On Tuesday, the fourth day after the Russian military drone incident, a National Security Council meeting was finally convened, after which it was announced that the council “agreed to update and refine the necessary procedures to more effectively counter threats posed by drones.” To me, this translates into an acknowledgment that the procedure initiated by the NBS on Saturday, when the “drone crisis” began, was neither relevant nor effective for the current situation, no matter how they try to reassure us that everything is fine. Am I misinterpreting?
There are two possible translations. One is that something is not quite right with the procedures. Or the other – that these procedures are simply not known and those procedures have not been followed. It is difficult, of course, to determine what happened there, but the laws gave an opportunity to act.
What the internal procedures were, it is difficult for me to say. If it is a military drone, then the decision should be made by the NBS commander Leonidas Kalniņas himself, informing the defense. What the actual action was, it is difficult for me to say.
What is missing in this whole story is a normal, understandable explanation for the citizens that “we assessed that the drone will not detonate, so we will let it fall by itself”. Whether it was so or not, I do not say or know; what I want to say is that there should be a single believable story. Because the population is in a big misunderstanding of what has happened. They had to explain what the risk calculation was that made them decide not to shoot down this drone. If it had hit somewhere in Rezekne… Either they had great confidence and calculations that it would not happen like that, or… Then it should be explained that way, but it is not done.
There has been so much talk about communication regarding the Russian drone that there is already resistance to blame everything on poor communication, but of course it was chaotic and terrible. And here I want to ask: are these our generals in particular, who do not obey the training requirements of modern communication? Because in that infamous press conference of the Ministry of Defense and the National Armed Forces on Monday, you could see that Minister Andris Spruds repeatedly threw himself at the mines of his generals, i.e. corrected the very ambiguous statements about “friendly drones”, correcting that “no, no, don’t misunderstand, this is very serious incident”.
It’s bad to say so, but in my time we strictly adhered to centralized communication, where the ministry sometimes took responsibility instead of the NBS, but there was unified communication, so mostly the relevant department of the ministry communicated, the minister himself or sometimes by inviting the NBS and coordinating opinions before that. It is difficult for me to say and understand what is happening there now. Before unified communication was introduced, there were times when disjointed communication hurt the system as a whole, so we implemented this centralized communication, ensuring that there is a single point of view.
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