Ukraine Needs More Stingers to Counter Russia's New Shahed Tactic
Back to the early days of the war, when Stingers and Javelins ruled the field.
Russia has a new Shahed tactic, and it’s ugly.
Not subtle, not stealthy, just brutally effective.
Instead of skimming low under radar like they did last year, Shahed drones are now cruising at over 8,000 feet and diving straight down onto their targets like budget Stukas. Picture a flying lawnmower with a 90-pound warhead doing a kamikaze nosedive from two kilometers up, too fast and too high for a pickup-mounted .50 cal to do anything but watch.
This isn’t speculation, it’s confirmed by both Ukraine’s Air Force and frontline defenders like Oleksiy, a deputy commander in Kyiv’s Territorial Defense Forces.
His mobile fire group is tasked with protecting infrastructure and civilians, and until recently, their weapon of choice, a truck-mounted M2 Browning, or “Technical,” was doing the job.
But now? It’s a glorified observation tool.
The drones are not only flying higher, they’re flying faster; Russia’s latest Shahed mods reportedly push past 180 mph, with newer versions projected to hit 370+ mph and a range of 1,550 miles.
Oh, and they’re showing up in numbers. Last weekend alone, Russia launched 273 drones in one wave, many of them decoys designed to burn out Ukraine’s limited interceptor inventory.
We’re watching Russia transform Shaheds from cheap kamikaze tools into strategic air superiority weapons, not because they dominate the skies, but because they exploit the economics of exhaustion.
The .50 Cal is Not a Cure-All… Ukraine Needs to Get Its Missiles Back
The .50 caliber M2 Browning has been a workhorse in nearly every US conflict since World War II, and it earned its keep in Ukraine, too, at least early on. Mounted to the beds of Hiluxes and Land Cruisers, these heavy machine guns were Ukraine’s first mobile answer to Iran’s Shahed drones.
And they worked, back when the drones flew nap-of-the-earth, slow and steady, barely above treetop level.
But the M2 was never designed to track fast-moving targets at 8,000 feet. This isn’t Fallujah or Kunar. Ukraine’s air defenders are now trying to use anti-personnel and light-vehicle weapons to hit drones behaving more like dive-bombing cruise missiles. That’s not just an uphill battle, it’s bad math.
And I hate math.
The engagement envelope of a .50 cal is limited not just by range, but by elevation speed, bullet drop, and barrel heating.
At higher altitudes, even when gunners see the drone, they often can’t get enough lead or sustained fire to land effective hits. It becomes a spot-and-report mission, not a kill mission.
Worse, the more Russia adapts its drone tactics like faster ingress speeds, vertical dives, coordinated decoys, the more the limitations of the Browning platform start to feel like a liability, not a solution.
Then there’s the issue of scale. Firing 200 rounds of linked .50 BMG at a drone that might only be in view for four seconds is not sustainable. Ukraine is already facing logistical strain; chewing through expensive, hard-to-source ammunition on engagements with low success rates only accelerates that problem. It’s a drain on resources, morale, and readiness.
What makes MANPADS so essential isn’t just that they’re shoulder-fired or lightweight; it’s that they offer proportional lethality. You’re not burning up $4 million interceptors or wasting entire ammo belts.
You’re matching a $20,000 missile to a $25,000 Russian drone and winning the exchange decisively. And more importantly, you’re reintroducing an effective standoff kill zone, something the Browning setup can’t offer anymore.
Machine guns are great for drones that hug the terrain. But when your enemy is lofting death from 8,000 feet with a vertical dive profile, it’s time to stop pointing rifles at the sky and start putting missiles back in the hands of soldiers.
Time to Bring Back the Stinger (and Its Soviet Cousin, the Igla)
The first months of the full-scale invasion gave us a masterclass in asymmetric defense. Ukraine didn’t have layered IADS or air superiority, but what it did have were boxes of shoulder-fired missiles and volunteers ready to use them.
Ukrainian soldiers used MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) extensively and aggressively in the early stages of the war; think of them as the infantry’s slingshot against a Russian Goliath flying at medium altitudes.
