I don't see fly-by-fiber getting very popular. The only goal is anti-jamming. But if the drone was fully autonomous, there would be no signals to jam. And the fully autonomous drones are coming fast. Meta's SAM 2 can follow pretty much any object anywhere, and people are beginning to get it running on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin. That's 75% of the work. The other 25% is autopilot and a way to disable it if it flies back over friendly territory. 6 months I'd say, for amateurs starting now. I'm sure some companies already have prototypes working.
There are multiple roles for a small airborne asset. One of them is ISR (video feed), used for targeting artillery or movement tracking and such. Jamming can block the down stream feed and defeat that support role.
Anti-jamming is the intermediate goal. Fly by fiber allows the pilot to retain control of the drone while over the battlefield.
With a completely autonomous drone in contested space (presumably with EW around), there's no way for a pilot to tell the drone "fly a little to the left to see what's behind that tree." Each drone has very specific use cases.
That just moves the arms race from anti-jamming to anti-ML targeting, doesn't it?
Litter your trenches in inflatable mannequins (anti-CV), put all your soldiers in ghillie suits (anti-CV), have cheap fireworks ready to spread chaff (anti-radar) and flares (anti-IR).
Any reasonable autonomous control system is going to have sensor fusion to combine different wavelengths of sensor data together. Kalman Filters are a thing, even outside of military applications. You're going to need countermeasures that are anti-CV, anti-radar, and anti-IR measures in one source to confuse a well-made autonomous drone.
Even then, if they just put a bullet into anything that has the approximate optical & heat signature of a human, it'll work fine. Who cares if you blow up a few inflatable mannequins and flares if you also get all the soldiers?
This is very clearly divorced from the realities of warfare.
* A Kalman filter is an algorithm, not a magical wand. How is that algorithm implemented? What are the parameters? How are they tuned? How is the state, and uncertainty thereof, modeled? How accurate is that model in the field? Details and implementations matter. Finding answers that work reliably in the field, even for a limited set of circumstances, takes huge amounts of time, money and talent, and involves a continuous process of trial and error.
* Drones have a limited payload capacity, which means a limited amount of ammo to burn on false positives, and a limited amount of smarts and sensors with which to process their environment.
* Many attacks rely on the element of surprise to catch the enemy unaware, or leave them with little time to plan - shooting fake targets alerts others to your presence and can quickly give away your position, providing time to take cover and/or stage a counterattack.
* The people developing the smarts for these drones are a limited resource that need to be found, hired, and paid, and they have to play a cat-and-mouse game to maintain the robustness of the targeting system.
* Asymmetric warfare is a time-honored guerilla favorite. It doesn't matter how fancy and sophisticated your drone's targeting system is if rendering it useless is cheaper, and wasting ammo on non-targets can very much tip the scales here.
That system is already orders of magnitude more complex than a small autonomous suicide done with a cheap camera, and probably not within reach even for the big players for at least a couple of years. At least of you want to do that with a solid, reliable targeting system and have at least some friendly fire prevention in place.
And more importantly, that's what I mean with arms race. Now the mannequins in the trenches get a little heater element to keep them at body temperature, and they get internal water bladders with the appropriate radar cross section, ect. Easily doable today, and orders of magnitude cheaper than a sensor fusion drone.
Add counter drones and point defense cannons, and the attack drones need rocket motors for final approach, which makes CV another order of magnitude more difficult, ect
The obvious solution is to target civilians with autonomous drones. Not much different to sanctions in terms of civilian casualties, but much more effective at stopping the enemy infrastructure. Since sanctions mostly kill children and the elderly.
At that point, isn't it easier to just shell those civilians if they are in drone range, or cluster/fire bomb them if you need to fly in an aircraft to deliver the drones anyway?
Terrorism by non-state actors is a danger, of course, but guys with AKs and pipe bombs storming a football stadium seems easier to pull off and yet hasn't happend so far anyway.
What's the point of doing that? What kind of mission objective does that achieve? If you want to scare civilians away or deport them, you don't need to kill them at all, you just need to make them run for their lives.
Autonomous can still be jammed. They can and probably will still use gps, visual info, sonar, sound, magnetic fields, or pressure. All which can be jammed from the outside. And this is already happening.
Any fully autonomous drone that can be produced in the near future will be easily foolable. And if it has a remote fail-safe deactivation system the enemy can figure it out and deactivate it too. So you solved absolutely nothing of what a wire solves. And made the same pitch we have for every ML product right now: we're X% there, next year we're there. When in fact next year we're still going to be next year away from there.
There's a simple way to build a failsafe that the enemy can't figure out. The basic rule of cryptography--assume your enemy knows everything but the key.
When the launcher and the drone connect they make up a completely random key. It is known only to the launcher and the drone. The drone will self destruct if it receives said key. The enemy could jam the destruct but they couldn't trigger it. Note that no encryption is even needed.
One time pads are inherently unbreakable crypto other than by compromising the pad. And in this case the secret is known only to the drone and controller.
fly-by-fiber used to be very popular. And still is. The systems Russia is getting from North Korea is fly-by-fiber. Though I agree that autonomous drones is probably where we are heading. Ukraina has already shown swarms of autonomous drones working together.
You even have different types of drones providing different function. A mama drone carrying smaller drones to the place of operation for example.
Which is humorous to me as consumer drones get these sorts of features, meanwhile the military industrial complex charges 100-1000x the price.
"But they have to test to guarantee safety"
Nobody cares, there's a reason Ukraine is using cheap consumer/commercial drones, because they're effective as hell, and you get much more bang for buck without most of your money going into the back pockets of defense company executives.
If national defense is sooooo important, why aren't defense companies publicly owned?
Knowing a little bit about this, a 12km spool of 0.125mm plastic fibre costs about $1k [0]. Limits the range still (especially if the fibre is jacketed/supported in anyway).
That's pretty cheap. An unguided artillery shell is about $3000 each, plus the logistics of getting it there. Guided munition is in the 6 figure range.
In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a great deal.
I remember reading that Ukraine loses about 3-4 drones for every successful hit. Higher in EW heavy regions. Beyond EW the losses are because they can't find targets within battery time (these are always 1 way drones regardless), they miss, they get shot down, etc.
Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could make it worth it by itself.
If that was true, Russia would have been utterly defeated a long time ago. Ukraine uses about 4000 drones per day, even if a successful hit meant just 1 infantryman killed or incapacitated, Russians will be at the negotiation table, at least, because no way they can sustain 1000 people per day in irrecoverable losses.
They also loose equipment at a staggering rate. From the start of the invasion 2022 until end of July, they have lost more than 570 000 soldiers, 8000 tanks and 16000 artillery systems.
