Army secretary says US can’t keep pumping money into expensive weapons that can be taken out by an $800 Russian drone
BY Herschel Smith
1 week, 6 days ago
“We keep creating and purchasing these exquisite machines that very cheap drones can take out,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said during an episode of the “War on the Rocks” podcast that aired Tuesday.
“If the number is even remotely right, that Russia has manufactured 1 million drones in the last 12 months, that just makes us have to rethink the cost of what we’re buying,” he continued.
“We are the wealthiest nation, perhaps in the history of the world, but even we can’t sustain a couple-million-dollar piece of equipment that can be taken out with an $800 drone and munition,” he said.
Driscoll was responding to a question about whether the US military was walking away from the Robotic Combat Vehicle. He said that while the concept was valuable, the cost ratio didn’t work.
They may be slow but at least they’re learning.
On May 8, 2025 at 6:19 am, jrg said:
Maybe stepping up research on how to mass kill electronic flown devices to avoid the damage they inflict. Drones do change the battlefield on how to fight a war. People become pre-occupied with looking up in the sky rather than looking around for the enemy.
On May 8, 2025 at 2:30 pm, scott s. said:
I read the Russians used a fiber-optic controlled drone to take out a HIMARS launcher that was on the road. Not sure how you do that (must be pretty short range like a TOW). That negates the ECM threat, unless you provide enough power to actually interfere with the on-board circuits.
Any force that is in close proximity to an opposing force is going to have to account for these weapons. Russia is using motorcycles to give speed and dispersion in the assault movement to the objective.
Naval forces have the ability to evade/remain outside the engagement range of quad-rotor style UAVs, but then your own weapons need a range/endurance capability that makes them expensive (being able to launch via a cat shot and trap on a wire isn’t simple nor cheap).
On May 8, 2025 at 2:54 pm, Michael (from Utah) said:
“We are the wealthiest nation, perhaps in the history of the world…”
Maybe in a sense, but in reality? I’m thinking we’re the most debt-laden nation in the history of the world.
On May 8, 2025 at 5:38 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
The Russians are famous for their saying about warfare, “Quantity has a quality all its own,” but the arrival of mass-produced drones and UAVs on modern battlefields has put a new slant onto it.
Consider the main battle tank. Tanks have been dominant land weapons since the Great War a century ago. After WW2, most major nations settled upon and adopted the main battle tank concept, i.e., rather than classing their tanks according to the nomenclature used during and before the Second World War. Accordingly, most armies have adopted capable tanks in the 45-65 ton range, with competitive standards of mobility, protection and firepower.
The increased use of advanced, digital-age technology on MBTs is certainly one reason they cost more to make than they used to, but one of the biggest cost centers in making a tank is the same as it was in 1916 ~ the need to keep the crew alive and combat-effective.
As anti-tank weapons have developed, armor developments have more-or-less kept pace. The best modern armors, such as Chobham, Dorchester, and depleted uranium types, can stop a wide variety of lethal threats from kinetic energy penetrator rounds to chemical warheads using shaped charges. Why all of the time, effort and expense? Because keeping the crew alive and the tank and crew combat-effective isn’t easy.
Tank design, being a series of trade-offs, cannot protect the tank against every threat from every angle equally well; an impregnable tank would probably top a hundred tons and be immobile. One of the places designs have cut corners in order to save weight is to make the upper or top surfaces of the tank less well-protected than those directly facing the enemy and his guns, guided munitions and so forth.
It is indeed very tough to penetrate frontally and knock out such MBTs as the British Challenger series or the U.S. Abrams series of MBTs. For quite a long time, no one had ever penetrated and knocked out a Challenger in combat. These tanks are tough outs, no two ways about it.
But armor and things to defeat armor are in a perpetual race. The anti-tank weapons designers hit upon a solution back in the 1990s: Top-attack weapons. The Swedish Carl Gustav AT missile is a case in point.
Using the correct warhead/munition, a missile can be fired from standoff range which will accelerate to the target, but instead of hitting it frontally, it will veer over it as it nears the target, to attack downward through its thinner overhead armor. When its sensor suite tells it to fire, a molten hyper-velocity “slug” or self-forging projectile will be fired down into the tank from above.
The result is usually a destroyed or brewed up tank, often spectacularly so.
The Ukraine War has seen some refinements. The Russians have adopted cheap drones to drop shaped-charge and other top-attack weapons on Ukrainian tanks, with no little success – or taking the idea further, they have created “kamikaze” drones which will dive into a target, destroying themselves and it in the process.
Why are these new weapons significant? First, a cheap, mass-produced drone is nowhere near as expensive or complex to produce as a guided anti-tank missile. Indeed, the Russian solution to the problem of tough-to-destroy MBTs is orders of magnitude cheaper than something like Javelin or Carl Gustav.
And because these new mini-drones are cheap and easy to make, they can be released to flood the battle space. It isn’t just tanks and other armored vehicles which are being targeted, but individual soldiers on the ground unfortunate-enough to be caught in the open when enemy UAVs are about.
The Russians have created a sophisticated and refined command-and-control system, with world-leading sensing and ISR capabilities. At the low end, it is drones and UAVs which do the dirty work, at the upper end, advanced hypersonic and other types of missiles.
It isn’t just warfare on land which is being transformed. War at sea is being changed in a like manner. The United States has, since the end of the Second World War, relied on carrier battle groups to project power and provide presence in potential hot-spots around the world. These operations are as much a part of their mission as actual combat operations.
With the advent of viable hypersonic missiles, however, the age of the carrier as a dominant form of naval power may be drawing to a close. Or, at the very least, the role of such vessels and task forces may be significantly revised and changed. Why? Because the Chinese can afford to trade hypersonic anti-ship missiles for flat-tops all day long. Worse still, they have the industrial capacity and base to make good their losses, whether in vessels or expendable weapons – whereas we currently do not.
There is no technology known today that can bring down a hypersonic missile in the terminal phase of its flight path. Unless the Chinese have invented it, and are sitting on it. And the Russians and probably the Iranians have these weapons, too.
Expect within a few years to see land UAVs replacing tanks. Without having to worry about protecting an expensive, difficult to replace crew, these robotic tanks will be cheaper, more robust, lethal and probably capable of being networked into a single unified mass of vehicles, a.k.a. an electro-mechanical digital super-organism.
Another step contemplated soon is unmanned systems of various kinds which require no data link to perform their missions, and are capable of stigmergic behavior, like a flock of birds or a colony of ants.
The Russians are getting around anti-drone measures which hack into the link by using wire-guided systems, just like AT missiles have done for many years. This limits their range somewhat, but not to a crippling extent most of the time.
On May 13, 2025 at 7:16 am, Don W Curton said:
Is this in the same league as previous President Bush – When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. ??