I wasn’t planning on doing another Ukraine drone piece so soon after my Martian war machine post, but these new Ukrainian ground drones are pretty interesting.
The video covers three new remote platforms:
“The Termite, or termit, which stands for Track Modular Infantry Transporter, has a 300kg payload. It can carry a single casualty, or be sent with a controller so a casualty can self steer him or herself, and a more seriously injured colleague away from danger. Its modular design means it can also deliver military kit and carry offensive weapons. With a 20-hour power pack, it has front and rear cameras and night vision.”
Next: The Shablya combat platform, which is a remote control turret. “Its 7.62mm machine gun can destroy enemy armored vehicles and UAVS.” UAVS, sure, but it would have to be a very lightly armored vehicle for 7.62 to penetrate. “Easily hidden, it can also be attached to the Termite. It can be controlled from a shelter or via Wi-Fi, and it can store targets and reposition at the push of a button. It needs three boxes of 200 rounds but the barrel needs changing every 600.” The form factor is pretty striking, looking like something out of a video game. Or maybe a Vektor CR-21. And indeed, automatic versions of turrets like this have been a staple of various video games for some time.
Last is the Lyut or Fury, a four-wheeled remote-operated 7.62mm machine gun platform.
All these are interesting bits of kit that are probably well-suited to the Ukrainian battlefield, but all probably superfluous to, say, U.S. military needs. The Termite is probably 1/50th the cost (or less) than the army’s robotic mule, but its slow speed means it’s probably unsuited for evacuating wounded troops or near-front logistics resupply for an army as focused on maneuver warfare as the U.S., and unlike the robotic mule is probably unsuited to rough terrain. U.S. forces would probably use helicopters or any number of IFVs for those roles. Likewise, I don’t see much of a role for the wheeled gun platform for much the same reasons (though from time to time you read about Uncle Sam testing broadly similar remote vehicles for roles like remote demolition).
I can see more uses for the remote turrets as an area-denial weapon for certain situations, such setting up a dozen or so around bivouac perimeters with one guy monitoring the video feed. Knowing America’s modern weapon procurement trends, they would probably try to include an autonomous mode, which would do great right up until it fragged friendly troops or some kid tending sheep…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 4th, 2024 at 11:57 AM and is filed under Military, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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11 Responses to “Ukraine Rolls Out More Drone Innovations”
Given the track record we have, the more likely outcome of a US-operated ground RPV encountering shepherds is that the idiots running the thing will have completely failed to account for the likely presence of said shepherds, freeze, allow the thing to be captured and then used against us…
I have no ‘effing idea at all how the morons involved with the operational planning in Afghanistan and Iraq continually failed to account for these sorts of encounters… We have two famous incidents stemming from “Special” forces (and, I use that term in the sense of “Special Education”) encountering the “unexpected civilians”. Bravo Two Zero was an SAS example, and that ridiculous bullshit during “Operation Red Wings” was another. There were more, by both the UK and the US.
I have no idea why these ‘effing idiots in the various “Speshul” outfits keep assuming that the local civilians where they’re going to be operating won’t be out doing things like, y’know, herding their sheep, but there you are: Even after Bravo Two Zero, which should have served as a “learning event” for all concerned, they kept right on insouciantly prancing into areas that even cursory recon should have told them was going to be filled with “civilians on the battlefield”.
I blame a lot of this crap on training at home station, where they go out into the desert and just play war, absent civilians who’re exploiting it all. In the UK, I find it hard to believe that the SAS didn’t routinely encounter civilians in their training areas, but apparently they just handwaved that whole issue away in Desert Storm. It’s even more egregious for the US forces that were there in Afghanistan, because it ain’t exactly (or, shouldn’t be…) news that the civilians are going to report your ass to whoever, and you have to have a plan for that which is going to work. Discovering that you’ve been “made” by a kid, and then not having a plan or the balls to execute said plan by killing that kid? You’ve just suffered an extreme failure to train or prepare for the real world.
