The AI part in this piece seems a bit premature, as far as I can tell from the promotional videos of successful combat, all of the drones are piloted. The more interesting thing is how each combat brigade for Ukraine (and one can only assume something similar for Russia) has drone operators in addition to the dedicated drone support units as detailed here:
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpke...
Does anyone know if any NATO countries are adapting to this or ideas to break the stalemate on the frontline where neither side can use armored vehicles very effectively due to their drone vulnerability besides the Russians throwing men and equipment into the grinder to soak up Ukrainian ammunition?
Air superiority means nothing when the opposing side has meat for the meat grinder and it's widely spread out. The West has gotten ridiculously invested in "smart bombs" which cost a fortune and as a result we have less of them. Meanwhile the enemy has no problem sending tens of thousands of waves of small squads to their death.
In fact a study came out in 2022 that made the Pentagon panic because it's estimated in a war with China, the US will deplete its entire anti-ship missile stockpile in only a week.
>Air superiority means nothing when the opposing side has meat for the meat grinder and it's widely spread out.
Western attack helicopters are just one prong in the meat grinder that would grind up enemy infantry formations and entrenchments far quicker than they can be replenished.
NATO vs Russia in a conventional war is basically the West hitting the delete button. Nuclear blackmail is about the only thing sparing Russian forces from that fate.
A war with China is more of a defensive situation. If large-scale infantry combat even had the opportunity to take place I'd be surprised.
That said it's always prudent to plan for the worst contingencies however remote.
Well I hope they're better than the Russian attack helicopters. They lasted ... I want to say about 3 weeks.
What's the plan, btw, if the west does not have air superiority due to Russians, or Iranians, having drones, and the west running out of smart rockets before they run out of drones, and the denial of communications works about as well for the West as it worked for Russia? (meaning, drone communications can be disrupted at 5 meters, which means the drone explodes 10 cm from your ass as opposed to directly in your face)
>Well I hope they're better than the Russian attack helicopters. They lasted ... I want to say about 3 weeks.
NATO forces are very, very good at combined arms actions in conventional wars. Assets aren't used unless there's a fairly high assurance of surviving and accomplishing the mission.
>What's the plan, btw ...
Western military planners have been watching the Ukraine conflict closely and are aware of the threat that cheap commercial drones pose, seeing as they're partly responsible for the phenomenon.
>meaning, drone communications can be disrupted at 5 meters, which means the drone explodes 10 cm from your ass as opposed to directly in your face)
The US in particular excels at dominating the EM spectrum. I wouldn't be surprised if enemy drones wholesale fall out of the sky en masse or are otherwise rendered totally ineffective.
> NATO forces are very, very good at combined arms actions in conventional wars. Assets aren't used unless there's a fairly high assurance of surviving and accomplishing the mission
And how likely are NATO forces to run out of combined arms ammo after 2 weeks?
We didn't think that we were going to have to fight Russia, or to help our allies kill Russians by the hundreds of thousands. Generals are often criticized for wanting to "fight the last war," but it seems that contrary to all conventional wisdom, that is exactly where the West is headed.
Russia doesn't have nearly the amount of nukes they used to. Apart from the dismantling, all signs point to many of them being unusable due to lack of maintenance (due to corruption). What they have left are smaller bombs.
Nuclear arsenals and capability are regularly assessed by the FAS. The latest numbers leave Russia with around 1,710 currently actively deployed strategic nuclear weapons. [1] And somewhere around 4,000 nuclear warheads beyond that. These figures are just estimates, but do account for dismantling, obsolescence of dated capabilities, and so on.
The reason strategic weapons are generally tracked is largely because these are the massive weapons, both literally and in terms of capacity. For instance a modern strategic nuke on the smaller end would generally be around 500kt of yield. The largest bomb ever detonated, Czar Bomba, was 50,000kt of yield. For contrast, the nuke dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15kt. Even if our estimate is wrong by 90% in the happy direction, that's enough power to effectively destroy any country countless times over, including the US. Furthermore, those 4000 'rando' warheads are indeed going to be small relative to strategic nukes - but "small" in this case again means sizes of up to ~100kt, once again several times the power of Hiroshima.
I find the propaganda gradually trending towards 'nuclear war wouldn't be so bad' to be quite disconcerting. Let's at least wait until we're a multiplanetary species before we decide to start offing ourselves on a massive scale. Or even better, never do it in the first place. The Fermi Paradox is a real thing, and could be easily explained by people's inability to escape their own self delusions.
I doubt Russia's nukes still work. They would create a localized environmental atrocity where they landed, but that's about it.
It costs a king's ransom to maintain a nuclear arsenal, as Ukraine well understood when they made the decision to give their own weapons up. The people charged with maintaining Russia's nuclear weapons since the fall of the USSR had absolutely no incentive to do anything but divert the funds for their own purposes. That's just how the Russians roll.
Meanwhile, ours will most likely work as intended. The question is, does Putin feel lucky? Well, does he? (Don't answer that, please -- I don't actually want to know.)
(Shrug) I can read and watch the news, just like you can. A country of congenital losers made up a bunch of fairy tales about Nazis to justify an incompetent war of conquest against their peaceful neighbor. They said it would take three days, and now, over two years later, they are bumming weapons from North Korea.
You tell me: what should I think of Russia, given the evidence at hand? They are still powerful enough to cause immense pain and suffering outside their borders as well as inside. If they were content with the latter, that would be one thing, but we have Putin's word that they are not.
The reason why Russia invaded Ukraine wasn't because of NATO but to maintain their sphere of influence, and apparently reclaim the Russian empire.[1] Indeed, it is Russia's greatest strategic mistake if they wish to push against the expansion of NATO. Sweden and Finland joined, and the Eastern Europeans are particularly vocal in their support of Ukraine and why they joined NATO in the first place.
