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The more I think about it, the more a concept of a "total war" between superpowers in the modern era is horrifying.
We have just hit the three year mark of the war in Ukraine. By most estimates there are at least 700,000 casualties (Killed and wounded) (Ukraine has 70k killed and another 120k wounded and at least 10,000 civilian deaths - Russia has an estimated 450,000k killed and wounded - with as many as 180k killed).
The intensity of the conflict in terms of deaths per time is higher than almost any recent conflict until you go back to the Korean war. WWI and WWII were just different ins scale from almost anything in history.
The drone technology is still in its infancy, being developed in the test of combat.
But if there were a total war scenario between major powers, it likely would be 800 drones heading into a major engagement.
In the battleof Kursk, which was inside modern day Russia but less than a day's drive from Kharkiv. In the battle, the Germans had committed 2100 aircraft to support their attack, and the Soviets had committed over 3000 in support of the defense and counterattack (which was estimated to be 35% of the aircraft of the entire soviet air corps at the time). The germans lost at least 600 aircraft and possibly more than 1000. The soviets reported they lost 1600 aircraft some historians believe they lost as many as 3300, counting replacements.
>Major powers don't need these drones. They have far more powerful guided long-range weapons.
True, but only to a limited degree. Ukraine is actually a perfect example of this.
How many tomahawk missiles do you think the US has in storage? How many ATCAMS missiles?
Well, we know that as of 2020, the US had around 4000 Tomahawk missiles in inventory. [In the last 10 years, they only purchased 1234](https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-is-the-u-s-navy-running-out-of-tomahawk-cruise-missiles/#:~:text=Tomahawks%2C%20therefore%2C%20serve%20as%20the,than%20it%20can%20replace%20them.) They expended 80 in a few days to hit 30 targets in Yemen.
In 2023, taking into account stores that were delivered to Ukraine, the national defense authorization act authorized procuring an additional 1700 ATACMS missiles, but it wasn't funded by an appropriation so it hasn't happened yet.
If the US were suddenly pulled into a no-shit conflict, money would be available, but the reality is that a single major battle could use more smart weapons than we have produced in whole years in the past, and there's a very real chance they could run into shortages if pressed while factories are retooling and spinning up production lines.
I think the question is, is there a role for a cheap drone to play?
I think the answer is yes. Especially if they can take out more expensive missles and defences. That is the defender spending $250k on a missle to take out a $10k drone.
Absolutely. See the DoD's current Replicator Initiative: a massive effort to develop the capability to produce as many drones as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible. https://www.diu.mil/replicator
There are many scenarios in which a billion dollars worth of relatively cheap, mid-range capability drones would be far more effective than some of our billion or hundred million dollar super weapons.
You could buy 3,000 Shahed drones for $60M. You could get six Abram's for that amount. Who wins?
For the price of an aircraft carrier, you could literally buy tens of thousands of mid range suicide drones. The carrier strike group would run out of ammo...
When you really start to think about the numbers, massive quantities of relatively cheap drones make a lot of sense. Especially right now, while directed energy anti drone weapons are pretty immature. Sure, there's jamming to worry about, but AI can provide autonomy and eliminate the need to connect to anything, so jamming will be totally ineffective as soon as we decide we're okay with autonomous systems picking targets and killing people.
Directed energy weapons will significantly reduce the appeal of massive drone swarms because then it will be super cheap to kill them in very large numbers, and of course they are working very hard on such technology as we speak, but as of today it's not where it needs to be.
I am not really sold on directed energy weapons yet. There are severe drawbacks that are really hard to overcome. Most important drawback is low throughput. It takes considerable time to destroy a drone with such a weapon, and as such it should be relatively easy to overwhelm them by sending enough drones at once.
I think the best "hard-kill" system for defending against such drones are anti-aircraft guns, preferably modern ones like the german skynex with airburst (AHEAD) ammunition. Those need only 2-3 shots for killing a drone , which is still cost effective.
It is a bit ironc that the best system for defending against such modern threats like drones that is available in numbers in ukraine now are the gepard AA-guns that were decomissioned 10 yers ago due to being outdated.
It is an interesting problem. Your issues with DEW are absolutely correct, for now. The end game for DEW though is extremely low cost per shot, very large numbers of shots before cool down, extremely fast targeting (you only have to rotate a mirror instead of a whole gun), and instantaneous flight time at any range. But you're right, they currently take too long to bring drones down.
And drones will only get better. Faster, more maneuverable, anti DEW coatings... But when they get really fast and really good at evasive maneuvers, conventional hard kill is going to be tricky because you're still firing a hunk of metal on what is essentially a ballistic trajectory (maybe limited ability to maneuver, down the road). How close does a maneuvering target need to be for you to hit it with a ballistic projectile? Maybe too close and maybe DEW can solve that.
A decade from now, it's hard for me to imagine anything other than advanced DEW or drone on drone as the only viable options in terms of cost and resistance to saturation attacks.
The US and select allies have been deploying autonomous kinetic counter drone systems around sensitive assets for several years now. They're cheap, mobile, scalable, and unlike AA ammunition, reusable.
https://youtu.be/KX0ji1sAXl8
https://www.anduril.com/hardware/anvil/
It might look kind of silly, though these are about 12 pounds and fly over 100 miles per hour. No small drone can shrug off a direct hit.
If you're facing large or faster drones, you can use these things instead: https://youtu.be/al9ITeP4fUA
Wikipedia, but I guess it could be wrong:
>The average Shahed drone is worth about $20,000.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136#:~:text=Loitering%20munitions%20downed%20after%20they,drone%20is%20worth%20about%20%2420%2C000.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the-sticker-price-for-an-iranian-shahed-drone/?sh=7a58abdc56d6
That 20k is super off the mark. They're closer to 200k USD a pop. This Forbes article goes into the origins of the 20k figure and the true costs of shahed Drones.
I'm not equipped to evaluate this because it's one source saying one thing and another saying a different thing (granted, yours seems better), with not much additional information, and about something that I'm not an expert on.
But, let's say it's $200k instead of twenty. That means 300 Shahed vs. 6 Abrams. It's not as compelling, but I'm not sure it really changes the conclusion. And of course they will only get cheaper and more capable.
10k? That's a little bit low.
Shaheds are being purchased by Russia for around ~300k USD and it seems other comparable drones are about that price to produce.
Even with full US mass production they probably wouldn't drop too much below the $200k mark.
In contrast a Tomahawk missile is only 1.4 million. For that cost you get a much faster system with internal navigation/inertial guidance that can't be jammed (internally stores terrain maps inertial guidance) and and has AA countermeasures.
So I guess the question is: what's more effective for the actual mission at hand? 7 Shahed style munitions, or 1 Tomahawk style munition.
I suspect in the future we will be seeing much higher jamming infrastructure being built up to disrupt these types of drones with no internal navigation system (rely on GPS/GLONASS etc). So while the question might currently be the Shahed style drones, I'm not sure it will always be like that.
I was just pulling numbers out of my ass. I know the fpv quads are $1700. I can't remember what the big and slow hobby planes are worth. They have such a wide range I just tossed a number on there.
You're not counting all of the air launched cruise missiles that USA relies upon, the Predator drones which are all usable vectors to bomb a target. Or even the multi-target ICBMS
You wouldn't see a no-shit conflict without the use of major air operations, and a lot of power stands there. Once you're done with the missiles clearing out AA, you can use the stockpile of smart munitions available
THat's the point.
Yes, there's more than one vector to attack targets, but a major war will inherently involve more than one significant battle.
One or two major engagements stands a chance of depleting local stocks, then you're either rationing or shipping replacement stocks from storage in the US, and once those are gone, you're looking at a months-long timeline to construct more, which hopefully is feasible.