The US military is horrible at this. I was making this point as far back as Bosnia, because nobody was taking into account that there were going to be civilians all over the place, and they were all going to be watching and reporting on everything we did. I ran training for people with that assumption built in, and that was the only place I ever heard of anyone doing that. Had several victims of my training scenarios look me up after their tours over there, and they were like “You were the only person who talked about that as a risk, and you were absolutely right… It was; they started responding to what we were doing as battle drills within days…”
You fight as you train, and so you must train as you mean to fight. The “We’re in a vacuum…” assumptions made in most US military training setups, which are encouraged by our huge training bases and lack of civilian presence where we train most of the time, only encourage this.
Shepherds are gonna happen, especially where there are subsistence farmers and herders across Central Asia and the Middle East. You have to account for that, and if you don’t…? Lone Survivor II, here we come. I don’t blame guys like Marcus Luttrell, I blame the idiots running the training programs and doing the operational planning.
Secondary point: The US military has horrible machinegun doctrine, mostly due to the idiocy with which we equip and train the crews. Our basic tripod that’s on issue is the M122, which is the same one that went under the Browning .30 back during WWII, and the M192, which is a titanium copy thereof. Both of these tripods are optimized for use in fixed defense positions that take hours to prepare. We do not issue a “terrain adaptable” tripod like the German Lafette that they borrowed from the Danes and then put under the MG34/42 family. In the assault, you can easily move these guns from hasty position to hasty position, and then deliver truly effective long-range fires. There’s also a periscopic sight that goes along with them, enabling the gunner’s head to be kept well below the exposed line of fire; our MG sights require head above the bore to use, and exposure to enemy fire.
Railed on that for years, to no avail. The brass simply doesn’t “get” machinegunnery, or put any import on the training/use of machine guns.
Something like that Lyut is about the only way I see getting an actual useful MG support platform into US usage. We’ve actually screwed around with experimenting with something akin to it, going back to the late 1990s, but nobody thinks it’s important enough to actually procure. Hopefully, Ukraine lights a fire under some extraordinarily fat and stupid asses in the US procurement system; we could have had something like that in our forces twenty years ago, essentially real-life sentry guns from “Aliens”.
The problem is the one that led to the failed solution of the NGSW: You can’t effectively answer fires from over 800m with a machinegun you are firing off of its bipod and some private’s shoulder. Max range you can rely on from that “mount” is about 800m, on a good day. No tripod or T&E? You ain’t hitting sh*t effectively past that 800m range, and most of those bursts are gonna be all over hell and gone…
Since they won’t buy a decent tripod and accessories, or really train the crews, about the only way out is a gadget solution like that Lyut. Which we trialled and could have had going, if they’d put some money into it, twenty years ago.
‘Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front’ by Günter K. Koschorrek is the best English language memoir of a Wehrmacht machine gunner. He doesn’t focus on his equipment and tactics, but plenty seeps through. Koschorrek’s narrative is consistent with the veteran Eastern Front MG Truppen I interviewed years ago for a special project.
Back during the late 1980s, when I was stuck recruiting in Illinois, I met an older gentleman who had a booth at the Lake County Gun Show. That show was an interesting place, due to the number of different characters who’d show up, from the legendary “Illinois Nazis” to the crazed collectors who had one of every variant of Winchester Model 94 ever produced.
The guy I’m talking about was a retired Army DA civilian who’d spent the majority of his career in Germany from the late 1940s into the late 1970s. During that time, for whatever reason, he developed this fascination with German machinegunnery, and had spent his entire time in Germany going around and collecting whatever he could find on the subject. I struck up a conversation with him at the gun show, because he had a lot of that stuff on display and was trying to drum up interest in a book he was writing about the subject.
He had a huge variety of informational sources, from 8mm and 16mm films taken by serving soldiers on the various fronts, memoirs, training syllabuses, manuals, civilian-published handbooks, and on and on. I visited him at his home, and the amount of material he had was immense; we’re talking several wide-format file cabinets and bookshelves that were simply stuffed with things.
