Russian Mad Max-style war motorcycles were already strange enough. Now they are stranger and more vulnerable.
A video filmed through a Ukrainian drone unit this week shows one of the Russian army’s armored attack motorcycles dressed in crude camouflage around its welded anti-drone armor.
It wasn’t the two-wheeled equivalent of Russia’s metal-clad “turtle tanks,” but it was close to it, and almost in fact suffered from the same drawbacks as turtle tanks: poor mobility and visibility.
Once the Ukrainian drone spotted the square, camouflaged motorcycle, rolling gleefully down a dirt road in broad sunlight somewhere along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 28-month war against Ukraine, the end results were almost certain. of the Ukrainian Apachi FPV strike group chased the motorcycle and blew it up.
It’s imaginable that the pilot never saw the drone arrive. It’s hard enough to see through the bulky steel cages that Russian crews are welding onto more of their war bikes in a desperate effort to protect them from FPV drones. It’s probably even trickier when those cages are wrapped in camouflage.
After wasting some 15,000 armored vehicles in Ukraine, the Russian military is in desperate need of transportation and has bought reasonable Chinese golf carts, as well as Chinese and Belarusian dirt bikes.
Soldiers have been driving smooth four-wheeled cars and even softer two-wheeled cars since at least World War I. But they rarely drove those fragile cars into direct combat, keeping them on the front line for relief duties.
Several armies experimented with armored attack motorcycles, and just after World War I, they found them to be heavy. Lacking the speed and maneuverability of an unarmored motorcycle and the cover of a larger wheeled or tracked vehicle, armored motorcycles occupied an unfortunate middle ground.
However, after World War I, the German army supplied motorcycles to some infantrymen and ordered them to attack Allied positions, to prove a bad idea in real life. The effects were “quite tragic,” according to Ends Cuoio. Needless to say, the concept of deploying motorcycles for direct fighting has been abandoned. “
A hundred years later, the Russian army, short of vehicles, revived the concept, but only because it had few options. The concept was that troops on bicycles were speeding toward Ukrainian lines faster than Ukrainians could react. Once inside, faced with the diversity of small arms, the troops on bicycles dismounted and fought on foot.
In practice, the motorcycles were not small enough to be detected by Ukrainian surveillance drones, nor fast enough to dodge the movements of FPV explosive drones. When Russian motorcyclists attacked positions held by Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade early last month, the Russians were “hit in the teeth” by drones, the brigade said.
A few weeks after the first troops set off on bicycles, some survivors began installing anti-drone cages on their bikes, necessarily copying the practice that turned some Russian tanks into armored turtle tanks.
The problem, of course, is that a 40-ton tank with a 1,000-horsepower engine can support much greater additional armor than that of a 200-pound, 100-horsepower dirt bike. This is a lesson that the Danish army learned after the war. World War I, when tests of the F. P. 3 armored bicycle were carried out. “The superior mass of the vehicle made it difficult to steer,” notes the Tanks Encyclopedia. “Mobility throughout the country was minimal. “
The Russians compound their mistake by adding camouflage to the armor of the chassis of some motorcycles, thus hindering the visibility and mobility of cyclists.
Even worse, the camouflage is poorly designed. Traditionally, clever camouflage featured “colorful, irregularly shaped designs that made it difficult to define and shape the camouflaged object,” according to the Imperial War Museum.
But the monochromatic camouflage of the Russian war motorcycle hit by the Apachi FPV Strike Group attack highlighted the square shape of the motorcycle’s cage armor, allowing the motorcycle to stand out in the landscape rather than blend into it.
The attack organization of the aircraft carrier Apachi FPV was not impressed. “The first barn on two wheels in our direction,” the organization reflected on social networks, highlighting its publication with an explosion emoji.
Sources:
1. Apachi FPV Strike Group: https://t. me/apachi_fpv/227
2. Oryx: https://www. oryxspioenkop. com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment. html
3. Full quota: https://www. endscuoio. com/military-motorcycles-in-world-war-one/?v=7516fd43adaa
4. Tank Encyclopedia: https://tanks-encyclopedia. com/ww2-sweden-landsverk-armored-motorcycles/
5. Imperial War Museum: https://www. iwm. org. uk/history/5-facts-about-camouflage-in-the-first-world-war
A community. Lots of voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.
Our network aims to connect other people through open and thoughtful conversations. We need our readers to share their perspectives and exchange ideas and facts in one space.
To do so, please comply with the posting regulations in our site’s terms of use. Below we summarize some of those key regulations. In short, civilians.
Your message will be rejected if we realize that it seems to contain:
User accounts will be blocked if we become aware that users are engaged in:
So, how can you be a user?
Thank you for reading our Community Standards. Read the full list of publication regulations discovered in our site’s terms of use.