The Russian and Ukrainian military drone operators are posting daily videos of drone attacks on social media, demonstrating how drones, costing as little as a few dollars, can effectively destroy tanks and other weapons worth millions of yen, and highlighting how drones are transforming the modern battlefield.
Drones – remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles – have been experimented with as far back as World War I. But their use has exploded in the Ukraine war, transforming them from a special mission role into one of the most widely used battlefield assets.
At the start of the war, drones varied in number from unit to unit, but now they are a highly organized and integrated part of the Ukrainian military fabric: Nearly every brigade has an attack drone company, and many units have smaller reconnaissance drones.
The Ukrainian government plans to manufacture 1 million FPVs by 2024. For comparison, this is twice the amount of ammunition provided by the European Union last year.
Drone operations on the battlefield begin with sending in a reconnaissance drone equipped with a sophisticated camera that can transmit real-time footage to the pilot’s screen, allowing him to search for targets from the air.
Surveillance drones come in all shapes and sizes. The most popular, the Chinese-made DJI Mavic, is a quadcopter with four propellers that is used around the world to photograph landscapes, weddings and other events. They cost around $1,500-$3,000 each and are even used by soldiers to survey battlefields from trenches.
Specialized forces based behind the front lines use larger surveillance drones, often with wings and equipped with cameras costing thousands of dollars, that can see farther into enemy territory as they fly.
Once a target is found, its location is transmitted in a highly confidential manner to command centres and is then reflected on a digital map called Klopyva, which compiles Russian target data.
Once the location information is provided, commanders plan the most effective tactics for attacking the target. Ukraine has limited supplies compared to the Russian military, and often has to make difficult decisions to conserve what little ammunition there is.
FPV drones can aim at a target without hesitation, making their attacks much more accurate than other weapons. While moving vehicles can often dodge attacks, drones can track and hit them, but the damage they can do is far greater with conventional artillery shells than with the small warheads that drones can carry.
Soldiers reportedly grew fearful of the sound, which often meant the enemy had located them or was about to attack.
Ukrainian soldiers say the increased use of drones in combat has forced tanks and other heavy equipment to retreat several kilometers further from the front line, and infantrymen cited FPV systems and bomb-dropping drones as the biggest threats, saying the sheer number of drones now in the air makes it difficult to reach and reinforce trenches.
In long-term, wide-area combat, the key is cost: the fewer resources used to destroy a target, the better.
FPV drones, like bomb-dropping drones, have a crucial advantage over many other weapons: they are cheaper than a single artillery shell and more accurate.
Still, drone technology is most effective when combined with other weapons, and even FPV drone pilots who have hit dozens of enemy targets say they are nearly powerless to hold the front line without infantry and artillery fire.
Long-range attacks
Drones aren’t just used on the battlefield: The Ukrainian and Russian militaries both use long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to attack targets hundreds of kilometers away from the front line.
These long-range drones are often used to attack weapons factories, military bases and energy facilities deep behind enemy lines.
The use of long-range drones began to increase in the fall of 2022, when Russia purchased hundreds of Shahed drones from Iran and began firing them at Ukraine. They quickly proved effective and were less costly than the surface-to-air missiles that Ukraine initially used.
As a programmed flight, the Shahed’s trajectory is often designed to be as complex as possible in order to confuse Ukrainian air defenses.
The most common Shahed-136 is estimated to cost less than $100,000, and Russia has built its own manufacturing facilities. Ukraine has had to fight back, mounting anti-aircraft guns and machine guns on top of pickup trucks to fight them off.
At the same time, Ukraine is developing its own drones to penetrate Russian soil as a way to make up for a lack of long-range missiles.
Early Ukrainian-made long-range drones were often shot down by Russian electronic warfare systems, but Ukrainian forces have learned their lesson and in recent months have been able to attack targets inside Russia, including factories and oil refineries.
In late January, Russian energy company Novatek was forced to suspend operations at its giant Ustilga fuel processing and shipping terminal for three days after a Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at the facility, which is crucial for exporting some hydrocarbons.Affected for several weeksIt is believed that.
Electronic warfare against drones
Electronic warfare (EW) systems have proven to be the most effective way to disrupt drones. Both militaries use EW systems to jam radio frequencies in certain areas. When a drone’s signal is jammed, the pilot can lose the ability to control the aircraft or see its video signal, depending on the frequency that is jammed.
According to Ukrainian pilots, EW has become increasingly complicated on the front lines. Most EW systems have limited frequencies available, forcing drone pilots to adapt by switching to less commonly used frequencies. This has led to a technological game of cat and mouse on the front lines, as EW operators constantly try to confuse drones flying on different frequencies.
Both sides also have to contend with electronic reconnaissance systems that can track drone signals and trace them back to enemy pilots, potentially pinpointing their location.
Pilots have responded by increasing their use of “signal repeaters,” which act as relay stations connecting the aircraft with themselves. The repeaters can be placed on the ground or attached to other drones and flown in the air, increasing the range of the signal and obfuscating the pilot’s location.
While larger truck-mounted EW systems are used to protect expensive equipment, infantry units are beginning to use smaller systems to protect trenches, but they are less powerful and therefore more inconsistent in their effectiveness.
Serhiy, a Ukrainian infantry platoon commander with the 59th Brigade fighting in the east, said Russian UAVs were changing frequencies, making his unit’s homemade EW systems, man-portable EW devices and anti-drone guns less effective. He declined to give his full name because Ukrainian soldiers had been told not to be identified for their safety.
Next-generation drone equipped with AI
Faced with the growing challenges posed by EW systems, both Ukraine and Russia are racing to develop drones guided by artificial intelligence (AI), which can identify and lock onto targets without needing to communicate with a pilot and are less susceptible to signal jamming.
AI-based target identification is already being used by both sides on a small number of drones.
“You can’t jam a drone like this because there’s nothing to jam it,” said a 20-year-old drone pilot with the 92nd Brigade who goes by the call sign “Darwin.” Sources in Ukraine’s drone industry say the technology needs further development before it can be widely used.
Still, many manufacturers, politicians and pilots believe AI systems could become central to future drone warfare, with some predicting that EW defenses will become so widespread that traditional FPV drones will become largely useless.
The footage, reviewed by Eleanor Whalley of the Reuters video verification team, was posted to Telegram channels or provided by several drone units of the Ukrainian military, including the Azov Regiment in Kreminna, the 110th Mechanized Brigade in Lastochkino and Akhdevka, and the State Border Service in Vodian and Khryanikivka.
Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), Armed Conflict Areas Incident Data Project (ACLED, drone attacks from February 24, 2022 to March 2024), Institute for War Studies and American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (data on Russian occupied territories as of 3:00 pm ET on March 12), Council on Foreign Relations, Center for Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET)
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