I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck
warontherocks.com
warontherocks.com
One stat: "In May alone, Ukrainian drones destroyed over 89,000 Russian targets" https://www.newsweek.com/robert-brovdi-ukraine-russia-war-dr...
They've recently promoted the 'Birds of Madyar' guy to run the newly formed Unmanned Systems Forces and are moving to a unified drone line defence the whole way along the frontline. Update on that: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2073811/russia-army-ukr...
Also re drones not having the effect of artillery, fair enough but Ukraine has been using FPV drones to destroy Russia's artillery. Here's footage of one of it's most modern being taken out https://youtu.be/DMOjOJnAd8A?t=161 It's kind of asymmetric - the artillery can't similarly take out the drones because they are too small and replaceable.
I keep telling people that the terrain and the strategies that Russians use is the primary reason for the effectiveness. Mortars and artillery already handle the same requirements as the author says. The reason they are effective in 2024-25 is that the drip-drip-drip of single soldiers running over vast fields / unarmoed vehicles driving over known routes is the only way Russians make progress. For a moving target they are great, but multiple moving targets would get shredded by competent artillery anyway.
Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
By far the best use of drones still is as battlefield recon/fire correction to adjust existing artillery/mortar capabilities.
Source: I’m one such drone hobbyist and I’ve watched way too much footage from the front. None of what i’m writing is in absolute terms. I just don’t see the same way as commenters in the public who think they are a checkmate for any combat situation. The incompetence of the Russian forces caught everyone by surprise, but they have learned. My country’s border with Russia is heavily forested and not as flat as Russia. The drones are not able to go through the canopy. Infrared recon is a way better choice than FPV suicide drones.
Citation needed.
The huge border between Russia and Ukraine is completely flat grassland. This means that to Russia, Ukraine joining NATO is an unacceptable risk because that border is impossible to defend against NATO tank invasion, and the flatness go all the way to Moscow.
A lot of people on internet keep poking fun at Russia inadequate tanks as "proof" Russia is stupid for invading with such crappy gear. Russia is very well aware of this, and is why they invaded in first place, they know of Ukraine joins NATO any military exchange with NATO (like what happened between Iran and Israel) would need to immediately become nuclear because their existing army can't defend the huge open flat terrain against NATO equipment.
On the other hand, I believe Russia made itself very vulnerable by letting its cosmic sector drown in corruption. Nowadays they have fallen so behind the US in launch capabilities that it isn't even funny. Try hiding anything from the fleet of satellites that the US has, or can have if it wishes to.
Starlink may be the single most dangerous technologic development of the 21st century to Russia.
Trump looks more likely to be bribe-able than Musk. Very different personalities and net worths. Musk seemed to be genuinely angry with Trump's budget, for example.
Russians have assault groups of couple tanks and half a dozen ifv. Had Guderian used same forces in a single battle? The biggest Russian operations had 40-60 armored vehicles, mainly ifv.
Tanks are still a real power, especially western modern tanks.
it gives some insights about reasons for russian invasion. this is english translation . not sure how accurate (don't feel like checking few pages of text), but close enough
https://www.aalep.eu/advent-russia-and-new-world
origin in russian. you can right-click translate it https://web.archive.org/web/20220226224717/https://ria.ru/20...
For example, hypothetically, what is the chance for a major NATO country will never have a president that might decide to bomb another country out of the blue, because that country according to said president, has weapons of mass destruction, despite the fact the same country intelligence said the target DOESN'T have such weapons? This will never happen right?
Even in Russia, only complete loonies treats this as a plausible scenario. That's why you can see bunkers and anti-tank ditches and defensive lines being built on the European side of the Russian border, and nothing of this sort on the Russian side. They don't even have a basic chain-link fence. Mushroomers sometimes get lost and just walk into Russia.
You do realise that the parent was actually making a historical reference? "Weapons of mass destruction"... doesn't that ring a bell?
Invasion? Oh my, are you delusional? NATO is a defence alliance, stop consuming Russian propaganda maybe.
Libya?
This can be reversed and then Russia was supposed to be able to use its supply of 20000 prewar tanks to just swipe through Ukraine and stop at Uzghorod like an Iraqi 2003 style thunder run. It tried to, but failed miserably.
Maybe 19th and early 20th century doctrines are no longer alive with guided ammunition and spotting drones constantly in the air. Actually we can see it in Ukraine today, the moment when Russia setups an armored column it will often get disassembled by drones and artillery kilometers before reaching the zero line. It requires major effort and sacrifice to move frontline few meters on open terrain.
