The Drone Problem on the Modern Battlefield
Drones are at the forefront of military discussion these days, and for good reason. The massive employment of FPV drones (guided by a pilot via video to dive onto a target) in Eastern Ukraine has highlighted their combat utility, to such a point that many are declaring maneuver warfare dead and buried, beneath swarms of killer quadcopters. However, while they have become the foremost discussed aspect of warfare within the last four years, drones in combat are nothing new. They’ve been used for decades before the Russian offensive. The scale of their employment has changed, but the deployment was already beginning long before 2022.
None of the current discourse about drone warfare was on the horizon when Escalation (Maelstrom Rising Book 1) was written in 2019:
We missed the second remote-control kamikaze, though. It plunged down and blew up a foot above one running Nationalist’s head. The sudden, ugly black puff shrouded the carnage, but as the smoke cleared, there were three bodies lying on the grass, motionless. The other four Nationalist fighters kept running. There wasn’t anything they could do for the fallen men, anyway. And staying in the open was a recipe for disaster.
Early Military Drones: Kettering Bug, Larynx, and Aerial Torpedoes
The drone itself is about as old as the airplane. Albert L. Stevens had a design for a controllable airship in 1908. The US tested the Kettering Bug and the Italians the Crocco Telebomb in 1918. The British successfully tested the Larynx suicide drone in 1929. In James Dunnigan’s How to Make War (Fourth Edition, 2003), Dunnigan points out that pretty much all guided weapons, including torpedoes, guided missiles, and cruise missiles, all count as “drones.”
The limitations of the technology, however, for a very long time kept these weapons systems as largely conventional munitions in the hands of state actors, and the communications technology meant they were largely “fire-and-forget” or perhaps wire guided, such as the TOW missile (though the parallels with fiber-optic one-way attack drones in Ukrainian and Russian use are interesting). They were expensive, and they had strict limitations. (Current FPV drones in tactical use have pretty strict limitations as well, but they have in some ways surpassed their more expensive predecessors in the “recon-and-strike” capability.)
ISR Drones and Loitering Munitions: Predator, Reaper, and Switchblade
The US deployed any number of drones in various roles during the 1990s and into the GWOT, from the well-known Predator and Reaper family to the smaller ScanEagle and Raven. Primarily ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) platforms for various tactical and operational echelons, the arming of the Predator, and later its successor the Reaper, with Hellfire missiles added a new recon-strike capability.
That capability was not destined to remain limited to the operational level, with drones controlled from half a world away like the Predator or Reaper. The US has had the AeroVironment Switchblade loitering munition since 2011.
Irregular Warfare: ISIS, Cartels, and Weaponized Commercial Drones
ISIS Drone Attacks in Mosul and Raqqa
The initial use of drones for IED attacks by Daesh was in Syria, against the Kurdish Peshmerga in 2016, but as the siege of Mosul began, followed by the reduction of Raqqa, they were used extensively as a “poor man’s air force.” While they got little overall attention in comparison to the VBIED and SVBIED attacks, over 200 such attacks were recorded during the battle for Mosul. The jihadis discovered that they could effectively conduct air strikes even in US-dominated airspace, because there was little to defend against them under 3,500 feet.
Mexican Cartel Drone IEDs After 2017
While any direct causation between jihadi and narco use of drones is difficult to prove, there are signs that the two different problem sets have learned from each other, both in the application of gruesome video for propaganda and terror, as well as, potentially, drone weaponization. The Mexican cartels began to use drones around 2010, and were even commissioning custom made drones by 2014. Initially, these were primarily used for smuggling and reconnaissance, but by 2017, they were starting to see use for delivery of remote-detonated IEDs. While IS had been using drones for aerial attacks consistently from 2016 on, the same use began to become increasingly common in Mexico shortly thereafter.
A weaponized drone had been seized in Guanajuato in 2017, and one was used against Gerardo Sosa Olachea, the public safety secretary in colonia Los Laureles in Tecate in July, 2018. The employment of aerial IEDs has only continued since.
Ukrainian FPV Drones: Scale, Not Invention
With the failure of either side to gain air or fire superiority in Ukraine following the full-scale invasion of 2022, Turkish TB2 Bayraktars initially provided the Ukrainians with air strike capability in contested airspace. When electronic warfare and air defense rendered the TB2s ineffective, small FPV drones filled the gap. Controlled via radio (or fiber-optic cable to bypass electronic warfare jamming), these small aircraft can either act as ISR platforms, bombers (dropping small munitions on enemy positions) or kamikazes, diving into a target with either an IED, a PG-7 warhead, or a purpose-built munition attached. These are all parallel functions to the use of drones going back to at least the early GWOT, just at a larger scale, and before the C-UAS systems could catch up. (Russian Polye-2 C-UAS (Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems) vehicles in Armenian hands failed against Azerbaijani drones in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.)
The mass deployment of FPV one-way attack drones in Ukraine presented not a new form of warfare, but simply an expansion of its scope to the point that it has effectively stalled operations along the eastern side of the country. Again, there are a lot of other factors besides simply drone use involved there, to include politics and logistics. But the point is that this weapon has been growing in use for a long time.
What Comes Next
Militaries around the world are rapidly expanding their drone production and integration. Furthermore, C-UAS tech such as Anduril’s Anvil and associated systems, as well as expanded electronic warfare suites, laser weapons, and even kinetic close range air defense systems are all trying to solve the drone threat. The near future could see drones become a dominant factor, or see them become simply another problem set to be countered.
What Escalation Got Right in 2019
The Battle of Nitra in Escalation featured small kamikaze drones conducting search-and-destroy fire missions on the defenders. It made movement in the open near suicide without at least some sort of concealment (as has been proved to be the case in Ukraine). The novel even features engagement of drones with small arms as possible, if extremely difficult.
Of course, what didn’t make it into the novel or the series that followed was the scale of cheap FPV drones forcing a long, grinding stalemate of positional warfare. However, whether that outcome would have happened in any other circumstances aside from Ukraine (relatively flat, open terrain, being fought over by two former Soviet states with cultural and tactical holdovers from the old Red Army) is unknown.
Read the full battle in Escalation: Maelstrom Rising Book 1.
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