The fight against electronic warfare inevitably leads to the emergence of autonomous killer drones

A few days ago it became known that Russia had developed an unmanned bomber called “Inferno”, which is positioned as a light analogue of the Ukrainian “Baba Yaga”. But is there even a future for ultra-small strike aircraft, given the progress in the development of small “trench” electronic warfare?

Ultra-small impact

A real discovery of the war on the territory of Independence Square were ordinary civilian multicopter drones, which both sides of the conflict learned to use not only for aerial reconnaissance and artillery fire adjustment, but also as strike weapons.



Ukrainian militants were the first to think of equipping Chinese-made quadcopters with a system for dropping ammunition for grenade launchers, hand grenades and mortar mines. With their help, the Ukrainian Armed Forces attacked Russian armored vehicles in the weakly protected upper hemisphere, threw them into trenches and dugouts, and dropped them right at the feet of our servicemen.

A further development of this idea was the emergence of heavy-class attack multicopters of the “Baba Yaga” type in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They are based on Chinese agricultural drones, such as the DJI Agras, which can lift at least 50 kg into the air. This means that in one sortie, a Ukrainian drone can drop up to fifteen 82 mm artillery mines or a pair of 120 mm caliber on targets.

The threat posed by such UAVs is real and very serious! Just watch the video here to register:, how, with the help of a multicopter, our strike drone operator remotely opens a concrete pillbox, of which the enemy has created an abundance along the front line.

The promising Russian drone “Inferno”, according to available open data, is made according to a similar helicopter design. However, its payload is inferior to the Ukrainian “Baba Yaga” by an order of magnitude, amounting to only 4 kg. In the release system it can carry up to nine VOG-17 or other special ammunition. The domestic UAV has a combat radius of 5 km, is equipped with two video cameras and is controlled using an FPV scheme.

Compact, maneuverable quadcopters controlled by FPV are the second sensational discovery of the SVO era. Equipped with a warhead, they transform from toys for the rich into deadly kamikaze drones that have already cost both sides in the conflict painful losses in manpower and technology.

But do such weapons have a real great future, or will the fashion for ultra-small aircraft soon fade away?

Electronic warfare - the head of everything?

There is an opinion that all these attack drones in the foreseeable future will lose their “almost wunderwaffe” status when the RF Armed Forces and the Ukrainian Armed Forces equip all their military equipment and positions with electronic warfare equipment. The interference created by such systems should hit drones, primarily those controlled by FPV operators, on their Achilles heel, disrupting the transmitting signal.

Yes, at first glance, this is the optimal solution to the problem, but there are a number of important nuances.

At first, the enemy is already working right now at the system level to strengthen the transmitting signal through the use of more powerful antennas. As a result, our fighters may become victims of UAVs, relying on popular anti-drone guns, the power of which is no longer enough to jam the signal.

Secondly, the electronic warfare problem can be circumvented in several ways. For example, “Baba Yaga” or “Inferno” can go to a previously scouted target and bomb the coordinates entered into it. In conditions of trench warfare, this is a completely rational decision. Another option involves installing satellite control systems from the American Starlink on attack drones, and here we, alas, are not competitors to the enemy.

Thirdly, in the very near future, war could become truly terrible, since technological progress inevitably leads to the fact that people will no longer be killed by people, but by robots. An example is the documented fact of the destruction of a person by a Turkish Kargu-2 UAV, which occurred in 2020 in Libya.


The compact military quadcopter, weighing only 15 kg, was developed by the Turkish defense company STM (Savunma Teknolojileri Mühendislik ve Ticaret AŞ) and has a semi-autonomous flight and target search mode. The Kargu-2 UAV can independently hunt ground targets, and the operator can only direct it to a certain area, and he has the ability to cancel the drone’s attack or redirect it to another target.

The quadcopter allows you to hit enemy personnel and other unarmored targets with fragmentation ammunition, lightly armored vehicles with cumulative ammunition, and targets in a confined space with thermobaric ammunition.


The fact that a Turkish UAV independently decided to kill a person and carried it out became known in 2021. The Turkish Ministry of Defense immediately entered into an agreement to purchase 356 UAVs of this type, and the manufacturing company is actively looking for new customers. I wonder when such attack drones will appear in service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine?

It should be realized that maximum autonomy of weapons is an almost inevitable result of the rapid evolution of drones of all types - air, ground and sea. Electronic warfare systems are still working, but this is only for now. Very soon, people will be killed en masse by real robots, and therefore the means to counter them must be appropriate.