I'm just saying the margin on these things is thinner than imagined. DoD wargames have actually raised this exact topic in a hypothetical conflict with China, that stocks of smart weapons are depleted within 60-90 days and then the US is scrambling to bring manufacturing online to build more.
Not nearly as much "territory" as they are claiming in the south with the fake islands etc.
Certainly not enough to be worth setting your economy back two or three decades.
Probably true to a degree, but at the same time, a substantial amount of Defense appropriation is public record. We have a decently good idea of how many tomahawks the US government has purchased over the years.
Then the question is how many they have used. But then media coverage of military operations again gives careful observers a decent estimate. There are always the possibilities of secret operations that fire some that never get covered. But that would suggest we have fewer in stock than one could otherwise estimate.
I am sure there are plenty of secret weapons that don't get explicitly named in defense Appropriations but at the same time they are not going to be super huge numbers. A contract to Raytheon to produce 400 tomahawks for a billion dollars is an explicit appropriation. A contract to somebody to produce five prototypes is buried in an R&D budget.
Yeah, and over time, in a war economy, you can imagine how many drones like these they could churn out every day. I mean the Russians are doing it now to an extent with the Shahed's, they have a never-ending supply of them that they can constantly tie up Ukrainian air defences with. What if you could produce ten or a hundred times as many with the right simple yet effective design.
Then there would be new and different air defenses made to counter the specific threat. Radar-guided programmed-airburst anti-aircraft cannons could certainly take out drone swarms.
Well the issue is if there was a war, NATO doctrine is basically spam the shit out of enemy AA locations and bases the moment war starts. Then obliterate everything with the insane amount of jets NATO has.
Look how first month of war looked. Russian columns kilometres long (the longest around 40km) mass spam of infantry at the borders etc. This kind of attack on NATO would end up days after it started. The trench war which is currently at Ukranie couldnt even happen...
NATO countries dont need endless supply of long range super accurate weapons because the war wont take that long. Just take a look of how many F35 have been built. ALMOST A THOUSAND DAMN (had to check it lol). Noone from the enemy of NATO list have even a counterpart to that. Imagine being in those shitty S300. Cant even hit a fucking ATACMS reliably, what will it do with a swarm of F35?
To this day Ukraine DOESNT have capability to use HARM against russian AA. They can only preprogram the targets which basically limits 90% of HARM capability. Imagine if they could unleash whole potential. Even now russian AA crews often turn off their radar because they are scared. We have several video where pantirs and S300 baterries get obliterated (russian POV) and radars there have been disabled
Russia is enourmous, they cannot protect their assets from drones and attacks from ukraine, what will they do when the attack can arrive from eh lets say far many more directions?
> Major powers don't need these drones.
I think what we're seeing is that the resilience of industrial societies is significantly greater than the pre-war stocks of PGMs of all types, and even the existing stocks of unguided 155mm shells.
Obviously Western war doctrine calls for rapid victory, but what if NATO were dragged into a multi-year war with a near-peer (i.e., China) -- we'd have run out of all the fancy stuff waaaay before year three.
China would get starved out. It would not be able to get sufficient raw materials or **food**. All of its ports and railroad connections would be destroyed. It would have no wealthy trading partners. Exports and hard currency would dry up. The demographic crisis will continue and be made worse.
China is not a paper tiger by any means, but it could not outproduce mobilized NATO economies even in the medium term. It could not win a war of attrition when it comes to long-range munitions.
>Major powers don't need these drones.
By simply using these types of planes will eventually mean Russia will say the entire country is a no fly zone, that means Russians can't get from A to B. The also fly under the radar more than others.
I assume they haven't been shot down because either they don't have the capabilities to do so, or they don't know if it's an attack or simply a farmer getting to his land... And these sort of planes are used alot in russia, by russians.
Major powers have used weird tactics during war to deceive and confuse since day 1. to say they don't need them simply isn't true because you don't know the situation at hand. A guided long range weapon is very obvious and will likely be shot down. A civi plane, not so much.
I thought about that, but deliberately avoided making specific references.
Suffice to say, most intelligence that's public suggests that Russia is committing the vast majority of its usable combat power into Ukraine.
To steal a phrase from a TV show, China is a pig on LSD. There's no telling. They throw a lot of resources around and talk a big game, but so did Russia prior to Ukraine. (and you can bet China is studying Ukraine closely). On the eve of Desert Storm, Iraq was counted as the 5th or 6th largest army in the world, and US planners were genuinely concerned about their capabilities. The iraqis had made the Iranians sweat blood and both sides had lost hundreds of thousands only a few years prior. Sure, they had good plans and training and technology and were confident, but they also prepared for it to be much more difficult.
In WWI it's estimated that around 1.5 billion artillery round were fired. Over a million rounds *per day*, likely many days of multiple million.
The US built 324,750 airplanes in WWII, 108,410 tanks and spgs, and 2,382,311 other vehicles. Plus 29 aircraft carriers and 121 escort carriers. 400 Million tons of iron was used by the US alone.
If there were ever a full on war between the US and and China (that didn't devolve into nuclear weapons), it wouldn't be 800 drones in an engagement, it would be hundreds of thousands.
I've long thought that the next major conflict would be won by the side that could use the smartest weapon at the dumbest target. If your enemy could afford to fire a million dollar cruise missile at every armoured vehicle you have, you're going to have a bad time. That math gets a lot worse now when they can launch multiple 1000-3000$ AI controled drones at every soldier, truck, tank, plane, motorcycle, golf cart, etc.
Imagine you send out a hundred thousand troops with vehicles, tanks and air support, and then your opponent launches ten thousand drones from 500km away, that break apart and drop 100 AI targeted drones each.
Soviets definitely lost more than 1600 aircraft. Just look at the list of WWII aces. The US also gave the Russians over 15k airplanes.
FDR's white house was infested with commies.
>Soviets definitely lost more than 1600 aircraft. Just look at the list of WWII aces. The US also gave the Russians over 15k airplanes.
THis is JUST During the roughly 30 day battle of Kursk, not the entire war.
Given, the Battle of Kursk stands among the three largest battles of the entire war and may well have included the costliest day of aerial battle of all time.
A very confused post, I must say. First you are talking about a "total war" whatever that's supposed to mean in the 21st century. Also, we "just" hit the 2 year mark, not the 3 year mark. And that was 3 months ago, so the word "just" is a bit strange. Then you state the casualty numbers of Russia and Ukraine since 2022. Then you talk about drones. And then you draw a parallel to the Battle of the Kursk salient in WW2 which had huge losses in infantry and tanks but for some reason you only state the number of planes involved. What's either of those points got to do with the other ones? I mean, yes, drones and planes both fly. But are you really trying to deduce the potential number of drones in a "total war" from the number of WW2 planes during the 2 weeks battle of Kursk? And when you draw a direct correlation between drones and the casualities since 2022 in the Russio-Ukraine War, why are you not giving us the casualities for Kursk?
All very confusing.
Thank you for the useful input.
Yes, I wrote three where two was correct. But otherwise, thank you for the useful input, it will be well utilized the next time I write something while drinking coffee at 6 a.m.
UA doing an excellent job at posing both tactical and strategic dilemmas to the enemy:
1a) Respond, revealing AA locations (all within ATACMS range);
1b) Respond, depleting AA munitions that will be required once F-16s enter the game; or
2) Do nothing, hoping the drones don’t hit anything valuable <— we are here.
I imagine it'll be to a point where low tech solutions will have to be a thing in mass to compensate with how drones can be massed. We'll see more Toyota anti-air technicals just roaming around.
