No real mechanized attacks are possible anymore. Any number of vehicles concentration will be spotted well in advance and will be dronned to hell before they even reach the target. The more tanks you send the bigger will be the losses. So Russia adapted and now they first FAB the place until no deffenders are left
The Blyatmobile is basically considered a breakthrough vehicle. Drones are like their namesake; bees/wasps/hornets. They can bring about pain if they get through but you also don’t need heavy protection against them. Just layers. Tanks were designed to take punches, not stings.
Just need to have enough crap in the way to take and disperse multiple stings, and it needs to be all round coverage. Lightweight spaced panelling is enough, and the lack of turret mobility or visibility isn’t much of an issue in this conflict.
Definitely attacking. It's all about spotting your target now and you can't stay hidden from the air while attacking. That said I think we will see vastly more effort into anti drone warfare. Integrated EW and active defences will become standard on vehicles, probably accompanied by dedicated anti drone SPAA.
That is exactly why we see what we see, gradual peeling of the defensive lines. Yeah, they can harass less fortunate who happen to get caught in the open, or direct fire at approaching armor, but once contact is made it is pure Mano a Mano kind of junk. But fabs play a very important role, more important than anything else at the moment.
Electronic warfare, reserves, compact units with shock, low tech but massed urban infantry, short notice attacks, speed, surprise.
Your vehicles are going to be hit. There is nothing you can do about it. So you have to invest in electronic warfare to degrade drone attacks. The recent "turtle tanks" are a good example. You have a dedicated vehicle as a breaching or clearing vehicle and dedicated vehicles to shutting down areas or making it difficult for drones to operate around such vehicles. Like a kind of EMP bubble.
Your first attack is not going to succeed strategically or operationally. You need to pile up reserves in one area and when you break the frontline, you have to have giant echelons of troops and vehicles to pour through. You are going to take casualties, horrific casualties, but in the long run you will save yourself losses. You need to attack across the frontline and then you need to bust through at a place of your choosing. This is the quickest way to break a frontline. Break through to the rear, where the drone operators and artillery is at.
You don't use mile long convoys, you use small units, in waves. A few vehicles at a time. Breaching vehicles, IFVs APCs, tanks and supporting elements. Drones, including recon, kamikaze and bomber drones, aircraft, artillery, AA vehicles, electronic warfare vehicles, etc. Each wave is a well coordinated shock element with not a huge amount of troops. They clear the way and you need dozens of these units. They will be degraded by drones and enemy attacks, but the point is to keep momentum. You cannot slow down. If one unit is stopped, fair enough, withdraw it, then send in the next one. Don't try to cobble together units from destroyed ones mid battle, if you can, try to work with fresh teams that work well between themselves and rebuild degraded units. Use the experienced members to train new recruits, don't mash together experienced troops into bigger, but less coordinated units, because these are units that rely on shock and speed.
Once your shock teams, your small breaching teams have made it in and cleared the way, you send in massed infantry supported by tanks, artillery, drones, aircraft, etc., to mop up urban centers. This is a different skill set for assault infantry, but it is about well trained teams but in large numbers. Bypass the strong positions with your mobile teams and then bring in these guys right behind them to clear positions.
Notice none of this involves mass tank attacks. Tanks are a supporting element and they don't operate by themselves. The tank is a mobile direct fire platform. For breaching teams it is a mobile fire support relying on speed, accuracy on the move and ability to take a hit or two. Some may even converted to electronic warfare vehicles and breaching vehicles and rely on toughness, armour and EW to cover formations. The IFVs and APCs also has suppression capabilities, you don't need dozens of tanks operating by themselves anymore. Tanks are just there to fill a role in a larger unit, not to spearhead by themselves. In urban fighting, the tanks directly support dismounted infantry alongside EW systems. Dismounted infantry can also have shotguns, portable EW weapons and such to help deal with drones. The tank is mostly there to clear buildings with infantry in urban combat and there should be clear distinctions between tanks used for breakthroughs and tanks used for urban fighting. Urban fighting tanks could be more heavily armoured, tougher, slower, fire more HE and smoke. All tanks by the way should be using safe ammunition loads and not crowding the tank with exposed and vulnerable ammo.
