Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.
So, you endup with best case 3.000.000 USD/unit drones. This for 2.000 drones, not considering budget overuns.
Both sides in Ukraine use more than this in a single month.
Again the obession with flashy technology in the US military ignores the reality of what is a large scale peer conflict.
Those drone maybe great, but their cost and the possible manufacture complexity make it not very practical for large scale peer conflicts.
Are you really arguing about ~$5mil a month in drones? Thats around the cost of ONE PATRIOT interceptor or 5 HIMARS salvos. Its not going poof, its splattering invaders.
If you really want to get outraged by something read about russians behind Lancet suicide drones https://www.sensusq.com/blog/sensusq-analysis-on-the-zala-42... Son of the de facto owner/ceo of the company currently works at UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva.
The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smartphone and 20-40 pounds of explosive? The military expects that they will get a lot cheaper, which means you need to be able to counter them at least as cheaply.
This article misses the larger point. A drone costs $200. Why do missles cost $3 million? Yes, this is a cold war era missile. But with drones, the last thing we need is more cold-war era kit.
Imagine a theater of war with $100 million worth of $200 drones in it. That's 500,000 drones.
> Several news sources have reported that a single TB2 drone can be purchased for a million dollars, but Bayraktar, while not giving a precise figure, told me that it costs more. In any event, single-unit figures are misleading; TB2s are sold as a “platform,” along with portable command stations and communications equipment. In 2019, Ukraine bought a fleet of at least six TB2s for a reported sixty-nine million dollars; a similar fleet of Reaper drones costs about six times that.
It seems to me there is still a lot of opportunity in the low end with even smaller and cheaper UAVs with a few kilograms of payload. There have already been numerous instances of COTS UAVs being jerry-rigged to drop mortar shells, and it seems to work pretty well in a lot of scenarios. Particularly for smaller governments dealing with relatively unsophisticated insurgencies.
Its about cost difference. The primary way to engage a small drone (sUAS) is with a missile costing $60k+ which has limited inventory. To shoot down a drone that costs $400. Its not hard to see how quickly that gets out of hand.
Try talking to the soldiers who have been in hot zones in the last 5 years. Guarantee they will tell you just how hard it is to shoot them down.
> The main saving grace of a system like this is that the munitions, unguided rockets and cannon rounds, are pretty cheap. In contrast while drones are much cheaper than the chopper, they’re very expensive as munitions.
Based on the current war in Ukraine, this isn't true at all.
Even relatively expensive loitering munitions (compare to mortars dropped from DJI drones) like the Switchblade 600 cost in the range of $10,000-20,000 per deployment, significantly cheaper than the flight costs for a rotary light attack sortie and much cheaper than even the "low-cost" missile option for the Prachand (the Thales FZ275 LGR - the high-cost option is the MBDA Mistral, which costs $300,000 per deployment).
There is no scenario in which a manned rotary craft competes with a drone on cost.
Drones are effective, but nothing is ever cheap on the battlefield. While the warhead that ultimately kills the target is often cheap, the real cost comes from the system that picks the right target and delivers the warhead there at the right time.
Cheap commercial drones have a short range. In order to use them effectively on the battlefield, each drone needs an operator, who must also be on the battlefield. Those operators then need other people for watching their backs, coordinating their actions, and handling the logistics. Those 1000 cheap simultaneously launched drones are now an entire brigade on the battlefield, which is definitely not cheap.
Not even $2M. Have you seen the footage of the UA/TDF using civilian quadrotor drones to drop anti-tank hand grenades on vehicles? As long as the radio spectrum is open, these type of attacks will be very hard to stop.
The game-changer here would be bringing cost down and range and accuracy up.
I don't know what the cost of a modern army's soldier in the field is (or how that varies by national average income --- one of the cost drivers for the US military is simply typical wages and income), but as a very naive ballpark estimate, the US Army which boasts north of 450,000 active-duty soldiers and a $173 billion budget (FY2022) is therefor looking at about $380k/soldier-year, total cost.
