Traffic in the Air: Drones in Modern Warfare

Published October 6, 2024 | This is a working paper presented at the Takshashila Institution Internal Conference on ‘Frontiers of Warfare’, May 2024

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Executive Summary

• The perception of drones as ‘Unmanned systems’ is problematic, given that drone warfare requires some of the highest degrees of ‘manning’ in the war operations of a system. While it is true that drones are indeed ‘uninhabited’, sheer human force – from flying the drone and assessing the data it collects to supporting drone operations in the form of MUM-T – is central to the success of drone operations. Ground crew, maintenance crew, network systems and data link managers, and authorisers of lethal attacks, hence form part of the operations of an “unmanned system” making it very much so manned.

• In and of themselves, drones are not a battlefield ‘game-changer’. Many contemporary analyses indicate that the use of drones in war is a ‘revolution’ and a ‘game-changer’. However, this essay contends that while drones are indeed a powerful addition to a diverse arsenal, in and of themselves, they are only evolutionary, and not revolutionary.

1. Introduction

Drones in large numbers have become a distinct feature in military conflicts and counterterrorism operations today. They are all the rage in performing a host of military functions, including Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), ground attack, and countering electromagnetic interference in combat preparedness. Large-scale examples of their use in military conflicts come from the Armenia-Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh) conflict, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Syrian civil war, even though their use goes back to even the Vietnam and Kosovo wars. In terrorism and counterterrorism operations, drones have been used by the Obama and Trump administrations in the US to conduct strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq. And in China’s case, drones are being incorporated into major aspects of combat training. 

This essay discusses aspects of modern military drone use, citing examples from the Russia-Ukraine war and China’s combat training drills. Further, the essay draws out two key assessments on military drone use that can potentially guide policy on the challenges of inducting drones.

And finally, the essay looks at drone swarms and AI-enabled drones from the perspective of the future of warfare.

2. Contemporary Military Drone Use

Below is the image of a Black Hornet drone:

It is a nano drone that fits in the palm of an operator’s hand, with a body length of about 7 inches and a weight of about 16 grams. It is equipped with thermal imaging/ infrared cameras produced by an American firm called Teledyne FLIR, which is well-known globally for its surveillance camera technology. The drone is capable of transmitting real-time imagery of the battlefield to the operator for a time span of about 25 minutes. But for a system with numbers so small, a single unit of the drone costs a whopping US$ 195,000. And yet, a handful of Black Hornets have been one of the US’s most important defence exports to Ukraine in its war against Russia.

In its war with Russia, Ukraine has demonstrated that drones are a powerful tactical tool to frustrate enemy air and ground defences. It has done so by developing a local drone industry that engages both civilians and foreign partners in NATO countries to produce drones fit for military operations in large numbers. This is a lesson Ukraine has gathered from its previous failures against anti-aircraft systems in the Donbas conflict of 2014, operated by the infamous 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces. Such systems included the 9A34M2 Strela-10 and 2S6M Tunguska anti-aircraft artillery systems, of which, the latter also carried a 30 mm chain gun for low-flying helicopters.

Subsequently, Ukraine developed a more diverse air power approach, teaming inhabited aircraft with drones such as the Medium-Altitude, Long-Endurance Turkish TB-2 Bayraktar for precise attacks on valuable ground targets, Kamikaze drones as loitering munition for critical assets such as Russian oil refineries, and the nano Black Hornets and RQ-11B Raven drones for ISR and night-time battlefield assessment operations. All of these have come with a reasonable degree of success in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ conception.

