Tux

Mick Ryan's take on the war after returning from Ukraine.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/ukraine-war-how-check-russia-s-momentum
Russia is now a more dangerous adversary than it was two years ago. This calls for change in how the war is fought.
There is a compelling and urgent need for NATO to change from a “defend Ukraine” policy to one of “defeat Russia in Ukraine”. At the same time, Ukraine needs to develop and share with its supporters its theory of victory. One official in Kyiv told me there is no clear vision of how Ukraine will win. A new Ukrainian theory of victory must be a foundational element of any revised Western strategy.

I think many countries were probably quite happy to sign up to nuclear non-proliferation given the difficulty and expense involved in setting up your own nuclear arsenal.  Also, if anyone tried to breach non-proliferation treaties then there existed the legacy nuclear-armed powers who were able to carry out enforcement.
There will be basically no significant cost/difficulty barrier to establishing an autonomous killer drone fleet, once the technology exists.  That means any country will be able to do it almost at will, and, if they do, who would be able to stop them?  I think it'd have to be someone with an even bigger fleet, no?  Which means that, in this case, I don't think a treaty can work in the way we'd like it to.
Maybe the real answer is to stop thinking about developing multi-layered C-UAS as a way to free up areas to manoeuvre in southern Ukraine and to start considering it a matter of humanitarian necessity.

I don't know if anyone has posted this yet, but  RUSI just published a paper on the present and near future state of drone warfare.
Mass Precision Strike: Designing UAV Complexes for Land Forces
by Justin Bronk and Jack Watling
Excerpt:
Swarming capabilities are commonly touted as the most significant area of capability development in the small UAV defence sector. However, the requirement to swarm introduces significant hardware and software complexity, which in turn drives cost growth and reduces the number of individual assets that can be fielded for any given budget. Massed UAV groupings, as seen regularly in light shows at civilian displays, rely on a ground control station tracking the position of all UAVs in a formation at all times and a central mission computer sending commands to each one to coordinate their movements. This allows large numbers of very simple small UAVs to fly in a coordinated fashion, but it is not a practical approach for military UAVs and weapons in a contested battlespace, due to terrain masking, EW, signal range and emissions control challenges – the ground control station would be struck, decapitating the whole swarm. Instead, for a mass precision strike complex to be capable of swarming tactics, the individual assets involved must have onboard sensors and low-latency datalinks that are resistant to hostile EW disruption. In addition, each asset must carry a mission computer powerful enough, and software complex enough, to fuse the information about terrain, threats and targets received from its own  sensors and those of other UAVs in the formation through datalinks, and to react to that information dynamically in real time. These capabilities are not inherently new, nor are they reliant on advances in AI or complex machine learning models. However, what the requirements for sensors, datalinks and advanced software do is raise component costs, even if used with an inherently cheap airframe/engine combination.
Furthermore, if a mass precision strike system is premised on swarming tactics for its effectiveness against its core target sets, then the number of assets required to use it in a sustained fashion will be increased, due to the need to consistently project sufficient assets into the target area to swarm. In conjunction with the increased hardware and software complexity required, this requirement to sustainably field swarming UAVs in large quantities over time means that fielding this sort of system as more than a ‘Night One’ theatre entry tool is likely to be uneconomical.
In terms of where swarming capabilities are likely to add value commensurate with the additional cost implied by their inclusion as part of a precision strike complex, the primary application will be to improve the capability to overwhelm air defence systems... Other advantages of swarming capabilities are that they can help reduce wasted warheads by deconflicting target selection so that multiple assets do not hit the same target. However, doing so in a way that can differentiate between a target having been hit and successfully disabled versus a target having been hit ineffectively and thus requiring a repeat strike with another asset requires significantly more advanced sensor and processing capabilities than simple deconfliction. Ultimately, for target deconfliction and strike optimisation, the value added question will come down to whether the additional efficiency against defended and undefended target sets gained from functional swarming capabilities outweighs the strike weight foregone by the increase in individual asset cost and the resultant reduction in quantity.

