UKR almost feels like yesterday's drone war. It seems pretty obvious purpose built murder bots by technologically capable powers like PRC would be fully autonomous and expendable like actual munitions. Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds. Don't even bother to reusable / save material. Just send them out to indiscriminately detonate like cheap smart munitions that they should be.
Strategic depth is a factor. In the Israel/Iran war, Iran's Shahed drones weren't useful due to the large distance. They could be shot down at a leisurely pace. If Iran was fighting a nearby country like Iraq, it would be a very different story. On the other hand, Israel made use of surveillance drones inside Iran, but only due to methods employed to shrink the strategic depth, either by smuggling them into Iran, or doing a clandestine launch from allies like Azerbaijan. But obviously, such tactics are not durable in a war of attrition, and they're not applicable to high-volume Shahed-like suicide attacks.
In the Pacific theatre, Taiwan is very close to China, so possibly, attack drones will be useful similar to the Ukraine/Russia war.
There are also many different types of drones being employed. The short-range small quadcopters, all the way up to large Predator drones. Shaheds are kind of in the middle in terms of size. The boundary can be blurred too between loitering munitions (Switchblade) and drones.
For the suicide quadcopter drones, there is a realization that Skynet is the next step in the arms race. Full edge autonomy over the kill chain. No need for data link (susceptible to electronic warfare) or trained pilots or added round-trip latency.
Anti-drone tech is also changing. Interceptor drones, net-dropping drones, ground-based laser, electronic warfare, and small guided ground- or air-launched interceptors.
Also have to consider the combined arms picture, none of this can be reasoned about in a vacuum.
But I suppose my main takeaway is - no two theatres are the same, AND there is a diversity in drones. So to collectivize a takeaway around "drones" would be a reasoning error.
One thing will be certain when it comes to wars between nearby countries. You need to knock out the enemy's industrial production quickly with bombers. Or have your own industrial production that can maintain pacing and avoid culmination in a war of attrition.
My comment was more specific to the article, i.e. counter "SMALL" UAS / tactical / infantry battlefield scale.
Pacific theater / operation/strategic scale, IMO bigger drones and traditional loitering munitions kind of just blend together. A shaheed is just a poor man's cruise missile. Iran didn't have #s or ability to coordinate / mass #s for any strategic effect. I think Israel has like magazine depth of ~800 interceptors for low tier / subsonic threats and 1000s in stockpile. Iran was (E: *NOT) capable of saturating that.
Depending on relative size / force balance, can still drag on war of attrition after factories turn with sufficient stockpiles. I'm kind of thinking nation state actors, the hedge is really storing a few 10-100,000 loitering munition tier drones in tunnels to ensure some sort of conventional MAD with neighbours. But really that's for... competent / connected nation state actors who has backup ISR, i.e. piggy off US/ eventually PRC global ISR for targeting. I imagine a resourced nation can build out shaheed tier manufacturing underground.
Incidentally, we had news earlier this year that PRC/Polytech is acquiring 1M, as in 1,000,000 loitering drones. Presuming shaheed tier (2000km sky moped) since Polytech has show shaheed clones in past. That's enough to easily saturate all defenses in first island chain even if US+co prepositions every piece of interception hardware ever made or plan to acquire in next 10+ years. That's strategic level shaheed spam.
My main takeaway is cheap loitering munition/drones can reasonable replace potentially short range fires (~2000km), if there's enough of them to casually bleed interceptors, AND if there's survivable theater level kill chain. Last part is really... what separates Ukraine, Iran... maybe Russia's current... hobbyist tier efforts. RU launching 500+ salvos are still trying to evade anti air, with many interceptions because they don't have ISR / killchain to eliminate antiair. It's easy to build a lot of shooters, it's hard to build out the sensors to hit important things. In a highend fight, at least one side (and possibly both) side is going has the ISR and magazine depth to ensure antiair becomes irrelevant and then it will be matter of munitions + concrete attrition math
I'm fully agreeing with your assessment (see my squad-level-airpower comment beside here), however I think there'll probably be cheap-enough counter-measures, like the latest CV-90 variation that has anti-drone munitions and built-in sensors to detect them at close quarters.
