>All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now.
Worth mentioning that this already happened to an attack helicopter 20 years ago! The Comanche[0] was a revolutionary recon/attack helicopter with some mental stealth engineering behind it - everything from limiting sound profile via blade design & fenestron, a radar presence a fraction of an Apache, they even directed the exhaust down the tail boom so that the heat generated could easily be dissipated by the tail rotor!
Unfortunately for helicopter nerds, UAVs were a fraction of the price, suitable for recon and attack, and pilots could survive it being shot down.
My game of choice was Gunship on the Commodore 64, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter simulator from Microprose. Spent YEARS playing that.
Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.
I loved that it had a dynamic campaign where the frontline moved according to how well you did.
Before that, I also enjoyed LHX.
> Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.
Do you remember what the copy protection was for MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter? It was the silhouettes of US and Soviet fighters and bombers from the Cold War era: "identify this aircraft". Somehow they thought my teenage self, obsessed as I was with Cold War military tech, wouldn't learn the shapes. It's how I learned the shapes of most fighter jets.
Yes, I had a pirated copy. We all did back then, legal games were unheard of.
That guy has been very active on twitter since the start of the development of the game. I don't have his account anymore since I stopped caring about twitter but ... he's probably still there journaling!
Comanche, LHX Attack Chopper, Gunboat and Wolfpack. A handful of military sims meant hundreds of pages of specs to sift through -- best copy protection I ever had to deal with. I probably spent more time reading the manuals than I did playing the games.
I don't recall having played Comanche in order to compare the two. The other game I spent innumerable hours in was F117A [1] - partially because -- again, my recollection -- one had to damn near real-time fly from the base to the target and then back, all the while in stealth mode, which usually meant going slow and terrain hugging
Around the time of F-117A I discovered Jetfighter II which felt a lot smoother handling wise, it was great to just fly around doing stunts to be honest. I spent a lot of time just doing carrier take-offs with an immediate 360 and back into landing.
Yes, I also played a ton of F117A. The terrible graphics were actually what let me run it and LHX, I had an anemic 386. I only got to play Comanche at my uncle's house. LHX actually looks exactly as I remember it. I remember those blocky polygons very fondly.
The voxel-based graphics and resulting frame rate were one of those distinct “wow” moments I had while gaming as a kid. Up there with playing Doom or Flight Simulator for the first time.
Today its graphics look so outdated, but back then it was amazing how you could fly through valleys to get to targets.
There were a few games like Comanche, X-Wing, Magic Carpet and Descent that felt like they really pushed the technology while trying to show how we could utilize 3d in a different way from the other titles of the time (which were usually all FPS games).
Yeah, that was an amazing helicopter, and it's really too bad it was cut, but as you say, it just didn't make economic sense any more when UAVs were invented. I guess it's something like the Japanese battleship Yamato, with the largest guns ever installed on a warship. It was amazing, but easily sunk by airplanes flown from aircraft carriers, so it was already obsolete when it was launched.
I worked with a former army officer / test pilot who was formerly involved with the Comanche project, when the news came out that it got cancelled. He was quite disappointed with that, and disagreed with what was said about it's survivability. He said if they can't see you, they can't shoot you.
> He said if they can't see you, they can't shoot you.
He should tell the F-117 pilot who got shot down with a few decades old anti-air system that, while keeping in mind that the F-117 flew higher and faster and quieter (relatively).
And still, it was supposed to not be vulnerable to enemy radar. And a multi decade old anti-air system, with the benefit of good intelligence and incredibly sloppy American operations, managed to shoot it down.
Why would anyone think a helicopter that would be flying much lower to the ground, would be invulnerable to e.g. man portable air defence systems?
Because low flying aircraft are harder to detect than high flying aircraft. More over when their rcs has been significantly reduced. It’s not “invulnerable” no more than any stealth aircraft, submarine, tank, or any other platform is. It’s significantly harder to defeat.
it wasn't vulnerable to enemy radar, serbian AA realized that it was the exact same pattern day in and day out, did some quick calculations, and fired at the spot it knew it would be at the next day.
aircraft carriers are even more vulnerable. battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes. When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.
> battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes.
The main reason really is range. A battleship can obliterate a target within about 25 km (yes, I know the guns can shoot longer than that, but practical accuracy against a moving target such as another ship..) whereas an aircraft carrier can launch strikes from hundreds of km away. Further, the carrier can launch reconnaissance aircraft (nowadays with radar obviously, but thinking of the WWII era when battleships were obsoleted) so it's aware of what's happening around it. So it can, say, stay away out of range of enemy battleships, as well as detect enemy targets at long range to launch strikes against. Yes, mistakes can still happen, see the battle of Samar. And yes, the battleship likely has floatplanes, but compared to a carrier, few of them, shorter range, and needs relatively calm seas to recover them.
All this being said, yes it took a lot of planes launched from a lot of carriers to sink the Yamato. But due to the range issue explained in the previous paragraph, the carriers could safely do this well out of range of the massive guns of the Yamato, whereas the Yamato could do nothing more than sit there impotently taking hit after hit until it finally succumbed.
> When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.
In principle, yes. But to do that the battleship needs to get awfully close to whatever it's going to shoot at, running the risk of hitting mines, or being targeted by shore-based anti-ship missiles etc. And if you already have the overwhelming superiority to get rid of all such enemy systems before bringing the battleship in, why not use those same assets to hit the same targets the battleship would hit in the first place?
You are mostly correct, except for one key point: the battleship was armored so that it could get close to the action and have somewhat reasonable chances of surviving. Most ships today could not take near the hits the Yamato did. (the Yamato shows why it is pointless to try)
Missile cruisers/destroyers are the battleship replacements.
But airplanes can also carry and launch missiles even better, with some warning and planning.
Battleships are useful for the naval equivalent of a bar brawl or a street gang fight. Aka up close, nasty, ‘punch them in the face until they can’t get up again’. They’re the equivalent of Mike Tyson in his prime for that.
Which even now would have some PR value, and no matter the time period will always be a spectacle.
But tactics have evolved more since then, and we just don’t have those type of fights that much anymore. And when we do, we just bring a ‘gun’ instead of relying on our ‘fists’.
Of course, anything is possible and maybe we’ll turn New Jersey into a spaceship to fight our space naval battles in a hundred years. Odds are low though.
While this is inevitable, I wrote a blog post once upon a time about the trend this generates and why I'm worried about it.
In principle, wars between armies are proxy wars between nations/governments/etc.
A long time ago (Sumeria maybe), soldiers started to fight soldiers, and civilians could get on with civilian life while fighting continued (farming, production, etc.). Now obviously that doesn't mean that no war has ever had civilian casualties, or that armies have never targeted civilian populations, but it made warfare a fairly symmetric endeavour. Rather than having your farmers hacking at each other with hoes until there are no farmers left, you can pit some of your strongest and best trained men against your enemy's strongest and best trained men, and accept the results of that to avoid total annihilation of your whole populace.
But that only works because both sides have skin in the game, and people are dying on both sides.
If we move to a model where a stronger power can fight a war remotely with no risk to real people, then the only way to take the war to the enemy will be to target civilians. Terrorism, asymmetrical warfare, etc. will be the only way to respond to drone strikes and the like.
I don't know what the answer is, but it worries me.
> If we move to a model where a stronger power can fight a war remotely with no risk to real people, then the only way to take the war to the enemy will be to target civilians. Terrorism, asymmetrical warfare, etc. will be the only way to respond to drone strikes and the like.
This is hardly new, it's been the reason for the prevalence of suicide bombings in the Israel/Hamas war for decades.
>Part of a broader pattern in military technology right now.
It's not a new discussion, this comes up every decade or so when some new technology takes expensive kit out but just as with the tank nothing is going anywhere.
Paraphrasing I can't remember who, "if you're getting out of the tank, what are you getting into?" Helicopters, tanks, mechanized and combined arms warfare and metal are still pretty much the only way you take territory, there's no alternative, even if drones start taking helicopters or expensive vehicles out it's the only thing that is mobile and packs a punch and protects your infantry.
the biggest tick against helicopters is that they are much more expensive, and poorly armored than a tank, and their speed advantage for delivery matters a lot for special ops type jobs, but is pretty irrelevant for army type jobs.
KA-52 helicopters were considered to be a one of the big obstacles that Ukraine faced during their 2023 counteroffensive. "Military briefing: Russian ‘Alligators’ menace Ukraine’s counteroffensive"[1]:
> Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think-tank, said Russian helicopters fitted with anti-tank guided missiles “were always going to be a much greater threat to Ukrainian forces during a counteroffensive than during periods when Ukraine was defending against Russian attacks”.
> “They can hover, spot for targets and fire anti-tank guided missiles from beyond the range of shoulder-fired Manpads or anti-aircraft fire,” Bronk said.
Yeah, attack helicopters means you have ATGMs with twice the range and very good optics for battlefield awareness. Sure manpads means it's difficult to use them over contested territory, but they are still very strong if you keep them on your side of the front.
Attack helis were never that important compared to tanks of mechanized infantry. On top of that, it really seems that a significant part of their role can be fulfilled by drones.
when UAF was ramping up the counter offensive wherever they made any gains into the minefields a couple of ka-52s showed up and shut that down. UAF had no answer to them as their ATGMs simply outrange any SHORAD that UAF has...
True, but I can easily see that the same role - short range airstrikes - could be played by drone teams in the future. They also have the capability to observe and strike targets over the treelines. And in top of that, they are cheaper, easier to scale and maintain, and do not require vulnerable airfields to operate.
Of course Russians will use their helis, they already built them, but nobody will probably seriously think about developing and building new helis in the future.
> All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now.
Manned systems still have advantages though: no matter how much EW there is, you still have a man in the loop.
But I expect the role of the human to be less and less mechanical, and more and more about bearing the responsibility. As such I expect manned systems to evolve into more like on mini command post supported by a squad of automated weapons. (Ideally you'd want the manned version to look exactly the same as the automated ones to prevent enemies from targeting it, like the IDF did with its fake tanks[1] a while ago).
