If their opponents had also built up a stockpile of drones and loitering munitions, they might have worn down the Azeri advance, says Bendett. “While drones will be hailed as the straw that broke the camel's back in this war, Azerbaijani success is also attributed to good ol' fashioned mechanized infantry operations that took the territory, one square kilometer at a time,” says Bendett. According to Bateman, the problem is not tanks but “incompetently trained and equipped military forces that left themselves clumsily open.”īendett notes also that the victory was not simply a matter of drone strikes. Drone videos show Armenian tanks clumped together as if on a parade ground, with no real attempt at dispersal, camouflage or using the terrain for cover. Robert Bateman, writing in Foreign Policy, forcefully suggests that the problem is one of competence. While some have suggested that the massacre of Armenian armor by Azeri drone fleet signals the end of the tank, others are not so sure. This is a multicopter with onboard intelligence and a smart recognition system able to identify, locate and destroy targets on its own.
There were also repeated rumors, though little evidence, of smaller tactical kamikaze drones like the Turkish Kargu being deployed. Waves of Harops can be launched from mobile launchers carrying nine each.Ī truck-mounted launcher can send in a wave of nine Harop loitering munitions to attack targets. The Azeris also deployed a locally-made version is the Israeli Orbiter-1K small kamikaze drone and the Israeli-made Harop loitering munition. Later Azeri videos show drone strikes on groups of individual soldiers and trenches, suggesting that they may have run out of higher value targets.
#Turkish tank force how to#
These ridiculous machines may have been decoys to force air defenses to give away their location so they could be targeted by TB2s.īendett says the TB2s were probably flown by Turkish operators who had experience of taking on older Russian air defenses in Libya and Syria, and who knew how to exploit their weaknesses. Russian Defense Minister Krasnaya Zvezda suggested this might be because of a ‘dead zone’ at very low altitude where the Russian systems have difficulty engaging targets.Īzerbaijan also converted a number of its old Russian An-2 biplanes into bomb-dropping drones. The destruction of air defenses is particularly significant: once these have been knocked out, the drones can pick off targets at will.Ī similar situation occurred in Syria in June, where again Turkish Bayraktar TB2s apparently destroyed dozens of Russian-built anti-aircraft vehicles.
#Turkish tank force plus#
By October 3, Azerbaijan already claimed to have destroyed 250 armored vehicles and a similar number of artillery pieces, plus 39 air-defense systems including an S-300 air-defense system.
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