The Guardian profiles one of Ukraine’s deadliest drone pilots:
Earlier this week, Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, announced the 10th model of first person view drone (FPV) “that officially goes into operation in the armed forces of Ukraine”.
Not only has Olexsandr, nor any of his colleagues, not seen this drone, but they say they have not received any such hardware from the ministry of defence.
Olexsandr’s drones are all made from components bought online from China and then put together by two of his friends on the 24th floor of an apartment block in Kyiv.
He either picks them up on his monthly trips back to Ukraine’s capital where he lives or they are delivered by post to him close to his field of operation.
The price is about $400 (£314) a drone and the costs are largely met by generous unnamed donors. That is said to be significantly less than the $650 being paid by the big voluntary organisations that are buying up drones for other army units due to the lack of equipment from the defence ministry. “We can win this war with drones,” says Olexsandr. And yet the Russian drive to build them in their thousands and provide them cheaply to the frontline is not being replicated on the Ukrainian side, he adds.
“It is why even now I am not joining the armed forces — if you join the commander can be a fool and not know how to conduct quality operations,” he says. “I’m very effective by myself. I am ready to fight until the end of the war like this. According to official information, Russia produces 3,000 drones from the plants. In Ukraine, some small rich tsars [profiteering businessmen] produce these drones for selling, volunteer funds buy them and then charge them $650 a drone.”
He has lost eight reconnaissance drones to Russian fire, including two last month when a tank shot close to his position leaving him with a deep gash to his leg. “The Russians have changed their strategy to try and kill drone crews,” he says.
[…]
Olexsandr had little experience of drones before February 2022 but could see they could be crucial to the war effort and so practised with one purchased from the internet. “I wanted to find something where I could be most useful,” he says.
[…]
On a reconnaissance mission, Olexsandr prefers to be alone. He will typically be set a kilometre square piece of ground to monitor, working from as close as 800m from the target and as far away as 12km.
When he is working with kamikaze drones, he operates in teams of three to four. One will operate a reconnaissance drone and another pilots the kamikaze drone itself, which is attached to up to 600g of C4 explosive material. Then there will be at least one other person overseeing the signal and wider communications.
The Ukrainian crew could be as close as 400m from the target or as distant as 5.5km away.
Throughout the Age of Exploration, what we might say was the zenith of European civilization’s spiritual power, the tradition of buying commissions for filling out the junior officer corps was de rigueur for many state militaries across the continent.
With the rising tide of bureaucratism over the 19th century putting paid to the practice practically everywhere by the turn of the 20th, the ostensible justification was that this would result in more ‘professional’ fighting forces, with ‘less chance of incompetence’, and all that.
A funny thing happened though. The sort of funny things that for some reason always seem to happen every time you see something that takes the form of ‘let us have a grand central soviet of [thing] that will thus allow us to get even more gooder and more numerous [thing] than ever before’.
Instead of ‘like what we have now, but even better’, valour, personal dedication, and care for troops, disappear in the span of a generation. Or pretty much overnight in historical terms. The armies that conquered Imperivm Brittorvm and the armies that were made to live like pigs in unimproved trenches for months despite complete lack of movement (because ‘merely temporary measures for the glorious offensive’ was official doctrine) could not be any more different in spiritual terms.
A big chunk of the reason is obvious really when you stop to apply some critical thinking to it for 5 seconds; what kind of person would shell out *their own* money to put themselves in harms way at war? Unless they were really interested in war.
Comparatively, a contemporary officer corps in the occident is stuffed to the gills with glorified desk clerks looking to draw their pay checks with the least amount of trouble possible.
[NB: the Kaiser's armies at the same time period of course lived like kings comparatively, engineering very nice well made earthwork complexes and fortifications, because they still had an aristocratic officer corps]
Two apposite quotes:
When the enemy is in range, so are you.
They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—
Very “smart” of the Guardian to say he lives in “24th floor”…