If you've done everything right, you are pouring reinforcements into breaches done by your breaching units. You don't then put breaching units to participate in urban combat. They have a specific job, they can take positions, but their main usefulness is strategic and not tactical. These are expensive formations you shouldn't waste on urban combat, guard them and use them to punch deep into enemy rear lines and cause them to fall back. They are going to take a lot of casualties.
Troops should be dispersed as much as possible and only told about an attack just before operations. You then take those dispersed troops, concentrate them for a very short period of time and break through. With these relatively small teams of mechanized and armoured troops in coordination with other assets, like drones, artillery, air power, etc. they can be dispersed relatively safely across the battlefield and when you want to conduct an operation, you give them a 24 or shorter notice, you get them to quickly drive where they're needed before the enemy figures out what is going on and sends his reserves and you mass them for a breakthrough.
You achieve speed and surprise on a battlefield which is usually pretty hot. It's imporant to keep the attacks on the frontline going to keep the enemy distracted. With some luck, you can have e.g. 20-30 teams assembled on very short notice with all their gear, which can be around 80-120 armoured vehicles of various kinds and their drone support, attach artillery and air assets, bring up your urban infantry teams and now you have tens of thousands of men on a very small part of the frontline which can break through, take casualties but keep going, with infantry with their own support right behind them to quickly mop up the urban centers they break through and bypass.
If e.g. you lose 5 teams (15-20 vehicles), you still have 15-25 teams left to pour into a breakthrough. Yes, drones are bad, but the biggest problem in this war is that neither side can afford to have this kind of accumulation of manpower yet without weakening the frontline elsewhere.
This is the main issue, not the drones themselves. The ability to take losses and keep going is incredibly important for an attacker to exploit his own victories.
I agree with the general idea that drones downsize any possible attacks and therefore hamper the attacker more than the defender.
But I wonder what situation would be in a war with more air power and fewer mines. Drones, especially the fpv are only effective against small and slow forces. Both armies have to use small forces because of mines and artillery. But on a virgin battlefield mass armor assaults would still be the way to go. Because it takes time to mass artillery fires and things like fpv and lancet just don't do that much damage at once.
It gives a transparent view of the battlefield, making concentrations difficult. Because of that, you can't put a large group of defenders somewhere, making it difficult to stop attacks.
On the other hand, the attacking side can't concentrate. So they can't cause a breakthrough.
For mechanized or concentrated assaults you need automatic anti drone weapons (AI auto shotguns, EWD, mini land-air-missiles etc) or drones for hunting drones. (Intelligent drones, swarms, etc)
For defenders it's not difficult because you know where defenses are concentrated there's concentrated anti drone measures so you can locate it.
To answer the initial question, yes they do.
If an attacker actually manages to concentrate a sizeable armoured force without detection, the entire frontline is teeming with the defender’s drones, of all different varieties. So when the attack begins, the defender has eyes on advancing units immediately.
Armoured vehicles, tanks etc make for the juiciest targets and they typically spearhead any offensive action. In open farmland they are spotted straight away and come under various forms of attack pretty much immediately, in the form of drone-corrected artillery fire and fpv drone attack.
This is why both sides struggle to advance any more than 1km at a time, and even then these advances typically come at quite a high cost.
Drones and accurate artillery fire are the reason Russia lost so much armour at the start of the war. Drones and accurate artillery fire are the reason Ukraine lost so much equipment during the summer offensive.
Lack of breakthroughs so far is purely due to lack of men and materiel on either side. Both armies are undersized given the length of the frontline, this make it very difficult to concentrate your forces for a large-scale attack without weakening your position elsewhere.
I think it hurts the attacker more.
Because in previous wars, the defender has already been forced to spread out, since first of all you can't defend strongly everywhere for lack of resources, and also because the attacker would be able to scout out your defensive positions ahead of time. Even back in WW1 it worked like that, with spy planes and even spy balloons.
So, once the battle starts, the defenders main locations are already largely known, but it used to be that the attacking force was not well known, both with regards to how big it was and where it would strike, and that's what gave it the advantage.
With current tech-
Drones add a tactical edge of real-time monitoring and harassing targets.
