronic warfare is a crucial defensive layer, but its effectiveness seesaws as opposing sides introduce measures, countermeasures and counter-countermeasures. And it will be sidestepped completely when autonomous drones can reliably find targets and have no need for communications and navigation links.
The most promising measure seems to be fielding interceptor drones—in effect, propeller-driven surface-to-air missiles. With these, a defender can fight cheap mass with cheap mass. Yet they are still technologically immature, and their range and speed will limit their capacity for wide-area defense.
These changes in warfare have dire strategic implications for Western military doctrine. For decades, countries have structured their armed forces around high-cost, technologically superior platforms. This focus, which prioritizes projecting power against peer competitors, has inadvertently created a critical vulnerability to cheap, high-volume threats.
The Australian Defense Force, as a prime example, cannot defend against saturation attacks on the scale recently seen in Ukraine and Israel.
China has no doubt watched events in Europe and the Middle East with great interest. It has already developed systems suited for this type of warfare, such as the CH/FH-901 loitering munition, which can be launched from a 48-tube launcher on a truck or in sorties of eight by the FH-97A pilotless aircraft to create a swarm. Expect more such Chinese weapons to appear.
The age of the swarm has arrived. For modern militaries, the answer is no longer just the quality of their technology but the capacity to inexpensively combat massed targets, and to do so day after day.
Timothy Millar is a PhD candidate at the University of Canberra’s National Security Institute, where his research specializes in using node-based network modelling to analyze both the cognitive and physical domains of warfare. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
