Video removed for TOS reasons.
Children out of Russia, Chechen fighters into Ukraine. Throwing in people who may need time to get acclimatized to the battlefield again doesn’t seem like the best idea. I know the Chechens have done some of the fighting, but they may still be rusty.
Latest aid package to Ukraine, 31 May 2023. Drawdown from existing US stocks. The capabilities in this package include:
• Additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems;
• AIM-7 missiles for air defense; these have been integrated into the Ukrainian BUK anti-aircraft system. Alleviates a critical shortage of missiles.
• Avenger air defense systems; Vehicle Stinger missile launcher system.
• Stinger anti-aircraft systems; The MANPADS version
• Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS)
• 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds
• 105mm tank ammunition;
• Precision aerial munition. Unknown system. Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB)? Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM
• Zuni aircraft rockets. 5" unguided air launched rocket.
• Munitions for Unmanned Aerial Systems; Unknown. Possibly submunitions removed from US Rockeye cluster bombs.
• AT-4 anti-armor systems;
• Over 30 million rounds of small arms ammunition;
• Mine clearing equipment and systems;
• Demolition munitions for obstacle clearing;
• Night vision devices;
• Spare parts, generators, and other field equipment.
Looks like that Freedom of Russia Legion is back at it again with a cross border raid this time on the town of Shebekino.
Troops Cross Into Russia as Putin’s Army Fights To Defend Belgorod—Report (msn.com)
I wasn’t familiar with this (or forgot) so looked it up. I see it’s a recoilless (don’t stand behind it) one-shot gun. I don’t know enough or see enough in the article to say how it compares to other options, but maybe some of you do.
AT-4 seems to be a good and cost-effective tool for what it’s for. Disabling military vehicles less than full-up MBTs at ranges from 50 to 250m. It’s not bad at light fixed fortifications either. Not concrete bunkers, but ordinary concrete / masonry buildings, sandbag-reinforced light buildings, etc.
Like any one-shot weapon, they’re convenient. Like any one-shot weapon, 10 of them weigh more than one gun and 9 extra rounds would.
it’s unclear how much of the next year of the war will be dismounted Ukrainian infantry dealing with dug in Russian troops and/or Russian motorized infantry. I’d hope the Ukrainian offense could develop more fire and maneuver speed and less house by house “save the city by reducing it to rubble” tactics.
Sadly, the enemy gets a vote in which tactics work against them and the Russian approach is highly nihilist, both as directed at enemy (i.e Ukrainian) troops, enemy civilians and civilian infrastructure, and at their own friendly (i.e. Russian) troops. In a Russian meatgrinder form of war the AT-4s will work well. If we send enough of them.
Against NATO tanks it is lacking. Against Russian pop-tops it works well enough. The major flaw is that it has limited range and is unguided.
That AT-4 sounds reminiscent of an older weapon in the US arsenal, the M-72 LAW. They lacked the punch to take out modern MBT’s, but still useful for taking out lighter armored APC’s or trucks and other softer targets.
The US bought an AT-4 variant as exactly the replacement for the M72.
I can’t say I’m an anti-tank expert but it seems they would still be effective in disabling the track if one was stupid enough to present its flank to you and a sitting tank is, well, a sitting duck.
Gotta love that Swedish humor - ‘A-T-4’ = ‘84’ for their 84 mm anti-armor rocket.
Meanwhile, everything old is new again - U.S. apparently buying up and refurbishing old Gepard systems from Jordan for use by Ukraine. Mobile flak defences like this and the old Soviet ZSU-23-4 had been considered obsolescent for their original purposes as they are no longer very useful against many modern aircraft or missiles. But in the new drone age they are coming in to their own again - far more cost effective as drone defense than expensive air defense missiles.
I would think so! I wonder how many Vietnam-era Quadmount halftracks are sitting around in military museums in the US? IIRC the Israelis updated the design with autocannon.
The ZSU-23-4 is to the US M2-equipped M45 quadmount halftrack as a tiger is to a housecat. Everybody in fast jets respected the heck out of the 23-4.
Counter-drone weapons really need an aim-shoot paradigm less than the firehose of a CIWS or 23-4 more akin to a sniper. Really good modern radar or imaging lidar coupled to a small caliber cannon that can single shot or do very short bursts. Or if we ever get the deposited power of lasers up into the multiple tens of kW they’d be ideal.
You’re not going to defeat drones cost effectively (or safely) by firing 100 rounds of ~20mm cannon at each one. Gotta be a lot closer to one shot one kill. With pretty well guaranteed self-destruct for any rounds that miss. And you can’t be wasting much time per drone since they can arrive by the dozen. Gotta be see, kill, next!
This is a case where the defense needs to be cheaper, faster, and better than anything we have today.
Certainly using a CIWS like a Vulcan would cost more than the drone to shoot it down, but that might be acceptable if the cost differential is not too high and the defending country has a bigger economy.
I’m thinking hunter-killer drones might be in our future. Imagine a hundred or a thousand boxes located around a city, each with a drone in it. When an enemy drone is detected, the closest boxes open and drones fly out. They get vectored to within the vicinity of the enemy, then use their own sensors to close with it and kill it, either by collision or some kind of weapon like a net dropped on the props or something. The drones could also fly ‘air cover’ constantly by having charging in their storage boxes, and having enough drones to always have some in the air.
If you’ve seen some of the racing drones out there, they’re very fast and very agile. They can go 0-200km/h in less than a second. The enemy’s drones couldn’t do that as they need to be more efficient and larger to have the range needed,. But local defender drones can be fast and powerful and would be very hard to avoid. Put a proximity fuse in them with a frag grenade, and they’d just have to get close to have a good chance of killing the enemy drone.
The older weapons and shells should be cheaper and more easily available to buy.
Save the high dollar weapons for when it has to be used.
Strikes against targets in the Russian city of Kursk:
That’d work in a war zone. Kinda.
But using a naval CIWS to defend, say, Yankee Stadium or JFK airport raises the small problem that every shell that is fired lands someplace. Not too many safe places to land a burst of 20mm in greater NYC.
Your idea of pop-up short range high agility drones is probably how we kinetically defend fixed infrastructure in peacetime.
I’ll just note here that “disposable” is not necessarily the same thing as “single shot”. Most of the leftover containers in my kitchen are “disposable”, but have been used again and again. And I’ll bet that a resourceful army like Ukraine could find ways to re-use those recoilless guns.
For the AT-4 the projectile and the gun are manufactured together. Most of the value is in the projectile. Unless they can work out a factory to make similar replacement projectiles they’re probably better off casting the launch tube aside & getting a new one.
Also, the outer tube is only sturdy enough to be used once. It sustains enough stress in it’s single use to make it useless after that…unless you’re looking for somewhere to store your rolled up posters,