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1·1 hour agoWhat I have contention with is the idea that this is an unstoppable strategy, it is a dead end strategy to monomaniacally pursue flying bomb production as a method of building overwhelming force.
Yes Iran can use it to deny the Strait Of Hormuz. Ok, I just don’t think that actually proves as much as people think it does.
Of course it can, you’d have to be an idiot to think that’s not possible, but the military complex is better defended so it’s more likely to get shot down, using EXPENSIVE missiles because people aren’t taking action on what is happening in Ukraine and building drones to fight these things.
Not really, the entire job of an Army is to not have an address you can look them up with and send a flying bomb too. It is a moving apparatus and therein lies the rub for an Air Force or Navy opposing it.
It is far easier to kill somebody living in a house, or a fire station or blow up a electrical substation, those don’t move.
Hitting a well defended, mobile Ukrainian military force? That is an entirely different ballgame and shaheds aren’t going to be especially effective in that environment. Sure you have frontline equivalents to the shahed, but once heavy machine guns and flak cannons come into the question shaheds are literally just target drones whether we are talking static or mobile contexts.
To put it another way, sure shaheds/flying bombs work but any counter your enemy invests in is eventually going to outpace you in power because your attacks are so inherently disposable in nature.
A combined arms defense/offense will almost always be more efficient than a “monoculture” flying bomb saturation strategy and it will be useful in a vastly broader array of contexts.
These are only some of the far more cost efficient counters that exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon_System
https://www.army-technology.com/projects/l3harris-vampire-multi-purpose-weapon-system-usa/
https://www.missiledefenseadvocacy.org/defense-systems/marine-air-defense-integrated-system-madis/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martlet_(missile)
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/navy-mi-8-destroyed-12-shahed-drone-3-hours/
Where is your evidence of this? I see none.
You still aren’t addressing the problem that no amount of shaheds/flying bombs, no matter how great, can project even a gram of true power. All they do is kill, maim, temporarily break and terrify. That is NOT the same as projecting military power.
Shaheds don’t “invade”, that implies a sense of permanence on the battlefield they don’t possess, they don’t even really “fight”, all they do is “murder”.
The point is to saturate air defences and take out military targets. Russia is being stupid with their drones going after Civilian targets, but clearly sending 948 didn’t do much damage because Ukraine had enough air defence.
They are sending the drones after civilian targets because their military is too dysfunctional to put that pressure on the frontline where they actually need it to win, so russia resorts to indiscriminate terrorism to try to paper over that fact.
Russia has not saturated Ukraine’s air defenses. Quite the opposite. Now russia has a serious problem in that the more Ukraine invests in counters to shaheds the more powerful Ukraine gets and the more powerful diplomatic ties they forge with other countries seeking the same capability. Crucially air defense requires a vast array of skills, technologies and expertise all of which will benefit Ukraine’s economy long into the future and in contexts that far extend beyond simple brute war and violence.
The same goes for maritime security and USVs.
Russia on the otherhand has invested a huge chunk of its economy into the dead end of flying bombs that are only useful for terrorism.
10,000 * $50k = $500 million
Why do people’s brains go mush when thinking about this. That would be a STUNNINGLY inefficient way to spend half a billion dollars on a military. All you get is a shitty one time capability to commit terrorism. There is no army, no resuable weapons platforms no highly skilled and trained personnel. Every single cent of that $500 million is a sunk cost with an impact that potentially evaporates the day after it is used.
Anything else you spend that $500 million on militarily is going to have a longer term impact.
That doesn’t mean drones don’t have a role to play in military force structures, obviously they have a huge role, but this idea they are economically efficient needs to die yesterday. Do the math yourself, it doesn’t work out in favor of drones.
Production of shaheds isnt cheaper than investing in a traditional military of equal capability, shahed production is FAR more expensive and one time use than building a traditional military force.
The advantage of shahed production and use is it requires relatively low skilled labor with a low technical barrier for entry for production lines. That is it.
2·2 hours agoYeah but almost the entire Air Bender Nation had withered away before Korra spurred on a new wave with the Harmonic Convergence.
No sorry didn’t mean to imply that. Not at all.
Don’t get me wrong I want a competitor to Steam/Valve but Epic isn’t it.
Well yes but the confounding thing is, when you lose an air war like this you don’t just lose locally, you lose catastrophically everywhere.
I think the collapsing of russian air defenses doesn’t just mean that more than Crimea can be liberated, it means that russia cannot stop Ukraine from choosing where and when conflict will happen.
