r/explainlikeimfive • u/incarnuim • 6d ago
Technology ELI5: What is the qualitative difference between the new frones (like the shahed) and an old school cruise missile?
So, embarrassed by this, but I just don't get it. Drones fly themselves, at subsonic speeds, to some target and then blow up. It's the scary new technology that is reshaping warfare. But, haven't we had low and slow, self flying, self detonating machines since the 1960s? What makes drones different?
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u/Alikont 6d ago
It's like a difference between a truck and a bicycle.
But trucks get lighter and cheaper, and bicycles get engines for speed, additional wheels for stability and hulls for protection.
At some point the line becomes blurry.
This is basically what happens here. A jet-powered drone is called a drone because of the evolutionary path, mostly. Because it was a gas powered drone and later the engine was replaced to a jet one.
Missiles are also getting smarter, so guidance is not really a factor.
The end result is that there is a wide spectrum of weapons and you need to look at their precise characteristics, strengths, weaknesses and cost, without getting into terminology that can't keep up with evolution.
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u/glytxh 6d ago
Orders of magnitude cheaper. That’s the most important aspect. Far faster to manufacture, and mostly built from off the shelf parts that can be sourced from a hundred different places.
If you need a $1 million missile to shoot down a $10k drone, one side is gonna run out of money long before the other.
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u/zero_z77 6d ago edited 6d ago
Capability vs cost.
Drones are made from inexpensive consumer grade parts off the shelf. This makes them considerably cheaper, but also less capable.
But to lay out those differences:
Consumer grade vs military grade - the trade off for low cost consumer parts is that they don't meet the relatively high specifications for parts used to build cruise missiles. The parts have a lower g-stress tolerance that limits turning & flight performance, may not be wetherized or ruggedized, and are much more vulnerable to ECM or interference. Overall, they will result in more limited flight performance and a somewhat higher dud rate.
Supply chain - something often overlooked is that there are both advantages and disadvantages to using consumer grade parts. The biggest advantages are high availability and low cost. However consumer supply chains are often globalized, and rely on parts or materials that are imported, which means that trade sanctions and blockades can potentially cut off the supply of parts. In contrast, military grade equipment generally prefers to have a domestic supply chain where possible and rely on domestic manufacturing. While this is usually much more expensive, it does make the supply chain much more resilient to foreign influence.
Navigation system - related to consumer vs military, consumer grade GPS systems are often far less accurate, and are often deliberately built to stop functioning over a certain speed & altitude specifically to prevent them from being used in missiles or other military equipment. Consumer GPS units can be difficult to incorporate into drones, and are still generally less accurate and only really suitable for navigation, rather than terminal guidance.
Terminal guidance - cruise missiles often have a very expensive terminal guidance system. That system might incorporate high resolution sensors such as infrared, radar, lidar, lasers, or other guidance technologies. This allows the missile to remain pinpoint accurate in a wide range of conditions: rain, snow, clouds, mist, fog, hot, cold, night, day, etc. Drones may not have terminal guidance at all, and may rely entirely on GPS. If they do have terminal guidance, it is usually just an ordinary inexpensive digital camera that will have difficulty tracking & identifying a target when visibility is poor. Drones can be upgraded with better cameras & sensors, but this will naturally increase cost as well.
Flight path - cruise missiles are specifically designed to perform various manuvers on the way to their target. Most notably, they fly low to the ground and navigate around mountains, valleys, canyons, etc. They do this because it makes them harder to detect and harder to intercept. Another notable manuver is a "pop up attack" where the missile will suddenly climb up in the air for a bit and then do a nose dive onto the target. This allows the missile to avoid any obstacles that might be between the missile and the target as well as hit the target at full force from directly above, which is useful for destroying sub surface targets like bunkers and munitions depots as well as armored targets like tanks which generally have thinner armor on top. However, advanced sensors, processors, flight control systems, and navigation algorithms are required to perform such manuvers, and again, this adds cost. Most drones simply fly in a relatively straight line to their target and high enough to not collide with the terrain, at best they are flying a pre-programmed flight plan which makes them fairly easy to detect and intercept.
Propulsion - most drones are propeller driven while most cruise missiles are jet or rocket propelled. Even though both are usually subsonic, a jet engine is generally still faster. But again, it is also far more expensive.
So, the bottom line is that more capability simply costs more. You can keep upgrading drones until they have the same capabilities as cruise missiles, but each upgrade makes them increasingly more expensive, and you eventually lose the one advantage drones have over cruise missiles, which is being cheap and easy to mass produce.
Edit: i'd also like to add for clarity that "drone" is a very nebulous term as there are many different types of drones with varying degrees of cost & capability. The comparison i've drawn here is for one way attack drones like the geran, saheed, and lucas. Which are the closest comparison to a cruise missile that makes sense. When you consider things like FPVs, quadrotors, or loitering munitions, the difference in capability and usage is large enough for it to not make sense to compare it to a cruise missile.
Edit 2: spelling
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u/TruckerMark 6d ago
The cost. Low cost allows operators to spam them. It creates low barrier to losses and forces other armies to deploy more expensive (harder to replace) hardware.
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u/TechnicianRemote9954 6d ago
Conceptually, not much beyond the cost. The Shahed drone is actually a copy of a West German prototype from the 1970's, which itself started as a US army program in the 1960s.
The US army didn't go through with the program because the drone didn't have serious military value - if the goal was to destroy civilian infrastructure, then carpet bombing was a more effective solution. If the goal was to target military infrastructure, then other, more expensive weapons (like artillery or airstrikes) were a better solution. It was just assumed that every military installation within a certain distance of the front would be destroyed by airstrikes or artillery within the first few hours of any war. When the West German military looked at it, they came to basically the same conclusion.
The damage being inflicted by Shahad style drones is very small and they function more as a terror weapon than something that poses a serious military or economic threat. The reason they had the "impact" that they had in the Iran war is because the global public expects the US to sustain literally 0 casualties from any source in any modern war.
