As shown by Ukraine, cardboard drones are a very cost-effective way to destroy much more expensive military equipment.
And you know who has more expensive military equipment than anyone else in the world?
That’s right: Us.
Uncle Sam is the operator of billion dollar B-2s and fleet supercarriers. Enemies capable of getting cheap drones within striking distance of those assets could put a world of hurt on the Pentagon, as indicated by this cheap and crude YouTube satire:
Can U.S. military radar see cardboard drones? Either nobody knows, or only a small handful of U.S. military researchers know. Either way, I have to think they’re frantically researching that question right now.
Here’s a bit more on SYPAQ’s drones:
A low-cost “cardboard” drone that arrives flatpacked and is held together with rubber bands is giving Ukraine an unexpected edge on the battlefield.
It’s called the Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System, or PPDS for short, and is made by the Australian company SYPAQ.
It has been in Ukrainian hands since March, when the Australian government announced it would send at least 100 per month as part of a $20 million aid package, The Australian reported.
According to SYPAQ, the drone arrives in a package some two and a half feet long — and isn’t much more complicated than an IKEA product.
But the low-tech framework is packed with a military-grade guidance system.
SYPAQ says it’s quick to assemble the drone from its parts: a lightweight board frame, a propeller unit, and an avionics system which soldiers can program with a target location.
The drone can carry up to 6.6 pounds, making it useful for dropping off medicines or ammunition.
To adapt it for reconnaissance, soldiers simply “cut a hole” in the drone for a camera to see through, SYPAQ manager Michael Partridge told IT-focused news outlet The Register.
The finished build has a wingspan of around six and a half feet. It is so light it can be launched by catapult, or literally by being thrown like a giant paper plane, according to Australia’s 7News.
At a reported cost of around $3,500 each, they’re cheap by military standards.
That’s maybe not as cheap as the Flying Yeet of Death, but it has a much longer range.
Depending on its payload, it travels at around 37 miles per hour, and has a range of up to 75 miles. And when it arrives, soldiers can simply retrieve the cargo, detach the propeller and avionics module, and throw away the frame.
Although it’s known as the “cardboard drone,” there’s conflicting information as to what its main framework is actually made of.
Partridge told The Register that it’s made of waxed cardboard — a description repeated in nearly all media reporting so far. In a recent announcement the company coyly said it’s “known as the ‘cardboard plane.'”
But a product specification uploaded on the company’s website, likely in late August, describes it as being made from lightweight foldable foam board, which appears to match some images.
So the cardboard drone isn’t actually cardboard. C’est la guerre.
Cardboard is “transparent to radar, so harder to spot,” Oklahoma State University drone researcher Jamey Jacob told Popular Mechanics.
“The radar will pick up things such as electric motors, batteries, and propellers, but not the cardboard,” Jacob said.
That potential capacity for extra stealth gained media attention this week when Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia echoed claims by a prominent Russian military blogger that they were used to attack a Russian airfield.
Several details of the attack remain unconfirmed — including whether Corvo PPDSs were even involved — but the airfield was just within the drone’s reach from Ukraine.
Per the pro-Russian Telegram channel @fighter_bomber, Ukraine used a swarm-like formation of several unarmed Corvo PPDSs amidst drones packed with bombs, helping the swarm evade radar.
When you’re airframe only has to last 75 miles to hit a target, all sorts of cheap material possibilities open up: Foam, cardboard, wax-paper, Mylar.
Hell, maybe even that crappy hemp paper the potheads are always pushing will finally have a real use-case: Make war, not love.
In any case, the radar guys are going to be very, very busy over the next few months…
Tags: drone, Military, Raytheon, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, SYPAQ, Ukraine, video
You know how the stealth folks are always going on about “This jet has the radar cross section of a unladen swallow”? The non-cardboard parts of one of these are about the actual size of an unladen swallow. I bet something like IR LIDAR ends up being how you look for these, or maybe a sensor that uses a fusion of LIDAR plus something else. Possibly something loitering up high (aerostats?) that stares at the ground looking for moving anomalies in a bunch of wavelengths.