Saw this quote from Tim Snyder and thought it fitting to this discussion. It seems to me, Mike Johnson is looking ahead.

Yeah, that's why you might want to keep the communication rudimentary.  If the transmissions are short enough and infrequent enough, you can be somewhere else by the time most C-UAS systems are able to repond.  In a target rich environment, the comms would have to happen only very briefly and just before they all went in for their kills.  If there aren't a lot of targets, it wouldn't need to bother.

Guidance will certainly be the challenge. Not only detection and target discrimination but how do you prevent fratricide?  Does that then require some IFF since you aren’t going to launch singletons against a swarm.  The aforementioned bats have solved the target discrimination problem in a swarm setting.
Do different models of drones have significantly different acoustic signatures?  If so, could they home on that?
Then again a bunch of dpicm armed drones sent into a swarm to explode could do substantial damage.  All depends on how dispersed the swarm is.  Widely dispersed until final targets probably makes sense.

But here and good news. After despearted interview of UKR Foreign Affairs minister about "Patriots", something moved in Eurpore
 

Just riffing a little off what @sross112 was saying, in all these scenarios there has to be some thought given to where we think the UAV-war will find a balancing point.  That means that c-UAS is the key.
If we allow ourselves into the world of autonomy making EW all-but ineffective, there are a couple of options with regards to what form c-UAV ends up taking:
Autonomous c-UAV drones ('fighter' drones) are effective against enemy UAS which fly above the treeline (or any other appreciable ground clutter) but everyone struggles to make them effective against those which are small and/or agile enough to travel amongst trees, hop over people's garden fences, etc.  This world means that the compromising effect which UAVs are currently having on efforts to employ legacy systems (towed arty, MBTs, etc) will persist as long as the enemy have low-flying attack UAVs.  This, I think, is the world most people on this thread are talking about and is the most likely to result in the most UAV-heavy future force compositions. Autonomous c-UAVs quickly gain sufficient sensor/AI levels to be effective against basically all enemy UAVs.  You now have a world similar to the WW2 air war where the main battle is for air superiority and then your land forces can engage however they see best.  At this point, once you have won air superiority, you ask yourself how best to attack the enemy: other drone designs?  HIMARS? any old towed arty lying around?  All those will have their pros/cons but you don't need to worry about the enemy UAS threat, at least, so some of them might remain on top tier TOEs. If ground-based anti-drone sniper units work, then see @The_Capt's thoughts, above - it will compromise UAVs but might do as much or more to compromise other legacy ground units, as well.  If innovative forms of camo and concealment prove widely effective against future attack drone AI, that will also change the game.
I think what all of the above probably hinges around most is the size, sensitivity and reliability of passive sensors of all relevant parts of the EM spectrum.  If your autonomous UAVs can reliably see your chosen EM frequency at sufficient resolution, then I don't see what will stop AI getting us all to #2, above, pretty damned quickly (as well as probably enabling The_Capt's, nifty ground systems).  Perhaps some of our resident subject-matter experts can opine as to whether there are any serious blockers to sensor design in certain parts of the spectrum which could then be exploited as UAV 'blind-spots' by both sides and result in a situation closer to #1?

