During the very heavy bombardment by the Russian army on Monday against various civilian targets in Ukraine, several Iranian-made remote-controlled drones were used in addition to missiles and rockets. They are called Shahed-136 and, according to various sources, are one of the most significant innovations introduced by the Russian army in recent weeks.
The Shahed-136 drones are manufactured by HESA, an Iranian state-owned company. They are about 3 meters long and have a wingspan of 2.5. They can fly more than two thousand kilometers autonomously, i.e. according to GPS coordinates, and carry up to around 50 kilos. The Ukrainian army says they make a lot of noise, “like a chainsaw or a scooter.” The Shahed-136 belong to the family of so-called “Kamikaze drones”: they crash into a target by, if armed, detonating their own explosives and then destroying themselves.
The fact that they are large, slow and very noisy, making them easy to distinguish, doesn’t make them any less dangerous. The Russian military uses them in groups, making it difficult to take them all down. It also lets them fly at very low altitudes, making them invisible to the main air defense systems. The Shahed-136 also have a very low cost: they’re built from cheap plastic and metal, and equipped with GPS systems similar to those found in smartphones. They can therefore be used in bulk and not gobbled up like some very expensive artillery weapons.
According to Bloomberg, Iran delivered about a thousand Shahed-136 to Russia at the end of August. The Iranian government has officially denied the news.
The big change over the past decade has been the exploding availability of cheap consumer microelectronics with ample computing power and GPS-based navigation (e.g., smartphone components). This has given even non-state groups access to reasonable accuracy against fixed targets (5/20) pic.twitter.com/Uz2Zkh43sW
– Justin Bronk (@Justin_Br0nk) September 26, 2022
Iran has been one of the top drone makers in the Middle East for years, thanks to investments and research into US drone junk launched in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past twenty years. The Shahed-136 are among his most refined products. It has been supplying them to Houthi rebels in Yemen’s civil war for years, used them to attack an Israeli oil tanker off Oman last year and has been systematically launching them from its bases in Syria to attack targets on Israeli soil.
But while Israel is equipped with state-of-the-art air defense systems capable of intercepting even the Shahed-136, the Ukrainian army is having a much harder time stopping them. “They pose a new threat to all of our defense forces and we must use all means at our disposal to try to counter them,” Ukraine’s Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said last week. One of the main problems of Ukraine in the fight against drones, but also in other war zones, is that the front with Russia is hundreds of kilometers long. The Ukrainian army is not capable of defending everything with the same intensity and must carefully choose where to deploy certain defense technologies.
In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Russian army has so far used the Shahed-136 primarily in the Kharkiv region, where it is still trying to counter the Ukrainian offensive. In early October, six Shahed-136s crashed into a building in Bila Tserkva, a town about 50 kilometers south of Kyiv. The Shahed-136s were also used in Monday’s bombing raids, but it’s unclear which cities exactly.
To stop the Shahed-136 before they hit their target, the Ukrainian military could use electronic devices to tinker with GPS systems or part of the 26 tanks equipped with Gepard air defense systems recently delivered by Germany . But even the cheetahs provided to the Ukrainian army are very few compared to the area they were supposed to defend.