The Decibel - How to fight drones in Ukraine

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

In the span of two weeks, Russia has launched two major drone attacks on Ukraine. Scores of so-called “kamikaze drones,” purchased from Iran, have been attacking Ukrainian civilians and devastating power and water infrastructure.Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the defence program at the Center for a New American Security. She’s back on the show to tell us how these drones work and what air defence systems from allies might do to help Ukraine.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Maina Karaman-Wellms and you're listening to The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. That's the sound of an armed drone whizzing above Kyiv on Monday. The weapon was on its way to blow up a target and Ukrainian forces tried to shoot it down. But some of these drones weren't shot down.

As firefighters responded to the wreckage, other drones were headed towards new targets. Ukraine said that Russia launched more than 40 drones on Monday. On Tuesday, Russia continued its attacks, firing missiles at energy and water infrastructure. As the damage and death toll grows, Ukrainian officials are urging allies to send more air defense systems. They only cover a certain footprint in terms of how much area they can defend against. So you would need hundreds of these to cover the entire front lines where Ukrainian forces are fighting the Russians, let alone in the cities. Dr. Stacey Pettyjohn is a senior fellow

and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. She joins us to talk about how Ukraine is trying to defend itself against attacks from the skies. This is The Decibel. Stacey, thank you so much for joining me here again. Thanks for having me. In the last two weeks, there have been two major drone attacks in Kyiv. On Monday, we saw drones sent by Russia striking energy infrastructure in that city, along with a residential building where it reportedly killed people.

But there have also been reports of drones being used in the Odessa and the Mikhelev regions as well. Could you just give me a sense, Stacey, of what it would be like being attacked by one of these drones? These are large, what we call loitering munitions. Some people call them kamikaze drones. They really are missiles that then home in or are guided to a target and can attack it. And they're really sort of an interesting system because they're not particularly sophisticated. They have a very loud motor, so people can notice that they are above, which is probably quite terrifying and frightening. But they also have significant endurance. They can fly a long time. So something like 2,500 kilometers at up to, which means they can fly from a very long distance and slowly find their target and then strike it.

So they're guided to fix targets by the GPS that they have in their system. And let's just clarify here. What kind of drones exactly are we talking about? Because I think when people hear the word drone, they think about the little commercial drones, you know, that you can you can buy for yourself, those those unmanned aircrafts. Sure. These are not sort of the quadcopter commercially manufactured drones. These are military weapons that Iran has built. They call them the Shahid-136. Russia has rebranded them as the Jiran-2.

It has an 80-pound explosive on it, which is a fairly sizable one. When you look at some of the quadcopters or smaller drones that are fairly ubiquitous in the Ukraine war, those sometimes are armed, but they'll be carrying a small charge or like a grenade, something that's very tiny, not an 80 pound explosive that can do a reasonable amount of damage. Okay. So how would you defend against these drones? Like once they're flying over a city, how could you actually defend yourself? Ideally, you'd like to have a layered system of air defenses. And Ukraine does. And this has been partially why they've been able to be so successful in the war, because they have used their air defense system quite astutely and prevented the Russian Air Force from

really flying with impunity over Ukrainian skies. But the drones are different because they are really slow and they don't produce a significant heat signature because the engine is so rudimentary. So they end up sometimes posing a bit of a challenge to any one particular defensive system. And ideally what you want is a long-range system that will detect them because the first stage of defending is actually identifying something as a threat. Then you need to determine whether it actually is an enemy threat or whether it's a friendly force. And so you need to be able to distinguish between that.

Then you want to intercept it and shoot it down. And you need to do it and shoot it down. And you need to do all of these actions relatively quickly because while I was saying these are not particularly fast drones, you still don't have an abundant amount of time to intercept them. And if they get through, then you have shorter range systems that can then take shots at them. And hopefully, as they progress somewhere along the way, one of the defenses ends up succeeding and shooting them down. And when we say shooting them down, what exactly are we talking about here? Because there was some video out of Ukraine recently where people, they're literally like shooting rifles and

guns at these drones to try to stop them. Is that effective? It's not the most effective defensive strategy. And in fact, it's somewhat dangerous because the bullets are going to fall down. And it's still really fairly difficult even to hit a slow moving object in the sky. More effective options are guns, but there are radar guided guns, anti-aircraft guns that are specifically designed for this. And these systems would be good at shooting down these drones and targeting them effectively without sort of putting additional shrapnel and bullets in the air. You could also use missiles, but the missiles are more expensive. So your cost exchange ratio is not particularly