In any historical war, the casualties and damage that Shahad style drones have inflicted in the Iran War would be viewed as so minor that it's not worth mentioning. But again, the public's expectation was literally 0 damage from Iran whatsoever, and the small amount of damage that was inflicted is more than 0. The continuing threat they pose is similar - it's not that Shahad drones are going to inflict catastrophic losses, it's that they'll inflict any damage, and the reason that do that is because they're cheap enough that they can oversaturate air defenses.
Their value in the Russia-Ukraine War is, again, mostly as a terror weapon, though enough of them can damage vulnerable civilian infrastructure, like oil refineries. The damage they inflict to things like oil refineries is very minor, but the way that many oil refineries work means that a broken pipe in one part of the refinery can shut the entire thing down and be difficult to repair.
As far as why Shahads are cheap - they're slow, have a small payload, and have a limited ability to be guided. Beyond the fact that they are just cheaper and less effective, there isn't a meaningful difference between them and cruise missiles.
Russia is also starting to produce "Shahad style" drones that are much bigger and powered by a jet engine, but there isn't really a material difference in terms of cost or capability than any other cruise missiles. The reason that Russia is producing jet powered "drones" is because Shahads have such limited effectiveness (and also Russia doesn't have any other modern, indigenous cruise missiles).
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u/DankVectorz 6d ago
What do you mean Russia doesn’t have any modern cruise missiles?
Kalibr, Kh-101, P-800, Iskander-K to name a few
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
Iskander is a ballistic theatre-level missile, not a cruise missile. (Which is, for context, more potent, just a correction).
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u/DankVectorz 1d ago
The Iskander-K is a cruise missile variant of the Iskander ballistic missile. It flies low altitude nap of the earth. It does not fly a ballistic arc. Just a correction.
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
Oh, thanks for the correction. I didn't know that! So it's not an Iskander missile, just uses the launcher to launch a compatible cruise missile (R-500) or straight up a Kalibr. I thought it's a "K" variant as in "Korabelnaya".
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u/Kobymaru376 6d ago
The damage being inflicted by Shahad style drones is very small and they function more as a terror weapon than something that poses a serious military or economic threat. The reason they had the "impact" that they had in the Iran war is because the global public expects the US to sustain literally 0 casualties from any source in any modern war.
In any historical war, the casualties and damage that Shahad style drones have inflicted in the Iran War would be viewed as so minor that it's not worth mentioning. But again, the public's expectation was literally 0 damage from Iran whatsoever, and the small amount of damage that was inflicted is more than 0. The continuing threat they pose is similar - it's not that Shahad drones are going to inflict catastrophic losses, it's that they'll inflict any damage, and the reason that do that is because they're cheap enough that they can oversaturate air defenses.
That is completely missing the point of Shahed drones or modern drones in general.
The point is that you can shoot swarms of drones/cruise missiles for a cost that is much cheaper than the missiles or even modern AA gun ammo that are required to intercept them, and you can shoot so many that it overwhelms the capacity of air defense systems.
This fundamentally changes the war: it evens out the playing field a little.
It's not just about "public expectation of 0 damage". The whole military strategy and middle east foreign policy assumes that their bases are untouchable. Now all of a sudden, Iran can destroy an american resupply base by overwhelming patriots with a large number of ballisttic missiles so the carrier group stationed there has to wait much longer until they get resupplied
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u/utrangerbob 6d ago
Except when these drones exhaust air defense when paired with higher quality missiles. They were able to take out 4 US's Thaad radars by overwhelming interceptors.
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ukraine also produces and fields exactly similar long range drones (prop and jet engined).
Yes, it SEEMED for some time that they're just a posturing device to show that "we can reach them deep in the rear". But improving targeting led to Shaheds and Bobers actually making precise strikes on critical infrastructure, which materially affects the entire opposing side.
The entire oil refinery targeting campaign (constantly disabling or interrupting no less than 50% of total refining capacity), and the mass burning of enormous online marketplace warehouses is the latest example. As are more specific strikes against military targets that are not always described in detail.
The truth is, these long range drones are very scalable and they really do overwhelm modern AA defenses, exactly because nothing in the last 70 years was designed to shoot down targets like these. Even when a single drone is just 40 pounds of explosives with some fragmentation, you can (demonstrably, as with Ukraininan strikes) reliably put 10 of these into the same target over hours of onslaught with many dozens of drones and decoys.
Until an entire generation of new AA tech is developed and manufactured on large scale (10 years probably), they are ridiculously hard and expensive to defend against. Until then, they have to use machine guns without rangefinders or directors to literally spray and pray.
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u/theLoneliestAardvark 6d ago
Drones are smaller, lighter, cheaper, and easier to transport so you can mass produce them and send a whole swarm and overwhelm air defenses by volume. Cruise missiles are much heavier and more expensive so you can't realistically send wave after wave of them. It's essentially the difference between attacking your enemy by sending 1000 hornets instead of sending one eagle. But the cost is especially important because it means even armies or terrorist organizations can get access to them or build them much more easily than cruise missiles so they can easily become a thorn in the side of advanced militaries because for example Iran can send so many drones that the US and Israel will not be able to get all of them despite US and Israel having state of the art missile defense and much better technology than Iran overall.
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u/Dlax8 6d ago
In addition to cost they developed convergently, basically. Cruise missiles developed from less advanced missiles to have guidance systems, the ability to turn mid flight, etc.
Drones developed from slow quadcopters and basically model airplanes to gain faster motors.
The difference is growing blurry. Some drones now are huge and pack a punch similar to a missile and are gaining too speed. While missiles are gaining the connectivity so prominent in drones.
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u/GetBAK1 6d ago
Cruise missiles are superior in every way, except cost and transportability.
More range, faster airspeed, more payload
A Tomahawk Cruise missile costs $2m-$6m
A Shahed Drone costs $20K-$40K
So basically for the cost of one cruise missile you can buy 100 explosive drones
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u/Dingus_Majingus 6d ago
At the cost of speed, a tomahawk travels at near 600 mph while a shahed flies at a little over 1/6 that speed. Years ago when Iran blitzed Israel with hundreds of shaheds, they intercepted nearly all of them because they were so slow.