Did you see the videos of a drone dropping a shitload of thermite on a forest canopy? [0]
> Most nations don’t have flat open fields where signals can reach far away drones unimpeded by line of sight for tx/rx.
Most nations have cellular networks that penetrate buildings and forests just fine. In fact, Ukraine used the Russian cellular network for their recent attack deep behind enemy lines.
I'm not saying this will always be possible, but it's not hard to see that line of sight communication is not the end of the line for military drone control. There are many routes for providing an ad hoc line of communication if you don't just use consumer-level tech.
The thermite drones do attack forested areas on the farmlands, but the forests I talk about are tens or hundreds of kilometers wide. You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
"Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals, and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using cheaper components)."
The currently used FPV drones use consumer level ass communication methods. Do you also think that current military-grade communication methods can be easily jammed on the battlefield?
Using the consumer level stuff as a reference point and thinking it is somehow SOTA is not going to lead to good conclusions.
> Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target.
The point was that there are plenty of radio signals that work fine and with high bandwidth in the 'problematic' terrain types you mentioned. Having said that, you can't rely on the cellular towers of the enemies of course. You need relay drones to create your own ad hoc cellular network.
> You could just fire an artillery round and be done with it.
At what coordinate? The whole point of FPV drones is that the operator can fly close to the target area and only then decide what the best place to strike is. A shell that is 20m off target is just a waste.
The point of destroying the canopy is reducing the attenuation of the signal for other drones to go in and be able to be precise.
The article says that GPS is largely hopeless on their particular battlefield, though, so some other means of accurate positioning would probably be needed.
Your video shows something that an artillery corps could accomplish just as easily and not at all be prone to EW.
Granted, moving indirect fire is probably more expensive than a single fpv drone dropping a thermite bomb, but at scale indirect fire is far cheaper, more effective, and critically not prone to EW.
The artillery, while destructive, is not going to be nearly as accurate. If you want artillery to hit something on the move accurately you want something like a laser adjusted Excalibur round.
The drone is actually extremely efficient.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1351804050035499...
Laser guided Excalibur rounds didn't come out until much later, same for the laser guided jdams. And the cost of those is much higher, plus logistical an deployment cost, than a FPV drone.
Edit: I also don't know anybody that ever fired a copperhead round in anger. That was very much a product of 80s and 90s doctrine to counter Russian armor.
You won't find them with light infantry, but you will with Cav / Mech units.
To my knowledge there still isn't a laser guided mortar in the US inventory with dual mode laser terminal guidance. HEGM project was cancelled in 2018.
Local airborne EW platforms can relay GPS signal.
Combined with Inertial Navigation System reduces the CEP.
Laser terminal guidance gets it on point.
The US has a lot of work to do in EW - it also has done a lot of work to prepare for some of these scenarios.
So yeah that is in line with what I have said.
US doctrine is based in air dominance.
Also, most Excalibur rounds do not have laser guidance kits. Those are much newer and more expensive. We may have given Ukraine a handful, if that. Still requires laser designation by airborne or land forces, but can give you excellent accuracy even in completely denied GPS environments and against mobile targets.
Remember that the argument was basically that drones can do nothing useful in (heavily) forested terrain. They can with a little bit of creativity.
A US VT (variable time) fuse is meant for airburst - for example to splinter a forest canopy.
Run over to the impact crater that was just made, and with a little experience you can quickly know the round type, direction, and distance. If you have those last two you can rattle off a quick counter fire mission.
Artillery counter-fire radar systems can also identify and track artillery/mortar fire.
(for anyone curious)
The drones now are using fibre optic cables with the reel mounted on the drone. Having the reel on the drone avoids snagging issues and the fibre itself avoids EW jamming and line of sight issues.
And it's glass, no? So not going to environmentally degrade over time.
Considering the fighting is mostly over agricultural fields, what are the long term consequences of years of war?
And unlike landmines, how do you detect and remove kilometers of cable?
What happens when someone uses agricultural machinery on a field littered with cable, both to machinery and people? What are the consequences of consuming broken bits of cable that may mingle into produce?
And most critically, if the above are issues, how do you then remove cable from fields at scale? It would seem maddening to try to detect and gather kilometers of tangled glass.
Even if you had 100 drones starting from the same exact place and going to the exact same place you would find 24g of glass per meter. A single leftover beer bottle would be at least 6 times that amount.
When you worry about stuff it is useful to do the work.
This is true, but flat open fields are precisely the places where major mechanized battles usually took place. For the very reason that manoeuvering other equipment in complicated terrain is hard.