Once you take out all the russian air defenses in one area russia is forced to still operate in then you take out all the capacity russia has to even get air defenses into the area, then you take out the command centers that would request the air defenses to come into the area, then you blow up the air defense logistics depot far behind the frontline, then blow up the factory making and repairing the air defense systems. This process inherently snowballs.
Ukraine has already raced all the way up this chain and it demonstrates that the russian military might has critically collapsed. Yes it sort of happened from short and long range strikes converging on midrange dominance from both sides for Ukraine, but the idea is still the same.
The end state, which is the failure state of a modern organized military when subjected to overwhelming and sustained air power, is when it becomes a dubious proposition for russia to even concentrate logistics because there is a very good chance the logistics point has already been compromised and will be blown up from a drone streaking out of a hostile sky from an unpredictable direction once the russian depot builds up enough material and personnel that Ukraine decides it is time to spring that particular trap.
Honestly I think the most likely end state of this war is a fire sale of russia to Chinese interests, the entire country will become salvage for China.
Don’t get me wrong I am not saying this is good, rather this is what russia failing is going to look like as russia continues to catastrophically lose power relative to China. I don’t see how the chips could fall any other way.
In the future it will be called “Russia” but most of it will be owned and controlled by China. Which ok, that will certainly bring issues but I don’t know if it is worth fear mongering about as again, the only way this war ends with Ukraine winning is russia narrowly avoiding becoming a failed state from the russian elite selling off most of russia to China.
This outcome is going to be the outcome almost no matter what, its existence as a “possibility” to worry about interests me less than how we get there and what the details are.
NE near coastal fresh wetlands of the US are absolutely crawling in ticks. Ughhhhhhh. Nature has rejected us.
Ok, this is simple, I will never give Epic money if they won’t retain their developers and artists.
Might as well be France, during the Blitz, exporting tanks to Franco’s Spain. It doesn’t help you if you’re businesses are going to be someone else’s property in another few months.
No it might as well not, do not fear monger, the frontlines of Ukraine are not in danger of collapsing. The opposite is true, Ukraine’s localized counter attacks are threatening to develop into full on counter offensives.
The more foreign powers work with Ukraine on drone defense the more all of Ukraine benefits. Drone production is one of the easiest weapons of war to scale up production of, we aren’t talking about helicopters, tanks or jets here.
Also… these nations tend to have a lottttt of money and idk I feel like a whole lot of money might be something Ukraine is interested in acquiring to help the war effort? Do you understand how much money these nations can decisively throw around if it has to do with ensuring the security of their ports and skies???
Nope, they just have to say something so they don’t get in trouble for helping Daddy.
The bottleneck is not drones, the bottleneck is expertise.
Foreign investment/buy orders increase the production capacity of Ukrainian businesses which compensates for any drones diverted by increasing overall production, so no it isn’t diverting from the frontlines really.
Lol “Economic Slump” my ass, the russian frontlines are already a human rights disaster, even if they ended the war now collapse is coming for russia. They are just desperately postponing the inevitable to try to bully Ukraine into agreeing to a peace deal that screws them over.
Time is running out for russia.
Note, you are not a coward if you don’t want to charge the Ukrainian frontlines because you are terrified, you are just being rational. You are fucked.
What makes them cowards is not standing up to their society that has normalized perpetrating this war. They are going to die pointlessly anyways, why not stand up and die for a reason?
9·22 hours agoYes and I just figured out how to levitate too.
3·1 day agoAgreed.
…and then what? Invade with a vastly diminished force that was only minimally invested in because all the money went to shaheds? Again basically what can be done is an act of mass terrorism, but that doesn’t project power and it sure as hell doesn’t produce money which the russian economy is in desperate need of.
I mean yeah, if we just let russia sit there and pile up weapons it is going to be a problem.
“Fortunately” I don’t see russia being able to extract itself from the Ukraine war without getting severely fucked up (I say fortunarely in quotes because it sucks for Ukraine), russia’s air defenses are crumbling and it leaves the backbone of their military utterly exposed to very longterm damage. I am not saying there is no threat I am saying the anxiety around russia’s shahed production is seen under a very warped lens.
I agree Europe needs to prepare better, I don’t mean to come down against that either.
50,000 shaheds * $50,000 per shahed = $2.5 billion that would have been better spent on a more permanent aspect of the russian war machine, too bad they are obsessed with making flying murder bombs like it is a religion.