Much of the old USSR heavy aircraft industry supply chain was in Ukraine. Now Russia has minimal capacity to build new strategic aircraft: those few that they managed to put into service since 1991 largely still relied on stockpiled old parts. Even for tactical aircraft they only manage to deliver a few per year. And with their shattered educational system and declining working-age population this trend won't reverse any time soon.
Russia has either no capacity to build new strategic bombers at all, or has al they need to do it, depending on the timeframe you're talking about.
If they really decided to do it, they could make some kind on narrow-body bomber derivative of Il-96 in a few years.
Bombers require unpressurized bomb bays. The B-52 is built completely unlike any Boeing airliner. The fuselage is significantly different than an airliner and the structural changes would not be trivial to implement. They also need to have control surfaces designed to take off with a full load and land empty. Airliners don't have to take that into consideration.
The P8-Poseiden is based on the Boeing 737. It can carry missiles like the AGM84 Harpoon externally, and also has an internal bomb bay for torpedoes and mines. Converting a modern airliner design to a cruise missile carrier would be a trivial exercise for most industrial societies. Russia would struggle though...
B-52 was designed in the 40's. Much has changed since and a lot of things that had to be figured out by costly experimentation are much easier and completely calculated.
Sure the resulting plane would not be optimized in a lot of aspects but they could do it.
Instead of modifying the plane to support an unpressurized bomb bay in a pressurized plan could they not pressurize the plane at all, and provide the crew with breathing equipment?
> They also need to have control surfaces designed to take off with a full load and land empty. Airliners don't have to take that into consideration.
Is it the take off or the landing that would be the problem? If the take off could they use JATO?
The basic premise of nuclear safety is mutually assured destruction. If Russia believes that another superpower believes that Russia might be less capable of MAD due to losing a huge chunk of one leg of the nuclear trifecta they might be more likely to act premptively in launching a nuclear exchange.
Also, The Russian government relies on projection of an image of strength not just externally, but internally as well. If the Russian government is seen as weak internally they might be more likely to take drastic actions to stay in power.
Put all these together, and it seems like the world might just be a bit more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Maybe that is the Ukrainian strategy - make Russia do something monstrous to a western power to force western action.
Russia was using those bombers to terrorize their cities night after night. Ukrainians are not required to (nor will they) sit back and take it out of abstract MAD force balance concerns. If Russia cared that much about the value strategic aviation holds in their nuclear doctrine, they wouldn't be using it to chuck missiles at chldren's cancer hospitals and apartment blocks.
If you want to try to impose some deeper strategic meaning onto this, a more plausible one would be the reverse: that the more "western powers" pull back from supporting Ukraine, the more Ukraine is are forced to establish they are capable of less conventional, less predictable, more aggressive means of deterrence to compensate for the absence of strong western partners.
There’s no 4D chess here. Ukraine was attacking the planes used to bomb their civilians day in and day out.
That is entirely too many words written that make no sense… The Ukrainian people were being killed by X, the Ukraine eliminated a bunch of X - end of story
Escalation from picking on Ukraine to using nuclear weapons is an escalator ladder that doesn’t make sense with respect to projecting strength - because utilization means direct war with the United States, which Russia will decisively lose. Once they use a nuclear weapon there is nothing else left to escalate. All the cards have been played.
Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.
It doesn't follow. For the US the most survivable part of the nuclear triad was always the submarines. For Russia it was the road-mobile nukes. The rest of the nuclear deterrent for both the US and Russia is quite optional, and serves mostly political reasons.
Not striking Russian airfields hasn't exactly worked very well to tone down Russian aggression, so it makes sense to try to directly hurt their ability to attack. It's an entirely legitimate target: military equipment, from a country waging war against Ukraine.
By comparison, Russia keeps bombing civilian targets in a futile attempt to terrorize Ukrainians into surrendering. Or maybe just out of sheer spite.
Either way, it seems Putin is not at all interested in peace, which means the only way to stop this war is to stop Russia's ability to wage this war. The claim that Putin might resort to nuclear strikes in response to Ukraine defending itself, is pure propaganda aimed at cowing defenders into compliance. If he actually wanted to launch nukes, he'd have done so already.
Boy what a classically insincere insecure schoolyard bully's rationalization of why he brutally attacked an innocent child.
Blame Putin for being a vicious bully, not the kids he's brutalizing for provoking him by defending themself from the assault.
Ukraine is one of the few countries that could develop a nuke quickly - they have the know how as they were the key for USSR nuclear arsenal.
The reality is if they were nuked and no one reacted, in a matter of months they would be nuking Russia.
Nuclear bombers haven't really been much of a factor in MAD since Dr Strangelove was made. It's all ballistic missiles these days, or newer stuff.
I still don't understand how Putin managed to convince so many people that a rule that exclusively works to his benefit is a good idea. Weak of mind.
Aren't they just buying stuff from china these days? Do they need a domestic supply?
China isn't gonna be producing parts for Soviet Bombers that they've never used themselves.
I don't think China is selling them strategic bombers.
Electronics, ATVs and clothing not Strategic nuclear bombers
I would assume having supply chain in place and aircraft manufacturer's like antonov, Ukraine is hiding its supersonic bombers somewhere.
Ukraine has no large supersonic bombers the size of the TU-95/TU-160/TU-223m. They do have a very small fleet of SU-24, but those are tactical bombers, not strategic bombers.
Ukraine actually has inherited 19 TU-160s from USSR. 8 of which were transfered to Russia as a payment for natural gas, and 11 were disassembled.
The longest-range battery-powered drones have a range of only 14 km or so (and probably cannot carry enough explosive that far to help much with an attack like yesterday's attack) thus the need for the Ukrainians to use
trucks to transport the drones used in this attack to within a km or so of the
target. It is easy for Ukrainians to pass for Russian (e.g., if stopped at a
checkpoint inside Russia) because there were 3 million Ukrainians living
inside Russia at the start of the invasion in 2022. The same cannot be said for many future
conflicts. To give an example, the German regime got almost no useful information
coming from spies in England during WWII because it proved easy for British
society to detect and capture German spies. It probably would have proved equally difficult or almost as difficult and risky for the Germans to get a truck loaded with drones, explosives, drone operators and the electronics needed to control the drones to within a km of an English military target (if the citizenry knew about drones the way we in 2025 know about them).
