Video Documents Effective And Appropriate Response To "FPV" Multirotor Drone Sighting

🇷🇺 🇺🇦 Commentary

Commentary-themed posts tend to deal with recent developments. These will typically be much shorter and less detailed than my analysis-themed posts for which commentary-themed posts may serve as “building blocks.”

One of the biggest analytical challenges one encounters when attempting to accurately and holistically assess the effects and effectiveness of armed “first-person video” (“FPV”) multirotor drones—and other “new” munitions more generally—in the Russia-Ukraine War stems from the unsurprising tendency of both Russia and Ukraine as governments and their subordinate military personnel to make highly selective disclosures that, in practice, results publicly available data that reflects a profoundly consequential sampling bias. Simply stated, only videos of successful attacks tend to be publicly disseminated—and constitute the bulk of the publicly available library of armed “FPV” multirotor drone attacks—while videos of unsuccessful attacks—and mundane everyday operations—are not publicly disseminated. As a result, observers are likely to overestimate the per unit—per multirotor drone—effectiveness of armed “FPV” multirotor drones.

As with all areas of analysis, we can work from first principles or we can work from available empirics. While the best analyses will simultaneously do both, much of what passes for serious analysis in the Russia-Ukraine War is best characterized as mindless empiricism that clings to documented real-world cases, which are, of course, selectively disclosed in a manner that amounts to a profoundly problematic sampling bias. Documented real-world uses, such as the following video, offer an opportunity to counter mindless empiricism on its own (problematic) terms.

The video shows two Russian combatants in a van who detect a Ukrainian armed “FPV” multirotor drone seemingly by sight—passive radio frequency sensors/detectors can detect the presence of an armed “FPV” multirotor drone of the radio frequency communication uplink/downlink variety, but not those of the fiber-optic cable communication uplink/downlink variety. The two occupants of the van quickly dismount. The person recording the footage is equipped with a shotgun. The remote human operator/pilot of the Ukrainian armed “FPV” multirotor drone had to quickly decide whether they would target the van or the dismounted Russian personnel. In this particular instance, the remote Ukrainian pilot chose to prioritize the targeting of (dismounted) manpower over materiel.

The armed “FPV” multirotor drone, which is equipped with an impact/contact fuse and has a limited destructive radius, missed the dismounted driver. As the armed “FPV” multirotor drone, which appears to have been of the fiber optic uplink/downlink variety—which Ukraine is also using in ever-increasing numbers—was remotely piloted/navigated to undertake another attack run, it was fired upon by the two dismounted Russian personnel. While the video records the detonation of the Ukrainian armed “FPV” multirotor drone, it may or may not have been hit by small arms fire—the warhead may have been prematurely detonated by an object encountered in flight, or the warhead may have detonated upon impact with the ground following a loss of control.

To be clear, armed “FPV” multirotor drones constitute a profound threat to militaries worldwide. The above video documents just one incident in which the remotely-piloted armed “FPV” multirotor was “expended” without damaging, let alone destroying, anything of note. There are untold thousands of videos documenting successful attacks. The important takeaway is not that armed “FPV” multirotor drones are ineffectual but that these are not (remotely operated/piloted) killing machines characterized by 100% effectiveness. Various countermeasures exist, and we are ultimately dealing with a fairly small and slow uncrewed aircraft-turned-munition that is equipped with a quite small and light warhead that results in a limited destructive radius. Beyond the technical particulars, the remote human operator—and onboard so-called AI going forward—must prioritize either the targeting of the vehicle or its dismounts in a world in which the dismounts can actively target the armed “FPV” multirotor drone with small arms fire and, going forward, purpose-built countermeasures. I covered this dynamic in a recent post dealing with the use of armed “FPV” multirotor drones of the fiber-optic uplink/downlink variety in a recent post.

The multirotor drones lying in ambush must initiate flight from zero elevation above ground level and at zero airspeed. This takes time, and there is a fast-expanding library of documented ambushes in which the occupants of the “ambushed” vehicle evidently detect an armed “FPV” drone casually lying in wait on/next to the road—the remote human operator/pilot must observe the road through the onboard camera for an ambush to be possible—and quickly evacuate the vehicle in response. The remote human operator/pilot is then forced to decide whether to target the vehicle—sans human occupants—or target one of the dismounted occupants of the vehicle, who tend to disperse/not cluster in groups. As a result, an ambush of sorts takes place, but the effectiveness of the ambush is greatly lessened relative to a situation in which the armed “FPV” multirotor drone is not detected, which would allow for an attack on a vehicle that is still carrying its occupants.

New Video Highlights Vulnerability Of Unsophisticated "Ambush" Attacks Involving Fiber-Optic "FPV" Multirotor Drones