Ukraine’s ‘David’ drones stun Russian ‘Goliath’

Ukraine’s fightback against Russia has totally revolutionised land combat for tactical distances of less than 10km through the saturation use of AI-enabled small, armed drones.

A Special Police Battalion launches a Vampire combat drone flying over positions of Russian troops, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine in April. Picture: Reuters

Ukraine’s fightback against Russia has totally revolutionised land combat for tactical distances of less than 10km through the saturation use of AI-enabled small, armed drones. These are typically quadcopters with 25cm rotor blades capable of carrying 2kg payloads for more than a dozen kilometres.

They are now dominating the skies over the 2000km border with Russia and are destroying more vehicles and killing greater numbers of the invaders than any other weapon system, and are responsible for more than 80 per cent of the thousands of weekly casualties. This staggering percentage shows how the technology is dominating the frontline and affecting rear area logistics.

The effectiveness even of these small tactical drones was demonstrated on June 1 with a devastating attack by Ukraine on four major Russian airfields destroying between 12 and 40 planes, including several irreplaceable strategic bombers. In a remarkable feat of asymmetric warfare, dozens of these weapons were apparently smuggled across the border and then installed inside several trucks.

These were driven to the airfields in Siberia – the furthest 4000km away – and, in a perfectly co-ordinated strike, were launched simultaneously from the vehicles parked nearby. Many of the quadcopters used AI to locate strategic bombers such as Tu-95s and Tu-22s and crashed into them, automatically using their explosive payloads to create total mayhem. Military bloggers say the attacks have been so devastating as to be “Russia’s Pearl Harbor” – an exaggeration but an indication of the severity of the assault, which came as a total surprise.

In a remarkable feat of asymmetric warfare, dozens of small tactical quadcopters were apparently smuggled across the Russian border and installed inside several trucks.

Russia’s aerospace sector has already been struggling to replace combat losses in Ukraine and is no longer building strategic bombers, except for the T-160M “Blackjack”, which has been coming off the production line at a rate of one every few years. Just in economic terms, the result is one of the most lopsided in history, with drones worth just a few hundred dollars each destroying an estimated $2bn of Moscow’s most precious military hardware.

Australians are probably unaware that drone warfare has been evolving at a remarkable pace because of the conflict – and Russia is now also fielding advanced systems, particularly smaller FPV (first person viewer) quadcopters that have a fibre-optic control link, making them completely resistant to jamming. Kyiv has also adopted this new development with an even higher level of enthusiasm, and its domestic industry is scaling up to the extent that this year it will produce more than four million tactical systems – each one capable of killing Russian soldiers or crippling vehicles.

Ukraine’s defence industry can now produce one of these weapons for about 10 per cent of the cost of a single 155mm artillery shell – and they look set to further increase their dominance of the conflict. In the face of such determined resistance, which is becoming more capable every day, Russia might be able to continue making small tactical gains for some time yet, but at enormous cost.

Military bloggers say the attacks have been so devastating as to be ‘Russia’s Pearl Harbor’ – an exaggeration but an indication of the severity of the assault, which came as a total surprise.

The sheer scale of Ukraine’s adaptation of commercial hobby technology is mind blowing – and as a consequence the battlefield has been transformed so that any enemy soldier or vehicle close to the front is able to be attacked and almost certainly destroyed within minutes of being located. Slightly larger systems in the 15kg payload class are being used to destroy Russian supply columns, artillery positions, headquarters organisations and troop concentrations at distances up to 50km. They are also being used to resupply many Ukrainian frontline units. The number one priority for Kyiv is saving the lives of its soldiers because of the heavy casualties since the Russian invasion of February 2022, and replacing humans with AI-enabled technology. While drones were initially used as cheap and fast surveillance systems, they have now evolved into a separate branch of Ukraine’s military. Originally, they were deployed by individual soldiers in an ad hoc way, but now the formations are at regimental level, meaning thousands of soldiers are simultaneously launching and controlling these new weapons.

In many cases they are more important to a soldier than their rifle. Russian prisoners frequently report of never having seen a Ukrainian but to instead have been under incessant drone surveillance and then attack. It is now very rare for large vehicles to be seen moving within 10km of the frontline because their destruction is a certainty – a matter of not if, but when.

Even the most heavily armoured main battle tank is quickly destroyed by successive strikes – the first to blow off a track and immobilise it; the second and third to disable add-on reactive armour; then everything following is to knock out the vehicle, particularly with top-down attacks where the protection is weakest. Russia has suffered such huge losses of materiel that in many cases its forces are resorting to carrying out attacks using trail bikes and commercial cars and trucks.

Almost exactly two years into the war, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a 2024 decree creating the Unmanned Systems Forces, specialising in drone and robotic warfare across all three domains of land, sea and air. This is the world’s only known dedicated drone command. For strict security reasons, personnel numbers are classified but might be around 10,000 specialists.

A drone boat with AIM-9 Sidewinder missile similar to those used by Ukraine in their sucessful attacks on the Russian Black Sea fleet.

As well as having great success on the frontline blunting relentless Russian assaults – Moscow has no problem throwing away the lives of soldiers in “meat wave” attacks – other Ukrainian units have conducted strikes hundreds and occasionally thousands of kilometres away. These have targeted energy facilities as well as critical industrial sites.

Before the war began, the Russian Black Sea fleet was the dominant force in the region, operating from the Crimean home base of Sevastopol. However, losses from cruise missiles, aerial and sea surface drones have been so crippling that almost half of the fleet has been destroyed, and the remaining ships are bottled up in Novorossisyk, more than 400km further east, on the other side of the Kerch Strait.

In their latest iteration, Ukrainian drone boats equipped with Vypel R-73 missiles designed for air-to-air combat have shot down Russian military helicopters seeking to engage them. In mid-May an advanced Russian Su-30 jet fighter was similarly destroyed by a drone boat armed with an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile – the first known case of an uncrewed system downing an advanced piloted aircraft.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, says his country is prepared to share this technology with the ADF.