"WASHINGTON — The White House
disclosure last week that Russia is seeking hundreds of armed and unarmed
surveillance drones from Iran reflects Moscow’s need to both fill a critical battlefield
gap and find a long-term supplier of a crucial combat technology, U.S.
intelligence, military and independent analysts say.
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s
national security adviser, offered few details about the intelligence
assessment he revealed to reporters last Monday, including whether the
shipments had started. But other U.S. officials said Iran was preparing to
provide as many as 300 remotely piloted aircraft and would start training
Russian troops on how to use them as early as this month.
Russia has exhausted most of its
precision-guided weapons as well as many of the drones it has used to help
long-range artillery strike targets in its monthslong bombardment. Meantime,
the first batches of American truck-mounted, multiple-rocket launchers have
destroyed more than two dozen Russian ammunition depots, air defense sites and
command posts, according to two U.S. officials, making Moscow’s need to counter
the new, advanced Western arms more urgent.
Enter Iran, a leading drone
developer for decades.
Iran has supplied drone technology
to Hezbollah in Lebanon; to Houthi rebels in Yemen attacking Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates; and to Shiite militias in Iraq, which have carried
out strikes against Iraqi and American troops.
“Russia is turning to an ally that
has flown drones in complex environments in large numbers,” said Samuel
Bendett, a specialist on Russian drones and other weapons at CNA, a research
and analysis organization in Arlington, Va.
“While the Russians still have
drones, they don’t have all the types they need.”
Russia’s deal with Iran underscores
the ever-growing importance of drones to modern warfare, not just in
insurgencies or counterterrorism operations but also in classic
conventional-style conflicts. In a contested battlefield where dueling
artillery barrages are the deciding factors if an offensive fails or succeeds,
drones play a pivotal role.
A Russian delegation visited an
airfield in central Iran at least twice in the last five weeks — June 8 and
July 5 — to examine drones that can be armed, Mr. Sullivan said in a statement
released by the White House and reported earlier by CNN. The Russians reviewed
Shahed-191 and Shahed-129 drones, according to satellite imagery the White
House provided with the statement to The New York Times.
Ukraine had its own drone fleet and
has also used hundreds supplied by the United States and other NATO countries, like Turkey,
to destroy hundreds of Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers, military
officials said.
But analysts said Russian
counterdrone and electronic warfare equipment, including jamming devices, have
blunted the early success of the American and Turkish drones.
A recent report by the Royal United
Services Institute, a research organization in London, concluded that Ukraine
needed more electronic warfare equipment of its own to combat advanced Russian
systems.
Ukrainian surveillance drones, which
help target Russian troops, survive only about a week before Russian defenses
force them to crash or shoot them down, the report said.
Ukraine and its supporters in
Congress have pleaded for the United States and its allies to provide more and
bigger drones that can carry more weapons and stay aloft longer, like the Gray Eagle
aircraft. U.S. officials have shelved those proposals for now,
fearing that the Gray Eagles would be easy targets for Russia’s air defenses
and could also be viewed as escalatory by President Vladimir V. Putin.
Russia had its own formidable
arsenal of drones, but the potential delivery of hundreds of armed and unarmed
Iranian drones would help the Kremlin replenish a fleet that has suffered steep
losses during the nearly five-month campaign.
Russia lost dozens of reconnaissance
drones to Ukrainian air defenses and to mistaken attacks and jamming in the
early phase of the conflict. Surveillance drones are essential to the grinding
ground battle. But Russia’s defense industry has struggled to build capable
armed drones in large quantities and other remotely piloted aircraft that can
fly high over targets for hours at a time, analysts said.
The Russian military has honed its
use of drones. The small unmanned aircraft have been a boon for quickly
targeting Ukrainian forces and transmitting coordinates back to Russia’s
longer-range weapons, including howitzers and mortars.
“They are surely improving their
skills,” a Ukrainian Army major named Kostyantyn, who declined to provide his
last name for security reasons, said this spring about the Russian military’s
use of drones.
Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas,
the swath of territory in the east of the country that has become the focus of
Russia’s military campaign, have said their artillery is almost immediately
targeted by Russian counterfire, which they partially attribute to the use of
drones.
Russian drones — primarily the
Orlan-10, a small fixed-wing aircraft, along with small, commercially available
quadcopters — have drastically changed how Ukrainian forces move around the
battlefield. They park their vehicles under trees or other cover and must
conceal artillery pieces to avoid being detected by overhead surveillance.
But even with proper camouflage,
pro-Russian media channels frequently post videos of Ukrainian equipment being
targeted and destroyed as a drone loiters above.
In recent weeks, however, Mr.
Bendett and military analysts said, Russia’s edge in the drone wars has
diminished. About 50 Orlan-10s have been brought down by Ukrainian or
accidental Russian fire or jamming, analysts said.
As a result, demand remains high for
off-the-shelf consumer models and modified amateur drones resistant to jamming.
Both sides are using crowdfunding campaigns to replace lost equipment, analysts
said.
Russia and Iran have given muted
responses since Mr. Sullivan’s disclosure.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S.
Peskov, declined on Wednesday to say if Moscow had any plans to purchase
Iranian drones. He said Mr. Putin was not planning to discuss the issue during
his scheduled trip to Tehran this week.
Western and even some Russian
analysts say the Kremlin has seen the value of drones in various conflicts around
the world for years, including in Syria. And yet Russia was not ready for the
intense need in Ukraine.
Yuri Borisov, who until last week
served as Russia’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview with a
Russian news organization last month that the Russian military should have
deployed drones in combat zones more aggressively.
“I think that we are belatedly
engaged in the serious introduction of unmanned vehicles — this is the
objective,” Mr. Borisov told the organization, RBC.
The United States has not seen
indications that Iran has transferred any drones to Russia, a senior military
official said in a Pentagon briefing on Friday. But U.S. officials and analysts
said Moscow’s apparent deal with Iran was a major role reversal for one of the
largest arms purveyors on the planet.
“Russia is used to selling military
gear to nations like Iran, not the other way around,” said P.W. Singer, a
strategist at New America in Washington who has written extensively about
drones.
Iran has issued carefully worded
comments about its military cooperation with Russia that some Iranian media
outlets have interpreted as a confirmation of a drone deal.
On Tuesday, Nasser Kanani, a
spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters that “military
cooperation between Iran and the Russian Federation on new technology has not
had a significant change in recent times.”
Exactly which types of drones Russia
may seek from Iran remains unclear, although the satellite imagery released by
the White House offers strong clues.
In recent years, Iran and its
proxies have launched a number of attacks on American troops in Iraq and Syria
with armed drones that U.S. officials believe were designed and produced
domestically. On Oct. 20, Iran launched five so-called suicide drones at the
American base at Al Tanf in southern Syria, though only two exploded on impact
as intended.
U.S. military leaders believed that attacks with
similar drones earlier last year were carried out in Iraq by
Iranian-backed militias.
In addition to drones, Iran has an
increasingly sophisticated arsenal of long-range missiles it could potentially
provide to Russia, such as those used in an attack on U.S. bases in Iraq two years ago
that resulted in numerous American injuries.
The Pentagon has not invested
heavily in suicide drones, which can be small enough to fit into a backpack,
but it has purchased a short-range version called a Switchblade.
Mr. Biden authorized
the transfer of 100 Switchblade drones from Pentagon stockpiles to
Ukraine in March, and 120 drones called Phoenix Ghost that officials
said were similar to the Switchblade in April. In May, the Pentagon
announced that it had committed 700 Switchblade drones to Ukraine
since the beginning of the Biden administration.”