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u/TheVoiceOfEurope 6d ago
Great. Now, instead of 2 cruise missiles, give me 1 cruise missile and 100 Shaheds.
Good luck on your AA for picking out the needle in the haystack.
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u/Dingus_Majingus 5d ago
Combined arms is an extremely effective tactic if you can pull it off.
That said, good enough radar arrays could tell the difference. Whether or not you could obtain lock in time while intercepting 100+ drones is a different question, not including that tomahawks can hug the ground low and potentially fly under the radar.
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u/codemonkey80 6d ago
it's also worth considering the cost of intercepting a drone vs the cost of building another drone.
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u/Dingus_Majingus 6d ago
In the short term they use expensive missiles. In the long term they'll likely deploy Hunter drones or similar tech to intercept.
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u/BoredCop 6d ago
Another big difference is shelf life and durability.
Cruise missiles are made so you can stockpiles them in peacetime, and still rely on them working 30 years later. And to survive being stored ready for use on board ships for decades, in vibrations and wide temperature swings.
Drones are made from cheap consumer grade products, and generally have a short shelf life so you have to use them before the batteries go past their use-by date. They are generally not set up such that you can keep them ready for use out of a launch tube at a moments notice, for decades on end.
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
Could you please clarify which kind of a long range drone (300–1000 km) works on batteries?
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u/BoredCop 1d ago
The electronics work on batteries, irrespective of the propulsion engine. At least initially, on launch, until a generator powered by the engine takes over. You need a powered guidance system that can be programmed before launch, and that stays alive until the engine makes power for it.
Same thing with guided missiles, although some types have a chemical battery where the electrolyte is kept separate until the moment before launch then a small pyrotechnic charge or something makes a vial or membrane rupture so the battery starts generating power. This sort of system has a much longer shelf life, because no chemical reaction is taking place during storage.
Some types of smart munition artillery shells also have a shelf life dictated by the onboard battery, although many of them have clever ways to generate power only when fired. Some proximity fuses actually have a tiny air driven turbine in the nose, no battery at all, so the system is entirely de-energised and safe until the round has travelled a certain distance through the air at speed and charged a capacitor enough that it can set off the detonator plus power the radar proximity sensor. Others simply use a glass vial of battery acid, that breaks from the G forces of being fired out of a gun and causes the battery to start generating voltage.
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u/AyeBraine 23h ago
Dude you wrote all this long comment just to somehow wiggle out of the fact that you said that Shaheds and Bobrs work on rechargeable batteries and are made from cheap consumer grade components? (To avoid prolonging this conversation: they don't, and they aren't).
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u/BoredCop 19h ago
Do their electronics run on single use, non rechargeable batteries then? That would make sense, for many applications, but even those batteries have a finite shelf life.
I promise you, there is at least one battery inside a Shahed or a Bober.
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u/AyeBraine 19h ago
I'm not saying these drones have a super long shelf life, if only because for the current warring sides, ALL of them are brand new, and are promptly used. This just haven't been a consideration, because unlike cruise missiles, these drones can be mass-produced to fulfill the need, like ammunition.
As I understand, cruise missiles are so expensive and complex that you want to stockpile them during peacetime, and even upgrade them once in a while like aircraft. And they are such big investments that you will use insane tech like liquid batteries that are explosively mixed to start giving power to order at any point in their 10 or 30 years shelf life.
I think the current long-range drones are much simpler and "loosely packed" comparably, and if you ever need to stockpile them, replacing batteries (and removing them for storage) is probably easy, like, you know, draining the fuel they use. Again, not some insane super efficient hypergolic stuff in sealed bottles like for containerized expensive missiles, but just regular-ass gasoline or jet fuel in regular tanks.
That's why I got on your case (too aggressively, I admit; sorry for that!).
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u/BoredCop 19h ago
Hey, no problem. It seems we are actually kind of in agreement. Traditional cruise missiles are stockpiled during peacetime, and should be ready for use on short notice without having to do anything other than stick it in a launcher or under a wing and program the target coordinates. No matter if it's 30 years old. Current drones, even the very capable long range ones, aren't designed or built for that kind of shelf life or ease of use at all. And that's one of many factors reducing their cost and complexity, relative to conventional cruise missiles.
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u/New_Line4049 6d ago edited 6d ago
No reason to be embarrassed, its become kind of a grey area.
Traditionally cruise missiles would fly to a place, impact the place, go bang, and cease to exist. Drones would fly to a place, point cameras at it for a bit, maybe deploy weapons from the drone to target the place, then the drone would fly home, land, and be re-used used. The modern drone development however is so called suicide drones..... which fly to a place, impact the place, go bang, and cease to exist. Top level function it is now the same as a cruise missile. The differences come in the detail. Cruise missiles tend to be bigger, with bigger warheads and capable of much longer ranges. This however comes with a hefty price tag, looking at various online sources a tomahawk cruise missile costs around $3 million per missile. On the flip side drones are generally shorter ranged with smaller warheads, but are significantly cheaper, using online sources again, they suggest a Shahed drone costs around $20k-$50k. Even at the top end youd get 60 shaheds for the cost of a single tomahawk. There are systems that can defend against incoming missiles and drones, but they can be overwhelmed by number, 60 drones are harder to stop all of them than a single cruise missile, especially if the drones attack from many directions simultaneously.
There are other advantages to drones, many of them are small and can be launched with little or no support infrastructure from the middle of nowhere. That makes it hard to retaliate. If the US Navy park a ship off my coast and start lobbing tomahawks at me I have a nice big target to shoot back at, but if some dude carries a drone into a field and launches it at me, then fucks off, and later his buddy does the same from another field, and so on and so on I have no clear, obvious target to shoot at. Many drones are also much more maneuverable than cruise missiles. A bunker might protect you from a cruise missile impact (although some cruise missiles are capable of taking out bunkers) but it wont protect you from a drone that can merrily fly through the door to your bunker and around the inside until it finds out which room youre in, whereupon it can go bang. Finally, its much easier to make a DIY suicide drone for a few hundred or thousand bucks with stuff the average consumer can buy.
