Miniguns vs. Moscow: On the Front Lines of the Drone Wars

Photos by Aerotim, Ira Suldina, and Iain Harrison

It’s 11:43 p.m., we’re barreling down country lanes on a frigid December night, doing well over twice the posted speed limit, and I’m stuffed in the back of a Mini Clubman next to a child’s car seat. Sergey, our driver, is running through an inch-perfect rhythm of braking point, entry, apex, and exit while metal blasts from the sound system. A few minutes ago, Tim, who’s currently occupying the right front seat, poked his head into my room as I was getting ready to call it a night. “Iain, it’s happening. Let’s go.”

I grabbed some warm gear, threw my pants back on, and all three of us hustled to the car. After a few minutes, we pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road, just as the opening bars of Rammstein’s “Feuer Frei” came over the speakers. How very apt.

Our destination was a Soviet-era agricultural airfield that appeared to have been untouched since the Reagan administration. Piles of discarded tires were placed seemingly at random, while the tarmac was fissured and strewn with last season’s weeds, poking defiantly from wide cracks. 

Off to one side was a Polish-built copy of the Antonov An-28 utility aircraft which up until recently had been gathering moss at another airstrip close by, before it was rescued for its current mission. We parked the car under cover, and Sergey graciously let me out of the back seat, as the child locks were enabled. Safety first.

Tim and Sergey are the nucleus of an off-the-books anti-drone team, a crazy idea born from a lifetime of extreme sports. They look like brothers. Early 30s, about 6-foot-2, 180 pounds, rangy, and lean. If this was a 1950s movie, Tim would be the leading man and Sergey his loyal henchman — or possibly the villain. 

Both are skydivers, and while Tim’s favored powersport is pushing an aerobatic aircraft to the limits, Sergey is a champion freestyle motocross artist, who’s well on his way to breaking as many bones as Travis Pastrana.

They operate in a gray zone between Ukraine’s Territorial Defense units and the air force — the first experimental squadron, who are free to innovate when it comes to tactics and equipment, in contrast to more traditional force structures. “In the air force, the number one rule is to not make your superior look bad,” says Tim. An officer could spend an entire career living by that rule, progressing steadily through the ranks and never actually achieving anything of note, before shuffling off to his dacha in retirement. 

These guys are different. They don’t get official funding, and they don’t draw a salary, so they can’t be fired or formally disciplined. But it also makes finding money for operations extremely difficult. Most of their kit comes from personal purchases. 

Tim ran through preflight checks with his copilot, Valerii, a crusty, bullet-headed ex-air force colonel with over 16,000 hours on the An-28, many logged in Africa and Afghanistan, where in addition to flying, he acted as electrician, mechanic, logistician, armorer, and medic. He has a well-worn Leatherman tool on his belt, natch. Well past retirement age, Valerii has no obligation to risk his life flying interdiction missions, and in Ukraine, when you’re the parent of three kids, you’re excused from service; between them, Tim and his wife have five. He and Valerii share the mentality of, “If not me, then who else?” so they serve, unpaid.

Other crewmembers attended to their duties and threw on armor, helmets, and parachutes. Or not. Each was free to make their own risk assessment based on previous experience (extensive), the chances of incoming frag (very possible), and the probability of being able to escape from the aircraft in the event of it being hit (minimal). 

Sergey worked on his baby, a Dillon Aero M134D minigun that was lashed amidships, the barrels of which would soon be pointing out of the side door. The feed chute was hooked up to the feeder/delinker, and the barrels manually rotated to strip the first rounds. Engines were run up, and we sat on the runway waiting for a target as the aircraft strained at the leash.

We didn’t have to wait long. On a tablet computer held by the thermal gimbal operator, four red chevrons headed north toward us: Geran 2, one-way attack drones. While they’re a Russian refinement of an Iranian design, no one here calls them Gerans — they will always remain Shaheds, courtesy of the first batch delivered by the sh*ttastic theocracy in 2022. We didn’t know what they were armed with, but none of their potential warheads are filled with confetti and party favors. 

Tim pushed the throttle to the stops and both TWD-10B turboprop engines spun up to deliver almost 2,000 horsepower to the three-bladed propellers. The brakes were released, and we bounced down the runway. A few missions back, this An-28 was forced to  return with parts of its wing missing, as a Shahed warhead had detonated a bit too close for comfort. And last night, a Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter had crashed on a counter-drone operation just like this one, killing all four crew — so the job is not exactly favored by insurance professionals. 

The aircraft clawed its way through the night sky, the chevrons closed in, and we headed toward them on a collision path. As the gap closed, two helicopters to our south were having a good night and managed to shoot down three drones in the pack but couldn’t close the distance on the fourth. 

Our FLIR operator scanned the skies ahead and zeroed in on a tiny black speck. If he’d panned a bit quicker, there’s a chance it would have been lost against ground clutter, but there it was, the unmistakable delta wing form of a Shahed. 

