SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE BRIEFING — Drone weapons are part of the daily narrative of the war in Ukraine – from Russia’s use of Iranian drones against infrastructure to Ukraine's drone strikes against Russian territory and Russian vessels in the Black Sea. Beyond those headline-grabbing attacks, both sides are now using drones in nearly every military operation, and as the volume of drone strikes soars, Russia and Ukraine have invested heavily in domestic drone manufacturing to meet a soaring demand.
And if Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine sparked the world’s first true drone war, other global theaters of conflict aren’t far behind. Hamas used drone weapons in its October 7 assault on Southern Israel, Israel has an arsenal of high-end drone weapons, and Iran – beyond its shipments of drones to Russia – used dozens of drones in its weekend attack on Israeli targets, and has armed several of its proxy militia groups with drone weaponry. Meanwhile, experts in drone proliferation and East Asian security say drones will play outsized roles if conflict comes to Taiwan.
The Cipher Brief hosted a special briefing on drone warfare with two top experts – the Center for a New American Security’s (CNAS) Stacie Pettyjohn and Zachary Kallenborn, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski moderated the conversation.
Beyond the crisis zones and broad proliferation of drone weapons, the conversation looked at what the future may hold – from "drone swarms" to drones with "minds of their own," – as the modern battlefield changes at warp speed.
THE CONTEXT
- Rapidly advancing drone technologies are being used by nation states and non-state actors, helping military leaders boost intelligence, targeting and attack capabilities.
- Both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war are using drones for reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and short- and long-range attacks. Russia has used drones in recent air strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Ukraine has used unmanned aerial vehicles to strike military infrastructure and oil facilities inside Russia, as well as maritime drones to target Russia's Black Sea Fleet.
- Iran is a major producer of drones. It used dozens of drones in its weekend strike against Israel, and Tehran has sent Shahed drones to Russia for use in Ukraine and helped Moscow begin domestic production of Shahed weapons. Iran has also sent drone weapons to regional proxies.
- China is a leader in the global drone market. China's Da Jiang Innovations (DJI) is the world's largest drone maker, supplying 70% of the world's consumer drones and almost 80% of U.S. consumer drones.
THE BRIEFING
The Cipher Brief asked experts in the field to assess the state of drone technology and potential opportunities and threats.
This excerpt of the full briefing has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: In this very dynamic world of drone weaponry, what do you see as the leading edge — the drone technology we ought to know about, or worry about?
Pettyjohn: For me it’s the software and autonomy, and what sort of systems are making their own decisions.
To a large degree right now in the war in Ukraine and other places, there has been a limited use of autonomy. You have mundane things like collision avoidance, automatic takeoff and landing, but there are reports that the Ukrainians are trying to develop automatic terminal guidance for the first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones, and that they have a fully autonomous drone – the Saker strike drone – though these are hard things to verify.
Israel on the other hand already has drones that are more sophisticated in this area and have more autonomous features and end up having a human still controlling them. But one human is controlling multiple drones at the same time, which is a pretty big leap from what we've seen in other recent conflicts.
The Cipher Brief: It really is a leap. And while “autonomous” is just a word, Zach, talk a little bit about what that really means — drones with minds of their own.
Kallenborn: The language does suggest something sort of like “Terminator,” but that's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about the ability of machines to make some level of decisions on their own, where they're sort of processing information. And in that human-control setting, it has the ability to recognize — OK, that's a tank, that's an armored personnel carrier, that's a person, and then make some level of decisions to make sure I hit the thing I was supposed to hit.
But over time we could expect to see an expansion of that – more complex uses of autonomy, more complex decision-making as well as the integration of drones into drone swarms, where you have a whole bunch of drones working and operating together, where they're communicating towards common goals. And the drones within that swarm are almost certainly going to have significant degrees of autonomy because it's almost impossible to imagine a human controlling a thousand, 10,000 drones all operating together.
The Cipher Brief: So we're talking about lots of drones that at some point were sent somewhere by humans, but in a swarm, behaving with autonomy.
