chrisl

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yes, it's a "difference detection" problem, but if you're looking for something that's near your limit of resolution it gets harder.  And all measurement systems have noise. For most human optical applications you're used to signal levels that are *way* above the noise, but someone trying to hide from a satellite is going to work hard to keep the changes that you see down close to the observer's noise level. That makes life much harder for the automated system and its trainer.  And aside from the changes they're looking for, there are lots of other changes going on above threshold because stuff just moves around on earth.  That's noise, too, but of a different sort, and part of the developer's goal is to be able to discriminate benign activity from targetable activity when they both show up in the signal.

Not just good quality data. Good quality data that has been accurately labeled, and often in massive volumes and of high diversity.  Depending on your system, that can be very difficult to get - I do some optical systems where we're almost guaranteed to have low signal to noise (always working at the limit of our resolution) and are likely to run into things that are outside the training set, and we spend huge amounts of effort on both improving the repeatability of the acquisition (relatively easy), and automating the development of training data, which sometimes involves a lot of bootstrapping.  You think watching the scanners at TSA checkpoints is painful? Have I got a job for you...

What makes you think that isn't how Bayraktar found a lot of high value stuff early on, or that that's not how we got all the  river bridging massacres?  You can be sure that anybody who owns satellites and computers is spending a lot of effort on that.
Whether it works for artillery hides will depend on a lot of things - the satellite resolution and wavelengths: optical are generally higher res, but easier to camoflage against;  SAR doesn't really care what color you are, but does care about your shape and what you're made of.  That's also why artillery units train to be able to hang out behind CB range, or just drive around, and then just like a panda: park, shoot, and leave in 5 to 10 minutes.
 
 

Not just good quality data. Good quality data that has been accurately labeled, and often in massive volumes and of high diversity.  Depending on your system, that can be very difficult to get - I do some optical systems where we're almost guaranteed to have low signal to noise (always working at the limit of our resolution) and are likely to run into things that are outside the training set, and we spend huge amounts of effort on both improving the repeatability of the acquisition (relatively easy), and automating the development of training data, which sometimes involves a lot of bootstrapping.  You think watching the scanners at TSA checkpoints is painful? Have I got a job for you...

You know it, babe 😙

 

And my point was that the original estimate missed enough key features about how DE works that it wasn't terribly meaningful, and the discussion of energy source is a distraction.

Now this is just unfair.
That thing will land on your tank, clean the optics, collect 2 dollars for services and place a thermite bomb under the side of the turret while you are looking for change.

As already alluded to - high power lasers are typically pulsed.  They might be powered by a system that’s in the kW range and hit GW in pulses that are a few ns long.    And the short pulses typically are putting all the power in a small area virtually instantly, so you get tremendous local heating and ablation with every pulse - you neglected thermal diffusivity in your bierdeckel calculation. For example, you can power a laser that can engrave rock using a 9V consumer battery.

Anything that is radiating energy is telling you where to find it.  Anything radiating structured energy (active ISR, comms, jammers) is telling you that you want to find it first.  You either have to have the biggest, fastest network of active systems to beat a nominal peer, or you want maximum autonomy with very infrequent active radiation that is somewhere else unpredictable every time it radiates a signal.  More when I’m not typing on a phone…

Anything that is burning holes in the sky at those ranges is going to get lit up and hammered very quickly.  It had better be able to move fast and be cheap enough to account for losses.
I think it will be more point defence for strategic installations as part of a larger AD umbrella.  Tactical is right out and operational has got some serious challenges.

I'm no expert but if you pulse your laser you cause a tiny explosion that will do more damage than the pure heating effect. It's late here and it's a long article but here is more information than you ever wanted to know on laser guns:
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php

That is massive denial in play.  The game will be to collapse an opponents denial/ISR bubble, and only then can one do manoeuvre.  That is huge if it comes to pass.  We built entire libraries on manoeuvre warfare and now it may become the punctuation mark, not the forcing function.  This is essentially the death of conventional mass as we knew it.  Mr Tankie taking a back seat will be the last of our problems.   

I don't think "knowing where the enemy is" is a problem if this war is a demonstration.  The ability to push small lethal drone swarms around on the battlefield only need to happen as fast or faster than your opponent can drive...or launch their own swarms.  Many ways to do this because each individual system is so light.  This means one can drop kill boxes at range and essentially deny an area.
As to sensors and processors.  Well we will have to see won't we.  Being able to fly through a bamboo forest autonomously looks pretty sophisticated to me and we are only getting started.  I honestly only see range and endurance as a local tactical limitation.  Operationally they can be packaged and projected at very long ranges by any number of systems.  A HIMARS cargo shell could carry a hundred of these small systems and deliver them 100kms away.  In place the little buggers could just sit on the ground until a target comes by and within range.  Trading off who pops up to take a peek or linked to other sensors that came with them (pigeon hearts anyone?).  5 fly up and overwhelm the target.  The other 95 stay in the grass.  I only need the little bugger to fly maybe a km.  Give them solar panels and they can recharge in place.
That is a major military problem. 

So you fill them with thousands of them.  Hell you deliver them via artillery and have them just sit like a minefield.  People are thinking "platforms", these are munitions.
Counter?  Cheap UGVs with swarms of their own.  Cloud fight out front before humans even get engaged.