Oh and also 38 war ships and one submarine - against a country that didn't have a navy at the start of the invasion. Drones is ammunition and is used in air, land and sea.
Those are Ukraine numbers, so there is double counting, propaganda, and other such reasons to take some salt with them. Different countries have different estimates but they publish them less often. Those numbers are the best we have, and give a similar magnitude to other estimates but they are also higher than others.
Of course there are also things that nobody can see and there is reason to believe Russia is intentionally not counting some thing.
On the other hand we also have reason to believe Russia is recruiting about 1000 men per day, and the number of troops they have is not increasing. So while the numbers above are suspect they cannot be too far off.
Those are Ukraine numbers, but they are repeatedly confirmed by ISW and others. There are of course errors, uncertainties. But they seem not to be inflated. Often they instead seem to be somewhat conservative compared to other sources.
My point is mainly that "drone only does something of value 1/4 of the time, rest of them are lost uselessly" isn't a bad statistic. Even if it took 10 drones to significantly wound an infantryman, or 100 to blow up a tank, that would be still a very good use of them.
If that was the case the Russian army in Ukraine would be growing quickly. We know that Russia recruits around 1000 people per day and their army stays virtually the same size. That pretty much proves that the casualties are close to 1000 per day.
The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days. They also do not account that due to observation drone presence attacking leads to greater losses.
>>The models do not account for attack drones which kills most Russian soldiers these days.
If you have data that reliably attributes Russian casualties to the weapon systems causing them, I'd love to see it. I know that Twitter and Tiktok are chock full of Ukrainian "drone drop" videos but again that is part of the information operations and shouldn't be taken as an accurate reflection of the battlespace writ large. That said....if they were killing >500 Russians daily with drones, which almost all have recordable video footage, we should be seeing maybe 10x as much footage as is getting released.
One work-around would be to find the most appropriate weapon system that IS in the model and see if it could cover FPV drones. I think QJM aggregates weapons systems but goes down to the squad level, so maybe it accounts for specialized infantry tasks like snipers. Insert a weapon into the model that is a "sniper" but with a 10km effective range. Then run the numbers again. That still ignores the effects of Russian EW but hey...this is an iterative process.
There are reports that drone loss for Ukraine is like 3-5 drones per a successful attack. There are also reports that Ukraine carries like 4000 daily drone flights. It is not clear how may of those are for observations and how many are for attacks. If one assumes that there 3000 attack flights and 600 reach the target, it can easily explain 50% of Russian losses.
In addition a sniper is a bad analogy. The drone warhead is at least a hand-grenade useful against hard targets. A better analogy would be a guided light artillery shell if such exists in models.
>The Russians already did the math. They are accepting the butcher's bill because the trendline is obviously heading towards a Russian victory.
If it was so simple no war would ever be fought since the losing side would just decide it's not worth the fight. It was clear Japan and Germany would lose the war the moment the USA entered, yet they fought on for four more years.
Part of the problem is incorrect assessments of the balance of power, combined with stubbornness. Both the Germans and the Japanese assessed that their martial spirit would enable them to overcome their industrially-superior adversaries. Both were wrong. Also militaries the world over have a culture of stoicism under conditions of adversity. At the tactical level it sometimes means you can turn around what appears to be an unwinnable situation. I'd have to dig to see where this has reliably worked at the strategic level. My initial thought is "it doesn't, but military officers who have spent their entire adult lives inculcated to act otherwise will never acknowledge that".
There's been interviews where Ukrainian troops said "we thought the Russians would just run away after the first day of seeing our Leopards".
Both sides in this conflict have underestimated each other in different ways, but industrial attritional warfare is the great equalizer: it doesn't matter what men THINK will lead to victory if enough steel is thrown in the other guy's direction to remove all subjectivity.
None the less, at the heart of the matter it comes down to economics. Russia's GDP vs the colective West's says who's going to win this one - at least, assuming it goes to the long haul and nothing changes (which of course it will, unexpectedly, at some point).
Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
Not all GDP's are created equal, though. The US/West has the capital to bury Russia....but isn't mobilizing it the same way it did in WW2. Which of course begs the question of "Why not?", the answer to which is: the US doesn't care as much about the fate of Ukraine as Russia cares about the fate of Ukraine. If we're not in it to win it, then why prolong the death and destruction? Unless the death and destruction was the point all along?
>>>Also the Ukrainians are fighting for survival from the top of the country to the bottom (motivation makes a big difference). For the other side, the view at the top is very different from the view of those going into the fight (often unwillingly) at the bottom.
Do you think the Ukrainians aren't suffering from serious motivation problems? Regular reports of men drowning in freezing rivers trying to cross into Romania. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men in hiding from the roving bands of "mobilizers". [1][2][3] The Russians, by contrast, are mostly there because they are from impoverished regions of Siberia and the enlistment bonuses are gigantic.[4] Russia is basically depopulating its ethnic minorities from Siberia to fuel its war machine. For a country that has its very survival on the line, Ukraine has a TON of men who aren't picking up rifles.
Even if Ukraine is doomed to lose, we need to still continue supporting them, simply to win time to rearm, and also to kill enough Russians to make further aggression unlikely.
In WWII, Soviet Union suffered 7.9M combat dead and dead/incapacitated ratio was way softer back then simply because healthcare was on the lower level - it was 80 years ago. Meaning, for each dead there are more incapacitated today simply because severely wounded people (with heavy concussions, explosive amputaions, multiple fractures and shrapnel, infections), mostly died in WWII and now they survive so don't add to the dead statistics - but are useless for warfare later.
Soviet Union had 190M people in 1941 and Russia has 145M, plus in 1940, 6050K kids were born in the USSR and in Russia today, barely 1200K are born each year. So availability of manpower is about 75% of 1941 and rate of replacement is only 1/5 as high.
In 1945, Soviet Union was a country of invalids and widows. It utterly lacked any mobilisation capacity - 1946 conscripts served for 5-7 years in peacetime army because there was no one to replace them (my grandfather was conscripted in 1947 and served till 1953 while there was no war going on).
Easy to see that approximately 3, or max 4 million combat dead (1/2 to 2/3 the share of population) will bring Russia to the same position, considering lower replacement rate of manpower, and lower share of young population.
What is the fraction of those that need to be killed for Putin to see it's going nowhere? My bet is with 1 million. Losing 1 million dead before Ukraine falls means he will not be able to do much else after it does, putting him in a bind. It will be enough for even the most mindless dictator to stop.
They are gaining ground, that’s an indisputable fact.
