Posted by tim333 1 day ago
In simplest term, it's like your neighbor parks their car on your driveway, you get police to issue fines, or maybe even get it towed. But your neighbor has money, so they keep paying fines, etc.. Your whole neighborhood supports you, so they would call the cops for you, go to town hall and all of that. In the end, you'll never win and get your parking space back. The only way is to park your and all your supporters' cars in their driveway, give them a taste of their own medicine.
Most long wars in the last century become trench wars; maneuver warfare is too expensive (in terms of materiel) to sustain between adversaries who are at all balanced; the Iran-Iraq War is a good example of this. Additionally, most small/proxy wars are used as testing grounds for either validating new weapons, or checking the viability of old/expired munitions; Ukraine is being used this way, but so was Libya.
It seems that any decisive action is too risky for Western leaders to contemplate. Western leaders seem willing to 'stir the pot' in places like Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, but never want to commit decisive resources. The threat of nuclear escalation seems to be too high for the minuscule popularity that one might win as a victor in Ukraine. Non-nuclear countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, etc.) could commit ground and air forces to Ukraine's aid with little to no risk of any consequences, but even they are unwilling to do so. The sad part is that the lesson being taught here is that China will be able to conquer Taiwan with almost no risk of foreign intervention, no matter how long it takes them.
Firstly "In April 2001, George W. Bush publicly announced the American defense of Taiwan"..."This framework was approved by President Donald Trump in 2018" (wikipedia)
Secondly there's a sea in between China and Taiwan meaning it could largely be defended by a no fly zone. In Ukraine once Russia troops have crossed the border it isn't easy to get rid of them without a lot of messy ground warfare.
The only real difference here is that the U.S. has even fewer advantages in this hypothetical conflict. China, like Russia, has hypersonic missiles and drone swarms both of which are aircraft carrier killers and carriers are still the U.S.’s main way to project power so far from home. According to Pentagon estimates, in a war with China, the U.S. would only have about a month’s worth of ammunition. The supply chain situation would be a disaster, and Japan and South Korea likely wouldn’t risk directly supporting the U.S. because they’d be stuck right within China’s range, not thousands of kilometers from home.
Whatever’s written on paper is meaningless if the country guaranteeing your security has too much to lose, it’s just paper. Ukraine had guarantees, Poland had guarantees in 1939, and plenty of other countries in history had guarantees that didn’t hold up. What really matters are actual capabilities, war scenarios and costs.
Colby knows that[1], because he has all the data and understands the political reality. And the reality is that the U.S. could lose the war, and all the economic and political consequences of losing its hegemony would follow.
All of America’s enemies in history were weaker than the U.S. In the last 100 years, the U.S. hasn’t fought an opponent anywhere near its level of strength. Even in WWII, three quarters of Nazi Germany’s forces were destroyed by the Soviet Union, that’s a fact you won’t see in Hollywood movies about brave heroes. Now the U.S. would be facing the world’s factory, a country with the resources, political system and industrial capacity to actually win that war.
1. https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/09/pentagon-...
The US would only need to bring an aircraft carrier to the general area and then could base aircraft in Taiwan. Even if the Chinese military was stronger than the US it'd be a difficult task for them.
The Economist discussing that https://archive.ph/Rjuzy
They can't cut off the Druzhba pipeline because they need to keep Hungary and Slovakia happy.
Ukrainian government even officially proposed that some time ago as I remember.
The US has definitely used the Ukraine war as a way to wear out the Soviet stockpiles out of Russia.
The EU just hasn't either political will or capabilities to really help Ukraine win.
Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops in German territories. But that's exactly what is happening in Ukraine war.
The EU on the other hand is under existential threat from Russia so they (we, actually as I'm French) really ought to do something serious to help Ukraine not only stabilize the front line and wear down Russia, but win this war.
But because we underinvested in defense for decades (because the Western Europe couldn't imagine a conflict was possible with their biggest trade partner, and because eastern Europe was too keen on trading political influence inside the EU to the US in exchange for security guarantees against Russia without having to build a capable military on their own) we ended up in 2022 with little capabilities to really help Ukraine.
