Not a day goes by that Ukraine does not issue a military statement bragging about its surgical strikes against Russian military targets.
Six months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one weapon that has proved critical and has given Ukrainian forces the edge on the battlefield by stopping long Russian tank columns in their place is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
UAVs, or drones are playing a key role in Ukraine’s counteroffensives against Russia’s assault, and their success is so astounding that Ukrainian forces are singing its praises, literally.
A Ukrainian song went viral in April when Turkish drones operated by Ukrainian forces inflicted major damage on Russian tanks.
The lyrics go like this: “Bayraktar will change your mind.”
The Bayraktar, the Turkish-made weapon that Ukrainian officials are touting, is one of the most effective in Ukraine’s arsenal that has played a part in slowing down the Russian advance.
The Bayraktar TB2 is small enough to be moved around on a flatbed truck, making it hard to detect and giving it the ability to be launched from almost anywhere.
The crown jewel of the Turkish military industry designed by Selçuk Bayraktar, the son of a Turkish auto-parts entrepreneur, is one of the world’s leading weapons manufacturers.
It has been operational for years and described as a game changer in conflicts in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh, but the conflict in Ukraine made it a world-recognized weapon that is effective and costs a fraction of similar American and Israeli drones.
The use of UAVs has played a key role on the battlefield. It’s becoming such a weapon where you rely less on people crossing borders or engaging directly and it really made a huge impact in many wars.
The United States and Israel are the biggest producers and sellers of drones, but other countries including Turkey, China and Iran are making huge strides.
Mohammed Walid Bin Siraj, vice president of Dragoman Strategies, based in Turkey, told The Media Line that the recent success of drones has ushered in a new era of drone warfare which has changed how traditional wars have been fought in the last few years.
“The use of UAVs has played a key role on the battlefield. It’s becoming such a weapon where you rely less on people crossing borders or engaging directly and it really made a huge impact in many wars,” Siraj said.
He explains that UAVs are capable of carrying out many missions, that for a long time were reserved for expensive, hard-to-get fighter jets. Siraj says their small size and relatively cheap price, and ease for almost anyone to acquire, gives them the edge.
Siraj says Turkish drones have had a major impact in Ukraine against one of the top armies in the world.
“I can tell you that the majority of Russian damages, Russian damages and casualties, were inflicted by Turkish drones,” he said.
Turkish drones annihilated Russian tanks when they targeted them on major roads in the early days of the invasion, and many streets around Ukraine turned into tank graveyards, where the hunted became the hunter.
“Not only drones have changed the way wars are fought, but also it impacted the position of the countries that produce them; it changed Turkey’s stature around the world, it elevated it to a country that produces military weapons,” according to Siraj.
“The Turkish defense industrial complex is massive, one today we can consider very successful,” he said.
He explains that with the help of drones from Turkey and Israel the Azerbaijani army inflicted tremendous damage on its Armenian counterpart.
“Ankara’s experience in desert region is in Libya, its experience in the mountains region is in Azerbaijan in Caucasia, its experience now in northern Syria, northern Iraq and also in Turkey helped improve its drone technology,” Siraj said.
Price effectiveness, precision, proportion – that makes Turkish drones very successful and very significant during combat
During Turkey’s military operation in Syria backing armed opposition groups against President Bashar Assad’s forces and fighting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK organization – which Ankara has viewed as a terrorist group for forty years, the Turkish military depended on the West, especially the United States, to deliver equipment effective for that type of warfare.
“Turkey in retaliatory action uses drones vastly and literally paralyzed Assad’s northern command’s operational capability by destroying its tanks, personnel carriers, its air defense system and also its facilities of logistics and supporting the troops,” Siraj said.
He says the secret behind the Turkish drones program can be attributed to the triple Ps.
“Price effectiveness, precision, proportion – that makes Turkish drones very successful and very significant during combat. Turkish drones are not a very expensive one like the Americans or the European drones. With a very minimum price you can inflict tremendous damage, not only machine or human, but also you are making your enemy spend money. You are inflicting financial damage,” according to Siraj.
In July, Israel’s military censors lifted a ban on reporting the country’s use of armed drones, acknowledging for the first time that the Israel Defense Forces has unmanned attack aircraft and have used them.
There have also been several news reports of Israeli drones attacking targets in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, which have never been confirmed officially by Israel.
Israeli drone expert Col. Ofer Haruvi has more than three decades of experience with UAVs. He started as a pilot in Israel’s Air Force, where he spent most of his time developing UAV systems and ended his military career as the head of the UAV department. Haruvi retired 20 years ago, and as a civilian he co-founded FlightOps, a startup which develops operation systems and software for drones.
Haruvi argues that drones are changing how modern battlefields are conducted.
“They are included in more military operations, and they’ve proven themselves as a weapon making significant and visible impact on the battlefield,” he told The Media Line.
In the eyes of many, especially in Ukraine, where drones have altered the way traditional wars are fought, Haruvi says that the revolution is “in front of us. Until now it changed a lot, but it didn’t cause a full-fledged revolution.”
“Today most of the drones are not autonomous, they are piloted, remotely yes but still they are piloted, but in the future then we’ll see that they will do tasks in the battlefield with minimum involvement of an operator, and this will be the revolution,” he added.
The Kaman 22 Iranian UAV drone. (Fars News Agency/Creative Commons)
Haruvi says drones have changed drastically since he started working on them in the 1980s, where they were more like a toy.
