I have often wondered whether one of the drivers of Ukraine’s mass adoption of tactical level drone tech is driven by the fact that they lack the industrial capability to produce 155/152 in a way that would be traditionally needed for this conflict, while drones can be produced quickly without the factories required for artillery.
I’ve also wondered which system they would prioritize, if they had the choice.
How many shells can you make with the resources used to make enough drones with enough capability to destroy that 155?
I'm assuming that a base-level 155 HE shell is pretty cheap to do once you setup the line, but the guided packages are rather pricier. The signature of the gun firing is a lot easier to track, and I'm not sure the guided shell is as flexible.
The question whether these platforms should be prioritized and scale on production reside on, as you say, context.
Even so, the massive scale of these new technologies being scaled up at a price on the character of a high intensive conflict by themselves put them at a greater advantage over traditional systems in the meantime of equalizing both legacy and new developments.
Is clear that the US should prioritize certain assets, more capable, to allow for a deterrence and strategic strikes against certain peer rival in the pacific, but the fact that both European and Russian industry tend to not make these choices of prioritization also tell that their situation is different, as they can out-source parts for a rather neutral industry as is the Chinese, as well concentrate their efforts on their actual situation, a high-intensity attritional land warfare in Europe.
The US has to deal with it’s rather failed Asian pivot, as well as their other global commitments, and deciding upon some platform over the other on their lines does not negates the advantages of regional powers specializing themselves upon these rather cheap platforms for modernization.
In line with what you hear out of Ukraine - see Phillips OBrien’s latest Substack Live. But this goes two ways and the perspective here is purely US centric. In Europe we are learning that we don’t always pick our wars - they come to us. Ukraine today, maybe Greenland tomorrow. Not a single a EU country could deal with 500+ drones, but we might be able to shoot down a few dozen SU fighter bombers.
Well, I think the general principal still applies.
It’s still a question of what you plan to do, where, and what resource constraints you’re under. Is your primary security threat Russia (I mean yes, even if we’re obviously a fairly adversarial nation towards Europe under this admin), then it informs how you should think about that force design.
The DIP implies that we plan to rewrite doctrine based on new technology - in fact we already have, with 'Recce-Strike' now at the heart of how the British Army plans to fight. It's fundamentally flawed and is essentially just saying 'this time the fires are powerful and precise enough that we can win wars at stand off'.
Reforming doctrine and procurement based on projected capabilities is extremely troubling. I worry that a move to stand-off warfare is more to do with justifying the government's failure to invest in the platforms we need at the mass that would make a difference than it is about making our Armed Forces more effective.
I think there’s a lot of idiosyncratic problems with British defense spending that make that a complicated question in the first place.
I mean, fundamentally Britain needs to make a decision about what they want their force to even be. Is it a small and flexible expeditionary rapid reaction force for global issues? Is it meant to fight a coalition campaign in Europe? Do they intend to primarily partner with the US or Germany/France?
Until they can work out what they even intend to be, it’s sort of always going to be a schizophrenic discussion about what to procure based on their extreme budgetary constraints.
I think that's a slight cop-out. The original sin was Afghanistan which bent the Army in particular so out of shape that it has never recovered - despite the clear threat being Russia since 2014 if not before. The idea that the Army is still trying to understand its job is a bit generous - it's very clear that we should be a NATO Corps to fight in Europe, with 16X as the GRF - and the government understands this and basically says it in every document.
A credible Corps would be affordable, unfortunately we didn't recapitalise the Army in the 2010s and we are still catching up. Rather than admit this and spend more/reduce ambition, we pretend that the next iteration of technology will give us more for less, which is dangerous for the reasons you outline in your (excellent) article.
Oh no I mean I agree on what they should be. I just more mean that I don’t really have the impression that Britain has yet resolved all those questions.
Britain's primary role should be to provide AirSea support to (Continental) allies, including land-attack e.g. Tomahawks, Storm Shadows, as well as nuclear deterrence. But it's overstretched.