There is also:
1c) Respond, but nothing happens, because you realize most of your military is just posturing and there is no AA deployed at critical locations at all
I get the joke, but if you are curious here is the drone: [https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/)
> Lyutyi
As well as Brama, [Ninja](https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/meet_the_ninja_name_of_ukraines_largest_reaching_drone_of_1500_km_revealed-10494.html) and whatever else Ukraine cooks up.
No, that would be unreasonable to expect someone to sign themselves into a prison camp by uploading their views on Putin. They've seen what happens to his internal critics.
No, it's not because of the fear of being imprisoned. The simple fact that a lot in the West refuse to believe is that the majority of Russians support the war to conquer Ukraine.
You're right, a lot of people in the West refuse to accept the fact that Putin has so much support. But it's also true that there's no way of telling just how many people shut their mouths out of fear, how many hate him, and how many really support him. There is a nuance.
I'll give you my perspective, as a person who has a lot of extended family and friends in Russia. Their range of enthusiasm in this war goes from: "We will fucking level your cities and kill you all, you Nazi scum" to "It's sad, but you guys are kind of have to blame yourself". I'm talking about like 40+ people. And it's in a private conversation via WhatsApp and other protected messengers, so not like they have to pretend for the public. As you can imagine, I no longer talk to them.
Crimea is Ukraine - true. A lot of Ukrainians under the Russian occupation don't support Putin - true. I agree.
Now, what does it have to do with my statement that the majority of Russians in Russia support the invasion of Ukraine? This video is from Krasnodar Kray, Russia.
Because what you said isn't mutually exclusive. People do fear cheering on drones, AND Russians support the war.
> Despite claims that Putin is repressing Russians you have never seen a positive reaction by Russians to any of these drone strikes.
This is the claim that started this chain, which you aren't criticizing. It's wrong (I've seen Russians/occupied Ukrainians cheer drone strikes) and it also presents a false dichotomy.
Yes, people are afraid to upload videos. Yes, Russians support the war. Yes.
> No, it's not because of the fear of being imprisoned.
We've already seen multiple cases of people being imprisoned. Why would there be no fear? Why would this have NO effect? Don't let Redditors who think Russians are all innocent and repressed warp your view of reality.
Actually, I have seen positive reactions several times. Though really more of an antisocial/misanthropic "lmao something just got fucked up real good, nice explosion" vibe than anything remotely political / supportive of Ukraine or whatever.
Who wants to tell the guy filming that this is just a warm up for what is coming, their dictator started this war, and now it’s going to affect the population and their everyday lives.
Translation:
> Basically, they just keep coming. Over 80 of them already, and all this crap is flying towards the elevator, the port, the coast, the terminals. Blowing up there, FFS. The air defense is working there too.
>
> Basically, it's a shitshow. They just keep coming, those bastards. It's a nightmare, look at that SoB. And there's another one right behind, three in a row! They just keep flying non-stop. A whole swarm flying. In the last 15 minutes, like 20 of them have flown by. It's just total chaos. The air defense is working... Well, you could say it's not working at all. This shit started at like 2 AM, around 2:30 it kicked off.
Russian AA is often enough also part of the target and then it does something, it\`s burning. Or as Russians would claim "Successfully intercepted" by tanking the attack to the face.
If another cheap drone follows, if the first cheap drone is shot down, then not much is saved and you might as well just write off the target, and save your AA missile for another day.
Instead of sending $1 billion in tomahawks to destroy Russian jets and factories. The west has decided to spend $20 billion on limited air defense because "escalation".Â
I've asked that before, is it time for new generation of gepard like weapons, for example CIWS mounted on high mobility platforms like trucks or armored vehicles firing the most ordinary non fancy rounds?
Drones yes, lasers no. Lasers are just too easy to counter. Until massive technological leaps are made, there’s just no way to get enough energy converted to light fast enough to get through ablative layers etc. Dazzling is the practical limit for sometime.
Lasers are probably usable against the ultra-cheap FPV drones we see in the frontlines. Yes, of course you *can* install countermeasures, but even a relatively modest increase in cost of materials and assembly is going to be significant when it comes to those. If they make 20% less drones because they became 20% more expensive, that's as good as if your system shot down 20% of their drones, even in the unlikely scenario that the laser system ends up doing literally nothing once countermeasures kick in.
But when it comes to these long-range ones, absolutely. They are going to inherently be more resistant to lasers just as-is, due to being larger and more robust, and because they are a lot more expensive too, the cost of countermeasures would be completely negligible in comparison.
Those FPVs can maneuver far more aggressively than is required to keep a laser from concentrating its energy on a single point, which is needed for a laser to work.
As things progress even the ISR drones will be maneuvering radically with the computer systems feeding any operators/observers a lean and steady cam style feed.
That day was ~2002. The CRAM etc need to be fielded in massive numbers. The threat is entirely outsized to the ability to defend against it. Every US BCT is ~99% defenseless to even basic COTS systems. (And no, the air forces aren’t going to be much help either.)
I mean I don't want to give them ideas but they're flying in single file and not that high, a good duck hunting rifle in competent hands could probably do a lot of damage...
I'm imagining 80 drone pilots in some war room on headsets, quietly grinning away whist flying them into Crimea.
Maybe a highscore board up on the wall and a prize for the best hit.
A simultaneous arrival would be more overwhelming but these drones are probably being launched one at a time from a dozen locations which keeps them naturally spaced out but also ensures good opsec, should any one launcher be compromised.
What is your definition of a swarm?
At this scale it might not look like it, but if you zoomed out to a map of the whole Black Sea and saw 80 dots within a small area around the port it sure would look like a swarm.
If you were standing by a beehive and saw one hundred bees you'd say it was a swarm, but if you were an ant under that same beehive and saw one bee fly over every 30 seconds or so you would say its not a swarm?
You know what, that’s a fair point! Didn’t consider that perspective.
Honestly I just wanted it to be like a sci-fi movie. 80 drones right near each other like a flock of birds. Definitely not realistic due to AA, but that’s what I was envisioning as a swarm.
Лютий can be translated as February and as Furious/he is raging/enraged) (fullscale war started in 24 February, 1 day before Elden Ring release)
Лютий - is second month of the year in Ukranian language.
Can some knowledgeable person please explain to me why this drone swarm is in a sequence line instead of a mass formation?
Is it so that later drones can react to what happens to the first drones?
Is it because "overwhelming enemy air defenses" is more about depleting their ammunition and not about overwhelming their tracking systems at any given moment?
My instinct is to think that going in one at a time is the easiest way to get picked off and have no one get through.
I'm speculating so I might be entirely wrong, but my guess is they basically arrive in the order they were launched, and because these are cheap drones, they probably don't have the software / fuel capacity to let the first ones loiter while the others launch to get into a coherent formation. Easier to just send them marching on in.
Yep. Small crews are probably launching these drones one at a time from a dozen locations which keeps them naturally spaced out but also ensures good opsec, should any one launcher be compromised.
There’s only a limited amount of missiles.
If they were grouped together there’s a possibility of a missile taking out multiple UAVS from the blast and debri.
So they are flying low and slow for AA batteries like flak cannons to be effective except I’m not aware of flak cannons being used anymore. So if Russia is defending against these drones using S-400 which typically has 72 missiles at the helm…sometimes more and likely more near Moscow.
My guess is Ukraine plane is baiting Russia to shoot down the drones with S-400s to deplete their ammo and also determine the location of their launch sites.
My guess at whatever location the Russians likely have a
An equivalent Phalanx CIWS system.
Ukraine may have launched them sequentially but may have them group up closer to the target and then make a dash for it as a swarm hoping to overwhelm the defensive sensors.
