How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[kimbosbread]

Just now, poesel said:

But there are other ways. You could attack the transmission protocols and try to take over the drone.

Offensive real-time cyberwar is a really interesting concept, but I’m not sure how close that is. You’ll basically need to build a general purpose automated attacker, think HackGPT or something. You won’t have anybody in a trench or AFV who knowns nmap from ssh from vim, so it needs to be completely automated and basically have a natural language interface in which to communicate with its masters in- hey I broke into this drone, what do you want me to do with it?

[photon]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

tac aviation

So, what ever happened to the Russian helicopters? During the summer Ukrainian push it looked like the KA-52s were effective at their intended job of breaking up a mechanized breach, and the UAF was targeting them on the ground. Have they been withdrawn? Blown up? No longer necessary? Tac helicopters seem like another system that's ripe for disruption by cheap powerful compute at the edge.

[Letter from Prague]

15 minutes ago, poesel said:

Hmm, not so sure about this part (I totally agree with the rest). Military drones are in their infancy and so is EW wrt to drones.

Devices that blast loudly to drown the spectrum are surely on the way out. But there are other ways. You could attack the transmission protocols and try to take over the drone. Or attack the video transmission to spy on the drone, or even fake it. Or put an EMP blaster on a drone and try to fry others. Or have cheaper EW emitters than the means to find and destroy them (economic attrition).

I'm no expert in this matter, but I think it is too early to dismiss EW.

And that's even before you get to the overlap between EW and direct energy weapons. For non-autonomous drone, short and well targeted blast can destroy receivers and render it uncontrollable without needing to broadcast in all direction all the time. Lasers can destroy cameras at way lower power levels than that are needed for vaporizing something.

None of this means drones are defeated - but I think "we haven't seen majority of the arms race yet" is pretty safe position. It also makes me somewhat frustrated that I don't see major Western militaries investing into this, but maybe it's just classified.

Edited May 18 by Letter from Prague

[Vet 0369]

On 5/13/2024 at 3:07 PM, LongLeftFlank said:

Good! The slow blade penetrates the shield.

Dune!

[kimbosbread]

5 minutes ago, Letter from Prague said:

And that's even before you get to the overlap between EW and direct energy weapons. For non-autonomous drone, short and well targeted blast can destroy receivers and render it uncontrollable without needing to broadcast in all direction all the time. Lasers can destroy cameras at way lower power levels than that are needed for vaporizing something.

I gotta be honest, I’m not convinced by “Jewish Space Lasers”. In principle, I get that you can blind and destroy optics, but in practice, this means you need LOS, and way to detect the drone quickly.

Assuming these work, which I don’t think they will due to autonomous, low flying drones, there are all sorts of operational and logistics issues with this kind of systems. To charge the capacitor bank and batteries, you need a generator. That means noise and heat. That makes you a nice big target.

Apparently soldiers are not a fan of the testbeds: https://breakingdefense.com/2024/05/army-soldiers-not-impressed-with-strykers-outfitted-with-50-kilowatt-lasers-service-official-says/

[kimbosbread]

Which gets me to my next point- is there even a practical way to quickly detect and identify small autonomous drones flying at 0.5-1000m, and at 1-200kmh?

The Dune quote is sooooo relevant. What do we even do if the drones learn that the slow approach is completely ignored by AAA? You can’t shoot everything slow moving around you! Or what if the drones approach at 1m height? These things have completely wide open flight evelopes.

[ASL Veteran]

 

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According to several reports, the Ukrainian Air Force has begun flying Wild Weasel missions to suppress Russian air defense radar.

 

 

 

TheRevolutionReport

 

@TheRevolutionR1

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UKRAINE IS LEARNING VIETNAM WAR TACTICS The Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine adopted the tactics of the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War to destroy air defense systems on the front line. A tactic called “wild weasel” is when pilots allow enemy air defense… Show more

 

 

10:44 AM · May 13, 2024

 

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The tactic requires a pilot to tease the surface-to-air missile site into unlocking its fire control radar. As the radar illuminates the aircraft, it is engaged with an AGM-88 HARM missile that locks onto the radar signal. If the radar site shuts down emissions, the HARM still flies to the last known location of the emitter. This is the kind of "grab them by the 'nads, stab them in the face" combat that requires nerves of steel.

This is an inside-the-cockpit view.

