Dronnitsa-2024. From technology to organization
A fast unmanned aircraft has slipped into the area of operations of the means EW, but they did not interfere with him - neither orientation, nor the transmission from the video camera, nor the operation of the control channel. He did not need GPS either. It was September 8, 2024. But this was not a war.
It was near Novgorod, at the site chosen for the demonstration part of “Dronnitsa-2024”, the most representative all-Russian meeting of operators of combat unmanned aerial vehicles, held for the third time by the forces of the KTsPN movement – the Coordination Center for Assistance to Novorossiya.
The flight was a demonstration, and the video image was broadcast on a large screen on an outdoor stage, where an instructor in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the call sign “Professor” gave a representative of the UAV developer a fun but strict survey on the use of the product.
As in the previous two times, the meeting took place on Novgorod land and, as in the previous time, its main creators were the leader of the KTsPN Alexander Lyubimov and the head of the NPC "Ushkuynik" (Autonomous non-profit organization "Scientific and production center for testing and competence in the field of development of unmanned aviation systems and means of protection against their illegal use "Ushkuynik") Alexey Chadayev.
The third "Dronnitsa" was different from the first two, and there is hope that this could be a breakthrough.
New format
You can read about the previous "Dronnitsa" in the author's article "The Unmanned Future Is Being Created Now. About the Dronnitsa-2023 Gathering", and a review of the entire series of meetings was made by Maxim Klimov in the article "The conferences of the Coordination Center for Assistance to Novorossiya "Dronnitsa" are an absolute success in a "very problematic field"».
A quote from the author’s article mentioned above can briefly but succinctly describe the last meeting:
"Dronnitsa", which began as a gathering for the exchange of experience among copter operators, has become much more - a series of events that are already actually moving forward the entire unmanned theme in Russia - and training operators for the front, and disseminating combat experience, and informing about what the enemy is doing, and what is called on the "Dronnitsa" Telegram channel the words "People's Military-Industrial Complex".
Last time, the basis of work with representatives of the “People’s Military-Industrial Complex” for an outside observer looked like their number – a huge number of volunteer groups and commercial startups were attracted to “Dronnitsa-2023”, in the mass of which it was easy to get lost.
This time the concept changed and began to resemble the old joke that “the shorter the line, the fewer unnecessary people there are” (although the line ended up being quite long), the selection for participants was much stricter, only the strongest were admitted, and the exhibition of the “people’s military-industrial complex” in the building where the event was held was not held at all.
This gave some skeptics reason to doubt that Dronnitsa was developing, but the program of flights and demonstrations of equipment during the final day of the meeting told a completely different story.
In fact, "Dronnitsa" was brought into a more optimal format for such a gathering.
If at the previous Dronnitsa all the lectures followed one another, then at this one they were separated - lectures on the topic of combat use of UAVs, combat experience and electronic warfare were in one hall, work with volunteer organizations - in another and a special event for manufacturers and developers - in a third.
And the exhibition, now no longer of the people, but rather of the “small military-industrial complex”, was held on the same day as the flights and in the same place.
It turned out faster, easier and better than last time, and the level of technology has made an epochal leap over the past year.
Reports and discussions
As usual, everything began with a speech by A. Lyubimov and A. Chadayev, in which a new goal of the event was announced – to promote the creation of a “UAV industry capable of working better than the enemy’s”, “the transition from technical solutions to organizational ones”.
The question is extremely urgent, because now it is the enemy who is leading in the organizational structures.
Video of the introductory lecture.
The appearance of representatives of the "big military-industrial complex", large defense holdings, whose names and products are known to literally everyone, among the speakers at "Dronnitsa" should be considered a milestone. This did not happen before.
