Isegoria

The Lancet loitering munition is a standout success for Russia:

While other weapons have performed below expectation during the invasion of Ukraine, this 35-pound kamikaze drone has proven capable of taking out a wide range of targets, including main battle tanks and parked aircraft, from far over the horizon.

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After being used on a trial basis in Syria in 2021, the Lancet was rushed into full-scale service for this conflict. The first known use in Ukraine was in July 2022, some five months into the invasion. Since then it has been used in small but growing numbers.

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At first only a handful of Lancet strike videos were posted each month. But this January, 22 Lancet attack videos appeared. That number rose to 62 in May, and 124 in August. The makers claim they are mass-producing the weapon at a new facility, so what we are seeing now is only the start. This growth in production is taking place despite the fact that the Lancet uses Western-made electronics, which in theory should be impossible for Russia to obtain.

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The Lancet is launched from a catapult rail and transmits video back to the operator. Lancets are reportedly flown in conjunction with reconnaissance drones which spot targets and relay coordinates. The Lancet operator flies to the target area, visually confirms the target, and carries out the strike.

An electric propeller drives the Lancet at around 70 miles per hour. This slow speed makes it an easier target than a guided missile or other munition.

“Every day we shoot down at least one or two of these Lancets,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, told Reuters. “But it’s not a 100 percent interception rate, unfortunately.”

Early Lancet attacks were all on static targets. More recent videos have shown hits on moving vehicles. This may indicate a change in doctrine or an improvement in operator skill levels.

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According to Lost Armor, as of Oct. 3 there are 667 Lancet strike videos. Of these, 210 are classed as target destroyed (31%), 355 target damaged (53%), 48 miss (7%), and 52 are unknown (7%) . In particular, the heavy armor of tanks sometimes shrugs off the Lancet’s relatively small warhead.

This suggests that around 2,000 Lancets have destroyed 200 targets and damaged hundreds. That may seem low, but with each Lancet costing perhaps $35,000 and each target costing millions, the Lancet is extremely cost-effective.

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By far the largest number of Lancet strike videos show attacks on Ukrainian artillery, both towed and self-propelled guns. As a recent report from UK defense think tank RUSI notes, Russian forces now use the Lancet extensively as a counter-battery weapon. Artillery is the traditional means of striking enemy artillery, but the long range of the Lancet, and its ability to seek out hidden targets on the ground, give it real advantages. Additionally, the Lancet operator remains hidden and will not be targeted by counter-battery fire.

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Towed artillery is much harder to destroy than a self-propelled gun, even when hit. The latter is a tracked vehicle with a store of flammable fuel and explosive ammunition on board, either of which can be set off by a Lancet strike. A towed artillery piece, by contrast, is a more solid piece of machinery able to survive the blast and minor shrapnel fragments of a Lancet hit.

“The lethality of Lancet is often insufficient,” according to the RUSI report. “One officer also said that although he had seen his gun ‘destroyed’ several times online, it remained alive and well.”

This tallies with previous conflicts in which towed artillery has proven more robust to counter-battery fire. Crews may be injured or killed, but the guns themselves tend to survive and remain serviceable. In WWII, the loss rate for self-propelled guns was two to three times higher than for towed artillery. So many of the Lancet hits on towed artillery likely did not result in kills.

Both drones and thermal imagers have been game changers in the Ukraine conflict, but fitting a thermal imager to a drone is not so simple:

These days high-end drones, like smartphones, have high quality video: and it is possible to shoot impressive 4K video at 60 frames per second from a drone that fits in your pocket. 2.7k and 1080p video are routine on lower-cost models. But thermal imagers are many years behind video cameras, and resolutions are much lower.

You can get a low-cost thermal imager like the Seek Thermal Compact for under $200, but the resolution is only 206 x 156 pixels – fine for checking insulation and finding leaks around the house, but no good for seeing objects hundreds of meters away. Going up to 320 x 240 will double the price, but you will still struggle to tell whether you are looking at a truck or a tank. Part of the problem is that while a video camera can show differences in brightness and color, a thermal image is monochrome and only shows temperature. The details which help identify objects visually may be missing, an issue highlighted by how difficult it is to recognize faces via thermal imaging.

When discussing the issue of thermal imager on reconnaissance drones, an expert from Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka drone unit noted on social media that a Matrice drone with a thermal imager costing several thousand dollars could only detect Russian vehicles at 3-4 miles distance and even then distinguishing types was difficult. The daylight camera could pick out targets from 15 miles. They suggested spending the money on more batteries and an additional ground control unit as a better way of boosting the drone’s usefulness.

