by mrguyorama | 2025-11-11 02:55:38+00:00
>Both Ukraine and Russia have more combat aircraft than the US, if you count drones.

That's just absurd. There is almost no mission a real aircraft can do with ease that a drone can replace.

>and the vast majority of casualties on both sides are from drones.

Who told you that?

>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? Russia seems to continue sending cruise missiles. They are closer to running out of planes, and cannot replace a single loss, but that operation was far more of a propaganda victory than a tactical one. Maybe it caused Russia to have to be more careful about the border and tie up some troops in that?

>The US Army has never fought drone swarms, because they have never been fielded in any war,

The US military has fought skies filled with thousands of targets though. The UK did it before computers, and the US navy invented a brand new networked and automated battlespace management system for their fleet to handle hundreds of Russian cruise missiles launched at a surface group. In the 60s. The same Navy invented a mechanical gyro system for inertial navigation that modern ring laser gyros do not even come close to touching.

People have this weird idea that the US military industrial complex is incompetent and it's just radically misinformed and silly. The F35 had teething problems, same as every craft. The Switchblade is overpriced and underpowered, because it was a tiny experiment for mostly "Special forces" and thus had a special forces price tag. It's also dramatically more electronically sophisticated. The military refuses to build a new self propelled artillery system for.... reasons?

But the US military has a looooong history of fixing those teething problems and creating incredible equipment. Air to Air missiles started with a dud rate of like 60%. But the people who called them a fad were wrong. The people who said the US should invest into more cheap air power that had no bells and whistles (like ejection seats or radar warning systems) and that burning money on expensive SOTA aircraft using cutting edge electronics would be a boondoggle and would fail, and they were so fucking wrong. Literally those exact people were the ones crying about the F35 being crap and not living up to expectations, and they should ask Iran, who had plenty of Russian and homegrown anti-air weapon radars and SAM systems how well they fared against the F35, and the B2 which is an older Stealth system.

Meanwhile the biggest issue with the B21 raider is that Lockhead might lose money on it due to inflation.

The Navy definitely has trouble, but they've always been prima donnas when it comes to procurement, insisting on changing off the shelf stuff with custom requirements and asking for absurdities like the Zumwalt's original cannon, but the Aircraft Carriers are still insane and we can buy frigates from someone else.

Like, you people know that "The Pentagon Wars" about the Bradley was an absolute fiction, right? And that the claims Colonel Burton made in that book are wrong? And if you ask the Ukrainians, the Bradley (an old version at that!) is not only very effective, but an outright lifesaver. Something like 80% and above survivability for crew and passengers when it is destroyed. BMPs have radically worse survivability.

The US military has already adapted, with for example slapping a laser tracker on 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.

The single most powerful thing that small, cheap drones provide is small group ISR, allowing individual soldiers to have the kind of battlefield awareness in trench fighting as your average CoD protagonist. Maybe we are close to emulating the "Enemy, front, 300 feet" from Arma.