AntiDroneUkraine.com

23/04/2024

Jam-Resistant American Radio Keeps Ukraine’s Long-Range Drones Flying (Forbes com)

A Ukrainian Shark reconnaissance drone resembling a small aircraft flies out over Russian lines, transmitting a stream of high-definition video. The drone searches for valuable targets like ammunition depots, air defense sites and artillery positions deep inside occupied territory. The Russians respond with electronic warfare, throwing up a wall of radio noise impenetrable to most drones. The Shark flies right on, unaffected by the jamming, thanks to its advanced Mesh Rider radio built by U.S. company Doodle Labs which allows long-range flights through intense interference.

Doodle Labs, based in Marina Del Rey, California has been working with long-range Wi-Fi since 2008, but co-CEO Ashish Parikh told me that they ended up in the military drone communications business almost by accident.

“Everything just came together in 2020,” says Parikh. “The U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit were looking for small, low-cost radios for drones and we just happened to have all the right technologies.”

The key to Doodle Labs success is that they are building on a towering base of existing technology. A whole industry has grown up around the 802.11 standards of communication, which underlie WiFi and local area networking. Everything is made to the same standards, which means that companies like Doodle Labs can build their technology on top of it.

“We don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel,” says Parikh. “And 802.11 just keeps getting better.”

Traditional military radio makers build everything themselves, whereas Parikh says they can take advantage of new developments like WiFi7 which launched recently and which promises faster speeds and more robust connections. Basically, they benefit from billions of dollars of industry-wide research rather than doing it all themselves.

Doodle Labs previous work in the industrial sector included providing communications for robotic machinery like autonomous trucks in mines and mobile robots moving goods in warehouses. These tend to be very ‘messy’ environments in radio terms. Some frequencies may be full of traffic from other systems, others will be affected by radio noise and interference from industrial equipment. Communications need to be able to cope and provide a rapid, seamless link.

Parikh says there are three basic approaches to dealing with radio interference, and they use all of them. One is filtering, so that the receiver can block out everything except the exact wavelength being used to communicate. Another is using multiple bands and the third is hopping to a different band where these is no interference.

The same approaches, with some refinements, apply to the problem of countering jamming. But while military developers typically build everything themselves from the ground up with their own proprietary systems, with all the costs and development time that entails, Doodle Labs are building on existing standards. Parikh says they use commercial Qualcomm chips and the Linux operating system, although people had previously told him this would never work in the defence sector.

“Seeing what’s now happening, and the need to respond and move fast, all of a sudden our approach is being appreciated,” says Parikh. “I feel a sense of validation.”

The Need For Speed

The conflict in Ukraine has seen electronic warfare moving at an unprecedented pace. As the drone war escalated from a few thousand to literally millions of drones, both sides have turbocharged their efforts to jam opposing communications.

Drones like the ubiquitous kamikaze FPVs and ‘Mavik’ scouts are hard to stop, and defenders often rely on jamming. This can be a matter of breaking the control link, blocking the video feed, or jamming satellite navigation. The electronic warfare contest has turned into a cat-and-mouse game of developments where each innovation in jamming is met with a new move in countermeasures.

The pace of change seems to have found some U.S. suppliers unprepared. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 10th on poor results by Skydio drones, which although built to U.S. Army specifications, had problems in the intense jamming environment.

“Ukrainian officials have found U.S.-made drones fragile and unable to overcome Russian jamming and GPS blackout technology. At times, they couldn’t take off, complete missions or return home,” according to the WSJ. “American drone company executives say they didn’t anticipate the electronic warfare in Ukraine.”

By contrast Doodle Labs did anticipate the electronic warfare and have been winning it from the start, but only by rapid innovation.

“Resistance to jamming is the number one requirement from our defense customers at present,” says Parikh. “There are changes to the electronic warfare landscape on a monthly basis, and a rapid release cycle is required to beat the jammers.”

Ukrainian company Ukrspecsystems uses Doodle Lab’s Mesh Rider in their Shark drone which routinely carries out long-range missions. The Sky Mantis multicopter is another application, with around 100 currently operating in Ukraine.

Parikh says that jammers are constantly evolving, but they are staying a step ahead with new techniques to defeat them. The time to switch to a new frequency is now measured in milliseconds,

Some commentators suggest that one day jamming will be able to defeat all drones – the Russian recently tried this and failed with a monster jammer tank piled with electronic warfare equipment — but Parikh thinks that this will never happen simply for reasons of physics.

