dan/california

Whatever way provides the best human shield to the retreating Russians Yeah, except they skipped the training part. Could hit these drones with a laser guided 70 mm rocket? And what would be the best platform to hang them on? Even a Super Tucano seems like overkill. You just need the most basic thing out their that can carry a rocket pod and have the laser rigged up. You don't need to dodge SAMS or dogfight. Just systematically line up on one non eveading target after another. Would need good ground control to vector in.

Assuming your not on the Russian side it is a hard question what to do, for a civilian in Kherson. All the very real risk of being subject to the Russians, who will probably be looking to take a bad defeat out on somebody. Or hide in the deepest corner of the basement while the flaming hurricane of urban combat rolls over you.

They are probably trying to use the buses as human shields on the ferries. Wouldn't even be the worst thing the Ruzzians have done today.

Nothing will convince the Chinese to chose wisely more than an absolute certainty that the only way they are setting foot on Taiwan is a new land bridge built out of sunken ships and dead bodies.

These drones, and the Orlan Tens are both pretty nice examples of good enough engineering. The limits on their effectiveness have at least as much to do with the broader problems of the military using them as they do the hardware itself. There is a lot to be said for slightly upgraded copies of both. Five hundred or a thousand improved 136 class drones would do a proper job on an unfriendly air defense system if the strike was planned out by a competent planning/targeting complex. Throw in some seekers that will home on various sorts of emitters for 10% of them, and you have ruined someone's whole day for 50 or a 100 million dollars. Assuming a hundred thousand dollars per unit.

We are spending LOT of money, it is also one of the better bargains in history. The Ukrainians are doing the bleeding, and even if it cost another hundred billion it is dirt cheap to essentially eliminate the Russian Army for a generation or more. With Ukraine victorious and in NATO we really CAN pivot toward China.

I can't imagine what the target would be ~20 miles from Slovoyansk to rate a Grim-2. I would think they would burn two whole pods of GMLRS first. Maybe Ukraine snuck an airstrike in with a thousand pound LGB/JDAM of some description? SOF had time to rig a big bomb? A whole ammo dump went at once?

The last time the Ukrainians tried absolutely everything to make the Russians look at Kherson, They smacked the bleep out of them in Kharkiv. I think it less likely to be deception this time, but it is still worth pointing out.

By far the best revenge is to convince the FSB he is a Ukrainian double agent, and it is all his fault.

If the Kremlin is talking, it is lying, really is almost that simple. They have completely trashed the worlds ability to believe anything they say so badly it will significantly complicate the negotiations to end the war when operation "Sunflower Fertilizer" has kicked the last living Russian soldier out of Ukraine.

They just need to do a MASSIVE one right now. Just make it absolutely clear that Putin can run out the clock in this decade...

Just the sheer volume to be defended, and the fact the radar signatures are quite small. Hence my proposal about arming whatever light civilian aircraft make the most sense in the largest possible numbers. Nothing close to full combat capability is required.

So pondering the short term emergency fix to this drone problem, as opposed to the long term engineered fix. These things fly very slow and don't dodge right? So what is the the lightest, cheapest, most available aircraft that you can hang a gun pod on? The pilots don't exactly need full top gun skills either. And is their some sort airborne radar set that could be hung on a twin engine king air to find the bleeping things? Ukraine really needs some sort rough and ready solution to this problem RIGHT NOW. None of this stuff has to fit for real combat to patrol for drones on the west side of the Dnipro. And if there is anybody out there working on a balloon mounted radar this would be the moment to raise your hand. The boil the frog approach is wrong, has always been wrong, and is being proven to be ever more wrong. The Russian army in Ukraine needs to smashed into very small smoking, bleeding pieces as fast as humanly possible. Then tell the Russians the lights can go out in Moscow and St Petersburg, too. The Poles need to start very publicly setting up a production line to produce slightly improved copies of the Iranian drones and point out the Kharkiv to Moscow just isn't that far., and It also gets a LOT colder in Moscow Edit: Would those laser guided 70 mm rockets work for this application in an air to air role?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/17/fiona-hill-putin-war-00061894 Excellent but long. A lot of discuusion about how the war ends

The Pentagon/NATO are FINALLY, MAYBE, really going to ramp up ammo production to at least some semblance of what is needed.

This may be the funniest tweet of the whole bleeping war. I move this becomes forum standard terminology going forward.

I am going to respectfully disagree. Drones need to be light cheap, and plentiful. I fully agree that a centimeter of aluminum nitride is highly laser resistant. The quarter of a millimeter that might be a practical coating for a small, battery powered, flying thing that needs to carry a payload, not so much. And for most drones blinding the optics is as good as a k-kill. This is going to be its own arms race though, i am sure there will be surprises all around. The one thing I will bet on is that where current drone employment is mostly a one a or two at a time thing, in the next war table stakes is going to be flights of ten or twenty. The Iranian stuff is already sort of attempting this, although it doesn't have the sophistication to do much more than give a bunch of them the same target. Edit: and guns don't have the range to defend whole city, not unless you have hundreds, and hundreds of them. The upfront cost and the manning for that add up rather quickly. U.S.Army is rapidly moving to a shorad battalion structure that has guns, missiles, and lasers. This is the throw it at the wall see what sticks stage of the drone arms race.

Didn't the Ukrainians capture a bunch of Russian teachers when the lines disintegrated in Kharkiv? I seem to recall they probably didn't even have Geneva Convention status as combatants. They were technically liable to being charged under Ukrainian law and sent to prison for a LONG time. I suspect It was in everyone's best interest to do a deal.

Quantity might matter. Can it fire the AIM-120? Edit: Or can the IRIS-T SL radar que a NASSAMS launcher? Somebody ought to be working on at least one of those tricks.

The brilliance of the Nassams system is that it uses air to air missiles that NATO has tens of thousands of. Although for the next war clearly you have a laser system or surrender. Not 100% if IRIS T has the same trick or not.

I would point out that we have gone from mysterious deaths of Oligarchs, to mysterious deaths of upper level people in the regime proper, or the first one, anyway.

Just hung is all I have seen.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/doubts-over-suicide-of-russian-who-sent-men-to-war-q8nnjqtxk Head of mobilization "hung himself" Edit: I would call that a sign of stress....

A significant fraction of Russian ballistic vest appear to be just mild steel plates that would not even stop a 9mm. Edit: something very strange is happening with the way this link displays. It is showing me the wrong one when I just look at the forum, but the right one when I went to add this edit. Anubody else having things get squirrely?