Over the past two years of war in Ukraine, a fairly broad consensus has emerged that small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), along with loitering munitions and low-cost alternatives such as first-person view (FPV) drones have drastically increased the risks to armoured vehicles on the battlefield. Given their low costs and high numbers, there is general agreement that such weapons are likely to pose a serious problem for Western armed forces in future wars.
This outlook should be tempered by understanding that the extent of the small drone problem in Ukraine has emerged from the unique conditions there, and operating conditions in future wars are likely to be different. Nonetheless, given how drones are increasingly proliferating with non-state armed groups, and are increasingly manufactured by major players in industry, it is clear that this is a problem which will not go away soon.
Industry has responded by releasing a plethora of technologies, broadly aimed at detecting, and either shooting down or jamming drones. Myriad examples have been displayed at nearly every defence trade show recent years. Interest in these systems is high, and their value seems to be understood by military personnel. Yet, what has been conspicuously absent is any form of convincing large-scale transformative change from Western militaries in response. There is certainly a lot of experimentation going on right now, or purchases of small batches of equipment for specific operational requirements, but larger-scale transformative programmes are thin on the ground.
This is a good point to consider what an effective response might look like. The first step here is to understand that small drones can be extremely numerous; production figures for FPV drones coming out of Russia and Ukraine, range from an estimated 50,000 to over 100,000 per month. Consequently, any missile-based approach is likely to suffer from unacceptably high cost asymmetries, as well as difficulties scaling production to match the potential volume of the threat. So this effectively leaves three viable effector paths – jamming, directed energy weapons, and ballistic solutions.
Jamming is widely-used and perhaps the most cost-effective of the three, but it is not always effective, and the target operating frequencies require regular updating to keep pace with the opponent changing around the control frequencies they use. Added to this, two innovations threaten to erode the effectiveness of jamming: the rise of drones using fibre-optic datalinks, which cannot be jammed; and increasing autonomy, which will enable drones to locate and engage targets without the need for human control.
Directed energy weapons – such as high energy lasers (HELs) and high-power microwaves (HPMs) are promising, and have proven capable of defeating small UAVs at a lower ‘cost per shot’ than their ballistic counterparts. Leaving aside their relative technical immaturity, their main downsides are their power and cooling requirements, both of which would realistically limit them to being mounted on a dedicated vehicle or trailer, rather than ‘bolted on’ to an existing vehicle.
Ballistic solutions – such as cannons, machine guns, grenade launchers, and some forms of active protection system (APS), can be quite effective, and are available today. In the case of cannons and grenade launchers, to be effective against small drones, they typically require the use of air-bursting munitions (ABMs), which in turn require the weapon to be fitted with an ammunition programmer. While the technology has been available for a long time, its adoption on general-purpose platforms has been relatively slow, but now seems to be gathering steam.
Even once an effector has been chosen, bigger questions remain regarding concepts of operations. Should militaries go for dedicated anti-drone vehicles to accompany mechanised or armoured formations? How many, at what ratio? How will this impact tactics? Will platoons still be allowed to operate highly dispersed? Or will they be forced to stick close to the anti-drone vehicles? Answering this is not straightforward. On paper, a dedicated anti-drone vehicle may appear well-suited to protecting a platoon, but if a vehicle within this platoon is 2 km away from its protection, and being targeted by a very low-flying FPV using a fibre-optic datalink, is it still useful?
When considering as many tactical scenarios as possible, the answer which seems to make most sense is to try to equip every single IFV, APC, and tank with its own ‘hard-kill’ anti-drone system. This would not necessarily require a uniform solution, but could be as simple as adaptation of existing systems wherever possible. For instance, does your APC have a remote weapon station with a machine gun? If so, integrate a direction-finder to provide early warning, and modify the fire control system to allow automated targeting of drones. Does your IFV have an automatic cannon? If so, add an ABM capability. Does your tank have an APS? If so, modify the radars to detect drones reliably, and (if possible) use the existing APS effector.
Taking this kind of decentralised approach aims to devolve protection to the lowest level possible, that of the individual platform, thus preserving the ability to operate dispersed, rather than having to remain within a certain distance of a dedicated anti-drone vehicle. Perhaps more importantly, it would be possible to implement within the scope of platform mid-life upgrades, and would be more accessible to smaller militaries than procuring hundreds of dedicated anti-drone vehicles on multiple different platforms. It would not be perfect in every case, but at the very least, it would provide a basic foundation for future capability growth, and would likely be better than waiting for a silver bullet that may never arrive.
Marc Cazalet