“A jammer has to listen for what frequencies are being used to jam them,” says Parikh. “It cannot listen and jam everything at the same time. There will always be gaps.”

And radios like Mesh Rider will always be able to exploit those gaps.

Smaller Faster Better Cheaper

Parikh describes Mesh Rider as a hybrid software-defined radio. While the theoretical, ideal software-defined radio is capable of communicating with any protocol on any wavelength, in practice it is constrained by hardware. Doodle Labs’ radio uses six different bands in a patented design claimed to be the first to offer this versatility.

Being software-defined means that upgrades can be applied quickly and easily. This is a world away from traditional military communications. The U.S. Army spent billions developing its Joint Tactical Radio System which an official report in 2012 found “demonstrated poor reliability, transmission range, and voice quality that restricted the unit’s ability to accomplish its mission.”

The JTRS program went on for many years without producing satisfactory hardware. This type of delay would not be survivable in the current conflict.

The U.S. Army’s current handheld Improved Multiband Inter/Intra Team Radios, cost $25,000 each. Like Doodle Lab’s Mesh Rider these offer a high level of encryption , but they only have a data speed of around 12 kbps, compared to megabits per second for Mesh Rider, enough to transmit high resolution video.

And crucially, the smallest version of Mesh Rider weighs less than an ounce and costs just a few hundred dollars, making it small and cheap enough for expendable drones. This efficient use of commercial off-the-shelf hardware with flexible software shows why Parikh feels their approach has been validated.

Extending Drone Reach

What really sets Doodle Labs offering apart is that they offer the capability to communicate at extended range. While many small drones can operate at 10-20 km (6-12 miles), the Shark can communicate from 80 km (50 miles) or more.

“Ukrainian engineers have done some extremely creative work with commercial off-the-shelf radios,” says Parikh. “But with how sophisticated jamming is getting, those radios can only take you so far and you need resources to develop complete solutions.”

Long-range communication means pairing highly sensitive receivers with highly efficient signal amplifiers, both technologies which require a high degree of technical expertise and where Doodle Labs has ample experience.

Looking ahead, Mesh Rider looks like a good match for Ukrolancet fixed-wing kamikaze drones with ranges in the tens of kilometres. The smallest version is also affordable enough for highly jam-resistant FPVs.

Further in the future, Parikh says mesh radio can enable new types of drone operations in which dozens of drones can operate in the same area simultaneously, overcoming current limitations. Doodle Labs is now working with a variety of customers including the U.S. Army, Rockwell and Airbus, and will be involved as a component supplier in the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative to field large numbers of small, low-cost drones.

The intense battle between communications and drone jammers is set continue. And Doodle Labs is planning to win.

22/04/2024

Ukrainian electronic warfare against Russian drones. How do domestic companies increase production of scarce weapons? (epravda com ua)

Two years ago, no one in the military thought that electronic warfare (EW) equipment would need to be installed in almost every pickup truck or carried in a backpack.

The emergence of FPV drones forced us to rethink this technology. As soon as it became clear that perhaps the only way to destroy an enemy FPV or Mavic is to cut off its connection with the operator, Ukraine and Russia entered a technological race. Both sides are trying to produce as many electronic warfare systems as possible while simultaneously finding weaknesses in enemy systems.
Former Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valeriy Zaluzhny wrote in an op-ed for The Economist that the enemy has mastered this technology much better, so Ukraine urgently needs to catch up.

In 2024, the state customer's attention to electronic warfare increased significantly. "In 2022, we supplied dozens of systems per month. In 2023 - hundreds, in 2024 - thousands," a representative of Kvertus, one of Ukraine's largest electronic warfare manufacturers, told EP.

However, the front line is still far from being fully equipped with electronic warfare equipment. To meet this need, Ukraine needs to speed up the development of devices and build a competitive market.

Frequency warfare
An FPV drone has a vulnerability: the operator has to manually guide it to the target. Communication between the drone and the operator takes place at certain radio frequencies. The task of the electronic warfare device is to get into these frequencies and jam this communication with a powerful signal. If done correctly, the enemy drone will lose control and crash.

However, electronic warfare may not work. Its effectiveness is affected by a number of factors: the sophistication of the enemy drone, the distance between it and the operator, the quality of the EW components or tuning to other frequencies.