In WWII, a joint Australian / British force carried out an attack, posing as Japanese fishing boat, and sailed right into Singapore harbour to place explosives on the vessels there. They flew a Japanese ensign, wore sarongs and wore tan makeup. Operation Jaywick was not a huge strategic success (and the local population was subject to reprisals since the Japanese thought it was their fault) but it did raise morale a lot in allied forces, as it was an early blow against Japan (which had seemed invincible at the time).
Even in the extreme example of white Australians trying to pass as Malaysians, special forces have pulled of plenty of raids without the need for native language speakers.
Even if you need someone highly fluent who can pass as a native, most of the time there's a nearby country where they have some kind of grudge against the belligerent. I can think of a lot of potential theatres where finding an enemy of a belligerent who can pass as a "native" would not be difficult. North / South Korea, China / Taiwan, The Middle East ... conflicts often occur in places where there's a lot of conflict.
Also, in a war, often the military and civilian sector are stretched thin. Russia can't spare the troops to guard everything as well as they could in peacetime, and even if they could search every vehicle they can't afford to gum up their logistics.
> The longest-range battery-powered drones have a range of only 14 km or so
As a Ukrainian soldier – ha ha ha
Thank you for your service, sir!
> It is easy for Ukrainians to pass for Russian
There is no need to do so because they did employ a civilian drivers who never knew what 'cargo' they are hauling. Just like in the previous attack on the bridge.
Someone still needs to hire the driver and set up everything. Much easier for someone that can just blend in, looks like everyone else, speaks the language and doesn’t only know the culture well, but even grew up in a similar culture.
>> someone that can just blend in, looks like everyone else, speaks the language and doesn’t only know the culture well, but even grew up in a similar culture.
You've described half of the Ukrainian population.
I was assuming that the drone operators were in the truck to make it more difficult for the Russians to jam the control signals. Do you know whether that is true?
Maybe the drones were pre-programmed for a particular destination (given to the Ukrainians by the US and its reconnaissance satellites), i.e., no drone operators needed.
The latest technique is (besides the fiber optic stuff) is running the command and control over the local phone network of the country you’re in so it just looks like regular mobile data. That’s what allegedly happened here.
The operators weren't present at the site.
They either used the trucks as a relay for the operators far away or the drones themselves were automated.
> It is easy for Ukrainians to pass for Russian
It would not be necessary, as you pointed out, plenty of Ukrainians still live in Russia and they are free to drive trucks. Best of my knowledge, there is nothing like interment of Japanese that happened in US during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
You can't really distinguish Ukrainian from Russians, unless it's a Ukrainian from former Polish territories or some rural regions.
As far as I’m aware, the USSR (read: Russia) forced everyone to know Russian, and not just know, but know only Russian and forget their own languages and culture. So, most of the populations once occupied by Russia, they can pretend they’re Russians quite easily, especially when they look European. Including former Polish territories. They had plenty of Russian occupation too.
Drones also easily get jammed. Which is why both sides are using cable based drones with spools of fiber optics cable.
It's only a matter of time before they go fully autonomous. The technology exists now and tbh I'd be surprised if it hasn't been deployed already.
Yeah those optic fiber drones on the video are so easy to jam lol
nvidia chip and yolo model and you get autonomous drone
> The longest-range battery-powered drones have a range of only 14 km or so (and probably cannot carry enough explosive that far to help much with an attack like yesterday's attack)
You are completely, utterly clueless.
Even the longest recorded strike with fibre optic seems to be a lot longer than that.
Battery powered though? And "like a helicopter with multiple rotors" (term?) as opposed to like an airplane with wings and elevators?
I am not aware of any fibre optic drones that aren't battery powered.
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why can't drones park on or near power lines and inductively charge?
Would be kinda neat to see drones hanging off power lines like bats.
Power lines mess up your communication signals.
It may have been even more effective than that if the intel supported specific target selection. Russia is likely already having a difficult time keeping their fleet operational, and if Ukraine was able to select aircraft that had recently flown then it's likely to have left mostly the non-flyable aircraft, causing Russia that much more difficulty to employ them.
Ukrainian intel have said that they were seeing Russia prepare for a large aviation bombing attack. So all the best bombers were out on the tarmac getting fueled when they attacked. Maximum pain. Russia didn't just loose a third of their strategic bombers, they lost their best third. The other lesser two thirds will now have to handle the wear and tear going forward. And these planes are already old and torn and require a lot of upkeep.
The cost of those aircraft vs the cost of this operation has to be astounding.
As a European I often feel we don't deserve the allies we have in Ukraine.
Ukrainian drone veterans will fill important roles in NATO, regardless of whether Ukraine explicitly joins.
Would it be reasonable to assume some of the damaged aircraft are not bombers?
It would, but these were FPVs and their targets can be precisely chosen at the very moment of the strike.
Also, these are remote airbases where all the strategic bombers are stationed. Fighter jets would not be there in significant numbers if any since they are needed in other bases closer to the front-lines and also some at the borders.
In in of the videos you could see a Mi-8 which was ignored because of it's insignificance compared to the primary targets.
Well, claims included also Beriev A-50, which is clearly more expensive than any of the bombers.
Absolutely, not trying to dump cold water on this remarkable feat of covert action. I just imagine there are a few support aircraft, fighters, non-op planes, helicopters, etc.
> Would it be reasonable to assume some of the damaged aircraft are not bombers?
Probably not many if any, they weren't attacked with area munitions but with FPV drones they were attacking bomber bases, specifically aiming to reduce offensive capability, there's not a lot of reason to target non-bomber other aircraft.
It's pretty crazy all other spots in the top 5 are taken by the US except #3 by Russia.
I wouldn't read too much into that. India and Pakistan skirmish last month debunks it.
I'm skeptical of how much damage drone-based munitions would do to these planes. A bit of frag shrapnel doesn't "total" them.
The planes were relocated and loaded with fuel and munitions for a massive raid which would've have happen that morning. They were able to hit fuel tanks specifically as they had few museum pieces to train on for the whole year.
