They may kind of suck but even so they are still transforming the war in Ukraine. A month or so ago FPV drones took out much of Russia's nuclear bomber fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150789), something like 80% of battlefield casualties are due to drones, neither side pretty much can use tanks because they get taken out by drones. It's a huge change in war fighting.
They've recently promoted the 'Birds of Madyar' guy to run the newly formed Unmanned Systems Forces and are moving to a unified drone line defence the whole way along the frontline. Update on that: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2073811/russia-army-ukr...
Also re drones not having the effect of artillery, fair enough but Ukraine has been using FPV drones to destroy Russia's artillery. Here's footage of one of it's most modern being taken out https://youtu.be/DMOjOJnAd8A?t=161 It's kind of asymmetric - the artillery can't similarly take out the drones because they are too small and replaceable.
The article addresses this in the first few paragraphs. The author argues that whilst the 80% may or may not be accurate, they're using a definition of drone that encompasses many kinds of machine and not just FPV drones which is what he's talking about. He also says the number is highly misleading because most of his FPV drone missions were double-taps where the target had already been taken out by more traditional military assets, and that commanders used drones mostly because they were given them rather than because that was the best military strategy.
FPV drones for combat are a hot flash in the pan. They have had a major effect for now, but naturally as these countermeasures evolve, so weakens their effect.
I keep telling people that the terrain and the strategies that Russians use is the primary reason for the effectiveness. Mortars and artillery already handle the same requirements as the author says. The reason they are effective in 2024-25 is that the drip-drip-drip of single soldiers running over vast fields / unarmoed vehicles driving over known routes is the only way Russians make progress. For a moving target they are great, but multiple moving targets would get shredded by competent artillery anyway.
Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
By far the best use of drones still is as battlefield recon/fire correction to adjust existing artillery/mortar capabilities.
Source: I’m one such drone hobbyist and I’ve watched way too much footage from the front. None of what i’m writing is in absolute terms. I just don’t see the same way as commenters in the public who think they are a checkmate for any combat situation. The incompetence of the Russian forces caught everyone by surprise, but they have learned. My country’s border with Russia is heavily forested and not as flat as Russia. The drones are not able to go through the canopy. Infrared recon is a way better choice than FPV suicide drones.
The big thing that FPV drones have going for them is that they're ludicrously cheap and easily constructed from relatively basic parts by moderately skilled people.
It's literally cheaper to strap a grenade to an FPV drone and fly it into a tank hatch than it is to fire a single non-precision artillery round, let alone tens or hundreds of them.
Plus, you can deploy your drones remotely from the top of a trunk deep behind enemy lines and fly them into irreplaceable strategic aviation assets with a shot exchange factor better than 1000x.
This seems to contradict the article, which among other criticisms, specifically says that these drones are more expensive and less reliable than mortars.
There are different calibers of mortar shells, bigger size has more range and power.
I think author of the article has cheated by not specifying the caliber, because a 155mm artillery shell cost is more than a $1000, precision guided one cost is tens of thousands. While a drone capable of reaching 10km+ costs less than $1000, without payload.
Of course they are less precise. And in most cases, they need quite a few rounds to adjust their aim at the target, so his comparaison was already stupid unfair.
He takes into account all the drones that don't work and then goes on and pretends artillery is 100% accurate and has an absurdly low cost (at the price he is quoting, they are basically sending grenades).
Let's not even discuss moving target or penetrating inside fortified targets which mortar will never be able to do.
Assuming you have good gun bunnies (term of affection, I assure you) and a spotter on the ground or in the air.
The mortar guys in my old company could put a round into a trashcan with line-of-sight but when someone else is calling in fire then they are more of an area weapon. Assuming that a fire mission is going to involve more than one or two rounds to bracket the target now you're talking more dollars and the people on the ground probably aren't going to stand there and wonder how long it's going to take to hit them.
The way I (and most other people I've heard talk about it) see it is drones are an area denial weapon.
> people on the ground probably aren't going to stand there and wonder how long it's going to take to hit them
Lesson learned in WW1 and apparently forgotten multiple times since then: the first few shells have by far the most damage potential and they better be precise.
> Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
The drones now are using fibre optic cables with the reel mounted on the drone. Having the reel on the drone avoids snagging issues and the fibre itself avoids EW jamming and line of sight issues.
Yes, def. possible. But right now in UA's regions where drones are used the most, there are so many used fiber-optic cables laying on the fields, that you have basically zero chance to cut them all, because you would be cutting already discarded ones.
At the extreme of 10KM range we are taking about 2.4kg of glass maximum.
Spread of over 10km.
It is largely insignificant.
Even if you had 100 drones starting from the same exact place and going to the exact same place you would find 24g of glass per meter.
A single leftover beer bottle would be at least 6 times that amount.
When you worry about stuff it is useful to do the work.
I was about to respond to your comment above by saying landmines are 1000x worse, but you just said the opposite, which is completely incomprehensible to me. Are you perchance thinking of literally just the environment, not the fact that countless lives will be harmed and lost for decades to come because of the indiscriminate nature of landmines?
While landmines have the obvious explosive and shrapnel first order effect of causing great harm, I'm wondering about the subtler effects of fiber optic cable pollution.
What happens when someone uses agricultural machinery on a field littered with cable, both to machinery and people? What are the consequences of consuming broken bits of cable that may mingle into produce?
And most critically, if the above are issues, how do you then remove cable from fields at scale? It would seem maddening to try to detect and gather kilometers of tangled glass.
Provided that you catch it in time ... the window for doing that is short (several minutes) and you also likely need to expose yourself to potential other drones patroling in your proximity.
> I’ve watched way too much footage from the front.
Did you see the videos of a drone dropping a shitload of thermite on a forest canopy? [0]
> Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
Most nations have cellular networks that penetrate buildings and forests just fine. In fact, Ukraine used the Russian cellular network for their recent attack deep behind enemy lines.
I'm not saying this will always be possible, but it's not hard to see that line of sight communication is not the end of the line for military drone control. There are many routes for providing an ad hoc line of communication if you don't just use consumer-level tech.
Your linked video is interesting, but I fail to see how this at all differentiates/promotes drone usage versus artillery, indirect fire.
Your video shows something that an artillery corps could accomplish just as easily and not at all be prone to EW.
Granted, moving indirect fire is probably more expensive than a single fpv drone dropping a thermite bomb, but at scale indirect fire is far cheaper, more effective, and critically not prone to EW.
Think of the fpv drone like a smol guided TOW missile at extremely low cost.
The artillery, while destructive, is not going to be nearly as accurate. If you want artillery to hit something on the move accurately you want something like a laser adjusted Excalibur round.
I was one of the first non special operations troops to use a modern infantry-company sized drone (small, low cost) to guide conventional and guided artillery in 2008-9 for the US.
Laser guided Excalibur rounds didn't come out until much later, same for the laser guided jdams. And the cost of those is much higher, plus logistical an deployment cost, than a FPV drone.
Edit: I also don't know anybody that ever fired a copperhead round in anger. That was very much a product of 80s and 90s doctrine to counter Russian armor.
GPS guided munitions like Excalibur are useless against peer adversary. Costs as much as 100 regular rounds and as 200+ FPV drones but has zero accuracy thanks to EW and jamming.
And yet, more than a year ago:
The US gave up sending Ukraine Excalibur guided artillery shells costing $100,000 because they rarely hit their target, report says.
I mean, the US isn't flying our EW aircraft over Ukraine.
So yeah that is in line with what I have said.
US doctrine is based in air dominance.
Also, most Excalibur rounds do not have laser guidance kits. Those are much newer and more expensive. We may have given Ukraine a handful, if that. Still requires laser designation by airborne or land forces, but can give you excellent accuracy even in completely denied GPS environments and against mobile targets.
To my knowledge there still isn't a laser guided mortar in the US inventory with dual mode laser terminal guidance. HEGM project was cancelled in 2018.
Drone 1 (or any other means) destroys the canopy. Drones 2-10 are no longer hindered by said canopy and deliver their payload with extreme and dynamic precision.
Remember that the argument was basically that drones can do nothing useful in (heavily) forested terrain. They can with a little bit of creativity.
I guess we live in different regions. Everything north of Estonia/Denmark is thick spruce and pine forest. I’ve seen what artillery does to these trees, but I’d be hesitant to say a drone could lift something heavy enough to serve like Vietnam war era ”daisy cutters”. Artillery explodes closer to the forest floor.
Run over to the impact crater that was just made, and with a little experience you can quickly know the round type, direction, and distance. If you have those last two you can rattle off a quick counter fire mission.
Artillery counter-fire radar systems can also identify and track artillery/mortar fire.
Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article? The reason the attack on airfields worked is precisely because they operate inland and not on the frontline. Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target. That’s why Starlink is/was so crucial. Even GPS is jammed so independent flight can be impossible with cheap components.
The thermite drones do attack forested areas on the farmlands, but the forests I talk about are tens or hundreds of kilometers wide. You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
I wonder what the tech gap is to using circular polarized light from the sun as a point of reference for dead reckoning. If Bees use it why not camera systems?
I guess I mean in the sense of if you have the drones starting position, the end location (or approximate) and movement tracking based on terrain movement, like the cheap version of Tomahawk but instead of having a map you just use relative change from a stereo camera/lidar pointed at the ground to track relative movement? I guess the hardware to run that isn't available in mass production.
I don't think you can do terrain following entirely in software unless you already have an accurate image of what to expect--and a munition will never know the fine detail. (Coarse detail--I would expect you could do a fair job of steering a ballistic missile based on images of the target area. Closest match and figure out in what way the image is stretched is at least theoretically possible with camera + software. Computationally practical, I don't know, nor how accurate it could be.)
> Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article?
"Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals, and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using cheaper components)."
The currently used FPV drones use consumer level ass communication methods. Do you also think that current military-grade communication methods can be easily jammed on the battlefield?
Using the consumer level stuff as a reference point and thinking it is somehow SOTA is not going to lead to good conclusions.
> Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target.
The point was that there are plenty of radio signals that work fine and with high bandwidth in the 'problematic' terrain types you mentioned. Having said that, you can't rely on the cellular towers of the enemies of course. You need relay drones to create your own ad hoc cellular network.
> You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
At what coordinate? The whole point of FPV drones is that the operator can fly close to the target area and only then decide what the best place to strike is. A shell that is 20m off target is just a waste.
The point of destroying the canopy is reducing the attenuation of the signal for other drones to go in and be able to be precise.
Dense forest scenarios aside, it seems to me that an FPV drone could perhaps serve best as an adjunct to mortar fire and other artillery, rather than as a replacement. If you knew exactly where your drone was, it could basically assume the role of a forward observer.
The article says that GPS is largely hopeless on their particular battlefield, though, so some other means of accurate positioning would probably be needed.
Isn't the drip-drip-drip of single soldiers running around the response to artillery in the first place? Any concentration of manpower attracts artillery and if it's significant, HIMARS gets called in. Naturally, the response is to disperse men and make artillery less effective. The response to that is FPVs chasing down the individuals instead. They're a counter to a counter and can't be judged in isolation.
My point is that it is difficult to imagine another peer conflict in a similar geographical type reaching such a level that budgets should be diverted in a major way to develop these devices in the hope that they are some miracle weapon. Layperson politicians read headlines and think they are a first-level counter and not a counter-to-a-counter as you said :)
That is true, although I think a lot of what can be invested in, is transferable. Control software, targeting, AI could be adapted to larger or smaller scale drones. Manufacturing capabilities can be as well. ISR drones are pervasive and it used to be uneconomical to shoot down a relatively cheap one, like an Orlan, with something that cost as much or more. Now there's cheap counter-ISR FPVs. I don't think the future is manually guided at all though.
Drones could be manufactured from standardized components, LEGO so to speak, allowing for add hoc redesign and automated manufacturing . Foilwrapped fuelcokecans with a primer and a bus are where its at .
Exactly. Many are missing the big picture - while Ukraine has managed to hurt the Russsians with drone warfare, how much has all that really helped Ukraine to drive back the Russians or re-take the territory held by the Russians? The simple answer is that it hasn't. Moreover, drones are not going to give an edge to Ukranian any more as the Russian too have mastered not just counter-drone warfare but also streamlined it into their conventional warfare tactics. (For example, Russians now outproduce the Ukrainians in drones and now use WW2 style motorbikes to evade drone defence - https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/06/25/russias-motorcycle-... ).
"Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx."
This is true, but flat open fields are precisely the places where major mechanized battles usually took place. For the very reason that manoeuvering other equipment in complicated terrain is hard.
Ofc there are significant exceptions, like the Alpine front in WWI, where Austrians and Italians faced each other in mountainous terrain for years, or the Hürtgen Forest in WWII. But a remarkable share of all major mechanized battles of history took place in flat open fields, or something at least resembling that sort of terrain (gently sloping hills with good visibility etc. etc.)
>Ofc there are significant exceptions, like the Alpine front in WWI, where Austrians and Italians faced each other in mountainous terrain for years, or the Hürtgen Forest in WWII. But a remarkable share of all major mechanized battles of history took place in flat open fields, or something at least resembling that sort of terrain (gently sloping hills with good visibility etc. etc.)
Fighting through some portion of the Ardennes has been a fairly recurrent theme in central European land warfare since vikings did it in the 800s.
I'm sure if one digs they can find a reference to a roman general doing it too.
I haven't claimed that there were zero such instances, but my guess is that such battles in difficult terrain may be ~ 5 per cent of the total, if not less. People and animals get exhausted easily in bad terrain, and it is hard to supply the troops. Even mechanical equipment becomes less reliable and more prone to malfunction.
Notably, the German operation Sichelschnitt in 1940 was very successful because the French command considered it unlikely that German Panzers would be able to cross the Ardennes in force, even though the French command was probably well aware of their own military history.
I made the error of emphasizing that I was thinking in a generalized manner of major nations with military tensions with shared borders. A lot of thought should be put towards if simple geography could make this cheap dispenable warfare more expensive than initially due to requirements for repeaters, shielded high-end comms chips or other assistive tech.
Great insight in this comment - in the 21st century wars are so unique that hi-tech weapons emerge specifically for certain battlefield applications.
I.e. just one country over, just one slightly different conflict between different actors would require completely different looking-feeling weapon systems.
It’s not something you think about, usually - so much of what we see used is made for asymmetrical warfare.
Yeah, so Taiwan. Drones or no drones? Just poking around at the news, seeing Chinese drone carrier ships. Drone carrier aircraft, landing craft being prepared, drone swarming being practiced.
Pretty sure we’re going to see a lot of drone warfare in the coming years. I hate to put a timeline on it but the Chinese did announce one so we know what it’s going to look like and where it’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen.
All writing on the success of technology in war follows the same structure.
A new weapon is introduced and finds success, is boasted as the future of warfare. It works and is a significant advantage for the side using it, being a force multiplier.
After the initial succes the other side starts using it too, and there's a scramble for countermeasures. This makes the wonder weapon less effective.
Then articles are written that are the inverse of the hype following the first implementation. Even doubting if 'this is the end of -wonder weapon- ?'
Look at the tank. With every new weapon (take drones) it is theorized that drones would be the end of effectiveness of tanks as a weapon system.
It's not, but it's not longer a wonder weapon, yet a piece of equipment, that's constantly evolving. Is an arms race and it's been like that since the invention of the club by our ancestors.
Don't forget that drones are evolving very fast and their potential is frightening. What about swarm of unmanned AI and computer vision capable drones spreaded across fields and forests waiting for their prey? You can make antipersonnel drones much smaller as you don't need even to kill the enemy - just to wound.
You can place a big batteries across that zones so drones could go recharge theirselves and continue serving.
Eventually you can just drop thousands of such killers above the territory or even some city and they will kill every human they find.
Ok, then we can make unmanned drone hunters and human killer bots will start to enhance their defense capabilities. That will start another round in evolution where humans on the battlefield are just spectators. Or prey if they unlucky.
The article contradicts this view. It says that drones are hardly evolving: even years into the war they still use easily jammed analogue radio links on a handful of frequencies, and the biggest "upgrade" has been tying a fiber optic cable to them with all the obvious downsides that implies (at double the cost). Nor have they become easier to pilot.
The FPV drone is used in battle largely because they're extremely cheap and use components sourceable from many suppliers backed by hobbyist markets. These devices are so cheap and basic they don't even use digital encryption for the video back to the operator, they don't even take off a third of the time, and you're talking about putting AI chips on them. There is much lower hanging fruit than AI.
As far as I know drones usually are one step forward against jamming capabilities of the defence. Jamming device that blocks all frequences costs a lot in money, consumes a lot of power and can be mounted only on a vehicle. And then fiber-optic drones join the game. Infantry not in the vehicle is unprotected and is unable to defence itself. The only chance to survive is to run faster than drone which can be achieved using bikes. But that is not a solution at all.
Not all drones are cheap. What about FPV with night vision cameras? Even if it costs a lot but gives you superiority you can benefit from it in some critical missions and then mass production will reduce the cost.
I suppose going from FPV drones to unmanned AI-drones will change everything like when jet aircrafts replaced propeller aircrafts.
I saw some fascinating videos explaining that the terrain caused the war in first place.
The huge border between Russia and Ukraine is completely flat grassland. This means that to Russia, Ukraine joining NATO is an unacceptable risk because that border is impossible to defend against NATO tank invasion, and the flatness go all the way to Moscow.
A lot of people on internet keep poking fun at Russia inadequate tanks as "proof" Russia is stupid for invading with such crappy gear. Russia is very well aware of this, and is why they invaded in first place, they know of Ukraine joins NATO any military exchange with NATO (like what happened between Iran and Israel) would need to immediately become nuclear because their existing army can't defend the huge open flat terrain against NATO equipment.
