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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Large scale swarms will probably never be a major issue for infantry. You have a finite number of drones, even at extremely high rates of production, spread across all things you want to target. Sending a swarm at individual infantry, or even platoons is just wasteful. At scale that's thousands of drones, per day, that you could have instead sent towards more valuable targets.

This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.

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This is not true.

The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.

A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.

If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.

Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.

Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.

People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.

Edit:

I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.

As I understand it, currently all drones require a human operator who can only operate one at a time. And except for some special operations behind enemy lines, you must be fairly close to the target, as within a few km. The fiber optic ones, even closer

So your 50 drone swarm is going to need 50 operators, fairly close to the front. Who are also vulnerable to enemy counter drones and glide bombs - the latter is a real problem for Ukraine

I haven’t seen any evidence of a “swarm” on combat footage from Ukraine war, I have seen a few drones hitting a single target, especially armored vehicles in fairly quick succession, like a few seconds, It looked like independent operators all picking the obvious high value target, not some intentional “swarm”

Tech may change this in the future but we’re not there quite yet

iPhones can run some AI models on device already. Expect this to change, rapidly.

Depending on what you're looking for, a Raspberry Pi has enough processing power to do object / target detection and the like already.

AI as we know it today is overkill for this application. Image detection and signal processing is enough for most.

Ukraine is having pretty substantial manpower problems in its armed forces. If fully autonomous drones against mobile targets had been figured out, they would been deployed and there would be no need for the more expensive / shorter range fiber optic drones and you wouldn't hear about the manpower issue as much

They haven't been figured out, yet.

They are absolutely on the way.

And full self driving is just a year or two away for the past 15 years

If we were in a war with widespread conscription that needed self-driving vehicles, I'd bet we'd a) see a lot more investment in them and b) a lot less concern about edge cases.

You're very out of date.

First, you don't need AI operators, you just need a swarm. The operators are reusable!

>Ukraine reported the largest single-day drone attack by Russia on July 9, 2025, where Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones. This surpasses earlier attacks, including one on May 26, 2025, when Russia launched 355 drones.

With that many pilots, that is a swarm.

Next, analysis of last months AI driven attack was performed by many drones with no human terminal guidance - they were jammed and expected to be!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/ukraine-russia...

>“Our models are being trained to recognise targets to understand target prioritisation,” he says. “We do not have full autonomy yet. We use the human factor where we need to, but we are developing different scenarios for taking autonomy further.

> “We are also testing some autonomous drones, which we have not announced and are probably not planning to announce, but they have a high degree of autonomy, and they can potentially combine themselves into swarms. We are still facing technical problems and hurdles, but we already see a path forward on this.”

One Final Note - Most of the info you ever hear about military tech is only the things people are allowed to discuss publicly. The battlefield is also a hell of a lab, and 3d printers and open source flight software (and open source AI models) are amazing.

Note that the one drone is not the other; when they talk about Russian mass drone attacks, they will refer to Shahed etc drones, which are autonomous, not unlike the WW2 V1 "drones".

But yeah, drone swarms with fewer operators will be, probably already is a thing. But what I've seen so far, they're just not very useful; drones look to be generally used on individual targets, if there's a bigger or more targets, they'll use something bigger like a HIMARS, glide bomb, or if it's closer by, an artillery strike.

Drone swarms primary purpose is to overwhelm defenses.

Many argue drone swarms require some level of orchestration and control, others say a certain level of automation is required.

I'm aware of the differences in many drone classifications.

HIMARS was made largely impotent by GPS jamming. Glide bombs have limited range (barring exceptions for stuff like JASSM-ER but that is massive increase in cost) and detection and fire by counter battery. Artillery strike requires fairly close proximity but a bit more of rocket assisted.

Spent time doing military things with a lot of ordinance and a lot of drones.

Those 725 drones were spread across a fairly big geographic area, and didn’t hit all at once. Also they operate more like cruise missiles, not the FPV drones it seemed like the article was referring too

“Swarm” to me means more than just number. It’s number, concentration, and tactics, like a swarm of bees… the problem is they are concentrated and hitting from many directions, While individually they are not that bad, when they use this tactic it is very effective, Which is how they can drive 500 pound bears away from their hive.

