Wiping out an order of magnitude more wouldn’t be enough, because 900 would still remain to pulverize Russian forces. (Currently eyeballing the list of destroyed Russian vehicles, it looks like more than 10% were destroyed by TB2s. That’s insane. A handful of drones are causing 10%+ as much damage as 200,000 Ukranian soldiers with tanks, anti-tank rockets, bombers, artillery, etc. Extrapolating out, 900 drones would cause 1000%+ as much damage; Russian forces would be losing something like 500 military vehicles per day, along with their crews.
If most drone purchasers believed Russia would be able to counter 1000 TB2s, well not only did they turn out to be wrong in hindsight, I think they should have known better.
Also: What sort of anti-drone weapons do you have in mind, that could take out 1000 TB2s? Ordinary missiles and other anti-air weapons are more or less the same for drones as for regular aircraft, so there probably aren’t dramatic low-hanging fruit to pick there. The main thing that comes to mind is cyber stuff and signals jamming. Cyber stuff isn’t plausible I think because the balance favors defenders at high levels of investment; if you are buying a thousand drones you can easily afford to make them very very secure. Signals jamming seems like the most plausible thing to me but it isn’t a panacea. Drones can be modified to communicate by laser link, for example. (If you have 1000 of them then they can form an unbroken web back to base.) They also can go into autonomous mode and then shoot at pre-identified targets, e.g. “Bomb anything your image recognition algorithm identifies as a military vehicle on the following highway.”
There are multiple levels of strategy here. If Ukraine had 1000 TB2s, it would be reasonable for Russia to prepare for that and be able to truly clear the skies. In fact, many of us expected this would be part of Russia’s early attacks, and it’s a big surprise that it didn’t happen.
My point is that it would be a different world with a different set of assumptions if much larger drone fleets were common. ECM and ground-to-air capabilities would be much more commonly embedded in infantry units, and much more air-to-air (including counter-drone drones) combat would be expected. Russia would have been expected (even more than it WAS expected, and even more surprising if they failed) to destroy every runway very early. You can’t look at a current outcome and project one side changing significantly without the other side also doing so.
Spending a whole lot on the assumption that Russia would be incompetent in this specific way seems like a different inadequacy, even though it turned out to be true this time.
I’m saying that if Ukraine had bought 1000 TB2′s, whatever changes Russia would have made (if any) wouldn’t have been enough to leave Ukraine in a worse position than it is in now. Sure, Russia probably would have adapted somewhat. But we are very far from the equilibrium, say I. If Russia best-responded to Ukraine’s 1000 TB2s, maybe they’d be able to shoot down a lot of them or otherwise defend against them, but the Ukrainians would still come out overall better off than they are now. (They are cheap! It’s hard to defend against them when they are so cheap!)
TB2s don’t need runways since they can fly off of civilian roads.
I do think counter-drone drones are the way to go. But it’s not like Ukraine shouldn’t buy TB2′s out of fear of Russia’s hypothetical counter-drone drones! That’s like saying armies in 1920 shouldn’t buy aircraft because other armies would just buy counter-aircraft aircraft.
Wiping out an order of magnitude more wouldn’t be enough, because 900 would still remain to pulverize Russian forces. (Currently eyeballing the list of destroyed Russian vehicles, it looks like more than 10% were destroyed by TB2s. That’s insane. A handful of drones are causing 10%+ as much damage as 200,000 Ukranian soldiers with tanks, anti-tank rockets, bombers, artillery, etc. Extrapolating out, 900 drones would cause 1000%+ as much damage; Russian forces would be losing something like 500 military vehicles per day, along with their crews.
If most drone purchasers believed Russia would be able to counter 1000 TB2s, well not only did they turn out to be wrong in hindsight, I think they should have known better.
Also: What sort of anti-drone weapons do you have in mind, that could take out 1000 TB2s? Ordinary missiles and other anti-air weapons are more or less the same for drones as for regular aircraft, so there probably aren’t dramatic low-hanging fruit to pick there. The main thing that comes to mind is cyber stuff and signals jamming. Cyber stuff isn’t plausible I think because the balance favors defenders at high levels of investment; if you are buying a thousand drones you can easily afford to make them very very secure. Signals jamming seems like the most plausible thing to me but it isn’t a panacea. Drones can be modified to communicate by laser link, for example. (If you have 1000 of them then they can form an unbroken web back to base.) They also can go into autonomous mode and then shoot at pre-identified targets, e.g. “Bomb anything your image recognition algorithm identifies as a military vehicle on the following highway.”
There are multiple levels of strategy here. If Ukraine had 1000 TB2s, it would be reasonable for Russia to prepare for that and be able to truly clear the skies. In fact, many of us expected this would be part of Russia’s early attacks, and it’s a big surprise that it didn’t happen.
My point is that it would be a different world with a different set of assumptions if much larger drone fleets were common. ECM and ground-to-air capabilities would be much more commonly embedded in infantry units, and much more air-to-air (including counter-drone drones) combat would be expected. Russia would have been expected (even more than it WAS expected, and even more surprising if they failed) to destroy every runway very early. You can’t look at a current outcome and project one side changing significantly without the other side also doing so.
Spending a whole lot on the assumption that Russia would be incompetent in this specific way seems like a different inadequacy, even though it turned out to be true this time.
I’m saying that if Ukraine had bought 1000 TB2′s, whatever changes Russia would have made (if any) wouldn’t have been enough to leave Ukraine in a worse position than it is in now. Sure, Russia probably would have adapted somewhat. But we are very far from the equilibrium, say I. If Russia best-responded to Ukraine’s 1000 TB2s, maybe they’d be able to shoot down a lot of them or otherwise defend against them, but the Ukrainians would still come out overall better off than they are now. (They are cheap! It’s hard to defend against them when they are so cheap!)
TB2s don’t need runways since they can fly off of civilian roads.
I do think counter-drone drones are the way to go. But it’s not like Ukraine shouldn’t buy TB2′s out of fear of Russia’s hypothetical counter-drone drones! That’s like saying armies in 1920 shouldn’t buy aircraft because other armies would just buy counter-aircraft aircraft.