That Ukraine even needs so many unmanned weapons points to a deep manpower shortage.
Dec 21, 2024
Via WarTranslated
A Ukrainian national guard brigade just orchestrated an all-robot combined-arms operation, mixing crawling and flying drones for an assault on Russian positions in Kharkiv Oblast in northern Russia [Ukraine!–OFP].
“We are talking about dozens of units of robotic and unmanned equipment simultaneously on a small section of the front,” a spokesperson for the 13th National Guard Brigade explained.
It was an impressive technological feat—and a worrying sign of weakness on the part of overstretched Ukrainian forces. Unmanned ground vehicles in particular suffer profound limitations, and still can’t fully replace human infantry.
That the 13th National Guard Brigade even needed to replace all of the human beings in a ground assault speaks to how few people the brigade has compared to the Russian units it’s fighting. The 13th National Guard Brigade defends a five-mile stretch of the front line around the town of Hlyboke, just south of the Ukraine-Russia border. It’s holding back a force of no fewer than four Russian regiments.
That’s no more than 2,000 Ukrainians versus 6,000 or so Russians. The manpower ratio is roughly the same all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s 34-month wider war on Ukraine. Russian troops still greatly outnumber Ukrainian troops, despite the Russians suffering around twice as many casualties as the Ukrainians since February 2022.
The Ukrainian operation involved remote-controlled flying surveillance and minelaying drones, one-way explosive robots on the ground and in the air as well as gun-armed ground ’bots.
In what amounted to a smaller-scale proof of concept for the recent combined-arms robot assault, a Ukrainian ground robot cleared a Russian trench in Kursk Oblast in western Russian back in September. Russia has attempted small-scale ground ’bot assaults of its own, but less successfully.
The problem, of course, is that while robots are adept at surveilling and attacking, they’re terrible at holding. To hold ground, armies put infantry in trenches. They sit, watch, wait and call for reinforcements when the enemy attacks. It’s tedious, taxing duty that requires constant vigilance.
Constant vigilance is difficult when a human operator is remotely observing the battlefield through the sensors of a maintenance-hungry ground robot.
Machines break down. And their radio datalinks are highly susceptible to enemy jamming, as the California think-tank RAND discovered when it gamed out a clash between hypothetical U.S. (“Blue”) and Russian (“Red”) army battalions partially equipped with armed ground drones. “Blue’s ability to operate was degraded significantly by Red’s jammers,” RAND concluded.
It’s not clear the 13th National Guard Brigade even tried to hold the Russian positions it cleared in the all-robot attack.
After nearly three years of war, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in military robotics. But the Ukrainians’ innovation is, in part, an answer to its desperation—that is, its struggles to recruit enough human soldiers to match the Russians person-for-person.
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Sources:
1. Army Inform
3. RAND
Although Axel writes great stuff most of the time, sometimes he sucks. This piece belongs to the latter.
First mistake; Kharkiv is in Ukraine and NOT in mafia land. It’s also not in the north, but in the east of Ukraine … west of mafia land.
Second, even as General Cornflakes has admitted, the loss ratio is about five to one in Ukraine’s favor, and not two to one as Axel claims.
Third, Ukraine will ALWAYS suffer a manpower shortage compared to the cockroaches. He doesn’t have to mention this obvious fact over and over again. Mafia land has many more people and, unlike Ukraine’s buddies in the West, mafia land gets direct military help from north korea.
Fourth, Axel assumes that Ukraine conducted this all-drone attack due to manpower shortage. Where does he get this assumption? Ukraine can just as well do this to show itself, its allies, and the world what its capabilities are. It can also do this to test the overall concept, or to spare human lives. Or, just to be the first. Or all of the above.
Fifth, he assumes, “Constant vigilance is difficult when a human operator is remotely observing the battlefield through the sensors of a maintenance-hungry ground robot.” Why? Soldiers in a trench on watch must get replaced every so often. They also need “maintenance”; food, water, shelter, medical attention, rest, and so on. The very same can be done with soldiers sitting at a screen. And, one soldier can remotely watch several monitors at the same time, making him more efficient than a single soldier in a trench. Besides that, it’s drones that do most of the surveillance already anyway.
At any rate, Ukraine did achieve one thing; it will go down in the annals of warfare as the first nation in history to conduct an assault on a battlefield with only machines. The age of the Terminator is coming.
Good analysis facts!
I too thought the axeman had gone nuts with that “north russia” quote. WTF?
Sometimes I also write something wrong, like everyone else occasionally does, but that’s what proofreading exists for.