September 2024 Developments

Highlights

• From Sept. 15 to 19, hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah sharply escalated along
• Israel's northern border. PG. 7
• Hezbollah responded with artillery strikes on Israeli military positions and launched
• drones targeting Israeli assets. PG. 7
• The Houthis’ missile strike against Israel on Sept. 16 underscored the widening scope of
• external involvement, significantly intensifying the conflict’s complexity. PG. 9
• The Ukrainian military continues its offensive in Russia’s Kursk region; however, the
• fighting has become more difficult. PG. 11
• During the full-scale war, the Russian military developed an unmanned ground vehicle for
• dispersing land mines. PG. 11
• The Ukrainian military has also developed a family of unmanned ground vehicles designed
• to disperse land mines. PG. 13
• Technological advancements have encouraged the Russians to focus their industrial
• capacity on building blended wing body “Supercam” drones. PG. 15
• The Russians have developed a new offensive tactic of advancing within an EW-protected
• corridor within which Ukrainian FPVs are almost useless. PG. 16

Editor's Note

Drones are a bridge between conventional and unconventional warfare. Unmanned technologies have democratized long-range, precision strike capabilities that were once limited to states that could afford more advanced weapons. After all, it is much easier and cheaper to develop, build, supply, and sustain a drone arsenal than to field conventional analogues such as warplanes and cruise missiles.

In the hands of both conventional and irregular warfare operators, drones can have tactical, operational, and strategic effects — spanning the gamut from killing individual soldiers to disabling power stations and oil refineries. Even destroying nuclear-capable bombers sitting on the tarmac at an air base. We’ve seen Ukrainian special operations forces achieve all these effects with drones. Moreover, Ukraine’s regular strikes against targets deep inside Russian territory repeatedly show how “traditional” air defense radars (designed to intercept manned aircraft and missiles) struggle to detect and track low-flying drones.

Unmanned systems have proven their combat utility on Ukraine’s various battlefields. At sea, Ukraine’s maritime drones have helped break the Russian naval blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and have forced the bulk of Russia’s fleet to retreat from Crimea. In the so-called air littoral, Ukrainians use drones to deliver medical supplies and ammunition to forward units when land lines of communication become too dangerous. Surveillance drones are a force multiplier for both sides, offering a way to precisely target and correct artillery fire and thereby limit the number of wasted shots. Ukrainian drones have rammed Russian drones over the battlefield, providing some of the first bouts of drone-on-drone warfare. And, of course, drones are a means to carry out direct strikes.

Drones have also played an important role in Ukraine’s covert operations within Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, as well as within the Russian Federation. During the full-scale war’s first year, Ukrainians relied on smugglers as a primary method of supplying covert teams across the Russian front lines. About one year into the conflict, however, the Russians cracked down and cut off smugglers’ routes. Since then, drones have become the primary supply vector for Ukrainian teams operating in Russian territory.

These Ukrainian teams usually communicate via email or messaging apps (Signal is preferred) to Identify their drop location and needs. To conduct these supply drops, Ukrainians have used a large octocopter drone originally designed for agriculture and modified to drop land mines and to carry supplies.

According to one former Ukrainian special operator, these supply missions were typically done in pairs. One smaller drone went first as a scout to survey the landing site and to act as a canard for Russian EW threats and other C-UAS systems. With this smaller drone providing pathfinding ISR, the larger supply drone would follow. “We lost quite a few of the scouting drones, but we never lost any of the supply octocopters,” said Mike, the former Ukrainian special operator.

According to Mike, traditional Russian air defense radars were incapable of detecting low-flying drones. The Russians’ special counter-drone radars reportedly had a limited field of view and needed to be prepositioned and pointed in the direction of incoming threats.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is the epicenter and driver of many drone warfare evolutions — but that battlefield is far from the only place where combatants are experimenting with drone warfare. Around the world, numerous other armed groups have also used relatively cheap unmanned systems to achieve precision-strike capabilities once exclusive to conventional state militaries. We saw this during the 2016 Battle of Mosul, when ISIS nearly broke the Iraqis’ morale with small drone strikes.

Operating from Yemen, the Iran-backed Houthi militants have employed aerial and maritime drones against commercial vessels in the Red Sea. They’ve also launched drone attacks against Saudi Arabian oil facilities and Israel. On Jan. 28, 2024, an attack drone, launched by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq — an Iranian-backed Shia militia group — struck Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost in northeast Jordan. The explosion killed three U.S. soldiers and injured 47 others.

In Myanmar, a rebel group called the Chin National Army, or CNA, has imported thousands of commercial and agricultural drones — mostly from China but also from western countries such as the United States. Using these drones, the CNA has routed government forces and managed to recapture 70% of Myanmar’s Chin State province, including five key military bases. The problem set is broad.

Mexican cartels use drones at the southern U.S. border for ISR, to harass border patrol, and for smuggling drugs. Drones are also a tool to smuggle contraband into U.S. prisons. Small drones offer America’s adversaries — whether they are terrorist groups or nation-states — a low-cost, plausibly deniable way to spread panic and to paralyze our economy. The drone incursions at London’s Gatwick Airport in December 2018 highlighted that threat. By simply flying drones within the airport’s vicinity, the unidentified perpetrators were able to ground traffic and strand more than 100,000 travelers for three days. A similar incident could easily happen in America, and just imagine the propaganda impact of a cheap, armed drone destroying a multi-million-dollar American warplane parked on the tarmac at some U.S. Air Force base.

At this stage, the greatest limiter on the spectrum of possible drone warfare applications is the end- user’s imagination. Thus, when it comes to using drones in defense and security operations, it’s not good enough to be proficient based on clearly proscribed training objectives. You must also possess a wide-ranging, up-to-date education that empowers you to adapt beyond the limits of your training and technological expertise.

Victory in drone combat depends on more than your operational skills — you must also be able to generate ad hoc innovations while in constant contact with the enemy and using the technologies and tools you have on hand. In that sense, Ukraine’s drone war has one key similarity to air combat over the Western Front in World War I: If you’re not adapting faster than the enemy, then you will lose. Along that line of thinking, our mission at the Vector Report is clear. We aim to arm your imagination at the speed of war by keeping you informed about the latest trends in unmanned warfare technology and tactics.

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