Guys with rifles require line of sight to the plane; explosive-filled vans have to get onto the runway (or taxiway, etc.). Drones have maneuverability: they can go over or around obstacles. Fences and gates don’t stop them, and the person piloting them can be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I doubt these drones were remotely piloted, just went to typically used ramp positions.
People are creatures of habit.
And maintenance is easier when everything is nearby.
I read that all the drones were, in fact, remotely piloted using Russia’s cell phone network (they were not doing this from Ukraine but with infiltrators inside of Russia).
This was important for a few reasons. If you watch video of it you see the bombers had old tires piled on top of them (some of them). This was to help foil AI drones so they don’t “look” like bombers.
Second, Ukraine did not target the most advanced bombers in the Russian fleet (Tu-160 I think). The ones meant to be a part of their nuclear deterrent. Supposedly, Russian doctrine is if one leg of their deterrence is removed then they go nuclear with whatever is left. Sure, some of these older bombers can carry nukes but they aren’t really a part of that anymore.
Third, considering we have video of the drones going after the bombers suggests Ukraine had a link to the drones.
Ukraine was careful not to touch those most modern (still old) bombers which needed human pilots to decide what to hit.
There are many, many different levels of “hardened”. Even without any intentional armor, the typical airplane hanger is probably a significantly harder target than the typical airplane, and these small drones can’t carry very much payload. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a drone capable of destroying an airplane was incapable of doing any significant damage to a typical hangar.
Reports are conflicted: Some say that they were remotely piloted, while others say that they were guided by onboard AI. Possibly they had both, as a fallback in case communications were jammed. And while fooling AI is the intended purpose of the tires on the planes, I don’t think there’s any evidence it actually works, especially not now that everyone knows the trick and can retrain their AIs accordingly. Militaries doing stupid things that don’t actually work is as old as time, especially for incompetent militaries like Russia’s.
I’m trying to understand why a substantial number of bombers exposed in the open were left un-attacked. With 117 drones, there should have been more than 1-per-bomber, and even if taking losses or glitches into account, it seems it should have added up to a lot more than just 13 or 14 Russian bombers being hit, as some reports state.
One thing I’ve noted is that all the images and video I’ve seen are all from the same airfield. So those 13 or 14 are probably just the confirmed hits at that field and we have no confirmation about the others. Or the numbers could be only those confirmable by satellite imagery, which is likely a subset of the total number.
And if proper preflight procedures are not followed, leaving them out in the rain can be… bad. (And IMO, the Wiki writeup is incorrect when it says, “not a maintenance error.” As can be seen in slides 77-80 in this document, there was a screwup during preflight procedures.)
w/o knowing anything about the specifics of what the drones were or how large/small their payload was would it not be better to concentrate a lot of firepower on a few targets, destroying a few rather than inflict superficial damage on lots of targets, only rendering them temporarily unusable, until repairs are made.
Its not just the attacks on airfields, but fiber optic drone attacks on a lot of high value targets.
Power stations, politicians, data centers and endless other high value targets.
Fiber optic drones can have a range of 6-25 miles, so you can set them up outside the secured perimeter. Plus they seem easier to get than other military hardware like mortars.
How does the drone carry 25 miles of fiberoptic cable?
My understanding is the diameter of the drone cable is about 0.25mm to 0.5mm. If you assume the volume is 0.25mm and it is 40km long, that works out to about 2 liters in volume of fiber optic cable.
You can do very serious damage to an aeroplane with only a small charge. Hit the wing spars at the wing root and the plane is written off until it can be re-winged, which is not a quick repair even if you have the neccesary parts available.
This is the tactic the SAS used against Axis aircraft in North Africa in WW2. They placed thermite charges on top the wings that burned down through the spars. This way each soldier could hit more targets for a carryable weight of explosives.
And of course that shows that this is not a new problem, if your opponent is willing and able to operate far behind the front line they can do tremendous damage to supposedly safe targets.