It doesn’t make much sense to hit the pipelines if the refining infrastructure is broken. In that case they don’t have anything to send through the pipelines anymore anyway.

Hitting pipelines is more of a short-term measure to cause pain. They’re relatively easy to repair (much easier than advanced refining equipment), and there’s often some redundancy so that gas can be shipped through a different part of the network if one pipeline is breached.

On the other hand, the pipelines span such a huge area that they’re basically impossible to defend. If you’re able to constantly hit pipelines all over the place, you’re causing significant strain on enemy logistics. However, as mentioned by another comment, the pipelines are often buried, which makes them practically immune to light drones.

All in all, I think Ukraines strategy of targeting refineries directly is probably better in the long term, even though they’re more well defended. It also has the advantage of forcing russia to try to defend the refineries. Even russia understands that defending the pipeline network is basically impossible, so they would rather just take the hits and repair the pipelines, so you wouldn’t get the secondary benefit of straining their air defences.

Aaaaand let’s shift to punishing the sites they used to be protecting!

It’s becoming more and more obvious that russias air defence is way over-stretched, they can’t compensate for that by shifting insufficient assets around. When moscow and st. petersburg have been hit a couple times, they move more air defences there, exposing more holes around logistics hubs closer to the front, or oil refineries in the rear. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that Ukraine is competent enough to punish this: Give it a couple days, and Ukrainian intelligence will know which previously defended sites which are now exposed, and start hitting those. Hell, they might even take out some of the AA while it’s being moved.

Still plenty more food for the drones!

I think a major point here is that mass drone attacks become more viable if your enemy only has expensive means to shoot them down. If your drones are cheaper and easier to produce than the weapons the enemy is using to shoot them down, you are winning in attrition every time the enemy shoots down one of your drones (because, presumably, you can produce more of them for longer than the enemy can produce the counter-measures).

When you take that into account, it changes your equation dramatically: With a 5 % hit rate, you’re spending 1 000 000 USD per target, while the enemy has spent 19 x (cost of shooting down drone) defending that target. If it costs them more than 52 500 USD (on average) to shoot down a drone, you’re both hitting targets, and spending less money doing it than the enemy is spending on defending themselves. A single AMRAAM missile costs around 1 000 000 USD, so if you’re using those to shoot down these drones, you’re spending 20 x as much as your enemy, and still getting hit.

Enter the Gepard (or similar countermeasures). They allow you to shoot down a drone at a fraction of the cost of the drone. You might still be getting hit (around 5 % of the time), but now you’re capable of fielding much more AA at a fraction of the cost. When dealing with these massive drone swarms, volume is the name of the game. A single 1 000 000 USD AMRAAM missile can never take down more than a single drone, so it’s never going to be a long-term viable strategy to use them for drone defence. It’s much more reasonable to field a truckload of Gepards (or similar) so that you have enough volume of fire to take down all the drones headed your way.

I was just thinking the same thing - I’ve seen a lot of 1400+ lately!

I took a look at the link, and they estimate that the “cost” is spiking the last couple months, but I can’t see that reflected in the number of losses of any specific type of equipment. Do you have any idea what’s causing them to estimate that the cost is spiking?

I wouldn’t say things like proximity triggers or primitive homing tech like heat seekers are autonomous. Heat seekers don’t adapt to changing situations, but follow a completely mechanical “go towards the warmest spot” path. Being autonomous would mean the could react to the “warmest spot” either disappearing or moving in an unphysical way (suddenly appearing somewhere it’s shouldn’t be, as can happen with e.g. flares).

Basically, if the weapon has a single thing it can do (move towards hot thing), and no way of adapting if that thing doesn’t work as expected, I have a hard time calling it autonomous.

I wouldn’t call a simple robot-vacuum autonomous either for that matter. If the instruction set is “go forward until you hit an obstacle, then rotate 15 degrees clockwise and repeat”, I don’t really see that as “adapting to changing circumstances”.

I would rather say that your definition of “autonomous” appears rather wide? I wouldn’t call e.g. a heat-seeking or radar-guided missile “autonomous”. I would say that “autonomous” implies the drone/missile/torpedo/etc. can somehow adapt to changing conditions rather than follow a simple pre-programmed path.

You can have very simple “autonomous” systems, for example “Move towards this GPS coordinate, unless you lose connection, in which case fall back to inertial guidance until you either reach the target or re-acquire connection”. Another example could be “Home in on the heat signature, unless you lose the signal, in which case execute some planned manoeuvres to re-acquire the signature”. Yet another could be “Move towards target, but if you detect that you’re being tracked by radar, or detect an AA launch, conduct evasive manoeuvres / move closer to the ground, etc.”

All the above imply that the drone / missile / torpedo / whatever is capable of responding to changes in the surrounding environment. To my knowledge, there were no WWII-era weapons capable of doing that. A typical WWII-torpedo was “Start the propeller and keep going at maximum speed until the detonator is triggered or you run out of fuel and sink.” I can’t really see how that would count as autonomous.

Based on how the question is phrased, it can be very open to interpretation.

I’ve thought all kinds of sick thoughts along the lines of “I could push this person in front of the arriving metro”, or “I’m holding a kitchen knife, if I were to stab the other person in the kitchen there’s nothing they could do about it”. When I was in the army, and we were at the shooting range, I could get thoughts about how easy it would be to shoot a whole load of people. Of course, I never consider doing those things. I’m talking about people I would lay down my life to protect, and I still get these thoughts.

I was very relieved when I read somewhere that this is fairly normal, and some researchers ascribed it to a protection mechanism: Their theory (which they provided some evidence for), was that be evoking these thoughts, your brain makes you more aware of acute potential dangers, so that you can act more carefully to avoid them. Basically, by becoming conscious that you could push/stab/shoot someone, you handle your movement/knife/firearm more carefully to avoid doing so by accident.