Ofc there are significant exceptions, like the Alpine front in WWI, where Austrians and Italians faced each other in mountainous terrain for years, or the Hürtgen Forest in WWII. But a remarkable share of all major mechanized battles of history took place in flat open fields, or something at least resembling that sort of terrain (gently sloping hills with good visibility etc. etc.)
Fighting through some portion of the Ardennes has been a fairly recurrent theme in central European land warfare since vikings did it in the 800s.
I'm sure if one digs they can find a reference to a roman general doing it too.
Notably, the German operation Sichelschnitt in 1940 was very successful because the French command considered it unlikely that German Panzers would be able to cross the Ardennes in force, even though the French command was probably well aware of their own military history.
It's literally cheaper to strap a grenade to an FPV drone and fly it into a tank hatch than it is to fire a single non-precision artillery round, let alone tens or hundreds of them.
Plus, you can deploy your drones remotely from the top of a trunk deep behind enemy lines and fly them into irreplaceable strategic aviation assets with a shot exchange factor better than 1000x.
The mortar guys in my old company could put a round into a trashcan with line-of-sight but when someone else is calling in fire then they are more of an area weapon. Assuming that a fire mission is going to involve more than one or two rounds to bracket the target now you're talking more dollars and the people on the ground probably aren't going to stand there and wonder how long it's going to take to hit them.
The way I (and most other people I've heard talk about it) see it is drones are an area denial weapon.
Lesson learned in WW1 and apparently forgotten multiple times since then: the first few shells have by far the most damage potential and they better be precise.
Good luck to hunt moving individuals with mortars, though.
He takes into account all the drones that don't work and then goes on and pretends artillery is 100% accurate and has an absurdly low cost (at the price he is quoting, they are basically sending grenades).
Let's not even discuss moving target or penetrating inside fortified targets which mortar will never be able to do.
Now FPV drones are also used as anti-air defense. $1500 FPV drone can intercept $100k reconnaissance drone or loitering munition.
I.e. just one country over, just one slightly different conflict between different actors would require completely different looking-feeling weapon systems.
It’s not something you think about, usually - so much of what we see used is made for asymmetrical warfare.
And there gunna be lotsa drones.
The Chinese are big on dual-use hulls. Do all these normally-civilian ships have mount points for rapid-fire point defense ?
The FPV drone is used in battle largely because they're extremely cheap and use components sourceable from many suppliers backed by hobbyist markets. These devices are so cheap and basic they don't even use digital encryption for the video back to the operator, they don't even take off a third of the time, and you're talking about putting AI chips on them. There is much lower hanging fruit than AI.
A new weapon is introduced and finds success, is boasted as the future of warfare. It works and is a significant advantage for the side using it, being a force multiplier.
After the initial succes the other side starts using it too, and there's a scramble for countermeasures. This makes the wonder weapon less effective.
Then articles are written that are the inverse of the hype following the first implementation. Even doubting if 'this is the end of -wonder weapon- ?'
Look at the tank. With every new weapon (take drones) it is theorized that drones would be the end of effectiveness of tanks as a weapon system.
It's not, but it's not longer a wonder weapon, yet a piece of equipment, that's constantly evolving. Is an arms race and it's been like that since the invention of the club by our ancestors.
If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?
I don't think it's improvised civilian hobbyist tech. They run autopilots that also fly professional drones and can fly planes.
I think it's mostly that it has to be super cheap, otherwise it doesn't bring value (because other weapons are more efficient if you have more money). If your one-way drone costs 10k dollars, maybe it's too expensive even though it can fly during the night.
And then there are fundamental limitations, like flying in bad weather.
> obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone
But a reusable drone won't go inside a hangar (because at this point it probably won't come out). If your drone can go somewhere, drop something and come back, doesn't it mean that another class of weapons could do this job?
More autonomy, but MUCH more expensive. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per use. The issue is indeed using mass-produced consumer drones. It's a bit like the widespread use of "technicals" in some conflicts: yes, a pickup truck with a .50cal in the back is inferior to tanks or armored cars, but it's also much, much cheaper.
There's a bit of a "Sherman vs. Tiger" thing that's been going on since the dawn of industrialised warfare. Is it better to have a more effective weapon that you can only afford a few of, or lots of cheaper ones?
The US doctrine approach to the problem would simply be a set of B2 bunker buster decapitation strikes on Russian military HQs, but of course that option is not available to Ukraine. They can't even manage Iraq-war-style wave of SEAD strikes followed by unit level CAS. The air war has kind of stalemated with neither side having conventional air superiority and both being vulnerable to the other's anti-air.
As a quiet gay nerd I'd love for there to be no war, no bullies. But unfortunately we live in a world where our species evolved from monkeys and we still often act like it. If my usually peaceful tribe needs weapons to defend itself when attacked then I'm all for it. But using those weapons to attack another for any reason other than defense is a nono in my books.