And because of the obsession with public spending and debt reduction, countries refused to seriously invest seriously in their industrial capabilities to supply the Ukrainians with a war-changing amount of ammo and other assets. (the fact that South Korea alone was able to give more ammo to the Ukrainians than the whole of EU in 2023 is a sad joke really).
I can't really blame the US, they played their own interests while minimizing consequences for them (and that's also why they wanted to avoid escalation in priority). But I do blame European leaders, including my own president, for not taking this matter as seriously as they should have. (For a full 10 month in 2023 Les forges de Tarbes, France's main production of 155mm shells, has been stuck with no way of producing anything because they couldn't pay their suppliers because they lacked liquidity to do so, this was utterly ridiculous and should have been solved with a single phone call. But nobody in charge bothered, for almost a year…)
EU as an entity is under threat. But only few members bordering Russia actually feel the threat. Russia is not going to invade France or Spain anytime soon, they are relaxed.
> He also wrote that a 5 percent defense spending goal would jeopardize the country’s welfare system,
> Sánchez said that 17% of this year’s military spending would go to natural disaster relief.
The Spaniards are the only ones outright saying it, but seem very obvious that the silent (and overwhelmingly economical) majority in EU think this way
The economic consequences of the war have been severe for Germany though, but they don't seem to care that much unfortunately…
All of the main neocon actors (e.g. lindsay graham) say this. The idea that western military resources are unlimited is a neocon article of faith.
It's weird coz it is possible to count the number of e.g. shells and air defense missiles manufactured and stockpiled and it is plainly obvious that it is not enough and was never enough. That is why Ukraine losing was inevitable.
>Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops
Imagine the USA supplying weapons to a leader who is actually just like Hitler while he is committing a genocide.
You dont have to imagine too hard.
War is not only the 155mm shells. NATO has so many weapons stockpiled for war with USSR, they could send everything to Ukraine and it will help a lot. As an example, just check how many old Abrams the are in storage and never will be used and how many have been sent.
In this war it is most:
>Artillery has been known as the “king of battle” for centuries, and this largely remains true today. In the Russia-Ukraine war, artillery fire accounts for about 80 percent of the casualties on both sides.
https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/weapons-war-race-between-ru...
>NATO has so many weapons stockpiled for war
Many, like the F16 proved expensive and fairly useless.
And, at some point they had to start deciding whether to strip their inventories bare or hold back weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
So, while there are many stockpiles, theyre not necessarily much help.
In a supreme act of irony the NATO member that stripped its inventories the most now has America threatening its territory.
is no longer the case. Now it's drones https://www.army-technology.com/news/drones-now-account-for-...
which I guess show that things can change. If it had been a NATO vs Russia war it would have been air power or maybe nukes which everyone wants to avoid.
The switch to drone warfare may be a problem of Russia. They had a clear advantage in artillery but it's more even with drones and western collaboration like this Project Octopus may give Ukraine the advantage. (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/a-western...)
Drones are the one thing theyve got left. It makes sense theyd hype them up. It also makes sense that military-industrial complex lobbying machinery like your website would hype up whatever seems to be working - it fills their order book.
>The switch to drone warfare may be a problem of Russia.
Body bag exchange ratios have recently topped ~40:1. Actual casualty ratios are (being generous, here) probably 25:1 at this point.
Reasonably neutral estimates have the military deaths since 2022 at about 80k Ukrainians, 250k Russians. (see wikipedia)
That case was 1212:27, or 44:1.
>Reasonably neutral estimates have the military deaths since 2022 at about 80k Ukrainians, 250k Russians
You might want to reassess your measure of what constitutes "reasonably neutral" because that 80k number is off by roughly an order of magnitude.
It's also worth noting that these lopsided 44:1 casualty exchange ratios are A) a relatively recent phenomenon - only in the last ~4-5 months. They are hard to bullshit though.
