How Ukraine Intercepts Russian Drones and Glide Bombs (And What NATO Is Doing about the Problem)

It is a simple, four-step process  for Ukraine, if you think about it. 

So why can’t NATO replicate it? Well, even that question is a bit misleading.

We all know that Shahed-style drones and  glide bombs are a major problem for Ukraine.

And thanks to a strange Russian  action back in September, 

the rest of the West should also understand  how much of a latent threat that they are.

However, all things considered,  

Ukraine does a fairly good job at  intercepting the little buggers.

And despite NATO mostly letting  the decoys peter out on their own,  

it is not as if the alliance  has ignored the threat entirely.

Indeed, 

the second point is part of the reason why the first point it is true.

Yet none of this is widely known.

That is why NATO invited me to  Istanbul for its annual SHINE event,  

which serves as the end of the year  proving ground for experimentation and  

demonstration of new defense technologies  within its innovation continuum program.

It was a great opportunity for me to learn  something new, with the confidence that  

they certainly would not invite any  competitor YouTubers from Australia  

who might be interested in the same subject,  seeing as Australia is not a member state.

So, today, let’s discuss  how exactly Ukraine does it— 

and affordably, may I add— before transitioning back to  

what the system can do for  the NATO alliance overall.

But we ought to begin with the basics.

Shahed drones are an Iranian model that Russia  manufactures domestically under the name Geran.

They can deliver about 50 kilograms of warhead,  

enough to do significant damage  to the exterior of a building,

and have become the primary method of terrorizing  

the Ukrainian public over  the last couple of years.

The reason for the Kremlin’s  shift there is because Shaheds  

are cheap—perhaps tens of thousands  of dollars for garden variety models,  

or $100,000 for a model equipped  with all the latest innovations.

Russia might fire up to 800 of them on Ukraine  in a single night, and the indications are that  

production numbers will only increase from there,  absent any sort of intervention from the West.

They have a range of 2500 kilometers, 

meaning that Russia can fire them from inside  of the country and still cover all of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, glide bombs are explosives  converted from Soviet-era stockpiles.

Russian pilots fly them high into the  air and drop them from a safe distance,  

using gravity and an airfoil  to guide them to their targets.

They are bigger and therefore can pack about  three times the explosive that a Shahed can.

However, the process for intercepting both  of them is very similar. I am therefore  

going to stick with Shaheds  as the illustrative example,  

and point out key differences  with glide bombs as they arise.

In any case, we have step one of the  process: Russia fires its weapon.

Step two is a generalized detection of the launch.

This is a team effort. On Ukraine’s side, some  Swedish-donated airborne early warning and control  

aircraft might provide the first indication  that something is in the air—and it’s not love.

NATO AWACS might also pick up a launch  and forward that information. Ostensibly,  

they are protecting NATO territory, but  they will pick up anything happening  

in Western Russia and relay  it to Ukraine all the same.

On the ground, U.S.-produced Patriot batteries  come with some powerful radars and might locate  

them as well, even if their corresponding  missiles are unlikely to engage the drones.

Actually, the missile system  derives its name from the radar: 

Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target

Of course, Patriot batteries in Poland may detect  

the drones too—basically acting like  the ground version of the NATO AWACS.

But Ukraine has some home-grown  detection systems as well. 

“Sky Watch” is the most rigorous of these.

At its core, the program  took a bunch of cell phones, 

attached them to various  locations around the country, 

like literally on top of telephone poles, 

gave them an external power source, and left them to transmit audio 24/7, 

essentially listening for the  lawnmower-like noise that a Shahed emits.

All of that data goes to a central processing center, 

which attempts to triangulate locations based on what the ten to fifteen thousand ears hear.

Not bad for a program that is estimated to have  

only cost between five and  fifty-four million dollars.

The other system that Ukraine  has in place is for people to  

manually report suspected positions and  trajectories via cell phone text message.

Some of this occurs on official  channels, through retired military  

or local government employees. Some of it  is civilians just trying to do their part.

Regardless, all of these systems have  their limits. They can inform Ukraine of  

a general launch and perhaps a broad trajectory.

But they are not precise enough to properly  assist in shooting down any of them.  

If that is all you have, then this would  be the scene everywhere in the country.

Now, the alert itself might be helpful you  are a civilian and you want to seek shelter.

However, buildings cannot run and hide. So if  you want to protect your physical possessions,

you need to do more than just this.

That takes us to the actual  interception process. Here,  

there are many options that Ukraine could take.

One is to use a Patriot missile straight from the  Patriot radar. That is a bad strategy in the long  

run, however: each Patriot missile costs seven  figures, well more than what the Shaheds cost.

You could scramble fighter jets to tail the  Shaheds and manually shoot them down. But again,  

that is a bad option because fighter  jets cost a ton to operate every minute.

