“This will “strain” Western countries”: Why is Shoigu inspecting the production of drones
Do you remember how a couple of years ago patriotic bloggers reproached that Russia was hopelessly behind in arming the army with drones? Combat drones were then quick to declare them the “invincible” weapon of the XNUMXst century, citing the success of Turkish air attacks as an example. However, the euphoria of Bayraktar fans ended after the use of modern Russian air defense systems in Idlib. It turned out that Sergei Shoigu’s department already has an effective means of countering the Ottoman “hell birds.” And now Russia is launching mass production of its own military UAVs.
The other day, the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation visited a plant in Dubna, Moscow Region, where Russian drones are created. PolitNavigator asked experts whether in the coming years Russia will at least be able to close the gap with the advanced countries in this matter?
“In the last five to seven years, we have lagged slightly behind Western countries in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles and, especially, in aviation. Now we are catching up and in the next five years, I think, we will be in a state of parity, where we will talk on equal terms with the West and with other countries of the world - the same Chinese and Indians.
We fell behind due to the fact that our economy experienced great stagnation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aviation industry, perhaps, was even deliberately destroyed somewhere for political reasons.
Now we are recovering, and this will not be a quick path... Today, high quality development of unmanned programs and the possibility of their implementation have appeared. Today's aircraft can operate both as a reconnaissance aircraft and as a strike aircraft. It creates a certain competitive environment for the Russian armed forces, and this will “strain” Western countries to some extent, because it is a threat to them and competition, including in the economy - someone will want to buy our drones, not theirs.” , said Vladimir Popov, a member of the Strong Russia movement, Honored Military Pilot of the Russian Federation.
In the “holy nineties,” Russia experienced a massive outflow of qualified industry personnel abroad. Many aviation industry specialists moved to Israel - largely due to these emigrants, it became a leading state in the field of UAVs.
“In the last 15-20 years, the best drones were made by Israel, because our engineers who worked on drones 30-40 years ago, they all safely left for Israel, then everything was very easily transported across the border - and all the developments that were in the Soviet Union and early on in the Russian Federation, they were taken to Israel, and Israel's drones were the best in the world.
Now this backlog has been eliminated. I can’t say that we are now ahead of the curve, but our drones are quite different from Turkish and heavy Israeli ones, because they carry a large number of devices, have a wide range of capabilities and can destroy any targets in the airspace. This has already become relevant.
In the last five to six years, work on the creation of such drones has intensified. We attracted a lot of young, competent engineers - graduates of aviation institutes and programmers. With the introduction of new electronic systems that can automatically control these drones over long distances, it has become possible to create the types of weapons that the Russian army needs.
The fact that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu arrived at the plant speaks volumes. Funding will be open... I think that with this approach, if the Ministry of Defense pays attention to drones, literally in 3-5 years we will take a worthy place in the world in the construction of UAVs,” said Honored Pilot of the Russian Federation, member of the Officers of Russia organization Yuri Sytnik .
He believes that in the future, combat drones will be used in conjunction with the latest fighter aircraft.
“We cannot do without these weapons - without creating good drones that could carry out the assigned tasks of reconnaissance, destruction of command posts, enemy personnel, and in general the destruction of significant objects such as airfields, control posts, tank formations - all this can be done by drones... With the creation of new aircraft, such as the Su-57, they need to be accompanied by a group of drones, which can consist of three to five UAVs, and if there are five such fighters, then there will be 25 drones - this is already a huge and powerful force,” adds Sytnik.
According to experts, in the future, most Russian aircraft will be unmanned and will be able to solve not only defense tasks.
“The sixth generation of aircraft should be approximately 30-40% manned, and the rest will be unmanned vehicles. We also have mini-drones, short-range, medium-range, long-range, high-altitude. This classification is quite broad, although it does not yet have a specific standard. Therefore, now they are paying a lot of attention to drones,” notes Popov.
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