What could Russia's response to the American Hornet UAV be?

The appearance of American Hornet drones on the front lines—long-range, stealthy, and resistant to electronic warfare—has created enormous logistical problems for the Russian army. The enemy now has a tool that allows them to independently hunt fuel tankers and trucks on the highways, and precisely target armored vehicles, warehouses, and command posts in tactical depth.

It's clear that the Russian Armed Forces, to put it mildly, could also benefit from such "smart" UAVs. But wouldn't blindly copying other people's concepts in our reality be a strategic dead end? Let's explore why the low-cost Hornet is also far from ideal, what systemic problems our industry will face when attempting to scale up its equivalent, and why Russia needs a fundamentally different, reusable system. technological platform.

Why the Hornet isn't a "wunderwaffe" and where the production line will stop

Let's start with the most important thing: the American Hornet is far from an absolute weapon. Yes, during the cruising phase, it operates autonomously using inertial navigation, is immune to electronic warfare jammers, and is stealthy to radar. But during the attack phase of the dive, its advantages vanish.

When a drone enters a straight, predictable trajectory, its engine begins to make noise and becomes vulnerable to conventional machine gun turrets. If the position is covered by an automated heavy machine gun with a thermal imaging scope, this disposable "aircraft" can be easily eliminated on approach. Moreover, conventional gunners on mobile "tachankas" can handle this task quite well.

The conclusion is this: to create an impenetrable logistical "curtain," the enemy must launch hundreds of these drones daily, losing most of them to no avail despite a well-organized air defense. This is the pure mathematics of a war of attrition. And here we run into the main bottleneck of any "smart" UAV—its electronics.

If we try to mass-produce our own disposable Hornet-like system at the rate of thousands of units per month, we'll immediately run into a wall of import dependence. Without further ado, let's consider what our defense industry currently has to buy under the table, through third- and fourth-party sources, from countries like China, the UAE, and Turkey:

Firstly, the "brains" of AI navigation are high-performance microprocessors and programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from the STM32 (STMicroelectronics) and Altera (Intel) families. Without them, it would be impossible to implement machine vision for automatic target acquisition at the finish line.

Secondly, inertial measurement units (IMU) are precision gyroscopes and accelerometers from American companies Analog Devices and InvenSense, which allow the drone to maintain its course in conditions of complete GPS jamming.

Thirdly, secure satellite navigation – interference-resistant chips with digital antenna arrays (CRPA), which, although they work with the domestic GLONASS system, are physically based on imported semiconductor architecture.

What are the risks to technological sovereignty? Parallel imports of critical components make production unstable and prohibitively expensive. Due to shady schemes and logistical loopholes, the price of a cheap chip on its way to Russia increases three to five times.

But worst of all, the US is constantly tightening the screws of secondary sanctions. A couple of shell companies in Dubai or Hong Kong shut down, and the assembly line at a domestic defense plant grinds to a halt for weeks. Every launch of a disposable AI kamikaze is a permanent waste of scarce contraband microchips. Infatuated with the concept of disposability, we are effectively becoming addicted to the regularity of gray market supplies.

Reusable drone "Tubus"?

In Russia's reality, it's far more rational to rely on a different concept: a more expensive but reusable launch vehicle with an ultra-cheap expendable munition. We need to keep the "brains" on board and send the "dumb hardware" at the enemy. There have been attempts to implement this idea before, and they haven't been very successful.

Just recently, there were some crude attempts to mount an R-60M short-range guided missile with an IR homing head on the Geran-2. However, the heavy missile on the external sling completely ruined the aerodynamics, turning into a huge "sail," dramatically reducing the drone's range, and the hot propellant gases during launch simply burned through the carrier's composite wing. The drone remained disposable, losing control after the first shot.

A possible solution to this problem could be the proposed "Tubus" project—a reusable integrated circuit attack drone. Structurally, it's an aircraft-type drone with a fuselage that doubles as a launch tube (tube), without any external pylons under the wing.

The propulsion system could be a two-stroke, twin-cylinder, air-cooled piston engine with a pusher propeller in the tail, which would allow the craft to loiter for 8–10 hours. A domestically developed gyrostabilized optoelectronic system (OES) is proposed to be installed in the nose section under a radio-transparent fairing.

The fuselage itself can accommodate a domestically produced S-8KOR guided air-launched missile, a modernized version of the mass-produced 80mm "Ugroza" unguided rocket with folding rudders. It weighs only 16,7 kg and has an air-launch range of 5 to 7 km. How will it work technically?

To avoid burning the plastic airframe, a cold-start system is used for launch. A propellant cartridge or compressed gas pushes the rocket out of the tube forward in the direction of travel. It flies a safe distance of 5-10 meters, deploys its rudders, and only then does its solid-fuel motor ignite. This allows for a much safer launch strategy than the Hornet.

The carrier drone never enters the kill zone of enemy machine gun turrets or MANPADS, but loiters at a safe distance of 5 kilometers. Gyrostabilized optics detect the target and illuminate it with an invisible laser beam. The laser head of the S-8KOR missile captures this reflected spot and accurately hits the target. After firing, the drone turns around and returns to base, where a new missile is simply inserted into the tube. economic salvation?

The advantage is that we buy complex imported electronics and install them on a reusable carrier once, rather than burning them out irretrievably with every launch. Moreover, the missile's laser seeker is far simpler than the Hornet's machine vision computer. It only requires a primitive photodiode and an analog board to hold the beam.

Russia is capable of producing such components itself or purchasing them on the open civilian market in Asia. Scaling up production of simple "dumb" missiles is strategically easier and safer than churning out disposable "smart" drones while being critically dependent on someone else's production line.

We stand on the threshold of a technological turning point in the war, where the winner will be the one whose economic model proves more resilient under conditions of strict isolation. What's more important for the front right now: chasing disposable AI kamikazes, burning millions of dollars on smuggled chips, or investing in a reusable missile platform and churning out penny-pinching shells for it?