Russia and Ukraine have never been, currently are not, and never would be as well equipped as the US and Chinese when it comes to counter UAS.
"Counter-UAS" doesn't seem very effective is the point and that is coming from the people who are actively fighting wars of the future.
There's no reason to assume that the US, or China or Poland or Germany or Britain or France or whoevewr, would not suffer in the same static situation as Russia and Ukraine have. This is not a problem of simply "more", given that Ukraine has arguably the most extensive short range air defense network in the world with advanced systems like IRIS-T and SL-AMRAAM, as well as Gepard and Skyranger, but rather it is an issue of basic tactics and techniques that have yet to be discerned.
There is simply no way to survive in close combat without emulating what the Russians are doing: small unit short attacks backed by brief high intensity periods of firepower. That seems to be the only effective means of attack and it achieves rates of several hundred meters per day on a really, really good. Several tens once you average it out.
Any army that has not taken in the lessons of the past 36 months is doomed to be annihilated, as the Russians were in 2022, by a massive arsenal of Lancets and similar weapons. Given how glacially slow armies move in peacetime, and at times counter-productively in the face of evidence, nobody can be assumed to have any real capacities in this realm except the active combatants. Everyone can be assumed to learn this is the optimal way of defeating mechanized attacks though.
The other consideration is that there are no longer enough concentrations of troops for artillery to generate the same level of casualties. But the *threat* of artillery still shapes the battlefield; FPV UAVs are slower to deploy and concentrate. Arty is fast and fire and forget.
They're complimentary but at the very least we know a few things from Ukraine:
1) Towed artillery is the most survivable combat system in the world. It is easy to conceal from roving eyes of ISR capable munitions. For all its survivability it is not the prime killer, and hasn't been for nearly two years, because it is hard to hide when flash spotting and acoustic detection is rampant. It is still useful it just has to move between hides periodically and while not being watched.
2) Tanks are completely non-viable in groups greater than "one", as they will be detected and destroyed, often multiple kilometers from the frontline. They must hide in concealed positions and only move when drones are not looking i.e. there is bad weather or heavy EW protection. In other words, tanks (and IFVs) have become artillery pieces with TTPs similar to Crusader or Pzh 2000. Operations of one vehicle, absent from its platoon, moving between pre-prepared firing positions with extensive camouflage. Mechanized assaults do not work.
3) Groups of infantry in double digit number may be extinct across the board. The Russians are apparently attacking, and successfully so, with groups of between 3 and 6 soldiers mobilized in golf carts or light trucks. Ukrainians are defending with groups of 2-4 men in connected and overhead protected DFPs occasionally with another DFP nearby. The squad and platoon sized DFP is likely becoming extinct if it hasn't already.
4) The FPV drone threat is the primary reason for present levels of force dispersal, not the artillery threat, as the artillery threat is identical to the mid-1980s and was easily dealt with platoon sized DFPs of that era. The drone threat OTOH is capable of zipping into a trench and killing a machine gun team and injuring their assistants. Best to chop it up across a wide area so that when they inevitably get detected only two or three men become casualties instead of six or seven.
5) Air superiority in a conventional sense confers almost no protection to troops on the frontline but is almost completely necessary for protection of the industrial areas and electrical infrastructure of modern society. Combat operations in the FEBA can be stopped entirely by the organic weapons of a brigade when the brigade includes drones like Lancet or various FPV ad hocs.
The list might go on but those are the ones I've seen from actual soldiers on the frontlines and their camp follower analysts.
I wouldn't disagree, but I'd also argue the static frontline actually demonstrates that drones aren't able to make a decisive change in the frontline situation.
On the contrary,
they're the cause of it.
Zaluzhnyi noted this before his dismissal. Similarly, the Nazi Germans described Allied air superiority on the Western Front as "having their feet nailed to the ground", which would be resoundingly similar to how a Ukrainian or Russian commander might describe it. The difference is the Russians have the capability to attack, however slowly, while the Ukrainians have been pushed out of even their Kursk salient.
The strategic concern of drones is less than cruise missiles, at least, so it's only really a concern for the brigade FEBA which encompasses about 50 kilometers of depth either side of the FLOT. The general threat description is shockingly similar to 1980s depictions of interdictors and ground attack aircraft like Tornado or Su-24. Except unlike these very expensive and scarce systems, the drones are actually effective and cheap enough to be genuinely disruptive to planning assaults, and it turns out the 1980s tactics developed for the interdictor threat are wholly inadequate to deal with the drone. The issue is the quantity and the consistency, rather than the nature, of the threat of course.
За останній місяць по всіх фронтах стали активно працювати спеціальні групи російських пілотів, які літають FPV на глибину 30-40 км. Управління йде через ретранслятор високо в небі. Дрони 10-15 дюймів із подвійною АКБ. Завдання: бити по нашій логістиці й атакувати тилові цілі. Причина успіху...
t.me
Tanks and vehicles within the FEBA have been repeatedly under threat of air raid by drone attack and there's no real solution besides driving off into a concealed position and hoping you weren't spotted. This is hard because modern drones are very fast, very hard to detect, and have good range of vision with megapixel CCD cameras. This is not easily replicated with an armored vehicle unless you have a multi-million dollar radar and active protection system which costs an order of magnitude per engagement more than the weapon attacking it.
The methods of which to break the stalemate caused by drone systems is presently unknown. There are lots of ideas. None of which have panned out in Ukraine yet given the deployment of the most advanced Western air defense systems available, and the ones which haven't been tested such as microwaves and lasers are still years (perhaps a decade) away, so they might as well be a non-factor for a hypothetical US-PRC war. At least until the late 2030s, assuming we miss the 2027-2032 window.
Air power is currently having a really big moment. It will end, but not with the weapons and tactics of the Cold War, because this is a threat wholly unknown during the Cold War. It may require deployment of long range radars and air defense systems on individual armored vehicles though. At that point, it would be worth asking what the purpose of an armored vehicle is, and if it can be replaced by a cheaper system.
archived 27 May 2025 17:31:36 UTC
archive.ph
Presently the situation resembles Korea, at least in some respects such as the fighting from individual or pair or trio sized DFPs, and if you will remember the Korean War you will remember that it never solved the stalemate problem before culmination.
The situation is similarly hard in Ukraine, except instead of the world's largest population (and most battle hardened army) fighting the world's biggest economy (and most mechanized army) fighting a trench war, it is two countries similar in economic strength to Italy and Bulgaria mutually obliterating the last century's most powerful superpower in terms of battlefield equipment losses and munitions expenditure.
Mechanized forces have simply gone the way of horse cavalry in 1914. It's unclear if, unlike horses (rather, donkeys), they might be able to return. The perennial issue of the modern age is the inability to produce new weapons and equipment in a timely fashion to replace the old, after all, and thus any future wars will be fought with Cold War weapons predominantly. As Russia and Ukraine have demonstrated, such weapons and their tactics (whether actual or informed-by), are inadequate for modern wars.
The benefit of being big, though, is that you can learn how to fight with what you have. Russian and Ukrainian solutions are converging on the idea that a tank needs to fight essentially underground, and by moving between concealed hides it can hide from drones, provided it has sufficient electronic warfare and air defense available. The sticking point is most of these things, such as short range air defense, are absent from Western/NATO armed forces and that's just talking about the Sergeant Stout.