Moreover, it wouldn't be in our interest to let another state invade another state for the express purpose of annexation and regime change. Our answer at minimum, must be the sanction of said state. If necessary, we will strangle their growth until they become like North Korea. Otherwise, our toleration will leads to further wars down the line and would be contrary to our democratic values and to the rule based international order.
I wouldn't also be too worried about WW3. It is unlikely that France would be involved, but it is clear that nukes is something that states are weary of, with good reason. I would call that nuclear blackmail which hobbled supporting Ukraine.
Recall the difficulty of getting Germany to send tanks or the controversy on the use of missiles like Storm Shadows. Now the British allowed the Ukrainian to use those missiles in attack on Russian territory. This is known as the escalation ladder and Russia seems to have a weaker hand since they backed down every time.
Russia's greatest strategic mistake if they wish to push against the expansion of NATO.
The Ukraine war isn't about NATO, of course, any more than it was about Nazis.
It also wasn't a mistake. They aren't in it to win. I believe that Putin is deliberately trying to turn his country into a failed state that the rest of the world will have no choice but to prop up.
When you realize that it is Putin who looks at Kim with envy, and not the other way around, a lot of seemingly-nonsensical things abruptly begin to make sense.
Not to complain about voting, but interestingly, I've advanced this theory multiple times on multiple venues and it gets downvoted without comment each time. Can't anyone actually come up with a counterargument, just for discussion's sake? Or simply ask a question that the proposal doesn't answer adequately?
I can't think of such a question, and apparently neither can anyone else. The only admissible conclusion is that Putin wants to turn Russia into North Korea.
> For that matter Russia made it clear that Ukraine in NATO was a redline since basically forever. An interesting aside is that that cable was written by William Burns, current head of the CIA who was, at the time, the US diplomat to Russia. Well we moved ahead to include Ukraine in NATO, and here we are.
That is not what happened. Ukraine and Georgia applied for NATO membership in 2008, but at Russian pressure, got denied. This left them without allies and allowed Russia to invade both without triggering mutual defense clauses. Burns got played. He has changed his mind since then and now argues for military aid for Ukraine, and warns about even wider war should Ukraine fall.
> Now France and others are claiming they must stop Russia, implicitly even if means World War 3, because the idea of Russia being able to set military and missiles within rapid striking range (on the territory of Ukraine) would be a tremendous threat to their national security. That is reasonable and true, and it is literally the exact same thing that Russia was saying when calling Ukraine in NATO a redline.
The threat is not "missiles within rapid striking range", because Russia already has nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad in the middle of the EU, closer to France than any point in Ukraine. The threat is Russia rolling over Ukraine and conscripting millions of Ukrainians into invading Poland, like they have conscripted Ukrainians from territories occupied in 2014 into fighting against Ukraine. It is better to stop Russians in Ukraine in already established battlefield than to see the war spread into the EU.
This is an interesting comment and its great to see a source.
I just want to add a bit to France's threats to deploy troops to Ukraine for direct conflict. There's a serious case to be made that this is France playing a game of chicken, essentially trying to get the Russians to have to consider that as a possibility and plan for the contingency, thus occupying their time and forcing them to hedge resources they would otherwise employ.
Certainly nobody knows for sure - unless they have penetrated French intelligence - but this seems to be the majority take of US foreign policy analysts I've read.
Whether such a game of chicken is responsible or not is its own discussion. Although one could also point to escalatory rhetoric from the other side.
>Whether such a game of chicken is responsible or not is its own discussion.
I'd argue giving in to nuclear blackmail is irresponsible. Personally I'd like to see the US version, with the Russians having to pause and think about what the eventual, complete loss of all their conventional forces in Ukraine looks like should they advance too far.
Then again, that's probably what the US has already communicated to them in private regarding use of tactical nukes.
This isn't what nukes would entail, for either side. If the US nukes Russian forces in Ukraine - Russia is going to retaliate with large scale nuclear strikes on the US. It's for this reason that if the US did want to go nuclear, it would likely be with a massive first-strike effort directly on Russia, which Russia would respond with in kind. The US has wargamed with tactical nukes a bunch - it always results in rapid escalation to 'the end.' I'm sure Russia has concluded the same. Neither side is ever going to threaten to go a 'little' nuclear.
I’m sorry, to clarify: The US version of the aforementioned game of chicken. That is, the threat of conventional military action.
It was widely reported that the US privately communicated the consequences of tactical nuclear weapon use to Russia, while maintaining an element of strategic ambiguity. Most reports suggested these consequences involved a full-scale conventional military response within Ukraine’s borders, thereby disincentivizing use.
In terms of subsequent escalation: As you pointed out, Russia of course knows using nukes against the US is literal suicide.
This scenario does not make any sense. Should the pandora's box of nuclear use be opened, it's not getting closed. And in this context, large scale conventional forces aren't much more than sitting ducks that would just be met with further nuclear strikes. It's for this reason that there's few, to no, scenarios involving nuclear weapons that don't result in global nuclear war, and thus the end of the developed world, if not of humanity.
The West wouldn't be replying in kind with tactical nukes, because that leads to escalation as you said. It's about proportional cost imposition as a means of deterrence.[0]
It's also possible the opening salvo of such a response might see tactical nuclear deployments neutralized via conventional means.
Absolutely, I completely understand the idea and motivation, but I'm arguing that it's impossible, and so unlikely to be our plan. The entire reason tactical nukes are desirable is because they obliterate conventional forces, and Russia has thousands of them. And keep in mind "tactical" often kind of masks what these are - these are not glorified bunker busters.
The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to several times larger, would generally be considered "tactical" in modern times. These are massive weapons. Then there's ADM/'nuclear landmines' [1], and more. In the absolute worst case scenario, there's even the possibility of transitioning to strategic weapons. Approaching this sort of battlefield with conventional forces is not a viable idea.
