Well, it is a cost effective tool proving again of how flexible Russians are.
But the very same medicine applied against them would have been defeated in most of the cases.
The thing is that all the new latest toys are like paper rock and scissors... nothing is omnipotent and there are things that can counter it easily.
The west looks all powerful fighting third world countries because those countries almost never have the counter weapon... in Iraq there was no abundance of Kornets and large calibre RPGs to counter Abrams tanks... but later on they started to arrive and things weren't so easy.
The availability of MANPADS and ATGMs and other SAMs and more importantly the total lack of long range cruise and ballistic weapons that the west is weakly defended against made those third world countries vulnerable to western attack, yet 20 years of HATO in afghanistan just revealed they are not nation builders either.
Lots of Afghans still remember the good the Soviets did in the 1980s.
The point is that medium sized drones and gliding bombs would be horribly vulnerable to Russian air defences and would be worse than useless because medium sized drones are not cheap and losing aircraft every time you try to launch a gliding bomb is too much of a cost too.
For Russia conversely a medium sized drone to patrol the front line on the Russian side is a cost effective measure that makes sense and after degrading their air defences a gliding bomb is a very effective way to deliver large volumes of HE from a stand off range that keeps your aircraft safe from remaining individual air defence systems.
Drones... recon and suicide drones seem to be the best solution to hunt down air defence and artillery vehicles on or near the front line too.
It only took a year a half, and only one target
The point is that decision making centre suggests there are not a lot of them and in the past the shit ideas they were coming up with were not worth interfering in, but now they are going the terrorist route hitting civilian targets a hit on them can be militarily justified, plus of course the introduction of F-16s and Storm Shadow missiles means airfields in the Ukraine should be hit hard and regularly too.
As well as ammo and fuel dumps of course...
Look at the cook offs rate. It is hilarious.
The failed rounds look like quarter charges for propellent while the last round looked like it was massively over loaded with propellent.
Looked like a 60mm mortar to me... very dodgy.
Lucky they weren't exploding... they didn't even look like they were clearing the fence...
So the rate is not determined by the Russian side. I think this is the optimal approach. NATzO escalation
would arrive under any scenario where their proxies are losing
The west has given lots of money and ammo and weapons and they want to see results which is going to force Kiev to mount an offensive... which will require grouping troops and armour and ammo and fuel together for an offensive... which creates groups of targets that cluster munition 300mm rockets and 220mm rockets and even 122mm rockets are designed to deal with from great distances...
How did a swarm of Ukrainian drones manage to get through Russia's air defenses to arrive at Moscow?
Lots of empty space in Russia where there is no population or SAM site sitting waiting to shoot things down... the weapons that are most effective against small targets like drones also tend to have a quite short range so to cover the border and every square metre inside the country would take millions of systems and what ever path the enemy planned for their attacks you can bet they would try to bypass as many of those systems as they could... rendering them useless.
He isn't wrong though. Both sides are Russian and this is all Barbarossa 2.0 to depopulate and gain territory for them. Nothing has changed and the Western countries like in WW1 like in WW2 are and will be Russia's enemies.
The US spending more money at a time when they should be saving and paying off some of their debt before it becomes overwhelming is a good thing for everyone.
In this case this conflict is getting rid of the idiots who believe the wests bullshit and also the ones that are actually nazis... so this was a long time coming... having a good clean out of the greedy and the idiots... just a shame it is costing good lives to deal with it, but everyone dies... some might want to die of old age in their beds, but others would prefer to die doing something that matters and makes the world a better place... and killing nazis is probably as good as it gets until the aliens invade or the Covid zombies rise up...
What means "wanted"?
Probably means kill them and be welcomed by Russia...
Russia needs to arm its population in the border areas; at least create some sort of territorial defence. Also use modern technology to monitor the border; put cameras and detection devices on all roads from Ukraine entering Russia.
When Kiev armed its population in Kiev those idiots started shooting each other and their own troops seeing enemy forces everywhere...
It is not as effective as it sounds.
Creating a proper territorial force does make sense because it is controlled and coordinated...
Find a fancy expensive residential building in Kiev and jam a cruise missile down the elevator shaft
Find several
They care less about their own civilians than they care about Russian civilians.
What would be more effective is finding all the financial assets of the richest and most powerful still in the Ukraine and start blowing those things up and burning them down and those at the top will start getting told to change tactics or else.
More importantly start hitting American and HATO related targets like the US Embassy which seems massively overstaffed to be an embassy really.
If this is true then it's a big win for the russian air force. That's a lot of il-76.
Would expect sabotage and booby traps galore...
I can see each tank having a controller in a drone to warn it of threats and help with targeting and assign targets. imagine a formation of 4 tanks with 4 extra sets of eyes from drones with a gods eye view of the battlefield. Plus artillery to cover what is forward of the tanks.