It's quite impressive really. There must have been a lot of planning and information.
Check out videos, they are completely engulfed in flames!
The planes were full of fuel, a small explosion is enough to set them on fire and total them
An amazing idea: Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory and let them loose. In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Hard to know whether to be seriously impressed or seriously concerned - if Europe decided that enough was enough and started helping Ukraine with troops if they decided the Russian nuclear threat was a paper tiger we're in for some very interesting times.
Russia has a nuclear triad. Unless all of their submarines were in port and taken out during the attack, there’d be no way to prevent them from losing all three delivery mechanisms simultaneously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad
Russia hasn't spent enough in their military to afford nuclear maintenance in decades. They don't have nuclear weapons any more, they're just faking it at this stage.
It’s an elephant in the room, and I have a strong impression not everyone acknowledges it.
And there worst part of the triad, ICBMs, can't really be taken out easily by any method I can imagine. And they are nearly impossible to intercept, even by the US.
A giant, incredibly detailed documentation ppackage, down to what posters are on what walls in what rooms were leaking in western media the other day.
Putin has very carefully put himself in the position that his death would cause a very chaotic power vacuum in Russia (to the detriment or at least risk of almost everyone), to dissuade any would-be assassins.
russia has dead hand system, any attack on putin will trigger the dead hand.
most importantly USA doesn't want putin dead, because his next successor could be smarter and more brutal
>Which is why a simultaneous targetted assassinations of Putin, his key government supporters, and the oligarchs is needed.
It's ironic that while Ukrainian supporters like you dream about terrorist attacks, Putin himself doesn't order strikes against Kiev government.
Imagine an assassination that is done with a drone mailed internationally to a PO Box. Send a gig driver to pick up a small box and drop it off at an abandoned lot.
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
The ultimate sleeper agents.
By all accounts the Ukrainian attack took a year to execute. It's the kind of planning that was behind the explosive pagers that Israel cooked up.
It's a new kind of automated terrorism - who knows what is planted around Russia now and when the Ukrainians will set it off.
It's not terrorism if a country is at war and their military facilities were targeted.
I imagine a "glitter bomb" operation. Basically a postal package that leaks drones all along its delivery route.
Also, why can't drones just infiltrate a country in little spurts from the borders, pausing near power lines to inductively power themselves.
A lot of this stuff is terrifying, and conflicts like the ukraine are basically funding/inventing nightmares.
The mode is new, but you must agree that choosing cluster munitions for a church on Sunday is an actual nightmare compared to a slight background hum of latent independent drone missions.
When it comes to abuse of trust, I'm worried about goods coming from China. Israel's compromise of the pager supply chain shows that innocuous seeming devices can be weaponized via trust.
Imagine if every IoT appliance decided to burn down/self destruct and every phone with satellite connectivity decided to weaponize its battery pack. If every car with cell service connectivity decided to accelerate with brakes disabled at once. If every access point/router decided to make itself inoperable/turned into a bot net removing home internet all at once and likely shifting traffic to cell towers which could overload them resulting in zero communication. Imagine that as many devices as possible were programmed or constructed in a way to create failure on a specific date or period.
Sounds insane, but I would have said the pager thing sounds insane too. All those things definitely sounds possible to me.
i recently heard a podcast where a16z claimed this was one of the main reasons why you need a US electric vehicle and robotic industry - what if Chinese device could be weaponized at will in the event of a conflict?
Nervously eyeing my robo vacs.
This is exactly why you should not let your Iot devices connect to Internet.
Ding, ding, ding. Welcome to the "Circus of Globalist's Externalities come home to Roost!"
At a certain point, you as a country can only be said to be capable of what you can do without external aid. The possibility that your Allies will always remain as such, either at their behest, or your own, is simply never zero.
Queue the Globalist's in the crowd going "The entire point was to maximize the amount of time before peace broke down through economic interdependence. Wrong. They optimized for that metric while maximizing the vulnerability to supply chain based attacks. They made individual countries less resilient and accepted the risk that if a much greater worldwide action potential was actually reached, everyone would be potentially fucked.
So why doesn't Black Mirror have an episode where the PRC are the bad guys?
It's probably not so easy to just send explosives via mail.
its much easier to buy them in the USA, like guns, bullets, grenades. to damage an airplane you dont need much: just a mix of molotov cocktail, and aluminum and metal shavings a-la Walter White in order to penetrate and ignite the fuel tank of a strategic nuclear bomber.
Who needs explosives? Spring loaded pointy rod to the skull or razor to the neck
I doubt the post office does that much screening.
I can now understand Palmer Luckey's point of intelligent weapons. It truly brings to life the quote from Game of Thrones, "Why is it more noble to kill 10,000 in battlefield than dozen at a battle." Intelligent weapons enable the second scenario. Civilian lives are mostly unharmed.
I think autocorrect mangled your quote! "Why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner?"
Would be sitting in customs for bribe clearance in here.
Imagine an anti-tank drone buried in the bushes 100 yards off the road.
How about an automated weapon you shoot from a howitzer 15 miles away that autonomously surveils the area under it's impact zone for a couple armored vehicles and reliably eliminates them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155
You can actually see video of these in action in Ukraine. Bofors has also produced the BONUS round which is basically identical in action.
I can imagine this could have been the motivation 18 months ago.
"In the early morning hours of 29 December 2023, Russia launched what was seen to be the largest wave of missiles and drones yet seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, with hundreds of missiles and drones hitting the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other cities across the country."
You have to wonder how much of that time was inventing/creating the actual capability on top of planning/rehearsing. Would be an interesting story in the mold of the "Dam Busters".
It’s just an incredible of a story to me. The logistics and spycraft required boggle the mind
> Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory
The trucks used for the delivery were acquired (along with the mobile homes the drones were launched from that were on their beds) in Russia, as I understand it, not driven from Ukraine (of course, the drones still needed to be delivered from Ukraine for the attack packages to be assembled.)
I wonder if those drones could be made in RU ? They were all using off-the-shelf parts. I don't see the need to import then from Ukraine.
> An amazing idea: Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory and let them loose.