In the first six months of the full-scale invasion (February to August 2022), MANPADS were deployed daily, sometimes dozens of times per day, especially during Russia’s low-altitude push toward Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mykolaiv. Russian helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft frequently flew low to evade radar, making them perfect targets for shoulder-fired systems like the US-made Stinger, Polish Piorun, British Starstreak, and Igla systems.
Ukrainian infantry, Territorial Defense Forces, and even special forces units operated MANPADS from forests, urban rooftops, and roadside ambush points. The impact was immediate: Russia suffered heavy helicopter losses, including Ka-52 Alligators and Mi-8/24s. The rate of shoot-downs was so high that it reportedly forced the Russian Air Force to reduce low-altitude sorties in contested zones.
To give you a rough idea of scale, by April 2022, Ukraine claimed hundreds of successful MANPADS engagements. NATO and partner nations had already delivered over 2,000+ Stinger-type systems by the summer of that year. Ukrainian sources documented so many MANPADS kills that some brigades were reportedly running low on missiles within weeks of high-tempo fighting.
Now, as Russia pivots to high-volume, high-altitude drone warfare, it’s time to dust off the doctrine and reload the tubes.
The FIM-92 Stinger and its Soviet-era cousin, the 9K38 Igla, were never designed for swatting Shaheds per se, but what they were built to do, engage small, fast, low-flying threats, makes them perfectly suited to the drone war’s next evolution. These systems bridge the gap between expensive air defense batteries and truck-mounted machine guns.
More importantly, they give soldiers autonomy in air defense, without the need for radar coverage, long setup times, or external fire control.
Unlike heavier systems that require vehicle transport or fixed emplacements, MANPADS are infantry-portable, which means you can position them on rooftops, in forested terrain, on urban fringes… basically anywhere drones are expected to pass.
That mobility is a nightmare for Russian drone planners. It turns Ukraine’s countryside and cityscapes into a dense, unpredictable kill zone where any open corridor could have a missile waiting at the other end.
And then there’s the psychological value. One of the reasons Shaheds are so effective isn’t just because they explode, it’s because they show up in waves, often unchallenged, buzzing overhead with a chainsaw whine that terrorizes civilians and overburdens defenders.
Getting MANPADS back into regular rotation restores initiative. Instead of watching drones pass overhead, Ukrainian troops can once again meet the threat head-on; no waiting for command approval, no praying the radar net catches them in time.
Both systems, Stinger and Igla, are familiar to Ukrainian forces. There’s no massive training curve here. Many Territorial Defense and regular Army units have already used them effectively, and a rapid refresher course is a small price to pay for doubling or tripling drone intercepts overnight.
As things stand, Ukraine doesn’t need boutique systems or sci-fi railguns to counter the new Shahed threat. It needs what worked before: high-angle, heat-seeking autonomy in the hands of trigger-ready soldiers. And that means crates of Stingers, pallets of Iglas, and the political will to get them moving, fast.
So, how many MANPADS does Ukraine currently have? Not enough. Ukraine has received over 3,000 Stinger missiles and several hundred Igla systems from international partners, but they need more.
How many does the US and European allies have to give? Stockpiles are classified, but I would make a highly educated estimation in excess of 20,000 launchers and 60,000 missiles.
Why MANPADS Are the Perfect Antidote to the Dive-Bomb Shahed
The dive-bombing Shahed is a puzzle. One that’s specifically engineered to exploit gaps in Ukraine’s air defense coverage. It flies high to dodge machine guns, stays cheap to burn out expensive interceptors, and dives fast enough that even radar-based systems struggle with reaction time.
So, what do you need to kill a weapon like that?
You need a weapons system that’s fast, portable, radar-agnostic, and cost-balanced. In short, you need MANPADS!
First, they’re optically guided, not radar-dependent. That means they don’t rely on a centralized sensor net, which is a serious bonus when Russia is jamming everything from GPS to broadband comms. If a soldier sees the drone, they can shoot it; no uplink, no bureaucracy, just trigger discipline and line-of-sight.
Second, the dive profile of the new Shahed actually plays into the strengths of MANPADS. A descending drone presents its hottest surface, its engine exhaust, on a parallel line with the shooter. That’s an ideal target for the heat-seeking warheads used in both the Stinger and Igla platforms.