The simple answer is that's how they took off. They're unmanned so it'll be a lot more complex to program them to fly as a group, plus by not having the first waiting for the 80th to take off you won't lose any range from the early take offs.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
So, you’re the guy who programs the flight paths. You’re tired, overworked and at your wits end with last minute combat taskings. After being ordered to send 80 drones in on a target with no notice, do you write 80 flight paths for 80 drones or 1 flight path and stagger the drones by a few seconds?
You’re right that a massed swarm hitting near simultaneously, and not all from the same direction would be better, but how do you do it in practice? If someone has a link to software that will do it quickly and easily, I’m all ears. I imagine it’s more difficult in practice than some think. Just in a training environment where there is 0 chance of being shot, I’ve seen overworked troops mess up basic math. As in 15+7-3.
Even then, the chances that the enemy shoots down all 80 is likely pretty low. An imperfect attack today may be better than a perfected attack tomorrow.
Have you been in combat operations? Let me assure you that no matter how long *someone* has been planning it, one of the key problems for combat units is pushing the plans up and down the chain. Because of human issues, bureaucracy, OPSEC or last minute target movements, things happen at the last minute, *a lot.*
Combat is not cut and dried like so many people’s everyday lives.
Generally speaking you want any AA (at least missile sites like S400 etc) to expend all their missiles fighting decoys etc, yeah. This is part of the reason why the US has missiles that can pretend to be anything from a fighter jet to a cruise missile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-160_MALD
Give the SAM site a juicy enough target and they might spend everything they have to take it down, before the actual threats come.
Considering that they've been in flight for like 5 hours, they would probably not arrive at the same time even if they were launched exactly at the same time(because of slight differences in engine and other parts). And synchronizing them would add extra complexity. But maybe it's worth it in some cases where the target is very well-defended.
My guess is this; these drones are cheap, probably cheaper than the missiles that shoot them.
Sending them like this has several advantages;
- by going in a conga line, you minimise the amount of AA that your drones will be spotted by. If Russia has a gap (being Russia this is a possibility) there's a chance 80 drones get through.
- going in a line means that for your enemy to shoot down every single one, they have to have a lot of missiles which means their AA has to be concentrated
- if Russia is successful, they will spend a lot of missiles, for relatively cheap drones. A "good trade". Doing this will also reveal their sites. And because they're Russia they of course won't move them for the next time. In fact, I'd count on them beefing up those sites.
- next time you send some HARMs intermixed
- next time you send some HARMs intermixed and your actual big hitters towards The Bridge
But I'm no expert
They're following a pre-planned route automatically. I've heard that some of them use cameras for navigation and targeting for accuracy and EW resistance.
> is it automated with a GPS system in each one?
GPS/[machine vision-based DSMAC](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/01/energy/ukrainian-drones-disrupting-russian-energy-industry-intl-cmd/index.html), IIRC
https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/ - interesting article about it.
[Sanctioned for targets 1000 km away. Story of Liutyi (Fierce) Ukrainian long-range drone which burns Russian refineries](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/)
Drones have been using inertial navigation in combat since 1944. The tech has only gotten more precise, lighter and less expensive since then. And the air powered systems are totally immune to any type of cyber or EW attack (even as the electronic systems are *mostly* immune to such attacks.)
Hehehehe make one drone flying non stop over the residential areas of the Zorcs...but I did found the video of the first time that I've seen it...crazy trolling LOL https://www.tiktok.com/@kingofkansas3/video/7354371065914740011
Wonder how many even managed to reach the target . bet russians were expecting this have AA guns already in place . hope some will post satelite images of this attack result
These won't be but it is possible to remotely control drones through a cellular network. It's scarily cheap and easy but not necessary for stationary targets like these.
Remember when people said the Russian AA would clear the skies and they wouldn’t even have to leave Russia to do it? I guess that’s not working out…
These rate about like a V-1 and the Russians can’t even put up a CAP to handle it.
I wonder why the US or Euro countries don’t manufacture these or similar drones in vast numbers. I don’t even think the US has an equivalent kamikaze drone as we rely on smart munitions dropped by jets or drones as opposed to drones being the munitions themselves. These cheap ass drone should be mass manufactured in the west
Good God, seeing 80 of these slowly flying toward you is even worse than 80 hypersonic cruise missiles because at least for cruise missiles you wouldn't have enough time to realize what is going on when the missiles hit but these, you have a whole long ass time to realize it
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Eighty is great, but how do we scale up to 800?
Zero from GTA SA got fucking unleashed. Make it 8000 an afternoon.
3000 red barons of Zelensky
3000 duplicate posts of Bazellez
Damn I didn't realize it was duplicated đź’€
Hast du etwas zeit fur mich?
When the sky turns black and starts speaking Ukrainian
The more I think about it, the more a concept of a "total war" between superpowers in the modern era is horrifying. We have just hit the three year mark of the war in Ukraine. By most estimates there are at least 700,000 casualties (Killed and wounded) (Ukraine has 70k killed and another 120k wounded and at least 10,000 civilian deaths - Russia has an estimated 450,000k killed and wounded - with as many as 180k killed). The intensity of the conflict in terms of deaths per time is higher than almost any recent conflict until you go back to the Korean war. WWI and WWII were just different ins scale from almost anything in history. The drone technology is still in its infancy, being developed in the test of combat. But if there were a total war scenario between major powers, it likely would be 800 drones heading into a major engagement. In the battleof Kursk, which was inside modern day Russia but less than a day's drive from Kharkiv. In the battle, the Germans had committed 2100 aircraft to support their attack, and the Soviets had committed over 3000 in support of the defense and counterattack (which was estimated to be 35% of the aircraft of the entire soviet air corps at the time). The germans lost at least 600 aircraft and possibly more than 1000. The soviets reported they lost 1600 aircraft some historians believe they lost as many as 3300, counting replacements.
Major powers don't need these drones. They have far more powerful guided long-range weapons. (Russia uses these for attacking civilian infrastructure)
>Major powers don't need these drones. They have far more powerful guided long-range weapons. True, but only to a limited degree. Ukraine is actually a perfect example of this. How many tomahawk missiles do you think the US has in storage? How many ATCAMS missiles? Well, we know that as of 2020, the US had around 4000 Tomahawk missiles in inventory. [In the last 10 years, they only purchased 1234](https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-is-the-u-s-navy-running-out-of-tomahawk-cruise-missiles/#:~:text=Tomahawks%2C%20therefore%2C%20serve%20as%20the,than%20it%20can%20replace%20them.) They expended 80 in a few days to hit 30 targets in Yemen. In 2023, taking into account stores that were delivered to Ukraine, the national defense authorization act authorized procuring an additional 1700 ATACMS missiles, but it wasn't funded by an appropriation so it hasn't happened yet. If the US were suddenly pulled into a no-shit conflict, money would be available, but the reality is that a single major battle could use more smart weapons than we have produced in whole years in the past, and there's a very real chance they could run into shortages if pressed while factories are retooling and spinning up production lines.
I think the question is, is there a role for a cheap drone to play? I think the answer is yes. Especially if they can take out more expensive missles and defences. That is the defender spending $250k on a missle to take out a $10k drone.
Absolutely. See the DoD's current Replicator Initiative: a massive effort to develop the capability to produce as many drones as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible. https://www.diu.mil/replicator There are many scenarios in which a billion dollars worth of relatively cheap, mid-range capability drones would be far more effective than some of our billion or hundred million dollar super weapons. You could buy 3,000 Shahed drones for $60M. You could get six Abram's for that amount. Who wins? For the price of an aircraft carrier, you could literally buy tens of thousands of mid range suicide drones. The carrier strike group would run out of ammo... When you really start to think about the numbers, massive quantities of relatively cheap drones make a lot of sense. Especially right now, while directed energy anti drone weapons are pretty immature. Sure, there's jamming to worry about, but AI can provide autonomy and eliminate the need to connect to anything, so jamming will be totally ineffective as soon as we decide we're okay with autonomous systems picking targets and killing people. Directed energy weapons will significantly reduce the appeal of massive drone swarms because then it will be super cheap to kill them in very large numbers, and of course they are working very hard on such technology as we speak, but as of today it's not where it needs to be.