3 days after russian invasion or main russian news agency was auto-published article that was supposed to be a victory lap, and promptly removed. it was very briefly mentioned only in few western publications and not many people who speak russian know about it
it gives some insights about reasons for russian invasion. this is english translation . not sure how accurate (don't feel like checking few pages of text), but close enough
> The huge border between Russia and Ukraine is completely flat grassland. This means that to Russia, Ukraine joining NATO is an unacceptable risk because that border is impossible to defend against NATO tank invasion, and the flatness go all the way to Moscow.
This can be reversed and then Russia was supposed to be able to use its supply of 20000 prewar tanks to just swipe through Ukraine and stop at Uzghorod like an Iraqi 2003 style thunder run. It tried to, but failed miserably.
Maybe 19th and early 20th century doctrines are no longer alive with guided ammunition and spotting drones constantly in the air. Actually we can see it in Ukraine today, the moment when Russia setups an armored column it will often get disassembled by drones and artillery kilometers before reaching the zero line. It requires major effort and sacrifice to move frontline few meters on open terrain.
Whenever I see this reasoning, I wonder how many people really believe not a single NATO country will ever elect a nutjob that might just decide to invade someone for a bullshit reason.
For example, hypothetically, what is the chance for a major NATO country will never have a president that might decide to bomb another country out of the blue, because that country according to said president, has weapons of mass destruction, despite the fact the same country intelligence said the target DOESN'T have such weapons? This will never happen right?
I recommend looking up European military readiness levels before diving too deep into fantasies. Who is supposed to invade Russia? Latvia, with its tank army of exactly zero tanks? Or a major country like Germany, with its barely 100 operational tanks and enough artillery ammunition for just two days?
Even in Russia, only complete loonies treats this as a plausible scenario. That's why you can see bunkers and anti-tank ditches and defensive lines being built on the European side of the Russian border, and nothing of this sort on the Russian side. They don't even have a basic chain-link fence. Mushroomers sometimes get lost and just walk into Russia.
So? Nothing in NATO brings the rest of the alliance along for the ride in that case. The core agreement is defensive, not offensive, and historically NATO has not at all been unified on attacks on other countries.
NATO was fairly well united in attacks on Afghanistan, Serbia, and Libya. (I'm just clarifying the historical record, not attempting to justify Russia's actions.)
There is a big difference between behaving like Saddam
Husain vs a geopolitically boring country where nothing happens ever and the people have a high standard of peaceful living as a result. Another self imposed wound for Saddam choosing to be an overall thorn in the side during most of his entire regime. Iraqis could have had the chill high standard of living boring peaceful lives that is part and parcel in the western world. We act like these things are impossible to achieve elsewhere but really the people take to that readily when it is made available, and it is merely the leadership that needs to stop the almost high school tier tit for tat feuding and military mindset of the world that some have. We see this with every society that goes from warbent and militant to basically nothing happening since that pivotal regime change or shift in the wind moment and living peacefully: e.g. Japan after WWII. South Korea. Vietnam. Yugoslavia. East Germany. Spain. Italy. The list goes on with examples from around the world over the last century. Entropy favors peace but it is leadership that steers things otherwise every time.
There is the possibility of a peace settlement that includes a provision prohibiting Ukraine from joining NATO. Personally, I would say this is a reasonably likely outcome.
I’m engaging with this as though Russia’s motivations are serious, despite the fact that they’re doing nothing to actually prepare for this hypothetical NATO invasion. But even if you engage with it seriously, the failure to secure and defend Western Ukraine makes Russia totally vulnerable, NATO commitments or not. And losing so much of your military reserves doing it should terrify anyone who is actually concerned about defending Russia. Russia’s nuclear arsenal is literally the only thing protecting them right now.
I would say that the events of Russo-Ukrainian war have shown that even a lot of tanks (and NATO does not have anywhere near as many as Russia did, the former Soviet stockpile was absolutely massive) aren't the crushing force that they used to be in Manstein's and Guderian's time. Of course Putin is a bit old and may think in old patterns...
On the other hand, I believe Russia made itself very vulnerable by letting its cosmic sector drown in corruption. Nowadays they have fallen so behind the US in launch capabilities that it isn't even funny. Try hiding anything from the fleet of satellites that the US has, or can have if it wishes to.
Starlink may be the single most dangerous technologic development of the 21st century to Russia.
> tanks aren't the crushing force that they used to be in Manstein's and Guderian's time
Russians have assault groups of couple tanks and half a dozen ifv. Had Guderian used same forces in a single battle? The biggest Russian operations had 40-60 armored vehicles, mainly ifv.
Tanks are still a real power, especially western modern tanks.
It's hard to tell for sure about the tanks, the Russian army used really shitty tactics. Tanks are supposed to be used with infantry support to avert "cheap shots" with short range anti-tank weapons. Turkey managed to lose a few Leopards in a similar way. Just Leopards with nothing hanging out in enemy territory.
I don't believe they have enough money to buy Musk. They can influence him through propaganda and memes, but outright bribery is unlikely. That would have to be a vast, vast money transfer.
Trump looks more likely to be bribe-able than Musk. Very different personalities and net worths. Musk seemed to be genuinely angry with Trump's budget, for example.
Why do you think everything can be bought with just money? He might be sold if for trivial things. Some Russian hooker, propaganda and memes, as you said, make him believe siding with Russians makes him more cool. Same things as with the orange guy.
Musk’s wealth is tied to Tesla, which from a business perspective is in very deep trouble. But the stock price doesn’t reflect this. I sometimes wonder how much it’s worth to Musk that the stock not reflect Tesla’s actual performance, and who might be driving those irrational price movements.
I mean their sense of being is the defending alliance. And from their being scared by Russia and unwilling to help Ukraine, we can tell that when Russia would attack Estonia, they will do nothing and invent some excuse why Putin is a good marvellous wonderful guy with whom I’m personally a very good friend. Them attacking Russia first, looks unbelievable. They are afraid to even help the country that was attacked, as they were told by Russians they won’t be happy, and so they obediently do what they told.
Travel the world or check out your favorite map software, snd look at current hot conflicts and recent ones in the past. You have Iraq and Ukraine/Russia which are relatively flat, then you have Afghanistan or Iran on the opposite side of the spectrum. Even a flat country can have forests too thick for flying wirelessly or with fiber optics.
Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech and doctrine being in its infancy.
If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?
More autonomy, but MUCH more expensive. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per use. The issue is indeed using mass-produced consumer drones. It's a bit like the widespread use of "technicals" in some conflicts: yes, a pickup truck with a .50cal in the back is inferior to tanks or armored cars, but it's also much, much cheaper.
There's a bit of a "Sherman vs. Tiger" thing that's been going on since the dawn of industrialised warfare. Is it better to have a more effective weapon that you can only afford a few of, or lots of cheaper ones?
The US doctrine approach to the problem would simply be a set of B2 bunker buster decapitation strikes on Russian military HQs, but of course that option is not available to Ukraine. They can't even manage Iraq-war-style wave of SEAD strikes followed by unit level CAS. The air war has kind of stalemated with neither side having conventional air superiority and both being vulnerable to the other's anti-air.
Slightly unrelated, but reading the "product" page is crazy to me. So much about lethal radii, kill zones and stuff like that. Wild, couldn't ever picture myself working on something like this and sleeping well at night
I would. But I would be hesitant to if I got wind that it was being sold to a bad government, or that my government was a bad government/intended then for misuse.
As a quiet gay nerd I'd love for there to be no war, no bullies. But unfortunately we live in a world where our species evolved from monkeys and we still often act like it. If my usually peaceful tribe needs weapons to defend itself when attacked then I'm all for it. But using those weapons to attack another for any reason other than defense is a nono in my books.
In context of working on military hardware, it's more complex than that. Name whichever state you consider evil, there are good chances they've recently received or bought weapons from a state you don't consider evil. Name whichever state you consider good, there are good chances they sold their weapons to parties you find questionable.
You may build tech that helps the good defenders defeat the forces of the stronger, evil attacker, but 5 years down the line, you may discover that same tech is now used to blow up hospitals and refugee convoys - and it doesn't take your country being on the wrong side of a war, it just takes the usual international politics.
Unfortunately money plays a big role. The US is different, with good paying jobs for engineers being common but believe it or not, that is not the norm everywhere in the world. Sometimes people need to follow the money. I think this plays a big role on the russian side of the war. Their economy isn't very diversified and the state owns the means to a large portion of the economy's production. If you need cash, a good way to get it is to do putin's bidding.
There is also the problem that the military tends to go for the best. In some cases that's a good idea (the cost of getting that laser-guided bomb to the release point is well above the cost of the bomb), but when dealing with unmanned units the zerg approach is very often the winner.
Look at Iron Dome. By comparison to other modern SAMs it's abysmal. But that's by design, Israel wasn't looking for a good SAM. They were looking for the cheapest SAM that could hit a sitting duck. But that's what it's facing--ballistic inbounds that have no countermeasures and no ability to evade.
I was under the impression that while there is a lot of grift, a lot of that was supply chain cost as well. You or I could build one but it would all be sourced in China without vetted supply chain parts or firmware. These Ukraine drones are all off the shelf parts and running who knows what firmware everywhere.
I suppose that's true but not necessarily. Most of the control hardware would likely come from Taiwan. Structural components can be machined locally, brushless motors or whatever other mechanism can also be machined locally. Sensors etc are available from Japan/Taiwan as well. But tbf I think it would be possible to source reliable Chinese components from reputable companies as well - try do b2b already and they wouldn't get the sales if the product didn't work. Make purchases through a variety of disposable paper companies and the factories would have no idea that it's for defense.
Software for loitering etc would be so easy nowadays too. Hell I can tell a pi zero to track GPS + multiple cameras + loiter/engage target on whatever signatures are available from available sensors.
I say this while eyeing up the Carvera. I want to justify it so badly. Perhaps the Air...not for aforementioned purposes of course, unless some defense contractor wants to pay me ahaha.
China is partially blocking export of drone parts. More so for Ukraine, so their drones have 50%+ of domestic parts. Custom firmware, even with auto aim for the last 10m where jamming can hit the signal.
> Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech
I don't think it's improvised civilian hobbyist tech. They run autopilots that also fly professional drones and can fly planes.
I think it's mostly that it has to be super cheap, otherwise it doesn't bring value (because other weapons are more efficient if you have more money). If your one-way drone costs 10k dollars, maybe it's too expensive even though it can fly during the night.
And then there are fundamental limitations, like flying in bad weather.
> obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone
But a reusable drone won't go inside a hangar (because at this point it probably won't come out). If your drone can go somewhere, drop something and come back, doesn't it mean that another class of weapons could do this job?
$10,000 can be cheap for a one way drone. Bombs often cost for more than that. The real question is value, if hitting the target is worth more than the cost of what you hit it with then you have a good value. Taking out a $1000 drone with a $100,000 missile is a good value if that drone is headed for a $1,000,000 building, but if the drone is headed for a cow probably not worth it.
And the reusable drone has a serious battlefield limitation that it's extremely vulnerable while positioning to drop it's munition. Very good against something that can't defend itself (we have a lot of video of them dropping stuff into tanks that the crew bailed out of for some reason), but the cost mounts quickly if a soldier with a shotgun can engage it.
Sadly I think that AI will make a very large difference here. And AI hardware that can control weapons is already hundreds of dollars and dropping fast, because a cell phone can do it.
Given that the drones he talks about are even less equipped than a standard hobbyist drone (no GPS, no compass), I suppose it's more a "tradeoff" between keeping the drone cheap enough to be disposable vs having enough functionality to be practically controllable by the operator.
I don’t understand why the author has such a narrow definition of FPV drones.
He talks as if reusable drones are a completely different category, that they are all toys designed for enthusiast racers… Generally he implies that a myriad arbitrary technical details are fundamental limitations of this paradigm, it’s a strange mindset.
Also, as others commenters state, isn’t a 43% success rate exceedingly high? Even if it’s 20% accounting for environmental factors and faults in manufacturing. How likely is it that a mortar does anything? Or a soldier with a rifle? Or anything else?
> When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool.
It sounds like he was imagining some kind of scifi adventure, but it’s always been clear that they are using cheap drones with tech that has been commonplace for a decade. And that’s completely fine, it’s intentional.
> Also, as others commenters state, isn’t a 43% success rate exceedingly high? Even if it’s 20%
That's the whole question, and that's kind of the point that the article raises: the success rate does not matter. What matters is the cost. At the same cost, can you do more damage with other weapons or not?
Indeed that’s what I meant, it’s a good question. It sounds like the author only saw the cases where mortars or reusable drones had been successful. But I cannot imagine a mortar being more efficient even if one shot is 5x cheaper. Perhaps they are more effective at suppression, but I would be surprised if they really hit anything meaningful more than 5% of the time, similar with most artillery or bombing, or just plain infantry.
What even comes close to the success rate of a drone to hit a particular moving target? And you can do it while hidden 10km away with a lightly trained operator. And manufactured cheaply, safely and quickly by unskilled labor, and easily transported to the front and hand-carried by troops.
Any kind of alternative, like precision bombing or sniping, or just getting close and shooting at it, must be much more costly, particularly when you also account for the cost of the equipment used, even if it is reusable, and the training, risk and human cost.
I think we should not discount the psychological effect.
From what I have read from Ukraine vets, ubiquitous drones make you crazy in a way that tank attacks don't. The difference is in their ubiquity. You are likely to encounter a tank relatively infrequently, and have enough time to recuperate between those encounters. But with a sky full of drones 24/7, or close to that, your nerves will give way sooner or later.
A hit does not equal a kill. Killing a tank or an apc, takes a lot of hits from an FPV drone due to the small payload. I have heard quoted an average of 16 hits.
That's why you see videos trying to go in open hatches and the like. And that's why you are seeing cope cages. It doesnt matter how many chains or steel plates you weld on to your tank if you are hit by a TOW or a Javelin, it's still going to get you. They can penetrate more than a meter of steel.
But the FPV is carrying a DPCIM or a small RPG it's much less likely to penetrate a tanks or an apc armor.
> What matters is the cost.
Logistics matter too. How many FPVs can a company carry? How many fit in a pickup? Do you need a truck load to kill a tank? If you need like 10 to kill a tank, you need to do 10 attacks, either 10 people attacking the same target in quick succession or one guy 10 times.
A Javelin is pretty much one hit one kill, and the hit rate is supposedly at about 89%. So you need like one or two to kill a tank.
From what I have heard, bigger heavier reusable drones, that release their bigger payload are more effective than FPVs.
It's a good point, I'm wondering though what the ROI of a Javelin is throughout its lifetime, including training costs. It's not obvious that you end up better off, perhaps.
ROI also depends on availability. Ukraine knows everything about the article and likely agrees (though they will dispute some details) - Ukraine was trained on the old Soviet Artillery doctrine and knows it well. However Ukraine cannot get nearly enough of the supposedly cheaper mortar rounds at any price while they can make drones quickly. In theory I could make 155mm rounds for Ukraine in my garage, but my metal lathe (most people don't have one but I do) isn't the right tool for the job and so I'd be making dozens a month at best, what Ukraine really needs is a modern factory than can make thousands or even millions per month - it would take me years to create that factory.
The way I see it, it's probably worth it. You probably want a layered approach, you have a few high end, very expensive very effective weapons for maximum effect at the beginning of a conflict to take out the enemies high end, tip of the spear forces. And then you want to have a deep reserve of cheaper, legacy stuff to deal with volume and attrition.
You need to be in line of sight, but not very close, it has a max range of 2 to 4 km depending on the version. Missiles in the spike family can also acquire targets after launch.
You realize that a lot of stuff they were sticking on tanks was to defeat the Javelin?
You simply can't put a big enough warhead on a man portable missile to defeat the main armor of a modern tank. Thus you do not actually want to hit the tank--the purpose of the Javelin is to fly *over* the target tank, when it's overhead it's warhead detonates, firing an explosively formed projectile down into the *top* armor of the tank. Those cages were meant to keep the Javelin from getting to the right spot to do that.
I assume this is like a pilot in WW1 reporting how finicky and hard to use bi-planes were. No doubt a bunch of weapons manufacturers have seen this and the special operations Ukraine did in Russia and Israel did in Iran and the wheels of progress are turning and the result will be terrifying.
Likewise, ysterday I was reading about Chuck Yeager's first jet flight, in a P-80, and how most of his time was spent manually juggling the fuel flow to prevent the engine either overheating or flaming out. He barely had time to think about actually achieving anything.
A decade later, automated fuel flow was standardised and aircraft were flying twice as fast and high.
What terrifies me is that the next step may be AI swarms, where one side sends thousands of drones at the same time and let each of them autonomously choose what they want to target.
It's all technically feasible up to "choosing wisely".
In a sense it's already happening with the Shahed drones. Maybe not smart AI, but the end result is still the same: you have no clue where they will end up.
What's eye opening about the recent iran israel conflict is how drones were used. Iran fired about 1000 drones and israel easily destroyed all but one of them. On the other hand israel used drones to devastating effect.
I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's clear that drones as a primary means of warfare is simply not effective. hamas and hezbolla have no notable successes with drones, except for on october 7 where they used them to great effect to destroy specific machine gun emplacements and a couple of tanks. They will be part of the future, but never the future itself.
Israel has been serious about defending against simple weapons for a long time. And expect them to have doubled down on this since 10/7. As far as I know they are the only modern power to have done so.
