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Tanks, Troops in the Open Are Hit Within 10 Minutes: Ukraine Official
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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I'd be curious to see how it plays out with the next major ground operation the US does.
I feel like neither Russia nor Ukraine having air superiority changes the dynamics quite a bit.
I have my doubts that the tactic would work as well if the target has more unfettered ability to bomb your potential staging areas.
Homies acting like the US hasn't been bombing places with drones since 2003
Shaheds Russia is bombing Ukraine with right now are an Iranian copy of a captured Sentinel drone
No I'm agreeing with you.
I'm responding to people sweating about these "new" capabilities like the US has been caught by surprise.
F18
If the F-35 is operating within small drone range, it's probably detectable on infrared tbh. If it's a larger drone, then there's not really much of an advantage of launching it by F-35 because you'd probably be outside of radar range anyway. The F-35 is most useful when it IS accomplishing the role of CAS because it has the benefit of a pilot.
As it stands, I feel like the primary role of jets today is to maintain aerial superiority to drop heavy bombs (which are far cheaper than building an equivalent drone).
The secret here is the word "drop". As in drop them on drones beyond their limit maximum height.
Even cheap consumer-grade FPV drones (e.g. from DJI) have a service ceiling of like 6km. They're just legally not allowed to fly that high lol.
Sorry Maverick you can't drop the drone because it's forbidden in the Terms of Service, over.
That's going to be easily within infrared detection distance, right? Sounds like it would only work against insurgents who don't have access to advanced guided munitions.
I think the whole concept of air superiority is also under question.
How do you have air superiority when hundreds of drones can be launched without airfields or any real infrastructure required?
How do you gain it when SEAD type missions would be constantly needed against hundreds of drones which cost a fraction of the cost of the munitions used against them?
Shit dude, there are a lot of possibilities out there.Airlauch your own drone swarm to give it extra range. Produce drones with further range, better accuracy, and better explosives. Electronic warfare to stop enemy swarms. That's just off the top of my stoned head.
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Airlauch
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Those drones are fast as shit
Well, there's still the infrastructure to actually distribute the drones to where they're deployed.
So if I can use cruise missiles to take out your air defenses, and long range bombers to take out your airfields, and then start hitting supply caches and truck convoys, you might have a hard time actually getting the drones to the areas where they're needed before their targets have moved on.
Or not, I don't know. I'm just curious how it pans out in a more asymetric conflict.
Thing is, modern drones that can take out tanks don't really need staging areas. You can fit one in your backpack and operate it out of a hole in the ground.
I'm not talking small airfield, more like the cache where you would actually keep and distribute the drones.
The whole thing falls apart of you can't keep resupplying them, even if they don't need much space to operate.
Distributing modern drones isn't any different from distributing guns or ammunition or food or supplies. They're small, easy to pack, individually distributable, and require minimal infrastructure.
You might need a lot of infrastructure to launch a Predator, but I could build an FPV drone in my room.
Yeah, but in a warzone distribution of those things can be hard, and is only made harder by an opponent that can bomb you and you have minimal ability to defend or get warning.
You can't just handwave logistics and supply line defense. At some point things get put on a truck and driven to where you hand them out. If the trucks get blown up or that distribution point gets bombed, you can't hand out the drones, and if you can't get them to troops it doesn't matter if they would trounce a tank.
In Ukraine no one has air superiority, so both parties are facing similar logistics issues.
The next time the US does a ground invasion, it'll invariably have air superiority because of navel missile assets and long range bombers being able to clear out defenses. So it'll be curious to see how effective that will be at countering the drones.
If the US is fighting a peer war, how do you plan on them gaining aerial superiority and naval superiority? Ukraine's operations in the Black Sea demonstrate that you can do the exact same thing you're doing with drones in the ocean, and Russia/China both have hypersonic missiles for more distant naval assets.
Moreover, your ability to project with bombers only exists if you've taken out enemy anti-aircraft systems, so you would need air superiority in the first place. That's not a given since F-35s are notorious for having incredibly finicky maintenance that reduces their uptime.
Wars are decided by logistics, so your statement that "if you don't have logistics then drones are useless" is basically saying "if you've lost the war then you've lost the war." Drones require far less logistical management than aircraft or ships or tanks but are easily capable of taking on any one of those things.
Well, for one I thought I was pretty clear in saying I wasn't talking about the US fighting a peer war. That's what I was specifically curious about how it would play out. Are smaller drone tactics like we're seeing in Ukraine able to counter air superiorities ability to make a safe operating environment for troops and armor?
Conjecture about a war between the US and China is entirely out of scope. If the current war has shown anything, it's that Russia isn't actually in the class everyone assumed.
How far off is Ukraine from a peer, though? What are they missing that the US would have in the same conflict (other than sheer numbers)?
Stealth aircraft? Russia has been deploying those.
Naval power? Not really relevant in the Black Sea, particularly with Russian naval defences and antiship missiles.
This is what modern warfare looks like. The only reason this is a shock is because the US has spent the past few decades bullying terrorists in the Middle East.
Thing is, air superiority doesn't do jack shit because drones aren't really operating in "airspace," they're operating barely above the treeline.