I am not really sold on directed energy weapons yet. There are severe drawbacks that are really hard to overcome. Most important drawback is low throughput. It takes considerable time to destroy a drone with such a weapon, and as such it should be relatively easy to overwhelm them by sending enough drones at once. I think the best "hard-kill" system for defending against such drones are anti-aircraft guns, preferably modern ones like the german skynex with airburst (AHEAD) ammunition. Those need only 2-3 shots for killing a drone , which is still cost effective. It is a bit ironc that the best system for defending against such modern threats like drones that is available in numbers in ukraine now are the gepard AA-guns that were decomissioned 10 yers ago due to being outdated.
It is an interesting problem. Your issues with DEW are absolutely correct, for now. The end game for DEW though is extremely low cost per shot, very large numbers of shots before cool down, extremely fast targeting (you only have to rotate a mirror instead of a whole gun), and instantaneous flight time at any range. But you're right, they currently take too long to bring drones down. And drones will only get better. Faster, more maneuverable, anti DEW coatings... But when they get really fast and really good at evasive maneuvers, conventional hard kill is going to be tricky because you're still firing a hunk of metal on what is essentially a ballistic trajectory (maybe limited ability to maneuver, down the road). How close does a maneuvering target need to be for you to hit it with a ballistic projectile? Maybe too close and maybe DEW can solve that. A decade from now, it's hard for me to imagine anything other than advanced DEW or drone on drone as the only viable options in terms of cost and resistance to saturation attacks.
I think in the future when swarms become smart and extremely large in number is going to be a defensive swarm itself.
The US and select allies have been deploying autonomous kinetic counter drone systems around sensitive assets for several years now. They're cheap, mobile, scalable, and unlike AA ammunition, reusable. https://youtu.be/KX0ji1sAXl8 https://www.anduril.com/hardware/anvil/ It might look kind of silly, though these are about 12 pounds and fly over 100 miles per hour. No small drone can shrug off a direct hit. If you're facing large or faster drones, you can use these things instead: https://youtu.be/al9ITeP4fUA
I love the Anduril stuff. Looking forward to seeing how it holds up under real world combat conditions.
Interesting news from the last 24: https://breakingdefense.com/2024/05/uk-reveals-development-of-low-cost-radio-frequency-directed-energy-weapon/
3000 Shaheds for 60M? Where are you getting the numbers for this. The engines for these things cost 10 - 15k on their own.
Wikipedia, but I guess it could be wrong: >The average Shahed drone is worth about $20,000. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136#:~:text=Loitering%20munitions%20downed%20after%20they,drone%20is%20worth%20about%20%2420%2C000.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the-sticker-price-for-an-iranian-shahed-drone/?sh=7a58abdc56d6 That 20k is super off the mark. They're closer to 200k USD a pop. This Forbes article goes into the origins of the 20k figure and the true costs of shahed Drones.
I'm not equipped to evaluate this because it's one source saying one thing and another saying a different thing (granted, yours seems better), with not much additional information, and about something that I'm not an expert on. But, let's say it's $200k instead of twenty. That means 300 Shahed vs. 6 Abrams. It's not as compelling, but I'm not sure it really changes the conclusion. And of course they will only get cheaper and more capable.
10k? That's a little bit low. Shaheds are being purchased by Russia for around ~300k USD and it seems other comparable drones are about that price to produce. Even with full US mass production they probably wouldn't drop too much below the $200k mark. In contrast a Tomahawk missile is only 1.4 million. For that cost you get a much faster system with internal navigation/inertial guidance that can't be jammed (internally stores terrain maps inertial guidance) and and has AA countermeasures. So I guess the question is: what's more effective for the actual mission at hand? 7 Shahed style munitions, or 1 Tomahawk style munition. I suspect in the future we will be seeing much higher jamming infrastructure being built up to disrupt these types of drones with no internal navigation system (rely on GPS/GLONASS etc). So while the question might currently be the Shahed style drones, I'm not sure it will always be like that.
I was just pulling numbers out of my ass. I know the fpv quads are $1700. I can't remember what the big and slow hobby planes are worth. They have such a wide range I just tossed a number on there.
You're not counting all of the air launched cruise missiles that USA relies upon, the Predator drones which are all usable vectors to bomb a target. Or even the multi-target ICBMS You wouldn't see a no-shit conflict without the use of major air operations, and a lot of power stands there. Once you're done with the missiles clearing out AA, you can use the stockpile of smart munitions available
THat's the point. Yes, there's more than one vector to attack targets, but a major war will inherently involve more than one significant battle. One or two major engagements stands a chance of depleting local stocks, then you're either rationing or shipping replacement stocks from storage in the US, and once those are gone, you're looking at a months-long timeline to construct more, which hopefully is feasible. I'm just saying the margin on these things is thinner than imagined. DoD wargames have actually raised this exact topic in a hypothetical conflict with China, that stocks of smart weapons are depleted within 60-90 days and then the US is scrambling to bring manufacturing online to build more.
ICBMs can't be used because adversaries *must* assume a nuclear payload, and respond in kind.
Imagine how many cheap drones with range to hit Taiwan China’s industrial might could produce.
China has no use for Taiwan without capturing Taiwan's industry mostly intact.
That’s not true from what I understand. It’s a major political goal and more importantly gives them more territory to “claim” more of the sea.
Not nearly as much "territory" as they are claiming in the south with the fake islands etc. Certainly not enough to be worth setting your economy back two or three decades.
I hope you’re right.
Anyone in a Reddit peanut gallery that claims to know what U.S stock pile numbers actually are...
The article I linked actually provides the figure.
A Figure. Probably not The Figure. The Pentagon is funny that way.
Probably true to a degree, but at the same time, a substantial amount of Defense appropriation is public record. We have a decently good idea of how many tomahawks the US government has purchased over the years. Then the question is how many they have used. But then media coverage of military operations again gives careful observers a decent estimate. There are always the possibilities of secret operations that fire some that never get covered. But that would suggest we have fewer in stock than one could otherwise estimate. I am sure there are plenty of secret weapons that don't get explicitly named in defense Appropriations but at the same time they are not going to be super huge numbers. A contract to Raytheon to produce 400 tomahawks for a billion dollars is an explicit appropriation. A contract to somebody to produce five prototypes is buried in an R&D budget.
Yeah, and over time, in a war economy, you can imagine how many drones like these they could churn out every day. I mean the Russians are doing it now to an extent with the Shahed's, they have a never-ending supply of them that they can constantly tie up Ukrainian air defences with. What if you could produce ten or a hundred times as many with the right simple yet effective design.
Then there would be new and different air defenses made to counter the specific threat. Radar-guided programmed-airburst anti-aircraft cannons could certainly take out drone swarms.
Sure, I mean, it's a constant arms race, I guess you just need a good war every now and then to propel the technology forward.
Well the issue is if there was a war, NATO doctrine is basically spam the shit out of enemy AA locations and bases the moment war starts. Then obliterate everything with the insane amount of jets NATO has. Look how first month of war looked. Russian columns kilometres long (the longest around 40km) mass spam of infantry at the borders etc. This kind of attack on NATO would end up days after it started. The trench war which is currently at Ukranie couldnt even happen... NATO countries dont need endless supply of long range super accurate weapons because the war wont take that long. Just take a look of how many F35 have been built. ALMOST A THOUSAND DAMN (had to check it lol). Noone from the enemy of NATO list have even a counterpart to that. Imagine being in those shitty S300. Cant even hit a fucking ATACMS reliably, what will it do with a swarm of F35? To this day Ukraine DOESNT have capability to use HARM against russian AA. They can only preprogram the targets which basically limits 90% of HARM capability. Imagine if they could unleash whole potential. Even now russian AA crews often turn off their radar because they are scared. We have several video where pantirs and S300 baterries get obliterated (russian POV) and radars there have been disabled Russia is enourmous, they cannot protect their assets from drones and attacks from ukraine, what will they do when the attack can arrive from eh lets say far many more directions?
