so much debt they can never repay it.

I think there’s a slight misconception here (that is quite common). Let’s say you have an income of 100 Kronk, and a debt of 1000 Kronk. Further, let’s say that every year, your income is expected to increase by 5 %, and you spend 5 % of your income to pay down your debt. This year, you pay down 5 Kronk, next year you pay down 5.025 Kronk, etc. That means you can take out a loan of 5 Kronk this year, 5.025 Kronk next year, etc. in order to maintain a perpetual debt of 1000 Kronk, and a perpetual income after down-payments of 100 Kronk. (Adjust the numbers a tad to account for interest)

The point is: Even though you have perpetual debt, every debtor is being repaid on time. You’re basically just refreshing the debt. As long as people trust that you will be able to pay them back with interest, they have no issue giving you more loans - after all, they’re making bank off this.

This is overly simplified, but the idea is basically that as long as your income is increasing as fast or faster than your debt over time, debtors can trust that they’ll get their money back with interest, and you’ll be able to take out loans. This is basically why the US is able to keep taking up more loans, and have an ever-increasing national debt. Whether that trust is justified, and whether this is really a good, sustainable idea is a whole different question.

The issue russia is seeing now is that people don’t trust that they’ll be paid back with interest, at least not in a currency they care about. Basically, their income is stagnating (maybe even declining soon), while their debt has exploded. It’s more about the rate of change and prognosis for future development than the actual income/debt ratio today. When nobody wants to give them new loans, they can no longer “refresh” their old loans: Previously, they could just take out a new loan to pay down one that was close to defaulting if they were in a tight spot, they can’t do that when nobody wants to give them new loans. That means they need to spend even more of their income to pay down loans to keep them from defaulting (which would make the situation even worse for them).

So long story short, they’re pretty much spiralling at this point.

They aren’t trying to push the russians out. They’re trying to make staying impossible.

I think this is heavily under-stated. As long as russia is taking huge casualties without making significant progress, Ukraine is winning. All of occupied Ukraine (and more) is within striking range, so unless russia can completely neuter Ukraines ability to strike occupied territories (which is looking more unlikely by the day), it’s simply limited how long they can hold it. You can’t realistically annex a place as long as sticking your nose out of the bunker can get you killed.

keep the grinder going for many years to come

With current russian losses at 30-40k/month, a 500k mobilisation is enough to feed the grinder for ≈ 12-16 months. Of course, they’ll have standard recruitment on the side, but there’s every reason to doubt that they’ll be able to maintain anything close to the current recruitment rate if they’re doing forced mobilisation simultaneously.

Imagine that though… at the current rate (which has been increasing lately), the russians are set to accumulate 350 000-500 000 casualties by this time next year. That’s a decently sized city, all dead or wounded. I wish they would just stop…

But, But, But if they do that, russia could ESCALATE!!! By… deploying the same ballistic missiles they’re already using? Hitting some residential district again? Sending in another meat wave?

Some Chinese institution: lies

Some journalist: Points it out

Chinese government: “Stop spreading these baseless lies about us!”

This guy: “There sure is a lot of Sinophobia around here these days!”

Seeing the results of russian air defence being forced back to protect the rear!

While this is awesome, I just can’t help but notice that the limiting factor here is so clearly ammunition. I see these stacks upon stacks of parked vehicles, and can only imagine what a single HIMARS or ATACMS strike would do. Sure, Ukraine is doing an absolutely phenomenal job with these drones, but when you’re looking at a parking lot full of ≈ 50 trucks parked close together, probably some 200 km in the rear, drones are simply limited in how fast they can deal damage. It takes a significant number of man-hours just to fly the required ≈ 50 drones to the target, and the enemy gets far too much time to respond by moving the trucks after the first hit. An ATACMS missile or two would wipe out all 50 trucks in minutes.

This just goes to show why Europe needs to step up and send more ammo!

Historically, that’s typically what happened. If the aggressor was beaten back, the defender could decide to push them a little extra back and grab some land or a “buffer zone”. Some years later, the aggressor is mad that they lost land, and have constructed a story about how they were the victims (after all, they’re the ones that ended up losing land). Of course, they need to “retake their stolen land”, so you get a new war. Rinse and repeat every couple decades, and you have European history up until about 1945.

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.