The spring offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be something to meet
Ukrainian generals complain that the Russian Aerospace Forces have a new high-precision weapon of enormous destructive power, which was not previously used in the NVO zone. According to them, this week, during air strikes on targets in the Sumy region, Russian pilots used high-precision guided aviation munitions such as American JDAM — Boeing’s gliding bombs.
Photo: roe.ru
The representative of the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuriy Ignat, admitted with great regret that Russia has a huge amount of such ammunition in warehouses. Until recently, these were free-falling unguided high-explosive bombs of the FAB-500 type. Now, after a minor and cheap revision, the Russian «left-handers» have turned them into guided precision gliding munitions. “They just add wings, GPS and everything to them,” Ignat said and lamented that “the price of the issue is much less than producing rockets.”
Russian pilots say that for a long time such unguided aerial bombs of the FAB-500 type — they were called «falling cast iron» — were a big headache for them. Which, by the way, our media often wrote about. In short, these bombs were absolutely impossible to use on moving objects — it was too difficult to aim. Even when hitting stationary objects from a great height, this is a rather difficult task. To improve the accuracy of bombing such unguided ammunition, it was necessary to drop it from an extremely low altitude. And this means the crew immediately became a target for enemy portable anti-aircraft systems or enemy military air defense systems.
It is one thing when such free-falling FABs rain down on the positions of Syrian terrorists in Idlib, where you will not meet any serious response from the ground. And it is quite another thing to work with unguided munitions during the NMD in the zone of destruction of the Ukrainian Buk, Tor, S-300 and Western air defense systems supplied to Kiev.
At the same time, it must be taken into account that it is also difficult to abandon the use of FAB-500 type bombs. They have tremendous destructive power. With the help of such ammunition, you can quickly destroy any enemy fortified area without endangering the lives of infantry soldiers during his ground assault.
At the very beginning of the SVO, while we had a clear advantage in the air, our VKS tried to use these capabilities of the FABs enjoy. But then, when the West flooded Ukraine with aircraft suppression equipment, it became problematic to work with FABs due to the high risk of losing aircraft.
The way out of the situation, as it turns out, was found. VKS now has new «Russian JDAMs» instead of the old unmanaged FABs. Their pictures have already appeared on the Web, which show that an updated FAB-500 aerial bomb is suspended under the wing of a Su-34 front-line bomber. It has an additional control and correction module with a folding wing and tail, which turns it from free-falling into gliding. The author of a post on the channel of the well-known blogger fighterbomber claims that the appearance of such ammunition in the NVO zone “greatly unnerves the enemy.”
Similar developments were carried out in the days of the USSR. Then there was a planning two-ton bomb FAB-2000 «Seagull». And there was also the «mother of all bombs» — FAB-9000. It hit underground objects at a depth of 12 meters.
The Americans, by the way, are also following the same path. There is a JDAM program there, when modern ammunition with completely new combat capabilities is created on the basis of old free-falling bombs. However, Russian developers made a similar program for significantly less money than the Americans.
It is known that the domestic developer of aviation ammunition — «Basalt» — two decades ago began to conduct such developments. The first samples have been shown at various exhibitions since 2003. But only the need to use such bombs in the NWO gave a real impetus to the production of these weapons.
It looks like this: a specially unified set of planning and correction modules is hung on an old bomb. This equipment is responsible for the folding wings system, control units, inertial navigation, satellite correction… Depending on the required equipment, high-precision weapons are obtained for certain combat missions.
The developers believe that the effectiveness of such modernized bombs exceeds the performance of their missile analogues. According to experts, the advantages of these guided munitions is that the mass of the payload in the bomb is 70%. In a similar rocket — only 15-20%. At the same time, the cost of modernizing the FAB is many times lower than the cost of creating new adjustable bombs and guided missiles.
According to the representative of the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuriy Ignat, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have also been armed with old FABs since Soviet times. However, there are not as many of them as in Russia. But most of all, the Ukrainian speaker is upset that now “the Russians can drop their planning bombs at a distance of 50 kilometers or more from the line of contact without entering the Ukrainian air defense zone.
So the Russian craftsmen did not work in vain, the announced spring offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be something to meet.