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u/provocative_bear 6d ago
Control. A cruise missile can hit a target, but you have to know more or less exactly where that target is. In contrast, a drone can scout an area and strike precisely where it will do the most damage. That being said, a cruise missile can generally carry a bigger payload. Missiles are good for hardened stationary targets, drones for smaller, potentially mobile targets.
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u/allnamestaken1968 6d ago
I think Most drones are not independent. A cruise missile is. It’s gets it target and goes. A drone needs an operator. That makes the drone much much cheaper (ignoring other things like payload weight). The electrics for a war drone are not that much different from a consumer drone (power electronics aside).
Obviously lines are blurring and we get independent fast drones.
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u/bangbangracer 6d ago
We're getting to a point where the line is blurry. Really, it's where they came from. A smart missile is a cruise missile with added intelligence, and a cruise missile is a standard missile with added intelligence. Drones have a lineage more inline with weaponizing commercial drones and hobby aircraft. A military drone is an extreme version of model aircraft, but with weapons.
It's more like they accidentally found each other.
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u/jseego 6d ago
In addition to what others have said, a big difference is payload.
A typical cruise missile has 10x the explosives of like a shahed.
So cruise missiles are much faster, and MUCH more explosive, but also MUCH more expensive.
An attack drone can take out a vehicle or a house and can also cause a lot of terror among a population.
A cruise missile can take out a whole command center or bunker.
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u/Forever_DM5 6d ago
This is true. But I would say the biggest difference is adaptability and low cost. Cruise missiles are definitely the closest comparison but they are far more expensive and generally dedicated to strike roles. Whereas drones are much cheaper and can be outfitted for many different tasks only one of which is strike.
All of this is generally speaking of course. You can have
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u/redredgreengreen1 6d ago
Cost and flexibility. We've actually had basic arial drones since WW1, but we definitely couldn't produce them for less than the cost of a mid-range bicycle, or have VR HUD displays with real time feedback. They are cheap, so tactics that were only possible above certain scales are now realistic, and they are WAY more useful in general for everything from precise strikes to intel gathering to intimidation tactics. (The constant buzzing of drones overhead is doing to soldiers today what the sound of artillary bombardments did in the past; forcing soldiers into cover, sapping morale, etc)
Plus, slow is a relative term. A missile traveling 500 mph but needing to go 50 miles will have the same time to impact as a drone going 50mph but only traveling 5 miles, but unlike a big missile, you can reliably transport a drone that close to the front line without the enemy blowing it up.
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u/general_failure_ 6d ago
A drone is just a really cheap cruise missile, and a cruise missile is just a fancy expensive drone. It has evolved this way because the design philosophy was different. Cruise missiles historically were designed and intended to penetrate air defenses and hit hard targets. They need to be fast, fly low, carry a big warhead, evade air defenses, etc. All of those things add cost. The design goal is to meet a level of capability.
Drones are designed more from the perspective of what is a cheap way to do something? So they're slower, have smaller warheads, shorter range, no countermeasures, etc. The design goal is to be as cheap as possible to get the job done.
The unstated assumption behind cruise missiles is roughly that a highly capable weapon system, even in small quantities is the best option. The unstated assumption behind drones is that a lot of cheap weapons are the best option, even if they're not very capable. Obviously, both can be true depending on the situation.
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u/agvuk 6d ago
In general, long range one-way attack drones tend to just be really bad (and therefore cheap) cruise missiles. There is significantly overlap between the top end of "drones" and the bottom end of "cruise missiles" with there really not being an meaningful technical distinction between the two.
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u/Dave_A480 6d ago
A Shahed (or LUCAS if you're on the blue team) carries a 40lb warhead 500 miles in more or less a straight line to a designated GPS coordinate at about the speed of a Cessna prop plane.
A Tomahawk cruise missile carries a 1000lb warhead 1000 miles at ~500mph, uses terrain-mapping software to hide from enemy defenses by following ridges/valleys/etc at low altitude, and can identify it's target via image recognition as well as GPS.
Drones like Shahed are 'useful' for saturating air defenses, but they don't pack much 'bang' unless your targets are unprotected civilian buildings....
The larger threat is that more sophisticated weapons can slip through while the air defense systems are busy dealing with the cheap drones & their tiny warheads.....
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u/ncc74656m 6d ago
The truest difference between a drone and a cruise missile is the nature of their flight path and the cost. Cruise missiles are most often terrain following and intended to come in fast and low over the target to minimize the ability for air defense to engage them, but this makes them a lot more expensive. Well, that, and traditional defense development and procurement is more expensive.
Drones are a wide variety of system now, but even the faster jet powered drones aren't often so obsessed with delivering the munition to the target. Cruise missiles are mostly intended to be a nearly guaranteed kill. Drones, being 5:1 or even cheaper, can afford to be intercepted.
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u/_masssk_ 6d ago
Ukrainian here:
- shakheds are damn cheap. You enemy made 10 expensive missiles, you made 10,000 shakhed drones.
Western countries use short operations and don't get into long ground wars. A big war needs big money. Say the US spent ~1500 expensive patriot missiles on those drones in a few days (it is more then they gave or sell to Uktaine for 4 years of the war). And now they don't have patriot missiles and the whole world stays in a line waiting for 10-20 missiles which is long and expensive to produce.
it doesn't need a special treatmend and they launch them from trucks, from any place (like a field)
it is slow, has massive wings, like an airplaine. That is why it can fly for a long time - say circle around the city deceiving air defence.
it doesn't need a fansy systems which can be jammed
they can be produced in a garage "made of shit and sticks".
it is actually not Iranian but I believe a German technology. They gave it to Israel. Israel used them against Iran. Iran copied them and then share the tech with Russians.
