Armies need their own drone air force flown by specialist soldiers, study says

Experience in Ukraine suggests that armies should concentrate drones in special battalions that have the skills pilots to fly them and the programmers to rapidly adapt to constant jamming, according to British defense experts.

Ukrainian data shows "the efficiency of [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] operations when conducted by a dedicated formation has risen from 10 percent up to 70 percent for some mission sets," according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. The report did not provide any more specifics on the data, other than a footnote that said it was based on Ukrainian General Staff "datasets of mission performance between different formations" that RUSI accessed in Ukraine in February 2024.

The RUSI report advocates the creation of "mass precision strike complex" units that launch integrated swarms of drones comprised of different types of reconnaissance and combat UAVs. The concept seems similar to "strike packages" of manned combat jets, which combine attack, escort and electronic warfare planes on a mission. To be clear, the report isn't calling for infantry platoons to be stripped of their backpack-carried drones , which have proven indispensable in Ukraine and the Middle East. But it does argue that for some tasks, such as long-range surveillance and strike, it's more efficient and economical to achieve this through dedicated units.

"UAVs may be distributed to provide units with situational awareness, but mass precision strike should be managed by a specialist formation," the report concluded. In addition to better mission planning by personnel trained and experienced in drone operations, "experience from contemporary theatres shows that almost all UAV capabilities are highly susceptible to hard counters as the adversary learns how the UAV functions; capabilities must therefore be continuously adapted and their supporting mission data files updated. This requires scarce skills such as UAV design and programming and the accumulation of data centrally."

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