 

 

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To effectively use the F-16s they will receive in the next two to three months, the Ukrainians must master the SEAD/DEAD mission to open maneuver space. To do that, you must eliminate enemy surveillance radar and air defense systems. The Russians never bothered to develop a doctrine like SEAD/DEAD, and as a result, they never managed to establish air superiority over the battlespace. In fact, they have lost several high-value aircraft deep over Russian territory. If this report is accurate, it is an excellent sign that another link to Ukraine's Soviet past has been broken.

Here is an excellent brief history of the Wild Weasels.

 

 

 

 

 

[poesel]

Just happened to stumble over this video from a Ukrainian drone production workshop:

 

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, holoween said:

Well then we should also look at reliability of the system and possible density of fires.

Yes, density of fire is something that UAS theoretically has a difficult time matching up with artillery.  Except, that's theory and not reality.  In reality the shell shortages and high degree of vulnerability to artillery systems has limited massed artillery fire.  A high level Ukrainian source recently went so far as to say that towed artillery is pretty much pointless.  They fire off a few rounds and then have to move quickly before UAS or traditional counter battery fire (often directed by UAS) responds.

I've already argued, several times, that massed fire isn't all that important.  What is important are results.  If a column of 6 vehicles are driving at top speed towards a trench and UAS spots it several KMs away there is enough time to get FPVs into the air and intercepting the column.  If you wish to use the 1 in 5 hit ratio, then Ukraine only needs to launch 5 FPVs to ensure that the first vehicle is effectively hit.  If that one vehicle winds up blocking a road or failing to clear mines, then it has done its job.  How many artillery rounds would it take to ensure a hit?  More, I'm sure.

Also, it is clear that offensive drone capabilities will be held at the company level very soon, if not platoon.  It's already happening.  So the deployment distance between drone units will continue to shrink and the ability to mass drone units for particular operations will grow.  This is possible primarily because of the inexpensive acquisition and deployment costs.

The limitations on UAS from EW is temporary.  The_Capt did a nice job explaining how automation is already finding its way into this war, so we should presume for the next war it will be standard.  Once that happens, UAS will have as much to fear from EW as a strategic bomber fears a machinegun.

Steve

[ASL Veteran]

 

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, holoween said:

So the stuff you put on the drone has no effect on its price?

Of course it does, but it's not much.

Like JonS you are focused on a shrub and not the forest.  The $80k estimate you quoted is factually flawed because it includes infrastructure that is used for more than just one drone.  So if you are trying to examine the per FPV cost those things must not be considered as relevant.

Now, if you want to examine the total cost of deploying a drone unit (that controls many drones), that's fine.  Take the infrastructure cost and then divide it by how many drones it is expected to use.  That gives you an operational cost per drone.

But here is my main objection.  Someone says "a dumb 155mm round is EUR 3000" and I say (generously) that is equivalent to a single FPV drone.  You then say "ah, but this source says the real cost is $80k with everything factored in".  That's apples to oranges.  Apples to apples is comparing that $80k number against the cost for a single 155mm round, plus the cannon, plus the soldiers, plus the training, plus the ISR, and plus everything else.  Using this flawed accounting method that would put the cost of a 155mm shell at probably $15m.

To summarize, if you want to use the $80k figure for the "true cost" of a single FPV, then compare it to the "true cost" of a single 155mm shell of $15m.  So were you trying to argue the dumb artillery round is more cost effective?  Because if you were, you did the opposite.

 

Folks might remember that I've had debates like this with you guys for 27 years.  "The stats say it takes 5 Shermans to kill 1 Panther, yet I had 5 Panthers and lost two of them to a single Sherman!  Your game is broken!".  I can knock down arguments like this with one hand tied behind my back, half asleep, and needing to pee really badly.

Steve

[holoween]

8 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Of course it does, but it's not much.

Like JonS you are focused on a shrub and not the forest.  The $80k estimate you quoted is factually flawed because it includes infrastructure that is used for more than just one drone.  So if you are trying to examine the per FPV cost those things must not be considered as relevant.

 

Given that nowhere else in the paper they discuss anything but the actual unit price im inclined to disagree with this interpretation. They havent mentioned the price for any infrastructure for the employment im assuming because they are concerned primarily with the drones themselves as they are the attritionable part of the system.

 

25 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

The limitations on UAS from EW is temporary.  The_Capt did a nice job explaining how automation is already finding its way into this war, so we should presume for the next war it will be standard.  Once that happens, UAS will have as much to fear from EW as a strategic bomber fears a machinegun.

