Yeah; that's a lot of work.
Better is to just bomb the shit out of Moscow/St. Petersburg until Putin either kills himself or goes into exile or one of his generals kills him or at least pulls troops fully out and gives Ukraine back all the land.
Ukraine is game to you? Part deux.
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Yeah; that's a lot of work.
Better is to just bomb the shit out of Moscow/St. Petersburg until Putin either kills himself or goes into exile or one of his generals kills him or at least pulls troops fully out and gives Ukraine back all the land.
As entertaining as it may be, I don't think bombing the shit out Moscow is a realistic consideration. I think the our best hope of fast forwarding to the bit where Putin kills himself in a bunker somewhere remains providing Ukraine with the best military support possible (sadly, with a Putin Puppet in the White House, this will depend on the EU), and tightening the sanctions as much as possible. The sanctions in particular have got to be annoying the Russian Oligarchs; maybe they'll start thinking about having a chat with Putin over some Polonium Tea...
I mean Kaliningrad is right there.
Seriously though, surely this attack justifies deploying Polish air assets in Ukraine to assist with drone defense. At a minimum.
You don’t occupy. That lesson should have been learned by now. Just decapitate and warn that you’ll do it again if necessary.
Al moot, in any case, because of the nuclear thing.
Which can leave a nation in anarchy and disarray. What ends up coalescing may be worse than before, and gives the new leader an enemy to rally the populace around.
Unfortunately the best we can do is to cause a civil war within Russia. Something I have a gut feeling to be extraordinarily unlikely to happen (the history of the civil war against the whites after 1917 is acutely burned into the Russian psyche).
Even if just a fraction of the nuclear weapons of Russia are functional, there are so many of them that remainder is enough to effectively wipe out all Western countries.
The next best thing one can aim for is a breakdown of civil order and mobster rule take over. So extreme violence, lawless and dog-eat-dog society. Basically a society paralysed by internal criminal strife.
What do we know at this moment?
According to Polish authorities at least 19 drones intruded Polish airspace at night 9th to 10th September.
Remains of 14 crashed drones was found as of about 19:00 local time today. Debris of unidentified rocket found in village 50km from border.
4 drones shot down by Polish F-16 and one by Dutch F-35.
One house and car damaged. No injuries or deaths reported.
According to Polish authorities at least 19 drones intruded Polish airspace at night 9th to 10th September.
Remains of 14 crashed drones was found as of about 19:00 local time today. Debris of unidentified rocket found in village 50km from border.
4 drones shot down by Polish F-16 and one by Dutch F-35.
One house and car damaged. No injuries or deaths reported.
According to unverified claims, drones found in Poland are Russian Gerbera decoy drones equipped with additional fuel tanks and western SIM cards (Polish and Lithuanian cards were allegedly found). That is drones were intentionally modified to intrude Poland.
Russian troll sites (that I checked today) are attempting to spin claims about drones assembled by Ukrainians from Russian drone remains. Some quoted earlier posts. All evidence points to deliberate Russian operation prepared in advance.
Russian troll sites (that I checked today) are attempting to spin claims about drones assembled by Ukrainians from Russian drone remains. Some quoted earlier posts. All evidence points to deliberate Russian operation prepared in advance.
If they had been filled with copies of Sims 3 instead, there'd be no doubt.
The Front Page has a short piece about small-scale radars that have been able to more than double their drone-detecting range thanks to a software update.
https://meincmagazine.com/culture/202...dar-doubles-range-with-simple-software-patch/
Yeah... I would prefer not to do that due to Perimeter/Dead Hand being a thing. While it is really meant for a nuclear attack, I could see it being unleashed if the Russian leadership was wiped out due to a sustained conventional bombing attack.
Additionally, unless you're calling for extremely precision directed attacks, innocent civilians would be caught in the crossfire. And we shouldn't have that blood on our hands.
God I hope that you mean attack militarily relevant targets near Moscow/St. Petersburg rather than, ya know, what you actually said. Because bombing civilian centers is the fastest way for Europe to lose its soul - and totally unnecessary to boot.
The problem with that is that NATO doesn't have the means to shoot down swarms of cheap drones. Those drones cost $10,000 apiece. An anti-aircraft missile costs $2,000,000 and stockpiles are small. NATO's reliance on preposterously expensive high tech weaponry (Rumsfeld Doctrine) bites it again.
Without skin in the game, NATO will not adapt. The above is a lesson that needs to be learned practically in a safe environment. Policing Ukrainian skies is precisely the practice that we need.
Anders Puck Neilson is ahead of you with his excellent commentary on drone warfare.
View: https://youtu.be/gZL1KzV54Cw?feature=shared
Ukraine is mostly using manually aimed machine guns to shoot down drones. NATO has those. Option number two is the auto cannons on fighters. NATO has those too (well, the F35 only has them as external pods because auto cannons were perceived to be mostly obsolete...).
