The signs were there with the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in Azerbaijan. Some of the video that came out of that conflict were pretty sobering. Whole platoons of infantry wiped out by suicide drones at night, captured with a thermal camera on a targeting drone. The attacks looked like cluster bombs, but every single cluster bomb found a human target.
The AGM-65G Maverick costs around $270k per missile (in 1999 dollars, so, like $500k in post-Covid dollars).
$100 will get you a DIY FPV drone, for $5-10 you can get a 1 lb shaped charge or EFP that will punch through the top armor of any AFV in existence today.
A little R&D (that is *easily* within the capability of a non-state actor), you can get semi-autonomous targeting of people or vehicles. If you want to spend a little more, $500 will get you MMWR that will detect people or vehicles, but really, you just need a half-way decent image recognition module capable of running on Android hardware. Much of this tech is essentially off the shelf.
So, for ~$200, you can (potentially) get a semi-autonomous suicide drone capable of targeting and destroying people or equipment or vehicles.
Or, said differently, for the cost of a single Maverick missile, you can get ~1300 of these suicide drones and the shipping container to put them in.
Combine with a few operators, and distribute them around a military base, and in a matter of minutes, you can destroy the operational/maneuver capability of an entire US Army heavy division or take out an entire airbase and all of the aircraft not in hardened hangers.
And while yes we can take out drones - the CBA of taking out a $200 drone with a $1 million air defense missile seems to favor the drone, heavily. Additionally, I don't think anyone has fielded operationally a drone swarm defense. Obviously electronic warfare and jamming is a thing, but jamming works for RPV drones, it won't work on autonomous drones.
Thus the US military (and presumably anyone else worried about this sort of thing) needs to develop or re-develop, muy rapido, an air defense strategy to cost effectively defend against drones. My guess is it will be a combination of HERF weapons and proximity fuzed small caliber (30mm or less) air defense canon.
But yeah, the heavy footprint style of the US military is very vulnerable to drones at least from my casual observation.
|