“They were not so reliable; it was not integrated into the concept of operation of armies. It started to take part in the battlefield, but it wasn’t something significant,” he said.
In the past, armies used drones mostly for intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance missions. Now, Haruvi says UAVs have made huge strides and are “considered a major weapon in most armies with tasks that are crucial to the success of any military operation.”
Israel has excelled in developing drone programs, and Haruvi attributes this to several factors.
“One is that Israel is on the forefront of technology and innovation, so when you realize something new that can help you, Israelis are less suspicious of new technologies and are willing to adapt to a new technology in its military.”
In addition, he says, Israel’s “intensive trend industry in the defense forces that allows very short cycles of developments of new technologies is another reason.”
Third, he says, Israel has “crucial need, because of the neighborhood that we live in. If you put all of these factors together, you understand why the Israeli army is adopting new technology such as the drones.”
Israel is considered one of the pioneers in UAV technology and has one of the largest drone fleets in the region, and is among the world’s biggest exporters of drone technology. But most of its UAVs are unarmed reconnaissance aircraft.
To underscore the rising importance of UAVs, in April, the Defense Committee of the Bundestag’s Budget Committee gave the green light to funding for the acquisition of 140 missiles fitted on armed drones in the German military’s fleet of Heron TP drones, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries.
Today most of the drones are not autonomous, they are piloted, remotely yes but still they are piloted, but in the future then we’ll see that they will do tasks in the battlefield with minimum involvement of an operator, and this will be the revolution.
Wars for a long time relied on two dimensions – land and sea, but Haruvi says having the ability to use a third dimension – the air, and altitude, is a useful tool for armies to gather intelligence, targets and other aspects.
Whereas in the past, Haruvi says, advanced technologies like this were secure and could only be used by rational countries, “now they are accessible to all kind of lunatics, including less-sophisticated armies.”
“In general, we are enabling unstable groups to use very high technologies, this is not just drones, it might be cyber, it might be even nuclear, and even irregular organizations and paramilitary groups,” he explained.
Israel was itself the target of drone attacks recently, when UAVs launched by Hizbullah in Lebanon were aimed at a disputed natural gas platform in the Karish field, in the Mediterranean Sea.
Security expert Majid Al-Qaisi, a retired major general in the Iraqi army, and director of the Security and Defense Program at the Policy-Making Center for International and Strategic Studies in Baghdad, told The Media Line that drones have become a favorite weapon for small groups for military purposes and drug smuggling.
“Low cost, ease of modification, difficulty in tracking, and small size, makes it difficult to detect and that’s why it’s desired,” he said.
Al-Qaisi says that the drone’s small size and its flight at a low altitude that does not exceed a thousand meters make it the weapon of choice for many armed groups. This is what happened in Erbil and the Green Zone in Baghdad.
Last November, three drones were used to attack Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi. A drone laden with explosives struck Kadhimi’s home inside Baghdad’s high-security Green Zone, injuring six of his bodyguards; he was unharmed.
Drones were also used in western Syria in 2018, when the Russian Kmeimim air base was targeted, and in Raqqa in 2017 drones were used against US forces. US troops in al-Tanf base in Syria reportedly came under drone attacks in recent months by Iraqi groups loyal to Iran.
During the war to liberate Mosul, the Islamic State organization targeted Iraqi forces with daily drone attacks.
“Drones have become a feature of contemporary warfare, used by militias, terrorist groups and organized crime groups,” according to Al-Qaisi.
He says this weapon is being used by countries against other countries despite the distance between them, in order to assassinate “hostile” figures.
“The (Baghdad) airport operation is an example of this,” Al-Qaisi said, referring to the “surprise operation” on January 3, 2020, that killed top Iranian general Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
Iran also is developing drones for military use; its program started in the mid-1980s, and has begun producing and manufacturing them. In 2021, Iran unveiled its new Kaman 22 drone, modeled in large part after the US-made MQ-1 Predator.
Iran is using Syria as a launching pad for sending drones into Israel and has reportedly supplied its allies in Yemen and Iraq with this lethal and effective weapon. Its considerable knowledge of drone technology, combined with its battlefield tested UAVs, have made the Islamic Republic drones highly sought after.
Russia reportedly is seeking to purchase hundreds of Iranian drones to counter Ukraine’s effective military campaign against its forces.
The technological advancement of drones and their great spread have become a dilemma for countries and how they should confront it.
That’s because the group that uses the drone to attack something has the ability to deny having sent it, and the targeted party has difficulty in proving who launched the drone at them, according to Al-Qaisi.
One of the groups that has used the drones with great efficiency is the Houthi rebels against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The Saudi coalition, which includes the UAE, has been waging war and a military operation against Yemen since 2014.
The Houthis were able to reach targets deep in the kingdom and hit them accurately, including targeting Saudi Aramco, the public petroleum and natural gas company, and the country’s airports.
“These are real Iranian techniques – Samad 1,2,3 – and they have different distances, and the Houthis use them to achieve their goals for them. But this would not have happened without Iran’s support and the supply of drones to them,” Al-Qaisi said.
He says that the Lebanese Hizbullah also owns these UAVs.
“The danger now lies in the lack of international joint cooperation to limit the use of these aircraft by groups that use them to carry non-conventional weapons such as biological or chemical weapons,” according to Al-Qaisi.
“There must be controls and laws for the purchase of these drones until the person or group behind their purchase is identified. We are facing a new generation of weapons that everyone can use,” he said
But Al-Qaisi says that this will not last long if there is cooperation between countries.