Some of these drones have been deployed to guide artillery fire to lethality, to avoid the blind firing of unguided 122 mm and 152 mm rounds. Errors in artillery fire guidance may also come from issues with correct calibration or tough weather conditions. Because artillery requires laser-guidance, which only a few Ukrainian systems possess, it becomes important to have eyes on the ground to direct artillery fire, especially for a target as large as a tank. In this regard, Ukraine is finding solutions in the use of drones as eyes in the air. However, a lot of the success of Ukrainian precision strikes is also attributable to the fact that Russian forces are underperforming in command and control, allowing Ukraine’s “relentless artillery fire [to] find them.” Russian counter-battery fire operations are also messy, as their artillery attacks continue to remain unguided, eventually decimating any and all unintended targets they manage to land on.

Most importantly, Ukrainian forces are excelling in the ‘dronisation’ of perception. With the incorporation of First-Person View (FPV) in drone warfare, which effectively refers to the utilisation of binoculars or virtual video-feed goggles by remote pilots to gain an unaided visual line of sight during drone flight, drones have become a tool to chase ground forces and eventually explode upon close contact. Operators equipped with FPV technology and low-cost quadcopters or Australian ‘Corvo’ cardboard drones (which Ukraine has purchased in hundreds as part of a US$ 30 million defence aid package), have become a regular sight in a 30-people Ukrainian assault group, wherein the number of FPV operators remains proportional to the number of soldiers.

Similarly motivated, China is experimenting with drones both in the Taiwan Strait and along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), but for different types of military operations – some supportive, and some offensive. And even though China has been out of war for decades now, the real test of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is to use drones and other systems to achieve sustained pressure before full-fledged combat victory. This principle has become a classic in the PLA combat preparedness textbook, and can be understood as a mixture of ‘grey-zone’ and ‘attrition’ warfare.

One of the most common deployments of drones in the PLA is for attack in combat. In 2019, China's domestically developed, made-for-export Wing Loong series of drones demonstrated firing more than 3,000 rounds of live munitions with an overall reported accuracy higher than 90 percent. Modular drones deployed in the PLA engage in a host of functions, including penetrating ISR, which refers to quickfire ISR across a vast expanse. For example, in the past few months, the BZK-005 (developed by the Beihang UAS Technology Co., Ltd.) and the Tengden TB-001 drones have become a mainstay in Chinese incursions across the median line of the Taiwanese Air-Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), for conducting penetrating ISR missions.

The PLA’s path to power is incomplete without dominance in network-centric warfare, which it refers to as a condition of ‘informatization’. As part of this idea of modernisation, during its combat preparedness drills, the PLA simulates itself to be in a “complex electromagnetic environment” (CEME) wherein there will be a need to deploy counter electromagnetic warfare to ensure systems security. Hence, in July 2022, the PLA inducted a new variant in the FH-95 series of drones developed by Aerospace Times Feihong Technology. These drones are capable of performing electromagnetic jamming and armed reconnaissance, especially in border patrol scenarios. In fact, this latest variant is being first put to test by the Xinjiang Military District close to the Chinese border with India. 

Further, to master “effective concealment” in combat training, Air Force Brigades in the PLA Western Theater Command (WTC) have also been practising “clearing the electromagnetic fog”. This refers to a situation in which radar systems experience interference, leading to the loss of the enemy aircraft signal. In a situation such as this, drones such as the FH-95 are the PLA’s first choice. 

Further, as part of its military supply operations in harsh conditions along the LAC, the WTC has experimented with the use of MALE drones for “last-mile delivery operations.” Evidence for the use of UAVs comes from a November 2020 drill conducted by the logistics departments of the PLA Army and the Tibet MD, wherein the goal was for a drone delivery unit to transfer hot food, drinking water, medicine, and other urgently needed materials to personnel located at a base in the mountains, because the manned mobile transportation unit on the ground was “blocked by enemy fire.” As claimed in the report of this drill, the success of the drone delivery unit was determined by the fact that amidst bad weather and high altitude conditions, drone operators were decisive in making a comprehensive judgement on terrain, wind speed, temperature, and other factors to ensure the drones’ safe landing at the predetermined area. The report further promises that the PLA Army logistics department is preparing to expand drone delivery to armament and ammunition supplies to active last-mile locations.

