Military experts: It is time to revive anti-drone artillery

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Anti-air artillery held a major place in the air defense system in World War II and beyond.

Even in the Vietnam War, this artillery played a major role in confronting American bombers that were unable to reach altitudes of less than 3,000 meters due to being exposed to intense fire from Soviet-made 57 mm Vietnamese artillery.

But anti-aircraft artillery has not found a place in modern air defense and missile defense since the late 1960s and early 1970s because the guns are unable to confront missiles and aircraft flying at speeds far exceeding the speed of sound.

Only the "Tunguska" and "Pantsir" systems remained in the Soviet air defense, which belong to the field air defense system, not the strategic and operational one. The "Pantsir" system, for example, has 30 mm quad-barrel cannons in addition to the anti-air missiles.

But the special military operation changed the operational conditions on the battlefield, as it became clear that large-scale and expensive drones such as the Turkish “Bayraktar” do not pose a great danger to Russian forces because they are easily destroyed by “Pantsir” missile systems and anti-aircraft guns.

Later, limited-sized drones carrying 50 kg of explosives appeared, but they can reach areas thousands of kilometers away from the direct line of contact. These marches now pose a great danger to strategic military and economic installations due to the difficulty of detecting them in the first place and the high price of the missiles they shoot down.

Of course, the majority of drones of this type are destroyed when they approach military and economic facilities, but what is the price of this measure, knowing that the cost of a small, long-range explosive-carrying drone is much less than the price of the missile that destroys it?

Russian military experts who served in the Soviet Army in the sixties and seventies consider that the time has come to revitalize anti-aircraft artillery, and they say that it is advisable to deploy anti-aircraft artillery batteries near the target installations, according to reconnaissance and intelligence information, knowing that these marches fly at low altitude and quickly. Slow, so it would be easy for 57 mm gun batteries equipped with modern radars and opto-electronic devices, for example, to track and destroy them at a distance of 5 kilometers from the target.

There is no doubt that modernized anti-air artillery can play a major role in combating long- and short-range Ukrainian drones.