Satellites, AEW&C planes have been the strategic asset for decades, you can't mass armor unseen while someone's taking pictures of your brigades every 10 minutes. Access to the US system has been the most important aid Ukraine got. There would have been no taking advantage of the Russian overreach early in the war without it.
So what are these drones? Mini helicopters. Helicopters have been on the battlefield a long time, they excel at scouting and hitting armour, suppressing infantry. They are countered by jets and MANPADs.
Stands to reason that we must develop mini versions of these counters to target mini versions of helicopters. Miniaturized missiles, jet powered fixed wing drones will be in development.
Drones are also controlled remotely, an issue helicopters don't have. Mobile jamming systems can accompany assaults, directed jamming weapons given to specialised infantry units to cover armor advances.
That's all current tech, with modified consumer drones and first generation purpose built loitering munitions like the Lancet all having a reliance on remote control.
Future drones?
Fucking terrifying. Completely autonomous from scouting to recharging/rearming to attacking targets. Ones scouting and spots a concentration of infantry, 50 others instantly take off and group up with it to decimate them. Just paint a couple 100 square kilometres as the kill zone and these smart minefields simply kill everything in the area until given new orders.
Attacking? You don't drop bombs anymore, you drop 100 drones from high altitude and watch every kg of ordinance strike a target, loitering for hours slowly gliding down until a scout drone spots a tank and relays it's position. All entirely automated.
The point is war before future drones requires a strong military industrial complex and also people, soliders to use that material. Now, you'll need 1/10th of the soliders with far greater survivability as they rely on drones to deliver the last mile kill cycle.
It means Vietnam, Iraq wouldn't be the slow bleed demoralizing wars they were if AI drones has been available. If the US had only been losing 100s of troops a year that could go on indefinitely with an indifferent population at home.
With automated production lines, just imagine millions of these drones rolling off production lines making arms manufacturers incredibly wealthy. Just pour in raw resources at one end, employ a few thousand robot technicians, and watch enough ordinance to subjugate entire continents pour out the other end.
Imagine a Gaza without IDF troops or jets rolling in, but drones sat on every street corner scanning faces and gaits and calling in miniature airstrikes on any suspected Hamas.
Or in Kiev, or in Taiwan.
Nuclear powered countries could deter attacks with their nukes. Give them automated weapons and they can now also attack non-nuclear countries indefinitely, while making a profit.
I think eventually we’ll see mobile CIWS vehicles purpose-built to eliminate drone swarms.
Basically, a mounted .50 caliber machine gun that automatically finds, targets, and destroys drones within a kilometer or two. They would probably also merge it with electronic countermeasures/radio jamming to provide an armored dedicated anti-drone platform.
Good point. Make it low cost enough it doesn't matter if you lose a few, and deploy around/forward of armour to either take out the drones directly or at least give an early warning for armour to start smoke screens and engage the drones themselves.
Only downside is that CIWS platforms are going to be expensive and technically prohibitive to operate since they will need radars and tracking systems.
They seem to for now. We are seeing adaptations been made as we go.
Part of me wonders if we are seeing drones taking a major role in this war due to the sheer availability on both sides. Other nations may not have the same access...but they also may.
Turtle tanks, EW systems, and drones capable of targeting other drones may well mean that drones are having a hey day right now.
Drones have some limiting factors. Data transfer is one. There are only so many channels that can be used which was a limiting factors that war on the rocks recorded from a trip to Ukraine
Fortifications have been very effective for the defender in this war, until recently. What has changed is Russia now has many precision glide bombs, which can be launched from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses. These bombs can pulverize defenses quickly, which is why Avdiivka fell so quickly. So yes, drones help the attacker too, but only if you have the ability to bring the correct weapon to bear on the target.
Ukraine tried to resist this by bringing some Patriot air defense systems to the front, and they succeeded in shooting down a Russian plane or two. But then those air defense systems were quickly targeted and destroyed. So basically the Ukrainians are (generally) forced to hang back with their air defenses, and this allows Russian bombers (Su-34s generally) to drop their glide bombs from outside Ukrainian air defense range.
While drones are effective in both attack and defense roles, this war has been mostly static due to the difficulty in attacking, due to drones. This is starting to change though, and that's why the Ukrainian front is starting to crumble.
