BACK in May this year I found myself at an undisclosed military training base somewhere in Kyiv Oblast in Ukraine.
It was just before Ukraine’s counteroffensive that got under way at the start of June and the new recruits in the forest base were part of the preparations for a military campaign that is now 11 weeks in.
Such is the widespread use of drones on the battlefield that rarely a day passes when footage of their deployment does not appear on social media, turning the conflict in Ukraine into what one commentator described as the first “bystander war”.
While Kyiv continues to deny involvement in the drone attacks and they pale in comparison to Russia’s assaults on Ukrainian cities, they have increasingly spooked Moscow’s elite which has hitherto been insulated from most of the war’s consequences. Earlier this month, technology journalist David Hambling, who specialises in aerospace and defence, highlighted a report by the UK think tank the Royal United Services Institute that suggested Russian electronic warfare took out 90% of Ukraine’s drones in the early stages of the war.
Other improvements in speed, flight range, payload capacity and other capabilities are having an immediate impact on the battlefield. One example was the use of 3D-printing harnesses to create light-activated mechanisms that could be fitted to the underside of DJI Mavic drones, turning the drone’s auxiliary lights into a trigger that could release grenades or bombs.In January, Ukraine’s defence ministry announced it would spend $550 million on drone technology this year, signing deals with 16 Ukrainian manufacturers.
“The size and the scale of drone use in Ukraine supersedes all the previous conflicts,” said Samuel Bendett, a researcher in uncrewed military systems who is an analyst with the Centre for Naval Analyses Russia Studies Programme. The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, for example, were initially seen as a game-changer for Ukraine when videos showed the Bayraktars destroying valuable Russian hardware with baseball-bat-sized “micromunitions” during the chaotic first days of the Russian invasion.
As researchers at the University of Birmingham pointed out in an online study in The Conversation, some of these drones have the advantage of being able to be directed in real-time through first-person view devices – a tablet or a virtual reality headset – and are both highly manoeuvrable and very fast.
Belgique Dernières Nouvelles, Belgique Actualités
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