Ukrainian intelligence knows what frequencies enemy FPV drones fly on. Initially, it was the 850-930 MHz band, so the electronic warfare devices were tuned to these frequencies. Nowadays, drones are increasingly flying in the 720-1020 MHz range, so electronic warfare systems need to switch to them.

This is what the technological race is all about. Who will be the first to switch their drones and electronic warfare systems to new frequencies, who will learn to detect enemy FPVs, who will be the first to make electronic warfare technology widespread and teach the military how to use it effectively.

Sometimes the parties come up with original solutions. The Russians created a drone that was controlled via a 10-kilometre cable - it cannot be physically jammed by electronic warfare. Armies are also using FPV drones with machine vision, which capture a target at a great distance and fly to it on their own even after losing communication.

To win the technological race, Ukraine needs to develop a wide range of electronic warfare products for all combat situations, make them user-friendly and, most importantly, technologically up-to-date. Finally, it is necessary to reduce the cost of these systems and establish their mass production in order to supply tens of thousands to the frontline.

Ukrainian electronic warfare equipment

The Ministry of Defence's codification procedure is a mark of quality for military equipment. After tests and inspections, the product is deemed "mature" and ready for mass production. Nine Ukrainian models of mobile electronic warfare have already passed this procedure. More are at various stages of approval.

As Oleh Donets, responsible for electronic warfare in the Brave1 cluster, told EP, 50 companies are currently developing such systems. There are many developments on the domestic market of mobile electronic warfare devices: from anti-drone guns to trench domes.

For example, an electronic warfare backpack by Quertus costs UAH 275,000. According to the developer, it operates in a "non-standard" frequency range of 720-1050 MHz. A soldier will wear it while moving a group and turn on the protective dome for several hundred metres as soon as he hears an enemy drone.

The overwhelming majority of electronic warfare systems on the domestic market are assembled from Chinese components: batteries, modules, amplifiers. This does not make the products bad - the whole world buys Chinese electronics. However, dependence on Beijing in the production of weapons could be detrimental to Ukraine.

"More and more important Chinese components are on the export ban list, so we are trying to localise them. We are currently supporting a domestic company that is negotiating with a European corporation to produce one of the electronic components for electronic warfare in Ukraine.

Ukrainian producers are also making efforts to localise the main Chinese component of the EWR - the modules. There is a vision that they should be assembled in Ukraine from European chips," Ihor Fedirko, a specialised adviser at the Ministry of Strategic Industries, told EP.

The main requirement for an electronic warfare system is that it must operate at current frequencies. Initially, FPV drones flew on standard frequencies, so the 850-930 MHz range was sufficient. Now the enemy is expanding the range to non-standard 720-1020 MHz. Accordingly, electronic warfare equipment must also evolve.
"The military says that 65-70% of enemy drones still fly on standard frequencies. The rest are on non-standard frequencies. Drones on standard radio frequencies will not go anywhere. It's just that the Russians can now combine attacks with drones on standard and non-standard frequencies. Accordingly, we need to have more different or universal electronic warfare equipment at the front," said Yaroslav Filimonov, co-founder of Kvertus.

The surveyed manufacturers say they are already adapting new developments to work in non-standard frequencies. The Ministry of Strategic Industries and Brave1 claim that the market is constantly communicating with the military at the front and responding to trends. The question is how quickly these developments will receive their first serial contracts.

Ukraine also produces large electronic warfare systems to counter enemy missiles, shaheds and reconnaissance drones. They are capable of jamming GPS signals or replacing them with false ones, throwing an object off its route. According to former Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat, the landed shaheeds in the fields are the result of Ukrainian electronic warfare.

Some of the developments - Bukovel, Nota, Pokrova - are well known, while others are kept secret. Most of them are made by private companies.

In addition to Ukrainian systems, there are also Western ones at the front, which the Armed Forces usually receive for free. At the beginning of the great war, this equipment supported the Ukrainian military's ability to defend itself against drones. In the future, the army is likely to prefer domestic products.

Ukrainian electronic warfare equipment is cheaper and battle-hardened. Developers are constantly communicating with the military and refining new models based on their feedback. There are many nuances: enemy operating frequencies, ease of use, functionality to prevent "friendly fire", and the ability to integrate with various systems at the front.