Is it such an amazing idea? Imagine the shoe is on the other foot - would you normally be able to drive a truck full of drones into a country at war, say Israel? This puts a target on civilian vehicles.
> In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Again, is it such an amazing idea? Do you want to make people in charge of nuclear weapons more jumpy and likely to make a rash decision?
Put a target on civilian vehicles? This changes nothing. I don't know if you read or watched "generation kill" but even US troops shot at everything which came too close for comfort in Iraq. And I understand that, any unidentified vehicle could be hostile. You are not going to sit and wait to find out as a soldier.
Also they didn't drive a truck into Russia. The trucks were acquired and modified in Russia. And according to Russia they are not in a war. They are in a "special military operation"...
Amazing doesn't necessarily mean welcome.
It's amazing in how effective it was, and the asymmetry of the destruction compared to cold-war assumptions.
Russians are using those planes to bomb Ukrainian cities and murder Ukrainian civilians.
“Amazing” is the correct word for it
I would support this idealistic approach and disregard for consequences if we didn’t have an “ally” that’s doing exactly the same thing, and potentially vulnerable if a major power decides to intervene
Fwiw, the US bomber force is ~75 B-52's, 40-something B-1's, and 20 B-2's. Pretty similar to Russia, until today.
Worth noting that it is about strategic bombers only. Even is all of them are destroyed - Russians will continue everyday terror against cities as usual, but from other platforms. Pure evil country.
>Pure evil country.
There are no evil countries. There are people making choices, and they can always make other choices. Things aren't fixed and Russia can still have a different and better future.
There might not be evil countries, but there are absolutely evil governments and broken cultures.
Sometimes defeat is required for change and sometimes change can only come from the outside.
The third Reich was not evil. As USSR. Mass murdering just happened by accident. Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Iran are not evil as well. Why they are sanctioned?
They can behave evil for a while - Germany in WW2, Russia recently etc.
What about the past 100+ years of Russian history makes you think that?
Ukraine don't win that way, and they don't get support from Europe that way.
If Russian lives were valued, they wouldn't have started the conflict, much less continued it they way they do.
So no, for Ukraine I don't see what purpose targeting civilians would bring.
Ukraine is outmatched on ammo.
Also, some of the Western kit comes with restrictions on what exactly and how far they can hit inside Russia.
Not sure why the sibling comment is dead, it's an interesting topic. Here is a safe for work video of someone walking through countless strands of fibre over a field:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1l0ld99/...
I read one operator describe the forests as being like Mirkwood from the Hobbit. Eerie.
I was thinking you should be able to turn this into cheap fiber to the premises.
If the numbers are true, this would be one of the more successful attacks in history. Drones are changing the whole dynamic of wars.
My concern is that it doesn't just change war, but security in general. I don't think that we have realized the real implications of this technology, especially the fiber optic drones.
> I don't think that we have realized the real implications of this technology
Define “we.” The defence community has been deeply engaged with what’s going on in Ukraine since ‘22. (And the supremacy of sensor fusion in India’s air battle with Pakistan.)
We as a society. I don't want to write down my detailed thoughts on this, but anyone with a red team mind can imagine the implications for personal security.
Fiber optic drones? AI drones are the really scary one. No control frequency to jam, no fiber to carry.
Real implications are that once again you don’t want your personal shit being public, which will still take some while for gen.audience to understand about social media and all sorts of corporate surveillance.
I don't think my or most people's shit being public will result in fiber optic drone attack.
Its so strange to me that counter drone measures (active defenses - like jamming , lasers, nets, guns + passive measures - hardened aircraft shelters etc.) are not more common around airbases and the like. I would have thought governments would be rusting to harden installations and infrastructure. maybe this is the wake up they need.
Drones weren't seen as much of a threat as these airbases are many thousands of kilometers from the Ukraine border.
Those bases are heavily defended against drones. Ukraine has tried repeatedly to hit these bases and only succeeded once prior hitting a single TU-95. Since then there's been nothing as Russia adapted. The long range drones required have a larger radar signature and Pantsir + AA guns on the ground are pretty good at stopping that. That plus heavy EW and GPS jamming.
Which is why Ukraine spent the last year hitting softer targets like oil and factories.
>Those bases are heavily defended against drones.
Weight doesn't seem to imply effectiveness I guess.
EW is needed at the front, and these bases were deep within Russia. Lasers are not common technology for anti-drone use yet, and likely kinetic weapons are superior since lasers will not work in any sort of bad weather.
Drone countermeasures are an immature technology; nobody knows the solution. Notice the limted defenses elsewhere in the war. The US military is still experimenting with different solutions.
Plenty of proposed solutions, but nothing mature and proven. Again, the US military is still struggling to find answers. Drones dominate the Russia-Ukraine front (and the rear, per the OP).
Why are they so effective in Ukraine and Russia if there are so many solutions? Why do all the experts say they will transform warfare?
START treaty between US and Russia requires that the Bombers are stored out in the open so that they can be monitored from satellite, to check compliance.
I guess after today's attack, that treaty is dead.
Russia already suspended their participation in Feb. 2023.
From the treaty:
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or concealment practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms.
Anti-drone nets or simple hangars won't violate it.
Russians can and will violate any treaty they have signed, also lying about their actions if caught. It is their handbook since forming of the Russian empire.
They have been in compliance with nuclear treaties, that’s not a trivial point.
Also going back to the time of slave trade and genocide of native Americans seems a bit rich…
I would guess they have that stuff but the trucks the drones were transported in entered within the perimeter of the base and bypassed it.
Some say that the Spanish Civil War was the rehearsal for WWII. No doubt, the war in Ukraine is just such a situation.
As long as TACO doesn't dissolve NATO or try to invade Canada, the optimist in me believes a global conventional war is highly unlikely.
Dissolving NATO is beyond his power. He could maybe withdraw the US from it.
> He could maybe withdraw the US from it.
realistically speaking, this destroys NATO
Why would he dissolve NATO? That would just encourage something else to form where the US doesn't have a veto over all decisions.
Recent decisions don't seem to follow that agenda and rationale.
You are naive if you think global conventional war is highly unlikely at this point. A nuclear weapon capable country is being backed in to a corner
Backed into a corner? All they need to do is pull out of Ukraine, and they’ll be fine.
