Drones Cannot Replace Manpower

金門調酒 - Kinmen Cocktails #6

Large units cannot be replaced by drones. In fact, drones require already large units to become larger.

More Manpower

One of the main counter-intuituve points we have from experience fielding drones for more than a decade: the manpower requirements for UxS/drone-enabled units are higher, not lower.

Think about it. At the simplest level, an infantry or armor company are time-tested units in terms of size, manpower, training, firepower, mobility, and protection. These types of units are designed to seize and hold ground. To enable them with drones requires more people, more technology, and more equipment (sometimes loads more).

First, more soldiers or Marines are required to operate and maintain the drone equipment. It can take months of training (and countless OJT hours) to build a proficient drone operator.

But a drone-enabled unit has far more information/data coming in, which increases the potential to generate intelligence. More manpower is required to sift through these data for insights.

Drones also dramatically increase a unit’s capability to conduct strikes at their own level. This is not simple, as it requires instruction and experience in ordnance, safe handling of explosives, rules of engagements, target analysis, strike tactics, and combined arms deconfliction. This also requires more manpower.

More Funding

Even cheap drones are not cheap. The investment in resources to train operators and maintain a supply chain is high. Most US units are still in the experimental stage for incorporating tactical drones. The 101st has rolled out a $750 FPV drone, but a typical tactical drone like the Switchblade 300 costs $70,000.

The supply chains required to support this equipment are still in the process of build out.

Questions of Effectiveness

From War on the Rocks:

“During my time in Ukraine, I collected statistics on the success of our drone operations. I found that 43 percent of our sorties resulted in a hit on the intended target in the sense that the drone was able to successfully fly all the way to the target, identify it correctly, hit it, and the drone’s explosive charge detonated as it was supposed to. This number does not include instances when our higher command requested a sortie but we had to decline because we knew that we could not strike the target for reasons such as weather, technical problems, or electronic interference. If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is not bad, but that is not the whole story.”

The requirements for combined arms maneuver have not gone away - they have increased in the face of increases in firepower and ISR.

“I began to notice that the vast majority of our sorties were against targets that had already been struck successfully by a different weapons system, most commonly by a mortar or by a munition dropped by a reusable drone (in other words, not a first-person view drone). Put differently, the goal of the majority of our missions was to deliver the second tap in a double-tap strike against a target that had already been successfully prosecuted by a different weapons system. The proportion of missions when we successfully carried out a task that only a first-person view drone can fulfill — delivering a precision strike on a target that could not be hit by other means — was in the single-digit percent.”

Drones are effective within military units that have a solid combined arms capability. This should be obvious. The boring work of tactical innovation—breaking out your equipment and doctrine, getting to the field in the rain and the mud, and seeing what works—has to be done. The US Army and US Marine Corps are slowly embracing this process.