Russian drones, iPhone thinking
Last week, the magic that is the YouTube recommendation algorithm served up this video to me. The video is about the evolution of Russian drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. Having no shortage of time on my hands, I saw the whole thing and then some. Best innovation example: The Russians stuck modems with 4G SIM cards from Ukranian telecom carriers on their drones. I literally mean stuck. These devices were cello taped to the drones. Why? So that the Russians could pinpoint where the drones were being hunted down....and then use that information to alter the flight paths of the next set of drones. Ingenious! There are also unconfirmed reports that they ripped out chips from washing machines and reprogramed them for use in drones. I urge you to watch the first 15 minutes which highlights the evolution of the Russian unmanned attack drone program over the past ~4 years. My takeaways are:
- The Russians realized quickly that their existing stuff is not providing enough 'bang for the buck' (sorry). So they promptly dropped their ego, just imported Shahed drones from Iran, did a large scale copy-paste by localizing manufacturing, and of course a re-branding (Shahed --> Geran)
- In my head, defense product development is like a 5-10 year cycle, or even longer (10-30 years) in the case of complex equipment like fighter jets. The Russians binned that and are upgrading their drones as if they were iPhones. New versions every 6-12 months. They had no choice but to move fast, because prior versions would just keep getting hunted down.
- The latest generation (Geran 5) is...not really a drone? It's more like a missile. Because the Russians have decided that the best way to avoid their drones getting shot down is to make the drone 3x-5x faster. They replaced the propeller engine of a drone with a jet engine. In one sense you could argue this is no longer a 'drone war' but more like a regular war.
TL,DR: Never underestimate the engineering capabilities of a sufficiently motivated Russian.