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2023-06-04

Signal from Ukraine:Warzones without Drones a Remote Possibility

Conflict zones are witnessing an unprecedented increase in the use of unmanned aerial systems. Drones come with multiple benefits. Smaller, cheaper, easier to implement, they provide access to the third dimension for all deployed forces. They restore mass to a dimension that is increasingly burdened by the price of machines. They make it possible to compensate, in part, for what military aviation has traded in volume for technology.

The war in Ukraine is the second conflict, after that of Nagorno-Karabakh, where drones take a significant place in military operations. Without crowding out other platforms, their roles in armed clashes between two nations are beginning to take shape. They bring some-thing extra that cannot be brought by manned aircraft.

By comparison, in 2021 the U.S. army had half the number of aircraft in service compared to 1945. The comparison, however, does not represent much as today’s machines have incomparable capabilities. Nevertheless, they still do not have the gift of ubiquity and drones can remedy this.

Range of Drones

The belligerents align a wide range of drones of which are the military models most used in the field. The list covered in this article is not exhaustive because it evolves as the pace of deliveries concerns the most common models and other models have been used for test-ing. In addition, to meet the very important needs, both sides also use a range of civilian drones. Ukrainians have also modified some of them so that they can carry out offensive missions with the dropping of Molotov cocktail, anti-tank grenades or explosive charge. This same type of tinkering on the part of the troops of the separatist republics of Donbass has been observed.

Varied Functions

The majority of drones are used for reconnaissance, target designation or surveillance purposes. The most publicised are used for attack purposes such as the TB-2 drone on the Ukrainian side or the KUB-BLA and Lancet suicide drone on the Russian side, but in this war, drones also have other less publicised roles.

The Orlon-10 drone is a reconnaissance drone, probably the most used by Russian forces, but there is also an electronic warfare version where two platforms are used to make international mobile subscriber identity-catcher (IMSI) respectively on the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands. This allows sending SMS on enemy mobile phones. The system would have the ability to intercept up to 2,000 phones within a six km radius.

Three drone models were used by Russian forces to support the destruction of Ukrainian ground/air defences. The E95M target drone was originally developed to train and test air defence. The Russian army diverted it from its original use so that the Ukrainian army could activate its ground/air systems and a fighter could then fire anti-radar missiles in the wake to destroy them.

The same thing was done with an old, decommissioned reconnaissance drone model from the mid-1970s, the TU-143. Its imposing size (more than eight metres long) and its high speed (950 km/h) in the background proved an attractive target and credible for ground/air defence.

Reconnaissance Drones

Ukraine has used several reconnaissance drones, also dating from the 70s including the TU-141. The TU-141 is an optical reconnaissance drone with a range of 1,000 km and a speed of 1000 km/h. Given its age, it has the advantage of being completely insensitive to jamming because it has no data link and its navigation is only inertial.

This drone made itself known in the open on March 10, 2022 when a copy crashed in the suburbs of Zagreb in Croatia. It had previously flown over part of Romania and Hungary with impunity while carrying a bomb. It would seem that a programming error in the coordinates by a Ukrainian operator was the cause of the incident.

Maritime Targets

During this war, drones also intervened for the first time in maritime warfare. The TB-2 drones were used to achieve the target designa-tion for a P-360 Neptune anti-ship missile battery based on land against the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet.

These same drones were also directly responsible for the destruction of several small (16m long) Raptor class patrollers with MAM-L missiles as well as a small landing barge. This is the first time TB-2 drones have been used against maritime targets. This shows how ships of all sizes are also affected by the threat posed by drones.

Force Multiplier

The weight of drones in military operations is not the same in Russian and Ukrainian side. While the former still largely benefits from strike capabilities in the depth of aviation, from the fire support provided by helicopters and attack aircraft, the latter is not.