This sort of narrative reminds me of WW1 generals who also thought the airplane was a fad.  First off Russian glide bombs need to carry so much HE because they are inefficient and imprecise.  A whole lot of HE is not necessarily a good thing.  For example, if I have 10 enemy in a build I can use a large 500lb HE munition to drop the building.  The energy it takes to get that heavy munition to that building is significant, costly and has a high ISR signature.  If I have 10 micro-drones with a .45 cal round that will not miss, that simply fly into the building and kill all 10 enemy, I am using far less energy and cost to deliver the same effect.  I am using precision and processing as an offset.
So the Russian AF lobbing large glide bombs is not a sign that “big booms are back baby!”  It is a sign that 1) Russian ISR is still fairly low res, 2) Russia does not have a lot of higher tech precise munitions and 3) we should really be worrying about air denial for Ukraine because if that fails then a whole lot of this is largely academic.
As to “someday soon C-UAS will make this all go away and we can go back to Grandpa’s war” - there is a lot of hand waving on “someday C-UAS”.  Yes, counters will be developed but they will likely reshape the battle space in doing so.  For example, let’s say we invent a nifty micro-smart missile or laser that can blast those pesky UAS out of the sky, even when they are in swarms.  “Huzzah!  Now that is over with, let’s roll out the tanks and do this Persian Gulf style…USA.USA!”
Well except for the part where we have operationalized a technology that can find and hit a flying target the size of a bird with a very small munition at crazy scales.  What do we suppose the impact of that technology is going to have on conventional ground units?  That level of ISR alone means nothing can move without being picked up for kms.  Individual infantry are screwed, vehicles may as well be battleships.  The changes such technology would bring would be f#cking profound.
So there is no going back after this with or without UAS.  Unmanned, plus ISR, plus processing power, plus miniaturization, plus cheap production are all conspiring against our entire current theories of warfare. They have been for decades while we tried to ignore them.  So we can do “hope and denial” or we can can see the shift for what it is and adapt.
 
 

Isn't the number one thing that the UA troops were saying was the game changer for recent battles the glide bombing? 
This correlates to the drone discussion as that is what drones can't deliver yet: LARGE amounts of HE. They also can't support long range C4ISR like a HIMARS can. They don't have the kill radius that those tungsten balls do either. 
I'll give FPVs their due as they are the only indirect option that has proven effective on moving targets close to the front. That is where they are very useful is right on the front and close behind it. Anything deeper than that is a toss up. Look at the last airfield strike where quite a few long range UAV's went in. If you had a choice between that many UAV's or the same number of ATACMS, Tomahawks, or Storm Shadows which would you take? Which would give you the most damage and loss to the enemy?
Now that will lead into the what is available question, and that is where this war is a disconnect between the ground in Ukraine and if the US was prosecuting the same conflict: resources. The UA has had to develop the UAVs and FPVs in order to fill a gap that is not present for the US. A thousand pages ago a lot of us agreed that C4ISR and ammo to hit the targets equals success. The UA has been starving for ammo. If we really want to test the theory of where these weapon systems fit into the future, give the UA the platforms and the ammo and see where the drones get meshed in. My bet is company level and below integral fire support and recon. 
For those reasons I don't believe that the UAV's will usurp the other systems, but they will become complementary. I do believe they will be very significantly expanded and should be prolific on the fire team to company level, but I don't see how in their current form they can replace 50lbs of explosive and fragmentation 50 or more kms away in a matter of minutes. 
The defensive primacy will only last until there are effective drone countermeasures, whatever they may be. Once that is done, those layered indirect fire platforms and the other members of the traditional combined arms will be back on deck to make things happen. 

Drones are part of a system - the whirrwhirr flying thing is just the end point of that system. The system can be attacked anywhere along its chain, and different points in the chain will need different combinations of things to effect an attack.
At the moment everyone seems exclusively focussed on knocking down the whirrwhirr. Thats part of it, but so is camouflage, dispersion, armouring up, supply chains, intelligence in its myriad forms, attacking the operators, disrupting comms, deception, etc.

Fair but also at risk of undersubscribing.  This sort of military doctrinal nihilism - "Its all been done before," can risk missing just how profound an impact the introduction of air warfare had.  In fact modern surface warfare, both land and sea profoundly changed as a result of air warfare, forever.
Within the next 5-10 years we will reach an equilibrium but it will likely look nothing like the one we currently have. 1914 did not look anything like 1940 for very good reasons, even though levels of equilibrium had been achieved, it was a fundamentally new equilibrium.
And it is a major mistake to think this is all about Unmanned.  C4ISR likely has had the largest effect on the battlefield by far. Total illumination and ubiquitous connectivity has led to a lot of the phenomenon we have seen at the outset of this war - there were not thousands of FPVs back in Feb '22.  Like WW1, it is the confluence of technologies that is creating a shifting wave.
So, sure we will come up with UAS defenses.  My money is on "other UAS" as the ground based solution is simply too hard and expensive.  This, plus C4ISR, could create a battlespace with an entire unmanned front edge, colliding with another unmanned force edge.  How war is fought in that space will be deterministic for the manned systems follow on.  This is not "the same equilibrium" we had back in 2020 in the least.
Mastery of that new equilibrium will be critical in the next decades. 

