mxaxai wrote:Commercial drones are easily jammed as they usually use WiFi bands and aren't designed to evade jamming. GPS jammers can also help disorient the drone. Both are available commercially. I suspect that Russia, after the initial suprise, has looked at their options and started deploying some countermeasures around high-value targets.
The Russians are definitely doing that. They're deploying more commercial and military-grade drone jammers as well as
encouraging homebrewing-up jammers. They've also reportedly talked to their (nominal) Chinese allies, or at least manufacturers of commercial drones that are sympathetic to the invasion, and basically handed over coding and programming that, while not really shutting the drone off remotely (although I want to mention this because this is a possible real trick to counter commercial drones in war), it has allowed the Russians to track drones back to their operators and respond with artillery fire (which is why the Ukrainians are reportedly at least using Chinese commercial drones less and less). The flip side to that is that at least some Chinese companies have also supplied the Russians with commercial drones.
Many of the drone kills you see on YouTube are from much earlier in the war, although jammers aren't universal tech even in the US military, so frontline units are still likely to remain vulnerable to commercial drones for the duration of the war unless they can somehow magically homebrew their own jammers like what I had linked to above. And keep in mind directly dropping bombs isn't even the primary means drones are being used to kill enemy units: they still mostly serve as artillery spotters, and even very cheap commercial drones have cameras with sufficient resolution that they can simply hover well outside of jamming range.
Also, don't underestimate the value of "resource distraction" with drones. Even successfully shooting down a drone, especially a super-cheap consumer one, means potentially using up an Igla/Verna or a Strela-10 (with its relatively heavy warhead, no it's not just a Strela MANPADS slapped onto an MT-LB) or an Osa or even a Tor, which otherwise could've been used to shoot down a Ukrainian MiG, Frogfoot or Hind or even a more complex, actually armed drone like Bayraktar. Yes, you could argue that this matters less as Russia has tons of counter-air missiles, but the knockdown logistic effects are very real especially when you get to a smaller scale. A soldier uses up an Igla to shoot down one of those Mavic or whatever consumer-grade drones; ok, now that unit has to wait for a replacement Igla to make its way down an already stretched and abysmal supply chain. Or a soldier fires an Igla to shoot down a Mavic; ok, now you gotta toss the old tube away, go to the truck to grab a new tube, slam the battery onto that thing (on most Russian legacy MANPADS like Strela, Igla and Polish Piorun, the battery is the spherical, rubber-like "squeezable" object that sticks out from the bottom; the rubber sphere contains pressurized argon and/or other inert noble gasses that are essential to keeping the battery cool and otherwise preserving it; like the rest of the system itself it is one-time use and once the battery is plugged in and the internal seal of that pressurized sphere penetrated as a result, the usable life of that battery is less than an hour; only the absolute latest generation of MANPADS like Verna, which is still very rare, use solid-state batteries that get around this problem), be prepared to reaquire new targets - and then you no longer have to worry about anything anymore because now you're dead, because during that relatively long window it took for you to throw the used-up Igla away and grab a new one, a nearby Ukrainian Frogfoot flew over and bombed your whole unit dead.
At minimum the drone threat requires spreading a highly-mobile, tactical-level air defense network that's clearly spread out overly thin as it is. This is something the Ukrainians are well aware of, and this is why they haven't bothered to attack the Kerch Bridge; the bridge requires strategic-level air defense assets like S-400 all the way down to more Tors, Buks, Osas and Pantsirs that could otherwise be deployed to the front lines to directly engage Ukrainian air assets. If the Ukrainians somehow destroy it, it would free up all those assets to do so, for the sake of destroying one of many supply lines (as poor as those supply lines are in general). Not to mention it's a very structurally-hard target to kill anyway. The Russians are very well aware of this too, but it puts them in a hard Catch-22; if they do release those assets to the front lines, it gives the Ukrainians free access to at least strafe the bridge every time a truck convoy or a train passes over.
Military drones are more robust but obviously come with a higher price tag. Switchblade kamikaze drones reportedly cost around $10,000, about 10 times more than a good commercial drone.
I want to point out that in military terms, $10,000 is still very cheap and preferable to a manned aircraft, or even compared to Bayraktar which also in military terms is still pretty cheap. It's especially cheap when it's literally free to begin with, because a sympathetic government is giving you all the Switchblades it can in order to defeat the Russians free of charge.
Not to mention DARPA and other government agencies have very active programs to drive down the cost of loitering munitions, to the point where they'll likely cost practically the same as off-the-shelf consumer drones.
