The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.
A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.
If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.
Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.
Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.
People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.
Edit:
I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.
As I understand it, currently all drones require a human operator who can only operate one at a time. And except for some special operations behind enemy lines, you must be fairly close to the target, as within a few km. The fiber optic ones, even closer
So your 50 drone swarm is going to need 50 operators, fairly close to the front. Who are also vulnerable to enemy counter drones and glide bombs - the latter is a real problem for Ukraine
I haven’t seen any evidence of a “swarm” on combat footage from Ukraine war, I have seen a few drones hitting a single target, especially armored vehicles in fairly quick succession, like a few seconds, It looked like independent operators all picking the obvious high value target, not some intentional “swarm”
Tech may change this in the future but we’re not there quite yet
First, you don't need AI operators, you just need a swarm. The operators are reusable!
>Ukraine reported the largest single-day drone attack by Russia on July 9, 2025, where Russia targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones. This surpasses earlier attacks, including one on May 26, 2025, when Russia launched 355 drones.
With that many pilots, that is a swarm.
Next, analysis of last months AI driven attack was performed by many drones with no human terminal guidance - they were jammed and expected to be!
>“Our models are being trained to recognise targets to understand target prioritisation,” he says. “We do not have full autonomy yet. We use the human factor where we need to, but we are developing different scenarios for taking autonomy further.
> “We are also testing some autonomous drones, which we have not announced and are probably not planning to announce, but they have a high degree of autonomy, and they can potentially combine themselves into swarms. We are still facing technical problems and hurdles, but we already see a path forward on this.”
One Final Note - Most of the info you ever hear about military tech is only the things people are allowed to discuss publicly. The battlefield is also a hell of a lab, and 3d printers and open source flight software (and open source AI models) are amazing.
Those 725 drones were spread across a fairly big geographic area, and didn’t hit all at once. Also they operate more like cruise missiles, not the FPV drones it seemed like the article was referring too
“Swarm” to me means more than just number. It’s number, concentration, and tactics, like a swarm of bees… the problem is they are concentrated and hitting from many directions, While individually they are not that bad, when they use this tactic it is very effective, Which is how they can drive 500 pound bears away from their hive.
Otherwise “swarms” have been a thing for along time. Would you call an 19th century infantry regiment (let’s say about 600-1000 soldiers) a “swarm”. Or how about those formations of B17/B24s/Lancasteres in WW2 which would attack in similar numbers (hundreds). I would say no, partly because they didn’t use a swarming tactic
Argue about the definition of swarm (the distance between units and level of coordination) all you want, but ultimately it's irrelevant given the addition information.
Massive coordination is going into attacks across hundreds or thousands of Km. Multiple layers of drones, electronic warfare, recon, airspace deconfliction, etc. Highly orchestrated. Large numbers that are overwhelming systems designed to defeat them, like a swarm of locust.
Note that the one drone is not the other; when they talk about Russian mass drone attacks, they will refer to Shahed etc drones, which are autonomous, not unlike the WW2 V1 "drones".
But yeah, drone swarms with fewer operators will be, probably already is a thing. But what I've seen so far, they're just not very useful; drones look to be generally used on individual targets, if there's a bigger or more targets, they'll use something bigger like a HIMARS, glide bomb, or if it's closer by, an artillery strike.
Drone swarms primary purpose is to overwhelm defenses.
Many argue drone swarms require some level of orchestration and control, others say a certain level of automation is required.
I'm aware of the differences in many drone classifications.
HIMARS was made largely impotent by GPS jamming. Glide bombs have limited range (barring exceptions for stuff like JASSM-ER but that is massive increase in cost) and detection and fire by counter battery. Artillery strike requires fairly close proximity but a bit more of rocket assisted.
Spent time doing military things with a lot of ordinance and a lot of drones.
Ukraine is having pretty substantial manpower problems in its armed forces. If fully autonomous drones against mobile targets had been figured out, they would been deployed and there would be no need for the more expensive / shorter range fiber optic drones and you wouldn't hear about the manpower issue as much
If we were in a war with widespread conscription that needed self-driving vehicles, I'd bet we'd a) see a lot more investment in them and b) a lot less concern about edge cases.