The level of the reports has also taken a step forward, and a very noticeable one. Of what is permissible to mention, it is possible to note:
– a report “Myths and misconceptions about swarms” about future autonomous unmanned systems capable of fighting in autonomous self-governing groups (swarms) by Andrey Boyko from the St. Petersburg National University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO);
– a report by a participant of the SVO with the call sign “Associate Professor” “SVO – a view from abroad: visible problems and proposed solutions”;
- Maxim Klimov’s report “Trends in the development of electronic warfare and electronic reconnaissance equipment in the theater of the Air Defense Forces”, written, among other things, based on personal experience of working on the line of combat contact;
- a report "Pentagon plans to overcome the positional deadlock" by the best analyst to date, summarizing the current combat experience of the SVO, a man who, on his own initiative and alone, carries out the work that in the US Army is carried out by a separate unit within TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command, responsible for the theoretical foundations of troop training and the study of combat experience), writer and historian Andrei Markin.
But it was another report that created the biggest sensation.
At the end of the first day, a representative of the “Unmanned Competence Center” (call sign “Bars”) presented to the public a report entitled “Studying the enemy’s experience in managing the “Army” drones».
The report covered the topic of the development of unmanned forces with such depth and clarity that the representative of the highest echelons of power present in the room simply went blank.
And there was a reason for that – the abyss in the organizational abilities of the Ukrainian and Russian authorities was breathtaking, and even more breathtaking was the fact that the ways in which the Ukrainian side quickly, effectively and cheaply achieves significant results are seriously considered criminal heresy in the Russian elite; for a Russian statesman, the very idea that somewhere down there someone can come up with something that those at the top cannot come up with is sacrilege.
Slide from the report of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. With very eloquent figures.
One example: behind the creation of Ukraine’s “unmanned forces” were essentially bloggers, supported in time by the civilian Minister of Digital Transformation, who had no problem conveying the necessary information to both Zelensky and the military.
Until recently, this was absolutely unthinkable in our country. But how the enemy worked in this war is a topic for a separate conversation, but here it is worth mentioning one extremely acute issue that arose as a result of the report.
Does Russia need its own unmanned forces similar to those in Ukraine?
The topic is important and serious.
The Ukrainians, having made unmanned units a separate branch of the armed forces, got a head start in developing organizational and staff structures, both communications and combat methods. Technically, their UAVs have also stepped forward, and it is not only due to their cooperation with Chinese manufacturers.
But should we copy this?
"Dronnitsa" was devoted specifically to organizational forms, and such an important issue could not be ignored.
A. Lyubimov spoke on this topic, and the concept of a new-look brigade, described earlier in the article, was mentioned as an illustration of his theses. "Unmanned-centric" strike combined arms brigade of a new look based on the experience of the Northern Military District", after which the author had to speak out. Unfortunately, the man who came up with the idea of the "unmanned motorized rifle brigade", Colonel Pyotr Arkadyevich Biryukov, passed away not long ago.
P. A. Biryukov (in a hat with a star) with soldiers.
P. A. Biryukov
But his ideas are not dead, and there are people who defend them.
At Dronnitsa, everything was announced, first publicly, and then again during a non-public, closed event with officials.
"End-to-end technology" versus "Unmanned systems forces"
Without going into the details of the discussions, it is necessary to voice the extracts from it. This is all the more important because after the high-profile death of a group of UAV operators in the 87th rifle regiment of the 1st Slavyansk brigade of the 51st army, calls to “do as in the Ukrainian Armed Forces” have been loudly heard in the Russian environment, where the task of “sending a UAV operator to slaughter” is solved many times more difficult than in our country, and as a result, the gigantic money that the Ukrainian Armed Forces invest in training their “drones” is more or less “paid off”.
And here a trap awaits us.
The Ukrainian "Unmanned Systems Forces" will reach their organizational dead end very quickly. They will develop into regiments with a well-established system of using UAVs, and their development will stop there.
They simply will have nowhere to develop, because the task set is to deliver high-precision strikes using UAVs to a given depth of enemy defense, and that is how it will be carried out.
In contrast to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a different approach was voiced and communicated to some officials at Dronnitsa.
