Isegoria

The implications of the lethal, portable drones for ground combat have not yet been worked out, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers):

Soldiers can see the enemy at a distance and attack them with incredible precision. If someone is shooting at you with machine guns or rockets, you can hide behind a wall or in a hole. There is no way of taking cover from LMAMS short of being inside a closed bunker. It can fly around to attack from any direction and can dive into trenches. This makes it unique, and the tried and tested tactics of previous decades will have to be revised. Lying flat and keeping your head down may simply make you an easier target.

In the future, firefights with rifles may become as rare as stabbing with bayonets. The real action may take place at longer ranges without any face-to-face contact at all.

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You have to fire a lot of unguided weapons to score a hit. For rifles and machine-guns, a figure of twenty thousand rounds or more is often quoted for every casualty. Artillery and mortars fire hundreds of rounds, tearing up vast areas of landscape without hitting a target. Guided weapons are different. From their first use in the 1960s, laser-guided weapons were hitting the target more than half the time. With such weapons, range is irrelevant: a target is as easy to hit from two miles away as from two hundred yards. A squad with twenty LMAMS is likely to score close to twenty hits — which may be on vehicles, firing positions, or individuals.

The test firing of a Trident missile from a Royal Navy submarine has failed, for the second time in a row:

The latest test of the UK’s nuclear deterrent was from HMS Vanguard and was seen by Defence Secretary Grant Shapps.

The missile’s booster rockets failed and it landed in the sea close to the launch site, according to the Sun, which first reported the malfunction.

Mr Shapps said he has “absolute confidence” in Trident’s submarines, missiles and nuclear warheads.

This is highly embarrassing for both the UK and the US manufacturer of the Trident missile.

British tests of Trident missiles are rare, not least because of the cost. Each missile is worth around £17m and the last test in 2016 also ended in failure when the missile veered off course. Test-fired missiles are not armed with their nuclear warheads.

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The missile was supposed to have flown several thousand miles before landing harmlessly in the Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa. Instead, it dropped into the ocean near to where it was launched.

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The missiles the UK uses are drawn from a common pool that the US and UK both use, and the US has conducted multiple tests without these kind of problems.

Skilled FPV drone operators are becoming the most feared opponents in the war in Ukraine, David Hambling notes:

When a Ukrainian drone strike team recently took out the Russian FPV operator known as Moisey it was seen as a big success. Moisey was personally credited with destroying dozens of vehicles and killing almost 400 Ukrainian soldiers.

Standard consumer quadcopters like the ubiquitous DJI Mavic series are designed to be flown out of the box by an untrained user. The operator does not exactly fly the drone so much as tell it where to go, with the drone doing all the piloting and preventing crashes. The drone will auto-hover at a fixed point even in gusty winds and, thanks to sonar and other sensors, avoid obstacles.

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FPVs by contrast are stripped-down racing machines without any of the piloting aides on standard quadcopters. This is partly a matter of cost, but mainly to do with speed — a drone switched to manual mode with all the obstacle avoidance turned off is faster than one in normal mode where speed is automatically limited to how fast it can fly safely.

This is why FPV pilots wear VR-style goggles: they need to have good situational awareness, to look ahead and plan their path to avoid flying into things. FPV cameras have a wide field of view so the operator does not make a sharp turn and find a wall in front of them.

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Russia’s Academy BAS says its combat FPV operator course takes a month, working 12 hour days with no days off. The equivalent training at Ukraine’s Victory Drones takes 33 days, and participants are expected to have 20 hours practice on a simulator before they start. The pass rate on FPV courses can be as low as 60%, compared to up to 95% for regular drones.

The average hit rate for FPV drones is sometimes quoted at 10% whereas highly skilled operators may succeed with 70% or more of their attacks.

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XTEND say that operators can fly one of their drones like a pro within a few minutes of trying it out. This includes carrying out tricky maneuvers like flying through doorways or windows, which is exactly the kind of skill needed by an FPV kamikaze operator, or even flying around inside buildings or tunnels.

The intelligence provided by XTEND also solves one of the big issues with current FPVs, that of losing communication in the last second of flight as the drone drops below the radio horizon.