Near-peer conflicts have more meaningful targets which favors these kinds of expensive weapons platforms.
A drone that can do meaningful damage to a factory 500+ miles from a front line is either an easy target or it starts to look a lot like a missile with all the associated costs from that.
I think it's more complex than that. The US made Switchblade drones which cost tens of thousands of dollars were outperformed with lightly modified FPVs with grenades, which came in under a thousand.
We don't know if they underperfomed so much as weren't cost effective. If the switchblade costing $10k results in a kill 80% of the time, while the $1k drone is 30% of the time, you just get 3 times as many $1k drones, average about the same kill rate, and save 70% to boot. Or spend the same amount and get about 3x the kill rate.
It is not just production cost, the average latency between target detection and target destruction has a large impact on battlefield dynamics. More precise weapons can destroy most of the capability of less precise weapons before they are ever used. Additionally, precision weapons typically have a much smaller logistical footprint, and logistics can make or break military campaigns.
Much of the US focus on precision terminal guidance is derived from this calculus in a straightforward way. It may be more expensive in a unit cost sense but significantly cheaper in terms of net expected effect on the battlefield. This "precision versus quantity" argument played out to greatly favor precision in Ukraine.
> This "precision versus quantity" argument played out to greatly favor precision in Ukraine.
Yes, but the defining attribute of the Ukraine war seems to be CHEAP precision - the ability of drones to respond and attack car-sized targets in real time is what has turned this war into a slog.
The American-made stuff is great, but I've seen multiple examples of Ukrainian missile crews reacting contemptuously to the idea that they could use a Javelin/NLAW to take out an older Soviet piece of equipment; that kind of task seems to be reserved for Soviet-era weapons or (preferably) drones.
OTOH the highly precise HIMARS played a crucial role many times. Regular artillery has to shoot dozens of shells before it hits the exact high-value target. This betrays the position of the cannon; if it's close enough it will be fired at. HIMARS is precise so it can pack up and leave before the projectiles even reach the target.
FPV drones are precise because they're remotely piloted by experienced pilots. This allows them to inflict large damage with small payloads applied at a critical point, Luke Skywalker-style.
HIMARS is highly effective exactly because it's cheap precision. An air force capable of executing the missions that HIMARS can would cost Ukraine many many billions of dollars. HIMARS clocks in at $5M per truck and $200k per rocket.
FPV-drones can also be precise post-mortem. You record the flight as command-inputs in sim from start location.
Then you deploy the drone from some carrying vehicle, land and loiter, listening for a trigger. Trigger comes, the drone flies only gets a connection for a lineup if any and flies through the "line up" trajectory.
Should work as long as the drone's inertial and visual navigation stay adequate. (I suppose that GPS and the like gets constantly jammed near high-value targets.)
HIMARS is precise, but my understanding maybe 25% are actually getting through to their targets these days. But still until recently Ukraine didn't have anything of comparable capability
The reason drones are kicking butt right now is because you get both precision and quantity. Advances in electronics, software, communication links, and sensor technology mean that you can make guidance systems as a hobbyist that would be a million dollar missile from a specialized defense contractor just 15 years ago.
You lose range, but urbanized warfare of the 21st century seems to be a very different battlefield calculus from the strategic bombing campaigns of WW2. The vast majority of engagements these days seem to be within easy drone range, probably because they can be produced in quantities that negate the "just destroy everything within 200 miles" strategy of WW2 carrier battle groups.
The fact that recent engagements have been within easy drone range is an accident of geography. The same situation won't necessarily obtain in the Western Pacific. The quantity of drones you can produce won't matter if the launching platform can't survive long enough to get within range of the target.
This gets complicated, because technology usually advances on multiple fronts at the same time. As others have mentioned, we've seen drones primarily used as an air-to-ground weapon in Ukraine because the airspace is not particularly contested. We have not yet seen them used in air-to-air combat.
There are multiple reasons to believe that drones' advantages over piloted aircraft are even greater than drones' advantages over tanks. Take the pilot away and the G-forces you can pull increase many-fold. Take the pilot away and you have no compunctions against sacrificing a drone for tactical advantage. Take the pilot away and you can field 10x or 100x as many aircraft, since pilot training is often the limiting factor in the growth of your airforce (see eg. Japanese WW2 experience from 1943 onwards, or the need for Top Gun in Vietnam). More aircraft can play airspace denial, since the presence of a bogey creates a kill zone in the area where they can bring their weapons to bear. Computer algorithms can play physics and geometry games where no matter where a piloted aircraft turns, there is always something waiting to shoot them down. Computers can run these simulations instantly, overwhelming the pilot's ability to react. The human becomes the weak link in the weapon system.
The equilibrium I see is drone designs with a range made to just out-range cheap weaponry like glide bombs and common anti-ship missiles, maybe 50-80 miles. For anything fancy (like the supersonic cruise missiles that the Russians have with 200-300 mile range), you want directed energy CIWS instead, but you need those anyway to defend against enemy drones. Then you pack these drones into shipping containers, and launch and retrieve them directly. A single container ship carries its own air force of roughly 10,000 drones, and makes the airspace around it out to ~100 miles completely inhospitable for foes. The convoy becomes its own aircraft carrier, just like the escort carriers of WW2, but the air wing follows the shipping containers and can be packed onto trucks or rail at its destination. Then you bring the convoy to where it needs to be, creating a no-go bubble around it at all times.
Yeah, although given the number of TEU shipped from China to the US, I would not count out a significant number of drones having been prepositioned in US territory.
> This "precision versus quantity" argument played out to greatly favor precision in Ukraine
With artillery that's certainly true. On the other hand, Ukraine moved from expensive Bayraktar drones in 2021 to primarily drones in the 1k-10k price range today. Cheaper weapon systems allow them to be deployed in more places. Getting 5000 drones for the price of 5 drones might be worse for logistics, but it also means some will always be where you need them, doing wonders for the latency between target detection and target destruction.
Those FPV drones (either of the bombing or suicide variant) seem to be precise enough - there's plenty of footage of them hitting moving vehicles in weak spots like engines/hatches, individual soldiers etc.
As for AI features when the comms are jammed, Russian lancet drones, which have some autonomous capability, seem to be running on Nvidia Jetson boards, and those things cost like $200.
It is a fair question, but I have seen plenty of footage where the first drone misses a weak spot. Sure, the explosion is intense, but the tank continues unabated. Then a second or third drone hits the weak spot for disablement.
I'm not just including precision, but ability to get through defenses - i.e. total battlefield effectiveness.
Precision in terms of "circular error probability" isn't the biggest issue now. Its the EW environment.
My point was if system A gets through defenses 30% of the time, but is 10x cheaper than system B which gets through 80% of the time. System A is generally the better choice, except for some very specific circumstances, very high value targets with limited strike opportunity.
It's one thing to make a speculative assessment, or a prediction. But the use of the implied past tense in reference to a situation that has many variables and which in any case is far from decided is definitely quite pretentious.
I don’t think anybody serious questions the outcome of the Ukraine war — as evidenced by the international realignment caused by NATOs defeat, increases talk about Ukraine relinquishing ground, etc.
What event do you believe could change the outcome at this point?
And since Ukraine was defeated, we can discuss why: their inability to match artillery exchanges for most of the war.
To clarify: Is this a hypothetical statement or is there a specific NATO defeat that you have in mind? As I understand, Russia has not directly attacked any NATO states since the state of the Ukraine war. (Leave aside the sabotage of Nord Stream natural gas pipelines.)
But that you responded with rhetoric rather than pointing out where I’m wrong suggests you don’t have an answer to what would change the outcome.
Not even his allies believe in the “Victory Plan” — and several started talking about calling Putin after reading it.
If you think I’m wrong, stop engaging in empty rhetoric and explain what you think will allow Ukraine to win… because nobody seems to know, not even Zelensky.
Sorry, but I can't engage you on this. You have to understand that your original statement, in both content and tone, simply precludes any follow-up or debate. And then when this ws pointed out, you doubled down on the same weird, time-traveling, debate-terminating formulation.
So okay, fine: HN is a big place, and there's plenty of other people you can debate on this particular point if you want. I don't think we'll convince each other of anything anyway, which is also perfectly fine.
Defeated enemies aren’t making regular incursions into the ‘victors’ land which the ‘victor’ can’t stop, or launching attacks agains the ‘victors’ capital.
Kursk was stopped after small gains and prior to any major captures — with Ukraine losing their best units. That loss has led to cities along the line of battle being captured, including the fortress city of Vuhledar.
There’s now increased talk of Ukraine giving up territory — which is their defeat.
Edit due to rate limit:
You’re citing areas Russia withdrew from during the Istanbul talks as “lost” while ignoring that Russia posses 18% of Ukraine and is advancing.
Russia isn’t losing “more and more control” on any front, they’re forcing Ukraine back — including driving Ukraine from places like Vuhledar they’ve held for the entire war until now.
To use your Canadian analogy:
It would be like if the US seized the 20% of Canada closest to the continental US and then proceeded to shell Canadian army to dysfunction from there — which would be seen as a sane and effective strategy.
Looks like Russia has lost everything but a tiny portion they gained, at immense cost - including the near total collapse of their economy.
And are going to be locked in trench warfare on land they don’t control, with uncertain supply lines, with no air superiority - going into winter.
And is losing more and more control of the little they have left.
This is Russia’s Afghanistan writ large, and will lead to the total collapse of the Russian gov’t (and society) soon.
It’s already nearly destroyed an entire generation of Russian men - in the middle of an already epic demographic collapse.
Don’t get me wrong, this has wrought terrible damage to Ukraine too. But with Russia’s economy (previously) and population being 10x larger, this whole debacle is a huge embarrassment to Russia. Even bigger than the collapse of the USSR.