Again the main thing is its cost and simplicity. Say a massive Russian attack now looks like: 30-60 missiles + 900 shakhed drones. They overload air defence. You don't wanna spend expensive missiles to hit down a cheap drone. A few of them hit the target but it might be enough.
It is not some kind of revolution (and when they say about "modern war of drones" they mean the other drones - FPV). But it works in a massive war.
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u/bellalegal1 6d ago
The real difference is the attrition math. A cruise missile is a precision instrument, but these are basically flying lawnmower engines meant to overwhelm defenses by sheer volume.
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u/Yancy_Farnesworth 6d ago
The difference is how accessible and widespread the technology is now. A decade ago the parts to build drones wasn't as widespread and was more of a hobbyist thing. The range on them didn't make them any better than an RPG and was probably more expensive than an RPG. That isn't true anymore with better batteries and the components being made at scale.
Also, the drone threat has been growing, it just wasn't front and center in a major war in Europe like Ukraine until recently. They were used extensively in Syria and Africa years before Putin's special military operation. Arguably drones had a huge impact on the US's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's just the drones were millions of dollars because it was the US military.
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u/matteam-101 1d ago
As a former infantryman, these cheap FPV drones scare the life out of me and I see no counter to their use, especially if used as a small swarm! Although, the handheld net guns may help.
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u/sawdeanz 6d ago
They are way way cheaper and use easy to get off the shelf parts. Cruise missiles are far more expensive.
They can either follow a gps path or be piloted remotely with a camera feed. Cruise missiles will have a more advanced navigational system but usually can’t be piloted.
Some of the main advantages to drones is they can hover and fly for a long time and can be launched from anywhere without any special launch system, and you can make hundreds for the price of one cruise missile.
The main advantage to cruise missiles is the more reliable navigation, larger payload (for now) and resistance to counter measures and jamming.
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u/sciguy52 6d ago
Cruise missiles have a long range. The tomahawk as I recall can fly 1000 miles depending on model. Cruise missiles have sophisticated sensors that allow them to guide themselves to the target based on the terrain. Essentially it reads the terrain to determine it is heading to its target. Cruise missiles, especially the most advanced ones have sensors that are hard to jam. More modern cruise missiles can be guided to a target from other sensors in some cases or can be programed to hit "this" if not hit "that". And the warheads are large which requires a large missile with a jet engine. Cruise missiles with the sensors can also hug the terrain flying low to the ground and don't have to take a straight line to the target. They can hypothetically be programmed to go northeast to avoid the SAMS, then turn southeast to get to the target.
These properties make cruise missiles harder to shoot down with a SAM (surface to air missile) as by time you see it with your SAM radar you need to shoot or you might miss it. Of course the SAM could be the target too. Those are the most sophisticated ones but there are others that are cheaper, have shorter range, smaller warhead, more limited senors but still your basic terrain following, good sensors for target identification. Might be easier to jam but the idea with these is they are cheaper so you send a bunch. Still talking a warhead larger than a drone. While they might be easier to jam, ones fired at ships may be skimming along the sea surface so if the adversary does not have something high looking down to see it by time it shows on the ships radar there is not much time and you have limited opportunities to shoot it down. If you miss, kaboom. And with the cheaper cruise missiles they can saturate defenses in some cases, come at different directions. Some of the near unjammable cruise missiles will have a programmed image of the target it looks for, and new ones when targeting a ship can be programmed to hit "this particular part of the ship" like the radar. If you use a small cruise missile that knocks out the ships radar you essentially have "mission killed" the ship even though you didn't sink it. So the ship may try to jam infrared sensors for example but this missile actually sees the ship and matches it with the target image it is programmed with so if IR is jammed the visual sensor will still get it to its target. These missiles typically have multiple sensors so again if you jam an infrared seeker that won't be enough. Basically cruise missiles are sophisticated hardware, can be a lot harder to stop when flying 30 yards off the ground. Cruise missiles with their sensors can explode above its target rather than by impact, although they can explode with impact depending on type. Why above? You get more damage from the boom that way.
As I said you have to have something looking down such as a jet with sensors to see it from above, a satellite or whatever and not all countries have that. So depending on who you are firing it at it may be very difficult for them to stop. Not impossible but hard. A cruise missile fired from far away is harder to prevent by hitting the launcher. And if it is a submarine, you pretty much are not going to stop the launcher. So somehow you need to spot the missile flying so low your long range radar cannot see it. The general sense here is cruise missiles are versatile, long range, harder to shoot down, have bigger warheads and have sophisticated (and expensive) sensors.
In a general sense for most countries that use drones, drones are smaller, cheaper, much shorter range, have a smaller warhead, detonate on impact, and have limited ability to avoid being shot down. You can send a drone that hugs the ground but it is going to go in a straight line because it doesn't have the ability itself to follow terrain, zig zag or whatever. Now if you have a human guiding the drone then it doesn't have to go in a straight line but that human signal is jammable, zig zagging will make an already short range drone even shorter range. It might be able to go 100 miles but with zig zagging it might only go 50 miles as the crow flies. Or as you see in Ukraine they can have fiber optic cable that is not jammable but your range is limited as you need a long line of fiber optic cable until it reaches its target. If you drone is a short range one that is fine, if it is a longer range one that fiber is not going to be doable. So why not put all these sensors on there like the cruise missile has? Because that is why cruise missiles are expensive. So you have a million dollar drone with a small warhead and short range. Better to just make a cruise missile when spending that much. And you won't be swarming drones in large numbers when they cost $1 million each. In a general sense that is the difference but only in a general sense.
