Someone here said "[Russian] tactical units", "smoke grenades". They must be joking.
A drone like this is defending against 2-3 50-year-olds without military experience wading through a bombed out tree-line into almost certain death, because there are literal firing squads waiting if they don't. With a huge round like 12.7, all you have to do is fire pot shots in the general vicinity while drone pilots do the rest. Also, these can be life-savers for an outpost when weather conditions ground all drones.
This is a fluff piece, but these machines might become very real very soon. They're already used for resupply and dropping mines. We have plenty of videos of that from both sides. A few months ago we had a video of one of these taking out an infantry carrier. This is not vaporware. It's a bad approach at worst, but I wouldn't be surprised if this grows exponentially for many years to come.
From the video with one of these robots (maybe the one in the story?)
>We prepared for the combat use of these modules for a very long time. It was a very difficult sector on which the enemy was constantly conducting assault actions. That's why the infantry needed reinforcements. But the robot drone didn't just drive onto the position for a day. Instead of real fighters, an iron one held the line for a month and a half and actually fooled the Russians because they didn't even think about something like this. (https://youtu.be/Ir6sNgW91Hw?t=226)
"Very difficult" and constants assaults doesn't sound like what you describe.
I have to say if I was defending against Russians trying to kill me I'd much rather operate the gun remotely from behind a hill than sit there in range.
This is the second comment that says that I'm downplaying these situations, so I guess I really wasn't very clear.
Small assault groups of untrained men can still be "very difficult". The defending outposts are similarly small groups. The defenders experience very long, exhausting rotations: a month is considered good: supplies are dropped by drones. This is because as of ~2025 the most dangerous part of a rotation is the infil/outfil. The record for a frontline rotation is close to 500 days (they had to dig their own well underground). Both sides are backed by drones. As someone pointed out, the "expendable" assault groups, in part, serve to draw defenders out for drones. Further, you often hear of anecdata that a defensive position was overrun, because Russians sent bodies after bodies until defenders ran out of ammo. 5:1 death rate (Russian:Ukrainian) is considered good for Russia, 10:1 is something they probably can maintain. Ukraine has to aim for 15:1. Russian personnel losses average around 30k per month since early 2025, which, I hear, is very close to how much they can regenerate at the moment. I've watched an interview on Lindybeige where someone involved with drone pilots said that pilots with 1k+ kills is not uncommon, kills in the hundreds is normal.
It's not easy to talk about the Ukraine war, because it changes so radically every N months.
>5:1 death rate (Russian:Ukrainian) is considered good for Russia
>pilots with 1k+ kills is not uncommon, kills in the hundreds is normal.
I am strongly pro-Ukraine in this conflict, but this sounds over the top and unbelievable. Are you sure this is not Ukrainian propaganda? Are there any reliable public sources about this?
I think Ukrainian propaganda would go "we can generate N times more manpower than Russia", which is the opposite of what these figures suggest. These figure are about the fact that force generation in Ukraine is a huge problem.
Edit: I first heard of these numbers from Peter Zeihan. I've since heard ballpark-similar estimates from other people. I think of it this way: Russia has a huge manpower pool. Further, their ability to extract actual manpower from it is higher (due to poverty, largely). So Ukraine likewise requires a huge battlefield advantage to break even. Further, Ukraine needs another huge advantage on top of that, so that it's painfully obvious that not only the war is unsustainable, but that it's only unsustainable to Russia: only then will Russia sue for peace. At the moment, it seems like the war is unsustainable for both, which means noone has the advantage.
Incredible. I wonder what the most kills is for a single individual through direct action? There’s always the nuclear bombshell but that’s more of a team effort. These kills are through individual action.
You are being dishonest. Those squads usually have SOME degree of drone, artillery and aviation support behind them. They are basically there to find out where the defenders are. Sure they are expendable, but they are just a part of the attack. I bet 24 hours sitting in a trench with FPVs, 152mms, and FABs exploding all over your position would change your mind as to the danger posed by those attacks you make fun of. Being at exactly this location vs kilometers away while remotely controlling a mobile gun turret makes ALL the difference
I am not making fun. If it seems that way, I misspoke. I think that any war is terrifying and this one more than any other I know of.
The way I imagine the attacks this UGV defended against is small groups of men deemed expendable knowingly going to their very likely deaths. Yes, this is part of a bigger Russian strategy which is very dangerous and unfortunately, so far, too effective.
> 2-3 50-year-olds without military experience wading through a bombed out tree-line into almost certain death
Yeah, excepts apparently these good for nothing oldtimers are taking 5 to 10 square kilometers per day against entrenched integrated force, capable of launching dozens of killer drones per target at a moment notice. Do you feel the inconsistency here? I do.
