In all seriousness, the videos I’ve seen really have not shown infantry to be doing a great job of dealing with drones.
I get that there are some mitigating factors:
I only see the videos that Ukraine puts out, and those probably aren’t going to be tilted towards things going well for Russia.
Probably a lot of the people being targeted were recruited recently. Russia had very limited training time for even their basic stuff, much less teaching tactics that are still being developed against new weapons that also have evolving tactics.
I get that people often don’t have a lot of warning. The soldiers are a lot more visible to the drone than the drone is to the soldiers. And they have to act with maybe a few seconds; it’s easy for me to criticize actions from the armchair.
Sometimes, the intuitive reactions that humans have that we evolved to past threats aren’t great at countering present-day threats. We haven’t had to deal with something small and flying and clever that can readily kill us and anything else nearby. Not since we were small, rodent-like critters, at any rate. So I can believe that we probably aren’t really geared up for that at a human level.
I’m not really into land warfare all that much. But I do have a book on light infantry tactics. When infantry get ambushed, if they’re being ambushed at very close range – and this is why warning of an ambush includes mentioning whether it is “near” or “far” – the counter is not to take cover, but to immediately attack into the ambushers. Why? Because that messes up their lines of fire – now instead of a cleverly-set ambush, they’re having to worry about shooting their own people. But that’s hardly the intuitive reaction – if something is trying to kill you by surprise, backing up to get some room, or taking cover, or any number of other things are probably a lot more of a gut instinct. But we still manage to train for it.
But my point is still that at this point in the war, people have to know that drones are a serious problem. You’d think that people would have at least some kind of plan as to what to do when they encounter a drone. They go to the trouble of putting up anti-drone netting, building protection on vehicles, etc. But…tactics at the moment of actual contact matter, maybe more than all those other things.
I’ve seen a ton of videos where soldiers try to outrun drones. Sometimes try to outdrive them.
Sometimes take shelter in things that don’t protect against drones, like a house or vehicle with an open doorway.
Sometimes try to take cover where they’re pretty badly exposed against something that can maneuver, like trying to hide under or in something. That might work against artillery, but not against something that can be flown directly into you at a vulnerable angle.
Like, I don’t know what current doctrine is – and I’m sure that both sides have people working on it – but I’d think that it should probably be something like this:
If you are in the immediate vicinity of something that is actually hardened against drones, like a bunker with anti-drone netting and then another barrier, then maybe duck inside. That still probably isn’t going to deal well with, say, two drones, because the first one is going to destroy the netting, but I don’t know if drones are regularly deployed in groups.
If you’re on foot, scatter. The drone can hit one, but not everyone. Your job isn’t to run away from the drone, but to get a minimum radius between you and everyone else. That maximizes your chances and their chances. That doesn’t counter drones – spending a couple hundred dollars on a drone is a good trade for a soldier – but it at least mitigates their effect.
If you’re on a vehicle, if you’re carrying a bunch of infantry, halt and get dismounts off of and away from the vehicle. Sticking everyone on a vehicle is just making them a great target. The vehicle is probably going to be the target.
Possible exception: if you’re on a vehicle and can move quickly, call out the direction of the drone, then drive away from the drone to maximize time that it has to approach you. If you’ve got good odds of shooting down an incoming drone given extra time, that might be worthwhile remaining a single, concentrated target.
As soon as they’re away from others, everyone with a weapon who can should be shooting at the drone. If you’ve got a rifle or even a pistol and you have a few seconds of firing time before you get killed, you probably want to be trying to shoot down the thing that is trying to kill you. It may be hard to hit, but it’s gotta be better than the alternative. I know that those guys are carrying weapons, but I’ve seen so many videos of people just running around, trying to flinch or roll away from a drone, or whatever.
They can’t do this instantly, but my guess is the best existing weapon that could be widely deployed against small drones like this would be a short-barrel automatic shotgun firing birdshot; that was what I was suggesting to be a good idea early in the conflict. I know that it’s just probably not possible to have everyone lug around specialized weapons all the time, but at least if there’s a vehicle moving, someone is presumably looking out for threats. Semiautomatic if it’s not possible to get automatic.
It sounds like both sides are doing that now (semiautomatic, not automatic):
Russia Delivers Semi-Automatic Shotgun Vepr-12 to Armed Forces in Ukraine.
