The Ukrainian military has a budget of 4.6 billion Euro, so about $5 billion. (It also has several hundred thousand soldiers)
The Bayraktar TB2 is estimated to cost about $1-2 million. It was designed and built in Turkey and only about 300 or so have been made so far. As far as I can tell it isn’t anything discontinuously great or fantastic, technology-wise. It’s basically the same sort of thing the US has had for twenty years, only more affordable. (Presumably it’s more affordable because it’s not produced by the price-gouging US defence industry?)
The Bayraktar TB2 has been enormously successful defending Ukraine against the Russian military. See this list of visually confirmed Russian war losses, ctrl-f “Bayraktar” and then remember that this is only the stuff caught on video / camera and circulated publicly.
Previously, it was (I suspect) the single biggest factor in the Ethiopian government’s turning of the tide against Tigray. (If not the Bayraktar, then other similar drones.) Prior to that, it was the single biggest factor in Azerbaijan winning its war against Armenia.
As of the start of the war, Ukraine had only about 18 Bayraktar TB2′s. (12 in 2019, 6 more in 2021, if I’m reading the Wiki correctly).
...
Suppose that Ukraine had by some miracle had asked my opinion about weapons procurement and taken my advice a few years ago. They could have spent, say, 10% of their annual budget for three years on TB2′s. This would amount to $1.5B. This would buy about 1,000 TB2s, almost two orders of magnitude more than they currently have, and about one order of magnitude more than they had combat aircraft at the start of the war.
I challenge anyone to argue that this would not have completely turned the tide of the current war. (I’d even venture to guess that no russian units would remain intact in Ukraine at all by this stage in the war; they would have been pushed back across the border.) Remember, the Russian air force hasn’t been able to eliminate the handful of TB2s Ukraine currently operates, and no doubt would very much love to do so.
That’s not even taking into account experience curve effects. If I understand the math correctly, for aerospace the progress ratio is 85%, and so each doubling of cumulative production leads to a 15% reduction in cost, and so if Turkey had scaled up production 16x to meet this new demand, the individual cost would be half as much and Ukraine could afford to buy 2,000 instead… If lots of countries had ordered more drones instead of just Ukraine, Turkey could scale up production by several orders of magnitude and unit cost for the drones could drop down towards $100,000 and Ukraine could have 10,000 of them.
...
How much do I believe this take? Well, I’m not a military expert or anything. It’s possible I’m missing something. In fact part of why I’m writing this is to find out from other people whether I’m missing something. But yeah, as far as I can see given what I know, this seems basically correct. Militaries all over the world have been massively underinvesting in drones for years.
From things I have previously heard about drones, I would be uncertain what training is required to operate them, and what limitations there are for weather in which they can & cannot fly. I know that being unable to fly in anything other than near-perfect weather conditions has been a problem of drones in the past, and those same limitations do not apply to ground-based vehicles.
This is a good point, but it doesn’t change the bottom line I think. Weather is more often good than bad, so within a few days of the war beginning there should be a chance for 1000 drones to rise and sweep the field. As for training, in the scenario where they bought 1000 drones they’d also do the necessary training for 1000 drone operators (though there are returns to scale I think; in a pinch 1 operator could probably handle 10 drones, just have them all flock in loose formation and then it’s as if you have 1 big drone with 10x the ammunition capacity.)
I do agree for the most part. Robotic warfare which can efficiently destroy your opponent’s materiel, without directly risking your own materiel & personnel is an extremely dominant strategy, and will probably become the future of warfare. At least warfare like this, as opposed to police actions.
In terms of whether this is “civilizational inadequacy” or just “optimizing preparation for war is hard”, do you think this advice applies to Taiwan? It’s a similar budget, but a very different theater of combat. I’d expect drones are useful against naval units as well as land, so naively I’d think it’s a similar calculation.
I mean, yeah? I haven’t looked at Taiwan’s situation in particular but I’d expect I’d conclude that they should be buying loads of drones. Thousands or many thousands.
This sort of thing is a pretty chaotic equilibrium. I predict that a LOT of effort in the near future is going to go into anti-drone capabilities for larger countries, reducing the effectiveness of drones in the future. And I find it easy to believe that most drone purchasers believed (incorrectly, it turns out) that Russia had already done this, and would have wiped out even an order of magnitude more by now.
I suspect this isn’t a civilizational inadequacy, but an intentional adversarial misinformation campaign. The underinvestment may be in intelligence and information about likely opponents much more than overt spending/preparation choices.
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.