I agree with you on almost everything. Where we differ is on the nature of money. I think the recent wars emphasize that the real bottleneck in war is no longer $$$, but the things those dollars represent. So for instance a million $1000 drones is, on paper, only a billion dollars. The bottleneck isn't the cost, but the production. And you can't just spin up production making millions per year, because you also need the raw resources - and you end up with this entire complex supply chain, all on top of finite raw materials, and then the logistics to organize everything. And in the case of a war scenario, this all needs to be organized in a disruption proof system. It's extremely complex and difficult, even if you have an infinite money machine.
And I think you would actually agree with this by taking a simple thought experiment. Imagine we have 1 soldier with a million dollars of training. And we give an opposing force the choice of eliminating that soldier, or eliminating 1,000 $1000 drones. Everybody is going to pick the drones, and it won't be even remotely close. In fact drop it down by an order of magnitude, 100 drones, and it's still not even close - even though the on paper value of that soldier is an order of magnitude higher. 10 drones is probably where it starts to get close, though I think it'd still lean heavily towards the drones.
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I would add that when a war becomes a late stage war of attrition, the value of infantry goes up. I am speaking in more general terms in a war where manpower is nowhere near a critical issue. In any case by the time manpower does become a critical issue, a war is usually already lost, even if it might be able to drag on for many months yet.
30% unit casualties causes the unit to be Combat Ineffective in the infantry role.
(Number of infantry x .3) = $DesiredCasualties
Let's say it takes 10 drones to kill a soldier, and each drone is $250/ea. That's $2,500, or the $KillCost
$DesiredCasualties x $KillCost = Dollar value needed to move an infantry unit into combat ineffectiveness
Looks like around 620,000 troops deployed by Russia so far.
620k x .3 = 186,000
186000 x $2500 = $465 million, bottom line price, in a crazy world where the starts align in many ways that aren't realistic, gives you a huge destruction in combat capability for less than $500mil.
For those following along, this is extremely overly simplified, but I hope it conveys both the huge military advantages drones provide as well as the political (less dead bodies to deal with, less broken soldiers sent home for treatment and decades of care) and economic advantages lethal drones in combat can provide.
And the enemy is using the exact same thing against you. Yet infantry will remain critical for claiming territory, clearing areas and more. As drones advance, war will probably become even bloodier. And drone operators that survive are already coming home completely broken men suffering from extreme PTSD.
Then factor on top of this logistics. You need to transport men, keep them fed, equipped, and more. You need to move a massive amount of stuff constantly in war, yet drones are going to be buzzing everywhere. So I think we're seeing the future of war now - slow, grueling, bloody wars of attrition.
And war where high prices tags are replaced by high costs in stuff, making it more apparent than ever that economies maximized through financial games and services are paper tigers when facing economies based on the production of tangible things.
I don't think they are, actually (using the same TTPs), nor would it make sense to.
Ukrainian drone doctrine is very different than Russian, and not just on paper, but how it is playing out.
This is for two main reasons: proximity to logistics for the defenders vs attackers, and existing military structures including vehicles and troop organizational structures (MTOE) that drone systems support or are supported by.
So I don't agree with your assessment there. It doesn't seem to match what's happening in the field with the type of drones used and the percentage of the classification of each type of drone system and purpose. These are quite different.
I also don't think it will be more bloody, but less over time. Much of the fight is in the electronic warfare arena and in air dominance across the vertical airspace. A colleague agrees:
Infantry are expensive to train correctly, to outfit, and supply. I think the total number of frontline combat troops will continue to go down as a fraction of overall troops, while increasing supporting positions for drones, communications, electronic warfare, and general battlefield logistics.
That article reads like typical NATO stuff which sounds great in practice but makes assumptions that don't exist, and are unobtainable (like air superiority), if you're fighting an enemy more sophisticated than guys running around in sandals with AKs. Here [1] is a report from somebody who worked with drones in Ukraine, and why he's exceptionally disillusioned with them.