Further, similar to Ukrainian assault and artillery forces, the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) hosts drone units at its bases, intending to integrate drones into missile guidance. Most recently, satellite imagery suggests that a UAV brigade was inducted at the 61st Base of the PLARF in Anhui province, while the PLARF Reconnaissance regiment based out of Fujian province, facing Taiwan, has also incorporated a UAV regiment for enhancing ISR ahead of missile strikes.

On the use of drones with Taiwan as its principal direction, perhaps the PLA’s most interesting demonstration has been in Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T). MUM-T refers to joint operations capacity between manned and unmanned systems (such as fighter jets or helicopters and UAVs) to achieve a shared goal in a mission. Usually, in a MUM-T arrangement, the drone acts as a force multiplier while the main mission tasks are carried out by the manned aircraft, and any high-risk tasks that may potentially risk the pilot’s life are performed by the drone.

Below are two pictures posted by the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defence on X, as part of their daily reportage on Chinese sorties beyond the ADIZ:

Evident from these graphics is the fact that China has turned the Taiwan Strait into a drone-aircraft teaming experimentation zone. The images indicate that recce drones such as the BZK and the TB001 have complemented deployments of fighter aircraft such as the Chengdu J-10 and the Shenyang J-16. Further, in 2021, CCTV reported that the KVD-001 was tested for a similar capacity, where it sent real-time data of a target to the controlling centre, and helicopters acted accordingly with precision to take off, lock on the target, and engage.

3. Key Judgements on Drone Use

Based on the use cases discussed in the first section, this essay highlights two key assessments to temper expectations and understand the challenges of drone use in battle.

The perception of drones as ‘Unmanned systems’ is problematic, given that drone warfare requires some of the highest degrees of ‘manning’ in the war operations of a system:

In military parlay, drones are referred to as ‘unmanned’ aerial, surface, or underwater systems, because they are operated remotely. While it is true that drones are indeed ‘uninhabited’, sheer human force – from flying the drone and assessing the data it collects to supporting drone operations in the form of MUM-T – is central to the success of drone operations. Ground crew, maintenance crew, network systems and data link managers, and authorisers of lethal attacks, hence form part of the operations of an “unmanned system” making it very much so manned.

While drones can be semi-autonomous, in that they can be auto-piloted based on pre-fed data for takeoff, flight and landing, in the contemporary context, complete autonomy of a drone system does not exist and is only in its experimental stage. Such autonomy will require the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems onboard the drone, enabling it to not just autonomously takeoff, fly without hitting obstacles, and land, but also to engage in F2T2EA stages of a battlefield ‘kill chain’ – find, fix, track, target, engage and assess. 

In 2012 and 13, estimates suggested that the ‘human-out-of-loop’ is a possibility in the next five years. As it stands today, ‘human-in-the-loop’ is the only acceptable means of fighting battle. This therefore suggests that a drone simply doesn’t come with a price tag of its own – it comes with the cost of a soldier and/ or an operator.

The overall operational cost of a drone may still be cheaper than that of a fighter jet – for example, as per a 2012 study by the American Security Project showed that an MQ-9 Reaper drone, used for drone strikes in Pakistan, had a total per unit purchasing and operational cost of about US$ 10 million. Given that at least four Reaper drones formed a single group for an active mission, the total operational cost was about US$ 40 million. In addition, given the extensive requirements vis-a-vis ground flight crew and a stable satellite data link, the per-hour flying cost for the Reaper was estimated at around US$ 3250. With all of that combined, the cost still does not outdo the purchasing cost of a single American F-35 Lightning fighter jet – a whopping US$ 109 million. 