Also relevant, as always, is Paul Warburg, who does amazing political analysis:
View: https://youtu.be/kAqHnMXLUno?si=bxi8UV_RIk1hhPUF
His take, this is just political warfare to scare NATO countries to huddle up air defense into their own countries and to give nothing to Ukraine. So, the obvious answer is doing the opposite: have kinetic responses ready that binds Russian forces away from Ukraine.
Embargo Kaliningrad, destroy their E-war equipment wherever and whenever it is disrupting our countries and for good measure strike the four shahed launcher complexes that launched the drones towards Poland. Also patrol western Ukrainian skies.
I mean… did we, as a collective, learn anything from Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
Bombing the shit out of Moscow and/or St. Petersburg isn’t going to cause a jacquerie. It may, in fact, cause the Russian populace to rally against the West.
We also now have much more precise weaponry, so there isnt really any reason we cant make select critical locations (military bases, weapon factories, SAM radars, that sort of thing) completely disappear without hurting the populus, forcing Putin to have to try to control the civilians by trying to twist how the West, who arent the ones actually making their lives miserable, are the enemy. All of these attacks that we do against legit targets as opposed to non-military targets presents the option to place a seed of doubt in the minds of the population about which side is the bad one...
I don’t even think you need the psychological angle for justification. Every bomb, missle, munition of any kind that hits a civilian target is not hitting a militarily significant target. Their ability to prevent you from doing further damage to them is determined by the strength of their military. So every time you chose to hit a military target instead of a civilian target makes it that much easier to hit the next military target.
You don’t need to touch St. Petersburg or Moscow - just trash their radar/SAM installations and start picking off the military industrial base at leisure. When Russia has no tools of war left, it won’t matter one whit how much doubt has been seeded in the minds of the general population - it will be someone Putin is on a first name basis with that will plunge the knife.
NATO has a shit-ton of AH-64 Apache helicopters. The Apache has an auto cannon. Could it target a drone?
It could be hit by one. Or a MANPAD. These two things are why you don't see Russian choppers buzzing over Ukraine anymore.
It could target a drone but it couldn't catch one.
As it is Russia has already modified its Shaheds to fly above machine-gun range, and has begun to equip them with jet engines which make them much faster. Does increase the price tag though.
Yes, MANPADs would be a threat near the front lines but they wouldn't need to be near the frontlines to intercept drones targetting Kyiv.
Option #3 is autocannon with radar, which exist in various formats. The latest is a Skyranger turret on a Boxer body, for which Rheinmetall has gotten a 1B+ order and where some will be shipped to Ukraine by the end of the year.
I am still baffled that these haven't been a priority purchase by everyone for at least the last year.
They don't necessarily have to chase drones to intercept them if you can track the drones early enough.
Again… if Perimeter is real, I would not want to accidentally trigger it by decapitating the Russian government through sustained bombing campaigns or precision strikes.
There is also the cheap laser guided rocket option. An F-15 with 42 rockets could hunt down more than a few drones. The guided rockets may still be a bit more expensive than the drones, but still far cheaper than an AMRAAM or AIM-9x. In the end it's going to be all about layers with a bit of everything required.
https://www.twz.com/air/f-15e-armed-with-drone-killing-laser-guided-rockets-appears-in-middle-east
There's also the give the guy in back of a trainer a machine gun or assault rifle option too.
https://www.twz.com/air/this-is-how-ukrainian-yak-52-crews-hunt-russian-drones
https://www.twz.com/air/this-is-how-ukrainian-yak-52-crews-hunt-russian-drones
It’s long past time to act if Russian drones were as far west as Lodz. That’s only 90 miles from Warsaw and 164 miles from Krakow. That’s mildly terrifying IMO.
They are being purchased for new drone defense vehicles like M-SHORAD and MADIS in the US. The drawback for the autocannons is range so they are really meant to stop smaller lower flying drones like the FPV drones you see on the front.
We have already seen a change in tactics to move the Shaheads to higher altitudes to move them out of range of ground fire so your next level defense would be ground launched APKWS rockets or Coyote Block 2 interceptors.
After that you are into MANPAD and dedicated AA missile platforms.
As Expensive as the interceptor is compared to the enemy drone, the interceptor is trying to protect innocent civilian lives and millions and millions of dollars in infrastructure.
A small cost if it is successful.
A small cost if it is successful.
While that cost to benefit ratio works well when you're dealing with a handful of drones like what happened in Poland, it doesn't scale very well when you get to the volume of drones Ukraine is dealing with. Even Israel needed significant help with the larger Iranian drone and missile attacks. You need to be able to produce enough interceptors, or some alternative, to ideally stop all of the drones.
You know what would be cheaper than sending hundreds of kamikaze bomber drones every night?
Hundreds of reusable interceptor drones armed with nothing more than machine guns to intercept those bomber drones WWII style.
You wouldn't even have to make fancy ones since they'd be operating very safely behind friendly lines and can leverage 4G/5G networks for remote control without any fear of jamming.
I'm convinced we'll see those sooner than we think, they are the natural counter to Russia's attritional warfare with kamikaze drones.
