In the war I fought in, there was a markedly different approach to combat air ops between even just the different service branches. The Army tended to use the Apache like it was a flying tank, hovering and delivering ordinance; the Marines (which is where I fought) flew as low and as quickly as possible even while sending rounds and hellfire missiles downrange. The marines were not losing aircraft in anywhere close to the numbers of the Army when I was there. You need a skilled operator to hit a helicopter moving at 100 knots when it's 15m over the buildings, and we mostly operated at night. I remember watching a ZPU gunner pointing the cannons directly at us and firing, and laughing as the rounds just flew behind the tail.
It's my understanding (and from watching the videos that I can get as a civilian) that the Russians still aren't operating their helicopters in a manner that I would be comfortable with if I was inside one. I certainly wouldn't be pumped flying in the environment they are in, with so many MANPADS out there, but there is no way a machine I was in would be hit with an anti-tank missile while we hovered (as was in the article.)
Lot of preamble to say: no, I don't think the attack helicopter is dead. Attack helicopters are nimble and can hide in terrain quite well, and even when an attacking force can see them it takes a skilled operator to actually hit them. The single use drones that operate like kamikaze vehicles may throw a winkle into the mix, but a helo flying at 150knots is going to be very challenging to hit for one of those. I expect there will be quite an arms race countering and then counter countering these in the future wars.
I'm a former Army helicopter pilot (but Black Hawks, not Apaches) and I think this is an interesting observation.
By 2011, when I went to war, the main thing we'd learned was to fly high up above small arms range: above 1,000 feet AGL. Only our Kiowas were generally allowed to operate below that, flying exactly the way you describe Marine helicopters operating; that was part of the Kiowa's nature as scouts relying mostly on the pilots' eyes (and sometimes their M4 rifles pointed out the door). The aircraft (Kiowas, but also Apaches and Black Hawks when in support of troops-in-contact) that got chewed up were invariably operating down below that.
By that time, Apaches were also mostly a deterrent. The point was for them to be seen. That kept the enemy in hiding under cover while we did whatever else needed to be done. Before firing a shot, they'd circle for 30+ minutes recording video and talking into the tape recorder to establish positive identification of targets and explicitly go through all the steps that the lawyers came up with to mitigate civilian casualties. It was all very unlike e.g. Iraq in 1991 or 2003, to my knowledge, or present-day Ukraine. Not at all stealthy or fast. And there has been an effort in recent years to unlearn all of this, and get back to the tactics that would be needed in a fight like Ukraine's.
I was in Iraq in 2003, so like you said very different. We did take small arms fire all the time, pretty ineffective though. We had one Cobra come back looking like Swiss cheese but it did manage to fly back to the fob.
Russia's use is more similar to the use you describe in the marines. Come in fast and low, pop up the nose and fire off the ordinance while popping flares then get out before the MANPADS can take a shot. The problem is that this limits them to very expensive portable artillery and the accuracy suffers a lot when you can't stick around.
The big use for helicopters is defense. Russia showed the potential during last year's failure of a counter-offensive by Ukraine. They'd pop up just over the treelines to shoot their TOW equivalent from outside of MANPADS range (can't do this on offense because you can't be sure that the front line didn't accidentally bypass a MANPADS somewhere). The helicopters would target the minesweeper and rear vehicle to stall the convoy then the chopper's remaining missiles along with artillery and whatever else would finish off the vehicles in the middle (or they'd try their luck in the minefield which always ended badly).
Both sides are doing this also with aircrafts, seen many videos. Point their noses up at predefined distance at given angle, launch battery of unguided missiles. You end up with some form of micro-grad, not very effective I'd say, hitting anything valuable requires a lot of luck. But in saturated airspace that's all they can mostly do, plus bigger planes deliver some gliding bombs.
It's not a novel approach. Russia baked it into their aiming systems decades ago and they supposedly train on the maneuver.
The software can detect when the correct pitch/direction are achieved so the barrage can be reasonably accurate. They don't have the luxury of slowly dialing in their aim, but have much better calculation systems and are firing a fraction of the distance (often over just 1-2 treelines).
As I said, I don't know that it's ideal. I think troops on the ground with a laser designator while the chopper lobs munitions up over the treeline from a farther, safer distance would be ideal.
Attack helicopters might still have a limited role in some theaters. But the Marine Corps seems to realigning to fight China in the Western Pacific where, regardless of survivability, regular attack helicopters lack the range and speed necessary to be relevant. They might also face a threat from manned fighters which are potentially very dangerous to helicopters, even those flying evasively at low altitude. Thus the shift in force structure away from attack helicopters and towards the F-35B.
I'm not trying to argue with you and I appreciate you weighing in with firsthand expertise. It's just that current USMC leadership seems to be focusing on different priorities.
The CAS role for an AH-1Z and a F-35 couldn’t be more different. I said this in another post but it bears repeating here, like the A-10 the AH-1Z was doing low altitude, slow, line of sight close air support. Literally “put a hellfire in the third window from the right on the top floor of the tan building with the tile details on the roof line” and then watching the Marines behind cover point at it.
Maybe Marines on the ground had a different experience, but I viewed the jets, Artillery, and AC-130s as a much more blunt instrument. We got a lot of calls for precision strikes that would have been danger close, and without us I can imagine a lot more friendly fire incidents.
That said, there is no air to air defense for an attack helicopter, it’s comical that we even practiced. Without our jets suppressing enemy jets, there would be no way helicopters could operate, we’re sitting ducks.
Well, actually helicopters are already critical in both anti-submarine and anti-ship warfare. They can extend range and distribute shots of anti-ship missiles to make concurrent salvos from multiple directions more deadly.
Well, actually you missed the point of the original article and of my comment. No one is claiming that all military helicopters are dead, just attack helicopters. The helicopters used by naval forces for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare (along with other missions) generally aren't classified as attack helicopters.
I did not miss the point of the article, I just don't get his interest in medium helicopters when the missile he wants 8 of on a medium helicopter weighs 100 pounds.
Your experience is against insurgency and irregular force. Near-peer enemy with better weapons is different case.
Kosovo war for example. US deployed two battalions of AH-64s in Task Force Hawk into Albania, but never send them over the border. Their task would have been just what they were designed for, but risk reward ratio was just too high. Serbs would have been able to cause them massive casualties.
For most cases combining drones for targeting with field or rocket artillery achieves the same.
My experience is not just against insurgents. I fought uniformed Iraqi military, and some black pajamas guys later. I was there in 2003.
The conflict in Kosovo was nothing like the ROE in Iraq, and if you’re on the ground calling for fire you damn sure would know the difference between arty and us.
> The single use drones that operate like kamikaze vehicles may throw a winkle into the mix, but a helo flying at 150knots is going to be very challenging to hit for one of those.
All you're seeing is makeshift COTS drones picking targets of opportunity. If you know that MANPADS can easily take down a helicopter then you are already aware that there is decades-old technology already quite able to take down helicopters, and the only difference between the drones you're seeing today and those that can be easily produced today is the product design requirements.
I sometimes frequent on 9gag, and someone had posted a video of UKR drones attacking RUS drones/UAVs. I don't remember seeing a speedometer on the feed of the attacking (UKR) drone, but if I can estimate it was at least (RUS UAVs) 80-100km/h (just cruising/spying) while the (UKR) drones were coming in at twice the speed.
Considering how UAVs and/or smaller drones have evolved and used in the battlefield the past few years, we need to rethink the way to conduct war.
> assuming improvements to drones and not the counter-drones
And I think we just began. The good thing about this (if there is ever a good thing in war/death-dealing) is that a drone carrying a small explosive device to release it over a vehicle will not kill 10k civilians.
When they fly, they basically turn horizontal, relying on body lift + vectored thrust. They're small enough, with high enough power/weight ratios, that that's enough. Apparently there's no need for a tilt-rotor, because the whole airplane becomes a tilt-rotor.
Similar principal as cruise missiles, which have short stubby wings to augment body lift + vectored thrust. When the airframe gets light enough, you don't need much in the way of wings.
There were a few drawbacks. It required a seat that pivoted 90° forward, so that when pilots could see when taking off and when landing.
Unpowered landings would inevitably result in damage to the airframe.
Powered landings looked like space-x rockets, and were at the time difficult to pull off, as their instrumentation and and flight systems weren't developed enough to reliably land vertically.
They noted the airframe would have a habit of spinning when hovering vertically.
It was cancelled after a failed test flight, but with modern technology I think one could be built flightworthy.
The plane does look cool, and would fulfill a critical role of a jet aircraft that can be launched without a runway.
