The irony is Moscow started out ahead. In 2014, Russian-built drones like the 35-pound, 75-mile-range\u00a0Orlan-10<\/a>\u00a0pinpointed poorly prepared Ukrainian units for\u00a0devastating\u00a0artillery strikes, while Russian jammers blinded Ukrainian communications and reconnaissance. But since then, Ukrainian troops have gotten much better, thanks to a heady brew of Western aid, off-the-shelf technology, and home-grown, bottom-up innovation.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Russia has struggled to get out of its own way, with grass-roots civilian groups fighting to get imported Chinese quadcopters past the Soviet-style bureaucracy to the troops in the field, while only Iran is willing to sell Moscow military-grade models. Drone warfare has become a microcosm of the military, economic, and cultural differences between the warring sides.<\/p>\n \u201cThree important things happened,\u201d said\u00a0Samuel Bendett<\/a>, a CNA Russia expert who co-authored the report, told Breaking Defense in an email:<\/p>\n Now, it\u2019s important not to underestimate\u00a0Moscow. When Russian units have all the right pieces in place \u2014 not just adequate drones, but also trained operators, competent commanders, and a\u00a0battlefield network<\/a>\u00a0to share data \u2014 they can still fight with lethal efficiency. A\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0by the UK\u2019s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) says the time between an Orlan-10 spotting a target and artillery striking it \u201cremains rapid, at around 3-5 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n But Russia\u2019s fleet of Orlans and other military drones \u2014 about 2,000 unmanned aircraft pre-invasion, according to Kremlin claims, one of the largest fleets in the world \u2014 has been decimated by 15 months of intense combat. Russia\u2019s domestic drone makers have been slow to replace them, either with more purpose-built military models like the Orlans or with cheaper and less capable civilian-style mini-drones.<\/p>\n That\u2019s in part due to Western sanctions that disrupted imports of crucial electronics that Russia cannot produce itself, in part due to poor coordination among a half-dozen major companies, according to public admissions by Russian experts and officials.<\/p>\n As an example of the problem, Bendett and his CNA co-author Jeffrey Edmonds highlight Almaz-Antey\u2019s heavily hyped Dobrynya, rolled out last fall, with an estimated\u00a01,000<\/a>\u00a0built and sent to the front. Yet the report says even Russian sources acknowledge that the Dobrynya is basically a copy of a Chinese design, and its camera and other key electronics are Chinese imports.<\/p>\n Indeed, CNA says\u00a0the most popular mini-drones on either side are the Chinese\u00a0DJI Mavic<\/a>\u00a0series, despite an official Chinese government ban on exporting them to either warring party. Mavics are prized for their ease of use, small size, and cheapness, which makes them almost expendable assets in a conflict where \u2014 depending on whether you use Bendett\u2019s estimate or RUSI\u2019s higher one \u2014 Ukraine alone loses 5,000 to 10,000 drones\u00a0per month<\/em>, mostly to radio jamming and GPS decoys rather than anti-aircraft fire.<\/p>\n But the Russian military and defense industry have been slow to embrace such off-the-shelf small drones, let alone train troops and commanders to employ them properly. So their adoption has been driven by civilian volunteer groups and frontline soldiers. Unlike democratic Ukraine, however, Russia\u2019s authoritarian society is inhospitable to such bottom-up innovation.<\/p>\n Russian soldiers have complained of shortages of all sorts of equipment, especially drones, over social media networks such as Telegram, which has inspired civilians to organize donation drives, crowd-sourced buying of DJI Mavics to bypass Beijing\u2019s export ban, and even ad hoc training for troops. So far, so similar to Ukraine since 2014 \u2014 and officially, after half a year of hesitation, the Ministry of Defense endorses these efforts. \u201cOn September 28, 2022, the MOD announced that newly mobilized Russian soldiers can bring their own quadcopters to the front,\u201d Bendett and Edmonds write. \u201cSeveral days later, on October 3, 2022, the MOD announced that Russian regions [i.e. regional governments] using their own funding to equip deploying soldiers can purchase drones and other equipment for the departing troops\u201d.