dan/california

https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1802979561937760465 Read Dmitri every day!

https://www.reddit.com/r/DroneCombat/comments/1dhbu21/ukraines_tivaz_artillery_group_posted_extended/ Himars or Excalibur?

https://www.reddit.com/r/DroneCombat/comments/1dh6vkc/a_ukrainian_recon_drone_from_the_joker_group_of/ Another way that drones break legacy systems. The proximity detection on this missile didn't pick up the drone, so it just sailed right on by. This subreddit has an approximate infinity of strikes on infantry as well, be warned that many of them are VERY graphic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DroneCombat/comments/1dhe9r1/ua_74th_recon_battalions_shadow_drone_team/ Maybe the Ukrainians in this sector don't have drones with infrared...

Dmitri is having a good day!

I am to pitiful to kill......I hope.

A lot of the specifics depend on information we are guessing about. Not least the size and cost of the current interceptors. Detection ranges, rate of climb, and endurance also matter. If you can wait to launch a kamikaze drone until you have a reasonably solid contact, then the drone doesn't need any of stuff required for a two way mission. If they are cheap enough to just have them self destruct if they don't find a target, like wise. But if they are sort of expensive and take a long time to reach operating altitude it could go the other way. You would have to be running race tracks of them all the time to ensure adequate coverage, and that could get expensive quickly if they were 100% disposable. The current FPV drones seem to be unsafe to set the fuse once, they certainly don't try to bring them back. If you need continuous racetracks reusability might be worth the very real hassles and expense.

We haven't lost the election yet...

Might not be a reason, but I would at least have a few people looking at it. If you could kill it with a some sort of recoilless shotgun set up, and the drone could carry five rounds. That would put your cost per kill down around ten bucks. Heck for this application you could literally put two shotgun shells back to back in a barrel. it isn't like there is going to be anything behind it in normal usage. Literally just use a straight barrel with an electronic ignitor for the round. Identical mass and momentum in both directions

Estimates an Orlan cost $100,000, if you can kill them with ten thousand dollars suicide drones, instead of million dollar missiles with restricted manufacturing capacity that is a huge win. Couldn't find an estimate for a Zala in the time I had to look. I vaguely recall that they are more.

But the "air to air" drones for lack of a better term are not doing any complicated flying until fairly late in the mission. They could climb to patrol height and fly their ready circuits either under computer control, or being flown by less experienced/trainee pilots. Just hand them over to the experienced guys for the attack run. The part I am far more interested in is the aforementioned infrastructure. How are they spotting drones, dispatching resources, and vectoring the kill vehicle close enough for not very good cameras to work. I don't expect an answer to this question until after the war. Also how long before the air to air drones don't have to do this the kamikaze way. This is the next step in the whole drone arms race. A big step, at that.

Last nights ISW lays out the nuttiness of Putin's current proposals in detail.

Ukraine would make a deal in day based on the current front lines. But Russia and The US, and Europe would all have to agree on something. Ukraine would join NATO and the EU at the same table, at the same time, signed by the same people. That is the ONLY guarantee that we don't do this again in a year or five, and the Ukrainians know it. Edit: just to clarify, this is a long article about the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022.

How does the Russian army do crap like this, and not just dissolve?

The above is the money quote. Russian ISR is HEAVILY reliant on these fixed wing UAVs, if the Ukrainians can do this at scale it will be at least as big a deal as Patriots being effective against ballistic missiles, maybe bigger.

https://www.threads.net/@24hoursukrainenew/post/C8NbTQugf-w A BMP going boom. It is an interesting, and funny, bit of data in the ongoing debate about whether it is more dangerous to ride in a BMP, or on one.

If we are talking our preferred historical analogies, 1905 was lovely year. Russia was militarily defeated almost utterly in an unnecessary war of choice, and then rocked but not tipped over by civil unrest. If it hadn't been for WW1 they might have managed some semblance of gradual reform, as opposed to an epic implosion. I grant the eye of that needle gets ever smaller, and the consequences of missing it higher, with every passing day. If i can be forgiven for throwing out an extra idea, am I the only one that thinks modern communications might be making autocracies both stronger and more brittle? It massively increases the regimes ability to repress all dissent everywhere, right up until the whole country blows up at once?

https://www.threads.net/@antifaoperative/post/C8NUbqRv6He?deeplink_ig_tifu=1&tifu_login=True&xmt=AQGzR0QG2agm2-4duThXs_Dq-As6SIAUtomkLKFvDIObbSY

ISW is coming down rather hard on the side of there being no choice but beating the Russians more or less completely.

This is THE lesson, the last argument of Kings is still a thing. We need to act like we understand that not rhetorically acknowledge it. Acting like it means massive investments in the defense industrial base among other things, and return to making well chosen risky bets on future technology. Not everything is going to work, but getting caught out in the areas where the new stuff DOES work is going to be very painful. Let me add one more lesson that encompasses essentially everything that has happened after 1991. The superpower that is having to do its own fighting is losing. Even regional superpowers that have to do their own fighting are losing. Russia immolating itself in Ukraine is just one of many examples. Indeed one of the more likely outcomes of Ukraine is that Russia becomes a Chinese proxy.

Let me try to clarify a few things. Billindc's argument is that Russia is so deep in the hole, and restrained by he contradictions of its own excuse for a system, that the "West" can push for a near maximalist victory at acceptable risk. The_Capt's theory is that the risk of trying win this thing in a way that humiliates, and might destabilize, the Russian regime are to high. We need to take our chips off the table and try to land this thing where the front lines are at more or less. Let Russia fail slowly without the risk of an ongoing hot war. Now let me ask a third question, what is the outcome of this war that most encourages China not to wreck the world economy,and a great deal else, by trying to grab Taiwan? Because that, along with avoiding a nuclear exchange, is the real goal here. A major part of The Capt's argument is that the exact settlement in Ukraine is less important than we would like to think, short of the complete collapse of Kyiv. I would argue that what IS important is an outcome that that maximizes the deterrence of Xi from doing something as remotely as stupid as Putin's little plan for a short victorious war. Does the way Ukraine ends really move the needle on that one way or the other?.

Long interview with the commander of U.S. brigade that was to target of more Shaheed class drones than the rest of the U.S. Army combined. A lot of technical details.