I do not suggest that the Russian tactic I described doesn't work. I'm saying that these machines are a viable approach to explore. Further, I'm not saying that the Russian strategy is to just repeat this tactic ad nauseam: it's part of a bigger play where they probe for weaknesses across very long lengths of the frontline, stretching Ukrainians thin, and, when weakpoints are found, they do proper, hyper-concentrated assaults with war-hardened veterans.
A big backdrop of this UGV story is that Ukraine is spread very thin. Rumour has it that brigades across the front are 20-40% strong.
At that rate Russia will have conquered Ukraine in about a century. The war is clearly going to be decided by attrition, not the current rate of land capture.
Reading between the lines of the article it seems advanced but not too surprising.
I assume that at night when it "withdrew to a covered location" there was opportunity for maintenance, battery swaps, etc.
The article says that it successfully carried out "multiple calls for fire." That sounds like over those 45 days there were multiple missions to provide suppressive fire. They're not explicit about what that means but it sounds like, "if you see anything moving in this arc, take a few shots at them". Presumably there's some AI to prevent it from wasting ammo on really dumb decoys.
A "simple" mobile automated turret has been around for a while. The novelty they would be demonstrating is essentially battlefield robustness. They aren't claiming that this machine can operate completely autonomously for 6 weeks but the incremental pieces are still hard.
I don't understand how it doesn't just get hit by a drone? Is it because the Russian drone pilots all operate from out of theatre and the loss of starlink disabled this?
US MIC graft and corruption has created a woefully obsolete, dinosaur military force adept at only fighting symmetric wars of 1995. Infantry meat assaults, paratroopers, tanks, and all expensive big kinetic systems are all largely obsolete like castles and mounted knights. What needs to happen is automated factories of highly-integrated, standardized, cheap, fast, disposable drone/rocket/loiter and small, light, fast ground and marine systems that can be rapidly deployed in great numbers via standardized containers (20'/40' ISO perhaps) by unmanned ground, air, and sea vehicles. The hand-building of fragile, commodity, bespoke, hobby-grade drones isn't scalable or optimized even though it technically works so far, but it's obviously not the best way to sustain and automate production on an industrial scale for lowest cost and most efficient use of human effort. The company/s|country/ies that can produce orders-of-magnitude more drones and drone supervisors/pilots "wins".
At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?
Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?
In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.
If you think about, we moved human one-on-one battles to MMA and combat sport, this allowed channeling individual human aggression in a controlled environment. The future war might be not very different, swarm of drones fighting other swarm of drones while others watching on the news, who can build, manage and deploy smarter and more effective drones. If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat.
We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable.
So it is NOT like before. And the logical conclusion, as those drones get better and more widely adopted, is that war will be nothing more a video game with real economics and supply chain. So we basically made the cost of genocide or colonization too high to absorb. Previous wars, people got away with it.
The majority of nations? majority of people on earth? We are going to a multilateral world and to win a war you need secure the appeal of majority. If the majority think your war is illegal they can cut you off from the world economy.
It is a distributed consensus-based algorithm, and the young people who are writing those algorithms will shape the future of governance.
It is interesting that people give downvoting, so either they enjoy having the current wars continue and people physically killed, or they basically gave up on seeing a better future.
Ukrainian invasion was attempt at genocide and colonization. Israel did anoyher genocide last year. And then there is yemen which may not be genocide, I dunno, but has super high unchecked amount of victims. Saudi made sure no one is watching.
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively
This has been the assumption for over a decade now.
> those who can't produce any more drones, lose
Already the norm. Even the Taliban has been operating a drone mass production program for a couple years now [0][1].
> If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat
This abstraction of warfare isn't as peaceful as you make it out to be. Operationally, you still need to take out dual use infra which in a number of cases is civilian in nature.
The reality is, countries have increasingly accepted that civilian casualties will occur and it doesn't matter because they don't impact tactical goals.
In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.
This has always been the case.
It's very common for a war to be lost by the side that runs out of resources first -- whether soldiers, oil, missiles, or whatever the limiting factor is. Right now a major question in the Iran war is how many drones and missiles Iran has left.
What you describe as "playing strategy video game and call it day" is essentially democracy, and why democracies generally don't declare war on each other. Mostly, they trade goods and play football (soccer) against each other instead.
Orignal Star Trek did an episode on this - "A Taste of Armageddon". The war was a video game - fought on a computer. But if the virtual bombs hit your area, you were declared dead and had to a report to a disintegration chamber. If you can get past the dated special effects - the concept is the same.
6 weeks equates 84 average sized US highschools worth of people dying on the Russian side and twice as many coming back with life altering injuries. I'm not sure how a country can survive that.
The difference is you can appeal or ignore a game result. If Ukraine lost a strategy game tournament, would they give up their territory? Or fight to hold it still?
> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?
> Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?
But then how will you gain new territory for oligarchs and billionaires? Are you really ready for the sacrifice that their next yacht will be smaller instead of larger? Do you really want them to withdraw from London's real estate market?
This wasn't immediately obvious to me, but it's important to note this unit is remotely controlled. The article made it sound autonomous. Further, the unit went back to base nightly (for maintenance / battery swaps I assume).
This is surely the future. At some point we will eventually have battles fought entirely by pilot(less) drones? And then war becomes purely economical.
The article calls this a "Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle armed with a machine gun" and the headline calls it a "Ukrainian Combat Robot". Not a "drone" like the submitter's title has.
Edit: it seems like the creator calls it a "droid". Is that just them, or is that becoming standard terminology for a kind of ground-based "soldier-robot"? See:
193 comments
A drone like this is defending against 2-3 50-year-olds without military experience wading through a bombed out tree-line into almost certain death, because there are literal firing squads waiting if they don't. With a huge round like 12.7, all you have to do is fire pot shots in the general vicinity while drone pilots do the rest. Also, these can be life-savers for an outpost when weather conditions ground all drones.
This is a fluff piece, but these machines might become very real very soon. They're already used for resupply and dropping mines. We have plenty of videos of that from both sides. A few months ago we had a video of one of these taking out an infantry carrier. This is not vaporware. It's a bad approach at worst, but I wouldn't be surprised if this grows exponentially for many years to come.
>We prepared for the combat use of these modules for a very long time. It was a very difficult sector on which the enemy was constantly conducting assault actions. That's why the infantry needed reinforcements. But the robot drone didn't just drive onto the position for a day. Instead of real fighters, an iron one held the line for a month and a half and actually fooled the Russians because they didn't even think about something like this. (https://youtu.be/Ir6sNgW91Hw?t=226)
"Very difficult" and constants assaults doesn't sound like what you describe.
I have to say if I was defending against Russians trying to kill me I'd much rather operate the gun remotely from behind a hill than sit there in range.
Small assault groups of untrained men can still be "very difficult". The defending outposts are similarly small groups. The defenders experience very long, exhausting rotations: a month is considered good: supplies are dropped by drones. This is because as of ~2025 the most dangerous part of a rotation is the infil/outfil. The record for a frontline rotation is close to 500 days (they had to dig their own well underground). Both sides are backed by drones. As someone pointed out, the "expendable" assault groups, in part, serve to draw defenders out for drones. Further, you often hear of anecdata that a defensive position was overrun, because Russians sent bodies after bodies until defenders ran out of ammo. 5:1 death rate (Russian:Ukrainian) is considered good for Russia, 10:1 is something they probably can maintain. Ukraine has to aim for 15:1. Russian personnel losses average around 30k per month since early 2025, which, I hear, is very close to how much they can regenerate at the moment. I've watched an interview on Lindybeige where someone involved with drone pilots said that pilots with 1k+ kills is not uncommon, kills in the hundreds is normal.
It's not easy to talk about the Ukraine war, because it changes so radically every N months.
>5:1 death rate (Russian:Ukrainian) is considered good for Russia
>pilots with 1k+ kills is not uncommon, kills in the hundreds is normal.
I am strongly pro-Ukraine in this conflict, but this sounds over the top and unbelievable. Are you sure this is not Ukrainian propaganda? Are there any reliable public sources about this?
Edit: I first heard of these numbers from Peter Zeihan. I've since heard ballpark-similar estimates from other people. I think of it this way: Russia has a huge manpower pool. Further, their ability to extract actual manpower from it is higher (due to poverty, largely). So Ukraine likewise requires a huge battlefield advantage to break even. Further, Ukraine needs another huge advantage on top of that, so that it's painfully obvious that not only the war is unsustainable, but that it's only unsustainable to Russia: only then will Russia sue for peace. At the moment, it seems like the war is unsustainable for both, which means noone has the advantage.
> pilots with 1k+ kills is not uncommon
Incredible. I wonder what the most kills is for a single individual through direct action? There’s always the nuclear bombshell but that’s more of a team effort. These kills are through individual action.
The way I imagine the attacks this UGV defended against is small groups of men deemed expendable knowingly going to their very likely deaths. Yes, this is part of a bigger Russian strategy which is very dangerous and unfortunately, so far, too effective.
The reality is that Russia is not gaining anything in this war- it just keeps Putin in power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo:_Annals_of_the_Dinochrome...
> 2-3 50-year-olds without military experience wading through a bombed out tree-line into almost certain death
Yeah, excepts apparently these good for nothing oldtimers are taking 5 to 10 square kilometers per day against entrenched integrated force, capable of launching dozens of killer drones per target at a moment notice. Do you feel the inconsistency here? I do.