This tracks with the earlier ~12% drone kill efficiency estimates. However drone is a mass deployment weapon. Ukraine did about 2 million frontline sorties in 2024 and aims for 5 million this year. This 1 out of 9 ratio translates into absolutely devastating damage, that artillery and airstrikes (which are also hardly "easy to use") can only dream of.
This is true, but the author also talks about cost e.g. $500 for a drone vs $100 for an artillery shell with far more effect. Surely at the point where the drone has visual on the target you can fire 5 x shells over for massively greater effect on target, and keep the drone flying for the next target, and the next.
$100 is a cost of a 60mm mortar shell. It is a hand grenade sized munition lobbed from a Pringles can sized weapon to the range of 1-2km. This is generally not the thing that comes to mind when you think of artillery strike.
A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.
A M107 155mm round weights 95lbs when launched. Assuming that is pure lead (this is false, but lead is very cheap and it gives us numbers to work with) I can buy lead ignots for $2.89/lbs. Which puts us at $293 per rounds in just materials. Since we assume the other materials cost money too, plus there is the energy used to turn ignots into a round, it seems unlikely you can get the cost to much under $1000 no matter how good your mass production is.
But theoretically much better aimed. Don’t know if there’s enough data here to do the math. Plus that it’s a bit gauche to do math about human lives, but here we are.
Do you have numbers for that? Because the higher-end munition also has (rudimentary) steering capabilities? And higher end stuff obviously has the same or better honing software
That's interesting thankyou. It's a good google rabbit hole. Apparently we're in surge pricing right now because of Ukraine, and Russian shells are only costing them $1000. It seems they caught us sleeping, manufacturing wise.
The heavy Soivet calibre used by Russia is 152mm which translates to a slightly cheaper shell (though not 5x for sure). Russia also uses 122mm arty which is substantially cheaper: the costs follow to the cube volume. Another factor is that a lot of supplies are Iranian and North Korean old stock with what we can assume reasonable prices. Ukraine was getting Vietnam war era 155mm stock relatively cheap too, while it lasted.
Mortar is notoriously inaccurate, while a drone is a precision guided weapon. To compare apples to apples, a drone needs to be compared to other precision guided weapons. Think Stinger or other TOW missiles instead. Those are at least two orders more expensive.
This is kind of a 'Muskets are cool but they take too long to reload' vibe.
Yeah Ukraine isn't working with the best tech; it's a doctrine of desperation rather than preparation. But they discovered something effective and it will change the way wars are fought in the future.
> But they discovered something effective and it will change the way wars are fought in the future.
They didn't really. TOW's are a thing from the 70s. They are essentially the same thing, but instead of electric rotors they are using a rocket motor. Switchblades existed before this conflict too, if loitering is the measure we are going with.
It's a hacked together solution to a real problem they are having, lack of artillery shells and more reliable munitions. And well done to them.
But a country with the benefit of time and deep pockets is going to come up with more reliable, more effective solutions.
We are seeing the Russians turn to drones as well, but they also burnt their stockpiles of other weapons and are in an emergency too. And additionally they have also doubled their artillery shell production.
It is interesting hearing feedback from the frontline. Even with the issues, I think it is clear drones are changing modern warfare when you have companies like Anduril. What most people think is coming next is autonomous drones, although I don't morally agree with it. Sorry you had to have this experience, I wish this war would end, too many lives have been lost and it is senseless.
The is also a sort of autonomous targetting for jammers available ? The grandfather of the shaheed was intended to guide itself towardsrrrussian radar aka em sources, so i guess a modern drone should be similar capable on connection loss to rech the disturbing em source.
> I would, first of all, recommend ensuring that troops in the field have well-trained organic mortar support with an ample supply of ammunition.
That would not be possible because it has become basically impossible to bring in vehicles close to 5-10 kms of the front-lines because of the, well, drones. And you need to carry ammunition to those mortars with something, preferably not how the Vietnamese did it in the jungle (i.e. using brute human force).
Just check this snippet from a recent article in the FT:
> “'At this point, you’re a lucky man if you drive 5km from the front line and your car is still operational,' a Ukrainian drone unit commander deployed in eastern Donetsk region told the Financial Times. He said his men now sometimes had to walk up to 15km at night to reach their positions...
> In the past weeks, Ukrainian supply trucks have reportedly been hit by Russian drones on the road linking Kramatorsk to Dobropillia, some 30km from the fighting. On both sides of the front line, roads are being covered with anti-drone nets in an attempt to stop fibre optic drones."
This comes from Ukrainian guys still fighting this war, not from a Western war-tourist like the guy who wrote this article.
The author writes that he was not there for the fiber optic evolution. They have changed the game when it comes to these flat open terrains with heavy jamming. The quality control and cheap components issues won’t go away unless they are improved, which brings costs to a ”cheap” alternative. As I wrote in my comment above, walking/driving moving targets are still on the table, just not as feasible as in the early days without signals jamming.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to hit them, just that it’s more difficult than in the early days. Even fiber optics have cons like harder maneuverability, but the driveway attacks are probably in the category of ”loitering” drones that sit on the ground waiting for targets before taking flight again.
None of what he is saying is that valuable. All of these problems are something a hobbyist fpv drone pilot can share. Add to that, it’s quite old info. If the author didn’t get a chance to see fiber optic drones, they left the fray a long time ago in terms of advancement.
Basically its just screen yes. It's just convenient and more portable to do it
this way.
Small desktop screen also exist and are used to peek on what the FPV operator is seeing.
Interesting read. Curious how the author feels re: the attack on airbases using shipping containers/drones that was so successful?
Seems to be a unique case that worked especially well for (higher end I'm sure) FPV drones. Getting artillery in on shipping containers would have a higher likelihood of detection. Similarly, the ability to 'guide' in the drones with munitions seemed to allow for greater flexibility during the attack and its effectiveness.
I imagine eventually these cheap FPV's will be augmented with low-cost GPU's allowing for running smallish models and self-guided autonomy. This would seem the next evolution where a commander deploys them in bulk and overwhelms the enemy in a way that can't be jammed like radio-communication. Similarly, horrifying when you consider their eventual use in terrorism scenarios...
That didn't use FPV drones, they're rather difficult to control at 6000km and they didn't have operators nearby.
Most likely it's the first major deployment of their semi autonomous drone tech, driven "declaratively". They've shown that stuff recently, they probably used it before showing it.
> If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is bad ...
I disagree with this premise. I suspect that 20 to 30% success rate is not at all bad, but rather excellent. Compare to artillery with shells costing a few thousand each on the low end, to $100k+ for more advanced rounds, with 100s or 1000s fired per casualty.
The article claims it is 20-30% in quite limited circumstances, and less if you include "we know it will fail" sorties. And seemingly entirely disabled by jammers, where available.
I guess they must be working for Ukraine, or it wouldn't be buying them. But how well they scale against a competent opponent is less clear.
Yes, he writes that after he left the battlefield they became more common.
There was a video of a soldier wading through massive amounts of fiber near the front line. Just imagine that for each drone attack there will be 10-50km of fiber dropped on the landscape. It will not rot and stay there until someone cleans it up.
I've always wondered if the burning batteries and electronics in the drones have any significant environmental impact when compared to conventional weapons.
There's a really good interview with a Russian drone manufacturer where he talks about how you need to use both.
The fiber-optic drones have small warheads/payloads. They are used to hunt the enemy's EW transmitters. Once the jammers have been suppressed, then the radio-controlled drones with bigger payloads go to work and do the bulk of the damage.
From what I understand Ukraine is not using many fiber drones because there are other disadvantages. They can have them, but they mostly choose to use radio anyway. Russia is using a lot of fiber drones.
There are... I think they aren't unproblematic - the fibre can get caught on things etc. Also I read of instances where the opposition can follow the fibre back to find the drone operators.
Tracing the fiber back is possible only in extremely favorable conditions. The light must hit the cable just right and there cannot be too many cables from previous runs on the battlefield.
Those cables are 10km long. You can trade a couple hundred meters when the drone is flying by, but there are several KM that you cannot even see at the same time as you can see the drone.
This is why it's so fascinating to read about this conflict. The back and forth innovations (some obvious, some rudimentary, some very much not) is just incredible to follow.
Early on: Drones in war!
Then: Ahh EW makes them useless!
Then: Fiber optics defeat EW!
Then: But you can follow the cable!
Then: But you can try to respool the cable with a power drill!
> Today, some Ukrainian and Russian units are also using drones controlled by fiber-optic cable, rather than radio, though I had no personal experience with this type of drone in my unit
As TFA says, Ukraine has a much smaller capacity of producing the required optical fiber, which is the main reason why they are using fewer such drones.
I don’t agree with the conclusions he draws from his own analysis - almost all the issues and shortcomings he points out are related to technological shortcomings he admits - are already being addressed by the new systems - or are primarily issues with how drones are being used in the field - i.e. tactical combat decisions.
These are not inherently valid arguments regarding the effectiveness of drones as a new weapons platform - but with the current state of the technology and with the decisions on the battlefield
It’s early days, the technology will improve and the tactics will be standardized with time and drones will prove to be a dangerously effective tool - which has the additional scary bonus of being cheap and easy to mass produce and deploy
I see a lot of comments saying that "but the technology will improve".
Sure, maybe. Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months. We don't know, and the author doesn't pretend that they do. Don't forget that drones have been used in this war for years, and the vast majority of the drone industry has already pivoted to the military because it's easier to make money there. So it's not exactly "brand new technology".
But my point is that the author just says "from what I've seen, here is how it looks". And it seems like it has value.
> Don't forget that drones have been used in this war for years
3 years of usage is brand new. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have been designing and producing purpose-built FPV drones since the beginning (I assume things are well underway now). It's a bunch of consumer shit thrown together, which makes it kind of incredible that they work as well as they do.
An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that. And then you saying that "maybe the technology will not improve".
Usage, sure. But the technology is not. Those drones are flying smartphones. We have already had mass-produced consumer drones for more than a decade. We don't use them because they are new, we use them because they are cheap and accessible.
I am not sure what you call "consumer shit" here. They go for cheap FPV drones precisely because they are cheap. But the autopilot running in them can fly a Cessna. We can make them fly longer (they will be bigger), we can use better radios, we can add thermal cameras and bigger payloads. We can add GPUs and AI capabilities. All that we have, but then it doesn't cost 500$ anymore.
> An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that.
Or maybe you see an assault rifle and say "Look at this rifle; it's only the beginning! In a couple years it will have wings and it will drop heavy bombs before returning to base, because it will be reusable". And I'm saying: we already have fighter jets; they are just more expensive.
You based your doubt for whether the technology would improve on consumer shit thrown together for a few years as opposed to military technology purposely designed and built over a long period. That is bad reasoning. There is nothing more to it and it is thus far more likely that the technology will improve than not.
I believe your prediction was "Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months."
You seem to think that this ragtag level of warfare between Russia and Ukraine is somehow indicative of what the limit of NATO-level militaries is. I'd say "we'll see", but hopefully we never have to find out.
> I believe your prediction was "Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months."
There was a part before the "or" :-). I did not predict anything, I said "maybe, maybe not". And you told me it was "bad reasoning".
My point was that the article says that drones have a ton of limitations in 2025, and many comments here say "yeah but that's because it's just the beginning". Drone manufacturers have been looking at the military for longer than 3 years, because that's easy money. Saying that "this is just consumer shit thrown together" sounds like you haven't really followed the drone industry in the last 15 years.
> I did not predict anything, I said "maybe, maybe not".
The derisive way of putting the alternative (Musk's proven trash announcements) indicates that you were arguing a certain side. It definitely wasn't neutral.
> And you told me it was "bad reasoning".
The bad reasoning is what you're basing the (let's say) doubt on. You seem to know that a lot of technological progress has happened in the military FPV drone industry, but the article and described limitations are about (again) consumer level shit thrown together, not the advanced FPV drones that exist today.
Perhaps the conclusion should be that a lot of the problems described in the article are already solved, but that Ukraine (and Russia) couldn't get their hands on enough of the more capable FPV drones due to those being too expensive or not produced in large enough quantities.
> the problems described in the article are already solved, but that Ukraine (and Russia) couldn't get their hands on enough of the more capable FPV drones due to those being too expensive or not produced in large enough quantities.
Yes, that's what I think. And I believe that's what the article says: "The FPV drones we currently use are not ideal".
Then people say "yeah but they will improve", to which I answer: "or maybe not so much". Simply because better systems already exist, are mass-produced and are more expensive.
> I see a lot of comments saying that "but the technology will improve".
When people say "the technology will improve", I think they're usually referring to the drones currently in use becoming much better not due to breakthroughs in technology, but by applying existing technology more effectively for military purposes. Current military drones used in Ukraine are inefficient conversions of civilian products that were never meant to operate under jamming, leave as small thermal signature as possible, etc. Original military designs, which are optimized for the battlefield rather than the local dog park, can be significantly better.
> Current military drones used in Ukraine are inefficient conversions of civilian products
Are you sure about that? Many drone companies have been engineering for the military for years before the Ukraine invasion in 2022.
The thing is, those FPV drones are super, super, super cheap. We do have better technology, it does exist. But it is more expensive. Is it worth it then? That's the question.
Those drone companies are offering ridiculously expensive and overengineered products like the Switchblade, even though a drone 1/10 of its price can do the same job in many scenarios. These are bloated products that have seen little combat and haven't been trimmed down to the bare essentials. They are the Juiceros of the drone world.
Meanwhile, we have cheap FPV drones that have proven themselves in combat, but they remain toys upgraded with 3D-printed parts by tinkerers. They haven't been repackaged into proper military products and adapted for mass manufacturing.
The sweet spot between a toy and a $20k+ product from a military supplier remains largely unaddressed. It's like the early days of personal computing when some people had already assembled working machines in their garages and demonstrated their usefulness, but there were no rugged and standardized mass-market versions yet that could be ordered by the hundreds of thousands.
I agree, and I also raised more points in my comment. The terrain of the flatlands between Ukraine and Russia is the main reason for their success. The same could be said for vast parts of the Middle-East. It’s easy to operate these on farmlands that go for kilometers.
Even if the technology improves and the economics of scale reduces the cost, I still don't buy the narrative that swarms of tiny kamikaze drones will radically change warfare.
Aside from radio jamming, I have not seen an actual defense against a strong EMP.
To defend against an EMP wiping out your drone swarm, you would have to invest in shielding etc which would remove them from the class of small cheap drones.
Idk if anyone can speak about this, but to me this doesn't seem like a problem that these types of drones can overcome.
Usually the initial attack (From Ukrainian perspective) is stopped by regular military weapons like AT, Artillery, Mines and drones are used to mop up the battlefield - Burn out abandoned vehicles and hunt scattered soldiers
Most of the problems the article describes are due to using civilian fpv drones on the battlefield or using untrained pilots: bad controls, narrow channel, faulty parts
Most of them would not apply when military finally catches up, starts producing war fpv drones and make good drone pilot training programs
You need to compare this to hit rate with mortars and attrition by counter battery fire on mortar teams. Not to detract from a sober assessment but it's hard to judge without the other parts of the story.
Mortar may be 5 times cheaper but 100x easier to destroy it and its crew.
Also half of the problems described are purely technical and can be easily solved with some budget. In Ukraine most drones are assembled by volunteers. So its not the reliability of drone that is an issue, its lack of proper assembly and QA.
As noted if you have the budget the end product is a FGM Javelin or a Spike NLOS or as the article mentions a switchblade.
These things are pretty much the same thing (a thing that can be carried by a man that accurately puts a warhead on a target) just better and more expensive.
edit: Actually the NLOS might not be man portable, but there are other smaller Spike missiles that are.
Fertility rate is a problem for the future, that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to, meanwhile dying or being enslaved in a war is a problem for right now that you can't escape via policies.
Which one you think is worse?
Also, most wealthy industrialized western nations have the same fertility issues, some are only compensating by huge legal and ilegal immigration which can be causing bigger domestic economic and societal issues than being involved in a war abroad. The west and its values, as we used to know it, is also dying.
>that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to
Nobody can. And it's not like they don't want to. Neither the very traditional and religious Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia (2.14, barely above replacement, and trending down), nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world. All have fertility troubles. Urban lifestyle just does fertility in.
Yeah you can, they just don't want to because it will be at the cost of short term corporate economic growth.
>And it's not like they don't want to.
They don't want to compromise short term corporate profits. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
>nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world
Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are. Norway has different issues than Japan. Every country has different issues.
Really? Can you name one developed country besides Israel that has succeeded?
>Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are
The Government Pension Fund Global (Statens pensjonsfond utland), also known as the Oil Fund (Oljefondet), was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector. As of June 2025, it had over US$1.9 trillion in assets.
Price of a 3 bedroom house in Oslo: $1.5M
$1.9T / $1.5M = 1.266M houses
Population of Norway is 5.6M
Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?
in japan it was even for many decades and its a problem but not tragedy, japan today still doing strong. Even if population in china shrink by 50% they will still have more pole than europe or us. And lets face it shrinking 50% this will really take decades and unlikely to happen since this will correct itself eventually.
How is Japan still going strong? Have you been there? Real estate just sitting empty, villages deserted, (young) people with no hope for the future, (hidden) poverty, the government and central bank basically bankrupt long-term.
Japan is stuck in the 90's with no hope for the future and they will be even less relevant then they are now within 1 generation.
Japan is absolutely not "doing strong" for the next 50 years or so and the same will happen to China. If you have no people, you have no future. As simple as that.
