Drones, drones everywhere
They are ubiquitous. Those annoying, buzzing things that look like mosquitoes from afar and come in all sizes and invade our lives in every way imaginable.
They’re called drones and they’ve been around for a long time.
The first recoverable “unmanned aerial vehicle” was developed just after World War I by the U.S. Navy and used sporadically in World War II. Mass production began in the early 1960s.
I first tried one about 10 years ago, instructed by a son-in-law at the time who used it to snoop on neighbors and spot foxes in the adjoining woods at dusk. They are still available as toys. You can get a pretty good one from Amazon for under $500.
But drones are much more than toys now. When my wife and I sold our Naples house earlier this year, our realtor used a drone to photograph the property. Turns out that’s pro forma, part of the sales process for many single-family homes in Southwest Florida, part of the advertising shtick.
And weddings. I’m told wedding planners use them to compile the festivities for later viewing – everything from the nuptials to the dancing to the rowdy behavior at night. It’s a new cottage industry.
And how about sports? Drones buzz about providing aerial views of baseball fields and soccer pitches, even indoor hockey rinks. We take them for granted, expecting no less for our TV viewing. Follow the long pass from above or watch the soccer kick leading to a breakaway. They have become an integral part of sports journalism.
But that all pales compared to military use. A recent Wall Street Journal headline screamed, “Drones Redo Rules of War.” And they have done just that. Pentagon officials say they are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation.
Everyone has read of the audacious attack deep inside Russia earlier this year by drones sneaked in by Ukraine to destroy Russian bombers. That was followed in short order by Israel taking out Iran’s air defenses with drone strikes.
What was less publicized was the embarrassment of American destroyers spending months swatting down cheap drones from Houthi terrorists in the Red Sea. The WSJ called it “the world’s most expensive game of whack-a-mole with the U.S. on the wrong side.”
There’s no question of their cost-effectiveness. You can throw a barrage of drones at the enemy without concern about cost. They are so cheap that both Ukraine and Russia have hundreds in the air at all times. Literally hundreds. Reuters reported that in one salvo last month, Russia unleashed over 700 of them, the largest assault of the war up to that time. Expect 1,000 at once come September.
Apparently it’s a winning strategy. According to the WSJ, drones have been three times more effective in inflicting casualties in Ukraine than all other weapons combined. They are so dominant they force everything else – infantry, armor, even trench design – to adapt to a sky full of buzzing robots.
Warfare has clearly changed. Command centers, we are told, are now made up of skinny guys with laptops directing drones the size of dinner plates to targets in the field.
Anduril Industries’ Christian Brose sees all of this as part of a revolution in military aircraft. The go-to, he says, will eventually be “vehicles half the size of fighter jets with business jet engines in back – much larger than what comes to mind when we hear the word ‘drone.’”
Although such autonomous aircraft might be recovered after battle, he says, you can afford to lose them. Unlike anything else in human conflict, they are expendable.