Missiles targeting Moscow daily: why Ukraine gains little from drone attacks.
Stop!..
The number of various "unique" analogs of drones, drone-rockets, and simply rockets in our information space has long exceeded all reasonable limits.
Every day, the public is thrilled by the new achievements of Ukrainian "geniuses" and "inventors." Any painted pipe with a homemade autopilot affixed with blue tape consistently raises the level of national self-awareness and irresistibly brings us closer to victory.
But that's not true. In a country that has been fully deindustrialized during the years of independence, where even nuts and bolts are not produced, where there is not a single large factory, where vocational education has been eliminated, and engineering education has been replaced with marketing, there has never been and is no such number of specialists and professionals capable of creating truly competitive products in such quantities.
All these childish crafts at the level of a young aviator's club are worth nothing. They either don't fly, or they don't reach their targets, or they endanger the crews launching them right at the launch site.
Stop lying to ourselves! The American "HIMARS" (M142 HIMARS) is designed and produced by the largest corporation in the world, Lockheed Martin, where thousands of designers and engineers work on this topic, and the number of subcontractors amounts to several hundred. The Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles were developed by the French together with the British, with the project and manufacturing handled by the powerful European consortium MBDA — a leading global developer and manufacturer of missile systems.
Only the most economically developed, large, and technologically advanced countries can afford to independently develop drones, "drone-rockets" (cruise missiles), and simply rockets. Such developments take years, decades, and hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Meanwhile, any garage cooperative of a dozen "inventors" builds its "unique" unmanned aerial vehicle of cosmic scale in terms of futility and incompetence.
Before the 2025 budget is sliced up for various home model rockets and drones, think, Vladimir Alexandrovich, do we really need all of this? We don't just need 30,000 strike drones and 3,000 rockets — we need those drones and rockets to reliably reach their targets.
As long as the enemy bombards all of Ukraine and Kyiv every night with a single "Shahed," which is refined by thousands of engineers and produced by the hundreds daily, and our Ukrainian "unique" drones cannot reach Moscow — we will not win this war.
Imagine, dear Vladimir Alexandrovich, that every day a new unique studio "Evening Quarter" emerges. Where will you find so many Koshovys, Kazanins, and Zelenskys? And will it be interesting to the audience?
We urgently need the consolidation of all design and engineering personnel and all productions to refine the best existing samples of drones and rockets into truly combat-ready conditions. We don’t need many different and unnecessary amateur systems. We need our drones to reach Moscow every day.
The author expresses a personal opinion that may not coincide with the position of the editorial board. The author bears responsibility for the published data in the "Opinions" section.