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Cont: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine part 9

Dr.Sid said:
I wouldn't underestimate Russia. Ukraine is top drone force at the moment. Russia is close second. Russia doesn't have MBTs because they proved ineffective. So I would ask how many drones does Poland have. How many jammers. What is their drone production, how many they can burn per day. Poland is open minded compared to some other European armies, but I don't think they have nearly enough.
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That's pretty much my thinking.
 
Dr.Sid said:
I wouldn't underestimate Russia. Ukraine is top drone force at the moment. Russia is close second. Russia doesn't have MBTs because they proved ineffective. So I would ask how many drones does Poland have. How many jammers. What is their drone production, how many they can burn per day. Poland is open minded compared to some other European armies, but I don't think they have nearly enough.
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That's the wrong question. Poland is a NATO member. So it's not how many Poland has, but how many the whole Europe has, even if Trump somehow managed to stay out of it. (NATO is an international alliance. It can only be abandoned by congress, not by executive order.) PLUS how many Ukraine has, if the war with Ukraine is still going. They're not gonna just sit down and go, "eh, let Poland deal with it alone."

Oh, and Turkey, Norway, Finland and the Baltic states are also in NATO and have a land border with Russia. And Turkey is a major global exporter of drones. And the Baykar Bayraktar TB3 has a range of 5700 km. Those things can reach Irkutsk in Siberia. In fact, launch them from a bit further east (I'm sure any Baltic state would cooperate) and they can reach Yakutsk where the gas pipeline to China starts. And I mention that as important because Russia doesn't have plants to liquefy that gas; it only goes out by pipeline.

Plus, it's not just drones. Russia has proven utterly unable to stop cruise missiles. And now they'd be dealing with the domestic versions not the hamstrung export versions. The domestic SCALP / Storm Shadow has almost twice the range of the ones they gave Ukraine.
 
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Plus NATO countries are fielding and developing effective anti drone systems, some are already in use in Ukraine and others are being field tested.

What had Russia developed or fielded?

I still maintain that while still being an important factor on the battlefield and integrated in to tactics, drones will not dominate as they do at the moment.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Plus NATO countries are fielding and developing effective anti drone systems, some are already in use in Ukraine and others are being field tested.

What had Russia developed or fielded?

I still maintain that while still being an important factor on the battlefield and integrated in to tactics, drones will not dominate as they do at the moment.
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Yeah, data analysis from Ukraine suggests that it takes more than a dozen drone hits to actually disable a tank. The clips you see online are only the killing blow. Pack a few Skyranger or Serval vehicles with a tank division, instead of sending the tanks grouped in small groups without any defence, and yeah, you might lose a few tanks, but the rest will just roll over the unprotected Russian infantry.
 
Andy_Ross said:
What had Russia developed or fielded?
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Well, AFAIK it was Russia who came up with fibre optic drones. And the West* thought their improvised extra drone protection around armoured vehicles was hilarious until it became obvious we should copy it.

* I'm assuming there were also serious people who did not care about how stupid it looked, but about learning how effective it would turn out to be.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Well, AFAIK it was Russia who came up with fibre optic drones. And the West* thought their improvised extra drone protection around armoured vehicles was hilarious until it became obvious we should copy it.

* I'm assuming there were also serious people who did not care about how stupid it looked, but about learning how effective it would turn out to be.
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I mean in the anti drone field!

Plus wire guidance has existed for decades.

What improvised protection has been copied?
 
Andy_Ross said:
... wire guidance has existed for decades.
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Certainly, but nobody was using a spool of wire to control a drone while receiving high quality video back down the control wire. With a single optical fibre you can send masses of data in both directions at once, using different wavelength lasers, and it's immune to electrical interference.
 
theprestige said:
I think the real benefit of fiber-optic guidance will be the vast amounts of training data for the next generation of drone AI for terminal guidance and targeting.
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That and it's lighter than a steel cable.

And on the positive side, unlike other weapons, it seems to actually help the local fauna. There are photos of birds' nests made of the fibre-optic cable left behind. It's good to be eco-friendly, amirite? :P
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Not so sure about that. Once it breaks up, optical fibre is a sharp hazard like old syringe needles. And there's goodness knows how many thousands of miles of the stuff draped all over the place.
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theprestige said:
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I'm not even bloody joking. Birds (especially corvids) learned to even rip up those barbed wire anti-bird things on some balconies and put them around their nests as defences.

Anyway, about the fibre-optic nests, and this is from Reuters talking to a senior museum researcher, not from some joker on X or Reddit:
 
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