A whole age of warfare sank with the Moskva
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Absolutely incorrect analysis. The signature marine weapon is the Poseidon P8. This is a heavily modified Boeing 737 NG configured for maritime intelligence and attack. This is what sank the Moskva.
If you read the analysis from intelligence reports, the Neptune is a rather unremarkable anti-surface missile with underwhelming capabilities. The Poseidon hovered hundreds of miles away and relayed the combat information to Ukraine commanders when the Moskva was weakened; and more than likely, when its short range defenses were down (likely due to Russian Incompetence). No doubt the Poseidon has watched every Russian Naval asset to figure out they were taking down defense radars and they devised a plan to sneak a relatively crappy Neptune missile in.
I think the defining age is intelligence, but then again, hasn't it always been? It's just taking on new forms. One of the most important and urgent projects the Air Force will undertaken is AWACs replacement with another 737 variant that has PESA, AESA, ELINT, AEW capabilities to this platform and provide the same level of battlefield intelligence on solid ground as we have that the P8 provides for maritime.
Arms without targeting are at best areal suppression weapons. Russia's impressive-looking mobile rocket-launcher batteries appear formidable, but their effect seems largely to be producing a few seconds of terror over a few hectares of land.
Ukraine's ability to target individual generals with precision, to distract and destroy naval flagships, to down helicoptors, to drop munitions on or through tank hatches, to land artillery and rockets with precision on massed troops and materiel ... has been tremendously effective. The shot:kill ratios seem to be extremely high.
At the same time, the US has telegraphed Russian moves, plans, and force structures with precision as well.
What the state and source of this intelligence is varies. Part clearly comes from near-theatre sources such as the Poseidon, other AWACS assets, and probably other capabilities in Nato Europe, Turkey (itself both part of Europe and Nato, though notable for its position on the Black Sea and control of the Bosperous). Much all but certainly from satellite observations. And I'd suspect a considerable degree is based on signals intelligence.
Russia does not control those domains, and has been unable to establish clear control within them. This is unlike, say, any major US campaign of the past 30 years, whatever other concerns might have as to their legitimacy, with the exclusion of satellite capabilities. To date, Russia has not felt it has the ability to move against those intelligence assets. It certainly has the ability to do so should it choose, and a more general conflict might result in that. But for now, it is pinned down in a fishbowl.
Effect here though seems to be a combination of intelligence as to enemy position and operations, the ability to deliver force to specific points of need, invulnerability of observation posts, and a general popular support within the theatre of operations. As well as remarkable material support from outside entities.
This will be (and all but certainly is being) studied in war colleges and curricula for generations.
It seems unlikely that there is direct US involvement - the US doesn't want that and it would slow the Ukranians down.
They seem to have their own networked fire control: https://en.defence-ua.com/events/digitization_of_ukrainian_a... , and have said that Starlink was critical, after the Russian cyberattack bricked a lot of satellite terminals.
They even have a local drone startup: https://interestingengineering.com/ukraines-combat-drone-the...
If the trend towards use of technology continues in this way, future wars between nations will be stopped before they go kinetic by reframing the entire coordination problem that causes them into something addressed through information warfare instead. At worst, you might see low-level stochastic violence.
a very impressive example https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/tttrzs/ukrai...
Wrt. original article - Moskva's air-defenses weren't upgraded during last modernization (completed 2020) due to budget. They upgraded its cruise missiles which got land attack capabilities though - that tells about Russian priorities. The old air-defenses - S-300 and OSA - had issues against such a low flying missiles like Neptunes (i.e. 2-4 meters) though AK-630 CIWS could have potentially shot down those missile if activated on time by the info from the main radar. There are also unconfirmed reports that a Bayraktar was hanging around and took away a lot of attention and probably took down the main S-300 radar antenna of the Moskva right before the attack. The Bayraktar also was doing the mid-course guidance of the missiles thus allowing to not use the main radar of the Neptune battery thus avoiding the battery position detection by Russia.
because the US did not face a formidable adversary in the past 75 years
in a war somewhat comparable with this one in terms of manpower and tech - the Korean War, the US had suffered heavy casualties and had only narrowly escaped a complete defeat
One would be that the US chooses its engagements. Even given that, Korea (1950--53, within your 75 year window), Vietnam, and the Yugoslav war (in which the US was not a major participant but did contribute to the no-fly zone) were reasonably significant, involving Chinese and Russian forces and arms. The Iraq conflicts were not highly symmetric, but did involve threats to US forces, which the US mitigated. On balance, the US seems to treat even highly asymmetric opponents with respect as concerns their ability to inflict harm and damage, and seeks to minimise that.
Another is that even where it faces a highly asymmetric adversary, there are:
- A long and formidible force build-up.
- A preliminary air-superiority campaign in which any possible defences are neutralised.
- A concerted effort to maintain superiority.
I'd say it's a bit from A, a bit from B. But the clear lessons are that the U.S. values, and achieves, total air superiority. In the present conflict in Ukraine, Russia did not, and has not.
Technology has also clearly moved on. The major development of the aughts was in IEDs and remote attacks. To an extent, the US applied countermeasures here again via air and intelligence superiority, with reconnaissance which both detected in advance and replayed after successful attacks the placement and entities engaged in IED emplacements.
I've had discussions elsewhere over the characteristics of Switchblade drones, in particular their one-way "kamikazi" modes. I see two principle advantages:
- A one-way mission should nearly double range, and increase defended area by the square of the range.
- A returning low-speed munition would tend to invite return-fire on the launch point.
Since Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost drones are carried into the field by individual troops, increased mass, decreased range, and greater vulnerability of the deploying troops would all be strongly negative characteristics. My counterypart in that discussion was not convinced, though I find the rationale fairly strong.
I also see drones primarily (and incredibly) useful for recon, but not for combat - we already have cruise missiles and guided artillery for that, and under wartime economy, they could be mass produced much cheaper than they are now
because the US did not face a formidable
adversary in the past 75 years
Those were not green troops. They had fought Iran for close to a decade, were well-equipped, and were fighting on their home terrain against a US force that had little to no modern desert warfare experience.
I don't think the US-led coalition's brilliant strategy and execution should be confused with a total lack of fighting prowess on Iraq's part.
South Korea and allied powers were significantly outmanned during the Korean War, and the idea that the US had any kind of decisive technology advantage in theatre is belied by the accounts of lack of US preparedness post WWII.
Is the Korean war comparable, or a non-significant adversary of the past 75 years?
(The Korean war began 72 years ago, and ended with an armistice 69 years ago.)
A CTG affords considerable intelligence, logistical, and rapid-response capabilities.
What is to stop the US from actually piloting these drones
Diplomatically? The risk of nuclear escalation or various WWIII-esque scenarios, because at that point you have the US military directly killing Russians.
Assuming that the US (gulp) does not actually want WWIII, I can't see them flying the drones themselves unless they could somehow have 100% plausible deniability. Keep in mind that Ukranian facilities and perhaps the whole country itself could fall to Russia, and all secrets might then be revealed to the Russians. Or a single base could be captured. Or Russia may be able to spy/intercept/deduce this information.
Just as Soviet pilots have been killing Americans in Korea and Vietnam, despite not technically part of the war.
There is no "simple legal trick" to start a war.
I don't think this is down to intelligence, it is just how the NATO anti-tank missiles are designed to work.
Those drones have limited range, and need to be proximate to, and be able to rapidly find, targets.
Which requires intel.
At this point ... I lack specific information on where or how that intel is aquired. Some may be from surveillance-drone flights or getting lucky sending out individual drone-attack missions. I suspect more, however.
This seems exactly like both Iraq wars, except that Sadam's troops might have had working encrypted radios.
In the first war, massively undergunned (in terms of number of rounds of ammunition) US tanks would enter a battle, and 66% of them would immediately get stuck in a boot loop, or otherwise break down.
The remaining ones would rapidly fire a dozen rounds or so a few miles in a dozen different directions, anihilating enemy equipment well before it had any hope of striking back.
Then, logistics people would go out and fix the stranded tanks.
It's pretty obvious that the targeting systems and supply lines were what held everything together during those campaigns.
Ukraine has been dominating in those two dimensions as well (using US equipment and intelligence, in many cases).
>During the war, the Abrams tank exhibited good reliability, lethality, sur- vivability, and mobility, but limited range, according to the observations of commanders, crews, maintenance personnel, and Army after action reports. Reported Army readiness rates for the Abrams were 90 percent or higher during the ground war-indicating a high availability to move, shoot, and communicate during combat.[1]
The GAO report you linked is conspicuously missing failure rates, and doesn't contradict anything I said above. In fact, it supports my claims.
Turning on 90% of the time immediately after being repaired doesn't mean its running at the end of the day, or even an hour later!
From the GAO report you linked, they ran out of most types (60%) of spare parts and started cannibalizing tanks after only 4 days of operations. They had major computer issues ("communication issues" according to the report), and had to fall back on old fashioned radios and obsolete targeting.