In fact, the faster and steeper the dive, the easier it is for the missile to maintain a thermal lock. This isn’t just possible, it’s textbook.
Third, the close-in timing window created by a dive-bombing profile gives little room for anything slower or more complex.
Traditional SAM systems often need cueing data and time to assign targets, especially in cluttered airspace. But a well-placed MANPADS crew has a unique advantage: it lives in the last ten seconds of the drone’s flight path. That’s the sweet spot, right before impact, when every other system has missed or misfired, the shoulder launcher becomes the last line of defense.
MANPADS also bypass the economic trap Russia is trying to set. Launching a $20,000 Shahed to bait a $300,000 interceptor is a great trade for Moscow. But losing one to a $25,000 Igla or a $70,000 Stinger? Not so much.
That’s a kill ratio Ukraine can afford to sustain, and more importantly, it puts pressure back on the attacker. If Shaheds are no longer guaranteed to get through, the economics of saturation attacks start to fall apart.
Finally, these systems scale with terrain. You can stage them in open fields, nest them in ruined buildings, or walk them into forested zones where vehicles can’t go. That means they can defend not just cities or high-value targets, but soft logistics corridors, critical infrastructure nodes, and humanitarian evacuation routes, all places too risky or too remote for fixed-site air defense.
In short, MANPADS make the battlefield three-dimensional again. They allow Ukraine to meet this new drone threat with flexibility, speed, and tactical independence. The Shahed dive-bomber may be Russia’s latest trick, but it’s not invincible. All it takes to stop it is a soldier, a line of sight, and a shoulder-fired reply that’s already proven itself in two wars and four decades of asymmetric combat.
Every evolution in this war has followed the same pattern: Russia adapts, Ukraine outsmarts.
That’s how it’s gone from day one: javelins versus tanks, Starlinks versus jammers, drones versus everything. And now, as Russia pivots toward drone-centric, high-volume, high-altitude attacks, the next countermeasure won’t come from a lab in Silicon Valley or a billion-dollar air defense system, it’ll come from a man on foot with a missile on his back.
This is the phase where mobility beats complexity. The battlefield is simply too saturated, too fast-moving, and too unpredictable for Ukraine to rely solely on fixed air defense positions or radar-driven kill chains.
What’s needed now is a decentralized, shoulder-fired doctrine… a throwback in hardware, but a leap forward in tactical thinking.
It’s about restoring flexibility to the kill chain. Portable systems allow commanders to reassign firepower on the fly, rearm quickly, and defend targets that fall outside the protection bubble of Patriot batteries and Buk launchers.
It gives Ukrainian forces the freedom to create dynamic air defense zones, fluid perimeters that move with the fight, not behind it.
And from a strategic standpoint, it sends a message: Ukraine’s defenses aren’t static. They’re not waiting to be overwhelmed by the next wave. They’re adapting in real time, shrinking the cost gap, and reclaiming the initiative.
The next step in this war isn’t bigger. It’s not more expensive. It’s not smarter AI or satellite uplinks. The next step is simpler, faster, and in the hands of the people who are already fighting.
The future of drone defense is portable, and it’s already here. Now it just needs to be fielded in larger numbers. Get Ukraine the tools they need.
Слава Україні!
Question: would shooting „down“ a Shahed drone in final approach keep it from exploding? Because that is what is needed, isn’t it? If the drone warhead on its way down still explodes it most likely will still do its horrible job of destruction and kill.
Pardon me, but I keep feeling that it's time for Ukraine, which has studiously avoided causing civilian deaths by targeting only military targets, to alter that practice somewhat and take their response to Putin into the cities, including Moscow and hopefully St. Petersburg.
Send them a warning that they can expect attacks on military-related targets within cities so that civilians have time to evacuate, and then blow the crap out of the high-rises in Moscow. Let's have the war really come to the Russian people, not by killing them but by creating the wreckage of what they considered off-limits.
Right now, probably for most Russians in Muscovy, the war is a distant nuisance. My feeling is that it needs to be brought to the Russian people through destroyed houses, ruined bridges, unusable airports and train stations and so forth. Start attacking the Nevsky in Putin's home city of St.Petersburg and make the war intolerable to Russian citizens.