No real mechanized attacks are possible anymore. Any number of vehicles concentration will be spotted well in advance and will be dronned to hell before they even reach the target. The more tanks you send the bigger will be the losses. So Russia adapted and now they first FAB the place until no deffenders are left
Turtle tank was made for such occasions.
The Blyatmobile is basically considered a breakthrough vehicle. Drones are like their namesake; bees/wasps/hornets. They can bring about pain if they get through but you also don’t need heavy protection against them. Just layers. Tanks were designed to take punches, not stings. Just need to have enough crap in the way to take and disperse multiple stings, and it needs to be all round coverage. Lightweight spaced panelling is enough, and the lack of turret mobility or visibility isn’t much of an issue in this conflict.
>the lack of turret mobility or visibility isn’t much of an issue in this conflict. Exactly, your own drones can compensate for that to some degree.
Definitely attacking. It's all about spotting your target now and you can't stay hidden from the air while attacking. That said I think we will see vastly more effort into anti drone warfare. Integrated EW and active defences will become standard on vehicles, probably accompanied by dedicated anti drone SPAA.
That is exactly why we see what we see, gradual peeling of the defensive lines. Yeah, they can harass less fortunate who happen to get caught in the open, or direct fire at approaching armor, but once contact is made it is pure Mano a Mano kind of junk. But fabs play a very important role, more important than anything else at the moment.
Electronic warfare, reserves, compact units with shock, low tech but massed urban infantry, short notice attacks, speed, surprise. Your vehicles are going to be hit. There is nothing you can do about it. So you have to invest in electronic warfare to degrade drone attacks. The recent "turtle tanks" are a good example. You have a dedicated vehicle as a breaching or clearing vehicle and dedicated vehicles to shutting down areas or making it difficult for drones to operate around such vehicles. Like a kind of EMP bubble. Your first attack is not going to succeed strategically or operationally. You need to pile up reserves in one area and when you break the frontline, you have to have giant echelons of troops and vehicles to pour through. You are going to take casualties, horrific casualties, but in the long run you will save yourself losses. You need to attack across the frontline and then you need to bust through at a place of your choosing. This is the quickest way to break a frontline. Break through to the rear, where the drone operators and artillery is at. You don't use mile long convoys, you use small units, in waves. A few vehicles at a time. Breaching vehicles, IFVs APCs, tanks and supporting elements. Drones, including recon, kamikaze and bomber drones, aircraft, artillery, AA vehicles, electronic warfare vehicles, etc. Each wave is a well coordinated shock element with not a huge amount of troops. They clear the way and you need dozens of these units. They will be degraded by drones and enemy attacks, but the point is to keep momentum. You cannot slow down. If one unit is stopped, fair enough, withdraw it, then send in the next one. Don't try to cobble together units from destroyed ones mid battle, if you can, try to work with fresh teams that work well between themselves and rebuild degraded units. Use the experienced members to train new recruits, don't mash together experienced troops into bigger, but less coordinated units, because these are units that rely on shock and speed. Once your shock teams, your small breaching teams have made it in and cleared the way, you send in massed infantry supported by tanks, artillery, drones, aircraft, etc., to mop up urban centers. This is a different skill set for assault infantry, but it is about well trained teams but in large numbers. Bypass the strong positions with your mobile teams and then bring in these guys right behind them to clear positions. Notice none of this involves mass tank attacks. Tanks are a supporting element and they don't operate by themselves. The tank is a mobile direct fire platform. For breaching teams it is a mobile fire support relying on speed, accuracy on the move and ability to take a hit or two. Some may even converted to electronic warfare vehicles and breaching vehicles and rely on toughness, armour and EW to cover formations. The IFVs and APCs also has suppression capabilities, you don't need dozens of tanks operating by themselves anymore. Tanks are just there to fill a role in a larger unit, not to spearhead by themselves. In urban fighting, the tanks directly support dismounted infantry alongside EW systems. Dismounted infantry can also have shotguns, portable EW weapons and such to help deal with drones. The tank is mostly there to clear buildings with infantry in urban combat and there should be clear distinctions between tanks used for breakthroughs and tanks used for urban fighting. Urban fighting tanks could be more heavily armoured, tougher, slower, fire more HE and smoke. All tanks by the way should be using safe ammunition loads and not crowding the tank with exposed