Kallenborn: Yes. And exactly how autonomous and in what ways, is complex. Having a drone that's navigating by itself, we can do that. You can get that off a simple drone that you can buy at Walmart. It's not necessarily complicated or particularly controversial, but at scale, what that means is you can have greater degrees where you have to consider autonomous decision-making over life and death, which raises of course larger moral and ethical concerns about how effective these systems are, as well as whether machines should be taking human life.
The Cipher Brief: Stacie, we read about drone use in Ukraine on an almost daily basis. Help us to understand, from the garage model to the other end, what the Ukrainians have been bringing to bear.
Pettyjohn: It's pretty astonishing, the breadth of different types of drones that have been used by the Ukrainians and the Russians. If you Google “drone Ukraine,” most of the articles that come up are about the Turkish Bayraktar TB2, which is a big medium-altitude, slow-moving drone, more akin to some of the systems that the United States would have, like a Reaper or Predator, though not as advanced. But those are not the drones that have been common in Ukraine – it's much smaller drones, both military-grade and commercial systems.
It's really on the commercial side where things have exploded in a way that I think few people would've foreseen. Almost every unit that is out there would not conduct any operation today without at least one commercial quadcopter (drone) up in the air for situational awareness, if they're planning operations, if they're going on attack, if they're moving. These small commercial quadcopters, initially the Ukrainians had more of them and were more willing to use them than the Russians. The Ukrainians found them so effective, pairing them with artillery units where the drones essentially acted as spotters and were able to help find targets for artillery so they could accurately hit them. And they did so without putting a person in as much risk as having somebody up there looking and trying to be that proximate to the enemy.
And the final thing are the kamikaze drones, and you have both military and commercial variants. The commercial ones are modified with bombs strapped to them. They're small quadcopters. They're built from cheap commercial subcomponents and then troops on the front lines will strap whatever sort of munition that they have to it and fly it into a target.
There are military-grade variants of this that have also been really important.
The Cipher Brief: Is it now a level playing field between Ukraine and Russia?
Pettyjohn: Russia's probably ahead, despite what you read, because they have always had an advantage on the military side and they've extended that, and the Ukrainians are developing a lot of drones that are military-grade, but they just can't scale production. They have a startup industry. On the commercial drones, Ukraine had a three-to-one advantage initially. Russia adapted, caught up, copied the Ukrainians, same thing with the first- person Kamikaze drones. Ukraine was the first mover there. They saw the potential and really began to exploit these systems to great effect going after mobile targets. The Russians were like, Wow, that's a really terrible weapon. And they copied them and managed to centralize production and are producing probably as many, if not more than the Ukrainians at this point.
The Cipher Brief: Zach, I wanted to ask about an area where innovation on the Ukrainian side has been joined with impact – the maritime drones. What impact have they had?
Kallenborn: That's been a really fascinating development in the conflict, where you have Ukraine increasingly using basically modified jet skis that operate remotely, and you can have bombs on them and then smash them into ships and blow stuff up. I think it's been significant in a number of respects.
Early in the conflict, Ukraine largely conceded the sea-based aspect and kind of gave up there. But these affordable drones have allowed them to cause significant harm against a number of Russian ships.
After some of these attacks, Russia withdrew a number of its manned ships into port. They just kind of sat in port. There was a clear psychological effect there. Now there's been a number of recent attacks that actually have sunk a couple of significant Russian ships.
This isn't the first time that we've seen drone boats being used in combat. The Houthi rebels for example, have used drone boats against Saudi frigates to sink naval vessels. And of course the Houthis are non-state actors. They have state support, but I think this goes to show that we can expect to see this technology broaden all over the world.
The Cipher Brief: There was a very significant statement that Ukraine’s former military commander Valery Zaluzhnyi made in November, that the war was approaching a stalemate, and he said technology had made it very hard for either side on the battlefield to make advances. Have drones been part of that, disrupting so much offensive capability?
