Drone swarms could replace cluster bombs and more
Warfare - Part IV
Area denial is key to any war and it certainly has been key in Ukraine.
Mine fields and the abundance of FPV drones have all but stopped any offensive in its tracks.
For now, however those have been limited to the 25km line of contact in the front.
Limited by battery range, electronic warfare, signal strength and dependence on human operators.
In this post, I will outline a system that can conduct Drone raids and Area denial activity in the deep rear of Russia.
First step, FPV drones need internet:
Meet the future of Russian Wifi:
Ukrainians are already flying Starlink uplinks 1500km into Russia almost on a daily basis.
It would be relatively trivial to modify these drones to relay FPV drone links over Starlink so that they can be controlled remotely.
Ideally, the drone acts as a 4G LTE celltower which has beamforming technology and is hard to jam.
That’s great but how do you get FPV drones into the Russian rear
The internet can be fixed but these Ukrainian drones can’t actually carry the weight of dozens of drones. Luckily I played too much with this when I was a kid:
Palyanitsya-class systems can deliver the drones.
The recently announced “Palyanitsya” FPV rocket drones will enable Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with heavier payloads, they can also be scaled up to carry more payload.
Let’s assume they are able to deliver 100kg of payload on-target and an FPV drone weighs 10kg.
That means they would be able to carry 10 FPV drones to any region behind the enemy lines.
One strike could turn into 10 strikes.
Rocket-systems are also very fast.
These propellor-led drones that can fly 1500km into Russia are really slow which is good, they might spot something worthy of a Drone swarm.
Palyanitsya could deliver 100’s of drones in the region in a short timespan.
Imagine every propellor-led drone could call in an airstrike, similar to the JTAC people in modern armies except flying around Russia all the time.
It’s the drone version of the cluster bomb.
But not just cluster bombs.
FPV drones are also used to lay mines which means that they can be used to replace this guy also:
Imagine Ukrainian FPV drones mining Russian railway systems remotely and up to 600km in the Russian rear.
With Palyanitsya and drone swarms they could blockade any Russian logistics system up to 600km back.