Podgórski: fresh Russian bomb “Wiertło”

A fewer days ago, the Russian military company ROS-TECH informed the TASS agencies about the implementation of the serial aircraft cluster bomb “Dreel” .

The first information about the above-mentioned bomb was recorded in my archive, in the 2016 trade fair articles. It was planned to implement these bombs for production in 2021, but meanders to make the “Dreel” bomb is simply a way through torment. The war against Ukraine has dramatically shown many shortcomings in the arms of the Russian army. The Russian manufacture (Constructive Offices) developed interesting types of weapons, but as happens in the times of peace, and this price was besides high, and this lobby of a given company was besides weak, and this typical, absurdly extended Russian bureaucracy threw logs at the feet, and it was military decision makers in the MON of the old date, without imagination, did not realize the possibilities of fresh weapons, etc.

One of the “victims” of Russian bureaucracy and the ever-present regulation that “unknown better” is the enemy of the attainable “good” was the “Dreel” bomb. The Driel bomb was developed in a technology that is hard to detect for radars, and is guided by the Russian GLONASS satellite navigation strategy (a much more precise and hard to disrupt than the known American GPS).

The “Dreel” cluster bomb contains 15 self-propelled sub-missiles falling on the SPBE-K parachute. These sub-missiles lead to tanks or elements of the anti-aircraft defence system. They have a temporal self-destructor that destroys a bullet that won't hit anything.

A bomb intended fundamentally for fresh Su-57 fighters. The scope of the "Driel" bomb is 30 km, which had the difficulty of detecting Su-57 allowing attacking enemy radars and OPL systems. According to Russian MON specialists, this is besides small and they blocked production for available Su-34 aircraft, as the Su-57 program was constantly delayed.

During the war, the problem that Driel blocked was the thought to equip the RBK-500 cluster bombs with the UMPK glider and satellite navigation module and with a scope of about 60 km it was expected to be a good weapon. It turned out that accuracy was specified a different, very common strategy failure, hence RBK-500 UMPK proved to be a fail-safe weapon.

In these conditions, after almost 2 years of war, the “Deril” was remembered. seemingly the Russian side in the wartime, after not very successful experiences with RBK-500 UMPK, concluded that despite the shortcomings of "Dreel" (range), it may not be an perfect but useful weapon and was directed to production. To sum up my arguments, it is not good information for Ukrainians, due to the fact that the half-ton “Dreel” bomb is simply a deadly weapon that will give Russian aviation (Su-34 and Su-24 bombers and multi-tasking Su-30 bombers) a modern, effective and destructive tool for influencing ground targets, including, for example, attacking moving columns of Ukrainian armored equipment.

Krzysztof Podgórski