I spent a couple of afternoons with him, and I think I learned more about the “how-to” of German machinegunnery than I’d learned working with the Bundeswehr and studying my ass off with the US Army. It’s a totally different school of how to do it, and we never, ever picked up on it.
Frustratingly, I was a dumbass, and instead of getting copies of everything I could, I just took some notes on stuff I was interested in, and waited on his book to come out. I was reassigned from recruiting command to Korea, and when I came back and tried contacting him, his phone was disconnected and my letters were returned. Later discovered that he’d apparently suffered a heart attack and died at home, and that was it. I don’t know what his heirs did with his stuff, but that damn collection rightfully belonged in a museum somewhere, and that manuscript should have been published… Sadly, it’s probably all in a landfill somewhere.
All that is to say that one of the things he had was a training film worked up by one of the mountain warfare divisions the Germans had. In it, they show precisely how we should have been responding to long-range fires in Afghanistan: From the moment they observed Soviet troops shooting at them, and identified the targets, the MG teams had their tripods in place and set up to deliver fire damn near out to 1500m, to devastating effect. All enabled by that Lafette tripod everyone says is “…too heavy…” and the “…too high…” rate of fire that the MG42 delivers. There are reasons the Germans went for that 1200rpm and were specifying an even higher minimum of 1500rpm for the MG45 they were working on… It just works, particularly at long range. That film demonstrated it very, very clearly. The Soviets went down like bowling pins, thinking they were safe from the Germans due to the range. In all likelihood, they had no idea they were even being shot at before the rounds impacted and killed them.
The US conception of what machineguns are for, and how to use them is incredibly flawed, in my mind. The idea is, the guns “support” the riflemen in the unit, not that the MG is the real base of fire for the unit. Because of that, they don’t get full effect, and the mentality is still largely “Hey-diddle-diddle, straight down the middle…” in full-frontal assaults on enemy positions. The German idea was that the MG was the primary firepower of the squad, and you used it to best effect by maneuvering the gun into the best positions and then driving the enemy from theirs. They termed the idea as being the “Strategy of surfaces and gaps”, with the idea that the riflemen would be finding their way through the enemy defenses, scouting for the MG team, and then providing security for it as it set up on dominating terrain to render enemy defenses essentially pointless, and then taking them by fire as they were forced to withdraw. Properly conducted, German MG tactics are devastating, and far more economical of your manpower than the typical US idea of “Find, Fix, and Destroy”. US doctrine works, but as we saw in Afghanistan, separate the troops from their external supporting firepower, and they’re screwed. Thus, NGSW…
[…] DEMONSTRATES THE VALUE OF NOT BEING SEEN: Ukraine Rolls Out More Drone Innovations. “I wasn’t planning on doing another Ukraine drone piece so soon after my Martian war […]
Actually I think Termite has a lot of utility: light infantry needs a low profile resupply / casevac platform with excellent mobility, and this looks vastly cheaper than doing it by helicopter or drone
These, or versions thereof with some greater mobility capabilities, might be very useful in urban or counter-terrorism settings.
I could see the IDF, for instance, using ground drones that maybe have both lethal and non-lethal armaments on them, to probe areas that have high risk of ambush, maybe to clear an area, maybe to get enemy forces to reveal positions. One part of a multi-layer / multi-wave attack.
I could also see more fortified versions being used as means of keeping areas clear where an army didn’t want to dedicate infantry or used fixed machine gun posts for the job. Maybe even to create rolling “no man’s lands” – again, most useful against terrorist or insurgent style enemies rather than a foreign army.
Supposedly, autonomous weapons systems violate several international conventions and a bunch of laws in individual states; you have to maintain “man in the loop” for anything lethal.
What I could see coming, however, would be semi-autonomous systems monitored by volunteers, crowd-sourced as it were. Get a ping, have the system run the evidence by you, you look it over, and a juried system says “Yeah, shoot…” or “No, don’t…”
Something like that would have been valuable on October 7th. You’d have to spend a lot of time and money to make sure it was secure, and vetting the people doing the monitoring, but you could do it as a form of alternative service. Hell, make it something like jury duty…
In a sufficiently dark world, someone might just gamify it, and make the whole thing a sick sort of video game for the public to play. I’d be entirely unsurprised if such a thing proved to be highly successful, and even profitable. “BORDER SECURITY: The Game”.
