3w ago

21st-Century Dragoons: Dissecting Russia’s Motorcycle Assault Tactics

frontelligence.substack.com 21st-Century Dragoons: Dissecting Russia’s Motorcycle Assault Tactics

The reduced time between detection and engagement, driven by real-time drone surveillance and the high velocity of FPV attack drones, has created a hostile environment for traditional armored platforms on the battlefield.

This battlefield approach is likely to become a lasting part of Russian military practice, making it relevant for those preparing to counter Russian aggression

All credits to Tatarigami_UA and Frontelligence Insight team

Thread with key findings here: https://xcancel.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1937204380740256083

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In response to these challenges and the accelerating depletion of armored vehicle reserves, Russian forces have increasingly relied on small tactical units using concealed movement to reduce the risk of detection. However, this comes at the cost of mobility and operational flexibility. Once discovered, such groups are often quickly eliminated by drone or artillery strikes. Even when they achieve tactical success, their ability to exploit defense breakthroughs are seriously limited when operating on foot.
This needs to be bolded, because I am sure there is going to be some unintentional or intentional propaganda about "New Russian Motorbike Tactics" and while I recognize that I am sure Russia is innovating with motorbike tactics this is also just a brutal waste of human life being done blatantly.
In otherwords, they are using motorbikes instead of APCs sometimes simply because they don't have any APCs.

the reason this line started going down after 2024 isn't because Ukraine began to lose/stopped going on the offensive, it is because Russia no longer has enough armored vehicles to lose them in battle at a statistically significant rate compared to Ukraine's practically available and functional armored vehicles.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine
That being said, I do think autonomous, unmanned dirt bikes will radically change the battlefield once someone figures it out. Forget robotic dogs, or even unmanned ATVs, dirtbikes are sooooo much more agile and all of the disadvantages of a dirt bike as a weapon basically go away once you make it electric and autonomous so that the vulnerability aspect isn't a risk to a human operator.
You can get devastating results if you can convince 30 people on dirtbikes to charge an entrenched position at fullspeed, but it isn't going to work out long term because your lifespan doing those kind of tactics becomes very short and what ends your life will be totally random and out of your control no matter how experienced you are as a soldier. However, if 30 people are driving autonomous dirtbikes... well all of a sudden that isn't an issue anymore and it simply becomes a question of the cost of attrition in autonomous dirt bikes that will be lost for attaining a given objective.
It would look pretty weird because you would need a dynamically shifting counter weight to keep the dirt bike stable, but I imagine it would be easier than making a walking robot dog...?
- In short, swarm tactics only work as long as you have swarms to deploy, and proxy/aux swarms are nowhere near the same thing in any capacity.
  
  Also, this tactic relies on exploiting the fact that the weapon systems the enemy have are designed to fight enemies that somewhat value human life, so the weapon systems are highly lethal, focused and have a limited amount of ammunition. The idea being "Surprise! We care less about human lives than you predicted!" is enough to temporarily seize the initiative at extreme cost to human lives.
  The easy counter to Russia's strategy here is to just have autonomous 7.62 machine gun unmanned ground vehicles (similar to the ones Ukraine has been using for medevac uses, which is really really really fucking cool especially for all the non-war rescue use cases these things are going to save lives in when the rest of the world catches on) that screen important defense position or armored manned vehicles.
  Now when the motorbikes try to swarm the position, they put themselves in the crossfire of lightly armored autonomous machine guns controlled by a central, entrenched enemy/armored vehicle. Sure the motorbikes can focus on destroying the lmg robots, but then they aren't dealing with the actual issue which is the entrenched position or the armored vehicle the unmanned machine gun platform is screening. The unmanned vehicles don't even need to be that capable given that a Russian motorbike doing circles around a Ukranian tank (which is a very dangerous position for an armored vehicle to be in), is from the perspective of an umanned LMG ground vehicle 300 meters away, a target that is moving back and forth only slightly.
  Guess what is even cheaper than a motorbike, a human life, and some training, drugs and ak47? A 7.62mm bullet.
  This is not a winning strategy, it is an act of cowardice on Russia's part to throw away human lives so carelessly.
- Why don't they have any APCs? What was causing them to lose them at such a high rate? Surely if they produce more of them, they won't lose them again to the exact same battlefield tactics.
  You complain about propaganda, yet the way you seem to avoid repeating the "propaganda", is to regress to completely ignoring why APCs weren't protecting troops anyway.
  The reality is that in Ukraine, the drone and artillery concentration is such that armored vehicles aren't effective. What is effective is having small agile units that can advance before the enemy can direct fire at them.
  
  Why don't they have any APCs? What was causing them to lose them at such a high rate? Surely if they produce more of them, they won't lose them again to the exact same battlefield tactics.
  Because they have resorted to throwing large numbers of armored vehicles at a foe that has innovated with new technology far better and has large amounts of foreign military help especially along intelligence and target acquisition tactics.
  The reality is that in Ukraine, the drone and artillery concentration is such that armored vehicles aren't effective. What is effective is having small agile units that can advance before the enemy can direct fire at them.
  This could not be further from the truth, I can link plenty of sources to this but no armored vehicles are just as important as they ever have been and you are falling prey to shallow popular mechanics style future war hype pieces if you think that drones and artillery make armor obsolete.
  To point out something basic, the reason Ukraine hasn't been able to make decisive use of the 30 or so abrams and 30 or so leopards main battle tanks they were given (which is actually quite an intimidating number of tanks given that these tanks eat Russian tanks for breakfast, well actually usually for a midnight snack...) is that Ukraine hasn't until recently had the necessary artillery to support an armored assault outside the context of decisive air power (which Ukraine also doesn't have).
  The thing people often don't realize about main battle tanks is they are much more vulnerable to infantry than one would assume, even when the infantry opposing the tank don't have the means to directly destroy the tank. Tanks must either
  be heavily screened with infantry and other assets to help them not miss a hidden enemy with anti-tank capability or some kind of physical tank trap/hole designed to strand the tank crew in open ground vulnerable to artillery
  Or...
  this is the most critical thing! Main battle tanks are best used to create a breach through heavily entrenched enemy lines, but a crucial element of this push must be a very closely coordinated, absolutely oppressive rolling artillery barrage that advances along the front and corridors of an armored heavy assault. This rolling barrage of artillery changes the calculus as not being in a trench or an armored vehicle as infantry becomes a stochastic risk from shrapnel flying out of the air and ending your life.
  Tanks can move through this kind of intense breach opened at the absolute most high intensity conflict areas in a land war and survive the hellish conditions which might include very close by artillery support to repel counterattacks.

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