19278

Wow, that video gives new meaning to the term FUBAR. While listening to this I was reminded of the Patton speech.

No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.”

Those poor conscripts are the ultimate “dumb bastard”. They basically are never going to kill any Ukrainians unless they get really lucky.

As @Wombat said earlier they are net negative to the Russian forces , they suck up food, medical supplies and logistics support. The only thing they do to help the Russian war effort is attract artillery shells, which I guess could be targeting some better troops.

19279

Yeah, same for me. It helped make sense of the various to/from vehicle/troop movements.

19280

Confirmed by Russian press, so this isn’t just Uk propaganda:

And this is interesting:

19281

Somebody should probably tell them that they don’t need to do that. Food, clothes, and ammo are easy supplies. The military has it covered.

19282

I remember reading about shakedowns and similar abuses in the Russian military circa maybe 2000. It sounded an awful lot like prison behaviors.

19283

The hazing culture in the military goes back into the Soviet times.

19284

Re: the drone war, information is pretty scant on the Shahed 136. It’s autonomous and direction-fired, I assume it’s got a GPS chip and not much else in the way of brains, but I haven’t been able to find information on whether it’s purported camera suite has any real targeting capability. It’s very small, 11 feet long and 8 wide, so the size of a very small vehicle. And very slow, but it’s a much different thing than the 129, which seems more like a Predator-class drone where they can supply a couple of hundred rather than thousands, and is bigger. More capable, granted, it’s ground controlled, can carry bombs and missiles, etc. These seem to be, like I said, “Go to GPS xxxxx.xxxxx and dive.” 20k per is the estimate for cost. Very long range compared to a quad like a Switchblade, but that’s not terribly important considering it’s only the last few miles that matter.

No conclusion on offer other than that these are the cheapest, smallest, and dumbest of what Iran fields in the drone category. And presumably the most numerous.

19285

Yeah, it’s the $20K thing that’s an issue. Extremely cheap to manufacture. Meanwhile, a single Patriot missile is several million dollars. An AMRAAM is $1.1 million dollars. Even a cheapo Sidewinder is $600K. And a Stinger is about $36K. All of our current systems are on the wrong end of the cost equation.

19286

That was my thought as well, as a terror weapon it’s very affordable and also capable of striking from a long, long way away. If I were an orc, I would strip the munitions from 4 out of 5 and send one every fifteen minutes, just one, to physically and mentally exhaust my enemy.

19287

I haven’t done any research on this, but are defensive (dogfighting) drones a thing? It not, why not?

It feels like they should be: if you can make a $20k slow, fragile, flying bomb, why can’t you make a $20k slow, fragile, flying gun? The economics of the latter feel like they should be better, since they’d be reusable while loitering munitions by definition aren’t.

19288

You only need 1 bomb to hit 1 building.

When you defend you need x amount to cover a limited area. And you need to fly constantly.

Unless you have foolproof 100% long range detection

19289

But if the air-defense drones are reusable then keeping a large number of them in the air doesn’t seem like it should be an insurmountable problem? The opex from refueling / reloading them has to be tiny compared to the capex of even a $20k flying bomb.

19290

I saw a group of Ukraine police firing small arms at a drone. All I could think was, why waste your ammo?

19291

Seems like a “not yet.” The brains are in the weapons once they leave the rails, the other brains are the pilots getting the weapons to the right spot and position to be used. Since there’s considerable lag and lack of area awareness for the human-controlled drones in a fighter theater, they can’t keep up with a human with eyeballs and a better aircraft. The other side of that coin is you don’t spend F-35 money on something controlled from half the world away because then you lose an F-35 to a SAM or fighter that cost a fraction, speed of light matters.

Then there’s the self-driving car fiasco, which if you read my blog I predicted many years ago was many, many years away from being what they were promising. (the blog thing is a joke.) To make a fighter aircraft do the same in theater would require tech we just don’t have, despite sensors that are probably vastly superior both external (AWACs) and internal to the drone.

Final side, but not the gripping hand, there’s the argument from that old Eddie Murphy movie whose name escapes me, Modern something? Where they were trying to come to market with an intelligent fighter jet that was autonomous, you can make an argument that a small one with the right gear could do things in a dogfight a human can’t do strictly by G force limitations on the person and the frame required to move the person, but that was sci-fi back then and seems to be in the same boat right now.

19292

Deal of the Century?

19293

At 100mph, it’s not that bad an idea. It’s hittable and downable by a single bullet somewhere decent, these are flying kiddie pools with a quadcopter brain in the front and a gut full of explosives, small arms can work in that situation. If I were on a rooftop and saw one coming in, I’d damned sure be shooting at it until my magazine ran dry (and depending on the angle and quality of my weapon, having a good chance of hitting.)

19294

That’s the one, thanks!

19295

Well, it looked to be too far for handguns. But there is always the golden BB issue.

19296

Ah, sorry, I read small arms as anything man carried, I wouldn’t bother with a pistol but an AR platform where I have a decent head-on shot rather than an on the ground deflection shot at 90 degrees, that can still work. Wing shooting is ridiculously hard at small ranges with a shotgun, but if a drone is going 100mph coming straight at me and I have a 5.56, then the last 300 yards of its flight are going to be a pretty solid opportunity to get a round on it.

19297

Lastly to the money question, the drone isn’t the expensive bit, it’s the missile that is able to defeat the human and the countermeasures it’s shooting at. Quick Google says a Sparrow, which is pretty much the short range, I think radar missile? Or The sidewinder infrared cost over $300,000 per shot.

Edit: To be clear, the drone that can actually enter a combat theater and fire these missiles is actually hideously expensive, 20-200 million, but I think what you were stating was that the cost of the platform can be amortized over many sorties, rather than the missiles that are one-shot costs.