Ukraine frontline: The killer drones changing warfare

drones of the future this is a drone War really this is so walk horse of this war when one soldier sitting 2 kilometers away flies one drone into the sky it performs the function of a whole reconnaissance company our presence for us a Winter's Night on the Ukrainian front line seen through a thermal camera Ukrainian drone operators from our host un the 41st Brigade are preparing a combat launch against Russian possessions but these Hunters are also the hunted and this is their most vulnerable time enemy eyes will be watching ready to call in pinpoint retaliation Darkness remains useful to soldiers but only up to a point in a war that increasingly resembles science fiction the signature weapon of the Ukraine war is undoubtedly the Drone it's said that at any one time there might be as many as 10,000 drones in the air over the extended front line and we're here in perhaps the most hotly contested drone Warfare sector you can perhaps hear the artillery in the background throughout history military success has gone hand inand with technological innovation today another relatively new weapon has come to dominate the battlefield here in Ukraine changing the face of War forever that weapon is the Drone a drone is a guided aircraft without an onboard pilot they're sometimes called unmanned aerial vehicles or uavs but let's just call them drones in the war above Ukraine drones come in all shapes and sizes and perform a number of different roles like the giant Turkish design by ractor that helped stem the initial Russian invasion the Iranian Shahed suicide Dr drones that have been launched In Waves against Ukrainian cities or the Chinese made mavic 3 recreational drones which you can hold in the palm of your hand and have been adapted by both sides to hunt and kill military adaptations of these civilian models which cost less than £2,000 can destroy a main battle tank worth many millions over the course of this last year male cameraman jamy wisman and I have been exploring as well as experiencing the Drone theonomy spending time with Frontline drone unit talking to soldiers about the Russian drone threat and visiting a factory where one of the most sophisticated Ukrainian uavs is being produced only on the front line though can you truly understand the respect if not fear that the Drone threat Now commands we too have been targeted by Russian drones the first occasion occurred last summer when entering a Ukrainian trench at night you can hear the Drone hovering directly over our heads the next day Russian drones were spotting for their artillery as we left the front line under shell we were lucky since then the importance of drone Warfare has only increased the numbers that are being deployed by both sides at any one time are extraordinary in this film we will consider where the technology race between military drones might be heading we're already witnessing drones fighting drones and soldiers surrendering to the machines could the de velopment of artificial intelligence and machine learning see humans largely replaced on the battlefield or are we about to enter an even more dystopian era in which clever AI drones can quite independent of human control identify pursue and kill enemy soldiers but first let's examine how we got this far by the start of World War I European militaries had recognized the potential usefulness of man flight of most value was the ability to spy on the enemy from above the help these eyes in the sky could give in correcting artillery fire and spotting enemy troop movements was unprecedented but such early reconnaissance aircraft was slow easy to spot and vulnerable to attack by enemy Fighters that started to appear in 1915 they were shot down in droves each Recon plane usually carried two Personnel parachutes were not issued it was during the Great War that the idea of unmanned aircraft with a military application began to be explored the first example of such a remote control plane was the British aerial Target of 1917 during the same conflict the Americans also developed the ketering bug the world's first flying bomb it could carry 82 kgs of explosive for 75 Mi guided to the Target by a Pneumatic electrical system aided by a gyroscope and ultimeter neither the aerial Target nor the catering bug entered service the term drove first came into use in the 1930s possibly inspired by the name of the deavin queen bee a large radio controlled Gunnery Target based on the man tiger moth aircraft some 400 of these were built attempts were made by several countries in World War II to utilize drone technology in the field of guided weapons but it was not until the Vietnam War era and the Advent of effective Soviet surface to air missiles the drones such as the air launch lightning bug which was developed from a Gunnery Target Model started to see significant combat use thousands of these drones were deployed over North Vietnamese territory as a means of gathering Battlefield intelligence without putting at risk the lives of aviators and multi-million dollar machines once that war finished however interest in drone development dwindled it was not until the turn of the century that it was reawakened particularly after 9/11 when us LED coalitions prosecuted conflicts in difficult terrains against local insurgencies it did not possess modern a defense systems so dawned the era of the mega drone large purpose-built combat uavs such as the Predator could perform surveillance reconnaissance and attack missions that lasted anything up to 40 hours from takeoff to Landing they could detect the heat signature of a human being from several miles up or launch a missile that could destroy a tank all the while piloted from facilities thousands of miles away from the battlefield these highly sophisticated machines did not come cheap the Reaper a development of the Predator which is used by the RAF costs $32 million a piece but a new development from an unexpected Source was about to turn the world of drone Warfare on its head and would have a profound effect on the war in Ukraine the