I am no kind of expert and perhaps all the real well-informed people have thought very differently, but when I hear and think about the effects of drones on warfare, it's overwhelmingly about the effects cheap ISR and middle-strike drones. (Since about 2020. The 2010s it was Predator-like UAVs.) Maybe not very relevant to the US armed forces, the least poor of mans; paying 5x more for 20% better performance is often worthwhile, and likely the USG will keep doing so. (Even if, strictly speaking in an objective strategic calculus, it isn't.) But if the enormous strategic advantage previous granted by airspace dominance and satellite imagery on-demand is greatly attenuated by the poor man's replacements that are half as good where the old poor man's solution was 10% as good at best, that seems like a huge deal. Between Ukraine and Iran, it looks to an uneducated observer like this is the case.
I'm reminded of the (hyperbolic, under-justified, visibly ideological, but well-argued and thought-provoking) analysis by Anarchonomicon of the advantages and practical obstacles of motorcycle infantry. To skip most of the pop culture references and ideological bent, his point was that motorcycles have enormous advantages in mobility, evading air power, and evading surveillance. But they are too deadly to learn for casualty-sensitive great nations to use, and largely an inferior good if you can be assured that you have comprehensive airspace control, as the US and its allies has been able to assume safely for five decades. If the poor man's solution makes that control less comprehensive, and makes it unnecessary for many of the old uses - primary air strikes and aerial-view intelligence - then the dynamics of insurgencies, weaker-power armies, and any other 'armies of the desperate' will change at least this much, and great powers will have to react.
(https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/the-antagonists-tech-tree if you want to see the rest, despite the flaws, and evaluate the evidence base and structural considerations he does bring in. With the caveat to read it only with the clear knowledge that the author has an ideological-aesthetic axe to grind, I think it's very worthwhile to pick apart and find which pieces fit into a better-ground worldview. I rank it with De Atkine's Why Arabs Lose Wars as pieces that I hold with epistemic tongs to avoid taking them on faith by accident, but even so find to shape large pieces of my model of the world.)
I have often wondered whether one of the drivers of Ukraine’s mass adoption of tactical level drone tech is driven by the fact that they lack the industrial capability to produce 155/152 in a way that would be traditionally needed for this conflict, while drones can be produced quickly without the factories required for artillery.
I’ve also wondered which system they would prioritize, if they had the choice.
How many shells can you make with the resources used to make enough drones with enough capability to destroy that 155?
I'm assuming that a base-level 155 HE shell is pretty cheap to do once you setup the line, but the guided packages are rather pricier. The signature of the gun firing is a lot easier to track, and I'm not sure the guided shell is as flexible.
Agreed
The question whether these platforms should be prioritized and scale on production reside on, as you say, context.
Even so, the massive scale of these new technologies being scaled up at a price on the character of a high intensive conflict by themselves put them at a greater advantage over traditional systems in the meantime of equalizing both legacy and new developments.
Is clear that the US should prioritize certain assets, more capable, to allow for a deterrence and strategic strikes against certain peer rival in the pacific, but the fact that both European and Russian industry tend to not make these choices of prioritization also tell that their situation is different, as they can out-source parts for a rather neutral industry as is the Chinese, as well concentrate their efforts on their actual situation, a high-intensity attritional land warfare in Europe.
The US has to deal with it’s rather failed Asian pivot, as well as their other global commitments, and deciding upon some platform over the other on their lines does not negates the advantages of regional powers specializing themselves upon these rather cheap platforms for modernization.
In line with what you hear out of Ukraine - see Phillips OBrien’s latest Substack Live. But this goes two ways and the perspective here is purely US centric. In Europe we are learning that we don’t always pick our wars - they come to us. Ukraine today, maybe Greenland tomorrow. Not a single a EU country could deal with 500+ drones, but we might be able to shoot down a few dozen SU fighter bombers.
Well, I think the general principal still applies.
It’s still a question of what you plan to do, where, and what resource constraints you’re under. Is your primary security threat Russia (I mean yes, even if we’re obviously a fairly adversarial nation towards Europe under this admin), then it informs how you should think about that force design.
