Andrew Perpetua
@AndrewPerpetua

Ukrainian ability to destroy Russian recon drones with their own drone interceptors is going to have a MASSIVE impact on the war. But it will take months of attrition before you see any large impact on the war. Russia has a large number of drones at its disposal.

I don’t know what their drone manufacturing capability is, it does exist and they do manufacture a large number of drones. I also don’t know how much this capacity can grow. Is it already maxed out? Can it double, triple?

But, I believe, at the current rate of losses, we will not see a significant impact on Russia’s ability to do recon for another 8 months or so. In the meantime, it is possible Ukraine could cripple Russia’s ability to recon specific areas of Ukraine, which would then force Russia to manage its resources in some manner to redistribute the drones around their units. But, if Ukraine’s ability to shoot down drones keeps growing, and Russia’s ability to manufacture drones cannot grow along side it, then we could see Russian recon take a really serious hit by Spring.

There are a lot of unknowns here. But it is clear that Ukraine is expanding this anti drone program as fast as possible, it is likely one of the nation’s highest priorities due to the damage the drones inflict on both military and civilian infrastructure. And, correspondingly, Russia will do everything they can to maintain their ability to recon for the same reasons.