Steve

If youre making fully them fully automated youre going to dramatically increase the price quite easily to the point of being prohibitively expensive. And thats also only for the actual strike drones. Anything for recon needs the comms link or its pointless.

 

Also as a reminder im not arguing that drones arent changing the battlefield or that we just need a slight change and were back to late cold war fighting. Im arguning that investing into drones at the expense of everything else is a really bad idea because were unlikely to see such an outsized effect of drones in the future simply because counters will actually get introduced while in ukraine very little of that actually exists.

22 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Folks might remember that I've had debates like this with you guys for 27 years.  "The stats say it takes 5 Shermans to kill 1 Panther, yet I had 5 Panthers and lost two of them to a single Sherman!  Your game is broken!".  I can knock down arguments like this with one hand tied behind my back, half asleep, and needing to pee really badly.

I mean thats just a ltp issue. Sadly the majority of players who play CM have no idea how to actually play/treat CM as a normal strategy game.

[Battlefront.com]

18 minutes ago, holoween said:

Given that nowhere else in the paper they discuss anything but the actual unit price im inclined to disagree with this interpretation. They havent mentioned the price for any infrastructure for the employment im assuming because they are concerned primarily with the drones themselves as they are the attritionable part of the system.

Then what is the RUSI document saying brings the cost up by about $76,000?   "communication links" also sounds a lot like something that isn't specific to one FPV.

 

18 minutes ago, holoween said:

If youre making fully them fully automated youre going to dramatically increase the price quite easily to the point of being prohibitively expensive. And thats also only for the actual strike drones. Anything for recon needs the comms link or its pointless.

It seems you've missed large sections of discussion here about the costs of autonomy.  It is actually quite cheap and it is already seeing limited use in Ukraine right now.

There are also systems which are hybrid Human and autonomous which provide the benefits of both without any downsides from a cost standpoint.

As for needing a continuous feed for recon, that depends on what the mission is.  An autonomous flight that records everything it sees and flies back safely provides at least some view of the battlespace that is useful for some purposes.  Especially if it is directed based on other intel sources (e.g. satellite sees something, autonomous drones fly out to verify).

Also consider that an environment that negatively impacts ISR activities of a UAS also negatively impacts artillery usage.  It also negatively impacts ground operations generally.

This is where the more expensive UAS still has a role to play.  The multi-million Dollar "eyes in the sky" are largely immune to EW.  But those are not what we're discussing.

18 minutes ago, holoween said:

Also as a reminder im not arguing that drones arent changing the battlefield or that we just need a slight change and were back to late cold war fighting. Im arguning that investing into drones at the expense of everything else is a really bad idea because were unlikely to see such an outsized effect of drones in the future simply because counters will actually get introduced while in ukraine very little of that actually exists.

I mean thats just a ltp issue. Sadly the majority of players who play CM have no idea how to actually play/treat CM as a normal strategy game.

I agree with you that artillery still has a role to play for quite some time.  Especially very long distance precision artillery, such as ATACMS.  However, the real cost of drone systems (as opposed to what Rheinmetall, General Dynamics, and BAE would come up with) are not in danger of coming at the expense of other systems from a budget standpoint.  Building a few less tanks a year, not to mention NO TANKS, would free up more than enough money to fund UAS.

Steve

[FancyCat]

Sadly Drone vs Drone has equalized in Ukraine, Russians are at drone parity according to everything recent about it. This is where other systems come into play to give a opposing side more weight.

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Visited a couple of artillery divisions firing western 155mm, and they have confirmed to me that   WE ARE SO BACK

New 155mm artillery shell stocks are definitely being felt on eastern Ukraine's frontline.   Earlier this week, Russian forces tried to push a mechanized attack through Soloviove, Donetsk Oblast, but ran into FPV drones and heavy artillery fire, losing a T-72 and two IFVs.

 

[Probus]

2 hours ago, kimbosbread said:

Offensive real-time cyberwar is a really interesting concept, but I’m not sure how close that is. You’ll basically need to build a general purpose automated attacker, think HackGPT or something. You won’t have anybody in a trench or AFV who knowns nmap from ssh from vim, so it needs to be completely automated and basically have a natural language interface in which to communicate with its masters in- hey I broke into this drone, what do you want me to do with it?