20 or so years ago, my degree's optionally-mandatory* industrial placement year had me interviewing at Lockheed Martin.
I didn't get it, and in retrospect, given what is now coming to light about UK misbehaviour in Iraq**, I'm glad I didn't.
Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about this, as you're correct about the world we live in.
* tax thing
** https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/12/uk-veterans-allege-...
Who is bombing civilians? Shelling cities with inaccurate old missiles? Which cities are destroyed to the ground?
Russian state is pure evil, even worse than Iran.
Propaganda, and arresting dissenters, makes it difficult for the *average* Russian to realise anything is wrong.
But even in free nations, people like to think their soldiers are heroes rather than villains, and reports of crimes are covered up or brushed aside.
UK had a few million protest against the second Iraq war, and still didn't stop it. Do you think the percentage is higher or lower in Russia, with all its propaganda?
Worse, in the context of "picture myself working on something like this and sleeping well at night", consider sub-group modifiers: how many people in the UK resigned from defence companies due to agreement with the anti-Iraq-war protests?
You may build tech that helps the good defenders defeat the forces of the stronger, evil attacker, but 5 years down the line, you may discover that same tech is now used to blow up hospitals and refugee convoys - and it doesn't take your country being on the wrong side of a war, it just takes the usual international politics.
And the only reason for that is that as per usual private companies are making a killing.
You and I could build a similarly functioning device in 6 months with a small team. They're not that smart/advanced, imo.
I think most of the money for these things isn't paid for research/engineering but goes into MBA/investor pockets.
China in the role of Milo Minderbender.
Software for loitering etc would be so easy nowadays too. Hell I can tell a pi zero to track GPS + multiple cameras + loiter/engage target on whatever signatures are available from available sensors.
I say this while eyeing up the Carvera. I want to justify it so badly. Perhaps the Air...not for aforementioned purposes of course, unless some defense contractor wants to pay me ahaha.
Look at Iron Dome. By comparison to other modern SAMs it's abysmal. But that's by design, Israel wasn't looking for a good SAM. They were looking for the cheapest SAM that could hit a sitting duck. But that's what it's facing--ballistic inbounds that have no countermeasures and no ability to evade.
If you can do what they do in 6 months, why don't you do it? You would get rich easily.
I worked in the drone industry. Everybody thinks everything is easy to do. Spoiler: it isn't.
For example in the UK flying a drone requires registration.
Though I suppose I could make like most Brits seem to and bend the rules a little. The ailing police force certainly weren't around to help me when I needed it so I doubt they'd be interested in me fucking about with a drone in a field (sans pyrotechnics of course, I'm not stupid).
Now one could ask: if you don't manage to pass that point, could it be that you underestimated the complexity of building such a business? :-)
Ah yes, the "wonder weapon" mentality. This was a hot topic in Congressional hearings back during (IIRC) Reagan's presidency.
He talks as if reusable drones are a completely different category, that they are all toys designed for enthusiast racers… Generally he implies that a myriad arbitrary technical details are fundamental limitations of this paradigm, it’s a strange mindset.
Also, as others commenters state, isn’t a 43% success rate exceedingly high? Even if it’s 20% accounting for environmental factors and faults in manufacturing. How likely is it that a mortar does anything? Or a soldier with a rifle? Or anything else?
> When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool.
It sounds like he was imagining some kind of scifi adventure, but it’s always been clear that they are using cheap drones with tech that has been commonplace for a decade. And that’s completely fine, it’s intentional.
That's the whole question, and that's kind of the point that the article raises: the success rate does not matter. What matters is the cost. At the same cost, can you do more damage with other weapons or not?
What even comes close to the success rate of a drone to hit a particular moving target? And you can do it while hidden 10km away with a lightly trained operator. And manufactured cheaply, safely and quickly by unskilled labor, and easily transported to the front and hand-carried by troops.
Any kind of alternative, like precision bombing or sniping, or just getting close and shooting at it, must be much more costly, particularly when you also account for the cost of the equipment used, even if it is reusable, and the training, risk and human cost.
That's why you see videos trying to go in open hatches and the like. And that's why you are seeing cope cages. It doesnt matter how many chains or steel plates you weld on to your tank if you are hit by a TOW or a Javelin, it's still going to get you. They can penetrate more than a meter of steel.
But the FPV is carrying a DPCIM or a small RPG it's much less likely to penetrate a tanks or an apc armor.
> What matters is the cost.