“Our XOS operating system enables a drone to have several ‘state’ solutions to determine what happens during comms-failure, including: hover, continue to target, return to home, patrol, and more,” says Shapira.

This effectively allows the operator to ‘lock on’ to a target as soon as they identify it, so the drone will find a target even if it is evading rapidly, or the signal is lost due to jamming or other causes. In principle XOS could be trained to aim at the weak spot on a target, such as the turret rear of Russian tanks where an FPV hit often results in instant destruction.

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Last year, XTEND signed a contract to supply Israel’s Ministry of Defence with a multi-drone operating system enabling an operator to control “dozens of human-guided semi-autonomous drones simultaneously.”

”Like mammals evolving beneath the feet of lumbering dinosaurs,“ David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), “a very different type of drone has been proliferating close to the ground”:

These are little craft that do not compete with the lofty lords of the air. And while the big drones are in decline, their miniature cousins have been preparing to inherit the earth.

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As of 2015 the Pentagon has around ten thousand drones, and nine thousand of them are small, hand-launched craft made by AeroVironment Inc of California

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It may look like a toy aircraft with a four-foot wingspan, but it puts air power in the hands of the foot soldier.

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Big drones compete with the manned aircraft that they resemble, but for once, looking like a toy may be an advantage.

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Raven’s built-in GPS meant it could fly a mission via a series of programmed waypoints with no human intervention, so it could take pictures of a building or installation even if it was out of radio range. Endurance was tripled to an hour, and a new modular design meant changing sensors (say, switching between day cameras and infrared night vision) was a matter of “plug and play”.

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Unlike the Predator, which requires pilot’s qualifications to fly, Raven operation can be learned in about three days.

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The controller comes with a shrouded “viewing hood” to make the screen easier to see in bright sunlight — an echo of the black cloth that the TDR-1 operators covered themselves with in WWII.

The ground control unit can run training software, known as the Visualization and Mission Planning Integrated Rehearsal Environment or VAMPIRE. With VAMPIRE, an operator can practice flying virtual missions without needing to launch anything; it is like playing a handheld video game. An enhanced version can download sensor feeds from actual missions; this add-on is known as the Bidirectional Advanced Trainer (yes, that’s VAMPIRE BAT).

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The video feed was originally recorded on a consumer eight-millimetre video recorder, a Sony Handycam, which allowed the user to freeze-frame or look back through the flight; it is now recorded digitally. The other piece of hardware is a ruggedized laptop, a Panasonic Toughbook computer. This provides a moving map display via Army software called FalconView.

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In 2012 a complete system with two ground control stations, three RQ-11B air vehicles, plus all the sensors, spares, and carry cases, can cost the US military $100-$200,000. A single air vehicle on its own costs around $34,000. It is the sensor package, especially the thermal imaging, that pushes the price up.

To civilians that might seem like a lot of money for a radio-controlled model aircraft, but it needs to be put in context. In the conflict in Afghanistan, soldiers have on occasion used shoulder-launched Javelin anti-tank missiles costing $70,000 against individual insurgents behind cover. The mine-resistant MRAP armored trucks, hastily purchased to give protection against IEDs, cost about $600,000.

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It’s certainly a low-cost option compared to $14 million for a Reaper. The Reaper also costs about $4,000 an hour to fly, so one ten-hour flight costs as much as a Raven. The F-22 Raptor costs $50,000 an hour to fly, the F-35 over $30,000, making Reaper cheap by Air Force standards.

Cheap drones were clearly a thing nine years ago, but super-cheap FPV quadcopters with 40-mm grenades or RPG warheads were still in the future.

The Hellfire is not an ideal fit for the Predator, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), which struggles to carry two of them:

Rather than developing smaller, smarter weapons, the Air Force decided it wanted a bigger aircraft. General Atomics anticipated this and the company funded development of “Predator B.”

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When it went into service in Afghanistan in 2007, the Predator B was renamed the “MQ-9B Hunter-Killer” or “Reaper.”

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It is four times as heavy; the turboprop engine is six times as powerful and doubles to speed to around 200 mph.

[….]

A Reaper can carry fourteen Hellfire missiles, or four missiles and a pair of laser-guided 500-pound bombs.

