1/ Why is Russia's air defence system so patchy that it regularly lets Ukrainian drones cross thousands of kilometres of Russian territory? A prominent Russian drone developer highlights a range of deficiencies in Russia's air defences. ⬇️
2/ As noted by other warbloggers, yesterday's attack on the Omsk oil refinery required Ukrainian drones to fly at least 2,400 km. Russian drone developer Alexey Chadayev points out that air defence teams often don't bother shooting down drones that pass through their areas:
3/ "The situation with the Omsk Oil Refinery raises the awkward question of "transit" regions—regions where local anti-drone enforcement agents operate based on the objective-based defence principle: if it's not aimed at us, let it fly on,…
4/ …as long as we or our facilities are not in the news.
Yes, you'd be surprised, but this approach does exist, and not all that uncommon.
5/ "I'll even quote one executive of a large enterprise who asked me point-blank at a meeting about equipping mobile task forces: "How are we even going to know what's heading specifically for our facility?"
6/ "In response to my wide-eyed reaction, he said: "Well, we have a mandate to defend our own property. If we use our ammunition outside our facility, management will hold us accountable—on what grounds was it used?"
7/ "And most importantly, they will. Accounting and control are our everything.
Hence the conclusion. Our land may be private, but the sky is public. Anyone who doesn't understand this can already say goodbye to the property they consider "theirs."
8/ "Drone warfare also shows that post-Soviet-style capitalism no longer works. And not because of communist revanche. But simply because the wheel of security technology has turned.
9/ "Let's remember another rule of drone warfare. The coast is usually defended against a threat from the sea. The sky is the sea upwards. Accordingly, the entire ground is now the coast."
He also highlights the inefficiency of Russia's decentralised air defence system:
10/ "I'll put it more bluntly. The model we're developing, where counter-drone defence is the responsibility of the army's air defence plus [regional] governors, has proven its inadequacy in Omsk.
11/ "The army simply doesn't have the manpower to organize zonal defence, and army air defence isn't even a branch of the armed forces (as it used to be) but part of the Aerospace Forces, and a fifth wheel at that.
12/ "And the governors lack the authority, competence, and personnel: they assemble headquarters, issue orders, and then it turns out there's simply no one to carry them out.
13/ "Therefore—I'll repeat once again, as Delenda Carthago would have it—we need a unified federal civilian small-sky control system. Both for protection from attacks (now) and for building unmanned logistics infrastructure in the not-so-distant future."
14/ Chadeyev also draws attention to the implications of comments by Fire Point chief designer Denis Shtilerman, whose drones were used in the Omsk attack, that the operation took "more than a week" to plan:
15/ "What does that mean?
That the enemy is well aware of the location of our air defence position areas and also knows that they are static, not being changed or moved.
16/ "And we can confidently spend a week plotting flight paths and modeling scenarios, confident that the enemy (i.e., us) will remain roughly where they were during that time.
17/ "And also that the enemy (i.e., us) won't take any additional measures to cover the largest remaining oil refinery, even taking into account the fuel crisis.
An enviable lack of respect, but, alas, one that has paid off.
18/ "If we analyze the attack itself, we see that the brunt of the interception fell on the air force, with the target mobile task forces making virtually no contribution.
19/ "And the air force simply stopped using its weapons after the drones flew directly over residential areas—and that's understandable, too. The image of an SU-57 firing missiles at its own city of a million people isn't very impressive.
20/ "They shot down quite a few during approach, but not all. Simply put, there was a lack of proper defence layering.
21/ "And this presents us with a difficult moral choice. Let's imagine that in Omsk, teams with interceptors, say, say, Yolkas, had been operating at the mid-air. Warheads, as we know, can't be used; they would have relied on kinetic energy.
22/ "And then a drone with several dozen kilograms of warheads, shot down by something like a Yolka, falls intact onto a high-rise building and explodes there, causing numerous civilian casualties.
But not a single one would have made it to the oil refinery.
23/ "And today, let me remind you, no one was killed or injured in Omsk.
What would have been the correct course of action for the defence headquarters? Question for the chat." /end
Sources:
🔹 t.me/chadayevru/4943
🔹 t.me/chadayevru/4944
🔹 t.me/chadayevru/4945
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