A Ukrainian serviceman of the Defence Intelligence prepares to launch long-range drones, in undisclosed location, Ukraine, Feb. 28.Evgeniy Maloletka/The Associated Press
James Snell is a former senior adviser for special initiatives at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the author of the forthcoming book The Fall of the Assads.
The battlefield in Ukraine is dominated by drones. The front lines are under constant, incessant drone surveillance. The majority of combatant casualties are caused not by artillery – as they were at the beginning of the war – but instead by drones.
Drones once served as spotters for artillery. Now they have replaced the systems they once aided. Heavy bomber drones drop modified shells (once, they dropped only grenades), while first-person view (FPV) drones, carrying small charges, fly directly into men and machines, their camera feeds cutting out as they detonate and tear through flesh and steel.
Western militaries have made extensive use of drones. In Afghanistan and Iraq, they spotted targets and launched munitions, so much so that for enemies of NATO forces, they became the reviled emblems of those wars. Yet now, Russia and Ukraine are each far ahead of Western militaries in drone design. China is where the majority of commercial drones are manufactured. It will have an immense advantage in the production and operation of drones for war.
The NATO battle plan is a plan for air dominance carried out by sophisticated and debilitatingly expensive jets. These are aircraft so difficult to produce and so costly that they are often developed, built and modified in common. Britain, Italy and Japan are working together to produce the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), a sixth-generation fighter concept whose first flight – if all goes well – is still a decade away.
The backbone of NATO’s future air power was set to be Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation F-35 Lightning, an impressively capable but economically troublesome programme. Development and procurement of the aircraft is estimated to cost the United States more than US$2-trillion – the most expensive program of its kind ever mounted. Even shared among an alliance, and with individual aircraft costs falling as more are produced on an assembly line, the F-35 and its successors, including the American NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance, now christened the F-47), seem more and more exquisite and expensive when compared to Ukraine and farther afield. These are modern battlefields in which each combatant plans to produce throwaway drones in the millions per year. The Ukrainian target for domestic drone production is now more than four million per annum. Some Ukrainian sources say they can manage as many as five million.
For Western countries, manned air power is the cornerstone of war planning. They are vital for the striking of hostile targets short of full-scale invasion, as seen in the recent American strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, as part of international efforts to protect the Red Sea from piracy.
As the United States lurches away from previous commitments and threatens coercion against two NATO allies, Denmark and Canada, people have started to talk. Already, that talk has broken into the public domain, with people close to Canada’s defence establishment and European militaries beginning to consider ditching the F-35, or at the very least decreasing their order volume.
As the war in Ukraine has proven, countries have a significant say over how their weapons are used abroad, even in matters of life and death. Swiss systems have been subject to re-export prohibitions, preventing their usage in Ukraine. Internet communications systems, theoretically guaranteed by Polish and American funding, have been switched off at critical parts of the battlefield on the whims of those overseas. The buttons have been pressed in California or Texas.
If NATO forces, absent the United States, found themselves fighting Russia, a country the U.S. President seems eager to ally with, all that America would have to do would be to deny software updates, deny spare parts, deny use of world-spanning value chains – and these advanced, finicky systems would soon become hobbled and ineffective.
This is not ideal. But it might be a good opportunity – a chance to go all-in on homegrown drone forces, rather than persisting with the now rather old-hat idea of manned air power. This idea is not absurd. It has been seriously discussed in tech circles. Many defence-tech workers saw drones in Turkish hands in Syria and Libya, in insurgents’ hands in Syria – especially during the recent collapse of the Assad regime – and saw the future. You could buy thousands of cheap drones for the cost of one F-35. Which one looks like a better deal, especially now?
Institutions are conservative. In Britain’s, and to a lesser degree Canada’s, hidebound MoD and DND systems, air forces have repeatedly downplayed the use of drones. Britain’s official MoD drone, Watchkeeper, was an expensive failure. It will very soon be retired, having failed on every front, failed every test it was ever given. A drone force to replace an air force: this was not a first choice, but since the decision has been made for us by others in Washington, it is more than likely we will have to look into it.
Ukraine is not a rich country, yet its drone production rates are impressive. They build, adapt and deploy, all in-country. The NATO of the future, if it exists at all, must be prepared to show the same ruggedness, the same resilience. Perhaps it ought to think, too, about using some of the same tools.