Drones have transformed mine warfare in Ukraine:
Mines were buried underground for concealment, unless the minefield was laid in a hurry when they might be simply placed on the surface. This made them easier to avoid but kept thew deterrent effect.
The US developed scatterable mines during the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s. These are a fraction the size of traditional mines, with a magnetic sensor triggered by a vehicle passing over them. Scatterable mines were dropped by aircraft or helicopters, and later by special artillery rounds and rockets. This enabled commanders to create minefields behind enemy lines to block or channel movement or simply to cause casualties. The USSR soon fielded their own versions.
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The TM-62 is powerful enough to destroy a tank track or blow off a wheel and immobilize it or destroy lighter vehicles.
Ukraine’s ‘Baba Yaga’ multicopter bombers started dropping modified TM-62s as bombs. Then the operators experimented with laying TM-62s as mines. They could be placed on the trails left by tracked vehicles, or on roads miles behind enemy lines, giving a very high chance of a hit.
Any vehicle immobilized by a mine will be spotted by the reconnaissance drones, and bombers and FPVs dispatched to finish it off before it can be recovered.
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Last summer Ukraine’s elite Birds of Magyar drone unit started placing mines on roads behinds enemy lines at night. Russian military social media lit up with warnings and reports of casualties. A Russian map showed that every segment of the 72-kilometre road network around Krynky had been mined. Logistics vehicles taking supplies to the front were being destroyed at an unprecedented rate.
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The miner’s preferred weapon was the ten-pound PTM-3, which is significantly bigger than the PTM-1S but has a far more effective design. Rather than simply relying on blast, this is a shaped charge weapon, Each of the four sides of the PTM-3 is a linear shaped charge which will, when detonated, cut through almost anything immediately above it, neatly severing a tank tread or severely damaging a soft vehicle.
The mines were placed at night, making them difficult to spot from vehicles driving at high speed without lights because of the threat of drone attacks.
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To make demining more challenging, the Ukrainians also produce wooden replica PPTMs which look just like the real thing. These are likely much lighter so can be mixed in with real mines.
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Scatter mining is inefficient because it distributes a few mines over a large area. Drone mining puts mines exactly where they are needed and can be used to block an opponent’s advance or retreat, or cut their supply lines. Drones may quickly ring any static opponent with mines, penning them in.
If drones shall be mines, why shouldn’t drones be miners?
P.S. Love them or hate them, it’s genuinely impressive how resilient the Ukrainian military command has been. Yes, it’s a proxy of the United State; nevertheless, most other proxies would’ve folded long, long ago.
Overwhelmingly the victims of mines are civilians. It looks as though Diana Spencer’s anti-mine activism was a complete failure, with even our host Isegoria appearing to approve of them.
Hence solutions like cope-caging a whole road.
Jim says:
They could also be minesweepers. Even for something less noticeable than dropped mines.
First pass is a flyby with non-linearity detector. All electronics that isn’t shielded up the yingyang shows.
After that, classics. Just hang good old pulse minesweeper sensor on a cable from some cheap quad-copter (since sweeping is slow and payload is very modest, performance requirements are low).
No dude with helmet and whatnot at arm + cane length, so no extra moving metal in a few meters, other than the cable. The trade-off is increased weather dependency.
It’s still slow, too. But maybe fielding great amount of these things in mostly automated mode would help.
“Scatter mining is inefficient because it distributes a few mines over a large area.”
Scatter mining have never been what he says it is.
Okay, I see that has been written by a journalist…
If the enemy is in range, so are you. Ukraine came up with a brilliant new way of killing. Within twenty-four hours, the Russians were working on a copy. More Russians are getting killed, and so are more Ukrainians. This is a win how?
Very cool, T. Beholder.