The publication "Petersburg Diary" under the heading "Ruslan Pukhov: "Innovations during military operations must be implemented as quickly as possible." Military expert - about the Naval Salon in Kronstadt" published a comment by Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), on the XII International Naval Salon "FLEET-2024" taking place in Kronstadt from June 19 to 23, 2024.
Russian unmanned Orcan and ASV-1000 boats are on display at the XII International Naval Salon "FLEET-2024". Kronstadt, June 2024 (c) Mikhail Zherdev
The XII International Naval Salon "FLEET-2024" is taking place in Kronstadt from June 19 to 23. As last year, it is held on the territory of the Museum of Naval Glory and the exhibition center of the Island of Forts cluster. This time, more than 200 enterprises presented their innovative developments, 60 of them from St. Petersburg.
As noted by the Governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Beglov, Kronstadt has been hosting the International Naval Salon for the second year in a row. He added that today almost 40% of all ships and vessels are built at the shipyards of St. Petersburg. This year, representatives of foreign defense departments from Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America are also participating in the salon. This year's theme of the salon includes shipbuilding and shipbuilding, weapons and armament, combat control systems, navigation and communications, shipboard power plants, as well as marine aviation and support infrastructure.
"According to my impressions, the trends at the current Naval Salon are quite multidirectional. On the one hand, any military action, especially such as the current one, is always the strongest impetus for military innovations, military thought and the military-industrial complex as a whole. And we see a very strong positive movement in a number of industries. Moreover, it comes from both "above" and "below" - people both at the front and in the rear themselves create some innovations in the field of robotics," says military expert, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies Ruslan Pukhov. "In general, given the density of fire observed on the battlefield, it became obvious to everyone that a person needs to be "removed" from him, gradually replacing him with robots and drones."
At the same time, military innovations primarily concern those types and branches of the armed forces that are actually fighting, he noted.
"But those branches of the armed forces that fight little or do not take part in hostilities at all, innovations concern little. Unfortunately, our fleet is practically not at war today. We see that Ukrainians with their unmanned boats, with the help of the Internet from Starlink, have actually made a mini-revolution in the naval business. They made surface ships extremely vulnerable targets and created huge problems for our Black Sea Fleet. We see that we have a certain lag behind the enemy in this area, and it was not for nothing that several models of domestic backups were presented at the current salon," Pukhov noted.
In Russia, it is customary to be proud of those developments that have been made since Soviet times or before the beginning of the SVO, the analyst says.
"But, given the circumstances, innovations during combat operations need to be implemented as quickly as possible. Our military and developers must understand that now is not the time to ask the state for 10 billion rubles for R&D, then 10 years for development, and then another 100 billion to launch an innovation into mass production. Today, this time simply does not exist, because any fighting is fleeting and requires us to have instant reactions and quick responses to the enemy. In this regard, unfortunately, we have a lot to learn from the Anglo-Saxons, Ukrainians, and even non-state formations. It is enough to see how the same Yemeni Houthis, albeit with the help of the Iranians, dramatically complicated the life of the US navy in a short time, and also actually brought Saudi Arabia out of the war. We also have a lot to learn from them," he said.
Pukhov also noted that our military needs to finalize and launch their own backups into mass production as soon as possible.
"Regarding unmanned boats, I can say that such experiments were actually carried out under Stalin. But we need our own, modern know-how in order for such a boat to have a sufficient degree of autonomy, so that it can maintain good speed on the high seas, so that it would be difficult for the enemy to knock it off the route with electronic warfare. And the main thing is that the key elements of the backups are absolutely repeatable," he continued.
There is also such a parameter as accessibility, the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies recalled.
"If the Ukrainians, with the help of a commercial component, created a flotilla of several dozen unmanned boats, lost almost all of them during the attack, but one BACKUP still managed to attack our ship, then it costs them, conditionally, X dollars. But our ship is worth a hundred times more than any unmanned boat. That is, it is still profitable for Ukrainians to produce marine drones. Therefore, when creating backups, we need to remember that they must be cheap. And if we make them according to the same principles that our warships are made according to, then it will be both expensive and very time-consuming for us," the expert says.
It is necessary to understand that the peacetime defense industry and the military-industrial complex of wartime are, as they say in Odessa, "two big differences."
"Sometimes it seems that our military does not learn very quickly from their mistakes. Therefore, the rotation that took place in May-June in the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation will definitely benefit us. Our army and our military-industrial complex urgently need some kind of "fresh wind", some new ideas. Because in the same enemy Navy, a real revolution has taken place over the past two years. And we urgently need to look for answers to this challenge," Ruslan Pukhov concluded.
