A new and sophisticated phase of aerial warfare has emerged from the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East over the past month, defined by the systematic use of massed drone saturation attacks. This evolving doctrine, refined by Russia and Iran, uses quantity and simultaneity to overwhelm even the most advanced air-defence systems.
The core of the tactic lies not in the technological superiority of any single weapon but in the brutal economic and operational logic of drone-based attrition. By doing so, it forces reassessment of how modern militaries can protect their airspace, infrastructure and military assets.
The war in Ukraine has been the main laboratory for the development of these tactics. Early in the conflict, Russia launched small waves of Iranian-designed Shahed 136 strike drones, small propeller-driven aeroplanes that can carry their warheads at least 1,300 kilometres. As the conflict has progressed, Russia’s tactics have grown in scale and complexity. The trend reached a new high during nights of the past month, when Russia repeatedly launched massive assaults with 300 or even 400 propeller-driven strike drones alongside conventional jet and rocket-propelled missiles.
While Ukrainian forces remarkably neutralised hundreds of the incoming drones, at times roughly 20 percent have managed to get through. On the night of 16 and 17 June, 30 targets in Kyiv were hit. The defences could not handle the full volume of munitions flying in.
Russia’s barrages were not an anomaly but the result of a highly effective and ongoing industrial scaling strategy. A production facility in Russia’s Alabuga special economic zone, set up with Iranian assistance, is intended to make thousands of Shahed drones a year. With more of the munitions pouring out of factory gates, Russia can mass ever larger groups of them in single strikes.
While separated by thousands of kilometres, air defence crews in Kyiv and Tel Aviv have been fighting the same technological revolution. Iran has also demonstrated the saturation doctrine. In retaliatory strikes that followed Israeli attacks that began on 13 June, Iran launched coordinated barrages of upwards of 100 to 200 drones alongside conventional missiles. While most of the drones were intercepted, the sheer volume of the swarm stressed defences and helped ballistic missiles get through. Altogether, 10 to 20 percent of munitions penetrated. This showed that even the most robust defences can be breached by sheer coordinated volume.
An underlying principle is that any defensive system has a finite target-handling capacity, though it will vary with circumstances. An attacker can try to exceed this limit, forcing defenders to prioritise which targets to engage.
Second, an attacker can succeed just by continuing to fire weapons that cost as little as US$35,000, knowing the opponent must try to knock them down with interceptors costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each. The defences are eventually defeated through financial and material exhaustion.
Seeing this coming, defence establishments have been looking for new and cheaper ways to knock down drones. But no perfect solution has been found.
Directed energy weapons, the subject of great hopes, can be hampered by weather and other factors. A US Army directed-energy weapon, the DE M-SHORAD, has so far failed to meet operational expectations. One limitation on the capacity of such weapons is the interval needed for directing their energy on targets before slewing to a new direction. And their engagement ranges hardly compete with those of traditional interceptor missiles.
Guns are inherently limited by short range. Ammunition capacity can be a problem for them, too, as indeed can be ammunition cost. These point-defence systems can easily be overwhelmed by multi-directional simultaneous attacks.
Worse, all these defensive systems, which are not cheap, are themselves worthwhile targets for inexpensive drones.
Electronic warfare is a crucial defensive layer, but its effectiveness seesaws as opposing sides introduce measures, countermeasures and counter-countermeasures. And it will be sidestepped completely when autonomous drones can reliably find targets and have no need for communications and navigation links.
The most promising measure seems to be fielding interceptor drones—in effect, propeller-driven surface-to-air missiles. With these, a defender can fight cheap mass with cheap mass. Yet they are still technologically immature, and their range and speed will limit their capacity for wide-area defence.
These changes in warfare have dire strategic implications for Western military doctrine. For decades, countries have structured their armed forces around high-cost, technologically superior platforms. This focus, which prioritises projecting power against peer competitors, has inadvertently created a critical vulnerability to cheap, high-volume threats.
The Australian Defence Force, as a prime example, cannot defend against saturation attacks on the scale recently seen in Ukraine and Israel.
China has no doubt watched events in Europe and the Middle East with great interest. It has already developed systems suited for this type of warfare, such as the CH/FH-901 loitering munition, which can be launched from a 48-tube launcher on a truck or in sorties of eight by the FH-97A pilotless aircraft to create a swarm. Expect more such Chinese weapons to appear.
The age of the swarm has arrived. For modern militaries, the answer is no longer just the quality of their technology but the capacity to inexpensively combat massed targets, and to do so day after day.