[Goose]

While drones have been used in past conflicts, I think this is the first where basically you can be very effective by just making hundreds of cheap drones with small pay loads.  The skies of Ukrained must be filled with them.  I wonder what the big, high powered radars see, anything?

Part of the reason for the success of drones is that much of the conflict is fairly static and the forces are in close proximity to each other. That makes drone warfare much more effective, if you can fly them. They are vulnerable to ECM and going forward I expect that will also become ubiquitous. It is also inevitable that anti-drone suicide drones will become very common eventually. Lasers are in the wings but IMO simpler approaches will become more common.

There are many different sizes of drones. Generally, the bigger the drone the higher it flies (because it can). The drones that are blowing up tanks and the like generally operate at low altitudes. They also have lots of non-metal parts. This makes them relatively "stealthy". The big, powerful ground based radars can't see anything at low altitude unless it is "close". The radar cross sections of the mostly plastic drones are low enough they are hard to see even best case. On top of that, nobody seems to be using these types of radars very much. I doubt large radars are playing a significant role in the drone war.

[Goose]

While drones have been used in past conflicts, I think this is the first where basically you can be very effective by just making hundreds of cheap drones with small pay loads.  The skies of Ukrained must be filled with them.  I wonder what the big, high powered radars see, anything?

Part of the reason for the success of drones is that much of the conflict is fairly static and the forces are in close proximity to each other. That makes drone warfare much more effective, if you can fly them. They are vulnerable to ECM and going forward I expect that will also become ubiquitous. It is also inevitable that anti-drone suicide drones will become very common eventually. Lasers are in the wings but IMO simpler approaches will become more common.

There are many different sizes of drones. Generally, the bigger the drone the higher it flies (because it can). The drones that are blowing up tanks and the like generally operate at low altitudes. They also have lots of non-metal parts. This makes them relatively "stealthy". The big, powerful ground based radars can't see anything at low altitude unless it is "close". The radar cross sections of the mostly plastic drones are low enough they are hard to see even best case. On top of that, nobody seems to be using these types of radars very much. I doubt large radars are playing a significant role in the drone war.