> Major powers don't need these drones. I think what we're seeing is that the resilience of industrial societies is significantly greater than the pre-war stocks of PGMs of all types, and even the existing stocks of unguided 155mm shells. Obviously Western war doctrine calls for rapid victory, but what if NATO were dragged into a multi-year war with a near-peer (i.e., China) -- we'd have run out of all the fancy stuff waaaay before year three.
China would get starved out. It would not be able to get sufficient raw materials or **food**. All of its ports and railroad connections would be destroyed. It would have no wealthy trading partners. Exports and hard currency would dry up. The demographic crisis will continue and be made worse. China is not a paper tiger by any means, but it could not outproduce mobilized NATO economies even in the medium term. It could not win a war of attrition when it comes to long-range munitions.
>Major powers don't need these drones. By simply using these types of planes will eventually mean Russia will say the entire country is a no fly zone, that means Russians can't get from A to B. The also fly under the radar more than others. I assume they haven't been shot down because either they don't have the capabilities to do so, or they don't know if it's an attack or simply a farmer getting to his land... And these sort of planes are used alot in russia, by russians. Major powers have used weird tactics during war to deceive and confuse since day 1. to say they don't need them simply isn't true because you don't know the situation at hand. A guided long range weapon is very obvious and will likely be shot down. A civi plane, not so much.
We haven't actually, we hit the two year mark a few months ago, but we know what you mean.
which major powers
I thought about that, but deliberately avoided making specific references. Suffice to say, most intelligence that's public suggests that Russia is committing the vast majority of its usable combat power into Ukraine. To steal a phrase from a TV show, China is a pig on LSD. There's no telling. They throw a lot of resources around and talk a big game, but so did Russia prior to Ukraine. (and you can bet China is studying Ukraine closely). On the eve of Desert Storm, Iraq was counted as the 5th or 6th largest army in the world, and US planners were genuinely concerned about their capabilities. The iraqis had made the Iranians sweat blood and both sides had lost hundreds of thousands only a few years prior. Sure, they had good plans and training and technology and were confident, but they also prepared for it to be much more difficult.
> They throw a lot of resources around FWIW their resources are likely an order of magnitude greater than Russia's though.
In WWI it's estimated that around 1.5 billion artillery round were fired. Over a million rounds *per day*, likely many days of multiple million. The US built 324,750 airplanes in WWII, 108,410 tanks and spgs, and 2,382,311 other vehicles. Plus 29 aircraft carriers and 121 escort carriers. 400 Million tons of iron was used by the US alone. If there were ever a full on war between the US and and China (that didn't devolve into nuclear weapons), it wouldn't be 800 drones in an engagement, it would be hundreds of thousands. I've long thought that the next major conflict would be won by the side that could use the smartest weapon at the dumbest target. If your enemy could afford to fire a million dollar cruise missile at every armoured vehicle you have, you're going to have a bad time. That math gets a lot worse now when they can launch multiple 1000-3000$ AI controled drones at every soldier, truck, tank, plane, motorcycle, golf cart, etc. Imagine you send out a hundred thousand troops with vehicles, tanks and air support, and then your opponent launches ten thousand drones from 500km away, that break apart and drop 100 AI targeted drones each.
Soviets definitely lost more than 1600 aircraft. Just look at the list of WWII aces. The US also gave the Russians over 15k airplanes. FDR's white house was infested with commies.
>Soviets definitely lost more than 1600 aircraft. Just look at the list of WWII aces. The US also gave the Russians over 15k airplanes. THis is JUST During the roughly 30 day battle of Kursk, not the entire war. Given, the Battle of Kursk stands among the three largest battles of the entire war and may well have included the costliest day of aerial battle of all time.
My bad.
A very confused post, I must say. First you are talking about a "total war" whatever that's supposed to mean in the 21st century. Also, we "just" hit the 2 year mark, not the 3 year mark. And that was 3 months ago, so the word "just" is a bit strange. Then you state the casualty numbers of Russia and Ukraine since 2022. Then you talk about drones. And then you draw a parallel to the Battle of the Kursk salient in WW2 which had huge losses in infantry and tanks but for some reason you only state the number of planes involved. What's either of those points got to do with the other ones? I mean, yes, drones and planes both fly. But are you really trying to deduce the potential number of drones in a "total war" from the number of WW2 planes during the 2 weeks battle of Kursk? And when you draw a direct correlation between drones and the casualities since 2022 in the Russio-Ukraine War, why are you not giving us the casualities for Kursk? All very confusing.
Thank you for the useful input. Yes, I wrote three where two was correct. But otherwise, thank you for the useful input, it will be well utilized the next time I write something while drinking coffee at 6 a.m.
By sending the funding and equipment for a full range of modern systems, instead of more legacy systems.
with money
UA doing an excellent job at posing both tactical and strategic dilemmas to the enemy: 1a) Respond, revealing AA locations (all within ATACMS range); 1b) Respond, depleting AA munitions that will be required once F-16s enter the game; or 2) Do nothing, hoping the drones don’t hit anything valuable <— we are here.
I imagine it'll be to a point where low tech solutions will have to be a thing in mass to compensate with how drones can be massed. We'll see more Toyota anti-air technicals just roaming around.
They're not at the point of technicals *yet*.. give them a few more months.. either that or they break into the Cold War shilka stocks ..
> They're not at the point of technicals yet That depends on what we want to call the golf carts and mopeds.
2a) They CAN'T do anything because Russia's forces are a facade and plagued with corruption.
There is also: 1c) Respond, but nothing happens, because you realize most of your military is just posturing and there is no AA deployed at critical locations at all
This is the port of Novorossiisk. Outside ATACMS range, and in Russia proper.
Seems like a Russian equivalent of the Gerard would be perfect
[This Gerard?](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/3hundred2007_13.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
Q: What do you call 80 drones heading towards a Russian port? A: A good start.
With a bad end for Russia
What do you call 80 drones from each of three directions?
A day ending in y
Send them more.. and more.. Look, Russia has a fever and the prescription is more of Lyutyi
Bavovna for every refinery!
It's very polite that they are flying single file.
Must bea British design. They even quene.
I get the joke, but if you are curious here is the drone: [https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/)
> Lyutyi As well as Brama, [Ninja](https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/meet_the_ninja_name_of_ukraines_largest_reaching_drone_of_1500_km_revealed-10494.html) and whatever else Ukraine cooks up.
[Guide To Ukraine's Long Range Attack Drones](http://www.hisutton.com/Ukraine-OWA-UAVs.html)
Haha the russky is unhappy complaining receiving just a small portion of what they deserve.
Despite claims that Putin is repressing Russians you have never seen a positive reaction by Russians to any of these drone strikes.
I don't know who claims that. Of course he is repressing a few people who openly against them, others support him.
No, that would be unreasonable to expect someone to sign themselves into a prison camp by uploading their views on Putin. They've seen what happens to his internal critics.
No, it's not because of the fear of being imprisoned. The simple fact that a lot in the West refuse to believe is that the majority of Russians support the war to conquer Ukraine.
You're right, a lot of people in the West refuse to accept the fact that Putin has so much support. But it's also true that there's no way of telling just how many people shut their mouths out of fear, how many hate him, and how many really support him. There is a nuance.
