New drones are sneaking past jammers on Ukraine’s front lines
Drones have transformed the war in Ukraine. Commanders sit in bunkers scanning banks of screens, as surveillance drones hunt for targets on the ground. Once they are spotted, artillery or mortars might blast them. Or bomb-dropping or kamikaze drones zoom in for the kill. The problem is that jamming and accidents down well over half of the drones in the air. But a new addition to the arsenal of both sides is proving more effective. They are fibre-optic drones. With no radio signal to detect or jam they are proving hard to stop.
In a factory in Kyiv production of the new drones is being ramped up from 600 a month to an expected 10,000 by the end of summer. 3DTech is one of 11 Ukrainian companies in the fibre-optic drone business. The company also makes some 3,000 kits to upgrade existing drones each month. Mihailo, commander of the Typhoon drone unit fighting in Ukraine’s east, is enthusiastic. Today 20% of his drones are the new variety, but he reckons that by the summer they will be the majority.
Unlike mainstream drones, of which Ukraine produced 2.2m last year, fibre-optic ones are controlled by an ultra-thin fishing-line-style filament redolent of the wire-guided missile systems that were first deployed in 1945. Not only are they hard to down (for now at least), but the fibre-optic cable means the picture relayed back to the pilot is crystal clear. It is the difference between upgrading from a 1970s fuzzy TV picture to HD quality, says Yuriy Ganusyak, whose company supplies batteries for drone-makers.
The first fibre-optic drones appeared on the front a year ago. Russia began deploying them in large numbers by the end of last year. Ukraine followed a couple of months later. They played a major role in Russia’s successful counteroffensive in its Kursk region in March. Now they are being employed in Russia’s assaults on the eastern battlefields. They are particularly suitable for hilly terrain where radio signals are often lost.
Both sides are racing to source fibre-optic cable. On April 5th Ukraine was reported to have bombed a factory making the stuff in Saransk in Russia. Until now no suitable fibre has been produced in Ukraine. Oleksiy Zhulinskiy, the chief technical officer of 3DTech, says that the Chinese dominate the fibre market, and that Russian and Ukrainian buyers have bumped into one another in Chinese factories where both are vying to buy it. Pre-paid orders have sometimes been gazumped by Russian buyers who offer more money, delaying, but not stopping, deliveries to their enemy. This month 3DTech is going to begin testing its own cable.
Unlike with a kite, the fibre-optic drone’s spool flies too, unwinding as it goes. In Mr Zhulinskiy’s factory, banks of 3D printers whirr as they make them. Chinese ones were unreliable and a reason why many of Ukraine’s first-generation fibre-optic drones failed to reach their targets. Now, claims Mr Zhulinskiy, 80% do.
Still, not everyone is convinced. Olha Bihar, the commander of an artillery and drone unit on the Orikhiv front in southern Ukraine, says they are heavy and that it takes months to train a pilot to fly them. Their cable can get tangled in trees and it glints in sunlight, which can give away the location of the drone and its pilot. The drones also have a relatively short range of 10-15kms. This means that the pilot needs to be right at the front in order to hit well inside enemy territory.
New ideas are being tested to counter fibre-optic drones. Both sides are constructing nets over key roads and positions, but these are not proving much of a defence. If the drones are heard above, troops are using shotguns to pepper them. 3DTech is trialling a drone with a sawn-off shotgun for attacking other drones.
Fibre-optic drones may be the new big thing, but they are a stop-gap solution developed to circumvent jamming. In the Ukrainian arms race, the holy grail is a laser weapon capable of blinding or frying the electronic heart of any incoming drone, missile, warplane or helicopter. At a tech fair on April 13th Vadym Sukharevsky, the head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, demonstrated how Ukraine is testing its own Tryzub laser system to do just this. The effective lifespan of any new military technology seems to be getting ever shorter as the war drags on. ■