Russia And Ukraine Use FPV Multirotor Drones To Attack Telecoms Towers, Other Antennas, With Increasing Regularity
🇷🇺 🇺🇦 Minimal Comment
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As I’ve explained in many recent posts, uncrewed “first-person video” (“FPV”) multirotor drones and similar are best characterized as miniaturized strike munitions that can be used to undertake highly surgical strikes against an incredibly diverse array of targets that were previously beyond the practical reach of militaries for want of a sufficiently large arsenal of suitable high-accuracy munitions. Armed “FPV” multirotor drones of the fiber-optic cable communication uplink/downlink variety can even be flown inside buildings and tunnels to attack what would otherwise be hard, if not impossible, to reach concealed targets with an inexpensive and, as such, plentiful uncrewed aircraft-turned-strike munition.
One of the most fascinating and, I think, most consequential applications of armed “FPV” multirotor drones is likely to be the very surgical micro-level targeting of various antennas, including those installed on the likes of cell phone towers and other quite tall mast-type structures. Such structures, which are mostly hollow and are designed to withstand sustained powerful wind gusts, can be quite resilient to damage absent a very high level of accuracy and precision. With armed “FPV” multirotor drones and similar, the individual antennas mounted on such structures can be readily attacked if situated within 30-50 kilometers of the frontlines. The following videos document several such attacks undertaken by the Russian military against antenna masts in Ukraine.