And how does the fact that it "will still take decades" suddenly make it OK for the country? Also if you shrink a population by 50% within decades it will completely destroy the economy (and military and culture). You can't just half the population that fast and expect things to just carry on as normal or magically recover.
I think people consider Japan to be doing strong because it's still a safe peaceful society to live in, despite the economic issues. Compared that to living in LA in the world's strongest economy, where it's like you're in a PvP server. So what's the point of having a strong economy if nobody can afford to live and the streets full of shit from homeless people.
I agreed with a lot of your posts above but not the extreme characterization of living in LA.
I do expect the crime rate is higher than most Japanese cities - culturally it's very very different. I don't feel like it's a "pvp" situation though (from a violence perspective; rampant, unbridled capitalism +consumerism in the US gives me pvp vibes for general living) and the streets aren't full of shit.
I like LA, especially the beach and other very nice areas (obviously). I also think I'd probably prefer living in a Japanese city though so maybe you're right in the end.
China can set the fertility rate to whatever they like. It is tied to taxes and penalties. They can move the slider to make it fiscally impossible to be childless.
I think you need to compare it to other man portable guided weapons like the FGM-148 Javelin. The Javelin is much much better in all respects, except perhaps range. But is about 100 - 200 times more expensive.
If you can afford* the Javelins and the TOW's of the world that's what you are going to use otherwise, you are stuck with FPVs.
Afford means not only fiscally, but production capacity wise as well.
Doesn't a single javelin missile cost almost 200k? The drones I've seen I'd budget at 150-300$ plus explosives. I think that puts the javelin more at 500-1000x as expensive imo.
You need 15 drones to do what a javelin can do though, and that is at best. If the tank armor is good a small drone cannot do any damage (that is why drones try to fly in open hatches - bypass the armor), while a javelin can go through modern armor.
Tank armor can be good as it gets, the problem is you can't have good armor everywhere on the tank otherwise it would weight hundreds of tons. So a small drone doesn't need to penetrate tank where it's best protected but to disable it (hit APU, tracks, engine...).
Drone pilots regularly die due to the source of wireless signals being found. Especially in the built up areas where they cannot operate from a trench or bunker. It is a challenge but there have been methods for this for a while now and it has shown. Even recently there’s been reporting that priorities of some drone teams are now purely anti-pilot activities compared to other targets.
True - and I hope I didn't give the impression that drone operators aren't taking significant personal risk, but compared to the alternatives for short range indirect fire (mortars) it seems like these systems should be less vulnerable?
But not more challenging than counter battery against teams firing Javelins or other portable anti tank weapons.Or teams using Switchblades.
FPVs are man portable guided munitions, not artillery. Pretty much all existing man portable guided anti tank weapons are better than FPVs at their job.
And artillery is better than any of them at it's job. While FPVs can score kills they have minimal suppression effects, when an FPV hits a friendly, everyone else is going to keep moving, because stopping will offer them no benefit from the next one, and the next one might be minutes out. When an artillery round lands everyone hits the deck.
FPVs don't seem anti-tank replacement -- they do seem to have a role against soft targets ie against massing infantry, c2 nodes or suppression of enemy mortars. In this role, from a distance, they seem harder to suppress than the alternative, ie mortars.
Also these are immature tech... I suspect at least some of the issues identified will be mitigated in time.
One of the key points of the article is "I feel FPV drones to be mostly a failure because their success rate is low"
Why is that a failure? If one 500$ drone has even only 10% success rate, if the target is a 1M$ equipment it's still a win!
> Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals, and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using cheaper components). This results in the need for sophisticated de-confliction procedures that, quite simply, do not always work. Even when de-confliction works, sometimes a team must wait as long as half an hour for a frequency to become available before takeoff. If it does not work and two drones find themselves in the air on the same channel at the same time, they will interfere with each other’s signals, usually resulting in a crash. On top of that, the enemy’s drones also fly on the same frequencies, which can also result in interference and a crash.
This gave me the somewhat macabre image of Ukrainian and Russian drones doing automated frequency coordination with each other, so they can orderly proceed in bombing each other's soldiers.
I don't think that's what happens though. But I'm surprised flying drones in the same area as enemy operators is even possible. Wouldn't both sides try to jam or take over each other's signals, deliberately blocking channels, etc - so that in the end, no one could control anything?
Or, if the signals are really unencrypted, what keeps anyone from setting up a radio beacon that just spams the "detonate now" signal on all channels at maximum power. Instant drone-free zone?
It is only a matter of time until those drones fly into their target fully autonomously with machine learning.
Heck, I could build that with hugginface (I will never do that) in a few evenings if you are ok to blow up the wrong target with a single digit percentage.
I guess I'm missing something, but why isn't the problem of finicky steering solved by adding auto-stabilizing software? Would that take away too much of the maneuverability?
My first reaction was the same. I have a small indoor quadcopter with 2 main modes: freestyle (like a helicopter), and an easier mode that keeps the drone hovering.
My first thought was, why not use the easier mode (press forward to go forward, back to go back, etc.)? But looking at those war videos, these drones always come at an angle towards the target. And in that sense, it's easier to use the more difficult helicopter mode. What I mean is, once you know the helicopter mode, it's easier to do this kind of maneuver than using the "easy mode".
The author offers no major new insights on the effectiveness of drones. His counter argument is against the maximalists who claim quadcopters are revolutionising warfare and render armour and artillery obsolete. But nobody serious ever suggested that. The same way tanks are relevant despite rpgs. They simply represent a new element in the battlefield, and a useful one as well. The fact that they are not ideally suited for dropping bombs doesn't matter. They are great for surveillance and giving units situational awareness, and the fact that they can occasionally be used to attack targets that otherwise would be impossible simply augments their usefulness. The article is interesting,
but it's attacking a straw man. I have a great respect for the ukrainian armed forces
but to be perfectly honest their combat effectiveness is not exactly world beating. The suggestion that NATO should be taking lessons from how Ukraine is fighting Russia is odd.
IF you tell it go into the hanger and find a target CV can do that. It might not be the best target in the hanger, but that doesn't matter too much if you can get in.
If you add enough "if's", then surely everything is possible :-).
I don't think we're anywhere near having drones that happily fly above a war zone, detect an interesting hangar, find a way to get inside and select a target inside.
Currently they mostly fly FPV drones manually. The next basic step is to have "terminal engagement", where at some point they can select a target and the drone will fly autonomously to it using CV. But in order to do that, the drone will need processing power, and therefore it won't cost 500$ anymore.
Would you rather go for a drone that costs 5k and can use CV for terminal engagement, or 10 drones that cost 500 and simply stay on their latest vector if no command arrives?
The drone is 500$. If the board is 300$, it makes it a lot more expensive. What's the value of that board? How much does it help? Remember that you need to fly it with FPV to the place where the operator can select the target. So you have a radio link at some point, that can be jammed.
I see on the rpi website [1] that an RPi 5 costs 120$. That's 25% of the price of the FPV drone (500$).
Then you have to integrate that RPi to the drone, both mechanically and software-wise. From YOLO, you need to actually get into commands for the autopilot. There is work involved.
And another question is: can you order millions of RPis like this? If not, what is the cost of alternatives?
Not saying it's impossible, just saying that people tend to underestimate those questions. I know it from experience, I have seen projects fail because of that.
I was trying to state you fly it manually to the hanger. Once it locks onto the hanger (that is not your own hanger) it can fly - even if cv messes up we are at a target so anything destroyd is okay even if not what you want.
Oh, I had misunderstood it. But still, it's a lot harder to do that succesfully than to lock on a target and fly straight into it. Which already requires the compute power to do it, which makes it a lot more expensive than it is without.
Sure, but we can trade off computer power. Pi level computers can fly a straight line inside and explode in the middle (you are likely running several drones so each flys to a pattern hoping to get something useful inside). While flying to the middle they can do some image recognition, and if something looks like a high priority target they can target that, if not exploding in the middle will do something. The more powerful computer you put on (were powerful is often more expensive though not always) the better you can find targets
The important point in this is the drone will explode before it could reach anything not a target. It can sometimes find a better target than a pattern. In the ideal case you might fly it all the way, but if you lose radio over enemy territory anything the drone can find needs to die anyway so it may as well attempt to find something and kill it.
some mid-range iphones or android would even do the trick. especially iphones have tone of processing power nad strong NPU/GPU and lots of cameras, lidar, depth sensor, and plenty of other sensors. second hand phone 13 mini would do the trick and you can get it for less than $500
How many artillery shells one needs to expend to hit anything? I bet more than 10. And they are pricier AND endanger people who use them, more.
Mortar shells (80mm class) are cheaper, but mortars need to be compared to drone-dropped munitions, not artillery shells - because mortars' range is way shorter than that of an FPV drone and is comparable to the artillery - a good FPV drone - although not the $500 one - can cover about the median artillery firing range of this war (16km).
Drones bring about more casualties and are used wider exactly because they are more cost-efficient.
War is one of humanities oldest past times. If men can’t figure out their differences, they try to kill each other, as witnessed in the entire animal kingdom.
Through the pipeline they shut down or thorugh the shadow fleet they've sanctioned? As it stand, Europe is moving in the right direction, not quickly enough for some, but still.
Ban on new Russian gas contracts starting January 1, 2026
End of short-term contracts by June 2026
Complete phase-out by end of 2027.
Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognized as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is:
(a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party;
(b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or
(c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender;
provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape
There’s regularly uploaded footage of clearly surrendering soldiers directed towards a safe zone to give up. Propaganda is propaganda, but it happens more often than we might think.
I wonder if some "Surrendering to a Drone" protocol couldn't be codified under the Geneva Convention EG "Visibly disassemble your gun, throw the bits in several directions" etc.
Russia literally executes prisoners of war - those who have already surrendered. Russia castrates, tortures and cuts off heads of live prisoners of war. Russia targets and executes civilians.
They may kind of suck but even so they are still transforming the war in Ukraine. A month or so ago FPV drones took out much of Russia's nuclear bomber fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150789), something like 80% of battlefield casualties are due to drones, neither side pretty much can use tanks because they get taken out by drones. It's a huge change in war fighting.
One stat: "In May alone, Ukrainian drones destroyed over 89,000 Russian targets" https://www.newsweek.com/robert-brovdi-ukraine-russia-war-dr...
They've recently promoted the 'Birds of Madyar' guy to run the newly formed Unmanned Systems Forces and are moving to a unified drone line defence the whole way along the frontline. Update on that: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2073811/russia-army-ukr...
Also re drones not having the effect of artillery, fair enough but Ukraine has been using FPV drones to destroy Russia's artillery. Here's footage of one of it's most modern being taken out https://youtu.be/DMOjOJnAd8A?t=161 It's kind of asymmetric - the artillery can't similarly take out the drones because they are too small and replaceable.
The article addresses this in the first few paragraphs. The author argues that whilst the 80% may or may not be accurate, they're using a definition of drone that encompasses many kinds of machine and not just FPV drones which is what he's talking about. He also says the number is highly misleading because most of his FPV drone missions were double-taps where the target had already been taken out by more traditional military assets, and that commanders used drones mostly because they were given them rather than because that was the best military strategy.
[dead]
FPV drones for combat are a hot flash in the pan. They have had a major effect for now, but naturally as these countermeasures evolve, so weakens their effect.
I keep telling people that the terrain and the strategies that Russians use is the primary reason for the effectiveness. Mortars and artillery already handle the same requirements as the author says. The reason they are effective in 2024-25 is that the drip-drip-drip of single soldiers running over vast fields / unarmoed vehicles driving over known routes is the only way Russians make progress. For a moving target they are great, but multiple moving targets would get shredded by competent artillery anyway.
Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
By far the best use of drones still is as battlefield recon/fire correction to adjust existing artillery/mortar capabilities.
Source: I’m one such drone hobbyist and I’ve watched way too much footage from the front. None of what i’m writing is in absolute terms. I just don’t see the same way as commenters in the public who think they are a checkmate for any combat situation. The incompetence of the Russian forces caught everyone by surprise, but they have learned. My country’s border with Russia is heavily forested and not as flat as Russia. The drones are not able to go through the canopy. Infrared recon is a way better choice than FPV suicide drones.
The big thing that FPV drones have going for them is that they're ludicrously cheap and easily constructed from relatively basic parts by moderately skilled people.
It's literally cheaper to strap a grenade to an FPV drone and fly it into a tank hatch than it is to fire a single non-precision artillery round, let alone tens or hundreds of them.
Plus, you can deploy your drones remotely from the top of a trunk deep behind enemy lines and fly them into irreplaceable strategic aviation assets with a shot exchange factor better than 1000x.
This seems to contradict the article, which among other criticisms, specifically says that these drones are more expensive and less reliable than mortars.
There are different calibers of mortar shells, bigger size has more range and power. I think author of the article has cheated by not specifying the caliber, because a 155mm artillery shell cost is more than a $1000, precision guided one cost is tens of thousands. While a drone capable of reaching 10km+ costs less than $1000, without payload.
Ya I didn’t see where the author discussed how imprecise artillery is vs drones. Aren’t mortars even less precise?
Of course they are less precise. And in most cases, they need quite a few rounds to adjust their aim at the target, so his comparaison was already stupid unfair.
He takes into account all the drones that don't work and then goes on and pretends artillery is 100% accurate and has an absurdly low cost (at the price he is quoting, they are basically sending grenades).
Let's not even discuss moving target or penetrating inside fortified targets which mortar will never be able to do.
Artillery carries more explosive and is good for destroying buildings and fortifications though.
Did you not read the article? One of his major points is that a mortar is significantly cheaper and faster.
Assuming you have good gun bunnies (term of affection, I assure you) and a spotter on the ground or in the air.
The mortar guys in my old company could put a round into a trashcan with line-of-sight but when someone else is calling in fire then they are more of an area weapon. Assuming that a fire mission is going to involve more than one or two rounds to bracket the target now you're talking more dollars and the people on the ground probably aren't going to stand there and wonder how long it's going to take to hit them.
The way I (and most other people I've heard talk about it) see it is drones are an area denial weapon.
> people on the ground probably aren't going to stand there and wonder how long it's going to take to hit them
Lesson learned in WW1 and apparently forgotten multiple times since then: the first few shells have by far the most damage potential and they better be precise.
Mortar is cheaper and faster, but it is about 80mm, not a 155mm.
Good luck to hunt moving individuals with mortars, though.
> Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
The drones now are using fibre optic cables with the reel mounted on the drone. Having the reel on the drone avoids snagging issues and the fibre itself avoids EW jamming and line of sight issues.
I watched the video of one navigating a series of nets to weave its way inside and into the open hatch of a tank. It’s ridiculously impressive.
I watched a video of one being destroyed by cutting the trailing fiber optic cable with a pair of scissors. Also impressive.
Yes, def. possible. But right now in UA's regions where drones are used the most, there are so many used fiber-optic cables laying on the fields, that you have basically zero chance to cut them all, because you would be cutting already discarded ones.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wcMZWRJL_m4
I was wondering about that. At military-industrial scale, that's a lot of fiber optic cable.
And it's glass, no? So not going to environmentally degrade over time.
Considering the fighting is mostly over agricultural fields, what are the long term consequences of years of war?
At the extreme of 10KM range we are taking about 2.4kg of glass maximum. Spread of over 10km. It is largely insignificant.
Even if you had 100 drones starting from the same exact place and going to the exact same place you would find 24g of glass per meter. A single leftover beer bottle would be at least 6 times that amount.
When you worry about stuff it is useful to do the work.
Somehow I don’t think that’s their primary concern at the moment
Granted. But it's going to be someone's concern after all this is over.
And unlike landmines, how do you detect and remove kilometers of cable?
Glass breaks down to sand so I wouldn’t worry too much about it
With physical weathering.
I was about to respond to your comment above by saying landmines are 1000x worse, but you just said the opposite, which is completely incomprehensible to me. Are you perchance thinking of literally just the environment, not the fact that countless lives will be harmed and lost for decades to come because of the indiscriminate nature of landmines?
While landmines have the obvious explosive and shrapnel first order effect of causing great harm, I'm wondering about the subtler effects of fiber optic cable pollution.
What happens when someone uses agricultural machinery on a field littered with cable, both to machinery and people? What are the consequences of consuming broken bits of cable that may mingle into produce?
And most critically, if the above are issues, how do you then remove cable from fields at scale? It would seem maddening to try to detect and gather kilometers of tangled glass.
If it had economic value people would find a way. But it doesn't. So.
Out of all the possible failure modes of fiber optic drones, scissors are pretty much the least likeliest issue you’ll encounter.
Provided that you catch it in time ... the window for doing that is short (several minutes) and you also likely need to expose yourself to potential other drones patroling in your proximity.
Could you use a bunch of chaff in hopes of burning the fiber optic cables?
> I’ve watched way too much footage from the front.
Did you see the videos of a drone dropping a shitload of thermite on a forest canopy? [0]
> Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
Most nations have cellular networks that penetrate buildings and forests just fine. In fact, Ukraine used the Russian cellular network for their recent attack deep behind enemy lines.
I'm not saying this will always be possible, but it's not hard to see that line of sight communication is not the end of the line for military drone control. There are many routes for providing an ad hoc line of communication if you don't just use consumer-level tech.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00-ngEj5Q9k
Your linked video is interesting, but I fail to see how this at all differentiates/promotes drone usage versus artillery, indirect fire.
Your video shows something that an artillery corps could accomplish just as easily and not at all be prone to EW.
Granted, moving indirect fire is probably more expensive than a single fpv drone dropping a thermite bomb, but at scale indirect fire is far cheaper, more effective, and critically not prone to EW.
Think of the fpv drone like a smol guided TOW missile at extremely low cost.
