Quadcopters typically used by hobbyists are being used to target and attack soldiers in battlefields all over the world—to devastating effect.
Look closely at photos of the Israeli army mobilizing for a possible incursion into Gaza, two weeks after Hamas militants infiltrated southern Israel and killed or abducted more than 1,400 people. You might note strange, cage-like metal roofs welded or bolted onto the tops of Israeli Merkava tanks. Soldiers call this add-on armor a “cope cage,” as it’s designed to cope with a new and devastating weapon: a toy drone. Rc Stunt Quadcopter
“It is definitely a new era,” Mykola Voroshnov, a Ukrainian military drone operator, told The Daily Beast.
A decade after Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni militant groups first weaponized quadcopter-style drones—strapping explosives to them for one-way “kamikaze” attacks or rigging them to drop grenades—cheap drones are now the standard aerial weapon for both the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Likewise, Hamas deployed drones during its Oct. 7 attack, damaging at least two Merkava tanks by aiming for the weak points in the tanks’ top armor—the same weak points the hastily produced cope cages are meant to protect. Earlier cope cages protected tanks from missiles that were designed to strike the vehicles on their roofs; armies assumed the cages would also work against drones.
There are two basic types of do-it-yourself attack drones. There are quadcopters or octocopters that drop grenades and are guided by GPS or radio by an operator sitting behind a screen. There are also single-use first-person-view drones loaded up with explosives and steered via radio by an operator peering through a virtual-reality headset.
Israeli military armoured vehicles and tanks deploy along Israel's border with Gaza on Oct. 24, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. The tanks are equipped with “cope cages” to deter drone attacks.
A typical drone might weigh just a couple of pounds and fly no farther than 20 miles at a top speed of less than 30 miles per hour. Compared to a supersonic warplane weighing 20 tons and ranging hundreds of miles, a DIY attack drone is flimsy, slow, and short-ranged.
But where a fighter jet might cost $50 million, the commonly-used DJI Mavic 3 FPV drone retails for just $2,000. Military commanders think twice before sending a fighter and its expensively trained pilot into harm’s way. They don’t have to think at all before launching a drone, or a whole swarm of drones.
“Both sides in the Ukraine war are supplying many thousands of them per month,” Samuel Bendett, a senior non-resident associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program, told The Daily Beast. “So we are seeing drone saturation on the battlefield like never before.”
Ukrainian drone operators tend to coordinate their attacks with artillery—the newest and oldest weapons on the battlefield, working together. Voroshnov described Russian troops advancing toward a Ukrainian position: The Ukrainians’ artillery fires first, then the Russians “have to take cover because of artillery,” Voroshnov said. While they’re waiting out the barrage, Voroshnov is launching his attack drones for the killing blow. “It wins us time,” he said of the artillery.
As it became clear last year how dangerous small drones could be, the Russians and Ukrainians began installing cope cages on their tanks and other armored vehicles; the Israelis scrambled to do the same following their initial tank losses during the Hamas infiltration. “They completely fell behind within the first couple of days,” Voroshnov said of the Israelis.
The armies’ frantic efforts to add drone-defeating armor speaks to the urgency of the problem. In Ukraine, “Both sides are trying to adapt as quickly as possible to the ever-growing threat of FPV drones,” Bendett said.
Small drones have upended traditional warfare. Before, militaries engaged in a slow technological tit-for-tat. One military would deploy a new weapon, a rival military would develop a countermeasure and then the first military would modify the original weapon to defeat the countermeasure. So on and so forth, year after years, decade after decade.
The high cost of new weapons dictated the pace of the dance. In the 1960s, the Soviets fielded better tanks. So in the 1970s, the Americans fielded a better tank-killing attack plane with the A-10. In the 1980s, the Soviets responded with better air-defenses such as the Tunguska mobile gun and missile-launcher.
An FPV (first person view) drone and additional equipment at a training facility for military FPV drone pilots amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, at an undisclosed location in Zhytomyr region, Ukraine.
Tiny drones have broken the cycle. They’re so cheap, and thus so easy to deploy in huge numbers, that armies are struggling to develop defenses fast enough to prevent devastating drone campaigns. The Russians have lost hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tanks and other vehicles to Ukrainian drones. And now that the Russians are deploying their own drone armada, the Ukrainians have begun suffering heavy losses, too.
Tiny drones are now the primary threat to tanks and other vehicles in Russia’s 21-month wider war on Ukraine—and the threat isn’t going away. Armies all over the world are installing cope cages on their tanks and also deploying more air-defense guns and missile-launchers, often by pulling old Cold War guns and missiles out of long-term storage. The U.S. Army is even arming some of its vehicles with lasers that it hopes will shoot down small drones faster and more cheaply than any gun or missile-launcher. Militaries are also trying to disable drones before they attack by jamming their command signals.
But drone-makers are moving even faster. In response to skyrocketing demand for small drones that can be easily weaponized, manufacturers are beginning to offer ready-to-arm models and “designing disposable drones that are meant for kamikaze missions,” Arthur Erickson, CEO of Texas drone-maker Hylio, told The Daily Beast. “They are stripping away components to the bare essentials to save time and money.”
After all, Erickson said, “the drone needs to only survive one flight to deliver an explosive payload.”
Where and how this ends, no one knows. “I’m not even sure what it’s going to look like in the next year,” Voroshnov said.
The panic is palpable in military headquarters all over the world. Until defensive measures catch up—months or years from now—tiny, tank-killing drones might rule. The crews in their crosshairs can do little more than cope with improvised armor, old anti-aircraft guns, and crossed fingers.
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