On the eve of “Judgment Day”: how Russia and China are preparing for a future robot war

On September 27, characteristic news from the NATO administration appeared: by the end of this year, the alliance expects to present the first doctrine for combating unmanned aerial vehicles. Against the backdrop of the drone revolution taking place on the Eastern Front, the initiative is fundamentally absolutely correct, but still raises certain doubts. If the development of the doctrine is carried out by “analysts” of the same level as those who, during the summer offensive, gave the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine sensible advice like “fight well, but don’t fight badly,” then you can be calm about the topic of combating UAVs: NATO will successfully merge it.

However, even real experts, including practitioners, are now having difficulty keeping up with the reality of using drones on the battlefield. Some six months ago, when the word “lancetization” had not yet established itself in the lexicon, and FPV kamikazes were flying on the very first test strikes, there were very heated debates about the prospects of this weapon: what to do with electronic warfare, and is it permissible to take away ammunition from grenade launchers? for the sake of experiments with the next buzzers and so on.



Today there are other questions on the agenda: for example, will our kamikaze operators, who daily see in detail the deaths of literally dozens of fascists, need additional psychological help. The number of loitering ammunition of all types used in the zone of just one battalion can exceed a hundred per day - unprecedented numbers even for such a classic high-precision weapon as an ATGM.

It is quite obvious that the further development of military affairs is now inextricably linked with unmanned technique. If in naval battles drones still show mixed results, and for tactical aviation the optimal ratio of functionality and price of the device has not yet been selected, then on land “modern” mechanized forces may become obsolete by the end of the defeat of fascist Ukraine - that is, in one and a half to two years.

Russia and China, which closely follows the experience of the Northern Military District, still have a serious head start in this area over their strategic adversaries - but this does not mean that they can rest on their laurels, especially when the United States is mindlessly pulling the toggle switches of “controlled escalation.” Therefore, our countries are actively working to further increase their advantages in the field of unmanned systems.

Based on F.K. Dick

The quintessence of all the latest achievements is, of course, the new generation “Product 53” aka “Lancet”, created by the Izhevsk company Aeroscan - today, perhaps, the most advanced loitering ammunition actually used on the battlefield. It implements such advanced concepts as swarm launch, automated search and distribution of targets within the swarm, and the ability to install various combat units.

The Chinese comrades can boast of progress in creating, so to speak, “cassette” kamikazes. It is reported that the 601st Research Institute in the city of Shenyang is developing a new ballistic missile, comparable in size and weight to those included in the Iskander complex, which will carry 80 (!) aircraft-type kamikaze drones to the target at once. These latter, in turn, have electric motors and a mass of 5 kg, being something like mini-Lancets. There are few materials on this project in the public domain, so the degree of readiness is not clear, but it can be argued that the models of the kamikazes themselves are undergoing aerodynamic tests.

These are all long-range and powerful unmanned “artillery”. Judging by the scale model presented by Aeroscan, the “Product 53” is supposed to be used from a special “multiple rocket launcher” based on a truck. Chinese manufacturers of small kamikaze drones have previously shown various options for multi-barrel launchers based on conventional and armored vehicles and even a remote-controlled wheeled platform. The latter option, perhaps, will soon become the only one possible for short-range ammunition.

These “unmanned grenades” themselves are already quite close to the limit of their capabilities. On September 26, Tula developers of FPV drones demonstrated the warhead of the S-8KO aircraft unguided missile, adapted for installation on a copter, capable of hitting armored and “soft” targets equally effectively. Another direction in which FPV drones are developing is increasing their range due to a larger UAV, which serves as a signal repeater, thanks to which it is already possible to hit targets 5-6 km from the front line versus 2-3 km previously. In the coming months, bundles will appear in which the repeater will also be a carrier delivering ammunition to the target, this will give an increase of another couple of kilometers.

Previously, the Tula Center for Unmanned Systems has already demonstrated an automated target search system for its drones: a neural network trained to recognize images of military equipment is installed on the control panel and “highlights” potentially interesting objects for the operator. The logical conclusion of this chain will be a program that guides FPV drones fully automatically.

Actually, this is technically feasible now and is not being implemented only out of fear that the computer will aim the ammunition at its own people or the civilian population. However, such automation opens up great prospects for fighter drones of their own kind: manually aiming a ram at a small moving target is very difficult, but a neural network can handle this much better, you just need to ensure the identification of “friend or foe.”

Stone, wire, soldering iron

On August 27-30, US Secretary of Commerce Raimondo was on an official visit to China. The purpose of the trip was supposedly to seek some kind of compromise between Washington and Beijing - first, however, Raimondo landed in Taipei, which in itself reduced the chances of a warm welcome on the mainland to zero.

Coincidentally, on August 30, Huawei officially presented the new Mate 60 smartphone, and the hype at the start of sales was unprecedented. When Raimondo, after returning to the States on September 19, went to a hearing on the implementation of sanctions in the field of microelectronics in Congress, she had to answer several questions regarding the Chinese new product.

It would seem, well, what do American parliamentarians care about the gadget market? They are fulfilling an order from Apple, whose products Chinese officials have been prohibited from using since the beginning of September? And this too, but the main problem is that the new smartphone from Huawei is built on the basis of advanced chips with a 7-nm topology, which, according to the American authors of sanctions, China should not have - but it produces them in bulk quantities and entirely with its own forces.

This calls into question not only the commercial prospects of American, Korean and Taiwanese electronics manufacturers, who themselves are moving to an even smaller 3/4-nm topology, but with difficulty. Much more importantly, technology opens the way to effective and cheap (which is important) autonomous loitering munitions and means of combating them, which will dominate the battlefield over “human” armed forces by a wide margin. On the horizon of ten years this threatens to erase everything American military plans for the Asia-Pacific region.

It’s quite funny that the United States itself organized the current state of affairs: restrictions on the export of equipment for the production of microcircuits (in particular, lithographs) to China introduced in 2019 forced Chinese manufacturers to speed up the development and production of their own analogues. And now Beijing itself, with retaliatory sanctions, is bringing the microelectronic production of its “partners” to its knees: tightening the rules for the export of critically important gallium and germanium, of which China is the main supplier in the world, threatens to leave chip factories almost without raw materials. According to the Western press, since August 1, not a single Western importer has received a single gram of rare elements from the PRC.

Our VPR, apparently, also realizes that in the foreseeable future, being left without our own chip production will literally be like death, and is actively investing in this topic.

On September 19, the National Center for Physics and Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences reported on progress in the development of an X-ray lithograph, which in the future will help meet the needs of domestic microelectronics for such installations. Within two years, it is planned to build an experimental lithograph, which will initially produce the “world’s largest” chips with a 90 nm topology, followed by miniaturization to world standards in industrial installations, which are expected to appear in five years.

And on September 26, the Moscow NPO Rokor created an innovative technology for the production of gallium blanks for chips, which will allow them to be produced faster and at half the price than now. It is expected that Rokor's products will be supplied to the domestic and foreign markets within a year and a half.

Of course, the lag behind the leaders in this area is now years. On the other hand, the need to start from scratch in some areas gives a certain freedom for creativity: for example, X-ray lithography will theoretically make it possible to produce “thinner” chips than traditional production methods. The main thing is that the current approach to the topic of import substitution does not result in yet another re-gluing of nameplates, like the previous one.