Ukrainian Troops Marched Into Russia Behind a Creeping Barrage of Drones and Drone-Jammers
It's a 21st-century version of a tactic from 1916
On Aug. 6, a Ukrainian corps including at least five combat brigades plus supporting air-defenses, drones and artillery—10,000 or more troops—attacked across the Ukraine-Russia border into Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
Three days later, the Ukrainians have advanced as far as 10 miles, captured scores of Russians and sparked panic in the Kremlin and in the headquarters of the Russian military’s Northern Grouping of Forces, whose 48,000 troops should have been defending the border in Kursk but have been bogged down a hundred miles to the east in Vovchansk, the Ukrainian border town that’s the locus of Russia’s own attack across the border starting in May.
What happens next may depends on how many more troops Ukraine can send into the Kursk salient—and how many troops Russia can shift to meet the Ukrainians. While we await a clearer picture of the balance of forces, it’s worth asking how the Ukrainian corps has managed to advance as far as it has.
Reportedly, it’s employing a modern version of a century-old tactic. An electronic creeping barrage.
Traditionally, a creeping barrage is an artillery tactic. First developed by the British Army’s Royal Artillery just before the July 1916 Battle of the Somme—one of the biggest battles of World War I—a creeping barrage required artillery to lay down a wall of shells that would first impact in the no-man’s-land between British and German trenches and then advance toward the German trenches at a walking pace.
The British infantry would simply walk behind the barrage—and stroll right into the German trenches as the artillery cleared them out.
It didn’t work the first time. British generals “overestimated their firepower,” the National Army Museum in London explained. “The guns were too thinly spread for the task in hand.” Creeping barrages only began working in the final weeks of the five-month battle, around the time the Canadian army reinforced the battered British Army.
“The Canadians advanced behind a carefully aimed wave of Allied artillery fire that moved ahead on a set schedule,” the Canadian veterans agency recalled. “This heavy bombardment forced the enemy defenders to stay under cover for protection and prevented them from cutting down the advancing troops with their rifle and machine-gun fire.”
Flash forward 108 years, to a time when the drone rather than artillery arguably is the king of battle. To advance into Kursk, the Ukrainian army first deployed counter-drone radio-jammers. This according to a Russian blogger, translated by Estonian analyst @wartranslated.
“The enemy in his native area first properly clears the sky from our [drones],” the blogger explained. Safe from Russian surveillance, the Ukrainians massed their combat brigades and supporting forces. And when they attacked, they did so under the protective shield of their own first-person-view drones (FPVs)—and further electronic warfare (EW).
The drones and jamming inched forward in a 21st-century version of the 1916 creeping barrage. “Under the cover of directed EW measures, he deploys a huge number of UAVs,” the blogger wrote. “Under the continuous barrage of high-precision FPVs that come in swarms, they reduce the distance to [Russian] positions.”
“They enter and secure … empty dismantled trenches in small groups for four to six hours under the cover of a UAV. The EW line is brought forward and the pattern is repeated.”
It’s a creeping barrage of jammers and drones. If it eventually fails, like the initial artillery creeping barrages failed in 1916, it might be for a want of mass and coordination.
If it keeps working, it might be because Ukrainian commanders understand the sheer number of drones and jammers they need to deploy fully to protect a front stretching tens of miles—and because, after 29 months of war, Ukrainian drone-operators and electronic-warfare troops are among the most experienced in the world.
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