Imagine a modern tank like T-14 with three crew but also AI so the commander can command and the driver can drive and the AI can destroy targets as designated by the commander, so what would normally be the gunner is twiddling their thumbs... or perhaps controlling a drone.
Or maybe an auto hover drone that the commander operates that has a flat recharging plate on the engine deck of the tank so it can land and charge up and then take off and hover and fly around looking for targets for the commander who might have it hovering 20m up or 3km up with MMW radar and thermal cameras to see all day and all night in any weather and spot and even mark targets for laser guided missiles etc etc.
Just an idea to use up old stocks laying around and take out the enemy fairly cheaply. Yes the west might make a story out it, but the Russians will have the last laugh.
I agree with what you are suggesting but it would be rather important to know what they are actually keeping in storage and what was recycled because it was obsolete.
SA-1 and SA-2s are certainly obsolete though they did upgrade SA-3s for some countries because they can still be effective against cruise missile type targets at low to medium altitude.
With the SA-1 and SA-2 then their rocket motors are useful as target practise for modern SAMs and their old warheads could be removed and used on medium sized drones as dumb bombs.
Another example would be old 180mm guns they used for a while... very good range but not widely used... perhaps HE shells could be used as free fall bombs for smaller drones (they are lighter than most aircraft delivered bombs). Equally things like 160mm mortar bombs can be used as HE warhead payloads in suicide drones... a 40kg HE fragmentation bomb already designed and made... just unscrew the fins and propellant and fit a fuse.
Missiles like the SA-6 are backwards compatible with some systems so mounting an older SAM on a vehicle would lead to shorter range and lower accuracy but against some targets still very much good enough... you could even use them against ground targets in their original role for many of their larger SAMs.
Would the berm still be there after it goes up?
A berm works by directing the force of the explosion upwards to reduce the chance of it setting off piles of ammo nearby... it often fails with large volumes of ammo because unexploded rounds are blown into the air on fire and land inside other berms and continue to burn until they explode too, but the concept is sound if you build it right... but obviously for a big offensive they are gathering up too many munitions in too small a place which makes them an easier target.
Closer to the front line they will be in much smaller caches and for instance if you have 155mm artillery shells you would distribute them in single firing loads so the gun would turn up and fire off the shells and then leave to the next location.
It is like a distribution network or aircraft system... you have your international airports and your bigger air strips down to more local airfields to areas mown on a paddock with most of the bigger rocks removed. The point is that you might have a dozen international airports but thousands of airfields and tens of thousands of air strips.
You can shoot down the planes and hit the airfields but there will always be plenty of both...
There was that seismic activity in Kiev a few days ago. But who knows. There was that meteor shower directly over Keiv allegedy , during a pretty serious air raid.
Yeah, they said out of 200 meteors the Kiev air defence shot down 190 of them and only ten hit the ground...
They will have to be careful with their bullshit because some in the west will be thinking their air defence works so why would they need any more...
The real question, what can be done against small low flying drones, it seems that shooting them over civilian areas is as dangerous as their strikes, but the interception has to be kinetic as these seem to be preprogrammed.
I suspect agile fast drones that are slightly bigger and faster and perhaps dragging a net or something similar to disable the threats... a large net would be best as most targets will likely destruct when caught so you want it to be far enough away from your drone so that your drone is not damaged so a rather bigger drone will be needed I guess.
Something that can shoot but is only effective over a short range would be ideal... a shotgun armed drone that can fly to 20m away from the target drone and then fire a few buckshot rounds at the target.
At 20m the buckshot would hit very hard and break things like propellers and damage batteries and motors and structure but at 100m it wont be dangerous at all because the round balls are not very aerodynamic and slow down relatively rapidly.
The large number in each shot increases your chance of getting a hit, while their smaller size (than a solid slug) means they don't retain energy to remain dangerous over longer distances like a slug or a rifle bullet would.
Today we Ukraine atacked refinery in southern russia, russia is too large country so there will be always paths to find through air defence and Ukraine knows this and will use it more and more for targets iit decides have value for them.
Which is why Russia has to totally eliminate Ukraine as a country and an idea... escalating will just bring more suffering to the Ukrainian people, but you are too stupid to end it now and get the best deal for now... you want to prolong it so you get less and suffer more... it has always been your choice, but by the time you see that there will be not much choice left.
The irony is that the Minsk agreements were going to get you way more than you could have taken by force then or now.
Production of drones in the Ukraine can be targeted too.
It’s a tricky situation, you can’t really “decapitate” their leadership as who knows who actually run the show? Brits or yanks? I was wondering why this wasn’t done until I realised that it’s not just propaganda. Ukraine is completely controlled by their “partners”. Sorry for expression, but It’s like fighting cancer.
Cancer gets voted out at the end of next year...
Russians are better able to wait for a good result than end it now and being doing this all again in about 4 or 5 years from a rather worse position.
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Ukr SAM missed its target and hit a building apparently drawn by the heat from the flue pipe of a domestic gas boiler.
