I'm still waiting for the arrival of supposedly 40000 Syrian troops or volunteers to Ukraine...
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I think Chinese drone makers probably got their hands full for years to come with PLA orders.
While the timing of this deal is a little suspicious, I don’t think there is much appetite in either China or Russia for direct massive Chinese arms sales to Russia.
Unlike China, Iran has no weapons export potential to speak of beyond drones. Thus they are not a threat to Russia’s arms industry. But the day Russia buys significant high end military equipment from China is the day the Russians kiss their international arms markets goodbye.
That’s a needless sacrifice for Russia when they are doing just fine on the battledespite what the western digital army says in cyberspace.
These Iranian drones will be a big boost once they arrive in numbers, but they are almost certainly not going to fundamentally change how the war is going.
For the Chinese, Ukraine doesn’t matter beyond its impact on the EU.
Despite the best efforts of the usual suspects, the EU’s fundamental policy and position on China remains unchanged, and China using Ukraine as a threat is infinitely more effective than getting directly involved to keep it that way.
While grabbing a bigger share of the global arms market would be nice, China hardly needs it, unlike the Russians. What more, any additional arms sales is unlikely to come close to the costs of the inevitable US and EU sanctions (both directly from the application and indirectly from fighting it).
Besides, I think there is actually a risk that the Ukraine war might end too early for Russia.
Ukraine is absolutely bleeding the EU dry, and the longer it drags on the more damaging. Why should Russia waste needless deaths to end the war quickly to do the EU a solid when the Russians can instead drag this out till at least spring/summer 2023 to harvest maximum energy export profits from the EU?
It's one thing to be able to design and build a drone, and another to mass produce it. Iran can build enough drones for it's proxy wars in Syria and Yemen but to fulfil an order of 1,000 is impossible for them. There aren't military factories, engineers waiting around in Iran for an order like this. As a comparison, Turkey seems to have maxed TB-2 production to around 18 a month, or 200 a year and now has several years backlog. How can heavily sanctioned Iran match that, let alone exceed it?
If it was possible/cost effective to create the infrastructure to mass produce drones on this scale from scratch I'm sure Russia would have done it themselves already. That's why I'm somewhat sceptical of this story. If it was a few dozen Iranian drones I'd be more inclined to believe it. But the only way Russia is getting hundreds or a thousand drones any time soon is through China.
I don't see why buying Chinese drones would be any worse for the Russian MIC than buying Iranian drones. Unlike Iranian drones Chinese drones are established on the international market with foreign customers on multiple continents including Russia's ally Serbia. The only issue would be political fallout from the west and it would lead to criticism or sanctions on China. Hence why selling them via a third party may make sense.
I think the CH-4 would be good, it wouldn't surprise me if the Iranian drones look very similar. There should be no problem for Chinese manufacturing to handle and increased order like this, especially if there is a political benefit to it. Churn out a drone with Iranian marked internals in kit form, send over to Iran where assembly takes place and then shipped over to Russia.
I think aerospace related manufacturing is a lot harder to scale up rapidly compared to say, armoured vehicles due to increased scrutiny with parts used. From Iran's perspective the only limiting factor is probably just funding due to being under constant economic sanctions while their drone factories will be idle while waiting for more orders from the government, while for China it'll be about capacity since you can only set up production lines so fast and their drones seems to be quite popular for both PLA and foreign buyers. If Russia throws down the big bucks I don't see why Iran can't provide the goods.
We don't know the details, but I doubt it is 1000 of one type we are talking about here, or even 1000 firm orders. Knowing the aviation industry, it would probably be something like 500 firm + 500 commitments and options or future development. It is probably also safe to assume not all 1000 (or however many it is) are the big Shahed 129 or future Shahed 149. Iran manufactures other smaller types like the Mohajer-6 which can be armed with a pair of ATGMs, previous Mohajer variants which appear unarmed, a plethora of loitering-munitions, the tiny ones launched by hand and even the ScanEagle copy of which they donated one of to Russia in 2013. Many of these aren't complex at all, and if assisted by Russia, mass production in the necessary scale isn't going to be an issue.
I know Oryx isn't the most popular source, but this page from 2019 documents some of the vast amount of drones used by Iran:
WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - Russian officials trained in Iran in recent weeks as part of an agreement on the transfer of drones between the two countries, the U.S. State Department said on Thursday.
Data shows 42 flights by Iranian firms under U.S. sanctions - since Ukraine war began. U.S. official says drone deal moving ahead: 'Russians are training in Iran
"During the last several weeks, Russian officials conducted training in Iran as part of the agreement for UAV transfers from Iran to Russia," a US official told CNN. The official said the intelligence about the training has recently been declassified
Iran has begun training Russian officials to use its advanced drones, according to the Biden administration, the latest sign that Moscow plans to use Tehran’s military weapons to try to seize a new .
The State Department said Thursday it would “vigorously” enforce all US sanctions on Russian and Iranian arms trade, doubling down on previous comments by US officials that on drones.
Nonsense from a singular source amplified via media control. When Iranian drones actually show up ill believe it.
Most likely to be ready made equipment since Russia already have pretty much the know how of creating UAVs and UCAVs