Affordable precision: Ukraine's innovative defence against drones
Russians continually attack Ukraine at night using cruise missiles and swarms of Shahed drones. The latter, although minimally effective against military targets, serve the Russians not only as weapons of terror but also as decoys, diverting the attention of Ukrainian air defence. This is how Ukrainians hunt them.
Additionally, Russians use Shaheds to map Ukrainian defence activity, which aids them in conducting subsequent attacks by exploiting identified gaps.
Meanwhile, Ukraine must deploy equipment to combat these drones, which costs at most tens of thousands of pounds. It often uses air defence systems, where a single missile costs hundreds of thousands of pounds. There have been instances of firing Patriots, where a missile costs several million pounds.
Therefore, Gepard gun systems are ideally suited for hunting Shaheds. Depending on the number of shells fired, they cost from a few to tens of thousands of pounds. Another economical option is the American VAMPIRE (Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment) systems based on simple APKWS-guided rockets, which cost slightly over 10,000 pounds each.
Below, you can see a drone being shot down, and the thermal camera image and markers visible at the beginning of the recording are identical to the previous instances of firing "Vampire."
American Vampire — The world's cheapest rocket air defence system
The VAMPIRE system is a very lightweight solution designed for installation on vehicles like pick-up trucks. It includes a mast with an electro-optical head featuring a thermal camera and laser designator and a LAND-LGR4 launcher container from Arnold Defense. It weighs only 27 kilograms and holds four 70mm calibre rockets.
The ordnance consists of APKWS rockets with a seeker head that follows a reflected laser beam. This is a very inexpensive means of attack because it is based on the widely used, unguided Hydra 70mm rockets within NATO countries. The construction of APKWS involves unscrewing the front part of the old missile with a contact fuse and installing a new section that includes a seeker head and deployable control surfaces.
