Aiming an unguided grenade at a speeding tank is a difficult task.
Oct 12, 2024
Unmanned Systems Forces capture
A Ukrainian drone team from the Nemesis group scored one of the more impressive kills of Russia’s 31-month wider war on Ukraine last week when it spotted a fast-moving Russian turtle tank and, carefully leading the speeding vehicle, dropped one grenade to crack open the tank’s add-on armor—and then dropped a second grenade under the tank’s tracks. At night.
“Our pilots demonstrated the highest level of skill,” the Ukrainian military’s drone branch boasted. The drone’s third grenade missed, but it didn’t matter. The damaged tank veered off the road. Its three crew clambered out from under the vehicle’s punctured metal shell and scurried away.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced the formation of a separate drone branch—the world’s first—back in February. The Unmanned Systems Forces flies a wide array of drone types for surveillance, strike and supply missions.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, said the country’s drones “fundamentally changed the situation on the battlefield.” Fedorov predicted the separate Unmanned Systems Forces would accelerate technological advancements.
Night capability is one of the branch’s priorities. Early in the wider war, most drones were strictly equipped with daylight cameras and were ineffective at night. Late last year, the Ukrainians began deploying so-called “vampire” drones fitted with infrared cameras, giving the soon-to-be-independent military drone groups their first true nighttime capability.
The vampire drones wreaked havoc on unprepared Russian troops who had come to equate darkness with protection. Dropping grenades by the dozen, the drones blew up parked vehicles and wrecked fortifications. The Russians called the night drones “Baba Yagas” after a forest witch from Slavic folklore.
Many of the early vampire drone raids targeted stationary targets: Russians troops in their overnight bivouacs. But as the Ukrainian operators grew more skilled—a trend the establishment of the Unmanned Systems Forces was meant to encourage—they began going after moving targets, too.
More and more explosive first-person-view drones on both sides of the wider war have on-board artificial intelligence that helps guide them toward human-shaped targets in the final moments of their flights. But the vampire drones aren’t single-use FPV drones.
A three-pound FPV might cost $500. A vampire drone might weigh up to 40 pounds and cost more than $10,000. Instead of flying into their targets like an inexpensive FPV does, a vampire drone bombs it from overhead. The targeting A.I. is less useful in this context.
So operator skill is still everything when a vampire drone goes after a moving target. For the vampire drone operator, it’s old-fashioned bombardment: matching the target’s speed and direction and calculating lead based on altitude.
It’s a safe bet many nighttime drone bombing runs on moving targets miss—and the Unmanned Systems Forces simply declines to post the videos of the failed attacks. That any of the nocturnal raids are successful is impressive, however. “Hitting a moving target is an asterisk task,” the branch stated, using the term “asterisk” to mean “special.”
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Sources:
2. Reuters
“matching the target’s speed and direction and calculating lead based on altitude.”
This seems like something that the drone’s software could handle…
U.S. to Deploy Missile Defense System and About 100 Troops to Israel
The Pentagon announced it would send the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery and its crew as Israel considered retaliatory attacks against Iran.
The United States is sending an advanced missile defense system to Israel, and will deploy about 100 American troops to operate it, the Pentagon announced on Sunday.
President Biden directed Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, and its crew, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement on Sunday.
The move comes after Iran launched about 200 missiles, including ballistic missiles, at Israel on Oct. 1 and as Israel plans its retaliatory attack. It will put American troops closer to the widening war in the Middle East.
General Ryder said the battery would “augment Israel’s integrated air defense system.”
“This action underscores the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel, and to defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks by Iran,” the statement said. “It is part of the broader adjustments the U.S. military has made in recent months to support the defense of Israel and protect Americans from attacks by Iran and Iranian-aligned militias.”
The United States sent a THAAD battery along with other air defense systems to the region weeks after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. It was not immediately clear how quickly the missile defense system and troops would arrive in Israel.
On Saturday Mr. Austin spoke with Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, and “expressed his deep concern about reports that Israeli forces fired on U.N. peacekeeping positions in Lebanon as well as by the reported death of two Lebanese soldiers,” the Pentagon said in a statement about the call.
On Sunday morning, the Israeli military said that its jets had hit around 200 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon over the past day.
That is so pathetic!
I don’t give a shit about the ME. They are all crazy and fully deserve each other.
I doubt that most American people care, I don’t either, but that damned old fool Biden seems to care enough to send our TROOPS there!
Yeah, but not to Ukraine. Ukraine is closer to us than any non-european trash in the ME. Africa is also close to us, but only the West and South Africa. The brains of our leaders must be controlled by Antisocial Intelligence…
They have brains?