So what are folk's opinions about lumping the Russian Federation's disinformation campaigns into cyber warfare?  I only mention it because most news is consumed over the interwebs and not by TV/Newspapers anymore.

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, poesel said:

Hmm, not so sure about this part (I totally agree with the rest). Military drones are in their infancy and so is EW wrt to drones.

Devices that blast loudly to drown the spectrum are surely on the way out. But there are other ways. You could attack the transmission protocols and try to take over the drone. Or attack the video transmission to spy on the drone, or even fake it. Or put an EMP blaster on a drone and try to fry others. Or have cheaper EW emitters than the means to find and destroy them (economic attrition).

I'm no expert in this matter, but I think it is too early to dismiss EW.

I am no expert either but EW has been around for decades, so a mature counter is struggling in this war.  As to more fanciful EW (EMP blaster?). I have not seen any of this sort of tech nor does it really address fully autonomous unmanned.  The cheap-many makes the most sense out of this but again if a UAS does not need transmission protocols to target and strike then basically we cutting a link back to an operator that isn’t there.  As to the rest (eg hacking in flight), well if you can do that why not do the same for every other computerized and networked system on the battlefield? (which is basically everything.)

[Battlefront.com]

15 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

Sadly Drone vs Drone has equalized in Ukraine, Russians are at drone parity according to everything recent about it. This is where other systems come into play to give a opposing side more weight.

 

That video shows quite well what we've been talking about.  An FPV was used to strike the column and score a significant hit (I think the hit was on the tank that eventually drove into a shell crater), the column had three more vehicles disabled (one lost a track, another some sort of hit?, and a third appears to have driven into a bog), then the artillery started working on them.  I counted 9 artillery impacts, none of which directly hit any of the already disabled/abandoned vehicles.  An FPV was then flown in to make sure the tank in the crater was unrecoverable, which it succeeded at.

Steve

[The_Capt]

55 minutes ago, holoween said:

If youre making fully them fully automated youre going to dramatically increase the price quite easily to the point of being prohibitively expensive. And thats also only for the actual strike drones. Anything for recon needs the comms link or its pointless.

 

Also as a reminder im not arguing that drones arent changing the battlefield or that we just need a slight change and were back to late cold war fighting. Im arguning that investing into drones at the expense of everything else is a really bad idea because were unlikely to see such an outsized effect of drones in the future simply because counters will actually get introduced while in ukraine very little of that actually exists.

Other than a speculative RUSI report (and 80k is no where near prohibitive - a Javelin round costs nearly 3 times that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin)). Do you have any references for this?  Processing power has been getting exponentially cheaper and lighter over time.  At a full 80k milspec FPV I would also expect 80-90% pk rates at still 1/3 the cost of the Javelin.  Plus an FPV has nearly twice  the range, can double as ISR and target on the fly.  I have seen exactly zero analysis that outline the “prohibitive” costs of full autonomy.

[aside: If EW can block encrypted burst comms then none of us can talk to each other so worrying about comms from the drone is also pointless.]

“At the cost of everything else.”  ??? Yes, that is how defence procurement works.  Those poor $25m dollar tanks might not get funded because we are investing in $80k fully autonomous drones- that is 312 FPV to a single tank.  The reason tanks won’t get invested in is more likely because they are no longer effective given those drones.  The reality is actually the other way - we will spend billions on legacy equipment while emerging gets shorted because industry cannot make enough of a profit at them.

[The_Capt]

14 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

That video shows quite well what we've been talking about.  An FPV was used to strike the column and score a significant hit (I think the hit was on the tank that eventually drove into a shell crater), the column had three more vehicles disabled (one lost a track, another some sort of hit?, and a third appears to have driven into a bog), then the artillery started working on them.  I counted 9 artillery impacts, none of which directly hit any of the already disabled/abandoned vehicles.  An FPV was then flown in to make sure the tank in the crater was unrecoverable, which it succeeded at.

Steve

Same scenario but RA turns magic EW up to 11.  Operator- UAS stand back and provide ISR, fully autonomous go in and become landmines - don’t even go in for fancy strike, just fly and plop down in front - arty and ATGMs still do the dirty.  Infantry backstop the whole thing.

Welcome to 2024.

[The_Capt]

3 hours ago, photon said:

So, what ever happened to the Russian helicopters? During the summer Ukrainian push it looked like the KA-52s were effective at their intended job of breaking up a mechanized breach, and the UAF was targeting them on the ground. Have they been withdrawn? Blown up? No longer necessary? Tac helicopters seem like another system that's ripe for disruption by cheap powerful compute at the edge.