At the beginning of the conflict, the Russian army seems to have abandoned the use of drones. Nevertheless, it was found that ground troops had civilian DJI drones without any real knowledge of their size. Faced with the losses suffered by the convoys and destruction of infrastructure on its rear, it began to use them more for the protection of logistic axes, to detect ambushes and for the surveillance of bridges.

In a more traditional way, drones were used to guide artillery but also to make the laser designation for guided shells. They have also been logically leveraged for surveillance and opportunity target designation. An ORLAN-10 drone was reportedly used to target Ukrainian multiple rocket launchers that were stationed in the parking lot of the mall hit in the suburbs of Kiev on March 21.

The ORION combat drone would have been used only marginally, probably more for communication to show that they also have ma-chines equivalent to the TB-2.

For its part, the Ukrainian army exploited from the beginning of the invasion the potential of its drones to inform about enemy positions and advance. Very quickly, they were used to point targets to artillery and adjust fire.

Despite the small number of machines available at the beginning of the conflict (only about 20 TB-2s), relatively large damages could be inflicted on the Russian forces. This relatively cheap drone (its production price would now be less than US$1 million per unit), can be implemented from road sections and does not need dedicated aeronautical infrastructure which simplifies its implementation and makes it resilient in the face of missile strikes that can hit aerodromes.

Psychological Pressure

Drones are directly responsible for less than 10 per cent of the losses inflicted on the Russian army. The majority, 70 per cent of the de-struction of equipment, is attributable to artillery and just over 20 per cent to rockets and anti-tank missiles fired by infantry. However, the ratio attributable to artillery owes a lot to drones and the less than 10 per cent of losses due to attack drones could be in the depth of the enemy device, unlike artillery.

This has not only hindered the Russian supply chain, which is already fragile, but also maintained a permanent threat to the rear. This forced the Russian forces to dilute their anti-aircraft systems on all their communications routes. This has had the effect of reducing their effectiveness because, as many as they are, they are not enough to cover everything.

The use of “suicide drones” is increasing on the Ukrainian side as they begin to be delivered in numbers. However, in the absence of real-ly established doctrine, this type of effector is still at the stage of experimentation in the field, each user still being made to optimise the use of this new tool and understand its limits. In spite of all, this allows a constant threat to the opponent, even if he is firmly entrenched, and to hit him without being in a direct line of sight. If the destructive effects are still limited, drones exert real psychological pressure on the opponent.

Sustainable Losses

If the Russian losses from armoured vehicles or manned aircraft are well documented, that’s a little less the case for drones. Indeed, on both sides, the loss of one of these gears is in no way a strategic issue. In addition, the most expensive machines are composed of the TB-2 drone on the Ukrainian side and ORION on the Russian side.

However, none of these two machines exceeds one million Euros per unit, so that their losses are completely sustainable for both par-ties.

Moreover, it seems that 35 of the 36 TB-2 drones delivered to Ukraine were shot down in mid-March. This may explain why for about two weeks videos from TB-2 have become scarcer on social networks. However, this absence was only a parenthesis because deliveries con-tinue at a regular pace and several dozen machines have been delivered since. The TB-2 drones have become iconic on the Ukrainian side and are practically the only drones on which the Russian army makes, sometimes, a communication effort when it kills one.

Communication Strategy

As an integral part of the communication strategy, there is an effort on the part of the Ukrainians to communicate on any Russian drone that has been shot down or crashed (probably by the loss of the data link). It may not be representative of the actual losses, but it serves Ukrainian communication, which wants to show the world everything it inflicts, in losses, on its opponent. In any case, whatever the loss-es of drones suffered from one side or the other, it does not seem that this really constrains their use on the ground. Drones have al-ready become indispensable.

The drones, apart from the larger ones like TB-2, ORION, FORPOST, TU-141 and TU-143, are far too small to be treated by heavy ground/air defence systems. Thermal powered drones can be handled with portable ground/air missiles (MANPADS) but the main threat to them is electronic warfare. Thus Russian electronic warfare units would be priority targets for the Ukrainians because the interference generated would greatly hinder the implementation of drones that are now essential for the Ukrainian army. Moreover, jamming would be the most effective way to counter these drones.

