KUPYANSK, Ukraine—Four aerial drones the size of dinner plates swooped almost simultaneously and slammed into a giant Russian mortar system, each detonating its load of about 1.5 pounds of explosives in quick succession.
The August attack on Ukraine’s eastern front by a specialized drone team called the Achilles Company was one of the first times they performed a maneuver that is at the cutting edge of modern, affordable warfare: the swarm.
Four pilots wearing goggles that relayed footage from the drones directed the attack from about 7 miles away, piloting the craft from hand-held controllers. The impact of the drones, each costing a few hundred dollars, set alight and destroyed the Russian mortar, called Tulpan, or Tulip, which is mounted on a tracked vehicle weighing some 30 metric tons.
The Achilles Company, part of a specialized unit in the 92nd Mechanized Brigade, is one of the newest elements in what Ukraine’s government calls its Army of Drones—an effort to promote the use and innovation of remotely piloted aerial craft.
The Ukraine conflict has been an incubator for deploying uncrewed aircraft in conventional combat. At first, soldiers and civilian volunteers adapted drones meant for photographing weddings to spot enemy movements and target or intercept them with artillery. Aerial-drone reconnaissance teams with off-the-shelf models were quickly deployed across the military.
Then the Ukrainians started 3D-printing claws to drop explosives straight from the drones and piecing together their own drones from scratch. This spring, they added FPV racing drones, or first-person-view drones, to their arsenal and within months experimented with using them at the same time to take out bigger targets. So-called swarms can overwhelm air defenses or help penetrate armor by bombarding vulnerable sections.
Russia has started to catch up, expanding its use of drones for reconnaissance and bombardment. And the Pentagon is paying close attention. Last month, it announced a program named Replicator to amass a huge number of the sort of expendable drones that have boosted Ukraine’s success on the battlefield.
Ukrainian soldiers work hand in hand with engineers to hone their tactics and modify drones to complete more ambitious missions or avoid new Russian countermeasures like jamming.
At the forefront of these efforts is the Army of Drones, an initiative launched last summer by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pledged to raise $100 million from donors to buy drones for the military and keeps adding new objectives. Mykhailo Fedorov, the 32-year-old minister of digital transformation overseeing the effort, works with senior military leaders to fill gaps and infuse a private-sector mentality.
“The ultimate goal is that we will have a new type of army,” said Georgi Tskhakaia, an adviser to Fedorov. “Like there is the air force and there are artillery forces, there will be drone forces. A different army within the army.”
This summer, Ukraine trained 10,000 new drone pilots, mainly for conducting reconnaissance and artillery targeting, and is preparing another 10,000 operators.
In January, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Ukraine’s top military commander, ordered the formation of aerial strike-drone units like Achilles Company. The Army of Drones strike units have already destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks, artillery pieces, air-defense units and armored vehicles, inflicting extensive damage for a fraction of the cost. The ambition now is to place them inside every army brigade.
At the same time, an uptick in long-range attacks deep inside Russian-held territory and even within Russia itself has presented Moscow with an unexpected and unprecedented threat to its homeland. At the end of August, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack yet on military targets across Russia. Tskhakaia said such attacks—carried out mainly by another set of other specialized units—also fall under the Army of Drones.
“It’s a never-ending process,” said Tskhakaia. “It’s always in R&D.”
Together, these developments point to the integration of drones into regular ground forces on an unprecedented scale, said Austin Doctor, a political scientist and counterterrorism researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“We’re likely seeing in real time the implementation of a new blueprint for…hostile engagement moving forward, across a variety of conflict types including state-on-state engagement, insurgency and others,” he said.
As the war drags on, Russia has also developed cheap drones and adopted some of the Ukrainians’ own drone tactics. Russian-made FPVs are a significant and constant threat to Ukrainian armored vehicles and infantry pursuing the counteroffensive in the south, soldiers there say.
Ukraine’s Achilles Company first experimented with FPVs around May, launching them one at a time against soft targets like gatherings of soldiers and surveillance towers. As they ramped up to more than a dozen strikes a day, they tried flying several FPVs together to destroy armored targets and increased the payload capacity while adjusting to Russian countermeasures like electronic warfare.
FPVs, which take more skill to pilot than basic commercial drones, are now imported to Ukraine in the thousands a month from manufacturers in China and the West, with many donated by volunteers, according to people in the military and industry. Local manufacturers are looking to exponentially scale up their production by the end of the year.
“FPVs have shown themselves to be very effective, not that expensive, fast and can knock out infantry from their positions,” said Oles Maliarevych, a volunteer sergeant in Achilles Company, who owns a shoe store in Kyiv and worked as a producer with Warner Bros. before the war started.
Another member of the unit, a former Kyiv airport worker, devises the explosives in the basement of an abandoned home near the front lines. After the U.S. decided to give Ukraine cluster munitions, the Achilles Company figured out how to take them apart and affix the smaller bomblets held inside to their drones.