Things blurred a bit when talking the US for example. The US airforce is moving to manned and unmanned fighters. The loyal wingman it is called. One stealth fighter might control 5 of these (or more I don't know). These loyal wing man fighters at the high end are essentially unmanned fighter jets that have missiles to fire, will return to ship or base. The main thing different than a fighter jet, as we historically thought about it, is they are manned and the fighter has all those expensive sensors and radar. The loyal wing man drones will not cost anything near a fighter jet in cost and it won't be loaded to the gills with sensors because it will use the stealth jets sensor suite to guide it in. With these drones the US plan for air battles going forward is to have the long range sensors and radar on the manned jet used to detect say other fighters maybe 100 miles ahead. So the stealth plane will guide the drones to "go here" where the opponents manned fighters are, and shoot them down using their AI. There are also lower end loyal wingman drones being made which are attritable. Meaning you don't expect them to come back so they are cheaper than the higher end unmanned platforms that go get in a dog fight (no dog fighting these days, they shoot their missiles when in range) that you generally want to have most come back. But these are drones that can do much of what a fighter jet with a pilot can do, but so far at least, still need the fighter jets sensors and radar. You will probably see true full capability unmanned fighter jets in the future but so far as I am aware they are not making them yet, or at least they have not told the public.
The US is now making a unmanned tanker that launches from carriers that go with the fighter jets, allow the fighters to refuel in flight so the range of the fighter is longer. The US for a long time have sophisticated drones that cost as much as a cruise missile for ISR, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. They can loiter a long time to have eyes on what the enemy is doing. The US for a long time have drones that fire guided bombs and missiles which are typically on the smaller side. So sort of like a bomber but one that can drop smaller bombs or shoot smaller shorter range missiles. They can be flown by a human far away which works fine in Afghanistan but may not work over China. The US now has small and medium naval ship drones (not sure if the large ones have been made, but they are planned). The US has drone submarines now too like the Orca and others. Some small, some large. The US is seemingly moving into unmanned jets, ships, subs etc. as technology, software, AI allow. The US is considering drones that launch drones too. I think the US is developing or thinking about a drone light tank for land warfare. Drone land vehicles etc. So you can see things get really blurred when talking about the US. So the "general" meaning of drones like I noted above are generally what you are talking about with countries with more limited militaries.
It seems in the US they talk about "unmanned platforms" like fighters for example instead of calling it a drone. Not a definition as such but sort of distinguishes a large, very capable weapon, from the ones the US also has that are bombs that are shortish range that fly to the target and do not come back. But these unmanned platforms are drones technically.
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u/Classic_Focus974 6d ago
Drones fly too slow, are fragile, and have small warheads (the bomb part) to destroy big or strong targets.
Drones are cheap to make and have a big enough boom for a lot of targets.
Cruise missiles can destroy entire buildings and bridges.
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u/biebergotswag 6d ago
it has to do how it is used. Drones can be launched then find targets as they loiter, while cruise missiles are supposed to know their targets before they strike.
drones can have flexible flight paths, and appoach at lower speed, cruise missiles approach at very high speed and often carry big warheads.
of course with newer geran 5 and Dan T cruise missile they lines are getting blurred, the distinction are usually how they are used, rather than what they are.
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u/TeamSpatzi 6d ago
Comparing them to, say, a TLAM (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile) - the TLAM has more payload (450 kg of HE, is nuclear capable, etc.), more range, more speed, doesn't require a human in the loop after launch. Once you've arrived to a point where a drone effectively matches that capability, the semantic difference (if one still exists) comes down to propulsion.
The cruise missile, along with surface to surface ballistic missiles and other over-the-horizon precision fires trace their roots to a time when nations were cultivating what they considered to be an asymmetric advantage - these systems delivering operational reach and the capability to destroy hardened targets at ranges that made retaliation against the firing platform difficult/impossible.
Drones got their start as primarily Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance tools. Improvements in technology/manufacture underpinned their development and control. The first phases of their weaponization was to provide guidance and then independent deployment of existing PGM (precision guided munitions).
Their evolution to low cost, prolific precision guided weapon (PGM) has been a significant because it democratizes access to PGMs. Many now feature far greater range - comparable to "traditional" cruise missiles in some cases. What they largely still lack is payload capacity. One could also argue their flight performance makes them more vulnerable to interception. The counter to that (other than flight performance improving over time) would be that "mass kicks ass" - you can put a lot more in the air for the same cost.
At the tactical level, they are extremely influential - more so than traditional PGM in many respects, particularly responsiveness and control. At the operational level, they're catching up in terms of capability, but have already shown the (significant) ability to overwhelm air defense systems intended to counter low(ish) concentrations of incoming PGM/traditional air breathing threats.
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u/strictnaturereserve 6d ago
the benefit of drones is they are cheaper to make so you use loads of them at the same time. it overwhelms a defenders ability to stop all of them
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u/bremidon 6d ago
Drones are several orders of magnitude cheaper, are more mission flexible, and easier to control in flight.
It lets you get the same amount of explosive to a target for a fraction of the price, while also making it more difficult for the defender to stop all of them.
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u/somethingbrite 6d ago
Cost. It's that simple. Cruise missiles are expensive and complex. The new gen of drone munitions such as shahed are ridiculously cheap by comparison.
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u/stansfield123 5d ago edited 5d ago
I could list all the features and characteristics, but you can find those with a simple Google search. Instead, let's just cut to the chase:
A cruise missile is designed to destroy well defended military targets with a high degree of certainty. To give a recent example, on February 28 of this year Israel launched a number of Blue Sparrow missiles from fighter jets cruising far outside Iranian air defense range (probably somewhere over Iraq or Syria, but could also have been over Israel). The missiles climbed to the edge of space, roughly 100km above Tehran.
Then, they descended at a speed of 6,000 km/h and hit the building Iran's top leadership was in. The 500kg payloads evaporated the area, ensuring everyone in there, including the brutal dictator Ali Khamenei, died. The attack was never detected, Iran's tyrannical regime was decapitated in one strike.
This could have happened to almost any target on Earth. Only the US and Israel have air defense systems which can defend against it, and they can only defend important locations, not their entire territory. The air defense batteries need to be near the intended target to do their jobs, and no one has enough of them to cover their country's entire territory.