last two decades have seen the emergence of a recreational and Commercial drone Market that is now worth tens of billions of pounds small mass-produced radio controlled uavs equipped with live stream video cameras can be bought on the High Street or online for as little as a few hundred they are simple enough to be flown by a child they were designed with fun or civilian business in mind one company dominates this industry DJI technology company was founded in China in 2006 by 2021 DJI had calleded more than 70% of the global drone Market by market share it had become the apple or Microsoft of drones but long before then both Russia and Ukraine realized that dji's range is civilian drones could be adapted for military purposes this is recent footage of a DJI aggress drone which was designed for agricultural purposes and is able to lift 120 kg here it is practicing the evacuation of a wounded Russian soldier from a Minefield but there is another much smaller DJI model that has become the iconic weapon of this Ukrainian war and that is the mavic a quadcopter that retails in the UK for less than £2,000 the mavic is mostly used on the Ukraine battlefield for reconnaissance work here a mavic variant is being launched on a surveillance Mission by a soldier from the M's recent host unit the 41st Brigade but the mavic and other similar off-the-shelf drones have also been widely adapted to drop grenades and small bombs on enemy infantry and armored vehicles this is a walk of this war we they made special upgrade uh double uh double battery we put a second battery to the up and we can to re we made to reach up to 50 km in depth to devastating effect we have often encountered the mavic 3 being operated on the Ukrainian side of the front lines our presence for Russia but the Russians are also using mavic in great numbers small recreational drones like these have a limited range of around 15 km and an endurance of under an hour they often operate at Heights that make them vulnerable even to Small Arms fire consequently attrition rates are very high this AOS Scout unit of the Border guards told us they' once lost 10 such machines in a single day but when a drone is shot down no pilot dies and the machines are far easier and cheaper to replace than a man combat air yeah but it's better to lose drone than La of soldier here we are watching the AA Scouts correct artillery fire onto Russian positions in the town of marianka via an iPad linked to the drone camera the shell is in the air right now and we're waiting for [Music] explosion the this is another of the drones in the Aeros scouts arsenal it is a homemade kamakazi model with an RPG Warhead ratcheted by plastic tape to a mavic type [Music] machine okay the same unit also operates the Ukrainian design to produced vampire heavy attack drone it is big and powerful enough to carry and drop an anti-tank mine repurposed as a bomb these larger machines are less Expendable than the mavic here a crashed bat heavy attack drone of the 41st Brigade is being retrieved under artillery fire from No Man's Land only 400 m from the Russian trenches the Russians call such drones babayaga after the flying witch from Slavic folklore this is what a hit from such a witch can do to one of their tanks but there is a more recent drone development that has taken this war to another terrifying Dimension fpv stands for firstperson view an fpv drone is a form of loitering munition a kamakazi flying bomb that is crashed into a Target by its operator the first military fpvs were adaptations of racing drones with small explosives attached now they are being purpose built in their hundreds of thousands like a standard recreational drone such as the mavic which has a stabilization system that enables it to hover as the operator views its camera footage on a tablet an fpv drone is flown like a combat jet the pilot sees only what his drone camera sees in real time via a video headset they're not easy to fly in the Ukrainian military fpv Pilots have to pass various tests similar to those undergone by prospective military jet Pilots this is Daniel he used to be a travel agent today he supervises flying bombs rather than package holidays an fpv drone can cost as little as $300 but in trained hands it is a deadly weapon an fpv kamakazi can be flown fast and accurately into the smallest of targets such as through the open hatches of an enemy armored vehicle or even against individual soldiers that is the stuff of nightmares this is a new type of fpv that explodes before contact like a cluster bomb bigger kamakazi drones that can hit targets up to 30 km behind Russian lines are now being used as artillery substitutes due to the lack of shells which is why fpv Pilots have themselves become Prime Targets this is footage of a Ukrainian highas strike against an fpv Pilot School in occupied denet in January several dozen students were reportedly killed this film shows the reported assassination in hon province of a famous Russian fpv Ace colai Moses who was located and killed by a rival Ukrainian drone unit I know from personal experience the chilling effect of the heavy drone presence along the front line we spoke to a number of Ukrainian soldiers about fighting in that environment Victor is a doctor in the 56 Brigade drones are very disruptive and in bakut we conducted at Medical evacuations only at night sometimes only if there was a very seriously injured person we took a risk sasher is a self-propelled Howitzer Gunner of the 41st Brigade in a concealed position in the kuban's front line his vehicle is protected Against kamakazi drones by a heavy mesh net drones Remain the greatest threat to his survival drones of the future this is a drone War really previously tank was the main fighting fist that broke through defenses now tanks only uses artillery they can't just ride out and shoot directly anymore they shoot from afar because a drone costing only $1,000 will fly immobilize the tank and then a second one will finish it off that's it cost a company commander in the 56 Brigade agrees a drone is basically a civilian camera that flies to