This applies even more so with FPV drones. The drone flies at high speed and requires a skilled pilot to avoid obstacles and successfully hit the target, so good quality video with a rapid refresh rate, and cheap thermal imagers will not do the job.

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“Ukrainian manufacturers also have all these technologies and can produce FPV drones with thermal imaging cameras, but the main problem is the price,” an Escadrone spokesman told Forbes. “If a regular FPV drone costs $500, then the same drone with a thermal imaging camera will cost about $2,500.”

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This type of issue highlights the difference between military-grade loitering munitions like the U.S.-made SwitchBlade 300. This is similar in size to an FPV drone and has daylight and thermal imaging, plus a lock-on-to-target function and numerous other features, but costs around $50,000 per shot.

Larger, reusable drones costing in the tens of thousands of dollars make far more sense for thermal imagers.

An AI racing drone recently beat human pilots, raising the question of when AI drones will transform warfare:

“The AI is superhuman because it discovers and flies the best maneuvers, also it is consistent and precise, which humans are not,” says Scaramuzza. He notes that, as with AlphaGo, Swift was able to use moves — in this case flight trajectories — which the human champions did not even think were possible.

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A $400 FPV with the warhead from an RPG rocket launcher can knock out a tank, personnel carrier or artillery piece from several miles away, or chase down and destroy a truck traveling at high speed. They are cheap enough to use against individual footsoldiers and can dive into trenches. But it requires a skilled human pilot. Ukrainian sources say the training takes around a month to achieve proficiency, and many people fail the course.

FPV success rates appear to vary wildly, with different sources citing 20%, 30%, 50% or 70% — much appears to depend on the exact situation, the presence of jamming, and the skill of the pilot. A super-skilled AI might push that rate far above 70%, negate any risk of jamming and enable fleets of smart FPV drones to attack simultaneously without human operators.

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Swift relies on having reliable information on the speed, location and orientation of the drone in real time. This is far more challenging outdoors where there are changes of illumination, wind gusts and other variables to contend with.

Also, Swift has to learn the course ahead of time to work out its flight path.

“The current system only works for drone racing and for a specific racing track of which you perfectly know the map,” says Scaramuzza.

The neural network which navigates through the gates is trained specifically for that layout . The other problem is that Swift trains on a specific setup and if conditions change – for example the wind changes direction – all its learning may be wasted.

“Swift’s perception system and physics model assumes that the appearance of the environment and its physics are both consistent with what was observed during training,” says Scaramuzza. “If this assumption fails, the system can fail.”

Andrei Bogdanov, CEO of Barcelona-based drone company UAVHE, is not developing his Baduga flying rifle for the military:

The problem Bogdanov is trying to solve is the control of feral pigs. The Twitterverse mocked an American user who suggested that he needed an assault weapon to prevent his yard being invaded by “30-50 feral hogs” in 2019. But controlling these animals, which cause an estimated $1.5 bn in damage in the US alone each year, is a major challenge.

Hunters usually only kill a few in a pack, causing the rest to scatter. In Spain where Bogdanov is based, hunters shoot some 400,000 wild pigs every year, but this is not enough to stop the population rising.

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Bogdanov, has developed Baduga, a hunting rifle mounted on a small drone. A smart suspension system keeps the weapon’s center of gravity below the point of attachment, and gyro-stabilization ensures that the barrel remains stable regardless of wind or motion. The sights, including a multispectral camera able to see in the dark, are mounted on the barrel.

Bogdanov says that the firing platform is effectively decoupled and independent from the drone, firing as easily as it would from a tripod. The system automatically compensates for recoil, and has a magazine of 60 rounds. A further development may see automated in-flight magazine changing.

Early versions of the design employed off-the-shelf gyros, the latest iteration is custom-built for this application and weighs around 4 kilos, with the rifle adding a similar weight. The platform is a standard heavy commercial drone, similar to those which carry movie cameras and survey instruments.

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Bogdanov says his setup achieves an accuracy of better than 0.1 minutes of arc, so the limitation is the accuracy of the rifle and ammunition.

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“Unlike ground shooters, a drone in the air has a more accurate picture of the direction and strength of the wind over the altitude spectrum — it is easily calculated from the drift of the aircraft relative to the ground,” says Bogdanov.