The artillery, while destructive, is not going to be nearly as accurate. If you want artillery to hit something on the move accurately you want something like a laser adjusted Excalibur round.
The drone is actually extremely efficient.
Laser-guided artillery rounds have been around a while. The Soviets were using laser-guided 240mm heavy mortar rounds in Afghanistan.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1351804050035499...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M712_Copperhead
I was one of the first non special operations troops to use a modern infantry-company sized drone (small, low cost) to guide conventional and guided artillery in 2008-9 for the US.
Laser guided Excalibur rounds didn't come out until much later, same for the laser guided jdams. And the cost of those is much higher, plus logistical an deployment cost, than a FPV drone.
Edit: I also don't know anybody that ever fired a copperhead round in anger. That was very much a product of 80s and 90s doctrine to counter Russian armor.
there are now laser/gps guided mortars. probably still more expensive than drone but easier to deploy
GPS guided munitions like Excalibur are useless against peer adversary. Costs as much as 100 regular rounds and as 200+ FPV drones but has zero accuracy thanks to EW and jamming.
... Not quite.
Local airborne EW platforms can relay GPS signal.
Combined with Inertial Navigation System reduces the CEP.
Laser terminal guidance gets it on point.
The US has a lot of work to do in EW - it also has done a lot of work to prepare for some of these scenarios.
And yet, more than a year ago: The US gave up sending Ukraine Excalibur guided artillery shells costing $100,000 because they rarely hit their target, report says.
I mean, the US isn't flying our EW aircraft over Ukraine.
So yeah that is in line with what I have said.
US doctrine is based in air dominance.
Also, most Excalibur rounds do not have laser guidance kits. Those are much newer and more expensive. We may have given Ukraine a handful, if that. Still requires laser designation by airborne or land forces, but can give you excellent accuracy even in completely denied GPS environments and against mobile targets.
Yep, 120mms I think.
You won't find them with light infantry, but you will with Cav / Mech units.
special forces and other unspecified units: https://breakingdefense.com/2024/02/iron-sting-an-exclusive-...
Sorry I'm talking US specifically.
To my knowledge there still isn't a laser guided mortar in the US inventory with dual mode laser terminal guidance. HEGM project was cancelled in 2018.
well, if usa will get a bundle of iron dome, iron fist and iron sting, it will get a cool 30% discount
Drone 1 (or any other means) destroys the canopy. Drones 2-10 are no longer hindered by said canopy and deliver their payload with extreme and dynamic precision.
Remember that the argument was basically that drones can do nothing useful in (heavily) forested terrain. They can with a little bit of creativity.
I guess we live in different regions. Everything north of Estonia/Denmark is thick spruce and pine forest. I’ve seen what artillery does to these trees, but I’d be hesitant to say a drone could lift something heavy enough to serve like Vietnam war era ”daisy cutters”. Artillery explodes closer to the forest floor.
Last line isn't necessary correct. Artillery rounds have different types of fuses.
A US VT (variable time) fuse is meant for airburst - for example to splinter a forest canopy.
russians really didnt like this last year https://youtu.be/SUe7SJgVMmo?t=110
Isn’t artillery easier to locate/ counter attack than a drone operator station?
Yes.
Run over to the impact crater that was just made, and with a little experience you can quickly know the round type, direction, and distance. If you have those last two you can rattle off a quick counter fire mission.
Artillery counter-fire radar systems can also identify and track artillery/mortar fire.
RCH 155 which Ukraine has now can shoot while moving. That should make it harder to counter.
All of the good footage is in /r/CombatFootage
(for anyone curious)
Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article? The reason the attack on airfields worked is precisely because they operate inland and not on the frontline. Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target. That’s why Starlink is/was so crucial. Even GPS is jammed so independent flight can be impossible with cheap components.
The thermite drones do attack forested areas on the farmlands, but the forests I talk about are tens or hundreds of kilometers wide. You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
Since fiber optics being used signal jamming is stopping to be a thing. You can fly with a drone into basement and have 4k video.
I wonder what the tech gap is to using circular polarized light from the sun as a point of reference for dead reckoning. If Bees use it why not camera systems?
That will give facing. Not range, nor actual bearing (your drone is moving relative to the local air, not to the ground.)
I guess I mean in the sense of if you have the drones starting position, the end location (or approximate) and movement tracking based on terrain movement, like the cheap version of Tomahawk but instead of having a map you just use relative change from a stereo camera/lidar pointed at the ground to track relative movement? I guess the hardware to run that isn't available in mass production.
I don't think you can do terrain following entirely in software unless you already have an accurate image of what to expect--and a munition will never know the fine detail. (Coarse detail--I would expect you could do a fair job of steering a ballistic missile based on images of the target area. Closest match and figure out in what way the image is stretched is at least theoretically possible with camera + software. Computationally practical, I don't know, nor how accurate it could be.)
> Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article?
"Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals, and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using cheaper components)."
The currently used FPV drones use consumer level ass communication methods. Do you also think that current military-grade communication methods can be easily jammed on the battlefield?
Using the consumer level stuff as a reference point and thinking it is somehow SOTA is not going to lead to good conclusions.
> Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target.
The point was that there are plenty of radio signals that work fine and with high bandwidth in the 'problematic' terrain types you mentioned. Having said that, you can't rely on the cellular towers of the enemies of course. You need relay drones to create your own ad hoc cellular network.
> You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
At what coordinate? The whole point of FPV drones is that the operator can fly close to the target area and only then decide what the best place to strike is. A shell that is 20m off target is just a waste.
The point of destroying the canopy is reducing the attenuation of the signal for other drones to go in and be able to be precise.
Dense forest scenarios aside, it seems to me that an FPV drone could perhaps serve best as an adjunct to mortar fire and other artillery, rather than as a replacement. If you knew exactly where your drone was, it could basically assume the role of a forward observer.
The article says that GPS is largely hopeless on their particular battlefield, though, so some other means of accurate positioning would probably be needed.
Isn't the drip-drip-drip of single soldiers running around the response to artillery in the first place? Any concentration of manpower attracts artillery and if it's significant, HIMARS gets called in. Naturally, the response is to disperse men and make artillery less effective. The response to that is FPVs chasing down the individuals instead. They're a counter to a counter and can't be judged in isolation.
My point is that it is difficult to imagine another peer conflict in a similar geographical type reaching such a level that budgets should be diverted in a major way to develop these devices in the hope that they are some miracle weapon. Layperson politicians read headlines and think they are a first-level counter and not a counter-to-a-counter as you said :)
That is true, although I think a lot of what can be invested in, is transferable. Control software, targeting, AI could be adapted to larger or smaller scale drones. Manufacturing capabilities can be as well. ISR drones are pervasive and it used to be uneconomical to shoot down a relatively cheap one, like an Orlan, with something that cost as much or more. Now there's cheap counter-ISR FPVs. I don't think the future is manually guided at all though.
Drones could be manufactured from standardized components, LEGO so to speak, allowing for add hoc redesign and automated manufacturing . Foilwrapped fuelcokecans with a primer and a bus are where its at .
Taiwan
Exactly. Many are missing the big picture - while Ukraine has managed to hurt the Russsians with drone warfare, how much has all that really helped Ukraine to drive back the Russians or re-take the territory held by the Russians? The simple answer is that it hasn't. Moreover, drones are not going to give an edge to Ukranian any more as the Russian too have mastered not just counter-drone warfare but also streamlined it into their conventional warfare tactics. (For example, Russians now outproduce the Ukrainians in drones and now use WW2 style motorbikes to evade drone defence - https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/06/25/russias-motorcycle-... ).
Drones really helped to slow down Russian invasion.
Now FPV drones are also used as anti-air defense. $1500 FPV drone can intercept $100k reconnaissance drone or loitering munition.
"Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx."
This is true, but flat open fields are precisely the places where major mechanized battles usually took place. For the very reason that manoeuvering other equipment in complicated terrain is hard.
Ofc there are significant exceptions, like the Alpine front in WWI, where Austrians and Italians faced each other in mountainous terrain for years, or the Hürtgen Forest in WWII. But a remarkable share of all major mechanized battles of history took place in flat open fields, or something at least resembling that sort of terrain (gently sloping hills with good visibility etc. etc.)
>Ofc there are significant exceptions, like the Alpine front in WWI, where Austrians and Italians faced each other in mountainous terrain for years, or the Hürtgen Forest in WWII. But a remarkable share of all major mechanized battles of history took place in flat open fields, or something at least resembling that sort of terrain (gently sloping hills with good visibility etc. etc.)
Fighting through some portion of the Ardennes has been a fairly recurrent theme in central European land warfare since vikings did it in the 800s.
I'm sure if one digs they can find a reference to a roman general doing it too.
I haven't claimed that there were zero such instances, but my guess is that such battles in difficult terrain may be ~ 5 per cent of the total, if not less. People and animals get exhausted easily in bad terrain, and it is hard to supply the troops. Even mechanical equipment becomes less reliable and more prone to malfunction.
Notably, the German operation Sichelschnitt in 1940 was very successful because the French command considered it unlikely that German Panzers would be able to cross the Ardennes in force, even though the French command was probably well aware of their own military history.
I made the error of emphasizing that I was thinking in a generalized manner of major nations with military tensions with shared borders. A lot of thought should be put towards if simple geography could make this cheap dispenable warfare more expensive than initially due to requirements for repeaters, shielded high-end comms chips or other assistive tech.
Great insight in this comment - in the 21st century wars are so unique that hi-tech weapons emerge specifically for certain battlefield applications.
I.e. just one country over, just one slightly different conflict between different actors would require completely different looking-feeling weapon systems.
It’s not something you think about, usually - so much of what we see used is made for asymmetrical warfare.
Yeah, so Taiwan. Drones or no drones? Just poking around at the news, seeing Chinese drone carrier ships. Drone carrier aircraft, landing craft being prepared, drone swarming being practiced. Pretty sure we’re going to see a lot of drone warfare in the coming years. I hate to put a timeline on it but the Chinese did announce one so we know what it’s going to look like and where it’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen.
And there gunna be lotsa drones.
All writing on the success of technology in war follows the same structure.
A new weapon is introduced and finds success, is boasted as the future of warfare. It works and is a significant advantage for the side using it, being a force multiplier.
After the initial succes the other side starts using it too, and there's a scramble for countermeasures. This makes the wonder weapon less effective.
Then articles are written that are the inverse of the hype following the first implementation. Even doubting if 'this is the end of -wonder weapon- ?'
Look at the tank. With every new weapon (take drones) it is theorized that drones would be the end of effectiveness of tanks as a weapon system.
It's not, but it's not longer a wonder weapon, yet a piece of equipment, that's constantly evolving. Is an arms race and it's been like that since the invention of the club by our ancestors.
Don't forget that drones are evolving very fast and their potential is frightening. What about swarm of unmanned AI and computer vision capable drones spreaded across fields and forests waiting for their prey? You can make antipersonnel drones much smaller as you don't need even to kill the enemy - just to wound. You can place a big batteries across that zones so drones could go recharge theirselves and continue serving. Eventually you can just drop thousands of such killers above the territory or even some city and they will kill every human they find. Ok, then we can make unmanned drone hunters and human killer bots will start to enhance their defense capabilities. That will start another round in evolution where humans on the battlefield are just spectators. Or prey if they unlucky.
The article contradicts this view. It says that drones are hardly evolving: even years into the war they still use easily jammed analogue radio links on a handful of frequencies, and the biggest "upgrade" has been tying a fiber optic cable to them with all the obvious downsides that implies (at double the cost). Nor have they become easier to pilot.
The FPV drone is used in battle largely because they're extremely cheap and use components sourceable from many suppliers backed by hobbyist markets. These devices are so cheap and basic they don't even use digital encryption for the video back to the operator, they don't even take off a third of the time, and you're talking about putting AI chips on them. There is much lower hanging fruit than AI.
As far as I know drones usually are one step forward against jamming capabilities of the defence. Jamming device that blocks all frequences costs a lot in money, consumes a lot of power and can be mounted only on a vehicle. And then fiber-optic drones join the game. Infantry not in the vehicle is unprotected and is unable to defence itself. The only chance to survive is to run faster than drone which can be achieved using bikes. But that is not a solution at all. Not all drones are cheap. What about FPV with night vision cameras? Even if it costs a lot but gives you superiority you can benefit from it in some critical missions and then mass production will reduce the cost. I suppose going from FPV drones to unmanned AI-drones will change everything like when jet aircrafts replaced propeller aircrafts.
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> Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
Citation needed.
I saw some fascinating videos explaining that the terrain caused the war in first place.
The huge border between Russia and Ukraine is completely flat grassland. This means that to Russia, Ukraine joining NATO is an unacceptable risk because that border is impossible to defend against NATO tank invasion, and the flatness go all the way to Moscow.
A lot of people on internet keep poking fun at Russia inadequate tanks as "proof" Russia is stupid for invading with such crappy gear. Russia is very well aware of this, and is why they invaded in first place, they know of Ukraine joins NATO any military exchange with NATO (like what happened between Iran and Israel) would need to immediately become nuclear because their existing army can't defend the huge open flat terrain against NATO equipment.
3 days after russian invasion or main russian news agency was auto-published article that was supposed to be a victory lap, and promptly removed. it was very briefly mentioned only in few western publications and not many people who speak russian know about it
it gives some insights about reasons for russian invasion. this is english translation . not sure how accurate (don't feel like checking few pages of text), but close enough
https://www.aalep.eu/advent-russia-and-new-world
origin in russian. you can right-click translate it https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
> The huge border between Russia and Ukraine is completely flat grassland. This means that to Russia, Ukraine joining NATO is an unacceptable risk because that border is impossible to defend against NATO tank invasion, and the flatness go all the way to Moscow.
This can be reversed and then Russia was supposed to be able to use its supply of 20000 prewar tanks to just swipe through Ukraine and stop at Uzghorod like an Iraqi 2003 style thunder run. It tried to, but failed miserably.
Maybe 19th and early 20th century doctrines are no longer alive with guided ammunition and spotting drones constantly in the air. Actually we can see it in Ukraine today, the moment when Russia setups an armored column it will often get disassembled by drones and artillery kilometers before reaching the zero line. It requires major effort and sacrifice to move frontline few meters on open terrain.
Well if they didn’t bother their neighbors they wouldn’t have to worry about NATO. Seems like a self imposed wound there.
Whenever I see this reasoning, I wonder how many people really believe not a single NATO country will ever elect a nutjob that might just decide to invade someone for a bullshit reason.
For example, hypothetically, what is the chance for a major NATO country will never have a president that might decide to bomb another country out of the blue, because that country according to said president, has weapons of mass destruction, despite the fact the same country intelligence said the target DOESN'T have such weapons? This will never happen right?
I recommend looking up European military readiness levels before diving too deep into fantasies. Who is supposed to invade Russia? Latvia, with its tank army of exactly zero tanks? Or a major country like Germany, with its barely 100 operational tanks and enough artillery ammunition for just two days?
Even in Russia, only complete loonies treats this as a plausible scenario. That's why you can see bunkers and anti-tank ditches and defensive lines being built on the European side of the Russian border, and nothing of this sort on the Russian side. They don't even have a basic chain-link fence. Mushroomers sometimes get lost and just walk into Russia.
> before diving too deep into fantasies
You do realise that the parent was actually making a historical reference? "Weapons of mass destruction"... doesn't that ring a bell?
Historical or about a week ago
That has nothing to do with "NATO tank invasion of Moscow".
So? Nothing in NATO brings the rest of the alliance along for the ride in that case. The core agreement is defensive, not offensive, and historically NATO has not at all been unified on attacks on other countries.
NATO was fairly well united in attacks on Afghanistan, Serbia, and Libya. (I'm just clarifying the historical record, not attempting to justify Russia's actions.)
There is a big difference between behaving like Saddam Husain vs a geopolitically boring country where nothing happens ever and the people have a high standard of peaceful living as a result. Another self imposed wound for Saddam choosing to be an overall thorn in the side during most of his entire regime. Iraqis could have had the chill high standard of living boring peaceful lives that is part and parcel in the western world. We act like these things are impossible to achieve elsewhere but really the people take to that readily when it is made available, and it is merely the leadership that needs to stop the almost high school tier tit for tat feuding and military mindset of the world that some have. We see this with every society that goes from warbent and militant to basically nothing happening since that pivotal regime change or shift in the wind moment and living peacefully: e.g. Japan after WWII. South Korea. Vietnam. Yugoslavia. East Germany. Spain. Italy. The list goes on with examples from around the world over the last century. Entropy favors peace but it is leadership that steers things otherwise every time.
Invading eastern Ukraine isn’t going to do anything about that problem. Once Russia failed to take Kyiv in 2022 any strategic justification was gone.
There is the possibility of a peace settlement that includes a provision prohibiting Ukraine from joining NATO. Personally, I would say this is a reasonably likely outcome.
I’m engaging with this as though Russia’s motivations are serious, despite the fact that they’re doing nothing to actually prepare for this hypothetical NATO invasion. But even if you engage with it seriously, the failure to secure and defend Western Ukraine makes Russia totally vulnerable, NATO commitments or not. And losing so much of your military reserves doing it should terrify anyone who is actually concerned about defending Russia. Russia’s nuclear arsenal is literally the only thing protecting them right now.
I would say that the events of Russo-Ukrainian war have shown that even a lot of tanks (and NATO does not have anywhere near as many as Russia did, the former Soviet stockpile was absolutely massive) aren't the crushing force that they used to be in Manstein's and Guderian's time. Of course Putin is a bit old and may think in old patterns...
