David Axe
Forbes
May 23, 2024
Ukrainian workshops build more than 100,000 explosive first-person-view drones every month for the Ukrainian military. That’s a lot of drones. But each drone weighs just a few pounds and typically carries a single grenade weighing just a pound or so.
So while 100,000 drones represent a lot of firepower, it’s not very heavy firepower. FPV drones are extremely dangerous to exposed infantry, but armored vehicles can usually shrug off multiple strikes by FPVs—and keep fighting.
That appears to be changing, however. It seems Ukrainian drone crews have found some way to massively boost the explosive potential of a single FPV. Consider the Russian T-80 tank that rolled toward Ukrainian lines in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast recently.
As a surveillance drone from the Ukrainian army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade observed from high overhead, an FPV drone zipped past the 46-ton, three-person T-80—which sported blocks of add-on reactive armor as well as an anti-drone screen—and then turned around.
The quadcopter FPV barreled toward the T-80. Normally, an FPV strike on a tank would result in minor damage. This time, however, the T-80 exploded in a massive fireball that separated the turret from the hull and incinerated the crew.
Did the FPV crew get lucky? Or was some new technology at work? Trent Telenko, a former quality auditor with the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency, suspected the latter. “I am beginning to wonder if Ukrainian FPV builders have stolen [an idea] from the Swedish RBS-56,” Telenko wrote.
The RBS-56 is an anti-tank missile, designed by Swedish firm Bofors, that packs a 25-pound warhead which, triggered by sensors on the missile’s underside, explodes downward instead of forward. This top-down attack method targets the thin armor on a tank’s topside.
The FPV that blew up that T-80 appears to have pierced the tank’s hull from above and struck its ammunition storage, triggering a devastating secondary explosion. “Something so simple makes an FPV far more lethal,” Telenko noted.
Telenko wasn’t just speculating. The Ukrainians have received, from their foreign allies, potentially thousands of Next-Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon missiles. The 28-pound NLAW is, like the RBS-56, a Bofors product—and borrows the RBS-56’s downward-blasting warhead.
There’s at least one video circulating on social media depicting Ukrainian troops removing the missile from a damaged NLAW launcher, “apparently [to] use the warhead in an FPV,” according to weapons historian Matthew Moss.
That pairing—an FPV with an NLAW warhead—”would be interesting,” Moss mused. For unfortunate Russian tank crews, it might mean instant death.
To be clear, Ukrainian troops don’t have to cannibalize donated NLAWs in order to supply their drone teams with top-down warheads. Ukrainian industry is perfectly capable of producing downward-blasting munitions from scratch.
If the Ukrainians take the same approach to warhead production that they bring to drone production—build lots of different types in lots of small workshops—then there may not be just one kind of top-down drone munition in the Ukrainian arsenal. There may be several kinds.
It’s increasingly apparent the Ukrainians have some top-down munitions for their FPV drones. There aren’t many other ways tiny drones can turn giant tanks into towering fireballs.