The market is growing

Despite its relative newness, the market for mobile electronic warfare equipment is surprisingly competitive, with many manufacturers and customers. Electronic warfare equipment is purchased by charities, the army, law enforcement agencies, cities, and even private companies. "In 2022, 80% of our systems were bought by charities and businesses, and now 85% are purchased by the state, military units, and communities," said a Kvertus representative.

Many of the complexes are purchased by military units, which were allocated 10% of military personal income tax in 2024 to purchase equipment. As a result, the army received UAH 9.6 billion for urgent equipment purchases.

This approach has also benefited the market. The military often buys equipment that has not yet been codified but has already proven itself. In this way, developers receive working capital even before government contracts are signed, and the military receives the desired equipment faster.

Direct procurement by the military also has its weaknesses. For example, each unit must have a procurement specialist, otherwise part of the money may remain unused. The National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption pointed out the risks of inefficient spending due to the lack of clear procurement regulations.

"Cities also order electronic warfare systems. The mayor of the frontline city of Nikopol approached us and said that the Russians were training their FPV drone operators to attack civilian infrastructure. We were looking for a solution for them. We have the same cooperation with the authorities of Lviv and Dnipro. Private companies also buy our systems to protect their facilities. All they need is a permit from the National Guard," Kvertus says.

Since the beginning of the Great War, the refurbishment market has been somewhat chaotic. Both large companies and garage craftsmen supplied the frontline. There were almost no codified products with a quality mark from the Ministry of Defence.

Now the market is changing. The Ministry of Defence says that small teams are coming together to create better products. Brave1 notes that customers are paying more attention to proven products, and manufacturers are trying to go through the state codification procedure.

Now the question is to ensure that the market moves in the right direction technologically and keeps up with the trends at the front. To do this, the government should shorten the process of codifying products.

The second important issue is mass production. Current production volumes do not meet the needs of the army - there is still a shortage of electronic warfare equipment at the front. To solve this problem, manufacturers of codified systems should systematically receive large and long-term orders from the state.

antidroneukraine.com

17/04/2024

Inside the changing world of drone warfare (Task and purpose com)

The threat of small drones and how they are implemented has changed the way the military trains for war. Some drones are used as a reconnaissance platform for detecting troop movements, while others are rigged with hardware to drop grenades and mortars on enemy fighters.

Either way, small commercial drones will be a permanent fixture in modern warfare.

“Talk to any soldier in Ukraine,” said Brig. Gen. Guillaume Beaurpere, commander of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (SWCS). “You don’t go anywhere without a drone flying either in support of you or against you.”

First-person view (FPV) drone footage and other videos have poured onto social media feeds since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. The videos have put the horrors of war on center stage as Russians and Ukrainians have been stalked and killed by off-the-shelf, modified small drones.

“What we are seeing these things used as today is a lot of reactive adaptation of technology. So, in the war in Ukraine, we’re seeing both sides kind of adapting to the disruptive nature of this tech,” said Dylan Hamm, a former Navy SEAL who currently works for PDW, a defense contractor focused on drone technology. “They’re figuring out: ‘What, can I zip tie to this drone?’ ‘How can I get this kinetic payload delivered?’ And they’re just making it happen.”

Small drones have played a major role during the war in Ukraine. Hamm said there have been several instances of quadcopters being rigged up with an RPG-7 rocket, modified from a direct, shoulder-fired weapon to a “maneuverable shape charge” that creates a nightmare for armored vehicles.

“That’s kind of flipped all strategy up on its head because now what do you do? How do you counter that capability?” Hamm said. “How do you protect folks against it? And how do you employ that capability on your own side to the greatest effect?”

Small unmanned systems
Dylan Hamm spent 12 years in the Navy and deployed to locations around the world eight times. But it wasn’t until later in his career that he started seeing the use of small unmanned systems.

“As I got toward the end of my time — 2017 through 2020 — we really started to see kind of the disruptive nature of small unmanned systems. I mean, we’ve always had larger systems like ScanEagle that we had in [Operation Enduring Freedom], which was able to provide us route clearance […],” Hamm said. “But it wasn’t until the implementation of those really small quadcopters and things of that nature that we started to see how capable these systems were.”

Hamm dove head first into the technology and explored their capabilities to see how the technology could support the missions they were conducting.

“That included design, fabrication, prototyping, configuration, tuning, deployment—all of it,” Hamm said. “So, with that, I kind of learned a good amount of that holistic process of product design, and I carried that with me as I transitioned out [of the Navy] in 2020.”

