Automated machine gun turrets using artificial intelligence to aim have downed their first Russian jet-powered drones over Ukraine, Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said on Oct. 5.
A day prior, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that twelve such turrets had been installed where Russian jet-powered drones have been particularly active, including around Kyiv.
“There are already cases of shooting down even jet UAVs, even ‘Geran-5’ from the those very turrets,” Ihnat said on national television.
“The use of innovative technologies — artificial intelligence — has eliminated human error. Machine vision is used in the shooting down. Artificial intelligence allows you to target even jet-powered drones.”
Since Russia started using jet-powered drones en masse against Kyiv toward the end of summer this year, they, especially the Geran-4 and Geran-5 models, have presented an air defense problem for which Ukraine has not yet found a single solution.
Most existing interceptor drones, which were responsible for downing the majority of Russia’s Shahed-type attack drones until recently, are not fast enough to intercept jet-powered drones.
Jet-powered interceptors are actively in development, but producing them at the scale required to contain the jet-powered drone threat is likely impossible due to the lack of supply chains for cheap jet engines in the West.
In the meantime, advances in artificial intelligence technology have led to better automatic aiming systems, allowing small arms like U.S.-made Browning heavy machine guns to add to Ukraine’s anti-drone air defense network.
