In recent years, the . Its has been somewhat of a press marvel, with pictures of it supposedly. The Uran-9, on the other hand, is a much more powerful and larger drone that is supposedly capable of doing a job similar to an armored fighting vehicle, without anyone aboard. Now the big question is this: does this thing have the ability to actually be useful on the battlefield?

The Uran-9 is not a subtle machine. It is heavily armed with a 30mm 2A72 automatic cannon, a coaxial 7.62mm machine gun and multiple 9M120 Ataka anti-tank guided missiles. The Uran-9 also has a suite of optics and targeting systems that includes thermal imaging and a laser designator. Based on armament alone, this thing has the ability to take out anything from soft targets (i.e. people) to main battle tanks and everything in between.

The fun doesn’t stop there. The Uran-9 can be reconfigured to carry different weapons, including point-defense surface-to-air missiles like the Igla and Strela, as well as different sensors. Each Uran-9 system consists of two vehicles and a transporter truck for moving them from place-to-place and for command and control of the vehicles while operational.

But is it really needed? What you really have here is an advanced radio-controlled light tank. In other words, it has a man-in-the-loop operating system, meaning controllers are driving it and employing its weapons from a trailer nearby.

A big limitation of such systems is the range at which it can operate from its control vehicle. Unmanned ground vehicles with man-in-the-loop control concepts have a serious disadvantage as their line-of-sight radio signals can be blocked by terrain and man-made structures easily. Just the curvature of the earth is a much more pronounced obstruction for ground dwelling unmanned systems when compared with flying ones.

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Using a satellite data-link is not nearly as viable a command and control communications solution for unmanned ground systems as it is for airborne ones. Mountains, and structures, and even foliage, can still block data-transmission and the fragile equipment needed to make it happen is not conducive to a mini-tank that likes to bust through fiery obstacles like the Uran-9. Also, the bandwidth required is huge and would limit the amount of vehicles that could be used at any given time. There is also the question of how capable Russia’s abilities are when it comes to high-speed satellite data-links in the first place.

There are some partial antidotes to these restrictions, such as using an aircraft or aerostat as a beyond-line-of-sight radio relay, but this too has similar limitations of a satellite system. There is also the question of how susceptible the Uran-9's radio signals are to electronic attacks and jamming.

With this in mind, when it comes to something like the Uran-9, you end up with is a vehicle that can only support very local missions because the second the signal to its command vehicle is significantly degraded or blocked it becomes a big boulder with a target painted on its side. In essence this means that it could scout an area very close by, depending on the terrain, but its not like it can make an armored charge over the horizon.

Even on a very “local” operations level, the Uran-9 seems to have limited utility. It could provide security for large bases and work as a sentry for checkpoint duty and similar missions, but considering it is packing a large load of very deadly anti-tank missiles, there are few scenarios where such heavy firepower would be needed.

Also, because there are still multiple people controlling and supporting the system when it is operating, the efficiency of it is highly questionable. This prompts the question: why not just use a manned combat vehicle for these types of missions?