So I have no idea what the US will do if Russia resorts to nuclear usage in Ukraine, but I think this scenario can logically be discarded as one of the possible options. It plays well in the media, but it simply does not make any strategic nor logical sense.
>Approaching this sort of battlefield with conventional forces is not a viable idea.
It's almost certainly unstated US foreign policy on the matter, and not just a media bluff.
They might have thousands but they don't have thousands deployed. Moreover, use with any kind of frequency would just trigger a strategic US response, which would defeat the entire purpose—assuming there was purpose in the first place, which there isn't given conventional cost imposition.
Despite chill messaging, I suspect the US's strategic trigger finger is far itchier when things get real, and Russia knows this. Their triad has two arms which very possibly are entirely negated, and their C&C infra is garbage. There's a very real risk they'd just straight up die and accomplish nothing.
You're conflating the two types of nukes here. Tactical nukes tend to be just physically much smaller than strategic. They can be used in artillery, normal missile systems, mines, etc. For instance one defector even claimed that the USSR had developed suitcase nukes that they were stashing in various locations in the US, which would be easier than ever now a days. [1] There is no concept of deployment for these - it's simple and normal usage. When you speak of deploying, you're talking about strategic nukes. These are the absolutely massive weapons (both in terms of payload and also in terms of literal size) that are generally launching out on ICBMs. Russia has around 1700 strategic nukes deployed, and thousands of tactical nukes of all shapes and sizes.
All that said I do agree that this would result in mutual mass strikes with strategic weapons, and whatever tactical weapons may be appropriate for such a strike. This is why I think direct conflict with Russia, or Russia using nuclear weapons of any sort in Ukraine, is likely to escalate rapidly to what would be the defacto end of the world.
Read the above link. There are currently a minimum of 1,710 known deployed Russian strategic nukes. But speaking of a deployed tactical nuke is somewhat nonsensical. It's like talking about a deployed 155mm shell. Firing them requires nothing particularly unique and knowing the exact amount available is impossible, other than that it's certainly in the thousands. That's again the primary difference between strategic and tactical.
My previous reply was talking entirely about tactical nukes. They're not exempt from the concept of deployment. Even the Russians don't just let them float around willy-nilly. Most sit in storage.
>But speaking of a deployed tactical nuke is somewhat nonsensical.
The people whose job it is to track deployments of tactical nuclear weapons would probably disagree.
Well nobody is entirely sure how many tactical nuclear weapons Russia has. Nobody is really sure of much really. Do you remember that early propaganda wave about needing to only give Ukraine $xx billion more because Russian was imminently running out of missiles? It was Stoltenberg that called it the 'critical phase' of the war, then repeated by all the media, late 2022 if I recall correctly. Everything on these topics is at best kind-of-sort-of-not-really intelligent guesses. We can't even get the vaguely right ballpark figure for their conventional warheads, and there's minimal effort to keep that classified relative to nuclear.
But strategic nukes are a different beast those simply because of their size and requirement for specialized launchers, as well as their relative incongruence with conventional weapons delivery devices. You're not launching a strategic nuke out of a conventional rocket system (as could be the case for a tactical nuke) for sure! So this makes them, more or less, able to be reasonably estimated. It's still a pretty big guessing game, but it's generally going to be at least roughly in the right ballpark.
You either support countries' right to self-determination or you don't. What happened in Ukraine and Georgia since 2008 is the equivalent of the United States repeatedly overthrowing democratically elected governments in Canada and Mexico, invading their provinces, then acting all surprised when citizens of those countries no longer want anything to do with the US and getting aggrieved about their "sphere of influence" and "buffer zone" shrinking. You can't maintain a "sphere of influence" if you antagonize all the countries in it.
You might notice that a lot of things happened in Russia internally since 2008 that indicate it's not a healthy society. While Putin is definitely the animus behind much of that and is fabulously, perhaps singularly evil, fundamentally the problem is people believing this "sphere of influence" crap instead of accepting countries' right to free association, territorial integrity and self-determination.
Please stop using the term "red line" when it comes to Vladimir Putin. There never was any red line his is a war of conquest, there are no defensive considerations it is an all or nothing personal survival gambit. He will try anything and everything if he thinks it will improve his chances of survival.
That's a long-winded way to say, "No fair! I only robbed your house because you threatened to join the neighborhood watch."
That aside, why would Russia need a 'buffer' from NATO? Russia is a nuclear power. They can never be attacked or conquered again... except from within.
If Ukraine will win war with Russia, it will mean that Ukraine will take their place as mightiest country in the world. EU will be a good buffer for us.
Huh? Did Afghanistan take Soviet Union's place as the mightiest country in the world, when they pulled out? Did Afghanistan or Vietnam take the US's place as the mightiest country in the world, when they pulled out?
NATO I believe isn't really setup for a long and wide ww1 style conflict like in Ukraine. I understand the plan in case of a russian invasion was always to use nukes at one point.
This isn't what air superiority means. It occurs when one side is able to safely fly, and their opponent isn't. It's likely to be an obsolete concept in any sort of peer to peer war due to widespread anti-air weaponry, yet it's very near an assumption in NATO war doctrine, because that doctrine has been developed over decades of invading countries with no ability to defend themselves.
> It's likely to be an obsolete concept in any sort of peer to peer war due to widespread anti-air weaponry, yet it's very near an assumption in NATO war doctrine, because that doctrine has been developed over decades of invading countries with no ability to defend themselves.
That's too strong an assumption. The USAF 's bread and butter is supersonic stealth jets that can enter a territory, fire RF missiles to take out anti-aircraft radar, and leave faster than anything can catch it. Repeated hit and run attacks that wear down ground defenses until they can fly unchallenged. That's on top of the massive arsenal of precision guided missiles that will take out any static installation identified by constant global satellite surveillance.