I think we're due to a cambrian explosion of drone types and counter-measures in the coming decade, in your mass-drone scenario I think smaller drones will probably be possible to counter with cheap "technical"-like vechicles armed with cheap enough sensors/radars and automatic-/machine- shotguns (there has always been experiments but no pressing use for them in the past).
I think the even broader answer to battlefield level drones is... to establish stupid levels of decisive overmatch where cheap drones can't be effectively operated at scale, i.e... IDF vs Hamas. If one can afford it, to spend much more to shape battlefield to deny cheap drone usage. But there's probably not many that can afford it.
My main uncertainty is how likely performant autonomous drones will proliferate. The skill ceiling to train someone with fingers to fly a drone is lower than developing autonomous targeting software for potentially specific battlefield conditions. Maybe short/medium term will be technically beyond irregular forces skill ceiling and their 2 guys who read AI for dummies. Maybe it will be COTS tier and anyone can pull out the companion app, tap human, male, Caucasian, or passenger jet, airline, engine nacelle.
The problem with Shaheeds and other slow air like them is they're not substantially different to the type of vehicle which would be needed to intercept them.
So a stockpile of Shaheeds can be largely countered by launching something very similar provided you can detect it. You could very much imagine having a vehicle which can simply leave the payload behind for better air speed when used in interception mode.
This is quite different to most conventional missile threats where the time between detection and interception, as well as the performance characteristics, necessitates extremely high performance interceptors.
An analogy would be that you can hit a baseball with a bat, but not a bullet even though they're both just ballistic projectiles.
Interceptors being more expensive is a big problem. The only solution I can think of is ground-based lasers, which cost a few dollars per shot. If they can be protected.
Other than that, you either need the X-factor of intelligence and air superiority, which bypasses the problem by taking out bottlenecks like TELs and supply chains. Or, have more industrial production. If you have neither, you're in trouble.
A mostly independent thing countries can do is have better home-front resiliency, which is a kind of defense in depth against suicide attacks. Taiwan needs this. Get everyone a bomb shelter.
> Interceptors being more expensive is a big problem.
Yes, but they do not have to be. Shaheeds are slow, easy to detect and track and not maneuverable. They could be intercepted by very cheap short range systems.
What makes interceptors expensive are requirements to counter stealthy, maneuverable targets with very high success probability (i.e., when you consider a leaker to be catastrophic). Nether of this applies to current UKR threats. At least not yet.
Ample footage from Ukraine has shown that drones are very effective at getting into shelters, foxholes, and other enclosed spaces. Doesn't even have to be all that powerful of a boom, just enough to rattle everyone's cages enough to take them out of the fight for a little -- the next wave of drones will finish the job.
On paper, shaheed tier drones can be upgraded with better compute to fly much more complex (i.e. close terrain hug) which exponentially drops chance to intercept by forcing defender to increase/scale IADs density/complexity. Analogy cruise missiles -> LO/stealth cruise missiles with more complex compute and flight profiles, they're still subsonic and "easy" targets when detected, but make detection hard because scaling detection = scaling more nodes i.e. Same # of munition requires #^2 sensors to detect. Another analogy is urban tag, instead of slow player screamingly loudly at fast defenders, drone is sneaking to target quietly and defenders suddenly needs more eyes for same catches, perhaps not affordably more.
