Except that this sort of drone is piloted. I think that implies it can be more precisely targeted than artillery.
Artillery cannot circle around your bunker to find the entrance, then fly inside and blow you up. The right FPV drone and pilot can literally fly in through the muzzle of a tank and explode inside the turret.
From a quick Google, artillery shells cost between $3000 and $10,000 each (plus the cost of the gun, of course). These drones cost a few hundred. This war is really messing with military notions of what counts as “cheap”.
Precision Guided Munitions come pretty close.
Precision guided munitions are expensive. FPV drones are not. Plus a precision guided munition can’t find the entrance. It has to be told where the entrance is prior to firing. With an FPV drone, the pilot can find a small opening and exploit it immediately. See here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V4VfY8ZZ8H0
I think that this war is really messing with military notions in general. I bet up at the pentagon, a large number of books on strategy and are being torn up an re-written.
Thats the price for the dumb shells. Shells with guidance systems like the M982 cost about $60,000 per shell.
The economics of FPV drone production are favorable. This diagram by Kamil Galeev explains why. From Why is weaponry so expensive?
Competitive pressures tend to reduce bullshit. Drones are cheap because their manufacturing antecedents are toys, a consumer product. Less tolerance for bullshit.
Climbing the complexity curve isn’t easy, but it’s easier than transitioning to lower bullshit. We know this because many more companies have done the former than the latter.
One of the most common routes to bullshit is overkill, something that cost pressures discourage.
Citation is paywalled: Why is Weaponry so Expensive? - kamilkazani
Ukraine may very well manufacture 26 gazillion FPV drones, but the parts will come from the Chinese consumer good industry, a low-BS industrial sector.
ETA: This post follows the rule of funny. I can think of qualifications to the above (relating to aircraft and space flight), but I don’t think they detract from the overall tendency.
To all that excellent analysis I’ll add a third dimension. Production volume. New late-model mobile phones are very complex electronic devices that retail for a couple to a few hundred dollars each. Now imagine a device just as complex and difficult to design and buidl, but only one thousand of them will ever be made. Or only a hundred. All the same R&D, all the same design effort, all the same factory tooling effort, but amortized over a hundred units, not a couple million.
That’s aerospace.
Yeah, that’s one reason why dealing with drones is hard; they are cheap enough that a lot of anti-drone measures are more expensive than them, or at worst not much cheaper. Even bullets go up in cost quick when you are firing lots of them at small, evasive targets.
Which is another answer as to “why 1-4 million drones”; attrition of the defenses. Shooting them down consumes ammunition that has to be replaced, and they are cheap and expendable enough that “run them out of ammunition” is a reasonable tactic. And if nothing else replacing it means money and resources not going into offensive weapons.
And if you want to raise goosebumps and cold sweat on anyone responsible for designing, deploying, or operating air defense systems, whisper “UAS* swarm” to them.
*Unmanned Aerial System seems to be the current term of art for an air drone plus all its necessary bits, including command and control and payload.
One of the main effects of the Allies’ WW2 aerial bombing campaign was all the AA guns and fighters NOT at the front shooting at tanks and infantry.
This is the critical thing. The reaosn you make a million of them is the same reason you make a million shells for your artillery; the drones IS the weapon, more so than a delivery system.
the brilliance of drone warfare, especially for the army resisting the invasion, is that they’re affordable way out of proportion to their effectiveness.
Modern large scale arms are becoming so expensive that countries cannot afford a substantial reserve of them. Canada’s plan to purchase a modest number of F-35s (about 90-100 of them) will cost more, even after you adjust for inflation, than the entire Royal Canadian Air Force cost in World War II, when Canada had a monumentally huge air force of thousands and thousands of aircraft. A rich modern country of 40 million people is now in a position where if it buys modern combat aircraft, it can only buy just enough to fulfill defense requirements and will have no real backup and no ability to quickly replace losses. And that’s the air force. Our new ships? $100 billion if it’s a penny, and we get 15 of them and that’s it. Canada’s standard main battle tank, the Leopard II, costs, depending on version, at least 15 times more (I am adjusting for inflation, remember) than Canada’s WWII tanks, mostly the Churchill and Sherman.
But holy shit, you can build drones by the gazillion. They’re cheap, amazingly hard to defend against, and if you lose one who cares? Losing a plane or a tank means you lose trained personnel, which is doubly bad. If you lose a drone the operator just sends off another. This also means you don’t have to worry about force protection. Your use of F-35s or tanks must be balanced against not throwing them away; you need to keep them alive if possible so you can use them again. If I have a million drones I don’t care. I’ll cheerfully burn ten drones to kill one APC.
Drones are to 2025 warfare what bombs and RPGs were to insurgency warfare in the past.
In the last few years of the war, one QUARTER of all German artillery production was dedicated to trying to fight off bombers. In the last year of the war almost their entire fighter force did nothing else, as a result of which there was nothing to help the front lines.
Perhaps they’re interested in selling them to Canada?
Seems a possibility to me!
To attack Russian air base, Ukrainian spies hid drones in wooden sheds -
LOL, I love it. They may have destroyed 40% of Russias bombers. Also they hit a naval base.
These drones are awesome. They cost less than an artillery shell and they have better aim.
Canada could have such drones manufactured quite easily. And we absolutely, positively should do so immediately. In volume.
They have a lot of experience, both making and using.
Can’t hurt to import a few pros from Ukraine.
Moving impressively fast has been promised, after all. Let’s hope we’re already making such arrangements.
But even though they’re cheap enough that you can consider them expendable, sometimes, they do survive the mission (depending on the mission). Which effectively makes them even cheaper. That never happens with artillery shells.
Well…
But you’re not getting them back, nor would you want them back.