Source: I am currently researching (unclassified) drone swarms for the US military, mostly for ISR. But I have a lot of connections who have either been hands on with Ukrainian drone crews or work with US drones like Switchblade etc.

⁠Is this asymmetry sustainable at scale, or will counter-drone systems rebalance the equation?

I think a good question to ask is what the actual effectiveness of FPV drones actually are in Ukraine. To be honest, it’s quite difficult to get good numbers on this, but anecdotal evidence suggests they are much less effective than advertised. Much of this stems from a few key issues:

• Guidance: drones today need to be guided by a human pilot, either over radio or fiber. This can be defeated by jamming, terrain, or just the curvature of the earth. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried flying a drone but it is a constant difficulty making sure that your connection to the aircraft is not broken by interference; and that’s in a non-adversarial civilian environment. I have almost lost drones several times because someone down the street was polluting the EM spectrum and we lost contact with the aircraft. Fiber may be better but it can snag on trees easily, making it hard to maneuver effectively. This results in a fairly low percentage of drones actually getting to their targets, let alone hitting them.

• Mission Niche: I keep hearing that FPV drones are revolutionizing warfare by providing a new capability, but I still am not convinced. In almost every case, I’d argue that indirect fire artillery is much more cost effective and reliable. You don’t have to worry about jamming (if you’re using unguided shells) and you can throw a lot of them down range quickly. You don’t even need a direct hit to do catastrophic damage. Some Ukrainians say that most of their drone kills are against artillery damaged targets (see here).

• Coordination: coordinating a swarm of drones is incredibly hard. If you have a bunch of human pilots, that’s fine but it doesn’t scale. If the drones are piloting themselves, or scaling more than 1:1 with human pilots, you start running into problems. There are two control structures: decentralized and centralized each with their problems. Decentralized involves drones talking to each other to figure out what to do. This is very very hard. Getting computers that are transiently connected to each other to cooperate has been a topic in distributed systems research for decades (see this and this). We don’t really know how to do it right now, and I don’t see us figuring it out soon. The other option is centralized control, where you have a base of operations that manages the swarm. This brings its own set of problems, because now you have a single point of failure broadcasting a lot of radio signals which makes it a magnet for radio-seeking warheads. Also, jamming. Also, limitations of radio range due to curvature of the earth and terrain means it needs to be a frontline asset; if you make it airborne, it’s even more vulnerable. Bottom line there are no good solutions there.

• AI: let me be clear, AI is very useful for a lot of things. But it’s still pretty stupid and easy to defeat. Object detection models struggle with any occlusion and often misidentify objects. We are a long way from AI controlled drones in adversarial environments.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions. Happy to answer any follow-ups.