The recent damage to the "Abrams" confirms that armored vehicles are very vulnerable to drone attacks, notes the serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Ihor Lutsenko. Special protection is needed, and there are technologies, but for some reason Ukraine is in no hurry to use them.
There was news about the alleged destruction of the first "Abrams".
I will not comment on a specific case now, but I will speak about the problem of protecting armored vehicles from drones.
For some reason, all the photos of "Abrams" and "Leopards" that I come across are without protection against drones. The same applies to Soviet tanks, I am not talking about "Bradley" and other BMPs.
For an FPV pilot (or a bomber, it doesn't matter) an armored vehicle is the number one goal. In some areas of hostilities, it is with the help of small UAVs that up to 75% of damage is achieved by drones. Either an FPV with a Soviet charge for a grenade launcher, or a drone with a reset with something similar, ranging from MK19 grenades to heavy cumulatives - all this hunts for large prey.
The armor is the least protected from above. If the tank's frontal armor is sometimes very thick, which even an anti-tank bomb or anti-tank missile cannot penetrate, then it is too thin from above, both on the tower and in the rear part of the hull.
Artillery, i.e. self-propelled guns, is a separate story. They try to hit them with redoubled force, because they cost a lot, can shoot far and cause a lot of trouble to the enemy. Despite the fact that such artillery usually lives far from the front line - 10 km, for example, but it is also hunted by more technically advanced drones of the "Lancet" type, and they cause a lot of trouble. But now, even for an ordinary FPVikha, 10 km is quite a real distance, if the radio horizon allows.
At the beginning of last year, in addition to my immediate duties, I was also engaged in the protection of artillery against "Lancets". Together with specialists, we developed structures with nets to cover self-propelled guns from "Lancets". As of now, the army has more than fifty of them. The second generation of the design has already been released. There are several cases when this design saved from FPV attacks.
What is so little, only 50? After all, we have hundreds and hundreds of artillery installations that need to be covered? The banal answer is that all this goes for sponsorship money. For the time being, the state of Ukraine is not in a hurry to protect its Ukrainian equipment from UAVs.
My (that is, conventionally "my") decision on protection is not the only one. A year ago, one military unit, realizing the need to protect armored vehicles, also developed an excellent solution for protecting tanks, etc. I would like to emphasize that these honorable gentlemen and I thought synchronously, even though we did not know each other at that time. They went through the proper process, issued documentation for their development.
And the result is zero, almost like mine. The state did not need their decision yet.
As far as I know, the net protection against drones is produced by the company of one famous oligarch. The protection is pretty flimsy in my opinion, but it's better than nothing.
That is, on the conditional "market" there are at least three solutions, three players-developers, players-manufacturers. Take and bet AT LEAST SOMETHING on expensive foreign tanks!
But they don't ask. In the so-called counteroffensive-2023, mostly bare tanks, bare BMPs and bare APCs went.
By the way, our enemy is also concerned with the problem of protection against drones. A large resource was thrown there. You can see exotic designs on enemy armored vehicles. But our designs are an order of magnitude better (than my colleagues', than "mine"). But there are very few of them. And the enemy will have more and more of them.
And it is not that the Ukrainian military leadership does not know about this problem. Back in the summer of last year, I personally talked about it with the command. He informed that the people who were assigned to deal with this issue did not solve the problem. Not pulled out until now (
Now that the bosses have changed, I'm starting all over again. New people in GS, among whom there are those who have simply enormous front-line experience. Perhaps there will be a systematic interest there and will withdraw money, push to design even better solutions?
Because now NO armor must go into the combat zone without cover from above from drops and FPV. This is a matter of life and death. And this is now a matter of "pressure from below". There are solutions, you just need to take them and start implementing them en masse.