So: Have I thought about shooting someone? Plenty of times. Have I considered shooting someone? Never.

While drones have undoubtedly become the primary medium-range strike platform, videos like this show very clearly why rocket- and tube artillery will remain invaluable weapons in the foreseeable future. No FPV or dropper drone can get close to delivering this kind of firepower, let alone deliver it fast enough to hit these kind of troop concentrations before they have time to disperse.

It’s almost mind boggling how these rockets can cause huge casualties in an instant from such long range.

Imagine walking into the ring to meet a guy that’s not only 30-1, but who’s a war veteran that you know has likely killed people in MOUT operations and who documented digging out his title belt from his bombed out home.

I would be terrified by less.

The moment when Ukrainian drone superiority gets good enough that they can seriously hamper/degrade russian drone production will definitely mark a tipping point. It only goes one way from there.

That’s not the point, it’s more like

• Fire an arrow at an enemy wearing full plate armour and carrying a crossbow
• Arrow bounces off armour
• “lol that’s so outdated” shoots you back with a crossbow

Sure, you could get lucky and hit a gap in the armour, but what you’re doing is wildly inefficient. As stated in the article, a bunch of the north korean missiles are detonating before reaching their targets, and they’re also very inaccurate. Just like in the arrow/armour analogy, it’s not like they’re useless and can’t cause harm, it’s that they’re wildly ineffective compared to modern missiles.

More importantly, the point is the state of russian (+ allies) manufacturing capabilities. If they were capable of fielding enough modern weapons, they wouldn’t be using outdated and inefficient ones. Sure, you can arm modern soldiers with swords and crossbows, and they can probably kill people with them. However, you’re going to choose firearms and grenades 10/10 times if you can.

Well, in the sense that Orbans primary political views are “We should build a far-right nationalist dictatorship/oligarchy led by Viktor Orban”, Magyar does actually disagree with his core political views.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that some kind of net that can be shot from an under-barrel mounted grenade launcher hasn’t been developed/deployed yet. I’m imagining something like a standard 40 mm grenade casing that contains a net that folds out after maybe 50 m (or a programmable distance, or a proximity trigger). Very thin/light strings are enough to take down a drone, so you could probably easily pack a 5 x 5 m or even 10 x 10 m net into a 40 mm casing. People are already shooting at drones with rifles, I would imagine something that lets you shoot out a large net to 100 + meters would make taking down drones a lot easier for an infantryman, and being able to fire it from a standard barrel-mounted grenade launcher would make it very easy to deploy.

I would imagine that this kind of thing could drastically improve the ability of infantry to deal with drones when they are exposed. I’m sure there’s a good reason this hasn’t been implemented, but I have a hard time figuring out what that reason is.

Definitely, however a major advantage of flak over solid rounds (especially with modern automatic range finding and programmable munitions) is that it’s a very easy and cheap way to turn a 1 m miss on that 30 cm drone at 1 km distance into a hit.

The weapons shooting these munitions typically shoot anything from 12.7 mm to 30-40 mm munitions, while even bird shot is enough to take out a drone. With that in mind, there’s really no reason to not make that 30 mm shell fragment into a dispersed cloud of bird shot that would barely harm a plane, since it makes it so much easier to take out the thousands of drones attacking you. Whenever the occasional heavier target shows up, you can just disable the fragmentation effect (programmable munitions) and you basically have a CIWS.

I honestly believe that the enormous amount of drones on the battlefield today will cause a resurgence of flak as a primary AA weapon. For a while now, missiles have been the go-to, but expensive and advanced missiles can be countered by massive swarms of cheap drones. Flak cannons with modern targeting systems and automatic range finding is probably the most reasonable counter to these drone swarms.

The fact that Ukraine has the reserves to be able to send specialists to the Middle East right now shows which way this is tipping.

While Ukraine is garnering support (and frankly, debt) from some rich nations by sending them resources, russias access to missiles/drones is getting worse since Iran needs them for themselves, so likely won’t export any more for the time being.

An air war like this is fundamentally about destroying your enemies assets faster than they can produce them, while building your own assets faster than they’re destroyed. If one part gets an upper hand in that balance, it will inherently snowball quickly, since that party is getting more assets for each day, while the enemy has fewer assets for each day. The most crucial component here is probably your manufacturing capacity for weapons systems.

Of course, it takes a lot of time for this to materialise when russia has had so deep stores of weapons. Hopefully, we’re seeing a long-term effect of Ukraine having a larger manufacturing capacity for air defence assets than russia. If they actually have that, it’s also because their manufacturing capacity has grown very fast, which means the discrepancy will only increase. The tipping point is when Ukraine is both manufacturing air defence capabilities faster than russia, and are increasing their manufacturing capacity faster.

Which is honestly kind of ironic when thinking about the fact that the EU was built from the rubble of WWII, which was started by a dictator who took over a democracy.

This seems like a good place to start. This kind of task (carrying ≈ 30 shells of ≈ 50 kg each per day) isn’t really on the high-end as far as “exhausting and physically taxing” goes when you consider what soldiers go through (of course, completely depending on how far they’re carried). However, it does place a significant strain on your body to do it over time. That means they can test these things for this kind of task where the soldiers should be completely capable of functioning without the exoskeleton if it doesn’t work properly. That way, they get testing in non-critical situations before they can scale up the use of these to tasks that humans aren’t even capable of doing without the exoskeleton once they’ve ensured they work properly, don’t break down etc.

Looks like it’s only a matter of time before we see up-armoured assault troops that can carry 100+ kg of gear and shoulder-mounted weapons while taking trenches… must suck to be in the next batch of prospective sunflower fertiliser.