IMO the _current_ problem with subsonic / shaheeds tier munitions, at least the one's being being used is they seem to have very basic navigation capabilities field by forces that don't have ability to plan better missions. VS defenders being supported by US/NATO with high end ISR that dramatically improve intercept planning/chances. Again, IMO the latter is what makes or breaks, affordable theater level shaheed spam. These are glorified mopeds + smart phones. On paper most countries can have 100,000s of them. But to use them effectively and even _more_ economically, need highend ISR+killchain to employ fraction of munitions (or some other platforms) for initial SEAD / dismantle IADs and eliminate future intercepts. AKA closer to US/PRC tier of C4ISR which will ramp into another gear once mega-constellation based. Which is out of reach for most countries, unless they strategically align to "unlock" "smarter" munitions.
I think because drones impact at the time is because it's filling an previously untapped niche with a cheap and ridiculously useful alternative.
In my mind I'm calling it "squad-level-airpower" , regular airpower started with spotters, then fighters and CAS in WW1. By WW2 it had expanded the role to achieve operation and theater levels goals, and finally with nukes also a strategic level, and still remains required to achieve goals on larger levels.
However with air-defences creeping down to MANPADS, CAS became more problematic and adding then the cost of planes and pilots made it far from universally useful in a close war.
Drones being man-luggable and -operatable and cheap with hardly any infrastructure more or less flooded a that useful niche, and it's not like that niche was unsurprising, just not successfully exploited previously as the US army tried with the VZ-1 and HZ-1.
Like you mentioned with the Iran conflict, classic air superiority still holds the crown to achieve larger goals on strategic levels (even if drones helped out on an tactical level).
I've been trying to judge this impact on doctrine and procurement but these things are hard to judge when it's happening. Hindsight is cheating ;)
It's huge, though. Many tiers of equipment, doctrine, vehicles, product time to market improvements, RF equipment, radars, stealth tech, software, battle drills, and even new job specializations of various levels. It's intense, and a constant iteration cycle at a pace we haven't seen for at least a long time, but possibly forever.
One possible future is that wartime casualties decrease because humans in the field are just completely useless. Accompanying this positive development will be the negative tail risk of exinction.
American military doctrine seems to include the assumption that you will always have the manufacturing capacity and the supply lines to get all the materiel you need to the front, that you'll be bottlenecked by something else like manpower.
This works pretty well for fighting limited wars where part of the justification is to develop and maintain military readiness. Would it still be true in a large scale war against China - could you pump out a million drones a day - or would you wish for a doctrine that included reusable drones?
(That I know of, their awareness of high-capacity supply line issues goes back to at least the Civil War.)
Historically, the US military had a considerable industrial base of its own - arsenals, navy yards, etc. - which could manufacture anything from a pistol cartridge up to an aircraft carrier. Unfortunately, Congress shut all of that down in the later 1900's, in favor of defense contractors. Gov't-owned facilities just couldn't compete at greasing Congressional palms.
In Pacific war... with standoff distances involved most of determinant fighting all going to be one way trip, i.e. 2000km+ = disposable. I suppose question is how much US can value engineer their stand off missiles, which will inevitably have more requirements than PRC because when US moving shit across salty ocean, each shot is logistically more expensive. PRC can just haul them out of conditioned depots and get firing.
And how many US can actually produce, i.e. bluntly, US military has _never_ fought any adversary on the scale of modern PRC. WW2 JP+DE had like <50% of US economic and industrial power, while being ganged up by multiple other allies with reasonably large militaries. Peak cold war USSR also similar scale (1/2 US) and realistically US war plan for NATO invasion was to stall and nuke the Fulda gap. Asymmetrically stomping Iraq still took 5 carriers on high tempo operations (not sustainable for more than 1-2 months), favourable coalition basing, completely compromised IADs... multiple months to dismantle power charitability 1/100th size of modern PRC. Even Korean war vs peasant PRC fought US+UN to stand still. Vs modern PRC with 150% US GDP by PPP and and industrial gap like current shipbuilding #s, in their backyard, I suppose the answer is, get defense spending back to 10%-15% of GDP (at least Korean or Vietnamese wartime economy) and go figure out form there.
Another way of putting that is that for all that people love to point to gunship diplomacy, the US is if anything more fond of using diplomats to aid our military than the other way around.
