Posted on 04/06/2016 2:26:07 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
An unnerving sight appeared Monday during fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. What appeared to be an Israeli-made suicide drone hit a bus carrying Armenian soldiers and then exploded.
There is an unconfirmed video appearing to show the strike, which killed seven Armenian volunteers according to RIA Novosti. And the drone captured in the video looks a lot like an IAI Harop — a canister-launched flying bomb which can detect the source of radio transmissions or be manually guided onto a target.
An Armenian Ministry of Defense spokesman alleged Azerbaijan is using Harop drones in the fighting.
If the footage is accurate, it’s a rare and alarming glimpse at one of the 21st century’s most significant trends in warfare — the increasing proliferation of lethal drones beyond the arsenals of advanced militaries. Small armies that do not have the resources to develop combat drones on their own can now buy them elsewhere, and send them on one-way missions in very real, very violent wars.
But it’s worth nothing that suicide drones are hardly new weapons (they go back to World War I). And arguably, there are only a few major differences between a remotely-piloted kamikaze drone — guided by an operator on the ground — and a cruise missile or precision-guided bomb.
Most large militaries have deadlier, faster and longer-range precision weapons than suicide drones. One distinction is that the Harop’s payload is smaller — it weights 51 pounds — and they cost much less than most precision-guided missiles when factoring in the cost for the aircraft needed to carry them. A Harop, on the other hand, simply carries itself and loiters above the battlefield, ready to plunge onto a target.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought sporadically for Nagorno-Karabakh since a brutal war in the early 1990s. Both countries are former Soviet republics, and when the Soviet Union cracked up, Christian Armenians in the region broke away from predominantly Muslim Azerbaijan.
The current fighting may be the worst since the 1990s. Armenian Pres. Serzh Sarksyan said the clashes could escalate to “full-scale war.”
Russia has a military base in Armenia and is a close ally, but has also supplied tanks to Azerbaijan, making the Kremlin an arms dealer for two states which have hoarded weapons to fight … each other.
Israel is another player, which sells drones and air-defense systems to Azerbaijan in exchange for Caspian oil and safe access for Israeli intelligence agents. And like Israel, the Azerbaijani government is wary of Iran. Then there’s the fact that Israel has positioned itself as a source for advanced drones on par with the best Western versions — but more affordable for poorer countries. It has another suicide drone known as the Harpy.
“Israel has taken the same capital, technology-intensive route to drone development as the United States, producing UAVs that fill key roles within a broader surveillance-strike complex,” The National Interest noted in 2015.
Emphasis on strike. Israeli drones are designed for patrolling vulnerable borders and fighting quick, sporadic wars that occur every few years. Turns out, Azerbaijan too has borders to protect and fights short wars every couple of years. What’s far more foreboding is that both it and Armenia have been gearing up to fight a bigger one.
Video at link
[snip] Russia has a military base in Armenia and is a close ally, but has also supplied tanks to Azerbaijan, making the Kremlin an arms dealer for two states which have hoarded weapons to fight … each other. [/snip]
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Suicide drone? In the same sense a cruise missile is, I guess. Old munition, Turkey was the first purchaser a decade ago.
But it’s worth nothing that suicide drones are hardly new weapons....
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I think you meant to say:
But it’s worth noting that suicide drones are hardly new weapons....
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What the H! :)
Azerbaijan is a secular Muslim nation with close ties to the USA and Israel.
They neighbor Iran (who they despise and the feeling is mutual) and act as a major counterbalance to Iran in the region.
What the heck is a “suicide drone”?
Some sort of weird moral equivalence issue going on.
I guess bullets are “suicide bullets” since they get destroyed upon impact.
I’m guessing it’s destroyed when attacking it’s target, explosive payload blows up the drone as well?
Stupid title. Suicide means a loss of life (of the drone operator, apparently). “Disposable” is the word the editor of the article apparently can’t spell.
Yeah, but who would click on a title like that? “...with a disposable drone” ok, whatever, who cares...
20 years ago, I wrote a paper, where I suggested that this conflict would continue indefinitely until there was full ethnic cleansing and annexation. The paper was poorly received in an IR class, but I stand by my assertions. (My assessment of the long term prospects of Islamic terror relating to Chechnya and Circassia are even more depressing.)
Thank you for your info.
It now appears the Kremlin has found a better way to have its cake and eat it too, by selling copious amounts of deadly weapons to both sides and still ensure that war remains a distant possibility.
If the logic of deterrence holds up and the conflict stays “frozen,” the military-industrial complex benefits from arms sales to both sides and the Kremlin benefits from Armenia’s growing political dependence. Russia can also strengthen its political and economic ties with both countries. At a trilateral meeting in Baku this August, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced the desire for mutually beneficial cooperation, as did Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
Russia appears committed to deterring conflict through strategic parity, but if funneling more weapons into the region leads to further outbreaks of violence, or, as Nona Mikhelidze of the Rome-based Istituto Affari Internazionali suggested in a recent commentary, the joint military force intensifies the security dilemma and makes an Azerbaijani invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh more likely, Russia can step in and ensure the next peace agreement suits its purposes first and foremost.
https://intpolicydigest.org/2016/12/07/russia-s-double-dealing-armenia-azerbaijan/
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