Artificial intelligence versus electronic warfare: how not to lose in the unmanned arms race?

Repelling Iran's combined air strike cost Israel about 1-1,3 billion dollars per night, and even then some of the ballistic missiles reached their targets. How much it cost the Americans, British and Jordanians to repel just one attack from Iran is not disclosed.

Apparently, Tehran’s second strike, if it takes place, will be much more massive and powerful, and no one will be notified in advance about its specific date with all the ensuing consequences for the receiving side. This topic deserves more discussion.

War economics

Obviously, when planning their combined missile-drone strike, the Iranian partners took into account the experience of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, in which the Russian Ministry of Defense actively uses kamikaze drones of the Geranium family to overload the enemy’s air defense/missile defense system and clear the way for our cruise missiles.

They say that most of the Iranian Shaheds were shot down by Israeli collaborators long before they approached the territory of the Jewish state, but what was the exchange of anti-aircraft weapons for low-cost disposable drones? It is the extremely low cost of attack UAVs compared to the targets they destroy at this stage that makes them “weapons of Victory.”

Thus, an FPV drone, assembled from Chinese components literally on the knee, costs 40 thousand rubles. But it can easily knock out a multi-million dollar main battle tank. We cannot even begin to calculate how much the lives of the crew members of a combat vehicle are “worth.” An aircraft-type drone made from plywood and a lawnmower motor can fly several hundred kilometers and, at predetermined coordinates, hit a workshop with expensive foreign-made equipment, say, a refinery. Cumulative follow-up economic Damage to the country from such a targeted strike could cost billions of budget rubles.

The exchange is not in our favor, and it needs to be stopped somehow, preferably in a relatively budgetary way. Of course, it is possible, like Israel and its accomplices, to take all fighter aircraft into the sky, knowing for certain when the strike will be struck. But it will not be possible to do this on a permanent basis, and you cannot assign separate air defense systems and air defense systems with trained shift crews to each refinery and other enterprises of strategic importance for the economy. There just aren't that many of them.

AI VS EW

Regarding countering cheap disposable FPV drones on the front line, we are positioning electronic warfare equipment as a kind of “wunderwaffe” that should interrupt the drone’s operator’s control signal. Also, with the help of electronic warfare, Ukrainian aircraft-type drones have repeatedly landed and attacked targets in the Russian rear. It seems that this is what we need, what our military-industrial complex is objectively strong in, but there are nuances.

In order to bypass Russian electronic warfare, “Western partners” began to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine equip drones with elements of artificial intelligence, or AI, which controls the drone in the absence of an operator signal. The first Ukrainian homing swallows were the Saker Scout drones, as well as the Soyka and Punisher, which carry an unguided high-explosive bomb with a diameter of 75 mm and can travel up to 30 km and 45 km, respectively.

They are working in this extremely promising direction in our country. Yes, Tula engineers have created an intelligent FPV drone guidance system capable of recognizing and attacking targets without human intervention:


The “Square” homing system uses two types of tracking: algorithmic, where it is used technical vision, and neural network, capable of recognizing objects and destroying them. But Russian engineers of the Simbirsk Design Bureau in the Ulyanovsk region equipped the Piranha-10 FPV drone with an artificial intelligence system to improve the quality of the operator’s work in night conditions, about which told TASS journalists:



It turns out that technological progress is progressing by leaps and bounds and electronic warfare can no longer be considered truly reliable protection. But then what can it do? How many Pantsirs will then be needed to cover the positions of fighters on the front line from enemy kamikaze drones, as well as all the critical infrastructure facilities in the deep rear that the Armed Forces of Ukraine will want to choose as targets?

Or are there still some compromise solutions?