I think something to keep in mind, the US hasn't fought a war on the home front since 1865. The Spanish American war, WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf war, Afghanistan, Iraq - none of these were fought on American soil, with the exception of Pearl harbor, which was a navy base, not a major manufacturing site. So we haven't really had to reckon with what happens if our homeland is under fire - sure, we drilled for it during WWII, worrying about Nazi bombers and Japanese sabotage but neither actually happened.
It doesn't look like our wars are going to get closer anytime soon, but modern planes and rocketry have much greater range than in the 1940s the last time we were at war with countries with significant resources. If we ever come head to head with China, their missile capabilities could be a real concern.
The US would loose a war against China simply because China can outproduce the US many times over. I have no idea why the US keeps teasing a war with China, a war they would most certainly loose. What is the point?
Can China protect their relevant industrial base from being quickly degraded by intelligence + bombers? In WW2, Japan had no power projection into the US mainland, so the industrial base of US sealed the deal.
Most likely yes, simply by the scale of their industrial base and military strength. No way the US can significantly degrade Chinese industrial base in a war scenario without using massive amounts of nukes and I don't think even Trump is that insane.
This appears to assume a lack of intelligence such that the entire industrial base needs to be targeted. But only a relatively small subtree of the industrial base is relevant, and you don't necessarily need to degrade the whole subtree, it can be sufficient to degrade key nodes that create supply chain bottlenecks. I'm not saying it can be done, but I am unpersuaded that it can't.
The problem is that the exact same can be said of the American industrial base and the American industrial base is much smaller than the Chinese one so it would be far easier to wipe out.
Wiped out with what aircraft carriers and with what air superiority? China has limited to no power projection into US mainland aside from ICBMs which are scarce. US has B2 bombers they can send over China. US has multiple nearby countries they can use as a staging ground for their F-16 and F-35s. They can send sorties over and over into China and drop thousands of JDAMs onto selected targets. China can't do anything like that. China's SRBMs and navy and airforce are a threat to Asian countries but not the US.
Recent war games paint a dire picture in a near-term hypothetical conflict with China over Taiwan.[0] They show the US tenuously holding Taiwan at the cost of two aircraft carriers, several dozen other ships, hundreds of aircraft and the depletion of hundreds anti-ship missiles that have a production lead time of months to years and measly annual production rates.
At the same time China continues to stockpile commodities[1] and holds an overwhelming advantage in ship building production capacity over the US[2].
America may currently have an advantage in power projection over China, but they lack the industrial base to sustain any sort of attack as their ship building and missile building capacity is completely atrophied. China just needs to hold the line in the first conflict with the US and then they can quickly rebuild what they lost and launch barrages of drones at Taiwan.
As for how China can disrupt American industrial capacity? At first it will probably be a combination of unorthodox techniques including cyberattacks, agit-prop disruption techniques with social media, 5th column disruption like what we're seeing in Russia, and perhaps more exotic things like autonomous submarines that launch drones to attack infrastructure near the coast, or perhaps more of those balloons that they were using for surveillance but instead of surveillance equipment they'll contain drone swarms to be released over vital infrastructure or tinderbox forests.
It is unlikely that America will risk sending any B-52s over China and it's also unlikely that F-35s will pose any long term risk to Chinese industrial capacity given the brittle F-35 supply chain.
A war with China will be about whoever can produce more cheap weapons faster while deploying them in unexpected ways and China without a doubt wins that race.
B2 stealth will not serve you in the middle of a sensor (radar) network. And taking it out with radiation seeking missiles may not be a reliable counter. They almost certainly have a network of passive radars and disposable emitters.
An effective attack against Chinese mainland by US forces would be the trigger for nuclear war. The century of humiliation has cemented a "never again" attitude.
Also, Aircraft carriers are vulnerable to mass missile attacks, and land bases in the Philippines, Japan or Taiwan are within missile range.
