The US Army could not survive for long in a Ukraine level drone war
For a long time, the US Army assumed the US Air Force would protect it from enemy aircraft. Which is why, in the 1990s, the Army shuttered many of its short-range air-defence, or SHORAD, units.
This process only accelerated during the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the Army was fighting an enemy with no aircraft.
By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the Army was down to just 300 or so aging Avenger air-defence vehicles, each firing infrared-guided Stinger missiles out to a distance of three miles. This to protect a million troops, if you count active and reserve forces.
The Army didn’t anticipate that nine years into the Russia-Ukraine war, both sides would weaponise tiny, cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones – and fling them at each other at a rate of tens of thousands per month.
The 100,000 FPV drones the Ukrainians launch every month account for a significant proportion of the roughly 1,000 casualties the Russians suffer every 30 days. Now consider: the Russian army never divested its SHORAD forces the way the US Army did. It went to war in Ukraine with a thousand short-range air-defence vehicles and is still getting overwhelmed by FPV drones.
Imagine what would happen to the US Army on a battlefield buzzing with tiny drones. It should go without saying that the US Air Force isn’t going to send a $100-million F-35 stealth fighter to try, and probably fail, to shoot down a $500 FPV drone flying 10 feet above the ground directly over the front line.
The air-defence calculus has changed, and the US Army now finds itself all but defenceless against one of its most serious threats. Army leaders are beginning to internalize the scale of their air-defence problem. But are they doing it fast enough?
The Army is counting on two main programs to rebuild its short-range air-defences and give front-line troops a fighting chance against swarms of lethal drones. The first, the so-called M-SHORAD – that’s “m” for “manoeuvre” – adds a radar, a four-missile Stinger launcher and a 30-millimeter auto-cannon to an eight-wheel Stryker armored vehicle at a cost of $9 million per vehicle.
The Army is buying 162 of these vehicles, which isn’t even enough to replace the obsolete Avengers. The plan is to equip future versions of the M-SHORAD with a laser cannon and a new and improved missile. The Army will need hundreds of them, if not a thousand – and fast. But the Army doesn’t plan to pick a laser contractor until next year.
There’s another short-range air-defence system in development for US troops: a cargo truck fitted with an 18-round launcher for 10-mile Sidewinder infrared-guided missiles or radar-guided Hellfire missiles that range up to six miles.
These $15-million Indirect Fire Protection Capability trucks are too big and vulnerable to accompany tanks and infantry along the front line. The IFPC vehicles are supposed to hang back a few miles and back up the tougher M-SHORAD vehicles.
But how soon? The Army is still tinkering with the IFPC’s design. Testing is scheduled for 2026. The Army plans to buy more than 250 IFPCs through 2028. That’s too few, too slowly.
Worse: both the SHORAD-M and IFPC use missiles that cost much more than an FPV drone does and, because of their cost, are in short supply. A single Sidewinder costs half a million dollars. The Stinger isn’t even in production any more; its replacement is at least five years away.
Under current planning, the US Army’s growing SHORAD force – if it went to war in the coming years – might run out of ammunition after shooting down a few tens of thousands of drones: maybe a month’s worth. The air-defence problem isn’t just a vehicle problem. It’s an ammo problem, too.
If the Army can double or triple its investment in these new vehicles, shave a year or two off the current plans for fielding them and stockpile a lot more missiles, it might – in five years or so – be ready for the kind of drone threat the Russian and Ukrainian armies are facing right now.
But there’s a good chance the drone threat will be much, much worse in five years. The Army is already years behind the air-defence curve. How much farther will it fall behind? And how many American soldiers will die on some future battlefield because Army officials in 2024 didn’t fully appreciate how dangerous a $500 drone could be – and how many the enemy could launch?
