in a tiny Ukrainian workshop near the frontline ‘Chimera’ is preparing his robot army for battle. Lined up in a row, the four-wheeled unmanned vehicles known as "Hyenas" will crawl toward Russian lines full of explosives. Hunting, looking to attack an enemy dugout or halt an advance.
"Imagine what 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of explosives is like: it's very powerful," Chimera, 44, who asked to be identified by his call sign, said. "Very powerful." Workshops like this one, run by Ukraine's Third Army Corps, have sprouted up across the 1,200-km (745-mile) front as Kyiv's outmanned army seeks to gain the technological edge against Russia's unrelenting infantry assaults in the fifth year of war. Unmanned ground vehicles are a critical new component of Ukraine's strategy to fight smarter by preserving the lives of its troops on a drone-saturated battlefield, where virtually any movement can prove deadly.
Most Ukrainian brigades and regiments feature unmanned systems units which are expanding to include UGVs as part of their forces. visited Chimera's unit, NC13, a leader in employing UGVs to support battlefield assaults, to understand how the integration of these new weapons is shaping the future of land-based warfare. In the workshop, a garage space is crammed with experimental drones, some with tracks and others wheeled. One is mounted with a hose for dousing fires; another is equipped with a rack to hold portable rocket launchers.
Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, who commands the Third Army Corps, described the gradual replacement of infantrymen with UGVs as the next "revolution" in warfare. Considered one of Ukraine's premier forces, the corps wants to replace around one third of its frontline troops by the end of the year. "The West slept through the (drone) revolution in many ways," he said, adding the infantry now performs just 10% of the tasks it did before the constant aerial threat appeared.
"If the West really wants to not just keep up with the times, but to get slightly ahead, it needs to think about the next revolution," said Biletskyi. In frontline areas such as eastern Ukraine's "fortress belt" in Donetsk, ground drones can often be seen trundling to and from besieged cities with rations or ammunition, or spiriting away injured troops. They have performed more than 50,000 logistics and evacuation missions this year, Kyiv's defence ministry said in June.
Inside a grey command centre in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, the ground drone operators of NC13, formed last year, are manifesting Biletskyi's vision in real time, controllers in hand. Parked in front of screens beaming a black-and-white feed from the battlefield, they sprayed a tree line with a machinegun mounted to a UGV. Glowing screens and the din of digital chatter over Discord, the messaging platform team members use to communicate, lend the space the air of a gaming club.
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