Unlikely. Israel, a nuclear power by 1973, was attacked by multiple countries, and did not launch nukes. Russia, another nuclear power, is receiving attacks from Ukraine on a daily basis, and is not launching nukes.
As much as nuclear powers want you to think they will use them if you resist their goals, nukes only come into play when state survival is at risk, not when belligerents pursue limited goals. The US will never pursue the defeat of China. They will manage escalation. They will pursue the limited goals of status quo maintenance and a quick resolution, which can include bombing industrial production nodes to signal that China will lose a war of attrition, forcing it to call off an attack on Taiwan.
The key word was "effective". Ukraine's attacks haven't had any meaningful effect on the war. I would have no doubt that if Israel lost any of the conventional wars with it's neighbors, nuclear weapons would have been launched.
The original post was postulating that American bombers and intelligence could destroy China's production base. If US attacks did destroy a significant portion of China's factories, and production facilities, I have no doubt the war would become nuclear.
Israel was losing the Yom Kippur war until Kissinger's resupply effort. They didn't use nukes. Probably because Egypt signalled they were going for limited objectives. Israel's home front was also attacked unprovoked with Scud missiles by Saddam as a desperation measure during the Gulf War. No nuke usage.
Any US attack on China's industrial base would have similar signalling to control escalation risk. It would probably be limited to key nodes in the missile or drone supply chain rather than attacking the entire base. China likely wouldn't use nukes because they are also worried about the same escalation risks as the US. They will know the US is pursuing limited objectives. The US will probably tell them this through a deconfliction line, as well as publicly. If China does use nukes, it'll likely be limited with the goal of escalating to deescalate.
None of these decisions are easy and I agree there are significant risks. But I wouldn't rule it out, especially if the alternative is to lose a war of attrition and have your influence rolled back.
Does it keep teasing a war with China - seems like China keeps teasing an attack on Taiwan and the US is deliberately ambiguous on how it would respond to such an attack.
I think all this talk of who would win often ignores that factor to. There is no realistic total war scenario between China and the US - China doesn't have any desire or capacity to role tanks into Washington and the US doesn't have any desire to role tanks into Beijing.
The war, if it comes will be China trying to take control of Taiwan and the US intervening on the side of Taiwan. Victory for China looks like Taiwan under PRC rule, victory for the US looks like Taiwanese independence.
With that in mind "all" the US needs to be able to do is make the cost of the invasion/maintaining the supply lines too high. If I was China the drones I might worry about the most would be underwater!
>Image fuse some cheap rgb/ir/thermo with edge compute to maim any warm bodies at 100km+ speeds.
"Sir, we have successfully culled the enemy deer population by 30%. Thei Department of Wildlife is issuing no further permits for this season, and their hunters are emotionally devastated. The impact on their civilian morale cannot be overstated. Where should we direct our next billion dollars? I was thinking maybe drones with long-range microwave to boil off their swimming pools...?"
I don’t know if that would matter in an actual war between china and the US but sending explosives at anything that’s warm sounds like a war crime. That would probably violate proportionality.
TBH once these platforms become deployed, noncombatants are signing their own suicide note even being close to battlefield. I imagine rules of engagement, expectations on civilians will simply change/devolve, i.e. most you can expect from "responsible" users is some map coordinates for murder bot no man's land where they shouldn't be. This without even mentioning we'll likely also see loitering drones hibernate as proximity mines / area denial munitions if they don't find targets. It will get very, very messy.
No? Modern artillery shells cost 5-10k per (50-70k for guidance kits + programmable) and kill at medium distance, with entire logistic park (including self propelled) and isr chain for proper deployment. It's a different tier / type of capability. It kills lots/plurality of casualties... and historically... relatively cheaply. Autonomous drones potential for scenarios like close quarters, interiors, entrenched positions. Depending on battlefield transparency you can autonomously transport a shitload drones to frontlines and have them hunt / deny difficult targets that artillery can't effective engage. Drones that don't find target can area deny by being proxy mines for limited time etc etc. All potentially much cheaper once you eliminate 1 drone 1 operator constraint.