Being backed into a corner? They're the aggressor.
A nuclear power is backed into a corner so you're predicting a global conventional war?
> backed in to a corner
Please tell me what would happen if Putin states "Job well done in Ukraine, all Nazi's are killed", and then withdraws his troops. NATO is going to invade Russia?
Everyone who has played Hearts of Iron knows that Spain is where you train your units for 1939
Weird, it only shows one drone coming out. Do they come out one at a time? When I think launching a drone swarm deep inside a country, I imagine the top blowing off and thousands of drones swarming out at once like insects.
There’s at least one other video where you can see the drones flying out one after the other, with like 10 second delay. Launching one at a time needs fewer pilots and has no risk of collisions that might set off a chain reaction. They’re clearly not in a hurry since who’s going to go near a truck full of high explosive drones anyway.
Oh yeah I forgot about pilots
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While I can admire the effectiveness I do have grave concerns when it’s so cheap to damage very valuable things from such a long distance. Nothing is as safe as it once was and never will be again. The once unthinkable becomes routine, perhaps tactical nukes are the next step, I hope it’s a long time before I find out.
next frontier step is nano-nukes: nuclear device the size of a cell-phone and be carried by a drone from walmart
I'm curious how they managed to control the drones from such a distance.
I'll bet Russia is curious too.
Apparently they're using a simple 4g/3g/2g modem with Russian SIM, which is the reason why all russian ISPs completely turn off mobile internet (& voice) when drone launches are detected (clearly hasn't helped here as the drones were launched from trucks super close to the targets).
These launches specifically seem to have also used on-board AI targeting models trained on photos of the plane models to hit, I assume as a fallback in case mobile connection isn't available inside the bases (and photos on some Telegram channels seem to show usage of the FOSS autopilot system ArduPilot (https://ardupilot.org))
> curious how they managed to control the drones from such a distance
The targets weren’t moving. As long as you have a cell connection in the trailer and up-to-date satellite imagery, you could send the coördinates and even flight path to the drones ahead of time and then have them deal with minor obstacles on their own.
Presumably even a slow connection the drone could send some imagery, someone confirms it / picks out a plane parked, and the drone does the thing.
Camera locking on to a parked plane, should be fairly easy to do the job.
I doubt they trust Musk with operational security anymore. It is pretty much guaranteed he would betray them to Russia.
obviously StarLink doesn't work in the deeps of russian territories
After a call from Putin, this won't happen again.
It always seemed obvious to me that this vulnerability exists everywhere. For example there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets. That's why I thought the media freakout about the supposedly Chinese balloon was so ridiculous.
> obvious to me that this vulnerability exists everywhere
“Everywhere” meaning undefended airspace into which one masses a significant fraction of one type of strategic armament.
This was the savvy exploitation by Kyiv, once again, of Russian operational incompetence.
> there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets
You want to try driving a truck up to a USAF base? (EDIT: Where strategic arms, e.g. B-2s, live.)
This is a novel threat vector. It needs to be protected against with vigilance. That to requires active effort to counter doesn’t mean it’s OP. Just that defensive perimeters need to be expanded, units not needlessly amassed, air defences kept in check and those perimeters constantly (and completely) monitored.
Are you joking? Have you seen ANY American Air Force bases? Tinker AFB is flanked north and south by interstate freeways and surrounded by civilian truck stops and materiel depots. The easiest way to stage a weapon there would be to literally order it on Amazon.
The air mobility command in the Bay Area is similarly totally surrounded by urban civilization.
All airfields are serviced by highways, even the main military ones. These little drones still have a 15 to 20 km strike range because they're one-ways.
The media freakout about the Chinese buying land near US air force bases, though, seems dead on.
Simple solution is to store them hangared. Not too expensive for a rich country like US. It will also improve deployment ambiguity and facilitate covert changes in readiness levels (it's hard to tell from outside whether a plane in hangar is fuelled and armed or not).
I don't think these types of planes are stored in hangars, these are huge. Geography is kind of a way to protect them.
The best way to protect them is maybe not invading and trying to commit genocide on a neighboring country.
It's like developing a good relationship with Ukraine wasn't a possibility, it had to be through corruption and now war.
They are stored out in the open because of the START treaty between US and Russia, it requires that nuclear strategic bombers should be visible from satellite to monitor compliance with the treaty.
This attack, potentially, might spell the end of that treaty.
Can Russia be sure that there are no more sleeper containers? Probably not. This might bind a lot of resources and create paranoia. That’s a good secondary effect of the attack.
But a greater effect will be the fertilization of a Russian drone program based on individualized assassination.
I imagine Ukraine will try similar again, though with a variation to make it harder to catch.
The men who did this are heroes.
As are any women involved
No wonder bay-area companies love to set up offices in East Europe. Their engineers are really really good, as this event demonstrated.
I would assume this event was a one-time hack, it does not scale. Actually most of the “miracle weapons” from the very beginning of the conflict have faded away.
Bairktars? Gone. Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while. What else?
Russians in comparison are great at scaling. Rockets flying daily, vespa-drones - daily, FAB bombs got wings and flying daily. That's the consistency what wins wars, not the greatest talent.
> Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while.
You haven't heard as much about sea drones because Russia was forced to stop naval operations close to Ukraine by them, after losing 1/3 of the Black Sea Fleet.
Though they still occasionally manage to make headlines doing other things, https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-naval-drones-shoo...
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It'd be risky but of they left more trucks staged for a second attack it would make Russia scramble to protect air bases deep in their territory.
The attack was certainly planned meticulously and can be termed a successful operation. Even the Russian media acknowledges it so, reporting that 5 airfields were targeted, attack on 3 were repelled successfully while attacks on 2 were a partial success. But they also speculate that Ukraine will not be able to carry out such attacks any more. As per their analysis, the drones were launched from cargo trucks and remotely guided via mobile networks. The Russian military are already revising their base security doctrines to increase surveillance around the bases and will now be apparently jamming mobile signals over airbases. Moreover, such kind of attacks require a network of human operatives - many have already been arrested and counter-intelligence operations to track down the rest is already underway.
