Russia-Ukraine Flash Report for 5-9-22 13:45 PDT - World War I Planes and 21st Century Drones

In the early days of World War I, the airplane was a battlefield oddity. The primary role was for reconnaissance. Faster, less vulnerable, and with greater range than balloons and dirigibles, airplanes weren't at the mercy of the winds, could change position and altitude quickly, and in the early days, didn't have to face dedicated antiaircraft weapons.

It wasn't until 1915 that the first "interrupter gear" was developed. This enabled a machine gun to be hard mounted in front of the pilot. It would shoot "through" the spinning propeller, with the gear synchronizing the firing of the machine gun, so it didn't shoot its own prop off. Pilots could now point their airplanes at a target and fire their guns.

Before developing the interrupter gear, pilots or observers would use service revolvers to shoot at enemy reconnaissance aircraft, and even then, there was a sense of "knighthood" in the sky. It wasn't uncommon for aerial adversaries to wave or salute each other as they passed - not just in the early days of the war but through World War I.

Somewhere along the way, reconnaissance pilots realized they could do more than take pictures from above the trenches and report back on troop movements. Some would take potshots at ground troops while others carried grenades and flechettes to throw out of their planes. Sometimes this had disastrous results, with grenades getting stuck in the rigging of World War I era biplanes and exploding.

This evolved into primitive bomb racks and sometimes cutting a small hole in the cockpit floor to drop munitions manually. Twenty-two years later, the German Luftwaffe would flatten the Spanish city of Guernica, and seven years after that, jet and rocket-powered aircraft were streaking across the skies of Germany.

In Ukraine, they've taken commercial drones and modified them to drop grenades, small artillery shells, and mortar rounds. Ukraine has taken the Soviet-era RKG-3 hand grenade, first deployed in 1950, and turned them into silent bombs on Russian and Russia-backed troops.

The grenade weighs 2.3 pounds (1.07 kilograms), well within the tolerance of commercial drones. They use 3D printers to make fins, turning the outdated battlefield munition into a modern non-precision aerial bomb. A $10K drone, a $5K 3D printer, and a $100 ancient RKG-3 grenade, with almost no battlefield value, have become the World War I biplane of 2022.

The most valuable part of this entire equation is the pilot, safely located kilometers away. Flying at 300 meters high (1,000 feet-ish), the drones can operate where they are hard to spot and produce no sound. Losses are quickly and easily replaced. Although Russian forces can jam frequencies, they use the same commercially available drones for recon, which use the same frequencies.

Military experts are observing these developments. This technology is easily transferable to other military forces, insurgents, and terrorist organizations - foreign and domestic.

A little more than 100 years later, history is repeating itself. Combat drones have existed for decades, but the main battlefield use has been surveillance for the most part. Over the weekend, we may have witnessed the first drone vs. manned aircraft engagement in history. It is important to note that the crewed aircraft was on or hovering just above the ground.

Military strategists have a lot of work ahead of them. In our assessment, this is a nascent technology that will evolve rapidly.