Current western position is that they don’t want Russia to win, but also don’t want to provide the level of support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000 Abram’s tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine. Obviously this is hypocrisy.
We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are, accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality.
That’s how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and Vietnam.
I've been purposely avoiding logging in to be more passive and less invested in the comment wars going on, but I just reversed my policy to congratulate you for a succinct and valuable post.
The political environment is so toxic that anyone who points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like that.
Why should I waste my valuable time to answer anything meaningful to an obvious propaganda comment? Such comments are what are degrading HN discussion.
Isn't the real problem astroturfing, shilling, brigading, being a government agent, and the like?
The person who posted the big wall of text that seems plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some places lines literally aren't moving and others people are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental misunderstanding. There are other issues with their comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't make.
People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not tolerated.
Despite saying that I'm arguing in bad faith, you actually have the only substantive response to my post. My interpretation of your comments is that either:
1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a very large (~1000km) frontage. Or:
2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of advance averaged across such a large front to produce reliably realistic results.
The task, then, is for me to dig back through the specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current stage of the Ukrainian conflict.
In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested for the "rate of advance" variable. I suspect that even if you dropped that value to 0.1km/day or even 0.....the models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3 of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-than-equal rate.
As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a generation who's baseline of social media engagement is mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone was expected to write long-form explanations for their positions, preferably with references.
This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years later.
And yet sometimes that's exactly what's happening -- and it needs to be called out.
Not the "foreign agents" part; that's your insinuation of what the parent commenter said. But there's an unusual degree commonality to the talking points and flat-out factually wrong narratives that people continually post about this conflict -- such that some of them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we literally hear several times a day.
It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
The thing is that it's both. It does put in perspective the western narrative that's being pushed because in order to make the necessary support for Ukraine appear as a better deal that it is but also jumps to conclusion when it says Russia will win, this is delusional. The best Russia will achieve is to get Donbass and Luhansk and it's hard to see if that's worth all the lives and money wasted into this stupid war.
Russia gains more population from occupying the remaining parts of Donbas than they lost from the whole war. As for the resources they now confirmed that the world would continue to buy the oil from them for the next 10 years no matter what. That will provide them with enough profit to rebuild.
So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.
Russia's professional army plus reservists was about 2.1M before the war.
Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth.
They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
Over the ~10 years of US involvement in Vietnam, the US had 58k dead and 150k hospitalized. In less than two and a half years of SMO, Russia has had probably around 315k casualties? 61k have been confirmed dead for sure.
The other thing to consider is that sure Russia had 2.1M professional soldiers and reservists, but how many knew how to fly a Ka-50? How many were well trained tank gunners? How many were competent, experienced members of the NCO corps, or well trained and equipped paratroopers, or artillery officers? How many are left, and how many have to have their positions go empty or be filled by someone new without adequate experience?
It appeared Russia cannot sustain the losses long term. The sign-up bonus for volunteers during the last year increased by factor of 10 from 2k USD to over 20K. Plus Russia has severe deficit of working force for anything that required non-trivial amount of training. They cannot afford a new mobilization wave for this reason.
"4000 drones per day" : The future is killer robots. Everywhere.
I could see a sci-fi future where we visit some planet somewhere and when we land there are no living beings anywhere.
Just killer robot factories pumping out more killer robots fighting an endless war with each other fully autonomously.
That's another AGI super intelligence end state. You get two AGI super intelligences fighting a war against each other and they fight until the entire planet is turned into killer drones and explosives. A plausible form of paper clip maximizer.
Also... if it is true that drones live for less than 2 sorties on average, that makes their returnable use pointless because launching them one-off doubles the range as they don't need to store charge for return trip, don't you think? Also i assume, primary cells that are not rechargeable, can have higher capacity than rechargeable batteries.
> Also i assume, primary cells that are not rechargeable, can have higher capacity than rechargeable batteries.
Interesting, do you have more information on state of the art non-rechargeable batteries? I would assume they just use normal LiPo cells anyway and just charge them once, ideally at the factory. Cheap, light (compared to the warhead at least), can deliver enough current.
I expect them to have hundreds if not thousands of drones in surveillance/recon roles, in which they'd mostly be reusable. If that "4k used per day" figure actually means the ones expended per day I'd be pretty surprised.
I find that extremely hard to believe, unless you're exclusively talking about sending drones to attack a specific location with a time crunch, I don't see any reason why a drone wouldn't be charged to full. Especially since that figure probably includes unarmed drones used for ISR
The documentaries I have seen on YT suggest Ukraine is building >1M drones annually, which would be enough to cover going through 4K daily, ballpark. Lots of those FPV videos do show various "low charge" warnings, maybe it just doesn't make sense to fully charge something that's basically a guided bullet on a one-way trip?
FPVs fly a few KM before getting to a target, so the battery will be low by the time they get to the part worth recording. There's no need for a return trip since it either finds a target or is intentionally ditched.
Also they use li-ion cells which can be run to a lower voltage than a lipo, which is normally what the flight controllers are configured for out of the box.
The payload of a drone is nowhere near that of an artillery shell and even if it was, you're going to spend X+$1000+$3000 instead of just $3000, where x is the cost of the drone.
The tooling and electronics for one drone model is amortized across millions of consumer drones, and also shared with other consumer electronics.
The tooling for an artillery shell is used only for artillery shells. Not many consumers looking to buy 152mm shell casings and high explosives.
In the industrial age, volume production is the usual solution to keeping costs low. Artillery shells would be a lot cheaper if we built as many of them as we did in WW2.
(As a side note, this is one reason why housing was so cheap in the post-WW2 1950-1970 era. There was a whole lot of surplus construction equipment leftover from WW2, so you could acquire the tooling needed to build a subdivision really cheaply. Once the surplus aged out and there was no economic reason to build a huge number of new diggers and bulldozers, construction got a lot more expensive.)
What you're actually asking is "Would artillery shells be cheaper if we could offshore all the actual work to cast, machine, and fill an artillery shell to China and then just ship the end result over by boat?"
And the answer is yes, China makes their artillery shells cheaper. American labor is very expensive and American military manufacturers tend towards low volume nowadays, because they don't trust the government to commit to 1 million shells a year for two decades, because every time there's a changing of the guard in the whitehouse, plans get gutted seemingly as a "Fuck you" to anyone who worked with the previous admin.
That being said, I'd like to see a citation for the $3k figure being thrown around. The number I've seen is more like $800
"the U.S. currently pays $3,000 for its most modern shells, according to an Army spokesperson. That price includes the charge, fuze, and shell body." [1]
The drone weighs a few hundred grams and carries nothing. The moment you look at anything close to a carrying capacity of 50kg, you are well beyond the $20k range.
