Ukraine’s innovative use of technology is playing a vital role in the war—but not necessarily in the ways shown on social media, said one analyst who travels frequently to the region.
The plentiful social media videos of Ukrainian drones destroying tanks, for example, give viewers the impression that the units flying the drones are more successful than they actually are, said Michael Koffman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The problem is that you get into huge issues with sample bias,” said Koffman, speaking at Army Application Laboratory’s VERTEX event. “The least successful units are going to show you probably their most successful strikes.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s increasing use of drones to drop mines and run resupply missions is getting less attention than the flashier strike missions, he said.
“Defensive mining missions have become one of their primary tasks, very commonly employed with magnetic influence mines,” Koffman said. Units then record the mines’ locations, allowing them to disrupt enemy logistics without affecting their own operations.
By contrast, loitering munitions may work poorly against vehicles, Koffman said, noting a story he heard about a Bradley armored fighting vehicle attacked by Russian first-person-view drones carrying explosives that sustained more than 20 hits and kept going.
Other units Koffman has talked to say that as many as half of the resupply missions are done by small logistics drones no larger than a few feet across. Such drones are necessary because the Russians regularly hit vehicles traveling within five to six kilometers of the front.
Small logistics drones are not capable of carrying large quantities of supplies. However, larger drones would be easier targets, in the air and when soldiers cluster around them when they land, Koffman said. Most of the resupply at Ukraine’s months-long river bridgehead at Krinky was done by drones, he added.
Koffman also said that if you compare the damage done to the number of drones lost, large drone bombers are among the most effective attack drones Ukraine has.
Still, Ukraine’s use of drones also comes with trade-offs, Koffman said. For one, drones require more people to operate them than other weapons with similar effects.
A single drone team operating first-person-view drones might include a drone pilot, a weapons specialist, a repair specialist, and another pilot spotting targets with an observation drone. But a single anti-tank guided missile operator could have a similar effect on the battlefield.
An overreliance on drones could also lead to commanders micromanaging troops, he said, likening the process to playing a real-time strategy computer game.
Drones can also be tricked, he said, but only if decoys are sufficiently realistic. Decoys must emit thermal and electronic signals, be mobile, and look like the real thing, Koffman said.
Those Ukrainian decoys attract many strikes by Russian attack drones and short-range missiles, he said. But Ukraine’s lack of air defenses compared to Russia’s huge number of drones means that Russian drones can still pick out targets as deep as 60 miles behind Ukraine’s frontline, he added.
“If you shoot down a [Russian observation drone], they’ll put up another one in 10, 15 minutes,” he said. Shooting them down also leaves fewer missiles to shoot down more dangerous attack helicopters, and exposes the position of the air defenses, he said.
Despite the challenges of using drones for strike missions, Koffman said the United States should learn from Ukraine’s use of drones to achieve mass precision strikes at close range. Drones have “democratized precision” in close-range fights, Koffman said.
By contrast, the United States currently overemphasizes the use of precision weapons to take out command posts and other targets deep behind the frontline. Striking these targets is “an important enabler, but it’s not a substitute for success in the close battle,” he said.
Koffman also warned U.S. commanders to re-think any assumptions they may have that they’d do any better than Ukraine at smashing through Russian lines.
There is an “overemphasis on maneuver warfare,” in the U.S. military, Koffman said, referring to a military strategy consisting of disorienting the enemy through fast, unexpected strikes that result in fewer casulties. But with a conflict like the war in Ukraine, “you really have to make peace with a high level of attrition.”
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