Using anti-aircraft system like the German  Gepard is better, but still a tad too pricey.

You could opt for soldiers  firing heavy machine guns at  

the drones. At least that option  is cheap. Reliable, though? No.

GPS spoofing is another cheap option. But that  is also lacking in the reliability department.  

The drone is still in the  air and might hit something.

Or it might eventually regain accurate GPS  data and hit where it was originally aimed  

at. Plus Russia can place countermeasures  on the drone to avoid going off course.

Instead, the most cost-effective solution  

is seemingly the solution to  every other problem in this war:

to fight drones, you need more drones.

Recall that the coarse radar systems  have signaled an impending attack.

That is good, because it puts  Ukraine’s counter-drone teams on alert.

These consist of four or five men with trucks, who sit in between the Russian boarder and  

likely targets in Ukraine. Obviously, they are mobile, 

allowing them to change their location each day to keep Russia guessing where they might be.

There are two main components to each team: a radar to detect the precise  

location of a Shahed drone and an interceptor drone to hit the target.

But the devil is in the details. These radar systems only have an  

effective radius of about 15 kilometers, leaving little time between the positive  

identification of the threat and the actual interception.

Remember that 15 kilometer number for later.

What happens next depends on the precise  interceptor drone and the battalion in  

question—Ukraine’s system is decentralized,  so there is no standard operating procedure.

The de facto method is to have Ukrainian pilots  

guide an interceptor drone next to  the Shahed and then once in sight

and detonate.

This is not easy. Shahed waves  come in the middle of the night. 

An operator might not be at his  mental peak at three in the morning.

Plus the interceptors travel  at 250 kilometers per hour, 

while Shaheds add another 200 kilometers per hour.

Thus, if you are aiming for a head-on strike, 

the relative speed is a ridiculous  450 kilometers per hour.

Glide bombs are worse, traveling at about  400 kilometers per hour on their own, 

for a head-on strike speed  of 650 kilometers per hour.

The difference makes hitting a  glide bomb from behind impossible.

It is feasible to strike a Shahed in that manner,  

down to a relative difference  of 50 kilometers per hour.

But some Shaheds now have sensors  mounted on the back that will notice  

the trailing interceptor and take evasive  action to avoid getting hit like that.

All of this indicated a need for automation,  which led to a call in January by 

NATO’s Allied Command Transformation,  seeking innovative solutions to the problem.

You might remember this NATO branch as  the Norfolk, Virginia installation that  

I visited a couple of months ago. I’m  still working on that video, I swear.

Anyway, at the end of March, companies  responding to the innovation challenge  

presented their work in Poland at the NATO-Ukraine  Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Center.

Allied Command Transformation had selected a  few proposals to move forward with—and fast.

Indeed, Supreme Allied Commander  Transformation Pierre Vandier made  

it the top priority and pushed  for immediate use in the field.

One of the solutions, from a German company  called TYTAN, is autonomous once launched.  

The radar that detects the Shahed also  guides the TYTAN close to the target,  

where it then explodes. That damage  is enough to bring down the Shahed.

There is some classified magic that goes on here. 

Shaheds are comparatively large, while the TYTAN drones are small.

Usually, a single radar system  cannot track both at the same time. 

But through that classified magic, these can.

Another option is an as of  yet unnamed interceptor,  

backed by AI targeting systems and built  by a defense startup called Alta Ares.

You may remember a few weeks ago I  was discussing the need for small,  

civilian companies to soak up some of  the traditional defense production.

Well, Alta Ares is that principle  in action. Four months ago,  

they only had five or six employees. Now  they are sending interceptors to Ukraine.

This is video of a model of one of them from  the aforementioned innovation continuum summit,  

which helps accelerate adoption and  operationalization of the winning  

projects. The real thing is about twice as big.

The Ukrainian team fires these and guides them  to the general vicinity of a suspected Shahed.

The AI system then takes over, tracking the Shahed’s precise location 

using the unique heat signature  that it emits from the rear center. 

That gets the interceptor close enough, 

at which point a human decides  exactly when to detonate.

The AI targeting has significantly  improved interception rates. 

When humans controlled the entire process,  an interceptor might only destroy its target 

between twenty and forty percent of the time, depending on the skill of the pilot,  

weather conditions, and so forth. With the AI doing the dirty work,  

interception rates have increased to between fifty and eighty percent.

You can also have a single pilot operate  five interceptors simultaneously.

That is up from a single interceptor without AI,  

a critical development when Russia  tries to overwhelm the system.

Moreover, the AI can learn from  the prior night’s interceptions.

For example, adaptations may  be necessary to adjust to  

seasonal temperature changes altering the  intensity of the Shahed’s heat signature.

It may also have to learn how to  focus on the Shahed when there  

could be other interceptors  in the area giving off heat.