Not the OP, but the massive concentration of naval ships (literally to the horizon), beach landing, and the (to modern eyes) surreal presence of barrage balloons all together in one picture is pretty mind blowing. I mean, just imagine all that activity.
The picture's caption is kind of unnecessary. That's only happened once in history. If you haven't seen Saving Private Ryan, the landing scene still stands the test of time.
Speaking of concentration of naval power I'd have loved to have seen the surrender and the German fleet in the Firth of Forth in 1918 - between both sides there were 43 battleships, 14 battlecruisers, loads of cruisers and 170 destroyers:
All of these ships are tiny. These are not ships, just landing craft. This is by any measure not a big concentration of ships, armor, or anything. D-day landings were impressive in 1944 but today these won't be big at all. Today, similar amounts of cargo and people can be delivered by planes, not by boat.
The ships in the pic are not that tiny. I just looked up "US 310 ship" (the rightmost one) and it was a 100-meter lander that could definitely carry at least a dozen heavy tanks, or ~30 trucks [1]. You would need a lot of planes for that.
Around 1000 of these double decker tank landing crafts were built during the second half of WWII to cross the Atlantic for the invasions. This one was sponsored by woman, Mrs. Pearl Magdalene Frick. [0] Fascinating. I don’t see mention of her elsewhere on the web.
>>This is by any measure not a big concentration of ships, armor, or anything. D-day landings were impressive in 1944 but today these won't be big at all.
The US pushed ~28,000 tons of supplies ashore in the first 5 days of Overlord. Eight days later it had grown to 117,000 tons. [1] Can you show us your loading and sealift plan for delivering 10,000 tons per day of supplies, sustained, in a partially-contested airspace, especially over a beach? We're not talking about unloading a Maersk Triple E-class [2] at a container port in peacetime.
Over such a short distance as back then? Well, i'm sure San Antonio class amphibious transport docks will be an overkill, but each can carry up to 14 tanks that are, today, over 70 tons heavy (in general, a 25K ton displacement ship can carry a lot of stuff easily). These alone will be easily enough to bring all necessary personnel, supplies, and heavy vehicles (light vehicles being much more numerous, could be problematic).
As for assorted supplies without too heavy or bulky separate items, 10K tons per day is a joke and can be shuffled by helicopters alone. Remember distances were absurdly short, 120-150km, easily within helicopter range, and they can make several sorties per day at this short range. Over time, pilot fatigue will become an issue and accident rate might get bit too high, but for combat operations this isn't a big deal because there will be higher losses to enemy fire.
EDIT: Made a major mistake in my numbers. Reworked the calculations but the substantive part of the argument remains the same.
A San Antonio has ~20,000 square feet of deck space usable for vehicles and cargo. If you stuffed it with TEUs you could fit 125.[0][1] Maximum mass capacity for a TEU is ~21t, let's call it 20t for easy math.[2] So a San Antonio moving containerized beans/bullets/bandaids is only lifting ~2,500 tons per sortie. There are only 12 active San Anontios, and keep in mind roughly 1/3 of any fleet is down for maintenance), so you would need half of all likely available LPDs (4 of 8 available with 4 in yardwork) of the largest (by tonnage, not hull numbers) Navy on the planet.
As for helicopters, you can carry palletized cargo internally on a CH-53 (one of it's few advantages over a CH-47). The K model, with stronger engines (and therefore payload capacity) than the E model, can move ~12t at 200km.[3] Let's just call it 10t at 200km, again for easy math. You would need 1,000 sorties in a day to move 10kt. If you pushed your aircraft to 3 sorties per day (limited by ground crew ability to turn the aircraft), you could do it with ~333 heavy lift helicopters. The US only has ~20 operational CH-53Ks, and ~140 CH-53Es. So no, moving 10kt per day is not a joke, and can't be shuffled by helicopters alone.
It would take both asset classes combined, let's call it 3xLPD for 7.5kt and ~80 CH-53s flying 240 sorties for 2.4kt. That would pretty much be a maximum effort for the Navy-Marine Corps Team, which is inarguably the largest and most capable military power projection and expeditionary logistics force on Earth.
So even in 2024, what they accomplished on D-Day is not a trivial amount of effort.
I dunno what might have been done back then (if the planes of the day even had the capacity to airlift tanks), but we can and do drop tanks via parachutes today. No airfield/landing required.
> but we can and do drop tanks via parachutes today
I don't think that's actually true. Some quick Googling shows the US M-1 Abrams tank is not air-droppable, and maybe the best they can do is air drop light armored vehicles which are much lighter.
People keep trying to look at war economics as each side spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar.
Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion dollar parked strategic bomber.
Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual targets and price tags isn't the right way.
The fact that Russia's valuation of their own soldiers life is off doesn't mean killing one soldier isn't worth a thousand bucks.
Even if you discount the tactical effect of losing soldiers in battle, just the gear of the soldier is worth more than a thousand dollars already (just ballistic vest + riffle is enough to pass this very low bar)
I'm not sure why people keep considering the cost of the target like this. In the grand strategic scope it sort of matters. If you want to win a war economically you need to inflict more damage on them than they can afford, but a lot of people seem to think that means that if I spend a dollar on a munition it should cause a dollar in damage to my enemy. But even in this Grand view it doesn't work that way because each side has a different amount of dollars.
What a military really needs to look at is how much damage can that target do if they don't break it first. If a target only cost $1,000 but can somehow do a million dollars in damage to me and me spending $900,000 to service that target is $100,000 savings. This is why during some wars the US was using cruise missiles on teams of dudes in Toyotas with discarded anti-aircraft guns strapped to the back. It's not those 'shitty technicals' were worth the millions of dollars like a tomahawk, it's that those things could drive around and do millions of dollars worth of damage if unopposed. If all you're cheaper assets are already working on something you might assign a multi-million dollar munition unless the target can't do as much damage as firing the munition.
Because an unserviced enemy target can generally cause an unlimited amount of damage in wartime it generally becomes cost effective to take any opportunity to disable an enemy asset.
Fiber is problematic as far as LOS and obstacles are concerned. Most launch points are concealed, usually at the edge of a treeline. As far as I understand, fiber creates unnecessary risk for operators.
Not sure whether they are already doing this, but the fiber could simply connect to a relay rather than the operator themselves, that way the operator can still hide far from the connected system and use wireless outside jamming to control if that still makes sense.
Radio controlled drones carrier drones to which the kamikaze drones are linked by fiber. Move the carrier in low EW area then control the kamikazes in high EW areas using the carrier as a relay.