Pettyjohn: I think it's directly related to the drones. They essentially shifted the balance on the front lines, to where it's defense dominant. It's not that offensives are impossible. We've seen recently that Russia has made gains, but it's been slow and difficult. And what you find is that especially within 10 miles of the frontlines on either side, there's a dense network of sensors with commercial drones, military drones and others going out to strike things that make it really hard to concentrate forces anywhere or to launch any sort of surprise attacks.
I think that is definitely a big piece of what has made offensive operations really difficult.
The Cipher Brief: Let's move to the Middle East. Completely different actors, completely different conflict. Zach, can you talk about Israel and Gaza and drone use?
Kallenborn: Hamas used about 35 of one particular type of drone weapon during the October 7th attack, as the first wave before the people actually came in, to strike a number of the border fences. The drones hit a communication tower to knock out cell phone coverage, which also knocked out command and control for the Israelis. So essentially they weakened and broke down some of the defenses before sending in people.
I haven't seen as much reporting around Israel's use of drones. I have no doubt that they're using them, but I think in part it's because part of what drones provide is a cheap air force, and Israel doesn't really need that. They have high-end fighters, bombers and stuff like that. And it's not like Hamas has particularly sophisticated air defenses to shoot those down.
But where we've seen usage is in the urban conflict area, where it's so incredibly dense and hard to see where your adversary might be only a block away, but if they're behind the building, you don't necessarily know. And I suspect Israel is using drones in some of the subterranean conflicts, going after the Hamas tunnels. Drones seem like a great use case for that, where you send the drone ahead of the actual soldiers and if the drone gets blown up, well who really cares? Or if the tunnel collapses and destroys a bunch of drones, not really that big of a deal. The challenge, of course, is when you're operating drones beneath the ground, the communication signals can be a challenge.
Pettyjohn: Drones are often employed by weaker adversaries because they're cheap and they provide an affordable form of air power, like Hamas did. It's important to remember that ISIS were the first to weaponize commercial drones in 2016 in Mosul (in Iraq), and that caught on really quickly.
The Cipher Brief: How big a player is Iran in this space?
Pettyjohn: Iran is an increasingly important player and definitely the one selling to the black market, to the groups that many consider terrorist organizations, and also to Russia.
Iran ended up coming into a play in Ukraine when Russia was running short of its cruise and ballistic missiles. The Shahed-136 is a slow propeller-driven drone, but it's long-range and more like a very cheap and not particularly good cruise missile. It often flies to particular coordinates and then crashes into them and explodes. And Russia began to acquire those and actually has begun to produce its own variant of the Shahed.
So the Shaheds have supplemented Russia's dwindling stockpiles of cruise missiles, and they've used them to suck up Ukrainian air defense missiles so that they waste them. Ukraine is using missiles that cost probably millions of dollars against a $50,000 crappy drone.
Iran is probably one of the biggest producers of missiles and drones. And the Houthis have been firing tons of Iranian long-range drones at ships in the Red Sea.
The Cipher Brief: Obviously we do not have a kinetic conflict underway with China, but one has to imagine that everybody involved is watching the conflict zones that we've been talking about for lessons. What do we know about the ways drones might be used if it comes to conflict over Taiwan?
Pettyjohn: I think we can confidently say that drones will play a prominent role. China has a huge inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles, but China also has a very large drone industry. It copied the United States. Many of its drones are similar to U.S. variants and it has been willing to export them. It entered the export market in 2008-2009, and set off a pretty big proliferation boom. China has a lot of drones. We don't know the exact number because they don't tell you, but we see them on ships in the South China Sea and the East China Sea. We know that they are embedded in units across all of the services.
Taiwan has said that it also needs to invest in drones and has recognized how useful they've been in the Ukrainians’ defense of their country, but they're disadvantaged in terms of the starting point. China already has a bunch more, and Taiwan is trying to develop some indigenous military drones, and has bought some US MQ-9 drones, the medium-altitude, high endurance drones that could be very useful in crisis pre-conflict phases, but it doesn't have a lot of other drones. So it really needs to expand the sources of military drones and commercial drones and invest and integrate them into their defense strategy.