NATO doctrine has always been geared towards countering the Sovet Union/Russia, despite the counter-terrorism detour the US took.
This is not really how it works in practice. The fastest craft ever made, by an extremely wide margin, was the amazing SR-71 Blackbird - yet another marvel from the Apollo era! [1] It hit mach 3.3 (2200 mph)! For contrast the F-35 hits mach 1.6, and Russia's SU-57 hits mach 2. Russia's workhorse anti-air system is the S-400. It has a range of 400k with a max speed of mach 14! It's also a mobile system.
Even MANPADs, which are extremely cheap (relative to an aircraft) pose a major threat. For instance the now somewhat dated FIM-92 [2] can hit mach 2.2. This is why even though Ukraine's air defenses are overall somewhat limited, Russian aircraft rarely if ever go for deep missions. Air superiority is probably just impossible in modern times against a peer adversary.
In practice by the time a frontline S-400 knows that there is something there, supersonic jets at cruising altitude already have too much kinetic energy to intercept. It doesn't matter if an anti-aircraft missile is capable of mach 14 if it's got less than the radar horizon worth of distance to accelerate and catch the target. A full AA system depends on a massive early warning radar system to launch interceptors and AA missiles, one that will quickly get destroyed by RF missiles in a real engagement.
MANPADs like the FIM-92 have an effective firing range that is a small fraction of the flight ceiling of jets, regardless of the missile's max velocity. They're not a threat unless a jet is flying very low for close air support or when lacking precision munitions, and the operator gets very lucky.
The reason I mention MANPADs is because of the target domain after air superiority is achieved. For instance helicopters have been used extensively in US invasions in the Mideast thanks to sustained air superiority. That quickly goes out of the picture when there's MANPADs everywhere. Even in the Israeli conflict, which is extremely asymmetric, helicopters have proven highly vulnerable.
As for the numbers stuff, all modern air defense systems have independent integrated radar of at least their engagement range, and do not rely on external radar systems, though of course everything works much better with layering and cooperation. An F35 at max speed (which it is only capable of reach at high altitude for very brief periods of time) is hitting about 1975 km/h. An S-400's engagement and radar range is about 400km. That's an engagement radius of more than 12 minutes at max speed. The engagement window would be smaller with a low & slow approach, but then you start running into various other risks, even going back to MANPADs.
One could try a long-range stand-off but that's unlikely to prove effective without getting into the primary way to disable anti-air defenses - overwhelm them. But that's extremely non-trivial even if the systems are in relative isolation, let alone if they're part of a comprehensive anti-air system. And all of this for one system. Again I would appeal to Ukraine. Their anti-air defenses are relatively limited yet it's been more than enough to greatly limit the engagement capabilities of Russia's Su-57s.
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Actually I also completely failed to mention another major factor. If this sort of war breaks out, satellites are going boom shortly thereafter, the global internet would follow in short order. This will further reduce the chances of any sort of effective elimination of anti-air.
> In practice by the time a frontline S-400 knows that there is something there, supersonic jets at cruising altitude already have too much kinetic energy to intercept.
The Swedish air force could routinely (16% of the time) get a fighter jet based missile lock on a frigging SR-71 in the 80s! 40 years later, altitude and speed do not help as much as you think. And radars are networked.
Citing the hard specification of various military hardware does not an analysis make. You neglected entirely the soft components, which is why we see severe under performance of the Russian air force in Ukraine.
It is unclear if the US will prevail against a peer adversary in an air war, but if anybody is able to achieve air supremacy, it would be the US and their allies.
Supersonic missiles are very vulnerable to a debris in the sky. Instead of catching of a missile, a drone can be blown up in advance on predicted trajectory of the supersonic missile.
The US is the greatest air power in the world bar none, and they're trained to disable and dismantle the opposition force's air defense and capabilities. It would be a mistake to think the US is weak in their SEAD game.
And that's not counting the rest of NATO.
I would not say that they will succeed in a peer to peer war, but NATO have the greatest chance to achieve air supremacy against any peer opponent.
You can deduct that NATO countries except US won't achieve air superiority against capable opponent(Russia, China), and their doctrine is not effective if new US president elect will decide so.
Ukraine actually uses Russian fighting tactics.. that's the way they trained and were equipped. They're also very poor, with a gdp per capita (before the war) of 1/3rd of Russia's. So it looks exactly the way these countries are equipped and trained to fight: lots of artillery, loss of life, trench warfare. Ukraine has neither the training nor equipment to do combined arms warfare. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that a war with NATO will look like the war in Ukraine.
As far as drone defense, we already have KuRFS/Ku-720(mobile version)[0,1] radar to track drones/etc that works with a phalanx, 50-caliber guns, 30mm cannon, and coyote drones. We're also deploying a 50kw palletized laser (w/ KuRFS) with the DE MSHORAD program[2].
All of these programs predate the 2022 Ukraine invasion. The Coyote (designed at the start to take out small drones) first took flight in 2007[3].
Not trying to knock Raytheon, those are useful technologies, but those sometimes work against some targets (mostly on clean test ranges) and are not even close to a complete solution. Reliably detecting and tracking drones is a very hard problem.
The Russian way of war isn't a bad way to go, but of course the units that know how to best fight like the Russians are actually(or used to be) the Americans.
I don't think it's necessary true that the war devolves into a lot of loss of life and trench warfare. That's mostly the result of a stalemate. The Russians expected Ukraine to be a pushover. That didn't happen.
Ukraine: $5,663 vs Russia: $13,006 (From WP's Economy of {country} pages)
Russia's oil does a lot. Using oil/gas fuels supports Russia's war economy by creating demand and raising their prices in the commodities markets, in addition to contributing to the climate disaster.