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So why not go down the obvious route and develop this specifically as a weapon system for the defense sector?

“Despite a common myth, developments for the military do not bring in a lot of money,” says Bogdanov. “We have shown it many times, but so far the matter has not gone further than talks and interest from military customers connected with it.”

In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, experts were surprised at how poorly the Russian army’s electronic warfare units performed:

Expecting a walkover, Moscow may have thought they wouldn’t need to fully deploy electronic warfare systems. But Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a US think tank, says another problem was that electronic warfare units couldn’t keep up with the rest of the troops.

“Russian systems are large unwieldy, vehicle-borne systems that are designed to be on the defensive,” he says. “And as a result, their electronic warfare systems weren’t very agile, they weren’t very fast and they weren’t very numerous.”

But Russia has learned from its mistakes, he says. Instead of using large equipment that can be easily spotted and destroyed, it is now increasingly relying on smaller, more mobile devices.

Bryan Clark says Russia has managed to deploy hundreds of mobile electronic warfare units along the front line in an attempt to slow down Ukraine’s counter-offensive. These range from GPS jammers to systems that suppress radar and prevent US aircraft identifying targets for Ukraine to attack.

Russian systems such as Zhitel and Pole-21 are proving to be particularly effective to jam GPS and other satellite links. They can disable drones that direct artillery fire and carry out kamikaze attacks on Russian troops.

Many of the sophisticated weapons provided to Ukraine by Nato countries are vulnerable to such jamming too because they use a GPS signal for navigation.

“Zhitel can jam a GPS signal within 30km of the jammer,” says Mr Clark. “For weapons like [US-made] JDAM bombs, which use just a GPS receiver to guide it to the target, that’s sufficient to lose its geolocation and go off target.”

The same applies to the guided rockets fired by the Himars multiple rocket system, which made a big contribution to Ukraine’s successful offensives last autumn.

The US arsenal has been virtually stripped of 155 mm artillery shells:

This has produced a situation where the US military has a powerful incentive to not only buy more 155 mm shells, but to buy the most technologically advanced version.

The Sub-Caliber Artillery Long-Range Projectile is designed to strike targets at long range with extremely high precision using a standard 155 mm gun. It can hit both stationary and moving targets at ranges of well over 68 miles (110 km), greater than the range of its predecessor. The ultimate objective of the shell is to achieve one-shot, one-kill.

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The details of the new projectile haven’t been released, though we do know that it’s a sabot round. That is, the projectile is sealed in a canister that strips away when it leaves the gun muzzle, revealing the aerodynamic projectile. In flight, the projectile deploys fins and wings and a motor (a rocket or a ramjet) to provide additional speed and range.

Inside, there is an avionics package to guide the projectile to its target and electronic countermeasures to fend off hostile jamming. This is particularly impressive engineering because these electronics must withstand a shock of 15,500 gs when fired from the gun.

The first atomic bomb test site — selected in 1944 from a shortlist of eight possible test sites in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado — had been selected, in part, for its supposed isolation:

Yet in reality, nearly half-a-million people were living within a 150-mile radius of the explosion, with some as close as 12 miles away. Many, if not most, of these civilians were still asleep when the bomb detonated just before dawn.

Several civilians nearby — stunned by the blast — later reported that they thought they were experiencing the end of the world. A local press report stated that the flash had been so bright that a blind girl in Socorro, New Mexico — about 100 miles from the bombing range — was able to see it, and asked: “What’s that?” In Ruidoso, New Mexico, a group of teenage campers were jolted out of their bunk beds onto their cabin floor. They ran outside, worried that a water heater had exploded. Barbara Kent, one of the campers, recently recalled in an interview with National Geographic that “[A]ll of a sudden, there was a big cloud overheard, and lights in the sky. It hurt our eyes. It was as if the sun came out tremendous. The whole sky turned strange.”

A few hours later, white flakes began to fall from the sky. The campers began to play in the flurry.

“We were grabbing the white flakes, and putting it all over ourselves, pressing it on our faces,” Kent said. “But the strange thing, instead of being cold like snow, it was hot. And we all thought, ‘Well, the reason it’s hot is because it’s summer.’ We were only thirteen; we didn’t know any better.”

One family in Oscuro, about 45 miles away from the site, hung wet bed sheets in their windows to keep the flakes from floating into the house. The strange substance continued to fall from the sky for days, coating everything: orchards, gardens, herds of livestock, cisterns, ponds, and rivers.