Lancet - Program
Zala Aero Group is a developer of aerial vehicles. The company is engaged in the development and testing of unmanned aerial vehicles, catapult and flying craft such as drones across Russia. ZALA Aero, which has been engaged in drones since the mid-2000s.
However, they took up loitering ammunition only in the 2010s. Such drones were not of interest to the Russian Ministry of Defense, and commercial companies, realizing that the military would not be interested in this, were not interested in such developments.
ZALA Aero, which is now part of the Kalashnikov group of companies, began developing loitering munitions, counting on export deliveries. The Lancet is not their first product, the Cube drone was released for it, which is now also used by the Russian army.
"Cube" in 2019 was presented at an exhibition in Abu Dhabi. The premiere of "The Lancet" took place in the summer of 2019 at the "Army" exhibition in the Moscow region, and at the "Kalashnikov" stand then it was the main exhibit.
According to military expert Vladislav Shurygin, at first the Lancet was a flying grenade.
As a result of its tests in Syria, repeated improvements followed, and the third version of the shock drone has already become a serious ammunition. "This is an artillery projectile that barrages in the air. It combines the qualities of a projectile and a cruise missile. "Lancets" can barrage for 40 minutes: they cut into eights at an extremely low altitude, and as soon as a target is detected, the drone is taken off duty and pointed at it. The maximum deviation from the target is up to a meter. In addition, "The Lancet" is almost inaudible. Much faster than a conventional drone, it is removed from orbit and strikes. This is completely our development, the opponents do not yet have such a high-quality analogue," he said.
Recently published footage of the use of Russian Lancet UAVs to eliminate terrorists in Syria caused a sharp reaction by Aprl 2021. "The footage of the use of the Lancet loitering ammunition by Russian special operations forces in Syria shows that the attitude of the Russian military has begun to change. Even if this use was experimental, the military got the opportunity to test new equipment for them and form an unbiased opinion, on the basis of which conclusions can be drawn about further improvements and the use of "kamikaze drones," says Denis Fedutinov.
The Russian Ministry of Defense for a long time ignored such a direction of unmanned vehicles as loitering ammunition, or, as they are also called, "kamikaze drones". According to Fedutinov, a possible explanation for this attitude was the limited impact capabilities of such devices compared to artillery. At the same time, such UAVs are actually single-use devices, which is not cheap.
In early 2021, the Russian mass media started an active information campaign to promote their next "super weapon" - the Lancet barrage ammunition. Russian propaganda resources released a number of materials that this, as they claim, "unique" barrage munition will also be able to destroy the Ukrainian Bayraktar TB2. Moreover, this barrage munition was called "the world's first aerial mine system against unmanned aerial vehicles, which are destroyed by barrage munitions." But the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, Konstantin Sivkov, noted that "names like "air minefields" are, I'm sorry, delusional," and regarding the actual barrage munitions, "Lancet" said the following: "There is nothing special about them." ".
"The technical characteristics of the Lancet barrage munition allow us to state that it is incapable of performing the tasks that the management of the Zala company so optimistically talks about" the Ukrainian company "Athlon Avia" commented to Defense Express on a propaganda video from a Russian manufacturer of barrage ammunition. the specialists of "Athlon Avia" have experience in developing their own barrage ammunition "Grim" with an X-shaped wing, which was undergoing testing.
One of the main arguments in favor of such an opinion is quite simple: " Lancet" simply does not have enough speed to shoot down Turkish drones . The stated cruising speed of "Lancet" is from 80 to 110 km/h. In Bayraktar TB2, it reaches 150 km/h. There is only one option left - to fly across. Theoretically, this is real, but in how many attempts will Lancet be able to hit Bayraktar in this way? From ten? Hundreds? Thousands? And in general, to implement this method of destroying enemy drones, the Lancet barrage munition must have cool, sophisticated systems that must calculate everything very precisely. There are currently no such systems in Russia.
"The deployment of serial production of the Lancet UAV seems to me personally far from a trivial task. We are talented in the development of some prototypes, prototypes, but mass production since Soviet times has always caused problems for us. We can shoe a flea, but we can't put shoeing fleas on the conveyor anymore," Ruslan Pukhov , director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, told Gazeta.Ru .
Among other things, the CAST director believes, it is highly likely that the Lancet has imported components. And this, of course, will be a bottleneck when deploying mass production. When manufacturing an initial batch of UAVs, foreign parts can still be purchased in some roundabout or semi-legal ways. But when these unmanned vehicles have to be produced in hundreds and thousands, there can be big problems with this business.
Yuri Kasyanov believes that 80% of the Lancets are made of Chinese components, but the final assembly and tuning takes place at Russian factories. But he admits that microcircuits for them are also quite likely produced in the Russian Federation. "They can make them forever, at least as long as China sells parts to them." At the same time, he says, Russia has already begun to master the process of manufacturing electric motors and batteries for UAVs, previously purchased from Chinese suppliers.
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