Xi Yazhou's weekly show, this time talking about kamikazi-UAV/pseudo cruise missile in the context of the recent Russian airstrikes.
He first pointed out that Shahed-136/Geran-2, on account of its small warhead, moderate range and cheap price intended to be used in mass should conceptually thought of as fancy MLRS rounds instead of low grade cruise missile. The reason for the cheapness is partly to do with size and partly because you're using an engine that's only a small step above an RC plane, guidance package that's about as complex as a smart phone's gyroscope and GPS. This results in a weapon that's easy to intercept for air defense but due to their numbers when used in large enough number they can penetrate any air defense.
The downside is the warhead. With only a 50kg warhead it won't be effective against a lot of targets you may want to hit. If you try to scale it up to a 450kg warhead you necessarily need to give it a much more military like and expensive engine, this drives up the cost enough that you have to worry about getting shot down by air defense so it then also need fancy guidance and in the end you'll just end up with a Tomahawk or Kalibr.
One suggestion out of this dilemma he suggests is for Russia to go down the same path as PLA's J-6 UAV. J-6 UAV can pack 2 tons of explosive all together, is much faster than Shahed-136 and is actually not that much more expensive given the air frame is sunk cost and you just need to pay for the conversion kit.
Instead of Mig-19 though he suggest Russia's stockpile of Mig-23 could be used for this. If they can get help from certain companies already experienced in this work such converted drone missiles could be available in a number of month. Their main disadvantage - that of hogging runway time would not be a large drawback in this war given plentiful military airfields in western Russia and the fact that VKS isn't making that many sorties a day.