Hell, I can see someone doing something like that with the now-ubiquitous security camera systems. Pay bounties for finding crime, reporting it, and let people make a profit off their expensive security systems. I could imagine someone monetizing all those snuff videos on YouTube quite easily…
Think of it as “crowd-sourced digital vigilantism”, and shudder at the likely prospect of it becoming a part of daily life… There will be backlash to the current spate of criminality, and laxity of law enforcement. Don’t look for it to be expressed in either restrained or rational manners.
[…] in first grade textbooks and onwards, and The false religion of the Cuban revolution BattleSwarm: Ukraine Rolls Out More Drone Innovations, Hunter Biden To Plead Guilty Rather Than Face Trial, and LinkSwarm for September 6 Behind The […]
Given the track record we have, the more likely outcome of a US-operated ground RPV encountering shepherds is that the idiots running the thing will have completely failed to account for the likely presence of said shepherds, freeze, allow the thing to be captured and then used against us…
I have no ‘effing idea at all how the morons involved with the operational planning in Afghanistan and Iraq continually failed to account for these sorts of encounters… We have two famous incidents stemming from “Special” forces (and, I use that term in the sense of “Special Education”) encountering the “unexpected civilians”. Bravo Two Zero was an SAS example, and that ridiculous bullshit during “Operation Red Wings” was another. There were more, by both the UK and the US.
I have no idea why these ‘effing idiots in the various “Speshul” outfits keep assuming that the local civilians where they’re going to be operating won’t be out doing things like, y’know, herding their sheep, but there you are: Even after Bravo Two Zero, which should have served as a “learning event” for all concerned, they kept right on insouciantly prancing into areas that even cursory recon should have told them was going to be filled with “civilians on the battlefield”.
I blame a lot of this crap on training at home station, where they go out into the desert and just play war, absent civilians who’re exploiting it all. In the UK, I find it hard to believe that the SAS didn’t routinely encounter civilians in their training areas, but apparently they just handwaved that whole issue away in Desert Storm. It’s even more egregious for the US forces that were there in Afghanistan, because it ain’t exactly (or, shouldn’t be…) news that the civilians are going to report your ass to whoever, and you have to have a plan for that which is going to work. Discovering that you’ve been “made” by a kid, and then not having a plan or the balls to execute said plan by killing that kid? You’ve just suffered an extreme failure to train or prepare for the real world.
The US military is horrible at this. I was making this point as far back as Bosnia, because nobody was taking into account that there were going to be civilians all over the place, and they were all going to be watching and reporting on everything we did. I ran training for people with that assumption built in, and that was the only place I ever heard of anyone doing that. Had several victims of my training scenarios look me up after their tours over there, and they were like “You were the only person who talked about that as a risk, and you were absolutely right… It was; they started responding to what we were doing as battle drills within days…”
You fight as you train, and so you must train as you mean to fight. The “We’re in a vacuum…” assumptions made in most US military training setups, which are encouraged by our huge training bases and lack of civilian presence where we train most of the time, only encourage this.
Shepherds are gonna happen, especially where there are subsistence farmers and herders across Central Asia and the Middle East. You have to account for that, and if you don’t…? Lone Survivor II, here we come. I don’t blame guys like Marcus Luttrell, I blame the idiots running the training programs and doing the operational planning.
Secondary point: The US military has horrible machinegun doctrine, mostly due to the idiocy with which we equip and train the crews. Our basic tripod that’s on issue is the M122, which is the same one that went under the Browning .30 back during WWII, and the M192, which is a titanium copy thereof. Both of these tripods are optimized for use in fixed defense positions that take hours to prepare. We do not issue a “terrain adaptable” tripod like the German Lafette that they borrowed from the Danes and then put under the MG34/42 family. In the assault, you can easily move these guns from hasty position to hasty position, and then deliver truly effective long-range fires. There’s also a periscopic sight that goes along with them, enabling the gunner’s head to be kept well below the exposed line of fire; our MG sights require head above the bore to use, and exposure to enemy fire.