The DIP implies that we plan to rewrite doctrine based on new technology - in fact we already have, with 'Recce-Strike' now at the heart of how the British Army plans to fight. It's fundamentally flawed and is essentially just saying 'this time the fires are powerful and precise enough that we can win wars at stand off'.
Reforming doctrine and procurement based on projected capabilities is extremely troubling. I worry that a move to stand-off warfare is more to do with justifying the government's failure to invest in the platforms we need at the mass that would make a difference than it is about making our Armed Forces more effective.
I think there’s a lot of idiosyncratic problems with British defense spending that make that a complicated question in the first place.
I mean, fundamentally Britain needs to make a decision about what they want their force to even be. Is it a small and flexible expeditionary rapid reaction force for global issues? Is it meant to fight a coalition campaign in Europe? Do they intend to primarily partner with the US or Germany/France?
Until they can work out what they even intend to be, it’s sort of always going to be a schizophrenic discussion about what to procure based on their extreme budgetary constraints.
I think that's a slight cop-out. The original sin was Afghanistan which bent the Army in particular so out of shape that it has never recovered - despite the clear threat being Russia since 2014 if not before. The idea that the Army is still trying to understand its job is a bit generous - it's very clear that we should be a NATO Corps to fight in Europe, with 16X as the GRF - and the government understands this and basically says it in every document.
A credible Corps would be affordable, unfortunately we didn't recapitalise the Army in the 2010s and we are still catching up. Rather than admit this and spend more/reduce ambition, we pretend that the next iteration of technology will give us more for less, which is dangerous for the reasons you outline in your (excellent) article.
Oh no I mean I agree on what they should be. I just more mean that I don’t really have the impression that Britain has yet resolved all those questions.
Britain's primary role should be to provide AirSea support to (Continental) allies, including land-attack e.g. Tomahawks, Storm Shadows, as well as nuclear deterrence. But it's overstretched.
I am no kind of expert and perhaps all the real well-informed people have thought very differently, but when I hear and think about the effects of drones on warfare, it's overwhelmingly about the effects cheap ISR and middle-strike drones. (Since about 2020. The 2010s it was Predator-like UAVs.) Maybe not very relevant to the US armed forces, the least poor of mans; paying 5x more for 20% better performance is often worthwhile, and likely the USG will keep doing so. (Even if, strictly speaking in an objective strategic calculus, it isn't.) But if the enormous strategic advantage previous granted by airspace dominance and satellite imagery on-demand is greatly attenuated by the poor man's replacements that are half as good where the old poor man's solution was 10% as good at best, that seems like a huge deal. Between Ukraine and Iran, it looks to an uneducated observer like this is the case.
I'm reminded of the (hyperbolic, under-justified, visibly ideological, but well-argued and thought-provoking) analysis by Anarchonomicon of the advantages and practical obstacles of motorcycle infantry. To skip most of the pop culture references and ideological bent, his point was that motorcycles have enormous advantages in mobility, evading air power, and evading surveillance. But they are too deadly to learn for casualty-sensitive great nations to use, and largely an inferior good if you can be assured that you have comprehensive airspace control, as the US and its allies has been able to assume safely for five decades. If the poor man's solution makes that control less comprehensive, and makes it unnecessary for many of the old uses - primary air strikes and aerial-view intelligence - then the dynamics of insurgencies, weaker-power armies, and any other 'armies of the desperate' will change at least this much, and great powers will have to react.
(https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/the-antagonists-tech-tree if you want to see the rest, despite the flaws, and evaluate the evidence base and structural considerations he does bring in. With the caveat to read it only with the clear knowledge that the author has an ideological-aesthetic axe to grind, I think it's very worthwhile to pick apart and find which pieces fit into a better-ground worldview. I rank it with De Atkine's Why Arabs Lose Wars as pieces that I hold with epistemic tongs to avoid taking them on faith by accident, but even so find to shape large pieces of my model of the world.)