Brigade Deep Battle 2.0

UAV-Fires teaming in support of the brigade deep fight

- Capt. Joseph Schmid

During the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict, military professionals throughout the globe witnessed Russia’s ability to systematically project “annihilation Fires” leveraging nascent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) teamed with massed rocket and cannon artillery. In their article titled, “Russia’s New Generation Warfare,” Phillip Karber, president of the Potomac Foundation, and Joshua Thibeault, a member of the Russian New Generation Warfare study team, detailed the debilitating effects of Russian UAV-Fires teaming. They state “Ukrainian units have observed up to eight Russian UAVs overflights per day … The increased availability of overhead surveillance combined with massed area Fires [have produced] … approximately 80 percent of all casualties.”1

Russian UAV-Fires teaming served the dual purpose of instantly attriting whole battalions of Ukrainian mechanized infantry as well as having the uncanny effect of disrupting the Ukrainian OODA Loop decision cycle (observe, orient, decide, act).2 Imagine a U.S. combined arms brigade (CAB) “in a three-minute period … [suffering] a Russian fire strike destroying two mechanized battalions with a combination of top attack munitions and thermobaric warheads.”3Following the almost instantaneous loss of two mechanized infantry battalions, the imagined CAB will likely no longer be able to perform basic warfighting functions. Consequently, its remaining combat power could no longer successfully close with and destroy a comparatively sized adversarial near-peer formation. This troubling observation from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has decidedly hastened our own UAV interoperability, especially at echelons above battalion.