Isegoria

During the 1970s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the CIA’s aviation efforts concentrated largely on pilotless aircraft, or drones:

Hank Meierdierck, the man who wrote the manual for the U-2 at Area 51, was in charge of one such CIA drone project, which began in late 1969. Code-named Aquiline, the six-foot-long pilotless aircraft was disguised to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a small television camera in its nose and photo equipment and air-sampling sensors under its wings. Some insiders say it had been designed to test for radiation in the air as well as to gather electronic intelligence, or ELINT. But Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer ever assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, offers a different version of events. “Spy satellites flying over the Caspian Sea delivered us images of an oddly shaped, giant, multi-engined watercraft moving around down there on the surface. No one had any idea what this thing was for, but you can be sure the Agency wanted to find out. That is what the original purpose of Aquiline was for,” Poteat reveals. “To take close-up pictures of the vehicle so we could discern what it was and what the Soviets might be thinking of using it for. Since we had no idea what it was, we made up a name for it. We called it the Caspian Sea Monster,” Poteat explains. Project Aquiline remains a classified project, but in September of 2008, BBC News magazine produced a story about a Cold War Soviet hydrofoil named Ekranoplan, which is exactly what the CIA’s Aquiline drone was designed to spy on.

At Area 51, Hank Meierdierck selected his former hunting partner Jim Freedman to assist him on the Aquiline drone program. “It flew low and was meant to follow along communication lines in foreign countries and intercept messages,” Freedman says. “I believe the plan was to launch it from a submarine while it was waiting in port.” The Aquiline team consisted of three pilots trained to remotely control the bird, with Freedman offering operational support. “Hank got the thing to fly,” Freedman recalls. Progress was slow and “it crash-landed a lot.” The program ended when the defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, gave a bid for the job that Meierdierck felt was ninety-nine million dollars over budget. McDonnell Douglas would not budge on their bid so Hank recommended that the CIA cancel Project Aquiline, which he said they did. After the program was over, Hank Meierdierck managed to take a mock-up of the Aquiline drone home with him from the area. “He had it sitting on his bar at his house down in Las Vegas,” Freedman recalls.

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Project Ornithopter involved a birdlike drone designed to blend in with nature by flapping its wings. And a third, even smaller drone was designed to look like a crow and land on windowsills in order to photograph what was going on inside CIA-targeted rooms. The tiniest drone program, orchestrated in the early 1970s, was Project Insectothopter, an insect-size aerial vehicle that looked like a dragonfly in flight. Insectothopter had an emerald green minifuselage and, like Ornithopter, flapped its wings, which were powered by a miniature engine that ran on a tiny amount of gas. Through its Office of Research and Development, or ORD, the CIA had also tried turning live birds and cats into spies. In one such program, CIA-trained pigeons flew around Washington, DC, with bird-size cameras strapped to their necks. The project failed after the extra weight tired out the pigeons and they hobbled back to headquarters on foot instead of in flight. Another CIA endeavor, Acoustic Kitty, involved putting electronic listening devices in house cats. But that project also backfired after too many cats strayed from their missions in search of food. One acoustic kitty got run over by a car.

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During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA didn’t get very far with its drones — until late 1979, when the Agency learned about a lethal anthrax accident at a “probable biological warfare research, production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia — the same location where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident, the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling anthrax spores.

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For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51, one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the year 2000, that future was now.

The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator, with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles, supplied by the army. The target would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden.

With 267 combat missions under his belt, 44 in Korea and 213 in Vietnam, Robert M. Bond was a highly decorated Air Force pilot and vice commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), which made him a VIP when he visited the F-117 program at Area 51 in March, 1984:

But in addition to being impressed by the F-117 Nighthawk, General Bond was equally fascinated by the MiG program, which was still going on at Area 51. In the fifteen years since the CIA had gotten its hands on Munir Redfa’s MiG-21, the Agency and the Air Force had acquired a fleet of Soviet-made aircraft including an MiG-15, an MiG-17, and, most recently, the supersonic MiG-23. Barnes says, “We called it the Flogger. It was a very fast plane, almost Mach 3. But it was squirrelly. Hard to fly. It could kill you if you weren’t well trained.”

On a visit to Area 51 the following month, General Bond requested to fly the MiG-23. “There was some debate about whether the general should be allowed to fly,” Barnes explains. “Every hour in a Soviet airplane was precious. We did not have spare parts. We could not afford unnecessary wear and tear. Usually a pilot would train for at least two weeks before flying a MiG. Instead, General Bond got a briefing while sitting inside the plane with an instructor pilot saying, ‘Do this, do that.’” In other words, instead of undergoing two weeks of training, General Bond pulled rank.