It would be like if the US went to invade Canada, and couldn’t even hold Ottawa.
Edit to answer your edit: maybe if the 18% was the land near Alaska. And they’re at almost the same amount of land they had control of when this whole mess started. All the major economically productive areas of Ukraine are still under Ukraine’s control.
> including the near total collapse of their economy.
I am not here to shill for Russia, but this is certainly not true. The Russian economy has proven much more resilient than anyone expected since the start of coordinated global sanctions by the world's most developed economies. It is currently growing about 4% per year.
You're not, but given that the IMF is saying 2.6 percent (current), 3.2 percent (projected) -- how does one obtain 4 percent for "current" growth (other than from Russian government figures)?
Since they are ramping up to build switchblades in Ukraine [1], I would say they are a quiet success. They were just extremely overhyped before they got there.
The 600 is significantly better than the 300 (which was provided in higher numbers).
Odds are there will be local adjustments made - different, more robust radio link and such to replace the fucking shit one that originally came with the switchblade.
I think you make some excellent points here. Small nitpick: According to the Ukrainian gov't, they can currently produce half that amount: 150k per month. That is still an incredible number.
I do think this war must be making any sufficiently advanced military rethink their ground game to include a lot of cheap FPV drones with attached explosives.
Switchblade cost closer to 50k$, its payload was around 100 grams of explosive, and its range and success rate in the electronic warfare heavy environment of Ukraine are lower than a 300$ FPV that can carry 1.5kg of explosive.
Switchblade was designed for a different war entirely.
> If the switchblade costing $10k results in a kill 80% of the time, while the $1k drone is 30% of the time, you just get 3 times as many $1k drones, average about the same kill rate, and save 70% to boot.
Sanity check: 80% success is an 80% success rate; 3 shots at 30% success is a 66% rate, which is much, much worse.
You need 5 cheap 30% drones to beat an 80% success rate, still a major savings at the prices you give, but 70% more than 3 drones.
Obviously this is just a binomial distribution, but another thing to consider I suppose would be if all trials are performed sequentially or simultaneously. If performed sequentially, on the one hand, you have a non-zero chance of not needing to expend the subsequent trials; on the other hand, it seems reasonable to think there might be a degraded (or increased!) probability for each sequential trial. If conducted simultaneous, similarly, it seems reasonable to think that that the individual chance of success is higher due to saturation of one form or another, but you are also guaranteed to expend all resources.
Point is just that it seems a little silly to try to reductively do these calculations - seems meaningless to try to compare without more information…
> but another thing to consider I suppose would be if all trials are performed sequentially or simultaneously.
Yes! That definitely came up while I was thinking about the problem.
I concluded that, in cases where you desire to eliminate (1) a particular target (2) under time constraints, only simultaneous attempts make sense. (And that this combination of needs is common.)
If instead your goal is to cause random deaths, you can ignore the simultaneous/sequential distinction, treat every drone as having a different target, and just say that 3 30% drones will get 0.9 kills for every 0.8 kills from 1 80% drone.
Both 80% and 30% are imaginary numbers, nobody measured it, so all the math is pointless.
I've read that it takes 10 to 15 FPV drones to finish off a "turtle tank".
Another thing commonly left out of these napkin math scenarios is cyber security risk... it may make sense to cut down on human resources, but you better make sure your drone fleet won't be commandeered by an adversarial nation-state's script kiddies. Cheaper to make, but perhaps also cheaper to have them turn on you.
Considering we're looking at an adversarial nation state (famously full of script kiddies) which is absolutely hell-bent and motivated to tackle their drone problem, and not once has that state or its script kiddies commandeered a single drone - nevermind a fleet of them - (nor are the script kiddies even remotely in range?) I don't see this being a problem now or in the near future.
It isn't a problem until it is one, and the it can be a huge problem. I don't know anyone who was ever made to look foolish saying 'it is improbable, but let's prepare for it anyway' whereas plenty of graves are filled with people who said 'that will never happen'.
Sadly generals, or at least the high command, tend to fight the last war, and tend to be fairly conservative.
WW2 was a classic example. Every nation except the US still had bolt-action rifles as the standard infantry weapon, on the belief that giving every infantryman semi-auto was a waste of ammo/too expensive/too heavy on logistics. Also motorization was not appreciated until late in the war, even in the German army - which despite all the attention devoted to the panzer/panzergrenadier divisions, was maybe 20% motorized at its peak. Mostly their soldiers marched from place to place, or used rail.
There is kinda a reason for this, that there are counter examples were new tech wasn't all it was hyped to be. And until something is battle tested, its hard to say how it would perform. Like early in the Vietnam war, US infantrymen may have been better off with the old M1 garand, because early models of the M16 tended to jam in combat conditions.
> anyone who was ever made to look foolish saying[...]
These are common throwaway sayings people with no concept of resources and an overly active aversion to risk often use.
The reality of the situation is that nobody cares to invest in some insanely expensive and vulnerable platform to hijack drones, because 1. it will probably get taken out by a drone 2. it would cost orders of magnitude more than all of the drones and personnel it would take out.
Furthermore, nobody would care to truly protect against such a counter, because the drones cost absolutely nothing.
Saying "it's improbable but let's prepare anyway" isn't how the real world works. Look around you - the world is absolutely filled to the brim with problems, even ones quite probable, even ones inevitable, that nobody can or is willing to spare the resources to deal with. As a general rule, preparing for the improbable is a poor path to success, and worse still is preparing for the improbable, where the improbable event doesn't even impact you in any serious way.
Also, ofc you don't hear about those people. Nobody is reporting on the non-event or the people who prepared for the non-event. Pure selection bias.
You are telling me that the US has made plans for invading or defending against every scenario imaginable[1], but they wouldn't bother considering the 'our drones are being hijacked and used against us' scenario? Just because you are overly confident doesn't make caution an extreme position.
I wasn't telling you that. There is a huge difference in preparing on a meta level for national and international level events, and actually investing in countering specific tactical scenarios. The tactical scenario we are talking about is mid-flight hijack and use of sub $1k drones, by a state, and by civilian script kiddies. It's not a "what if china sits it's navy on a contested Philippine island".
Did you read that article? That drone was electronically taken out of the sky and rendered useless, it was not commandeered and used against the US.
Where did I claim nobody's ever taken out a drone with ewar? Plus this action presumably took an entire squadron with extremely powerful ewar apparatus - a complete waste of time on an 800e drone that will be replaced before the one you've dropped even hits the ground.
Even if they landed it (meaning it landed its self due to loss of control) that doesn't fit your criteria, and says absolutely nothing about the topic at hand - battlefield uno reversing mini drones.
I just wonder how much does professional image comes into play. I can't imagine US troops using drones which are basically a bunch of PCBs screwed together and mounted to a sheet of laser cut carbon fiber, even if those things are technically the most cost effective way to build a drone.
Switchblade 300 definitely underperformed and disappointed, many many reports from Ukraine frontline, they preferred using normal Mavic 3 drones instead.
Switchblade 600 is a bit better but still overpriced what civilian market can deliver at a fraction of a cost, in vast numbers, not blocked by various political negotiations etc.
Russian military doctrine favors collateral damage. I think part of the US's love of precision weapons comes from the fact that they media will go nuts if the US kills non-targets.
20 civilians dying in Iraq to a helicopter that thought their camera was a gun was a national embarrassment. For Russia, 100 civilians dying in a mass artillery bombardment is a normal workday.
Specifically, the US considers anyone who is male and "of fighting age" not a civilian - and the "male" part is often optional.
This does somehow still result in a lower ratio of dead civilians than when applying the same definitions to Russia or Israel. This shouldn't be seen as a way to excuse the behavior of the US but rather as a way to recontextualize the actions of the latter two, whether you support or oppose their military operations.
I don't think it helps anyone to separate what israel does from what USA does. Everything that israel does is authorized and aided by the USA. It'd all stop the very second the USA told them to stop.
Last week I've seen russian military coming from 'official' TG channels boasting how they dropped grenades on civilians, Donetsk IIRC. Literally civilians driving in their cars or walking on pedestrian crossing with shopping bags, having grenades dropped on them, killing many including women. Sarajevo tactics all over again, just not serbs anymore (although both societies share a lot in common).
Also during beginning of the war there were videos of russian soldiers setting up machine gun posts next to bigger roads and literally gunning every single unsuspecting civilian car that came along... not much better behavior than hamas attack last year. Bucha, civilian mass graves with people having hands tied behind their back with wire and headshot found on territories won back from them.
Shows how depraved that society is that this doesn't even cause any upheaval, instead is something to boast about back home and to whole world. Now do a simple projection for next decades.
I know China is #1 topic for US right now, but China views US rather as a competitor. Russia views whole west and US specifically as existential threat to actively fight against (and it did in asymetric subversion warfare for past 2 decades). Not whole russian population, they don't give a fuck whether whole world burns as long as they can drink vodka into desperate oblivion, but all their rulers and that's all that matters there. Now how to tackle and survive that due to all the resources required from that land I don't know but future in that regard looks bleak.
they use it to hearten the folks back home. Civillian deaths mostly make civillians want to support the war and so is not a good idea. In turn this is why the us doesn't
What the US public opinion is and what the US government does are two different things. Americans are hilariously self-delusional in that regard. Just compare the civilian death tolls between the first two years of the invasion of Iraq and the first two years of the invasion of Ukraine.
For the last twenty years in the Middle East alone, the number of civilian deaths in which the US is either directly or indirectly involved is easily in the millions
Unless you're counting a lot of definitions of "indirect involvement" (eg including things Israel does on its own and any proxy wars the Saudis start), you're going to have a hard time counting to 1 million civilians with any authoritative sources. Most of the civilian deaths in the US's "war on terror" were to IEDs and other devices set up to kill Americans.
People who create studies suggesting those wars killed 5 million people include a lot of ludicrous definitions of "killed" to get numbers that big.
