There is something ineffably sinister about the remote eye of a kamikaze drone pilot watching and recording the last terrified moment of its human target
In his latest brilliant dispatch from Ukraine, RICHARD PENDLEBURY witnesses the explosion in the use -by both sides -- of battlefield drones, operated miles from the front line
ONE hot afternoon in the summer of 2006, we were given a chilling suggestion of the shape of war to come. Based in the Lebanese city of Tyre, we were covering the short but destructive conflict between Israel and the Shia militia Hezbollah. Israeli missile strikes and bombs had levelled entire districts in Beirut.
But that afternoon, on the Tyre seafront, we had heard only the constant sounds, like a suburban lawnmower or hedge strimmer, of what we thought were Israeli reconnaissance drones, invisible in the blazing blue sky overhead.
Then came the modest bang.
Just 500ft from where Mail cameraman Jamie Wiseman and I stood, a very small, drone-launched missile had hit a motorcycle on which two local men were sitting. One of the men possessed a walkietalkie. He was, presumably, a Hezbollah spotter who had been identified by the Israeli air force.
The men, along with their motorcycle, were reduced to a bloody jigsaw puzzle.
At the time, it seemed incredible. Unlike the usual shattering 2,000lb airstrikes by F-16 jets, the material damage was confined to the bike and its riders. The horror left only a smear on the highway. It was a ‘surgical’ hit.
Fast forward almost two decades. The isolated incident on the Tyre seafront is now the minuteby-minute reality of what faces an infantryman on either side in this bloody war in Ukraine.
SCAN TO SEE HOW DRONES ARE CHANGING WARFARE
Here, killer drones are everpresent. Thanks to thermal imaging they can operate at night as well as day. They are the new kings of the battlefield.
A drone is a guided aircraft without an onboard pilot. They are referred to as ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ – or UAVs.
Over the past year, Wiseman and I have experienced the drone phenomenon, spending time with UAV units, talking to soldiers and visiting a factory where one of the most sophisticated Ukrainian UAVs is produced.
Only on the front line, though, can you truly understand the respect and fear that the drone threat now commands.
We too have been targeted by Russian drones. The first occasion was last summer, while entering a Ukrainian trench at night. The machine buzzed overhead as a sentry tried to shoot it down with his rifle. The next day, Russian drones were spotting for their artillery as we left the trench under shell fire. We were lucky. We survived unscathed.
Since then, the importance of drone warfare has only increased. The numbers both sides are deploying are extraordinary. It is said that, at any one time, some 10,000 drones are in the air over the 600-mile front line.
In a command post just behind the Kupiansk front line, the commander of a 41st Brigade drone unit showed me an image on his iPhone. It was a snapshot of the positions of Russian drones operating over his sector, as captured by a Ukrainian scanning device.
Each drone was represented by an orange dot. But there were so many drones that the dots merged into one continuous orange line.
‘We had 26 Russian drones over us at one time,’ he said. ‘The Russians are now producing them on an industrial scale. I would say that the ratio of Russian drones to our drones over the battlefield now is something like five to one.’
How did we get here?
Large, purpose-built combat UAVs, such as the American-made Predator, perform surveillance, reconnaissance and attack missions lasting up to 40 hours. They
can detect the heat signature of a human being from several miles up or launch a missile that could destroy a tank, piloted from facilities thousands of miles away.
These highly sophisticated machines did not come cheap. The Reaper – a development of the Predator used today by the RAF – costs £25million apiece.
But the past two decades have seen the emergence of small, mass-produced UAVs equipped with livestream video cameras, which can be bought for just a few hundred pounds.
These commercial drones are simple enough to be flown by a child. They were designed with fun, or civilian business, in mind.
One company dominates this industry. DJI Technology Company was founded in China in 2006. By 2021, DJI had cornered more than 70 per cent of the global market. But before then, both Russia and Ukraine realised that DJI’s civilian drones could be adapted for military purposes.
One model that has become the iconic weapon of this war is the Mavic. A ‘quadcopter’ that retails in the UK for less than £2,000, the Mavic is mostly used on the battlefield for reconnaissance. But it and other similar off-the-shelf drones have also been adapted to drop grenades and small bombs on enemy infantry and armoured vehicles, to devastating effect.
We have often encountered the Mavic being operated on the Ukrainian side of the front line. But the Russians are also using Mavics in great numbers.
Small recreational drones such as these have a limited range of about ten miles and an ‘endurance’ (the amount of time it can spend in the air) of under an hour. They are often operated at heights that make them vulnerable to smallarms fire. Consequently, attrition rates are high.
An Aero Scout of the Border Guards drone unit told us they had once lost ten machines in a day. But when a drone is shot down, no pilot dies. And the machines are far easier and cheaper to replace than a manned combat aircraft.
Another recent development has taken us a further step towards the ‘science fictionalisation’ of warfare. FPV stands for ‘first-person view’. An FPV drone is a form of loitering munition, a kamikazestyle flying bomb that is crashed into a target by its operator. Some of the latest examples explode before impact, spraying shrapnel like cluster munitions.
