Explosive drones swarm Ukraine's battlefields. Will simple cage armor bars shield tanks from these evolving aerial threats?
by Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven
The drone war in Ukraine has generated breakthrough innovations in the realm of drone warfare, as both sides continue to attack with explosive suicide drones, drones with grenades attacks, drones with fiber optic cable that can’t be jammed and self-guided loiter drones able to “find” and then descend upon a target. Observers have referred to drone war innovations and tactics as revolutionary steps in the realm of modern warfare, and many of the breakthrough discoveries are rapidly being replicated by militaries around the world.
The ubiquitous and lethal nature of the drone threat has naturally generated a commensurate effort to innovate new drone-defenses able to offer previously unavailable levels of protection.
Drone defenses used in Ukraine span a wide range of technologies to include drone-on-drone kinetic defenses engineered to intercept and “explode” incoming drone attacks, EW weapons built to jam the RF signal of an approaching drone and throw it off course, laser weapons and passive protections such as counter-drone cage armor bars.
Cage Armor
Cage armor can prove quite effective against incoming explosive drones by virtue of simple proximity, the metal bars create a collision with the attacking suicide drone in the “air” “before” the explosive makes contact with the tank armor itself. This means some fragments continue on to hit the armor but the initial large “energetics” or “explosion” takes place “away” from the armor of the tank. This massively increases survivability and helps tanks survive increasingly deadly drone attacks capable of loitering and precisely targeting moving tanks. Cage armor is also used against RPGs and is most effective when countering point-detonate kinds of incoming rounds. In order to be fully protective, it seems cage armor would need to almost exist in a 360 kind of protective envelope. It also seems possible that these kinds of armor bars could stop, slow down or at least minimize the explosive impact generated by anti-armor weapons.
Overall tanks have been decimated in Ukraine, as Switchblade kamikaze drones have been destroying Russian T-90 tanks and simple dismounted, shoulder-fired anti-armor weapons such as Javelin and NLAW missiles have decimated tanks as well. As far back as a year or more during the war in Ukraine, a U.S. Army G2 intelligence report found that as many as one half of Russia’s active duty tank force has been destroyed in the Ukraine war.
Tanks Destroyed
Tanks have also been vulnerable to top-down attacks as well, given that the armor protections are less fortified than the sides of the chassis. This has enabled fighters armed with anti-armor weapons to attack from buildings or elevated terrain to shoot down on tanks below.
New counter drone weapons continue to explode onto the scene as well, to include vehicle-mounted laser weapons, vehicle-fired proximity rounds designed to fly to a spot and “detonate” across an area dispersing fragmentation to counter swarm attacks. One promising weapon is referred to as the Coyote interceptor, a small, dual-function drone which can operate as a sensor EO/IR drone itself or also function as an explosive to launch offensive attacks or intercept and ‘explode” drones in the air. Coyote can be programmed with a proximity fuse such that it can detonate across a specific “area” to counter drone swarms.
Countering Swarms
Drone swarms are among the greatest risks as they are intended to overwhelm points of attack in terms of pure vectoring, meaning incoming explosives blanket a target area from so many angles that well-targeted, precision drone defenses simply cannot track and destroy them all. This is where EW countermeasures and proximity fuses can prove tactically relevant, and high power microwaves can “blast” an area with “heat” designed to disable the propulsion mechanisms and sensing systems built into a drone.
There are also RF defensive methods created to intercept and detect the RF protocol of an attacking drone, bounce it off an existing database and make an instant determination about what kind of drone is attacking. In these cases, the defensive system can “jam” the attacking drone, “land” it or even “take-over” its flight path. This technique is one of many growing AI-enabled drone defense systems which gather and analyze incoming sensor data, perform analytics in milliseconds to verify target data and “pair” an optimal countermeasure or “effector” for a specific threat.
Kris Osborn is the Military Technology Editor of 1945. Osborn is also President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University