It wasn’t just the small off-the-shelf quadcopters that he was experimenting with and evaluating. He was testing unmanned, track-driven technologies as well. But, he found the small drones had a more agile and practical use for their missions.

“The small unmanned aerial systems have quite a bit more agility,” Hamm said. You can go up and over and around obstacles where the track ground vehicles are great. They have endurance, but they do have quite a bit of limitations in their ability to maneuver.”

Defense against small unmanned systems

There are several tactics employed throughout Ukraine to mitigate the risk of drone attacks, including weird-looking ‘guns’ that look like something straight out of a sci-fi movie.

Hamm thinks the technology is still in the early stages of development. The devices are fairly static and designed and developed to target certain frequency ranges or identify and target certain protocols, like a commercial DJI drone. The electromagnetic pulse weapon sends out DJI’s protocol command, forcing a drone to land or disarm.

“[the electromagnetic pulse weapons] lack a certain amount of agility. What we’re seeing overseas right now is really that cat-and-mouse game every week. Folks are innovating, changing the frequency bands they’re operating in, and changing the protocols they’re using,” Hamm said. “So, I think those systems are going to have to become more agile or just be iterated upon to continue to keep up with these changes.”

Hamm said tactics and fortifications are being changed to help ward off the threat of small unmanned drones. Nets are being implemented as a means to safely intercept a quadcopter, preventing it from delivering an impact-detonated munition.

Trench warfare is a major part of the war in Ukraine. The presence of drones changed the approach from tactics used during World War I and II.

“I don’t want a long linear trench if a quadcopter is going to come in at a long linear approach to deliver a kinetic payload,” Hamm said.

But with every change in tactics and every new technology implemented, there needs to be a comprehensive understanding of how to use it and how it can affect troops on the ground. For example, Hamm said jamming technology may be able to down a drone, but that could risk detonating the attached explosives when it hits the ground.

“I don’t know that there is a safe way in that implementation to down one of those drones without really risking those contacting each other and activating the device,” Hamm said.

Drone effects on military communication

In addition to jamming technology, cell phone towers and infrastructure emitting high energy levels can disrupt radio signals by disrupting operational frequencies.

PDW was recently awarded a $6.9 million contract from the U.S. Special Operations Forces Acquisitions, Technology, and Logistics (ATL) office for its jammer-proof radio technology, BlackWave. This helps ensure a reliable digital radio link in both intentional and unintentional jammed spaces. Due to the sensitive nature of that contract, Hamm was unable to elaborate on the new tech.

“I think it’s well suited for that particular conflict,” Hamm said. “They’re operating in trench warfare with artillery, and these systems are the disruptive tool they need to clear trenches and maneuver ground forces.”

Whether it’s different trench-clearing procedures or installing drone-stopping mesh over your armored vehicle, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of unmanned drones is a vital skill both Ukraine and the U.S. militaries are working to master.

“Everybody’s taking notes, adjusting tactics, figuring out how they can resource against it, and how they can potentially change unit structures to support these capabilities,” Hamm said. “Ukraine stood up an unmanned systems branch of their armed forces because they are fully invested in this capability.”

16/04/2024

Ukrainian Troops Staged A Daring Three-Night Raid To Steal A Russian Tank Fitted With A New Drone-Jammer (Forbes com)

Starving for artillery ammunition after Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress blocked further aid to Ukraine starting in October, the Ukrainian forces acquired tiny explosive drones as a firepower expedient.

Today these drones—hundreds of thousands of them—are the most important systems in the Ukrainian inventory. This means tactical radio jammers, which can block the signals operators use to control their drones, are the most important systems in the Russian inventory.

So when Russian tanks began rolling toward the front line with a giant new jammer—actually, clusters of multiple jammers—in recent weeks, Ukrainian drone operators were interested. Very interested.

If the new jammers worked, the Ukrainian operators would need to develop countermeasures.

Their chance to find out came earlier this month, when a Russian T-72 festooned with jammers ran over some barbed wire just east of Ukrainian positions in Terny, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. The wire prevented the tank’s driver from turning fast enough to avoid a collision with a BMP fighting vehicle.

Soon, a Ukrainian drone zoomed in and exploded. The drone didn’t badly damage the 51-ton tank, but it did spook the three crew. They bailed out—and then got killed by more drones.

