Ukraine Preps For Drone Attacks By Dropping Training Grenades On Own Troops
Ukraine is now training its troops how to more effectively drop grenades from drones on Russian troops - but which also serves to impress upon them how devastating a small, commercial drone can be when armed with grenades or improvised explosive devices.
The point of the training is to emphasize accuracy while also preparing the troops to take evasive action when they are under attack. JL
Joseph Trevithick reports in The Drive:
Ukraine (is) conducting novel dual-purpose training that
lets personnel hone their skills in using small weaponized drones and
allows troops to get a very realistic understanding of this threat. Both sides in the current war in Ukraine have been
making extensive use of commercialdronesarmed with grenades andimprovised munitions. It highlights how accurately a trained drone operator can attack a target, even a moving one, with a grenade-armed drone. This underscores the threat weaponized
commercial drones present. The lethal blast radius of a
standard RDG-5 is 10 feet (three meters), but it is also capable
of wounding individualsout to 82 feet(25 meters).
At least one Ukrainian unit looks to be conducting novel dual-purpose training that lets personnel hone their skills in using small weaponized drones and allows troops below to get a very realistic understanding of this growing threat. Both sides in the current war in Ukraine have been making extensive use of commercialquad and hexacopter-type dronesarmed with grenades andother improvised munitions. Thisis a trendthatgoes well beyondthis conflict and security forces around the world, including the U.S. military, areincreasingly having to contend withit.
A video showing the apparent dual-purpose Ukrainian training regimen is now circulating on social media. Exactly where and when it was shot is not immediately clear. The clip shows troops advanced in a line across an open field before what looks to be practice grenade falls on one of them. Underscoring that this is said to be a drill, all the other troops drop prone when the grenade goes off, except for an individual who may be a trainer walking behind them. There is no visible sense of urgency following the detonation to indicate that this is actually a real drone attack.
The grenade appears to bea URG-N training type, which is a reusable design that has live fuze that detonates a small white smoke spotting charge. The URG-N is meant to mimicthe Soviet-era RGD-5fragmentation hand grenade, variants and derivatives of which remain in service in both Russia and Ukraine, among many other countries.
The URG-N produces no fragments when it goes off, but it's not immediately clear how dangerous it is otherwise, especially for someone right next to it, when it detonates. It is similarly unclear how any safety issues might have been mitigated in this case. The platform used to drop the grenade is not visible in the clip. However, the footage aligns with a mountain of other videos from battlefields in Ukraine known to show commercially available quad and hexacopter-style drones that have been weaponized by adding devices to drop grenades and other small improvised munitions.
For one, it highlights how accurately a trained drone operator can attack a target, even a moving one, with a grenade-armed drone like this. The grenade is seen in the footage falling right next to one of the troops below, if not physically hitting them. This is in line with a regular stream of videos from Ukraine that show drones dropping grenades into the open hatches of tanks and other armored vehicles, as seen below.
This, in turn, underscores the very real threat that weaponized commercially-available drones present. The lethal blast radius of a standard RDG-5 is around 10 feet (three meters), but it is also capable of wounding individualsout to distances of some 82 feet(25 meters).
Details about the RGD-5 from a U.S. Army training manual.US Army
As already noted, the threats posed by lower-tier drones, including weaponized commercial designs, go well beyond the fighting in Ukraine, and even traditional battlefields. The barrier to entry to acquiring capabilities like this is also low enoughthat terrorist groups,organized criminal organizations, andother non-state actors, in addition to the armed forces of nation-states, are increasingly employing themin various contexts.
"I’ve been in the Army for 38 years, and in my entire time in the Army on battlefields in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Syria, I never had to look up," now-retired U.S. Army Gen. Richard Clarke, then head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM),said during a panel discussionat the annual Aspen Security Forum last year when talking about this new reality. "Now with everything from quadcopters – they’re very small – up to very large unmanned aerial vehicles [UAV], we won’t always have that luxury."
Altogether, the new video showing the apparent drone attack training in Ukraine is indicative of something that will become more common as time goes on. How many countries will elect to actually drop practice grenades on their troops remains to be seen, but similar training programs could well emerge using objects that don't explode at all. The U.S. military and others are already steadilyintegrating mock enemy dronesinto training exercises, but dropping real objects certainly takes that training up to another level of fidelity.
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance. Learn more...
0 comments:
Post a Comment