This seems just completely wrong. The trend for drones is that features and capabilities are increasing and costs are decreasing because they're based on cheap software and cheap consumer hardware. The trend for unguided mortar rounds or artillery shells is that they're as cheap as they're ever likely to be at thousands of dollars a round, plus the cost of the gun and its replacement barrels and crew. (guided artillery shells or missiles are so expensive they're a separate conversation)

If these small drones provide capabilities that are, as your comment implies, not new but they do it with a cost effectiveness that blows away anything that came before, that's a pretty big deal.

Capabilities are not the same thing as effects. A drone represents different capabilities at different price points, but the net result observed on the battlefield are not all that different that past infantry engagements. If enemy infantry knows your position, they can today reach out and kill you at similar ranges as they did in wars past. The how has changed, not the what.

Aren't these "cheap" drones tens to hundreds of thousands each?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136

There are also modified commercial drones that just drop explosives, and that is what is mentioned here. Those drones drop their payload and may return to reload if not shutdown. Those drones aren't "hundreds of thousands each", but around $500 each.

As for the drone you linked - we don't know how much it cost Russian to produce Geran-2, but definitely less than you imagine.

in Ukraine the FPV infantry killers are modified hobbyist drones, in the ~$500 range

the economist: https://www.economist.com/interactive/science-and-technology... https://archive.is/nJYJ0

Even this is almost certainly an underestimate. Open source intelligence that just the bill of materials for a Shahed is more than the tens of thousands previously estimated. These are probably more on the order of ~$400k [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the...

This comment thread is about cheap drones hunting down individuals. They are not using Shahed for that. You can easily build a small drone capable of carrying a grenade for under $300.

Firing traditional artillery makes you vulnerable to counter-battery radar. Since rockets, mortars, howitzers, etc all fire in a predictable ballistic trajectory, you have to quickly move or risk being shot at before your rounds even hit their target. An anti-personnel drone can move in any direction and can operate much lower to ground to avoid radar so no one will know exactly where it came from. You don't get as much of a bang but it's much more stealthy.

Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team. From what I have seen, the Ukrainian drone teams have to "shoot and scoot" in much the same way as the motor/artillery teams.

Part of the exposure is also due to the limited range of some smaller drone control systems, meaning those drone operators have needed to be much closer (a few km) to their targets than artillery crews (several dozen km).

There can be a long wire between the (cheap) radio and the person operating it. You probably don't mind if you lose the radio or the drone.

This is very different to artillery which is too expensive to lose to return fire and even more expensive if you try and make it operable remotely.

"Ya, but the drone operators emit radio. So too the drones. They are visually stealthy but are more visible electronically than an oldschool motor team."

Which is why it is very unlikely, that we can avoid fully autonomous killer drones.

(if they are not already deployed in experimental settings)

The impact on logistics is at least somewhat revolutionary. Previously it probably took several cases of mortar shells to inflict one casualty. Now that can be done with a couple of drones. Much lighter.

Yes and no. Ammunition is important, but from a logistics standpoint it will be much less burdensome than the food/water/fuel that must be provided to men on the field. Even in a hot war, an infantry unit is not engaged in full combat 24/7. But it never stops eating.

But autonomy explicitly decreases the human logistics burden too, by multiplying the effectiveness of each human.

Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.

And when you remove the need for even a single human, you also remove their logistics footprint.

> Where in Civil War times you would need to clothe, feed, camp 100 people, now you have that firepower in a single soldier's weapon.

Which doesn't reduce the number of troops you need against a given foe with peer equipment, it just increases the durable equipment and consumables per soldier

> Previously it probably took several cases of mortar shells to inflict one casualty. Now that can be done with a couple of drones. Much lighter.

Do you think it's 1, 2, or 3 drones to get 1 kill?

Jamming and dying batteries make the odds much worse than that.

Look up how many drones have been expended in Ukraine. Then look up how many casualties there have been. Finally, understand that not all casualties ate caused by drones, and do the math.