Note that most of the downsides there relate to having a pilot that you want to survive in an emergency. Get rid of the pilot, and you get rid of a lot of constraints on size, weight, G-forces, survivability, emergency response, etc.
That thing is amazing. I suspect optimised for shorter distance and dynamism, whereas I think the 280 is basically a faster helicopter that can cruise longer distance? Not expert, just wondered about the tradeoffs given the relatively bad safety record of the v22 Osprey it replaces. So this is an Osprey, but better and safer because simpler mechanics.
On new approaches, I saw something about new US missile research where they get rid of the fins and point the nose to turn. My Google-fu is failing me though.
Honestly I don't want to sound like a smartass and second-guess you, but the main problem with attack helicopters imo is that they are expensive to buy and operate, going comfortably into lower-end jet fighter territory, so to justify their existence, they need to possess some indispensable qualities.
I'm not sure what those are, but I think they probably have to do with the ablity to hover in place/land anywhere, a capability probably much more meaningful in transport helicopters.
And it seems the US has decided to choose the V-280 Valor, which is a tiltrotor rather than a helicopter.
I don't follow the space closely, but it seems to me there's no active program in the US that's developing a combat helicopter that's likely to enter service, so I don't think the US military considers them to be worth investing in that much.
An AH-1Z costs about 4,500$ an hour to operate, a F-15E costs about 29,000$ an hour. Helicopters can operate from basically anywhere you can drive a fuel truck to, jets not so much.
You’re talking about a tilt rotor to replace a troop carrying helicopter, it’s a different role with different requirements.
The AH-1Z is more like the A-10 warthog than a traditional jet fighter, and in the wars we’ve been in recently serves a similar role, close air support. To the Marines on the ground, they are indispensable. The airframes were “just” (in the terms that make sense for an airframe that has been in service since the late 60s) upgraded to 4 rotor with a number of other updates.
Being able to literally point at the enemy and have the pilots see you and put ordinance where you are pointing… that is way way different than trying to call in strikes from jets or freaking arty as some people were saying.
the united states stopped investing in them because they're more of a near-peer type weapon.
They are absolutely devastating to columns of tanks. And they help control the "z-axis" the the united states military is dependent on.
Helicopters give you the ability to have air "presence" and keep situations in check with low-peer adversaries. When you start bringing in MANPADS or stingers the game changes.
Oddly enough things like the US Javelin anti tank system and the british NLAW are making tanks relatively obsolete as well.
I suspect attack helicopters with some sort of very small automated phalanx system (directed energy weapon? net launcher?) to destroy drones would be incredibly effective still.
The Apache is still an effective platform for delivering a shit ton of ordnance down range from out of no where and then skidaddling.
The Russian Ka-52 has a soft-kill system that can blind the IR seekers of Soviet and US MANPADS the Ukrainians use. We've seen videos videos of it working... about 70% of the time, which means you have to shoot it 3 times instead of once, but it goes down just the same, and that's not saying anything about bullets, which you can do nothing about.
I think modern military doctrine dictates that you shouldn't even give a chance of an enemy to shoot at you.
I don't think they are a near peer weapon at all. Even small groups can have weapons that can hurt it, in contrast with an F-16, which, unless you have an air force of your own, or anti-aircraft batteries, you can do nothing about.
>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.
> 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.
We’re still in the very early stage of drone development for warfare and Ukraine is using a lot of civilian gear. Now the armed forces of the world are plowing their funding into R&D I expect them to develop quickly. For example, aluminum air batteries are perfect for this use case but havent been developed because until now single use batteries haven’t seen any demand. Those will at least double or triple the range for armed drones. High end solar panels can allow them to sit and wait for a trigger to attack.
Combine that with the tech behind the Redbull F1 camera drone [1] that can fly at 200mph and drones become much deadlier to attack helicopters. Slap a rocket motor on it for final approach, even a sub-M civilian model rocket motor, and it’s over. Imagine the drone just sitting there listening for a helicopter to get close enough - humans wouldn’t even need to be involved except to place it strategically.
>Imagine the drone just sitting there listening for a helicopter to get close enough
Imagine a drone which outputs the signature of an attack helicopter to draw out that loitering drone and then destroy it, leaving the space open for an actual attack helicopter to swoop in and do its business.
How? A helicopter is on the order of 75-80 decibels at 1000 feet. That’s the equivalent of a giant flying stadium speaker consuming kilowatts of power, that has to catch a much smaller 200mph drone while being just as cheap.
The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.
How much would it cost to slap some plywood on an old/scrapped heli engine and make a remote-controlled decoy that just looks and sounds a bit like an attack chopper?
Drones don't need to be small, and big doesn't always mean expensive.
Use your imagination. The counter-drone doesn't have to output the exact same energy profile as an attack helicopter, just close enough to trigger the anti-helo-drone's activation.
Examples: the counter-drone outputs only a specific frequency (the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range). It outputs that at much lower decibels (the anti-helo-drone just thinks the helo is farther away). It outputs that sound in bursts and directionally (the anti-helo-drone is only listening in a specific place).
Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Sure all of these "hacks" will be countered by future versions of the anti-helo-drones, but that's kinda my whole point.
"Just close enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
It doesn't matter if the decoy can match frequency if it can't match amplitude because it's trivial to triangulate the position and eliminate anything that's too quiet. Any helicopter that sounds "farther away" than its actual position is obviously a decoy. Measuring the time of flight on reflections eliminates directional speakers.
These aren't even hacks, this is something an Alexa smart home speaker is equipped to do today. Add a rudimentary radar and the decoy now has to have the same radar cross section as a big metal helicopter. Chaff isn't going to work when sensor fusion includes computer vision.
> Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Once it's dispatched, how is it going to target and intercept a small drone with a tiny radar cross section that has thrust vectoring? That's a job for static CIWS/AA, not a cheap counter drone dispatched from a decoy.
My point is that attackers have the technological and cost advantage here, possibly forever. Civilian quadcopters can't easily take down a 150 knot helicopter now but the technology to make 200+ mph military drones is already here, it just hasn't been combined into a weapon yet. No imagination needed, it's practically inevitable.
That's a lot of specific engineering just to protect the helicopter. Or you can just spend that engineering effort and money on replacing the helicopters with more advanced drones.
>the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range
Why? Sure you might be limited to that if you're using an Arduino but with an FPGA or even a cheap "edge AI" NPU you could do a very thorough analysis (even credit card sized image recognition modules with camera are <$50 now). Heck even a seeedstudio respeaker can do live voice identification and isolation, noise cancellation, and 16 direction source location/indication using 4 microphones!
The thing is, maybe it just doesn't make economic sense to protect the (expensive) helo with such more expensive shenanigans, given the volume of oomph it can bring onto the battlefield.
Knights in armor didn't necessarily die out because of their vulnerability to guns; rather, professional pikemen and musketeers started making more economic sense.
Most of these counter-drones would start out dumber rather than leaping to the end state.
A megaphone is pretty loud and doesn’t require kilowatts. Sure it’s directional, but it would be good enough in a sweep pattern to trigger sleeper drones. That would necessitate triangulation and counter-countermeasures.
Welcome to the arms race! Lockheed Martin is hiring!
since the waiting drone is a camera drone wouldn't it just activate the camera and have some object detection as well as the sound detection? turn enough to see where noise is coming from, anything the size of a helicopter, wait until next sound source?
on edit: ah, I understand a later comment better now, but I mean, detecting the waiting drone is probably going to involve that waiting drone doing lots of movement - not turning its camera to look at noise source.
Maybe helicopter moving should just have an increasing number of little anti-drones flying with it, increasing further the cost and complexity of helicopters.
But thats counter-counter territory- that means you are already on the entrenched territory backfoot that produces trenchwarfare, just with a overromanticized million- dollar queen piece in the background that brings no additional value to the battleground in a drone- vs drone saturation scenario. Its the same as tank vs minefield vs anti-rpg equpiment. Yes you can protect and counter, but the approach is so slow- expensive, it makes the original idea no longer worth the effort.
> We’re still in the very early stage of drone development for warfare and Ukraine is using a lot of civilian gear. Now the armed forces of the world are plowing their funding into R&D I expect them to develop quickly.
I'm not sure that follows.
Military drones like the Predator have been around for 30 years - at a cost of $30 million a drone. US military contractors are many things, but they're never cheap. And at that price, you don't have many and so they're never where they need to be.
The battlefield impact in Ukraine has been because for $500 you can strap a grenade to a DJI Mavic and you've got 60,000 times as many of them. And sure it's got much less range and inferior sensors and less jamming resistance and so on - but the price lets it be it's in the right place at the right time.