But at the same time, a similar study conducted in The Conversation in 2014, highlights that the per-soldier cost of US forces deployed in Afghanistan was US$ 2.1 million, and it is likely that costs are higher today. To add to this, an upskilled military drone pilot in the contemporary context, considered as much of a military object as a soldier or a fighter pilot, would cost the US armed forces US$ 50,000 per year on average, with the highest salary for the role going up to US$ 86,000. For a Reaper Unit with four active drones, the operator's salary alone adds US$ 200,000 per year to the overall budget. This excludes long-term benefits for veterans and the injured. As per a US Congress estimate from 2012, a typical “polytrauma,” where a soldier has experienced multiple traumatic injuries in war, has a calculated annual healthcare cost of US$ 136,000. And given that drones maximise their strengths in numbers, the cost of many specialised operators will be a consideration for defence budgets to come. 

Is this ‘military-grade’ specialisation overrated?

As drones have evolved to become critical in commercial activities, the employment of civilians as drone operators is a beaming industry. Naturally, it may lead analysts to contend that drone warfare can be made easy with cheaper civilian operators sitting anywhere that can be mobilised for wartime efforts. However, some facts of note should be considered to temper such analyses.

The first is that a majority of the drones that operate on the battlefield are radio-operated. These are drones that operate with a limited range, and require their operator to be on the battlefield, and are different from MALE or High-Altitude Long-Endurance (HALE) drones, which use ‘remote-split operations’ (RSO) using satellite linkage, but only form a small percentage of the battlefield drone arsenal. RSO or ‘reach-back’ drones such as MALEs and HALEs are stronger and bigger, but also more expensive, and there is little evidence to suggest that they have been deployed beyond the vicinity of two neighbouring states at war – such as the TB-2 in the Russia-Ukraine war. And as soon as Russian air defences began shooting the TB-2s down, for more than a year of the war, they were taken back from active service by Ukraine. Instead, more FPV operators were deployed.

With such an on-site operational requirement, mandating the presence of civilian drone operators on the battlefield is both a tactical and a moral challenge. The tense nature of the battlefield, the long hours of sitting in front of computers to coordinate drone flights, and the overall threat of being traced by the enemy, contribute to stressors that civilians may simply be unprepared to handle. As Matthew Gault, a journalist studying military experiences put it on his Medium blog, “It’s an awful job where a pilot — instead of sitting in a cockpit — sits inside a metal box in front of a computer screen for hours. Drone pilots are overworked, over-stressed, and pissed off.” The impacts are more severe for civilian operators.

To add to this, on the spectrum of remote warfare, between contact combat on ground and cyber attacks or the use of Private Military Security Contractors, drones lie close to where guided missiles would be. This is because of the phenomena of ‘distant proximities’. As explained by James Rosneau in his 2003 book of the same name, ‘distant proximities’ are subjective appraisals of “what people feel or think is remote, and what they think or feel is close-at-hand.” In drone piloting, the immersion is intense, and can lead to the creation of a feeling of deployment. The mental pressure of deployment, is, again, a phenomenon to account for given that civilians mobilised in war are barely trained for behavioural adaptation.

Lastly, if civilians were to instead be recruited to operate MALE and HALE drones from a long distance, such as the RQ-7 Shadow, MQ-5 Hunter, and MQ-1C Gray Eagle (primarily deployed by the US), the training required is military-grade. As per a 2015 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to the US Congress, potential operators must spend eight weeks learning the basics of flight and another 12 to 25 weeks specialising in one of the drone types to qualify for active duty. Once qualified, they are required to undertake mandatory flight training of 24 hours a year, which, the report argued, even the existing cohort of military drone pilots skipped out on, due to a lack of oversight. In the case of large numbers of civilians recruited for MALE and HALE drones, the problem of oversight will be greater still.

In and of themselves, drones are not a battlefield ‘game-changer’:

Many contemporary analyses indicate that the use of drones in war is a ‘revolution’ and a ‘game-changer’. However, this essay contends that while drones are indeed a powerful addition to a diverse arsenal, in and of themselves, they are only evolutionary, and not revolutionary. This is for three reasons.