In addition to the availability issues, these problems caused the US to accidentally or intentionally destroy 1% of its own tanks during the 4 day operation (the breakdown from the report is below).
The report also talks about how the recovery vehicles were unreliable and had major problems reaching broken down tanks. It makes it clear parts shortages were due to the tanks burning through a large stockpile of parts that had been shipped there before the operation began, not due to poor planning.
There's no way those tanks would have survived an operation that dragged on for months like Ukraine has.
However, the operation was a success despite this.
I think this supports my conclusion that superior targeting and logistics won that war, not reliable, robust hardware platforms.
The rest is pasted from the GAO report (I didn't correct their OCR errors):
Abrams crews indicated that its range was limited because it frequently had to stop to (1) refuel to compensate for high fuel consumption and faulty fuel pumps and (2) clean air filters due to extremely sandy conditions.
Bradley and Abrams crews reported problems obtaining repair parts, and many had exhausted their limited supply of some parts by the end of the loo-hour ground war. Because of these problems, according to some Army logistics personnel, sustainability could have become a major problem had the war lasted longer. Crews also experienced problems in posit,ively identifying enemy targets and in having to use outdated and unreliable radios.
...
For example, logistics personnel from the 1st Cavalry Division told us that about 60 percent of the parts they were authorized had zero balances by the end of the war. To compensate for the inability of the established system to provide needed parts, combat units had to search logistics bases for needed parts, to trade with other combat units, or to take parts from other vehicles. According to some Army personnel, the inability to replenish parts reserves could have impeded sustained combat operations in a longer war.
...
23 Abrams were destroyed or damaged in the Persian Gulf area. Of the nine Abrams destroyed, seven were due to friendly fire, and two were intentionally destroyed to prevent capture after they became disabled. Similarly, of the 28 Bradleys destroyed or damaged, 20 were due to friendly fire. Moreover, weapon system capabilities were not optimized because the weapons’ ranges were greater than the sights’ ranges. Crews also noted problems with ineffective radios and suggested that a navigation system be installed in every Bradley and Abram% Army officials recognized the need for improvements in these areas (see app. III).
You sir, you need to provide some references.
First I've ever heard of that.
Just junk.
Carlson said while the U.S. could give Ukrainian forces a general idea of where the ship was, it could not provide necessary tracking information to the Neptunes because P-8s datalinks were incompatible.
https://news.usni.org/2022/05/05/warship-moskva-was-blind-to...
>There’s also some other speculation suggesting that “Moskva has/had a single main air defence radar (3P41 Volna) for guiding S300 missiles, which has only a 180 degree field of view. Therefore, 360-degree coverage is provided by the 3-D long-range air search radars MR -800 Voshkod/Top Pair for short-range missiles SA -8.” The claim reveals that the Top Pair radar couldn’t distinguish the Neptunes flying over the sea from the crests of the waves due to the stormy weather.
These claims lack a solid basis, as the ship in question is a cruiser with good air defense capabilities. Although TB2 drones are very useful in naval warfare, cruiser-type ships are designed to track and repel multiple air contacts. As a result, paralyzing a Slava-class cruiser with one or more drones is unrealistic.
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/04/analysis-chain-...
>Though it makes for a compelling tale, this narrative is almost certain to be false. Not only are the radars and their operators onboard a warship like the Moskva more than capable of detecting and tracking more than just a single target, and would in fact do so virtually automatically so long as they were operating, but if they were in fact tracking a drone then situational awareness should have been at at a higher level than if the attack had occurred out of the blue.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/04/neptunes-wrath-flagshi...
On paper, a Slava-Class cruiser should have no issues tracking a drone and plenty of other incoming missiles and aircraft. That was in fact, the scenario it was designed to face. I suspect there's just simply too much we don't know and too many unanswered questions. There's a lot that would have to work correctly for the Neptunes to be targeted, from the search radar, handoff to tracking radar, and then successful intercepts by the medium tier SAMs and if not those, the CWIS. There's plenty that can go wrong. And keep in mind, there have been very few successful AShM intercepts in history.
If the full story ever gets told, it will be read by many, I'm sure.
Not your text, but that assumes a design focus that is not in evidence. It's a necessary focus for a USN cruiser, but that consideration isn't necessarily the case for a USSR designed cruiser, especially if the translation isn't one to one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIjoyIieOzY&t=1163s
The 2 Neptunes were probably enough, given the right circumstances (ie, lack of fast response by the Russians).
* Boat moving slowly? Check.
* Boat oriented in correct direction for broadside attack at the waterline? Check.
* Short range defense radars down? Check.
* Other defense assets out of the area? Check.
"Ok bring up your targeting radars and fire"
But the core of the article still stays - smaller weaponry is becoming much more effective and in any future conflict will be critical.
We can see it through the centuries - from big castles and heavy armoured knights, to lightly armoured mobile units and temporary fortifications.
In the Gulf War, when the enemy fired a shell, radar was used to calculate where it was fired from, and that location got a radar-directed shell directly onto it.
Incredibly effective.
Logistics
Note that Ukraine now has gotten new artillery from France that has longer range than apparently anything the Russians have.
90% of the merchant vessels in the world belonged to the British.
The British Empire and the the USA were the 2 largest economies in the world.
Once the USA entered the war the outcome was not in doubt, even if the German army hadn't been given mission impossible vs. the Russians - although if they hadn't then the Russians would have attacked them.
It had enough range to reach the target from shore, enough precision to hit it, and enough warhead to kill it. That's good enough.
The lesson from this is that warships can no longer operate with impunity near a hostile shore against a reasonably equipped opponent. "Near" is at least 100km. A truck-mounted system can now take out a major combatant vessel.
Finding large ships isn't that difficult any more. They show up on everything from civilian satellite imagery to drone cameras.
> It had enough range to reach the target from shore, enough precision to hit it, and enough warhead to kill it. That's good enough.
When you put it like that, it's kind of scary to think what GP's definition of whelming capabilities would be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-158C_LRASM
Then there's hypersonics, which, when flying at low-level, reduce the possible reaction time by the target by several orders from the moment it is detected at the radar horizon (best case!) to impact. Subsonic missiles, provided they're detected, take longer and allow for more reaction time.
The Neptune is basically a domestically built version of the Soviet Kh-35, with minor improvements. It's a contemporary of the U.S. Harpoon, and that one is rather long in the tooth. It's not to say that they're bad, nor is it any dig against the Ukrainians. Any capability is better than no capability! But it wasn't a frighteningly new technology either, and one that, on paper, the Moskava should have been capable of handling. It didn't, and it raises questions.
First, you have the sea. It's flat, it's quiet, and it's pretty much void of surface and aerial radar contacts. Missile stealth is really hard in this environment because of the quiet background, and the Neptune is not stealthy. The ship-based radars are really only limited to the curvature of the earth... so for the Moskva, that's probably 9miles in bad conditions, 18miles in best conditions. The cold background even allows IRST to work quite effectively (not sure if the Moskva has that capability). The target ship is going to know you're coming, especially the Moskva, as in the absolute worst conditions, that's about 30s-45s of warning time, or 10m-15m if you have an AEW radar.
Second, radar blindness is a two way street. You can fire a missile, but it will be blind to its target until it's pretty close and can activate some sort of terminal phase guidance. Navies _always_ keep their ships moving to avoid attacks. Basically, for a sub-sonic missile, you can fire it at where the target is now, but by the time it gets to where it thinks the target is, it may not be there anymore. There's a couple of ways to handle this. For Navy's very modern LRASM, that's a passive link receiving mid-course updates, with fallback to GPS/Inertial guidance. For the Neptune, it's just inertial guidance. Just _moving_ the target ship around randomly is enough to protect it from a Neptune strike and Russia did not do this.
Third, your missile needs to broadside. Ships are designed to cut through the water, so a head-on attack will just cause the missile to skip off the bow. Your missile needs to have enough spare fuel to turn about and detect the orientation of the ship. Again, you can defeat this by randomly turning your ship a bunch of times. There's a case in the Falklands war where an Exocet was coming in hard for a kill, but the ship's commander had enough time to orient the ship towards the missile with full rudder, and the Exocet bounced, then exploded on the deck rather than penetrating. There was damage, but ship stayed in combat. The Neptune doesn't have great loiter time. And its rudimentary radar terminal guidance it's probably easily attacked electronically anyway.
Finally you have point defenses. Russia actually has quite sophisticated CIWS systems, both missile and rotary cannon. It's speculated that the only really guaranteed way to defeat these systems is a saturation attack, which was not the case, or a supersonic terminal phase, which the Neptune is not capable of. Russia pretty much had all its defenses down.
So no, the Neptune is really not that sophisticated. This attack was successful purely based on knowing the limitations of the weapon system and timely intelligence.
