I think the idea some members are suggesting, regarding drone swarms armed with improvised bombs, is a great idea. Pakistan should learn something from these ragtag groups fighting throughout the middle east, and improvise. One doesn't necessarily need the best, game-changing, weapon to change outcome. This is what I mean by thinking "out-of-the-box".
Russia Offers New Details About Syrian Mass Drone Attack, Now Implies Ukrainian Connection
The Russian military’s top officer in charge of drone development has offered new details about apparent
first of their kind mass drone attacks on its forces in Syria in an official briefing at the country’s Ministry of Defense. The presentation reiterated the Kremlin’s assertion that terrorists or rebels could not have conducted the operation
without significant outside support, now implying a possible Ukrainian connection, but significant questions remain unanswered.
Speaking from the Russian
Ministry of Defense’s briefing room, amid examples of the drones and their munitions that the country recovered after the attacks, Major General Alexander Novikov, head of the Russian General Staff's Office for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Development, gave the
most detailed and complete official description of the incident to date. He said that unspecified terrorists utilized a total of 13 improvised drones, each carrying 10 bomblets, sending 10 to Russia's
Khmeimim air base in Latakia governorate and the other three to its naval base in Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea. The munitions each had an explosive charge weighing nearly one pound, as well as strings of metal ball bearings or BBs glued together as pre-formed shrapnel, which would have made them most effective against individuals out in the open.
“Construction of these drones takes significant time period and special knowledge of aerodynamics and radioelectronics,” Novikov. “Assembly and use of these components in the joint system are a complicated engineer task demanding special training, scientific knowledge, and practical experience of producing these aircraft.”
Novikov said that Russian forces had been able to capture a number of the drones after
electronic warfare systems at Khmeimim knocked them out of the sky. Somewhat confusingly, he later said that whoever had built the unmanned aircraft had included systems to specifically to defeat those countermeasures, though.
Air defense radars aided in detecting the attacks and
Pantsir-S1 short-range air defense systems destroyed some of the improvised unmanned aircraft, as well. He added that this was the first time Russian forces in Syria had come under such an attack, though rebels and terrorists have been employing such systems for years now in both that country and
neighboring Iraq.
The general officer acknowledged that the individual components, such as the apparent lawnmower or moped motors, were available commercially. This is a point the U.S. military has been keen to stress in the aftermath of the attacks.
...
To support these assertions, Novikov focused heavily on the drones’
on-board GPS, which has become
an important component of Russia’s allegation that outside actors, including one or more nation states, would have had to have been involved in the attacks at some level. The Major-General said the systems gave them military-grade precision when navigating to Khmeimim and releasing their bombs over the target area.
The “
pre-programmed coordinates are more accurate than those in the Internet,” Novikov, challenging arguments that militants could have acquired the necessary data via open sources online. Though the briefing included maps of the pre-programmed flight routes, which the Russian Ministry of Defense said it had created using information it downloaded from the examples it captured, he did not provide any actual data to support his claims.