The first military FPVs were adaptations of racing drones, with small explosives attached. Now they are being purpose-built in their hundreds of thousands.
An FPV drone is flown like a combat jet. The pilot sees only what his drone camera ‘sees’, in real time, via a video headset.
The drones can cost as little as £230. But in trained hands an FPV is a battle-winning weapon that can be flown accurately into the small
At any one time, 10,000 drones are over the front line
est of targets, even against individual soldiers, as evinced in a number of shocking videos shown on social media. There is something ineffably sinister about this scenario – how the remote eye of the pilot can watch and record the last terrified moment of a human target’s life, in close-up, just before the drone hits.
I was told that the Russians, with their advantage in numbers of such FPVs, sometimes use these weapons in ‘swarms’ to overwhelm Ukrainian positions before an infantry assault goes in.
That is the stuff of nightmares. But it is also a game changer and that’s why FPV pilots have themselves become prime targets.
In January, a Ukrainian HIMARS rocket artillery strike hit a Russian FPV pilot school in occupied Donetsk. Several dozen trainees were reportedly killed.
But what is it like to fight under the shadow of the drone? We spoke to a number of Ukrainian servicemen about their experiences.
Sasha is a gunner of the 41st Brigade. He says: ‘They are the future. This is a drone war, really.
‘Previously, a tank was the main fighting fist that broke through defences. Now tanks are only used as artillery.
‘They can’t just ride out and shoot directly any more. They shoot from afar, because a drone will first immobilise the tank and then second one will finish it off.’
Kos, the commander of an infantry company in the 56th Brigade, agrees. ‘Drones are the business card of this war, because they turned the field manual upside down,’ he says.
Air defence missiles and smallarms fire are only the last line of defence against drones. The most effective counter-measure is electronic warfare – in other words, jamming or interfering with the signals that send the drones to their targets.
Both Russia and Ukraine are locked in a race to jam each other’s drones or evade their opponent’s counter-measures.
Kos says: ‘The quicker that one side invents a drone, the quicker the other will come up with a new electronic warfare jamming method against it. And vice versa. And this will continue forever.’
But there is another completely different kind of drone war being fought over Ukraine, at a far greater altitude and much farther behind Russian lines.
Last autumn we visited a highsecurity facility protected by air defence missiles, where a state-ofthe-art drone that has achieved outstanding results over the battlefield and beyond is being manufactured. The drone is called the Raybird 3 and it was designed and developed in Ukraine by aviation company Skyeton.
It has a top speed of 110mph, a maximum altitude of more than 1.6 miles and can operate for more than 30 hours in all weathers, from temperatures of -30C to 50C.
Raybird also possesses tremendous range and surveillance capability. We are told, for example that a Raybird could be flown from Kyiv to Munich, record what a particular man in a street there was reading on his iPhone, and return to Kyiv.
But these operational figures and abilities would be redundant if the Raybird, with its 10ft wingspan, did not have exceptional survivability. Raybirds have flown up to 100 miles behind enemy lines without interception. One model has completed more than 80 missions over Russian-controlled territory. They are the eyes of the HIMARS and other very long-range rocket artillery systems.
‘Ours is a completely different war,’ one of the Skyeton executives tells me. ‘With the small drones, [soldiers] are fighting each other like in video games, at distances of up to seven miles.
‘Many have become almost addicted to this because it’s much more interesting than video gaming: it’s real. But we fly distances of more than 50 miles. It’s our mission to collect information from
Drones have turned the field manual upside down
really deep inside, in hostile electronic warfare conditions with very heavy jamming.’
Last week, a photo of a crashed Raybird 3 was posted on Russian social media. It had apparently come down due to a technical fault during a secret mission.
What made this really significant, though, was that it was found in the Krasnodar region of Russia, almost 125 miles behind the Russian front line.
The Raybird – which costs about £175,000 per drone – is built of fibre-glass materials that give it a very small radar cross-section. New variants will have electric engines, fuelled by hydrogen, that will give off a lower heat signature than petrol-driven models. The makers claim that its stealth renders it all but invisible to Russian anti-aircraft radars.
The next step is to cut out the human factor entirely. Skyeton has developed an on-board artificial
intelligence system so that Raybird can identify targets by itself. No need for an operator to be glued to the screen for hours on end, with the potential for loss of concentration.
One of the latest Raybird variants is also the first to be armed with a bomb. Man will literally be taken out of the equation, by this very 21st Century hunter-killer machine.
And such ‘progress’ is not confined to the combatants in Ukraine. Today, many non-state actors have armed themselves with efficient killer drones.
Eighteen years after that drone strike on Tyre seafront, Hezbollah fields its own fleet of attack UAVs. So, too, does the less powerful Hamas in Gaza. Both organisations’ drones can disable Israel’s latest battle tanks at a fraction of the cost.
The genie is out of the bottle. The age of the drone is here.