Defence contractors aren't famous for their cost-effective practices, so I'm not sure they can improve on the most important aspect of these drones.
A DJI Mavic with a grenade has a flight time of only about 20 minutes, and can only operate at low attitude and close to the operator. The MQ-1 Predator can travel hundreds of km under satellite control and orbit for hours at medium altitude to provide persistent overwatch with advanced sensors. The cheap drones used in Ukraine are in no way a substitute for large, expensive drones like the Predator / Reaper. They address totally different missions and it's naive to compare them.
NATO has been flying large, expensive drones equipped with long-range radar at the edges of Ukrainian and Russian airspace. You don't hear much about it but this has been tremendously helpful for feeding Ukraine targeting data and warning about attacks. Can't do that with a cheap drone.
0 of these heavy UAVs will be able to operate in contested airspace. This is why you no longer see Bayraktar footage anymore, and they aren't even remotely as heavy.
Successor heavy UAVs such as the RQ-180 are specifically designed to operate in contested airspace. These are far more capable and survivable than anything Turkey can produce.
We're back to "is the purpose of a defence contractor to siphon public money, or is there a war currently on which might impact the personal lives of the C-suite of the defence contractor?"
But exactly - Ukraine's defence contractors and suppliers have to innovate, and do it on the cheap. As a result there will be lots of lessons to learn, and after the war, hardware and concepts to sell (like Israel does, it's a top military exporter because it has had to develop and innovate).
Also, the US has shown it can stomach its pride and buy foreign off the shelf designs which are better (okay, not always, cf. the KC-45 vs KC-46, but still). And of course there's the whole rest of the world.
It's good to have more options but Anduril and Ares are mostly a lot of hype. They won't achieve anything close to an order of magnitude improvement. Costs are largely driven by the laws of physics, and those are the same for everyone.
I'm honestly not informed enough to comment, but everyone seems to agree there is really bad mismanagement at Lockheed & co + the incentives as set up are truly fucked up (I remember reading on that, but don't have the source handy) and actively encourage manufacturers to pile on costs to make more profits.
If there's good R&D and first-order thinking in the mix, one order of magnitude does not seem insane to me. It's a cliche, but look at what Elon Musk has achieved, everyone said it couldn't be done, but it happened.
Ultimately other things can help, like designing new innovative form factors and cathering to a changing reality (it's doesn't make sense to shoot down 50k$ drones with 1M$ missiles).
I think the speed will be what protects the helicopters from the drones. The drones can't sustain 200 miles per hour for long while the helicopter can do it for literal hours. The rocket motor is a good idea, probably the most likely to succeed
Nope. Due to retreating blade stall, only a few helicopter models such as the CH-47 can hit a top speed of 200mph, and then only with a light load for a short time. They certainly don't have enough fuel to sustain that speed for hours. High sustained speeds require a fundamentally different design such tilt rotor or compound.
The US Army is cutting back in this area. The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, which was a small attack helicopter, has been cancelled.[1] If it flies low and slow over the enemy, it's going to be shot down. Better to send many drones and lose some of them.
The concept of tactical air superiority is now questionable. The USAF used to boast that American troops have not had to fight under a hostile sky since 1952. That era seems to be over. There are so many portable systems now that can take out an aircraft.
Jam-resistant drones are already a thing. Drones are going to have to be shot down one at a time. This is quite possible but the missiles to do it can cost more than the drones.
Dumb question: Why are 12ga shotguns, possibly on small auto-targeting platforms, not a thing yet? Like a CWIS/CRAM but tiny and for close-in engagements?
The problem with shotguns is that you either have a small number of pellets (12ga) or a small amount of mass to do damage (bird shot). So with 12ga specifically, while it's more effective than a rifle round -- the pellets spread quickly enough that it's only a huge advantage when the drone is in the terminal phase. This is why in WW2, they would put timed fuses inside the AA shells so that they didn't have to hit the aircraft directly with the shell but the round didn't spread so far that it was useless.
I hear you, and a prox shell would be ideal, but I have a hard time seeing the comparisons. The scale of attack drones is so small and fast and close, and the drones are very fragile. Perhaps the hand grenade "bomber" types can be far enough up, but the FPV impactor types are right up in your face and have to fly at you to be effective.
Look around and you can find tons of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers skeet shooting drones with various levels of success.
There are issues though. Skeet guns are 28-34" barrels which is super-long. These guns are also heavy. Once you have ammo loaded up, you're talking 11+ pounds. These guns size and weight make them almost unusable for anything outside of drones. Carrying around an extra gun and heavy ammo is a big commitment both physically and logistically.
Double-barreled sawed-off shotgun in Doom style. Anyway you may not have enough time to fire more, and save quite a bit on weight and maneuverability. Maybe some special longer shells with more pellets, any slight touch and those lightweight plastics break and drone goes down.
> I'm imagining a shoulder mounted auto-targeting pistol.
About a decade ago, DARPA developed a .50 caliber gun round that has onboard guidance.[1] They were thinking snipers, not anti-drone, but maybe the concept can be adapted.
An FPV can clear those 300 meters in 6 seconds. Maybe six seconds is enough for target identification, aiming, and firing, but it is a tight timeline for tracking an ~1kg object ~0.3km away.
Am I the only person who is shocked to realize that this is the same Perun who does strategy gaming YouTube tutorials on a related channel!? I had seen a bunch of his Terra Invicta content… had no idea he also did actual military analysis? Is that what he does professionally in some capacity or is he just an amateur interested in this stuff with a fairly well researched YouTube channel?
I believe in his earlier videos he mentioned that he isn't able to discuss Australian defense procurement on YouTube due to a conflict of interest with his day job.
He actually started with strategy gaming, then when Russia invaded he started his slideshows on the main channel and ended up with another channel for gaming.
Importantly he correctly predicted the entire broad course of the evolution of the war in the past two years in his first video on like day 10 of the conflict. I’m always impressed by his analysis each week, definitely a channel worth following and binge watching.
He does defence economics mostly for the Australian military, and liaising with allies. Probably a civilian contractor, possibly a think tank employee at an outfit like ASPI, but I doubt it.
I mean, as I watched him destroy my personal definition of what a military industry might look like in X4 I did start to make the connection with the similar sounding war economist I followed.
Complete with slideshows about what he was doing, how he planned to do it, and the logistics involved with becoming the supreme arms dealer and private army to half a dozen governments.
Not really, the conclusions are basically the same between both
1. There are no wonder weapons, nor are weapons obsoleted so easily. You cannot look at one in isolation of the larger context. The incidents in one war do not inform the use in all wars or operations.
2. Militaries view these types of things as part of a larger system, the parts of which are combined to create a desired effect. It is situational and Russia C&C is not the same as other countries C&C.
3. War has pro/con evolutions, as the drones progress, so does the anti-drone tech. These same helicopters were allegedly instrumental in preventing Ukraine's counter offensive in Zaporizhzhia, with their standoff anti-tank missiles, popping up above the trees, outside the range of manpads
FWIW there's a response from The Chieftain in the comments which has sparked a good discussion:
> Sorry, mate, but I really think you missed the point of the attack helicopter concept, at least in the modern Western concept. I can't speak as to either how the Russians think they should be using their helicopters in doctrine, or how they actually are using their helicopters in doctrine, but you seem to have completely ignored where the attack helicopter fits in as far as we in the West are concerned. The days of using attack helicopters in a troop support role to aid ground forces are long gone, except in cases of extreme emergency or very permissive environments. Instead, they are used as the division and corps commander's maneuver asset. MG Isenhower last week publicly described an evolution during an NTC rotation for a corps-level mission, the 1AD CAB sending both battalions from Fort Irwin to a target area over 250km away, (Conducted with incorporation into a Red Flag exercise to replicate the air and SEAD problem) and this sort of operation pretty much matches what I've seen helicopters be used for over the past four years' worth of division and corps level exercises. You can imagine the level of havoc which can be wreaked by one battalion, let alone two in the division and corps deep areas, by a unit capable of identifying and engaging its own targets in real-time from (relatively speaking) close range, whilst itself emitting a rather limited EM signature, and, of course, being entirely unjammable unlike long-range loitering munitions.
"Not really" means the war and its tactics haven't changed at all in two years? I find that very hard to believe.
I agree with your three points, but they are very high level, a bit like quoting Sun Tzu. The question is whether the attack heli is becoming rapidly obsolete (or at least, relegated to less relevant roles), and I think it might. Other weapon systems have, after all.