Note if someone wants to spend some money, applying actual stealth tech to the radio wave reflecty bits inside a cardboard drone would make them pretty much actually invisible to radar until they get tangled up in the search array. Slap some wavelength absorbing coatings (i.e. IR-black paint, or maybe IR-grey would be better, something to match the background IR frequency of the sky) on the cardboard and the thing would be in the target’s lap before anything could see it.
Note this latter will be how US defense contractors move forward: “Yeah, cardboard is great, but we have “Iron Ball Cardboard” with “Extended Range Stealth Coated Power Modules” – only $1.5m per copy!”
Did someone say “Mylar”?
A Goodyear blimp in geostationary orbit using synthetic aperture radar can detect objects as small as a buried land mine.
A cardboard drone can be made invisible to ground-based radar more readily than it can escape detection by an AWACS because the “background IR frequency of the sky” is comparatively uniform.
This implies that blimps can be used to detect small objects from a great distance and direct ground-based interceptors by laser tagging the cardboard drone.
Is this a Goodyear for air defense or pie-in-the-sky?
Cardboard drones are detectable by radar, but you need much shorter wavelengths, in the mm-wave region, where the circuits can’t be made from silicon and antenna design principles are quite different (and expensive test equipment…even connectors can cost $500 a pop and, being rated for 100 insertion cycles, will cost you $5 in wear and tear every time you connect one). From the evidence I have seen, then Pentagon has been aware of this, if not before, then at least since at least the Sep 2019 swarm attack on the Saudi oil facility. We went through a similar worry about destabilization when cruise missiles started to proliferate in the 90’s, but with suitable radar and interceptor design, attack became more expensive than defense again. Nowadays, to hit a high-value target, you need a super-expensive hypersonic missile, but a high value target will likely have a highly-capable missile defense. The Russians have resorted to blowing up low-value targets like power lines with their hypersonics, not an economically sustainable strategy.
The basic physics of air power is still the same as in WW2. A short-range defender can be much lighter and cheaper since it carries less fuel and only has to destroy an unarmored attack aircraft, while the attacker needs to fly a long distance and has to hit a heaver ground target. But an attacker has the initiative and can sometimes capitalize on surprise. These cardboard drones seem to have an element of strategic surprise: the Russians got caught with a a gap in their radar capability.
The Russians seem to have adjusted to a similar situation to mostly neutralize Ukrainian battlefield drones, probably because the wifi-ish control channels on commercial drones are trivially easy to jam. Getting the SiC or GaN semiconductors to build mm-wave radar won’t be nearly as easy, but optical techniques (or even sound) may be good enough for small & slow drones of this type. Assuming the Russians can get their procurement act together, of course…
“[A] high value target will likely have a highly-capable missile defense.”
After four Ilyushin-76 transport planes at the Pskov air base were raked over by cheap cardboard drones, the Russians responded with countermeasures.
Satellite photos of undamaged aircraft have detected an array of tires spread out over their wings and fuselage. Evidently, the lightweight drone payload will bounce away from this armor protection, like bullets from Superman’s chest.
I would be interested to see what a phosphorus grenade would do to a pile of tires.
M.Rad –
Actually silicon devices have reached the point where mmwave radars can be effectively made using them. The key device technology is silicon germanium (https://towersemi.com/technology/rf-and-hpa/sige-bicmos-platform/) and both the military and commercial companies are using it for radar and mmwave communications systems. I know because I worked on several such systems in my last years at a defense contractor. It would be pretty straightforward to make a mmwave radar to look down for these drones. The key elements would be waveform design and processing algorithms.
Tire defensive belt “magic drone bounce” efficacy depends on whether they are bias ply or radials, as well as whether they are white raised letter or blackwalls. And if the quality of rooskie tires on combat vehicles observed in Ukraine is any guide, they could very likely be old and crumbly, which degrades the bounce yet further.
Or more likely, any warhead just detonates half a foot up from the aluminum skin, spreading any frag or incendiary effect over more of the aircraft surface.
@FM
It is my understanding that true whitewalls give the best protection. We’re not seeing them because – even among Russians – it’s still taboo for airplanes to wear white after labor day.
