Reference News Network, December 31 report: Russia's "Izvestia" website published an article on December 28 with the title "Why the Skill of a Drone Operator Is More Important Than Factory Capacity," written by Dmitry Kujagin, chief designer of the Russian Unmanned Systems Integrated Solutions Center. The full text is as follows:
New types of armed conflicts have turned the skies above the front lines into an environment with unprecedented technological intensity. Today, military strategists around the world, when analyzing experiences from the Ukrainian battlefield, draw a conclusion that the numerical advantage of drones is no longer the decisive factor. The era of "carpet bombing" using inexpensive first-person view (FPV) drones is giving way to a new kind of capability war, in which well-trained engineers are more important than drone production assembly lines.
To survive in contemporary conflicts, at least a balance in unmanned systems is required. World powers are closely studying events in the special military operation areas, trying to refine their defense doctrines with high-tech attack scripts.
The main issue facing analysts is how to organize the mass production of various types of unmanned equipment. To solve this problem, countries need to break away from conventional paradigms. In order to adapt to the speed of changes on the battlefield, countries have to abandon cumbersome processes such as time-consuming military acceptance procedures, strict import substitution standards, and bureaucratic bidding. In fact, only Russia and Ukraine are currently prepared for such flexible operations. However, Russia's industry relies on domestic resources and Asian supply chains, while Ukraine's capabilities largely depend on external support.
Under the context of a balance of power, a natural question arises: why not gain a decisive advantage by deploying a large number of drones to the front line? Can Russia not significantly increase the number of drones by leveraging its own resources? Since Russia's industry can produce millions of drones per year, theoretically, producing tens of millions is not impossible.
In fact, the technical solutions to achieve this production leap already exist and are being actively applied. Some images of villages almost wrapped in scattered fiber optic cables have spread across social media, these fibers serve as physical channels for FPV drones. No electronic warfare system can interfere with fiber optic drones, making them high-precision weapons that cannot be jammed or suppressed. Some people seem to believe that simply scaling up the production of fiber optic drones and increasing their supply five to tenfold would guarantee victory.
Actually, quantity is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Deploying large numbers of equipment to the front line without considering human factors will lead to a dead end. This can be compared to the production of sniper rifle bullets: if ten billion sniper rifle bullets and thousands of ultra-modern sniper rifles are produced without training new shooters, the battlefield outcome will remain unchanged. Even though each soldier can have plenty of guns and ammunition, the number of targets they kill will not increase.
Although the concept of a "robot war" has existed for some time, humans remain the core element. The requirements for people are growing exponentially. Contemporary conflicts have not reduced the number of personnel on the front line, but rather changed their composition. The front line increasingly needs highly skilled experts rather than traditional assault troops.
Today, drone operators or engineering team technicians should possess knowledge levels beyond those of ordinary civilian engineers. Their required subjects should include microcontroller programming aimed at bypassing enemy frequency filters, aerodynamics and strength theory for assembling non-standard combat platforms, and radio technology and information security aimed at avoiding detection by enemy radio technical reconnaissance equipment.
War history keeps repeating itself. The transition from "high ballistic trajectory" shooting with primitive firearms to musket direct aiming seemed to reduce the demand for shooters, but the size of armies actually expanded.
Similarly, digitization has not made soldiers' work easier. The large-scale use of drones has neither reduced the number of frontline soldiers nor lightened the intensity of their military labor. Instead, it has transformed combat into an intellectual contest, making wars more refined and targeted. To tip the scales in their favor, nations need to invest in establishing unique talent development systems.
Drones can be mass-produced by machines, but high-level operators who use unmanned equipment are expensive and scarce products. The main challenge in this phase of the confrontation lies here. (Translated by Liu Yang)
Original: toutiao.com/article/7589836170880680454/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author themselves.