--
Edit: I love that I got downvoted for asking this even though, sure enough, Perun indeed uploaded a recent video reviewing his opinions of the attack helicopter! Oh, well... that's HN for you.
Why do you think the days of the heli might be over?
I think if you ask the military of US, Israel, Russia, and China, you will find them saying the attack heli has unique and useful capabilities not available on other platforms.
Well, I don't have access to any military, but why would they say that?
To my knowledge the US has abandoned the development of their advanced attack helicopters, and it's not because the current ones are flawless. Their Apaches are very vulnerable in a modern threat environment.
The Russians seem to have lots of inventory, who knows what they are thinking. Even Perun states a lot of Russian tactics and doctrine seem very old fashioned, using helicopters in a way that doesn't seem particularly cost effective (e.g. in roles better served by artillery).
As for China, I haven't the faintest idea. What's their use of attack helicopters?
I'm guessing a lot of China's reason has to do with the Taiwan strait. For all the advantages tanks and IFVs have over helicopters, they aren't especially good at moving across 100 miles of water.
> "Not really" means the war and its tactics haven't changed at all in two years? I find that very hard to believe.
In this specific respect, not really. Neither Ukraine or Russia really gained air superiority and MANPADS are common. In that context, attack helicopters are not a great weapon. It does not mean that it would be the case in all future wars. Some countries are more capable than Russia. Sure, better anti-drone weapons would help, but it’s a bit early to call helicopters obsolete. Pretty much in the same way as it was premature to call the main battle tank dead as a concept last year.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: I meant the attack helicopter in a war between near peers. Obviously it is different when the enemy is technologically far behind.
It might help to first understand both pieces said essentially the same thing and came to the same conclusions. They both also look beyond a single war and a single operator
So it wasn't the delivery after all, but the content? Punished for disagreement, in other words?
It's also hilarious I got downvoted for saying Perun's video was 2 years old and surely there would be new considerations, and sure enough, Perun posted a newer video with new considerations!
> Using italics was unnecessary
So a single word in italics in a different comment triggered downvotes on my first comment that didn't use italics? Seems like retaliatory downvoting of unrelated comments then. In any case, italics is used for emphasis and it's used commonly enough here on HN that its very limited markup supports it.
> So it wasn't the delivery after all, but the content?
you are being argumentative... which earns downvotes. you can word things differently to not be this way. Also, talking about being downvoted is against the posting guidelines, which will earn more downvotes. (See the links at the bottom)
> Punished for disagreement
see it as a signal from community moderation, this is not a free speech platform, content and conversation moderation is necessary online, unpopular opinions are often downvoted to avoid back and forth argumentation, so you may view it beyond moderation as feedback on your views, context dependent
Perun seems to know his stuff. That said, I’d be curious to know more about his research process, as well as that of other Russia-Ukraine war mappers/vloggers. Determining whether grainy drone footage is current or past alone seems difficult to me as an outsider and fan of their work, though I wish it weren’t necessary and that the war were over.
Tbh Perun often just takes a report released by RUSI, ISW, or other war think tank and does some narration over it. On top of that, he often extrapolates from very small or noisy data.
His real talent is to find a bunch of these OSINT reports on a topic, combine them, and then apply his knowledge of economics and game theory and military history and theory to explain what it all means. As a PhD economist I can clearly tell he understands economics and has a talent for teaching it I only wish I did.
did you expect him to have access too, and release, classified data? What insights do you expect him to have over multi-billion-dollar intelligence and counter-intelligence efforts?
like, nearly all commentators, everywhere, are talking about OSINT releases from RUSI or CNA or whoever. and those are based on scraps from official UKR, NATO, RUS, etc. releases.
Perun brings lots of citations and discusses his sources regularly, and always adds caveats. I wouldn't liken his weekly video to those of the daily mappers or telegram video collectors. Very different kinds of content.
I wasn’t meaning to compare them negatively and I don’t really follow other channels on that topic besides maybe Task & Purpose I think it’s called. Not dismissing anything Perun or others have done, just acknowledging that it’s hard to reason about how he goes about gathering the info. I hear him saying he does research, but not the process.
Perun took a side. A major result is that he often either downplays or outright ignores things that don't agree with his world view. Look at his deductions then see how things actually went. There's almost always a massive discrepancy vs the actual outcome.
Perun is joke among military analysts, who are mostly impressed by how much money he has managed to grift from uninformed, but convincingly spun, waffle.
Wiki entry[1] and archived short story[2] for anyone else reading the parent's remark and wondering how does one coherently map attack helicopters to gender identity meme.
It wasn't based on the short story, the short story is a piece of trans literature that took the transphobic meme (which was around first) and turned it into a powerful work of art (for which fhe creator was literally hounded out of public exposure and into a major mental health crisis largely because of people's kneejerk reaction judging the work by its title.
This topic makes me think about identity and who gets to change the definition of it and who doesn't.
I think it is fascinating how the battleground has shifted over time from conflict over objective interaction in the real world to etymology and the internal classification systems people use to model the world.
How does one re-evaluate associations and what good does it do? Are associations not automatic by nature?
Additionally, aren't the people you describe (who don't accept an asexual view of gender identity) exactly who was using the meme the whole time? I don't think that group has become much smaller recently (still the majority of people), so if the meme has died down I think it is rather because people have become bored of it.
It's always worth remembering that a soldier who costs a million dollars to train can be killed by a 20 cent bullet. But soldiers still exist.
Everything in a war will involve losses that appear asymmetric if you consider losses in isolation. War is a horrible affair.
Helicopters won't disappear because they can be shot down, but if UAV, communications, plus artillery can replace them. Communication is the most likely weak link due to countermeasures.
FWIW, the US communication systems are designed to work in insanely degraded EM environments, they push the bounds of information theory. Bandwidth won’t be great but they will work. The other side of this is that any system that can degrade the environment to that extent is painting a giant target on itself, and the US has purpose-built “seek and destroy” platforms for anything that is aggressively limiting available bandwidth.
A lot of US systems are designed to be functional with bandwidth that is significantly less than an old dial-up modem. In the average case that doesn’t happen but it is an explicit design target to enable operation in severely compromised environments.
Soldiers exist, but expensive western soldiers are basically a different species compared to the cheap militia of the third world.
All the strategic decisions of western militaries is based on the sheer expensiveness of their foot soldiers, which means reluctance to fight ground wars, extreme aversion to casualties etc.
It also meant advanced militaries generally shrunk massively in terms of soldier count, ending conscription, making the existing forces more elite and more equipped (Since the meat solider is so expensive anyways).
So helicopters, given their decreasing cost effectiveness, is likely to entirely disappear as a tactical weapon. They will be transport only going forward, or some sort of a big drone carrier.
I’d say western militaries will avoid extreme casualties if they can, but read a bit about the Second Battle of Faluja - the U.S. for example has no problem sending troops into hardcore combat.
In fact, I would argue that the U.S., U.K., Israel, and now Ukraine and Russia are the only countries today that have demonstrated the capability to engage in extremely fierce fighting.
We’ve also become a lot better at keeping troops alive, which I wouldn’t mistake for a reluctance to engage in heavy fighting.
It’s important to remember, and Russia in particular has learned this lesson again most recently, that you need to exercise your military to work out cobwebs and operational problems, and while you can conduct training exercises, nothing resembles the experience from fighting a war. The number of countries with this institutional knowledge and experience continues to dwindle.
> I’d say western militaries will avoid extreme casualties if they can, but read a bit about the Second Battle of Faluja - the U.S. for example has no problem sending troops into hardcore combat.
I took part in Op Phantom Fury in a support role -- that was 20 years ago next month. And while that was real, intense combat, and several units got mauled, the total casualties on the US side were ~700. That's big for Iraq, and at the time, staggering. I donated a pint and a half of O-, more than I probably should have, because there were a lot of wounded coming in.
At the time we estimated as high as 5000 enemy combatants, and there were ~3000 killed or captured.
But compared to modern peer-vs-peer fights, that's rookie numbers. The Russians were taking ~1500 casualties a day during hard frights in Bakhmut; the Ukranians less, but probably on par with Fallujah coalition casualties.
> In fact, I would argue that the U.S., U.K., Israel, and now Ukraine and Russia are the only countries today that have demonstrated the capability to engage in extremely fierce fighting.
The US (and to some degree NATO) has the capacity, but 20 years of middle east fighting that produced nothing of value have removed the tolerance for more unneeded military adventures. Plus Iraq/AFG didn't send home 10000+ casualties a month. Serious, hardcore combat with commensurate casualties would not sell with the US public, and a large part of Russian / Iranian / Israeli / Chinese, et al politics are based around that perception.