General Bond’s death opened the possible exposure of five secret programs and facilities, including the MiG program, the F-117 program, Area 51, Area 52, and the nuclear reactor explosions at Jackass Flats. Unlike the deaths of CIA pilots flying out of Area 51, which could be concealed as generic training accidents, the death of a general required detailed explanation. If the press asked too many questions, it could trigger a federal investigation. One program had to come out of the dark to keep the others hidden. The Pentagon made the decision to out the MiG. Quietly, Fred Hoffman, a military writer with the Associated Press, was “leaked” information that Bond had in fact died at the controls of a Soviet MiG-23. The emphasis was put on how the Pentagon was able to obtain Soviet-bloc aircraft and weaponry from allies in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “The government has always been reluctant to discuss such acquisitions for fear of embarrassing the friendly donors, but the spotlight was turned anew on the subject after a three-star Air Force general was killed April 26 in a Nevada plane crash that was quickly cloaked in secrecy,” Hoffman wrote, adding “sources who spoke on condition they remain anonymous have indicated the MiG-23, the most advanced Soviet warplane ever to fall permanently into U.S. hands, was supplied to this country by Egypt.”

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It would be another four years before the public had any idea the F-117 Nighthawk existed. In November of 1988, a grainy image of the arrowhead-shaped, futuristic-looking craft was released to an awestruck public despite the fact that variations of the F-117 had been flying at Area 51 and Area 52 for eleven years.

Last month, Ukrainian makers Vyriy Drone performed an official handover of the first batch of 1,000 “all-Ukrainian” FPV drones:

It is important to note that some of the electronic chips in that make up devices may in fact come from China or other countries. But these are simple building blocks, commodity products which can be sourced from the U.S. and Japan. They are very different to specialist end products for drones like flight controllers.

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“Initially, there was a generally accepted opinion that China could not be beaten on price,” Ukrainian analyst Serhii Flash wrote on his Telegram channel. “Never. But competition, time, volumes, optimization of business processes work wonders.”

Flash shares a graph showing how the prices of various locally made components including motors, frames and propellers have dropped an average of around 50% over the last two years.

Frames and propellers are relatively easy to make without a major investment in production machinery. Other components are more challenging. In 2024 we reported on how Ukrainian makers Wild Hornets were making their own flight controllers on a robotic assembly line, and later set up a similar process to make their own drone batteries.

Specialist companies have gone further. Thermal imagers are a particular challenge, and FPV makers have spent considerable time and effort finding Chinese suppliers who meet their requirements for cost and capability. In other countries, the defence sector makes it own high-end thermal imagers and price is not a factor. Drone makers are on a tighter budget. A $2,000 military imager is not a viable proposition for a $400 FPV,

In October 2024 Ukrainian start-up Odd Systems announced that they were producing locally-made thermal imagers. These are comparable to Chinese 256×192 pixel imagers, but about 20% cheaper at $250. Odd Systems say they when they can make their Kurbas-256 in volume the unit price will drop even further.

Importantly the Kurbas-256 is designed for FPVs rather than general industrial use. The developers talked to users about their combat experience with commercial Chinese thermal imaging cameras and modified their design accordingly. For example, some Chinese cameras suffer from condensation forming inside them, making them unusable, so Kurbas cameras come in a sealed unit sealed to prevent condensation.

“We studied the experience and considered the wishes of FPV operators. We have created a Ukrainian product with full control of hardware and low-level software,” the company told Militaryni.

For example, the operator can adjust the output of the Kurbas-256 in flight, changing contrast for a clearer image depending on conditions. Also, most thermal cameras have automatic calibration which sometimes freezes the image for several seconds. This is not an issue for most applications but disastrous on a drone, so Odd Systems’ cameras do not have this ‘feature’.

The F-117 Nighthawk, the nation’s first stealth bomber, would radically change the way America fought wars, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

As a Lockheed official explained at a banquet honoring the F-117 in April of 2008, “Before the advent of stealth, war planners had to determine how many sorties were necessary to take out a single target. After the invention of the F-117 stealth bomber, that changed. It became, How many targets can we take out on a single sortie?”