By this stage the Russians had lost most of their APC’s and tanks were standing well back acting more as artillery. The Russians then started the widespread use of what looks like golf carts and ATV’s to reinforce their infantry. Later they started using motorbikes.
With their armor gone the infantry were sent in meatwaves. *This lead the Ukrainians to mount their Octocopter heavy lift drones (which the Russians are generally very afraid of), with light machine guns to bring down the infantry attacks. While experimental these drones proved very effective, their only problem being recoil issues firing the gun. It’s planned to solve the recoil quite quickly, but using machine learning and thermal optical sights shows huge promise. This makes the drones less susceptible to having their control link severed - even if they do they can operate alone and return themselves to base. The day of the gun armed autonomous AI drone it seems, is here.*
The Russians continue infantry attacks but they have now stopped supporting them with any armor and have turned north instead, trying to find a weaker spot.
An outstanding and imaginative Ukrainian defense with limited resources yet again, blunts the relentless hammer blows of meatwave attacks backed by dwindling armor.
> swarms of drones are being developed such that they can fly to a designated “kill box,” find and identify enemy tanks, then destroy them – all without any human pilot interaction.
I remember I mentioned that this the future of drones few years ago and everyone in the seminar laughed about it, but it’s a reality now. The next one is AI deciding what to target, which I believe is already in place as Israel is using it already, and apparently failing miserably with all the civilians casualties.
What's worse: a bomb destroying everything in a certain radius, or a drone killing all enemy combatants in that same radius with a 10% false positive rate?
> I believe is already in place as Israel is using it already, and apparently failing miserably with all the civilians casualties.
I don't think we have the data to reliably determine the impact of Israel's AI usage on civilian casualties. Sam Harris this week had an expert for urban and subterranean warfare from West Point on. He explained that it's impossible to get accurate numbers this quickly. In Mosul we apparently didn't have any numbers till a year after the battle ended. The ones we eventually got had huge error margins. This is before we even talk about ability to trust the source of the numbers. He further makes the point that the reported numbers we have right now are astonishingly low given we are talking about a war in a dense urban area, especially once we consider that Hamas has dug a huge tunnel system under civilian infrastructure to which civilians don't get access for shelter.
The expert's explanations on the show are worth every minute of it.
The numbers will be low because Israel would like nothing more than every palestinian to disappear without anyone noticing.
Its not a war its open air burial under piles of concrete.
The article makes an assumption that Ukraine has out-innovated Russia in terms of drones. That used to be true (in 2022-2023), with Ukraine's adapting low cost high availability commercial drones as weapons. However since the war has entered the long term Russia's industrial sector has outsupplied Ukraine in terms of quantity of drones, and has reached parity in terms of quality. The realities of the battlefield has seen the cheap and available commercial drones ineffective against mitigations (electronic warfare, surveillance and counter-battery, out-ranging and out-timing). Therefore the contest around drones has moved from quantity of commercial drones to cost-effective quality of drones in the face of countermeasures. This has even pushed some areas of the front to stop using FPV drones (on both sides) in favor of more traditional military drones.
The point of this is actually one of cost. Drones are effective weapons in large part due to their cost-effectiveness. As frequency-hopping modems, larger processors, and multi-frequency antennas are added to cheap drones they start getting expensive - to the point the cost-effectiveness suffers and their drawbacks start becoming more serious.
The article lists drone missions: mine clearing, evacuation, aerial drones, land drones, demining drones, ... . These are mainly overstretches. In terms of how drones have actually been employed in the war, there are naval drones which have been effective at holding Russia's Black Sea Fleet at risk, there are FPV drones which have been used primarily to stall the frontline defensively, and there are long range drones (not mentioned) that are used as an alternative to e.g. ballistic and cruise missiles.
There are R&D projects, many of them failed at employing drones for many missions. There are some partial successes in using them to lay mines (and fake mines). But there isn't as much success in using them for de-mining. Lifting a person for evac is very challenging to do with a drone, especially an autonomous one. Somehow "surveillance" doesn't make the list, but probably the #1 contribution/mission of drones is battlefield visibility.
The article compares taking 200 artillery shells to kill a building, vs 1 drone to kill a soldier. This is not only inaccurate, but it's apples-to-oranges.
Drones have not replaced artillery in the Russo-Ukraine war and they aren't going to. Drones cannot be massed because they interfere with one another in the electromagnetic spectrum. They also require a significant number of people to operate compared to artillery. The munitions on drones are far less powerful than artillery (e.g. drones have trouble destroying armor, artillery doesn't). Simple means (mesh, nets, smoke) can shut down drones - but have nothing on artillery. There's so much to say here but it's not even comparable and the article bases its primary takeaways from this incorrect assumption.
The article discusses that drones can fly "up to 22km". It doesn't mention that these require re-transmitter drones, which need separate pilots, separate modems, logistics coordination and ultimately - a much higher price tag. It can be worth it for certain missions, but it's hardly true that innovation has somehow created drones that are just better units. It's more that the employment of drones in warfare has gotten better - the command and control has gotten better.
The artificial intelligence aspect of drones is typically a "terminal flight system", one that can take over to seek non-moving targets once EW has shut down communications. While its true that Russia and Ukraine both use terminal flight guidance systems to deal with the "last mile" of EW cover, its nearly impossible to use this to hit moving targets or to hit vehicles with armor in the areas that are needed to achieve disablement or a kill.
The DoD has applied Project Maven to solve the problem the article discusses: automatically identifying targets to strike (which honestly applies to more than just drones - can be used for artillery, etc). Unfortunately Project Maven has been disappointingly significantly less accurate than human analysts at identifying battlefield targets on the same imagery.
I could go on, but I think the article is kind of stuck in 2022?
