Small, cheap, one-way, exploding drones – which some observers call
“suicide” or “kamikaze” drones – have been
a staple of low-tech insurgencies for years now.
Islamic State uses them. So do Houthi militants in Yemen.
But the
Russians and Ukrainians have turned cheap drone warfare into an art.
And neither side has figured out exactly how to defend against them. That has huge implications for the future of war. Even the wealthiest and most powerful countries should be worried.
It’s unclear what kind of
drone Kyiv flew into Moscow last weekend. There are so many different drone types in use by the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces that they’re impossible to count.
Ukrainian troops favor octocopters or quadcopters that they either build themselves or buy off the shelf from DJI in China and Mavic in France. The two-pound DJI Mavic 3T, which retails for $7,000, is particularly popular.
Russia imports drones from Iran, including 440-pound Shaheds that cost around $10,000 apiece.
Both sides also fly small, speedy racing drones that are just powerful enough to haul a grenade-size explosive—and damage an armored vehicle. Smaller drones are controlled by nearby operators holding a controller and seeing what the drone sees through its camera. Bigger drones follow satellite-navigation coordinates.
The great
advantage of a drone, besides its low cost, is its small size and – believe it or not – low speed compared to a supersonic manned warplane.
Air-defense radars are optimized for detecting large aircraft and missiles. And they have so-called “speed gates” that ignore very slow objects such as birds. It’s speed gates that make it so hard for radars to detect slowly-drifting spy balloons.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Pantsir air-defense vehicle in Moscow failed to stop the one-war drone attack on Sunday. The crew may never have seen the drone coming.
Ukrainian air-defenses have the same problem. Weekly barrages of Shaheds targeting Ukrainian cities and military bases are met with a fusillade of gun and missile fire. A few will still usually get through.
Desperate to combat the drones and struggling to acquire adequate numbers of modern air-defense vehicles, the Ukrainians have tried everything – even fitting old World War I machine guns to flexible mounts and aiming them into the sky. But as long as the best air-defenses are expensive and the cheap air-defenses are ineffective, there’s no panacea.
Even the Americans are worried. “The wars in Yemen and Ukraine show that actors like
Iran can produce and proliferate large numbers of drones to U.S. adversaries without being a leader in drone technology,” Marcel Plichta, a former Pentagon analyst, wrote for the Irregular Warfare Initiative.
The key to defeating cheap drones is cheap air-defenses. Systems any country can acquire in sufficiently large numbers, and use constantly, in order to swat away the vast swarms of drones that even the most impoverished adversary can afford.
That could mean going back to the past, in a technological sense. During the Cold War, NATO armies fielded hundreds of
Gepard air-defense vehicles, each packing a small radar and twin 35-millimeter guns. These aging vehicles, which were designed to shoot down helicopters—and thus don’t mind relatively low-speed targets—fell out of favor in the years right before the drone era. Most went into storage.
Now they’re back in demand in a big way. Germany has pulled 67 of the three-person Gepards out of warehouses and shipped them to Ukraine. The
United States bought back more Gepards from Chile and plans to donate them to Ukraine, too.
The Gepards might help Ukraine blunt Russia’s
drone swarms. Russia could pursue a similar strategy by reactivating some of its older Cold War air-defenses. But the rest of the world can’t count on limited stocks of surplus air-defense systems to protect it from cheap drones. When it comes to drones, defensive technology needs to catch up to offensive technology.
