[kragen]

Both Ukraine and Russia have more combat aircraft than the US, if you count drones. Of course the US has a far larger air force if you count by dollars rather than by airframe count, but if that's because they're buying US$10k milspec chips when US$1 parking meter chips would work just as well, that and a fiver will get you a cup of coffee.

An F-16 costs US$200 million and can be destroyed by a US$500 FPV drone with a grenade attached, as Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.

Surely you are correct that commanders would happily trade one FPV drone for one properly equipped F-16, even without the mortars. But it isn't clear that they would trade 400,000 FPV drones for the F-16, and that's the trade actually on offer.

The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war, probably because they don't work very well yet; that's why the Ukrainians are dinking around with FPV. The US Army has never faced even the kind of FPV drone war we're seeing in Ukraine. Their materiel has, though, since they shipped a lot of it to the Ukrainians, and it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are trying to keep their tanks off the front lines when they can, and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.

[gonzo41]

Think about mortars more. If you can be close enough for a drone 1-2km, then mortars should be what you're thinking about.

Mix a targeting drone with a vehicle mounted mortar team and they can have faster rounds on target and get of the X quicker than drone teams. And nets don't stop mortars.

200M will by a lot of that and can be fielded in a very flexible way.

[kragen]

Mortars miss; suicide drones don't. And even the crappiest combat FPVs outrange mortars at 10+ km. The second drone gets through the net. And I wouldn't be surprised if US mortar rounds cost more than Ukrainian drones. But certainly they are synergistic, and tanks and IFVs are also widely fielded on both sides of the war.

The obvious thing to do is to guide your mortar rounds with canards mounted slightly forward of the center of gravity, but the distance between "obvious" and done has a lot of rotting corpses in it.

[gonzo41]

Mortars have a 30m kill radius and you can hang rounds very quickly. There are guidable versions (expensive) but the regular rounds a cheap as chips (in military terms)

[kragen]

Mortars do not have a 30m kill radius against tanks and trenches.

[gonzo41]

Yes, but you can suppress a trench with mortars and do a combined arms attack against it. As for Tanks, there's other munitions better suited, the only reason the UAF aren't use them is scarcity.

[kragen]

Scarcity is not some kind of minor detail; it's damned near the whole story. Logistics win wars. Scarce weapons usually lose wars against abundant weapons. That doesn't always happen—the Zulus' abundant spears and arrows were no match for the Maxim gun's somewhat less abundant cartridges, and neither a pitchfork nor a handgun will do you much good against a tank—but it does usually happen.

When scarce weapons can defeat abundant weapons, and it's not because of range, it's usually because of precision. Drones are great at precision. 3 mortar rounds falling within 30 meters of your target trench are still ten times less deadly than a single FPV drone you can pilot straight into it.

[meheleventyone]

> Mortars miss; suicide drones don't.

TBF based on Ukraines own statistics drones miss a lot as well.

[kragen]

I guess getting shot down is just as good as missing.

[meheleventyone]

Anything where you don't hit the target is a miss so yes. Non-exhaustively and off the top of my head; running out of battery, electrical fault, losing signal/break in the fibre optic cable, shot down and operator error are all potential causes of a miss.

[jacquesm]

No, they miss a lot. ~5:1. But that still makes them cheaper than artillery rounds and they do a lot of damage and can do both recon and the subsequent attack with the same package, and without delay.

[kragen]

Hmm, I didn't realize. Do you mean ~5:1 is better than the miss ratio of artillery rounds, which makes them cheaper? Because I think a small FPV drone is about US$600 and an artillery round is about US$800, but that isn't a fact caused by the miss ratio.

[mrguyorama]

>Both Ukraine and Russia have more combat aircraft than the US, if you count drones.

That's just absurd. There is almost no mission a real aircraft can do with ease that a drone can replace.

>and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.

Who told you that?

>Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.

The one that took out max 10 planes from a year long endeavor that occupied significant special forces? Russia seems to continue sending cruise missiles. They are closer to running out of planes, and cannot replace a single loss, but that operation was far more of a propaganda victory than a tactical one. Maybe it caused Russia to have to be more careful about the border and tie up some troops in that?

>The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war,

The US military has fought skies filled with thousands of targets though. The UK did it before computers, and the US navy invented a brand new networked and automated battlespace management system for their fleet to handle hundreds of Russian cruise missiles launched at a surface group. In the 60s. The same Navy invented a mechanical gyro system for inertial navigation that modern ring laser gyros do not even come close to touching.

People have this weird idea that the US military industrial complex is incompetent and it's just radically misinformed and silly. The F35 had teething problems, same as every craft. The Switchblade is overpriced and underpowered, because it was a tiny experiment for mostly "Special forces" and thus had a special forces price tag. It's also dramatically more electronically sophisticated. The military refuses to build a new self propelled artillery system for.... reasons?