Railed on that for years, to no avail. The brass simply doesn’t “get” machinegunnery, or put any import on the training/use of machine guns.
Something like that Lyut is about the only way I see getting an actual useful MG support platform into US usage. We’ve actually screwed around with experimenting with something akin to it, going back to the late 1990s, but nobody thinks it’s important enough to actually procure. Hopefully, Ukraine lights a fire under some extraordinarily fat and stupid asses in the US procurement system; we could have had something like that in our forces twenty years ago, essentially real-life sentry guns from “Aliens”.
The problem is the one that led to the failed solution of the NGSW: You can’t effectively answer fires from over 800m with a machinegun you are firing off of its bipod and some private’s shoulder. Max range you can rely on from that “mount” is about 800m, on a good day. No tripod or T&E? You ain’t hitting sh*t effectively past that 800m range, and most of those bursts are gonna be all over hell and gone…
Since they won’t buy a decent tripod and accessories, or really train the crews, about the only way out is a gadget solution like that Lyut. Which we trialled and could have had going, if they’d put some money into it, twenty years ago.
‘Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front’ by Günter K. Koschorrek is the best English language memoir of a Wehrmacht machine gunner. He doesn’t focus on his equipment and tactics, but plenty seeps through. Koschorrek’s narrative is consistent with the veteran Eastern Front MG Truppen I interviewed years ago for a special project.
Back during the late 1980s, when I was stuck recruiting in Illinois, I met an older gentleman who had a booth at the Lake County Gun Show. That show was an interesting place, due to the number of different characters who’d show up, from the legendary “Illinois Nazis” to the crazed collectors who had one of every variant of Winchester Model 94 ever produced.
The guy I’m talking about was a retired Army DA civilian who’d spent the majority of his career in Germany from the late 1940s into the late 1970s. During that time, for whatever reason, he developed this fascination with German machinegunnery, and had spent his entire time in Germany going around and collecting whatever he could find on the subject. I struck up a conversation with him at the gun show, because he had a lot of that stuff on display and was trying to drum up interest in a book he was writing about the subject.
He had a huge variety of informational sources, from 8mm and 16mm films taken by serving soldiers on the various fronts, memoirs, training syllabuses, manuals, civilian-published handbooks, and on and on. I visited him at his home, and the amount of material he had was immense; we’re talking several wide-format file cabinets and bookshelves that were simply stuffed with things.
I spent a couple of afternoons with him, and I think I learned more about the “how-to” of German machinegunnery than I’d learned working with the Bundeswehr and studying my ass off with the US Army. It’s a totally different school of how to do it, and we never, ever picked up on it.
Frustratingly, I was a dumbass, and instead of getting copies of everything I could, I just took some notes on stuff I was interested in, and waited on his book to come out. I was reassigned from recruiting command to Korea, and when I came back and tried contacting him, his phone was disconnected and my letters were returned. Later discovered that he’d apparently suffered a heart attack and died at home, and that was it. I don’t know what his heirs did with his stuff, but that damn collection rightfully belonged in a museum somewhere, and that manuscript should have been published… Sadly, it’s probably all in a landfill somewhere.
All that is to say that one of the things he had was a training film worked up by one of the mountain warfare divisions the Germans had. In it, they show precisely how we should have been responding to long-range fires in Afghanistan: From the moment they observed Soviet troops shooting at them, and identified the targets, the MG teams had their tripods in place and set up to deliver fire damn near out to 1500m, to devastating effect. All enabled by that Lafette tripod everyone says is “…too heavy…” and the “…too high…” rate of fire that the MG42 delivers. There are reasons the Germans went for that 1200rpm and were specifying an even higher minimum of 1500rpm for the MG45 they were working on… It just works, particularly at long range. That film demonstrated it very, very clearly. The Soviets went down like bowling pins, thinking they were safe from the Germans due to the range. In all likelihood, they had no idea they were even being shot at before the rounds impacted and killed them.