Otherwise “swarms” have been a thing for along time. Would you call an 19th century infantry regiment (let’s say about 600-1000 soldiers) a “swarm”. Or how about those formations of B17/B24s/Lancasteres in WW2 which would attack in similar numbers (hundreds). I would say no, partly because they didn’t use a swarming tactic

Read the Ukranian part I quoted.

Argue about the definition of swarm (the distance between units and level of coordination) all you want, but ultimately it's irrelevant given the addition information.

Massive coordination is going into attacks across hundreds or thousands of Km. Multiple layers of drones, electronic warfare, recon, airspace deconfliction, etc. Highly orchestrated. Large numbers that are overwhelming systems designed to defeat them, like a swarm of locust.

Note: These aren't the Warthunder forums.

Soldiers adapt - deploying in groups of 3-4, moving along tree lines, and hiding in buildings/trenches. One of Patrick Lancaster's (an American journalist covering the war from the Donbas) videos has him hiding with a group of soldiers while a drone is overhead - the twigs and branches of the bushes and trees makes it impossible for a drone traveling at a moderate speed to see them, and would entangle the drone if it did attack.

Drones are being operated in layers based on range and capability. This applies to both long range / heavy payload drones and small / fast fpvs.

Long range, heavy payload, ISR drones with excellent optics and thermals are helping to spot targets from very far away that small groups of fpv operators can search and target.

Smaller drones must be somewhat closer, so this can't happen too far away from where are currently.

Depending on the terrain and what the enemy is using to adapt (like fiber optic tether for drones like a TOE missile, or like AI targeting and terminal guidance to counter controls + GPS jamming), fpv drones can be a liability (tree cover, rubble) or have a big impact.

What a lot of units are doing for tree cover is what is called a VT fuse for mortars or artillery. These can be configured to burst at tree height. Artillery/indirect often have coverage over top of drone units to cover their advance with smoke if need be, and much further range than FPV drone operations do without some sort of comms relay (could be another airborne drone relaying).

Yeah. Don't group up though. The first round of indirect fire is normally the most deadly.

It seems like you are making the point that there are large ranges of drones, and other weapons are required when drones are not effective, which I agree with. Drones aren't as cost effective as your earlier example of 12 soldiers being killed by a few drones. I can't find the interview, but a Ukranian drone operator said on average 15-20 FPVs were needed to wound/kill a soldier (80% are jammed). Just as it takes 1000 bullets to kill a soldier, it takes lots of drones (on average) to kill a soldier, making the cost-effectiveness worse.

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying they're not acting alone, and alluding to battlefield conditions changing and combatants adapting as they have done since warfare started.

They are using Combined Arms doctrine to support their drones now. Instead of drones supporting everything else, everything else is in support of drones and drone dominance.

The supply chain and cost is a big part of it.

As both sides continue to develop new and better AI targeting systems, RF jamming will cease to be effective and they'll have to move to laser jamming of the optical systems. As that is no longer effective, swarm tactics counter the laser tactics. Currently counter-swarm attack methods for drone-swarms are being investigated, because nobody knows of a cost effective way to stop this. Even the drone supply chain is very easy to do much of very near the front lines. Carbon fiber and some heavy duty airframes are harder. It's SO CHEAP compared to any comparable weapon.

This is nonsense. Drones get all the attention because of the novelty and that they obviously have become very important, but you're being beyond hyperbolic. Artillery is still the king of war and responsible for something like 80% of all battlefield casualties. This has become even more true now with drones having eyes in the sky everywhere enabling artillery to become even more devastating.

I dropped something I think you should read from a former coworker:

https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/the-meaning-of-drone-enabl...

Somehow my autocorrect changed TOW missile to TOE missile.

Oops!

I agree with you on almost everything. Where we differ is on the nature of money. I think the recent wars emphasize that the real bottleneck in war is no longer $$$, but the things those dollars represent. So for instance a million $1000 drones is, on paper, only a billion dollars. The bottleneck isn't the cost, but the production. And you can't just spin up production making millions per year, because you also need the raw resources - and you end up with this entire complex supply chain, all on top of finite raw materials, and then the logistics to organize everything. And in the case of a war scenario, this all needs to be organized in a disruption proof system. It's extremely complex and difficult, even if you have an infinite money machine.