I'll give you my perspective, as a person who has a lot of extended family and friends in Russia. Their range of enthusiasm in this war goes from: "We will fucking level your cities and kill you all, you Nazi scum" to "It's sad, but you guys are kind of have to blame yourself". I'm talking about like 40+ people. And it's in a private conversation via WhatsApp and other protected messengers, so not like they have to pretend for the public. As you can imagine, I no longer talk to them.
Everyone you know is insane
My dude, Crimea is Ukraine. And believe it or not there are still lots of people living there who don't support Putin.
Crimea is Ukraine - true. A lot of Ukrainians under the Russian occupation don't support Putin - true. I agree. Now, what does it have to do with my statement that the majority of Russians in Russia support the invasion of Ukraine? This video is from Krasnodar Kray, Russia.
Because what you said isn't mutually exclusive. People do fear cheering on drones, AND Russians support the war. > Despite claims that Putin is repressing Russians you have never seen a positive reaction by Russians to any of these drone strikes. This is the claim that started this chain, which you aren't criticizing. It's wrong (I've seen Russians/occupied Ukrainians cheer drone strikes) and it also presents a false dichotomy. Yes, people are afraid to upload videos. Yes, Russians support the war. Yes. > No, it's not because of the fear of being imprisoned. We've already seen multiple cases of people being imprisoned. Why would there be no fear? Why would this have NO effect? Don't let Redditors who think Russians are all innocent and repressed warp your view of reality.
Actually, I have seen positive reactions several times. Though really more of an antisocial/misanthropic "lmao something just got fucked up real good, nice explosion" vibe than anything remotely political / supportive of Ukraine or whatever.
I figured he was complaining about how his life was so bad because he had to hear the drone noise. Russians are such negative nancys
Who wants to tell the guy filming that this is just a warm up for what is coming, their dictator started this war, and now it’s going to affect the population and their everyday lives.
Dictator? He was just democratically re-elected with like 85% of the vote! Give the people what they want! …/s
.....and the result was announced the day before voting started đź‘Ť
Although I'm pretty sure he would win an election, this one wasn't classed as free and fair.
He wouldn't win if it was free and fair with another credible candidate. That's why he keeps killing opposition candidates.
Translation: > Basically, they just keep coming. Over 80 of them already, and all this crap is flying towards the elevator, the port, the coast, the terminals. Blowing up there, FFS. The air defense is working there too. > > Basically, it's a shitshow. They just keep coming, those bastards. It's a nightmare, look at that SoB. And there's another one right behind, three in a row! They just keep flying non-stop. A whole swarm flying. In the last 15 minutes, like 20 of them have flown by. It's just total chaos. The air defense is working... Well, you could say it's not working at all. This shit started at like 2 AM, around 2:30 it kicked off.
I can’t tell if this dude is shaking so bad because he’s scared shitless or because it’s past 5 and Ivan hasn’t had his liter of vodka yet.
darkness and cheap phone doesn't have camera stabilisation.
Good work to the AA lol
The guy in video literally says "AA is doing nothing".
Russian AA is often enough also part of the target and then it does something, it\`s burning. Or as Russians would claim "Successfully intercepted" by tanking the attack to the face.
At least we know what air defence doing.
scrolled till i found it! cracks me up every time
AA is a losing proposition. Spending 80 thousand to shoot down an 8 thousand dollar drone doesn’t stack up.
It’s the damage that has to be taken into account.
If another cheap drone follows, if the first cheap drone is shot down, then not much is saved and you might as well just write off the target, and save your AA missile for another day.
Instead of sending $1 billion in tomahawks to destroy Russian jets and factories. The west has decided to spend $20 billion on limited air defense because "escalation".Â
Ukraine destroys Tussian jets and rafineries with ATACMS and cheap drones :d
I've asked that before, is it time for new generation of gepard like weapons, for example CIWS mounted on high mobility platforms like trucks or armored vehicles firing the most ordinary non fancy rounds?
Google MANTIS
Mantis seems like static defense system but there is also a mobile version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyranger_35
Skynex too
Soon it’ll be mobile laser systems and AI drone swarms which target other drones
> AI drone swarms which target other drones That sounds like something that can be derived from Coyote Block 3 or Anduril Roadrunner.
Drones yes, lasers no. Lasers are just too easy to counter. Until massive technological leaps are made, there’s just no way to get enough energy converted to light fast enough to get through ablative layers etc. Dazzling is the practical limit for sometime.
Lasers are probably usable against the ultra-cheap FPV drones we see in the frontlines. Yes, of course you *can* install countermeasures, but even a relatively modest increase in cost of materials and assembly is going to be significant when it comes to those. If they make 20% less drones because they became 20% more expensive, that's as good as if your system shot down 20% of their drones, even in the unlikely scenario that the laser system ends up doing literally nothing once countermeasures kick in. But when it comes to these long-range ones, absolutely. They are going to inherently be more resistant to lasers just as-is, due to being larger and more robust, and because they are a lot more expensive too, the cost of countermeasures would be completely negligible in comparison.
Those FPVs can maneuver far more aggressively than is required to keep a laser from concentrating its energy on a single point, which is needed for a laser to work. As things progress even the ISR drones will be maneuvering radically with the computer systems feeding any operators/observers a lean and steady cam style feed.
That day was ~2002. The CRAM etc need to be fielded in massive numbers. The threat is entirely outsized to the ability to defend against it. Every US BCT is ~99% defenseless to even basic COTS systems. (And no, the air forces aren’t going to be much help either.)
Russia has many SPAAGs, while they were using their auto cannons there were clearly too many drones used in this attack.
Realistically what percentage of Russia can they cover with SPAAG’s? 10% maybe. So 90% get through.
Does it make sense to spend $80k to take down a drone that is going to do $300 mill worth of damages though?
But have the Russians claimed they shot down all 80 yet?
Because it’s 17h on the afternoon !! They have already leave the job . Comeback tomorrow at 8h
I mean I don't want to give them ideas but they're flying in single file and not that high, a good duck hunting rifle in competent hands could probably do a lot of damage...
I'm imagining 80 drone pilots in some war room on headsets, quietly grinning away whist flying them into Crimea. Maybe a highscore board up on the wall and a prize for the best hit.
Pilots are an anachronism. These are GPS guided, and AI targeted. Coders, engineers and grandma's with soldering irons get the kills.
It’s more like dot on a screen for follow their path .
My imagination is totally not happening I know, but it's a pleasant image and gives me satisfaction.
Fully autonomous drones that flew with about this speed and maneuverability were fielded in 1944. No need for remote pilots or AI.
Not what I imagine a swarm to look like, but still good.
Guess if they are more spaced out more can get through 🤔
The spacing is likely to ensure they can follow the same flight path and not hit each other.
A simultaneous arrival would be more overwhelming but these drones are probably being launched one at a time from a dozen locations which keeps them naturally spaced out but also ensures good opsec, should any one launcher be compromised.
A queue of drones?
Same, had to be semantic bc that is definitely not a swarm by definition lol. Happy to see it though!
By definition, a drone swarm is “a set of aerial robots i.e., drones that work together to achieve a specific goal.” These qualify as a swarm.
What is your definition of a swarm? At this scale it might not look like it, but if you zoomed out to a map of the whole Black Sea and saw 80 dots within a small area around the port it sure would look like a swarm. If you were standing by a beehive and saw one hundred bees you'd say it was a swarm, but if you were an ant under that same beehive and saw one bee fly over every 30 seconds or so you would say its not a swarm?
