I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck

> I’ve watched way too much footage from the front.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00-ngEj5Q9k

Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article? The reason the attack on airfields worked is precisely because they operate inland and not on the frontline. Cellular networks not only can be jammed but towers are a priority target. That’s why Starlink is/was so crucial. Even GPS is jammed so independent flight can be impossible with cheap components.

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.

Your linked video is interesting, but I fail to see how this at all differentiates/promotes drone usage versus artillery, indirect fire.

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.

All of the good footage is in /r/CombatFootage

(for anyone curious)

Think of the fpv drone like a smol guided TOW missile at extremely low cost.

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.

Since fiber optics being used signal jamming is stopping to be a thing. You can fly with a drone into basement and have 4k video.

Laser-guided artillery rounds have been around a while. The Soviets were using laser-guided 240mm heavy mortar rounds in Afghanistan.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1351804050035499...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_(weapon_system)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M712_Copperhead

Drone 1 (or any other means) destroys the canopy. Drones 2-10 are no longer hindered by said canopy and deliver their payload with extreme and dynamic precision.

Remember that the argument was basically that drones can do nothing useful in (heavily) forested terrain. They can with a little bit of creativity.

I wonder what the tech gap is to using circular polarized light from the sun as a point of reference for dead reckoning. If Bees use it why not camera systems?

I was one of the first non special operations troops to use a modern infantry-company sized drone (small, low cost) to guide conventional and guided artillery in 2008-9 for the US.

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.

> Did you miss the part about signals jamming in the article?

"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.

there are now laser/gps guided mortars. probably still more expensive than drone but easier to deploy

I guess we live in different regions. Everything north of Estonia/Denmark is thick spruce and pine forest. I’ve seen what artillery does to these trees, but I’d be hesitant to say a drone could lift something heavy enough to serve like Vietnam war era ”daisy cutters”. Artillery explodes closer to the forest floor.

That will give facing. Not range, nor actual bearing (your drone is moving relative to the local air, not to the ground.)

russians really didnt like this last year https://youtu.be/SUe7SJgVMmo?t=110

Yep, 120mms I think.

You won't find them with light infantry, but you will with Cav / Mech units.

special forces and other unspecified units: https://breakingdefense.com/2024/02/iron-sting-an-exclusive-...

Sorry I'm talking US specifically.

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.

Isn’t artillery easier to locate/ counter attack than a drone operator station?

I guess I mean in the sense of if you have the drones starting position, the end location (or approximate) and movement tracking based on terrain movement, like the cheap version of Tomahawk but instead of having a map you just use relative change from a stereo camera/lidar pointed at the ground to track relative movement? I guess the hardware to run that isn't available in mass production.

RCH 155 which Ukraine has now can shoot while moving. That should make it harder to counter.

Dense forest scenarios aside, it seems to me that an FPV drone could perhaps serve best as an adjunct to mortar fire and other artillery, rather than as a replacement. If you knew exactly where your drone was, it could basically assume the role of a forward observer.

The article says that GPS is largely hopeless on their particular battlefield, though, so some other means of accurate positioning would probably be needed.

well, if usa will get a bundle of iron dome, iron fist and iron sting, it will get a cool 30% discount

GPS guided munitions like Excalibur are useless against peer adversary. Costs as much as 100 regular rounds and as 200+ FPV drones but has zero accuracy thanks to EW and jamming.

... Not quite.

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.

And yet, more than a year ago: The US gave up sending Ukraine Excalibur guided artillery shells costing $100,000 because they rarely hit their target, report says.

I mean, the US isn't flying our EW aircraft over Ukraine.

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.

Last line isn't necessary correct. Artillery rounds have different types of fuses.

A US VT (variable time) fuse is meant for airburst - for example to splinter a forest canopy.

Yes.

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.

I don't think you can do terrain following entirely in software unless you already have an accurate image of what to expect--and a munition will never know the fine detail. (Coarse detail--I would expect you could do a fair job of steering a ballistic missile based on images of the target area. Closest match and figure out in what way the image is stretched is at least theoretically possible with camera + software. Computationally practical, I don't know, nor how accurate it could be.)