And I think you would actually agree with this by taking a simple thought experiment. Imagine we have 1 soldier with a million dollars of training. And we give an opposing force the choice of eliminating that soldier, or eliminating 1,000 $1000 drones. Everybody is going to pick the drones, and it won't be even remotely close. In fact drop it down by an order of magnitude, 100 drones, and it's still not even close - even though the on paper value of that soldier is an order of magnitude higher. 10 drones is probably where it starts to get close, though I think it'd still lean heavily towards the drones.

---

I would add that when a war becomes a late stage war of attrition, the value of infantry goes up. I am speaking in more general terms in a war where manpower is nowhere near a critical issue. In any case by the time manpower does become a critical issue, a war is usually already lost, even if it might be able to drag on for many months yet.

30% unit casualties causes the unit to be Combat Ineffective in the infantry role.

(Number of infantry x .3) = $DesiredCasualties

Let's say it takes 10 drones to kill a soldier, and each drone is $250/ea. That's $2,500, or the $KillCost

$DesiredCasualties x $KillCost = Dollar value needed to move an infantry unit into combat ineffectiveness

Looks like around 620,000 troops deployed by Russia so far.

620k x .3 = 186,000

186000 x $2500 = $465 million, bottom line price, in a crazy world where the starts align in many ways that aren't realistic, gives you a huge destruction in combat capability for less than $500mil.

For those following along, this is extremely overly simplified, but I hope it conveys both the huge military advantages drones provide as well as the political (less dead bodies to deal with, less broken soldiers sent home for treatment and decades of care) and economic advantages lethal drones in combat can provide.

And the enemy is using the exact same thing against you. Yet infantry will remain critical for claiming territory, clearing areas and more. As drones advance, war will probably become even bloodier. And drone operators that survive are already coming home completely broken men suffering from extreme PTSD.

Then factor on top of this logistics. You need to transport men, keep them fed, equipped, and more. You need to move a massive amount of stuff constantly in war, yet drones are going to be buzzing everywhere. So I think we're seeing the future of war now - slow, grueling, bloody wars of attrition.

And war where high prices tags are replaced by high costs in stuff, making it more apparent than ever that economies maximized through financial games and services are paper tigers when facing economies based on the production of tangible things.

I don't think they are, actually (using the same TTPs), nor would it make sense to.

Ukrainian drone doctrine is very different than Russian, and not just on paper, but how it is playing out.

This is for two main reasons: proximity to logistics for the defenders vs attackers, and existing military structures including vehicles and troop organizational structures (MTOE) that drone systems support or are supported by.

So I don't agree with your assessment there. It doesn't seem to match what's happening in the field with the type of drones used and the percentage of the classification of each type of drone system and purpose. These are quite different.

I also don't think it will be more bloody, but less over time. Much of the fight is in the electronic warfare arena and in air dominance across the vertical airspace. A colleague agrees:

https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/the-meaning-of-drone-enabl...

Infantry are expensive to train correctly, to outfit, and supply. I think the total number of frontline combat troops will continue to go down as a fraction of overall troops, while increasing supporting positions for drones, communications, electronic warfare, and general battlefield logistics.

Agree with your last paragraph 100% !

That article reads like typical NATO stuff which sounds great in practice but makes assumptions that don't exist, and are unobtainable (like air superiority), if you're fighting an enemy more sophisticated than guys running around in sandals with AKs. Here [1] is a report from somebody who worked with drones in Ukraine, and why he's exceptionally disillusioned with them.

I half wonder if what I linked to wasn't an indirect response to what you posted, as it was published only 3 days later, and is essentially that article's equal but opposite.

[1] - https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-fought-in-ukraine-and-he...

The drone cost in hundreds of dollars , low hundreds , even optic one cost $300-400 at manufacturing.

Train a soldier is hundreds of thousands.

Manufacturing , both Ukraine and Russia , generally speaking technological midgets, producing as of today millions a year. Ukraines projected output is around 4 millions in 2025

China can easily produce tens of millions. Even if 1 out 4 hit your target , that’s any army of any size in the world obliterated without new recruits.

Reports (caveat: biased, pro-ukranian reports) are though that Russian soldiers barely get any training, I doubt they are worth that much. Even at the start of the war, there were stories that they had to buy their own shoes.

