Homemade drones shine in battle
Toys, gaming gear being turned into armed, flying craft
IVANIVSKE, Ukraine — Buzzing like an oversize mosquito, a small drone lifted off from a farm field in eastern Ukraine, hovered for a bit, then raced toward Russian positions near the battle-ravaged city of Bakhmut.
“Friends, let’s go!” said the pilot, Pvt. Yevhen. With a pair of virtual reality goggles strapped around his head, he used joysticks to steer the craft and its payload of 2 pounds of explosives.
Cobbled together from hobby drones, consumer electronics and computer gaming gear, handmade attack drones like this one have emerged as one of the deadliest and most widespread innovations in more than 14 months of warfare in Ukraine.
Along the front line, drones extend the reach of soldiers, who can fly them with pinpoint accuracy to drop hand grenades into enemy trenches or bunkers, or fly into targets to blow up on impact. Self-destructing drones, in particular, are easily constructed, and thousands of soldiers on both sides now have experience building them from commonly available parts — though the Ukrainians say they use such weapons more frequently than their Russian opponents.
These small craft proliferated on the battlefield last fall, long before Russia said last week that two explosions over the Kremlin were a drone strike. Ukraine and Russia have blamed each other for the incident, and if attack drones did, in fact, fly over the Kremlin walls, it is unclear what type they were, what kind of range they had, or who was responsible.
For years, the United States deployed Predator
and Reaper drones in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost tens of millions of dollars apiece, and can fire missiles and then return to their bases. Ukraine, in contrast, has adapted a wide array of small craft that are widely available as consumer products, from quadcopters to fixed-wing drones, to spot targets and drop grenades.
Exploding drones belong to a class of weapons known as loitering munitions, for being able to circle or hover before diving on a target.
Russia manufactures a self-destructing drone for military use, the Lancet, and it has made extensive use of Shahed attack drones bought from Iran. The United States has provided to the Ukrainian military a purpose-built loitering munition, the Switchblade.
Such industrially made
craft have longer ranges and some have heavier payloads than the homemade weapons used in Ukraine. But the Switchblade, like the Shahed, often navigates to preprogrammed targets, a system that Ukrainian soldiers say is less effective than their hand-built alternatives, steered remotely.
Soldiers and civilian volunteers make these in garage workshops, experimenting and inventing with 3D printed materials, explosives and custom-built software to try to avoid Russian electronic countermeasures.
They have produced some that drop bombs large enough to destroy armored vehicles and can be reused, and cost as much as $20,000.
The smaller, more common self-destructing drones like those flown by
Yevhen cost a few hundred dollars. They are built around a type of drone used for hobby racing, usually a model made by the Chinese company DJI, with explosives attached using zip ties or tape.
They are single-use, disposable weapons; once armed and launched, they cannot even be landed safely.
“I see huge potential” for the weapon in the type of trench fighting that has dominated the war, Maj. Kyryl Veres, the commander of a Ukrainian brigade stationed near Severesk, to the north of Bakhmut, said in an interview. “Any equipment can be hit in a place where the enemy thinks he is a million percent safe.”
A cheap drone destroying a far more expensive armored personnel carrier is an example of asymmetric
warfare, used to overcome an enemy’s technological or numerical advantages. And despite the influx of Western weapons, Ukrainian forces remain outgunned by the Russians.
“The Ukrainian army should use unusual, asymmetrical tools of war,” said Serhiy Hrabsky, a retired army colonel and commentator on the war for Ukrainian media.
He drew a parallel to the roadside bombs that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan used, to devastating effect, against the U.S. military, which called them improvised explosive devices. Ukraine, Hrabsky said, is using “improvised kamikaze drones.”
He added that “the art of war is not static.”
The experience of flying with virtual reality goggles, providing an immersive view from the drone’s camera, is like playing a high-stress video game. The missions are far from riskfree for the pilots. The short range of the drones while carrying explosive loads — about 4 miles, typically — means the pilots must fly from trenches at or near the front line — vulnerable to artillery and snipers.
Still, the drones are lethally effective. The Ukrainian military has posted dozens of videos recorded by the drones as they swoop in on targets, with devastating accuracy.
Pilots chase and hit moving tanks or fly through the open doors of armored vehicles to explode inside, as soldiers at the last moment try to jump to safety. And they routinely fly drones into bunkers.