I'll estimate that actual combat troops are roughly 10% of the total, so we're looking at about $4 million per pair of boots on actual ground.[1] Maybe.
A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1--4 million (varying by source). Single use.
A Predator MQ-1 drone costs about $40 million. Multi-use. The Hellfire missile (with which Predators may be equipped) run about $58k -- $150k each.
The DJI consumer-grade drones being used in the Russo-Ukraine war run about $1k--2k each. Multi-use.
Switchblade 300 and 600 drones run from $6k to $70k per unit.
Significant challenges for smaller drones are the warhead that can be carried, range, identification of targets, and avoiding counter-battery fire, in which the launch, recovery, and/or control points for drones are identified and attacked by retaliatory fire. Among other advantages of single-use drones are that such counter-battery fire is more challenging as one cannot simply follow the drone back home.
Slaughterbot-scale drone attacks strike me as reasonably implausible in contemporary warfare. Targets are insufficiently dense, ranges are too short, and costs are comparatively high. A swarm of, say, 10 to 100 drones might be viable, but that's going to only take on 10 to 100 individual targets. Swarms of 1,000s of drones would require a very capable military organisation (of which the US, possibly a few other NATO forces, and perhaps China might be capable of affording such weapons), and still have to be transported relatively close to the field of battle by some other means. Though drop-shipping a standard 40-foot container might well be one option available. Others could be launching from a larger mothership (a drone aircraft itself, manned cargo aircraft, a ship or submarine, or land-transports such as trucks or railcars). Those are easier than launching an manned land-invasion, but still a complex undertaking.
Even states that have significant technical capabilities and relatively low inhibitions (Israel, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Russia) seem not to have widely adopted or deployed drone weapons, though whether that's a technical limitation or strategic decision I'm not sure.
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Notes:
1. As with all estimates, this is eliding a tremendous amount of detail and includes much guesswork and outright ignorance. I'd greatly appreciate pointers to accurate information on fighting vs. support troops. I'm omitting national guard though I'm well aware that they serve combat roles. My sources don't give hard numbers on soldiers in infantry, though I'm finding that the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 11th, and 25th divisions are considered "infantry", that a typical division is 10k -- 25k soldiers, so we're looking at 50k -- 250k soldiers assigned to infantry divisions, though again some fraction of that is support roles. Still, $0.5 -- $5 million for a soldier-year on the ground seems a reasonable ballpark.
Why just 1000? Why not 100M? From the war in Ukraine it seems that future wars will be fought by swarms of cheap drones. Most of them will never hit a target. Some of them though will do so. Ships, tanks, soldiers, jets, nothing stands a chance.
It seems to me that the country that develops the best supply chain of cheap drones will be the one that will be able to win any war.
You have to get the costs balanced too- it can't cost 1 million dollars to kill a 250 dollar drone, for obvious "what if the adversary was China" reasons.
So they used to buy $250 drones? I can understand why US defense contractors can't meet that price point, but maybe somebody should stop treating drones as consumables.
They are aircraft that is cheaper than anti-aircraft rockets normally used. One shot from anti-aircraft system cost 50-200k depending. This is great when the target costs 50 million, but drones costs start from 1k.
Drones are the future of warfare so you are a little late to complain about drones being used for warfare. The race is well under way.
“…used by both Russia and Ukraine for surveillance and for delivering bombs, goes for around US $2,000. You can get 55,000 of them for the price of a single F-35”
Adversaries spend 100k for a military grade drone. What do shoot it down with? A 1M dollar Patriot? Whatever you choose will be orders of magnitude more expensive than the drone.
Israel’s Iron Dome has the same issue. It costs massively more for defense than attack.
According to my napkin math it would cost 1.5 trillion USD to kill every American with drones and I am already assuming very cheap and capable ones, that you deploy them near the target and that the target is incapable of defending itself. The cost of deployment itself isn't even included. Nuclear weapons are very cheap in comparison.
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