Yeah, the calculus has definitely shifted. Plus Starship test flight 4 will be next month, and as soon as booster re-use works, the US can rebuild satellite constellations literally overnight. And presumably Kawaski and Hyundai can crank out jetskis by the thousands per months (sorry, USVs).
I for one am excited to see what their damage control is like. Maybe they figure ok we can lose 400 ships, and land 400. The problem is no matter how good you are at building ships, USVs are way cheaper.
I think the “energy” needs to include the computations needed to target and get a hit, plus the energy involved in logistics. Maybe training too. Under that metric, as we’ve discussed, FPV drones are literally almost zero energy.

What?  No.
I want a radio.
A tank is only good if it sees the other tank first and can get the first shot off and has a sufficiently good targeting system to get a 1st-shot kill, and the range is short enough that the other tank doesn't get a round in the air ensuring the near simultaneous death of both tanks.
No thanks.
With a radio I can hide in a little hole and call my friends who deliver action at a distance to make the tank go away without  the guys inside ever knowing I'm there.
But I don't even want to let things get that far.  I'm a geek, I enjoy the comforts of my home office.  I'll take space-based ISR for $1000, Alex. And the questio to the answer is "What do I have to build so nobody will bother trying to sneak up on me, lest they end up suffocating in a cubic mile of popcorn, and they know it?"
(edit: and I see @The_Capt ninja'd me on this.  I need to try to keep more caught up.)

I think the first couple paragraphs of your response are a version of the "XY problem" that's usually a form of: non-expert asks expert "how do I do X" or "can you help fix my thing that's supposed to do X", when the only reason they're doing X in the first place is that they really want to do Y and X is the only way they know how to do it.  An expert will tell them how to do X.  A system engineer will poke at their brain for a while to understand why they want to do X and figure out that the real goal is Y, and there are three other ways Z, A, and B to do Y that are all more effective and less hassle.
I don't think the energy thing is a red herring, so much as system energy comes in complicated ways.  Energy arguments are very useful in all sorts of things, including physics based sensors, function of biological systems, logistics, and weapons systems.  For a given volume you can pack in some amount of energy if you're working with readily available sources - petrochemicals, batteries, and high and low explosives are probably the main ones here.  How you choose to spend that energy is a discriminator among systems.
Artillery, for example, uses most of it in two big (and short) bangs - one of propellant to get the shell moving, and another to make a mess at the other end.  But with modern ISR, electronics, sensors, and control systems you can use some of the energy of that initial propulsion bang to maneuver the shell in the air - either to extend its range or to fine guide itself to a target.  But you have to be careful spending that, because every maneuver to change direction costs you some of that energy.  Hypersonic missiles have the same limitation - sure, they go stupid fast.  But every time you try to change direction of something going that fast you have to stick a finger out in the wind and use up some of that energy (and speed).  And the maneuvering cost is very non-linear in how fast you're going, so a just few maneuvers at high speed gets very expensive.  And pretty soon you just look like another dumb glide or ballistic missile and get shot down by some borrowed Patriot system.
 

I wonder how much the F-4 Vietnam experience plays in to this (I'm probably mis-remembering the aircraft involved - apologies if so - and possibly this is one of those 'truisms' that turns out to be an urban myth or at least not quite as simple as usually described).  The F-4 was initially designed without a gun / cannon, since it had air-to-air missiles that would supposedly render the gun obsolete - anything dangerous would be destroyed by missiles (or destroy the F-4 by missiles) before they ever got close to gun range. Turns out that the anti-air missiles didn't perform as reliably as hoped, and they did find themselves in dogfighting range without a gun to fall back on.
New versions were quickly developed that did have a gun, and all US planes since then, including the F-35 which is very much meant to not be a dogfighter, still carry a gun, because the cost of including it is relatively small, and the downside of not having one if you happen to find yourself in a situation where it's the best option is comparatively large.