So any more future attacks of such nature would all depend on how successfully the Ukrainian operatives in Russia are able to evade Russian security services.
Yeah sounds like Ukraine is saying they withdrew the team that built the equipment already, would be pretty risky to have another truck waiting in the wings.
Almost a bonus to have Russia jam its own airbases and increase surveillance if a follow up isn't possible.
Curios enough, drones definitely produce interference from rotors apart from sensible noise.
A modern anti-drone system should not rely on traditional reflection-detecting radars but try detecting electric motors, radio signals from 3g/4g modems etc. And it does not necessarily have to work for many miles.
I would see it as a reasonably sized box loaded with interceptor drones, they don't even have to explode. That's something we will see en masse shortly from the Russian side.
Actually nobody should take Russians as dumb and clumsy. They adapt fast. And they can benchmark fast too, thanks to ukrainians. The only open questions is whether the rest of the world accepts new situation, or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s
> A modern anti-drone system should not rely on traditional reflection-detecting radars but try detecting electric motors, radio signals from 3g/4g modems etc.
Standard kit on US military aircraft detect this and 5th gen platforms like the F-35 are designed to attack such systems.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the F-35 is that it is a combat aircraft, 1970s style but with better tech. In many regards, it is designed primarily as a state-of-the-art EW and AWACS-like system that can operate as part of a mesh. Yeah, it is still pretty good at the basic combat mission but the whole mesh EW/AWACS bit is its killer feature.
In the 20th century, you kill the AWACS/EW platforms, they are gone. A lot of effort went into both killing and protecting them. In the 21st century the AWACS/EW platform is a fluid organism comprising many stealthy cells because it is embedded into many platforms, and is much harder to kill because it isn’t a discrete target.
I don't mean those anti-drone systems should target regular aircrafts. Really cool F35 can target them and at the same time it’s highly unlikely F35 would have ever reached those distant airfields.
Short range drones powered by lithium ion batteries with a flight time of 20 minutes and a low ground speed are in absolutely no way a replacement for long range supersonic attack aircraft.
And an autonomous supersonic attack aircraft would cost..about as much as the F-35 because the F-35 is not principally expensive because of the pilot.
Short range drones powered by lithium ion batteries with a flight time of 20 minutes and a low ground speed are in absolutely no way a replacement for long range supersonic attack aircraft.
They don't have to replace them. They just have to destroy them.
Very much depends on the purpose, supersonic aircrafts coming from 60s are a great way to demonstrate power over a long distance along with aircraft sea carriers
But they are vulnerable both in the air and on the ground. Recent Iran attacks over Israel and everyday Russian attacks show that shakhed flying vespa-drones can overload any air defense and deliver ammo for real cheap
TIL most of the drones used in Ukraine aren’t wireless. They unspool an extremely thin fiber optic filament. There is a video of some soldiers walking through a field and it looks like he’s collecting thick spider webs as he goes.
Most drones are wireless, the vast majority in fact, but there are drones that use fiber optic but of course they are much more expensive and they have to carry a large spool of fiber optic, the spool must be on the drone so it wouldn't tangled.
AFAIK fiber drones are specifically short range, couple of miles only. The spool size itself is the limiting factor
What's the purpose of using the fiber? To avoid radio signals?
> or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s
This claim, that FPV UASs equipped with explosives are more effective than F-35s as a blank statement does not sound meaningful.
This attack just showed this. An f-35 could have never pulled off these attacks.
>less effective F35s
If the US had unleashed it's airforce, led by F35s the war probably would have been over in a week with Russia's air defences and invading army taken out.
Longer term, we can expect Ukraine to do this over and over, even is they loose.
Like, if Ukraine lost the war today, folded up, surrendered, kaput. You'd still get organized splinter groups with funding from small nation-states or even motivated partisan groups. And they'd still be able to pull off things like this strike. Not much can stop them.
Yeah, the planning and patience here is unmatched. I don't think the US or even China could pull off this level of patience today. But the cost here, my god, this was just so cheap! And there is no telling about how many more of these Ukraine already has in RU too
And Ukraine and everyone else knows this. Maybe not mad Vlad, maybe not yet. But even is Vlad wins, he's going to have to deal with these kinds of strikes until Ukraine is free again. And that kind of paranoia is not cheap.
And every other nation also knows this now too. Small non-nation-state actors now have a playbook of how to cost you big time.
Are there any effective short range small object radar systems?
Or is conventional radar so noisy / limited that close range and object size is a real problem?
That doesn't work on light-skinned vehicles, or aircraft.
I don’t know what the equipment is used, but definitely.
Ukraine destroys small plane drones and loitering munition with drones with the help of radar guidance.
Also I’ve heard about the case when training on an FPV drone and accidentally leaving designated area in the city triggered an air raid alert.
Sure, there are radars that effective for picking up small targets at short range. The C-RAM point defense system has detected and destroyed incoming mortar rounds. It's very expensive.
I think aircraft radars are deliberately designed not to pick up birds and bushes and the like. The radars on cars seem to pick up small objects.
This is precisely why the United States wants to keep the war in Ukraine going forever.
We get to destroy an enemy by proxy and another country will take the punishment and blame for it.
It's perfect, as long as our ally doesn't run out of blood.
If anything, the past several months have shown that the Ukrainians will keep fighting without American support, and want to keep fighting, because the only other choice would be surrender and enslavement. Having said that, America and the EU do get something out of supporting Ukrainian sovereignty. And it's not just damage to Russian military capacity, it's deterrence against Russian imperial expansion all along the frontier.
If anything this happened because US has less leverage on Ukraine than ever. US has very consistently pressured Ukraine from strategic strikes into Russia. Turns out people other than Americans also have agency.
> US has very consistently pressured Ukraine from strategic strikes into Russia.
This was previously true, but I thought this policy changed as of last week?
May 26 2025: US, UK and allies to lift all range restrictions on weapons in Ukraine
Ukraine’s western allies, including the UK and the US, have agreed to lift all remaining range restrictions on the use of their weapons after President Trump issued his strongest criticism of President Putin yet.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/uk...
Yes, I've been saying this since the war started. The best thing for everyone is obviously no war, but the second best is a long, hard, and bitter war for your enemy, especially if you don't have to be the one to fight it.
