Writing in The Spectator, James Lawson compares the arrival of the drone with the arrival of the tank. “The drone,” he writes, “has done to the tank what the tank did to the trench.” Of course, 111 years after the first tanks appeared on the battlefield, trench warfare (as we see in Ukraine) has not disappeared, nor, as Lawson writes, will tanks cease to be used. How they are used will change, however.
Looking at the Ukraine war, Lawson observes the carnage that drones can inflict (roughly “90 per cent of battlefield casualties in Ukraine now stem from drones”) and also highlights the way they are changing the economic calculus of war:
A £50,000 strike drone will destroy an Ajax, a Leopard 2 or a Challenger 3, each costing taxpayers between £8 million and £10 million, before support costs are even counted.
Lawson is writing from a British perspective (all three types of tank that he mentions are European), but I doubt if the relative economics are so different when it comes to U.S. armor. He also discusses the topic of anti-drone warfare, noting the discrepancy between the cost of drones and the cost of what is often used to shoot them down, a well-known mismatch, but one that has yet to be fully addressed.
Lawson:
Shaheds [a kamikaze drone] cost Tehran between £25,000 and £50,000. We shoot them down with air-to-air missiles costing £200,000 to £2 million, fired from Typhoons worth over £100 million each, running at £75,000 an hour. The Americans, defending Gulf bases, burn through Patriot interceptors at £3 million each against targets a hundredth of the price. No treasury can sustain that math indefinitely.
That’s true enough. It is also worth pointing out that, as the Ukrainians have shown, drones can be shot out of the sky much more cheaply than that. But confronted with a massive swarm of drones, makeshift defenses can only do so much.
Meanwhile:
A small number of well-trained soldiers with thousands of cheap precision weapons can hold off a heavy-metal army many times their size.
Software will accelerate this further. Using AI, a single operator, or a handful of soldiers, can control tens of autonomous platforms simultaneously. Over time, fewer troops will be able to man more platforms. Early adopters will gain a huge advantage in lethality. Autonomous mass is a procurement decision, not a hypothetical. Just this week, Ukrainian air and ground drones took and held a Russian position with no accompanying infantry.
Hopefully, the U.S. is already adjusting its defense procurement policies to reflect this new reality. Lawson notes that Estonia has “suspended a €500-million vehicle program and redirected the money to drones,” a revealing decision by, if the worst comes to the worst, what could easily be a frontline state. Estonia’s defense spending should hit 5 percent of GDP this year, but it is a small, not particularly wealthy country. It cannot afford “both . . . and” on every occasion, so the way it chooses to spend its limited resources is worth watching.
Germany’s parliament, meanwhile, has approved spending of €500m on “loitering munitions,” and has purchase options worth several billions more.
Obviously, how these weapons are procured matters:
Ukraine’s Brave1 platform is an Amazon-style marketplace for drones, on which brigade commanders spend points earned from verified kills on more kit. Delivery averages ten days; a product that underperforms is patched the following week. Russia has gone the other way: pick a couple of winners, scale them in enormous Siberian factories: seven million drones a year.
Wars abroad aside, there is also the not so small matter of homeland defense.
The world gets more dangerous, it sometimes seems, by the moment. Contrary to the views of some, there’s a limit to the extent to which that can be wished away by treaties and goodwill. The current shifts in military technology and the ease of access to its products will have to mean a fresh technological revolution in this country, as well, I suspect, as a major reworking of our defense procurement and manufacturing.