Logistics matter too. How many FPVs can a company carry? How many fit in a pickup? Do you need a truck load to kill a tank? If you need like 10 to kill a tank, you need to do 10 attacks, either 10 people attacking the same target in quick succession or one guy 10 times.
A Javelin is pretty much one hit one kill, and the hit rate is supposedly at about 89%. So you need like one or two to kill a tank.
From what I have heard, bigger heavier reusable drones, that release their bigger payload are more effective than FPVs.
Take those extremely high kill rates with a massive grain of salt.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/08/re-ass...
Javelin consumption rates early in the war (500/day) do not match Russian loss rates if the system was ~90% effective. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics/ukraine-us-reque...
You simply can't put a big enough warhead on a man portable missile to defeat the main armor of a modern tank. Thus you do not actually want to hit the tank--the purpose of the Javelin is to fly *over* the target tank, when it's overhead it's warhead detonates, firing an explosively formed projectile down into the *top* armor of the tank. Those cages were meant to keep the Javelin from getting to the right spot to do that.
From what I have read from Ukraine vets, ubiquitous drones make you crazy in a way that tank attacks don't. The difference is in their ubiquity. You are likely to encounter a tank relatively infrequently, and have enough time to recuperate between those encounters. But with a sky full of drones 24/7, or close to that, your nerves will give way sooner or later.
This alone may cripple the forward units.
It's all technically feasible up to "choosing wisely".
I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's clear that drones as a primary means of warfare is simply not effective. hamas and hezbolla have no notable successes with drones, except for on october 7 where they used them to great effect to destroy specific machine gun emplacements and a couple of tanks. They will be part of the future, but never the future itself.
A decade later, automated fuel flow was standardised and aircraft were flying twice as fast and high.
A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.
Yeah Ukraine isn't working with the best tech; it's a doctrine of desperation rather than preparation. But they discovered something effective and it will change the way wars are fought in the future.
They didn't really. TOW's are a thing from the 70s. They are essentially the same thing, but instead of electric rotors they are using a rocket motor. Switchblades existed before this conflict too, if loitering is the measure we are going with.
It's a hacked together solution to a real problem they are having, lack of artillery shells and more reliable munitions. And well done to them.
But a country with the benefit of time and deep pockets is going to come up with more reliable, more effective solutions.
We are seeing the Russians turn to drones as well, but they also burnt their stockpiles of other weapons and are in an emergency too. And additionally they have also doubled their artillery shell production.
That's just not true. I've not seen a TOW chase around a guy in a field, well not on r/UkraineWarVideoReport at least.
If you fire it at a guy or a vehicle, you either going to hit very fast or miss very fast.
That would not be possible because it has become basically impossible to bring in vehicles close to 5-10 kms of the front-lines because of the, well, drones. And you need to carry ammunition to those mortars with something, preferably not how the Vietnamese did it in the jungle (i.e. using brute human force).
Just check this snippet from a recent article in the FT:
> “'At this point, you’re a lucky man if you drive 5km from the front line and your car is still operational,' a Ukrainian drone unit commander deployed in eastern Donetsk region told the Financial Times. He said his men now sometimes had to walk up to 15km at night to reach their positions...
> In the past weeks, Ukrainian supply trucks have reportedly been hit by Russian drones on the road linking Kramatorsk to Dobropillia, some 30km from the fighting. On both sides of the front line, roads are being covered with anti-drone nets in an attempt to stop fibre optic drones."
This comes from Ukrainian guys still fighting this war, not from a Western war-tourist like the guy who wrote this article.
This seems to directly contradict this direct quote from the recent FT article I linked to:
> At this point, you’re a lucky man if you drive 5km from the front line and your car is still operational
Assuming the writer and their allegiances are what they say, is any of the info valuable to any of their adversaries?
They aren't really using VR headsets, right? The FPV goggles I know are just a screen showing the camera image without any virtual reality.
Also it's not like the pilot has to be exposed.
There are dedicated devices for this - much lighter, external battery (same as the drones use), etc. I use a Skyzone 04X.
Seems to be a unique case that worked especially well for (higher end I'm sure) FPV drones. Getting artillery in on shipping containers would have a higher likelihood of detection. Similarly, the ability to 'guide' in the drones with munitions seemed to allow for greater flexibility during the attack and its effectiveness.
I imagine eventually these cheap FPV's will be augmented with low-cost GPU's allowing for running smallish models and self-guided autonomy. This would seem the next evolution where a commander deploys them in bulk and overwhelms the enemy in a way that can't be jammed like radio-communication. Similarly, horrifying when you consider their eventual use in terrorism scenarios...
Most likely it's the first major deployment of their semi autonomous drone tech, driven "declaratively". They've shown that stuff recently, they probably used it before showing it.