Lockheed physicist Edward Lovick worked on each rendition of the stealth bomber, which began in the early 1970s with Harvey, a prototype aircraft named after the Jimmy Stewart film about an invisible rabbit. Harvey’s stealth qualities were initially engineered using slide rules and calculators, the same way Lockheed had developed the A-12 Oxcart. Only with the emergence of the mainframe computer, in 1974, did those tools become obsolete. “Two Lockheed engineers, named Denys Overholser and Dick Scherrer, realized that it might be possible to design a stealth aircraft that would take advantage of some of the results of a computer’s calculations,” Lovick says. “In 1974 computers were relatively new and most of them were the size of a car. Our computer at Lockheed ran on punch cards and had less than 60 K worth of memory.” Still, the computer could do what humans could not do, and that was endless calculations.

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“We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” Lovick says. “It was a radical idea and it worked.”

The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of redesigns it became a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have Blue.

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“It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed up on radar.”

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“Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.”

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The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a radar like a seven-sixteenth-inch metal sphere — roughly the size of a ball bearing.” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing.

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Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there. “Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F-117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.”

A top Space Force general said Tuesday that commercial systems have observed Chinese satellites rehearsing “dogfighting” maneuvers in low Earth orbit:

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said during the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”

A service spokesperson later elaborated on Guetlein’s comments, saying the operation occurred in 2024 and involved three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two other Chinese experimental spacecraft, the Shijian-605 A and B. The Shijian-6 systems are believed to have a signals intelligence mission.

The exercise showcased the country’s ability to perform complex maneuvers in orbit, referred to as rendezvous and proximity operations, which involve not only navigating around other objects but also inspecting them.

Guetlein listed the satellite dogfighting demonstration alongside several other concerning activities from “near-peer” U.S. adversaries. That includes Russia’s 2019 demonstration of a “nesting doll” capability, where one satellite released a smaller spacecraft that then performed several stalking maneuvers near a U.S. satellite.

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“That capability gap used to be massive,” Guetlein said. “We’ve got to change the way we look at space or that capability gap may reverse and not be in our favor anymore.”

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“The purpose of the Space Force is to guarantee space superiority for the joint force — not space for space’s sake. Space [operations] guarantee that, just like all the other domains, we can fight as a joint force and we can depend on those capabilities,” Guetlein said.

Recent upgrades to the Kometa system are allowing Russia to bring back glide bombs:

Most Russian glide bombs use a UMPK precision guidance kit, which relies on Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) signals from Russia’s GLONASS satellite system, the Russian constellation of satellites similar to GPS. The UMPK determines the glide bomb’s location and heading, adjusting its course with rear-mounted fins to stay on target. Although the GLONASS system is newer than GPS, it is more vulnerable to jamming, which the Ukrainians have exploited. The Ukrainian jammers emit fake PNT signals than are stronger than those from the GLONASS satellites, overpowering the actual signal and misguiding the glide bomb into thinking it is in a different location.

To counter this jamming, the UMPK includes the Kometa system, which uses multiple radio receivers to distinguish between genuine and spoofed PNT signals. Information about this system is somewhat limited given its sensitive nature. However, the Ukrainian Military Portal published an article in July 2023 with background information about the system. The initial Kometa design, introduced in 2012, consisted of three receivers capable of detecting the spatial separation between authentic PNT signals and the more powerful jamming signals. The system compares the strength and angle of arrival of the signals, allowing it to identify the real signal and filter out the signals coming from a jammer.

In April 2024, Armada International reported that the Russian military had started using an upgraded version of the Kometa system with an additional five receivers, bringing the total to eight. With more receivers, the upgraded Kometa could process a larger number of signals simultaneously, increasing its ability to identify and reject complex jamming patterns. Images posted on social media show Ukrainian forces capturing a device equipped with the 8-channel Kometa system. According to the post, the Ukrainians installed the system into one of their own devices and used it in an attack against Russia. Although not stated in the post, Ukrainian scientists likely studied the captured device to determine how to jam it. The Ukrainians were successful in jamming the upgraded Kometa system, forcing the Russians to stop using glide bombs.

Satellite-guided glide bombs were “miracle weapons” for the Russians, traveling 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings, facing practically no countermeasures.

That has changed. Now the Ukrainians not only have countermeasures — some of these countermeasures appear to be extremely effective.

“Previously, the enemy used glide bombs with high accuracy to attack objects in the territory of regional centers such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia,” Narek Kazarian, whose 10-person Night Watch team in Ukraine develops electronic warfare systems, told Forbes.

Night Watch’s new Lima jammer is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing, Kazarian claimed.

