In a recent interview with soldiers fighting on the frontlines, the Ukrainian Military TV channel of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense showed how the anti-drone squads work on the battlefield.
As follows from the video, there are three main tasks for these servicemen to accomplish when dealing with enemy unmanned systems. First is to track the drone operator, says a serviceman whose name is not disclosed.
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"We identify the drone’s flight paths, the places where they takeoff, not just because we are curious to know but to eliminate the enemy pilot in conjunction with attack forces: mortar or artillery squads launch strikes on the targets we give," he explained.
When it comes to the second objective – drone jamming – the military use aeroscopes which help them determine the direction of the unmanned system beyond the line of sight, and the vertical angle is calculated with mathematical formulas.
Once this information is processed, an operator of an anti-drone gun can neutralize an enemy aerial vehicle even without seeing it.
"An effective suppression with such an 'anti-drone rifle' leads to the disruption of connection and control between the drone and the pilot which is at some distance from it. The drone just hangs up mid-air and makes an emergency landing or simply gets carried away by the wind," said the serviceman.
In the video, we can see a range of weapons used for the jamming of enemy drones. Here we have a Ukrainian Antidron KVS G-6 gun covering up to 3 km range, an Australian lightweight (2.14 kg) DroneGun MKIII and a Lithuanian EDM4S Sky Viper jamming guns which have been proving their effectiveness in Ukraine since 2021.
Another important task is to shoot UAVs down. A troop from an air defense squad told Ukrainian Military TV about how this work is getting done as well.
Armed with a Stinger MANPADS, the squad deploys to a firing position as soon as it receives a command that a target has been detected. In his unit, there are two "marksmen": the first is the leading one, and the second one duplicates the shot.
According to him, in 95% of the cases, the target gets successfully destroyed.
Here's also a short separate video from Radio Liberty on how the Ukrainian-made anti-drone gun helps on the frontline:
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