It's speculated that the only really guaranteed way to
defeat these systems is a saturation attack
Obviously, there haven't been a whole lot of naval conflicts in recent decades. And antiship missiles are not cheap (although, obviously much cheaper than ships)
But, still. They seem like such an obvious method of attack that it seems weird we haven't really seen one in earnest.
Are there specific technological issues that need to be worked out?
Is it just me, or does this comment appear arrogant?
You you are taking all the credit and belittling the folks that did all the fighting, based on nothing but your own speculation?
As you state, antiship missiles are unremarkable, I believe 1980s pop and drop from above are undefendable. I got argued down about antiship ICBM/IRBMs, but I still think they will work. And drone subs will make any nearshore unnavigable to capital ships, if the cost of your carrier is 10x the cost of a fleet of 100 drone subs whose only job is basically fire a couple torpedos.
Drones/infantry portable weapons are being tested in real time by the pentagon with the Ukraine war, against a reasonable facsimile of a peer war.
The only thing lacking is high altitude anti air, but I think this war will result in the true air superiority denial weapon: the cheap air drone. Hell, it could be a solar balloon-drone hybrid: stay up as long as you want, relocate with "acceptable" flexibility, fire missiles at aircraft.
That will push more emphasis to Space superiority I predict.
The other aspect of force multiplication of drones hasn't been properly explored or used yet in this war: drones are currently used as CENTRALLY coordinated weapons. But if you also have combined arms drones coordinated by boots-on-ground infantry, that means your ten man squad can direct (with low casualty risk) ten faster, better armed, more capable drones in helicopter, grenade shelling, scouting, and direct fire. And if you can give basic AI orders to a drone once you get it place and then direct other drones into position, then a 10 man squad may be able to direct 20-30 ones. And they can have reserves to deploy if their controlled drones get damaged. And they are probably more durable to fire.
Truly effective infantry forces have sergeants and officers with ability to adapt tactical battle plans on the fly. Current drone organization doesn't strongly support this, but then again we are in the stone age of drones.
ASBMs have a similar issue in that there's no way for them to get out of the radar view of the target (or a ship near the target). And we've got missiles designed to take them out as part of the target set (SM-3 and SM-6 are quite capable, depending on range).
Drone subs are just mobile minefields. The idea of a mobile minefield isn't new, and you have all the problems of a minefield (including, but not limited to: sinking ships you didn't intend to), along with new challenges like: how do you communicate with your drone subs?
Your cheap anti-air drone is just a missile carrier? You're thinking weapons, not systems here. How do you target with them? And how do you keep them from getting targeted? Even being 20kft up (and improving the range that way), an equivalent AAM from a fighter will have longer range, simply because it's able to be launched from Mach 0.85, instead of 30kts. Sure, the drone might be cheap, but the missile won't be.
Brings back memories of Network-Centric Warfare [0], with self-synchronising edge-based forces operating on the cusp of tactical anarchy, IIRC.
> AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) is the name of the specific system installed in the E-3 and Japanese Boeing E-767 AEW&C airframes, but is often used as a general synonym for AEW&C.
> An airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) system is an airborne radar system designed to detect aircraft, ships, vehicles, missiles, and other incoming projectiles at long ranges and perform command and control
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_early_warning_and_con...
It's a variant of the 737-NG, not the 737-MAX.
The Moskva (and ships in general) aren't really made for a war where you can't shoot down AWACS. Because they can't be.
Generally the assumption is that the AWACS is going to be shot down, very fast. It's a pretty solid one to make, too.
But of course there was also a lot of incompetence, and the sheer age and obsolescence of the Moskva didn't help either.
Through also we had been at a point where a lot of trope movements are always under watch by satellites and now supplemented by various kinds of drones (some call it the unblinking eye) before.
We also have a lot of ways to take advantage of it (long range artillery, big drones, Javelins, small suicide drones, etc.).
What changed is not the general capabilities we have nothing I listed (except maybe the small suicide drones) is new.
What is new is how we can and in case of Ukrain do combine this weaponry and information systems.
So I don't thing any of the tech involved is the defining factor, it's the combination of them in the right strategy.
There have also been regular AWACS circular flights over Romania near the Black Sea and Global Hawk flights in the Black Sea.
Navy weapon-namegivers lack imagination.
Right now we're using drones like we used early WW1 aircraft. As spotters for long range weapons and very occasionally as direct bombers. We haven't yet developed drones that shoot down other drones cheaply. So we can spot enemy formations, ships, tanks etc. without any cost effective way to stop the small spotter drones.
I see this changing soon. We will soon have small cheap drones that will take down nearby spotter drones and the balance will change yet again.
So don't throw away old tactics and equipment just yet. There's a gap where we have no reasonable way to stop drones that will soon be addressed.
Remote Controlled land and water units would also work.
There are multiple reasons why it's the future.
1. Cheap to make
2. Can be smaller since they don't have to have space for humans to sit in them, which might increase ability to carry things, longer range etc.
3. Because humans don't have to be inside of them they can also go a higher speeds, maneuver faster without human body limitations
4. If a drone goes down, the drone pilot can man another one. All that training and knowledge is retained. Human operated vehicles have a high probability of losing their occupants.
5. If 5,000 drones get destroyed, it's lost money. If 5,000 military personnel gets killed it appears much worse in terms of optics, value of life etc.
Most civilian devices aren't designed to do that because it's usually more expensive. There are also nebulous arguments about hindering law enforcement (but also counter-arguments about criminals eg "if you outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns").
I feel like assuming that the device will be lost/destroyed can help optimize for short-term performance. Why not add a few grams of C4 to it, to make sure that it and its silicon are absolutely unrecoverable and in many pieces after its operational lifetime?
But, that's actually very close to what I was thinking about! I was imagining something with a much shorter range, however. Something like 1km, compared to that thing's 10km.
$200 is an incredibly ambitious target that's unlikely to be hit, but it's also not necessary to bring costs that low. Our military budget is $800B/yr and our current drones cost way more than $2000. Simply bringing the costs down a bit would get us sufficient quantity.
It’s doable rn
https://www.afcea.org/content/artillery-eyes-provide-sight-g...
The U S army worked on putting cameras in howitzer shells as far back as the 70’s, so short-ish range (10 miles or so), but cheap by military standards.
Though these days a cheap plastic drone might easily be less expensive if mass produced.
It’s the watching, tracking, and recording. It’s the months of getting to know every aspect of the individuals.
They become real, not just the ‘enemy’.
If killing someone through a camera is action-at-a-distance, so is blowing up an opaque metal box that you know probably has four humans in it, or firing your artillery piece at a grid square that probably has some humans in it, or dropping a bomb on a glowing blob on a thermal sensor that's probably a human. Even in daytime infantry-on-infantry combat, at a lot of ranges you're not shooting at people, you're shooting at piece of cover you saw gunfire emanate from. All of these partially-removed actions are also mainly what we're seeing drones do well at.
While one could design a killer robot to go inside buildings and shoot people while looking them in the eye, the complexities and timeframes of close-range combat make it seems like the very last place for robots to replace infantry.
They loved the formers gun camera videos and stories. They squirmed and looked at their desserts when the latter showed up close and personal pics of the “Highway of Death”in Kuwait. Miles and miles of burned bodies in the sands.
Pilots don’t have to watch in 4k like the button clickers do.
I have zero military experience so just guessing!
Maneuverability doesn't count for a whole lot in the real world. For manned aircraft the trend is to de-emphasize maneuverability in favor of signature reduction, ECM, and decoys. While it's theoretically possible to design a UCAV that could pull >9Gs, in practice it's totally pointless. That would make the airframe too heavy and expensive, and would adversely impact other more important qualities like endurance and magazine depth.
One way to make a stealth drone is to make it operate autonomously, without sending back a video feed. But nobody is comfortable with that for obvious reasons.
The approach the French have proposed for their next gen fighter jet is to have a stealth jet surrounded by a swarm of stealth drones. The pilot commands all the drones, and so any radio links would be short range and therefore hard for an adversary to detect.
Can signal relay swarm mitigate this threat?
To an extent, but the large the drone is (so it's more capable of range and payload capacity), the less the relative manned penalty is.
> 3. Because humans don't have to be inside of them they can also go a higher speeds, maneuver faster without human body limitations
Similar to above: the bigger the drone, the more they get constrained by other factors than the human body. A drone the size of a F-15 isn't going to be significantly more manueverable or faster than a F-15, simply because the G limit is in part due to the fact that plane can only be so strong, and the engines can only supply so much thrust.
We have only to look to WWII to see the strategic value of sapping the enemy of their experienced pilots. Which, in turn, could mean that shooting down enemy drones is no longer a goal. Perhaps it becomes more like a carrier formation, with a drone formation defending the operators, and the aggressor looking to destroy the operators instead of the drones. Much like how a carrier is a far larger prize than a carrier fighter.
Conscript armies get treated as cannon fodder.
