>Video emerging from the scene shows the helicopters slowly approaching a landing zone.
Bringing police tactics to an infantry fight will get you dead every time. Helicopters have always been sitting ducks dependent largely upon tactics to survive in even the most slightly unfriendly airspace.
It really is a marvel of modern technology that you can have a decent shot at defending yourself from a helicopter with something that costs under $1k and fits in a briefcase.
I wasn’t previously aware of Ukrainians flying drones directly into helicopter’s rotors, but that does make sense.
I obviously know very little about battlefield armaments so forgive the potentially stupid question - but have drones made combat helicopters obsolete?
Helicopters are vulnerable to small quadcopter drones when landing and taking off. This limits some traditional uses of helicopters (anything that involves landing in enemy territory becomes much more risky) but still leaves others (shooting missiles at surface targets).
Helicopters are very effective at shooting down large fixed-wing drones.
Helicopters are very effective at sinking drone boats without air defenses, but are in turn very vulnerable to drone boats equipped with SAMs.
That's like asking if bullets made infantry obsolete. As long as there is a role for attack helicopter on the battlefield, then it is not obsolete, just more vulnerable during its missions.
This IRL now is very much in the spirit of Mark Stiegler's 1990 humorous thought piece takedown of the $ inefficiency of the B-2 ~stealth bomber by proposing ~everyone buys chances to down one by any means possible.
There is a proper citation below, but you can enjoy this quick read at his dusty website here :
The B-2 Lottery · Marc Stiegler · published in New Destinies, Vol. IX/Fall 1990 ed. Jim Baen (Baen 0-671-2016-3, Sep ’90 [Aug ’90], $3.50, 286pp, pb, cover by David A. Hardy) Original anthology of eight stories plus six non-fiction pieces on space and technology.
Swarms of small drones aren't really a threat to large jets. Unless you're talking on the ground still. A drone capable enough to take on a jet is either something very similar to a missile or very expensive.
Lighter, faster, smaller, more numerous, and more mobile vehicles might make sense because the era of the slow moving castles near the front on land, sea, and air seems about dead.
Drones of all sorts out front with more numerous "ripsaw"-like vehicles with shoot-on-the-move mobile artillery (RCH 155) and air defense (AAA like Skyranger 30 and SAM like M-SHORAD) just behind.
Drones are fundamentally better than subsonic-Mach 4 missiles because they're 100-1000x cheaper, several times smaller, have a much smaller RCS, and have loiter ability. They're slower and pack tiny warheads relatively, but they're key to taking out mobile forces and other drones.
For fixed targets, that's something artillery and Shahed-like cruise "missiles" can deal with.
Bringing police tactics to an infantry fight will get you dead every time. Helicopters have always been sitting ducks dependent largely upon tactics to survive in even the most slightly unfriendly airspace.
It really is a marvel of modern technology that you can have a decent shot at defending yourself from a helicopter with something that costs under $1k and fits in a briefcase.
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