Why bother with the $100K ghillie suit with a person inside?  Just wrap it around an autonomous robot.

Why bother with the $100K ghillie suit with a person inside?  Just wrap it around an autonomous robot.

Why bother with the $100K ghillie suit with a person inside?  Just wrap it around an autonomous robot.

And arm them with what?  T-34s pulled from monuments?  Mosin Nagants?  Maybe there are a few IS-2s still floating around on a back lot.
I know they’re not quite down to that, but they’ve burned through decades of Soviet and post-Soviet production and are nowhere near being a manufacturing powerhouse to build back up.  They don’t have a huge base of non-military manufacturing that they can convert.  China is the only real source they have for manufacturing resources, and they’re not being particularly generous.  And Russia has been suffering brain drain for three decades.
 
And who will train the newly mobilized on the higher tech equipment?  Maybe it doesn’t matter, because it will all have been destroyed or fallen out of the sky by the time the next wave shows up.

And arm them with what?  T-34s pulled from monuments?  Mosin Nagants?  Maybe there are a few IS-2s still floating around on a back lot.
I know they’re not quite down to that, but they’ve burned through decades of Soviet and post-Soviet production and are nowhere near being a manufacturing powerhouse to build back up.  They don’t have a huge base of non-military manufacturing that they can convert.  China is the only real source they have for manufacturing resources, and they’re not being particularly generous.  And Russia has been suffering brain drain for three decades.
 
And who will train the newly mobilized on the higher tech equipment?  Maybe it doesn’t matter, because it will all have been destroyed or fallen out of the sky by the time the next wave shows up.

I am confident we will not see that either at all or maybe sometime in the last month of the war. In the present conditions, it is about as likely as the grand cavalry charge prepared in expectation of breakthrough and exploitation before the Loos offensive, the Somme offensive, the Cambrai offensive etc. in WWI. Finally, when the Entente were in position to exploit a breakthrough, they did it with hundreds of tanks and the war ended in a few weeks.
I like the brief summary from a new Wavell Room article https://wavellroom.com/2023/10/13/countering-tactical-kamikaze-drones-ideas-urgently-needed/:
"Ukrainian counter-measures: keep your distance
A tactical counter-measure (employed by both sides) is the withdrawal of platforms and systems from the frontline i.e. 10-15km where they are at least out of range to FPV drones.  This has created an inverted frontline. Units in contact are now dug-in infantry with their supporting organic weapons such as mortars and anti-tank missiles; drone operators; and the ECM detachments seeking to disrupt or down the other’s drones.  Communications are constantly degraded by the saturation of jamming systems.
Self-evidently, such an abnormal frontline is the opposite of manoeuvre warfare.  Neither side is daring to manoeuvre, except in very favourable circumstances, because the cost is too high.  ‘Going over the top’ has become prohibitive in lives and materiel."
I think it is exactly to the point. Now a large number of troops on the attack can be stopped by a very low number of troops on the defence, extremely dispersed and supported by massed fires.  There is therefore no sense in  massing units on the attack, unless to increase own losses, because it is so extremely easy for the defender to achieve sufficient force ratio for a successful defence anyway. The numbers on the attack are used for rotation and replacement, not for overwhelming the enemy. 
In these circumstances, how can an attack look like? Theoretically, speaking Infiltration and probing by dismounted infantry +counterbattery+ deep fires on the enemy rear to interrupt the flow of ammunition to support the counterbatery effort +ECM, again to support the crucial counterbattery effort. Once the counterbattery battle achieves success, then fires can be partially shifted more to the enemy's first line so that those dispersed, camouflaged and fortified infantry outposts can be whittled down.  Then repeated infiltration and probing combined with indirect fires is carried out until those infantry outposts either withdraw or can be stormed. Then the process has to be repeated on each new defence line because its inherent slowness means that the defender will ALWAYS be able to create and man another defence line behind the previous one.
Which to me seems exactly how the Ukrainians are fighting in Zaporozhe. The only potential way to progress from this to a more efficient system I see in 1) massive attrition of RUS artillery combined with some way to degrade RUS drones AND discovery of technical means to deal with RUS obstacles, AP mines included;. if the RUS finally run out of tubes AND become unable to substitute them with Lancets and FPV drones, AND the Ukrainians find a way to quickly go through even massive minefields, then the attacks can be started instead of lengthy  counterbattery battle, with a simultaneous engagement  of many defensive outposts over several defence lines with supressive, not necessarily destructive artillery and PGM fires, and Ukrainian attack hopefully will be able to continue without too much of a pause through several of those lines. Either by way of mechanised assault or on foot, Keiserschlacht style.
The 2nd way out is IMHO  the general morale failure caused by combination of massive losses cumulated over years on the entire frontline with the war weariness on the home front. The "1917 moment".
PS. I am aware of the ubiquituous caveats, that all historical analogies are deceitful, and this is not World War I, etc. but taking them in stride I think that at this moment, it basically this is recreated World War I. And the technical and organisational developments which happened since 1918  have combined to make it even more of a stereotypised World War I than the real World War I was.