Less than a year ago, Shaheds fell prey to mobile machinegun teams with M2 .50 BMGs mounted in the back of pickup trucks, as their flight paths took them low through valleys to avoid radar. Now, due to greater availability, they’re more often sent at higher altitudes, out of the range of ground-based HMGs and taunting air defense batteries to shoot them down with way more expensive surface to air missiles — weapons that would be better used on cruise or ballistic missiles. They also changed their attack profiles. Whereas previously they flew straight and level, now they continuously bob and weave in random “S” curves and change altitude before diving almost vertically into their target.

And in a further demonstration of the platform’s versatility, in the past few weeks they’d begun showing up armed with R-60 air-to-air missiles, each boasting an 8-kilometer range. In some cases, SA-26 MANPADS have been lashed to the drone’s fuselage, with the airframe being remotely controlled by a drone pilot. So, we’re now seeing World War II-style dogfighting with drones, man versus machine. 

What’s needed is a cheap, effective, and reusable countermeasure to intercept them before their terminal attack phase — hence the An-28 being pressed into service, but we can think of many more suitable platforms.

Tim struggled to match the drone’s speed and direction changes, throwing a six-ton sky tractor around as the target erratically changed course. He cranked his neck, looking over his left shoulder through bino NVGs, and keeping the drone at a 110-degree angle so he could illuminate it with a spotlight mounted on the Antonov’s left wing strut. 

As it fell into the center of the beam, Sergey let rip with a 2-second burst from the minigun, lighting up the night with a 3-foot-long tongue of flame from the gun’s muzzle and sending a hundred 7.62, 147-grain bullets arcing through the sky. The 3,000-round magazine was loaded with 4-bit, so 20 tracers showed where the center of the pattern was landing — and a good few smacked into the rear of the drone, which pitched downward. A couple more bursts for good measure sealed its fate, and we watched on the display as it impacted an empty farm field below, exploding with a black flash on the thermal camera screen.

Shaheds like this one are a nightly feature of life in Ukrainian cities. Their moped-like sound as they pass overhead is a precursor to an explosion, sometimes on a military or industrial target, sometimes a civilian apartment building. While the Russians claim they only ever strike military equipment, we’ve been on the receiving end of enough Shaheds to know this is either a blatant lie, or they’re really sh*tty operators. Likely, both.

We’ve covered the Russo/Ukrainian war from the front lines since the invasion in February 2022, and two of the constants defining it have been the rapid pace of innovation and the involvement of nongovernmental volunteer organizations. With the consolidation of the U.S. defense industry around a handful of prime contractors, we run the risk of missing out on many of these ad hoc solutions to problems our warfighters will inevitably face in future conflicts. 

Despite the change in administrations in DC, our intelligence gathering assets are still largely hamstrung by restrictions that keep them from fully exploiting innovations in technology and tactics — lessons which have already been paid for in blood. We shouldn’t have to pay the same price.

The Threat

The most widely used one-way attack, unmanned aerial system (OWA UAS) currently employed worldwide is the Shahed 136, or variants based on it. First used in 2022 in the Russo/Ukrainian war, its primary role is ground attack, and Russian strategy is to employ it to overwhelm air defenses through weight of numbers. Rather than field small quantities of exquisitely made precision weapons, both sides have opted instead to launch swarms of cheap, “good enough” drones that pack enough explosives to cause significant damage to buildings and critical infrastructure.

Designed by Iran’s state-owned HESA corporation in conjunction with Shahed Aviation Industries, the Shahed 136 is produced by Russia in a large factory in Alabuga, capable of churning out over 150 units per day. It is estimated that Russian development of the drone is now independent of its original producers, and there have been significant upgrades in terms of hardening against electronic warfare, sensor capabilities, warhead size and type, and TTPs.

As an illustration of how rapidly this technology has evolved, the first waves of Shaheds employed simple GPS navigation systems, which were vulnerable to jamming or spoofing from ground-based transmitters. 

To counter this, drones started showing up with GPS receivers that used more and better antennae, oriented toward the sky to better differentiate signals from satellites. Despite this, Ukrainian air defense was able to counter the improvement by increasing the number and output of its jamming stations. Russia has since countered this by employing high-tech Chinese-made Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA) with up to 16 channels, all of which must be jammed to send the drone off course. More recent innovations have been to create mesh networks among drone swarms, so they can be controlled by a pilot, much like a very large FPV.

U.S. air power doctrine has always emphasized air dominance through its large fleet of advanced, manned fighter and bomber aircraft. Our potential near-peer adversaries, recognizing that they can’t overmatch the U.S. in this fight opted instead to emphasize layered air defense. Both strategies have merit, but the advent of cheap, mass-produced drones tips the math in favor of the side that can afford to expend air defenses to shoot them down. 

If you don’t have the magazine depth to counter hundreds of targets at once, or the industrial base to keep replenishing that magazine, in the long term, you lose. Downing $30,000 drones with $3,000,000 air defense missiles is a poor choice.

In a quite stunning recognition of this potential threat, the U.S. recently announced it was fielding its own version of the Shahed 136, the LUCAS, or Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, bringing it into inventory in record time. Currently deployed by Task Force Scorpion Strike under CENTCOM, LUCAS is a reverse-engineered Shahed with an improved sensor and guidance package, though as of press time warhead capabilities are still unknown. 

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