Mastodawn

Air defense will soon become an economic impossibility. It is all offense and target intelligence from here on out for the rest of future history. Ukraine is making long range drones which cost 500 Euros to build. They're made of laser cut balsa wood and reinforced polystyrene. They pack just 3kg of explosives. Maybe they get lucky and make it all the way to their target and make a small boom, but if instead they eat a missile from a S-300, well that is a million dollar victory right there.

Infoseepage 4d ago

Seriously, forget about Shaheds, the future belongs to countries who builds a million of these things and knows where to shoot them and then also builds 20k Shaheds.

https://youtu.be/fTcHa2T1uTE?si=EvbYSqQ3sC5Kz99u

CHAÏKA: The $540 Drone Hitting Moscow!

Get an up-close look at Ukraine’s clever, budget-friendly drones built with lawn mower engines and balsa wood! Discover how these DIY marvels outsmart high-t...

YouTube

@Infoseepage Very apropos. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/phillips-obrien-on-iran

Phillips O'Brien on Iran

How clueless are our leaders? Very

Paul Krugman

João Tiago Rebelo (NAFO J-121)4d ago

@Infoseepage so, going underground is a defence tactic to be employed in the future?
I've been told that I have a submariner's disposition regarding open air, so I'm already conditioned to live without seeing sunlight and breathing fresh air...

Infoseepage 4d ago

@jt_rebelo If Iran had made 50k of these things and launched them with giant rubber bands in the last week, every shore side oil installation in the gulf would be destroyed right now. They simply would not have had the air defense missiles, C-RAMs, etc to deal with those sorts of numbers.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@jt_rebelo
Suppression of enemy air defense doesn't have to be a result of RF seeking missiles launched from high survivability aircraft, it can just mean flinging a lot of shit into the sky until your enemy runs out of ammo.

@Infoseepage @jt_rebelo rods from God say hello* 👋

But for conventional stockpiled weapons it’s soon game over due to this, absolutely.

*I know allegedly they were never built and deployed. Allegedly.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo Actually, the thing that these remind me most of is the bat bomb scheme from WW2. The idea behind that was to drop canisters filled with bats with time delayed incendiary devices attached to their legs over a city. They'd descend on the city and roost in random rafter and set the whole city ablaze.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo
These drones are so cheap that you could do something similar. A million bucks lets you launch 20k of them. At that price, you don't even have to target something specific. You program each of them with a different set of GPS coordinates laid out in a grid pattern of a city.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo You launch them all in the middle of the night and suddenly the city is trying to fight thousands of fires at the same time. There isn't an air defense system in the world capable of defending against 20k targets. You bingo every system in the world out of ammo. This is something to the effect of a nuclear bomb in its level of potential effects that virtually any nation state could build.

@Infoseepage @jt_rebelo this is a really, really good analogy.

Terrifying.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo You can also extrapolate to all sorts of other arenas of combat. That $2.5 billion dollar Arleigh Burke probably can't defend itself against a swam of say 500-1000 of something like these adapted with a video camera and an onboard "this is what a ship looks like" image recognition model. Even with 3kg of explosives onboard, the ship has to respond to each as a viable threat, because a lot of modern ships might as well be made of tissue paper.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo And that's much how Ukraine is using them. They launch ~20 of these at a target along a vector and they run all the S-300 missile defense systems along a corridor out of ammo, which opens up the corridor to attack by more sophisticated drones and cruise missiles. They're getting drones all the way to Moscow these days.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo The problem is, right now Ukraine is the scrappy country with a lot of will, passion and no money, but there is nothing in principle to keep almost every country planet from designing, testing and building systems like this on a very limited budget.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo Like, the best way to respond tactically if you were a navy vessel being swarmed by these things might be to only respond to them using CIWS, heavy machine guns and maybe, no joke, people standing on deck with small arms and refraining from using missiles on these slow moving targets. Because otherwise, you exhaust your ammo and that's when your enemy tosses a half dozen hyper-sonic missiles traveling 6 feet above wave height your way.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo The US didn't really have the discipline to do this against the Houthis, and ended up blowing a billion bucks worth of munitions, because no ship commander wanted to let some stupid drone get even close to their command and ruin their career. I think US destroyers only announced a few times when they'd used their CIWS to kill a target during that whole conflict.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo The French were more willing to try things and took down drones with machine guns from helicopters and also main deck guns

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo I just checked and according to Wikipedia, an Arleigh Burke carries 680 rounds for its main deck gun. I'm not sure what the combined effectiveness of all a Burke's systems would be to take down drones, but I know that all but the directed energy systems use ammo. How many drones do you need to launch at an Arleigh Burke before you start getting through? I don't know. Nobody has run the experiment, but it is a cheap experiment to run.

@Infoseepage @jt_rebelo I wonder if there’s a counter involving drone swarms that has been developed but never deployed publicly.

I know there was a ton of (public) research about swarms years ago and that tells me privately things have been going on even longer, but it is curious we haven’t to my knowledge seen them in use.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo If so, it hasn't been revealed by the US military to world. I frankly think we're way, way behind with both offensive and defensive drones. Ukraine, necessity being the mother of invention, has developed cheap interceptors to take down Shaheds, but they're FPV piloted at present and you have to be close by the offending drone's flight path to intercept it within your transmission and control range.

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=0FVsQE_oE-o

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo Ukraine is dealing with in excess of a thousand drone, cruise and ballistic missile strikes a week. They just got hit by like 400 someodd all at once and I think 16 drones/missiles got through to about 10 targets. Again, we haven't yet seen what happens to intercept rates when a country sends up stupidly large numbers of drones in very short time windows.

João Tiago Rebelo (NAFO J-121)4d ago

@Infoseepage @dotsie I mean, we may be seeing it really soon:
https://mstdn.social/@noelreports/116246860954964744

NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Explosions reported in the sky of Dubai, as interceptors are engaging aerial threats, likely Iranian ballistic missiles. Simultaneously, explosions are reported over Tel-aviv, Israel. Air defense is active there as well. #Iran

Mastodon 🐘

Infoseepage 4d ago

@jt_rebelo @dotsie Coming soon to a theater of war near you, many of which haven't kicked off yet, but probably will in the next couple years.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@dotsie @jt_rebelo Just checked and Ukraine's "Sting" drones have a range of 25-35 km, a claimed interception rate of 90% when FPV piloted by skilled operators, and cost about $3000 Euros. They also can be landed and reused if they don't get the opportunity to go boom next to a Shahed or similar drone. So, the interceptors are much cheaper than a Shahed, but not as super cheap attack drones that Ukraine themselves is making.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@jt_rebelo I don't see going underground as terribly effective. It is very costly and you wind up with buried entrance tunnels and the like.

I see defense against this as largely having your second strike capability be mobile, so they don't know where to send these things, plus stuff like GPS jamming.

You could also to an extent do the distributed bunkerization tactic I mentioned. The thing about these is they are so small and cheap and they don't even need a launch vehicle.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@jt_rebelo Your second strike capability with these could essential be a huge distributed network of storing these in glorified garden sheds. The lack of vehicular launch requirements, brings these things down to the level of a couple guys filling them up with fresh gas from a jerrycan and flinging them into the air with a giant rubber band when they get the go signal. Good luck stopping that.

Infoseepage 4d ago

@jt_rebelo The other big weakness of these things is range. Iran isn't going to hit Israel with these, but the quoted range puts everything in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE and half of Oman in peril and even Riyadh would have been in range. A country which builds enough of something like this could create something like a non-nuclear second strike capability against all their nearby neighbors and making these en masse is within the manufacturing capacity of a LOT of countries.