I don't see Ukraine winning this conflict in the long run, though, and if it goes on for too long, we'll see bitterness on the Ukrainian side directed at those they felt should have helped. Fighting to the last Ukrainian will eventually make an enemy of them imo.
Attacks like these don't cost much blood. Unmanned equipment destroys parked equipment. Sounds like a win for everybody.
One small nitpick - nobody who matters will or is blaming Ukraine for the war except far left and far right factions.
It is advantageous for the US to keep the war going to a point, but the real focus for the US is the Pacific and the US would prefer to not have to worry about Europe and Russia and instead focus on China. But the US isn’t able to end this war one way or another. Only Russia can end the war (aside from Ukraine no longer willingly defending their country) either willingly or by some sort of internal event, barring some miscalculation where they attack NATO forces. Some theorize Putin will do that to get defeated so he can save face but I don’t think that is likely.
> It is advantageous for the US to keep the war going to a point
It is very short-sighted view. It is definitely not advantageous. USA has reaped the benefits of law-based world order in the last 70 years and which was the reason it has its wealth now.
The longer the war is going on, the more unstable the world becomes and the less it is there for USA to benefit from.
The whole strategy of the USA after WW2 was to keep world and especially Europe safe.
The problem is that letting Russia win will only accelerate the demise of the US, so it cannot just walk away even if everyone in White House really wants that.
Too bad Putin wasn't brilliant enough to foil the evil US plan by not invading Ukraine.
It's very likely the US played a big role in helping plan and provide intelligence for this.
It was one and a half years in the making.
Nope, the Ukrainians said they got no help or intelligence from the US.
The US knew nothing about the operation.
If Trump had known about it, he probably would have told putin accidentally (or.. knowingly?)
Just give Ukraine theirs back.
In my humble, and probably wrong opinion, the war in the Ukraine is about two different systems. You could call one system of human interaction the Putin-model. This is the one we in the US have recently adopted. Another model is a collaborative one. The models are not sharply delineated, but the differences are essential. Do we act with collaborative intelligence or do we follow orders? Most US corporations and individuals now rely on the Putin model. In this model, some (possibly incompetent and possibly insane) individual decides what we do, and we do it. I have seen revered corporate leader choose the dumbest choice possible over and over. The other model requires that the individual members can collaboratively understand a problem and respond to it. Unfortunately our "follow the leader" educational system has insured that we have few thinkers who are able to actually assess and solve problems.
I apologize because my experience with corporate culture has resulted in a strong and decisive conclusion that corporate leaders such as Musk and Cook, et al., could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Really. What they can do is order other people to fight their way out of paper bags. If I were somehow ever in an overloaded life boat, the first people I would push over the side would be the Musks and Cooks. Musk's "send me an email" just does not work in a life boat in a storm. sigh.
I realize that in our cultist society this is blasphemy, but really - if you are able to think any original thought, go for it. And for those of you who do not get it. Well, the best I can say is good luck.
The differences you are touching on are about interpersonal trust, and the concept of trust in society. Russia has a traditionally low trust culture. It's rooted in the most private interpersonal relationships, and is reflected in society as a whole.
The U.S. has traditionally been a high trust society. But not everyone in the U.S. is a person who can trust others. The recent political machinations in the U.S. represent the low trust segment of American society. The key to undoing it is to re-inculcate trust at a personal level, and at societal level. How that is actually done is a difficult problem with no readily obvious solution.
Good thoughts. Made me think. I had not connected the trust issue as you did, but was aware of it. One thing that concerns me is the tracking ads that are the business model for the consumer internet. Even worse than the tracking is the targeting. At some point I saw some supposed code from twitter or another, that was basically
```
if (isDemocrat) showD() else if (isRepublican) showR()
```
The net(!) effect is that people develop completely different world views which tend to be echo chambers. To my mind this is the cause of much dysfunction. The democratic party still does not get the source of the gigantic dissatisfaction that many, many people have for the way things are. In their echo chamber, the concept that many people have real and valid concerns is verboten.
Unless the New York Times readers can figure out that the people they call "haters" are in fact suffering things there will be no alternative to those people who are capitalizing on that suffering. IMO.
As for trust, I believe one large step is to prevent targeting. Otherwise the alternative is to develop another business model.
[Edit for spelling a tiny bit more of clarity]
Interestingly, US military doctrine requires this sort of distributed authority. A straight-out-of-academy lieutenant requesting and directing the fire of an entire artillery battery, or calling in air support, doesn't happen in a "top down" structure. Of course, objectives are set by upper echelon (or political) leadership - which, of course, bear much deserved criticism, over the past decades - but ground-level war-making operates in a firmly collaborative model. Civilian (and maybe especially political) leaders seem to poorly understand this, and overlook the lessons they might draw from it.
Yes. It is true, but I believe there is a significant difference between calling in artillery and saying "Why don't we try drones". Artillery is doctrine. Drones were not.
I do not know if the US Army could adapt as effectively as the Ukrainians have. My guess is not. BWDIK. Certainly some recent US military actions do not seem to be adaptive.
So yes, the military is perhaps better than corporations at being adaptive. It is hard to imagine a military commander asking everyone to send an email every day. On the other hand, will the US Army do better than the Russian military when they face a highly adaptive situation?
What is Russia going to do when she figures that she cannot keep her strategic bombing fleet safe?
Well she's free to stop picking fights whenever she likes. That would help.
Hopefully stop using them to bomb hospitals and civilians.
If it’s that big a deal for Russia, it always has the option of pulling out of Ukraine.
All of this can end tomorrow. Pull out of Ukraine, get rid of Putin, they’d probably even get most of the sanctions eased.
This is the future of warfare and terrorism worldwide. Coming to a conflict zone near you.
US is doing a lots of shit in Middle east right now and the new kids will grow to revenge, it will be interesting times since the drones doesn't costs much.
I'm not convinced that what the US does or doesn't do now will have any impact on Muslim extremists' desire for revenge against Israel, the US, and the West. That ship sailed a long time ago. They seem to be in permanent revenge mode.
This is going to get nasty really fast until defensive technology catches up a lot of really expensive targets are very vulnerable.
