by kragen | 2025-11-11 13:03:40+00:00
> > and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.

> Who told you that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM #video from May 19: #interview with #drones developer Sergey Tovkach from #Russia on how #weaponry from #Ukraine is far better than what the US and even China have, and now 70% of fatalities on the battlefield are from drones.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/... “#Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in #Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more — up to 80 percent of deaths and injuries, commanders say. (...) drones rule the battlefield. They have far surpassed conventional arms as the war’s most lethal #weaponry. (...) The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. But drones now kill more soldiers and destroy more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say. (...) Of the 31 highly sophisticated Abrams tanks that the United States provided Ukraine in 2023, 19 have been destroyed, disabled or captured, with many incapacitated by drones, senior Ukrainian officials said. Nearly all of the others have been taken off the front lines, they added. (...) Ukrainian officials said they had made more than one million first-person-view, or FPV, drones in 2024. Russia claims it can churn out 4,000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025. (...) Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a “robots first” military strategy. ¶ However effective they may be, the drones fall far short of meeting all of Ukraine’s war needs and cannot simply replace the demand for conventional weapons, commanders warn. Heavy artillery and other long-range weapons remain essential for many reasons, they say, including protecting troops and targeting command-and-control outposts or air-defense systems. ”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-88Z-xqImI #video on #Ukraine #drones #weaponry, which it said is largely made by Vyriy and the Vampire’s maker Skyfall. Says dropping 10kg TM62 anti-tank mines onto tanks, and also dropping heavy bombs from drones, is a “warfare first”. The Vampire (Baba Yaga) can carry them 10km. Says the Donetsk battlefield is “dominated by FPV drones on both sides”. The most popular ground drone is Ratel’s 35kg-capacity Ratel S or “Honey Badger”.

> > Operation Spiderweb demonstrated with Russia's strategic bomber force.

> The one that took out max 10 planes from a year long endeavor that occupied significant special forces?

Yes, but that's only the beginning. Don't be like the people who dismissed covid as unimportant because it had only caused 2000 deaths.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-destroyed-t... #Israel #drones destroy two F-14 airplanes in #Iran. #weaponry #politics

> dirt cheap Hydra rockets as a way to reliably take down cheap munitions like Shaheds. That system has been a great success, and is super scalable. Beating that would require much faster munitions (at that point you are a pricier cruise missile) or being launched from so close you might as well use an artillery piece.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_70 a Hydra rocket costs US$2799, the cost of five Ukrainian FPV drones (though still a twentieth of the cost of the Shahed), and Operation Spiderweb found ways to launch their drones from nearly that close, ways that wouldn't have worked for an artillery piece. And you can beat laser targeting by humans simply by launching more simultaneous drones than there are defenders, or by flying below treetop level, or by flying outside the troposphere.

> The US military has fought skies filled with thousands of targets though.

The US military just lost a war against Afghan shepherds, and the people in the US military who "fought skies filled with thousands of targets" retired decades ago. And they weren't paying for thousand-dollar toilet seats at the time.

Also, and this is crucial, thousands of targets is very different from millions of targets, and you are going to be seeing wars with skies filled with millions of targets within five years. More accurately, millions of weapons; the humans are their targets.

It is not going to look like a video game. Those are rigged to be winnable.