When you topple a foreign government, destroy all the infrastructure for pointless "shock and awe" and then send the ethnic majority but recently oppressed armed forces home... you bear responsibility for the millions of extra deaths that follow when traumatic civil war rocks the nation. You are the exact example of the delusional American he means.
You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible. If you are going to blame every single death in a conflict, including indirect deaths (eg excess heart attacks) and deaths at the hands of the other party (IEDs laid by the other side), on the US, there's no reason to give you any more ammunition or make your argument seem rational.
> You are the exact kind of person to demonstrate why the US builds the best precision weapons in the world and doesn't kill civilians if at all possible.
We took out tons of infrastructure in Iraq during shock and awe. Utilities were on the target list. We were about to occupy it. That was incredibly stupid. The infrastructure itself was not collateral damage, it was targeted. We have no occupation plan, it was that stupid. The destruction resulted in millions of extra deaths due to the impoverishment and destruction of Iraqi society. Yes, we bear responsibility for all those deaths. You break it, you own it. That's war.
When you are the world police and you stop "doing wars everywhere," everywhere starts doing wars with you (usually through your weaker/looser allies). Hence Ukraine, Hong Kong, the Mexican cartels, Iran's proxy wars, and let's not forget 9/11.
In all cases, the US has demonstrated a level of weakness on the foreign stage, and terrible people have come to exploit that. Like it or not, those little wars in Iraq were the long arm of the Pax Americana, which is ending now, to the tune of the first land war in Europe in quite some time. And one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
This is what happens when you are a world-spanning empire. An empire, by the way, that Europe, India, China, and the rest of the civilized world has benefitted massively from in the form of free security and safe transport of goods. When there is no dominant empire, the world gets messy.
Ah yes, the "source?" argument. The classic cry of people who want to disagree but have nothing productive to add to the discussion.
I could point you to literally dozens of books on the Pax Americana and its decline (google is your friend) and America's de facto empire, as well as historical studies of the Pax Brittanica and the Pax Romana. Or Chinese histories that discuss the waves of peace and prosperity following the growth of major dynasties which end exactly the same way. I suspect you won't read any of them though, since nobody who asks for a source in an online discussion really wants a source (nobody ever asks for a source when they agree with you). They just want to claim that their counterpart is uninformed.
You want to engage in a debate involving cited sources? What's good for the goose is good for the gander - write a response with a citation or two that rebuts a key point. Otherwise, asking for sources in online arguments is borderline trolling.
Look. You made the claim; you have the burden of proof. What can be claimed without evidence can be disbelieved without evidence.
But also, on an online forum, a post is written once, but read many times. When you say "look it up yourself", that doesn't tell one person to look it up, it tells 10 or 100. That's inefficient - the looking up is done multiple times rather than once.
And, I can google for why the earth is flat and find plenty of resources. The fact that I can find stuff on google that supports your position doesn't say much.
So, yeah. Maybe you could supply some resources that you think are solid, and why you think they are?
The problem with narrativized framings like "Pax Americana" is that they only work if you focus on internal peace. The "American" century began with World War 2 (arguably) and was defined by continuous proxy wars and assassinations. The US also didn't stand unchallenged at least until the decline of the Soviet Union (remember: the commies even won the "Space Race" before the goalposts moved to putting a man on the moon) but arguably that was also a crucial step in the rise of China as a direct challenger.
In the case of Pax Americana the framing is also dubious as it wasn't American dominance that kept the peace in Europe (on this side of the iron curtain) but arguably more the shared market and the necessity of cooperation to recover from the wounds of two world wars while facing the threat of annihilation in the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.
Even in Europe this period was heavily defined by oppressive policing in both East and West Germany (culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in the East and the student protests and RAF terrorist attacks in the West), civil war in Northern Ireland (with terrorist attacks reaching deep into England at times), separatist movements in the Basque region, the excruciatingly slow death of fascism in Spain and Portugal, the violent suppression of striking miners in the UK, and the birth pains of neoliberalism and austerity.
The "pax" in these titles always only applies in a very narrow sense to the affluent in its imperial core, i.e. the American upper middle class of the 1950s or the British bourgeoisie of the colonial era. Even the Pax Romana is not a coherent description of life in the Roman Empire for the time frame it is often applied to and was defined by expansion (i.e. military conquest) not an absence of war.
If anything, the "prosperity" these terms often imply always only existed because of a hierarchical system of exploitation and the "peace" refers to the absence of serious challengers to disrupt this exploitation. The prosperity in Britain during the Pax Britannica specifically only existed due to the violent oppression of British colonies and the absence of powerful challengers to claim those colonies instead. Following the war economies of WW2, the 20th century saw a massive redistribution of wealth and public infrastructure to the financial elites, especially under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, while colonialism largely evolved from the crude brutal oppression of e.g. the British Raj to loans and privatization, aka "soft power" (promoting the production of worthless cash crops for international trade at low margins instead of vital food crops, making the economy dependent on imports to keep the local population fed, or exporting raw resources rather than building up local infrastructure to refine those resources into goods that can be sold at a higher price and thus having to import the finished goods at exorbitant prices).
So, yes, for you or I living in the imperial core - whether literally in the US or by extension in Europe - the "decline" and the rise of challengers is worrisome and can only be negative. But ultimately, especially to those living outside that core, the challengers are no worse or better than the status quo.
Yes, I agree with you that the "peace" mostly applies to those in the fold, and the only people who enjoyed a real, enduring peace for the whole time are the middle and upper classes of the very core of the empire. Personally, I would suggest that much of NATO (but not all of it at all times) has had relative peace during this time. The borders of empires have always had belligerents that need "putting down" from the perspective of the empire, which means small proxy wars. However, the "peace" usually refers to wars between nation-states.
Much of Europe's economic policy benefits from the huge subisdy that the US covers them with its guns - a drain of 6-10% of GDP may otherwise apply to NATO countries that find themselves up against Putin (and in a hypothetical world - maybe against each other). The Marshall Plan is also a relatively visible indication of how intertwined Europe's post-WWII growth was done with America's involvement, and when you look at US foreign aid ("imperial economic stimulus"), a lot of it today goes to poorer European nations. I agree with you that the EU (post-iron-curtain project) has been, as you suggest, a solely European initiative driven more by European solidarity than US guns. However, it exists in the world of the petrodollar (not any more) and with the quiet reassurance that many of the leading nations in the EU are NATO members. As we have seen with Ukraine, sometimes that NATO membership matters.
Empires are always a lot looser than we think - the Roman empire was a great example of this, where the nation-state of Rome (in the modern idea) didn't extend beyond the Alps until the Caracalla years, where Roman citizenship was truly extended to the provinces (note: after the end of the pax Romana). Egypt and the levant were basically completely autonomous, much like the EU is today.
What you call "policing" they call "exploiting". Every single country that has dared to vote too left wing has had CIA or USA army having something to say about it.
This happened in europe, south america, and middle east.
> I suspect you won't read any of them though
That's very unacademic of you to suspect I won't read "the books", which you didn't even bother to list.
It’s not that collateral damage is irrelevant. It’s that the calculation as to whether collateral damage is “worth it” in the context of the specific goal/target is usually relative and calculated unemotionally. Some may say inhumanly.
Of course it's also worth pointing out that this question hinges on the perceived cost of collateral damage.
For countries like the US which at least ostensibly claim to care about human life indiscriminately and to fight for "liberty and peace" and all that, there is a considerable cost to collateral damage, although of course that also depends on who the victims are and the cost can be higher for a Democrat leader than a Republican.
Putin's Russia infamously responded to a hostage crisis in Moscow by killing not only all hostage takers but also more than three times as many hostages and injuring most of the survivors. That alone should make it easy to extrapolate what the cost of collateral damage in Ukraine might be in Russia's calculations. Israel similarly seems to use a much lower cost than the US although in Palestine this is also shaped by the perception that anyone who isn't a militant or supports the militant is eventually going to turn out that way anyway (e.g. the child who died would have grown up to become a threat anyway).
Collateral damage is much less relevant in symmetric conflicts. Nobody is using either a Switchblade or an FPV in the middle of civilian areas in Ukraine right now.
Russia is using FPVs to kill civilians on their bicycles or buying fruit, and posting the videos on telegram to laugh about it. This happens every day, it is not a few isolated incidents. It is not boredom, but a chosen tactic.
Here's a great piece[0] about these Russian "human safari" tactics in Kherson, written by what seems to be the only Western journalist living in that city.
I hadn't heard of that before, but it really isn't a counter argument to what I'm saying: when you're targeting civilians themselves, you don't have “collateral damage”.
"Look at how much pain we can inflict, you want to be friends with us, that's the only logical conclusion".
That seems to be the explicit strategy here, and I've come to believe that they genuinely think that this is how it should be, that there can't be a different world. Perhaps some linguistic quirk that makes the difference between friendship (that's not based on a power gradient) and allegiance (unite with the strongest, even when they're monsters, in particular when they're monsters) different to express and think about, perhaps it's a long term effect of socialist ideology having co-opted all concepts of friendship based on equality for a system that never was. But the pattern seems to go all the way through society, from the infamous prison hierarchies to imbalanced spousal relationships to the KGB state to the relationship between state power and its barons (who are commonly called oligarchs, but they are the exact opposite, powerless pawns on the political floor that are allowed to hold a fief until they aren't)
While the regular Switchblade is essentially a glorified flying granade, many FPVs use RPG7 warhwads and are regularly used to take out tanks (possibly using multiple hits, but still).
Also there is a trend recently to see more and more AA FPVs taking down Russian recon drones, some flying up to 3 km high! This already had an interesting side effects of many such drones being covered by expletives or even fake Ukrainian markings - did not really help.
Switchblade 600’s have the same warhead as the Javelin. With 8.5kg of explosives, it’s an entirely different category of weapon than the drones you’re thinking of which had closer to 200g of explosives.