But the US military has a looooong history of fixing those teething problems and creating incredible equipment. Air to Air missiles started with a dud rate of like 60%. But the people who called them a fad were wrong. The people who said the US should invest into more cheap air power that had no bells and whistles (like ejection seats or radar warning systems) and that burning money on expensive SOTA aircraft using cutting edge electronics would be a boondoggle and would fail, and they were so fucking wrong. Literally those exact people were the ones crying about the F35 being crap and not living up to expectations, and they should ask Iran, who had plenty of Russian and homegrown anti-air weapon radars and SAM systems how well they fared against the F35, and the B2 which is an older Stealth system.

Meanwhile the biggest issue with the B21 raider is that Lockhead might lose money on it due to inflation.

The Navy definitely has trouble, but they've always been prima donnas when it comes to procurement, insisting on changing off the shelf stuff with custom requirements and asking for absurdities like the Zumwalt's original cannon, but the Aircraft Carriers are still insane and we can buy frigates from someone else.

Like, you people know that "The Pentagon Wars" about the Bradley was an absolute fiction, right? And that the claims Colonel Burton made in that book are wrong? And if you ask the Ukrainians, the Bradley (an old version at that!) is not only very effective, but an outright lifesaver. Something like 80% and above survivability for crew and passengers when it is destroyed. BMPs have radically worse survivability.

The US military has already adapted, with for example slapping a laser tracker on dirt cheap Hydra rockets as a way to reliably take down cheap munitions like Shaheds. That system has been a great success, and is super scalable. Beating that would require much faster munitions (at that point you are a pricier cruise missile) or being launched from so close you might as well use an artillery piece.

The single most powerful thing that small, cheap drones provide is small group ISR, allowing individual soldiers to have the kind of battlefield awareness in trench fighting as your average CoD protagonist. Maybe we are close to emulating the "Enemy, front, 300 feet" from Arma.

[kragen]

> > and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.

> Who told you that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM #video from May 19: #interview with #drones developer Sergey Tovkach from #Russia on how #weaponry from #Ukraine is far better than what the US and even China have, and now 70% of fatalities on the battlefield are from drones.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/... “#Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in #Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more — up to 80 percent of deaths and injuries, commanders say. (...) drones rule the battlefield. They have far surpassed conventional arms as the war’s most lethal #weaponry. (...) The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. But drones now kill more soldiers and destroy more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say. (...) Of the 31 highly sophisticated Abrams tanks that the United States provided Ukraine in 2023, 19 have been destroyed, disabled or captured, with many incapacitated by drones, senior Ukrainian officials said. Nearly all of the others have been taken off the front lines, they added. (...) Ukrainian officials said they had made more than one million first-person-view, or FPV, drones in 2024. Russia claims it can churn out 4,000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025. (...) Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a “robots first” military strategy. ¶ However effective they may be, the drones fall far short of meeting all of Ukraine’s war needs and cannot simply replace the demand for conventional weapons, commanders warn. Heavy artillery and other long-range weapons remain essential for many reasons, they say, including protecting troops and targeting command-and-control outposts or air-defense systems. ”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-88Z-xqImI #video on #Ukraine #drones #weaponry, which it said is largely made by Vyriy and the Vampire’s maker Skyfall. Says dropping 10kg TM62 anti-tank mines onto tanks, and also dropping heavy bombs from drones, is a “warfare first”. The Vampire (Baba Yaga) can carry them 10km. Says the Donetsk battlefield is “dominated by FPV drones on both sides”. The most popular ground drone is Ratel’s 35kg-capacity Ratel S or “Honey Badger”.

> > Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.

> The one that took out max 10 planes from a year long endeavor that occupied significant special forces?

Yes, but that's only the beginning. Don't be like the people who dismissed covid as unimportant because it had only caused 2000 deaths.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-destroyed-t... #Israel #drones destroy two F-14 airplanes in #Iran. #weaponry #politics

> dirt cheap Hydra rockets as a way to reliably take down cheap munitions like Shaheds. That system has been a great success, and is super scalable. Beating that would require much faster munitions (at that point you are a pricier cruise missile) or being launched from so close you might as well use an artillery piece.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_70 a Hydra rocket costs US$2799, the cost of five Ukrainian FPV drones (though still a twentieth of the cost of the Shahed), and Operation Spiderweb found ways to launch their drones from nearly that close, ways that wouldn't have worked for an artillery piece. And you can beat laser targeting by humans simply by launching more simultaneous drones than there are defenders, or by flying below treetop level, or by flying outside the troposphere.

> The US military has fought skies filled with thousands of targets though.

The US military just lost a war against Afghan shepherds, and the people in the US military who "fought skies filled with thousands of targets" retired decades ago. And they weren't paying for thousand-dollar toilet seats at the time.

Also, and this is crucial, thousands of targets is very different from millions of targets, and you are going to be seeing wars with skies filled with millions of targets within five years. More accurately, millions of weapons; the humans are their targets.

It is not going to look like a video game. Those are rigged to be winnable.