“We are able to produce something that flies and costs $350 per item, something that flew to St. Petersburg this night. It’s produced in Ukraine. So we hit the target that night. This thing flew exactly 1,250 kilometers,” Kamyshin said at a panel discussion of the Deciding Your Tomorrow project in Davos, Switzerland.

Yeah, this is why I was excited about those Australian cardboard drones – as un-sexy as they may be, they are very cheap, and effective air defenses against really cheap drones is not something that we really have today. If Russia wants to build air defense against something that runs $350/unit, it’s going to have to be a lot more cost-effective than what’s out there already. If it costs $3,500/unit to stop something that costs $350/unit to launch, the party launching the drone already wins, even if there is a 100% intercept rate. And that’s before one even gets to the issue that the attacker can generally choose the point of attack, which complicates things for the defender; with static air defenses, the attacker can concentrate their attack to aid in overwhelming defenses, whereas the defender is forced to disperse their defenses or forego defending some things.

I’d also note, though, that this goes both ways: if Ukraine develops a particularly-successful inexpensive drone and puts it into use, then Russia will probably aim to clone it. If one assumes that launching low-end drones is an effective tactic in today’s environment, then I think the real contest becomes who can deploy effective air defenses against low-end drones.

From what I’d read in the past, this is something that had been on the US’s radar prior to Russia’s invasion – China is the world’s dominant producer of (non-military) low-end drones. That’s a dual-use capability that could be put to military ends, and people were already concerned about the possibility of employment of swarms of them; we don’t really have a good counter to that yet.

googles

https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/getting-left-of-launch-in-the-counter-drone-fight/

America’s adversaries, including both state and non-state actors, have developed creative ways of using cheap, commercially available, and easily weaponized drones to assassinate opponents, destroy tanks, wage surprise attacks, smuggle drugs, and even conduct aerial dogfighting. Most recently, extremist groups such as the Houthis in Yemen have used drones to attack commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The democratization of drone technology means that countries, as well as terrorist organizations and “lone wolves,” are now able to conduct attacks with near impunity. This includes attacks against U.S. military forces deployed abroad, America’s commercial interests on land, sea, and air, and even critical infrastructure and population centers on the homeland.

In response to this drone proliferation crisis, the U.S. government has largely focused on a narrow “right-of-launch” approach. This relies on defeating tactical drones after they are en route to their targets with a variety of point and stationary defenses — small-arms fire, arresting nets, dazzling lasers, frequency jammers, and even other drones. This prevailing approach is reflected in the administration’s Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Action Plan, as well as the Department of Defense’s Counter Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Strategy, both of which focus mostly on mitigation technologies.

Yet our research suggests that a right-of-launch strategy is too reactionary. It cedes the initiative to America’s adversaries, and it requires expending costly munitions that are not designed to counter drones. This problem will only worsen as a new generation of drones, enabled by artificial intelligence, begin to collaborate in large numbers to overwhelm stationary and mobile military positions with swarm tactics. Defending every target, right-of-launch, with a “bullet-on-bullet” approach is likely to be technically difficult, costly, and insufficient. The Houthis’ recent drone attacks in the Red Sea are prima facie evidence that America’s current ad hoc and tactical response to these low-cost and easy-to-use capabilities is not working. This is not to say that mitigation efforts are not worth pursuing — the use of microwave energy to disorient and ultimately defeat drones holds particular promise. But this is only part of the solution.

I’m not so much interested in that author’s particular take on what should be done (and I’m not sure that it’s relevant to the Russo-Ukrainian War anyway…I’m not sure that it’s practical to destroy drones in that case before they leave the ground) so much as his summary of the situation today – that is, we really aren’t to the point of having a solid counter yet.

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2023/08/08/pentagons-counter-drone-office-to-demo-swarm-destruction-in-2024/

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The Pentagon’s counter-drone office will focus on neutralizing swarms of unmanned aircraft in its next demonstration planned for June 2024, according to a slideshow displayed during an Aug. 8 presentation by the office’s director.

The proliferation of drones on the battlefield is rising. For example, Ukraine is losing 10,000 per month while defending itself from Russian invaders, according to the Royal United Services Institute think tank. Flooding the battlefield with a large number of drones, especially those able to fly in a coordinated fashion, is a threat the U.S. military is still trying to address.

But that will take a layered approach, Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, who leads the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, told an audience at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

“To get after a large amount of UAS [unmanned aerial systems], because you won’t have enough interceptors … you have to leverage the [electronic warfare] capability, the high-powered microwave,” as well as kinetic interceptors like 30mm guns, he explained.

The counter-drone office released a request for whitepapers from industry on Aug. 4, seeking demonstrations of “fixed/stationary or mobile/mounted Detect, Track, Identify, and/or Defeat (DTID) capabilities against [small UAS] Swarm systems.”

What have you learned from the Russian invasion of Ukraine about the use of drones in battle? Has the capacity exceeded your expectations?

What we’ve seen is the validation that the threat is real, the threat is evolving. And we at the DoD are taking this seriously. What we’re seeing in Ukraine really is a validation of what we’re seeing inside of U.S. Central Command’s [area of responsibility]. And our methodology of how to get after this threat is a layered approach integrated in a common C2.

Globally, we’re seeing the threat continues to grow, and you’ll see a range of employment of that threat from large to small amounts, depending on where you are.