Counter example is the conscripted Allied armies at the end of WW2. In the last few months, the allies would much rather expend a mass of munitions rather than lose troops, especially front-line infantry, who were very hard to replace.
The US military is all volunteer today, and is very parsimonious with the lives of servicemen.
They're being shot down with air defense missiles designed for helicopters, because that's the cheapest option we currently have.
Once RFPs, responses, and projects work their way to completion, everyone will have anti-drone air defense missiles that, while still expensive, will be better cost:capability calibrated.
The real difference that drone warfare seems to make is in persistence of ISR, which is why so much funding seems to be going into stealthy HALE platforms with stealthy networking and sensors (point to point and LPIR).
The correct lesson to take away from Ukraine seems to be that future battlefields will have key assets (tanks, ships, supply stores, HQs, etc) under threat to a greater depth behind front lines. And not because of a capability change (i.e. a drone can get there with a weapon), but because of a visibility change (a drone can loiter and identify the asset).
Creating a smoking hole in the ground at an arbitrary location is a capability most advanced militaries have had since the 1990s.
What's changed is the ability to find something valuable to place that hole on, at all times, anywhere, at a cost you can organically equip smaller units with.
Ever C4 inside a grasshopper (as the grasshopper also need space to move), is going to be tiny.
Even if you made the grasshopper out of solid, but explosive plastic, a mini nuke would be far scarier.
I wonder, what the minimal size of a nuke is. I'm sure we have limits, due to materials, explosive force to cause the compression wave, etc, but I wonder the theoretical limited mini size.
I mean, what if an earwig could enter your ear, into your canal, then go boom, and turn your brain to mush?
Critical mass for plutonium is 10 KG. A nuke needs to be supercritical, plus the mechanism of the bomb itself. Smallest nuke ever built is 50kg, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_devic...
Smallest nukes were phased out by all major nations because there is too much risk of them getting lost, falling into wrong hands, being used without authorisation, etc. Several 'big' nukes were already lost and never found
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of... Note that explosive compression lowers the critical mass, but it soon requires more than one gram of high explosive to trim the fissile material budget by one gram, so minimal-size devices are still in the range of kilograms.
The individual units could travel a circuitous route to the actual target without raising much suspicion and once in the immediate vicinity they could be programmed to rapidly converge on the target.
That's how I see it. With self-assembling munitions you have less waste of resources, you can target individuals in a command structure or individual critical components of their military infrastructure and you could do it with things that could be made to be relatively inconspicuous so that an observer could see them as a normal part of the environment. Until they converge of course and if this happens fast enough it can be difficult for the targeted entity to unravel exactly how it all went down.
Future war looks scary to me.
The American W82 155mm nuclear artillery shell[0] weighed 43kg (95lb), was 860 mm (34 in) long, and had a yield of 2 kilotons -- equivalent to 500 full WW2 heavy bomber loads.
These shells (as well as bombs and warheads with similar yields, carried by planes and missiles, respectively) are called tactical nuclear weapons -- meant for use on the battlefield, to break up enemy formations. Their blast radius is relatively small. It was theorized that if the Cold War went hot and a conventional WW3 broke out, if the Soviet Union was pushing NATO forces back, then the Americans would authorize the use of tactical nuclear warheads. This would likely cause a spiral of escalation, up to a strategic nuclear exchange.
I think anti-drone drones are going to quickly move to being autonomous. No one's going to worry too much about "accidentally" taking down a simple drone and the threat of just one kamikaze drone getting through is too high to chance a delayed human reaction. Plus jamming or other measures will make direct control more difficult. An army will likely have a few circling "CAP" drones overhead at all times.
The proximal goal of any weapons system or operation is to deliver live ordinance to the target, preferably at minimal risk to those doing the delivering.
From WWI to WWII, the progress seemed to be to deliver larger volumes of ordinance, with some increases in accuracy. Since then, it's been longer range and higher accuracy, to the point now that we often need only a pair of 'smart bombs' or JDAMs to take out a target that used to take multiple full bomber loads. With highly accurate targeting, we can even deliver non-explosive ordinance just to minimize collateral damage. Of course Javelins, Switchblades,etc. make it close to 1-shot-one-kill on tanks and other heavily armored vehicles that used to be tough to kill.
Following the trend further, drones and AI recognition technology seem likely to make this even more effective. I'm sure everyone has seen the Slaughterbots video [1], but much loser in technology is killing swarms of small bots specifically targeting enemy equipment, and the loitering switchblade is already here - just add some recognition, maybe it recognizes, operator confirms, and the drone tracks it for the optimal strike moment. Add the swarm then seeks and destroys other examples of the same vehicle.... Small self-contained flying ordinance delivery drones being disgorged from larger carrier drones or aircraft - already in design & testing stages. This IS all going to change and fast, and the smart militaries are taking a LOT of notes on this battle.
That's hard to imagine. You can do the spotting job with a $400 consumer device. No piece of autonomous weapons delivery hardware in the modern world exists with a price tag less than 100x that amount. Drones are simply too cheap.
If there's a reasonable countermeasure, look to ECM (though frankly modern broadband wifi is remarkably resistant there too, given all the "jamming" present in modern coffee establishments!) and not drone killers.
As a weapon, they could carry weapons similar to submachineguns, shotguns or light marchine guns, depending on the size of the target. Add an AI of about the same level of sophistication as the "autopilots" in cars, and they should be able to identify and shoot down hostile drones relatively cost efficiently. Produced at scale, the smallest versions (designed to shoot down comercially available drones, for instance), would not have to cost all that much more than the drones they are designed to shoot down, if produced at scale.
I'm imagining at least 3-4 size categories, lets say. 1) Tiny, able to shoot down most quad copters. Top speed of 50-100knots. Price needs to be low enough to allow tens of thousands to be produced. Could potentially also double as anti-infantry weapons by strafing. 2) Small. Able to shoot down switchblade-sized drones. Top speed of maybe 200 knots. Can be produced in numbers of thousands. 3) Medium. Sutable to hunt small UAV's, such as Buyraktar. Top speed of several hundered knots, maybe just below Mach 1. Somewhat more expensive than the Buyraktar, but can also carry some of the same ordanance, like a tiny fighter-bomber. 4) Full-sized, possibly supersonic. Basically the same as the Loyal Wingman concept. Designed to counter other full-sized drones as well as manned aircraft.
Basically, the removal of a pilot, allows aircraft to span a wide range of sizes, and I would expect all sizes to be produced, as it is uneconomical to hunt quadcopters with full sized aircraft, while it is impossible to hunt supersonic aircraft with switchblade type aircraft.
In a way, this would be analogous to naval vessels, with different sizes serving different roles, from corvettes, MTB's and attacks subs, through frigates and cruisers, to WW2 style batlleships or carriers.
Now, for the AI researchers out there, imagine the careers that can be built around providing AI's for these vehicles. To see your own AI locked in a WW2 style dogfight with a similar drone from another country, in a real-time feed.....
The problem is that precision guided munitions are fairly expensive. Drones are cheap, but giving them any kind of offensive ability increases the cost significantly. A switchblade drone only costs about $6,000 and there still aren't swarms of thousands of them. Maybe once the economics enable massing hundreds of thousands of drones, autonomous control will become more reasonable.
Exactly this. How many drones can you get for the price of 100 F35's?
If you get that many drones, you want to have drones that can attack both enemy land units AND enemy drones.
Here I will just provide a couple of links to a couple of anti-air drone systems under development:
> But concepts that would fall under this class are under development. One relativly large example is Baykar Bayraktar Kızılelma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_K%C4%B1z%C4%B...
> This one is a hybrid drone, capable of both anti-air and anti-ground missions. It would fall under what I would consider "medium" size.
> Here is an early model of a Russian attempt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcAqF5BVLU4
Colourless, instant laser is the Star Wars we deserve, not the Star Wars we wanted, though ;)
I tend not to believe this. In part because Russia is very comfortable with shameless lying, and in part because it's really hard to deliver enough energy with a laser to a moving target. That said, non-moving (hovering) drones would be very reasonable targets as you can illuminate for as long as it takes for an important part to melt.
BTW my favorite anti-drone tech are trained hunting hawks. Hawks are a weapon for a more...civilized time.
Heating to create sufficient damage takes multiple seconds in good conditions. They work great in field tests where the operator can keep the target aligned exactly for a while and the target operator isn't evading. Add mirror finishes, thermal shielding, automated detection and evasion, much of which is cheap, and that'll stay a demonstrator weapon for a long time.
I don't think anyone is worried about the claimed Russian lasers against drones (particularly since Russia tends to tout a lot of vaporware), but I'd be worried that since Russia is already happy to systematically commit and even advertise their war crimes, that they'd start using the lasers as blinding weapons despite the fact that it is also a war crime.