A current example of civilizational inadequacy in the realm of military spending:
The Ukrainian military has a budget of 4.6 billion Euro, so about $5 billion. (It also has several hundred thousand soldiers)
The Bayraktar TB2 is estimated to cost about $1-2 million. It was designed and built in Turkey and only about 300 or so have been made so far. As far as I can tell it isn’t anything discontinuously great or fantastic, technology-wise. It’s basically the same sort of thing the US has had for twenty years, only more affordable. (Presumably it’s more affordable because it’s not produced by the price-gouging US defence industry?)
The Bayraktar TB2 has been enormously successful defending Ukraine against the Russian military. See this list of visually confirmed Russian war losses, ctrl-f “Bayraktar” and then remember that this is only the stuff caught on video / camera and circulated publicly.
Previously, it was (I suspect) the single biggest factor in the Ethiopian government’s turning of the tide against Tigray. (If not the Bayraktar, then other similar drones.) Prior to that, it was the single biggest factor in Azerbaijan winning its war against Armenia.
As of the start of the war, Ukraine had only about 18 Bayraktar TB2′s. (12 in 2019, 6 more in 2021, if I’m reading the Wiki correctly).
...
Suppose that Ukraine had by some miracle had asked my opinion about weapons procurement and taken my advice a few years ago. They could have spent, say, 10% of their annual budget for three years on TB2′s. This would amount to $1.5B. This would buy about 1,000 TB2s, almost two orders of magnitude more than they currently have, and about one order of magnitude more than they had combat aircraft at the start of the war.
I challenge anyone to argue that this would not have completely turned the tide of the current war. (I’d even venture to guess that no russian units would remain intact in Ukraine at all by this stage in the war; they would have been pushed back across the border.) Remember, the Russian air force hasn’t been able to eliminate the handful of TB2s Ukraine currently operates, and no doubt would very much love to do so.
That’s not even taking into account experience curve effects. If I understand the math correctly, for aerospace the progress ratio is 85%, and so each doubling of cumulative production leads to a 15% reduction in cost, and so if Turkey had scaled up production 16x to meet this new demand, the individual cost would be half as much and Ukraine could afford to buy 2,000 instead… If lots of countries had ordered more drones instead of just Ukraine, Turkey could scale up production by several orders of magnitude and unit cost for the drones could drop down towards $100,000 and Ukraine could have 10,000 of them.
...
How much do I believe this take? Well, I’m not a military expert or anything. It’s possible I’m missing something. In fact part of why I’m writing this is to find out from other people whether I’m missing something. But yeah, as far as I can see given what I know, this seems basically correct. Militaries all over the world have been massively underinvesting in drones for years.
From things I have previously heard about drones, I would be uncertain what training is required to operate them, and what limitations there are for weather in which they can & cannot fly. I know that being unable to fly in anything other than near-perfect weather conditions has been a problem of drones in the past, and those same limitations do not apply to ground-based vehicles.
This is a good point, but it doesn’t change the bottom line I think. Weather is more often good than bad, so within a few days of the war beginning there should be a chance for 1000 drones to rise and sweep the field. As for training, in the scenario where they bought 1000 drones they’d also do the necessary training for 1000 drone operators (though there are returns to scale I think; in a pinch 1 operator could probably handle 10 drones, just have them all flock in loose formation and then it’s as if you have 1 big drone with 10x the ammunition capacity.)
I do agree for the most part. Robotic warfare which can efficiently destroy your opponent’s materiel, without directly risking your own materiel & personnel is an extremely dominant strategy, and will probably become the future of warfare. At least warfare like this, as opposed to police actions.
In terms of whether this is “civilizational inadequacy” or just “optimizing preparation for war is hard”, do you think this advice applies to Taiwan? It’s a similar budget, but a very different theater of combat. I’d expect drones are useful against naval units as well as land, so naively I’d think it’s a similar calculation.
I mean, yeah? I haven’t looked at Taiwan’s situation in particular but I’d expect I’d conclude that they should be buying loads of drones. Thousands or many thousands.
This sort of thing is a pretty chaotic equilibrium. I predict that a LOT of effort in the near future is going to go into anti-drone capabilities for larger countries, reducing the effectiveness of drones in the future. And I find it easy to believe that most drone purchasers believed (incorrectly, it turns out) that Russia had already done this, and would have wiped out even an order of magnitude more by now.
I suspect this isn’t a civilizational inadequacy, but an intentional adversarial misinformation campaign. The underinvestment may be in intelligence and information about likely opponents much more than overt spending/preparation choices.
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.