The horror weapon transforming warfare

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A swarm of combat drones

While swarming tactics on the battlefield was once comprised of ground troops, the task can now be done by drones - 

It is arguably the oldest and simplest battlefield tactic out there: swarming, the attempt – usually by a side richer in numbers than firepower – to overwhelm the opposition not necessarily by precision or force, but by sheer numbers.

In centuries gone by, those numbers might have comprised surging ground troops or volleys of ammunition. But today, as with so many aspects of modern warfare, the task can be done by drones. Dozens, or perhaps even hundreds or thousands, of cheap, devastating drones.

On Sunday evening it reportedly only took a few drones for Hezbollah to infiltrate Israel’s normally impregnable “Iron Dome” air defences, but the impact was vast: on one of the bloodiest days since October 7 2023, four Israeli soldiers and around 60 people were injured in a strike at a military base in the north of the country.

Israeli soldiers walk near the scene where a drone from Lebanon attacked Israel
Four Israeli soldiers and around 60 people were injured during Sunday’s drone strike at a military base near Binyamina, northern Israel - 

Hezbollah said it targeted the camp using a “swarm of kamikaze drones”, which “broke through the Israel defence radars without detection.”

An Israeli military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said they are “studying and investigating the incident – how a drone infiltrated without warning and struck the base”. His conclusion was bashful. “We must provide better defence.”

Ruinous and deadly though they may be, drone swarms are no longer surprising in the modern theatre of war. The Israel-Gaza conflict is just one inevitable setting for the tactic. Another is the 600-mile frontline of the Ukraine-Russia war, where it has been estimated that up to 10,000 drones are in the air on any given day.

In the Red Sea, Houthi rebels have also shown an increasing inclination towards using swarms of sea drones to threaten commercial ships and intimidate western warships. One evening in January, a group of 18 drones – thought to be the relatively inexpensive Iranian-designed Shahad 136 – were flown towards merchant vessels and US and British warships patrolling the region. HMS Diamond shot down seven.

“This isn’t revolutionary, but it is different. Drones have existed for a very long time, but when you think about them in the Afghanistan war [for example], they existed in small numbers because people thought of them as aeroplanes without pilots, and most were almost as big as that,” says Professor Michael Clarke, visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London.

“The Western powers were very slow to cop on to the idea that much smaller, cheaper drones could be used as weapons, and in numbers, that’s the point. Not three or four, [but] 40 or 50 potentially.” The “wake-up call”, Prof Clarke says, came during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, when Azerbaijani drones wrought havoc on the Armenian forces from the air.

A drone swarm
Professor Michael Clarke: ‘The Western powers were very slow to cop onto the idea that much smaller, cheaper drones could be used as weapons’ - 
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“Their targets were Russian T-72 tanks. I remember even our own military said, ‘Bloody hell, this is what we need to prepare for.’ So it wasn’t the existence of the drone, it was the use of them, efficiently, and in numbers.” He returns to that maxim of swarming, the oldest trick in the book. “It doesn’t matter if it’s ballistic missiles or troops, if the numbers are high enough, you’ll always overwhelm the defence.”

The drones used in Armenia were not of the kamikaze kind, but rather raptors, meaning they came back and could be used again.

Increasingly that is not necessary, however, as drones the military can cheaply replace have entered the fray. In fact, the development of very affordable – between $300 and $500 – First Person View (FPV) drones, which are by far the most common on the Ukrainian battlefield, has arguably changed war forever.

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Currently, FPVs have skilled human pilots to fly them to the right targets using headsets and controllers not at all dissimilar from a games console. In the future, even that pilot won’t be necessary. “It’s entirely plausible, and we’re embarking on it already, of letting artificial intelligence control the drones, and then you could have thousands of drones with just one person looking after them. And if enough are used, they’ll overpower any system. That’s what happened to the Israelis on Sunday.”

For a few hundred dollars, then, a drone could feasibly wreak damage into the hundreds of millions. In swarms, they have an even better chance. Prof Clarke points out that Ukraine took delivery of over 1,000 small flat-packed Corvo drones from SYPAQ in Australia. Made from cardboard and invisible to radar, they are essentially toys, and fly too slowly for many modern radars to detect them. (“They’re essentially like birds,” he says.)

A drone is displayed during Iranian defence week
For a few hundred dollars, a drone could feasibly wreak damage into the hundreds of millions - 

The Ukrainians fixed fragmentation bombs to them and sent a swarm of 16 to attack an enemy base in Pskov in Russia. They disabled at least five Russian fighter jets and some radar units, causing billions of rubles worth of damage. Unsurprisingly, President Zelensky wishes to up the ante: at the end of last year he said Ukraine aimed to produce a million drones in 2024.

Still, when most of us think of drone swarms, the image that comes to mind might well be a flock of hundreds of whirring machines with LEDs attached, creating a light display as an eco-friendly alternative to fireworks. Such displays are now commonplace at royal events, New Year’s Eve or at Glastonbury, but they’re also a familiar sight in heavily militarised societies, where they have come to replace the traditional military parade.

It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to picture a future in which those drones are used not to impress but kill. Indeed, a now-viral clip from the 2019 Gerard Butler film Angel Has Fallen has laid it out: small drones, en masse, can be like a giant swarm of bees. You could swat one, but not all of them.

“We enjoy these fabulous displays, with a cityscape or Spitfire or whatever being formed in the night sky, but it’s the same technology to make weapons of war, so who’s going to do it first?” Prof Clarke says. “In battle terms, the area below 5,000ft is a new section of aerial warfare: it’s the drone domain now.”

So how to defend against them? “Ultimately, the focus has got to be on electronic counter-measures. It’s an arms race. You see hapless Russian soldiers taking pot-shots at them, but you see over Ukraine and Gaza now, even the sound of a drone creates terror. Just like the Doodlebugs in the Second World War, the psychological phenomenon is a weapon in itself.”

There are almost as many potential defence tactics as there are drones, but one will surely win out. Traditional air defences are not only ill-suited but often too expensive: former US defence officials have said the best weapon against small drones is the Standard Missile-2, a medium-range air defence weapon. The latest version, the Block IV, is $2.1 million a shot. Even if a swarm attack wasn’t successful, then, it could be financially crippling.

The futuristic solutions vary from solid-state lasers, which are being used by the US to disable unmanned aerial vehicles, to guns that fire at all angles to snag as many drones as possible, to new AI-powered censors that could detect drones flying much lower and slower than traditional aerial weapons, allowing traditional weapons to take them down earlier. Perhaps due to haste, Israel is currently focusing on the latter.

Searchlights look for Russian drones in the sky over Kyiv
Futuristic solutions to defend against drones vary from solid-state lasers to guns that fire at all angles to snag as many drones as possible - 

The British Army is not ignorant to the matter. The much-debated, sixth-generation Tempest fighter jet, which will have its future revealed in the defence review early next year, may be fitted with its own drone swarms, known as the Autonomous Collaborative Platforms (ACP) or “loyal wingman”. The pilot would be able to send swarms just as they do missiles.

Prof Clarke believes this is a matter that only underlines how the soldiers of the future won’t necessarily need simply “belligerence and the ability to carry their luggage across the Brecon Beacons in terrible weather.” Instead, as foes unleash the drones of war, they’ll need to be technically proficient.

“The British are up with all this, conceptually, but they’re scratching their heads about it, what we can do about it, and whether we can afford to do anything about it. We’ll find out in the defence review,” he says. “But if Hezbollah can do it, we can be sure everyone we might find ourselves up against in the next 40 years certainly will.”

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