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KUPYANSK, Ukraine—Four aerial drones the size of dinner plates swooped almost simultaneously and slammed into a giant Russian mortar system, each detonating its load of about 1.5 pounds of explosives in quick succession.
The August attack on Ukraine’s eastern front by a specialized drone team called the Achilles Company was one of the first times they performed a maneuver that is at the cutting edge of modern, affordable warfare: the swarm.
Four pilots wearing goggles that relayed footage from the drones directed the attack from about 7 miles away, piloting the craft from hand-held controllers. The impact of the drones, each costing a few hundred dollars, set alight and destroyed the Russian mortar, called Tulpan, or Tulip, which is mounted on a tracked vehicle weighing some 30 metric tons.
The Achilles Company, part of a specialized unit in the 92nd Mechanized Brigade, is one of the newest elements in what Ukraine’s government calls its Army of Drones—an effort to promote the use and innovation of remotely piloted aerial craft.
The Ukraine conflict has been an incubator for deploying uncrewed aircraft in conventional combat. At first, soldiers and civilian volunteers adapted drones meant for photographing weddings to spot enemy movements and target or intercept them with artillery. Aerial-drone reconnaissance teams with off-the-shelf models were quickly deployed across the military.
Then the Ukrainians started 3D-printing claws to drop explosives straight from the drones and piecing together their own drones from scratch. This spring, they added FPV racing drones, or first-person-view drones, to their arsenal and within months experimented with using them at the same time to take out bigger targets. So-called swarms can overwhelm air defenses or help penetrate armor by bombarding vulnerable sections.
Russia has started to catch up, expanding its use of drones for reconnaissance and bombardment. And the Pentagon is paying close attention. Last month, it announced a program named Replicator to amass a huge number of the sort of expendable drones that have boosted Ukraine’s success on the battlefield.
Ukrainian soldiers work hand in hand with engineers to hone their tactics and modify drones to complete more ambitious missions or avoid new Russian countermeasures like jamming.
At the forefront of these efforts is the Army of Drones, an initiative launched last summer by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pledged to raise $100 million from donors to buy drones for the military and keeps adding new objectives. Mykhailo Fedorov, the 32-year-old minister of digital transformation overseeing the effort, works with senior military leaders to fill gaps and infuse a private-sector mentality.
“The ultimate goal is that we will have a new type of army,” said Georgi Tskhakaia, an adviser to Fedorov. “Like there is the air force and there are artillery forces, there will be drone forces. A different army within the army.”
This summer, Ukraine trained 10,000 new drone pilots, mainly for conducting reconnaissance and artillery targeting, and is preparing another 10,000 operators.
In January, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Ukraine’s top military commander, ordered the formation of aerial strike-drone units like Achilles Company. The Army of Drones strike units have already destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks, artillery pieces, air-defense units and armored vehicles, inflicting extensive damage for a fraction of the cost. The ambition now is to place them inside every army brigade.
At the same time, an uptick in long-range attacks deep inside Russian-held territory and even within Russia itself has presented Moscow with an unexpected and unprecedented threat to its homeland. At the end of August, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack yet on military targets across Russia. Tskhakaia said such attacks—carried out mainly by another set of other specialized units—also fall under the Army of Drones.
“It’s a never-ending process,” said Tskhakaia. “It’s always in R&D.”
Together, these developments point to the integration of drones into regular ground forces on an unprecedented scale, said Austin Doctor, a political scientist and counterterrorism researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“We’re likely seeing in real time the implementation of a new blueprint for…hostile engagement moving forward, across a variety of conflict types including state-on-state engagement, insurgency and others,” he said.
As the war drags on, Russia has also developed cheap drones and adopted some of the Ukrainians’ own drone tactics. Russian-made FPVs are a significant and constant threat to Ukrainian armored vehicles and infantry pursuing the counteroffensive in the south, soldiers there say.
Ukraine’s Achilles Company first experimented with FPVs around May, launching them one at a time against soft targets like gatherings of soldiers and surveillance towers. As they ramped up to more than a dozen strikes a day, they tried flying several FPVs together to destroy armored targets and increased the payload capacity while adjusting to Russian countermeasures like electronic warfare.
FPVs, which take more skill to pilot than basic commercial drones, are now imported to Ukraine in the thousands a month from manufacturers in China and the West, with many donated by volunteers, according to people in the military and industry. Local manufacturers are looking to exponentially scale up their production by the end of the year.
“FPVs have shown themselves to be very effective, not that expensive, fast and can knock out infantry from their positions,” said Oles Maliarevych, a volunteer sergeant in Achilles Company, who owns a shoe store in Kyiv and worked as a producer with Warner Bros. before the war started.
Another member of the unit, a former Kyiv airport worker, devises the explosives in the basement of an abandoned home near the front lines. After the U.S. decided to give Ukraine cluster munitions, the Achilles Company figured out how to take them apart and affix the smaller bomblets held inside to their drones.