On the other hand, I believe Russia made itself very vulnerable by letting its cosmic sector drown in corruption. Nowadays they have fallen so behind the US in launch capabilities that it isn't even funny. Try hiding anything from the fleet of satellites that the US has, or can have if it wishes to.
Starlink may be the single most dangerous technologic development of the 21st century to Russia.
> tanks aren't the crushing force that they used to be in Manstein's and Guderian's time
Russians have assault groups of couple tanks and half a dozen ifv. Had Guderian used same forces in a single battle? The biggest Russian operations had 40-60 armored vehicles, mainly ifv.
Tanks are still a real power, especially western modern tanks.
It's hard to tell for sure about the tanks, the Russian army used really shitty tactics. Tanks are supposed to be used with infantry support to avert "cheap shots" with short range anti-tank weapons. Turkey managed to lose a few Leopards in a similar way. Just Leopards with nothing hanging out in enemy territory.
However, they effectively bought the owner of Starlink.
I don't believe they have enough money to buy Musk. They can influence him through propaganda and memes, but outright bribery is unlikely. That would have to be a vast, vast money transfer.
Trump looks more likely to be bribe-able than Musk. Very different personalities and net worths. Musk seemed to be genuinely angry with Trump's budget, for example.
Why do you think everything can be bought with just money? He might be sold if for trivial things. Some Russian hooker, propaganda and memes, as you said, make him believe siding with Russians makes him more cool. Same things as with the orange guy.
Musk’s wealth is tied to Tesla, which from a business perspective is in very deep trouble. But the stock price doesn’t reflect this. I sometimes wonder how much it’s worth to Musk that the stock not reflect Tesla’s actual performance, and who might be driving those irrational price movements.
That same NATO that has problems getting artillery ammo because they decommissioned the plants? Is this dangerous alliance in the room right now?
>NATO tank invasion
Invasion? Oh my, are you delusional? NATO is a defence alliance, stop consuming Russian propaganda maybe.
You mean defence of Yugoslavia/Serbia in 1999?
I mean their sense of being is the defending alliance. And from their being scared by Russia and unwilling to help Ukraine, we can tell that when Russia would attack Estonia, they will do nothing and invent some excuse why Putin is a good marvellous wonderful guy with whom I’m personally a very good friend. Them attacking Russia first, looks unbelievable. They are afraid to even help the country that was attacked, as they were told by Russians they won’t be happy, and so they obediently do what they told.
> NATO is a defence alliance
Libya?
Travel the world or check out your favorite map software, snd look at current hot conflicts and recent ones in the past. You have Iraq and Ukraine/Russia which are relatively flat, then you have Afghanistan or Iran on the opposite side of the spectrum. Even a flat country can have forests too thick for flying wirelessly or with fiber optics.
Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech and doctrine being in its infancy.
If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?
Western militaries have things like this: https://greydynamics.com/switchblade-drone-small-spring-load...
More autonomy, but MUCH more expensive. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per use. The issue is indeed using mass-produced consumer drones. It's a bit like the widespread use of "technicals" in some conflicts: yes, a pickup truck with a .50cal in the back is inferior to tanks or armored cars, but it's also much, much cheaper.
There's a bit of a "Sherman vs. Tiger" thing that's been going on since the dawn of industrialised warfare. Is it better to have a more effective weapon that you can only afford a few of, or lots of cheaper ones?
The US doctrine approach to the problem would simply be a set of B2 bunker buster decapitation strikes on Russian military HQs, but of course that option is not available to Ukraine. They can't even manage Iraq-war-style wave of SEAD strikes followed by unit level CAS. The air war has kind of stalemated with neither side having conventional air superiority and both being vulnerable to the other's anti-air.
Ah, the age old question of "1 horse-sized duck vs. 100 duck-sized horses"...
This is a Zerg vs Protoss debate.
Best strategy is Protoss + Zerg. What if toss could field some zerglings along with the expensive OP weapons?
Slightly unrelated, but reading the "product" page is crazy to me. So much about lethal radii, kill zones and stuff like that. Wild, couldn't ever picture myself working on something like this and sleeping well at night
I would. But I would be hesitant to if I got wind that it was being sold to a bad government, or that my government was a bad government/intended then for misuse.
As a quiet gay nerd I'd love for there to be no war, no bullies. But unfortunately we live in a world where our species evolved from monkeys and we still often act like it. If my usually peaceful tribe needs weapons to defend itself when attacked then I'm all for it. But using those weapons to attack another for any reason other than defense is a nono in my books.
It's very easy to mistake one's own government for the good guys.
20 or so years ago, my degree's optionally-mandatory* industrial placement year had me interviewing at Lockheed Martin.
I didn't get it, and in retrospect, given what is now coming to light about UK misbehaviour in Iraq**, I'm glad I didn't.
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about this, as you're correct about the world we live in.
* tax thing
** https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/12/uk-veterans-allege-...
It's easy to identify who is a evil country and who is a victim in Russo-Ukrainian war.
Who is bombing civilians? Shelling cities with inaccurate old missiles? Which cities are destroyed to the ground?
Russian state is pure evil, even worse than Iran.
In context of working on military hardware, it's more complex than that. Name whichever state you consider evil, there are good chances they've recently received or bought weapons from a state you don't consider evil. Name whichever state you consider good, there are good chances they sold their weapons to parties you find questionable.
You may build tech that helps the good defenders defeat the forces of the stronger, evil attacker, but 5 years down the line, you may discover that same tech is now used to blow up hospitals and refugee convoys - and it doesn't take your country being on the wrong side of a war, it just takes the usual international politics.
If only the majority of the Russian resident population could see that, they would stop Putin.
Propaganda, and arresting dissenters, makes it difficult for the *average* Russian to realise anything is wrong.
But even in free nations, people like to think their soldiers are heroes rather than villains, and reports of crimes are covered up or brushed aside.
Unfortunately money plays a big role. The US is different, with good paying jobs for engineers being common but believe it or not, that is not the norm everywhere in the world. Sometimes people need to follow the money. I think this plays a big role on the russian side of the war. Their economy isn't very diversified and the state owns the means to a large portion of the economy's production. If you need cash, a good way to get it is to do putin's bidding.
Switchblade 2 is $80k usd per unit.
And the only reason for that is that as per usual private companies are making a killing.
You and I could build a similarly functioning device in 6 months with a small team. They're not that smart/advanced, imo.
I think most of the money for these things isn't paid for research/engineering but goes into MBA/investor pockets.
There is also the problem that the military tends to go for the best. In some cases that's a good idea (the cost of getting that laser-guided bomb to the release point is well above the cost of the bomb), but when dealing with unmanned units the zerg approach is very often the winner.
Look at Iron Dome. By comparison to other modern SAMs it's abysmal. But that's by design, Israel wasn't looking for a good SAM. They were looking for the cheapest SAM that could hit a sitting duck. But that's what it's facing--ballistic inbounds that have no countermeasures and no ability to evade.
> You and I could build a similarly functioning device in 6 months with a small team. They're not that smart/advanced, imo.
If you can do what they do in 6 months, why don't you do it? You would get rich easily.
I worked in the drone industry. Everybody thinks everything is easy to do. Spoiler: it isn't.
I was under the impression that while there is a lot of grift, a lot of that was supply chain cost as well. You or I could build one but it would all be sourced in China without vetted supply chain parts or firmware. These Ukraine drones are all off the shelf parts and running who knows what firmware everywhere.
I suppose that's true but not necessarily. Most of the control hardware would likely come from Taiwan. Structural components can be machined locally, brushless motors or whatever other mechanism can also be machined locally. Sensors etc are available from Japan/Taiwan as well. But tbf I think it would be possible to source reliable Chinese components from reputable companies as well - try do b2b already and they wouldn't get the sales if the product didn't work. Make purchases through a variety of disposable paper companies and the factories would have no idea that it's for defense.
Software for loitering etc would be so easy nowadays too. Hell I can tell a pi zero to track GPS + multiple cameras + loiter/engage target on whatever signatures are available from available sensors.
I say this while eyeing up the Carvera. I want to justify it so badly. Perhaps the Air...not for aforementioned purposes of course, unless some defense contractor wants to pay me ahaha.
Considerable cost savings can be achieved when both belligerents are using the same parts from the same production line.
China in the role of Milo Minderbender.
China is partially blocking export of drone parts. More so for Ukraine, so their drones have 50%+ of domestic parts. Custom firmware, even with auto aim for the last 10m where jamming can hit the signal.
> Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech
I don't think it's improvised civilian hobbyist tech. They run autopilots that also fly professional drones and can fly planes.
I think it's mostly that it has to be super cheap, otherwise it doesn't bring value (because other weapons are more efficient if you have more money). If your one-way drone costs 10k dollars, maybe it's too expensive even though it can fly during the night.
And then there are fundamental limitations, like flying in bad weather.
> obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone
But a reusable drone won't go inside a hangar (because at this point it probably won't come out). If your drone can go somewhere, drop something and come back, doesn't it mean that another class of weapons could do this job?
$10,000 can be cheap for a one way drone. Bombs often cost for more than that. The real question is value, if hitting the target is worth more than the cost of what you hit it with then you have a good value. Taking out a $1000 drone with a $100,000 missile is a good value if that drone is headed for a $1,000,000 building, but if the drone is headed for a cow probably not worth it.
Sure. But isn't that the point of the article? That the author is not sure if they bring as much value as advertised?
And the reusable drone has a serious battlefield limitation that it's extremely vulnerable while positioning to drop it's munition. Very good against something that can't defend itself (we have a lot of video of them dropping stuff into tanks that the crew bailed out of for some reason), but the cost mounts quickly if a soldier with a shotgun can engage it.
Sadly I think that AI will make a very large difference here. And AI hardware that can control weapons is already hundreds of dollars and dropping fast, because a cell phone can do it.
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Given that the drones he talks about are even less equipped than a standard hobbyist drone (no GPS, no compass), I suppose it's more a "tradeoff" between keeping the drone cheap enough to be disposable vs having enough functionality to be practically controllable by the operator.
Also, the tech hurdles can easy be overcome with motherships as relays?
I don’t understand why the author has such a narrow definition of FPV drones.
He talks as if reusable drones are a completely different category, that they are all toys designed for enthusiast racers… Generally he implies that a myriad arbitrary technical details are fundamental limitations of this paradigm, it’s a strange mindset.
Also, as others commenters state, isn’t a 43% success rate exceedingly high? Even if it’s 20% accounting for environmental factors and faults in manufacturing. How likely is it that a mortar does anything? Or a soldier with a rifle? Or anything else?
> When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool.
It sounds like he was imagining some kind of scifi adventure, but it’s always been clear that they are using cheap drones with tech that has been commonplace for a decade. And that’s completely fine, it’s intentional.
> Also, as others commenters state, isn’t a 43% success rate exceedingly high? Even if it’s 20%
That's the whole question, and that's kind of the point that the article raises: the success rate does not matter. What matters is the cost. At the same cost, can you do more damage with other weapons or not?
Indeed that’s what I meant, it’s a good question. It sounds like the author only saw the cases where mortars or reusable drones had been successful. But I cannot imagine a mortar being more efficient even if one shot is 5x cheaper. Perhaps they are more effective at suppression, but I would be surprised if they really hit anything meaningful more than 5% of the time, similar with most artillery or bombing, or just plain infantry.
What even comes close to the success rate of a drone to hit a particular moving target? And you can do it while hidden 10km away with a lightly trained operator. And manufactured cheaply, safely and quickly by unskilled labor, and easily transported to the front and hand-carried by troops.
Any kind of alternative, like precision bombing or sniping, or just getting close and shooting at it, must be much more costly, particularly when you also account for the cost of the equipment used, even if it is reusable, and the training, risk and human cost.
I think we should not discount the psychological effect.
From what I have read from Ukraine vets, ubiquitous drones make you crazy in a way that tank attacks don't. The difference is in their ubiquity. You are likely to encounter a tank relatively infrequently, and have enough time to recuperate between those encounters. But with a sky full of drones 24/7, or close to that, your nerves will give way sooner or later.
This alone may cripple the forward units.
A hit does not equal a kill. Killing a tank or an apc, takes a lot of hits from an FPV drone due to the small payload. I have heard quoted an average of 16 hits.
That's why you see videos trying to go in open hatches and the like. And that's why you are seeing cope cages. It doesnt matter how many chains or steel plates you weld on to your tank if you are hit by a TOW or a Javelin, it's still going to get you. They can penetrate more than a meter of steel.
But the FPV is carrying a DPCIM or a small RPG it's much less likely to penetrate a tanks or an apc armor.
> What matters is the cost.
Logistics matter too. How many FPVs can a company carry? How many fit in a pickup? Do you need a truck load to kill a tank? If you need like 10 to kill a tank, you need to do 10 attacks, either 10 people attacking the same target in quick succession or one guy 10 times.
A Javelin is pretty much one hit one kill, and the hit rate is supposedly at about 89%. So you need like one or two to kill a tank.
From what I have heard, bigger heavier reusable drones, that release their bigger payload are more effective than FPVs.
> A Javelin is pretty much one hit one kill, and the hit rate is supposedly at about 89%. So you need like one or two to kill a tank.
Take those extremely high kill rates with a massive grain of salt.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/08/re-ass...
Javelin consumption rates early in the war (500/day) do not match Russian loss rates if the system was ~90% effective. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics/ukraine-us-reque...
ukrainians were blowing up with javelins and nlaw everything that is moving and had wheels
It's a good point, I'm wondering though what the ROI of a Javelin is throughout its lifetime, including training costs. It's not obvious that you end up better off, perhaps.
ROI also depends on availability. Ukraine knows everything about the article and likely agrees (though they will dispute some details) - Ukraine was trained on the old Soviet Artillery doctrine and knows it well. However Ukraine cannot get nearly enough of the supposedly cheaper mortar rounds at any price while they can make drones quickly. In theory I could make 155mm rounds for Ukraine in my garage, but my metal lathe (most people don't have one but I do) isn't the right tool for the job and so I'd be making dozens a month at best, what Ukraine really needs is a modern factory than can make thousands or even millions per month - it would take me years to create that factory.
The way I see it, it's probably worth it. You probably want a layered approach, you have a few high end, very expensive very effective weapons for maximum effect at the beginning of a conflict to take out the enemies high end, tip of the spear forces. And then you want to have a deep reserve of cheaper, legacy stuff to deal with volume and attrition.
Of course. That's combined arms doctrine
Ofc but javelin launchers and missiles cost $250k a piece. You get a lot of drones for that price.
And you need to be in a line of sight close to the target and not get hit by an enemy drone. And it requires some time to boot if I am not mistaken.
You need to be in line of sight, but not very close, it has a max range of 2 to 4 km depending on the version. Missiles in the spike family can also acquire targets after launch.
You realize that a lot of stuff they were sticking on tanks was to defeat the Javelin?
You simply can't put a big enough warhead on a man portable missile to defeat the main armor of a modern tank. Thus you do not actually want to hit the tank--the purpose of the Javelin is to fly *over* the target tank, when it's overhead it's warhead detonates, firing an explosively formed projectile down into the *top* armor of the tank. Those cages were meant to keep the Javelin from getting to the right spot to do that.
I assume this is like a pilot in WW1 reporting how finicky and hard to use bi-planes were. No doubt a bunch of weapons manufacturers have seen this and the special operations Ukraine did in Russia and Israel did in Iran and the wheels of progress are turning and the result will be terrifying.
Likewise, ysterday I was reading about Chuck Yeager's first jet flight, in a P-80, and how most of his time was spent manually juggling the fuel flow to prevent the engine either overheating or flaming out. He barely had time to think about actually achieving anything.
A decade later, automated fuel flow was standardised and aircraft were flying twice as fast and high.
What terrifies me is that the next step may be AI swarms, where one side sends thousands of drones at the same time and let each of them autonomously choose what they want to target.
It's all technically feasible up to "choosing wisely".
In a sense it's already happening with the Shahed drones. Maybe not smart AI, but the end result is still the same: you have no clue where they will end up.
What's eye opening about the recent iran israel conflict is how drones were used. Iran fired about 1000 drones and israel easily destroyed all but one of them. On the other hand israel used drones to devastating effect.
I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's clear that drones as a primary means of warfare is simply not effective. hamas and hezbolla have no notable successes with drones, except for on october 7 where they used them to great effect to destroy specific machine gun emplacements and a couple of tanks. They will be part of the future, but never the future itself.
Israel has been serious about defending against simple weapons for a long time. And expect them to have doubled down on this since 10/7. As far as I know they are the only modern power to have done so.
Allegedly there's lots of field tests of these swarms in the war already.
Whats their power and computing budget tho? The gap between what can be done in data center and on a $2 arduino chip is still vast.
This tracks with the earlier ~12% drone kill efficiency estimates. However drone is a mass deployment weapon. Ukraine did about 2 million frontline sorties in 2024 and aims for 5 million this year. This 1 out of 9 ratio translates into absolutely devastating damage, that artillery and airstrikes (which are also hardly "easy to use") can only dream of.
This is true, but the author also talks about cost e.g. $500 for a drone vs $100 for an artillery shell with far more effect. Surely at the point where the drone has visual on the target you can fire 5 x shells over for massively greater effect on target, and keep the drone flying for the next target, and the next.
$100 is a cost of a 60mm mortar shell. It is a hand grenade sized munition lobbed from a Pringles can sized weapon to the range of 1-2km. This is generally not the thing that comes to mind when you think of artillery strike.
A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.