The first is that as argued in point one of this section, drones are another step in the evolutionary ladder of “remote” warfare. This means that they augur advances in ISR, provision of crucial battlefield information to ground forces, and attack-related advantages. They still, however, are incomplete without the support of inhabited systems or artillery, and this is demonstrable in the example of the Ukraine war. Alone, the TB-2 cannot account for the massive and ever-evolving attack requirements that can be fulfilled only by fighters, bombers, and multi-role combat aircraft. Drones are a useful tool to frustrate enemy defences, such as kamikaze drones chasing ground forces, crashing into warships (such as the Ukrainian sea drones, which it claimed sunk the Moskva), or electronic countermeasures drones confusing enemy aircraft, but they are not decimators on the front lines. 

Secondly, the idea that drones account for highly efficient and bloodless ways of fighting battles is a myth. In the context of this essay, as should be the case with all warfare, efficiency should not be de-linked from the principles of necessity, distinction, and proportionality. As explained by Jolle Demmers in her 2020 essay, “The Remote Warfare Paradox,” drone warfare is only “bloodless” in that it minimises the risk of harm to the soldier or operator, but not in that it has accounted for more civilian deaths in Afghanistan or Pakistan than bombers have in a decade between 2010 and 2020. In fact, during his sentencing hearing, Daniel Hale, a former US National Security Agency Intelligence Analyst (NSA) who blew the whistle on the US’s drone warfare tactics in these countries, claimed that “With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of ten people killed are innocent.” 

These deaths are attributable to ISR failures, miscalculation of the proportion of advantage to be gained from drone strikes in a target area, and the ‘technification’ of drone operators, which prevents them from engaging in critical situational awareness under the garb of “mission failure.” In their December 2023 paper for ‘Ethics and International Affairs’, Neil Renic and Elke Schwarz refer to this phenomenon as “crimes of dispassion” – where “the increased tendency toward human technification (the substitution of technology for human labor) and systematization would exacerbate the dispassionate application of lethal force and lead to more, not less, violence.” If progress indeed is the goal for the deployment of drones in warfare, more violence for suboptimal results depicts the lack thereof.

And thirdly, while it is true that drones are inexpensive, replicable, and easily adaptable for military deployment from commercial technology, they are so for everyone. And this precise ease of emulation and acquisition is creating a sense of “peer pressure” to use drones in conflict, despite their evident challenges. Stacie Pettyjohn, Director of the Defense programme at the Center for New American Security, demonstrates in a February 2024 paper, that drone technologies exemplify how “innovations diffuse quickly to the enemy.” As a result, Russia has been quick to emulate Ukraine’s massive drone arsenal, especially the DIY Kamikaze drones. Paul Lushenko and Sarah Kreps add to this argument in their March 2023 paper for Defense & Security Analysis, making the case that “Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to match Ukraine’s drone successes, [which] signals his belief that drones have been so effective against his forces, that he must also use them to re-level the playing field against Ukraine or risk a strategic defeat.” The narrative revolving around the strategic use of drones in conflict has hence become more of a game-changer than drones themselves.

4. The Future of Drone Warfare: Swarms not Stacks

In 2016, the night sky in Guangzhou city in China’s Guangdong province lit up as 1,000 drones (EHang Ghostdrone 2.0 UAVs) were flown to celebrate the Lantern Festival. This display set a new Guinness World Record, breaking Intel’s 2016 world record of flying a swarm of 500 drones in Germany. The Chinese private drone manufacturer ‘Guangzhou EHang Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd’ was responsible for this feat. Then, in December 2017, EHang flew a swarm of 1,180 illuminated drones in Guangzhou during the Fortune Global Forum. 

