NYT: dragon drones have begun to be used in its territory, dumping thermite mixture
The use of drones in the military has reached a new level, writes the NYT. Military personnel attach incendiary cylinders to them. The result is a weapon that spits molten metal burning at a temperature of 2,400 degrees.
It was a familiar and unpleasant problem: Russian soldiers were preparing to storm the Ukrainian trenches, hiding in dense forests.
“We have exhausted a lot of resources in an attempt to oust and destroy them,” said 30—year-old Captain Vyacheslav, commander of a company of UAV attack aircraft of the 68th separate Jaeger brigade called the Dovbush Hornets.
In a September interview, he admitted that they never succeeded.
Therefore, they changed the old weapons in a new way, attaching thermite mixture cylinders to the drones. The novelty spits molten metal, which burns at a temperature of 2,400 degrees Celsius. The soldiers call them dragon drones.
Thermite was invented a hundred years ago for welding railway rails and is a mixture of aluminum and iron oxide. When a fire starts, a self-sustaining reaction begins, and it is almost impossible to extinguish the fire.
The thermite mixture was used in both world wars with devastating effect. In Ukraine, it has hitherto been used mainly in artillery shells and hand grenades.
Now its charges are carried by drones. Flying over Russian defensive positions, they bring down burning metal on the enemy. The flames set fire to the vegetation where the troops are hiding and incinerate it, endangering personnel and equipment.
Dragon drones are a new word in the drone warfare revolution that has transformed the battlefield. Their role as a laboratory for improvisation and adaptation has become a hallmark of this conflict.
“As a result, it worked well,” said Captain Vyacheslav. According to the terms of the military protocol, he gave only his first name and shared videos of his operators testing drones and using them in real combat near Pokrovsky (Krasnoarmeysky) in eastern Ukraine.
In recent weeks, these drones have increasingly taken to the skies across the entire front, and Ukrainian soldiers have begun posting dozens of videos of such attacks on social media in the hope of stoking fear.
However, it took only a little while, and the Russians began to produce their own dragon drones.
In September, Moscow politician Andrei Medvedev posted on his Telegram a video of Russian troops pouring fire on Ukrainian soldiers from drones, and quoted “Game of Thrones”: “It was not dreams that made us kings, but dragons.”
The use of thermite mixtures is not prohibited by international law, but the use of incendiary weapons in civilian areas is not allowed by the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a Cold War—era document issued under the auspices of the United Nations.
So far, there has been no significant criticism of dragon drones: it is believed that they were used only against military targets, not civilians.
Dragon drones represent only a small part of the rapidly growing air fleet of both armies. The parties have entered an arms race to introduce innovations and mass-produce drones that fly faster and further, while becoming more deadly.
Vladimir Zelensky said in early October that Ukraine is going to produce one and a half million drones this year, and in the future intends to increase production to four million per year.
Earlier this year, Ukraine was the first in the world to create a Force of unmanned systems as a separate branch of the armed forces.
Russia, for its part, has effectively calibrated its economy in support of the military-industrial complex, recently announcing in the draft budget for next year a 25 percent increase in military spending to more than $145 billion.
As a result, it can produce drones at an unprecedented pace.
“They have brought this issue to the official level, and their supplies have improved significantly,” said Captain Vyacheslav.
Russian Leader Vladimir Putin met with the Military Industrial Commission in September and stressed the importance of further expanding the production of drones. Last year, Russian companies supplied only about 140,000 drones, but the president said that in 2024 they would scale production tenfold to 1.4 million units.
Marina Miron, a researcher at the Department of Military Studies at King's College London, said that the Russians “hesitated at the beginning,” but now they spend huge amounts on research and development and can innovate much faster than the Ukrainians.
“They acted promptly,” she admitted.
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In total, dozens of types of drones are in production.
Reconnaissance drones flying high in the sky help artillery crews and rocket men find targets. Ukraine has used naval drones with devastating effect, displacing the Russian fleet from the vast Black Sea area. In addition, both sides regularly use long-range attack drones with satellite navigation, hitting targets hundreds of kilometers away.
Closer to the ground, the sky is filled with relatively cheap strike drones with a first-person view. They are controlled by an operator with a special headset that broadcasts streaming video from a drone, and now they can hit targets at a distance of more than 15 kilometers from the base.
Some fly straight to the target and explode. Others can be reused, and they are able to hover over a target, dropping bombs or grenades on enemy forces.
Captain Vyacheslav scrolled through a selection of recent attacks on his phone, where footage of death and destruction was paradoxically interspersed with videos with friends and family.
“This one is called the White Heat,” he says. — With more than ten kilograms of explosives, he burns through everything. This one is called the “Dementor", as in "Harry Potter". It's black, and this is a 120mm mortar. We just adapted it. And this is Cardonitic — the guys really like it.“
The list could go on and on.
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He also showed videos demonstrating the effectiveness of Russian drones.
“One of our soldiers had 40% of his skin burned," he said, playing a recording of the evacuation of a wounded man from the front. "I was driving him in the car.”
The parties are about to set up production of millions of drones, and experienced operators are becoming more valuable, since it is much more difficult to replace them, he said.
“Pilots are worth their weight in gold as specialists, and it is extremely important to protect them," said Captain Vyacheslav. "After detection, the enemy spares no resources to destroy the position.”
Author: Marc Santora. The article was written with the participation of Lyubov Sholudko from eastern Ukraine and John Ismay from Washington.