Lima isn’t a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” Kazarian explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”

[…]

“All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” Fighterbomber claimed. It might take eight or even 16 glide bombs to reliably hit one target, the channel added. And while the glide bombs are inexpensive for a precision munition — each costing around $25,000 — the Sukhoi jets that lob them two or four at a time aren’t cheap.

Launching four jets to maybe hit one target is risky and inefficient for an air force that has just a thousand or so modern jets, and has already lost 120 of them in action in Ukraine.

The intensive Ukrainian jamming has also grounded many of Russia’s drones. Night Watch’s earliest efforts focused on forcing down Shahed attack drones that routinely strike Ukrainian cities.

Radio jamming has effectively accomplished what the Ukrainian air force largely failed to accomplish with its expensive, vulnerable S-300, Patriot and SAMP/T surface-to-air missile batteries, which can hit Russian jets from scores of miles away but were always too few in number to fully protect the front line and safeguard Ukrainian cities

The Pentagon has announced a new contract to acquire Precision Strike Indoor & Outdoor (PSIO) small Unmanned Aerial Systems from drone-maker XTEND:

The contract is with the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate, an obscure outfit which develops capabilities for the military (“and Interagency customers”) to carry out operations typically involving clandestine, asymmetric strikes against the highest value targets. In the past this might have meant a Reaper drone taking out an insurgent leader on a balcony with a six-bladed Hellfire R9X ‘Ninja’ missile without damaging the building. The new weapon takes precision strike to places which were previously out of reach.

Flying drones indoors is a major challenge, in a complex and cluttered three-dimensional space with obstacles in every direction. XTEND’s CEO Aviv Shapira previously told Forbes how the company’s XOS operating system took over the difficult work of piloting, so that even a beginner could fly like a pro, going through windows and other narrow openings with ease.

All the operator needs to do is indicate where the drone needs to go and the XOS software does the rest, plotting the optimal route and automatically avoiding obstacles while also flagging objects of interest like people or weapons seen by the drone’s camera. It also makes a map of the space as it goes so it can find its way back.

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Rotor guards mean that the drone will not be damaged by collisions with walls or other solid objects, and it is described as a being used for ‘indoor precision operations’. The Scorpio carries a one-pound payload with multiple different warhead options.

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The Scorpio’s navigation system does not rely on GPS or other satellite signals, which may be jammed or unavailable inside buildings. Its range is quoted as greater than 3 miles, with a maximum speed of 25 mph.

Apart from its smart software though, perhaps the most striking feature of Scorpio are its communications. Mesh networking allows three drones to work together, controlled by a single operator. Typically two would be positioned to guard exits while the third explores a building interior.

The specifications include an option for a fiber optic data link. This makes the drone impossible to jam , and allows it to go into spaces where no radio signal can reach, such as underground tunnels.

A Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces official recently explained that fiber-optic FPVs are already in their third generation, after just a few months:

Any FPV drone has three critical components in addition to its basic airframe, motors and propellers: a warhead, a battery and a voluminous container for a spool of thin fiber-optic cable that might be 13 miles long.

The very first generation of Ukrainian FPV drone stacked each element — the warhead, battery and spool — on top of each other in an awkward pile. It should go without saying that the stack wasn’t very aerodynamic. “We oppose three-story drones as they have low energy efficiency,” the USF official admitted.

The next two drone generations combined elements. One stuffed the warhead inside the spool. The other stuffed the battery inside the spool. Both of these combos are more aerodynamic than the triple-stack drone, but the battery-inside version is more modular: it’s easier to swap in different warhead types, such as shaped-charge warheads optimized for penetrating vehicle armor.

The Crimean War of 1853–1856 presented military leaders with multiple choices between reliable but less effective capabilities and superior ones that could fail unpredictably at critical moments:

By the 1850s, the predominant telegraph system — used to coordinate 730,000 British, French, and Russian troops across the Crimean Peninsula, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans — was not yet Samuel Morse’s electromagnetic line, but a primitive optical “semaphore.” The semaphore telegraph used a simple series of towers topped with moveable wooden arms that displayed symbols from one tower to the next like the Beacons of Gondor from The Lord of the Rings. By the outbreak of the war, even these semaphore lines were sparse on the Continent. A message from Crimea in 1854 could take anywhere from twelve days to three weeks to reach London; from Crimea to Varna by steamer, from Varna to Bucharest by courier, and from Bucharest to London or Paris by mail. Russia, which had already invested in a more robust telegraph network, could send a message to the front in only two days — a very meaningful advantage. Naturally, the Allies moved quickly to catch up. They connected British and French army headquarters by telegraph, contracted with the British Electric Telegraph Company to set up 21 miles of buried cable within Crimea, contracted R. S. Newall & Co. to connect Balaklava with Varna, and installed a 150 mile line from Varna to Istanbul. By the time they captured Sebastopol, the most serious victory of the Crimean operation, they could circulate the news of their victory across Europe in only two days.

