Can ‘drone whisperers’ in Ukraine use the supply chain to ground weapons?
Can ‘drone whisperers’ in Ukraine use the supply chain to ground weapons?
For months now, Russia has been sending unmanned Shahed-131 and -136 drones into Ukraine. The small unmanned aircrafts fly in groups of five and are hard to distinguish from birds on radar. They have been deadly and effective, flying kamikaze missions into power plants and civilian targets.
The Shahed drones are both slow and loud, and Ukrainian forces can hear them coming, so they have managed to shoot down quite a few of them. It’s opened the door to an unconventional effort to use the supply chain, and pinch points within it, to take those weapons off the battlefield.
In the case of the Shahed, so-called “drone whisperers” are trying to identify vital individual components and prevent them from getting into the drones in the first place.
“We will identify the same end users, the same distributors, and then little by little we’ll uncover the acquisition networks that Russia and Iran have been using,” said Damien Spleeters, one of the drone whisperers working on the ground in Ukraine.
Spleeters is a weapons investigator at the arms control organization Conflict Armament Research, and recently, he found himself, screwdriver in hand, taking a Shahed drone apart — meticulously examining, photographing and cataloging everything inside of it.
Spleeters extracts chips and semiconductors and camera lenses from downed drones and then begins tracing the tiniest parts through the global supply chain, from factory to distributor to manufacturer.
He’s been doing this so long that every chip, every battery, every antenna tells him a story. “It functions to me as a physical document,” Spleeters said. “It’s a whole chain of custody … and you know all the hands it went through.”
By identifying each and every one of the drone’s components, he hopes to find opportunities to create a bottleneck in the weapon’s supply chain — to interrupt the flow of just one vital element and potentially make it harder for adversaries to introduce the weapons into the fight.
The problem: some of these components are really common. They might also be parts used in TVs, or phones, or computers. That means a manufacturer might not even know their chips have ended up inside a weapon, much less in the hands of Russian fighters in Ukraine.
“Some of these components go through China, Taiwan,” said Dan Gettinger, who founded The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College and is now director of publications at the Vertical Flight Society.
“Suppliers in third-party countries may not even know that they are supplying components for Iranian drones,” Gettinger said. “So that’s part of the challenge.”
Even so, the components ended up revealing a lot about the Iranian and Russian weapons programs.
Among other things, most of the foreign semiconductors and other components Spleeters and his team have found in the dissected Shaheds were made before 2021. That means there probably aren’t a lot of them left, which means a bottleneck in the supply chain may be right around the corner — and there may not be quite as many Shahed drones filling the skies of Ukraine.
An earlier version of this story appeared on the Click Here podcast from Recorded Future News. Additional reporting by Sean Powers and Will Jarvis.
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