<\/p>\n Even with official approval, however, the bottom-up groups have struggled publicly with the establishment. In one incident, \u201cin late November 2022, multiple pro-Russian Telegram channels, run by volunteers who fundraised and delivered quadcopters to the troops, raised an alarm that the Chinese-made drones they [were] importing from China [were] being held up at the border by the Russian Customs office,\u201d the study says. \u201cThe Russian bloggers publicly accused the government and the MOD of throwing up administrative barriers that prevented the delivery of drones to front-line forces. Some volunteers even went so far as to say that \u2018someone\u2019 in the Russian government was trying to establish a monopoly on drone imports and deliveries.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite these difficulties, Bendett\u00a0told Breaking Defense that \u201csome\u00a0of these volunteer organizations have delivered thousands of these drones by now, are constantly raising money for more supplies, and are providing everything necessary from UAVs down to thermal underwear. It\u2019s not clear at this point how some of the MOD and government structures honestly view this volunteer effort, but they\u2019re not trying to actively interfere with it, even if there have been some issues earlier at the border.\u201d<\/p>\n At least one of the larger groups has quasi-official connections of its own, Bendett said: It\u2019s purportedly headed by Dmitry Rogozin, previously the deputy prime minister and director of the Roscosmos space agency (and a current\u00a0moon landing denier<\/a>). \u201cRogozin,\u201d Bendett said, \u201cis probably using his former government contacts to facilitate the introduction of different types of drones and other needed systems directly from the manufacturers and developers to the forces in the Donbas.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, Rogozin and other actors on the margins of the Russian military-industrial complex have been among the most enthusiastic and successful adopters of drone technology \u2014 perhaps because they have the power of being connected to the bureaucracy but not the restrictions that come with being part of it. They include the paramilitary forces of the puppet Luhansk and Donetsk republics set up in eastern Ukraine, as well the notorious Wagner mercenary group founded by Putin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin. Wagner has even organized crowdsourced \u201chackathons<\/a>,\u201d asking patriotic civilian hackers to devise ways to protect Mavics and other commercial drones from jamming, while Ukrainian sources pay tribute to Wagner\u2019s lethally effective use of recon drones.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Russian state has resorted to importing military-grade drones from Iran, most famously the long-ranged Shahed series used to strike civilian infrastructure and battlefield targets alike. Unlike Russian designs, which mainly focus on reconnaissance, the Iranian drones are mostly \u201cloitering munitions,\u201d missile-like kamikaze drones with built-in warheads. Even more appealing to Moscow, Bendett and Edmonds write, Tehran\u2019s drone capability is \u201calmost entirely home-grown\u201d (with the exception of some US electronics on the Shahed-131), making them largely immune to Western sanctions. Russian troops have gone for training in Iran, and the two pariah nations have even announced a joint venture to build Iranian designs in Russia.<\/p>\n No amount of imported tech or foreign aid, however, will make up for Russia\u2019s biggest weakness: how it (mis)treats its people. Today\u2019s drones are remote-controlled aircraft, and until there is a breakthrough in AI, their effectiveness and even survival will depend on the skill of their human operator. But the Russian training pipeline, choked with conscripts, turns out too few specialists in drones or their supporting technologies, like the Strelets network for sharing target data, CNA reports.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, according to RUSI, the Russia military tends to keep its veterans in combat month after month, rather than pulling them out to rest, ponder what they\u2019ve learned, and pass it on to new recruits.That means innovative tactics and hard-won lessons, about drones and everything else, tend to stay in pockets rather than be shared, systematized, and spread.<\/p>\n Even in the Russian army, \u201clots of innovation is happening bottom-up, but it\u2019s difficult to ensure that good lessons-learned are shared by the entire force,\u201d Bendett told Breaking Defense. There are smart, skilled, and motivated Russians out there \u2014 both in uniform and in civilian life \u2014 but, fortunately for Ukraine, their own system seems to squander their talents.<\/p>\n\n
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