There's a certain pitch one can make for drones, and Ukraine is making that pitch. But I suspect the author might have too narrow a set of sources or some kind of biased interest, for what they are writing about.
> Drones cannot be massed because they interfere with one another in the electromagnetic spectrum. They also require a significant number of people to operate compared to artillery.
I think we've all seen these drone shows, where a large swarm maneuvers to make shapes in the sky, right? We're not far at all from one operator controlling a swarm, capable of pre-programmed formations and maneuvers.
The economies of scale work overwhelmingly in favour of drones -- small, light, disposable.
In theory, sure, but those swarm shows are pre-programmed: they aren't reacting dynamically to a (chaotic) situation on the ground and they aren't communicating with operators.
There's some far-flung future in which drones are fully autonomous and in fact don't even need antennas. At that point it's possible they can be massed. But it's a bit of a science fiction. At least, there isn't any such product available (commercial or military) and this isn't how drones are being used in war.
For economies of scale - true also of artillery and other equipment! The more you can scale production the more cost-effective the weapon. As mentioned, drones in the Russo-Ukraine war are starting to see their cost-effectiveness wane due to having to become larger (larger munitions, large antennas, etc), heaver (bigger batteries, larger munitions, etc), and non-disposable (high cost frequency hopping gear, difficult to find munitions, difficult to source batteries, etc).
Giant technological leaps could happen, but it's nerve wracking to bet the outcome of a war on something like that.
Meanwhile, the front line troops are reporting that almost all the drones are FPV guided. Computer vision apparently just isn't good enough to fly in through a doorway, like the FPV drones are used.
(Sure, you could make a cluster of GPUs do that, in a test. It's completely different to do it in war.)
I suggest following the thousands of drone videos that continue to come out of the conflict. They contradict much of this analysis.
Small and medium drones are much more precise than artillery and remain incredibly effective at surveillance, spotting and at attacking the poorly operated, low survivability armor that Russians have, despite countermeasures. Ukraine is now domestically mass-producing bomber UAVs able to deliver multiple mortar rounds semi-autonomously on a target. While ECMs (jammers) have undoubtedly reduced drone effectiveness, ECMs come at a cost. A small ECM will have a very localized effect, while a large ECM can be taken out with anti-radiation missiles, as the Ukrainians have been doing.
Everyone is also recognizing the huge psychological effect of drones in the battlefield now. Any kind of massing is getting increasingly risky, communications, autonomy and mobility become critical.
The main point of the article is that the war is driving innovation in drones, which is pretty self-evident and doesn't seem overstated at all.
It needs to be noted that these drone videos are highly filtered - they are used as fundraising tools by Ukraine Armed Force units and then what "trends" are the spectacular videos (and often are out of context).
So while you may see videos of drones taking out tanks, they are often tanks that have already been killed and drones come in on an immobile target, etc.
You would also think that Ukraine is using more drones than Russia - based on the videos. But Russian Armed Forces don't need to fundraise for their equipment on Telegram, and what videos of Russian drone attacks that are published don't make it to trending in American social media (because "disinformation").
What's happening on the battlefield and what you see in those drone videos are very different due to selection bias.
Drones have less of a psychological effect than, say, glide bombs or artillery. This is due to the size of the munitions.
The broad thesis that war is driving innovation in drones isn't incorrect. But the supporting material in the article is (I've listed some of them above, and you seem to agree with them, point by point?). The article is overstating the case for drones, even calling them the successors of artillery. That's all my comment is addressing - let's right size and calibrate this: drones are being innovated on, however they are less effective at higher expense than they used to be, they very well may continue to trend in that direction, and they aren't a replacement for conventional weapons.
I guess another way to put it is the title of the article isn't wrong. But if you read the article, the content clearly is.
> So while you may see videos of drones taking out tanks, they are often tanks that have already been killed and drones come in on an immobile target, etc.
Those tanks are immobilized by other drones or mines.
> You would also think that Ukraine is using more drones than Russia - based on the videos.
Yep, Ukraine uses more drones than RF in both absolute and relative terms, because Ukraine uses 10x less artillery shells.
No, I don't really agree with any of your points, I think they're either incorrect or not relevant. And the rest of the content in the article beyond the headline is reporting, not making a value judgment, so I don't see how it's wrong.
Oh interesting. No rebut of specific points or facts, just blanket disagreement?
I think its hard to call a whole article "correct" or "incorrect." This article makes many assumptions, states many things as facts, and yes - makes judgements. For the reasons states above I think the article overstates its case. It's behind the newest reporting by around two years. It misses or completely excludes important details (e.g. range requirements for retransmitter drones).
That doesn't make the article wholey incorrect or worthless. But yeah I think if someone is reading that article they should be aware of its inaccuracy, factual deficits, etc...
Happy to dive into any of the one-by-one points in the GP comment if there's questions or skepticism.
>"Six days a week – they take Sunday off – his team of 36 employees can produce an average of 360 drones per day. But although they have a manufacturing capacity of 10,000 drones a month, they’re producing just 3,000.
The Ukrainian government doesn’t pre-pay for orders, leaving manufacturers to come up with the capital to produce their drones. Without more funds, they’re unable to make more than a few thousand a month. This lack of upfront money is a problem, Mykhailo said. "
10's of billions were given to Ukraine. How come there is not enough money to pay for what seems to be very cheap and effective weapon?
Most of what was given to Ukraine wasn't cash. The US gave mostly military equipment that would otherwise have been decommissioned (which would have cost). The media just likes to list summarize this as a dollar amount which is somewhat misleading but understandable.
Ukraine wasn't just handed sacks of cash with dollar signs on the side. They've been getting X billions worth of lend-lease equipment, supplies, and training. This gives the Ukrainian government equipment and training but they've still got to provide the personnel and pay them. They also need to pay for whatever equipment they want that's not lend-lease, including their own drones.
