How cheap rockets are helping Ukraine fend off Russian drones
Russians are continuously attacking Ukraine at night with cruise missiles and swarms of Shahed drones. While these drones have minimal effectiveness against military targets, they serve the Russians not only as a weapon of terror but also as decoys, diverting the attention of Ukrainian air defense. Here's how Ukrainians hunt them.
Additionally, Russians use Shaheds to map Ukrainian defense activity, which helps them conduct subsequent attacks by exploiting identified gaps.
Meanwhile, Ukraine must deploy equipment to combat these drones, which cost at most tens of thousands of dollars, and often use air defense systems where a single missile costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. There have been instances of firing Patriots, where a missile costs a few million dollars.
Therefore, Gepard gun systems are ideally suited for hunting Shaheds. Depending on the number of shells fired, they cost from a few to tens of thousands of euros. Another economical option is the American VAMPIRE (Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment) systems based on simple APKWS guided rockets, which cost slightly over 13,000 dollars each.
Below, you can see a drone being shot down, and the thermal camera image and markers visible at the beginning of the recording are identical to the previous instances of firing "Vampire."
American Vampire — The world's cheapest rocket air defense system
The VAMPIRE system is a very lightweight solution designed for installation on vehicles like pickup trucks. It includes a mast with an electro-optical head featuring a thermal camera and laser designator and a LAND-LGR4 launcher container from Arnold Defense. Weighing only 60 pounds, it holds four 70mm caliber rockets.
The ordnance uses APKWS rockets with a seeker head that follows a reflected laser beam. This is a very cost-effective means of attack because it is based on the widely used, unguided Hydra 70mm rockets within NATO countries. The construction of the APKWS involves unscrewing the front part of the old missile with a contact fuse and installing a new section that includes a seeker head and deployable control surfaces.
