Droning On About Drones

Discussing uncrewed systems and the 'drone debate'

Military drones are, as the youth say, a thing.

Anybody who has any passing interest in military affairs will be deluged daily by videos and images of drones smashing up tanks, planes, and people with pin-point accuracy, combined with a torrent of articles heralding the new age of drone warfare and lamenting how western militaries are still reliant on zillion-pound missiles while drones costing a few hundred quid proliferate in Ukraine. The UK Ministry of Defence is publicly very ‘pro-drone’ and likes to mention them at every opportunity, despite there still being a conspicuous absence of them at scale in British military force structures.

As such, as ane fule kno by now, we need drones. Thousands of ‘em. All that the western militaries need to do is copy Ukraine and procure shedloads of cheap off-the-shelf drones, and consign the fat lazy defence contractor ‘primes’ to the dustbin of history.¹

…So goes one argument, particularly popular amongst the tech-evangelist crowd and, funnily enough, propagated by new defence startups looking to sell drones. Unsurprisingly, my take is that this narrative is far too simplistic, driven by excellent marketing aligned with political necessities, as well as the obvious bias that drone footage is the primary source of first-hand information for most observers outside Ukraine.²

Before people jump up and call me a luddite – no, I am not ‘anti-drone’. Uncrewed vehicles of various types have had a drastic impact on modern warfare and will continue to do so for the foreseeable. Just as the tank appeared in 1916 and hasn’t gone away, so too will drones remain a key feature of militaries. The slowness of most western militaries to adopt drone technology is also a key problem and something to be radically improved alongside other procurement and testing processes. However, the cry of ‘MoAr DrOnEs’ does not really mean anything without considering the detail of how they are actually operated as part of a military force.

---

Drones and Evolution

We are still in the birthing pangs of conventional drone warfare, and we are not entirely sure how it will evolve. Currently, drones are proving so dominant in Ukraine partly due to their relative cheapness and the relative expense and paucity of counters. This may well change in the future, whether through new technologies – better electronic warfare, lasers, radio waves, etc – or the proliferation of cheap accurate counter-measures; equipping all vehicles with accurate remotely-controlled machine guns, for example.

An RAF Whitley Bomber from the 1930s - the ‘drone’ of its day?

There is the argument that drones will become ever more present, networked, swarmed, etc, to the point that there will be no way of defeating them with classic equipment (‘There’s too many of them!’). Perhaps – but we’ve been here before. In the 1930s, some theorists made the (at the time) plausible argument that the ‘bomber would always get through’, and that all other surface forces, military infrastructure and civilian industry would ultimately be destroyed by an unstoppable swarm of bomber aircraft. The Second World War proved that this wasn’t the case; bombers were undoubtedly a very important feature of the war, but didn’t make everything else obsolete, even with the advent of the atomic bomb.

Maybe the battlespace eventually will just be a swarm of drones; but we don’t actually know. It may well be that cheap, effective counter-drone systems start to appear in great numbers and the balance evens out, or that there are practical impediments to implementing this vision of the future.³ So just doubling down on drones while ignoring the basics of warfare and military operations – people, training, logistics, resilience, industrial capacity, etc – may not be the best idea.

---

Drones and People

It is sometimes assumed that drones are a technological solution that allows you to boost mass without increasing the number of people in your armed forces. This is particularly popular line of reasoning in the UK MOD, which has a number of workforce problems and is unwilling to solve them through obvious, traditional methods (like de-buggering recruitment practices).

However, there is very little evidence at the moment to suggest that greater adoption of drones does, in fact, lead to reduced manpower requirements. This is especially true in the land domain – this illuminating article argues that drones currently require more people than older forms of technology. If this sounds counter-intuitive, consider that, for a reconaissance drone operation, you might need operators, communicators, commanders, data analysts, specialised maintainers, and software engineers. There may be fewer people at the ‘crunchy end’ but more people in the logistics and command ‘tail’. Artificial intelligence might assist with that eventually, but as drones become more sophisticated, it is likely that there will be more involved maintenance and control that will still require significant human input.⁴

Hence, by adopting drones, you don’t really reduce manpower; you just shift it elsewhere. This is seen very starkly in Ukraine. Ukrainian recruits, understandably, would rather be drone operators than infanteers; what has occurred then is that there are many drones, but not enough front-line infantry to exploit the opportunities enabled by drone warfare.

---

Drones and Force Structure

The end result of this is that if you want to adopt drones at scale, but are unwilling to increase the size of your armed forces, then you need to re-role your existing people into drone warfare specialists. This naturally leads to trade-offs.

