WAR OF THE DRONES

If late Victorian British writer H.G. Wells were to be alive now he might have written War of the Drones instead of War of the Worlds (1898). There are chilling similarities between his tripod-like Martians who suddenly arrived in Surrey, strangely mechanical intelligences, and the December sitings of various drones over US air bases on UK soil and then also at different locations across the US Eastern seaboard.

Dr Ulrike Franke (New College, 2012 - pictured right), Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a specialist in new military technologies, returned to Oxford and delivered a lecture on the core doctrinal and tactical question occupying the military leaders of our times, whether drones represent a revolution in warfare.

At the very end, we asked her about the recent drone sitings, one of which included a drone apparently tailing a British naval vessel in Hamburg harbour. She said, ‘We really don’t know what these drones are, where they are from, who is operating them.’ 

It’s as close to real-life Sci-Fi as you can get, and almost as chilling as Wells’ Martians.

But in other regards drones may not be a great revolution. NATO doctrine hasn’t budged because of the advent of ‘drone warfare’ and in some ways drones have duplicated previous, technology-induced stalemate that we recall on the Western Front in World War One.

Then it was machine guns strafing no-man’s land.

Now it is opposing drones in their thousands, that render the battlefield ‘transparent’, thereby making any surprise move all but impossible.

But let’s step back a bit and take a quick tour.

At the start of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, both sides had very few drones; Russia is believed to have had about 2,000.

Today Ukraine is producing and procuring over 2 million drones a year and has over seventy different drone ‘systems’ in play. When their counter-offensive began in the summer of 2023, Ukraine was losing 10,000 drones a month.

It was this scale of production and use that is a defining trait of drone warfare, and with it come a series of broader implications that may themselves constitute the ‘revolution.’

Franke says that for every YouTube clip you may have seen on Telegram showing a first person view drone landing munitions on a hapless Russian tank, there might be a dozen to fifty ‘fails’ and probably just as many strikes against Ukrainian assets.

In other words, drones are largely expendable and still have an experimental air to them.

‘One of the great, unexpected events of the war was the unexpected but striking role of civilian drones, a market dominated by Chinese giant DJI.’

Franke reminds us that drones costing less than £1,000 could, for a while at least back in 2022, achieve disproportionate successes in, say, reconnaissance, and then quickly in actual operations as they were modified to carry small munitions. In military procurement terms these items, up to and including the more sophisticated commercial drones in the £10,000 price range, cost ‘peanuts’.

Flanking this white-heat development back in 2022, already in the distant past, there were bigger drones and there were smaller drones like the Black Hornet that fits in the palm on one hand; there were First Person View drones, there were racing drones, strike coordination drones, reconnaissance drones, decoy drones, relay drones, wired drones, transport drones (a currently expanding theme – also to drop other robotised devices into a theatre of war) marine drones; and at the elephantine end of the spectrum the US Reaper drone with a 40 metre wingspan (not used in Ukraine).

Both sides went into a frenzy of development.

Make no mistake, says Franke, Ukraine is now a ‘major drone power’; but so too is Russia in cahoots with Iran. Embarrassingly, she argues that Europe have not kept pace or really even entered the fray, which is a huge problem, and DJI have fiddled with their supply lines to deny lots of important capabilities to Ukraine, no doubt at the behest of the Chinese state who are allies of Russia.

That gives us the scale of the real problem, Franke argues, and the template of the real revolution, which is less about evolving drone capability, and more about how agile and fit your technology manufacturing base is.

And this is Europe’s waking nightmare because to a significant degree it has passed this capability to Asia and despite the odd exception makes preciously few drones.

‘If you are a military, there is no point in ‘stocking’ a drone force. Anything that existed in 2022 is obsolete now. This means that success in drone warfare boils down to how nimble your manufacturing and tech base is.’

‘If China were to have a direct role [in a military conflict], we’d have a real problem,’ she says.

Where Western civilian involvement has blossomed is at the strategic, software and satellite level like Palantir, Starlink, Microsoft, Google and Amazon – all of whom have dealings with the US Federal government – but Franke questions their ultimate loyalties, more likely to be shareholders than governments, because they are for-profit enterprises with global businesses and typically Asian outposts.

Franke asks whether they will be ‘patriotic’ to Western causes, drawing attention to the rise of the East India Company in the late 16^th Century -  a company that worked towards both mercantile and imperial objectives at the dawn of the British Empire.

Franke also talked about drone defences, which will likely be as key in the future as any offensive capability. A shotgun approach can bring down a small, nearfield drone; there are aerial systems, and electronic defences with different technologies (spoofing, jamming, GPS, protective physical cages against incoming).

‘At root, whether for offensive or defensive purposes, there are no silver bullets – only a temporary advantage of days, at most weeks.’

What happens is that the enemy capture any new tech and replicate it very rapidly.

Franke is emphatic, ‘We have seen this time and time again.’ Even the cardboard drone that was supposed to be invisible, it didn’t really break any deadlock in the tech race.

Autonomous drones are the theme of 2025, so that beyond a certain point after launch, they can achieve their mission without any signal or tethered link to an operator.

Franke ended by saying that drones – someone else compared the to the Stokes Light Mortar of the Western Front – are the opposite of a nuclear capability.

‘They are an omni-threat in any conflict. Any state can buy them and build them. Civilians can buy them and build them.’

Another element of the revolution may well be the implications for traditional military procurement – where broader technology manufacturing flexibility, and dual use competence, is likely to trump incumbent defence contractors who might be used to multi-year development programs for capital intensive fighter jets with a whole life span of decades.

That is not the world we are now in, although there is a fervour of innovation right now around drones supporting pilot-flown jets, operating in swarms and so forth. Some of this, we just don’t know yet, and Franke talks down the swarming function of many drones working together, something that has been displayed prettily on social media but not a capability that has worked in any military application so far, despite many earlier boasts.

Franke says that the Chinese virtual monopoly of civilian drones is ‘extremely worrisome.’

Ands she adds that Europe ‘barely produces them’, excepting Ukraine of course, and this is possibly even more worrisome because it is self-inflicted.

Unlike H.G. Wells’ Martians, who eventually died from an unexpected bacterial infection on Primrose Hill in London, the unexpected, mysterious drone sitings of late 2024 demand an explanation because they are not going to go away. Instead they lift the curtain on a whole new security threat for the years ahead. It is distinctly menacing and it is not a plot device in a Victorian sci-fi novel.