I suspect reality is a combination--think RTS game. You give orders to your units but you don't babysit them.
Autonomous control, likely from a base station nearby, or one of their new carrier drones, and remote command.
I disagree with this premise. I suspect that 20 to 30% success rate is not at all bad, but rather excellent. Compare to artillery with shells costing a few thousand each on the low end, to $100k+ for more advanced rounds, with 100s or 1000s fired per casualty.
I guess they must be working for Ukraine, or it wouldn't be buying them. But how well they scale against a competent opponent is less clear.
Early on: Drones in war!
Then: Ahh EW makes them useless!
Then: Fiber optics defeat EW!
Then: But you can follow the cable!
Then: But you can try to respool the cable with a power drill!
Every week it seems is a new move.
Next Next up: Decoys.
There was a video of a soldier wading through massive amounts of fiber near the front line. Just imagine that for each drone attack there will be 10-50km of fiber dropped on the landscape. It will not rot and stay there until someone cleans it up.
(If wishes were horses I'd rather Russia hadn't invaded a sovereign country in the first place, but we are where we are)
So then why isn't the West providing them with optical fiber?
The fiber-optic drones have small warheads/payloads. They are used to hunt the enemy's EW transmitters. Once the jammers have been suppressed, then the radio-controlled drones with bigger payloads go to work and do the bulk of the damage.
These are not inherently valid arguments regarding the effectiveness of drones as a new weapons platform - but with the current state of the technology and with the decisions on the battlefield
It’s early days, the technology will improve and the tactics will be standardized with time and drones will prove to be a dangerously effective tool - which has the additional scary bonus of being cheap and easy to mass produce and deploy
Mortar shells (80mm class) are cheaper, but mortars need to be compared to drone-dropped munitions, not artillery shells - because mortars' range is way shorter than that of an FPV drone and is comparable to the artillery - a good FPV drone - although not the $500 one - can cover about the median artillery firing range of this war (16km).
Drones bring about more casualties and are used wider exactly because they are more cost-efficient.
Sure, maybe. Or maybe it will be like Musk announcing what Teslas will be capable of in 6 months. We don't know, and the author doesn't pretend that they do. Don't forget that drones have been used in this war for years, and the vast majority of the drone industry has already pivoted to the military because it's easier to make money there. So it's not exactly "brand new technology".
But my point is that the author just says "from what I've seen, here is how it looks". And it seems like it has value.
3 years of usage is brand new. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have been designing and producing purpose-built FPV drones since the beginning (I assume things are well underway now). It's a bunch of consumer shit thrown together, which makes it kind of incredible that they work as well as they do.
An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that. And then you saying that "maybe the technology will not improve".
Usage, sure. But the technology is not. Those drones are flying smartphones. We have already had mass-produced consumer drones for more than a decade. We don't use them because they are new, we use them because they are cheap and accessible.
I am not sure what you call "consumer shit" here. They go for cheap FPV drones precisely because they are cheap. But the autopilot running in them can fly a Cessna. We can make them fly longer (they will be bigger), we can use better radios, we can add thermal cameras and bigger payloads. We can add GPUs and AI capabilities. All that we have, but then it doesn't cost 500$ anymore.
> An equivalent would be something like taping an assault rifle to a small Cessna and dominating with that.
Or maybe you see an assault rifle and say "Look at this rifle; it's only the beginning! In a couple years it will have wings and it will drop heavy bombs before returning to base, because it will be reusable". And I'm saying: we already have fighter jets; they are just more expensive.
From where I stand, you're calling "consumer shit thrown together" something you apparently don't really know, and then you make predictions from it.
You seem to think that this ragtag level of warfare between Russia and Ukraine is somehow indicative of what the limit of NATO-level militaries is. I'd say "we'll see", but hopefully we never have to find out.
There was a part before the "or" :-). I did not predict anything, I said "maybe, maybe not". And you told me it was "bad reasoning".
My point was that the article says that drones have a ton of limitations in 2025, and many comments here say "yeah but that's because it's just the beginning". Drone manufacturers have been looking at the military for longer than 3 years, because that's easy money. Saying that "this is just consumer shit thrown together" sounds like you haven't really followed the drone industry in the last 15 years.
Sometimes the problem is not time or money.
The derisive way of putting the alternative (Musk's proven trash announcements) indicates that you were arguing a certain side. It definitely wasn't neutral.
> And you told me it was "bad reasoning".
The bad reasoning is what you're basing the (let's say) doubt on. You seem to know that a lot of technological progress has happened in the military FPV drone industry, but the article and described limitations are about (again) consumer level shit thrown together, not the advanced FPV drones that exist today.
