Infoseepage4d ago
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.
Show threadJoão 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...
Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.
Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.
Show threadAllie!4d ago

@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.

Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.
Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.
Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.
Show threadAllie!4d ago

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

Terrifying.

Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.
Show threadInfoseepage
@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.
Mar 17 at 9:17pmWeb
Show threadInfoseepage4d 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.