Better to lose a hundred Tu-95s than break major fashion faux-pas like that.
This site could easily be mistaken for The Onion. 😄
I generally agree with the sentiment of the post. However, detection of the drone isn’t as critical as shutting down the ability for them to operate. The latter is a bit easier with jamming, although it affects many other things. Still, it is what the US military did to counter low cost and difficult to detect IEDs. Back to agreeing to the post; defeating IEDs wasn’t cheaper than IEDs nor as successful as we would have wanted it to be.
I wonder if the US is becoming like the British in the Revolutionary War. Always fighting assuming certain rules of engagement while the opposition was fighting a war as if there was more to lose than gain from fighting in some formal manner. War might be diplomacy by other means, but for many others, war is also no holds barred.
The established side always has more to lose when innovation comes along, and the unestablished is more likely to innovate.
Which ain’t to say that victory is assured for David, either.
It’s all tit-for-tat, until the innovation is fully implemented by all. The big guy has an advantage in a lot of ways, because they have more mass to use…
Imagine a supercarrier filled with cheap cardboard drones showing up just off the coast of, say, China: Said carrier spends a day steaming up and down the coast, releasing the drones, and they go inland to seek whatever targets of opportunity they like. Like, electrical transformers.
Me? I don’t worry about war with China; I worry about war in China when the CCP inevitably falls… Which, should something like the Three Gorges Dam collapse, ain’t at all impossible.
China has so many internal contradictions and inconsistencies going on right now that it’s insane. They should have set out right from the beginning of economic liberalization to ensure things like the retirement and savings systems actually existed and worked well… They didn’t. So, we have the distortions of the Chinese real estate market instead of a bunch of strong banks with good investments in legitimate developments. They did the economic equivalent of some idiot body-building enthusiast who took tons of steroids rather than actually developing himself properly. Now, the world will be paying the price when the house of cards finally tumbles… You can’t possibly keep all of those balls in the air. Xi is living on borrowed time, as is the rest of the CCP.
[…] The Cardboard Drone Dilemma. “Uncle Sam is the operator of billion dollar B-2s and fleet supercarriers. Enemies capable of […]
When Japan was sending kamikazes against the US Navy late in WW2, not all planes were Zeros and the like. Some planes were trainers built of wood and fabric. These had engines of course and could carry a bomb — and they were nearly radar-invisible.
Gonna shoot a million dollar missile at everything your radar identifies sight unseen as a drone?
@Leland:
Jam the control data link, but what if the drone is autonomous with no RF link needed?
Jam or spoof the guidance signal, but what if it’s fine using onboard inertial and/or scene matching, and fails over to such if there’s a mismatch?
Electronic warfare that attacks signals requires the g&c package to care about signals.
@FM
Do you think a cardboard drone is carrying an inertial navigation package?
The Russian Aerospace Forces (VVS) believe that longer wave radars can detect the general presence of these small drones, but that the best means of targeting UAVs are infrared (IR) sensors locating engine heat emissions.
The VVS are putting up new units flying upgraded Mil Mi-28NM ‘Havoc’ helicopters equipped with advanced IR sensors, armed with IR targeting missiles. These units are already reporting successes in the Moscow Military District.
Given this footage of a Russian helicopter repeatedly missing a drone, I have my doubts.
Plus, equipping them for the Moscow district doesn’t do anything for successful drone strikes in the rest of the country. And even if it does work, I’m pretty sure IR targeting missiles are going to cost more per unit than the cardboard drones they’re taking down…
Your Sky News video shows a Mil Mi-28 or early Mi-28N helicopter using its 30mm Shipunov 2A42 cannon. Not a Mi-28NM, which has its updated sensor suite in an above the rotor mast. Nor were IR guided missiles launched.
How good are you at Olympic rules skeet shooting? The helicopter pilot is attempting a far more difficult shot with his cannon. Not only is the drone moving, but so is he. Why the Russians are probably deploying Vympel K-13 IR homing missiles on the Mi-28NM. They have a lot of them in inventory.
The military calculus here is based on the cost of the damage the drone can do, not the cost of the drone. Why drones are changing the cost ratios of modern warfare.