Excellent question.  Last summer they were doing stand off strikes at 8-10 kms back.  But all of these pushes over the winter have lacked tac avn support as far as I can tell.  The air power play has been glide bombs release from well back but AHs have been largely absent.

[Battlefront.com]

29 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Same scenario but RA turns magic EW up to 11.  Operator- UAS stand back and provide ISR, fully autonomous go in and become landmines - don’t even go in for fancy strike, just fly and plop down in front - arty and ATGMs still do the dirty.  Infantry backstop the whole thing.

Welcome to 2024.

Here's another scenario... EW is up to 11 and no UAS are in the area at all.  Ukraine has no idea the column is on the march, so neither FPVs or artillery respond to it.  Artillery has no more advantage than UAS in this scenario.

Another scenario is the EW is cranked back to 8.  Ukraine can use slightly better UAS with longer range cameras, but not FPVs in close.  They spot the column and dial in artillery.  A few dozen shells are fired and maybe, just maybe, they hit something enough that it stops moving, then another dozen expended to maybe kill whatever is disabled.

The point here is that you don't want to rely upon artillery to stop a moving column, not to mention ensuring its destruction.  It takes too many shells to ensure good results.  But artillery working with FPVs?  Much better outcome.

Steve

[dan/california]

 

3 hours ago, photon said:

So, what ever happened to the Russian helicopters? During the summer Ukrainian push it looked like the KA-52s were effective at their intended job of breaking up a mechanized breach, and the UAF was targeting them on the ground. Have they been withdrawn? Blown up? No longer necessary? Tac helicopters seem like another system that's ripe for disruption by cheap powerful compute at the edge.

"Modern" attack helicopters are completely obsolete. People have just spent so much money on them over the years that don't want to admit it just yet. Between cheap, expendable, and VERY soon autonomous drones, and things like the later models the Israeli spike missile that have a ~40km range, it makes zero sense to invest in expensive helicopters. At least the U.S. canceled the program for a next generation model.

The Russians got good use out the Ka-52s last year because of all the things NATO would bring to this fight that Ukraine didn't have. Good airborne radar at the right range is just one of MANY of those capabilities. They were also using the helicopters because they were they only thing in inventory that could fire their very best long range ATGM. I don't think anyone else is going to make that mistake again for a while. Whatever you want to say about the helicopter it is a very good missile. Ukarine is lucky tey don't more of them on more platforms.

3 hours ago, poesel said:

Just happened to stumble over this video from a Ukrainian drone production workshop:

 

These are smart motivated people, but at the same time this third year engineering student stuff. They are throwing large amounts of semiskilled labor at the problem to get thee production they need. For Ukraine, at this moment, this necessary and appropriate.

50 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Same scenario but RA turns magic EW up to 11.  Operator- UAS stand back and provide ISR, fully autonomous go in and become landmines - don’t even go in for fancy strike, just fly and plop down in front - arty and ATGMs still do the dirty.  Infantry backstop the whole thing.

Welcome to 2024.

So a lot of discussion about drone costs. A new Iphone costs less than $2000, by even the most pessimistic assumptions. It has an approximate infinity of processing power, and three great cameras. There is just no reason for the brains of a drone to ever cost more than that. so even if all the other bits, including a nice tandem/EFP warhead come out to $5000, you still have a DELUXE FPV drone for $7000. Except it won't be FPV, all the operator will have to do is confirm the coordinates of the kill box, and pull the safety on the warhead. 

The Pentagon needs to invest in the drone equivalent of a Gigafactory to make them by the tens and tens of thousands. And  they need to have a come to Jesus conversation with the defense industry about the way they get paid. We can afford to overpay somewhat for hardware engineering and development that works. Getting overcharged on a per piece basis is just not viable anymore.

Edited May 18 by dan/california

[poesel]

37 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

I am no expert either but EW has been around for decades, so a mature counter is struggling in this war.  As to more fanciful EW (EMP blaster?). I have not seen any of this sort of tech nor does it really address fully autonomous unmanned.  The cheap-many makes the most sense out of this but again if a UAS does not need transmission protocols to target and strike then basically we cutting a link back to an operator that isn’t there.  As to the rest (eg hacking in flight), well if you can do that why not do the same for every other computerized and networked system on the battlefield? (which is basically everything.)