Or perhaps Russia makes direct modifications that  change what a Shahed looks like to the AI system.

The downside is that the AI  systems notably increase the  

price tag of the interceptors because they require

NVIDIA chips to operate—chips that also  explode with the rest of the device.

But the value added makes them worthwhile.

You know, given those interception rates,  

you might wonder how Ukraine  gets hit by any drones at all.

Now, the fifty to eighty percent success rate per  

interceptor seems like there  is plenty of room for failure,

especially if 800 or more targets are  possibly up there in a single night.

But keep in mind that those  rates are per interceptor.

And it turns out there is no rule saying you  cannot fire more than one interceptor per Shahed.

Well, the central problem here is scale. Remember  how the radar detection radius was 15 kilometers,

or a 30 kilometer diameter?

Okay. Ukraine is about 900 kilometers  wide, going north to south.

It might therefore seem that you  would need 900 divided by 30 equals 

30 teams to form an interception wall.

But that is not how it works. The  interceptors must actually hit the Shaheds.

If you formed the system like this, 

then a bogey could hit the  seam and pass through unharmed, 

even if perhaps Ukraine  could spot it for a second.

That problem goes double if the target is one of those faster-moving glide bombs.

So you must deploy some overlap. 

Now, the exact size of the  necessary overlap is classified.

But for the purposes of a back  of the envelope calculation, 

let’s imagine you need to shrink it  down to one station per ten kilometers.

Then suddenly you have ballooned  your wall to 90 installations.

Want to make it safer and  have one per five kilometers? 

Now you are at 180 installations.

And then what happens if Russia tries to  concentrate fire over a few of those areas? 

You also need redundancy beyond the  five interceptors per human operator.

Unfortunately, here is where  we start to hit cash problems. 

The radars are expensive. And while the ratio of  

the marginal cost of an interceptor to the marginal cost of a Shahed is good, 

you need an enormous amount capital  investment to get the network off the ground, 

even if most interceptors  will not be used on most days 

and still be ready to fire on the next one.

All of these lessons tell us something important  for NATO. There is no sugar coating it.

The math gets worse for the alliance.  

The borders between Russia and NATO  countries stretch about 2500 kilometers.

Add in Belarus— lest we forget that young Lukashenko created  

a “Union State” with Russia many decades ago— and we get almost another 1300 kilometers.

On top of that, NATO countries would  have to staff all of those systems,  

which seems out of the question. The  units for such a mission do not exist,  

and it would be expensive to pay  salaries for them regardless.

So if you were wondering why NATO basically  watched the Russian drones fall to the ground  

on their own and only used fighters to shoot  down a handful of them, there is your answer.

The cost of duplicating Ukraine’s active measures  is too steep for the threat as it stands today.  

And it is cheaper to use very expensive  countermeasures in the rare instance  

that the Kremlin gets frisky—at least  until that changes, which it might be.

Short-run, the solution is to fund Ukraine to  shoot down more drones at the source. Ukraine  

has the experience and the willingness to  create more units, if given the resources.

At the moment, Russia is not sending these  types of drones directly into NATO airspace,  

because that would be too  transparent of an escalation.

The math is just easier if you shore  up the leaks in Ukraine’s system rather  

than exert redundant effort over a  huge line inside of NATO countries.

And if Russia decides to  completely go around the system,  

then there is no plausible argument  that it was merely an accident,  

and you can rely on more traditional threats  to deter Russia from walking down that path.

This is further reason to think that  the intent of Russia’s drone incursion  

was not to try to lure NATO to spend more on  internal defense and deny transfers to Ukraine.  

If anyone in the Kremlin thought that that  was the case, it was just poorly thought out.

I know that this idea has gotten a foothold  inside of the Western public discourse,  

because it seems like it has an element of truth  behind it. But it is important to really think  

through the logistical implications of the  theory before making those kinds of claims.  

And, as we have discussed before, there is  an alternate possibility that really what  

the Kremlin is trying to do is bait  the West into overresponding here.

Regardless, in the long run, the  solution is to develop fully autonomous  

systems that do not require crews to be  continuously present at the launch sites.

It is not an easy solution. But NATO allies have  

completed a good portion of  development to get there.

It is all part of NATO’s innovation initiatives.  

The next goal? Emergency battlefield  medicine in our brave new drone world.

Responses to NATO’s request for  information are due on November 17. 

Maybe one of you has some ideas?

Well, that is it for me—just a  regular old American who finds  

this type of logistical problem fascinating,

and definitely not an Australian YouTuber  with a passion for defense economics who  

will be publishing a bit of a longer look on  this subject on Sunday. (But seriously mate,  

it was good to meet you there,  and cheers to all you listening.)

Whoa. What happened there? Weird. Uh,  anyway, if you enjoyed today’s video,  

then please like, share, and subscribe,  and I will see you next time. Take care.