The Vepr-12 is a semi-automatic shotgun rifle originating from Russia, produced by Molot Oruzhie Ltd. since 2003. Designed by OOO “Molot-Oruzhie”, it was introduced to serve in the Russian armed forces and has also been used by other countries.
The primary purpose of this shotgun is to engage drones at short distances, especially when working in tandem with electronic warfare operators (for example, for drone suppression).
Ukraine Adopts Turkish BTS 12 Shotgun for Anti-Drone Warfare.
An automatic shotgun might have some recoil issues, but if it’s possible to mount it on a vehicle, that might mitigate that.
I’m sure that there are also efforts to try to develop new, dedicated systems that automatically warn of or target low-end drones, but obviously, given the videos that come out, we’re not fully there yet.
If you look at this video:
People are running. But they aren’t running away from each other. They’re running away from the drone.
I’m pretty sure that some of that was running for a trench, which I doubt is going to help all that much.
In this case, people ran towards each other. Naming the ones out-of-the-trench in order in the column, Guy #3 looked like he was running towards the trench until the drone got in front of him, Guy #2 is running away from the drone at first, then stops, and at the end is trying to run away from his buddy, who is heading straight for him. Guy #1 ran towards Guy #2. What they are not doing is running away from each other, then shooting at the drone.
It’s possible – I can’t tell - -that Guy #2 might have been trying to shoot at the drone – he had his rifle out at the end, and looked like he might have had a shooting stance a bit earlier. But I don’t think that anyone else was. Guy #3 was still moving, which I don’t think he’d be doing if he were trying to hit the drone.
I think that there are two people in the trench, and it looks like those were going for some kind of dugouts, which look like they have some kind of netting or fabric up. One might have made it in. But I’m pretty sure that neither was shooting at the drone.
But, okay, let’s analyze this.
They definitely had enough time to get away from each other. I would bet that every one had both a weapon and time to shoot at the drone. If they scatter and shoot, the most the drone kills is one, and at best, they shoot the drone. They maybe didn’t even need to scatter – they already had a fair bit of distance between each other. What they did here was ineffectual except for (a) maybe Guy #2, who I think may have been shooting until Guy #1 got too close to him, and (b) one of the guys in the trench, who I think made it into a bunker (assuming that the bunker would have protected him). So out of at least five guys, one guy might have done something to help protect the unit, and one guy might have done something to protect himself.
I’ll add that I’m not at all sure that those bunkers actually offer a whole lot of protection against drones. Maybe Russia has put out advisories on how to build drone-resistant bunkers, and this isn’t just someone’s ad hoc idea of how to stop them, but if there isn’t any form of internal wall, I am thinking that an explosion in the doorway may be sufficient to kill everyone inside. If everyone gets in one, then there’s the same concentrated target problem.
And one other point. I would guess that at this point, Ukraine probably has people review and edit the videos to avoid leaking important information. They probably have spent time looking at what to cut. But I still feel like there’s likely a good argument that some of the information should be censored.
For example, I think that that number in the right is a “distance traveled” number. That’s going to tell someone viewing the video – assuming that the drone flew in a fairly-straight line to reach the target – about how far away the launching point is. It may be that the way this works is that the drone operators are not at the location that the drone is being launched from, that there are some “field guys” that transport the drone to the launch point, and the “office guys” that fly it, with a radio relay being set up. Maybe the field guys “shoot and scoot”, so that that information doesn’t say much about where the drone people are by the time that the video comes out. But even general knowledge of how close the “field guys” are getting seems like it might be useful information, give Russia an idea as to where to have recon drones look. Ditto for the battery meters, which gives an idea of the range of the weapons.
I mean, Ukraine could put out the video, make the point that they hit the guys, but not provide any of that information.
I love how you give all this reasonable and sensible advice on movements and equipment but I think the russian army is just not that clever, disciplined and equipped to do all the things you mention, nor do they care 😂
They’d be throwing rocks and shovels if russian command demands them to. It’s a meat grinder, they do not care about personnel, they expect you to give up because you cannot keep up with the killing of their men. That is the russian tactic and way of doing things. Overwhelm you with bodies and once the surviving bodies get a hold of you, they will be brutal towards you like you live in a nightmare, due to the facts that the surviving soldiers will have an insane amount of hate towards you for killing so many of their comrades. Ask Germany how that went at the end of the war.