This would be the way. Essentially the system would be an air-to-ground TOW missile. I wonder how difficult it is to source fiber at the scale needed.
However, a drone can take hits in non-critical areas whereas the fiber is even harder to hit but vulnerable to any caliber or shrapnel sent up. May not be a huge issue, though.
For context, the total mass of a standard M67 fragmentation grenade is ~400g, including a 180g of actual explosive. So this is like a third of the standard payload of the e.g. DJI drones dropping grenades onto foxholes.
My initial expectation was that the cable would upset their mass budget, but honestly, that's pretty minor as these things go. Certainly, bigger boom > smaller boom, but smaller boom >> incomplete boom mission.
Wow. Imagine just having a tether like this [whatever altitude] above your property - if you had multiple of these fibers, one could use them as guy-wires - to hold a balloon with solar powered cam and redundant fiber connections... These should be placed over mountains - remote cabins, ski resorts.
Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy - and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver...
EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big Bird.
Oh I was thinking that the thing was jacketed like... I just assumed wrong - youd still need to wrap it in superconductive carbon nanotubes to make it work. :-)
I'm not horribly surprised - even for real installs in the US you are starting to see them take bare G.657B3 fiber and just staple it to the wall because it holds up fine.
(I would never do this but ...)
Obviously not the same exact use case but bare fiber is a lot more resilient than it used to be.
The smaller sizes are more expensive (as are much larger), it seems like 0.75 is around the cheapest per metre. However it's a lot heavier (0.75/0.125)^2 = 36 times) so less useful for this purpose.
I've converted a £10 trash tier quadcopter to run off of 30G wire. Only 5 meters range, and the weight and momentum of the wire cause extremely difficult to control oscillations, but it still flies (badly)!
The transmission losses over such thin wires are massive but the way around that is to supply a higher voltage than is required, and include a linear regulator inside the quad to burn off excess voltage when current draw is low.
I specced the wire purely based on the weight reduction I got from stripping out the cameras, battery, and then replacing the main body with a 3D printed skeleton, as the original battery contributed more rigidity than I had realised.
Sounds like you were supplying power. That's unnecessary in this case. Just leave the battery in.
The question is if you can reliably push video down a 5 mile pair of copper wires and send control inputs back up. And the answer is yes, even for an unshielded twisted pair. With the right encoding and enough voltage, you can get GBits down that wire.
The TOW missile is guided via electric signals over metal wires, but is much more expensive and less flexible (and probably has a very different flight profile) than drones and FPV drones. More modern wire guided missiles do use fiber optics (Spike, etc.).
>The anti tank guided missile designers of 50+ years ago would find this rather obvious.
TOW missiles are specifically mentioned in the article as an example of this technology being in active use for decades (and particularly, right now in Ukraine)
given the reports indicate drones being used 15 + kms from controllers already courtesy radio relay style systems that's a bit more than the 4kms of a TOW
Yeah, a beam-rider, doesn't have a fiber optic cable like the TOW.
There was some cool footage early on in the war where a skilled Ukrainian Stugna-P operator pointed the beam just off of an enemy helicopter (or maybe some armored vehicle, but I think it was a helicopter), then corrected to the target at the last moment. This gave as little warning as possible to the crew of the helicopter via their illumination sensors. Very skilful.
That's because US military doesn't optimize for cost and can have those things costing in the area of 250 per shot. Ukrainian military does optimize for cost and gets 10 of fly by wire Stugna's for this money.
I think older TOW, AT-2, and other such missiles used wires rather than fiber optics. Fiber optics is thinner, which would give it a much longer range presumably.
I'm familiar with a number of methods that are being used in Ukraine, and the ones that drone operators seem to be most keen on is autonomous targeting. Basically, using computer vision and other sensor networks to identify and subsequently target a threat (usually in a cordoned off zone). Unfortunately the cameras, sensors, and compute hardware is expensive enough that they're trying to preserve the drone by using droppable ordnance, which is a lot harder to hit accurately. And the prices essentially mean they only get used to take out jammers, with normal FPV drones being used otherwise.
They do rely on drones being able to switch between autonomous modes upon detection of jamming attempts, which seems easy enough to do (though I know nothing about the techniques). My thought was if the detection of jamming attempts is easy enough, shouldn't it be just as easy to use RF direction finding and a fairly simple greedy seeker algorithm to find and destroy the jammer?
There are systems that can target jammers, like an anti-radiation missile (ARM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile. Advanced systems like ARMs use complex sensors and algorithms to determine the location of the emitter before guiding themselves to its location. That allows them to hit an inactive radiation source and avoid terrain, but it requires sensors that are too expensive to use on quadcopter-type drones.
As far as I understand you can't simply follow the emitter signal because the jammer can easily take countermeasures. For example, putting the jammer inside a building or vegetation would prevent any unpiloted drone from causing any harm. Even if the jammer was exposed, cycling it on and off every 30s would still effectively interfere with flight but prevent a signal seeker system from reliably finding the jammer. Plus, many drones don't have the range to reach a jammer.
I know I'm just some dude and people on the ground likely have tried all of these ideas, but I guess then I would take the approach that you can use that sort of expensive sensor array on autonomous forward observer drones, which detect and map out jammer locations which can then be targeted with basic artillery. Basic terrain avoidance and autonomous (non-RF dependent) flight algorithms can be implemented on simple $500 drones with IP cameras and rpi onboard computers (I've built some of my own). I would imagine that within an order of magnitude of $500, you could get an autonomous drone with enough payload for any type of sensor array you could want for detecting jammers. The big problem that Ukraine has faced has been jammers operating within FPV ranges, which are typically about half the range of a 155mm artillery shell, so leave the targeting to them.
Well, on terrain avoidance, yes, that's fairly simple. What's not simple is avoiding terrain until you reach a certain point, after which you want to collide with the terrain. Identifying that point and autonomously targeting the correct bit of terrain is the problem.
There are systems that can detect and locate a signal like an RF jammer, but you have to 1) deploy that system into the area, 2) operate it, 3) maintain it, and 4) protect it. Then to make use of the intelligence it produces you need to have some sort of ordnance or PGM available. That is, you need to dedicate and risk plenty of materiel to take out a simple RF signal broadcaster, with the reward being the use of drones (including the enemy's drones).
I don't think your approach is ill-conceived or anything, but the reality for both Ukraine and Russia is that it's really difficult to properly implement that approach.
I think the calculation is pretty simple, really: the cost of developing and using a reliable jammer-seeking drone is much higher than the cost of a second jammer.
