Russia's Dan-M Training Drone Mimics the U.S. Tomahawk Missile. Now It's Attacking Ukraine.
Three years into Russia's wider war on Ukraine, the Dan-M may be more useful as a weapon than as a training aid.
Russia fires Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukraine practically as fast as it builds them. Reaching deep into their arsenal for alternatives to the multi-million-dollar missiles, the Russians found a handy alternative to the Kh-101: an target drone called the Dan-M.
On Thursday, Russian troops in occupied Crimea may have launched—apparently for the first time—one or more armed versions of the 550-pound Dan-M at targets in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian air-defenders detected the drone or drones … and opened fire with at least one R-73 air-to-air missile fired from the ground.
It was a recombobulation skirmish for a recombobulation era: a do-it-yourself air-defense system downing a target drone modified to be the thing it normally pretends to be.
Russia’s Sokol design bureau designed the Dan-M to mimic the U.S. military’s Tomahawk cruise missile. Ranging as far as 1,000 miles with a 1,000-pound warhead, the 3,500-pound Tomahawk—which navigates by way of terrain-matching and GPS—is one of the main deep-strike munitions for U.S. and allied surface ships, submarines and missile regiments.
The Dan-M is a tenth the size of a Tomahawk, but possesses similar flight characteristics. Launched from the ground or by an airborne helicopter, a Dan-M flies circles around air-defense batteries, presenting a realistic target for realistic training.
If it doesn’t get shot down after 40 minutes or so, the Dan-M pops a parachute and floats back to the ground for refurbishment and re-use. One of the drones is reportedly good for 10 flights before it wears out.
From drone to missile
It wouldn’t take much to transform a Dan-M into a miniature Russian clone of the American Tomahawk. Or a mini-Kh-101, if you’re being generous to the Russians. Just remove the parachute and add a warhead in its place.
A 40-minute endurance should translate into a range of several hundred miles: sufficient to strike across southern Ukraine from launch points in Crimea. Accuracy may be middling, however. The baseline Dan-M apparently navigates by way of an internal inertial system. It’s likely the target drone, like generations of inertial-guided drones that preceded it, tends to stray off course over a long flight.
Russian industry builds nearly 50 new Kh-101s every month, and Russian forces promptly fire pretty much all of them. Back-to-back Russian raids on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities on May 24 and 25 involved hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles and one-way drones.
Why the Russians are flinging Dan-Ms alongside the Kh-101s and other purpose-made deep-strike munitions is unclear. It’s possible the Russians “have a large number of these UAVs,” Ukrainian drone expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov noted.
It’s equally possible the Dan-Ms have been rendered redundant by the extensive practice Russian air-defenders get shooting at actual Ukrainian drones and missiles. Plus, the Dan-Ms might be much cheaper than the 5,300-pound Kh-101s, which probably cost more than a million dollars apiece.
In any event, the Russians now have what amounts to a new attack drone. But it’s just as vulnerable to Ukrainian air-defenses as previous models. The apparent first Dan-M raid ran into a Ukrainian missile battery equipped with one of Ukraine’s many “FrankenSAM” systems, which combine whatever launchers, radars and missiles—air-to-air or surface-to-air—the Ukrainians have lying around.
The U.S. and U.K. militaries have helped the Ukrainian military cobble together various FrankenSAMs. At least a few of the systems apparently defend southern Ukraine from missiles and drones coming from the direction of Crimea.
“After detecting the Russian drone, the fighters of the security and defense forces of Ukraine struck the target—the enemy's latest jet drone, probably Dan-M, was destroyed,” the Ukrainian main intelligence directorate reported. “It fell into the Black Sea.” (See video at top.)
Beskrestnov claimed there were three Dan-Ms in that initial raid—and all were destroyed.