Unmanned (in the broad sense of the word - unmanned underwater, unmanned surface and ground, and unmanned flying) vehicles are not a reason to create a separate branch of the military, this is what A. Chadayev calls "cross-cutting technology" - technology that runs through all branches of the military and types of the Armed Forces.
UAVs All types are needed by infantry, tank crews, and automobile units when escorting columns, and by sappers and saboteurs when placing a demolition charge on an enemy structure, and by medics for dropping medicines through a fire-exposed area or (in the near future) evacuating a lying wounded person on a heavy copter (this is already being done in the UK, it’s not science fiction).
Instead of reducing all “unmanned vehicles” to a separate branch of the military, we need to use the array of technologies related to it to robotize all types of armed forces and branches of the military, to transfer to machines especially dangerous or complex tasks that people in modern warfare solve poorly or at the cost of great losses.
This is why the “unmanned brigade,” or as it is called in narrow circles, “Arkadyevich’s brigade,” is not “purely infantry” and not “purely UAVs,” but rather deeply integrated units of ground forces and unmanned aerial vehicles at all levels, operating at a level of interaction that no one has ever achieved before.
But it must be achieved! This is a future that many people find repulsive because it has no precedent in the past, but this is exactly what the real future should be.
The formation of a separate branch of the military is a short and quick dash forward a short distance and a subsequent dead end forever.
Instead, the structure of the Armed Forces should have a functioning robotics service that would transform the army, relying on unmanned technologies - the entire army, the entire fleet and the entire aviation, not a separate branch of the military.
The Ukrainians, having secured a number of advantages for themselves, have driven themselves into an organizational dead end.
We must not repeat it, and this position was expressed quite loudly at Dronnitsa-2024.
Flights and demonstrations
The last day of the meeting, as usual, took place outdoors – and here those who expected to see new technology got what they wanted, as did those who were looking for suppliers and partners in the unmanned theme.
The exhibition of UAVs and related products, which was moved from the buildings to an open area, ended up being much larger and more representative than the one that took place last year, and the level of the participants was already completely different.
The picturesque location chosen for the demonstration part of "Dronnitsa" prompted thoughts about how much the specifics of unmanned small aviation differ from "large" ones - small UAVs do not need airfields, even field ones, an airfield here can be a park, a building, or anything at all.
The exhibition featured developers of copters, FPV drones, unmanned aircraft, including vertical take-off aircraft, developers and manufacturers of electronic intelligence (SIR) and electronic warfare (EW) equipment, ground-based unmanned vehicles and communications devices.
Among them are manufacturers of equally important but lesser-known systems – homing units for FPV, visual machine orientation systems that allow the copter to navigate based on the appearance of the terrain over which it flies, net throwers that turn the copter into a drone fighter, and many other interesting things: from heat-dissipating capes for camouflage from thermal imagers to tethered aerostats.
FPV drones were especially widely represented.
Looking at all this diversity, the thought never left me: if this were in the USA, the smart guys from Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Reysion with checkbooks would already be buying up small companies in order to produce millions of UAVs of various types in six months, but there was nothing like that here, although the participants developed a lot of useful contacts, and they managed to talk to the military, real military people, not the parquet ones.
Some of the exhibits gave rise to unpleasant thoughts.
Thus, at the stand of OOO KPK Novy Rubezh from Maikop there was not only a ground-based remotely controlled tracked transporter, but also an automated machine gun turret mounted on it, tested in firing ranges.
Photo by the author
And a hundred meters away from them, OOO Stupor from Obninsk was showing a very small optical-electronic targeting turret, capable of distinguishing a small UAV, such as an FPV drone, against the sky.
Photo by the author
If all this were in the US, six months after the "Dronnitsa" thousands of machine gun turrets with optical-electronic targeting systems capable of shooting down FPV drones, perhaps even autonomously, would already be standing on the towers tanks, armored vehicles, truck cabs, and unmanned carriers operating alongside infantry. But we are not in the United States, and we have a Russian military command and control system, not an American one.