Given the abundance of anti-aircraft systems delivered to Ukrainian forces, many are used to shoot down Russian thermal-powered drones (the thermal signature of electric drones is generally too low to be processed by infrared auto-directors). So there are a lot of ORLAN-10 drones that are referenced shot down.

Yet the ORLAN-10 drone is a very rustic and easy to build drone. So we have to question the appropriateness of using a ground/air missile to destroy such a low-value target. For example, the Starstreak missile, very powerful but expensive (around €300,000 per missile), is often used to shoot down these drones.

Considering the value of the missile fired, which is much higher than its target, it is obvious that this is not sustainable on a large scale. The Western stocks of portable anti-aircraft missiles are not infinite and especially the rate of consumption is much higher than what the industry can provide, if not several tens of these missiles would be fired every day. There is also the dimension of the financial cost of such consumption.

It seems that the ease with which Ukrainians use their MANPADS missiles to shoot down drones can be used to the benefit of Russia. A large use of low-cost drones in an area allows forcing the Ukrainians to fire their missiles which frees the passage for planes or helicop-ters while contributing to reduce the stock of missiles available to the Ukrainians.

Weapon of Propaganda

This is the other advantage of drones; they provide a lot of images and videos of combat. Their controlled distribution on social networks makes it possible to weigh heavily on public opinion and therefore, on the support given to the cause. This aspect is well mastered by Ukraine which, thanks to this, perfectly strengthened the image of its army with its population but also demonstrated its resistance to the Russian army with other countries. This mastery of information, by showing the destruction inflicted on the invader, has largely con-tributed to the establishment of the military support it enjoys today.

The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan illustrated how drones could play a central military role. The war between Russia and Ukraine demonstrates this on an even larger scale. Their role has grown, the depth of the theatre of operation helping, we see how drones find their place between aircraft and ground forces. They now occupy the place that was once occupied by light reconnaissance aircraft or observation balloons and also become indispensable elements to protect convoys from ambushes.

High-Risk Missions

Another point that emerges from this war is that drones are easily engaged in high-risk missions. Even the TB-2 drone can easily be sacri-ficed if the mission is operationally “cost-effective.” Thus, even though the Ukrainians have lost several of their TB-2 drones, the damage to the Russian forces is far greater than the loss of these drones. It is interesting to note that Russia does not seem to have hired any of its MALE Altius drones, the first of which came into service last year because they are far too precious and vulnerable in the Ukrainian context.

Drones have now become absolutely indispensable on the battlefield and are now a very real and growing threat to all forces on the ground, both at the front and at the back. Far from replacing existing weapon systems, they allow to optimise their use. They increase the effectiveness of artillery and optimise the use of anti-tank weapons by helping in the preparation of ambushes.

They also allow carrying out the most risky missions by preserving manned aircraft whose loss is problematic because they are much more difficult to replace.

Drones are an opportunity to give back to the air force, which has lost a lot because of the exponential increase in aircraft prices. It is to be expected that the proportion of low-cost drones on the battlefield will only increase inexorably.

We can wonder about the relevance of developing very high tech drones, at a cost equivalent to those of manned machines and which have practically the same constraints. Except to use them only on surveillance/intelligence missions in peacetime or on very low intensity conflicts, it is difficult to see what their place could be in a high intensity conflict.

On a battlefield, drones, regardless of their use, must be completely sacrificial machines because that is their main interest.

Reference:

https://liveuamap.com/en/2022/13-march-ukrainian-army-shotdown-tu243-uav-with-manpads, https://defence-blog.com/russia-uses-unmanned-helicopters-to-draw-out-ukrainian-air-defenses/

https://balkaninsight.com/2022/03/11/mysterious-drone-crash-leaves-croatia-baffled/

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