An illustrative ORBAT of a generic light infantry battalion, by moi

As a worked example, imagine that you have a standard light infantry battalion, which traditionally consists of a headquarters, three ‘rifle’ companies of three platoons each of around 30-40 men, and a ‘weapons’ company usually containing of mortars, machine gun, anti-tank, and recce/sniper platoons (each often a bit smaller than the rifle platoons). It is decided that the battalion must have at least one drone platoon armed with small UAS, and one counter-drone platoon.⁵ Each of these platoons must have three sections (of around 10 men), one for each rifle company, but there will be no overall uplift in manpower. What are you willing to give up for the drones?⁶ Do you rip out twenty men from each rifle company, therefore degrading each of your manoeuvre elements?⁷ Do you cut down or delete some of the support platoons; are you happy that the drones can reliably replace your snipers or anti-tank weapons, for example?⁸

Alternatively, you might decide that most of your drones are best put in massed specialist formations – entire drone battalions or even brigades.⁹ In which case, what do you give up then? Do you re-role artillery regiments into drone regiments, even though the enduring utility of classic artillery has been well-established (especially in concert with drones) and there are multiple reports of Ukrainians wishing for more artillery? Do you decide that you can lose a few engineering battalions, despite the utter criticality of engineering for mobility and counter-mobility on the battlefield? Or do you re-role a number of infantry and armour battalions completely into drone units, sacrificing flexible close combat mass for drone mass?

All of the above also only deals with the problem of drones ‘at the front’, and does not consider the trade-offs needed down the entire ‘tail’ of enablers – maintenance troops, communications, logistics, etc. For instance, how many vehicle mechanics do you need vs drone technicians? You might be able to rely on civilian contracted support, but in wartime, that is a workforce trade-off in itself.

My point here isn’t that you shouldn’t have drones – you absolutely should – but the answer to ‘what do you lose instead’ is not an easy one, and comes with trade-offs if you are not willing to expand personnel numbers and the logistics burden on your force. These issues are not discussed in enough detail throughout much of the drone debate.

---

Conclusion

Drone operators from multiple regiments of the British Army. Are drones specialist or generalist pieces of equipment? (Source)

None of the above are insurmountable problems, but in this short piece I wanted to highlight some of the thorny detail that often gets lost in ‘drones are the future’ narratives. Drones are almost certainly here to stay, though it may be that what we call ‘drones’ today will be transition into something else in the future. For instance, my own personal suspicion is that eventually the differences between what we call ‘attack drones’ and ‘missiles’ will collapse; all guided weapons will have some form of autonomy, networking, loitering ability, and multiple modes of operation.¹⁰ Similarily, I think the classic battlegroup or battalion organisation will start to morph quite significantly away from the current models, which often haven’t changed much since the Cold War or even the Second World War, due to the ever-greater proliferation of capabilities once considered niche or specialist.

Nevertheless, however drones evolve, let’s not forget the basics of warfare in the process. People still matter. Physics still matters. Force structure, training, tactics, logistics, and sound strategy still matters. Rather than focusing on the drone as a discrete subject, look at how it fits into the wider force. Let’s debate more about the ‘how’ of warfare, and stop just talking about the ‘what’.

---

What do you think about drones and future ORBATs? Have I got it all wrong? Let me know in the comments below!

All the best,

Matthew

1. ‘Primes’ is wonkspeak for the massive defence companies – Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, etc etc.

2. Don’t get me wrong, Anduril’s marketing is banging, but this is literally just an anime video.

3. For instance, there are reports that operating too many radio-controlled drones close together can start to interfere with command signals, made worse by electronic warfare.

4. I’m mostly talking about land warfare here, but a lot of it is broadly applicable to the other domains as well. For instance, there is a lot of talk about uncrewed fighter jets. If you think about it, making a fighter jet autonomous does not actually reduce any manpower requirements other than the pilot. All the maintenance and support staff will likely have to remain, and may actually increase depending on the software requirements!

5. I’ve kept to talking mostly about unmanned aerial systems in this piece, but I’m well aware that unmanned ground vehicles are starting to proliferate in a serious way in Ukraine and are definitely going to be a part of future military forces.

6. This, of course, also depends on what type of drone you have and you want the them to do – are they primarily for reconnaissance, strike, logistics, etc.

7. A reminder that a unit at 60% strength is considered combat ineffective by military rule of thumb. So if you have a 100-person company, and you remove 20 infantrymen for drone operations, you are down to 80% already. Its obviously not that simple in practice, but food for thought…

8. As a reminder, though drones have been destroying tanks in Ukraine, it often takes multiple hits and a lot of time. The benefit of a classic anti-tank missile launcher like a Javelin is that it usually only takes one hit, and it is very fast!

9. There is an interesting parallel here with the usage of machine guns in the First World War. The British Army first started with a very small number of machine guns at the battalion level; this was rapidly increased to the point that an entire Machine Gun Corps was created in 1915. By the end of the war, infantry battalions would hold light machine guns, while heavy machine guns were set up in independent battalions attached at the divisional level.

10. I categorically refuse to call them by the horrendous term now in vogue - ‘Effectors’ (urgh).