It doesn't matter how cheap you can build your shaheds if your opponent can shoot them down every night at the cost of a bit of fuel, a few bullets and the food needed to feed a few conscript operators remotely vectoring in the interceptor drones on intercept courses safely in some underground bunker somewhere deep in the rear.
Hundreds of reusable interceptor drones armed with nothing more than machine guns to intercept those bomber drones WWII style.
You wouldn't even have to make fancy ones since they'd be operating very safely behind friendly lines and can leverage 4G/5G networks for remote control without any fear of jamming.
I'm convinced we'll see those sooner than we think, they are the natural counter to Russia's attritional warfare with kamikaze drones.
It doesn't matter how cheap you can build your shaheds if your opponent can shoot them down every night at the cost of a bit of fuel, a few bullets and the food needed to feed a few conscript operators remotely vectoring in the interceptor drones on intercept courses safely in some underground bunker somewhere deep in the rear.
You know what's even cheaper than that, as far as operational costs?
Microwave DEWs, like Leonidas, which the US army has already acquired, tested, and deployed. For that matter, Leonidas is more or less a formalization of using phased array transmitters to take out targets, which we've known was an informal capacity of AEGIS and similar high power radar systems for at least a decade.
It doesn't just jam controls, it disables or destroys all unshielded electronics, and can cause heating sufficient to damage hardware. These things will take out marine engines, drone swarms, etc. I don't think the future is countering UAVs with more UAVs, I think it's that UAVs will be pushed back in prominence in any near peer conflict, the same way that the A10 is useless in such an environment, because there are effective technological counters that deal with fundamental issues with the platform, in part due to cost/role optimization that made the platform useful in it's intended environment. By the time you fix those vulnerabilities, you don't have an upgrade, you have a different platform.
You want to get past a DEW? Swarms won't do it, it has a nearly infinite slew rate, because it's electronically steered with minimal moving parts. It only has to be on a target long enough to disable it which is a relatively short time, and can do a fair amount of beam splitting. Sure, send a HARM against it. It's not a constant or omnidirectional radiator, and it's fire on the move capable, since it doesn't have any recoil to need stabilization, which makes targeting it a bit more complicated than a fire control radar for interceptors.
Microwave DEWs, like Leonidas, which the US army has already acquired, tested, and deployed. For that matter, Leonidas is more or less a formalization of using phased array transmitters to take out targets, which we've known was an informal capacity of AEGIS and similar high power radar systems for at least a decade.
It doesn't just jam controls, it disables or destroys all unshielded electronics, and can cause heating sufficient to damage hardware. These things will take out marine engines, drone swarms, etc. I don't think the future is countering UAVs with more UAVs, I think it's that UAVs will be pushed back in prominence in any near peer conflict, the same way that the A10 is useless in such an environment, because there are effective technological counters that deal with fundamental issues with the platform, in part due to cost/role optimization that made the platform useful in it's intended environment. By the time you fix those vulnerabilities, you don't have an upgrade, you have a different platform.
You want to get past a DEW? Swarms won't do it, it has a nearly infinite slew rate, because it's electronically steered with minimal moving parts. It only has to be on a target long enough to disable it which is a relatively short time, and can do a fair amount of beam splitting. Sure, send a HARM against it. It's not a constant or omnidirectional radiator, and it's fire on the move capable, since it doesn't have any recoil to need stabilization, which makes targeting it a bit more complicated than a fire control radar for interceptors.
Technically, yes. But the AH-64 does not have the speed to intercept drones reliably.
Dust off the P-51s and Spitfires.
Hold an e-sports competition for kids to intercept drones with drones carrying nets.
2 miles is a lot, but not enough range to guarantee being able to intercept winged drones. Maybe the next evolution is a stack of interceptor drones that are launched on an intercept trajectory via radar and which then do final approach via a cheap camera.
Or heck, maybe we'll just mount .50 cal on interceptor drones.
WW2 had proximity fuses in a 5" gun. Add some more accurate RADAR control and you can take out Shahed's to 20,000 feet.
Nothing new, or expensive to design. Just need to build the factories to build the guns and ammo.
We just need to want to do it.
And we need to acknowledge that large slow dumb CHEAP drones are a thing you need to counter. You can't fight them with million dollar missiles. The cost per drone is to high that way. Add in decoy drones, and you need a very cheap way to destory them.
Perfect solution for Shahed drones.
A dumb solution to a dumb weapon.
As soon as you have flak cannons, the shahed drones go away, because they won't work any more.
Just like MANPADs have removed attack helicopters from Ukraine skies. But you still need the MANPADs, or the helicopters come back.
Nothing new, or expensive to design. Just need to build the factories to build the guns and ammo.
We just need to want to do it.
And we need to acknowledge that large slow dumb CHEAP drones are a thing you need to counter. You can't fight them with million dollar missiles. The cost per drone is to high that way. Add in decoy drones, and you need a very cheap way to destory them.
Perfect solution for Shahed drones.
A dumb solution to a dumb weapon.
As soon as you have flak cannons, the shahed drones go away, because they won't work any more.
Just like MANPADs have removed attack helicopters from Ukraine skies. But you still need the MANPADs, or the helicopters come back.