Russia's Turtle Tanks Didnt Work So It Tried Turtle Dirt Bikes: Same Result

If it doesnt appear especially maneuverable or invulnerable to FPV attack drones, that's because it isn't. 

But it is indicative of Russia's desperate - if so far unsuccessful -  search for vehicles that can help with attacks. Back to the drawing board. JL 

David Axe reports in Forbes:

A Ukrainian drone unit (saw) one of the Russian military’s up-armored assault motorcycles wearing crude camouflage around its welded-on anti-drone cage armor. The problem, of course, is that a 40-ton tank with a 1,000-horsepower engine can handle add-on armor much better than a 200-pound, 100-horsepower dirt bike can. It suffered the same drawbacks as the turtle tanks: poor mobility and visibility. The bikes were neither small enough to avoid detection by Ukrainian surveillance drones, nor fast enough to dodge strikes by explosive drones. An FPV drone from the Ukrainian Apachi Strike Group chased down the bike and blew it up

Russia’s Mad Max-style war bikes were already pretty weird. Now they’re getting weirder—and more vulnerable.

A video shot by a Ukrainian drone unit apparently this week depicts one of the Russian military’s up-armored assault motorcycles wearing crude camouflage around its welded-on anti-drone cage armor.

It wasn’t quite the two-wheeled equivalent of Russia’s awkward metal-encased “turtle tanks,” but it was close—and it almost certainly suffered all the same drawbacks as the turtle tanks: poor mobility and visibility.

Once the Ukrainian drone spotted the boxy, camouflaged bike—blithely motoring along a dirt road in broad daylight somewhere along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 28-month wider war on Ukraine—the outcome was all but certain. An explosive first-person-view drone from the Ukrainian Apachi FPV Strike Group chased down the bike and blew it up.

It’s possible the rider, or riders, never saw the drone coming. It’s hard enough to see through the bulky metal cages Russian crews are welding onto more of their war bikes in a desperate effort to protect them from FPV drones. It’s probably even harder when those cages are wrapped in camouflage.

After losing around 15,000 armored vehicles in Ukraine, the Russian military got desperate for transportation—and began buying up inexpensive Chinese golf carts as well as Chinese and Belarusian dirt bikes.

Soldiers have ridden on lightweight four-wheeled vehicles and even lighter two-wheeled vehicles since at least World War I. But they rarely rode those flimsy vehicles into direct combat—instead keeping them well behind the front line for support duties.

Several armies experimented with armored assault motorcycles during and right after World War I, but found them unwieldy. Lacking the speed and maneuverability of an unarmored motorcycle and also lacking the protection of a bigger wheeled or tracked vehicle, the armored bikes occupied an unhappy middle ground.

Nevertheless, during World War I, the German army equipped a few troops with motorcycles and ordered them to attack Allied positions—as a real-world test of a bad idea. The results were “pretty tragic,” according to Ends Cuoio. “Needless to say: the idea of deploying motorcycles for direct combat was abandoned.”

A hundred years later, the increasingly vehicle-starved Russian military revived the idea—but only because it had few other choices. The idea was for bike troops to speed up to Ukrainian lines faster than the Ukrainians could react. Once within small-arms range, the bike troops would dismount and fight on foot.

In practice, the bikes were neither small enough to avoid detection by Ukrainian surveillance drones, nor fast enough to dodge strikes by explosive FPV drones. When Russian motorcyclists attacked positions held by the Ukrainian 79th Air Assault Brigade early last month, the Russians were “beaten in the teeth” by drones, the brigade claimed.

 

A few weeks after the first bike troops rode into battle, some of the survivors began installing anti-drone cages on their bikes—essentially copying the practice that transformed some of Russia’s tanks into up-armored turtle tanks.

The problem, of course, is that a 40-ton tank with a 1,000-horsepower engine can handle add-on armor much better than a 200-pound, 100-horsepower dirt bike can. This is a lesson the Danish army learned after World War I, when it ran trials of the F.P.3 armored bike. “The high mass of the vehicle made steering difficult,” Tanks Encyclopedia noted. “Cross-country mobility was minimal.”

The Russians appear to be compounding their error by adding camouflage to some bikes’ cage armor, impeding the riders’ visibility as well as their mobility.

Worse, the camo is badly designed. Traditionally, good camo featured “designs of irregular, colored shapes that made it difficult to determine the outline and form of the camouflaged object,” according to the Imperial War Museum.

But the single-color camo on the Russian war bike struck by the Apachi FPV Strike Group hit actually highlighted the square shape of the bike’s cage armor—causing the bike to stand out on the landscape rather than blend in.

The Apachi FPV Strike Group was unimpressed. “The first barn on two wheels in our direction,” the group mused on social media, punctuating its post with an explosion emoji.