A M107 155mm round weights 95lbs when launched. Assuming that is pure lead (this is false, but lead is very cheap and it gives us numbers to work with) I can buy lead ignots for $2.89/lbs. Which puts us at $293 per rounds in just materials. Since we assume the other materials cost money too, plus there is the energy used to turn ignots into a round, it seems unlikely you can get the cost to much under $1000 no matter how good your mass production is.
And then you need to add that 5-10x government contract price multiplier to the cost as well.
Then again the payload of an FPV is much more comparable to the mortar round than to the 155mm one
But theoretically much better aimed. Don’t know if there’s enough data here to do the math. Plus that it’s a bit gauche to do math about human lives, but here we are.
Do you have numbers for that? Because the higher-end munition also has (rudimentary) steering capabilities? And higher end stuff obviously has the same or better honing software
don't need to aim a large shell as accurately though.
It averages out at 8-10 shells to kill or disable one soldier.
An FPV drone can take out a tank, missile erector-launcher or a dugout. Kinda hard with 60mm mortar.
The estimate is 20 FPV hits for one kill right? But sure, the last one kills it
That's interesting thankyou. It's a good google rabbit hole. Apparently we're in surge pricing right now because of Ukraine, and Russian shells are only costing them $1000. It seems they caught us sleeping, manufacturing wise.
The heavy Soivet calibre used by Russia is 152mm which translates to a slightly cheaper shell (though not 5x for sure). Russia also uses 122mm arty which is substantially cheaper: the costs follow to the cube volume. Another factor is that a lot of supplies are Iranian and North Korean old stock with what we can assume reasonable prices. Ukraine was getting Vietnam war era 155mm stock relatively cheap too, while it lasted.
Mortar is notoriously inaccurate, while a drone is a precision guided weapon. To compare apples to apples, a drone needs to be compared to other precision guided weapons. Think Stinger or other TOW missiles instead. Those are at least two orders more expensive.
This is kind of a 'Muskets are cool but they take too long to reload' vibe.
Yeah Ukraine isn't working with the best tech; it's a doctrine of desperation rather than preparation. But they discovered something effective and it will change the way wars are fought in the future.
> But they discovered something effective and it will change the way wars are fought in the future.
They didn't really. TOW's are a thing from the 70s. They are essentially the same thing, but instead of electric rotors they are using a rocket motor. Switchblades existed before this conflict too, if loitering is the measure we are going with.
It's a hacked together solution to a real problem they are having, lack of artillery shells and more reliable munitions. And well done to them.
But a country with the benefit of time and deep pockets is going to come up with more reliable, more effective solutions.
We are seeing the Russians turn to drones as well, but they also burnt their stockpiles of other weapons and are in an emergency too. And additionally they have also doubled their artillery shell production.
> TOW's are a thing from the 70s. They are essentially the same thing
That's just not true. I've not seen a TOW chase around a guy in a field, well not on r/UkraineWarVideoReport at least.
Because tows are too fast. There is guidance, but the missiles fly at 200+ meters per second.
If you fire it at a guy or a vehicle, you either going to hit very fast or miss very fast.
I know, it was a tongue in cheek reply ;)
It is interesting hearing feedback from the frontline. Even with the issues, I think it is clear drones are changing modern warfare when you have companies like Anduril. What most people think is coming next is autonomous drones, although I don't morally agree with it. Sorry you had to have this experience, I wish this war would end, too many lives have been lost and it is senseless.
The is also a sort of autonomous targetting for jammers available ? The grandfather of the shaheed was intended to guide itself towardsrrrussian radar aka em sources, so i guess a modern drone should be similar capable on connection loss to rech the disturbing em source.
> I would, first of all, recommend ensuring that troops in the field have well-trained organic mortar support with an ample supply of ammunition.
That would not be possible because it has become basically impossible to bring in vehicles close to 5-10 kms of the front-lines because of the, well, drones. And you need to carry ammunition to those mortars with something, preferably not how the Vietnamese did it in the jungle (i.e. using brute human force).
Just check this snippet from a recent article in the FT:
> “'At this point, you’re a lucky man if you drive 5km from the front line and your car is still operational,' a Ukrainian drone unit commander deployed in eastern Donetsk region told the Financial Times. He said his men now sometimes had to walk up to 15km at night to reach their positions...
> In the past weeks, Ukrainian supply trucks have reportedly been hit by Russian drones on the road linking Kramatorsk to Dobropillia, some 30km from the fighting. On both sides of the front line, roads are being covered with anti-drone nets in an attempt to stop fibre optic drones."
This comes from Ukrainian guys still fighting this war, not from a Western war-tourist like the guy who wrote this article.
[1] https://x.com/RALee85/status/1937816538439991310
The author writes that he was not there for the fiber optic evolution. They have changed the game when it comes to these flat open terrains with heavy jamming. The quality control and cheap components issues won’t go away unless they are improved, which brings costs to a ”cheap” alternative. As I wrote in my comment above, walking/driving moving targets are still on the table, just not as feasible as in the early days without signals jamming.
> As I wrote in my comment above, walking/driving moving targets are still on the table
This seems to directly contradict this direct quote from the recent FT article I linked to:
> At this point, you’re a lucky man if you drive 5km from the front line and your car is still operational
I’m not saying it’s impossible to hit them, just that it’s more difficult than in the early days. Even fiber optics have cons like harder maneuverability, but the driveway attacks are probably in the category of ”loitering” drones that sit on the ground waiting for targets before taking flight again.
> During my time in [...], I collected statistics on the success of our drone operations. I found that [...]
Assuming the writer and their allegiances are what they say, is any of the info valuable to any of their adversaries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_lips_sink_ships
None of what he is saying is that valuable. All of these problems are something a hobbyist fpv drone pilot can share. Add to that, it’s quite old info. If the author didn’t get a chance to see fiber optic drones, they left the fray a long time ago in terms of advancement.
The Russians likely already have similar operational data from their own drone programs and intelligence gathering.
Still feels like why help them just in case they don't
> They are controlled by an operator wearing virtual-reality goggles
They aren't really using VR headsets, right? The FPV goggles I know are just a screen showing the camera image without any virtual reality.
Basically its just screen yes. It's just convenient and more portable to do it this way. Small desktop screen also exist and are used to peek on what the FPV operator is seeing.
Yeah I'd much rather use an xreal air or something. You can still see if someone (or an enemy drone) comes to kill you. AR is much better for this.
Probably you want the pilot to be 100% focused on the piloting. Someone else can look around and try to keep the pilot safe.
Also it's not like the pilot has to be exposed.
No, the latency is too high.
There are dedicated devices for this - much lighter, external battery (same as the drones use), etc. I use a Skyzone 04X.
They hide in bunkers and have other infantrycwith them if that’s not the case.
Interesting read. Curious how the author feels re: the attack on airbases using shipping containers/drones that was so successful?
Seems to be a unique case that worked especially well for (higher end I'm sure) FPV drones. Getting artillery in on shipping containers would have a higher likelihood of detection. Similarly, the ability to 'guide' in the drones with munitions seemed to allow for greater flexibility during the attack and its effectiveness.
I imagine eventually these cheap FPV's will be augmented with low-cost GPU's allowing for running smallish models and self-guided autonomy. This would seem the next evolution where a commander deploys them in bulk and overwhelms the enemy in a way that can't be jammed like radio-communication. Similarly, horrifying when you consider their eventual use in terrorism scenarios...
That didn't use FPV drones, they're rather difficult to control at 6000km and they didn't have operators nearby.
Most likely it's the first major deployment of their semi autonomous drone tech, driven "declaratively". They've shown that stuff recently, they probably used it before showing it.
Ukraine’s drones were primarily LTE/4G-connected for remote operation
Likely, but that's not enough
The report said they were guided remotely.
I suspect reality is a combination--think RTS game. You give orders to your units but you don't babysit them.
Yeah that's how I think it went down.
Autonomous control, likely from a base station nearby, or one of their new carrier drones, and remote command.
> If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is bad ...
I disagree with this premise. I suspect that 20 to 30% success rate is not at all bad, but rather excellent. Compare to artillery with shells costing a few thousand each on the low end, to $100k+ for more advanced rounds, with 100s or 1000s fired per casualty.
The article claims it is 20-30% in quite limited circumstances, and less if you include "we know it will fail" sorties. And seemingly entirely disabled by jammers, where available.
I guess they must be working for Ukraine, or it wouldn't be buying them. But how well they scale against a competent opponent is less clear.
The article talks about signal jammers, but as far as I know most drones there are remote controlled using fiber for exactly that reason?
Yes, he writes that after he left the battlefield they became more common.
There was a video of a soldier wading through massive amounts of fiber near the front line. Just imagine that for each drone attack there will be 10-50km of fiber dropped on the landscape. It will not rot and stay there until someone cleans it up.
I've always wondered if the burning batteries and electronics in the drones have any significant environmental impact when compared to conventional weapons.
I'd rather have old fibre cables and lithium batteries than old unexploded ordinance
(If wishes were horses I'd rather Russia hadn't invaded a sovereign country in the first place, but we are where we are)
According to the article, you will get BOTH of those, no? Some of the bombs on the drones don't explode.
There's a really good interview with a Russian drone manufacturer where he talks about how you need to use both.
The fiber-optic drones have small warheads/payloads. They are used to hunt the enemy's EW transmitters. Once the jammers have been suppressed, then the radio-controlled drones with bigger payloads go to work and do the bulk of the damage.
From what I understand Ukraine is not using many fiber drones because there are other disadvantages. They can have them, but they mostly choose to use radio anyway. Russia is using a lot of fiber drones.
There are... I think they aren't unproblematic - the fibre can get caught on things etc. Also I read of instances where the opposition can follow the fibre back to find the drone operators.
Tracing the fiber back is possible only in extremely favorable conditions. The light must hit the cable just right and there cannot be too many cables from previous runs on the battlefield.
It's not too bad when they see the drone passing by. I have no idea how often this can happen without being seen though.
Those cables are 10km long. You can trade a couple hundred meters when the drone is flying by, but there are several KM that you cannot even see at the same time as you can see the drone.
Sounds like for fiber optic strikes you gotta do a "shoot and scoot".
The operators usually use a cordless drill to wind back as much cable as they can after the drone is used.
This is why it's so fascinating to read about this conflict. The back and forth innovations (some obvious, some rudimentary, some very much not) is just incredible to follow.
Early on: Drones in war!
Then: Ahh EW makes them useless!
Then: Fiber optics defeat EW!
Then: But you can follow the cable!
Then: But you can try to respool the cable with a power drill!
Every week it seems is a new move.
Next up: Autonomous targeting.
Next Next up: Decoys.
> Today, some Ukrainian and Russian units are also using drones controlled by fiber-optic cable, rather than radio, though I had no personal experience with this type of drone in my unit
Because it is mostly the Russians that are using those, the Ukrainians have also started using them but in less fewer numbers.
As TFA says, Ukraine has a much smaller capacity of producing the required optical fiber, which is the main reason why they are using fewer such drones.
> the required optical fiber
So then why isn't the West providing them with optical fiber?
He talks about that in the article
I don’t agree with the conclusions he draws from his own analysis - almost all the issues and shortcomings he points out are related to technological shortcomings he admits - are already being addressed by the new systems - or are primarily issues with how drones are being used in the field - i.e. tactical combat decisions.
These are not inherently valid arguments regarding the effectiveness of drones as a new weapons platform - but with the current state of the technology and with the decisions on the battlefield
It’s early days, the technology will improve and the tactics will be standardized with time and drones will prove to be a dangerously effective tool - which has the additional scary bonus of being cheap and easy to mass produce and deploy
I see a lot of comments saying that "but the technology will improve".
Sure, maybe. Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months. We don't know, and the author doesn't pretend that they do. Don't forget that drones have been used in this war for years, and the vast majority of the drone industry has already pivoted to the military because it's easier to make money there. So it's not exactly "brand new technology".
But my point is that the author just says "from what I've seen, here is how it looks". And it seems like it has value.
> Don't forget that drones have been used in this war for years
3 years of usage is brand new. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have been designing and producing purpose-built FPV drones since the beginning (I assume things are well underway now). It's a bunch of consumer shit thrown together, which makes it kind of incredible that they work as well as they do.
An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that. And then you saying that "maybe the technology will not improve".
> 3 years of usage is brand new.
Usage, sure. But the technology is not. Those drones are flying smartphones. We have already had mass-produced consumer drones for more than a decade. We don't use them because they are new, we use them because they are cheap and accessible.
I am not sure what you call "consumer shit" here. They go for cheap FPV drones precisely because they are cheap. But the autopilot running in them can fly a Cessna. We can make them fly longer (they will be bigger), we can use better radios, we can add thermal cameras and bigger payloads. We can add GPUs and AI capabilities. All that we have, but then it doesn't cost 500$ anymore.
> An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that.
Or maybe you see an assault rifle and say "Look at this rifle; it's only the beginning! In a couple years it will have wings and it will drop heavy bombs before returning to base, because it will be reusable". And I'm saying: we already have fighter jets; they are just more expensive.
You based your doubt for whether the technology would improve on consumer shit thrown together for a few years as opposed to military technology purposely designed and built over a long period. That is bad reasoning. There is nothing more to it and it is thus far more likely that the technology will improve than not.
> That is bad reasoning.
From where I stand, you're calling "consumer shit thrown together" something you apparently don't really know, and then you make predictions from it.
I believe your prediction was "Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months."
You seem to think that this ragtag level of warfare between Russia and Ukraine is somehow indicative of what the limit of NATO-level militaries is. I'd say "we'll see", but hopefully we never have to find out.
> I believe your prediction was "Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months."
There was a part before the "or" :-). I did not predict anything, I said "maybe, maybe not". And you told me it was "bad reasoning".
My point was that the article says that drones have a ton of limitations in 2025, and many comments here say "yeah but that's because it's just the beginning". Drone manufacturers have been looking at the military for longer than 3 years, because that's easy money. Saying that "this is just consumer shit thrown together" sounds like you haven't really followed the drone industry in the last 15 years.
Sometimes the problem is not time or money.
> I did not predict anything, I said "maybe, maybe not".
The derisive way of putting the alternative (Musk's proven trash announcements) indicates that you were arguing a certain side. It definitely wasn't neutral.
> And you told me it was "bad reasoning".
The bad reasoning is what you're basing the (let's say) doubt on. You seem to know that a lot of technological progress has happened in the military FPV drone industry, but the article and described limitations are about (again) consumer level shit thrown together, not the advanced FPV drones that exist today.
Perhaps the conclusion should be that a lot of the problems described in the article are already solved, but that Ukraine (and Russia) couldn't get their hands on enough of the more capable FPV drones due to those being too expensive or not produced in large enough quantities.
> the problems described in the article are already solved, but that Ukraine (and Russia) couldn't get their hands on enough of the more capable FPV drones due to those being too expensive or not produced in large enough quantities.
Yes, that's what I think. And I believe that's what the article says: "The FPV drones we currently use are not ideal".
Then people say "yeah but they will improve", to which I answer: "or maybe not so much". Simply because better systems already exist, are mass-produced and are more expensive.
> I see a lot of comments saying that "but the technology will improve".
When people say "the technology will improve", I think they're usually referring to the drones currently in use becoming much better not due to breakthroughs in technology, but by applying existing technology more effectively for military purposes. Current military drones used in Ukraine are inefficient conversions of civilian products that were never meant to operate under jamming, leave as small thermal signature as possible, etc. Original military designs, which are optimized for the battlefield rather than the local dog park, can be significantly better.
> Current military drones used in Ukraine are inefficient conversions of civilian products
Are you sure about that? Many drone companies have been engineering for the military for years before the Ukraine invasion in 2022.
The thing is, those FPV drones are super, super, super cheap. We do have better technology, it does exist. But it is more expensive. Is it worth it then? That's the question.
Those drone companies are offering ridiculously expensive and overengineered products like the Switchblade, even though a drone 1/10 of its price can do the same job in many scenarios. These are bloated products that have seen little combat and haven't been trimmed down to the bare essentials. They are the Juiceros of the drone world.
Meanwhile, we have cheap FPV drones that have proven themselves in combat, but they remain toys upgraded with 3D-printed parts by tinkerers. They haven't been repackaged into proper military products and adapted for mass manufacturing.
The sweet spot between a toy and a $20k+ product from a military supplier remains largely unaddressed. It's like the early days of personal computing when some people had already assembled working machines in their garages and demonstrated their usefulness, but there were no rugged and standardized mass-market versions yet that could be ordered by the hundreds of thousands.
I agree, and I also raised more points in my comment. The terrain of the flatlands between Ukraine and Russia is the main reason for their success. The same could be said for vast parts of the Middle-East. It’s easy to operate these on farmlands that go for kilometers.
Even if the technology improves and the economics of scale reduces the cost, I still don't buy the narrative that swarms of tiny kamikaze drones will radically change warfare.
Aside from radio jamming, I have not seen an actual defense against a strong EMP.
To defend against an EMP wiping out your drone swarm, you would have to invest in shielding etc which would remove them from the class of small cheap drones.
Idk if anyone can speak about this, but to me this doesn't seem like a problem that these types of drones can overcome.
I think you are overstating the ease of employing an EMP.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/world-wont-end-danger...
EMP weapons are expensive, and one shot. I can see the future of drone swarms, but we are a long way out.
Usually the initial attack (From Ukrainian perspective) is stopped by regular military weapons like AT, Artillery, Mines and drones are used to mop up the battlefield - Burn out abandoned vehicles and hunt scattered soldiers
Maybe you should watch the countless videos DAILY, where soldiers are crippled for life.
