I read the Russians used a fiber-optic controlled drone to take out a HIMARS launcher that was on the road. Not sure how you do that (must be pretty short range like a TOW). That negates the ECM threat, unless you provide enough power to actually interfere with the on-board circuits.

Any force that is in close proximity to an opposing force is going to have to account for these weapons. Russia is using motorcycles to give speed and dispersion in the assault movement to the objective.

Naval forces have the ability to evade/remain outside the engagement range of quad-rotor style UAVs, but then your own weapons need a range/endurance capability that makes them expensive (being able to launch via a cat shot and trap on a wire isn’t simple nor cheap).

The Russians are famous for their saying about warfare, “Quantity has a quality all its own,” but the arrival of mass-produced drones and UAVs on modern battlefields has put a new slant onto it. Consider the main battle tank. Tanks have been dominant land weapons since the Great War a century ago. After WW2, most major nations settled upon and adopted the main battle tank concept, i.e., rather than classing their tanks according to the nomenclature used during and before the Second World War. Accordingly, most armies have adopted capable tanks in the 45-65 ton range, with competitive standards of mobility, protection and firepower. The increased use of advanced, digital-age technology on MBTs is certainly one reason they cost more to make than they used to, but one of the biggest cost centers in making a tank is the same as it was in 1916 ~ the need to keep the crew alive and combat-effective. As anti-tank weapons have developed, armor developments have more-or-less kept pace. The best modern armors, such as Chobham, Dorchester, and depleted uranium types, can stop a wide variety of lethal threats from kinetic energy penetrator rounds to chemical warheads using shaped charges. Why all of the time, effort and expense? Because keeping the crew alive and the tank and crew combat-effective isn’t easy. Tank design, being a series of trade-offs, cannot protect the tank against every threat from every angle equally well; an impregnable tank would probably top a hundred tons and be immobile. One of the places designs have cut corners in order to save weight is to make the upper or top surfaces of the tank less well-protected than those directly facing the enemy and his guns, guided munitions and so forth. It is indeed very tough to penetrate frontally and knock out such MBTs as the British Challenger series or the U.S. Abrams series of MBTs. For quite a long time, no one had ever penetrated and knocked out a Challenger in combat. These tanks are tough outs, no two ways about it. But armor and things to defeat armor are in a perpetual race. The anti-tank weapons designers hit upon a solution back in the 1990s: Top-attack weapons. The Swedish Carl Gustav AT missile is a case in point. Using the correct warhead/munition, a missile can be fired from standoff range which will accelerate to the target, but instead of hitting it frontally, it will veer over it as it nears the target, to attack downward through its thinner overhead armor. When its sensor suite tells it to fire, a molten hyper-velocity “slug” or self-forging projectile will be fired down into the tank from above. The result is usually a destroyed or brewed up tank, often spectacularly so. The Ukraine War has seen some refinements. The Russians have adopted cheap drones to drop shaped-charge and other top-attack weapons on Ukrainian tanks, with no little success – or taking the idea further, they have created “kamikaze” drones which will dive into a… Read more »