And one more follow-up. I realize that some of these things are incompatible with ways to counter other weapons. Ways to deal with taking artillery fire (where getting into a trench or at least going prone or staying in a lightly-armored vehicle may be a very good idea) may be a bad way to deal with a drone. And I assume that as doctrine and units develop, and maybe as artillery munitions become more-available, maybe we’ll see an increasing level of “combined arms” attacks – soldiers having to deal with concurrent threats from artillery and drones.
And sometimes, I’ve seen attacks from both drones and artillery.
But a lot of videos I’ve seen look to just be soldiers dealing with drones alone.
Yet another follow-up. Maybe everyone can’t carry a shotgun. But it might be possible to have something like a 40mm canister round if they are issued rifles with an underbarrel grenade launcher. That’d give them at least one shot with something maybe more-effective than rifle rounds.
Taking a quick skim, it looks like there is a canister munition for NATO 40mm grenade launchers:
HVCC, high-velocity canister cartridge[40] Canister shot containing several flechettes. Produces a 3 to 4 ft (0.91 to 1.2 m) wide dispersion pattern at 50 m (164 ft).[40]
So, we have stockpiles of that now. General Dynamics isn’t billing it as an anti-drone weapon in that PDF, but I would bet that it’d work. I would bet that the rounds aren’t that expensive (relative to other things that might be used for anti-drone defense). And as the above PDF points out, you can use them in an automatic grenade launcher, which a lot of light armor has…you can maybe convert an automatic grenade launcher into a potent short-range anti-air point-defense weapon with that.
While I’m looking at that, I notice that they also have the XM1176, which has a programmable air-burst fuze. I remember when the US military was looking into maybe issuing airbursting grenade launchers a while back:
They decided that they didn’t like the thing, so we don’t have a big stockpile of those. And the OICW wasn’t designed for shooting down aerial targets; it was intended to permit hitting targets behind cover. But…the programmable-time fuze munitions, in a different device capable of getting the range on an aerial target, might work well against drones. If you have an OICW-like device capable of identifying, calculating the range to, and then setting the range on a programmable fuze, an airbursting munition might actually do pretty well in bringing down a drone. Functionally act kind of like a proximity fuze, with less complexity on the munition, and that made a major difference in World War II, the last time that we were doing a lot of antiaircraft gunnery.
In all seriousness, the videos I’ve seen really have not shown infantry to be doing a great job of dealing with drones.
I get that there are some mitigating factors:
I only see the videos that Ukraine puts out, and those probably aren’t going to be tilted towards things going well for Russia.
Probably a lot of the people being targeted were recruited recently. Russia had very limited training time for even their basic stuff, much less teaching tactics that are still being developed against new weapons that also have evolving tactics.
I get that people often don’t have a lot of warning. The soldiers are a lot more visible to the drone than the drone is to the soldiers. And they have to act with maybe a few seconds; it’s easy for me to criticize actions from the armchair.
Sometimes, the intuitive reactions that humans have that we evolved to past threats aren’t great at countering present-day threats. We haven’t had to deal with something small and flying and clever that can readily kill us and anything else nearby. Not since we were small, rodent-like critters, at any rate. So I can believe that we probably aren’t really geared up for that at a human level.
I’m not really into land warfare all that much. But I do have a book on light infantry tactics. When infantry get ambushed, if they’re being ambushed at very close range – and this is why warning of an ambush includes mentioning whether it is “near” or “far” – the counter is not to take cover, but to immediately attack into the ambushers. Why? Because that messes up their lines of fire – now instead of a cleverly-set ambush, they’re having to worry about shooting their own people. But that’s hardly the intuitive reaction – if something is trying to kill you by surprise, backing up to get some room, or taking cover, or any number of other things are probably a lot more of a gut instinct. But we still manage to train for it.
But my point is still that at this point in the war, people have to know that drones are a serious problem. You’d think that people would have at least some kind of plan as to what to do when they encounter a drone. They go to the trouble of putting up anti-drone netting, building protection on vehicles, etc. But…tactics at the moment of actual contact matter, maybe more than all those other things.
I’ve seen a ton of videos where soldiers try to outrun drones. Sometimes try to outdrive them.