At this point it's not even so much about scale, but about intelligence - finding viable or valuable targets. A million FPV drones won't do much good if your enemy is >100 kilometers away. The Ukranian front line is over 1000 kilometers long, but viable targets are easily a hundred kilometers from that either side. And that's just around the front lines, picking off individual soldiers or hardware won't stop this war, not when thousands are recruited and trained every month. Which is why Ukraine has done some deep strikes, taking out trains, infrastructure, refineries, air bases, etc. If they can take out the Shahed drone production facility too, that'd be a huge blow. But again, it wouldn't stop this war, just slow down attacks on civilians.

training the soldier is only part of it.

you need at least ~16 years of food, water, and teaching to get something useful. ideally 18, sometimes as low as 12. and you can't refurbish ones that are missing parts or otherwise defective.

the 20k to run them through Basic Training is a pittance.

Basic/AIT in the US Army is closer to 50k-85k but can be a little higher for certain specialties.

Some lives are worth more $$$ than others... CASEVAC for a single US soldier will tie up multiple individuals + follow up costs (full logistics + medical + compensation + benefits etc) = orders of magnitude more than few 1000 drones. Estimates for fully burden costs of severely wounded is 2-5m+ for lifetime.

>Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.

It's not, it forces your enemy to waste valuable resources on defending those civilian targets.

> assumes you care about the civilians

Also, drones are currently being flown by soldiers in fpv goggles so swarm is not very practical. It will change once we have swarm software and there is a need for it.

Or just extend the logic to materiel instead of personnel, like Ukraine did with the airbase attacks earlier this year: for the price of a few dozen < $1k drones, you can eliminate $50M-$150M+ aircraft? The asymmetry is insane.

There's also nothing that practically stops those same tactics from being aimed at other soft infrastructure targets: electrical substations, telco facilities, water treatment facilities... the nightmare scenario is taking down transmission lines and switching stations outside, say, a large nuclear power plant during a heat wave. The nuke itself is hardened, obviously, but who cares if it can't transmit the power it's generating to the people that need it?

It also took 18 months to insert the people, set up the shell company, smuggle materials, manufacture, etc. It also had the advantage of surprise - the first such attack at such a distance from the front line. Is it unlikely such an attack will be replicated, just as a box-cutter hijack of 747s attack against buildings will not succeed again.

>This, btw, is also why claims that some side is targeting civilians in otherwise 'productive' warfare (e.g. actually achieving things instead of bombing for the sake of fear/terrorism/headlines/photo ops) is usually just lying propaganda. Civilians are a worse than 0 value target meaning you completely wasted your munitions.

The issue in your logic is assuming Ruzzia/Kremlin uses same natural logic as the rest of the world, I talked with many Zed patriots, that country uses a non natural logic, Zed Logic. Add on top of the unatural logic, the brainwashing and the fact that most of thye soldiers are murderers and rapists from prisons and you get a lot of civilians killed or abused by this asshols for fun or other reasons that make no sense in a natural logic.

An example of Zed logic

When Ruzzia attacks some civilian infrastructure in Ukraine (like grain storage) then Zeds claim it is legal, but when Ukraine strikes a military ship Zeds claim this is illegal, it is terrorism because... ... the ship was outside the SMO (special military operation) that Putin decided to be.

I am not joking, the Zeds are full of this bullshit logic, something ie legal/correct is always dependent of who makes the crime, where the crime is happening, who is the victim.

Second best Zed logic shit I heard is "USSR was the best democracy ever, in the entire human history"

Dude, Russians literally post this stuff on their own social media accounts. The "munitions" in question are no more expensive than a basic frag grenade.

And what part of the Russian war effort has led you to the conclusion that they value productivity over terrorism and photo ops? The incentive structures of the Russian military are just oceans apart from anything a westerner would consider a proper functional military.

I have some clips for you. Does this look like the operations of a productive military to you? You have no clue, absolutely none at all. They do this shit kind of to their own soldiers, and you think they're above trying to terrorize Ukrainians into compliance?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/europe/russia-deserters-ukrai...

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1937075719428780250

https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1935714762664693993

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1932061484030267809

Note: that last clip is very, very NSFL. For reference, naked and bound deserters were thrown into a dirt pit and fired upon with rifles (not killed, at least not in the video, but threatened essentially)

I can understand how a westerner who has never seen, even by proxy, the dregs of the Russian internet could conceive of just how fucked up Russian military culture is. But, like, none of this stuff is hidden. The brutality of what happens to people who disobey them is genuinely part of the image they want to portray to the world (and to themselves). And in this way they feel the need to make an example of the Ukrainians - who by the way Russian state media isn't shy about portraying as basically subhumans.

