“It is difficult to hit serious targets with such drones,” Bielieskov said.Īt a mere $20,000 apiece, the Shahed is only a tiny fraction of the cost of a full-size missile. Their power to terrorize exceeds their explosive might, however.Īccording to Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, the Shahed only carries a 40-kilogram (88-pound) explosive charge, which pales in comparison to the explosive force that a conventional missile's 480-kilogram (1,050-pound) warhead can deliver at a much longer range. “They know that most will not make it through,” he said. Instead, the Shahed is simply launched in bunches in order to overwhelm defenses, particularly in civilian areas. That kind of sophisticated drone technology exists - when multiple uncrewed aerial vehicles communicate with one another. They don't technically swarm, Bendett noted. Fired from a truck launcher in rapid succession, the drones can fly low and slow, better able to avoid radar detection. In Monday's attack on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said 28 drones made up waves of successive attacks. Whether Russia is capable of doing the same in the Ukrainian theater is unclear.īecause they are cheap and plentiful, Russia is able to flood Ukraine with Shaheds without risking the lives of pilots or putting sophisticated aircraft at risk. Shaheds are known to have been controlled via radio under the Iranians. That's because its GPS guidance system - which is vulnerable to jamming - isn't very robust. The drone has previously been used in Yemen and in a deadly oil tanker attack last year, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies.Īnd while its range is about 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), drone expert Samuel Bendett with the CNA think tank, said the Shahed is being used in Ukraine at much shorter ranges. It's powered by a 50-horsepower engine with a top speed of 185 kph (114 mph). warships and aircraft carriers during the war in the Pacific.Īccording to the Ukrainian online publication Defense Express, which cites Iranian data, the delta-wing Shahed is 3.5 meters (11½ feet) long, 2.5 meters (8 feet, 3 inches) wide and weighs approximately 200 kilograms (440 pounds). That's reminiscent of Japan's World War II-era kamikaze pilots who would fly their explosive-laden aircraft into U.S. They can then loiter overhead and nosedive in for the kill. Packed with explosives, they are preprogrammed with a target's GPS coordinates. The Shahed drones that Russia has rebranded as Geran-2 are what are known as loitering munitions, which are also in Ukraine's arsenal. Russia's unleashing of successive waves of the Iranian-made Shahed drones over Ukraine has multiple goals - taking out key targets, crushing morale, and ultimately draining the enemy's war chest and weapons as they try to take them out.
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