And the drones which can do this cost (???) with a range of (???) and a flight time of (???).
The problem with the "drones will do it!" narrative people put out there is that it's anything and everything but what the drone is, what it weighs, it's volume and current production are all absent figures which simply fill in as "better then whatever you just said".
For example, a reasonably portable drone capable of ISR and limited infantry scale strike would be the Switchblade 300, already provided to Ukraine. This has a range of 30km a top speed of 161km/h and 20 minutes of flight time, with a 1.6 kg explosive payload - which is respectable. You could carry quite a lot of these to the front if you wanted to.
That particular system cost about $50,000 a unit - optimistically. It's likely that price could be bought down, but it does include the drone, launcher and ground control system. A reasonable price today would be closer to $15,000 judging from more recent products being offered.
If I hunt around a little then locally I could buy something like this[1] locally for $1,300 which has a 1kg drop payload...but only 10km of range, and a 45 minute flight time - and let's remember better radios will eat into that payload and flight time.
Now obviously different drones can do different things, but the core point is the same: drones don't magically not have logistical "mass". You can't fly a bunch of drones to the front for free - you need to either recharge or refuel them at the destination. Which means you need to stockpile them. Which means they can be spotted and destroyed on the ground. The loiter times aren't "days", they're still better measured in minutes counting hours at most.
All of these disadvantages apply to artillery too, of course but the point is that once you start considering the actual range brackets involved and the parameters of real systems built with current technology, including limiting technologies like energy storage, payload and physics of real explosives, the generic superweapon slips away. Ukraine is using a lot of drones because Ukraine can buy drones but can't easily get artillery and gun barrels for it. But Ukraine was also having a lot of trouble with Russia's considerable artillery advantage up until quite recently, and still is because of North Korean shell resupply.
The word "drone" gets substituted in for a superweapon fulfilling every role perfectly, with no actual physical parameters which would make it imperfect - and that type of thinking should give a lot of people pause particularly in the context of Ukraine where any number of systems have had their moment in the spotlight before either falling out of favor due to adaptation or simply no longer being the most applicable to the task (i.e. the various anti-tank weapons are still doing excellent anti-tank work...there's just very few Russian tanks any more).
Original comment is about article content - "SMALL" UAV, i.e. tactical / infantry / battlefield level. As in the small UAV war in UKR frontlines that US marines is training for is against likely obsolete platforms because UKR is not capable of developing anything more advanced, like next gen autonomous switchblade tier+ munitions that can be massed at scale due to obscenely low prices and minimal operator / controller requirements.
A more reasonable price floor would be $300-500 for a performant 5-8 inch drone comparable to kamikaze drones in UKR. In case of PRC, mass produced in modern factories, developed by resourced military R&D, value engineered/acquired with almost no margins etc etc, instead of improvised in small workshops and software tweaked by hobbyist like UKR. For reference large 30kg industrial DJI Agras agriculture robot with AESA radar cost 8k factory direct in domestic PRC market. Not many operators can afford to mass switchblade at US prices with US MIC markup (I'm guessing including US).
When I say proximity mine, I mean small drone parks itself in some nook in lower power model, it's possible to run camera/sensors for days tied to purpose designed commodity hardware/SoC/ASIC, i.e. yolo/edge algo detects a heat signature that's roughly human, drone turns on and hunts it. It's a glorified flying claymore. Can even fall back as dumb claymore. IMO in near term against highend forces, those are the kind of drones marines will likely face - if conflict somehow devolves into point where tactical level drones are being used at all. TBH something has likely gone very wrong higher up in the force spectrum / strategic / multi domain levels if conflict devolves into small tactical drones, i.e. mop up survivors. The real fight is probably already over before that point.