To add some interesting context on the lend-lease act: The US gave Britain $32 billion under the lend-lease act during WWII. Britain make its last payment to the US for this in December 2006. The US actually got the money back. It's not some charity disguised to appease tax payers. It's really great!
China where all the parts are made started to control export of them to control use on Ukraine side. Quite few european NGOs have been buying parts on aliexpress, soldering and supplying drones to ukraine. China is trying to cut that off and next step probably will have to be crowd sourcing them to circumvent that (instead money donate these parts from these links).
On the other hand Russia has addopted the same tactic and now have flow of drones estimated to be atleast 2x more drones than ukraine.
Ukraine hitting oil processing plants in Russia using drones has been pretty effective in increasingly crippling Putin's money making machine that feeds his war. And sea drones already practically removed Russian navy from openly operating in the Black sea.
Overall oil refineries are decent targets because they are high cost and statically located and therefore difficult to defend, but Ukraine certainly wishes it had more conventional weapons at longer ranges so that it could strike deeper and dynamic targets.
Ukraine doesn't have many better alternatives. They can strike some energy infrastructure (which they've done) in an effort to affect Russian willpower. It can also try to hit airfields (which they've done) hoping to take out equipment, but Russia has been pretty good at moving equipment out of the way.
The strike campaign itself has been moderately effective but definitely short of a war-winning enterprise. Estimates on the actual damage on production and exports has ranged between the fantastical (28%) to the banal (6%). It looks like domestic petrol supply has been hit the hardest in terms of tangible economic costs, since oil prices have remained reasonable with lessened seasonal demand and lower OPEC supply targets. Russia has additionally made deals with Kazakhstan and Belarus to attempt to mitigate some of the economic effects, has been able to repair oil refinery damage, and has experimented with a range of mitigations.
The strike campaign has been further complicated by the US election year. The Biden Administration has asked Ukraine to stop targeting oil refineries, because global oil instability could cause a crisis that ultimately causes global issues, rising prices, and Biden a second term. Such strikes are expected to uptick after November. And with the possibility of long range missiles from military sponsors, plus winter-time difficulties, this might be a good window to see what Ukraine can really do.
Either way I think the article is not about the long range drones you are alluding to here, but the small commercial sized drones and mid-cost military drones that are based on them.
Moving equipment like fighters and bombers out of range of drones achieves a significant tactical victory for Ukraine by reducing loiter time at target for Russian aircraft. Incremental losses of both aircraft and crew also have compounding effects, since pilots for logistics roles like in air refuelling become scarce.
I agree that lack of weapons for direct assault limits some of the upside benefits as in "you cannot directly win a war on defensive moves" but you can force a better, safer, more advantageous outcome. In effect, Russia is losing a war of attrition on it's economy and materiel side. It does have massive manpower and stocks. It doesn't have infinite supply of economic resilience and home front tolerance for a failing economy undermines Kremlin myths.
Sometimes, not losing is the best you can get pending more help.
I disagree that failing to hit targets is a significant tactical victory.
But I agree that they should continue the strike campaign. They can't do much else on the battlefield right now. It's the right thing for them to look at areas they can raise cost and complexity for the Russians. I just wouldn't round it up too much...
I disagree that Russia is losing a war of attrition on economy (look at Russia's economy vs Ukraine's!). On a materiel side, maybe, Russia is using a lot of its stockpiles and those will eventually dwindle. But Russia is not somehow out of the fight when those stockpiles get low. On the other side of attrition, Ukraine is low on military aged men, artillery, fortifications, air defense. There's a strong argument to be made that Russia is the one winning the war of attrition, at least for the foreseeable future.
Russia is winning right now. But that doesn't mean it will win. The future isn't determined. I agree with you that a prolonged war won't necessarily go Russia's way, and that it may eventually lose the will to continue.
Russia can win the war of attrition only if allies stop backing Ukraine, which is exactly what Russia hopes to achieve through bought shills and "useful idiots" like those who delayed aid for Ukraine in US Congress for instance and the likes of Orban and Co.
However if these shills would fail to stall the allies, Russia would surely lose in the long run. I.e. Russia can't sustain long war of attrition, despite smokescreen of having supposedly infinite supplies.
I disagree with this other than that Ukraine will definitely lose if its backers stop supporting it.
It's not really clear that Russia would surely lose the war of attrition. A realistic scenario, assuming Ukraine's sponsors sustain its support: Ukraine and Russia continue sustaining losses as they are, Russia ramps up equipment production to offset what its needing to take out of storage, still the war slows down into more static trench warfare, Russia is able to maintain the willpower to stay in the fight, and Ukraine runs of out military aged men before Russia does.
I'm not saying the above will happen. I'm just saying that the above isn't a contrived, unrealistic scenario. No matter how much Ukraine's sponsors supply it with equipment, unless they themselves enter directly into the war there's no way to offset that huge attritional asymmetry.
Russia can't ramp up production sufficiently - not for the scale of war that Putin is waging now. And this is only going to get worse for them. It's a key factor - shortages will kill its military potential eventually. While allies can sustain production as long as they are willing to. So Russia bets on lack of will on their part.
I see your point and I think you have a reasonable point of view, although I don't share it because I think to have that point of view you have to make assumptions I'm not comfortable making.
I think there's a lot of variables in terms of how the timeline could progress: how Russia is able to draw on other sources (trade) for equipment, how global economic winds enable Russia to deal with its labor shortages, how deep those stockpiles really go (already Western observers have significantly underestimated them), how much materiel is needed to sustain a war of attrition (in which Russia isn't advancing), how much Russian air power plays into a future timeline and how and whether Ukraine can mitigate Russian air power starting from its current air defense deficit.
