A Javelin anti-tank missile possesses the firepower of a dozen drones.
Dec 13, 2024
Ukrainian defense ministry capture
It’s tempting to conclude, from the abundance of videos depicting the fighting around in Kursk Oblast in western Russia, that explosive first-person-view drones are responsible for knocking out the majority of the armored vehicles Russian forces have lost while counterattacking the 250-square-mile salient that Ukrainian troops have occupied in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast since August.
But that conclusion may be wrong. FPV drones feed live video to their operators, so there’s ample evidence of their strikes. But that evidence belies the reality on the ground in Kursk, if not elsewhere in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
That reality is that anti-tank missile teams, not drone operators, are responsible for many of the hits on the Russian vehicles that have been attacking in Kursk since Nov. 7.
“It’s very funny to see how everyone thinks that FPVs rule the way,” wrote Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian marine corps drone operator in Kursk whose team helps defend the western edge of the salient.
In two days of Russian assaults ending on Thursday, the Russian 237th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment lost 17 armored vehicles in Kriegsforscher’s sector.
Most of them were immobilized by mines or anti-tank guided missiles such as the American-made Javelin or the Ukrainian Stugna-P. “Only after that, FPV drones started working,” Kriegsforscher noted.
The tiny drones, hauling just a few pounds of explosives over a distance of a few miles, are better for finishing off stranded vehicles than they are at doing the actual stranding.
“In general, I see that approximately 10 to 15 percent of [armored vehicles] were destroyed by FPVs—I mean, during the move,” Kriegsforscher noted.
The Russians have lost around 100 vehicles in a four-square-mile patch of Kursk around the hamlet of Zelenyi Shylakh—and just in the past few weeks as they’ve escalated their attacks on the Ukrainian salient.
For all their increasing sophistication and the growing skill of their operators, Ukraine’s FPV drones—which the country builds at a rate of more than a million a year—still lack the destructive power of a 1990s-vintage Javelin ATGM.
In terms of sheer explosive firepower, a 35-pound Javelin is equivalent to a dozen FPV drones. And in the hands of an ATGM team from one of Ukraine’s notoriously bloodthirsty air assault brigades, a Javelin might be even more lethal.
That missiles still outshoot drones in Kursk despite the greater visibility of the latter over the former is yet another remind that, in mechanized warfare as in many things, looks can be deceiving.
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No doubt about it. A Javelin is a mighty powerful weapon and no tank is safe from it.
However, drones have certain advantages. The first one is cost. A drone might cost $500 or so, while a Javelin runs to around a quarter million bucks … for one. Another big advantage for drones is range. A Javelin has a max range of less than five kilometers, while a drone can be used miles further back into enemy territory. One big advantage of a Javelin is that it is immune to electronic countermeasures.
Both are good and effective weapons, and both belong on the battlefield.
Javelins showed their worth in the first months of the war when they destroyed countless tanks and armoured vehicles in the Kyiv region. Bayraktars were on the scene, but they have disappeared over the horizon now.
Yes, Bayraktars were the star in the early stages of the war. Not anymore.