Perhaps the conclusion should be that a lot of the problems described in the article are already solved, but that Ukraine (and Russia) couldn't get their hands on enough of the more capable FPV drones due to those being too expensive or not produced in large enough quantities.
Yes, that's what I think. And I believe that's what the article says: "The FPV drones we currently use are not ideal".
Then people say "yeah but they will improve", to which I answer: "or maybe not so much". Simply because better systems already exist, are mass-produced and are more expensive.
When people say "the technology will improve", I think they're usually referring to the drones currently in use becoming much better not due to breakthroughs in technology, but by applying existing technology more effectively for military purposes. Current military drones used in Ukraine are inefficient conversions of civilian products that were never meant to operate under jamming, leave as small thermal signature as possible, etc. Original military designs, which are optimized for the battlefield rather than the local dog park, can be significantly better.
Are you sure about that? Many drone companies have been engineering for the military for years before the Ukraine invasion in 2022.
The thing is, those FPV drones are super, super, super cheap. We do have better technology, it does exist. But it is more expensive. Is it worth it then? That's the question.
Meanwhile, we have cheap FPV drones that have proven themselves in combat, but they remain toys upgraded with 3D-printed parts by tinkerers. They haven't been repackaged into proper military products and adapted for mass manufacturing.
The sweet spot between a toy and a $20k+ product from a military supplier remains largely unaddressed. It's like the early days of personal computing when some people had already assembled working machines in their garages and demonstrated their usefulness, but there were no rugged and standardized mass-market versions yet that could be ordered by the hundreds of thousands.
Aside from radio jamming, I have not seen an actual defense against a strong EMP.
To defend against an EMP wiping out your drone swarm, you would have to invest in shielding etc which would remove them from the class of small cheap drones.
Idk if anyone can speak about this, but to me this doesn't seem like a problem that these types of drones can overcome.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/world-wont-end-danger...
Thr tldr would be "temper expectations"
At this point, the question becomes the price.
Mortar may be 5 times cheaper but 100x easier to destroy it and its crew.
Also half of the problems described are purely technical and can be easily solved with some budget. In Ukraine most drones are assembled by volunteers. So its not the reliability of drone that is an issue, its lack of proper assembly and QA.
Imagine what China can pull off here in case they're in a war.
Even if they win the war, they still eventually will have lost.
Moving the slider up (MORE children) is the hard part.
Which one you think is worse?
Also, most wealthy industrialized western nations have the same fertility issues, some are only compensating by huge legal and ilegal immigration which can be causing bigger domestic economic and societal issues than being involved in a war abroad. The west and its values, as we used to know it, is also dying.
Japan is stuck in the 90's with no hope for the future and they will be even less relevant then they are now within 1 generation.
Japan is absolutely not "doing strong" for the next 50 years or so and the same will happen to China. If you have no people, you have no future. As simple as that.
And how does the fact that it "will still take decades" suddenly make it OK for the country? Also if you shrink a population by 50% within decades it will completely destroy the economy (and military and culture). You can't just half the population that fast and expect things to just carry on as normal or magically recover.
I do expect the crime rate is higher than most Japanese cities - culturally it's very very different. I don't feel like it's a "pvp" situation though (from a violence perspective; rampant, unbridled capitalism +consumerism in the US gives me pvp vibes for general living) and the streets aren't full of shit.
I like LA, especially the beach and other very nice areas (obviously). I also think I'd probably prefer living in a Japanese city though so maybe you're right in the end.
Nobody can. And it's not like they don't want to. Neither the very traditional and religious Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia (2.14, barely above replacement, and trending down), nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world. All have fertility troubles. Urban lifestyle just does fertility in.
Yeah you can, they just don't want to because it will be at the cost of short term corporate economic growth.
>And it's not like they don't want to.
They don't want to compromise short term corporate profits. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
>nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world
Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are. Norway has different issues than Japan. Every country has different issues.
Really? Can you name one developed country besides Israel that has succeeded?
>Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are
The Government Pension Fund Global (Statens pensjonsfond utland), also known as the Oil Fund (Oljefondet), was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector. As of June 2025, it had over US$1.9 trillion in assets.
Price of a 3 bedroom house in Oslo: $1.5M
$1.9T / $1.5M = 1.266M houses
Population of Norway is 5.6M
Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?
How would they succed when they're not doing anything to succeed?
>Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?
How many families in Oslo can easily afford a 1.5 M apartment?
These things are pretty much the same thing (a thing that can be carried by a man that accurately puts a warhead on a target) just better and more expensive.
edit: Actually the NLOS might not be man portable, but there are other smaller Spike missiles that are.