>Unfortunately the cameras, sensors, and compute hardware is expensive enough
I wonder how much more expensive. My feeling is a better equipped military with greater ISR capacities can probably better discriminate targets and hence make more efficiently/economical use of smarter/expensive drones. What's the proverb where the poor stays poor because they have spend just to keep afloat and never get chance to invest. A force with inferior ISR has to spam cheap drones because they don't have the expensive hardware to employ less highend drones that probably take less manpower etc etc, and problem spirals. By highend I don't mean US MIC shitshow like switchblade that cost 60-80k, there are DJI drones with AESA radar (more advanced than most gen3.5 fighters) that cost 8k, which is to say the highend component costs can be "reasonable"
Most drone controllers sold on the market today already have a built in feature to detect loss of signal between the receiver on the craft and the transmitter. It's usually called Fly Away Prevention or failsafe and the detection method is pretty simple.
I think the major issue with having RF seeking drones is the direction finding itself. Being able to do that cheaply would probably require a fairly expensive antenna array and SDR to do the processing.
Why put the spool on the drone? I'd think you'd put it at the base station, and maybe have a way to cut the fiber on the drone so you can pull all the fiber back to the base station. Ah, but maybe that makes it easy to find the base station, but unless the drone can be autonomous after some point and take the fiber with it far from the base station, I'm not sure the base station's location can really be protected.
EDIT: Ah, the real reason the spool has to be on the drone must be that the drone can't pull the fiber through snags, and if the spool is on the drone then it doesn't have to.
The drone moves, the base station doesn't. The spool goes on the thing that moves, so it just has to unspool to move further. If the spool was on the fixed position, the drone would have to drag thousands of meters of fibre behind it, needing more powerful motors and creating a risk of snagging/snapping.
Spool on the Drone means a a bulk of gradually decreasing weight, depositing the wire as needed. Spool on the station means the Drone has to pull the entire ever increasing length of the wire, which can get stuck or even ripped by the trees or other obstacles
I’m guessing the strain on the spooled end is less and you want the end most likely to detach close to the ground where you might be able to reattach it, vs in the drone where it would fall to the ground and be unfixible.
The whole concept is unfixable. Once the fibre comes out, it's not going to go back in. It's that deadly combination of fragile and cheap. Just unpack a new drone and off you go. Don't spend a week (and 10 casualties going into the grey zone to collect it) winding it back up only to find it's broken in the middle.
Cables drones would (and likely do) make better relays than as attack drones. A relay drone flies out to the horizon and relays the LoS signals to an attack drone flying over the horizon from the perspective of the base station.
The relay then gets to spend far more of its power budget on the relay-drone segment and has a very low power relay-base segment. Relay drones also perform surveillance while they're on station. Better bandwidth to the base station from a "wired" connection means a higher fidelity feed or potentially additional cameras to cover a wider area.
The consequence, problem is ending up with long strands of basically invisible fibers everywhere. But that is a problem to solve later. After the defeat of Russia.
Yeah, these are called tethered drones. They've been around for decades and have their own use cases, especially on moving vehicles or boats. There's nothing new about them.
Explosives are just a payload (like any other payload you can attach to a drone), either independent from the whole system or activated through a simple relay. You can see ArduPilot is the ground station, where you can easily customize such switches. The distance is only about the wire/fiber; obviously, fiber is lighter, hence the longer distance for the drone to carry.
Beyond the limitations mentioned in the article (shortish range, reduced payload capacity), these drones also leave behind a trail pointing directly at wherever they were launched from.
This is a consideration, but not a deal breaker. Most weapons leave a signature (though to be fair, usually much more transient) of the launch location. Artillery has to operate under the threat of counterbattery radar and fires. I'm certain the Russian operators have figured out acceptable mitigations.
Depending on how you want to count either the Chechens or the Soviets invented a sophisticated method called Shoot-and-Scoot [1]. I wager this method also works great for drone operators.
You're not going to respool that wire anyways, those drones either find their way back autonomously or all have to find a target. After the attack just cut the wire and leave. You just have to be extra careful not to be detected before the attack.
Shoot and scoot doesn’t work with lots of drones near front line. You will be most vulnerable when you “scoot” actually. You need to dig in well instead
Unless you get some magically high quality camera on your own drones, the only realistic way to follow this trail is on foot. You can't just guide artillery or missiles to the other end of the wire, and if the Drone was launched over the frontline - there is little to do about it. And nothing stops the operator from pulling at least a part of the wire back, even if it's ripped in the middle - the trail is gone.
It's hard to track a sliver of transparent 0.125mm optic fiber back to the operator, unless you're doing it Ariadne's-thread-style - but you'd have to find it first (post explosion).
That seems solvable with a payload of a transceiver that is dropped outside the range of the jammer. Then you only need a spool as long as the radius of the jammer + some margin.
I hate that robot warfare continues to advance as if scifi hasn't been warning of the dangers to humanity forever. Everybody is just full ahead as if it'll all workout fine. I consider it one of Obama's major failures, USA was a few years ahead in drone tech so Obama went trigger happy blowing up "terrorists" all over the middle east instead of putting together a UN coalition to come up with a weapons treaty to slow down the spread. The short-term war is always seen as the top priority instead of the long term consequences. I'm still amazed at the gift to humanity that was the coalition building and foresight of the post-ww2 years during which these kind of things were possible, and which we currently seem determined to squander.
> instead of putting together a UN coalition to come up with a weapons treaty to slow down the spread
I fully agree with the sentiment, but do you think that would have done anything?
The barriers to entry are just very low, and the off-the-shelf components are heavily dual-use, which makes containment extremely difficult. I think even minor powers would have an extremely easy time doing the development anyway, either in secret (China) or by just eating the sanctions (Russia, Iran).
I’m amused picturing soldiers following the fiber back to the drone operator. But I suppose either their location is no real secret, it’s easy to defend and/or the other end has a radio transceiver far enough away from jamming and giving them a few more km of buffer.
The problem with following the fiber back is they don't have just one explosive drone and they will happily target anyone meandering into the grey zone.
Like using line of sight laser comms to send commands and return video?
Exactly that, line of sight. The horizon strictly limits your operational range, and for fpv suicide drones there goes your terminal guidance (or the "buzzing around inside a maintenance warehouse to blow up vehicles inside") capabilities.
Could be useful for high flying surveillance drones, but not much beyond that.
Yes, or just have a relay drone with radio comm relatively close, so jamming's not a problem and have that communicate via laser with the disposable drone.
One problem might be smoke, though, which happens both naturally on a battlefield and is also often used for concealment.