Sometimes take shelter in things that don’t protect against drones, like a house or vehicle with an open doorway.
Sometimes try to take cover where they’re pretty badly exposed against something that can maneuver, like trying to hide under or in something. That might work against artillery, but not against something that can be flown directly into you at a vulnerable angle.
Like, I don’t know what current doctrine is – and I’m sure that both sides have people working on it – but I’d think that it should probably be something like this:
If you are in the immediate vicinity of something that is actually hardened against drones, like a bunker with anti-drone netting and then another barrier, then maybe duck inside. That still probably isn’t going to deal well with, say, two drones, because the first one is going to destroy the netting, but I don’t know if drones are regularly deployed in groups.
If you’re on foot, scatter. The drone can hit one, but not everyone. Your job isn’t to run away from the drone, but to get a minimum radius between you and everyone else. That maximizes your chances and their chances. That doesn’t counter drones – spending a couple hundred dollars on a drone is a good trade for a soldier – but it at least mitigates their effect.
If you’re on a vehicle, if you’re carrying a bunch of infantry, halt and get dismounts off of and away from the vehicle. Sticking everyone on a vehicle is just making them a great target. The vehicle is probably going to be the target.
Possible exception: if you’re on a vehicle and can move quickly, call out the direction of the drone, then drive away from the drone to maximize time that it has to approach you. If you’ve got good odds of shooting down an incoming drone given extra time, that might be worthwhile remaining a single, concentrated target.
As soon as they’re away from others, everyone with a weapon who can should be shooting at the drone. If you’ve got a rifle or even a pistol and you have a few seconds of firing time before you get killed, you probably want to be trying to shoot down the thing that is trying to kill you. It may be hard to hit, but it’s gotta be better than the alternative. I know that those guys are carrying weapons, but I’ve seen so many videos of people just running around, trying to flinch or roll away from a drone, or whatever.
They can’t do this instantly, but my guess is the best existing weapon that could be widely deployed against small drones like this would be a short-barrel automatic shotgun firing birdshot; that was what I was suggesting to be a good idea early in the conflict. I know that it’s just probably not possible to have everyone lug around specialized weapons all the time, but at least if there’s a vehicle moving, someone is presumably looking out for threats. Semiautomatic if it’s not possible to get automatic.
It sounds like both sides are doing that now (semiautomatic, not automatic):
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/russia-delivers-semi-automatic-shotgun-vepr-12-to-armed-forces-in-ukraine
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/ukraine-adopts-turkish-bts-12-shotgun-for-anti-drone-warfare
An automatic shotgun might have some recoil issues, but if it’s possible to mount it on a vehicle, that might mitigate that.
I’m sure that there are also efforts to try to develop new, dedicated systems that automatically warn of or target low-end drones, but obviously, given the videos that come out, we’re not fully there yet.
If you look at this video:
People are running. But they aren’t running away from each other. They’re running away from the drone.
I’m pretty sure that some of that was running for a trench, which I doubt is going to help all that much.
In this case, people ran towards each other. Naming the ones out-of-the-trench in order in the column, Guy #3 looked like he was running towards the trench until the drone got in front of him, Guy #2 is running away from the drone at first, then stops, and at the end is trying to run away from his buddy, who is heading straight for him. Guy #1 ran towards Guy #2. What they are not doing is running away from each other, then shooting at the drone.
It’s possible – I can’t tell - -that Guy #2 might have been trying to shoot at the drone – he had his rifle out at the end, and looked like he might have had a shooting stance a bit earlier. But I don’t think that anyone else was. Guy #3 was still moving, which I don’t think he’d be doing if he were trying to hit the drone.
I think that there are two people in the trench, and it looks like those were going for some kind of dugouts, which look like they have some kind of netting or fabric up. One might have made it in. But I’m pretty sure that neither was shooting at the drone.
But, okay, let’s analyze this.
They definitely had enough time to get away from each other. I would bet that every one had both a weapon and time to shoot at the drone. If they scatter and shoot, the most the drone kills is one, and at best, they shoot the drone. They maybe didn’t even need to scatter – they already had a fair bit of distance between each other. What they did here was ineffectual except for (a) maybe Guy #2, who I think may have been shooting until Guy #1 got too close to him, and (b) one of the guys in the trench, who I think made it into a bunker (assuming that the bunker would have protected him). So out of at least five guys, one guy might have done something to help protect the unit, and one guy might have done something to protect himself.
