Russia Has Precision Weapons & Could Avoid Attacking Children & Civilians

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

“The Russians have attacked hospitals in over 18 circumstances,” …. 

An experienced Air Force Air Warfare Commander expects Putin to wind up in International Criminal Court for what clearly seems to be a deliberate attempt to murder children, innocent civilians and even hospital patients and pregnant mothers.

“The Russians philosophy is not one that is concurrent with the laws of armed conflict, or the Geneva Conventions. As, you know, the actual statistics over the last two weeks is that the Russians have attacked hospitals in over 18 circumstances. I’m here to tell you that I’m pretty certain that we’re going to see Vladimir Putin in front of the International Criminal Court and prosecuted not unlike Milosevic, Ret. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Warrior in an interview.

Deptula commanded the Gulf War Air Campaign as well as the air attacks over Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom, and is therefore quite familiar with precision weaponry. The Gulf War represented the combat debut of stealth technology in the form of the F-117 Night Hawk as well as the use of precision-guided, air dropped bombs called Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS). Air Dropped precision weaponry existed 30 years ago, and land fired precision weaponry such as Excalibur GPS-guided artillery entered combat in Iraq in 2007. The technology is here and has been here.

Global Firepower, for instance, publishes data on Russia’s 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV artillery system is specifically engineered to fire precision-guided artillery rounds at distances up to 70km. The system, which emerged in 2018, is fully capable of placing artillery rounds on exact locations with complete precision, meaning Russian land-fire could easily avoid attacking residential areas if the military leadership chose to. The self-propelled artillery platform fires 152mm artillery at high-speed rates up to 20 rounds per minute.

“Because of their complete and total disregard of avoiding civilian casualties in quite frankly, the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. So the Russian military is not interested in the precision use of the munitions that they have,” Deptula said.

Russia also operates a precision-guided “Tornado-S” variant of its 9A524 Tornado self propelled rocket launcher. It is an 8X8 wheeled armored vehicle with an all-digital Fire Control System and a precision targeting technology called “Global Navigation System,” according to Global Firepower. The weapon has an extremely lethal operational range of 90km.