Don's Weekly, 23 December 2024: Part 4, Magyar's Birds

by Donald Hill

An efficient army is an army of systems, procedures, and resulting checklists. Individual initiative is encouraged, and there is a constant cycle of operations, assessments, improvements, testing, and resulting changes. Successful units are efficient units, and they are given a high level of autonomy by the Ukrainian leadership. One such unit is the 414th Separate Regiment of Strike Unmanned Aerial Systems, also known as the “Birds of Magyar”. They began as a company and in this last year they grew into a battalion, then a regiment, and will soon be a brigade. When their leader, Robert Brovdy, aka “Magyar”, announced a recruiting drive, they received 1200 applications from civilians because people are drawn to success.

Their unit doesn’t accept everyone. There is a long questionnaire and interviews. Commanders recruit people into their unit and are responsible for them. Anyone that lies is tested by the operational psychology unit with a lie detector to reveal anything they’re hiding. If someone drinks, even if they’re a successful operator, it’s a black mark against them. The unit buys drug testing units that can be used at any time, and they’ve even brought in search dogs. At the same time, if someone is highly qualified but deserted from another unit, they aren’t turned away. 80% of the recruits are rejected, and of those accepted, if it turns out they cannot perform, they are given two months to find another unit before they are terminated. They would rather be undermanned than have personnel that need constant supervision. Few units have that luxury, but the success of the unit depends on discipline, competence and teamwork.

His unit is organized to be as autonomous as possible and he can only do this because of a successful fundraising program. In addition to drones, electronic warfare equipment and radars, he has truck drivers that also double as mechanics capable of not only maintaining vehicles, but salvaging parts from several damaged vehicles to repair one to working condition. His drone teams don’t just fly drones, they repair them and reprogram the electronics that allows them to function in a changing EW environment without delay. When they receive government-provided drones that have batteries with shorter life spans or other suboptimal characteristics, they upgrade them before using them. They create some of their own components, make their own munitions with explosives salvaged from unexploded ordnance, have their own metalworking shop that creates everything from hand carts to evacuate the wounded to anti-tank mines. Not only do they make these for themselves, but they give hand carts to other units and there are 95 brigades that receive 20,000 anti-tank mines a month from them.

It is in the unit’s DNA to be efficient, innovative and proactive. Initiative is encouraged at the lowest levels and everyone believes in what they are doing.

A successful businessman, Brovdy joined a Territorial Defense Brigade, fighting first in the Kyiv region and then Kherson. He decided he could do more than just sit in a trench so he raised money to buy drones and established Magyar’s Birds as part of the 28th Mechanized Brigade and later the 59th Motorized Brigade at Bakhmut. In February 20223 they became an independent company. At that time, they conducted five types of operations: Locating specific enemy forces, patrolling a sector, spotting for artillery, kamikaze attacks and bombing attacks.

His unit grew into a battalion and supported the Marines in the Kherson region and later became a regiment and supported multiple sectors at the same time. They now conduct 12 types of operations, adding night missions, mining, detection of enemy radio transmissions, electronic warfare, and radars to their capabilities. Drone units the size of companies or battalions cannot conduct these missions, but the capabilities are needed to detect enemy drones and pass on the information to EW operators.

When unknown drones are detected with radars and radio reconnaissance, sometimes they’re able to intercept the video feed and see what the drone is seeing. Interception drones are launched and make a visual confirmation on whether it is a friendly or enemy drone before it is destroyed.

When an enemy drone radio signal is detected, they hunt for the source of the transmission. Often, all they will find is an antenna while the enemy drone team is underground somewhere, so they destroy the antenna which means that the drone team will be out of operation anywhere from a few hours to a few days. In the meantime, they’ll patrol the area, and if they see the enemy erecting a new antenna mast or deploy to a different location, and then they’ll hit them.