-Catch-22
This post says they downed 65 "targets" in one day so I'm guessing they're the cheap drones. https://t.me/LastBP/9398
I recently found a video at https://twitter.com/FortemTech/status/1526925732122968067 (source: https://twitter.com/TomReiner4/status/1528214932461846528) which shows an anti-drone drone. Unfortunately, I couldn't find its price tag, but looking at the images in the manufacturer's site, it doesn't look like it would be much more expensive to manufacture than an equivalent-sized DJI drone.
for plane-like drones... guess something similar. gliders may be super hard to spot and will still be somewhat effective without a working propeller, so tough luck.
Gliders will be easier to spot because they won't be able to actively navigate through trees for cover the way the way a more nimble, powered drone could.
ISIS peeps have been dropping mortar rounds from DJI drones for a few years now, it's already a reality
I think once the detection methodology is worked out for ground forces (which aren't as constrained by power/weight issues as airborne systems), we'll see directed energy weapons (probably microwave) used to effectively fry these types of low performance drones. Whether the detection problem is solved is an entirely different issue than the weapons used once detected.
It was a lot more complex than that. Lots of factors were in play, including introduction of combined-arms warfare that included aircraft but more significantly the tank. More generally, see the Hundred Days Offensive [0]
My understanding of the WW1 tank was it showed promise but was not decisive.
Even in WW2 where air power was far more powerful, it's still debated how much it contributed to success.
The allies certainly had tactical air superiority in the last few months of the war, which hammered German Armour, but didn't in itself wipe out dogged resistance. The Luftwaffe was pretty scarce over the battlefields because it was occupied trying to stop the bomber offensive over Germany itself. The bombers themselves didn't really begin to properly dismantle German manufacturing until 1945. So air power did contribute to success in the end, but not as anticipated before the war.
The Air Force was very, very effective at supporting the ground troops. Whenever the soldiers got stuck on the ground, they'd call in the P-51s to wreck whatever was blocking them. The tanks and Wiederstanden were highly vulnerable to air attack, as well as getting their supply lines cut off.
The Kriegsmarine's super battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz were destroyed by air attack. Japan's super battleship Yamato suffered a similar fate.
It's discussed in detail in the two volume set "Winged Mars" by Cuneo. The crux is being able to see where the enemy was weak, and you could deny the enemy seeing where you were strong. That's what the focus (pun intended) of the air war in WW1 was all about.
> Even in WW2
Not in the books I read about WW2. See the battle of Pearl Harbor, Midway, etc. Air power ended the U-Boot threat. The Battle of the Bulge was over for the Wehrmacht the moment the weather cleared and the Air Force could fly. The destruction of the German oil fields was decisive for the Allied victory. See the Battle of Britain - Hitler abandoned plans to invade Britain, knowing he could not do so without air supremacy. Eisenhower knew that D-Day would not work unless the Luftwaffe was suppressed. Air power ended Rommel's campaign in Africa (cut off the Afrika Korp's supplies).
Midway would have been an abject failure for the USN if it weren't for the codebreakers. The B-17s at Midway and most of the other aircraft were pretty useless in the battle itself. This was one of the closest naval engagements in the war, and the US was lucky to come away with the victory. But in the end, the defeat of the Kido Butai wasn't a necessary requirement for defeating Japan.
The Battle of the Atlantic was also more dependent upon code breaking than aircraft for success. Combined with the convoy system, the U-boats effect peaked in 1942. After that it was all downhill. Air power in the form of B-24s and escort carriers helped, but were not instrumental.
And the Battle of Britain, there was no chance Germany could ever successfully invade the British Isle. They simply didn't have the Navy to cross the channel.
Air power helped in many campaigns, but was not instrumental in the outcome of the war.
there is some Ukrainian city where the Russians had attempted to kill the mayor. the missile had struck the exact part of the building where his office was located. the mayor had survived because he overslept
Seems like targeted drone strikes is our main method of engagement today.
Necessary? We already have lots of cheap tech that can destroy drones in a naval setting.
https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898...
> The thing is that things like anti tank and ship missiles are primarily defensive weapons, not offensive ones. Sure, a Javelin can wreck a tank, but it’s not going to break through a front line. Sure, a harpoon can sink a ship, but it’s not going to project power halfway across the world. A Patriot missile can shoot down a plane, but it’s not going to target moving targets 100 miles behind enemy lines, or provide CAS.
> Does this mean that in recent years that the power balance has swung in favour of defenders? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean you get rid of offensive capabilities.
My overall take away from the Atlantic piece is that they've fallen into the same trap as much of the rest of the internet. Large platforms have not been rendered obsolete because of the advent of these weapons, just as they weren't during the 70s with the first large battles involving Anti-tank and Anti-Ship missiles. (The former has a number of well-cited examples, but for the latter, I call attention to the Battle of Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia )
It's worth nothing as well that the Neptune AShM isn't really a revolutionary weapon, and is marginally improved over classes of AShMs developed in the 80s. It's notary comes from the fact that Ukraine essentially was able redevelop the capability of the old Kh-35, with modest improvements. It's not a next-gen missile such as a LRASM.
Similarly, the Javelin, while effective and having gone through incremental upgrades, is not a wildly new weapon. It's been around for decades, and as we're finding along with the Stinger, the U.S. needs to reactivate the manufacturing to build them from scratch which has been dormant for decades.
I draw attention to the fact that these are older weapons. Drones are giving troops in the field better ability to target than ever before, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the same difficulties apply. WaPo had an exclusive stating that it was U.S. Intelligence that gave the Ukrainians the necessary info to find and target the Moskava with their missiles. The weapons themselves are just one part in long chain of capabilities.
So that's where I think this piece misses much, because it's ignorant of some of the other elements of how all this comes together. The U.S. has been aware of China's long range precision fires for quite some time, and while they're worrysome, they're not terrified. To paraphrase a quote I heard, "a long kill chain provides plenty of opportunities to disrupt it along the way."
And that's where the Russians have failed. Not because they're being surprised for the first time by these weapons (they invented many of the earliest examples themselves!) but because they're not fighting effectively. As some commentators have noted, the supporting elements that would defend against these weapons are not in place, the systems designed to counter them are not active/maintained (which was probably the case of the Moskava), and the intelligence/reconnaissance that would have identified and monitored these threats are not in place. All of this contributes to failure.
The Russians are not getting wrecked by guided missiles because they're so high tech, they're getting wrecked because they're inept.
My understanding is that the U.S. sunsetted or reduced Javelin and Stinger production because of assumed air superiority in any potential conflict (COIN or near-peer).
For all of their love of redundancy, do you think that they are overconfident in air superiority?
I hear the "they'll rely on air superiority" bit a lot, but haven't read anything official that suggests that it's actual policy. It might just be one of those things that went unsaid as priorities shifted elsewhere. I think the Ballistic Missile Defense debate sucked a lot of oxygen out of the need for ground-based aircraft defense.
There's growing calls for more robust aircraft defense, both against fighter airplanes and drones, and it's getting some attention as you can read here: https://www.army-technology.com/news/us-ten-shorad-battalion...
I note though that these are short-range systems, and I haven't seen much new for longer range systems such as what some NATO countries are doing with NASAMS, and so it seems like things have been quiet in the U.S. for medium and upper tier (BMD being the exception.)
I've long wondered if there's hesitance to overlap medium and upper tier defenses with counter-air operations because of the risk of blue-on-blue engagement (See the Persian Gulf War and Patriot), and that it might be there reason why there's so little development in this space. Deconflicting those two things sounds rather difficult to me, and given our lack of success to date, the U.S. might simply have strategized that - with a few exceptions - it's best to leave medium and high altitudes to aircraft and just not worry about shooting down your own pilots.
But that's just a guess. It's an interesting question and one I'll be curious to see play out.
They're "getting wrecked" in terms of human and materiel losses, even though those seem to have stabilised compared to March/April, the reality on the ground is that the Russians have managed to acquire a land-bridge to Crimea and that they've mostly conquered the two regions of Lugansk and Donetsk.
Even speedboats with rockets or explosives strapped to them are a threat to warships, who were mostly protected by obscurity - finding ships at sea is hard. Drones negate a lot of that.
People will wave away the obvious by saying “The Russians are idiots”, “The ship was old”, etc, but the reality is a defender only has to fuck up once. The Russians should have (and may have in other scenarios) shot down that drone, but obviously failed.
Even the mighty US Navy has trouble teaching sailors to steer ships. Operationally the US Navy is exponentially more capable than the Russians… but remember, you only need to screw up once. Fundamentally, the current operating model of big navies is on a path to irrelevance. Nerds can argue if the early ironclad battles were truly relevant, but the fact remains that whether that moment was key or not, the end result was the same.
Other advantages:
- Quickly understand which tweets/sentences matter by scanning the likes
- Debate can stem from any tweet, so discussion is immediately less conflated and more focussed on specific parts or ideas
Twitter is good for one-off observations.
I've personally started a "microblog" for that kind of stuff.
All the reporting I've seen suggests that the Moskva was very old, wasn't refurbished very well, and even with these big caveats something must have gone seriously wrong for it to be sunk in the way it was.