Can I ask a stupid question about shaped charges? I assume they only work on a very fast projectile, like a tank shell. Would they work from a (relatively) slow drone?
Lightly modified FPVs with grenades are a major concern for soldiers, but so are mortars and artillery shells etc. There’s a lot of low cost long range weapons vs infantry, but a drone with a grenade isn’t really effective vs tanks etc. A fleet of cheap drones just don’t do anything if bomber aircraft can simply fly higher than they can reach.
Leave the realm of mass production and you can build drones that would be, but they quickly start looking like existing systems because militaries have been working with drones since WWII.
> but a drone with a grenade isn’t really effective vs tanks
You may be thinking of AP grenades, but broadly speaking this isn't true. UA has been dropping RKG-3 anti-tank grenades since early in the invasion. Any drone with a 3 pound lift capacity can knock out armor.
Can a RKG-3 in the right situation knock out some armor, definitely. But they don’t seem to be that effective vs amor designed to deal with shaped charges such as you’d see with a peer adversary.
Those shaped charges weren’t envisioned coming from directly above, especially precisely dropped on the engine or on hatches, hence the drones are hitting spots with little to no armour compared to the front and sides.
The Bofors RBS 56 BILL (1988), FGM-148 Javelin and similar missile systems exploited weak top armor long enough ago to result in changes to modern tank designs.
The KF51 Panther revealed 2022 should represent the current state of the art. comprising a hard-kill element of extending the coverage of the ADS to the roof of the vehicle for protection against ATGMs and unguided anti-tank rockets launched from higher elevations, as well as a soft-kill element for protection against threats such as loitering munitions.[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_KF51
Obviously getting 100% accurate information on current tank armor isn’t realistic but at minimum these drones aren’t breaking new ground.
Currently most air-defense systems heavily depend on rockets, so you can just send more of those cheap easy targets than the enemy air defense has loaded rockets.
Of course everyone sees this happening in Russia right now and is adapting their next generation, if they weren't already doing so. But that will only shift the sweet-spot for saturation attacks, not eliminating them
The Israel's "Iron Dome" is supposed to include lasers, and they did use lasers to shoot down incoming rockets. In a stationary setting, like a factory or a bridge, lasers can be hard to overload, with their fast targeting, straight-line shooting, and the cost of a shot measured in single dollars. Small / cheap / slow drones with 1-2 kg payload would be an easy target.
Tanks / APCs / IMVs / other armored devices that go close to the front line seem like having much more of an existential crisis.
The Iron Dome was easily overwhelmed with the ~200 ballistic rockets fired by Iran recently, many of which hit the military bases they were targeting. So it I think the point stands.
Iron Dome is for rockets like the one Hamas fires, not for short range and intermediate range ballistic missiles like what Iran fired. Those are very different things and have different requirements. You may as well be talking about body armor ineffectiveness against a tank shell.
Tanks and the other things you list do much better when used by well trained troops in ways that the trainers tell you to. russia isn't doing that so they look bad but that is russia not the concept
You're talking about a year ago. Today, Russia has the largest and most experienced infantry on the planet.
Ukraine tried NATO tactics in last year's offensive and got slaughtered. If they'd tried to bunch up even closer (as some NATO generals were pushing for), the losses would have been far worse inside of those kill boxes. It's not training. Tanks are trivial for spotter drones to find at which point they can die to stuff like drones dropping RPG shells onto the weak upper armor (even the most modern Abrams tanks can be penetrated easily) or even just calling in an artillery strike. The best case for either of these attacks is very often a mission kill and the worst case is a complete loss.
Tanks made to fight other tanks are a dead end. The future is pure infantry support. You want something with more armor than a Bradley so it can't be taken out without specialized weapons and with enough firepower to be a must-answer threat, so a bigger cannon than the one on the Bradley is needed. Rifled barrels should probably make an appearance again because they offer better accuracy and HESH rounds are great for infantry support and fortification busting. It also needs to haul troops because you can't afford an extra vehicle that can't hold troops. Merkava shows a path in that direction.
Russia has some evperienced infantry but they have and are using a lot of untrain troops. Even their well train infantry is often still being use wrong for the training. Every military commentator who has credentials to believe they know something [as opposed to say me who doesn't] notes how poorly trained most russians are. This is not soviet war doctine which russia knows and worries nato, it is something new and not expected.
NATO tactics have never been used as those start with air power which ukraine doesn't have. NATO hasn't always given good advice but this isn't the way they would fight.
ukrane is using tanks as they are made to fight. That isn't fight other tanks if there is any other option. tanks in previous world wars were fighting tanks but not today. Russia is sometimes using tanks like that and there they do well.
The only military commentators saying Russian troops are untrained are pretty ignorant and biased. Russia certainly sent untrained troops in the early part of the war, but most of them were by mistake and got recalled quickly. Russia recognized the need to train their troops (they only sent 100k troops and planned on an early peace that Boris Johnson scuttled).
To buy training time, they hired Wagner. Wagner needed bodies, so they recruited untrained guys from prison to die for them (though some small percentage survived and are presumably still working for Wagner). After 6 months of this, the Russian training pipeline started pushing out troops at a steady pace and has been ever since.
This is in stark contrast to Ukraine where you get several videos every week from someone who was kidnapped off the streets and sent to die in the trenches 24-48 hours later. A couple guys on my dev team haven't left their homes in months (female family getting them stuff) because they are so afraid of getting shanghaied.
As to "used wrong for the training", everyone is training/preparing for the last war. Nobody is sure how to train for this war as the only part that has a historical analog is trench storming, but that was over 100 years ago and the tactics have changed.
Did ANYONE expect calvary to reappear? I don't think so, but Russian troops are dumping money into buying small motorcycles and dirt bikes so they can mount up and charge the enemy trenches.
The real issue for me is that Russia is working out how to fight the new style of war while we in the US are not. Russia is going to walk away from this war with a massive 1M+ army of seasoned veterans while we can barely muster around 70k of active infantry most of whom aren't veterans and NONE with combat experience in the new way of war.
This is in stark contrast to Ukraine where you get several videos every week from someone who was kidnapped off the streets and sent to die in the trenches 24-48 hours later.
You mean "sent to training". It definitely seems strange to suggest that Russia has a smooth, efficient "training pipeline", while Ukrainians are brutally sent "to die in the trenches". As if their onboarding process is in any way different, or newly trained Russian soldiers aren't also being sent to die in trenches.
We all know what war entails, so there's no need for weird, emotionally manipulative language like this.
Russia is still sending about 1000 troops to the front lines every day with a week or two of training. I guess that isn't completely untrained, but it is the next thing to and the death totals show that lack.
Russian troops are definitely poorly prepared. Likely Saddam's troops were in a better shape in 1991, when the same tanks clashed in Kuwait: Abramses and Chieftains vs T-72s and T-80s. Then the Western tanks showed an overwhelming advantage. Now about a quarter of Abrams tanks in Ukraine were rendered inoperable, some of them plainly destroyed. Tanks did become more vulnerable to anti-tank weapons.
In fairness, the Abrams in the Ukraine are ancient export-version M1A1s. The current US standard is A2v4. Other than basic shape, the technology is completely different and several decades apart, the armor bears almost no relation. A lot of the old export Abrams had armor similar to the Israeli Merkava tanks, it didn’t have a lot of similarity to what the US used.
Something that gets lost in these discussions is that the US does continuous “Ship of Theseus” upgrades to their systems and they mostly don’t export the state-of-the-art. Abrams armor in US systems is regularly completely replaced with new tech but the details are classified and not exported.
That only works in areas like Europe and the Middle East where targets are relatively close. For drones to be relevant in the Pacific fight they'll have to be much larger, faster, and smarter; and thus more expensive.
That’s not the case. It happens, for sure. I know some hair raising army jokes, but plenty of military people recognise their opponents as people just the same.
I live in the US. A near-peer conflict involves a nuclear exchange. The world will change in ways forever that none of us can ever foresee at that point.
Respectfully, I think you're misunderstanding the term. The term is meant to represent the level of resources and weapons each combatant is bringing to the theater of conflict.
It does not mean that the two sides are necessarily using the most destructive possible weapons in their arsenals. A hypothetical US/China armed conflict over Taiwan (god forbid) would be "near-peer" even if neither side goes nuclear.
"Near-peer" is meant to distinguish that sort of conflict from, let's say, US vs. Taliban in Afghanistan where the two sides had vastly different levels of technology and capability.
Or maybe you're making the point that two nuclear states would be hard-pressed to fight an open war that did not devolve into a nuclear exchange. Which is a very valid concern. If that's your point, I apologize.
Given that neither side has directly attacked the other yet? Almost all of them.
Using nuclear weapons against an opponent who has enough nuclear weapons to retaliate is a "flip over the chess board and stomp on the pieces" move. Presently the US isn't even playing against Russia, at best it's sitting behind Russia's opponent and whispering chess moves into their ear.
There's also gradations of nuclear exchange, including a limited exchange (i.e. not against cities) that doesn't necessarily escalate to a strategic exchange. While obviously extremely dangerous and unpredictable, some think you can skirt that line successfully in a war.
This is the first time that I have seen this terminology. I tried to Google for it, but I cannot find any information about this idea. Are there any war college studies (US/Europe) that you can share?
Controversially, I don't think generals from either the US, nor Russia, would be willing to "pull the trigger" and launch a nuclear attack. Yes, I really think there would be a constitutional crisis where senior ministers and military leaders might stage an "instant" coup to prevent a nuclear attack.
The old ‘Russia will not use nukes because they have not used nukes’ routine so people can feel safer about poking the bear. There is always a first time and I’m very thankful that it hasn’t happed yet.
To me a near peer implies that either side has a good chance of losing the war. It’s my opinion that Russia has not yet been at a real risk of losing this war and thus has not yet had a need to use nuclear weapons. I’m aware that the NAFO line is that Ukraine still has this in the bag - but I still don’t see a Ukrainian victory as a likely.
