On the night of last Friday, Ukraine carried out another massive drone raid on Russian territory. Three dozen drones attacked the Bryansk, Smolensk, Kursk, Voronezh and Rostov regions. On Monday night, at least 36 vehicles were raided in the Bryansk, Belgorod, Kursk and Tver regions. Earlier, the commander of the AFU Air Forces, Nikolai Oleshchuk, reported that since the beginning of this year, the Russians have launched 2,277 kamikaze drones of the Shahed type in Ukraine, i.e. an average of 13 drones per day.
Obviously, the scale of mutual drone attacks will only grow. The parties, stuck in a positional war at the front, are trying to tip the scales by striking deep in the rear. This has already happened in the conflicts of the past. Among the relatively recent examples is the so-called "War of Cities" during the Iran-Iraq confrontation of the eighties of the XX century. After Iran's troops were able to stop the Iraqi tank blitzkrieg and turn the war into a positional one, Saddam Hussein's army tried to decide the outcome of the war with rocket attacks and bomb attacks on Iranian cities - the capital Tehran, the largest industrial centers Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, as well as many small frontline cities. Iran responded with bomb attacks on Baghdad, Kirkuk and Basra. Tens of thousands of people were killed on both sides, thousands of buildings and dozens of industrial facilities were destroyed.
The difference is that at that time the instruments of the "War of Cities" were manned aircraft and ballistic missiles. The production cycle of ballistic missiles takes about a year, a jet aircraft has been under construction for several years, and its pilot needs to be trained for half a lifetime. This sets the limits of an air war, beyond which comes the exhaustion of the parties. Now, the main tool of the Russian-Ukrainian "War of Cities" has become relatively cheap and extremely quickly reproducible drones. The possibilities of scaling their production and use are incomparably higher than those of manned aircraft and ballistic missiles. By the end of summer, raids involving hundreds of drones should be expected. The existing air defense forces and means of the parties, created to repel attacks by a maximum of dozens of aircraft, simply physically - in terms of ammunition, cost and the possibility of reproducing anti-aircraft missiles - will not be able to withstand swarms of hundreds of drones.
Besides quantity and economics, geography is important. Unmanned aircraft, due to the lack of dependence on airfields and the long duration of flights, can significantly expand the geography of strikes. Ukrainian drones have already flown to the Leningrad region, the Volga region and the Caucasus. The Urals and Western Siberia are next in line. In the Soviet years, the Arctic and Siberia were covered by squadrons of jet interceptors, but in the post-Soviet period this component was severely degraded and it will not be possible to restore it quickly. For example, serial production of MiG-31 heavy interceptors at the only Nizhny Novgorod Sokol plant that produced them was curtailed back in 1994 under the governorship of Nemtsov. And besides Siberia, our air defense system is full of undisguised gaps. Currently, military analysts are actively discussing the possibility of Ukrainian drone raids through the airspace of third countries, primarily Belarus. Such a spatial distribution of strikes will make the currently available focal air defense meaningless, when individual batteries and divisions cover individual settlements - drones will bypass the existing areas of air defense cover and strike deep into the territory, flying from undisguised directions.
All this is obvious to military analysts and military engineers in Russia, Ukraine, and the West. An active search for possible solutions is underway, and one of the most promising areas of combating the unmanned threat is considered to be the use of light piston aircraft optimized for combating drones by installing small arms. They are much cheaper than jet interceptors, the cost of their flight hour is an order of magnitude lower, their speed is comparable to the speed of intercepted drones, they can take off from any old DOSAAF airfields, highways, from any flat surface, they do not need to train pilots for years. On the basis of light-engine aircraft, it is possible to organize spatially distributed anti-drone defense at an affordable price.
Ukraine, which faced the threat of massive drone raids a little earlier than Russia, has already taken a step in this direction. At the end of June, military-related media and social networks flew photos of the Ukrainian Yak-52 piston aircraft, which fell into the lens of the Russian ZALA UAV, during the interception of the latter. On the fuselage of the Ukrainian aircraft, you can see marks that indicate the number of Russian drones shot down by it - three characteristic silhouettes of ZALA drones, six "Eagles" and one, presumably, the Iranian Mohajer-6. This is the first combat application of such a solution, although it is known that companies from the United States, Israel (mainly based on Cessna aircraft), Brazil (based on the Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprop attack aircraft) and other countries are working on anti-drone defense components based on light aircraft.
In Russia, the creation of an anti-drone defense of this type rests on the absence of a corresponding light aircraft in mass production. The UTS-800 aircraft built by the Ural Civil Aviation Plant (UZGA) seems to have made its first flight last autumn, but did not reach mass production. The main obstacle to the deployment of the series is the abundance of imported components. For example, the first TCB-800 that flew lifted the American General Electric H80 turboprop engine into the sky, which the Americans obviously will not supply en masse to Russia. In addition to the erroneous rate on imported components and fake "import substitution", the prospects of the TCB-800 are affected by the overload of UZGA with other projects. In addition to the TCB-800, UZGA's portfolio includes the development and production of a light turboprop aircraft of local lines LMS-901 Baikal, a twin-engine regional TVRS-44 Ladoga.
In these conditions, it is necessary to deploy an alternative to the UZGA project for the production of light aircraft using components available on the market. It is necessary to bypass the established tradition of protracted corruption-intensive tenders, research and development projects, where participants are interested not so much in creating and launching a series of new equipment, as in the most expensive and lengthy (ideally endless) development process. It is also necessary to conduct an urgent audit of the country's light aviation fleet for the possibility of equipping and using it in anti-drone defense. It is necessary to promptly develop options for retrofitting existing training, private, and agricultural aircraft to solve the tasks of anti-drone warfare. It is necessary to provide for the installation of containers with small arms on aircraft, modern information support for pilots (tactical situation screen), install a sighting device (collimator sight), communications equipment, ensure the use of night vision goggles, equip with thermal imaging devices. Several dozen such aircraft are needed, united by a single command. For understanding, there are several thousand light aircraft in Russia, besides, such aircraft are much easier to purchase on foreign markets than combat vehicles.
The presence of light interceptor aircraft will allow us to begin creating an anti-drone defense system. It is necessary to deploy a network of drone overflight warning posts, an analogue of the network of VNOS posts (air surveillance alert and communication troops) that existed during the war years, but implemented at a modern level, with modern means of communication, electromagnetic spectrum analyzers, thermal imaging devices. It is necessary to create a network of bases for interceptor aircraft, provide them with personnel, communications, fuel, and organize round-the-clock duty. It is necessary to solve the problem of interaction of anti-drone defense components with civil aviation and existing regular air defense forces and means. All these are important tasks, but it is pointless to start solving them without the actual interception tool.
Of course, light aircraft are not able to close the sky from all possible air threats. Cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles with jet engines - these targets will remain inaccessible to light aircraft. However, anti-drone defense with light interceptors will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of cheap and relatively massive Ukrainian attack drones of long flight duration, forcing the enemy to look for more expensive and high-tech strike solutions.
Creating an anti-drone defense system with light aircraft as one of the key components is a difficult organizational task. But the cost of procrastination is very high. Destroyed businesses, TV towers, derailed trains, closed airports. If we do not immediately begin to solve the problem of creating an anti-drone defense, the beginning of the "war of cities" can cost our country very dearly.
Ruslan Pukhov (Director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, Head of the Commission of the Public Council under the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on military construction and scientific research in the field of security)