Cultural block, 100%.  Once a weapon system has achieved such an exaggerated cultural profile the system itself almost becomes a psychological heuristic towards achieving the effects associated with its success.  As far as I can see it gets even worse once people start assuming they want to apply certain effects because that's what their favourite weapon system can do, because then you've blinded yourself to the possibility of the system's obsolescence.
It takes time and energy to occasionally reconsider what effects you want to apply and then work backwards to establish the best way to actually achieve that.  It always blows people's minds when you do it well, though.
I think what photon is admirably trying to do is observe the new, successful weapon systems in Ukraine and, instead of just deciding that "dronez rule every1 must has dronez!", extract the secret sauce of their success in more general, physical terms.
Unfortunately I (so far) think that the e-t profile and/or integral of same is a red herring; I think it's an emergent property of weapon systems that are able to lean into precision vs. brute force, rather than a deterministic property that can be used to decide the effectiveness of a weapon.

It's confused me for a long time that combatants don't focus on applying pyschological effects more often, at least on the battlefield.  I can kind of understand why western forces might shun the idea (good luck being seen as 'the good guys' if you try some of this stuff) but, for the sake of some extra weight, why don't Russian drones and missiles emit an inhuman screaming noise (for example) as they approach their target?  Especially those being used for terror attacks on civilian targets.
Ju-87s were militarily next-to-useless but their psychological impact on the enemy was out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed, almost entirely due to the sirens that sounded as the early models attacked.
V1s were militarily next-to-useless but people feared them far more than they needed to because you could hear them coming and you could hear when the motor stopped.  That was what people feared.

Cultural block, 100%.  Once a weapon system has achieved such an exaggerated cultural profile the system itself almost becomes a psychological heuristic towards achieving the effects associated with its success.  As far as I can see it gets even worse once people start assuming they want to apply certain effects because that's what their favourite weapon system can do, because then you've blinded yourself to the possibility of the system's obsolescence.
It takes time and energy to occasionally reconsider what effects you want to apply and then work backwards to establish the best way to actually achieve that.  It always blows people's minds when you do it well, though.
I think what photon is admirably trying to do is observe the new, successful weapon systems in Ukraine and, instead of just deciding that "dronez rule every1 must has dronez!", extract the secret sauce of their success in more general, physical terms.
Unfortunately I (so far) think that the e-t profile and/or integral of same is a red herring; I think it's an emergent property of weapon systems that are able to lean into precision vs. brute force, rather than a deterministic property that can be used to decide the effectiveness of a weapon.

It's confused me for a long time that combatants don't focus on applying pyschological effects more often, at least on the battlefield.  I can kind of understand why western forces might shun the idea (good luck being seen as 'the good guys' if you try some of this stuff) but, for the sake of some extra weight, why don't Russian drones and missiles emit an inhuman screaming noise (for example) as they approach their target?  Especially those being used for terror attacks on civilian targets.
Ju-87s were militarily next-to-useless but their psychological impact on the enemy was out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed, almost entirely due to the sirens that sounded as the early models attacked.
V1s were militarily next-to-useless but people feared them far more than they needed to because you could hear them coming and you could hear when the motor stopped.  That was what people feared.