Therefore, there is nothing like that in the army.
But there are a number of unmanned transporters, also built by small startups or even in the military, without the participation of the state, and here at Dronnitsa such equipment was also available.
Some of the very interesting developments have only just appeared and have not yet been fully tested, but the people who make them inspire confidence in their future successes.
And some things, on the contrary, have already been tested in battle. For example, a net launcher for hitting small enemy UAVs. It is produced by the company Inmatten. The Americans would also have such a thing in their troops en masse.
Net thrower for quadcopter. Photo by the author
Or a homing unit from JSC Ploshchad, which makes the FPV drone insensitive to electronic warfare. Incidentally, the company's CEO was one of the speakers at Dronnitsa, and was also personally present in the field.
Homing unit. Photo by the author
Or the UAV automatic visual orientation system.
Components of the UAV orientation system. Photo by the author
At least fiberglass frames for FPV are durable, fairly light and cheap.
Photo by the author
And there were flights above all this.
UAV manufacturers demonstrated their capabilities in terms of flights in the area of operation of electronic warfare systems, the audience in front of the stage watched this live while the developers were in dialogue with the "Professor", the audience established connections and established contacts, and the military got acquainted with the new weapons from the "small military-industrial complex".
Flights in the sky, real-time flight analysis on the ground. Photo by the author.
FPV pilot at work. Photo by the author.
The task was completed, the drone returned to the launch point. Photo by the author.
In the "small military-industrial complex" itself, this year the boundary between those who were able to evolve into a serious business and those who mentally remained in the garage became clearly visible. No matter how you look at it, it is also a necessary evolutionary step. And the "Dronnitsa" meetings helped to make it, among other things.
But still, the main success of this “Dronnitsa”, from the author’s point of view, is not in this.
crack in the wall
It will soon be three years since our army entered the bloodiest and most intense war in Europe since 1945.
And despite everything, a significant part of the power structures and military leadership continues to play the game of "I'm in the house" and pretend that nothing is happening. The ivory tower in which the highest military-political leadership has locked itself has become a threat to the very survival of both our country and our people.
But after the Kupyansk disaster in 2022, the situation began to change. At first, it was unnoticeable, everything happened very slowly. But over time, the process of the state emerging from lethargy went faster and faster. This year 2024 became significant in that the wall of the tower began to crack.
The pressure from below, from the front and from civil society became unbearable, and those in power, who had noticed with such difficulty that we had some problems, tried to react to them.
And “Dronnitsa-2024” became a milestone precisely in that the authorities, in the person of some of their representatives, began an open, direct dialogue with the militarized part of civil society, with those who have been carrying the “robotization of war” on their shoulders for many years, often at their own expense.
Not with court bloggers, but with a large group of people (not only from the KCPP, here we are talking about civilian volunteers-"drones"), who did not allow our country to lose the war with Ukraine in the difficult years of 2022-2023.
This year, the participation of the military was the broadest, and not only those who fight on the front lines, they have always been interested in and need various military innovations, and this time soldiers and officers from the front were there too. But there were also representatives of completely different structures, those where fundamental decisions are made that influence the Armed Forces as a whole.
And their composition was unprecedentedly broad. Military universities were represented en masse. There was also something from the political leadership.
Of what can be discussed are agreements on cooperation between the Ushkuynik Scientific and Production Center and the Center for Unmanned Systems and Technologies, a venture fund of great importance, and the direct participation of the National Technological Initiative in the event.
There are also things that it is too early to talk about.
This is not a victory yet, there is only a crack in the wall, not a breach, but the process has begun, and it is irreversible. And this is, apparently, the main achievement of "Dronnitsa-2024".
It remains to wish the KCSP to deepen this success by the next “Dronnitsa-2025”, since the decision to hold it has already been made.
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