Ukraine Military History Institute
The drone did not replace the howitzer
Dmytro Putiata opens with a point that runs against a lot of commentary. Drones have taken over many artillery tasks, and some artillery brigades now fly heavy bomber drones over Starlink that drop munitions on enemy howitzers at night. That is counter-battery work done from the air.
But he separates two kinds of target. An enemy gun that has just opened fire is urgent and has to be taken out now. A gun that is known but silent can wait for the night mission. The tools are complementary, and in his words nobody is getting rid of howitzers and ammunition to replace them with drones. That, he says, would be a very bad decision and not efficient at all.
Rob Lee then supplies the case that shows why.
Kursk, December 2024: the week Ukrainian guns stayed silent
When North Korean troops began their assaults in Kursk in December 2024, Rob says, they attacked in company and battalion sized groups of dismounted infantry. In that first week Russia put a large number of ISR drones overhead.
The effect was to suppress Ukrainian artillery without firing at it. The guns did not want to open up, because opening up meant being located and then targeted. So the Ukrainian brigades and special operations units in the area fought the first few days with very little artillery support.
What did the killing instead was FPV drones, Mavic drops and possibly Mk 19 grenade launchers. It was not enough. The North Koreans could operate in large groups, the mass was too much to handle, and the Ukrainians were pushed back.
Once the guns opened up, the assault groups shrank to squads
After about a week, the Ukrainian units dealt with the ISR problem and their artillery started firing. Rob's account is that North Korea then took very heavy losses and had to change tactics. Company sized assaults gave way to squad sized ones.
He notes this is the same adaptation Russia made earlier, when it started losing too many people. It matters because small groups are slow. The North Korean infantry were fit and could cover ground quickly in mass, but an attacker reduced to infiltrating in ones and twos moves far more slowly, and a slow attack is a manageable one.
That logic is the core of his argument. Russia uses less dangerous tactics because artillery deters it from more dangerous ones. Rob's warning follows directly: if you lose the artillery, you get that risk back.
Why FPVs alone cannot stop a mass assault
Rob is specific about the arithmetic. An FPV team kills one soldier at a time. An FPV flies at roughly one minute per kilometre. And it usually takes multiple FPVs to kill one soldier.
A brigade has a fixed number of FPV teams, sized for the limited numbers of attackers it typically faces. Units can combine against a bigger assault, but when the infantry simply outnumber the drones, the teams struggle. "There's a reason for artillery," he says. "There's a reason for everything."
Both sides are searching for manoeuvre again
Rob frames all of this through World War I. When machine guns and artillery arrived, they initially favoured the defence, and it took new tactics, new task organisation and new equipment, infiltration tactics among them, before offensive operations became possible again. Both sides are running that experiment now.
He says Ukraine is doing more of the testing, partly because it has fewer units on the offensive: air assault forces, assault regiments, and special operations units in limited ways. Russia, by his account, has been slow to adapt and often repeats the same thing, losing people unnecessarily.
The Russian assault that tried to drown the air defence first
The exception was an assault Rob describes from roughly two weeks before the recording, in what he calls the Azov direction. It involved the 90th Tank Division, with elements of the 41st Combined Arms Army and, he thinks, the 8th Combined Arms Army.
What made it unusual came first. About an hour and a half before the operation, Russia launched a batch of Gerbera decoy drones from its own territory toward the area. The aim, as Rob reads it, was to overload the air defence in that corps sector so that other Russian drones would get through.
Then Russia flew 20 Atlant loitering munitions almost simultaneously. The corps typically sees eight a day. Rob calls it four times the usual number; on his own figures it is closer to two and a half, but either way it was a deliberate surge. Russia had tested a similar mass launch a few days earlier.
Rob's explanation is that Russia expected an armoured counterattack and the Atlants were meant to break it, "which is not really how Ukraine fights anymore." Azov handled it.
What an Atlant is, and what flies with it
Samuel Cook asks the obvious question. Rob answers that the Atlant is a loitering munition, and an expensive one at roughly $30,000 to $40,000, with a range of up to 100 kilometres in some cases. It usually flies with a ZALA drone acting as a repeater.
Dmytro adds that the Orion now fills that role too, citing an attack on Kyiv a couple of months earlier in which a Lancet was relayed with Orion's help. Whether that attack carried munitions, the two were not sure.
Samuel says he is hearing about Orion as a problem in multiple places: a very high reconnaissance drone that, he thinks, flies above the reach of most air defence and carries powerful optics. He calls it a huge problem over the Black Sea.
What to watch
- Assault group size. Rob's argument predicts that where Ukrainian artillery is degraded, Russian assaults will grow back from squads toward company size.
- Decoy saturation ahead of ground attacks. Watch whether Gerbera launches timed to precede an assault become routine rather than a one off.
- Atlant volume per corps sector. A sustained rise above the typical eight a day would signal that the surge has become a standard tactic.