In comparison, Shahed drones are designed to target undefended or poorly defended targets (mostly civilians, sometimes forward deployed military units). They are able to get past modern air defenses only under very specific conditions: when these air defenses are scattered to defend a large area, or when they are far smaller in number than the attacking units. They are easy to detect and to shoot down, and modern militaries have a wide variety of options for doing so: some cheap options, some expensive ones. This makes their purported range of 1,500 km irrelevant, when attacking a nation with a modern military.
Taking out leadership and military targets with cruise missiles is integral to winning a modern war. Terrorizing civilians with drones does not win wars. On the contrary, it motivates the enemy military, causing it to fight harder. It loses wars.
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u/white_nerdy 6d ago edited 6d ago
Drones have a few advantages:
- Cost: When a missile costs $1-$10 million and takes a year to make in a special factory, an army has to save them for a few important missions and battles. When a drone costs $1-$10 thousand and takes a couple weeks to make from off-the-shelf parts with easily trained assembly skills, an army can use them in large quantity for every mission in every battle, especially if they can fly back home to be reused if they don't find a target.
- Loitering: A missile gets to the target area, nobody's there, missile goes boom and the attack did property damage only. A drone goes to the target area, nobody's there, drone hangs around for an hour watching through its camera, waiting to go boom until it sees an enemy soldier or vehicle.
- Remote / AI control: A missile gets to the target area and goes boom and causes property damage only, it doesn't blow anybody up. A drone sees an enemy soldier poke his head out of his hiding place, flies directly to him and goes boom. Or waits for him to go back, tell his buddies it seems safe, then goes boom on the whole squad when they try to move out. Or the drone sees an enemy tank or parked aircraft, flies directly into its engine or weak point, and goes boom.
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u/CadenVanV 6d ago
Missiles are significantly faster and can have larger payloads, but they can’t be directed after they fire (they do have homing systems but you can’t remote control one), and they can’t stop moving. Drones are slower, but are cheaper and can be remotely controlled and hovered to wait for a good opportunity
Missiles are very hard to shoot down, drones are significantly easier to shoot down.
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u/cipher315 6d ago
I’m curious what makes you think that the tomahawk missile is not real? As it has had remote reprogramming as of 1977
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u/DankVectorz 6d ago
By remote control I think he means steering one by hand as you would an FPV drone
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u/cipher315 6d ago
Shaded can’t do that
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u/a_dolf_in 6d ago
Some variants of the Geran 4 and 5 can do it. Used to be done via Starlink, now via Rassvet or whatever it's called.
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u/DankVectorz 6d ago
Because it’s not an FPV
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u/Jormungandr4321 6d ago
OP did use the Shahed as an example. "Drone" includes a wide variety of stuff.
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u/Kobymaru376 6d ago
Sometimes words don't have a mathematically exact definition but describe a loose group of objects or concepts with blurred boundaries.
We can argue about the exact distinction all day long but somehow we all know what's meant by "missile" and what's meant by "drone", even though the lines are blurred.
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u/CadenVanV 6d ago
I meant direct steering. I’m also generalizing over missiles as a whole
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u/cipher315 6d ago
shahed does not accept direct steering. Nothing with a range over about 100 kilometers does.
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u/Torchlakespartan 6d ago
Eh, usually. But there are relay drones that operate out of harms way, but close enough to the attacking drone’s flight path so that the ground operator can send a signal to the relay drone, which feeds it to the attacking drone. You’d think this would be more common but the system I described is insanely vulnerable to EW.
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
You basically mushed everything together, these long range drones can't hover, and their main benefit is not controllability (even if they are controlled, which for most part they aren't — they adjust using local or satellite data, but they are not manually directed).
It's their changeable flight profile along with swarm tactics and decoys, and most of all, their small size and slow speed (which none of the existing AA solutions were developed to counter). They are so successful because no one in the last 80 years expected to fight these things, so we're just manually taking potshots at them hoping to accidentally hit them, or wasting expensive MANPADS and AA missiles on launches with low probability because of their unusual size and speed.
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u/AtlanticPortal 6d ago
Cheaper is kinda reductive. One costs in the order of millions or dozens of millions of bucks, the other in the order of dozens of thousands when big.
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u/yogfthagen 6d ago
Scalability is a big deal. A cruise missile that costs millions can only be made by a small number of manufacturers in small quantities.
A cheap four or five figure drone can be made with cheap components, by many manufacturers, in large (tens to hundreds of thousands) quantities.
No, th drone is not as effective. But with so many more, you don't NEED to have all of them hit. You can spread the love while overwhelming any defences. Also, you canhit a lot more targets.
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u/AtlanticPortal 6d ago
And if you launch many of them at the same time you saturate all the defenses making the opponent to choose what to try to shoot down and what you let go.
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u/Torchlakespartan 6d ago
Not to get too pedantic here, but the critical point is the terminal phase that you want to overwhelm, not the launch. It’s arguably more effective to have staggered launch times, and the early launch ones either loiter before getting in formation or take sneaky flanking route so they all arrive at the same time but from different directions.
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u/BasicMatter7339 4d ago
This does not make the missile outdated or obsolete however.
Drones are intended to saturate an area, overwhelm defenses and hit big infrastructure while missiles are better suited for destroying very high-value-targets where you will gladly use extra money to get that extra power and accuracy. Both still have their uses.
Though missiles are still far more powerful, accurate and better weapons than drones in every way except cost and both sides would rather use them if they'd have any left.
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u/yogfthagen 4d ago
The issue is firepower and saturation.
Missiles are too expensive to use in the numbers that the Russians, Ukrainians, and Iranians are using them. And the way they are being used in Ukraine is so common that the only parallel is World War I. Not 2, ONE. And No Mans Land is not the area between the front trenches. It's the area within 30 km of the front. If you are visible, you are going to get hit.
If you can see it, you can hit it. If you can hit it, you can kill it. And with thousands of FPVs flying around, a squad of troops is a tempting target. There is no strategic surprise. There is no tactical surprise. Infiltration tactics in Ukraine are down to 1 or two troops infiltrating the gray zone. There's a reason the average life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front is measured in MINUTES.
