- kyiv has launched more than 1,000 cheap balloons toward Russia as decoys, relays and now even launch pads, and a balloon-launched Hornet drone is reported to have doubled its attack range to about 300 km.
- The DART missile drops from balloons at 12-18 km and deliberately kills its own shipping in the terminal phase, leaving Russian jammers with nothing to attack.
- Prevailing west-to-east winds give Ukraine a near monopoly on the tactic, even as Russia tests its Barrazh-1 relay balloon as an alternative to Starlink.
Google may have canceled its Project Loon project, a goal of using stratospheric balloons as flying cell towers due to economic considerations, but they are back in an unexpected scenario: a deepening front line between Ukraine and Russia.
This is largely because Ukraine has broken the economy with the business model that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, could not have: a cheap, easy-to-use weapons platform that cannot be affordably blocked or shot down while increasing its threat to Russian cities far from the front lines.
DART is a balloon-launched missile system deployed in Ukraine and developed by the Ukrainian company Center of Innovative Technologies Program (CITP), which launches projectiles from the lower stratosphere toward intended targets.
A smart missile approach and ‘dumb’ by design
While most of the world continues to focus on better satellite- or laser-guided smart missiles (or precision-guided weapons), Ukraine is taking a completely different approach, and it could be a much smarter play given the way it could develop.
The balloon-based DART missile starts out “smartly,” relying on satellite guidance to align and aim at a target before cutting guidance completely for the final 6 km of the journey, relying solely on its solid-fuel engine to reach its intended position.
The approach, although slightly crude, renders Russian jammers completely ineffective, unable to divert a DART missile from the target or “confuse” it in any way. The target does not appear to be civilians or combatants, but rather to restrict Russia’s ability to wage war by attacking infrastructure due to the missile’s operation.
DART carries a roughly 10-kilogram warhead that disperses conductive graphite filaments, a small-scale graphite bomb intended to cause short circuits in electrical infrastructure. This also means that it might not need the level of precision that many other missiles do: power plants and electrical grids tend to expand, making them much easier targets than other alternatives.
The most impressive part might be that the balloons, which often cost as little as $200, can lure expensive S-300 and S-400 interceptors into responding, depleting much more expensive ammunition and batteries on the Russian side.
Ukraine is also a direct beneficiary of geography: the winds along the front generally blow from west to east, allowing Ukrainian balloons to easily reach Russian territory, while the Russians have to fight against the current and, as a result, often float back to their own territory.
While DART is not yet codified by the Ukrainian military, it has already been displayed at trade shows, and the Eurosatory defense exhibition outside Paris in June marked its first major outing. It also makes allies and adversaries alike realize that the Ukrainian conflict continues to offer modern lessons on the battlefield.
The US military has been evaluating tethered aerostats for drone detection and communications relay, with an eye toward launching swarms of drones from them in the future.
The Russians, on the other hand, are investing in a different type of drone technology: the Barrazh-1, a stratospheric relay balloon carrying a communications payload of approximately 100 kilograms, which they say is built entirely in the country and aims to compensate for the lack of Starlink terminals available in the country for battlefield data and Internet services.
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