The Cipher Brief: You used the phrase earlier, “defense dominant.” Clearly Taiwan would be the defender in the event of an invasion. Does that suggest that drones should make up more of their calculation?
Kallenborn: Absolutely. There were reports a few months back about Taiwan more seriously engaging on building up drones for that purpose. It’s likely to be pretty critical. Of course, most of the conflict, especially early on when you actually have kinetic hostilities, we'd expect it to be over water, and certainly there's going to be a significant aspect of amphibious conflict, with China trying to bring ground assets onto the island. And a lot of drones are potentially very significant for that type of amphibious operation, both in carrying out offensively and especially I think defensively. I look back at the photos from D-Day where you have all these open-air ships and I imagine, what if you’d had a drone flying over that?
The Cipher Brief: What’s the future on the drone defense side? The counter measures?
Kallenborn: There's huge amounts of interest — lots of companies and governments all over the place are very interested in this. The challenge is that at the moment there really isn't any one size fits all. There's no silver bullet either on the detection side or on the interception side, defeating the drones. And a big part of that is that the scope of drones in the military is just so broad. What you're using to counter a drone boat is going to look different than what you use to counter a commercial quadcopter, which is going to look different than encountering big MQ-9 drones and so on.
For some of those aerial systems, a lot of just traditional air defense work pretty well. The problem is that many surface-to-air missiles tend to be really expensive. So you can shoot down a few-hundred-dollar quadcopter with a $2 million missile, but that's not really sustainable over time, even with a major defense budget. So a lot of folks have looked at electronic warfare, jamming signals. That's been fairly effective in many of these cases. But the problem there is that as these drones become more autonomous, electronic warfare becomes less significant.
Other areas that could be successful, especially when it comes to drone swarming, are high-powered microwave weapons which allow low cost-per-shot over large areas. The challenge there is cost – the actual microwave system might be $10-12 million, but over time, if they shoot down enough cheap drones at low cost, that might be effective.
The Cipher Brief: What's to prevent a terrorist group that wants to attack the United States from taking any number of the things we've been talking about here and bringing that to bear against our country?
Pettyjohn: Very little. The U.S. is generally an open society. We can't stop all terrorist attacks. A terrorist could grab a gun and a semi-automatic rifle and open fire in a Walmart or anywhere else. But I do think drones and small drones in particular are a growing area that the U.S. needs to be concerned about for homeland defense, for port defense, for espionage and sabotage reasons. A lot of the applications for the commercial variants are things like surveying industrial sites, doing quality checks and things that are otherwise pretty dangerous. But they also could very easily be weaponized. This is a really complicated and multifaceted problem that we haven't begun to grapple with from a homeland defense perspective.
The Cipher Brief: Is there stuff that you read and study about drones that makes it hard to sleep at night?
Kallenborn: Honestly, not really. Don't get me wrong, there are real concerns, but I think it's also important to contextualize some of that. When it comes to terrorism, at least in the United States, it's not very hard to get a terrorist weapon. You can go buy a gun, you can pick up a butcher knife and stab people. So when I think about drone defenses, yes, it’s really difficult to stop drones, but also terrorists in many cases don’t really need them.
What does worry me is finding the places where drones are really scary versus one of these other weapons. Drones have relatively small payloads, so they can't necessarily do as much harm, but the concern would be cases where that small amount of explosive could cause significant harm. For example, attacks on certain critical infrastructure sites, like chemical facilities where a small amount of explosive could result in rapid release of large amounts of chemicals near a population that would cause much greater damage. Similarly, one of the really concerning ones is VIP security, particularly for heads of state, where even if a president has air defenses, the challenge is that you can send so many cheap drones that you potentially overwhelm the target. So even if the Secret Service manages in a attack of 20 drones to shoot down 19 of them, one would still get through.
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