I’ll add that I’m not at all sure that those bunkers actually offer a whole lot of protection against drones. Maybe Russia has put out advisories on how to build drone-resistant bunkers, and this isn’t just someone’s ad hoc idea of how to stop them, but if there isn’t any form of internal wall, I am thinking that an explosion in the doorway may be sufficient to kill everyone inside. If everyone gets in one, then there’s the same concentrated target problem.
And one other point. I would guess that at this point, Ukraine probably has people review and edit the videos to avoid leaking important information. They probably have spent time looking at what to cut. But I still feel like there’s likely a good argument that some of the information should be censored.
For example, I think that that number in the right is a “distance traveled” number. That’s going to tell someone viewing the video – assuming that the drone flew in a fairly-straight line to reach the target – about how far away the launching point is. It may be that the way this works is that the drone operators are not at the location that the drone is being launched from, that there are some “field guys” that transport the drone to the launch point, and the “office guys” that fly it, with a radio relay being set up. Maybe the field guys “shoot and scoot”, so that that information doesn’t say much about where the drone people are by the time that the video comes out. But even general knowledge of how close the “field guys” are getting seems like it might be useful information, give Russia an idea as to where to have recon drones look. Ditto for the battery meters, which gives an idea of the range of the weapons.
I mean, Ukraine could put out the video, make the point that they hit the guys, but not provide any of that information.
I love how you give all this reasonable and sensible advice on movements and equipment but I think the russian army is just not that clever, disciplined and equipped to do all the things you mention, nor do they care 😂
They’d be throwing rocks and shovels if russian command demands them to. It’s a meat grinder, they do not care about personnel, they expect you to give up because you cannot keep up with the killing of their men. That is the russian tactic and way of doing things. Overwhelm you with bodies and once the surviving bodies get a hold of you, they will be brutal towards you like you live in a nightmare, due to the facts that the surviving soldiers will have an insane amount of hate towards you for killing so many of their comrades. Ask Germany how that went at the end of the war.
And one more follow-up. I realize that some of these things are incompatible with ways to counter other weapons. Ways to deal with taking artillery fire (where getting into a trench or at least going prone or staying in a lightly-armored vehicle may be a very good idea) may be a bad way to deal with a drone. And I assume that as doctrine and units develop, and maybe as artillery munitions become more-available, maybe we’ll see an increasing level of “combined arms” attacks – soldiers having to deal with concurrent threats from artillery and drones.
And sometimes, I’ve seen attacks from both drones and artillery.
But a lot of videos I’ve seen look to just be soldiers dealing with drones alone.
Yet another follow-up. Maybe everyone can’t carry a shotgun. But it might be possible to have something like a 40mm canister round if they are issued rifles with an underbarrel grenade launcher. That’d give them at least one shot with something maybe more-effective than rifle rounds.
Taking a quick skim, it looks like there is a canister munition for NATO 40mm grenade launchers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_40_mm_grenades
https://www.gd-ots.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/40mm-M1001-HVCC.pdf
So, we have stockpiles of that now. General Dynamics isn’t billing it as an anti-drone weapon in that PDF, but I would bet that it’d work. I would bet that the rounds aren’t that expensive (relative to other things that might be used for anti-drone defense). And as the above PDF points out, you can use them in an automatic grenade launcher, which a lot of light armor has…you can maybe convert an automatic grenade launcher into a potent short-range anti-air point-defense weapon with that.
While I’m looking at that, I notice that they also have the XM1176, which has a programmable air-burst fuze. I remember when the US military was looking into maybe issuing airbursting grenade launchers a while back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM29_OICW
They decided that they didn’t like the thing, so we don’t have a big stockpile of those. And the OICW wasn’t designed for shooting down aerial targets; it was intended to permit hitting targets behind cover. But…the programmable-time fuze munitions, in a different device capable of getting the range on an aerial target, might work well against drones. If you have an OICW-like device capable of identifying, calculating the range to, and then setting the range on a programmable fuze, an airbursting munition might actually do pretty well in bringing down a drone. Functionally act kind of like a proximity fuze, with less complexity on the munition, and that made a major difference in World War II, the last time that we were doing a lot of antiaircraft gunnery.