Both drones and thermal imagers have been game changers in the Ukraine conflict, but fitting a thermal imager to a drone is not so simple:
These days high-end drones, like smartphones, have high quality video: and it is possible to shoot impressive 4K video at 60 frames per second from a drone that fits in your pocket. 2.7k and 1080p video are routine on lower-cost models. But thermal imagers are many years behind video cameras, and resolutions are much lower.
You can get a low-cost thermal imager like the Seek Thermal Compact for under $200, but the resolution is only 206 x 156 pixels – fine for checking insulation and finding leaks around the house, but no good for seeing objects hundreds of meters away. Going up to 320 x 240 will double the price, but you will still struggle to tell whether you are looking at a truck or a tank. Part of the problem is that while a video camera can show differences in brightness and color, a thermal image is monochrome and only shows temperature. The details which help identify objects visually may be missing, an issue highlighted by how difficult it is to recognize faces via thermal imaging.
When discussing the issue of thermal imager on reconnaissance drones, an expert from Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka drone unit noted on social media that a Matrice drone with a thermal imager costing several thousand dollars could only detect Russian vehicles at 3-4 miles distance and even then distinguishing types was difficult. The daylight camera could pick out targets from 15 miles. They suggested spending the money on more batteries and an additional ground control unit as a better way of boosting the drone’s usefulness.
This applies even more so with FPV drones. The drone flies at high speed and requires a skilled pilot to avoid obstacles and successfully hit the target, so good quality video with a rapid refresh rate, and cheap thermal imagers will not do the job.
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“Ukrainian manufacturers also have all these technologies and can produce FPV drones with thermal imaging cameras, but the main problem is the price,” an Escadrone spokesman told Forbes. “If a regular FPV drone costs $500, then the same drone with a thermal imaging camera will cost about $2,500.”
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This type of issue highlights the difference between military-grade loitering munitions like the U.S.-made SwitchBlade 300. This is similar in size to an FPV drone and has daylight and thermal imaging, plus a lock-on-to-target function and numerous other features, but costs around $50,000 per shot.
Larger, reusable drones costing in the tens of thousands of dollars make far more sense for thermal imagers.
“Drone Strike Groups”.
There is an infamous tendency in US military system development to take some special purpose project and turn it into some kind of universal platform that can be everything to everyone. The HMMWV and Striker were both like that, so was the Blackhawk, and the same thing was threatening to happen to the Navy as the latest fad in fashionable thinking that contributed to the LCS fiasco.
The thing that helps the Navy push back just a tiny bit more successfully against this lunacy is just the difficulties imposed on them by the various real constraints of operating huge vessels on the stormy high seas and having to bring with them the whole suite of military capabilities necessary to surveil and control vast areas in hard to see environments (for instance, subs underwater), and of course to unleash massive attacks, provide missile defense, or even, theoretically, launch nuclear missiles.
And what the wiser Navy guys say is, “You can’t put it all on one ship, or even one kind of ship. You need specialized ships with division of labor that communicate to share and update an integrated combat operating picture, and work best together as a team. The modular unit size is not one ship. The module is a Strike Group. Sure, some things you can do with one ship for a short time. But at a lot of things you want to do need a group. A single worker bee can be told where to find the flowers, go get the pollen and bring it home. But the true module is the hive.”
I suspect the same “navy logic” will come to be applied to drones, and not just for “swarming” with a lot of identical ones. If the really good IR camera is heavy, expensive, and power hungry, then you need a dedicated spotter drone with long air time to be harder to find and kill while also being able tell the other IR-myopic killer / disposable drones where to attack.
When precision munitions became commonplace, I assumed we’d see sniper-like soldiers armed with high-tech binoculars that could pass along precise coordinates to distant artillery and maybe laser-designate the target, too. With modern drones, this seems like the way to go.
I naively assumed that radio-controlled drones passing back live video would be easy to locate from their emissions, but electronic warfare complicated, I guess.
An secondary operator with one eye on a hunter drone screen and another on a touch screen with an up-to-date GPS (or equivalent) map makes for a cheap red force tracker. (Makes you wonder who has access to all that google street view data.) Presumably if a drone operator spots an incoming assault a kill chain can be established by the time the infantry dismounts. However unguided artillery and rockets are still fairly unprecise, and for the price of an 155mm shell you can also send in a FPV killer drone.