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.
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.