Ukraine: Send in the Drones?

uk 75

uk 75

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I realise this is a bit too close to real life but given the West's lavish use of drones to pop off targets around the world I cannot help wondering whether a private contractor might offer a similar service to the beleaguered Ukrainians. There seem to be a lot of nice targets for RPVs to plink with hellfires and hornets or mavericks.
Or perhaps some technicals in secondhand Hummers with lots of TOWS etc could offer their services.
I am sure a Gulf State or perhaps South Korea could help finance. Where's Fawn Hall when you need her?
 
Also, Israel, the most likely source of the type of drones needed (e.g. Harpy, Harop) is likely to be highly reluctant to supply them for such a purpose, given the nature (not to mention instability) of the current regime in Kiev.
 
Thanks chaps. Cold draft of reality needed..

Mind you I do wonder what sort of weapons the US are thinking of supplying. They did do the same thing in the Yugoslav conflict and I am not sure it was a great success.
 
The rumour was state of the art anti-tank missiles and maybe a few MANPADs. Kindof like they did in Afghanistan in the 80s. It wouldn't change the course of the conflict, but it would lead to more dead people on the other side - and they think that could have political consequences. IMHO. the general obliviousness to economics, international law, local politics and long term interests in general doesn't give me great faith in any of the governments involved in this conflict (let alone the isolated paramilitaries).

As for the original question - Ukraine is too poor to buy much state of the art equipment. They were having trouble providing food and fuel for their regular troops at the start of the conflict (although they are now able to support mercenary forces). Most counties have no reason to supply weapons for free because they have no interest in increasing the conflict. Why would Israel or Korea want to increase violence that far away from home?
 
Snippets:

“This is something we haven’t seen before,” says Caitlin Lee, who leads the Center for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Autonomy Studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Arlington, Va. “This is the first time we’re seeing drone-on-drone conflict.”

And the action in Ukraine suggests that even more novel kinds of aerial conflict—including combat drones armed to fight in tandem with piloted aircraft—are coming to the broader world of warfare.

“We can retrain air defenses to look for smaller radar cross sections, but then they’ll pick up every bird that flies by,” says Sarah Kreps, director of the Cornell Brooks School Tech Policy Institute. “So it’s a real sensor problem that countries like the U.S. have spent billions trying to solve—not unlike when the U.S. spent [heavily on] countering improvised explosive devices that were far less expensive or sophisticated than systems our militaries had been trained to destroy. These are essentially flying IEDs that have foiled militaries in similar ways, creating asymmetric advantages that have been difficult to counter.”

“There have been debates about using autonomous drones in combat, and thus far, countries seem to have shied away from using them in a lethal capacity,” Kreps says. “At the same time, though, we’ve seen an increasingly porous line between the semiautonomous drones—which is how the U.S. used drones for counterterrorism—and fully autonomous drones.”

In a situation such as the one in Ukraine, where the West broadly supports giving the country the tools it needs to defend itself, “there could be a real first-mover advantage in using counterdrone systems in this type of autonomous capacity,” Kreps says, “which takes us further down the slippery slope of autonomy.”

www.scientificamerican.com

Drone-on-Drone Combat in Ukraine Marks a New Era of Aerial Warfare

Antidrone technology is combatting “flying IEDs” in the air over Ukraine—with implications beyond the war with Russia
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
 
MEMS for the arrestor gear on the Sopwith Gnat? Maybe Ral Partha minis will actually see action next...
 
Wow. Just wow. My mind is completely blown. So, drones are fighting drones in the air by throwing nets at them - like fishermen or pirates, YAAAAAR !!!

Unbelievable. H. G. Wells would have loved that new development in aerial warfare.
 

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