But there is a caveat in this story of progress. While the electric telegraph was faster in theory, it proved more difficult to set up and less reliable in practice. Submarine cables, unarmored and laid with little slack, often suffered outages due to damage by ships, sabotage or otherwise. While a clumsy semaphore tower could be set up and functioning in only four hours, an electric cable could take weeks to bury in hard, cracked winter ground, and could not be easily moved as needed afterwards. War correspondent William Russell noted “it was rather singular that the French preferred the old-fashioned semaphore” throughout the conflict. Though the French had begun a transition to the electric telegraph in the 1840s, they stuck with the semaphore system for the majority of the war effort, sending over 4,500 semaphore telegraphs, only finalizing their transition to electric after the war was over and reliability less critical.

Worse — the invention of the telegraph was the invention of micromanagement.

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Europe had the material technology to enable central decision-making, but lacked the experience to apply it wisely. Disgruntled generals suffered a blow to their status from central ministers who believed themselves to be better-informed than they really were. Command suffered and the organizational disaster for which the Crimean War is best-remembered followed suit. As with all technological innovations, their invention is just the first act of innovation, the second are the changes to human social organization needed for adoption.

Modern naval warships weren’t ready, either:

The original incarnation of steam propulsion — the paddle wheel — designed in 1776 to emulate the paddling of a duck, was vulnerable to attack; one blow to the large target that was the wheel and the ship was dead in the water. Because the paddle wheel occupied such a large surface area along the hull, an early steamer could not be equipped with a full broadside. Worse, in rough seas, the wheel could become submerged or rise out of the water entirely, damaging the engines; if the boat encountered an obstacle like floating debris, the boilers of early engines could build up too much pressure and explode, causing the ship to sink. For these reasons, the steamer was not trusted in combat.

Ironclad hulls, too, had been decried. When the British Captain Henry Ducie Chads tested the resistance of 5 ? 8 ” iron plating against artillery at Portsmouth in 1850, he found that only two or three shots could cause the armor to shatter into shrapnel that would gravely endanger the crew. The cast iron armor was brittle and prone to fracture, and had not yet been replaced by wrought iron, which could withstand more deformation before breaking.

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Traditional solid shot was designed to kill the crew and take down rigging, but it could typically only inflict repairable damage to the thick oak hulls of wooden battleships, not destroy them. In 1821, French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans proposed in a seminal pamphlet Nouvelle Force Maritime that the future of naval warfare would look dramatically different. Exploding artillery shells, he proposed, which were already in use on land, could be deployed at sea to sink large wooden ships-of-the-line outright. The exploding shell gun posed a danger to the wooden ship so great, he argued in a successive pamphlet the following year, that each battleship of the future must be armored with metal. The exploding shell gun Paixhans developed had a range of up to two miles and exploded upon contact with the target, allowing battleships to pack a more destructive ordinance at a lighter weight. The French Navy began trials with this gun — the Paixhans gun — in 1824, and had adopted it throughout the fleet by 1837. The British Royal Navy followed suit the following year. Soon, in peacetime, the exploding shell spread even to Russia.

The exploding shell was deployed to resounding effect during the war’s first major naval engagement. On November 30th, 1853, Russian Admiral Pavel Nakhimov approached the Turkish fleet at Sinop Bay, hoping to take the Ottomans by surprise during the initial Russian offensive.

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Sinop proved beyond all skepticism that the Paixhans gun had made the wooden battleship obsolete. The Allies immediately took notice. Napoleon II ordered the construction of a flotilla of five armored batteries, with four-inch iron plating that could withstand shelling as well as steam propulsion. Critically, by then, Captain John Ericsson and FP Smith of London had invented the screw propeller, which sat underneath the boat where it was less vulnerable to attack, and where it could be lifted out of the water to allow the vessel to maneuver by sail if necessary. Also critically, these armoring plates could then be constructed out of wrought iron, which could withstand shelling without fragmenting, rather than the brittle cast iron of years past.

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The Western powers recognized the paradigm shift, pushed through the unpredictable growing pains of emerging technologies, and adopted proactively to win. In an age of unprecedented transformation and speed at every domain, history teaches us that to slow down change is to accept defeat.

