A drone strike on a Russian drone factory in April 2024.
Via Russian social media
Drones blowing up drone factories is now an established trend in a war increasingly dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles of all shapes and sizes.
On or just before March 13, long-range attack drones belonging to the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency struck a hidden drone manufacturing facility in Obukhovo, just outside Moscow 300 miles from the border with Ukraine.
The facility was concealed in a concrete plant. “Local residents were the first to report powerful explosions and a fire at the facility,” the Estonian analyst WarTranslated observed.
It’s not the first time Ukrainian drones have targeted Russian drone factories. In April, Ukraine sortied one of its then-new Aeroprakt A-22 sport plane drones to strike a drone plant in Yelabuga, 550 miles east of Moscow.
The 2024 raid remains one of the deepest in Ukraine’s escalating campaign of deep strikes on Russian targets, And it may have been the first in which the Ukrainian drones went after the industry supporting Russia’s own drones.
It makes sense for the Ukrainians to continue striking Russian drone factories. Ukraine’s edge in drone warfare is perhaps its most important advantage as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 37th month.
Ukrainian drones are so thick in the sky in many of the most important sectors that any Russian vehicles that leave their dugouts “operate in a one-way manner,” one Russian blogger complained.
Struggling to jam the well-made Ukrainian drones, the Russians are trying to at least match the explosive UAVs vehicle-for-vehicle—if not exceed them on a technological level.
Unjammable drones
Elite Russian drone groups were the first in Ukraine to deploy unjammable fiber-optic drones that send and receive signals via miles-long cables instead of via radio datalinks, which are vulnerable to Ukrainian electronic warfare.
And now the Kremlin is ramping up production of the most numerous first-person-view drones in order to keep pace with Ukrainian production. The Kremlin has announced it will acquire as many as 4 million FPV drones this year; the defense ministry in Kyiv is hoping to acquire 4.5 million. The gap is closing.
In blowing up the drone factories, ironically with drones, the Ukrainian intelligence agency hopes to throttle Russian production—and ensure that most of the tiny UAVs buzzing over the front line … are Ukrainian.
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