I assume this is why the gp post suggested ‘near peer’ implies nukes.
Both the US and the USSR lost major wars during the Cold War without resorting to nuking their opponent when they felt they were "at a real risk of losing a war". In Vietnam and Korea, the Soviet involvement was considerably more than the current Western involvement in countering the Ukraine invasion. Soviet pilots on Soviet planes killed Americans in American planes. Soviet operators of Soviet-made SAM sites shut down American planes as well.
The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.
> The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.
Note that there have been numerous documented cases of near nuclear launches, especially in the 60s and 70s, it is by no means a bluff or an idle risk.
It is certainly a bluff. Accidents or misunderstandings aside, the only time the US chose to press the issue as it were was when it faced a serious threat to having its nuclear deterrent rendered completely ineffective (Cuban missile crisis). No one's launched nukes because of non-nuclear events in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Cuba, and no one will seriously contemplate it over losing pieces of eastern Ukraine or Crimea. Even taking the war into Russia proper won't do the trick, murder-suicide is only on the table when the threat is existential.
The bluff does, however, work very well in slowing down and dissuading Western help to Ukraine by cultivating the "don't do X else nukes tomorrow" memes and propaganda talking points. Very effective foreign policy tool for a nuclear-armed fascist dictatorship, other will certainly take note for future invasions.
I mostly agree, but it does assume rational
actors in charge. If the goal of conflict is to cement the position of a dictatorial elite, it’s not clear to me that ‘smaller scale’ nuclear exchanges are ruled out, especially if leaders are isolated, paranoid etc.
Ever since the US made crystal clear that a nuclear strike against Ukraine will mean the US annihilating all Russian forces in Ukraine by conventional means, such small scale nuclear exchange is in fact ruled out. This will in effect invite Russia to simply swallow such a devastating blow, or else end it all. Russia is in fact ruled by rational actors, so it rationally backed off. Thus in effect proving its rationality and the emptiness of its "but what if we're insane" bluff. They're not insane.
Slightly more serious. There have been times where we’ve gotten close during the Cold War. You can’t trust people to not use nukes on account of it being suicidal. People can be irrational like that. And/or chains of command can be irrational.
Funny thing about deterrence conversations in the west is that it’s so often characterized as a one way street. That the west can be deterred limitlessly and that others like Russia are impervious to deterrence. As if Putin were some fearless automaton with complete confidence. Because if anything spells confidence it’s having 4 out of 5 of your latest in service ICBM tests fail, including the most recent. Just how confident is Putin, having personally fostered such an endemically corrupt society, in his recently manufactured pits? Russia’s pursuit of a nuclear powered drone that would attempt to be a weapon of mass destruction by virtue of creating an irradiated tsunami reveals an intense fear of the credibility of their current deterrence.
That's a caricature. These countries haven't been colonies for decades, and Russia's efforts to gain influence in these places isn't "colonial" either.
It's something else - a new game with different rules. You can decry/condemn it this influence-jockeying all want, but if you can't get past 19th/20th century idioms and imagery about how the world operates, you'll never get anywhere in your analysis.
No, they're called "countries" actually. I highly doubt you'd get very far with this "territory" label if you were to bring it up in a discussion with anyone actually from these places.
Wait you're unaware that france has territories???? Please do some reading before doing the lecturing, it might be more pleasant for everyone involved.
I guess you're also completely unaware of the shenanigans they pull to avoid giving independence.
Ukraine was not considered to be a near peer to Russia before the war. It seems likely that they thought they’d have a quick win. Possibly, whatever it is they are after, it isn’t worth the pariah status using nuclear weapons would produce. (Or maybe they still think they can get it done conventionally).
America lost the Vietnam war. Do you think Vietnam is America's near peer?
Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
That's their claimed perspective. Unfortunately Russia's current regime tends to lie a lot, and there's no reason to take anything it says at face value. "Indiscriminate shelling of the Donbas (by Ukrainian forces)" is one of its many talking points that lots of people like to repeat, but which no one seems to be able to substantiate. Meanwhile reports of shelling by Russian forces are quite ample.
In any case: No, that's not why they went into the Donbas, or why they're trying to hold onto it.
> America lost the Vietnam war. Do you think Vietnam is America's near peer?
I was responding to somebody who said Ukraine was Russian’s near-peer. I didn’t say they should be considered peers now, just that they certainly weren’t when the choice was made to go to war.
The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
> Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
> They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, and has been conducting joint military excercises with Ukraine ever since, the last one happening ~1 year before the Russian war of aggression started. The current huge NATO support for Ukraine also proves the military closeness - to the point that many of the major victories NATO weaponry firing NATO rockets with NATO targeting details to targets identified by NATO intelligence, only with Ukrainian soldiers pushing the trigger.
Not to justify Russia's clear war of aggression in any way, just explaining that Ukraine absolutely was, and likely still is, moving towards NATO membership.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit,
That's the complete opposite of what happened. The key outcome of the Bucharest summit is that Ukraine and Georgia were explicitly denied Membership Action Plans, which would have been the crucial step needed to move their application forward. Instead they got kicked downstairs to "aspirational" status, which they both complained loudly and bitterly about. This was very, very big news at the time.
So no, Ukraine was not "absolutely moving toward membership" as of that date. They might be moving in a different direction now, but if so that's a result of the invasion, not the 2008 summit.
> I didn’t say they should be considered peers now
You implied it.
> The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had. Neither is Russia now.
Vietnam war was fought on the other side of the planet, an ocean away. Ukrainian war is fought on the border of Russia and has resulted in Russian territory being occupied by a foreign power for the first time since WW2. These are very different things.
It seems like they are fairly close to their non-nuclear limits though. I guess they could fuel air bomb Kiev but that would likely change the calculus re nato involvement so is not obviously an aid to their cause.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had
It wasn't sending every last teenager and pensioner to the front, like in the final defense of Berlin. But the simple fact is, it was throwing everything it reasonably could have at its optional colonial project, short of causing major instability for itself on the domestic front, or endangering its real (as opposed to imagined) security needs.
Until it was defeated in the way all the Western colonial powers were -- by simply being outlasted by the people that it had a delusional "need" to perpetually occupy.
Worth noting that Ukraine had nuclear weapons and negotiated them away in exchange for a promise that Russia would not use nuclear weapons against them.
The Bucharest memorandum contained the promises that:
- None of the countries (US, UK, and Russia) would threaten Ukraine’s territory
- If nuclear weapons were used against them, or they were threatened by nuclear weapons, the other signatories would “Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance”
Among other promises. So it seems like they’ve already had their promises violated.
China and France didn't formally sign the Budapest Memorandum. They made separate statements generally in support but aren't obligated to take any real action.
Worth also noting that the nuclear weapons that Ukraine had were useless. All modern (post-1960s) nukes except the UK's are equipped with PALs [1]. Without the launch codes, they are just very expensive hunks of lithium deuteride. The launch codes for Ukraine's nukes remained with the KGB/FSB in Moscow throughout the breakup of the Soviet Union. They had essentially zero negotiating leverage, and as a result got essentially zero out of the negotiation.
Without the launch codes they still had highly enriched weapons grade nuclear material. That’s the tough part. Making it go bang we figured out in the 1940s.
We also saw with DVD encryption that physical access to the device makes it tough to fully protect. Nuclear codes are protected significantly by “no one gets to tinker with the device without rapid lead poisoning”.
Enriching uranium is within the capability of a nation-state the size of Ukraine. If Iran and North Korea can do it, Ukraine certainly can. Hell, even today, in the midst of a war, they have 8 operational reactors at 3 power plants, plus 2 under construction, one damaged and recently repaired, 6 at the Zaporizhzhia power plant in contested territory, and 4 in the decommissioned Chernobyl plant.
Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead. (I suspect that the PAL is not actually a separate device that can be separated from the warhead, but a series of design choices for how the warhead is constructed that make it unable to fire without the input of a cryptographic code. But then, details on this are very highly classified for obvious reasons, so we'll never know for sure.)
The real reason they didn't and don't do this is because they don't want to end up an international pariah state like Iran and North Korea. It's very clear that the U.S. has a vested interest in nuclear non-proliferation; they were the ones who gave the PALs to all our adversaries in the first place, because in the game-theoretic calculus of MAD, a small number of enemies that you can bargain and reason with is better than a large number of nuclear states even if many of those states are on your side. We would not have supported Ukraine if they attempted to retain the nukes in the 1990s, and we wouldn't support them developing nukes now.
> Enriching uranium is within the capability of a nation-state the size of Ukraine.
Sure. But standing up a program makes you an international pariah. “We’re keeping this” would have had a bit less uproar.
> Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warhead.
People say this sort of thing, but it comes out that the US arsenal was set to 00000000 in fear that they couldn’t be used. I have… severe doubts on the uncrackable nature of Soviet nuclear cryptography.
The US invaded Iraq, because of the phantom prospect of a nuclear proliferation. A state which was just created and gave up Crimea without a shot fired in 2014 was not about to fight to keep nukes which were not theirs in the 90’s. With the combined forces of the West and Russia breathing down their necks there was zero chance that they would be able to keep them.
No country in the world is free to develop nukes, for any reason. Some still do, of course, but it is expressly forbidden by international laws and agreements.
Кожний Учасник цього Договору в порядку здійснення свого
державного суверенітету має право вийти з Договору, якщо він
вирішить, що пов'язані зі змістом цього Договору виняткові
обставини поставили під загрозу найвищі інтереси його країни. Про
такий вихід він повідомляє за три місяці всіх Учасників Договору і
Раду Безпеки Організації Об'єднаних Націй. В такому повідомленні
має міститися заява про виняткові обставини, які він розглядає як
такі, що поставили під загрозу його найвищі інтереси.
