Ukraine’s Top Military Leadership: We Are Starting to Win, Russia Is Starting to Lose
Head of Ukraine’s national foreign intelligence service – “We have studied…the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. We are aware of Russia’s long-term plans…at least until 2030.”
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Defense Minister Ruslan Umerov said 96% of all drones fielded by the Ukrainian military are domestically manufactured. Syrsky said during 2024, Ukrainian drone producers delivered more than 1.3 million robot aircraft to the armed forces. About 85% of all Russian casualties and vehicle kills on the battlefield are scored by Ukrainian drones, Malyuk said.
Very interesting to see the statistics. I always assumed drones were doing the most damage but it’s nice to have a number confirm this.
That percentage is way higher, than I expected. Happy for them, but the future of warfare sure looks scary
This war is a sample of what all major conflicts between industrialized nations are going to look like from now on. Even more utterly horrific for the average soldier. Death from above at any moment without warning, fuzzy front lines, the whole thing.
Equipment, too. The US DoD was looking at a new tank, but axed it. They don't exactly give out their reasons why, but a good guess is they saw what drones were doing in Ukraine and decided the design would have been obsolete before the first one came off the assembly line.
They are coffins on tracks now. The tank, the warship, the aircraft carrier. All exceptionally vulnerable to $10k drones and thus: all obsolete. Until some sort of anti-drone minigun on AI enters service, the tank sits, the warship barely floats, and the aircraft carrier is 500km away.
But: attaching some sort of infrared and visible spectrum 360 camera to a processing unit isn't beyond the pale already. It won't be long until these units are all back in action. Stealth drones already? Hypersonic missiles? Good old fashioned AT launchers? Reactive armour? Spaced hulls? Laser interception? Gauss canons?
We're in an accelerated arms race right now indeed
We've had these for decades now. They're called CIWS, and they're capable of taking missiles out of the sky and turning inflatable dinghies into flotsam. They're mounted on every aircraft carrier in the world - both US and otherwise - and we've fielded trailer mounted variants for at least 20 years. They were using them in Iraq to blow mortar rounds out of the air.
We have automated systems on vehicles capable of identifying a tank round traveling 1,700 meters per second via radar, figure out whether it's going to hit or miss the vehicle, and fire an explosive at it to neutralize it if it is, all within a span of about 300 milliseconds.
The biggest issues with drones are largely man portable solutions and things that don't send thousands of rounds of lead into the sky to rain down on a population center. Drones are small enough to fly indoors and cheap enough to be deployed in swarms. Figuring out how to counter those aspects is probably where the most energy is going to be spent.
Did not save the Moskva. Then again, it helps if you keep things in working order....
That, and drones are both small and therefore harder to detect - especially flying close to sea level - and they can be remote controlled, which allows them to move erratically, making them much harder targets to hit. There's definitely a reason that countries are looking into things like lasers and blasts of air to knock them out of the sky instead of just filling the area with a lot of bullets.
Drones also include the bomb seadoo things, its not just flying drones. I think sea skimming has also been a thing for 100 or so years for anti-shipping, the real change is the drastic reduction of cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMBT
Six anti-drone radars, the weapon station gun is 30mm so not as beefy as a Gepard/Skynex but those are meant to take out more than drones. And, yes, AI-enabled targeting.
30mm is probably unsuited, you don't need that calibre vs a drone, you need agility, and higher RoF.
The detection abilities all look undercooked for me too, some sort of mesh radar, infrared, and visible spectrum cameras combined with high speed classification network with targeting abilities, and realtime information about current friendly movements is still necessary to identify and confidently neutralise enemy drones. To counter jamming some sort of fibreoptic umbilical system and/or lifi would be necessary too.
And I know its being worked on, but people are being pretty hush hush about that. The challenge then being productionising these systems, it's all very well on a test bed, but the front line has some rather extreme conditions for hardware, and software, and the manufacturing of these integrated systems is challenging too. You'll need loads of them to really be effective. Mobile big dog type platforms would also be fabulous to run alongside a tank brigade
Skynex/Gepard are 35mm and can take down drones just fine, I suppose the 30mm also uses precision airburst. If you don't disperse the drones it might happen that their fire control takes down five with three rounds. What I'm more worried about is number of rounds. Whether they need that calibre to do airburst properly or they keep it large so it can double as a third ground gun I don't know.
I wonder how fast they can produce and use those new laser weapons, they should rip most drones a new one. Currently, modern war looks a like a total cluster fuck for everyone involved, tiny accurate death from above at any time... sheesh... With laser cover, currently only available on tracks/wheels and in short supply, I think it would already look very different. I have no real clue what's about to happen though, this war kicked off a crazy weird arms race.
The power requirements for lasers that can damage drones is pretty extreme. Ye cannae change the laws of physics captain! And so, deployments to mobile platforms likely to be probably more suited to a dedicated support type role IMO. Mounted to AFVs perhaps. LFVs anyone?
Hardkill APS seems to be less relevent these days for tanks aswell, if it even triggers on a drone there's no help for the next 10 that show up.
Tanks will probably never become totally irrelevant but it will be hard to justify their price when drone swarms seem to be the future.
You'd expect them to closely analyze the attacks and pour a few hundred billion into countermeasures though. Not exactly the same position that Russia is in.
The US military (and others) are pouring R&D money into anti-drone lasers. It's the only way for the cost element of anti-drone defenses to make any sense. When that tech is mature and small enough in sure it will eventually be mounted on tanks .
Ah yes, man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.
It's also a sample of what asymmetric warfare will look like. Militia groups can now buy or make their own loitering and guided munitions on the cheap. They won't have anywhere near the range or capacity of the military grade stuff, but a remote-controlled flying pressure cooker still blows up well enough.
Probably not. It only worked so well against Russians because of how shitty their military is. A modern army with properly running vehicles and operating bases (instead of scrap heaps and open trenches) isn't nearly as susceptible to short range civillian drones.
You need a small automatized AD machine gun or similar for every group of soldiers. Can be done, but requirea a huge amount of those anti-drone guns. Basically the amount of soldiers on the front, divided by ten or so.
Or just adequate cover. Or a drone jammer (something which exists and is available to civilians). Or a strategy that doesn't leave your troops milling around in open trenches for weeks at a time. Or a reaper drone flying overhead that detects the signal from smaller civilian quadcopter which then jams the drone, locates it's origin, ID's the operators with thermal vision and lodges a hellfire missile up their ass.
Again, a competent modern military isn't going to be vulnerable to this type of tactic.
They would prefer to have more artillery, though. In case-by-case evaluations (e.g. enemy tank formation spotted maneuvering at comparable distance), it often takes a much longer time (e.g. over an hour vs. some minutes) to neutralize the same kind of an opponent with drones, compared to smart artillery shells (e.g. BONUS).
Also, in some weather drones don't fly.
The flip side of that flips side is that stationary artillery is now obsolete. Drones force the issue where you need to be able to take your shot and GTFO.
From what I hear, they don't always bother - if it's a towed artillery piece, the circus of moving it is allegedly more dangerous than staying holed up.
(the following is "as far as I know", might be inaccurate) They dig their gun into a wooded area, put lots of antidrone nets overhead, keep ammunition far away in diverse locations, and don't stay near the piece when they aren't using it. If a drone comes, there's a chance it gets caught in the nets or detonates prematurely. If it hits, there is a decent chance that the gun can be fixed. If another battery starts trying to hit it, they hit back.
Yeah. This entire conflict has had a certified MGS4 „War has changed” vibe to it since the very beginning.
But... war never changes!