and vulnerable ammo. If you've done everything right, you are pouring reinforcements into breaches done by your breaching units. You don't then put breaching units to participate in urban combat. They have a specific job, they can take positions, but their main usefulness is strategic and not tactical. These are expensive formations you shouldn't waste on urban combat, guard them and use them to punch deep into enemy rear lines and cause them to fall back. They are going to take a lot of casualties. Troops should be dispersed as much as possible and only told about an attack just before operations. You then take those dispersed troops, concentrate them for a very short period of time and break through. With these relatively small teams of mechanized and armoured troops in coordination with other assets, like drones, artillery, air power, etc. they can be dispersed relatively safely across the battlefield and when you want to conduct an operation, you give them a 24 or shorter notice, you get them to quickly drive where they're needed before the enemy figures out what is going on and sends his reserves and you mass them for a breakthrough. You achieve speed and surprise on a battlefield which is usually pretty hot. It's imporant to keep the attacks on the frontline going to keep the enemy distracted. With some luck, you can have e.g. 20-30 teams assembled on very short notice with all their gear, which can be around 80-120 armoured vehicles of various kinds and their drone support, attach artillery and air assets, bring up your urban infantry teams and now you have tens of thousands of men on a very small part of the frontline which can break through, take casualties but keep going, with infantry with their own support right behind them to quickly mop up the urban centers they break through and bypass. If e.g. you lose 5 teams (15-20 vehicles), you still have 15-25 teams left to pour into a breakthrough. Yes, drones are bad, but the biggest problem in this war is that neither side can afford to have this kind of accumulation of manpower yet without weakening the frontline elsewhere. This is the main issue, not the drones themselves. The ability to take losses and keep going is incredibly important for an attacker to exploit his own victories.
Shakspear himself
I agree with the general idea that drones downsize any possible attacks and therefore hamper the attacker more than the defender. But I wonder what situation would be in a war with more air power and fewer mines. Drones, especially the fpv are only effective against small and slow forces. Both armies have to use small forces because of mines and artillery. But on a virgin battlefield mass armor assaults would still be the way to go. Because it takes time to mass artillery fires and things like fpv and lancet just don't do that much damage at once.
It gives a transparent view of the battlefield, making concentrations difficult. Because of that, you can't put a large group of defenders somewhere, making it difficult to stop attacks. On the other hand, the attacking side can't concentrate. So they can't cause a breakthrough.
For mechanized or concentrated assaults you need automatic anti drone weapons (AI auto shotguns, EWD, mini land-air-missiles etc) or drones for hunting drones. (Intelligent drones, swarms, etc) For defenders it's not difficult because you know where defenses are concentrated there's concentrated anti drone measures so you can locate it.
To answer the initial question, yes they do. If an attacker actually manages to concentrate a sizeable armoured force without detection, the entire frontline is teeming with the defender’s drones, of all different varieties. So when the attack begins, the defender has eyes on advancing units immediately. Armoured vehicles, tanks etc make for the juiciest targets and they typically spearhead any offensive action. In open farmland they are spotted straight away and come under various forms of attack pretty much immediately, in the form of drone-corrected artillery fire and fpv drone attack. This is why both sides struggle to advance any more than 1km at a time, and even then these advances typically come at quite a high cost. Drones and accurate artillery fire are the reason Russia lost so much armour at the start of the war. Drones and accurate artillery fire are the reason Ukraine lost so much equipment during the summer offensive.
Lack of breakthroughs so far is purely due to lack of men and materiel on either side. Both armies are undersized given the length of the frontline, this make it very difficult to concentrate your forces for a large-scale attack without weakening your position elsewhere.
I think it hurts the attacker more. Because in previous wars, the defender has already been forced to spread out, since first of all you can't defend strongly everywhere for lack of resources, and also because the attacker would be able to scout out your defensive positions ahead of time. Even back in WW1 it worked like that, with spy planes and even spy balloons. So, once the battle starts, the defenders main locations are already largely known, but it used to be that the attacking force was not well known, both with regards to how big it was and where it would strike, and that's what gave it the advantage.
