Everyone knew drones would change the nature of modern warfare, they just didn’t foresee exactly how. The war in Ukraine has changed that.
After two years of fighting, the ground war has settled into a stalemate with many of the hallmarks of World War I trench warfare — a raging artillery duel in which both sides are dug in over a clearly defined front line and where often small, tactically insignificant advances come at the cost of horrific losses of troops and equipment.
Russia is estimated to have suffered 350,000 dead and wounded since its February 2022 invasion, with the loss of thousands of tanks and armored vehicles and dozens of combat aircraft.
Ukraine’s losses are less, an estimated 100,000 casualties, including 31,000 combat deaths, but still are equally horrendous, considering the country has one-fourth the population of Russia.
Yet while the ground war is stuck 100 years in the past, the air and sea wars presage a future for which the United States, with all its technical superiority, appears to be woefully unprepared.
One of the main reasons Ukraine has not been conquered by a much larger and better-equipped superpower is that Ukraine is showing the world an entirely new concept of modern warfare.
Ukraine’s decimation of the Russian Black Sea fleet, using small speedboat-style attack drones laden with high explosives, has raised real questions about the ability of traditional navies to protect large surface ships, including America’s unmatched fleet of 11 aircraft carriers.
Meanwhile, the internet is awash with videos taken by small, inexpensive, off-the-shelf quadcopters dropping small, improvised bombs on armored vehicles, sometimes through an open hatch, destroying unsuspecting tanks.
And other videos show drones flying through open windows, or following individual soldiers like angry hornets until delivering a gruesome coup de grace — all captured on video from another drone.
Earlier this month, Ukraine used one-way attack drones to strike inside Russia, targeting a key aircraft repair facility and several oil refineries.
Russia’s advanced integrated air defenses were unable to shoot down the drones.
Meanwhile, Russia continues its relentless air assault of Ukraine, often hitting civilian targets such as high-rise apartment buildings with missiles and drones, many of which, but not all, are shot down by Western-supplied air defenses, including U.S. Patriot missile batteries.
In a widely-circulated essay published this month in War on the Rocks, retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno and co-author Nora Bensahel argue what we’re seeing in Ukraine amounts to “a paradigm shift of epic proportions” that threatens to render the U.S. Air Force with its reliance on expensive, sophisticated, manned stealth aircraft obsolete.
“The biggest problem facing the Air Force is that masses of uncrewed drones have now wrested command of the air away from manned aircraft in the skies above the modern battlefield. The drone revolution means that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for the service to achieve air superiority in future conflicts — which has been the centerpiece of its mission for decades,” write Barno and Bensahel, who are both professors of practice at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “The war in Ukraine has dramatically accelerated the military use of drones in ways few of us could have predicted. Today, they fill the skies above the battlefields in numbers that were simply unimaginable two years ago, conducting vital missions in surveillance, intelligence gathering, early warning, and precision strike.”
While Ukraine is anxiously awaiting a handful of F-16s, a fourth-generation fighter jet that first flew 50 years ago, what it needs even more is drones — hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.
“Ukraine flies an incredibly wide variety of drones — as many as 10,000 different types, according to one estimate. And they have to be expendable, since Ukraine reportedly loses thousands of drones each month,” Barno and Bensahel say.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who chaired the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, was struck by how many drones Ukraine was employing — on track to using 100,000 a year — as well as the innovations it was employing to overcome Russian jamming when he visited Ukraine last summer.
“They jam everything. GPS is jammed, but also communications is jammed. So normal drones don’t work. So the Ukrainians have taken cheap drones and added additional antennas,” Schmidt told CNN after he returned. “They’re building a completely new theory of war.”
Well before Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive, based on NATO military doctrine, sputtered, Schmidt predicted the only way Ukrainians could break through Russian fortifications would be with thousands of drones.
“Massive number of drones or massive number of human casualties on both sides,” Schmidt said. “The important thing about a drone is it’s a very, very targeted solution. It’s very inexpensive.”
The drone revolution is also on display in the Red Sea, where Houthi rebels have been able to threaten commercial shipping through one of the world’s busiest sea routes by launching almost daily drone or cruise missile attacks.
“The Houthis, who are a terrorist group sponsored by Iran, are launching dozens and dozens of these attack drones — 38 over [a recent] weekend against merchant shipping and against Navy warships,” retired Adm. James Stavridis told Bloomberg Radio. “So far we’re shooting most of them down.”
But in 2054, his latest novel imagining a future war, Stavridis, a former supreme NATO commander, predicts that artificial intelligence will soon give drones the ability to overwhelm today’s defenses.
“Artificial intelligence will take all those drones, put them together in swarms, mass their power and potentially change the battlefield forever,” he says. “We need better, more advanced technologies to defeat these drones and long-range cruise missiles.”
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 12, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) questioned why U.S. Navy ships were not equipped with lasers, state-of-the-art directed energy weapons to neutralize drones.
“We’re using $2 million or $5 million missiles to knock down $200,000 or $300,000 drones. This should be a task for directed energy,” King said.
When the general in charge of missile defense replied that those weapons are “something they’re looking at,” King bristled.
“I want more than looking at. I want development. And soon,” he said. “I think we should be having a capability in the Red Sea right now, that this is an opportunity to use that capacity.”
The British Defense Ministry posted a declassified video on social media boasting that its new “Dragon Fire” air defense laser has the power “to cut down targets at the speed of light,” all for around $13 a shot.
Ukraine, desperate for more air defense, immediately volunteered to test it in real-world conditions.
The U.S. faces two critical problems: a dearth of drones (the U.S. has a fraction of the drones Ukraine has, and the ones we have are big, expensive, and highly sophisticated) and a lack of effective counter-drone weapons.
“Technologies that protect against drones have failed to keep pace with the proliferation and rapidly evolving capabilities of offensive drones,” Barno and Bensahel argue in their essay.
“As a result, U.S. ground forces have now essentially lost the protective top cover that the Air Force provided through air superiority for decades.”
But, they say, the Air Force isn’t transforming to meet the new reality.
“Countering inexpensive drones that can pummel U.S. forces from the air at will simply does not fit into the service’s future vision. Moreover, defeating this new aerial threat would require the service to transform much of its doctrine and platforms.”
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The Air Force is too wedded to “exorbitantly expensive crewed platforms that reflect its 20th century roots,” they say, singling out the F-35 joint strike fighter, which is designed for high-intensity conventional warfare, but is “wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones.”
It may be time, critics suggest, for the Pentagon to reexamine the conventional wisdom that the key to winning wars lies in big-ticket, high-tech weapons.