Ukrainian surveillance drones were overhead the whole time. Scrutinizing the imagery, analysts concluded the lightly damaged T-72 with the tangled track and the heap of radio jammers was the perfect prize.

Sure, the fact that at least one drone struck the tank was a strong hint that the jammers weren’t working very well. Still, the Ukrainians wanted to know why.

The 12th Azov Brigade, one of the Ukrainian army’s elite units, volunteered for what would be an extremely dangerous mission. The objective: to retrieve the immobilized T-72 from the no-man’s-land outside Terny—a ribbon of shell-pocked terrain that is among the most dangerous in the world.

“We all started planning this operation together,” a 12th Brigade tanker named Ilya said in an official video describing the operation. The big unanswerable question was: would the tank even run? “Who can say if its engine was working or not,” Ilya mused. “That's the main question.”

Everyone understood the danger. And when a 12th Brigade company commander instructed a tanker named Baidar to tag along on the raid, he just shrugged. “It's simple for me,” Baidar said. “I'm in the army. I received an order.”

Combat engineers went first, sneaking out at night to probe the approach and check on the tank’s condition. They returned to Ukrainian lines, a mile away, with bad news. While it seemed the tank was operable, its turret was fixed in the forward position—and its 125-millimeter main gun blocked the driver’s hatch.

There was no way to get a Ukrainian driver through the hatch without first rotating the turret—a job for a trained tank crewman.

On night two, a tanker accompanied the raiding party. While engineers carefully untangled the wire jamming the tank’s tracks—a job complicated by the presence of a 21-pound anti-tank mine peeking from the soil directly underneath the tank—the tanker manually cranked the turret to unblock the driver’s hatch and then switched on the tank’s power.

Nothing. “No signs of life at all,” Baidar explained. In its rush to escape, the Russian crew had left the tank on—and drained its batteries. “It would be impossible to start it this day,” Ilya said.

The next night, the raiders returned. Engineers led the way. Infantry escorted them. Medics waited in the rear, expecting casualties. In the main party: Baidar and Ilya. The Ukrainians hauled three batteries, each weighing 150 pounds, plus compressed air, tools and night-vision goggles. The compressed air would help start the tank.

Russian artillery exploded nearby as the tankers worked under the cover of darkness. “Long story short, I inserted those batteries,” Ilya recalled. “I was really hoping it'd come back to life.”

It did. The tank was operational. Now the hard part: driving it a mile back to Ukrainian positions without getting blown up by Russian fire. “We gather all our things, throw them on top and, with crossed fingers, I think, ‘Well, let's go,’” Ilya said. He drove.

It was a clear, moonlit night. Peering through night-vision goggles, Ilya had no problem driving across the no-man’s-land to the ruins of Terny. “But when I drove into the village, very deep potholes began,” Ilya said. “Really, very deep. The tank was jumping. It was hard for me to see.”

Ilya didn’t notice the deep crater, apparently from a Russian glide bomb, that nearly swallowed the T-72. “I rush into this pit at high speed,” Ilya said. “I hit my head on the hatch and black out.”

Coming to, Ilya worried he had failed his mission. Glide bomb craters are deep and full of loose dirt that can permanently mire a 51-ton tank. Luckily for the Ukrainians, the captured T-72’s main gun had speared the soil like a toothpick, preventing the vehicle from sinking down to its hull.

Ilya threw the transmission into reverse and revved the engine to its full 2,000 revolutions per minute. “I make a backward lunge, stay in that position,” he recalled. “Again, on the brakes, I rev the engine again, but now I engage not the first gear, but the second, to make the fastest possible forward lunge and get out even more.”

Rocking back and forth at max RPM, Ilya finally drove the tank out of the bomb crater. Ilya was bleeding from injuries he sustained in the tumble into the crater and periodically blacking out, but he still managed to drive the T-72 past more bomb craters—and through dozens of shells the Russian hurled at the stolen tank.

Finally safe behind their own lines, the Ukrainians inspected the jammers they’d risked their lives to drive off the battlefield.

“It was makeshift,” Ilya said. The individual jammers and their antenna might have been factory-standard, but the overall assembly—multiple jammers roped together atop a wooden shipping pallet—was “homemade,” and probably not every effective.

“Why did they do this?” Ilya asked. “It's extremely inconvenient.”

That’s good news for the Ukrainian drone campaign: good news that a raiding party worked for three nights to deliver through mines, shellfire and tank-eating craters.