To Dodge Missiles, Ukraine’s Stryker Fighting Vehicles Dodge And Weave

The Soviet-made Sagger anti-tank missile still was fairly new and, in the West, relatively unknown when Egyptian forces used it to devastating effect on the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

The 26-pound, wire-guided missile could, and did, knock out Israeli tanks—by the hundreds—from several thousand yards away. The U.S. Army scrambled to develop a countermeasure and, 50 years later, the Ukrainian armed forces still are using it to defeat Russia’s heavier, farther-flying anti-tank guided missiles.

The crews of Ukraine’s American-made Stryker wheeled fighting vehicles apparently are among the more successful in evading Russian ATGMs—and for good reason. The Americans’ classic “Sagger drill” works best in a fast, maneuverable vehicle with good all-around optics. The 18-ton, 11-person Stryker checks all those boxes.

A Sagger operator controls the missile via signals that travel to the missile mid-flight via a wire that unspools from the munition like silkworm’s long thread. Eyeballing the target’s movement, the operator carefully steers the missile in real time.

This guidance method lends itself to interruption, evasion or both. The U.S. Army’s Sagger drills never really were official, but field manuals describing missile-evasion techniques urged vehicle crews to stay alert for the telltale flash of a missile firing—then maneuver in an “erratic and zigzag path” and get under cover, as fast as possible.

The goal was to move faster, and more randomly, than a missile-operator could react to. Fifty years later, Russian anti-tank missiles—including the 32-pound Konkurs and 64-pound Kornet—range farther and might have laser guidance in place of the command guidance.

But a Sagger drill still works at times, and especially in a vehicle as maneuverable as a Stryker is. Thanks to its 350-horsepower diesel engine, the eight-wheel IFV can accelerate to 60 miles per hour on good terrain.

One Stryker driver explained how the vehicle’s two-man crew stays alive on a battlefield teeming with missiles. “Its main advantages are speed, maneuverability,” the unnamed driver said of his IFV in an official video.

Strykers crews run their own version of the Sagger drill. The first step is for the driver and commander to scan through their separate infrared optics—the driver’s Leonardo-made Driver’s Vision Enhancer and the commander’s camera-equipped Kongsberg Protector remote gun turret—for the hot white flash of a missile launching from potentially miles away.

“When I was aimed at from an ATGM, sensors told me,” the driver recalled. He immediately threw his vehicle into evasive action. “I was able to make a decision either to slow down or speed up.”

Jinking foiled the missile’s guidance. “The vehicle saves us,” the driver added.

To be sure, an old-school Sagger drill—rooted as it is in a Middle East battlefield in 1973—probably doesn’t always work against the latest Russian anti-tank missiles in Ukraine in 2023. But it works often enough.

Ukraine’s independent air-assault forces have received nearly 200 Strykers from the United States and, despite deploying them to the vanguard of their four-month-old counteroffensive, have lost just three of them that outside analysts can confirm.

Something is keeping those Strkyers in action. Well-executed Sagger drills might be one of the main things protecting the speedy wheeled vehicles from Russian missiles.