film a wedding or a parachute jump some tourist trip Etc but when one soldier sitting 2 kilm away flies one drone into the sky it performs the function of a whole reconnaissance company drones are the business card of this war because they turned the field manual and the approach to hostilities upside down air defense missiles and Small Arms fire are only the last kinetic line of defense against the drones before they hit the target the most effective countermeasure is electronic interference in other words the jamming of the signals that send the drones to their targets Russia is the master of anti-drone electronic warfare electronic warfare systems have been developed that jam the signal we also have a person who jams and we have a device on a tripod that jams a certain sector by 60° so that the Drone cannot fly closer than 2 km to us this is how we counteract this but they invent something new and at the same moment we come up with some kind of counteraction it seems to me that the quicker one side invents a drone the quicker the other side will come up with electric Warfare jamming and vice versa and it will continue forever initially a mavic drone was used they would take off everything is fine now mavic simply cannot take off at 15 ft it will simply hit a tree and burn because the electronic warfare is worth working but there is another very different drone War being fought over Ukraine at a far greater altitude and much farther behind Russian lines we're in a top secret facility somewhere in Ukraine what do you see here is the production line for a state-of-the-art drone that is achieving extraordinary results over the front line the Drone is called the raybird 3 and it was designed and developed here in Ukraine by skyon we've been asked to blur the faces of the workers for security reasons it is claimed that the raybird 3 can fly higher faster and longer than any other UAV in its class raybird 3 has a top speed of 180 km/ hour a maximum altitude of more than 2.5 km and can operate for more than 30 hours in all weathers from temperatures of -30° Centigrade to+ 50 it also possesses tremendous range range and surveillance capability we're told for example that a raybird could be flown from ke to Munich record what a particular man in a street Paar was reading on his iPhone and returned to keev but these operational figures and abilities would be redundant if the raybird with its 3 m wingspan did not have exceptional survivability rayb birds have flown up to 160 km Behind Enemy Lines without interception one model has completed more than 80 missions over Russ control territory they are the eyes of the himars and other very longrange rocket artillery systems there a different War I mean different War so it it depends on what the distance they they fighting with with each other with the small drones they are fighting like in a games and I know a lot of people soldiers they are really addicted with this the raybird which costs around $250,000 a drone has built in resilience against signal jamming and other electronic countermeasures that baffle less sophisticated drones to fly uh in uh electronic warfare conditions really heavy genine so we can fly there and we can recognize exact objects rayb Bird's fuselage and wings are built of fiberglass materials they give it a very small radar cross ction particularly compared to such models as the B ractor new variants will have electric engines filled by hydrogen which will emit a lower Heat Signature than petrol driven models the makers claim that the rayb bird's stealthy qualities make it or but invisible to Russian anti-aircraft Radars recorded by Ray Bird's camera this is the moment that abuk one of Russia's most powerful air defense systems launches against the Drone high of a dbass and misses earlier this month a photo phap of a crashed rird 3 was posted on Russian social media it had reportedly come down while on a secret mission over the kador region of Russia almost 200 km behind the front line the raybird has a far better chance of survival than an ordinary drone or combat aircraft operator survivability is also taken into account a raybird can be assembled for launch on its crossbow frame within 20 minutes of arriving at a location the apparatus can also be disassembled within 2 minutes of the launch this is vital because the Russians are constantly looking to locate and kill drone operators with artillery fire the most commonly used device by the Russians to detect drone launchers is the aeroscope built by DJI the makers of the mavic series artificial intelligence is a growing presence in drone Warfare technology it could dominate its future skyon has developed an onboard AI system so that rird can identify targets by itself no need for an operator to be glued to the screen for hours on in with potential loss of concentration the latest raybird is also the first to be armed with a bomb man will literally be taken out of the equation in this very 21st century hunter killer machine the Skies over Ukraine are ever more crowded with combat [Music] drones here the Drone of the 41st Brigade flying a recon mission along the Russ front line records another drone on another mission passing beneath it the EU has said it will provide Ukraine with 1 million new drones the Ukrainian military is establishing a separate drone command one thing is certain in the age of the killer drone nobody is safe

Channel: Daily Mail

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Keywords: Daily Mail, frontline, Russian, Ukraine fighter, Ukraine troops, Ukraine, quarters, Tank, ATV, Andriivka, Ukraine soldier, gas, ukraine war, russian invasion, war in ukraine, ukraine news, russia ukraine, counter offensive, trench, trench video, bakhmut, trenches, pov footage, grenade, tank, tanks, zelensky, putin, vladimir putin, bomb, Hero, Life, Civilians, Captain, Shani Louk, Two, Soldiers, Ambushed, And, Captured, By, Ukranian, Brigades, in, Attack, Near, Robotyne, IDF, Hamas, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Police

Id: Gha9oDJpjAU

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024