So taking that and drawing larger conclusions seems strange.
Regardless, the point of the article is less about the specifics of the Moskva, so I think it's a fair hook.
These fleets are expensive to maintain. without a purpose like the cold war which afforded constant meaningful training, they become little more than a floating maritime exercise in cleaning and cooking. The accident rate of the US navy in the past decade serves as far more of a teachable resource than the Moskva.
Ukraine (with US support most likely) essentially pulled off this sort of operation in the exact sort of environment it was expected. The biggest distinction is the Ukranians have a very limited number of weapons in play to use on operations like this.
At the very least the US needs to assume that in limited scale regional wars like this, the presumption of ideal warfighting conditions won't exist and you might be dealing with someone overtly receiving a lot of state backing - i.e. the US can't reasonably sanction China.
> i.e. the US can't reasonably sanction China.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume you're linking these ideas together.
From a military standpoint, at least today, the US can use its blue water navy to patrol and shut down shipments of resources going in to China pretty well. You don't need to get near the Chinese coast to do that. The US also has no interest in any sort of land warfare in China, so ultimately the strategy is containment. That's why the US (and Biden announced this again today) would absolutely go to war with China over Taiwan, because for China to take Taiwan is to break out of this containment zone and basically eliminate most of the effectiveness of the US Navy in the Pacific as it would relate to China, and undoubtedly end the US as global hegemon.
I think people assume that the US Navy has to be close to China in order to do damage and therefore naval ships are screwed because China will launch missles. While I do think the US Navy would conduct operations and quickly learn what exact capabilities the Chinese have, I don't think their effectiveness is limited to near-shore operations. Frankly, the US can shut down all maritime trade for China and now all of a sudden the Chinese are trying to ship in food and goods and energy products (oil and coal) via road, which I don't think is currently feasible.
But I also don't think China is foolish enough to actually try and invade Taiwan, because that would be like Ukraine, except with the US actively fighting. Some suggest China may try and launch a limited nuclear strike on a location like Guam, but I think that's very dangerous because the US would no doubt retaliate on mainland Chinese military assets and it either ends right then and there with both sides calling a truce (and China not invading Taiwan) or it would continue to escalate into a limited nuclear exchange, which would be catastrophic. China doesn't and won't have the military strength to take over Taiwan unless it's willing to take insane losses, like Russia is now (but worse) in Ukraine.
* I also have a pet conspiracy theory that the war in Iraq was launched to warm up the US military and give it practice with combined arms tactics against an enemy that can fight back, but not too hard.
They'll be able to ship oil via rail and pipes from Western Siberia and the Russian Far East pretty soon, which, granted, is not as cheap as sea transport but is good enough. I think they have enough coal available inside China's borders.
I still cannot understand what the US strategists think when they're throwing the Russians (and their huge mineral resources) directly into China's hands. On this Kissinger is of course right, i.e. he mentioned recently that back in the day the US was careful not to diplomatically "fight" against both China and the USSR/Russia at the same time, for good reason.
Not even close to that. Transsiberian railways are already operating at full capacity, mostly due to re-routed coal exports. Both rail and pipes will take a decade to build to re-route supplies to China from sea to land.
US and NATO and the West gave Russia all the opportunity it needed to integrate and they refused.
Also the resources don’t matter much. Ok so China buys them cheaply from Russia, and then the US buys them cheaply from other producers, and China keeps making products. What’s the issue?
So the whole issue is that the US getting embroiled in a fight with someone for reasons has the issue that they're unlikely to be in a full-scale war footing, but rather they'll be fighting a single state with lots of neighboring friendlies, civilian traffic, and since they're not directly fighting China, no one's going to be able to stop the Chinese if they choose to screw around from backing whoever the opponent is.
Basically: exactly the scenario Russia finds themselves in with Ukraine.
In theory, the DF-ZF could hit a target 10,000km away, but I don't think that's operational yet.
The best bet for the USN to blockade would be with submarines. A blockade with surface vessels is going to be exceedingly difficult.
Also, China has enough oil stockpiles (around a year) to be able to switch their oil to overland transportation, not via roads but via pipes. Meanwhile, coal wouldn't be transported by ship but by rail, which is expensive but not that bad.
There's also PRC signalling developements of their prompt global strike program, using ICMBs to hit any target around the world = sinking US naval assets in port. Keep in mind every USN capital asset has to dock for maintainence eventually and current fleets are sustained by less than a handful of TAEO ships that enables more than a few days of continuous operation, which will make even distant blockade unviable. Sealift command / auxiliary force has ~30 fast support/oiler/ammunition ships total for all of USN. Reality is short/medium term PRC rocketry developments has potential destroy not just blue water naval projection but also extends inland to other strategic targets (i.e. strategic bombers) that make entire CONUS vunerable to deter attacks on mainland PRC targets. Ultimate goal is mutual conventional vunerability, which arguably already exists with cyberwarfare - US can blocade PRC, but no telling if PRC cyberwarfare can disrupt comparable % of US industrial production. IMO Blockade advocates US can starve PRC with impunity without realizing CONUS has become existentially vunerable in a other domains. Like stop PRC food/fuel imports and don't be surprised if energy grids start breaking down or DRMed agri equipement stops functioning during harvest season.
>except with the US actively fighting
Historically and fundementally, PRC taking TW has always been an exercise in overcoming US military. The point when PRC chooses to take TW, it would be when PLA has eroded ability for US to intervene by which time defeating US military intervention is as significant a political victory. Current PRC military modernization and aquisitions isn't built with confronting TW in mind, but US military and assumed US intervention. Frankly if US can be deterred or defeated then taking TW would be easy simply because it opens many other options like blockade, quarantine, siege etc. Then it will be a question of whether US is foolish enough to defend TW and risk losing her global hegemony or safe face and allow it to be an domestic Chinese civil war matter.
But this is self-defeating for a few reasons:
1. The forces in South Korea and Japan are already there, and now you've guaranteed a war with whoever you just attacked and the US.
2. Attacking these forces doesn't result in territorial gains so now you're just lobbying missiles at countries which can lob them back.
3. An attack on South Korea or Japan will undoubtedly result in a severe backlash globally for China, regardless of whether or not they only attacked US bases (which will surely kill civilians anyway).
> There's also PRC signalling developements of their prompt global strike program, using ICMBs to hit any target around the world = sinking US naval assets in port
Which they won't do, because the US can't tell if these ICBMs are nuclear weapons nor where exactly they are going. So this will almost guarantee a nuclear response, which is probably not desirable for China.
> Keep in mind ...
First, US intelligence will see movement of Chinese forces, activation of units, missiles being prepared, etc, and then the ships can just leave port and/or move out of range. Outside of these hypersonic missiles, others can be shot down or avoided. Similarly to Russia's idiotic invasion of Ukraine, the US and allies will see Chinese activities coming well before they have any good position to attack.
> Reality is short/medium term PRC rocketry developments has potential destroy not just blue water naval projection but also extends inland to other strategic targets (i.e. strategic bombers) that make entire CONUS vunerable to deter attacks on mainland PRC targets.
This doesn't make sense for a few reasons. First, Chinese rockets can't destroy US blue water naval assets in the general way you are speaking. Second, the US forces in places like Guam would not just leave the strategic bombers sitting around. China could launch a surprise attack and hit targets, but that results in a response against Chinese forces, and the US can reposition forces away from these bases to locations such as Australia or Hawaii.
> IMO Blockade advocates US can starve PRC with impunity without realizing CONUS has become existentially vunerable in a other domains.
Third, an attack on the continental United States would probably result in a some really crazy stuff that I don't think China is interested in aggravating.
> Like stop PRC food/fuel imports and don't be surprised if energy grids start breaking down or DRMed agri equipement stops functioning during harvest season. Ultimate goal is mutual conventional vunerability, which arguably already exists with cyberwarfare - US can blocade PRC, but no telling if PRC cyberwarfare can disrupt comparable % of US industrial production.
Eh it can be hacked. Nothing to worry about there. Also cyber warfare really treads the line between conventional and escalatory. If China shuts down US power plants, the US will respond in kind or may further escalate.
> every USN capital asset has to dock for maintainence
Yes but this is usually preventive maintenance, and they don't dock at the same time. These ships dock in a rotational program so that the US maintains a consistent "coverage" based on strategic interests. That's why there are so many ships. Also since most of this maintenance tends to be retrofits and such, these ships can be redeployed quickly in an emergency.
> Historically and fundementally, PRC taking TW has always been an exercise in overcoming US military.
Agreed, however the US has shored up allies in the region because of China's aggressive international policies which have scared smaller countries into allying with the US.
> The point when PRC chooses to take TW, it would be when PLA has eroded ability for US to intervene by which time defeating US military intervention is as significant a political victory. Current PRC military modernization and aquisitions isn't built with confronting TW in mind, but US military and assumed US intervention. Frankly if US can be deterred or defeated then taking TW would be easy simply because it opens many other options like blockade, quarantine, siege etc. Then it will be a question of whether US is foolish enough to defend TW and risk losing her global hegemony or safe face and allow it to be an domestic Chinese civil war matter.
