dan/california

Allow me to clarify. I have a STRONG impression that NATO ++ is strongly discouraging retired pilots from signing up with Ukraine. They could sign up on the same basis volunteers do now. I think we should go from from discouraging it, to at last covertly encouraging it. The more multinational the people that show up, the better. At an absolute minimum this should be ready to roll out the second it is announced Trump has lost. If Trump wins Ukraine won't even be the worst problem.

????

He hasn't won yet...

https://www.reddit.com/r/DroneCombat/comments/1doy7dm/ua_93rd_mechanized_brigades_signum_drone_team/ More infra red drones=fewer supply trucks.

Setting up a massive factory for 155 shells in Poland in ~three months would actually be more of a statement.

Given that North Korea ALREADY has nukes, I can't figure out what Russia thinks it can do that would be so scary. The U.S. and Japan have cause to worry about better North Korean missiles, Seoul is in range and always has been. Also China is not interested in a second Korean War, but with fallout, and they do get a vote here. It really seems like this is straight up strategic desperation from Putin. He gets the artillery shells he was already getting, and some NK meat for the grinder, Ukraine gets the South Korean defense industrial base. This is not a good trade for Putin. In fact, it is so bad I am coming around to the theory that Putin's whole NK adventure is a sign of serious cracks in the Russian regime.

The appropriate response to this is finally allowing the Ukrainians to stand up a new version of the Flying Tigers, and get a hundred F-16s in the field by the end of summer instead a dozen, maybe, barely.

Surely somebody can work out the brackets and wiring to hang gun pod on this thing You could put this same system on a lot of more or less civilian designs for drone hunting, too. Especially deeper into Ukrainian territory

The Pentagon has to make a best guess at least ten years out, though, just because of the procurement cycle.

While we are discussing things that we are not remotely ready for, what is to stop a massive attack by Shaheed type drones launched from a freighter of the East coast of the U.S.,? Or the Brussels, Antwerp, Hamburg conglomeration. I mean Hezbollah could probably do that. North Korea could certainly do it. Never mind one of the major players. We need to red team a LOT of things like that, and actually do something about the results. Or someone is going to do it for us, with live ammo. They wouldn't dare was mortally wounded on 9/11, and certainly dead and buried after the war in Ukraine and Oct 7th.

What is the time and cost for five thousand of them. Because you need one of them for every platoon in in NATO. That very much includes rear area, and supply units.

Only two years to late...

That will be all of them, going forward. They are being used by Mexican cartels, and Burmese rebels. This genii is out.

And that still with mostly improvised/civilian drones, and old RPG warheads. Military grade drones and tandem warheads haven't really shown up yet. They most certainly will, though.

Short version, FPVs can kill tanks. Verifiable engagements have risen from ~75 per month a year ago to ~200 now. Resulting ~50% damaged, ~15 percent abandoned, and the remainder destroyed, often catastrophically. Turtle tank adaptations are moderately effective but can be overcome by some combination of multiple hits and attacking the tracks. Turtle tanks suck at everything else. Article doesn't discuss anything but tanks.

I suspect there was a bad combination of wishful thinking, and budget pressure. For the last twenty plus years the U.S. has seen extraordinarily high success rates with GPS munition when used against the insurgent type forces we have actually been fighting. Add in the ever shrinking size of the military. But the pentagon stills needs to sign of that it can cover its vast array of commitments. Well, if you assume the same 90% hit rates as seen in the dirt wars, the math adds up, sort of. It takes a general officer with an an unusual disregard for his own career to question these sort of assumptions when large scale planning and force structure has been based on them. The Russians and Chinese of course are rather motivated disrupt this happy state of affairs. The only good news is that Ukraine has laid this bare in a way that we can fix it before we outright lose a war because of it. Can doesn't mean we will. We also need to remember how many Ukrainians paid with their lives for these lessons. It is a little it like Microsoft screwing up the smart phone business because it would have involved admitting how bad it would be for their existing business.

The B in BMP stands for BOMB! Two excellent vids of drones hunting trucks, day and night.

What all Ukrainian civilians did know is that external support was all but cut off for six months while the U.S.Congress ate its own tail. That contributed to a downturn in Ukrainian morale that it is going to take more than six weeks to fix.

This may not amount to much, but I am extremely tempted to at least classify it as creaking noise.

Proof that people are working on autonomous drones.