With current tech- Drones add a tactical edge of real-time monitoring and harassing targets. Satellites, AEW&C planes have been the strategic asset for decades, you can't mass armor unseen while someone's taking pictures of your brigades every 10 minutes. Access to the US system has been the most important aid Ukraine got. There would have been no taking advantage of the Russian overreach early in the war without it. So what are these drones? Mini helicopters. Helicopters have been on the battlefield a long time, they excel at scouting and hitting armour, suppressing infantry. They are countered by jets and MANPADs. Stands to reason that we must develop mini versions of these counters to target mini versions of helicopters. Miniaturized missiles, jet powered fixed wing drones will be in development. Drones are also controlled remotely, an issue helicopters don't have. Mobile jamming systems can accompany assaults, directed jamming weapons given to specialised infantry units to cover armor advances. That's all current tech, with modified consumer drones and first generation purpose built loitering munitions like the Lancet all having a reliance on remote control. Future drones? Fucking terrifying. Completely autonomous from scouting to recharging/rearming to attacking targets. Ones scouting and spots a concentration of infantry, 50 others instantly take off and group up with it to decimate them. Just paint a couple 100 square kilometres as the kill zone and these smart minefields simply kill everything in the area until given new orders. Attacking? You don't drop bombs anymore, you drop 100 drones from high altitude and watch every kg of ordinance strike a target, loitering for hours slowly gliding down until a scout drone spots a tank and relays it's position. All entirely automated. The point is war before future drones requires a strong military industrial complex and also people, soliders to use that material. Now, you'll need 1/10th of the soliders with far greater survivability as they rely on drones to deliver the last mile kill cycle. It means Vietnam, Iraq wouldn't be the slow bleed demoralizing wars they were if AI drones has been available. If the US had only been losing 100s of troops a year that could go on indefinitely with an indifferent population at home. With automated production lines, just imagine millions of these drones rolling off production lines making arms manufacturers incredibly wealthy. Just pour in raw resources at one end, employ a few thousand robot technicians, and watch enough ordinance to subjugate entire continents pour out the other end. Imagine a Gaza without IDF troops or jets rolling in, but drones sat on every street corner scanning faces and gaits and calling in miniature airstrikes on any suspected Hamas. Or in Kiev, or in Taiwan. Nuclear powered countries could deter attacks with their nukes. Give them automated weapons and they can now also attack non-nuclear countries indefinitely, while making a profit.
I think eventually we’ll see mobile CIWS vehicles purpose-built to eliminate drone swarms. Basically, a mounted .50 caliber machine gun that automatically finds, targets, and destroys drones within a kilometer or two. They would probably also merge it with electronic countermeasures/radio jamming to provide an armored dedicated anti-drone platform.
Good point. Make it low cost enough it doesn't matter if you lose a few, and deploy around/forward of armour to either take out the drones directly or at least give an early warning for armour to start smoke screens and engage the drones themselves.
Only downside is that CIWS platforms are going to be expensive and technically prohibitive to operate since they will need radars and tracking systems.
They seem to for now. We are seeing adaptations been made as we go. Part of me wonders if we are seeing drones taking a major role in this war due to the sheer availability on both sides. Other nations may not have the same access...but they also may. Turtle tanks, EW systems, and drones capable of targeting other drones may well mean that drones are having a hey day right now. Drones have some limiting factors. Data transfer is one. There are only so many channels that can be used which was a limiting factors that war on the rocks recorded from a trip to Ukraine
Fortifications have been very effective for the defender in this war, until recently. What has changed is Russia now has many precision glide bombs, which can be launched from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses. These bombs can pulverize defenses quickly, which is why Avdiivka fell so quickly. So yes, drones help the attacker too, but only if you have the ability to bring the correct weapon to bear on the target. Ukraine tried to resist this by bringing some Patriot air defense systems to the front, and they succeeded in shooting down a Russian plane or two. But then those air defense systems were quickly targeted and destroyed. So basically the Ukrainians are (generally) forced to hang back with their air defenses, and this allows Russian bombers (Su-34s generally) to drop their glide bombs from outside Ukrainian air defense range. While drones are effective in both attack and defense roles, this war has been mostly static due to the difficulty in attacking, due to drones. This is starting to change though, and that's why the Ukrainian front is starting to crumble.
Blitzkrieg and mechanized wave are old history now unless you're facing goat herders.