They're rookie numbers compared to peer-to-peer combat which was last seen in World War II and arguably today in Ukraine, but my point was that the United States and at least some western countries are very much willing to engage in that intense form of combat that the OP suggested that they weren't willing to engage in. Not just the Second Battle of Faluja, but also various engagements in Afghanistan to root out the Taliban.
To your point, I don't disagree that serious, hardcore combat with huge casualties wouldn't set well with the American public, but I would suggest that you're basing that hypothesis on how we reacted to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as such it's not really comparable because a war with, let's say China, is going to elicit a different response altogether.
Even so, we spent how long in Afghanistan? How long in Iraq? We were kicking in doors still even with a population that thought "what's the point of this?" for a decade +. Imagine if a real war kicks off - I'm not so sure we would be hesitant to fight if there were serious issues at stake.
Thanks for your service too. I was also in a support role during OIF. Thankfully it was rather uneventful for me personally.
Russia has the added, common problem for autocracies that they are heavily disincentivized from telling Putin the truth - it was far better to hide the problems, and be rewarded for doing a good job. At least until the war started.
Due to the nature of their deployment (ad hoc, improvised, crowd-sourced) swarms of quads in Ukraine didn't have much of a counter. Nobody had thought enough about it yet. All the work had gone into developing really sophisticated, cheap drones for consumer use, and strapping a bomb on them was all it took to weaponize that consumer technology. Nobody had spent a similar amount of time developing an equally sophisticated anti-drone system as a counter to a non-existent attack. There have been some garage-level technologies to mitigate their practical effectiveness, but that's not what I mean. I think we're in this period where quads are the meta, because not enough money has been spent thinking about the defense against them, but right now DoD contractors are developing the systems that will make cheap drones less effective in the future. I don't know what that will look like, but I'm sure it's a top priority to figure it out.
There were no counters to cavalry for like 1000 years. The only generalized countermeasure to cavalry was cavalry of your own. This led to the dramatic territorial and genetic expansion of nomadic peoples, such as the Arabs and Turks.
There are specific 'counters' like pikes, fortifications etc, but they only trade effectively against head on charges. Cavalry still held the advantage of tactical mobility, which meant they dominated reconnaissance, can pursue and annihilate defeated enemies, can retreat gracefully etc.
There may be no counters to drones except for more drones. Or the counter may have to be highly strategical, such as devastating hack-based attacks that may involve use of advanced and dangerous AIs (Cyberpunk Blackwall...).
Artilleries also had no counter for like 50 years. And completely reshaped military doctrine and strategy, made WW1 into a slog etc. WWII found a way to 'beat' artillery by armored thrusts to get behind them, but that is not easily achievable.
You're right that you may only find a counter to the latest tech once you've lost the war, or you may never find it and you'll only see the victors over you displaced by someone who does find a counter and now rules over you instead of your first enemy.
Lasers and microwaves can be mitigated, jamming doesn't matter if they're autonomous(and can also be mitigated), bullets have a hard time with fast and stocastic movement.
It's gonna be done on drone. And they can lie in wait in low power mode and navigate buildings so, yeah better hope you get all of them.
Drone on drone is very inefficient. There is plenty of work on going for anti drone capabilities for small caliber cannons, direct energy, and aps. I would not hand wave mitigation as defeating.
Well there is one limitation, flight time for drones is still garbage, and with more payload doubly so. You just have to wait 20 minutes and it'll run out of power.
The logical endgame of this is war between a bunch of drones with very few humans in the loop, with the only viable way for either side to end it being to attack civilian targets until the opponent surrenders.
The future will be boots on the ground, men engaging in hand-to-hand combat, one dies/one lives.
That might occur in the context of standoff weapons or cheap drones or AI or whatever, but all of those things will be to facilitate a scenario where your side brings more men to that fight, that your men have an advantage in that fight, and that the fight actually reduces the other side's ability to do the same to you.
Somehow, it hasn't gone away. There's a disputed border region between China and India where at least 24 soldiers were killed in Jume 2020 in hand-to-hand fighting between the Indian and Chinese militaries.
To be fair, that situation is an extreme outlier even by most pre-modern warfare standards. Exceptions don't prove rules, but they sure highlight the common case.
Are you sure? It seems that the obvious way for drones to "occupy" land is to embed an IFF transponder in every human that is authorized to be in the area, and then program your drone swarm to kill every living thing that is not identified as friendly. The reason this hasn't happened yet is that nobody ruthless enough has yet gained control of a drone swarm. But this is a social, not technical obstacle, and one that is disturbingly likely to fall in the next decade.
That's quite a dark thought. And I doubt we'll get there - in that case you'd be one failed chip away from death at all times. Nothing like redefining the reign of terror.
Yes, it is a dark thought. There have been many leaders in history where millions of people have been one failed harvest or missing piece of documentation away from death at all times, and the leader didn't care. (And worse, much of the population backing the leader didn't care either, as long as it wasn't them.)
Hey not sure why you're getting downvoted, you had a genuine question and I think it's a common misconception.
If you play out the drones, standoff weapons, ICBMs, whatever...at the end of the day war is about taking something from someone or stopping someone from taking from you. All the tech nets out and it's you face to face with another human.
All of the tech is context of the face to face.
And your comment about battles vs wars isn't wrong, but reducing "supplies and support" just sets you up to have a an easier battle. Maybe you reduce the other side's capacity to do battle so effectively that the next "battle" is just you walking into the other side's capitol/village/home, but you still actually need the boots on the ground to go do that thing.
BTW Russia and the US at least, saw this coming decades ago. Which was the reason behind the intermediate range missile treaty, which was sadly ripped up in the early 2000s.
They likely are useful now, given their costs are going down and can be used in saturation attacks like Iran just did. A single ICBM with a dozen 500lb bombs can take out an fleet of fighters.
If launched from a nuclear country, the attacked country would have to assume nuclear payload. In the case of another nuclear country, this means nuclear retaliation.
Yeah. The archetypal “second amendment” weapon… the kind any regular American would need to hold his own was a musket, then a rifle, then lever or auto loader, then an M16. Now it’s a drone. A man or crew out in the country with AR15s are Don Quixote tilting at windmills with the advent of cheap drones.
The places we're seeing drone warfare proliferate still have men with AR15s out in the country. The side that can no longer field those men will have lost the war
I'm surprise the article didn't mention the US military history.
The US Army has not had a evolution of its attack helicopter since the 1970s.
I remember because one of my favorite childhood games was Comanche 3. [1] Control a helicopter, not crash, not get shot down, neutralize enemies, and achieve mission objectives -- it was cutting-edge for 1997.
The Comanche program was scrapped after more than a decade of development. And the Defiant program was just cancelled last year as well.
Avionics for sure, but there's not really anything like a "5th gen" helicopter. Helicopters are mostly close air support. No one is going to send fleets of helicopters to engage in air to air combat with other fleets of helicopters.
I suspect that the US likely has effective means of jamming drone communications. If you have a seeker that doesn't need human intervention, why use electric motors when you can use rocket motors for your drone, aka "missile".
The drones I would see as maybe being effective is some kind of anti radar drone that can loiter in an area without comms and strike when the radar lights up.
That said the CAS role requires radio comms to the helicopter / airplane, so I mean maybe a drone with an LLM that can use human comms to figure out friend from foe.
Obviously the drone has to send back a TV signal to the controller, I think the US would figure out some kind of HARM missile that would just lock onto the drone transmitter. Or a CIWS system with a radar that locks on to the transmitter.
I think solid fuel rocket motors are cheaper than electric motors and batteries.
Maybe drones are the future, but I sort of see it as 2 broke countries duking it out. There's probably a reason why Ukraine wants US weapons like ATACMS and not a container ship full of drones. If you look at the $120 billion in aid to ukraine, that would buy you 100 million drones at $1200 per drone. Or 10 million at $12,000 per.
I guess what I'm saying is if NATO fought Russia it would be over in a few weeks and no one would care about drones. I think drones, except for Ukraine's sea drones, are highly useful in this conflict but probably not many others.
Sea drones could be a game changer, its a super long range torpedo and for anyone fighting the US, its probably safe to assume vessels beyond the vessel that launches them, are those of the US military / the enemy.
You know, there is an argument to be made that if you just abandoned having an army, and bought 1 million drones that would just target anything vehicular or human, you could just let the drones self guide on some kind of, go that way, kill something if you see it, or return for fresh batteries if you don't kind of algorithm.
The problem then is all the OPFOR has to defend against is cheap shitty drones.