I wonder if you could make a combo with power delivery and signal via a wire+fibre spool — eliminating the battery. Then have intermediate drones holding up the strand to extend the range…
cool idea but that seems very hard. Resistance goes up with distance, and tiny wires (100 µm or so for fiber) would have high resistance and low current capacity).
each extra drone is more power needed to keep the drones and wire in the air. More power requirements means bigger wires, bigger wires mean more resistance, which means more power
In addition, every drone has dependency on all of the drones previously. Failure at any point in the chain will cause failure in the entire system.
So in essence, there is a limit to how far you can chain drones together and they will be very vulnerable to catastrophic failure.
You also have more and more drones to control and send signal to.
Perun (unsurprisingly) did a video on the drone's evolution in Ukraine, including countermeasures and counter counter measures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnuTtUFiWM Drones are highly variable.
That's the wrong way of looking at it. At least, you need to consider the value of the targets this new system can destroy that the old ones wouldn't be able to.
Multi-mode would be heavier and bulkier. For the drone every gram saved on the spool is another gram you can add to the explosive. The article does talk about these drones having relatively small payloads due to the weight of the spool.
I briefly thought about having the drones spool out a pair of thin copper wires instead and having very high voltage running through the wires so the drone didn't have to carry a battery, but realized this would be wildly impractical as the resistance of the wire would kill the voltage and they would constantly be touching each other in the wind or sagging down to the ground and shorting out.
I've been thinking a lot about this setup, and it seems it's a major advantage if you can pull it off:
- The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to the drone.
- The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well.
- The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper, and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been used in war before.
- You don't have to worry too much about efficiency from the ground, since resources are plentiful unlike the sky where every gram counts. For example it would be completely fine to have a 20% efficiency from the ground to the sky (if we don't take into account the heating of the wire), for example spend 2kw to get 400w in the drone. Not ideal, but acceptable to many.
- Also, the efficiency can be greatly improved by using high voltage AC and a transformer on both ends. Very similar to how the power grid works, you can use thin cables to deliver a lot of power, I would not be surprised if 90% efficiency can be achieved. This field has been well researched, tethered drones can fly for hours, but the ranges that are useful in war (10+ km) are a novelty.
The data link for the drones is critical for many of the drones functionality.
a) Many drones still are being used for ISR (intelligence gathering). Live feed is valuable. Solving the navigation/guidance problem with dead reckoning doesn't let you solve the intelligence issue.
b) Turning FPV drones back into fire and forget munitions kinda robs them of their value proposition. We -already had- smart munitions that could be fired more or less unobserved into an area, and which could then more or less autonomously select and attack its own targets. FPV drones (in some applications) let you have part of that functionality (you can launch an attack into a general area without knowing precisely what you're aiming at, while still getting pretty precise terminal guidance) at substantially less cost (though granted the cost savings are coming from a variety of factors, not just the sensor portion).
I had this idea a few years ago when I was learning about VR position tracking issues stuff. Kinda surprised this wasn't a thing immediately after the first MEMS gyro honestly?
If someone says they're immune to RF jamming, I naturally interpret that from the perspective of blocking communication. I don't necessarily expect that they're claiming to be immune to EMP blasts straight-up destroying the electronics.
It's not just nuclear bombs. Contra idunnoman1222's confidently wrong declaration, what anfractuosity referred to is well-established stuff around for decades, not some weirdo fringe thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...
A lot of sci fi has "EMP grenades". I don't believe they've been declassified but I'd bet something like them exist. Whether they're quite down to "grenade" size I don't know, though my gut leans "yes". Most people's intuitions about what is possible in what volume of space are tuned for machines we want to be able to use and reuse. If you don't mind destroying the machine in the process, which you've already accepted if you're using the explosively-pumped flux compression generator, you have some options for generating a lot of charge very quickly in a small space, and there are people with experience using them in other applications out there to be hired.
Nuclear blasts can cause EMPs [1]. This is honestly the thing I am most scared about someone trying in a WW3 scenario - one high altitude EMP for Europe, one for North America, and everyone not in the military is back to the digital stone age.
> This is honestly the thing I am most scared about someone trying in a WW3 scenario
Interesting. The most scared I'm in that situation is suffering 3rd degree burns at the same time everyone else does in a few tens of kilometer radius.
Or you know what would be even worse? Not suffering that injury personally, but trying to ease the last hours of friends and family who did.
That feels like it would suck more than getting back to the digital stone age.
A nuclear weapon used in an EMP configuration is not the same thing as one used on the ground. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse#... more carefully and consider the implications. A nuke detonated for this purpose would kill no one... directly.
Is the fear overblown? I don't know. Nuclear has a long history of people grotesquely over-exaggerating the dangers. Makes it hard to tell. But even if it took 10 aerial-burst nukes to take out a country rather than just one, it's still a rather effective way to use the arsenal right now, arguably more effectively than detonating them on the ground. And it tightens the defense window quite a bit.
> A nuke detonated for this purpose would kill no one... directly.
Yes. I’m aware of that fact. And that is why I fear an EMP less than the alternatives.
Don’t get me wrong. It would suck. But it would suck in a “gosh the economy just collapsed, and there is a good chance we will starve or freeze in the next few months/years” sense.
Which is less bad than the alternative where they bomb cities and millions of people like you and me die in incredible agony hours/days after the bomb. And that is why i fear the second more. Things like where the hospitals are so overwhelmed that your burn treatment involves moving you to a field where your screams won’t bother others as much. Or a situation where we have to stop euthanizing mortaly wounded people because we run out of bullets (locally).
> Is the fear overblown?
I don’t know if your fear of the EMP is overblown. Probably not. I know my fear of a conventionally employed nuclear weapon is not overblown because we have the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it is not pretty.
I for one know which one I fear more and it is not the EMP. Of course this is all quite academic because by all chance they will choose to do both.
I'm surprised how few people are pointing out that you can simply trace the wire back to the control station. At roughly 1 km of actual range, that's not just mortar range, that's fucking grenade launcher range.
BS. Though a RPG could travel 1km (not sure), I know for sure that an effective RPG range is 300-400 m, after which accuracy degrades substantially.
And even if you try walking up the fiber cables (if you manage to spot them), you will become a target yourself much earlier than you manage to locate the origin of the fiber, i.e. the drone crew.
An automatic grenade launcher firing 40 mm rounds can reach up to 2 km on a parabolic trajectory.
It'd take a lot of grenades, but there are videos from the Ukraine war of Ukranian infantry landing hits at range on Russian positions using drone spotters.
Long distance fiber guidance is not a new concept. Most proximate example I can call to mind are the American TOW and Israeli Spike which have fiber guided variants/control options.