If you can afford* the Javelins and the TOW's of the world that's what you are going to use otherwise, you are stuck with FPVs.
Afford means not only fiscally, but production capacity wise as well.
FPVs are man portable guided munitions, not artillery. Pretty much all existing man portable guided anti tank weapons are better than FPVs at their job.
And artillery is better than any of them at it's job. While FPVs can score kills they have minimal suppression effects, when an FPV hits a friendly, everyone else is going to keep moving, because stopping will offer them no benefit from the next one, and the next one might be minutes out. When an artillery round lands everyone hits the deck.
Also these are immature tech... I suspect at least some of the issues identified will be mitigated in time.
Sure, but a Javelin missile costs more than $200K. You can have 200 fpv drones for that price.
Most of them would not apply when military finally catches up, starts producing war fpv drones and make good drone pilot training programs
Heck, I could build that with hugginface (I will never do that) in a few evenings if you are ok to blow up the wrong target with a single digit percentage.
This gave me the somewhat macabre image of Ukrainian and Russian drones doing automated frequency coordination with each other, so they can orderly proceed in bombing each other's soldiers.
I don't think that's what happens though. But I'm surprised flying drones in the same area as enemy operators is even possible. Wouldn't both sides try to jam or take over each other's signals, deliberately blocking channels, etc - so that in the end, no one could control anything?
Or, if the signals are really unencrypted, what keeps anyone from setting up a radio beacon that just spams the "detonate now" signal on all channels at maximum power. Instant drone-free zone?
My first thought was, why not use the easier mode (press forward to go forward, back to go back, etc.)? But looking at those war videos, these drones always come at an angle towards the target. And in that sense, it's easier to use the more difficult helicopter mode. What I mean is, once you know the helicopter mode, it's easier to do this kind of maneuver than using the "easy mode".
> As a result, training a highly proficient operator can take months. A standard, base-level course for Ukrainian drone pilots takes about five weeks
Only then can CV do the last part ("terminal engagement"). But that also means it won't go inside a hangar and find the target there.
I don't think we're anywhere near having drones that happily fly above a war zone, detect an interesting hangar, find a way to get inside and select a target inside.
Currently they mostly fly FPV drones manually. The next basic step is to have "terminal engagement", where at some point they can select a target and the drone will fly autonomously to it using CV. But in order to do that, the drone will need processing power, and therefore it won't cost 500$ anymore.
Would you rather go for a drone that costs 5k and can use CV for terminal engagement, or 10 drones that cost 500 and simply stay on their latest vector if no command arrives?
The important point in this is the drone will explode before it could reach anything not a target. It can sometimes find a better target than a pattern. In the ideal case you might fly it all the way, but if you lose radio over enemy territory anything the drone can find needs to die anyway so it may as well attempt to find something and kill it.
Again I think people overestimate how much compute this takes and underestimate how cheap embedded compute has gotten.
Then you have to integrate that RPi to the drone, both mechanically and software-wise. From YOLO, you need to actually get into commands for the autopilot. There is work involved.
And another question is: can you order millions of RPis like this? If not, what is the cost of alternatives?
Not saying it's impossible, just saying that people tend to underestimate those questions. I know it from experience, I have seen projects fail because of that.
It's useful for the fiber powered ones that can loiter indefinitely watching out for other drones and then go chase them.
Ban on new Russian gas contracts starting January 1, 2026 End of short-term contracts by June 2026 Complete phase-out by end of 2027.
(and I'm sure Russia does the same to Ukraine, I just haven't seen those videos).
An enemy combatant doesn't stop being an enemy combatant just because he dropped his weapons.
War crime is executing prisoners. And there are a few videos were Russians gleefully murder prisoners
Rule 3. All members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict are combatants, except medical and religious personnel.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule3
Rule 47. Attacking persons who are recognized as hors de combat is prohibited. A person hors de combat is: (a) anyone who is in the power of an adverse party; (b) anyone who is defenceless because of unconsciousness, shipwreck, wounds or sickness; or (c) anyone who clearly expresses an intention to surrender; provided he or she abstains from any hostile act and does not attempt to escape
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule47
A surprise drone attack on any Russian combatant that isn't a medic or chaplain is "lawful", even if they aren't holding a weapon at the time.
I wonder if some "Surrendering to a Drone" protocol couldn't be codified under the Geneva Convention EG "Visibly disassemble your gun, throw the bits in several directions" etc.
Catching an enemy soldier unarmed doesn’t mean you’re a war criminal, it means they made a big mistake.
This is war, not a gentleman’s duel.