If you haven't already, be sure to checkout MicroProse's [1] "modern" retro flightsim, Tiny Combat Arena.
Sure, it's beta and continuously in development (and likely won't be finished, ever), but still, you can take off in a Harrier and blow up stuff. The graphics are charmingly retro.
--
[1] published by MicroProse, but actually a one-man effort.
VTOL VR is a pretty great VR first mil flight sim. It has f-18, f-35, and apache like vehicles. They recently introduced wind effects and EW. Allegedly the radar cross-sectioning is better than DCIS (actually accounts for orientation towards the radar)
Tornado was another terrific sim. It had the best mission planner and immersion even though its simulation of the ALARM was busted. Digital Integrations? Don't remember if that was the publisher.
I highly doubt that such a general presumption holds.
As seen in the case of Russia’s super drone being downed by their own this week after presumably loosing control, only relying on unmanned vehicles en mass leads to a single point of failure.
Disrupt or corrupt signals, disrupt the entire force.
The US is the force it is because it can do combined arms like nobody else.
Unique capabilities don’t matter if your opponent saturates them with low tech or combined arms.
Look at last weeks Iran ICBM barrage vs. iron dome and David’s sling.
Sure, unmanned vehicles bring unique capabilities to any field of battle, but combined arms is as much the future as it was the past.
> Look at last weeks Iran ICBM barrage vs. iron dome and David’s sling.
I believe the issue was not overwhelming the defences but rather the defences (Iron Dome and David's sling) were designed for short range and slow rockets from Lebanon or Gaza and not long range fast/high rockets from Iran.
> It may be that the cost per Arrow missile (for long range intercepts) is $3M as well, so they didn't fire that many of them?
This. Israel knew the 3 targets in advance, according to reporting. Any jets or other valuable equipment from the two airfields would have been removed before the attack. It would have been a waste to use Arrow interceptors to protect empty hangars. Also, according to a satellite image of impact craters, many of the missiles hit dirt around the airbase, so wouldn't have been intercepted even if they needed to protect jets.
Iron dome is only used against small rockets, and was never intended to hit ballistic or cruise missiles. Thus it's not a failure since they aren't used for that kind of defense. There are separate anti ballistic systems that were used and shot down many of the rockets.
Interception comes with risks - the debris from that missile has to land somewhere. The only person confirmed to have been killed in the recent Iranian attack was a man in the West Bank who was crushed by part of a destroyed missile. It's clear that at least some of the missiles that got through were deliberately ignored because they were on target to hit open ground.
The best analysis I've seen is this Washington Post analysis that said that +24 Iranian missiles hit Israeli military/intelligence targets or were close misses:
I would say that's a pretty incredible intercept ratio.
We don't know if they were let through because their predicted targets or because there weren't enough interceptors or some other reason.
Air bases are pretty hardened targets. Most important stuff is kept in bunkers. They're also huge. The design assumption of an air base is that it's the prime target for rocket/missile/air raid attacks (and Israel airbases have been attacked by rockets in past wars, e.g. in the Yom Kippur war).
I've seen someone review satellite photos from Nevatim that seemed to indicate one or two hits to some structure. As far as we know nothing of value was hit and no one was hurt.
All that said, I wouldn't want to be around when these volleys of ICBMs are fired at you. Definitely not fun. But not a war winner either as long as they're conventional warheads.
Precision ICBMs are not low tech. They're 1-3M$ a pop. Not sure if that's what you were trying to say (that arrow/david sling/iron dome have been saturated to some large advantage by Iran).
Defense against ICBMs attack definitely matters, even if they can be saturated it's not that easy, you need launchers and you need to keep them capable of launching. The ICBM defense isn't just about knocking some of those missiles (and you can selectively do that by priority) it's also about early warning. The combination of these capabilities makes a huge difference.
Germany launched 1400 V2 1-ton warhead ICBMs on London and that didn't stop the British fighting.
Both in Israel and in Ukraine those missiles and UAVs are not really a huge factor.
Definitely combined arms is where it's at today, and today attack helicopters have a huge role to play within that scenario, what the future looks like with more sophisticated autonomous machines is hard to predict. Maybe an autonomous bi-pedal robot combined with a UAV combined with an autonomous tank combined with an autonomous jet...
I implied "low tech" insofar as that ICBMs are not really "autonomous" or a dynamic device.
They're launched, they fly, but at some point close to reaching terminal phase, all they do is fall along a pre-calculated trajectory.
Case in point with regards to Iran, a combination of factors played a role in Israel's response:
They knew the launch locations, times and most likely targets.
Hence were able to move out any valuable assets of targeted bases well ahead of time and, had they wanted to, could have even pre-emptively striked the launchers.
The latter again, requiring combined arms and from what I've seen about military ops, there are so many factors to pay attention to with sometimes such little time windows calculated by mission planners, that I don't see all that going full on autonomously for still some time to come.
The nominal number of assets involved, the number of types of naval and aerial assets involved, the highly detailed operation plan with a short window for payload launch resulting in a 2 minute window of said payloads reaching their targets simultaneously: That is such a dynamic and complex situation that the reliability required by each component in such a calculation is high.
That's why all of the humans operating these assets receive years of training.
Autonomous vehicles will have support roles or be optimized for high risk or standard, low-complexity scenarios, but I don't see them making huge strides to replace people in a big way in high-complexity, high-impact ops.
IFV are not dead, rocket launchers as well. Even tanks are still a key. At the end people are capturing land/city, not drones.
But drones are changing warfare. Drone hunting other drones, drone with self guidance - they are being used in battle right now.
500$ or even less is the cost of FPV drone with night camera capable to carry 2kg bomb. Russia is buying soldiers for up to $25000 to be killed by such cheap drone later.
Those drones are getting lost / shot down / missing their targets at high rate. But since they are relatively cheap, they almost effectively artillery shells right now. Don't need a high kill rate when you have lots of them.
That is true, not every drone hits the target. But the same with any other weapon. How many 155 shells are needed to actually hit the target? A moving target?
And one regular 155mm shell is 5x more expensive than FPV drone.
Drone prices everyone mentioning are without warheads. And depends on capabilities. Mainly how far it flies and how heavy payload is. I would say kamikadze drone manufactured in Ukraine costs 300-1000$
Humans have a place in high-end weapon systems until there is a locally running AGI in the system. An actual near-peer war never works the way people expected, and fancy new weapon systems tend to underperform initially. In the absence of an AGI, humans can adapt their behavior in the field faster than tech companies can fix their software and deliver new features.
For the sake of humanity, I wish that was the case, but it won't be. Defensive drones will exist for sure, but generally the targets will be human or infrastructure, not other drones.
They will be when there are AI controlled aircraft/drones that can exceed the G-force limits that humans require and can thus out maneuver any human controlled fighter.
Fifth generation fighter jets aren’t built for dog-fighting. They are stealthy, mesh-networked missile and bomb platforms.
Modern fourth generation fighters would be more than sufficient up close. Except that fifth generation fighters hunt in packs and none of them need to be pointed at their target to hit them.
A lot of sci-fi gets tossed around about 5th-gen fighters and stealth vs non-stealth is extrapolated onto everything.
If you're communicating, you are broadcasting your position to the enemy. That means you can be shot down.
If you're in passive stealth mode, you can't detect the enemy and they can't detect you until both sides are extremely close and that means a dogfight.
All of this also ignores the massive advancements in IRST and AI which can likely pick out subtle patterns in radar and other data that normal hard-coded algorithms cannot.
If the illuminating plane is not a stealth plane, then it'll get shot by the stealth plane long before it can detect the stealth plane.
If the illuminating plane is a stealth plane, then you've just traded on stealth plane for another. Even worse, there's a decent chance that your broadcasting plane gets shot down, the illumination fails, and the enemy stealth plane still gets away leaving you one plane less for no gains at all.
This doesn't seem right to me. The limiting factor here is the ability of an air to air missile to hit a target (and to find the target in the first place). A drone might be more survivable (if it's better at avoiding missiles because of the G-forces etc.,.), but it shouldn't be any better at destroying an enemy jet, right?
That theoretical highly maneuverable drone with a highly advanced sensor suite isn't going to be cheap either. At which point, what's the advantage? You wouldn't be bound by the number of pilots, but if the drones are too expensive it doesn't matter.
> what's the advantage? You wouldn't be bound by the number of pilots
You gave part of the answer right there. Not only would you not be limited by the number of - hard to replace and time-consuming and expensive to train - pilots but you don't run the risk of losing them either.
> but if the drones are too expensive it doesn't matter.