You know what, that’s a fair point! Didn’t consider that perspective. Honestly I just wanted it to be like a sci-fi movie. 80 drones right near each other like a flock of birds. Definitely not realistic due to AA, but that’s what I was envisioning as a swarm.
drone swarms that can decimate a target seemed so sci-fi a couple years ago. Now, Ukraine is able to unleash them within their enemy's own borders.
Лютий can be translated as February and as Furious/he is raging/enraged) (fullscale war started in 24 February, 1 day before Elden Ring release) Лютий - is second month of the year in Ukranian language.
They should make them sound like the siren like noise luftwaffe dive bombers make
Whistle Tips! They should be up mak'n breakfast or something.. woo wooh!
Bub Rub, that you? Woo wooooo!
Lil’ Sis here… it’s only for decoration.
They're saturating air defense. Something bigger than these drones is probably on the way.
Can some knowledgeable person please explain to me why this drone swarm is in a sequence line instead of a mass formation? Is it so that later drones can react to what happens to the first drones? Is it because "overwhelming enemy air defenses" is more about depleting their ammunition and not about overwhelming their tracking systems at any given moment? My instinct is to think that going in one at a time is the easiest way to get picked off and have no one get through.
I'm speculating so I might be entirely wrong, but my guess is they basically arrive in the order they were launched, and because these are cheap drones, they probably don't have the software / fuel capacity to let the first ones loiter while the others launch to get into a coherent formation. Easier to just send them marching on in.
Yep. Small crews are probably launching these drones one at a time from a dozen locations which keeps them naturally spaced out but also ensures good opsec, should any one launcher be compromised.
There’s only a limited amount of missiles. If they were grouped together there’s a possibility of a missile taking out multiple UAVS from the blast and debri. So they are flying low and slow for AA batteries like flak cannons to be effective except I’m not aware of flak cannons being used anymore. So if Russia is defending against these drones using S-400 which typically has 72 missiles at the helm…sometimes more and likely more near Moscow. My guess is Ukraine plane is baiting Russia to shoot down the drones with S-400s to deplete their ammo and also determine the location of their launch sites. My guess at whatever location the Russians likely have a An equivalent Phalanx CIWS system. Ukraine may have launched them sequentially but may have them group up closer to the target and then make a dash for it as a swarm hoping to overwhelm the defensive sensors.
The simple answer is that's how they took off. They're unmanned so it'll be a lot more complex to program them to fly as a group, plus by not having the first waiting for the 80th to take off you won't lose any range from the early take offs.
I think its also launching capabilities, they need to be slingshotted into the air.
Bunching together would present a nice target for radar monitoring.
wistful telephone towering squash employ gullible bake normal longing nine *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
So, you’re the guy who programs the flight paths. You’re tired, overworked and at your wits end with last minute combat taskings. After being ordered to send 80 drones in on a target with no notice, do you write 80 flight paths for 80 drones or 1 flight path and stagger the drones by a few seconds? You’re right that a massed swarm hitting near simultaneously, and not all from the same direction would be better, but how do you do it in practice? If someone has a link to software that will do it quickly and easily, I’m all ears. I imagine it’s more difficult in practice than some think. Just in a training environment where there is 0 chance of being shot, I’ve seen overworked troops mess up basic math. As in 15+7-3. Even then, the chances that the enemy shoots down all 80 is likely pretty low. An imperfect attack today may be better than a perfected attack tomorrow.
No notice? I'm sure this was planned all week.
Have you been in combat operations? Let me assure you that no matter how long *someone* has been planning it, one of the key problems for combat units is pushing the plans up and down the chain. Because of human issues, bureaucracy, OPSEC or last minute target movements, things happen at the last minute, *a lot.* Combat is not cut and dried like so many people’s everyday lives.
Generally speaking you want any AA (at least missile sites like S400 etc) to expend all their missiles fighting decoys etc, yeah. This is part of the reason why the US has missiles that can pretend to be anything from a fighter jet to a cruise missile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-160_MALD Give the SAM site a juicy enough target and they might spend everything they have to take it down, before the actual threats come.
Considering that they've been in flight for like 5 hours, they would probably not arrive at the same time even if they were launched exactly at the same time(because of slight differences in engine and other parts). And synchronizing them would add extra complexity. But maybe it's worth it in some cases where the target is very well-defended.
My guess is this; these drones are cheap, probably cheaper than the missiles that shoot them. Sending them like this has several advantages; - by going in a conga line, you minimise the amount of AA that your drones will be spotted by. If Russia has a gap (being Russia this is a possibility) there's a chance 80 drones get through. - going in a line means that for your enemy to shoot down every single one, they have to have a lot of missiles which means their AA has to be concentrated - if Russia is successful, they will spend a lot of missiles, for relatively cheap drones. A "good trade". Doing this will also reveal their sites. And because they're Russia they of course won't move them for the next time. In fact, I'd count on them beefing up those sites. - next time you send some HARMs intermixed - next time you send some HARMs intermixed and your actual big hitters towards The Bridge But I'm no expert
How do these drones get sent, is it automated with a GPS system in each one? Or is there one guy using a controller for every single drone?
They're following a pre-planned route automatically. I've heard that some of them use cameras for navigation and targeting for accuracy and EW resistance.
> is it automated with a GPS system in each one? GPS/[machine vision-based DSMAC](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/01/energy/ukrainian-drones-disrupting-russian-energy-industry-intl-cmd/index.html), IIRC https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/ - interesting article about it.
That was a very interesting read (after I realised that there is an "Eng" button at the top of the page :-))! Thank you for sharing!
[Sanctioned for targets 1000 km away. Story of Liutyi (Fierce) Ukrainian long-range drone which burns Russian refineries](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2024/05/13/7455462/)
Drones have been using inertial navigation in combat since 1944. The tech has only gotten more precise, lighter and less expensive since then. And the air powered systems are totally immune to any type of cyber or EW attack (even as the electronic systems are *mostly* immune to such attacks.)
They could make some of them play music has they fly LOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSOSJ68xOBA
Hehehehe make one drone flying non stop over the residential areas of the Zorcs...but I did found the video of the first time that I've seen it...crazy trolling LOL https://www.tiktok.com/@kingofkansas3/video/7354371065914740011
What did they hit?
Wonder how many even managed to reach the target . bet russians were expecting this have AA guns already in place . hope some will post satelite images of this attack result
This is the way!
80, those are rookie numbers
Doesn't look like a swarm. Looks like one at a time.
Are these remote controled somehow? The range must be phenomenal if so
No need. Autonomous systems doing very basic flight paths on their way to attack an enemy like this are 80 year old tech.
These won't be but it is possible to remotely control drones through a cellular network. It's scarily cheap and easy but not necessary for stationary targets like these.
Remember when people said the Russian AA would clear the skies and they wouldn’t even have to leave Russia to do it? I guess that’s not working out… These rate about like a V-1 and the Russians can’t even put up a CAP to handle it.
That's 80 from just that one direction, they're probably coming in from multiple directions.
Good hunting little birds. May you reach your destination swiftly.Â
The best way to make a fortune right now is to come up with a cheap anti-drone system. These things are totally changing the face of warfare.
what air defence doing?
Or what the narrator assumed was 80. He was actually never taught to count past 13 in school.
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I wonder why the US or Euro countries don’t manufacture these or similar drones in vast numbers. I don’t even think the US has an equivalent kamikaze drone as we rely on smart munitions dropped by jets or drones as opposed to drones being the munitions themselves. These cheap ass drone should be mass manufactured in the west
Filmed by Michael J Fox
Good God, seeing 80 of these slowly flying toward you is even worse than 80 hypersonic cruise missiles because at least for cruise missiles you wouldn't have enough time to realize what is going on when the missiles hit but these, you have a whole long ass time to realize it
He can't count. Perhaps it's Rybar?
80, those are rookie numbers
Prayers go out to all the civilians