Comment by dgroshev
8 hours ago
I'm just not sure what to even say when you're both so assertive and completely wrong. Please stop relying on twitter/reddit to inform your takes.
The war in Ukraine is being fought with all tiers of systems, ranging from Zircons and PAC-3 on the high end to booby traps on the low end. All of them are essential, and shortcomings on any of the tiers is ruthlessly exploited by the other side. Saying that it's only the small drones that matter betrays over-reliance on the gory FPV kill footage.
"QA, safety, blah blah blah" get implemented on every level as soon as it's feasible. You can just look at photos from Yelabuga and see how their assembly lines are not fundamentally different from Raytheon's. Ukraine is standardising their drone manufacturing. This is inevitable, because faulty munitions lead to
- killed friendly soldiers if the munitions explode pre-launch
- wasted logistic resources if they don't launch
- wasted time and targeting opportunity or friendly units not getting fire support when they fail after launch
The cost of faults is severe and much higher than just the cost of the munition itself.
It seems that you're misinformed about the real cost of modern FPVs used in Ukraine. Reports of sub-$1000 drones are years out of date and heavily relied on salvaged munitions, but there are only so many RPG warheads you can get for "free". Current FPVs are heavier, more capable, and cost a few thousand dollars. Further, it's reported that it takes dozens of FPVs to kill a single "hedgehog tank", which brings the total cost of one kill to a rough parity with "classic", "expensive" systems like the Javelin, except Javelins can be carried by a mobile squad, and launching FPVs requires a dedicated immobile unit with a long logistical tail.
Don't mistake forces not being ready to counter low-tier threats immediately with the threats being impossible to counter. Group 3 drones are very effectively countered in Ukraine, to the extent that it takes hundreds to deliver maybe a few TLAMs worth of payload to the target. There are mature systems being rolled out right now across western armies, from various gun-based solutions to APKWS. Group 2 drones are decimated with cheap anti-air drones. Group 1 drones are being handled with APSes, which work pretty well even in urban environments, as Israel has (very unfortunately) demonstrated lately.
So now they're standardizing it, cool. Would Ukraine still be around if they had not fought defended themselves initially with cheap toy drones and waited until they had 4 years of QA, non-combat testing, verifying shelf life, etc etc?
The history of war is a nonstop story of armies who consider themselves advanced over investing in old strategies and technology, then being wiped out by a ragtag group of rebels with cheap tools and new techniques beyond the imagination of the "better" military. The natural process is the new tech works, then improves.
A $100 rocket can easily turn the tide in war. Thinking that means that these $100 rockets will stay as they are and never change is absolutely not the point. Users will continue to refine them while keeping them affordable.
And if you're in a country that's being bombed nonstop, frankly, losing a few soldiers or having launch failures is meaningless. Having one successful missile out of 20 still has more benefit than 0 missile launch attempts and just waiting around for some "better" tech.
And while Japan ultimately lost, they effectively used kamikaze attacks where the pilot dies by design in order to terrorize and slow down an invasion. If they told every soldier to just stay on land and hold a gun, it a land invasion would've been more likely and more messy. And by consequence, since the Japanese were so willing to give their life to defend themselves and attempting so would just mean massive deaths on both sides, America avoided invading the mainland entirely and realized just firebombing every inch of the country would be a much cheaper technique that was impossible to defend from. And firebombing worked because it was dropping very cheap and ridiculously large numbers of bombs.