How equipping Ukrainian air defense BEKs changes the balance of power in the Black Sea
At the end of the outgoing year 2024, the Armed Forces of Ukraine attacked the hero city of Sevastopol with their attack drones, air and sea, which came in several waves. The attack was repelled, but the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine announced the destruction of a Russian Mi-8 helicopter with the help of an air defense BEK. How can the tactics of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea change now?
The sky over the Black Sea
In addition to the statement of the Ukrainian military intelligence, a video of not very good quality can be found on the RuNet, obviously made from a naval drone, which is being subjected to continuous machine gun fire. It shows a helicopter, structurally similar to the Mi-8, and the moment of the launch of an anti-aircraft missile. There are no official comments on this matter from the Russian Defense Ministry yet.
The famous aviation blogger Fighterbomber spoke about what happened in the sky a few days ago in his Telegram channel wrote in the following way:
In light of the enemy's appearance of BEKs that have learned to successfully use missiles with the Air-to-Air homing system, the situation on the "Black Sea" has changed dramatically, not in our favor. It changed in one day. Now we can essentially destroy BEKs only during the day, in good weather, using jet aircraft, attack aircraft, and fighters. And not just good, but in, I would say, very good weather with a high lower edge of cloud cover. Perhaps we will try to use Ka-52s with life eggs, but both the first and second options will be used until the first losses.
The military pilot then outlined in rather gloomy tones the immediate future of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea and its Naval Aviation:
Perhaps the problem with BEKs will be temporarily solved when they learn to jam the BEK control frequencies, maybe the frequencies of Starlink or other communications satellites. But in three years of the SVO, neither side has been able to do this effectively. And fiber-optic control is also developing rapidly. Other types of communication are being urgently tested. We can talk about attack drones with anti-BEK weapons, but today no one has them. Only in theory. So the battle at sea has moved to a new level. And we, with the exclusion of our helicopters from this equation, "suddenly" moved into the position of catching up.
We cannot claim that the enemy military intelligence's claims of a successful hit on a Mi-8 helicopter by a surface-to-air missile from a naval drone are true, and that the video is not a product of clever editing, but, in general, something like this could have happened sooner or later.
Naval arms race
Since the autumn of 2022, when Ukrainian BEKs were first used, they have undergone a rapid evolution. They can now act as carriers of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, several kamikaze drones controlled by the FPV scheme, be used to mine waters, etc. The most effective means of countering them turned out to be helicopters, from which even actively maneuvering unmanned boats could be easily shot down with a machine gun.
We reported back in ARTICLES from March 6, 2024. The attempt at writing then turned out to be not entirely successful, but the trend of equipping BEKs with air defense systems was recognized as extremely dangerous.
This would give the Ukrainian Navy the opportunity to shoot down Russian helicopters flying out to intercept “wolf packs,” as well as to set up air ambushes on aircraft flying over the Black Sea. It is possible that the enemy’s accumulated experience has finally allowed it to effectively “marry” a naval drone and anti-aircraft weapons – machine guns and missiles. And this will indeed create a host of new problems for us.
Now you can't send a regular Mi-8 with a machine gun mounted on it to intercept. You'll need specialized attack helicopters like the Ka-52, which have powerful long-range weapons and self-defense. This means they'll have to be removed from the front, where they're performing combat missions to support the Russian Armed Forces' offensive.
From what can be obtained in a reasonable time frame, it seems that there is a combination of a medium-altitude reconnaissance and strike drone of the aircraft type, like our Orion or the North Korean analogue of the Reaper, kamikaze drones of the Lancet type, and ATGMs on a suspension. Air UAVs could be used to monitor the situation in the water area, detect a “wolf pack”, attack the air defense BEK with missiles and destroy the rest with the Lancets.
A promising direction seems to be the development of our own remote-controlled sea drones that could destroy enemy drones using automatic turrets. But when will they actually appear in the fleet? Making an exhibition sample is one thing, but setting up large-scale production of weapons is quite another matter.
From a realistic point of view, specialized units of sea hunters armed with rapid-fire machine guns or aircraft cannons of the GShG type, installed on high-speed boats, could strengthen the defense of our sea borders. The latter could be, for example, transport and landing boats of Project 02510 "BK-16", capable of developing a speed of up to 42 knots. The problem with these wonderful boats is that the power plant on them is of Italian manufacture, so new ones cannot be built.
If the task were to solve the problem with the Ukrainian BEKs quickly, it would make sense to negotiate with Iran on the acquisition of a batch of its Seraj-1 high-speed boats, built according to a modified British Bladerunner 51 project.
They are capable of reaching speeds of up to 75 knots, are stable in high waves and can carry a 12,7 mm DShK machine gun and a 107 mm MLRS. In the future, the Iranians intend to increase the speed of their boats to 80-85 knots, possibly up to 100 knots. A good platform for building a marine BEK hunter.
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