Drone warfare the hot topic at Europe's top arms fair

Unmanned vehicles set to dominate land, sea and air battles

In today's defence world, drones are on their way to dominating warfare. On land, air and most particularly at sea, Europe’s biggest arms fair has demonstrated that the unmanned aerial vehicles are today's front-line shock troops.

At the DSEI (Defence and Security Equipment International) exhibition in London, all the talk was about the amount of money being poured into the technology, much of it from private hedge funds, with US companies in particular ready to “go large” on their development.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has led to a constantly evolving revolution in military affairs. Initially it was reports of Turkish Bayraktar models proving highly useful in taking out columns of Russian armour, then it was the highly improvised FPV (first-person view) quadcopters with an RPG warhead taped underneath that caused terror among Russian ranks.

A Sky Mantis 2 drone is displayed on the Evolve Dynamics exhibition stand at DSEI. Getty Images

The evolution exploded with Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb when in June it remotely triggered a mass drone attack launched from trucks that damaged or destroyed more than 40 bombers at four airbases deep inside Russia.

While Russia’s own drone developments cannot be discounted, as demonstrated by their massed attacks in Kyiv and elsewhere, Ukraine has also created an unmanned aerial navy that has sunk a third of the Black Sea Fleet and forced the rest to remain in port.

That has led to the latest frontier of drone warfare that is looming in importance and signals a new danger for sailors.

Red Cat, a company in Salt Lake City in the US state of Utah, is among those willing to invest for a good return in developing “mini aircraft carrier” drones that act as a seaborne mother-warship for swarms.

It has developed an 11-metre boat that can carry six Switchblade kamikaze drones, each with a warhead that can penetrate a ship’s armour alongside 40 Fang quadcopters armed with the equivalent of an RPG warhead.

Red Cat's plan is that a fleet of mother ships will sail more than 100km ahead of crewed carrier strike groups with a range of 800km or two days' sailing before refuelling. They will be equipped with AI-recognition technology and surveillance systems that will spring into life when enemy warships appear.

Game-changer

It is, according to Barry Hinckley, president of Red Cat’s Blue Ops, a “total game-changer” in naval warfare.

“Even financially it's asymmetrical,” he said. “They're swarming 40 drones like an orchestra, every instrument plays a different tune to the same song so you’ve spent $40 million to potentially take down a $4 billion warship.”

Those boats will include Red Cat’s six-metre kamikaze vessels, packed with explosives that would rip through the hull of enemy warships, as others have done in the Black Sea.

“There's no quick counter to this, so it certainly makes you think twice before you go into waters that aren't yours,” Mr Hinckley added.

Among the new systems featured at DSEI are the motherships of the air that are capable of flying long distances with a cargo of 40 or so drones in their belly, ready to drop at a 10km distance from an enemy target.

That is a sophisticated advance on Ukraine’s clever “truck n’ drones” Spiderweb operation that nonetheless provided insight into what the military imagination can achieve.

A drone killer device, used to disable unmanned aerial vehicles, at DSEI. EPA

That is something the West will soon need to consider with much more seriousness and speed than it is currently doing, suggested Gen Sir Richard Barrons, one of the architects of Britain’s latest defence review.

Russia’s incursion of 19 drones into Poland demonstrated Nato’s inability to deal with mass drone attacks – with perhaps four taken down – and sending advanced F-35 fighters as reinforcements was a “massive overkill”, he said.

Instead, he told The National at DSEI, Nato needs to evolve an integrated air defence system.

And if there was a serious drone swarm with large numbers in attack, the prognosis was not good. “Nato's ability to do a whole lot about that is nowhere near good enough,” he added.

But the solution is available, he said, pointing at the many defence company stands at the London exhibition. As the 100 or so manufacturers at the expo could testify, counter drone technology is relatively cheap.