That being said all you really need to do is install defensive netting at bases. You don’t even need hangers so relatively inexpensive retrofit.
That will probably cause drones to shift to dropped minions but at least those are less accurate.
Anywhere, not just conflict zones. There was a decades long terror campaign against planned parenthood and other clinics in the USA and white supremacist nut jobs keep trying to start a race war every five to ten years with bombing and shooting sprees, the weekly school shooting in the USA, and there’s the using a vehicle worldwide for killing civilians by incels/fundamentalists of all stripes. This opens up a new venue for those inclined to act.
And laser guns for defence.
But we are quite close to having (prohibitively expensive) flying cars!
And for defense of ships in port, they are mounted on sharks.
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While this is an impressive achievement, I am wondering if this prompts Russia to actually use nukes as it looks like they might be in front of a dilemma "use it or lose it" given what one can do with drones. Wiping out one third of one third of their strategic nuclear triad in a few hours might change their calculus considerably.
Nukes are useless in current world. What for? To destroy cities? How it can help to win the war where you are the aggressor? Wipe out Kyiv - Ukrainians will not stop fighting. Target troops with nukes? Like to nuke every mile of the frontline?
Either way more countries will oppose russia after use of nukes.
Being a nuclear power also does not prevent war, as you can see what happens between India and Pakistan.
On the other hand, it’s by far the most useless and obsolete third
All russian strategic bombers are obsolete. However even old soviet bomber with old soviet missile can deliver 500kg of explosives far away targeting random civilian locations.
No, Russia won't use its Nukes against Ukraine yet. Remember that the Russians believe the Ukraine conflict is a NATO proxy war against it. And over the past 3+ years, Russian media has reported that the "escalations" that they have seen in the war are deliberate attempts by the west to provoke an "undesirable" reaction from Russia (against the Ukrainians) to use as an excuse to escalate the war and possibly even directly get involved in the conflict and invade Russia.
Russian media analysis believe that Ukraine's polity is now resigned to the fact that they can't really militarily defeat Russia alone. And so they've shifted their strategy to use Ukrainian military to create high impact media headlines, to please their western "financiers" and to psychologically demoralise the Russians. That does make sense as attacks like this while being demoralising doesn't really offer any real military breakthrough to the Ukrainians, nor is it likely to stop the Russian advances.
The Russians already occupy around 20% of Ukrainian territory which the Ukrainians have been unable to take back. Since last year, the Russians have reportedly captured nearly 2000+ kms more of territory from the Ukrainian forces (including the Russian regions that were under Ukrainian control). And the Ukrainians forces can't realistically launch another major counter-offensive as they are very wary of running out of manpower (Ukrainians have 1/4th the wartime population of the Russians, and thus can't replenish their military as much as the Russians can).
Thus, it is an undeniable fact that right now, the Russian military have the advantage and the Ukrainian military is losing the war.
What remains to be seen is how much longer is the Zelensky administration willing to gamble that Russian economy will soon collapse or Putin may be deposed or NATO or EU boots will soon join the Ukranian forces to fight the Russians?
> That does make sense as attacks like this while being demoralising doesn't really offer any real military breakthrough to the Ukrainians
Eh? These planes are regularly used to attack Ukraine, and they are irreplaceable (one odd dynamic of this war is that a lot of the Russian equipment is a legacy of the past; modern Russia simply does not have the industrial base to replace it, so unless they can somehow convince China to sell them bombers, every bomber lost is a permanent reduction in offensive capability.)
i disagree with your assessment. remember, Russias economy is smaller than the Italian economy bigger than Spains.
this war is bankrupting Russia the longer it continues
So, shouldn't this be flagged?
Any article that offends the sensitivities of the wing-nut mode of the highly bi-modal community is immediately flagged. Such as the recent article by the resident of Sri Lanka during it's civil war.
https://indi.ca/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121939
But somehow, traditional warfare news seems totally fine, despite the fact that this has nothing to do with tech, or vulture capital.
There really needs to be an "unflag" link for posts, to allow both sides of the "flag vs don't flag" debate to be represented.
> Such as the recent article by the resident of Sri Lanka during it's civil war.
So because a post was wrongly flagged (I haven't checked but I take your word for it) we should also flag other posts that the community wants?
Or maybe we should stop using flags as downvotes? Flags are for disinformation, off topic and low quality links, that kind of things, not for "things I personally don't find interesting".
I'm commenting on the discrepancy between what dies of flagging, and what doesn't.
I don't think it's as much "I don't find it interesting", as it is "I don't politically agree with this".
Specifically, I think there should be an "unflag" link, so that opinions to keep comments active can also be registered.
If one had to guess how the war is going just by reading western media, it seems incredible that Ukraine didn’t win the entire war in five minutes!
"Russian meat grinder continues to grind" isn't much of a headline but you can absolutely find regular articles about the state of the war. They just don't bubble up to headline news or RT. Russia does get its share of press by bombing childrens hospitals and infrastructure.
Now compare that to a country with no navy sinking a missile cruiser or downing an AWACS jet. Or, in this case, sending trucks thousands of miles into enemy territory to destroy strategic bombers. It's simply more interesting news despite how it makes you feel.
It doesn’t make me feel any particular way because I don’t care about either side of the war. I’m just pointing out something I find amusing.
Russia thought they could take Kyiv in less than a week. If you're judging this war by their own goals, then they absolutely failed.
A long protracted war complete with the destruction of their strategic airforce and Black Sea Fleet was not something they would have even conceived of being the outcome back in January 2022.
That doesn't mean Ukraine "won". But barring any kind of black swan event in their favor, Russia definitely "lost".
If one only had listened to Russian media you wouldn't even know there is a war, just a "special operation"!
I think Putin takes joy in getting called out for this kind of hypocrisy. He copies US corruption like letting the President exceed his authority in a "special military operation" and then points at the bias.
It's not like he needed this bypass on a check on his power. He has done it to insult the US.
Ukraine never claimed a 5 minutes war, Russia did claim a 3 days special military operation though, that was a good 1000+ days ago though
Russia did lose its special military operation in about 5 minutes when it totally failed it's objectives. Leading to this drawn out war of attrition against a much smaller country.