Ukraine’s simultaneous sea and sky drone strike on Russia’s Black Sea flagship at the weekend was hailed as novel in naval warfare and a tactical turning point in Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
“We’ve never seen it [before],” Travis Reddy, CEO of Australian defence technology company DefendTex, told Crikey. “The ability to quickly evolve and iterate and affect the enemy is something that we’ve never seen in modern battle.”
According to open-source intelligence analysis of video footage (the source is yet to be confirmed), the dual aqua and aerial attack on the Crimean port of Sevastopol damaged and potentially disabled Russia’s lead frigate, the Admiral Makarov.
In a statement, Russia’s Defence Ministry called it a “terrorist attack” carried out with the aid and “supervision of British specialists”. It said Ukraine unleashed “nine unmanned aerial vehicles and seven autonomous maritime drones” on the “outer and inner roads” of the Sevastopol base, implicating both its Black Sea fleet and civilian ships.
Politics aside, just how does a drone worth a couple of thousand dollars debilitate a military asset worth hundreds of millions? Crikey turned its attention to the technology to talk tactics.
“The whole premise behind the use of drones is to use the many and the cheap to overwhelm the few and the expensive,” said Reddy, whose company provides weapon systems into Ukraine on behalf of governments around the world, including Australia.
He has also spent time in the field in Ukraine’s Donbas region and said drones are an inroad into asymmetric warfare. In short, attack your enemy where it’s weak and appear strong where you’re weak: “It’s all about trying to position yourself to take advantage of inherent flaws.”
One of the inherent flaws in traditional vessels of war — in this case Russia’s fleet — is that defence systems are designed to defend against fast-moving missiles, aircraft and the “easily detectable”. The beauty of drones is that they’re small and comparatively slow, so often get filtered as “clutter”.
“If they detect every bird that’s flying in the sky, every whitecap that’s on the ocean, the radar operator will be so consumed looking at a million things that aren’t of interest that they’ll miss those one or two things that are important,” Reddy said.
“You end up adopting this notion of hiding in plain sight, hiding amongst the noise, move slow, move steady, appear to be like all the other clutter that’s out there and then you’ll get filtered out and the operator will never see you because their systems are automatically removing that clutter.”
Psychologically, this breeds insecurity. Heightened vigilance means more hands on deck, more man hours, and operationally less efficiency.
Apply this to the Black Sea attack and suddenly the strategic scales start to tip. Small things are attacking from both air and ocean “overwhelming the decision-making cycle for people that are on the ship”.
It’s believed that many of these drones were neutralised by Russian defence systems, but not all.
“If one in 10 gets through that’s still a success,” said Reddy.
So what about the drones that made it through? Based on open-source intelligence analysis, the seaborne fighters are believed to be unmanned surface vessels (USVs) — similar to the canoe-like contraptions that washed up near Crimea in September.
These come equipped with a jet ski engine on the back, a Starlink satellite terminal for remote control, a thermal imaging camera, and contacts at the front to activate a detonator.
Reddy’s read is that someone’s remotely piloting it, “looking for the targets of opportunity”, locating a target, homing in, getting close enough, then detonating.
From the sky, it was probably a “suicide” drone that flies a “one-way mission”. These are the size of a Coke can and operate much like a flying hand grenade, meaning the explosives are embedded into the device. When it detonates, the drone goes down with it.
The drone game is very different on land, but its introduction to modern warfare is what Reddy deems “the great leveller of the battlefield”.
“One of the reasons that the Russians didn’t manage to succeed in the early days, is their logistics chain couldn’t keep up with the ammunition that’s needed, the fuel that’s needed, the food that’s needed to support all those tanks that are operating,” he said. “Drones don’t need any of that. They need a power socket somewhere you can plug in and recharge it.”
Makes me wonder why we are getting our knickers in a twist about multi billion dollar submarine projects. We should be covering our remote coastal areas with radar and drone bases. I assume we are all about defence and have no imperial ambitions of our own.
But we seem to have imperial ambitions for the US.
Right-on, bro! And I daresay that by the time our ancillary squadron of the US Sixth Fleet gets in the water (2040? 2050?) any enemy will have a whole fleet of drone subs with which to take them out.
We don’t have to do much of that in the North because the crocs have a major deterrent factor.
Large surface ships are good for projecting power but now useless for actually fighting wars.
Pretty sure the game changed decades ago for armed surface ships. The last time a navy had success in war was in the Falklands and even then the Royal Navy was saved because Argentina only had a few Exocet missiles to deploy but the few they launched caused mayhem. Surface ships are slow and visible, floating targets for modern jet aircraft, submarines and missiles fired from land, sea or air. Now we can add drones operating in the air and on the water. Comforting to know that we are spending $45 billion on new Frigates!
There’s a surprising amount of technology available for very little money that once integrated with very basic hardware can become a weapon.
There’s been an explosion of drone based tasks from surveying to inspection to search and rescue to driverless agricultural machinery to hobbyists mucking around.
There’s Ardupilot https://www.ardupilot.org/ freely available online covering surface, air, water or submersible drones as an autopilot.
There’s cheap chips or modules available for GNSS (GPS/Galeleo/GLONASS/…) navigation, inertial navigation, vision, barometer, temperature, compass etc
Sure there are military grade versions costing mega bucks but the consumer products plus a roomful of engineers paid by a natio state can achieve a lot with little effort.
There was all this scoffing when a Russian drone was shown to be using a consumer camera worth less than $1000 – err… why scoff? Seems pretty smart – ditto for the use of consumer GPS units.
I’m pretty sure Ukraine is focused on outcome and delivery – whether they’ve bootstrapped their efforts with freeware and consumer chips or not.
Drones are now everywhere – why spend $10m on fancy tech when $1000 and some gaffer tape gets the same result?
Apparently from Russian sources, 9 aerial drones and 7 maritime drones, controlled from a US spy drone from Italy loitering over the Black sea. All the aerial drones were claimed as destroyed and 4 of the maritime drones.
The maritime drones were apparently sourced from the UK, as was the training in their use. The training base was promptly hit with a cruise missile.
The boats may have hit a Missile Frigate and definitely a minesweeper – damage is not known atm – the Russians don’t blab much about losses for tactical reasons, but there are reports the Minesweeper may have sunk. Expect to see increased cruise missile attacks the next few days
The surprise factor is one aspect, something that will gradually be lost in future attacks, as rushed countermeasures are developed, but the scale of mass attacks – if 1 or 2 get through that is often all that’s needed.
Loitering drones carrying bombs, and the “suicide” loitering munitions drones developed from the Iranian “Shaheed” have been used by the Russians for the last couple of months – called “Geranium” – the “Geranium” drone has about the same power as a 155mm artillery shell, so moderately effective for small cost. I’m not sure what size the explosives dropped by the other loitering drones are, but they seem to be about the same size, going by videos released of their use.
Russians have also been using their more expensive drones for artillery fire control since the beginning of the war
Drones are definitely changing the face of modern warfare
And Petee Dutton cancelled our drone program so that he could “concentrate” on space.
Would that “space” be between his ears, because I have always considered that a void.
Presumably nobody tell him that the same technology for controlling drones is essential for his Buck Rogers fantasies.
Again having to rewrite a comment because a normal word (think of the Fat bloke in Thomas the Tank engine) had evil letters – thus the substitution below
“Presumably nobody tell him that the same technology for directing drones is essential for his Buck Rogers fantasies.”