7/2/19
Following in the footsteps of U.S. Marines and Special Forces, the Russian military is looking to outfit soldiers with small multi-rotor drones armed with explosives, the Russian Defense Ministry told Russian news site Izvestia. “It is planned that the new flight vehicles will perform not only reconnaissance missions, but also strike targets with miniature bombs” the news site notes. The outlet doesn’t say exactly how big the drones will be, only that they will go to divisions and brigades of the ground and airborne forces as well as special operations forces and marines. The Russian plan was informed by soldiers’ experience in Syria, according to Izvestia. In January 2018, ISIS attacked a Russian military base with hobbyist quad-copter drones rigged to carry and drop explosives. The Russian military’s decision to send small bomb drones to the front lines “once again highlights how much the experience in Syria has influenced Russian military operations,” said Sam Bendett, a researcher at the CNA Corporation and a member of CNA’s Center for Autonomy and AI as well as a fellow in Russia studies at the American Foreign Policy Council.
“We are seeing the full-scale adoption by a major national military of technologies that were first used very effectively by a non-state actor,” he said. “While on the receiving end of the [consumer-off-the-shelf] small quad-copter strikes, the Russian defense establishment was able to determine how and why such systems would be used.” Russia’s adoption of a wide variety of drones, from large unmanned strike aircraft to small quad-copters, could be a “boon for Russian UAV manufacturers,” said Bendett. “Many developers have in fact built, tested and showcased quadric-and multi-rotor copters at events like the recently-concluded Army-2019 expo, with the hope of potential [Ministry of Defense] contracts.”