A big backdrop of this UGV story is that Ukraine is spread very thin. Rumour has it that brigades across the front are 20-40% strong.
[1] https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oay_-cAlLXE
I assume that at night when it "withdrew to a covered location" there was opportunity for maintenance, battery swaps, etc.
The article says that it successfully carried out "multiple calls for fire." That sounds like over those 45 days there were multiple missions to provide suppressive fire. They're not explicit about what that means but it sounds like, "if you see anything moving in this arc, take a few shots at them". Presumably there's some AI to prevent it from wasting ammo on really dumb decoys.
A "simple" mobile automated turret has been around for a while. The novelty they would be demonstrating is essentially battlefield robustness. They aren't claiming that this machine can operate completely autonomously for 6 weeks but the incremental pieces are still hard.
https://github.com/tschak909/UA571C
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/grid-os-developmen...
UA 571-C remote gun sentry
Obviously developed in Ukraine ;-)
Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?
In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.
If you think about, we moved human one-on-one battles to MMA and combat sport, this allowed channeling individual human aggression in a controlled environment. The future war might be not very different, swarm of drones fighting other swarm of drones while others watching on the news, who can build, manage and deploy smarter and more effective drones. If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat.
> abstract it away and play video game?
What happens when one side wins? In the real world, they actually win. In the video game, nothing happens
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively
In other words, in the near future it might work the exact way it has always worked.
> they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat.
Your ideas are based on the idea of winning in a closed-system game. War is waged by people. Some people actually want the other people to die.
We (as humans) are getting more strict about losing people's life. We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable.
So it is NOT like before. And the logical conclusion, as those drones get better and more widely adopted, is that war will be nothing more a video game with real economics and supply chain. So we basically made the cost of genocide or colonization too high to absorb. Previous wars, people got away with it.
It is a distributed consensus-based algorithm, and the young people who are writing those algorithms will shape the future of governance.
The majority of the world thinks the Israeli/US-Iran war is illegal.
And hardly how China or India are likely to work too.
That future you seem to think is inevitable is very far from it:
> We don't allow genocide, we don't allow colonization and enslavement, at least the majority of nations agree that this is not acceptable
Literally all of these things are happening as we type this. What the majority of nations do or do not want is irrelevant.
Both cases, it is sad.
And they all get away with it.
> In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively
This has been the assumption for over a decade now.
> those who can't produce any more drones, lose
Already the norm. Even the Taliban has been operating a drone mass production program for a couple years now [0][1].
> If one side economy collapses and their manufacturing collapse, then what is left? they could easily kill the people, but other nations won't allow it, so it will stop at economical defeat
This abstraction of warfare isn't as peaceful as you make it out to be. Operationally, you still need to take out dual use infra which in a number of cases is civilian in nature.
The reality is, countries have increasingly accepted that civilian casualties will occur and it doesn't matter because they don't impact tactical goals.
[0] - https://www.themiddleeastuncovered.com/p/inside-the-talibans...
[1] - https://thekhorasandiary.com/en/2026/03/13/taliban-strengthe...
>
In the near future, war might be about who can build faster/better and hit the other economy more effectively, and those who can't produce any more drones, lose.This has always been the case.
It's very common for a war to be lost by the side that runs out of resources first -- whether soldiers, oil, missiles, or whatever the limiting factor is. Right now a major question in the Iran war is how many drones and missiles Iran has left.
What you describe as "playing strategy video game and call it day" is essentially democracy, and why democracies generally don't declare war on each other. Mostly, they trade goods and play football (soccer) against each other instead.
>> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?
Do you agree in case your team lose to be relocated to the remote territory and also be stripped of your language, history and national identity?
> At this point might as well just play strategy video game and call it a day?
> Both sides staring at screens, controlling drones fighting each other.. why use physical drones at all? abstract it away and play video game?
But then how will you gain new territory for oligarchs and billionaires? Are you really ready for the sacrifice that their next yacht will be smaller instead of larger? Do you really want them to withdraw from London's real estate market?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nucl...
https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw
Heck maybe not even a sub needed, some smaller country could have an automated tiny raft too small to be seen on radar tow in the drones
They could charge via phantom power from powerlines and will find a way around GPS jamming
The article calls this a "Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle armed with a machine gun" and the headline calls it a "Ukrainian Combat Robot". Not a "drone" like the submitter's title has.
Edit: it seems like the creator calls it a "droid". Is that just them, or is that becoming standard terminology for a kind of ground-based "soldier-robot"? See:
https://devdroid.tech/en/catalog/droid-tw
> each evening, it withdrew to a covered location.
Why? Isn't the advantage that it can stay in a position indefinitely? Does it not have infrared cameras, etc?