“The invaders came to Ukrainewith their new uniforms and their military vehicles, but something is missing in their inventory, Bayraktar, Bayraktar…”. These are the lyrics of a song that has gone viral, composed in praise of a strategic weapon that the Ukraine, the Bayraktar Tb2 drone. Manufactured in Turkey, this 12-meter wingspan machine weighing 650 kilos can fly for 27 consecutive hours at more than 220 km/h. Its skills include missile transport, reconnaissance, target strikes. .. A weapon with multiple capabilities, which has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, but also of modern warfare.
Drones, necessary tools
“The use of drones makes it possible to pose a disproportionate threat compared to the means invested and requires for those who must defend themselves strong resources to counter it”, wrote Stéphane Baudu and Jean Lassalle in July 2021 in a public report devoted to “drone warfare”. A few months later, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia illustrates their point. In this conflict, drones are preferred to aircraft due to the effectiveness of surface-to-air missile batteries and portable anti-aircraft defense systems. Thanks to their low radar emission and very high altitude flights, drones reach targets more easily.
“The range of skills is so wide and the prices so varied that you don’t have to be a big military nation to own drones,” physicist Daniel Hernandez told L’Express. It all depends, of course, on the project being implemented. “The Russians have a full range of aircraft, some carry missiles, others do scouting, there is something for every need,” says the specialist. On the Ukrainian side, drones are also used to alert populations by playing the role of alarm or to provide images to denounce war crimes of which the Russian army is guilty. To resist the invader, the Ukrainian Defense Minister even appealed to drone owners, inviting them to provide them to the government to help defend the country. “Even a drone made by an individual in a garage can be used,” confirms Daniel Hernandez. Moreover, most of the devices used by the Ukrainian army are sold commercially. But if the country relies on this tool to defend the country, it needs the precious help of the United States.
A technological confrontation between Russians and Americans
The undisputed leader in the production of drones in the world is China, but the Russian-Ukrainian conflict pits Russian and American capabilities against each other on the ground, two countries at the forefront of military technology. In this race for the most destructive drone, the United States has a beautiful one in reserve, which it has promised to deliver to Ukraine in the coming days. Switchblades are so-called kamikaze devices, with the particularity of carrying an explosive charge while acting as ammunition themselves. Small in size, they evade anti-aircraft defenses and hit their target directly. On Twitter, war specialist Michel Goya goes so far as to call this weapon a “game changer”, in other words it could change the balance of power.
But Russia is not short of assets. In a column published in May 2021 on the American site DefenseNews, the military analyst Samuel Bendett estimated that Russia had become “the world specialist in anti-drone tactics”. Large sums of money have been invested to develop tools capable of hindering or hacking enemy drones. And to cite as an example marking the attack suffered in January 2018 by Russia on the naval base of Hmeimim, in Syria. That day, the Russian army had managed to jam the signals of half the enemy machines and even to take control of them. It is now deploying this arsenal in Ukraine.
On the attack side, the Russian army also has kamikaze drones, called KUB-BLA. About a meter long, they are equivalent to unmanned fighter planes, the last crucial point at a time when announcing combat deaths is a delicate political exercise, even in an authoritarian country. But experts agree that it remains more limited than its cousin, the American Switchblade.
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