Ukraine Always Get What You Want

The end of a dying country is fascinating to observe.

 

That number, even if inflated, is sick but about on par for Russia. Putin doesn't care.

Ukraine's personnel losses are proportionally just as fearsome. They don't have the manpower that Russia can dredge up.

Thankfully, now that MAGA Mike Johnson has caved, we can resupply Ukraine with arms and equipment again. But we can't supply bodies.

 

The only combat tactic the Russians have ever used is human. wave after human wave.

 

Wrong thread.

President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

 

Ukraine has recognized this and rewrote the book on drones. Their use of drones to inflict serious damage on Russian forces will be studied for years. The more they can send drones to knock out equipment, the fewer bodies they’ll need to use.

 

The Russians have contributed to the rewriting of the drone book as well. Our Abrams tanks are now running around the UKR battlefield with iron cages over the turrets and add-on reactive armor because Russian drones have been successfully targeting them (and they are high priority targets).

 

Yeah the Ukraine war could prove to be the last hurrah for tanks, just like the coming Taiwan war will prove to be the end of aircraft carriers.

 

It won't be. As long as you have people walking on a battlefield, you'll have need of armored vehicles to protect them, and other armored vehicles to destroy the other side's armored vehicles.

Also feels like a premature prediction. Do you know how hard is to find, fix, and guide a missile home to an aircraft carrier at sea?

What will end aircraft carriers will be when we finally get the pilots out of the decision loop and accept that everything a pilot can do, a drone can do better and cheaper.

 

"Mr. McKittrick, I've come to the conclusion that your new drone defense system sucks."

 

At which points a "suicide mission" becomes simply the expenditure of several multi-million dollar pilotless planes. We're close to that point now, as witness the SecDef being flown in such a pilotless fighter plane.

 

Every war tends to give us a preview of the next one and this war is no exception. It's really unlocking the possibilities — some of them frightening — of what drones are capable of. The Ukrainians became adept at dropping mortar rounds from cheap quad copter drones onto tanks to knock them out (same thing you pointed out the Russians are now doing), and have mixed in kamikaze drones with first-person views. One video I saw, there was a Russian soldier who was the last survivor of his AFV crew. There was a first-person view drone that had him in its sights, and the pilot spent 15 seconds chasing him around the AFV like Bugs Bunny before finally ending him.
Hell, Ukraine — which scuttled its only capital ship at the very start of the war — has fought and is arguably winning the naval war in the Black Sea thanks to drones.

The next step, though, is going to be incorporating AI into all of this. Drones that loiter and select the targets on their own from programmed parameters. It's not far away.
If Vietnam was the "helicopter war" for the way it revolutionized their use, this one is definitely going to be the "drone war." Assuming we make it that long as a species, Russia vs. Ukraine will eventually be looked at as a turning point in how warfare is conducted similar to Agincourt, World War I and the early stages of World War II.