ISN,
The issue of the overall development of various types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including unmanned helicopters for civilian and military purposes, has been and still is well addressed by the Moscow-based analysts and defense correspondents. However, what has been lacking is analysis concerning the issue from the Western perspective.
When it comes to the issue of the use of UAVs by the Russian armed forces, this has been less publicised. This is partly because the open source information related to the operations of the 58th Army in Chechnya has not shed any light on the issue, and/or perhaps partly because there has been no reason to shed any such light.
The Chechen war provided the original impetus for using UAVs during combat. The technological level of the UAVs used in Chechnya has been low and lags behind the development and manufacture of UAVs in Israel and the US.
Another reason for the lack of information is the level of teaching of military operators to use UAVs effectively in Russia. It is not as advanced as it is in other countries such as the US.
Furthermore, the depreciation in the efficiency of the UAVs and the lack of interest by the military bureaucrats in procuring them has added to the lack of information on the issue.
A certain change in attitude and in the provision of funding by the Russian Defense Ministry can now be detected. The worldwide accelerated development of UAVs has caused the Russian Defense Ministry to focus on UAV design, development, and manufacture, and to allocate funds for this task.
Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine reported in October 2001 that Russian military experts were beginning to realize that they were missing the revolution in unmanned aircraft technology and, as a result, were urging design bureaus to begin working on a range of home-grown products.
According to another report published in September 2003 by the same publication along with other Russian-language reports, during the Chechen conflict, unmanned aerial vehicles proved to be indispensable systems for the Russian ground forces, but the Russian military experts and high-ranking officers of the armed forces in particular seriously underestimated their importance. This was in spite of the former Soviet Union
