Drones are everywhere. They will find you and very likely hit you. Your goal as a soldier on the sidelines is to prepare for this reality. We cannot hope for a golden hour, nor can we expect to have superiority in the air. Soft armour is your friend, underground is your home.
The “Survivability Onion” should be updated as follows:
Expect to be there, expect to be seen, expect to be hit, expect to be penetrated, don’t be killed.
The New Survivability Onion
You must survive above any other task. To achieve this, you need to be prepared for all of the hits you will take. I focus more on what you and your team can do, instead of wider doctrine or larger formations. This is where my experience is (and my pessimism expects those above us to cock it up).
Get Appropriate Gear
Soft Armour
I want to dispel the idea that wearing anything below the most protective and heavy ballistic plates is “lazy” or even “unmanly”, as I regularly heard during my service, particularly from NATO veterans. Not everyone needs protection from armour piercing 7.62x54mmR. Pretty much everyone needs protection from shrapnel. If your role and unit allows you to change your armour, it is worth looking at.
As an FPV pilot, I wore Ukrainian DSTA level 3 plates, roughly equivalent to NIJ level 3+. They weigh 960 grams each and can stop basic 7.62 and 5.45 rounds. If I was facing a rifle threat greater than this, I was likely dead anyway.
The weight savings allowed me to wear more soft armour with extensive coverage that helps deal with the greatest danger I faced as a drone pilot: shrapnel. Consider how long it could take to get evacuated after an injury. Shrapnel in your arm may not be life threatening immediately, but 2 weeks later, it could be.
Drone Detectors
Get drone detectors immediately. They are cheap, lightweight, rugged, easy to replace, and readily available. They complement your EW (electronic warfare) and every team member, vehicle, and position should have them at all times. RF (radio frequency) detectors and newly developed acoustic sensors can give you a critical heads up.
Learn Drones
No matter your role, learn drones. First Person View, Unmanned Ground Vehicle, Unmanned Surface Vehicle, Mavic, or fixed wing, it is worth understanding their uses and limitations. Drone knowledge is a tool you should be familiar with in the same way you do with a rifle. Is a rifle directly relevant to your role? Maybe not, yet you are trained to use it, in case that changes. If you lack resources, then reading and simulator use, at the very least, is preferable to ignorance.
On the flip side, knowing your threats more intimately helps you survive them. For instance, you might know that FPV analogue cameras have terrible resolution, and thus have issues spotting people that are stationary in cover without support from Mavic drones. This kind of knowledge is useful if properly applied. Wrongly applied, and you end up like the Russians standing still in an open field because they think drones see entirely off movement like a Jurassic Park dinosaur.
“Keep absolutely still; its vision’s based on movement.” - Dr. Alan Grant
Stay Inside and Avoid Ground Sign
Outside is the new no man’s land. If you are anywhere near the frontline, you are not safe. There is no arbitrary line to cross that splits the territory cleanly into danger and safety. Underground is where you stop being watched from above. Do everything possible inside and out of view. This also means minimising signatures – mainly thermal – that reveal your position. Having your generator inside is never fun, but better than the alternative.
Ground sign will be what gives you away if you are not spotted directly. Starlinks and masts are a giveaway that a position is likely occupied by a drone team. They must be outside to function, so are likely to be spotted and destroyed first. Stray animals are a particular concern, because their hanging around a location denotes food and warmth, meaning people. Scare them off or shoot them.
Ground sign worsens in winter, particularly with footsteps, smoking, and needing to decide between keeping warm or minimising thermals. The lack of foliage gives you far fewer places to hide.
In summer, when it dries out, expect them to burn down everything they can. Firefighting is risky, but preferable to being literally smoked out of your position and having your mast melt.
Expect to be seen. Plan around this by having your ground sign point to another position. For instance, we had our camouflaged mast above an abandoned position. When they burned down our foliage cover, they hit that instead of our actual position.
Think Creatively about Drones
It is common to think of drones solely as a cheap way to get effects onto target. While usually true, the wider point of drones is to lessen or eliminate the need for humans where it is dangerous. This is the reasoning for Ukraine’s drone wall, to make greater use of and preserve limited manpower. Whatever your role, drones can likely shoulder part of it to make it easier or safer for you.
When you identify a way drones can do exactly that, start arguing for their inclusion in your unit. Procurement may not be your job, but making noise is better than silence – or buying it yourself. Mavic drones were first used by hobbyists in 2022 because they filled a capability gap. We used a UGV at basic training to shift chopped wood around. Start small and someone else may think big.
Hope for the Best, Plan for the Worst
Plan for your possible deployment to this battlefield, even if you hope for a different war, or of course, none at all. The points I have brought up are actionable by small groups or by individuals in the near term with little investment, and will pay outsized dividends.
Surviving should be the first goal for you and your team. Start thinking that way.
Nathaniel Goldstone is a British veteran with combat experience in Ukraine as an FPV pilot and holds an MA in International Politics. He currently runs a company providing consultancy and training services for those in defence tech with an interest in drones.
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