I think China really screwed up and has no chance of reunifying now. Taiwan is going to continue to buy arms and the past decade or so of being lulled to sleep by what was a peaceful Chinese rise to power was shaken by poor diplomacy, backing Russia diplomatically (though not in practice), and seizing Hong Kong. It'll just cost too many lives, which is why it won't happen. The question is whether or not China decides that it thinks the US is weak (similar to Russia's miscalculation regarding Ukraine) and how badly the war escalates. Frankly, the best path forward for all parties is probably the status quo as China can saber-rattle over Taiwan but not actually fight. A war is very difficult to control. Anything can happen.
Honestly the easiest and simplest way out of this is for China to just leave Taiwan alone. But egos and such will just drag us all into a stupid war that solves nothing for anyone. I would say the easiest and simplest way is for Taiwan to just be part of China again, but if the people don't want that then it's not as easy as it is for China to leave Taiwan alone.
They'll complain other people are just following the current thing, but they absolutely love it too.
Earlier than that- the Israelis lost the destroyer Eilat to Egyptian SS-N-2 Styx missiles in 1967.
In fact, the Germans had quite a lot of success with air-launched anti-ship missiles in WW2, although it's debatable whether those count- they were more like guided bombs.
Interestingly, though, this does seem to be the first case of a large warship being successfully sunk by a missile launched from dry land. Argentina hit HMS Glamorgan with a truck-launched Exocet in 1982, killing 14 of the crew, destroying the embarked helicopter, and achieving a successful mission kill, but it didn't sink. And Yugoslavia used an anti-tank missile to sink a small Croatian armed speedboat during the 1991 Siege of Dubrovnik. Every other sinking of a ship by a missile has involved one launched from the sea or air.
- Argentine forces carefully analyzed their target, studied, trained, practiced, and drilled for the attack. Over and over and over. Almost as if they believed there was a real war on, and actually wanted to hit an enemy with their weapons...
- British forces mostly couldn't be bothered to analyze their defenses for weaknesses. Let alone train, practice, or drill. Then they footgunned their best warning system, and didn't realize they were under attack until human-eyeball lookouts saw smoke from the rocket motors of the incoming missiles. Once warned, the bridge officers basically sat on their hands and gawked. (Vs., say, alerting the crew. Or trying to use some of the various anti-missile defense systems that the ship had.)
- The ~5,000 ton "warship" was designed so poorly that one modest hit knocked out both her electrical and fire-fighting systems. Even back in WWII, having redundant critical systems was a well-known and much-valued feature of all real warships.
- Hours into the crew's efforts to fight the fires (resulting from the missile hit), coordination and command of the fire-fighting efforts were somewhere between underwhelming and non-existent.
Blunt Summary: The aircraft, missile, and anti-missile technologies used (or available) during the attack on the HMS Sheffield were no more than costumes and props in a play. The real meat of the play was a human story that would fit quite comfortably into the Old Testament. On one side was a small group of skilled and determined warriors, intensely focused on winning. On the other side was a crowd of clueless noobs, wandering through the scenery and telling themselves that they were a real army.
- naval area denial: even if the threat of the Exocet missile was overstated, it caused the British aircraft carrier to hang back. Conversely, having a nuclear-powered attack submarine in the area was highly effective for the British.
- Aerial combat: the carrier-borne Harriers were outnumbered and outclassed, but the Sidewinder missile was devastating.
The twin of your human factors story is the infantry engagements in the Falklands: a small force of professionals with good night-vision equipment was effective against unmotivated conscripts.
Mostly, my perspective is from being (by HN standards) extremely old. It was 1808 when Napoleon wrote (paraphrasing) that military power is 3/4 the quality of the people and 1/4 the supplies and equipment. The Atlantic gushes about the sinking of the Moskva as if wooden sailing ships were about to be replaced with steam-driven iron ones. I don't see much difference between the Moskva and the IJN's Akagi and Shinano (being sunk) back in WWII. Arguably, one lone dive bomber sunk the former. Certainly one little submarine sunk the latter. (Which was, at the time, by far the heaviest aircraft carrier ever built.) Atlantic-quality journalists at the time could have gushed about how the dive bomber would be new queen of the naval battlefield (they were pretty much obsolete by the end of WWII), and how aircraft carriers would have to get tiny or they'd be doomed (again, reality was quite the opposite). Actually competent journalists could have noted that the Akagi was an extremely vulnerable ship by nature (stuffed full of airplanes, gasoline, bombs), and that damage control efforts on the latter were hopelessly incompetent.
From what I've seen, the Moskva was a very vulnerable ship by design. And the performance of the Russian Army gives no reason to suspect that the Russian Navy might be up to scratch on damage control.
But that sort of cold, people-centric old man's analysis of events is not what most folks want to hear.
https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-...
The author (a veteran US Marine) is, obviously, well more versed in this than me, a computer programmer, but I'd say that he's wrong here. The signature weapon of the war right now is artillery, on both sides, that's why most recently it was artillery pieces that the US sent to Ukraine. Artillery has been a mainstay of the wars on the Ukrainian-Russian steppes ever since Napoleon.
What this war brought new to the table, a thing which might be the real revolutionary part of this war (at least when it comes to military doctrine), is the deadly artillery + cheap aerial drones combo, it has brought havoc to both sides. Those Russian convoys were not destroyed by javelines, but by targeted Ukrainian artillery strikes (with the help of said cheap drones).
Inside of the cities (Mariupol, mostly, from where most of the images have come when it comes to urban combat in this war) the tanks have still shown their worth, as in it was mostly with tanks (and, again, with artillery) that the Russians managed to destroy (and thus conquer) most of the city (they also used some aviation to drop bombs on Azovstal, but that was towards the end of the Mariupol battle). An interesting apparition was that of the BTR-82 [1]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/twraun/russi...
If you look at it solely from the Ukrainian point of view - yes. The Russians are relying heavily on platforms, even if they are losing. That doesn't mean that there isn't value in those platforms, just that they are being misapplied. For example, a tank is much more valuable to use against another tank than to use against dispersed ground troops. We would likely see them being valued differently in a near-peer conflict that was more coordinated/strategic (one of the biggest enemies of the Russians has been their leaders' own greed and lack of preparation, training, and coordination).
War is largely about economics. Of course using man-portable anti-platform weapons is ideal - you can destroy equipment that takes months or years to build at .1% of it's cost. Just like using left over or homemade munitions for IEDs can generate a lot of damage (physical and economic), especially over the course of a decade or two.
Actually, no! Why is this still being rehashed?? Zelensky specifically requested: artillery, artillery shells, Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, armored vehicles, tanks, air defense systems, and military aircraft.
He said: “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.” (Liberation Without Victory, The Atlantic, https://archive.ph/nz2Da)
And while Javelins, and other missiles, have proven invaluable in taking out armored vehicles, the more effective weapon has been artillery (often targeted with the aid of drones).
I think it all comes down to the "educated" Western audiences only following this conflict through the eyes of the Western media, which Western media has its own incentives (about which this is not the place to write at length), suffice is to say that their reports don't accurately reflect the situation on the battleground.
What does reflect the situation on the battleground is the videos coming from both side (Ukrainian and Russian) which clearly show that artillery (plus cheap commercial drones used as spotters) is bringing in most of the losses. The greatest military Russian defeat [1] in this war until now was the result of artillery and drones, not of javelins, not of any fancy and expensive Western-provided weapons.
Later edit: This [2] is good, old artillery in use (in this case by the Russians). There's no javelins nor drones all by themselves that can take those artillery pieces out.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqbam9/new_drone_f...
[2] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1528738177741201410
I think the major surprise here is the sudden increased perception that a war between peer powers is not a thing of the past. I would guess that all the major powers are not ready today to fight each other in earnest for more than months or half a year in a non-nuclear war. China and Russia would not be able to get critical parts, and the USA would have to ramp up new manufacturing capability very quickly (it imports ingredients for high explosives from China?) Note that this would be extremely expensive for all countries, it would turn a large part of useful and beneficial production capacity into building an unproductive war economy. Citizens everywhere would suffer, even if none of the new weapons were ever used.
> On March 9, 1862, the Union warship Monitor met its Confederate counterpart, Virginia. After a four-hour exchange of fire, the two fought to a draw. It was the first battle of ironclads. In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete.
Ouch, false. The ironclad ships that the US built were what became known as "[river] monitors"--they were at best barely seaworthy, since they had no freeboard worth speaking of, so any sea that was mildly stalled would cause the ships to founder. In no way were they ships-of-the-line, or capable of threatening ships-of-the-line, and the first ironclad ship-of-the-line would have been HMS Warrior, built before the US ironclads.
> On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning.