The large expense for fighter aircraft tends not to lie in the actual production costs but in the development costs which are spread over a limited production run. Build more drones and they get less expensive per item. Build enough of them to overwhelm the enemy and you win drone superiority.
Hm... I guess the argument here is something like: we don't build 10,000 F-35s because we can't train 10,000 pilots. But with drones, the pilots are no longer a limiting factor so we can plan to scale drone production beyond what we do airplanes?
Yes, plus the fact that the craft does not need to be as complicated as the F-35 because it can omit everything related to keeping the pilot alive and functional.
Communication and detection underwater is a major issue. Radio is not effective at any range. Audio datalinks are short-ranged, low-bandwidth, unreliable, easily jammed, and give away your position. Active sonar gives away your position. High speed both gives away your position and makes passive sonar useless.
Torpedoes are forced to use physical wires for remote guidance because nothing else works.
It would be pretty easy for someone to develop a quiet, long-range torpedo that can be launched undetected outside active sonar range. (Assuming this capability doesn’t already exist.)
Also, SSNs already carry long-range drones called cruise missiles.
Manned subs will take a long time to become obsolete.
Most of what you listed would not be necessary for an autonomous SSN without a “man in the loop” no? Order it to perform a patrol or sit on the seabed, periodically sending up an antennae to listen for updates to orders. If it receives a kill order, it starts hunting. Preposition them at strategic locations if necessary.
To be fair, I’m (partly) playing devil’s advocate, but I don’t think the tech to create a fully or nearly fully autonomous attack sub is that far out. Key point is that you would have to be willing to give it more autonomy than the current crop of UAVs.
It could be done. We have autonomous underwater drones that can map the seafloor.
There are a lot of problems.
Technically, you need the resources of a nation-state to make stealthy ones that can operate at depth. There are no off the shelf systems you can strap together. Salt water and pressure destroys things very quickly. It wouldn’t take long for non-moving propellers to get fouled with debris. If you want a mine that launches a torpedo, I think that already exists. If you don’t need to operate at depth, a surface drone would be sufficient. If you’re attacking ships, aerial drones or missiles are better.
If you’re not a nation-state, diesel-electric submarines have been around for more than a century. They are easier to build and will be for a long time.
Even once you have drones, what are they attacking? The US has less than a hundred submarines.
In my opinion, this is an advanced technology weapon as part of a combined arms strategy. Basically a more sophisticated torpedo.
How small are the autonomous attack subs? GPUs powerful enough to power autonomous decision making attack subs are going to consume a lot of energy, a lot more than what a car sized system powered by batteries can provide.
As such, only nuclear AI subs may be viable, since that gives the strategic advantage of a submarine that doesn't need to resurface for like years. But putting nuclear reactors in an autonomous AI system sounds like a terrible idea.
Human societies have spent millenia developing the infrastructure to produce reliable/trustworthy soldiers. AI is not nearly at that level in terms of trustworthiness/fault tolerance, even if they will quickly be as smart as soliders.
I am not surprised, drone warfare today requires a lot of people and a lot of manhours, and it does not scale that well. Several guys are often moving the equipment on foot to get as close to the frontline as possible, so that the pilot can have a few shots at delivering a pretty small explosives to a target they might not even found. On the other hand, few conscripts can jump on a Grad and start shooting rockets on a whim.
The way Russians use them is obsolete… just like Russian tanks.
Combined arms maneuvering is what they _should_ be doing. In fact Russia reorganized to theoretically be setup for this sort of maneuvering; they organized into BTGs (battalion tactical groups) which contain basically everything: air defense (area denial and SHORAD), logistics (refuel, resupply, rearm, repair), infantry, armor, air attack, engineering, artillery, and I’m probably leaving a few out.
To this end they’ve been completely ineffective.
They started as the second best army in the world, then went to the second best army in Ukraine, and now they are the second best army in Russia.
How do you do combined arms into a minefield? It's a WW1-style mess where combined arms simply don't work.
Ukraine tried NATO tactics summer of last year and suffered a catastrophic defeat. Going across minefields requires convoys. Russian helicopters outside of MANPADS range (and too low to be visible to SAM site radar) take out the minesweeper and rear vehicles. Now you've got a bunch of sitting ducks. If it looks like escape is possible, artillery remote-mines the path the minesweeper cleared.
Try your luck in the minefield and you get destroyed. Get out to fight and the anti-personnel mines take everyone out. Stay in place and the regular artillery takes out all the troops. At night, you get grenade and RPG-dropping drones with IR cameras so you can't even hide.
I ask again, what is your combined arms solution to this mess?
But it is like asking what is the healthy thing to do when you are 300 pounds and can run because you have heart issues: the answer is to never be in that position in the first place.
Anyway I assume the US has some sort of remote detonation mine plan for if shit gets hot with NK.
Russia didn't defend Kursk because they didn't think Ukraine would be stupid enough to make that attack. That was a temporary PR win and a permanent strategic loss.
The results have been the elimination of Ukraine's best troops AND losing the ability to reinforce faltering lines which is why Russian advances have increased.
Maneuver warfare relies on secrecy to a large degree. You can hide strategic troop buildups from the Taliban because they don't have satellites, but not from a near peer. With current spotter drones and IR cameras, you can't really even rely on tactical secrecy.
Russians BTGs were a failure, an attempt to create a hyper-flexible swiss army knife for offensive + defensive + occupation activities, which then fell apart when they faced peer-level resistance from the Ukranians.
The BTGs were mostly Infantry and Artillery, supplemented with Tanks and specialty assets. Heavy losses in one of the main three segment made the rest of the BTG mostly or entirely combat-ineffective. And that's basically what happened -- the infantry and tanks died, and artillery was relatively untouched, which led to Russia sending convicts (Storm-Z) to find targets for the (still remaining, quite numerous) artillery.
They did not have real, integrated logistics and heavy engineering units on the BTG level (though they do have combat engineers / sappers). What supply units they do have are limited, and they are dependent on higher level replenishment organizations for operations lasting longer than 6 days. Those replenishment orgs inevitably got bombed by the AFU, so the BTGs rapidly ran out of gas and ammo, even when rocking a full TO&E.
They did have integrated EW and HUMINT capabilities, with the EW being particularly potent; Russian EW is still very good, even on the BTG level. The downside of these, though, is that they are a swiss army knife; small enough to be useful, but not big enough to be ideal (and withstand casualties), and it forces a busy commander to divide their attention in ways that a larger org may not.
Precision guided artillery looked like it could be a game changer for about a month or two, then Russia figured out how to spoof and jam it, making guided artillery worse than useless. Ukraine is back to using good old dumb artillery, which isn't too accurate but at least cannot be jammed.
There is high variance in the ECCM capability of US weapons supplied thus far. JDAM and GLSDB have fallen flat while ATACMS and GMLRS have done well for themselves.
You're out of loop, HIMARS hasn't been effective for quite some time, since the Russians figured how to remotely jam the GPS and make them miss.
That's not to say they are useless as you need extensive coverage over a large front, but it's largely worthless right now.
This is by the way why most NATO countries don't love the idea of sharing the latest weapons with Ukraine, they give opposition intelligence on how to counter them.
FWIW, the US has been sending obsolete or intentionally degraded systems. There is a re-fit process if it comes from US stocks to remove sensitive tech or capabilities. It would be an error to assume that what happens in Ukraine represents the capabilities of US systems despite having the same name.
This isn't unique to Ukraine, most US weapon exports are selectively degraded or have capabilities removed. Despite this, most export versions of US weapon systems are still very competent.
> It would be an error to assume that what happens in Ukraine represents the capabilities of US systems despite having the same name.
It's speculation, at best, to assume the opposite.
Of course we know that there are export versions, but those are given in general different labels, and we don't have any intel on the specific system version used in Ukraine.
Assuming that even non-export versions could not be jammed is thus just speculation.
The US encourages the speculation as a matter of doctrine.
That said, anyone familiar with the tech knows that it doesn’t work the way it would have to work for it to be jammable in the way assumed, as a matter of public record. A classic example is the amount of people and media that asserts the US has GPS-guided weapons. The US has never had GPS-guided anything, it was defeatable by design.
The "HIMARS is ineffective" soundbite seems to rest on a single quote from an unnamed Ukrainian official. Which we have no reason to doubt, but it doesn't specify what they meant it to be ineffective at (for example, what kinds of targets and with which type of munitions).