When I look at these, and other variables and unknown quantities, it's hard for me to draw out that Russia is destined/doomed to lose a war of attrition, if supply just continues a little bit longer. We've witnessed Russia adapting significantly during the war - even avoiding (so far) a general mobilization. Furthermore I can think of several more ways in which Russia could win the war with sustained sponsorship of Ukraine (that never test scalability of equipment manufacture). In short, I respect that you've got that view, just uncomfortable of making the assumptions to get there myself.
I wouldn't call even a six percent reduction 'banal'. But it depends on the amount of resources invested on both sides.
As a hypothetical:
If the attacker invests approximately zero resources, the defender invests crazy amounts of resources, then even approximately zero actual damage is a great outcome for the attacker. The real damage is in the resources wasted on defense.
Btw, this is pretty close to what our societies did to our own civilian air travel in response to terrorist threats in the 2000s.
(I have no special insight into the numbers for the current war. But I wouldn't sneeze at 6% reduction.)
Even those percentages of dropping oil profits can be pretty crippling for Putin. Especially since they can repeatedly hit what Putin wastes resources on repairing. And they should continue doing that even more.
But they surely need more effective ways to take out Russian military airplanes, especially those which are bombing the front line and cities. Not sure why allies can't supply them with needed technology to do it - they should possess some.
Russia's latest tactic uses fairly massive old-school dumb bombs, retrofitted with satellite guidance kits. These glide bombs are said to be launched by aircraft from high altitude, just outside of Ukraine's radar range. They have thus far proven highly effective and very difficult to intercept.
Not sure F-16s would help here in patrolling closer to launch points and intercepting the aircraft prior to dropping their payloads; or whether they would be too vulnerable. But, it does seem like a job for stealth interceptors, and certainly makes the case for air superiority.
With F16s it rather depends what air to air missiles they are supplied with. There are some that could take out Russian planes from a fair distance. But I'll give you stealth would be better. I'm surprised at how wimpy the west has been with air support - two years in and not an F16 in action. If they'd lent a couple of F35s with volunteer pilots it could have given Russia something to think about.
Yeah, no doubt the F-16s would be equipped with appropriately-ranged missles. The question is around their own vulnerability while patrolling/acquiring targets.
Seems to imply a job for stealth, or otherwise establishing air superiority. But, even with the latter the outcome might be variable—especially for eastern / northern Ukranian targets—without incursion into hostile (Russian or Belarusian) airspace.
Agree 100% on Western support. Seems we've been fighting to "not escalate" versus fighting to win. But, it's already a war with Ukrainian cities being pounded. In this context, "not escalating" seems to be a euphemism for "losing".
It's getting better with France and UK pushing to drop that "not escalate" demagoguery in favor of actually facing the problems. And it's helping.
Macron surprisingly was very on point about using the uncertainty tactic as a deterrent method, instead of "we won't do this / we won't do that in order not to escalate". It's good he finally got to that point, though it should have been clear from the start.
Other allies should also remove all restrictions for Ukraine on using weapons to hit targets directly in Russia.
What also works as a deterrent is Russia knowing that for any hit, they'll be hit by Ukraine in return, and not just on the front lines, but anywhere inside their territory.
Agree 100%. As it is, the risk is all on the Ukrainian side, save for Russian casualties (which Russia has shown to be of little concern, as they shovel everyone from prisoners to conscripts to the front lines).
They need to have more downside risk, which doesn't come from the West constantly reassuring them that we won't "escalate". Hitting targets in Russia would definitely change the calculus. As would enforcing a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine.
I was glad to hear Macron and others turn the corner there. But, I hope they're willing to back it up, else the bluster would do more harm than good.
I guess there may be an element of slowly boiling the frog in that the west was nervous about getting into a nuclear war with Russia which is understandable. But I think there should be an understanding that invading basically democratic countries is unacceptable and we'll make it a pain for the Russians until they rethink.
I heard an interesting idea to blockade their oil by hitting empty tankers sailing into Russia to pick up oil. That would create a major headache for them without actually killing many people.
You can't do it slowly, when they are actively attacking. Besides, their nuclear bluff got old and finally (as it should have been from the start) less and less allies pay attention to it. As Macron responded to that - France also has nuclear weapons. That's the way to shut Putin up.
Exactly this. The idea of "not escalating" means we are always responding to Russia's latest escalation, so are perpetually a step behind. No risk to Russia and no way to win a war.
And, falling for the gambit that Putin was a madman who would readily use nukes even if it meant mutually assured destruction was dumb from the start. If he was an irrational madman, so ready to destroy the world, then he could have done that from the start.
He can't be this crafty authoritarian, executing on a set of well-understood geopolitical strategic goals AND an irrational madman who doesn't care whether the world exists at all. You have to pick one.
> Estimates on the actual damage on production and exports has ranged between the fantastical (28%) to the banal (6%). It looks like domestic petrol supply has been hit the hardest in terms of tangible economic costs, since oil prices have remained reasonable with lessened seasonal demand and lower OPEC supply targets.
Isn't that the point, though? Hit refineries, forcing Russia to sell more crude oil to the world, and have less refined oil internally to turn into gas, etc?
That's partly the point yeah. Every war is an iterative set of actions and mitigations. The point I'm making is that so far the actual effect created by the strikes hasn't come close to winning the war, and its hard to project the numbers culminating in a war-winning economic catastrophy.
None of that is to say Ukraine shouldn't try, or that it doesn't have some "annoying" affect that increases costs and complexity for Russia. It does. Just want to be accurate about the level of affect and its potential.
And again, I think November after the election is going to be the best show of what Ukraine can do.
Was it the urgency of war? Or the non-market money that poured in?
I've had fantasies of doing another 1-3 years COVID style, but putting all 2 trillion dollars into cancer research instead of a vaccine that saves 1% of old, obese, and sick people. (or swap it with global warming cures, whatever you want to mobilize the world on)
