It is obvious that the scale of mutual drone attacks will only grow. The sides, locked in trench warfare at the front, are trying to tip the balance by striking deep into the rear. This has already happened in past conflicts. Among the relatively recent examples are the so-called “War of the Cities” during the Iran-Iraq confrontation in the 1980s. After Iranian troops managed to stop the Iraqi tank blitzkrieg and transfer the war to a positional war, Saddam Hussein’s army tried to decide the outcome of the war with rocket attacks and bombings against Iranian cities: the capital Tehran, the largest industrial centers of Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, as well as many small front-line towns. Iran responded with bombings against 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 back then the tools of the War of the Cities were manned aircraft and ballistic missiles. The production cycle of ballistic missiles lasts about a year, a jet aircraft takes several years to build, but its pilot needs to be trained for half of its life. This sets the limits of air warfare, beyond which the parties are exhausted. Now, the main instrument of the Russian-Ukrainian “War of the Cities” has become relatively cheap and extremely fast-to-replicate drones. The possibilities of expanding their production and use are incomparably greater than those of manned aircraft and ballistic missiles. By the end of summer we should expect attacks with hundreds of drones. 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 ability to replicate anti-aircraft missiles – will not be able to withstand swarms of hundreds of drones.
In addition to numbers and economics, geography is important. Unmanned aircraft, due to their lack of dependence on airfields and long-duration flights, can significantly expand the geography of attacks. Ukrainian drones have already reached the Leningrad region, the Volga region, and the Caucasus. Next are the Urals and Western Siberia. In the Soviet years, the Arctic and Siberia were covered by squadrons of jet interceptors, but in the post-Soviet period this component was greatly degraded and cannot be quickly restored. For example, serial production of MiG-31 heavy interceptors at the only Nizhny Novgorod plant, Sokol, that produced them, was curtailed in 1994 under the Nemtsov governorate. And besides Siberia, our air defense system is full of undisguised gaps. Military analysts are currently actively discussing the possibility of Ukrainian drone strikes through the airspace of third countries, primarily Belarus. Such a spatial distribution of strikes will make the current focal air defense useless, when individual batteries and divisions cover individual populated areas: drones will bypass existing air defense coverage areas and strike deep into the territory, flying from unprotected directions.
All this is obvious to military analysts and engineers in Russia, Ukraine and the West. Possible solutions are being actively sought, and one of the most promising areas in the fight against the drone threat is considered to be the use of light piston aircraft, optimized to combat 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 former DOSAAF airfield, highways, from any flat surface, they do not require years of pilot training. On the basis of light aircraft, it is possible to organize a spatially distributed anti-drone defense at an affordable price.
Ukraine, which faced the threat of massive drone attacks somewhat earlier than Russia, has already taken a step in this direction. At the end of June, photographs of the Ukrainian Yak-52 piston aircraft, which was caught in the lens of the Russian ZALA UAV during the latter’s interception, were circulated in the media and on social networks on military topics. On the fuselage of the Ukrainian aircraft, one can see markings indicating the number of Russian drones it shot down: three silhouettes characteristic of ZALA drones, six Orlans and one, presumably an Iranian Mohajer-6. This is the first combat use of such a solution, although it is known that companies in the USA, Israel (mainly based on Cessna aircraft), Brazil (based on the Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano piston attack aircraft) and other countries are working on anti-drone defense components based on light aircraft.
In Russia, the creation of such an anti-drone defence is limited by the lack of a corresponding light aircraft in mass production. The UTS-800 aircraft, built by the Ural Civil Aviation Plant (UZGA), apparently made its first flight last autumn, but it never went into mass production. The main obstacle to the serial deployment is the abundance of imported components. For example, the first UTS-800 to fly was powered by the American General Electric H80 turboprop engine, which the Americans obviously will not supply to Russia en masse. In addition to the erroneous reliance on imported components and false “import substitution”, the prospects for the UTS-800 are hampered by the UZGA’s overload with other projects. In addition to the UTS-800, UZGA’s portfolio includes the development and production of the local light turboprop aircraft LMS-901 “Baikal” and the regional twin-engine TVRS-44 “Ladoga”.
In these conditions, it is necessary to develop an alternative to the UZGA project for the production of light aircraft using commercially available components. It is necessary to avoid the established tradition of tenders, protracted and corruption-intensive research and development projects, where participants are not so much interested in the creation and release of new equipment, but in the most expensive and lengthy (ideally endless) development process. It is also necessary to conduct an urgent audit of the country’s existing fleet of light aircraft to assess the possibility of equipping and using it in anti-drone defense. It is necessary to promptly develop options for modernizing existing training, private and agricultural aircraft to solve anti-drone warfare tasks. It is necessary to provide for the installation of containers with small arms on aircraft, modern information support for pilots (tactical situation display), install an aiming device (collimator sight), communication equipment, ensure the use of night vision goggles, and equip them with thermal imaging devices. Several dozen such aircraft are needed, united under a single command. To put it another way, Russia has several thousand light aircraft, and such aircraft are much easier to buy 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 flight alert posts, analogous to the network of VNOS (airborne surveillance and communications troops) posts that existed during the war years, but implemented at a modern level, with modern communications equipment, electromagnetic spectrum analyzers and thermal imaging devices. It is necessary to create a network of bases for interceptor aircraft, staff them, provide them with communications, fuel and organize round-the-clock service. 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. These are all important tasks, but it makes no sense to start solving them without the actual interception tool.
Of course, light aircraft are not capable of protecting the skies from all possible air threats. Cruise missiles and jet-powered UAVs – these targets will remain inaccessible to light aircraft. However, anti-drone defence with light interceptors will drastically reduce the effectiveness of cheap and relatively mass-produced Ukrainian long-flying attack drones, and force the enemy to look for more expensive and high-tech attack solutions.
Creating an anti-drone defense system with light aircraft as one of the key components is a complex organizational task. But the cost of delay is very high. Destroyed businesses, TV towers, derailed trains, closed airports. If we do not immediately start solving the problem of creating anti-drone defense, the start of the “war of cities” could be very costly for our country.