I haven't seen that tech in this war, either. But you dismissed EW for the next war, and I think this is too early to do.

Even if a drone is autonomous, you still might want to have a command channel to it, I refer to Dr. Strangelove for the mechanics of it, although the encryption mechanics have improved a bit since then.
But even a fully autonomous, no back-channel drone can still be fried by microwaves or blinded by a laser.

But I have to concede the point that the importance of the necessity of a continuous radio connection to a drone will go down drastically. Hence, old-fashioned EW will lose its attack vector and become much less useful.

To answer the question of why not just hack the entire network? Because encryption on anything from mobile phone up is so hard that you need really, really much computer power to break it. OTOH, support for encryption on microcontrollers that usually fly those drones has been lacking. It just costs too many CPU cycles to do good encryption, and don't think about the video stream until you have specialized hardware.
But this, too, will go away in a few years, of course. The demand is there, so there will be products.

[chrisl]

29 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Here's another scenario... EW is up to 11 and no UAS are in the area at all.  Ukraine has no idea the column is on the march, so neither FPVs or artillery respond to it.  Artillery has no more advantage than UAS in this scenario.

 

Until the phone rings in Kyiv and it shows a Colorado Springs area code.  Kyiv listens for a second, looks at a map, and patches the call through to the BN HQ closest to the column and sets arty and UAS's in motion.

[chrisl]

29 minutes ago, poesel said:

I haven't seen that tech in this war, either. But you dismissed EW for the next war, and I think this is too early to do.

Even if a drone is autonomous, you still might want to have a command channel to it, I refer to Dr. Strangelove for the mechanics of it, although the encryption mechanics have improved a bit since then.
But even a fully autonomous, no back-channel drone can still be fried by microwaves or blinded by a laser.

But I have to concede the point that the importance of the necessity of a continuous radio connection to a drone will go down drastically. Hence, old-fashioned EW will lose its attack vector and become much less useful.

To answer the question of why not just hack the entire network? Because encryption on anything from mobile phone up is so hard that you need really, really much computer power to break it. OTOH, support for encryption on microcontrollers that usually fly those drones has been lacking. It just costs too many CPU cycles to do good encryption, and don't think about the video stream until you have specialized hardware.
But this, too, will go away in a few years, of course. The demand is there, so there will be products.

I suspect there will end up being a big asymmetry in EW capabilities.  The current Russian approach sounds mostly like "spray and pray" - send a lot of signal up in the relevant bands to cause interference, but it's not always effective because even consumer stuff (maybe even especially consumer stuff) is designed to accept large amounts of interference because of FCC requirements for consumer equipment (not allowed to generate interference, have to tolerate whatever there is).  Against someone who's expecting to face an environment with a lot of EW, that spray will mostly present targets (an awful lot of the NATO aircraft that have been cruising the Ukrainian border and the Black Sea are basically RF siphons).  

More subtle EW, like spoofing signals to take over drones will take a lot more computing, because even if video signals from the drones are't encrypted, the command signals and basic telemetry (position, orientation, altitude, speed) are low bandwidth and can be encrypted without any real operational penalty.  We'll probably start to see both encryption and spoofing of that, but it will be very lopsided as to who can spoof and who can't. Local degradation of GPS isn't too hard to do, and we've seen some of that already.

So that leaves the video feed.  A key thing to remember about encryption is that it only has to last long enough to not be useful to the eavesdropper when it's cracked.  For a drone that might be an hour or two.  And if you have a bunch of drones in the air at the same time, that's a bunch of processing power that has to get committed to breaking into the encryption in parallel, and they only have an hour, so the eavedropper has to be in position to get the signal, crack the key, and then get the information to someone for whom it's useful in that time.  And the signal for the eavesdropper just has to be degraded enough that they can't tell what it's looking at.  The old cable TV "encryption" from the 80s won't quite do it, but it doesn't have to be a whole lot better than that, either.  Sure, the eavedropper can record the signal and decrypt it later and might gain some strategic value eventually, but at the tactical level you just need an hour or so of security on the video feed.

As far as lasers and microwaves to defend against autonomous drones- lasers will certainly do it, and there's been plenty of discussion of their limitations (energy hogs, though you can run a pulsed laser that will probably damage an optical sensor off a 9V battery, the tricky part is hitting the camera straight on).  Microwaves can also fry the electronics, but need to be on a mobile platform, because the transmitter is going to be a beacon, too.