Meanwhile, in the very same WaPo article whence that quote derives, just an inch or two down, we have the statement "Kyiv still considers HIMARS to be effective". And in Wikipedia we have attestations of its continued use and effect, post-dating the popular "HIMARS is ineffective" quote:
HIMARS has also been used to strike Russian troop concentrations in hard cover, with a HIMARS strike on a Russian base in Makiivka killing 89 Russian soldiers on the admission of the Russian government, although BBC News Russian could confirm at least 139 dead Russian soldiers [July 2024]
On 9 August 2024, HIMARS destroyed a convoy of Russian troops in the Kursk Oblast of Russia in what Russian milbloggers described as one of the bloodiest attacks of the entire war.
So it would seem "HIMARS has become less effective" would be a more suitable description of the current situation.
Isn’t there a great deal of overlap? A guided artillery shell is kind of like a fast moving loitering drone. Sometimes shells can even be given more instruction after being fired.
MANPADS have generally not changed since the Afghanistan war. And here I mean the Soviet-Afghanistan war, not the twice as long but more or less equally ineffective American-Afghanistan war. If the attack helicopter is dead, then it has already been dead for ~40 years.
> There were about 11,846 U.S helicopters that served in the Vietnam War. The U.S records show 5,607 helicopter losses.
Are 310 helicopter losses in Ukraine that high? I don't think so. Russia has lost =~ 3K tanks. That's a 10:1 ratio for tank:helicopter, is that high?
Helicopters' role may change. They would be ideal drone operator platforms - they already have a weapons operator in a back seat. The right cannon / loadout could take out small drones. Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) style wingmen would work with quadcopters for helicopters. They could expand the sensory capability to avoid surface to air threats.
Today's US Army is dwarfed by the size of the Vietnam-era Army. I love putting this into perspective for people who don't know the history. Those 5,500+ losses would be more than the Army's entire helicopter fleet today; active and reserve components combined. 300+ losses would be huge, like half of the current Apache fleet. I'm not sure that we ever had more than 300 helicopters in Iraq or Afghanistan, even at the peak of the 2007-2010 surges.
The co-pilot/gunner actually sits in the front seat of the Apache, by the way.
Thanks, I figured but do you know just how much larger? I am listening to Ken Burns' Vietnam on Audible and I believe we had 200K personnel in Vietnam at the peak... oh shit I just double checked and it was 543K personnel JUST IN VIETNAM. Thanks, mang! Enlightening. That is 25% of our entire military today.
Yeah, at the peak of Vietnam we had more troops on the ground than the Army has on active duty today (about 450k). The Army's size declined by half after Vietnam, and then declined by half again in the 1990s. This is a nice figure illustrating active duty end-strength for all services since 1950: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/gov310/media/fad_milper_400.gif
That figure doesn't go back as far as WWII, of course. Even the Korea and Vietnam-era Army would be dwarfed by the WWII Army: 8 million troops in 1945.
Note that we do also have the Army Reserve and Army National Guard, which effectively doubles the total Army end-strength to about 1 million today.
As a career Army officer, I could go on about this, and what it means, and what worries me, all day.
At first, there were real budget cuts (the "peace dividend") of about 10%. Over time, total spending grew to be much more in both nominal and real terms, and much more per troop. However, it's also much lower as a percentage of GDP, from a high of 9-10% in 1968 to 3-4% today.
Russia's Ka-52 were a significant problem for Ukraine in the summer 2023 offensive. When Ukraine's armour would meet massive mine fields and get stymied, it was Ka-52s arriving, popping up over tree lines and taking pot shots at them with ATGMs from a distance that outranged most of their MANPADs. Only a few were taken out by lucky hits near the front. The only reason they aren't seen as much anymore is because Russia was idiotic and kept them parked at an airfield within ATACMS range.
Came here to say this. Ukraine also adapted by, most likely, having a roving Patriot that ambushed a few Ka-52s (and a few fixed-wing jets).
Western militaries don't seem to have much capability for tactical/mobile medium range air defense. The Russian Air Force has been extremely unimpressive, but has cobbled together an effective tactic now of launching glide bombs at front line targets from relatively safe territory. I am surprised no one has figured out how to put one or two long-range air-air missiles on a loitering high altitude drone.
A BS article if I ever saw one. Take for example this:
> Moreover, the threat is not the organic air defences of battlegroups or a Soviet Motor-Rifle Regiment or Brigade, but dispersed and well-hidden infantry and special forces units equipped with modern MANPADS missile systems. Furthermore, because the enemy forces are operating over the defenders’ own ground, the defence can be cued and alerted to approaching helicopters, given good data connectivity.
which is exactly what did NOT happen when the Ukrainians counter-attacked on their own territory, in Southern-Ukraine, when the Russian Ka-52s had a field day (actual, several field days) against incoming Ukrainian heavy armour. These Anglo guys still live in the 1980s, they should ask the Ukrainians what they feel about the "demise" of the attack helicopter, that way maybe non-sense like this won't get published anymore.
That counter attack was more than a year ago. Now Ukrainians have drones capable of intercepting slow air targets like drones or helicopters. And they are ten times cheaper than manpads.
They don’t, plus Russia’s EW capabilities are now so good that stuff like HIMARS has now only a 10% chance of hitting its target (from a recent Western article on the issue), so there’s no chance in hell they’ll let some drones fight their attack helicopters
and them (the Russians) not doing anything about it.
Which is to say that these delusions won’t help the Ukrainians one bit, nor any other Eastern European army that will possibly fight the same Russians in the near future.
Helicopters like all CAS require air superiority / supremacy to operate effectively. Neither side has either, so it is not an ideal environment for a helicopter to operate in.
This seems to be the takehome. The helicopter has to be a drone operator and behave very defensively, with effective active measures.
> Given the right network integration and the right weapons, you could inflict a deal of pain in a fairly basic helicopter while staying well out of the way of any air defence. You still have to protect yourself against chance encounters – partisans or special forces with shoulder-launched weapons, for example. This appears easier said than done.
I hope our military is thinking about drones, because when WW3 starts our enemies are going to have millions of tiny software-controlled drones and if we're still fighting like we're in WW2 it's all over for us.
The US military pioneered drones at every scale and price point, and has been deploying them operationally in very large numbers for decades. They have by far the most mature and diverse capability of any country at this point.
Also, the drones being used in Ukraine by both sides would not survive in a more sophisticated electronic warfare environment.
I would challenge this view:
a) every price point - definitely not the low end
b) in very large numbers - definitely not 6 digit numbers we see in Ukraine
c) Ukraine IS the most hostile EW environment, and various US weapon systems do not fare that great there
Yes, US were the first movers and invested a lot - but into expensive high-end systems (and not really tested in challenging EW environment), not ubiquitous low-end. Presumably they are catching-up. Maybe. They are not catching-up in building warships.
They shouldn't die, just become robotic with optional remote control. Comparing to copters helis have significant advantages and disadvantages too. I.e. different enough to have different roles
It means the invasion essentially started in 2014 with the invasions of Crimea and the Donbas. The full-scale invasion in 2022 was basically an expansion/solidification of that effort.
All piloted combat aircraft seem questionable at this point.
More weight, more vulnerability, more ethical issues, less ability to take high g force, more expensive, more focus and endurance issues, more constraints on taking risks.
When bombing runs are guided bombs anyway and air to air is all about over the horizon missiles anyway then there really questions around why you need a human in it at all.
Ask not what you can do to the attack helicopter, but instead what the attack helicopter can do to you. Increase vulnerability is only one side of the coin. If there are still valuable missions that can be better done by an attack helicopter than by a competing system, then they are not dead.
But yeah, drones will probably take most of the missions away.
Remember when the Ukrainian counter offensive failed, in part due to the Russian helicopters coming in and absolutely annihilating the offensive?
I do. The helicopter isn’t dead, neither is the tank.
But their tactics might change, and they might become optionally manned, because why not?
But if you need quick reaction, massive firepower, or troop transport either quickly or in difficult to reach places, good luck doing it with drones or wheeled vehicles.
It's my understanding (and from watching the videos that I can get as a civilian) that the Russians still aren't operating their helicopters in a manner that I would be comfortable with if I was inside one. I certainly wouldn't be pumped flying in the environment they are in, with so many MANPADS out there, but there is no way a machine I was in would be hit with an anti-tank missile while we hovered (as was in the article.)
Lot of preamble to say: no, I don't think the attack helicopter is dead. Attack helicopters are nimble and can hide in terrain quite well, and even when an attacking force can see them it takes a skilled operator to actually hit them. The single use drones that operate like kamikaze vehicles may throw a winkle into the mix, but a helo flying at 150knots is going to be very challenging to hit for one of those. I expect there will be quite an arms race countering and then counter countering these in the future wars.