Russian special forces will be equipped with a weapon package to shoot down drones
Military special forces will be equipped with Tiger-M armored vehicles equipped with Arbalet-DM combat modules capable of countering drones, Defense Ministry sources told the Izvestia newspaper.
This year this type of armored vehicle will be assigned to the Central and Western military regions.
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In 2020, the Defense Ministry said that special forces in the Krasnodar region used this weapon against drones at a distance of up to 1.5 kilometers. The exercise took place in July as part of a large-scale surprise inspection of the forces of the Southern Military District.
The special feature of the module using a 12.7 mm large-caliber machine gun is its ability to be fully stabilized, allowing it to hit targets not only from a fixed position, but also while the vehicle is moving. The software helps to automatically capture and track targets in the air and on the ground. The armored personnel carrier equipped with the Arbalet module can detect the enemy and identify targets at a distance of 2.5 km during the day and 1.5 km at night.
The combat module willshoot down drone
As military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Izvestia, countering small unmanned aerial vehicles remains a difficult problem both in Russia and abroad.
A Russian armored vehicle with state-of-the-art equipment.
“For man-portable air defense missiles, they are too small a target, and for conventional small arms, they can only be shot down if the enemy is at close range,” he explained.
The Tiger-M armored vehicle equipped with the Arbalet module is designed to protect convoys on the move, cover deployment areas and conduct reconnaissance. The large-caliber machine gun is capable of hitting infantry and light armored vehicles.
An upgraded Tiger armored vehicle variant equipped with a more powerful combat module using a 30 mm automatic cannon has also been developed and tested.