That requires line of sight with the target. Most drone usage right now is far beyond line of sight.
You could get around that by having a relay drone at high altitude, but that complicates the system by a lot, and you'd have to somehow defend your relay.
fiberoptic drone control and feedback surveillance during initial phase of engagement
such ordinance, would provide telemetry and situational intelligence resources while transiting the first kilometers of range, thus the ordinance is munition and reconaisance device.
that requires good weather and precision alignment on a moving platform. line of sight is possible with a relay drone, but now you have to align multiple lines of sight precisely while moving, and still can't fly with any smoke, fog, etc.
fiber optic seems like a pretty robust solution here.
I mean... why wouldn't a non-radio control channel defeat RF jammers? Breaking: enlarging the drones sufficiently to include a cockpit with avionics for a human pilot also defeats any RF jammer.
> DARPA's Close Combat Lethal Recon drone was a fiber-optic guided loitering munition for urban combat
Forbes just really loves pushing lethal "urban" technology. I personally find the habit to be disgusting.
> “I am already asking Ukrainian specialists to test this control technology so that we do not end up behind the enemy,”
It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them.
Forbes, of course, loves this because in our current economic model there's a lot of money to be had in inventing new horrific ways to murder people. Well, that's my "1 of 4 free articles" this month, I guess.
> It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them.
So the ethical answer is to what, roll over and let the Russians win? Wars are awful things. But to paraphrase Trotsky, you get to choose whether or not you're interested in war. But you don't get to choose whether or not war is interested in you.
Or negotiate for peace. It is known there was a solid negotiation process in place and the Ukrainians were interested in it. NATO was not and worked to destroy it.
> Wars are awful things.
...and _Forbes_ acting as a cheerleader of them is disgusting.
> But to paraphrase Trotsky
Trotsky was spreading propaganda. In the actual study of war, they rarely break out as described, and they often have months if not years of time where they could have been avoided entirely.
It usually turns out there is someone with vested financial interests in war and they always find themselves near the people who generate the conflict. Go figure.
I can't tell if this is Russian propaganda or just terminal naïveté. This war is going on because Russia, without justifiable provocation, invaded another sovereign nation. There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate" about other than Russia leaving their land.
If I hypothetically put a gun to your head and told you to give me your wallet and the credentials to your bank accounts, no amount of "negotiation" would make your property legally mine or what I did any less than armed robbery. Same here.
I think the propagandist was trying to make an analogy with the distinguishable outcomes of "dead with no wallet" and "unharmed with no wallet".
In the case of Ukraine, Russian state media have often claimed their goal is to exterminate Ukrainians and their culture so that distinction would not exist.
>There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate" about other than Russia leaving their land.
Are the Ukrainians aware of this? Because massive forced conscription and closed borders for leaving are strongly pointing out against it.
>no amount of "negotiation" would make your property legally mine
Negotiations are needed not for legality, but for example, to stop mass forced conscription of people who doesn't want to die for political ambitions of Zelensky, corrupt Ukranian government or for something else, that they think doesn't worth dying for.
The Ukrainians will decide for themselves if and when to negotiate, and on what terms.
They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the just end to this war that they seek.
Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for or otherwise valuable to them, or your general view of their government -- just doesn't factor into it.
Does not seem like it. They are not asked. They are banned from leaving the country. They are captured right on the streets and forcefully, under threat of death, sent to fight in war.
> They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the just end to this war that they seek.
No, it's already decided for them - and decided otherwise. That's the reason borders are closed and Ukrainians are sent to frontlines against their will
> Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for
That's not my idea, that's their idea - otherwise there would be no need for closed borders and forced conscription.
Let me rephrase that more accurately . . . the democratically-elected government of Ukraine is exercising its legitimate authority to draft people into its military during a severe war that it did not start.
So presumably their view would be that the Allied cause during WW 2 was wholly illegitimate, because after all, those nations had conscription policies as well.
All the data (status of human rights organizations in this area, statements of officials, law enforcement agencies, the reaction of "democratic" institutions to such cases when they leaked to public) shows, that after civilian are captured on the street - civillian will be tortured until he goes to the frontlines or until he dies. Just two option: go to war or die via torture.
The "the Ukrainians wanted to negotiate, but NATO wouldn't let them" line is definitely standard tankie propaganda.
And lo and behold, within literal seconds of putting forth this perfectly straightforward observation -- which granted might sound slightly, vaguely controversial, but really isn't to anyone following the basic event chronology of this conflict (and the various false narratives that people keep mindlessly repeating about it) -- someone had to flag it.
The quoted parts have nothing to with how the events really unfolded. US military aid to Ukraine remained at stable 300-400m USD per year in the six years preceding the full-scale invasion - without a "counter-escalation". The opposite happened: by 2021, the fighting in Ukraine had died down to sniping and sporadic shelling on the frontline. Ukrainian losses for the entire year were 79 soldiers.
If anything, the greatest single US-related factor for the full-scale invasion was the humiliating retreat from Kabul, which signaled that the US would not stand by its commitments. Russian planning for the invasion began around the time of the retreat.
>>>Russian planning for the invasion began around the time of the retreat.
Do you have a source for that? I'd love to read any insight into that process.
My personal, totally unsubstantiated, opinion is that Russia began planning an invasion in 2019 after Poroshenko signed a Constitutional Amendment pledging Ukraine to seek NATO membership, which was followed up by Zelensky promising a NATO referendum the same year.[1][2]
I suspect Putin initiated planning but was unprepared for anything prior to mid-2020....and then invasion planning was derailed by COVID. Forces couldn't be postured until they got that mess under control, and then you also need a big annual exercise as pretext for moving that much combat power into their assembly areas. Hmmmm....I need to go back and take a hard look at the early force flows, as well as Russian rhetoric in response to the 2019 political decisions by Ukraine.
> a country that's a full-blown comic book villain.
Have you examined the logic of this position? You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain?" And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send conscripted civilians to their deaths? So much so that it "satisfies" you?
> You legitimately see an entire country as a "comic book villain?
Not an entire country. The leadership of the country, yes.
> And this seems rational and is a justified reason to send conscripted civilians to their deaths?
I'm not sending anyone. If the people of Ukraine decides it is time to stop defending themselves I will accept their decision with a sad resignation.
> So much so that it "satisfies" you?
Yes. It satisfies me that we are on the good side of this conflict. Would satisfy me even more if the conflict were not happening. But spending my tax money to help people protect themselves is much better, much more satisfying than the usual status quo which is to spend my tax money to hurt innocents.
Eagerly awaiting your further questions on the topic.