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In eight prolific decades of Pax Americana, military technology has developed to the point of being unrecognizable from WWII. Military organization, however, remains the same, and the imaginations of procurement offices haven’t moved far either.

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The history of the Crimean War reminds us that adopting new technologies is not without challenges, but the failure to do so can be far more consequential.

The side in control of the air tends to win, Austin Vernon notes:

At a minimum, dominant air power is a massive force multiplier that allows the side wielding it to take significantly less casualties than its opponent. Aircraft can uniquely disrupt supply lines, command and control, and troop concentrations. The forces on the losing side must drastically alter their tactics to survive, limiting their ability to attack or defend.

Another feature is that air-to-air battles tend to be lopsided. It is more common to see 20:1 or 10:1 kill/loss ratios than even matches. For example, the F-15 has 104 kills and zero losses since entering service in 1976. The defining factors have been pilot quality, aircraft performance, weapon performance, and sensor capability (radar, airborne early warning aircraft, etc.).

US airpower was so dominant in the 20th century that most opponents focused on building ground-based anti-aircraft defenses. An arms race developed between these anti-aircraft missile batteries and ever more sophisticated aircraft, weapons, and tactics on the US side. Stealth to avoid detection, cruise missiles to avoid risking aircraft, and highly specialized tactics and weapons to defeat anti-aircraft batteries are an outgrowth of this competition.

Drones are not a new category but dramatically reduce the cost of some existing functions:

FPV Drones → Attack Helicopters

Advocates of rotor aircraft thought they would dominate the battlefield in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, to the detriment of traditional armor. It didn’t happen because helicopters are vulnerable to air defenses, including shoulder-fired missiles and anti-aircraft guns.

First Person View (FPV) kamikaze drones that cost <$1000 or slightly larger reusable drones are bringing this prediction back from the dead. They are still vulnerable to air defense, but it is irrelevant given their cost. Ground forces will need to make many adjustments, similar to when anti-tank guided missiles made WWII-style tanks obsolete in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bomber Drones → Attack Helicopters (pt. 2)

Some missions call for slightly larger munitions than disposable FPVs can justify, and “bomber” drones that weigh around 25-50 kg and cost $10,000 fill the void. They mostly fly at night to increase survival rates and often use satellite communications, like StarLink, to avoid jamming. Missions are attacking parked vehicles, mining roads, and dropping grenades on infantry. These drones are much more powerful than FPVs and are worth the price if they can survive a few missions.

Recon Drones → Scout Helicopters and Forward Air Control Aircraft

Scouting for artillery, ground attack aircraft, and attack helicopters has long been a scarce resource, even for the US military. Infantry and armor units still had to self-scout with limited visibility.

Small recon drones, often off-the-shelf commercial models, bring top-tier scouting down to the squad level. Their cost makes using them sustainable, while many large drones, like the US Predator, are obsolete in high-intensity battles because of their price and vulnerability to air defenses.

One-Way Attack Drones → Cruise Missiles

Cruise missiles have a unique ability to attack heavily defended targets in the opponent’s rear, but their price limits their number.

Propeller-powered one-way attack drones can cost as little as $50,000 instead of $1+ million, increasing volume. The overall impact has been much more muted than FPV and recon drones because these drones are so easy to shoot down and have small payloads that limit what targets they can be effective against. They travel slowly, roughly the same as a car on the interstate, to meet cost goals and extend range. Their utility plummets once the opponent adapts to shoot them down with cheap weapons, like guns on trucks and helicopters, cheap interceptor drones, or electronic warfare. The drones can still provide net benefits if they temporarily overwhelm air defenses, force the enemy to expend significant organizational resources to counter them, or the targets are valuable enough.

Interceptor Drones → Man Portable Anti-Aircraft Missiles

Militaries developed man-portable anti-aircraft missiles to counter helicopters and low-flying aircraft, but they are much too expensive and complex to counter drones.

Instead, small racing-style drones that cost no more than a few thousand dollars ram or explode near targets. Their prey is primarily more expensive attack drones and higher-tier recon drones that cost $30,000-$200,000.

There are some experiments with drones carrying shotguns and other air-to-air weaponry to deal with the smallest FPV and recon drones. Time will tell if these are viable.

