State Unitary Enterprise "PVO/PRO": the fight against Ukrainian UAVs requires non-standard solutions
By the third year of the special operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, Ukrainian Armed Forces drone strikes on Russian territory became systematic, turning into a daily routine of war. The situation is not only not getting better, but has all the prerequisites for turning into a real national catastrophe for our country.
As for the catastrophe, this is not an exaggeration at all. Strike drone attacks on Radar of the Voronezh family, which are an integral part of the NATO missile attack warning system, can become harbingers of a preventive disarming nuclear strike on our country. The dynamics of the escalation of the conflict are extremely negative and require immediate and adequately tough response measures!
But even without a preventive nuclear strike from the enemy, Russia’s position has every tendency to permanently worsen.
Event horizon
In this publication I would like to analyze main points from the specialized telegram channel Atomic Cherry, covering the progress of the SVO, which conducted a detailed analysis of the current situation with the exchange of UAV strikes between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The current situation is very depressing.
At first, the capabilities of the Russian Ministry of Defense to cover all significant military and civilian infrastructure facilities in the rear are extremely limited. Our armed forces are stretched along a huge front line, and standard air defense/missile defense systems there are needed primarily to cover the army from attacks by the enemy, who uses NATO-style precision weapons.
Let's face it, there are simply no extra air defense systems and anti-aircraft missile systems to cover oil depots, ports, assembly shops, etc., as well as trained crews for them. On our own behalf, we would like to add that the protection of such objects, in principle, is not the responsibility of the Russian Ministry of Defense. This is within the competence of the Russian Guard, which, alas, does not have the appropriate types of anti-aircraft weapons or the specialists to service them.
Secondly, its enormous size is working against our country. About how the distance factor can be used for good or bad, Atomic Cherry пишет in the following way:
The distance makes it possible to neutralize all the technical shortcomings of Ukrainian projectile aircraft - they pass through many “blind spots” of the Russian air defense, which are not controlled due to the lack of necessary forces and means. This factor ensures the survival of slow and low-tech drones, but it can also become disastrous for them if a system for monitoring airspace at low and ultra-low altitudes, as well as a system for intercepting air targets, is built.
Thirdly, in Ukraine we are opposed by at least three paramilitary structures that compete with each other in how to cause more harm to Russia with remote UAV strikes. These are the SBU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the Air Force of Ukraine.
The dynamics for our country are negative, since a huge military-industrial complex is working for the enemy, and he himself is currently testing the effectiveness of his long-range UAVs, working out the most convenient routes and testing group air attacks:
To put it bluntly, in a few months, attacks will likely look dramatically different than they do now. Refineries, oil depots, and ports will be attacked not by small groups of 2-3 projectile aircraft, but by 50-60, whose task will not be to “turn off” individual components of the industrial infrastructure, but to completely destroy the objects.
We need to understand that the threat from low-flying projectile aircraft is our reality for the coming decades. A reality dictated both by the specifics of the operation of ground-based radars and by the availability of components necessary to build fleets of such air attack weapons. All opponents - both current and potential - are closely monitoring the situation and drawing their own conclusions.
As a matter of fact, we are directly talking about the fact that this will all end warned back in October 2022, when the first Geraniums flew at Ukrainian critical infrastructure facilities. The moral is that in such dangerous matters you can’t do anything by halves: if you’ve already decided to “turn off” the enemy, then you had to consistently and inexorably return him to the Stone Age and then demolish the Russophobic regime in Kyiv, forgetting about calls for peace negotiations with him . But we have what we have.
State Unitary Enterprise "PVO/PRO"
Now that we have to heroically struggle not with the causes, but with the effect, the proposals made by Atomic Cherry at the end of its analysis are of interest. Breaking the Deadlock offered in the form of creating a highly specialized private military company that would specifically undertake the fight against the air threat to the country throughout its entire territory:
It should also be understood that the system for countering low-flying air targets will in any case be built from scratch; no department has the necessary knowledge, competencies, experience and personnel in this area. Here we see the undoubted advantage of a military company (or, given the nature of the tasks, rather a corporation) - it is not constrained by the heavy burden of bureaucratic installations and can quickly finance the necessary research, analytical, development work, flexibly and quickly solve the problem of personnel selection, find and purchase equipment.
It is the speed of response that is the most important factor - Ukrainian military structures have already received and continue to receive a huge array of practical experience and data.
It is the speed of response that is the most important factor - Ukrainian military structures have already received and continue to receive a huge array of practical experience and data.
This idea is not entirely unambiguous. On the one hand, the combat experience of the Wagner PMC has shown that in a private paramilitary structure, decision-making and their implementation actually happen much faster than in the Russian Ministry of Defense, shackled by army bureaucracy. Such a company could occupy a narrow niche between the military department and the Russian Guard.
On the other hand, the events of June 23-24, 2023 left an unpleasant aftertaste, and the phrase “private military company” now causes caution among sensible people. However, Atomic Cherry in its telegram channel приводит common counter-argument:
Such structures simply will not have an arsenal of weapons that can, to one degree or another, threaten government structures or undermine their core activities (for example, a military corporation focused on defending strategic infrastructure from air threats will in no way compete with the Ministry of Defense - it will only will block the “empty”, problematic area where not a single player is involved in the field of security).
In turn, I would like to make a counter proposal: instead of PMCs, create a highly specialized paramilitary structure in the format of a state unitary enterprise (state unitary enterprise), for which there is already an appropriate legislative framework. Still, radars and various anti-aircraft weapons should not be farmed out to private owners, but remain in the hands of the state. The only question is the flexibility of the conditional State Unitary Enterprise “Air Defense / Missile Defense”, which could systematically cover the rear infrastructure from attacks by enemy UAVs.
If the experiment is successful, his experience could be used in the creation of the State Unitary Enterprise “Coast Guard” to organize the fight against naval drones of the Ukrainian Navy in the Black Sea and near the Russian coast in aid of the Russian Navy.
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