The Manpower-Intense Of FPV Drone Interceptor-Centric Air Defence

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Note: The following text was originally posted on my X/Twitter account.

While armed multirotor drones can be effectively and productively employed as a form of inexpensive surface-to-air munition/interceptor against fixed-wing drones—at least the slower designs and those that fly at a lower altitude—as well as other multirotor drones, these are inexpensive systems because they are remotely operated/piloted, human-in-the-loop uncrewed aircraft-turned-munitions. The combination of very limited range-endurance, the fact that the target is often moving at a speed of 50-100 km/h, and the fact that the armed multirotor drone employed as a surface-to-air interceptor is not a whole lot faster means that every pairing of armed multirotor drone-turned-interceptor and a remote human operator/pilot can only cover—protect—a very limited surface area. As a result, this amounts to an inexpensive but very manpower-intensive approach to air defence.

The videos of such interceptions released over the past year or so suggest that it is not unusual for two armed multirotor drones-turned interceptors—each with its own remote human operator/pilot—to pursue a potential target, a dynamic that can be seen from 00:35 in the attached video. Automating the systems and the targeting process will free up manpower, but will likely result in a non-trivial increase in the unit cost of such uncrewed aircraft-turned-munitions, with much of the greater expense going toward reusable sensors and command and control equipment that will remain on the ground. More generally, it is important to keep in mind that many discussions of the cost of a given military system tend to assign inadequate weight to the economic allocation of finite manpower and time. A faster surface-to-air munition will likely be considerably more expensive, but nevertheless offers a shorter time-to-target that can itself translate into the ability to intercept a much greater number of (moving) targets in a given timeframe. Given the above, there is a case to be made that the inexpensive but nevertheless rather primitive approach to air defence seen in this video and others like it should be primarily viewed as an effective wartime expedient rather than an approach that should necessarily be widely emulated (at least by countries that have the resources to do a lot better).