He projects some trends:

Barbell Procurement Strategy

The battlefield is so hostile that drones must be cheap enough to be expendable or capable enough to avoid all air defenses. The somewhat fancy $100,000 recon drone is probably in no-man’s-land. Large drones without sophisticated countermeasures, like the US Global Hawk or Predator/Reaper family, are obsolete outside the most permissive airspace. Even drones that were considered cheap before the war in Ukraine, like the Turkish TB-2, have been sent to the scrap heap.

One of the only viable(?) large drones currently in use is the pricey US RQ-180 because of its size and modern stealth features. Traditional cruise missiles also continue to be viable for deep strikes.

Small Eats Large

Drones aren’t automatically cheaper than legacy systems like helicopters or strategic reconnaissance platforms. Radical reduction in size and complexity is the best way to achieve this.

Better electronics and cameras have allowed recon drones with mass measured in grams. Or a shaped charge driven by an FPV drone into the weakest part of a vehicle’s armor can be much smaller than traditional anti-tank missile warheads.

Battery-electric powertrains can shrink much more than engines can, and these drones have disrupted short-range, low-speed categories much more than long-range or high-powered missions.

The success rate of these drones is often low, between 10%-50%, and many targets need multiple hits. However, the low cost of small drones means the math is favorable and similar to artillery shells.

Single Function Dominates

Drones can only be small and cheap if they are highly specialized for one task. Examples include anti-vehicle, anti-personnel, high-value targets ~30 km behind enemy lines, hitting enemy drones, dropping mines or supplies, etc. Many of these categories even have further specialization within them.

Paths with Faster Iteration Win

Things change fast since small drones are a relatively new technology. Pathways that allow quick adjustments can outcompete slow paths. Small and single-function platforms can increase iteration speed.

Slow, electric drones have massive advantages in operating footprint and costs, he notes:

Fuel

Fuel is one of the biggest concerns for modern militaries. The US military often assumes a fuel cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars per gallon to deliver to war zones for planning. The volume of demand in a high-intensity conflict could reach the level of economies like Japan. Aircraft are often the largest fuel consumers.

These drones require a fraction of the energy of high-performance aircraft and can often use electricity instead of fuel. The AEW scout battery pack would only be a few pounds and could charge with a tiny solar panel. Models like the tactical bomber, air-defense fighter, or air superiority fighter have batteries small enough to swap by hand. A few standard-size solar panels could provide enough juice for one sortie per day and don’t require vulnerable centralized infrastructure.

Infrastructure

An aircraft’s weight and stall speed plays a large part in determining runway length and quality. Small, slow drones need minimal airstrips, if they need them at all. There is no need for traditional air bases.

Parts/Maintenance

The US military prefers “module-based” maintenance. Techs change an entire radar module instead of diagnosing and fixing a certain subcomponent to reduce labor hours and the number of parts in stock.

Many drones would cost as much as a typical module, and there would be no reason to bother with parts or repairs. The need for techs and parts management would be minimal.

Battery-electric powertrains are reliable compared to jet engines and should be able to fly hundreds or thousands of hours before replacement without maintenance.

Training

Fighter pilots are the most valuable rank-adjusted human capital in any military. One great pilot can make a meaningful difference in an entire war by helping to clear the skies. Selection is intense, and training is very slow. Simulators help, but learning to fly a $100+ million fighter jet doesn’t happen overnight.

AI pilots take more effort to train initially but can replicate as needed. The burden for any human pilot/manager will be lower given the narrower mission of drones than multi-role fighters. The low cost of the platforms means both AI and humans can train constantly on real aircraft instead of using simulators. Battles can be live instead of simulated without endangering human pilots, improving the quality of training.

Sortie Rate

Most fighters need full crews to turn the aircraft around and keep it flying. Each airframe only has so many hours without full refits. Many aircraft struggle to fly one sortie per day. A low-maintenance, battery-electric drone with swappable batteries could fly 20-22 hours each day.

The sortie challenge would be especially beneficial for countries like Taiwan. China constantly flies fighters at the edge of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, which forces Taiwan to send fighters to intercept them, wearing down airframes and pilots. A constant picket of drones would negate this strategy.

Shipping

Munitions, especially bombs, are the biggest logistical challenge after fuel. Manned aircraft tend to drop large bombs that are overkill because of their limited sortie rates and the risk each mission entails. Drones with high sortie rates can use small bombs that make the drone more practical and reduce total tonnage dropped as each target gets the appropriate amount instead of a truck getting vaporized by a 2000 lb bomb.

Which branch should take on the drones?

