Alexey Chadaev, philosopher, political strategist and co-organizer of the Russian gathering of operators of combat UAVS "Dronnitsa", about how technologies are changing consciousness and whether anti-drone protection measures will become mandatory for business.
Technologies, especially military ones, are sometimes able to change the social formation. So, according to one version, firearms accelerated the demise of feudalism: the armor of knights was an ineffective protection against bullets of commoners, the class advantage on the battlefield was leveled. Can this happen with unmanned technologies?
— I didn't think so last year. But when the FPV revolution happened and we saw how a device worth 50 thousand rubles destroys a tank worth several million dollars, it looked like we were close to it. Now at the peak of development, the creation of such a device that is able to independently find a target, identify it and attack on the principle of "shot and forgot". This is already pulling for a revolution. Because air defense systems that were considered reliable and capable of controlling the sky are proving ineffective. The economics of war are starting to play a role here. When there are thousands of cheap devices, and anti-missiles, for all their speed and accuracy, are very expensive, you can disable air defense on the principle of a DDoS attack by simply overloading it.
Does the state lose its monopoly in this case?
— Historically, the state is an institution created primarily to manage the war. It stems from the army, although later it acquired other functions. Therefore, I see rather the opposite. One of the interesting indirect consequences of the breakthrough in military technology is the renaissance of the state. A state that turned into a fiction — a flag, an anthem, a coat of arms, a football team, elections, and all were decided by some other guys: multinational corporations, digital platforms, Masonic lodges, Wahhabi networks... - now it is needed again, again on horseback. It's just that not everything that is currently fighting is regulated. We see conditional blackmailers, conditional Hamas members, but as for me, this is such a proto—state.
But your own experience contradicts this. In unmanned technologies, and primarily in their implementation, the horizontal structure proved to be more effective...
— This is a seeming contradiction. In any technological breakthrough, the state finds itself in the singularity mode, like a cat running out onto a high-speed highway. It cannot react quickly. Therefore, organized communities of armed men beat him just at the pace. As it happened in Israel with Hamas.
The development of the UAV followed several vectors. In the USA, this was done by aircraft designers who perceived the device as an airplane, only without a person inside. The result was a large, incredibly expensive and complex structure, stuffed with everything possible. Well, you have to understand that the bigger and more expensive the thing in the sky, the more delicious it is for air defense. In China, drones were designed by IT specialists. Therefore, the Chinese drone is a smartphone from which the camera was separated and sent to fly, and all the controls are in the same smartphone. It's better, but it's not ideal either. Strangely enough, the bearded dudes in sneakers from the Middle East turned out to be the closest to the ideal, who realized that the main thing that is needed from a drone is maximum cheapness, the ability to keep the course and fly to the goal. Everything is built on this logic — from literally wooden makeshifts, which were thrown at our bases in Syria, and ending with the "Shahids".
And this did not happen when there were only tanks worth millions in business. And when Maviki appeared for 100 thousand rubles, armed men had new opportunities ...
— At the dawn of the era of fleets, private traders also played a key role: merchants like Columbus, pirates like Drake. And then the states took over everything, and by the 19th century there were neither of them left. The state is slower, but it takes power and scale. And at some stage, military drones will also become an exclusively state monopoly.
What are drones conceptually changing in the war, besides the fact that a new means of surveillance and delivery is emerging?
— The key military innovation of the twentieth century was engines. Motorization of everything gave a different level of mobility and changed the picture of the battlefield. The same role of "technology revolution" in the XXI century is reserved for drones. After all, it's not even about remote control, but about maximum automation of processes. The pilot of the World War II aircraft performed a lot of operations in combat, just to make the plane fly, the quadcopter does all this for us and in the limit it will not need an operator at all.
From a humanitarian point of view, drones destroy the main element of the traditional aesthetics of war — the heroics of confrontation. War is becoming like chess. And this is very difficult for our military tradition, in which the advantage on the battlefield is born of valor and military genius.
Hence, one of the fashionable topics, including among serious NATO military thinkers, is non—lethal weapons. In a broad sense, including the "soft power" so beloved by political strategists. The point is that in war there is no man―to-man conflict, but a subject―to-subject conflict. And if one subject has suppressed the will of another, it is not necessary to kill at all. The victory is not in destroying the enemy physically, but in destroying his subjectivity. It's just that killing remained the most effective way for a long time, because the person was so brought up that he was ready to die rather than lose his "I". Techies miss this important feature of the metaphysics of war, concentrating on the task of physical destruction, always the most expensive. And we are talking only about destroying the enemy in the enemy. Weapons on the battlefield are an artifact of superiority. The West understands this very well when it says that it has phase superiority in technology: in digital, unmanned, and data processing. Starting at some point, which our military thought missed, development shifted from increasing combat power, the limit of which was reached in atomic weapons, to increasing accuracy. Connectivity, manageability — general intelligence. "War is not about who will shoot whom, but who will change their mind."
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| Alexey Chadaev. |
| Source: dpru.obs.ru |
In a year and a half of intensive work on the topic of self-driving, were there things that surprised you?
