In the Ukraine war big troop concentrations have become almost impossible because the thousands of spotter drones in the air at any moment will spot them almost immediately, and provide accurate targeting information to (rocket) artillery within seconds.
FPV drones with a hand grenade strapped to them will finish off any stragglers. Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks, and can be used to deploy new minefields without having to risk soldiers out in the open.
So perhaps they are not (yet) key to winning a war, but they are certainly already key to not losing. There's a very good reason Ukraine is ramping up drone production to several million per year. Convert that to drones deployed per day and use your imagination to come up with uses for 30000 kamikaze drones per day.
> Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks
At that point it seems like it's basically a very slow moving missile, except it's steerable by a human operator.
I was under the impression that the value of these weapons was mostly in their simple construction from readily available parts (cheap ammunition and grenades instead of expensive purpose made javelins). Doesn't that kind of go away if you start to "innovate" with them?
If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
> If Lockheed Martin starts selling the drones at $30k a pop, I don't understand why they'd be better than a missile.
Well a Javelin costs[1] around $200k, so if the alternative is just $30k then that seems like a great deal just there.
But a drone offers different capabilities. In particular they can hunt to some degree and you can launch one without immediately giving up your position. That means it's much safer for the operators.
Against distant but more stationary targets, one can take more time to navigate them close to critical weak spots, so you potentially need much less explosives to get the job done. Just look at what Ukraine did against those bombers[2] in Russia. Less explosives means you can make a smaller drone which is less detectable, harder to counter and easier to carry.
The fiber optic FPV drone was an innovation and it's extremely cheap to build?
I don't think it's only been about cost, it's been about devastating effectiveness, they just happen to be much much cheaper than basically anything they destroy.
Necessity is the mother of invention, Ukraine is developing these things and innovating for actual survival, we're not talking about engaging lockhead martin on a 20 billion dollar budget.
It wouldn't necessarily, but innovation would separate the product from the commoditized nature of regular consumer drones, which I postulate is what made them cheap. Suddenly you need a special military drone, and that could end up being a moat Lockheed would charge you 20 billion for.
I suppose my concern is that missiles and bombs probably aren't any more expensive to produce than these drones are. There's just a huge markup for military equipment. We are trying to solve a problem of capitalism (or the military industrial complex i suppose) through technology, and that rarely works. It usually just creates a new layer of incumbents that want another 20 billion.
They're cheap because there's just not a lot of stuff in them. They're a lot simpler than even a model airplane, just 4 or more motors with fixed pitch propellers. Before commercial drones people would just make their own in a garage.
According to the internets, Ukraine is pumping out drones at about $300 to $500 at a rate of several tens of thousands per day. Of course a missile is faster and has bigger payload, but as a sibling comment mentioned, a javelin missile is about 500x more expensive than these cheap drones and can only hit target per missile. I can think of many scenario's where having a few hundred drones available to hunt down individual soldiers would be much more valuable that having a single javelin.
The low cost and extremely high effectiveness of a drone is very useful.
Also missiles are normally tens of thousands to millions of dollars each, depending on size, launch method, etc. ATACMs is around 1.5mil. A Patriot missile vehicle is around $4 million just for the launcher. A Griffin missile is $127,000.
ATACMs and others are large missiles with complex guidance systems. Sometimes maybe an optical guidance module.
FPV drones and basic quadcopter are low cost, man operated, and all of the previous counter threats are for the missiles etc mentioned above. Nothing this slow, or this small.
Most suicide drones are far less complex (but that is increasing), much smaller, with human and sometimes image recognition and INS guidance. Sometimes fiber optic tethered (where possible) to counter the electronic warfare counter measures.
Many of these drone systems are also open source. A lot of COTS or 3d-printed components (use-once).
It's just different types and scales of systems solving completely different types of problems, with completely different logistics requirements.
What this really comes down to is that fpv drones are a low cost, low risk, delivery method for certain classes of munitions. Give the size and low cost, it's like going from fighting humans to fighting swarms of stinging insects. No one really has solid defenses for this type of threat yet. Also including small to medium quadcopter platforms for ISR.
Propose a business plan to meet the ATACM's capabilities for far less. The Pentagon will be at your door with flowers in a matter of minutes. Trademarks, patents, and copyrights are trivial niceties, when national defense is on the line.
Edit: what you don't see, and are assuming doesn't happen, is the vicious competition that goes on before a military contract is sealed. Grift and overspending happen, because: humans, but weapons are made by the lowest bidder who meets the advertised goals of the program, every time.
FPV drones with a hand grenade strapped to them will finish off any stragglers. Bigger version (with more explosives) also apparently quite effective against armored vehicles like IFVs and tanks, and can be used to deploy new minefields without having to risk soldiers out in the open.
So perhaps they are not (yet) key to winning a war, but they are certainly already key to not losing. There's a very good reason Ukraine is ramping up drone production to several million per year. Convert that to drones deployed per day and use your imagination to come up with uses for 30000 kamikaze drones per day.