favorable. I mean, you want to shoot it down, but if you're firing a million-dollar missile to shoot down a $20,000 drone, that is not the exact sort of cost exchange you'd like to have. If you are successful when you shoot one of these drones down, what happens then? Do they explode when they're shot down? It depends if you hit the explosive charge that's on the nose or not, probably. Hopefully you don't. You just shoot it down and then there is an explosive on the ground. So it would be something that would need to be collected and carefully disposed of, potentially controlled detonation or something like that. So that it's because if it's lying there as an unexploded ordnance on the ground,

it is dangerous to anyone who could come across it. So Ukraine has been asking for help with air attacks since the start of the war. In fact, the first time we spoke with you was about the request for a no-fly zone earlier in the war. But now it seems that Ukraine is really asking the world for something called air defense systems. What exactly does that term mean, Stacey? So an air defense system can be anything that allows you to destroy a threat in the air. So aircraft are actually air defense systems that fly. But what they're talking about here are ground-based air defenses. And these are systems that ideally would be mobile, that the Ukrainians can move around and reposition them as needed around particular cities that might be under attack or with different troops as they move along to provide them protection from Russian drones, airstrikes, missile strikes, any of the above.

So it is what we call an active defense system. So it's basically a gun or a missile launcher that shoots another, a bullet or a missile in the air and then hits the incoming threat and destroys it that way. Okay. Allies from all over Germany, France, Britain, of course, the US have been promising to help supply Ukraine with weapons and some of these systems. I wonder, when we're talking specifically about these drone strikes that we're seeing, how do these systems work in terms of defending against the drone strikes? It depends on the particular drone and the particular system, but many of them are effective. So Ukraine has its own air defenses, which are older Soviet-made

systems that have proven to be quite valuable, but have less sophisticated radars, less sophisticated missiles in terms of being able to home in on the target and hit it, so they're less accurate. And what Ukraine has been asking for is a range of ground-based air defense systems from the shoulder-fired manned portable systems like the Stinger missile to much larger systems that can defend a larger area. And they have been seeking sort of the full gamut. They want to have a layered defensive system with multiple different types and opportunities to intercept either incoming cruise missiles, aircraft, or drones. It's kind of interesting, though, to think about if they're getting a bunch of different systems from different countries, and they have some of their own from a while ago, too,

it seems like you're kind of cobbling together a bit of a defense system here. Is that, I guess, less effective than maybe having kind of one standard thing that would roll out across the country? Yes, it's much less effective and efficient to sort of cobble together all these different systems for the pure reason of sustainment and logistics. So you can't have the same spare parts everywhere or the same munitions or missiles to arm these air defenses. OK, so we've talked about drones, but how effective are these air defense systems against things like like missiles? They're not perfect and they're limited in the geographic area that they can cover. So they've been quite effective. And if you believe what the Ukrainian government has been saying,

they've shot down a significant number of the cruise missiles that Russia fired in the last week. But there are always going to be what we call leakers, the ones that will slip through. So if Russia were to fire a really large salvo of missiles or drones, it could overwhelm any one of these single systems. And some of the attackers would get through. But the other thing is they only cover a certain footprint in terms of how much area they can defend against. So you would need hundreds of these to cover the entire front lines where Ukrainian forces are fighting the Russians,

let alone in the cities. So what you're saying is then they couldn't really cover the entire country of Ukraine, essentially, then? No, definitely not. Ukraine's huge. So you're going to have to selectively pick and choose where you want to defend. We'll be right back. So we've been talking about allies helping out Ukraine with supplying some of these weapons and air defense systems. Is there anything, though, that Ukraine is asking for in terms of weapons and defense systems that allies are not giving them?