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The flyaway price for Reaper is around $14 million for the basic model, or $20 million with all the trimmings, compared to $4 million for a Predator.

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So instead of a cheap, ultra-long endurance, expendable drone, the Reaper resembles a manned aircraft. Predator operator Matt Martin describes the Reaper as “a longer-duration, lightly-armed (and much less survivable) version of the F-16.” Without the duration and price advantages, the Reaper comes perilously close to being in competition with the manned jets. As we have seen, this is often a fatal situation for a drone in the Air Force.

During a July 2023 wargame, the Mitchell Institute tasked experienced operators, technologists, and engineers from the Air Force and defense industry to assess how a mix of uncrewed CCA (collaborative combat aircraft) and crewed combat aircraft could achieve air superiority over a peer aggressor (China):

One of the most important insights is the potential to use CCA as lead forces to help disrupt and suppress China’s advanced integrated air defense system (IADS), improve the lethality and survivability of the Air Force’s counterair forces, and magnify the service’s capacity to project combat mass into highly contested battlespaces. Experts agreed it will not be feasible to match China fighter for fighter and missile for missile in today’s battlespace, given the Air Force’s fighter force is now less than half the size it was in 1991. Accordingly, all three wargame teams proposed CONOPS that initially used CCA at scale to disrupt China’s IADS and level the playing field against the PLAAF.

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All three wargame teams also chose to use a mix of CCA variants designed as airborne sensors, decoys, jammers, or weapon launchers to disrupt and stimulate the PLA’s IADS, locate its critical nodes, and begin to attrit threats to support crewed aircraft operations. Dispersing these functions across a mix of CCA would improve the Air Force’s operational resiliency and increase the number of airborne targets an adversary’s forces must attack. By design, lower-cost CCA may lack the mission systems and full functionalities of 5th generation fighters. However, an adversary has no reliable way of differentiating between how CCA are equipped and must address them all as threats. The key is understanding that CCA — in the same way remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) sensor-shooters pioneered a new way of conducting precision strikes — will be more than intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) information gatherers.

Another insight is that CCA could increase the Air Force’s capacity to generate lethal mass for counterair operations. Appropriately equipped CCA can perform as force multipliers that increase the number of sensors and weapons the Air Force can project into contested battlespaces. CCA could also extend the sensor and weapon ranges of stealthy crewed aircraft they team with, increasing their lethality and survivability. This will require designing CCA with enough survivability to ensure they can reach their air-to-air weapons launch points in contested environments. Using CCA to reduce attrition of Air Force fighters and their crews would also have a major force multiplying effect over the course of a campaign — a key consideration given that DOD-mandated force cuts over the last 30 years caused the Air Force to divest its combat attrition reserves.

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CCA could multiply the Air Force’s diminished combat inventory in another way: by enabling some of its non-stealthy combat aircraft to engage in the fight for air superiority in highly contested environments. For instance, notional CCA designs available to Mitchell Institute’s wargame experts included a long-range, air-launched design that carried two air-to-air weapons or four 250-pound class Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs). The experts used 4th generation F-15EXs and B-52 bombers operating outside the range of China’s IADS to launch these counterair CCA into contested area

Experts participating in Mitchell’s wargame also preferred to use a mix of lower-cost CCA they classified as expendable systems and more capable, moderate-cost CCA that can be recovered and regenerated for additional sorties or attritted if mission needs require in highly contested battlespaces. Experts chose to use expendable CCA in significant numbers during the first few days of their campaigns as airborne decoys, jammers, active emitters, and other ways that risked their loss in highly contested environments. And since these notional CCA could be ground-launched by rockets without the need to use runways, wargame experts chose to pre-position them at dispersed locations in the Philippines and Ryukyu Islands to improve the resiliency of the Air Force’s combat sortie generation operations. As their campaigns progressed, experts shifted toward using a larger number of moderate-cost recoverable/attritable CCA that carried larger payloads of weapons and could return to their forward operating locations to regenerate for additional sorties.

Finally, wargame experts suggested there is a need to develop concepts for operating CCA with other uncrewed aerial vehicles for counterair missions rather than solely using them as adjuncts for crewed aircraft. Of note, operating CCA in this way would require providing them with more advanced autonomy and other technologies that add to their cost.