Загроза силою чи її використання проти територіальної
цілісності та недоторканності кордонів чи політичної незалежності
України з боку будь-якої ядерної держави, так само, як і
застосування економічного тиску, спрямованого на те, щоб підкорити
своїм власним інтересам здійснення Україною прав, притаманних її
суверенітету, розглядатимуться Україною як виняткові обставини, що
поставили під загрозу її найвищі інтереси.
Цей Закон набирає чинності після надання Україні ядерними
державами гарантій безпеки, оформлених шляхом підписання
відповідного міжнародно-правового документа.
Machine translation (Gemma2):
Each Participant of this Treaty, in the exercise of its state sovereignty, has the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it determines that exceptional circumstances related to the content of this Treaty have threatened the supreme interests of its country. Such withdrawal shall be notified to all Participants of the Treaty and the Security Council of the United Nations three months in advance. The notification shall contain a statement on the exceptional circumstances which it considers to threaten its supreme interests.
Threat of force or its use against the territorial integrity and inviolability of borders or political independence of Ukraine by any nuclear state, as well as the application of economic pressure aimed at subjugating the exercise by Ukraine of rights inherent in its sovereignty to its own interests, shall be considered by Ukraine as exceptional circumstances that threaten its supreme interests.
This Act shall enter into force after Ukraine has received security assurances from nuclear states, formalized through the signing of a relevant international legal document.
> Such withdrawal shall only take effect 12 months after the date of the receipt of the notification of withdrawal by the Depositary. If, however, on the expiry of that 12-month period, the withdrawing State Party is a party to an armed conflict, the State Party shall continue to be bound by the obligations of this Treaty and of any additional protocols until it is no longer party to an armed conflict.
As with any treaty, it can be broken/withdrawn from.
The treaty does not establish a right/recourse to a nuclear weapons program to NPT members in Ukraine's scenario. Ukraine just, when agreeing to it, said they'd leave if they had to. They would be non-compliant with the treaty, as North Korea was/is. They would be similarly sanctioned for it.
The Budapest Memorandom was a separate agreement, predicated on acceptance of the NPT. Similarly, nothing in it says "you can have a nuclear weapons program in scenario x".
If Ukraine started a nuclear weapons program, they would be in violation of the NPT treaty. Sanctions and loss of Western support would be virtually guaranteed.
It's not so simple, because Ukraine will join NPT when we will have security assurances from nuclear countries. It found recently, that security assurances, given to Ukraine, either a) broken, b) fake, so Ukraine may claim that the essential step is not completed yet.
> Despite the Russian claims that the missile is on 'combat alert', since its 2022 flight test, it has experienced four failed tests, the most recent on 21 September 2024
We have the short opportunity window, when Satana stopped to work and Sarmat is not working yet.
I think it'd be a pretty big mistake to interpret "it needs servicing every ten years" as "it stops working immediately after that", and similarly a mistake to think the Russians can't accomplish at least some of that maintenance themselves. One can run a car without oil changes for quite a while before the problems add up.
Even one nuke is a big threat for a non-nuclear country, but Russia is not the only one with nukes, so number of well maintained nukes in service is important, if RF want to win a war with nukes. It will be pretty dumb for RF to strike FIRST with expired nukes.
Because Japan had exactly zero nukes to send back at the US.
Russia has 2000. What percentage of them are you willing to gamble are working? Are 10% of them working? That's 200 US cities.
So, no. We are absolutely not going to follow your logic. There is too much chance that they have enough nukes working to make us infinitely regret a nuclear exchange.
Right, but when is the last time they detonated one? What is the current status of their stockpile and the infrastructure required to launch it and strike a target thousands of miles away?
Nuclear missiles have a lot of stuff that degrades over time. The plutonium. The conventional chemical explosives. The electronics. Were their nukes even designed to be serviced 25, 50 years in the future?
Russia went through quite a bit of economic difficulty in the waning years of communism and in the years after communism. The state of their other big expensive military toys (their navy, etc) and even their ability to equip their infantry on a personal level seems to be pretty far from ideal.
I'm not telling you that Russia doesn't have functional nukes, and it's certainly not a bluff that other nations can afford to call, but I think it's a very legitimate question.
russia is completely corrupt. Nuke upkeep is expensive and is an obvious area for corruption (you will only know at the end of the world). There is zero reason that more than a handful has actually been maintained.
Not to mention that their recent launch was a bit - eh.
The Soviet Union was evil, but it was somewhat competent. The russian regime is not.
I've never heard any expert in nuclear weapons suggest that Russian nukes don't work, especially the ones that have been modernized since the fall of the SU, which is all the ones attached to ICBMs and SLBMs. Until a few years ago, US nuke experts regularly inspected Russian nukes and Russian nuke delivery systems. If Russian nukes don't work, it seems likely that the inspectors would have been able to tell, e.g., through gamma-ray spectrography.
The ICBMs and SLBMs to "deliver" the nukes are more expensive and harder to develop them the nukes themselves, and Russia routinely tests those.
"harder to develop": London, not having had as much money to spend on nukes as the US and USSR had, gets its SLBMs (along with the launch tubes) from the US (whereas they make their own nukes and SLBM-carrying subs) and a few minutes of searching finds no signs of them ever developing an ICBM. (In fact, they might never have had ICBMs: they certainly don't now.)
OTOH current day Russia doesn't have the yoke of communism around their neck. Is the level of corruption worse than the economic inefficiency of communism? I don't know, possibly?
As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
This assumes that any party to a conflict chooses to use their nuclear arsenal. In WW2, both sides had chemical weapons but chose not to use them due to concerns of reciprocal strikes coupled with a perceived limited utility.
We could be entering a world where there is always a military alternative to nuclear weapons, leaving nukes in a state where their only utility is as a deterrent against another nuclear power using them.
Or more importantly, refrained from use of chemical weapons against those who could retaliate in kind. Japan used chemical and biological weapons in China.
Not sure that counts, as we're not using nuclear weapons in practice for current conflicts/engagements.
We have the whole other range of combat capabilities, and the distribution of those capabilities in our arsenal/armed forces seems guaranteed to change.
The closest near peer to the US is China which strategically is significantly inferior to the US and would very much not like to get into a nuclear exchange. But conventionally it has more vessels than the USN, and with nearly all of them near China while the USN is all over the world, they have an advantage early in a Taiwan war. Conventional wars between nuclear powers can be fought and won.
Not necessarily. Loosing a war is probably preferential to loosing your entire country, because mutually assured destruction using nukes is still a thing.
There is no guarantee whatsoever that if Russia were to launch a nuke on Ukraine, the USA or any other country would launch one against Russia. If they launched one on the USA or a EU country, that would be a different matter.
People have been saying tanks are dead for the last two years but:
- Even conflicts where tanks were obviously useful, like WWII, there were high rates of loss.
- Russian armored groups were poorly trained and not well supported by dismounted infantry early in the war, leading to high losses against fairly mobile Ukrainians armed with ATGMs. Now that the front has solidified, there's less room for maneuver where tanks are more crucial.
- Russia is employing a lot of old equipment and Ukraine doesn't have enough western armored vehicles for it to matter.
Cheap and prolific drones make tanks more vulnerable than before by making them easier to spot and delivering munitions directly, but there's still a need for armored direct fire, especially between two heavily fortified lines. You can't really break a trench line with waves of infantry anymore.
I suspect there's still a niche for helicopters too.
Tanks don't really make any sense. MBTs are designed to fight other MBTs. Out of the thousands of tanks that have been taken out in Ukraine, 99.999% has been by drones, artillary or ATMs. You can count the tank versus tank battles on the fingers of your hand. Wouldn't make more sense to evenly distribute the weight of the armour, so the back and top are reasonably armoured, rather than have foot thick armour in the front to stop rounds from other MBTs - a scenario which literally never happens.
MBTs make plenty of sense even if tank on tank fighting is rare. Having a big cannon that can fire high explosive rounds with a laser rangefinder in an armored enclosure is pretty useful even if you're not fighting tanks. Many western tanks have also been retrofit with additional armor against chemical rounds and mines, or have active protection systems.
Being in a T-72 with an armor configuration from the 80s and a carousel auto loader in the middle of the crew compartment in a war where your enemies have top attack atgms with tandem warheads would suck a lot though.
> All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now.
I don’t think that drones are necessarily the only answer to the “expensive weapons with expensive to train crews” problem.
Expensive weapons lead to cost boondoggles and economic asymmetry, eg $10k in modified COTS drones can defeat $MM in conventional armored vehicles.
We should be re-evaluating our weapons systems economically as well as doctrinally.
For example, would our Navy be more effective with thousands of relatively inexpensive small platforms that could do commerce raiding, interdiction, air defense and so forth (destroyer type jobs) than with our expensive and rare large surface combatants?
> For example, would our Navy be more effective with thousands of relatively inexpensive small platforms that could do commerce raiding, interdiction, air defense and so forth (destroyer type jobs) than with our expensive and rare large surface combatants?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeune_%C3%89cole was all about this... In the 19th century, when a couple of innovations (torpedoes, explosive shells) made it look like smaller ships could do enough damage that big ships were just a waste of money. In their case, they were wrong and their ideas were surpassed by further technological advancements (aircraft carriers).
Small ships with missiles and drones and unmanned submarines could be a decently powerful combination. You can't project power with those though, and around half the idea behind the US' carrier fleet is power projection.
And then a cheaper APS round disables your $10K drone, while a direct energy weapon for dollars of electricity can destroy swarms in one go. The car and mouse nature of weapons technology has always existed. Even at the advent of tanks there were anti tank weapons. That didn’t mean they were useless.
the Navy already has a problem with command and control (training, corruption, scandals, collisions, accountability - from delivering ships on time to the starlink wifi situation)
adding more things to control will cause more problems .... especially in peace time
Idk how they wouldn't compete in terms of financials.
They are in effect the specced-down mass production version of the F-22 and are comparable in terms of cost relative to similar fifth generation fighters (and even comparable to many fourth generation fights) but go toe to toe with or outperform the competition.
