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Comment by fourthark | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t fly yet, so that narrows it down a bit.

Do they’re trying to scare Russian with an airplane that can only be taxied around?

I wonder if it’s made out of proper material and not just some clay concept

The US has retired planes decades ago that are superior to the best Russia has today, so no I doubt we really care about Russia's thoughts. China maybe.

Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?

No. There are no drones which can reliably penetrate a modern integrated air defense system and strike a hardened target with large bunker buster bombs. The B-21 is supposed to be able to operate as a drone (optionally manned) but in a conflict with a near-peer adversary which can degrade the satellite communications necessary for remote piloting there will need to be humans in the cockpit.

>and strike a hardened target

!!!

That's the point! There are a hell of a lot of "unhardened" targets and using a full scale aircraft as a drone is missing the point about cost. I mean, there's not just the news from Ukraine, but also this:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/us/power-outage-moore-county-...

...and it looks like a classic case of "disruptive technology" syndrome, where the incumbents dismiss the upstart as inadequate for their sophisticated customers - justifiably as far as it goes - until all of a sudden the tsunami arrives because the new tech has been iterating until it can address the high end.

I read the original book defining the phenomenon in my university library around the time it came out, and it's interesting how describing the problem manifestly hasn't created a solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

> Aren't things getting to the point where drones are a global commodity and indigenous manufacturing capability is mostly moot?

“Drones” covers a wide range of things, from a Tu-141 to a Shahed-136 to a improvised grenade-dropping quadcopter to the MQ-1/9/20 Predator/Reaper/Avenger series to tbe X-47B and the (maybe soon) unmanned operation capacity of the B-21.

Some capability sets are widely enough available to be seen as commodities, some are available on the export market, but from a narrow range of suppliers who provide them very selectively, and some represent unique capacities.

Russia military is a pitiful shell of the former Soviet glory. Putin’s actions in Ukraine have effectively demilitarized them. They squandered their inheritance of Soviet equipment like an 18 year old in Vegas. Their nuclear force is a giant question mark. Their three legs of the nuclear triad are quite shaky. In the event of a MAD exchange; Their boomers won’t get a missile off due to the fast attacks that keep them targeted at all times. Their bombers and cruise missiles have been depleted and their facilities are so insecure Ukraine is able to hit them with drones from the 70s. Maybe their ICBMs work, but given their culture of graft and corruption even that is doubtful. They are a joke.

You're mostly correct, but Russian SSBNs spend much of their time in their own territorial waters. NATO SSNs seldom venture in there as it's just too risky. The boomers can even launch SLBMs when tied up at the pier in Severomorsk if they have to. And they are conducting successful test launches again.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/new-russian-submarine-s...

Even if only 10% of Russia's strategic nuclear weapons work correctly that can still make for a really bad day.

Speaking of ICBM's, I'm sure they use more sophisticated targeting now, but in the early days they'd astrogate for any necessary mid-course corrections.

(Cannot remember if I saw this procedure on a film narrated by von Braun himself, but I doubt it; I think I saw him in a Disney)

ICBMs still use a mix of stellar and inertial navigation. They can't rely on satellite navigation because in a major conflict those may be destroyed or jammed.

Some modern ICBMs might also have some limited terminal guidance capacity but there's not much public information on that subject.

With SLBMs, GPS (and the predecessors to GPS e.g. NAVSAT) are/were used to determine where exactly they were being launched from. The ballistic missile submarine would determine its precise location before launch using these satellite geolocating systems and use that position to calculate the flight path which inertial guidance in the missile would follow.

This was useful because inertial navigation in the submarines was imperfect, but having a precise location fix for the submarine was important if you wanted to shoot at things precisely. Of course with ICBMs launched from fixed silos, the origin point was precisely known from the onset.

Believing a satnav constellation will still be up by launch time sounds awfully like an implicit first strike philosophy?

>Russia military is a pitiful shell of the former Soviet glory. Putin’s actions in Ukraine have effectively demilitarized them.

And yet the war is ~8 months long and counting. "The other guy's military is trash." propaganda happens in every war, and on both sides, if you've studied even a few. We just cleared the sale of 116 Abrams tanks to Poland: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/12/07/us-state-dept-cl...

From the article:

>Polish defense officials have said the acquisition will enable the country’s military to counter Russia’s flagship T-14 Armata tank. The procurement will also allow Warsaw to replace its outdated Soviet-designed T-72 and PT-91 tanks with a new tracked vehicle platform.

The people on the ground conducting the war don't seem to think they've been "effectively demilitarized".

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