There are some things that they have not received or have been given yet, but they're also not getting things fast enough and in the quantities that they want. NASAMs, the U.S. air defense system that the United States is providing them, they're hoping to get them in a few weeks. And then there's another tranche of six that are supposed to be supplied, but they have to actually be procured through the U.S. acquisition process. So that's going to take probably a year plus. Wow. So from your perspective, how would you describe what allies, NATO really, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is a military alliance, how would you describe what NATO is trying to accomplish with what it is and what it isn't supplying Ukraine? I mean, it's been astonishing to see how much the alliance and all the individual member countries have rallied together and are providing Ukraine with weapons. I mean, at this point, the United States is providing, you know, four to eight billion dollars, it seems like a month of military supplies to the Ukrainians, which is just a tremendous amount. And you've seen that there's support across the alliance. But they are trying to balance a couple of competing factors.

They want to provide Ukraine with capabilities that they can use effectively right now to win. But they are also up capabilities that their forces might need for their defense to provide them to Ukraine. And a lot of these weapons, even the missiles and the bullets, take a long time to manufacture and we can't just really quickly ramp up production. And so there isn't an ability to just surge. It takes several years to sort of expand production lines under most cases. So they're balancing their needs, Ukraine's needs, and then thinking about escalation risks with respect to Russia. Let's talk about one of those escalation risks. The big one that we often hear is the option for nuclear weapons. On Monday, we saw NATO conduct what they

called a, quote, nuclear deterrence, end quote, exercise, which is actually just a routine drill that they do. And the defense organization was quick to say it wasn't related to anything that was actually happening in the war in Ukraine. But looking at the big picture here, Stacey, what's your read on the likelihood that Russian President Vladimir Putin might actually use some form of nuclear weapon? Thankfully, I think it's very low probability that he does use a nuclear weapon. But it is a higher likelihood than under most circumstances and a higher likelihood that we've seen for decades. And this is simply because, well, A, Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons and it has the long range systems, the intercontinental systems, the long range missiles, but it also has a lot of what we call

tactical or non-strategic weapons that are intended to be used on the battlefield and sort of shorter range, smaller yield. So they're not as destructive, though that's all relative for nuclear weapons. And the fear is that if Putin feels like he doesn't have any other opportunity or way of succeeding, and he staked his regime survival, his personal reputation on this by annexing the territories, by, you know, drafting people and trying to enlist all these reinforcements. And those are politically costly maneuvers for him at home, that if he doesn't have any other options for winning, he thinks that using a nuclear weapon would be the thing that would force the Ukrainians to give up and or NATO to back down and decide that the costs aren't worth it, that they don't want to risk being attacked as well, and that this whole endeavor of supporting Ukraine really isn't worth endangering their own country.

If a nuclear weapon is used, would any of these air defense systems that we talked about, would anything do anything to stop it? Depends what the delivery system is. If it were a ballistic missile, even a short range one, right now, the Ukrainians don't have air defenses that could stop that. And even if they could stop a short-range ballistic missile, Russia has many medium and then very long-range systems that it wouldn't be able to intercept. We started out talking about those drone strikes. We've moved on to this prospect of nuclear escalation. What do you think all of this says about Russia's

capabilities at the moment and where the war could be going? I think Russia is fairly desperate right now. Things have not gone well for them from the beginning, and they've only gotten worse. Putin has sort of boxed himself in by annexing these territories that he doesn't actually control and can't defend and maintain hold of. So they've also proven to be not particularly good at firing long range missiles. So they've fired them and fired lots of them at Ukrainian targets, military targets, civilian targets. Their targeting is often off. So they miss what they're trying to hit at, or they're not as precise as many defense analysts actually feared,

or they're not as capable of actually calculating the targeting data and hitting the coordinates that they want to. So they've expended a bunch of these better missiles that they have and more sophisticated long range systems, which has led them to buying the cheaper Iranian drones. They also have sought to purchase some short range ballistic missiles from Iran to supplement their stockpiles, which are dwindling. So it is not a good outlook right now for Russia. But that is, in some ways, exactly what is frightening about the entire situation, because it makes the risks of nuclear use somewhat higher. Stacey, I'm so glad we could speak with you again. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thanks for having me. Before we go, I wanted to let you know that The Globe's Report on Business magazine is asking for nominations for its yearly changemakers list of emerging leaders who are changing business today. The magazine will profile 50 bold, innovative, up-and-coming individuals based on their ideas, their accomplishments, and impact. To nominate a changemaker, you can go to tgam.ca slash changemakers and fill out the form by this Friday, October 21st.

That's tgam.ca slash changemakers. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.