In 2018, to beat another world record set by a swarm of 1,218 drones flown by Intel, EHang displayed a swarm of 1,374 drones in Xi’an during a Labour Day show. Here, however, the company faced challenges in syncing the drones, and cited “external interference” with GPS mechanisms of 496 drones. Nonetheless, EHang’s exhibitions comprise the largest global display of swarm/collective intelligence drones and demonstrate China’s unique capabilities in being able to synchronise miniature civilian UAVs at a large scale. And further, EHang claimed that these swarms were AI-enabled, in that they synced to perform the desired function autonomously, and self-executed a landing when they “felt out of sync.”

Albeit displayed in a commercial setting, EHang and Intel’s drone swarms portend a future where drones achieve their full potential by becoming part of a networked ‘swarm’ system. Among other things, in her abovementioned paper, Pettyjohn of CNAS points out that currently, drones are unable to sync their functions autonomously and integrated into a single swarm network managed by an individual, and instead operate in a “stack” managed by multiple operators coordinating through a software-based battle network. This is evident in the Ukraine war, where both sides operate stacks of multiple drones in the same vicinity, but at different altitudes to avoid collision. However, if the potential of AI-enabled drone swarms is realised, it may truly be an answer to the challenges posed by the cost of drone operators and the efficacy factor for ground attack. 

But at the same time, swarms are most effective for small drones, as MALE or HALE drones operating in a swarm of hundreds may cost a fortune and increase risks of collision and operational oversight. And the payloads small drones are capable of carrying are meagre. In that light, even swarm drones may not prove as effective as an artillery salvo, or match the potency of bomber-based firepower in battle. 

This, however, has not stopped countries from experimenting with drone swarm technologies and launch pads that can simultaneously launch drones that eventually coordinate autonomously. A stark example is China, where in May 2018, the state-owned defence conglomerate China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC) released a special action plan for ‘A New Generation of Artificial Intelligence’, in which it adopted ‘three directions’ in which the future of AI research and deployment in military equipment is headed: data intelligence, machine intelligence, and swarm intelligence. Under a ‘Product+AI’ approach, it has also launched an open innovative competition on creating leading-quality UAV clusters with swarm intelligence. In 2016, the CETC first tested a swarm of 67 fixed-wing drones, then broke its record in 2017 by swarming 119 such drones. By 2020, it swarmed 200 fixed-wing drones, and also released a video that same year claiming to show the successful test of a ‘barrage swarm’ that launched 48 attack drones to overwhelm a target. The CETC has also developed a swarm drone system (pictured below) that uses compressed nitrogen energy for simultaneously launching 48 fixed-wing UAVs that can form autonomous drone swarms. 

Beyond the use of drones for targeted attacks with a human in the loop, the deliberation on their uses as lethal autonomous systems has progressed at a gradual scale. The debate it has thrown up is formidable – governments and analysts are both favouring the unbiasedness of lethal autonomous drones, and condemning it. The obvious implication of such a drone’s autonomous initiation of the ‘kill chain’, is that it can simply be wrong about the targets it chose to engage. Given that its decision-making will depend on the data fed to it by human operators, it will inevitably be influenced by the ethical code of the military that the operators are aligned with. The inconsistencies across conflict zones may remain unaccounted for, and operators may have little control over the preset action, once locked and loaded. In all of this, as Herbert Kelman argues in his 1973 paper, ‘Violence Without Moral Restraint,’ military personnel will inevitably become “involved in an action without considering the implications of that action and without really making a decision” – and thereby, not even be free of the “moral injury” soldiers conventionally believe drone use may save them from.

5. Conclusion

As drones become more modular, cheaper, and widespread, it will become crucial for militaries around the world to engage in a thorough assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, while engaging in cost-benefit analysis beyond the price tag of just the drone unit. At the same time, as experimentation with AI-enabled drones and swarms takes centre stage a decade or so from now, militaries will be faced with the inevitable dilemma of perceived efficacy versus ‘moral injury’. So when the time comes, countries must be prepared with a legal arsenal to defend their swarms, and constitute an ethics code that accounts for battlefield progress in the true sense of the term – maximised advantage with minimal cost to lives, property, and society.