Russia’s Pro-War Volunteers Complain Government Worse Than Useless Getting Drones To Troops

One of the oddities of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is that prominent bloggers supporting the opposing armed forces hold essentially public discussions on social media sharing tips, frustrations, setbacks and triumphs.

Several recent posts on a Russian social media platform Telegram reaffirms what Russian nationalist supporters of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have long been complaining: that Russia’s government is simply awful at fostering innovation and procuring new small drones—to the point that it’s more hindrance than help.

And that despite officials at many levels of government agreeing more are badly needed in quantity on the frontline, where cheap, small civilian aerial drones (SUAS) have proven highly useful for situational awareness yet are quickly lost.

Sammuel Bendett, an expert specialized in Russian development of uncrewed systems and AI at the CNA and CNAS security think tanks, translated the post in a thread on “bureaucratic and logistical issues encountered by Russian drone developers.”

Twitter

“If a Russian official comes running to a team of drone developers or assemblers with a promise of support and a “green light” at all levels, the team get very concerned and asks that official not to interfere with its work the team knows that this official does not understand what to do next. He basically does not know how to organize drone production and what the “green light” should mean in practice….”

“As soon as this team starts working with the official, he begins to demand strict deadlines, but he cannot arrange payment for the work and to decide who will pay for work and how. If the official is truly brilliant and was able to solve the previous (payment) issue, everything will still hinge on some old lady in accounting, who will ask for an agreement with the Chinese (for parts) and payment to Sber (Savings Bank). And if these payment arrangements don’t exist yet, she doesn’t know what to do and it’s not her problem.

And even if you find an intermediary who will issue Chinese purchases in accordance with all the rules, you will run into the issue with the building for work, which will be a dilapidated wreck on the (city/town) outskirts, with rats in the basement. This is a true story, by the way.”

Part of it is that Western sanctions have created scarcity of many kinds of off-the-shelf components needed for convenient drone production. Russians have found various channels to circumvent sanctions and smuggle parts through overseas agents and via friendly intermediaries. But such necessarily under-the-table transactions apparently don’t produce the paper trail required by Russian bureaucracy.

As a result, the post claims drone building Russians supportive of the war actively avoid working with the government and military: “And that’s why those who really do something, refuse the help. They organize themselves, make their own products, find testing areas and raw materials. Volunteers collect money and take products to the front on their own. The system is organized and operates in parallel with the state and beyond it. Sure, there are some flaws and theft, but still… More than half of ISR across the entire front is provided by private volunteers via DJI Mavics.”

Ukraine’s drone innovation machine

Volunteers and patriotic startups have also played a major, and overall more successful, role in Ukraine’s resistance against Russian invaders, with innovation minister Mikhailo Fedorov also telling me in a recent interview that roughly half of drone procurement came from civilian donations to its Army of Drones program (in terms of numbers, not financial value). And overall civilian collaboration with the military, and government support for drone innovation, appears much more successful in Ukraine.

For example, the government’s Aerorozvidka drone reconnaissance/attack unit started as a civilian volunteer organization in the mid-2010s. These eventually assembled their own customized R18 bomber octocopters that contributed to defeating Russia’s failed war-opening offensive on Kyiv.

In a correspondence with the chief of Ukraine’s SSSCP communications security service indicated the number of companies developing new drones in Ukraine had increased from 30 to 90, each of which is building multiple types of drones. And already startups literally invented mid-2022 have by 2023 begun mass-production of deadly FPV drones.

Yet these successes shouldn’t obscure that the booming cottage industry in Ukraine faced—and still faces—many similar challenges. In a February 2023 article for Ukrainian Pravda, Maria Berlinska, the head of Ukraine’s Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center complained government regulations continued to make it difficult for civilian drone builder to acquire the parts they needed from overseas.

She argues Kyiv should further lift regulations restricting dual-use commodities and duties for companies supplying drones to Ukraine’s military. ““We are a country that does not produces its chips, high-precision electronics, optics. All avionics, all of the stuffing of our UAVs is imported.”

“Like everything else in war, drones are expendable,” she writes. “In practice, this means that where there are no drones, people become expendable.”

She was especially mad over 500 Mavic 3 drones that were delayed by Ukrainian customs at the Polish border. Her complaints eventually spurred a policy change on dual-use regulations.

Rise and fall of Russia’s Drone Hogwarts

Another logistical chokepoint when it comes to fielding cheap drones on the frontline are the number of personnel trained in operating them. This is especially true with the rising use of FPV kamikaze drones controlled by operators wearing 3D goggles. The speedy, explosive-laden racing drones can be lethal even against tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and can be built very cheaply at a few hundred dollars apiece. But they require a high degree of operator skill to pilot accurately to target.

While Ukraine staked a lead in mass adoption of kamikaze FPVs, Russian nationalists have been trying to catch up, taking it upon themselves to create FPV operator training programs offered outside of the hidebound regular military.

Bendett points to an incident where Russia’s private sector, rather than its government, sabotaged an initiative known as Project Archangel.

Nationalist volunteers asked for permission to rent a two-story building at the Myachkovo airfield in southeastern Moscow to support a free program for military operators. The rent was arranged at a rate of 250,000 rubles (currently $2,800 USD) monthly.

But just a few days before Russia’s kamikaze drone Hogwarts opened, the airport terminated the agreement forcing the organizers to scramble and find 60 hotel beds plus means for transit to the airport, where they eventually began instruction.

But then they were also told they couldn’t actually use the airport to practice flying drones, or receive instruction in military uniforms there either. In a zeitgeisty epilogue to this incident, however, the outcry raised on social media over the airport’s flip-flopping eventually allowed the academy to resume instruction there after all. That’s of course unfortunate for those opposed to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory.

Why do governments and militaries struggle to integrate small drones?

Small, civilian-style drones clearly bring disruptive capabilities to the battlefield at remarkably low cost. However, armed forces across the globe have been slow to adopt them systematically, preferring to rely on more expensive platforms. To be fair, military systems sometimes can do things flat out impossible for ordinary civilian drones due to sheer range or payload capacity, and can resist countermeasures that cause unhardened civilian drones to drop like flies. But it also means many units go entirely without affordable ‘eyes in the sky’ they desperately need to improve survival odds.

Traditional military procurement bureaucracies were developed around the assumptions of large complex armored vehicles, warships and aircraft; or somewhat simpler ones like trucks or Humvees built in massive quantities. These may take years to develop, cost large sums to produce, are subject to stringent oversight, and can only be undertaken by defense-industrial giants, to which smaller companies attach themselves like remoras on a shark.

But small drones can be developed, iterated upon and ultimately mass-produced much faster and at lower cost than a warplane, and obviously present smaller risks for lack of an onboard crew (though not none, due to risks of crashed drone impacting civilian objects or starting fires.)

And a much smaller amount of funding can go a longer way, a dynamic which has allowed Ukrainian non-profit Escadrone to begin mass-producing thousands of lethal kamikaze drones monthly, each costing a negligible $400-500 dollars. Compare that to the cost of a single $80,000 Javelin anti-tank missile.

Thus, procurement processes intended to build exquisite jet fighters costing tens of millions of dollars that will require well over a decade to safely develop have difficulty shepherding much cheaper, cost-efficient systems into production despite intense demand for them from below.