Tomahawk cruise missiles cost $2 million per unit.Tomahawk cruise missiles cost $2 million per unit. . The Switchblade kamikaze drone.The Switchblade kamikaze drone. . NASAMS (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System).NASAMS (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System). .Did Israel offer intelligence to Ukraine on how to shoot down deadly Iranian-made kamikaze drones?According to Ukrinform, the Ukrainian National News Agency, the report does not specify what information was offered to Ukraine, while noting after a drone swarm attack on Kyiv earlier in October, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, appealed to Israel for air defense weapons.The plea was rebuffed by Israel’s minister of defense, Benny Gantz, largely because Israel depends on Russian co-operation for the Israeli Air Force to conduct raids in Syria. Israel, he said, would provide early warning systems, but not air defense weapons, Kyiv Post reported.As reported by Ukrinform, a factory for the assembly of Iranian drones was destroyed in Syria. The strikes on targets in Syria, carried out on the night of Saturday, Oct. 22, are attributed to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).A senior Ukrainian official confirmed Israel is providing Ukraine with “basic intelligence” on Iranian suicide drones, according to a report in The New York Times.The report, which cited an anonymous source, also said a private Israeli security firm was giving the Ukrainians satellite imagery of Russian military positions.President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly asked Israel to provide air defense systems, listing the Jewish state as one of five countries possessing the technology to help the Ukrainians against aerial attack, The Times of Israel reported.Russia has been using Iranian drones Shahed-136, Shahed-13, and Mohajer-6 to attack targets across Ukraine.Shooting down noisy, propeller-driven Iranian-made drones is a frustrating business and harder than it might seem. It takes multiple actors on the ground and in the air working closely together for 24 hours a day, The New York Times reported.The war in Ukraine is now fought in two mostly separate arenas: on the ground in the south and east, where the Ukrainian Army has the upper hand, and in the air, where Russia is firing long-range missiles and deploying the exploding Iranian-made drones to cripple the electrical and heating infrastructure in Ukrainian cities in the hopes of demoralizing the population.Ukraine has turned its focus to an intense counter-drone strategy, made up on the fly but often surprisingly successful, The New York Times reported.Currently, it consists of three layers of protection: fighter jets that patrol around the clock; ground-fired antiaircraft missiles; and teams of soldiers with machine guns who try to shoot the drones down as they fly past.The hardest part is simply finding the drones, the Times reported.On radar, the small, plodding drones can be confused with migrating birds or trucks on a highway. Ground controllers identify potential targets and direct jets to intercept them, but often the pilots come up empty.Despite the hurdles, the Ukrainian military is now routinely shooting down more than 70% of the Shahed-136 drones Russia purchased from Iran in August, Yuriy Sak, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of Defense, said in an interview.Shahed-136 kamikaze drones built by Iranian company HESA are hardly state-of-the-art compared to expensive hypersonic weapons being developed by Russia and the US.But they’re so cheap Russia can launch dozens every day, with Ukrainian intelligence claiming Russia is ordering an additional 2,400 beyond the hundreds delivered earlier this summer., 19fortyfive.com reported.Compared to the Russian-built Zala KYB and Lancet kamikaze drones used earlier in the war, the Shahed-136 has a much greater range (some figures questionably claim 1,100-1,600-plus miles) and employs a much larger warhead.According to sources, the Shahed-136 has a maximum speed of 115 mph, nearly identical to that of a Sopwith Camel biplane fighter in World War I. That means it takes time to reach distant targets and is vulnerable to short-range anti-aircraft weapons.The drones’ Chinese-built 50-horsepower piston engines are audible miles away, leading Ukrainians to nickname them "lawnmowers." That means they’re unlikely to surprise their targets, 19fortyfive.com reported.On the other hand, the Shahed’s small size and radar cross-section (estimated to average .01 square meters), very faint heat signature, and ability to fly very low does increase difficulty of detecting and hitting them from longer distances.Shahed-136s are variously estimated to cost US$20,000, or $30,000 to $50,000, compare that to the US Tomahawk cruise missile, which sports a cost of about US$2 million per.Also, there is an economical problem for the Ukrainians.Short-to-medium range anti-air missiles launched from ground launchers and MiG-29 jet fighters cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.So even though new systems entering Ukrainian service could prove efficient Shahed-136 killers, they’re not cost-efficient killers, 19fortyfive.com reported.Russia’s Shahed-136s lack any external optics and therefore can’t be remotely piloted. Rather, they fly along a sequence of geographic waypoints guided by satellite navigation, either GPS or Russia’s GLONASS satellite network.Satellite navigation signals can be jammed, reducing accuracy, but the Shaheds have a backup inertial navigation system (INS) to stay roughly on course until they can reacquire the satellite signal, 19fortyfive.com reported.Though lacking a transmitter, Shahed-136s can receive updated commands and waypoints, such as being instructed to attack a newly located target.Despite overwhelming evidence from Western intelligence agencies, Tehran claims Russia’s new kamikaze drones don’t come from Iran.Moscow, for its part, pretends they’re locally built.Nobody appears to be telling the truth.The US, meanwhile, supplied Ukraine with its Switchblade drones, a type of exploding drone. Ukraine has also deployed Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones — larger, longer-range craft that surveil the battlefield and fire guided missiles, The New York Times reported.US President Joe Biden also agreed to provide two units of National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, known as NASAMS, which provide short-to-medium range coverage of 30-50 kilometres (18 to 30 miles).Germany has also begun to transfer four anti-missile units so advanced German forces have yet to even use the technology.
