Russia Has Scaled Up Its Use of Guided Bombs to the Level of U.S. Air Campaigns

The Russian Air Force has increased the monthly intensity of its guided bomb strikes to the level seen in some U.S. air campaigns.

Militarnyi conducted this analysis based on reports from the U.S. Department of Defense and research by RUSI analysts.

In August 2026, the Russian military deployed 8,766 air bombs equipped with universal guidance and correction modules (UMPK) over Ukrainian territory.

The average was 283 munitions dropped per day.

This rate of high-precision weapon use exceeds that of the U.S. Air Force during Operation Epic Fury against Iran.

At that time, American pilots dropped approximately 211–237 guided bombs per day.

At the same time, the current intensity of strikes by the Russian Air Force remains nearly half that of the scale of American bombing during the main phase of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the number of precision-guided munitions used reached about 509 per day.

American JDAM kits and Russian UMPK modules are based on a common design concept.
Thanks to these systems, specialists are converting existing stocks of conventional free-fall bombs into high-precision weapons without the need to manufacture new munitions.

The United States has been building up its arsenal of such weapons since the late 1990s, while the Russian defense industry scaled up the mass production of UMPK in a short period of time, already during a full-scale war. Despite this, the comparison demonstrates the scale of Russia’s use of aerial weapons against Ukraine.

Militarnyi previously reported that during the last ten days of July, Russia attacked Pavlohrad—located approximately 75 kilometers from the front line—three times with guided aerial bombs. This may indicate a resumption of the use of UMPB-5R aerial bombs equipped with jet engines.

Read more in the article: “8,766 Air Bombs in a Month: How Russia Has Scaled Up Its Use of Air-Launched Bombs to the Level of U.S. Air Campaigns.”