Shaheds fly somewhere above us in the dark. We hear them long before we can spot them.
We spent a night near the frontline in Kharkiv region with a Ukrainian interceptor drone unit hunting aerial targets over the Kupyansk direction — from reconnaissance drones to Russian-Iranian Shaheds flying beyond the reach of traditional anti-aircraft weapons.
Modern aerial warfare is evolving fast. Jet engines. Radar-evading coatings. Higher altitudes. Faster targets.
And hunting them at night is anything but easy.
I want to note something here, this is a great window into the cutting edge of anti-flying bomb air defense but a macro level the video still plays into a bit of a distortion of reality in russia’s favor here.
The fact that shaheds are now flying higher and faster now is a strategic loss for russia as it means the shaheds are more expensive, require more powerful and complex weapons and sensors, and are more vulnerable to being detected the higher they are (which is the reason they were designed to fly low in the first place) as a basic consequence of geometry. This looks scary from the Ukrainian perspective as the shaheds are getting more sophisticated and are flying higher, but the advantage of shaheds was never that they were sophisticated, this is a losing strategy for russia they are just trying to forestall the strategy totally failing against Ukraine by pushing the complexity of the shaheds up more and more… but the margins get narrower and narrower the longer this goes on for russia and the ability to intercept and detect shaheds from farther away becomes more and more possible the higher the shaheds fly.
Eventually a decisive high altitude cost effective interceptor will be deployed that will force russia to try to fly its shaheds/flying bombs low to the ground again (we are likely talking about cheap small missiles with rocket engines) and the pendulum will swing back to deploying a big machine gun to shoot them down at which point russia will have doubly lost the strategic fight here.