And there is far, far worse shit than this that never makes it out of Russian-language telegram channels.

Man. You sound diluted. Go see one month of Gaza and see how a real civilian targeted war would look like. If Russia would want to see terror they could create more civilian casualties in one evening than the entire war. In Ukraine civilians are not the target. In Gaza they are. Sponsored by the west.

Or, they could just stretch out civilian attacks over time to keep up the pressure.

This puts pressure on Ukrainian leadership and citizens while minimizing outcry from global powers.

The X.com links don't work. The CNN article was on a video showing how Russians treat a deserter. Ukraine has 400,000 deserters, and forces men on the street into vans for conscription. https://www.ukrainemonitor.com/article/837248236 https://www.bitchute.com/video/4GlBx4Dgihge

The Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are volunteers, well paid (five times average salaries). https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/b0002tho

The people on the ground know how the war is going - there are no more Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Winning attracts, and Russia doesn't need conscription. Amazingly, Ukraine is now recruiting 60+ year old men to fight. https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-signs-law-allowing-over...

I don't understand why this is Amazing, Russia has 4x the population of Ukraine and they've been conscripted since the beginning.

What is amazing is that we've been at this point for years and Russia has only made teeny tiny amounts of progress.

Winter Bear? Paper tiger.

They never would have stood a chance directly against the US in a peer conflict.

Like most, you're confusing conscription with mobilization, something the Western media conveniently repeatedly plays into.

Russia, and many other countries - like everywhere in Scandinavia, has compulsory military enlistment or conscription. But these people generally are not eligible to be sent abroad to participate in conflicts. Instead it's used for training. After that training they are then required to sign up for the equivalent of the US Selective Service where, after after some years (2 in Russia), they may be called up, or mobilized, for participation in any conflict. Russia carried out one very small scale mobilization very early on in the war. It led to hundreds of thousands of Russians leaving the country and was generally exceptionally unpopular. Since then their entire army has been 100% volunteer forces.

By contrast Ukraine immediately, after the war began, made it illegal for men of "fighting age" (18-60) to leave the country and declared a general mobilization such that any man of "fighting age" can be immediately mobilized and sent to the front. This had led to them at times literally dragging people off the streets, beating them into submission when necessary (with more than a few 'deaths in training'), giving then some performative training, and then sending them to the front. And the like the GP mentioned, they recently passed a law to allow even 60+ year olds to enlist, limiting potential medical exemptions, and more. In other words - they are simply running out of people.

So Russia has been essentially fighting a war of attrition against an endless hoard of people armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in the Western gear, directed by Western instructors, using Western intelligence, and winning. It's going to be difficult for any developed nation, including the US, to ever fight a real war like this - because people aren't going to tolerate general mobilization, let alone people coming back in body bags by the hundreds of thousands, for the sake of geopolitics half way around the world. Even Russia has managed to do so only by offering extremely high wages for their soldiers, but it's unclear what this will entail once the war winds down. Hopefully they have not found themselves in the US trap where they suddenly essentially have to always be at war to keep their economy chugging along.

Pssst - Your 100% volunteer claim is wrong.

https://us.dk/media/vsxfb4vt/factfindingmission_russia-recru...

>The Chechens most at risk of being coercively recruited are critcs of the authorites, family members of vocal critcs, drug and alcohol users as well as members of the LGBT community. The Chechen authorites have used coercive recruitment to get rid of what they call the undesirables. In general, any deviaton from the norms and rules of Kadyrov’s leadership could be used to coercively recruit Chechens. In this regard, the Chechen authorites use forced recruitment as a form of punishment in Chechnya. Although certain groups can be identfied as being more at risk than others, there is also a high degree of unpredictability and arbitrariness in the actons of Chechen authorites in regards to coercive recruitment.

And the ones who tried to hide: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/26/austria-deports-ch...

Chechnya has its own laws on just about everything. It's ruled by Islamic Law such that homosexuality, alcohol consumption, and even pork consumption are illegal there. They also have their own laws and culture with regards to war and were even completely excluded from the partial mobilization and allowed to do their own thing, as usual. It's a negligible part of Russia (about 1% by population) and not representative of Russian law or norms.

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