— I seem to be used to everything, but even I had a cultural shock when at one enterprise I went into a special room called the "room of the military representative", lined with cabinets with documents, in which there was a "logbook of magazines" on the table. Surprisingly, our dislike of the idea of order leads both to its underestimation and to such fetishization. Hence the desire to act not as effectively as it should be.
On the other hand, our military—industrial complex is an organic continuation of our culture. The Americans say: if you want to create something unique, go to the Russians. If you want to do something serial, never go to them. And our military thought is constantly struggling to create a superweapon that will surpass everyone in terms of characteristics. To be proud. And it doesn't matter that it will be in a single copy. Hence the famous meme "analogovnet".
In this sense, I really love the tale of Lefty. He broke the flea after all - she stopped dancing...
- yes. And I like another story from the same time. Almost in the same years when the action in "Lefty" takes place, Tsar Nikolai Pavlovich was on a visit to the city of London. An unknown American colonel, Samuel Colt, approached him at that time and showed him a trick: he disassembled three revolvers, mixed up the parts and reassembled them so that all three worked. The fact that Nikolai did not understand this trick led to the loss of our status as a great weapons power. We overslept the idea of standardization, and at this civilizational turn, we were very steeply bypassed. And we are still sorting it out. How is our domestic production of drones organized? There are 100,500 organizations of the "man with a soldering iron" class that come in batches to different entrances with their products superior to Mavik. And there they are asked the question: can you give a batch of 10 thousand pieces in 3 months and at the same price as the Chinese? And that's where it ends. There is a misunderstanding that mass is more important than superiority in range or optics. And TK is often formulated accordingly. There is a well-known story with military communications, when the task was set to create a system with characteristics superior to NATO analogues, but at the same time so that it was a complete copy of them, including components and materials. The developers were hanging themselves: Do you want checkers or should I go? That's why we're fighting the Baofengs.
And what does the "Dronnitsa" change in all this?
— Approaches. When we began to supply drones to the troops on a voluntary basis last spring, it quickly became clear that 30% of them did not survive the first flight. That is, it is pointless to increase supplies until they learn how to manage them. They began to deploy a training system, they rode around the near rear all summer, did courses for a young fighter in unmanned combat for all branches of the armed forces. And soon we realized that several dozen teams were working next to us and it all looked like kung fu schools in Ancient China. Information is passed verbally from the guru to the students, there are no standards, whose school is better — no one knows either, because there are no competitions. Therefore, we decided to create a communication space for everyone involved in training. That is, we were solving the problem mentioned above in relation to the military—industrial complex - not inventing, but replicating best practices. When we described the competencies of a drone operator in the WorldSkills paradigm, this skill turned from a sacrament into a profession. And it became possible to train operators and, most importantly, instructors. This was the result of last year's "Drone Race".
In 2023, as you know, shortly before the forum, our people launched a missile attack on a similar Ukrainian event in Chernihiv, and a little later drones attacked a military airfield in Soltsy, Novgorod region — this is 90 kilometers in a straight line from the venue of the "Dronnitsa". Therefore, the issue of security has become vital for us. Having studied the tactics of hitting the Soltsy, they built their own electronic warfare system from improvised means. We provided a perimeter and even trained on it ourselves. So the idea arose to deal with the issues of anti-drone protection of civilian objects. Now in Novgorod, on the basis of the university, the Ushkuynik research and production center has been established (the so–called medieval Novgorod river pirates).
What will he do?
— Develop and promote ways and standards to protect civilian facilities from the unmanned threat. It is clear that traditional air defense is almost powerless here, because it is too expensive and easily overloaded with cheap targets. New solutions are needed, ranging from "trench electronic warfare" to the cover of individual buildings and institutions. In addition to the actual technical problems, there are big issues with the regulation — after all, practically no one except the relevant structures has the right to deal with this. To begin with, we need an experimental legal regime in order to legally conduct tests.
Is it possible to say that, including through your efforts, the anti-drone protection of objects in the future will become as mandatory and routine as fire safety standards?
— Absolutely. Technology will only improve, so this problem is with us for about forever. And the development of such measures, including legislative ones, is one of the tasks of Ushkuynik.
The last question is why the Novgorod region?
— Pragmatically, the places are deaf, there is a place to fly. Plus, the convenience of working with a power that you can really reach — try to get any permission in a large region. Plus, there have been strong specialized industries here since Soviet times — radio electronics. And brains, of course. More recently, I was shown a local development: using a radar signal, it builds almost a television picture of the terrain, which allows, in particular, to fly in conditions of no visibility at all — snow, rain, fog. I have not seen anything like this at the Army exhibition.
The second reason is ideological. On the first "Drone" we flew over the Rurik hillfort, the place where the whole Russian statehood began. The theme of Ancient Russia, mythical birds from Novgorod pre-Mongolian paintings played a serious role in the selection: Sirin, alkonost, gamayun, the story of Archbishop John, who flew on a demon to Jerusalem in the XI century. By the way, in Ukraine a similar structure is called the "drone army", which, of course, is an obvious paraphrase of the "clone army". The cultural antithesis is clear.
Sergey Bondarenko