Hit The First Vehicle, Hit The Last & Trap The Rest: The Ukrainians Used A Classic Tactic To...

It’s a classic ambush tactic. Blow up the first and last vehicle in a convoy, trapping the other vehicles and their crews between the wreckage. Then pick off the survivors.

Even when it doesn’t perfectly work, this tactic can be devastating. Ukrainian troops practiced the tactic to devastate a Russian tank regiment in Brovary, outside Kyiv, in March 2022. They repeated it in Vuhledar this February.

And they did it again in Hladkivka, in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, on or before Saturday. A convoy with dozens of Russian military trucks—Urals and Kamazs—apparently was hauling ammunition toward the front line when Ukrainian rockets exploded at the front and back of the convoy.

The rockets reportedly were M30s fired by Ukraine’s American-made High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems. Each M30 peppers its target with 180,000 tungsten balls, just a handful of which could perforate a truck and destroy its cargo.

And if the cargo is ammo, expect secondary explosions. Much of the Russian convoy in Hladkivka escaped the rocket ambush. “The attack induced panic among Russian military personnel, causing them to disperse in the surviving vehicles,” the independent Conflict Intelligence Team noted. But the rockets and subsequent secondary blasts reportedly destroyed 16 trucks and killed 25 Russians.

The ambush might not have been possible just a few weeks ago. While Ukraine’s HIMARS with their 40-mile-range M30 rockets can strike across Russian-occupied southern Kherson Oblast, the launchers need cueing by satellites, drones or troops on the ground. The recent strike clearly depended on drone reconnaissance; a drone remained overhead to assess the damage as the rockets rained down.

Ukrainian drones increasingly range freely across Kherson—one consequence of a painstaking effort by Ukrainian forces this summer to achieve local air-superiority over the oblast.