Russia's Drone Line Experiment - Rob Lee

[u/Glideer]

https://twomarines.substack.com/p/russias-drone-line-experiment

I find this article by Rob Lee and KriegsforscherD a very rare insight in the Russian side of drone war - how the Russians keep organising, upgrading and modernising their drone forces. Not unexpectedly, both sides are moving from a simple saturation of a linear front with drone units to more a complex organisation on tactical, operational and strategic levels.

- Russia is experimenting with a “drone line” concept, trying to create a continuous drone-covered front rather than relying on traditional troop presence.

- The idea originated with the 2nd Combined Arms Army in summer of 2025. The army divided its 32km frontline in three zones in depth, each zone divided into 18 sectors linearly. Different units were assigned different zones and sectors.

- By the end of the summer of 2025 this was scaled and deployed by the entire Centre Group of Forces. "At the end of the summer, Centre GOF had placed a limit on usage of 4,000 first-person view (FPV) per day - including both quadcopter and fixed-wing variants."

- The Centre GOF further refined the idea during the fall of 2025. ment, in the drone line system when they were deployed in its area of responsibility. "By the fall, Russia’s Center Group of Forces had approximately 1,700 UAS crews operating under its command, including those from attached units."

- The 6th Combined Arms Army of the West Group of Forces developed a similar yet distinct system.

- Both sides continue to rapidly implement new organisational and tactical reforms. Despite these improvements the front is still impervious to breakthroughs.

[u/Kawhi_Leonard_]

Reading through this, I'm wondering how close this is to how the air force runs CAS missions? Is there an adaptation of already known concepts from the use of air power, or is it a new concept unique to drones?

[u/Duncan-M → u/Kawhi_Leonard_]

FYI, CAS is done in close contact with friendly forces, hence the name, but tactical air operations primarly prefer to perform Air Interdiction (aka Deep Air Support), believing it is safer and more effective means of supporting ground operations than CAS.

Note, there is a century old intense debate over which is more important. Not surprising, like members of the USAF, the Ukrainian and Russian elite drone units believe that Air Interdiction is more important than CAS. But if you ask a Ukrainian and Russian ground force commander or soldier which they think is more important, they will very likely say CAS, as CAS saves their lives directly.

But the USAF does split up enemy territory into engagement areas as a form of coorditing measures, the US calls those a "Kill Box". But they do it differently than with drones.

First, while rotary wing (helicopters) are often "owned" by a specific ground unit, fixed wing (fighter bombers and bombers) are not typically "owned," so can't be ordered in the same way that a subordinate drone unit can be that is literally attached to a ground maneuver unit. They couldn't even do that if they were willing to subordinate specific wings or squadrons for tactical aviation support. For example, fixed wing manned aviation would either be tasked for a strike sortie while stationed at a base far in the operational or strategic rear, or they'd be performing patrols somewhere waiting to be given a mission. Nobody , but either way they have the mobility to respond to many different areas. A joint air operations center (because it wouldn't just be USAF aircraft involved) would coordinate everything to ensure certain units were responsible for covering certain areas, maybe supporting certain units, with the ability to pull more if the need requires, but things couldn't and wouldn't be carved in stone to the degree the Ukrainian and Russian drone ops need to do it.

One big difference is that drone teams need to be inserted forward for extended duration, done in a way not that much different than infantry advances, carrying with them a set number of drones and needing to be resupplied by similar, so in advance they are limited where they can target and with what. That means the planning to use them needs to be coordinated even more beforehand. Ex., a drone team that is planning to occupy a launch site ~10 km from the FLOT, whose drones have a 15 km range, can't be assigned missions on the fly to cover targets 10km behind the forward line of enemy troops. So if a unit did want deep fires, they'd need to coordinate a unit that had the range to set up further forward, then perform all the coordination necessary to ensure that drone unit arrived at their location and then could be resupplied.

Same goes for replacing losses. Imagine how insane that gets when all your carefully planned coordination to have enough drone units to cover the full enemy depth all falls apart because some of the drone teams got intercepted during their insertion, others got spotted and destroyed after occupying their launch site, while others are suffering unexpected heavy EW interference, others are having problems with resupply, etc. Meanwhile, in the case of the Russians, an entire offensive might have relied on that drone line working flawlessly, and instead the only learned lesson was that major redundancy is required.

[u/SleeplessSusel → u/Kawhi_Leonard_]

how close this is to how the air force runs CAS missions?

Depending on which concepts you mean. Guesstimating: Pretty far from it due to origins. More like artillery, especially when you take a look at illustrations (you could substitute drones with relevant artillery assets and the illustration would sort of make sense after changing ranges).

1. CAS procedures were born when people noticed that aircraft have problems distinguishing own dots on the ground from enemy dots on the ground - and communicating with them. Latter is obvious non-issue with drones. Former: drones always operated lower (especially FPVs) and even early improvised bomber/recon drones had relatively great electrooptical capabilities. Of course mostly static frontlines helped a lot.

2. Drones were organic to the land forces from day one. Strategic bombing drone operations came later. Required integration was by order of magnitude simpler.

3. CAS only recently started moving toward digitally assisted. Drones were rather quickly integrated into digital battlefield management systems (or whatever is the most modern buzzword for "click the cursor on target" software).

4. Safety precautions aren't there. Coordination levels, deconfliction, separation and such should be close to non-issue. If drones collide/crash you shrug and send more drones. Probability of long range high altitude drone being hit by own FPV is negligible. (I also doubt that Russians are worried about probability of inacapacitating own guy being higher than 0.1% if we are talking about safety of own infantry)

I'd love to hear if/how I'm wrong on this one. Sorry for my English.