As Watling himself puts it: “Unhardened UAVs are disposable tools like munitions and get consumed very rapidly. You need them in your force and you need them to be cheap.”

For decades, Western armies have relied on a few expensive, 'exquisite' high-tech platforms, and that includes drones. This conflict of disposable drones may lead to a radical change in military procurement towards the many and the cheap.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A lot of these drone losses will be little more than shrapnel strewn across the battlefield. Not much to show off.

[–] OwlPaste 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

If they get shot down sure, but jammed drones would either land or fall, in either way theres plently to go for a drone carcass surely.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

True but then it becomes a logistics and organisation problem for a fairly meaningless photo op and Russia aren’t doing well with either of those things.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They're not going to be in a pile, though. They're still going to be individual drones lying in ditches in no-man's land. Hardly a compelling photo-op.

[–] OwlPaste 2 points 2 years ago

We have reports that russia is running out of materials, surely if the drones are flying around they would be closer to their front lines, so easier opportunity to recover.

I mean just logically, russia is not doing so well in the information war, so I assumed they would use any opportunity to showcase their achievements, like they have done with the several bradleys/leos destroyed. They were milking that footage for a week at least.

So to me its weird that they have not tried to improve morale with such statistics. But I obviously have no clue on combat morale.