The US conception of what machineguns are for, and how to use them is incredibly flawed, in my mind. The idea is, the guns “support” the riflemen in the unit, not that the MG is the real base of fire for the unit. Because of that, they don’t get full effect, and the mentality is still largely “Hey-diddle-diddle, straight down the middle…” in full-frontal assaults on enemy positions. The German idea was that the MG was the primary firepower of the squad, and you used it to best effect by maneuvering the gun into the best positions and then driving the enemy from theirs. They termed the idea as being the “Strategy of surfaces and gaps”, with the idea that the riflemen would be finding their way through the enemy defenses, scouting for the MG team, and then providing security for it as it set up on dominating terrain to render enemy defenses essentially pointless, and then taking them by fire as they were forced to withdraw. Properly conducted, German MG tactics are devastating, and far more economical of your manpower than the typical US idea of “Find, Fix, and Destroy”. US doctrine works, but as we saw in Afghanistan, separate the troops from their external supporting firepower, and they’re screwed. Thus, NGSW…
Rant over. For now.
The sentinel guns in the movie Aliens were awesome, and … they were stationary.
Something mobile, with a machine gun, that can be hacked? Or use AI of unknown trustworthiness? That’s a nightmare.
Fiber-optic links are a thing.
[…] DEMONSTRATES THE VALUE OF NOT BEING SEEN: Ukraine Rolls Out More Drone Innovations. “I wasn’t planning on doing another Ukraine drone piece so soon after my Martian war […]
Actually I think Termite has a lot of utility: light infantry needs a low profile resupply / casevac platform with excellent mobility, and this looks vastly cheaper than doing it by helicopter or drone
These, or versions thereof with some greater mobility capabilities, might be very useful in urban or counter-terrorism settings.
I could see the IDF, for instance, using ground drones that maybe have both lethal and non-lethal armaments on them, to probe areas that have high risk of ambush, maybe to clear an area, maybe to get enemy forces to reveal positions. One part of a multi-layer / multi-wave attack.
I could also see more fortified versions being used as means of keeping areas clear where an army didn’t want to dedicate infantry or used fixed machine gun posts for the job. Maybe even to create rolling “no man’s lands” – again, most useful against terrorist or insurgent style enemies rather than a foreign army.
Supposedly, autonomous weapons systems violate several international conventions and a bunch of laws in individual states; you have to maintain “man in the loop” for anything lethal.
What I could see coming, however, would be semi-autonomous systems monitored by volunteers, crowd-sourced as it were. Get a ping, have the system run the evidence by you, you look it over, and a juried system says “Yeah, shoot…” or “No, don’t…”
Something like that would have been valuable on October 7th. You’d have to spend a lot of time and money to make sure it was secure, and vetting the people doing the monitoring, but you could do it as a form of alternative service. Hell, make it something like jury duty…
In a sufficiently dark world, someone might just gamify it, and make the whole thing a sick sort of video game for the public to play. I’d be entirely unsurprised if such a thing proved to be highly successful, and even profitable. “BORDER SECURITY: The Game”.
Hell, I can see someone doing something like that with the now-ubiquitous security camera systems. Pay bounties for finding crime, reporting it, and let people make a profit off their expensive security systems. I could imagine someone monetizing all those snuff videos on YouTube quite easily…
Think of it as “crowd-sourced digital vigilantism”, and shudder at the likely prospect of it becoming a part of daily life… There will be backlash to the current spate of criminality, and laxity of law enforcement. Don’t look for it to be expressed in either restrained or rational manners.
[…] in first grade textbooks and onwards, and The false religion of the Cuban revolution BattleSwarm: Ukraine Rolls Out More Drone Innovations, Hunter Biden To Plead Guilty Rather Than Face Trial, and LinkSwarm for September 6 Behind The […]