When drones were first used, it would usually take five drones to knock out a single target. Brovdy reports that a single drone success rate is about 20-40% for both sides because of malfunctions, failure to explode, explosions while flying to the target and being shot down, but the largest failure rate is due to electronic warfare. Both sides are working on the development of drones with fiber optic cables to avoid the disruption of radio signals. Smaller drones can fly over 15 km on fiber optic cables and larger drones can fly up to 50 km. Fiber optics are an interim step until artificial intelligence becomes capable of recognizing different types of equipment and being able to be mass produced.

Decisions are made with information, and without good information you can’t make good decisions. The Wild Hornets are a drone production organization that requires units to record all their missions so the production team can view them and make changes to the equipment based on reviews of the missions and feedback from the drone teams. They refuse to work with drone teams that don’t record their missions. Magyar’s team operates in a similar manner, recording each hit and miss, and the circumstances of each mission. This procedure encourages self-discipline among the drone teams and allows the organization to understand trends to alter procedures for greater efficiencies. In some units, drone operators lie about their failures because of the danger of being sent for retraining or to be sent to the front line as infantry. In Brovdy’s unit, failure is just a data point and conditions are altered to reduce failure.

The regiment has their own metal fabrication and explosive recovery operation to be as efficient and independent as possible.

He can recall the data from any drone team in any month and analyze how effective they were against any type of target, such as personnel, bunkers or different types of vehicles. He can read what types of drones they flew and in what configuration, and he can factor in the weather and combat conditions, whether the operations were in support of offensive or defensive efforts and the nature and quality of the targets, or the EW environment. Teams analyze this data and make changes to replicate the successes, whether it is altering the equipment used, providing training for teams that are lagging, or changing procedures to implement proven successes throughout the unit.

The unit pays attention to logistics with just as much detail. To keep drones patrolling 24 hours a day, there has to be batteries constantly charging and spare drones to replace those that are damaged or lost. There are six types of drone crews, each with their list of needs, and those needs are calculated for a year so they can plan the purchases of components. Based on experience, they know each crew loses 7.5 Mavics a month while conducting 600-650 missions. So they need to buy 8 batteries. That’s just for the lost drones. To maintain the 24 hour patrols, each drone needs 20 batteries that are constantly charging.

They no longer use armored vehicles because they draw attention, are also destroyed by drones, are more expensive and harder to maintain. They prefer to avoid detection as much as possible and to abandon a truck in order to save lives.

You can’t conduct these operations without checklists and procedures, and they’ve developed algorithms to track their supplies of firewood (to keep crew and components warm), condoms (to fill with water to have the right weight to train on dropping bombs), summer and snow tires (to keep the vehicle and personnel alive).

They lose 22 Vampire drones that cost $16-20k when flying 2500 sorties each month. That’s about 100 missions per drone, 4 bombs per mission so 400 bombs per month per drone, and of those 400 bombs dropped maybe 150 hit an enemy soldier. So they can report that the average cost of a bomb drop mission is $100. An FPV drone can only be used once and has a 22% success rate, with a cost of $300 per drone, the cost $1500 per mission.

The different battalions of the regiment support more than 20 brigades that do not have the equipment and pilots to support their own operations. To that end, 20-30 drone crews from National Police, border guards and Territorial Defense units are sent under orders to his regiment for two months. They use the regiment’s drones, which means a higher loss rate that must be accounted for, and they use the unit’s trucks, EW systems and communication gear. At the end of two months they are sent back to their units and new drone teams arrive.

If enough drone teams are trained to provide their own unmanned operations for their brigade then Magyar’s Birds could allocate more resources to deeper, more difficult and specialized missions. Expanding into a brigade will make it easier to support the specialized operations, and he suggests creating 4-5 more regiments like his to provide offensive and defensive drone coverage for hundreds of kilometers of the front line. One challenge would be recruiting a greater number of personnel that could meet the high standards of Magyar’s Birds. Another challenge would be finding a leader that has his organizational skill to manage personnel, financial, logistical and technical requirements of such a unit. But at the very least, his operations at the company and battalion level provide a standard that other units can replicate.