I half wonder if what I linked to wasn't an indirect response to what you posted, as it was published only 3 days later, and is essentially that article's equal but opposite.
Soldiers adapt - deploying in groups of 3-4, moving along tree lines, and hiding in buildings/trenches. One of Patrick Lancaster's (an American journalist covering the war from the Donbas) videos has him hiding with a group of soldiers while a drone is overhead - the twigs and branches of the bushes and trees makes it impossible for a drone traveling at a moderate speed to see them, and would entangle the drone if it did attack.
Drones are being operated in layers based on range and capability. This applies to both long range / heavy payload drones and small / fast fpvs.
Long range, heavy payload, ISR drones with excellent optics and thermals are helping to spot targets from very far away that small groups of fpv operators can search and target.
Smaller drones must be somewhat closer, so this can't happen too far away from where are currently.
Depending on the terrain and what the enemy is using to adapt (like fiber optic tether for drones like a TOE missile, or like AI targeting and terminal guidance to counter controls + GPS jamming), fpv drones can be a liability (tree cover, rubble) or have a big impact.
What a lot of units are doing for tree cover is what is called a VT fuse for mortars or artillery. These can be configured to burst at tree height. Artillery/indirect often have coverage over top of drone units to cover their advance with smoke if need be, and much further range than FPV drone operations do without some sort of comms relay (could be another airborne drone relaying).
Yeah. Don't group up though. The first round of indirect fire is normally the most deadly.
It seems like you are making the point that there are large ranges of drones, and other weapons are required when drones are not effective, which I agree with. Drones aren't as cost effective as your earlier example of 12 soldiers being killed by a few drones. I can't find the interview, but a Ukranian drone operator said on average 15-20 FPVs were needed to wound/kill a soldier (80% are jammed). Just as it takes 1000 bullets to kill a soldier, it takes lots of drones (on average) to kill a soldier, making the cost-effectiveness worse.
I'm saying they're not acting alone, and alluding to battlefield conditions changing and combatants adapting as they have done since warfare started.
They are using Combined Arms doctrine to support their drones now. Instead of drones supporting everything else, everything else is in support of drones and drone dominance.
The supply chain and cost is a big part of it.
As both sides continue to develop new and better AI targeting systems, RF jamming will cease to be effective and they'll have to move to laser jamming of the optical systems. As that is no longer effective, swarm tactics counter the laser tactics. Currently counter-swarm attack methods for drone-swarms are being investigated, because nobody knows of a cost effective way to stop this. Even the drone supply chain is very easy to do much of very near the front lines. Carbon fiber and some heavy duty airframes are harder. It's SO CHEAP compared to any comparable weapon.
This is nonsense. Drones get all the attention because of the novelty and that they obviously have become very important, but you're being beyond hyperbolic. Artillery is still the king of war and responsible for something like 80% of all battlefield casualties. This has become even more true now with drones having eyes in the sky everywhere enabling artillery to become even more devastating.
The amount of money spent on training high level US infantry goes into the hundreds of thousands, and millions upon millions for Special Forces, Ranger/Ranger Recon/Tier 1 units/CIA SAC/SOG, etc.
A drone that can carry a payload can be built for under $200 USD. A swarm could be as few as say 10. Let's say 50, just for you example. 50x$200=$10,000.
If you take out an SF Team for example, that's 12 people. Let's say they were very new and they were only $800,000 into training so far in their career. 12x$800,000= $9.6mil USD.
Let's revise that calculation, with a 6 man infantry fire team young troops, $100,000 into training, each. $600,000/$10,000 = 60x more economically efficient even if all drones were lost in the operation, as long as the target was killed. You could still have 59 more tries with 50 drones per swarm to hit cost parity.
Oh yeah and some of those drones have thermals and high quality glass optics now, so they can see you and your squad as white dots moving across the landscape from miles and miles away.
People really don't understand the impact drones are having on the battlefield. It's nuts.
Edit:
I think this level of drone warfare will end up having a larger impact on warfare than both gunpowder and later the machine gun, but probably not as big as WWII large scale air campaigns.