The Air Force loathes low-performance aircraft and is skeptical of deleting human pilots. Its budget mostly goes towards capabilities that the drone air force isn’t replacing, like deep strike, high-end fighters, or the nuclear umbrella. Deleting these platforms makes little sense when they still provide key capabilities (hedging!) and are in the phase where unit cost is falling. For those reasons, the Air Force is a poor choice to raise the drone force, and its job is to ensure its aircraft are protected from small drones when parked.

Thankfully, the US has four air forces to choose from, three of which already operate high-end aviation (Air Force, Navy, Marines).

Anduril Industries is taking the reins of the United States Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program, and for Palmer Luckey this announcement is deeply personal:

Since my pre-Oculus days as a teenager who had the opportunity to do a tiny bit of work on the Army’s BRAVEMIND project, I’ve believed there would be a headset on every soldier long before there is a headset on every civilian. Given that America loses more troops in training than combat, the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer (SiVT) side of IVAS alone has the potential to save more lives than practically anything else we can imagine building.

Tactical heads-up-displays that turn warfighters into technomancers and pair us with weaponized robotics were one of the products in the original Anduril pitch deck for a reason. The past eight years we have spent building Lattice have put Anduril in a position to make this type of thing actually useful in the way military strategists and technologists have long dreamed of, ever since Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers. Not just day and night and thermal and ultraviolet, but peering into an idealized interactive real-time composite of past, present, and future that will quickly surpass traditional senses like vision and touch. Put another way, Superman doesn’t use menus — he just sees and does.

His announcement includes a paragraph of redacted text, before getting back to his main point:

Everything I’ve done in my career — building Oculus out of a camper trailer, shipping VR to millions of consumers, getting run out of Silicon Valley by backstabbing snakes, betting that Anduril could tear people out of the bigtech megacorp matrix and put them to work on our nation’s most important problems — has led to this moment.

David Hambling points to a number of videos released by Ukrainian forces that show FPV lurk-and-strike ambush tactics in action:

The technique is used behind Russian lines to strike vehicles travelling on supply routes and seems to be used as a way to interdict logistics – and also for targeted assassinations.

This technique may have been adopted as a way to get around the short flight time of FPVs, which typically fly for 20 minutes or less and cannot wait for targets.

[…]

What is clear from this is that all three FPVs were in the ambush area, and the operators found it worthwhile to expend three on a low-value target which was not carrying passengers or cargo. In Russia the Desertcross costs around $23,000; the FPVs are around $500 each but availability rather than cost would likely be the deciding factor. Nobody wastes ammo when it is scarce, however cheap it might be.

[…]

These perch-and-wait ambushes are interesting for what they do not show as much as for what they do.

There is no indication how the drones reached their ambush spots. Battery life is the big issue; the drones might have flown there under their own power and counted on having enough juice left for the waiting period and the ambush. But they may have been delivered by drone. Wild Hornets Queen Hornet has been shown delivering FPVs and acting as a flying relay station to increase control range. And when British PM Keir Starmer visited Ukraine recently, he was shown two FPV carriers, one a fixed-wing drone, the other a large multicopter.

Ukrainian forces are increasingly using drones to lay anti-tank mines on roads behind Russian lines. Mines are relatively easy to remove; drones which may be some distance from the road and can be relocated (or target anyone attempting to remove them) may be more challenging.

Ukraine’s latest unmanned aerial vehicle can fly 1,200 miles, drop a 550-pound bomb and return to base, David Axe reports, making it potentially the most powerful reusable drone in the Russia-Ukraine war:

It’s unclear what airframe the Unmanned Systems Forces uses as basis for the far-flying, multi-use drone, but the scant photographic evidence points to a modified civilian sport plane. Ukrainian drone regiments have long operated propeller-driven Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes fitted with remote controls and an underbelly bomb rack.

But the A-22s have only ever been caught on video conducting one-way missions, slamming into their targets like slow cruise missiles. The new Ukrainian drone can drop its bomb and then fly back to base, meaning it can fly a few or many missions until it wears out, crashes or gets shot down.

In making its longest-range drones reusable, the drone branch could multiply the number and pace of deep strikes it conducts against targets inside Russia, which have lately included bomber bases and oil facilities. The strikes have raised the cost of Russian bomber sorties targeting Ukrainian cities, and depressed oil production in a country that utterly relies on energy exports for state revenue.

[…]

Controlling a drone in mid air, usually through a combination of pre-set GPS-based navigation and direct human control via satellite radio, is fairly straightforward. Landing a drone is hard, however. Smaller models can cut their engines, pop a parachute and float down to the ground. Bigger models must be eased onto a runway.