Even worse than the previous paragraph. Aircraft carriers did not render battleships obsolete at Pearl Harbor, which involved a fleet of old battleships at a state of low readiness. If the Japanese thought battleships obsolete, why did they bring them to the Battle of Midway 6 months later?
One of the things that I think is poorly comprehended by much of the lay public is that military technology really is "part of a complete package". There isn't a single technology that beats everything else; instead, it tends to end up closer to a rock-paper-scissors scenario where it turns out you need all of the weapon systems to avoid being defeated by one of them. For example, in WW1-ish naval warfare, a large capital ship like a battleship is vulnerable to torpedoes, which means it needs a fleet screen of light units to avoid the torpedo threat, but those units are vulnerable to the powerful capabilities of battleships, which requires capital ships of their own to threaten.
What makes technology obsolete isn't "this can be countered by something else," it's "this capability can be provided by something better."
Merrimac sailed into Hampton Roads (near Chesapeake Bay) and wasted two pretty good wooden Union frigates. The Union then sent in the Monitor. The two ships spent four hours pounding away at each other at point blank range, and still managed to steam away under their own power. The cannonballs just bounced off the armor. Two ships that, as you said, were barely sea worthy. (Some contemporary writers said the same - not a fair test!)
"News of the action at Hampton Roads took the British public, press, and Parliament by storm. Large wooden steamers were clearly helpless against smaller armour-plated foes. Ironclads were fighting ironclads. Perhaps most significantly, the Americans had produced them in far less time and expense than either England or France." [1]
Lord Lyons (British ambassador the U.S.) wrote to Lord Russel (Foreign Secretary), "This is, I suppose, the severest test to which the system of coating vessels in iron armour has yet been exposed."
Admiral Milne, head of the British North Atlantic Squadron was "agog" at the results. Commander Hewett of HMS Rinaldo actually watched the battle and had the same reaction.
What was proved was that the weapons system of wooden ships-of-the-line was obsolete. Ironclads were now conclusively the future.
[1] "Seagoing purposes indispensable to the defence of this country:" Policy Pitfalls of Great Britain's Early Ironclads
Look at the Battle of Taranto in 1940. The British sent a bunch of old, WW1 biplanes against the Italian fleet in port. Three battleships, a heavy cruiser, and two destroyers were disabled. The British lost two planes.
Three days after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese hit two of the most powerful battleships in the Royal Navy (Prince of Wales & Repulse). Both battleships sunk, at a loss of six Japanese planes. Those ships were sailing and fighting back - they didn't fair any better than the ships at Pearl Harbor or Taranto.
Battleships were now obviously sitting ducks without accompanying airpower. They were obsolete in that they were no longer the ship around which the rest of the fleet was organized. The aircraft carrier was the now the most important ship in the fleet.
It did get sunk by battleships but only after it couldn't run anymore.
I skimmed the comments and it seems the author was wrong about a lot. I thought the Atlantic was a better than average paper, the quality must have declined.
The US has been transitioning off tanks for a while now
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021...
I suspect, most systems will continue to move underwater for the navy. We will also likely couple it with autonomous drones and decoys
reading that article, maybe that means there are longer range standoff weapons than Javelin/Stinger up the infantry's sleeve that we may not know about yet?
Eventually, the AGM-179 will replace the TOW/Hellfire/Maverick missiles, but this isn't really something soldiers will be humping around on raids like in Ukraine. These are heavy missiles (not counting their launch hardware), that require vehicles or aircraft to employ.
Also, a plea to everyone posting technical details. Please provide links to sources. It has been extremely hard finding solid data on this war.
Reminds me of the German "paratroopers" who spend most of the war as overly qualified infantry.
The Army has a sprawling operation and mission, but the Marines focus around that shock infantry model. The entire organization is focused around that, which has good and bad attributes.
Agree that it was playing the game to justify its existence. Personally I think "the nation's ready response force" is a good and necessary mission.
Weren’t these the signature weapons because Ukraine doesn’t have much of an air force? It’s true that the Javelin and Stingers (etc.) have been remarkably effective; however, it’s not like the US ought to ditch its expensive aircraft in favor of shoulder-launched weapons.
It's because they're cheap, easy to deploy, and effective. And Russian planes need to fly low because of other anti air weapons and a general lack of precision munitions.
The problem with Moskva was tactical - it was a sitting duck without adequate protection. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
Not to rain on the "feel-good" parade, but Moskva was laid down in 1976 and launched in 1979. It was older than most people on HackerNews. Don't treat it as bleeding edge technology.
In Donbas now war resembles most the WW2 with mass of artillery being exchanged for drone directed artillery. Not Javelin, not any other man portable anything can dislodge Russian or Ukranians for that matter. Massed drone directed artillery and rocket artillery is the current go to.
Those ideas of infiltrating marines to Chinese islands are so idiotic as to defy all belief.. I hope whoever came up with that is on the first boat there
Last but not least perhaps journalist writing for Atlantic can read some book about WW1? Like something basic that covers eastern front? Offense did not go anywhere and no Somme was not a bayonet charge ffs
Switchblades are a bit like 1914 "bombers". Useless by 1916.
I think it has happened many times that the invention of some new missile weapon (or other defensive weapon) had people think that some kind of offensive form of combat became obsolete. Maybe the first time would be when thrown spears or stones made the big brute with a club obsolete.
While in fact, up until now, this has gone back-and-forth numerous times.
Disciplined infantry made chariots obsolete, until cataphracts and knights arrived.
Longbows defeated knights for a moment, until they switched to plate armor.
Pikes/crossbows defeated knights, until they dismounted and picked up a Pollaxe, or later, as cuirassiers used pistols to harass.
Muskets and rifles defended well, until Napoleon used artillery, cavalry and manouver to give the attacker an advantage again.
Automatic rifles and machine guns led to trench warfare, until the Brits invented tanks.
Anti-tank guns defended pretty well vs tanks, until Guderian invented Blitzkrieg.
Shaped charges threatened tanks, until reactive armor was invented.
Actually, the general pattern that may be surprising to many, is that the key attribute for a weapon/platform to act offensively, is usually high survivability tactically, which allows them to advance, strategically. By comparison, platforms that have high firepower, but low survivability are often great defensively, as they allow counterattacks, but less useful when advancing.
So my prediction, going forward, as that at some point (next month or in a 100 years, I don't know), the large platforms will be equipped with defenses that allow them to regain enough survivability to be used offensively.
I think drones and loitering munitions are much more interesting than traditional missiles. A missile is a threat for a matter of minutes, and can be defended. But drones and loitering munitions... the idea that something up in the air can wait... for the exact right moment... and hit with such accuracy... it changes how you think about fighting.
It costs large amounts of money to build big ships and it costs little to sink them.
Obviously it all predicates on politicians making somewhat rational decisions.
That's the part that I find missing from these discussions. Missiles like the D21 sound really deadly, but the information and communications needed to successfully target a carrier hundreds or thousands of miles away and deliver the weapon successfully is the much more difficult part of the equation. As the U.S. Navy (paraphrasing) said themselves, "The D21 has a long kill chain, and plenty of places to disrupt that kill-chain."
Likewise, the carrier goes around with much more than it's planes and escorts. It has the information being fed to it from ISR elsewhere, from satellites overhead to pre-mission information, communications eavesdropping, etc to know what they're up against and when and where they might encounter it. That, in my opinion is far more important than the specifics and specs of such and such weapon.
The success or defeat of a carrier battle group I think is going to depend far more on who knows what and when, and therefor, what's going on in the electromagnetic spectrum, than any singular missile.
AFAIK at this point Kinzhal was successfully used only once, against a barn.
So you need a system or system of systems to find your target, relay that information down to your launchers (securely, quietly, and timely!) so you can launch your relatively cheap weapon. That's where all of the investment in communications, radars, overhead platforms (drones, aircraft, satellites) comes into play. The GlobalHawk that had been flying over the Black Sea for weeks at 40,000 feet isn't cheap, but without one, one's firing missiles blind.
The further out you get, the more eyes and links you need to find and track your target, and that's where it gets expensive. It also becomes less of a sure bet.
Two UK carriers come closest to the way the US Navy works, but are smaller. Russia's lone, damaged carrier is 25% smaller and may travel with a roughly comparable escort, if and when it becomes operational again.
Many other nations' carriers are one half to one fifth the size of a supercarrier. They exist to provide STOL/helicopter platforms.
U.S. Aegis-equipped destroyers faced multiple strikes of essentially, same missiles in the Gulf of Aden, launched by pro-Russian Howthi (both based on Soviet Kh-35), with no hits and no even close calls (as far known, CIWS was never activated).
https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1522608680595865606
https://twitter.com/GrangerE04117/status/1522643831736332288
https://news.usni.org/2022/05/05/warship-moskva-was-blind-to...
Don't have other sources handy, sorry.
CIWS could fire though, and apparently they did fire, but missed.