Imo you're one order away from the truth, here: the hard requirement is the effect (including the type of effect).  You'll probably need to transport an object to the target to cause the effect but that's not the start.
Again, I think you're one dimension away: you want to "delay the collapse of the weapon's time and space option space" not necessarily as long as possible but at least until the point at which the target can no longer avoid being hit and there is therefore no longer a need to re-target.  The rifle bullet is fine if fired from close range.  The FPV drone is stuffed if the target drives away from it at 100km/h.  What matters isn't the energy profile of the weapon system per se but its relationship to the intended target.
If you start from an intended effect, you can decide what the best target will be and what the best type of effect would be (chemical, kinetic, phonic, electromagnetic, etc.).  You can then work out the best way to apply that effect to that target (i.e. the type of warhead) in order to achieve the intended overall effect (I'll google synonyms for "effect" in a minute, don't worry).  The mass, volume and fragility of the selected warhead will be the main things that dictate the achievable energy-time curves for your weapon system.  Then you can start worrying about things such as launch signatures or changing trajectories post-launch and whether you can realistically do anything about those things.
I've already written about the "as long as possible" point but you mention retaining energy here and that's important.  Retaining energy is physically expensive and should always be seen as a compromising factor.  All else being equal you want to retain as little energy as necessary after launch in order to achieve your desired effect at the target.

Thanks for explaining what I'm trying to do better than I could!
What I'm trying to articulate (somewhat hamfistedly) is a tension between a hard requirement and a thing-you-appear-to-really-want in a weapon system. The hard requirement is that you must physically transport some physical object to your target to deliver whatever effect you're hoping to deliver. Mostly I'm thinking about kinetic effects, but maybe others too?
The thing you want is to delay, as long as possible, the collapse of the weapon's time and space option space. For a thing like a rifle, that space collapses as soon as the bullet leaves the barrel. For an FPV drone, that targeting time and options space remains uncollapsed until either your battery runs out or you hit something. Because the energy isn't put into the weapon system all up front, you can use that energy to retain the targeting option space for much longer as the weapon moves from launch to target. I think when we talk about "precision", we're mostly talking about delaying the collapse of the targeting choice space as long as possible (which requires the weapon to retain energy as long as possible).

Cultural block, 100%.  Once a weapon system has achieved such an exaggerated cultural profile the system itself almost becomes a psychological heuristic towards achieving the effects associated with its success.  As far as I can see it gets even worse once people start assuming they want to apply certain effects because that's what their favourite weapon system can do, because then you've blinded yourself to the possibility of the system's obsolescence.
It takes time and energy to occasionally reconsider what effects you want to apply and then work backwards to establish the best way to actually achieve that.  It always blows people's minds when you do it well, though.
I think what photon is admirably trying to do is observe the new, successful weapon systems in Ukraine and, instead of just deciding that "dronez rule every1 must has dronez!", extract the secret sauce of their success in more general, physical terms.
Unfortunately I (so far) think that the e-t profile and/or integral of same is a red herring; I think it's an emergent property of weapon systems that are able to lean into precision vs. brute force, rather than a deterministic property that can be used to decide the effectiveness of a weapon.

If we are trying to learn how to do war better, though, I don't think we can ignore the "soft and fuzzy" stuff at all.  You have been among the first to remind people on this very thread that the world doesn't stop turning when the war ends and there are many very recent examples of it all going Pete Tong when people have forgotten that.  You have to have a lasting relationship with the people you just finished fighting.  How much harder is that going to be if you spent the whole war doing everything you could to terrorise them in ever more imaginitive ways; drilling right down into their amygdalas with screaming drones and running spider-mines to teach them an instinctive loathing of contact with your forces?
As I said, I'm really surprised that some people don't do this stuff more.  I would however advise caution if we were to think of doing it more.  At least I would if we ever want to be welcomed anywhere as "liberators", again.

It's confused me for a long time that combatants don't focus on applying pyschological effects more often, at least on the battlefield.  I can kind of understand why western forces might shun the idea (good luck being seen as 'the good guys' if you try some of this stuff) but, for the sake of some extra weight, why don't Russian drones and missiles emit an inhuman screaming noise (for example) as they approach their target?  Especially those being used for terror attacks on civilian targets.
Ju-87s were militarily next-to-useless but their psychological impact on the enemy was out of all proportion to the actual threat they posed, almost entirely due to the sirens that sounded as the early models attacked.
V1s were militarily next-to-useless but people feared them far more than they needed to because you could hear them coming and you could hear when the motor stopped.  That was what people feared.