This stacks the deck such that the F-35 will be a peer to or superior to any "opposition" aircraft or anti-air weapon system while the US keeps the F-22 around to serve as a dogfighter that is reserved for fighting the rare circumstance of something that's legitimately a threat to an F-35.
What are the speeds and the distances required to take down a jet like an F-35?
Are you absolutely certain that there's no other way to take down modern fighter aircraft?
Like isn't that the lesson from the Ukraine war w.r.t. tanks? That there are cheaper, more effective tools out there to take out state of the art equipment.
Well your drone would need to fly faster than an f35 to catch up, maneuver more effectively than an f35 to hit a defending f35 and have a sufficiently complex sensor array to track and defeat the f35 autonomously.
We have many drones much cheaper than an f35 that can do this already. They're called AIM-9, AIM-120, Meteor. Or if you're Russian they're called R77, or R73.
Do you think it is plausible that we will see an incredibly cheap anti-aircraft missile that can destroy the latest fighter aircraft just like we've seen incredibly cheap drones that can destroy the latest tanks?
For one, because of physics: it's easy to hit a slow moving tank from a flying vehicle. It's impossible to hit a fast-moving flying vehicle from a slower moving one. And you can't make a cheap light rotor-based drone move as fast a jet-engine-powered plane no matter how hart you try.
For another, R&D: we've been working on fast autonomous flying vehicles to take down aircraft for decades: as the poster above keeps explaining, they're called AA missiles, and are extremely expensive, and even still have a hard time actually hitting a plain. Drones are an innovation in fighting tanks because they are much more maneuverable than traditional AT weapons and thus can more easily find chinks in the tank's armor. You could have always used the extreme maneuverability of AA rockets to hit those same chinks in the armor, but the cost was too high; drones were cheaper. AA rockets are extremely cost effective against plains though, as those jets are monumentally more expensive than a tank.
I misread the question a bit, sorry. Still, I believe the arguments hold - while I'm sure that it's possible to make cheaper missiles, especially if we take into account the markup typically associated with military contracts, I don't think there is any room to go anywhere near the cost savings that cheap drones brought against tanks.
The issue is that the F-35 when it's actually being competitive is practically invisible. The US actually has generally had to operate it without stealth coatings or while broadcasting a radio beacon while doing comparisons or competitions against other crafts and weapon systems because in an actual combat environment, an F-35 fit for stealth is completely invisible to electronics (and to a measurable degree eyesight) well within F-35 weapon systems' effective ranges.
So essentially you can't see an F-35 until it is already lined up to kill you. That tends to make it pretty difficult to hit it.
Are you talking about cheap drones replacing modern fighters, or cheap drones shooting down modern fighters?
They will absolutely replace modern fighters to a degree and already have to an extent, like we've seen in Ukraine with drones serving as close infantry support etc. instead of manned aircraft.
There are still some things "cheap" drones won't be able to do.
Specifically, if you want to carry big bombs and missiles, you need a large aircraft even if it's unmanned. The drone is also presumably going to need to be able to survive enemy air defenses to some extent. So you wind up with a big expensive drone like the MQ-9 Reaper ($30mil plus, lol) that is approaching the size and complexity of a manned fighter.
Also, and I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "small, cheap drones" are not likely to be shooting down modern fighters in the way that small cheap drones are currently killing tanks directly.
If you want an aircraft that can fly at mach 1.6+ and shoot missiles at other things (some of them stealthy) traveling at mach 1.6+, you are going to wind up with something fairly close to the size/cost/complexity of an F-35 even if you don't have a human being sitting inside.
Alternatively if/when starship is up and running it should be pretty trivial to ferry a lot of JDAM-esque weapons up to an orbital launch platform. From there you could practically throw bombs down in a suborbital path to a target and let the JDAM fins guide it in through the atmosphere.
A starship already costs around 90 million USD at cost (estimated based on parts cost currently) and is intended to cost around 10 million USD per launch commercially if it's able to be reused regularly.
And a single launch could carry a lot of bombs (like 50-400 based on the size). So on the high end after factoring in the cost of the bombs, amortising the cost of the initial orbital platform, and assuming a higher cost of like 120 million USD for a single launch, that would still almost certainly come out cheaper than sacrificing an MQ-9 or a much more expensive missile. And of course if you can get that cost down to 10 million USD per launch then other than artillery, that's going to be the cheapest way to deliver ordinance to any location in the world by far (after factoring in the cost of flight time for jets, etc).
Truly modern fighters have advanced defenses across the EM spectrum. Hardening a drone against those defenses makes them no longer “small” and “cheap”. Also, drones typically have much lower speed than a modern fighter. An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone where a key property is that it is much faster than the fighter, but this makes it expensive.
An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone
Yeah.
And barring some big advance, an air-to-air missile can't be any smaller than it is currently. It needs to carry enough explosive to damage the target aircraft, and it needs enough fuel to travel at supersonic speeds for a long enough distance to actually intercept the target.
No, because all the things you got rid of to make drones cheap when fighting tanks are required when fighting fighters. You only need to be slightly faster and slightly more maneuverable than your target to take it down, while older AT weapons were much faster: so slower drones could still be just as effective. This is not true for fighter jets.
> Ares is building a new class of anti-ship cruise missiles.
Not sure what this has to do with my claims about not being able to use cheap drones for taking down fighter jets. Military ships, like tanks, are also somewhat slower and somewhat less maneuverable than fighter jets, I believe.
I think it would already be a big advantage not needing a very expensive launch platform like a fighter jet, even if the unit price of the drone was a bit higher than that of the missile.
Without a capable stealth fighter the US & allies could lose air superiority to China very quickly in the Indo Pacific. And operations in the Middle East could become much more high risk from SAMs.
However it’s interesting to compare the F35 program to the alternative of producing several hundred F22s, or some other stealth solution.
The F-22 is still a better dogfighting craft than the F-35. In many many ways the F-35 is effectively a commoditised, specced down version of the F-22 geared towards general multi-role operation while the F-22 is hyper-specialised towards killing any other aircraft.
And importantly, the US wants to export the F-35 but keep the F-22 close to chest so that should push come to shove, the US can always maintain air superiority.
As a measure of deterrence, carries with Hornets can be useful. They do make it more difficult and expensive for the Chinese to take Taiwan.
However, it's unrealistic for them to establish anything like air superiority over the Taiwan Straits. Each carrier has fewer than 100 aircraft, and only a couple can be deployed to the region at a time. The opposing PLAAF has over 2000 combat aircraft including hundreds of stealth planes.
For the US to be competitive such a contest they need planes that are qualitatively better than the Chinese ones by a huge margin. American advantages in stealth, missile range and avionics are essential just to stay in the game.
In retrospect the money would have been better spent on building a Berry-compliant drone making company that can build consumer and attack drones.
Instead, the retrospective will likely be: "I guess we should now build drones in addition to our jet fighter." Double the effort, half the efficiency, half the result.
If we use the Ukraine war as a template for the next major war that the US faces (possibly against China) -- does the United States have the industrial capability to produce the tens to hundreds of millions of drones necessary to win?
Like can it produce the propellers, the frames, the motors, the batteries, the ICs to make a FPV drone that blows up in an enemy soldiers face?
Can that supply chain be made in the US and how long can will it take to make?
Is this a priority for the United States? Why or why not?
Well the US has a ton of larger process size fabs. There's at least 100 fabs of varying sizes and processes in the US as well as internal supply chain for materials, testing, and assembly. (Where do you think most of the semiconductors containing classified designs are manufactured)
Most are much smaller and more specialised/less automated so they don't have the same kind of production but there are a lot of fabs in the US and a lot of fab knowledge. Of all the countries, the US is one of the few that could probably survive a semiconductor industry collapse outside.
And many of those semiconductors in cheap FPV drones likely are actually fabbed in the US or could easily be fabbed in the US by Intel, Infineon, Texas Instruments, pSemi, NXP, Bosch, Renesas, Micron, onsemi, Analog Devices, Honeywell, Polar, GlobalFoundaries, Microchip, or Samsung, just to name a few non-military facing companies with significant fab operations in the US.
Hardly any war is symmetric, even when it is in a large sense there are differences in various theaters and specific battle situations. Sometimes you just need both as we can see in Israel which have every technology possible and yet wants to buy more Apache helicopters and Vulcans for air defence, two technologies they thought they will not need anymore
Myth? It's a well-documented Russian tactic. They basically have a two-tier military at this point: competent professionals, and untrained expendable cannon fodder. Professionals are used to operate weaponry that's more sophisticated than your basic AK, machine gun and 70s-era armour. They are valuable because of their training and (at this point) a lot of experience. The second tier is used to conduct the kind of attritional warfare that requires far less training of individual soldiers or smaller-size units, and results in very high casualties. This type of offensive operation makes slow progress, the only real downside being the sky-high casualties, so recruitment and training adapted - take everyone regardless of health and age, and give them just enough training to accomplish something before dying. It's very effective if you don't care about the lives of these soldiers. The professional tier goes in to exploit a breach, mans the self-propelled artillery, flies the drones, etc.
I think everybody is confusing the means and the ends, when it comes to these wars. They are not sacrificing people as cannon fodder because they are desperate to win the wars, instead the wars are the excuse for the real purpose, which is to have people killed. A sacrifice to demonic entities, whether they are imagined or not. The literal creation of hell on earth – that is not imagined.
The Aztecs and other ancient people like the Vikings didn't make excuses, they made war for it's own sake to please the entities they were worshipping with the blood of men.
This dates back to WW2. The "special echelon" made up of penal units (i.e. former convicts and soldiers being punished), the only difference is that during WW2 you were excused from the penal units if you were wounded (and happened to survived).
And of course it wouldn't work if the commanders didn't have informal authority to put their soldiers into pits or summarily execute them - also well documented.
All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now.
If you're fighting a highly asymmetric conflict where your enemies can barely touch your expensive toys then it's less of a concern.
If you're fighting near-peer it's a different story.