Most of the problems the article describes are due to using civilian fpv drones on the battlefield or using untrained pilots: bad controls, narrow channel, faulty parts
Most of them would not apply when military finally catches up, starts producing war fpv drones and make good drone pilot training programs
You need to compare this to hit rate with mortars and attrition by counter battery fire on mortar teams. Not to detract from a sober assessment but it's hard to judge without the other parts of the story.
Thr tldr would be "temper expectations"
This.
Mortar may be 5 times cheaper but 100x easier to destroy it and its crew.
Also half of the problems described are purely technical and can be easily solved with some budget. In Ukraine most drones are assembled by volunteers. So its not the reliability of drone that is an issue, its lack of proper assembly and QA.
As noted if you have the budget the end product is a FGM Javelin or a Spike NLOS or as the article mentions a switchblade.
These things are pretty much the same thing (a thing that can be carried by a man that accurately puts a warhead on a target) just better and more expensive.
edit: Actually the NLOS might not be man portable, but there are other smaller Spike missiles that are.
>So its not the reliability of drone that is an issue, its lack of proper assembly and QA
Imagine what China can pull off here in case they're in a war.
China's fertility rate is 1.
Even if they win the war, they still eventually will have lost.
Fertility rate is a problem for the future, that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to, meanwhile dying or being enslaved in a war is a problem for right now that you can't escape via policies.
Which one you think is worse?
Also, most wealthy industrialized western nations have the same fertility issues, some are only compensating by huge legal and ilegal immigration which can be causing bigger domestic economic and societal issues than being involved in a war abroad. The west and its values, as we used to know it, is also dying.
>that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to
Nobody can. And it's not like they don't want to. Neither the very traditional and religious Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia (2.14, barely above replacement, and trending down), nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world. All have fertility troubles. Urban lifestyle just does fertility in.
>Nobody can.
Yeah you can, they just don't want to because it will be at the cost of short term corporate economic growth.
>And it's not like they don't want to.
They don't want to compromise short term corporate profits. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
>nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world
Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are. Norway has different issues than Japan. Every country has different issues.
>Yeah you can
Really? Can you name one developed country besides Israel that has succeeded?
>Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are
The Government Pension Fund Global (Statens pensjonsfond utland), also known as the Oil Fund (Oljefondet), was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector. As of June 2025, it had over US$1.9 trillion in assets.
Price of a 3 bedroom house in Oslo: $1.5M
$1.9T / $1.5M = 1.266M houses
Population of Norway is 5.6M
Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?
>Really? Can you name one developed country besides Israel that has succeeded?
How would they succed when they're not doing anything to succeed?
>Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?
How many families in Oslo can easily afford a 1.5 M apartment?
Fertility rate in China has been less than one for decades. They have a lot of people, but they are heavily weighted to old.
in japan it was even for many decades and its a problem but not tragedy, japan today still doing strong. Even if population in china shrink by 50% they will still have more pole than europe or us. And lets face it shrinking 50% this will really take decades and unlikely to happen since this will correct itself eventually.
How is Japan still going strong? Have you been there? Real estate just sitting empty, villages deserted, (young) people with no hope for the future, (hidden) poverty, the government and central bank basically bankrupt long-term.
Japan is stuck in the 90's with no hope for the future and they will be even less relevant then they are now within 1 generation.
Japan is absolutely not "doing strong" for the next 50 years or so and the same will happen to China. If you have no people, you have no future. As simple as that.
And how does the fact that it "will still take decades" suddenly make it OK for the country? Also if you shrink a population by 50% within decades it will completely destroy the economy (and military and culture). You can't just half the population that fast and expect things to just carry on as normal or magically recover.
I think people consider Japan to be doing strong because it's still a safe peaceful society to live in, despite the economic issues. Compared that to living in LA in the world's strongest economy, where it's like you're in a PvP server. So what's the point of having a strong economy if nobody can afford to live and the streets full of shit from homeless people.
I agreed with a lot of your posts above but not the extreme characterization of living in LA.
I do expect the crime rate is higher than most Japanese cities - culturally it's very very different. I don't feel like it's a "pvp" situation though (from a violence perspective; rampant, unbridled capitalism +consumerism in the US gives me pvp vibes for general living) and the streets aren't full of shit.
I like LA, especially the beach and other very nice areas (obviously). I also think I'd probably prefer living in a Japanese city though so maybe you're right in the end.
China can set the fertility rate to whatever they like. It is tied to taxes and penalties. They can move the slider to make it fiscally impossible to be childless.
Sure, they can make it harder to make children. That's easy. Literally every developed country (except Israel) is doing that right now by default.
Moving the slider up (MORE children) is the hard part.
[dead]
Yes, even a 20% success rate seems quite high.
> The vast majority of first-person view drone missions can be completed more cheaply, effectively, or reliably by other assets.
At this point, the question becomes the price.
I think you need to compare it to other man portable guided weapons like the FGM-148 Javelin. The Javelin is much much better in all respects, except perhaps range. But is about 100 - 200 times more expensive.
If you can afford* the Javelins and the TOW's of the world that's what you are going to use otherwise, you are stuck with FPVs.
Afford means not only fiscally, but production capacity wise as well.
Doesn't a single javelin missile cost almost 200k? The drones I've seen I'd budget at 150-300$ plus explosives. I think that puts the javelin more at 500-1000x as expensive imo.
You need 15 drones to do what a javelin can do though, and that is at best. If the tank armor is good a small drone cannot do any damage (that is why drones try to fly in open hatches - bypass the armor), while a javelin can go through modern armor.
Tank armor can be good as it gets, the problem is you can't have good armor everywhere on the tank otherwise it would weight hundreds of tons. So a small drone doesn't need to penetrate tank where it's best protected but to disable it (hit APU, tracks, engine...).
Obvious solution, make the tank amour a drone crawling around and building up in direction of danger?
The obvious solution, is duct tape a bunch of corrugated steel around the tank, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_tank
Don't drones have another advantage not mentioned here -- counter-battery against operators being more challenging?
Drone pilots regularly die due to the source of wireless signals being found. Especially in the built up areas where they cannot operate from a trench or bunker. It is a challenge but there have been methods for this for a while now and it has shown. Even recently there’s been reporting that priorities of some drone teams are now purely anti-pilot activities compared to other targets.
True - and I hope I didn't give the impression that drone operators aren't taking significant personal risk, but compared to the alternatives for short range indirect fire (mortars) it seems like these systems should be less vulnerable?
Fiber wires are now the standard for most low flying drones.
More challenging than what?
More challenging than counter-battery fire against artillery, which is basically a solved problem in warfare.
But not more challenging than counter battery against teams firing Javelins or other portable anti tank weapons.Or teams using Switchblades.
FPVs are man portable guided munitions, not artillery. Pretty much all existing man portable guided anti tank weapons are better than FPVs at their job.
And artillery is better than any of them at it's job. While FPVs can score kills they have minimal suppression effects, when an FPV hits a friendly, everyone else is going to keep moving, because stopping will offer them no benefit from the next one, and the next one might be minutes out. When an artillery round lands everyone hits the deck.
FPVs don't seem anti-tank replacement -- they do seem to have a role against soft targets ie against massing infantry, c2 nodes or suppression of enemy mortars. In this role, from a distance, they seem harder to suppress than the alternative, ie mortars.
Also these are immature tech... I suspect at least some of the issues identified will be mitigated in time.
> Pretty much all existing man portable guided anti tank weapons are better than FPVs at their job.
Sure, but a Javelin missile costs more than $200K. You can have 200 fpv drones for that price.
Yeah, but it takes like two guys to carry and use the javelin. 200 fpv drones need like a company to be deployed.
One of the key points of the article is "I feel FPV drones to be mostly a failure because their success rate is low" Why is that a failure? If one 500$ drone has even only 10% success rate, if the target is a 1M$ equipment it's still a win!
> Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals, and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using cheaper components). This results in the need for sophisticated de-confliction procedures that, quite simply, do not always work. Even when de-confliction works, sometimes a team must wait as long as half an hour for a frequency to become available before takeoff. If it does not work and two drones find themselves in the air on the same channel at the same time, they will interfere with each other’s signals, usually resulting in a crash. On top of that, the enemy’s drones also fly on the same frequencies, which can also result in interference and a crash.
This gave me the somewhat macabre image of Ukrainian and Russian drones doing automated frequency coordination with each other, so they can orderly proceed in bombing each other's soldiers.
I don't think that's what happens though. But I'm surprised flying drones in the same area as enemy operators is even possible. Wouldn't both sides try to jam or take over each other's signals, deliberately blocking channels, etc - so that in the end, no one could control anything?
Or, if the signals are really unencrypted, what keeps anyone from setting up a radio beacon that just spams the "detonate now" signal on all channels at maximum power. Instant drone-free zone?
I suspect jamming and spoofing isn't that trivial and requires lots of gear that needs to be on while giving out its location...
It is only a matter of time until those drones fly into their target fully autonomously with machine learning.
Heck, I could build that with hugginface (I will never do that) in a few evenings if you are ok to blow up the wrong target with a single digit percentage.
I guess I'm missing something, but why isn't the problem of finicky steering solved by adding auto-stabilizing software? Would that take away too much of the maneuverability?
My first reaction was the same. I have a small indoor quadcopter with 2 main modes: freestyle (like a helicopter), and an easier mode that keeps the drone hovering.
My first thought was, why not use the easier mode (press forward to go forward, back to go back, etc.)? But looking at those war videos, these drones always come at an angle towards the target. And in that sense, it's easier to use the more difficult helicopter mode. What I mean is, once you know the helicopter mode, it's easier to do this kind of maneuver than using the "easy mode".
i saw ukrainian footage of drones where they switch to/from auto hover mode
The author offers no major new insights on the effectiveness of drones. His counter argument is against the maximalists who claim quadcopters are revolutionising warfare and render armour and artillery obsolete. But nobody serious ever suggested that. The same way tanks are relevant despite rpgs. They simply represent a new element in the battlefield, and a useful one as well. The fact that they are not ideally suited for dropping bombs doesn't matter. They are great for surveillance and giving units situational awareness, and the fact that they can occasionally be used to attack targets that otherwise would be impossible simply augments their usefulness. The article is interesting, but it's attacking a straw man. I have a great respect for the ukrainian armed forces but to be perfectly honest their combat effectiveness is not exactly world beating. The suggestion that NATO should be taking lessons from how Ukraine is fighting Russia is odd.
FPV drones don’t suck if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t have proper training, you’re going to suck at it.
Sometimes you don’t have time and resources to train everyone to be great. Good enough will have to do.
> As a result, training a highly proficient operator can take months. A standard, base-level course for Ukrainian drone pilots takes about five weeks
No disagreement there, but the title states "FPV Drones Kind of Suck".
Soon they'll be using CV and won't need FPV.
You still want someone to get the drone to a place where it can see the target, and someone to select this target.
Only then can CV do the last part ("terminal engagement"). But that also means it won't go inside a hangar and find the target there.
IF you tell it go into the hanger and find a target CV can do that. It might not be the best target in the hanger, but that doesn't matter too much if you can get in.
If you add enough "if's", then surely everything is possible :-).
I don't think we're anywhere near having drones that happily fly above a war zone, detect an interesting hangar, find a way to get inside and select a target inside.
Currently they mostly fly FPV drones manually. The next basic step is to have "terminal engagement", where at some point they can select a target and the drone will fly autonomously to it using CV. But in order to do that, the drone will need processing power, and therefore it won't cost 500$ anymore.
Would you rather go for a drone that costs 5k and can use CV for terminal engagement, or 10 drones that cost 500 and simply stay on their latest vector if no command arrives?
Terminal guidance boards are already available on Aliexpress for $300-ish. Using YOLOv7 no less. The future is now.
Are you telling me that you can search for "terminal guidance" on AliExpress and find such boards?
Yeah I think people overestimate how big yolo models are and how much compute costs.
The drone is 500$. If the board is 300$, it makes it a lot more expensive. What's the value of that board? How much does it help? Remember that you need to fly it with FPV to the place where the operator can select the target. So you have a radio link at some point, that can be jammed.
He's being generous. This could be done with a raspberry pi.
Have you tried it, or are you just guessing?
Yeah I've run various yolo implementations on my main computer and I've read what other people have measured on current and last gen raspberry pis.
Again I think people overestimate how much compute this takes and underestimate how cheap embedded compute has gotten.
I see on the rpi website [1] that an RPi 5 costs 120$. That's 25% of the price of the FPV drone (500$).
Then you have to integrate that RPi to the drone, both mechanically and software-wise. From YOLO, you need to actually get into commands for the autopilot. There is work involved.
And another question is: can you order millions of RPis like this? If not, what is the cost of alternatives?
Not saying it's impossible, just saying that people tend to underestimate those questions. I know it from experience, I have seen projects fail because of that.
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/
I was trying to state you fly it manually to the hanger. Once it locks onto the hanger (that is not your own hanger) it can fly - even if cv messes up we are at a target so anything destroyd is okay even if not what you want.
Oh, I had misunderstood it. But still, it's a lot harder to do that succesfully than to lock on a target and fly straight into it. Which already requires the compute power to do it, which makes it a lot more expensive than it is without.
Sure, but we can trade off computer power. Pi level computers can fly a straight line inside and explode in the middle (you are likely running several drones so each flys to a pattern hoping to get something useful inside). While flying to the middle they can do some image recognition, and if something looks like a high priority target they can target that, if not exploding in the middle will do something. The more powerful computer you put on (were powerful is often more expensive though not always) the better you can find targets
The important point in this is the drone will explode before it could reach anything not a target. It can sometimes find a better target than a pattern. In the ideal case you might fly it all the way, but if you lose radio over enemy territory anything the drone can find needs to die anyway so it may as well attempt to find something and kill it.
They don't need processing power. The CV can be done at the operator site, allowing operators to handle more drones simultaneously.
It's useful for the fiber powered ones that can loiter indefinitely watching out for other drones and then go chase them.
How much are the controllers they're using now? It's not like computers and cameras needed to do interesting CV are all that expensive.
some mid-range iphones or android would even do the trick. especially iphones have tone of processing power nad strong NPU/GPU and lots of cameras, lidar, depth sensor, and plenty of other sensors. second hand phone 13 mini would do the trick and you can get it for less than $500
It's not as if you could glue an iPhone 13 mini at the front of the drone and call it a day, right?
We're rapidly heading towards the world that was warned about in the 2017 short Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg
International volunteer? I think mercenary sh*t would be more appropriate.
How many artillery shells one needs to expend to hit anything? I bet more than 10. And they are pricier AND endanger people who use them, more.
Mortar shells (80mm class) are cheaper, but mortars need to be compared to drone-dropped munitions, not artillery shells - because mortars' range is way shorter than that of an FPV drone and is comparable to the artillery - a good FPV drone - although not the $500 one - can cover about the median artillery firing range of this war (16km).
Drones bring about more casualties and are used wider exactly because they are more cost-efficient.
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Why are his brothers invading his country?
War is one of humanities oldest past times. If men can’t figure out their differences, they try to kill each other, as witnessed in the entire animal kingdom.
Unhappy that rapists and baby killers are stopped before they can commit more war crimes?
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Well, Slovaks don’t believe they’re Russian.
A guy from Slovakia is fighting for Ukraine? Don't tell that your prime minister and supporter of Russia Robert Fico.
Are you calling him a hypocrite for disagreeing with a politician from his country?
No, but I think it is suspicious that someone from a country with pro-russian politics claims that drones are bad for Ukraines war effort.
Almost all Europe supports Russia by buying oil and natural gas.
Through the pipeline they shut down or thorugh the shadow fleet they've sanctioned? As it stand, Europe is moving in the right direction, not quickly enough for some, but still.
Ban on new Russian gas contracts starting January 1, 2026 End of short-term contracts by June 2026 Complete phase-out by end of 2027.
I've seen some of these FPV videos of kills of unarmed Russian soldiers. I honestly don't know why the pilots are not prosecuted for war crimes.
(and I'm sure Russia does the same to Ukraine, I just haven't seen those videos).
It's because killing unarmed soldiers during war is not a war crime.
Rule 3. All members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict are combatants, except medical and religious personnel.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule3
Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognized as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is: (a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party; (b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or (c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender; provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule47
A surprise drone attack on any Russian combatant that isn't a medic or chaplain is "lawful", even if they aren't holding a weapon at the time.
Pretty sure I've seen some that fall under Rule 47.
There’s regularly uploaded footage of clearly surrendering soldiers directed towards a safe zone to give up. Propaganda is propaganda, but it happens more often than we might think.
Glad to hear it.
I wonder if some "Surrendering to a Drone" protocol couldn't be codified under the Geneva Convention EG "Visibly disassemble your gun, throw the bits in several directions" etc.
So if artillery is fired at an enemy position, and they’re unarmed, is that a war crime?
Catching an enemy soldier unarmed doesn’t mean you’re a war criminal, it means they made a big mistake.
This is war, not a gentleman’s duel.
So if I see a drone I just drop my rifle and give it the middle finger and wait for it to go away and then resume when it's gone?
People defending their homeland hate this one trick!
> I've seen some of these FPV videos of kills of unarmed Russian soldiers. I honestly don't know why the pilots are not prosecuted for war crimes.
An enemy combatant doesn't stop being an enemy combatant just because he dropped his weapons.
War crime is executing prisoners. And there are a few videos were Russians gleefully murder prisoners
Russia literally executes prisoners of war - those who have already surrendered. Russia castrates, tortures and cuts off heads of live prisoners of war. Russia targets and executes civilians.
Under what law?