Comment by varjag

The development and production lifecycle _has_ to be long for a country not fighting a current war.

Ukrainian munitions get used up almost immediately. They don't need to stockpile, they are in a steady state wartime production.

On the contrary, peace time countries have to stockpile. A manufacturing line cannot be ramped up from zero to wartime, we need low volume manufacturing to retain the expertise and the supply lines. But that, in turn, means that we have to either trash the entire manufacturing output every few months (which would be insane), or stockpile. The latter option also requires building more capable systems so that the stockpiles are still relevant in a few years.

christ, sounds like mcnamara. the americans killed north vietnamese faster than they killed americans, so how come they lost?

TBF a proxy of one of the nuclear superpowers (ie Ukraine using US arms) is quite different from a run of the mill non-nuclear country retaliating against an invasion using conventional arms manufactured at home. The former invites MAD while the latter is predictable and boring. Seeing as they are the substantially larger aggressor presumably they can pull out of this war of attrition whenever they feel like it.

Just because he hasn’t pulled the trigger doesn’t mean there isn’t an actual red line.

Russian stated nuclear doctrine has been treated by the Russians as an existential threat to Russia if followed through on.

I suspect Israel and Russia are looking at each other with "You first!" so that they can start nuking and blame the other for starting it.

> Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with

Mostly because that's useless. Ukrainian weapon production and economy is located in Europe. Ukraine is basicaly western PMC now.

If nuclear war starts, nukes would be falling on European cities and facilities, not Ukrainian.

> most of the world would unite against them

Seriously doubt any country on Earth is going to attack Russia and risk global thermonuclear annihilation over anything other than a direct attack on their own lands.

Russian self-image is protector of the family of Slavic people and nations. Resorting openly to destruction of a Slavic people would be an incoherent tactic.

That self-perception lowered the gate for interference in Ukrainian affairs in the first place, but also set a ceiling on escalation.

" many, including Putin, would be on the chopping block."

I think that's the above comment's point. Attack moscow -> existential threat -> they're already on the chopping block -> nukes.

> Russia would never nuke Ukraine to begin with.

Russia is not fighting Ukraine, it is fighting NATO in Ukraine. And, IIANM, it has the capability of hitting non-Ukranie NATO targets in various places around the world - with cruise missiles and such. The assumption that "oh, Russia will never do this" is actually quite reckless and dangerous; and I don't just mean dangerous to whoever would get attacked, but dangerous for people all over the world, as we may find ourselves in a nuclear exchange with multiple blasts in multiple locations with radioactive matter spread far and wide.

Regarding the drones - definitely agree with you that drones have completely reshaped the experience on the front lines of this war. I understand that in a recent exercise with NATO forces, a Ukranian unit of drone operators essentially "took out" a couple of battalions:

https://www.krone.at/4046529

From looking at the sources below, it looks like Ukraine still has about 1/3 of the fighter aircraft it started the war with, though it started with many non-serviceable units (seems that at least 20 aircraft were non-operational), and received many parts from abroad:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_warfare_in_the_Russo-Uk...

https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losse...

I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.

Pretty sure almost all of the functional ones were destroyed or were kept in such reserve for security they weren't being used.

Electrifying the economy with renewables (and I’ll count nuclear as renewable) is the single most important thing countries can do right now to ensure their own military and economic security.

Distributed solar and wind are more difficult to bomb than nuclear, so they’re probably a slightly better choice (especially if they’re built to island / work off grid).

It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics.

Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.

> Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".

I wonder when drone carrier subs become a thing.

> Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage.

This drone has greater range than an F-35 and is cheaper to make:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-28_Ghost_Bat

https://www.boeing.com.au/products-services/defence-space-se...

Around 1900. They were held in very dubious regard in the early days of development.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1941/january/chap...

On British naval luminary compared submarine warfare to piracy, leading to the emergence a few years later of a tradition of Royal Navy submarine captains flying the Jolly Roger after completing successful missions.

First Sea Lord Admiral Wilson famously called submarines "underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English." Yet this didn't prevent the RN from purchasing submarines from the US in 1901, far earlier than most other industrial nations.

A carrier battle group can easily be seen and tracked by commercial satellite constellations.

At minimum they travel with 6 or 7 ships and leave a wake a mile long and they only go tens of miles an hour, it isnt a speed boat.

Here is an Indian carrier (formerly Russian) on google maps and the US ones are large https://www.google.com/maps/place/14%C2%B044'30.3%22N+74%C2%...

I think people forget how many satellites are pointed at all parts of the planet. They are used for crop reporting and weather and all sorts of shit. It isnt the 1960s where only the super powers have them and they drop rolls of film.

> Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction

I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance.

Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?

What is the carrier for if the jets it carries cannot stop swarms of drones?

The only thing I can come up with is “war crimes”, but, as Iran pointed out, if you can afford an aircraft carrier, you have trillions of dollars of easily hit civilian targets, so you pretty much automatically lose if the other side retaliates in kind.

Once the big valuable vessel is found, it can be reasonably tracked from orbit.

The interesting thing about drones is the ability to attack from many directions at the same time, overwhelming the short-range defenses. IIRC no fewer than 5 naval drones attacked the Moskva missile carrier at once, and successfully sank it eventually. Naval drones are compact, barely visible, and, unlike torpedoes, highly maneuverable.

Aerial drones are also highly maneuverable. Large navy ships are pretty tough on the outside, able to withstand a blast of a moderate-size shell or bomb. But they have smaller, harder-to-reach vulnerable areas. This is the kind of target drones are apt to attack precisely.

Most anti-air weapons are pretty expensive to fire, because they were intended against high-value targets like planes or cruise missiles. They are insufficient and wasteful to fire against hundreds of small, inexpensive targets.

It's like having a shotgun and a sledgehammer, but fighting against a swarm of hornets. Despite a large advantage in damage-dealing capacity, you quickly become incapacitated.

If a network of hydrophones can track submarines, why can't they also track carriers?

China is putting containerized missile launch tubes and drone launch systems on their container ships. If these get widely deployed at some point, there could come a time when there will be weapon systems already on-location in all of the major ports of China's adversaries. Most naval facilities have civilian ports nearby.

Despite the nuclear reactor, aircraft carriers won't stay in the fight long if their supply lines are disrupted. And also it's not likely that a carrier group could fend off a wave of 10,000-20,000 drones launched from a container ship that happens to be sailing near it.

At the end of the day, we rely more on nuclear weapons and MAD to deter these kinds of major hostilities between powerful countries. Talking about how conventional weapons match up is a bit of a red herring. The only thing that would change that would be very reliable nuclear missile/warhead interception systems - and I don't think any country even has a roadmap to such a thing.

Yes, if you keep your carriers out of striking range they are invincible! lmao