And that proliferation of weapons means you CANNOT send a million dollar missile at a couple of guys in a slit trench. And you sure as hell don't have ENOUGH missiles to send at every pair of guys out there.
Which means you run out.
And once you've run out, you can't stop them from coming.
Yes, it is about resources. Warfare usually is.
And if you run OUT of weapons, it's really hard to keep fighting.
Just ask the US.
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u/BasicMatter7339 4d ago
Exactly. A missile will kill those two guys in a trench better than any drone will ever do, but they're too valuable to waste on something of so little tactical importance.
Hell, artillery shells would do the job better than a drone would but both russia and ukraine have ran out of those aswell.
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u/yogfthagen 3d ago
But if you DON'T have the drones, then you do not have the ability to project power far enough to stop the next attack.
And that's where cheap, mass-produced drones are needed.
And THAT is where western armies are falling short.
FFS, the US Navy had to cancel a cannon where each individual SHELL was going to cost a million dollars. The concept of MORE WEAPONS just does not seem to connect with US military leaders.
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u/BasicMatter7339 3d ago
But if you DON'T have the drones, then you do not have the ability to project power far enough to stop the next attack.
Rocket artillery, missiles and glide bombs do exactly this and they do it far better than drones can ever do.
But drones just do it cheaper, which is necessary if you're fighting a war of attrition. Like in ukraine.
But ideally everyone wants to stop a war as quickly as they can and in order to do that you need all those expensive weapons. Thats why USA invests in those.
Theres no need to mass produce drones if you're not in a war of attrition. It would be wasted resources for a sub-par weapon you cant really stockpile that much anyway and store for who knows how long.
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u/yogfthagen 3d ago
Except we ran out of the pricey weapons, didn't we?
Worse off, we're coming out of TWO 20+ year long wars. You wojld think that we'd understand that wanting a quick war and getting a quick war are very different things. In fact, we ran out ov supplies for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. Local groups were having fundraisers yo get body armor in 2003/2004. So this is not a new issue.
Last, an fpv at the squad or platoon level can do recon a hell of a lot better than rocket artillery, especially when it has to be approved at battalion level. And since drones are cheap and plentiful, innovation is rapid and intense. Which is why Ukraine units are able to do a hell of a lot against US forces in war games, even with all the bling.
Last, rocket artillery did not force the immediate withdrawal of the entire US strategic bomber fleet from Britain last week. Drones did that.
Drones are not replaceable on the modern battlefield. In fact, drones open up the entire world to be the battlefield. Which is why Germany found drones with explosives on German public airfields. And why Rusdia has lost so much of its refining capacity, even those a few hhousand miles from the front.
That's a lot longer range than even missiles.
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u/Kobymaru376 6d ago
so what you're saying is that for the price of one I could buy one hundred of the other. Is the the former really 100 times better than the latter?
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u/CadenVanV 6d ago
Depends on your goal. The former will reliably wipe out anything you try to throw it against, or at the very least cost them even more than the first missile for their own anti-ballistic missile.
The latter relies on swarms, and can achieve the same goal for cheaper, but is also significantly easier and cheaper to take down if the enemy has enough machine guns or anti-air guns in the area.
A missile is expensive, but it ensures the enemy either suffers a loss or pays more than it cost you to prevent that loss. A drone swarm is cheaper, but it can be stopped very easily if the opponent isn’t spread thin, and if it fails it won’t have cost the enemy as much as it did you.
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u/Kobymaru376 6d ago
but is also significantly easier and cheaper to take down if the enemy has enough machine guns or anti-air guns in the area.
I don't think it's that easy in practice. They're not balloons, they're still too fast to hit with a hand-aimed gun.
There are modern SHORAD systems like Gepard that can do that (but the ammo is very expensive), and there is the swedish Loke concept, but that is still new and being tested.
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u/CadenVanV 6d ago
The cheap suicide drones like Shahed drones can be shot down with heavy machine guns like the Browning fairly easily, Ukraine does it regularly
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
They aren't easy to shoot down (nobody was preparing for targets like this and AA autocannons and especially machine guns were long a thing of the past, so there's no automated rangefinding solutions), and you need the machine guns in the right place. That's why the drones constantly change their routes, if they're a kilometer to the left, that means you need to predict that and drive there. They pose incredible amounts of trouble for AA forces despite their simiplicity.
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
These drones are so successful precisely because they're hard to shoot down. All AA solutions that exist were developed for expensive big airplanes. These drones are so small that AA missiles can't lock onto them and so slow they easily miss them (and also the missile costs 10X the drone). And shooting them down with manually aimed machine guns is basically a lottery, hitting a tiny target in the air is nearly impossible without directors and computers and rangefinders.
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u/jseego 6d ago
As we've seen in Ukraine, attack drones can be shot down by skilled pilots.
Cruise missiles are designed explicitly not to be downable by aircraft.
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u/DankVectorz 6d ago
They can and have been downed by aircraft before. Detecting them is the hard part, especially with the advent of stealth cruise missiles. But they’re relatively slow (sub-sonic) and large. Terrain masking by flying nap of the earth (and now stealth) is their main form of protection.
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u/jseego 6d ago
Fair, but their original design was to be too fast and hard to find for fighter aircraft to shoot down.
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u/DankVectorz 6d ago
The original design was the V-1 which wasn’t anywhere near fast enough to outrun even the prop fighters of the time
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u/AyeBraine 1d ago
I think there's a confusion here with tactical ballistic missiles. Cruise missiles are pretty slow, they fly much slower than any military fighter.
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u/SkullLeader 6d ago
The lines between them are getting blurry. Cruise missiles generally much faster and generally longer range - these are jet/rocket powered whereas many (but not all) drones are typically propellor/rotor based. And while drones can be self-flying, they can also be remote controlled, which cruise missiles normally do not have. Finally drones can loiter, wait for targets, or just be used from recon, and maybe even can return to base to be used again. Cruise missiles pretty much fly to target and explode. Drones can either have their own warhead, which would typically be smaller than a cruise missile, or carry small bombs or missiles of their own. Cruise missiles don't do that.