Russian army is attacking with little to no success, and it's reasonable to expect 3:1 KIA rate between attacking and defending sides.
Thats the most off the wall opinion Ive heard today.
>If russians are continuing slow advance, where do you expect bodies to be found?
Note that body exchanges were not this lopsided when Russia was retreating in 2022.
>it's reasonable to expect 3:1 KIA rate between attacking and defending
Unless one side is comprehensively outgunned and keeps falling into cauldron traps because they have orders to cling on to land at all costs.
Which seems to be a repeated pattern here.
Now, yes. But we wasted two years of war before going to that point and during this entire time Russia has outgunned Ukraine by almost an order of magnitude, mostly because shells where a scarce resource for the AFU, which is a shame.
And artillery still is far from irrelevant even now.
As I said above, I don't blame the US for not doing more as their action maximized their own interests, but I blame out European leaders for being spineless cowards.
If they deploy those forces they will be wiped out. There is no question of that.
European leaders' main hope was that they could sacrifice some troops to provoke the yanks over to save the day.
Trump has comprehensively and publicly ruled that out though. He refuses to be drawn in.
And what would you do in that situation? with a bunch of dead troops, an infuriated Russia and no US to come to the rescue?
4 years and a million casualties too late though.
> If they deploy those forces they will be wiped out.
What? We've all seen the offensive capabilities of the Russian over the past three years and it's been very clear that they can't run combined arms properly, nor can they secure air dominance over a country with only old Soviet airframes, they wouldn't be able to wipe out anything in a short period and attacking allied forces means declaring war to those nations, which Russians cannot afford to do.
> European leaders' main hope was that they could sacrifice some troops to provoke the yanks over to save the day.
They'd been no need to save anything, Putin isn't dumb enough to start a fight with European countries. Putin couldn't beat Ukraine in more than three years, hoping to win against the whole Europeans would be stupidly delusional.
Have we been watching the same war? Ukraine is getting absolutely trounced.
>nor can they secure air dominance
Um, air defenses in Ukraine are virtually nonexistent these days. Shahed attacks get through every time these days and glide bombs are wrecking all front line fortifications.
This certainly wasnt the case in 2023 or 2024 when the russian air force did nothing, but it is now.
>they wouldn't be able to wipe out anything in a short period and attacking allied forces means declaring war to those nations, which Russians cannot afford to do.
shrug Putin has said he would do it explicitly and Ive never known him to bluff.
I think you might be wildly overestimating how many troops Europe has to spare, also.
>Putin couldn't beat Ukraine in more than three years
He invaded the largest country in Europe, supplied by the richest and most powerful military bloc in the world. Did he fail if it takes 5 years to secure capitulation?
It's all a matter of investment in industrial capacities, especially for mundane early-twentieth century technology like 155mm shells.
It's not inevitable that North Korea is able to supply more shells than any individual NATO member, you know.
It is if American military exceptionalism is treated as an article of faith, which it was, so here we are.
Scaling up industrial production was never treated as a serious problem and still isnt because all you need, apparently, as OP said, is political will.
Putin made a bet on American and western hubris and it seems to have paid off.
I'm not sure the bet paid off much either - Russia is way down in money, human lives, global reputation, military equipment and so forth. And I doubt the war will develop much in Russia's favour going forward. You can get so far by say we're your friend, we won't attack to peaceful people and then hitting them when their guard is down but they wise up.
This was seemingly in an attempt to provide a diplomatic off ramp where everybody could pretend that they didnt back down in the face of a naked threat of force.
America and Ukraine both rejected the 3 point ultimatum though - basically saying "bring it on".
Since then the deal offered by Russia has worsened relative to Ukraine's steadily declining negotiating leverage.
>I'm not sure the bet paid off much either - Russia is way down in money, human lives
They have a casualty exchange ratio of 44:1 at this point. This is why Europe is in a bit of a collective panic and Trump is flailing around trying to make a deal.
None of that would be happening if the original plan of "levy a crushing defeat" was working out.
So yes, the bet is paying off.
>And I doubt the war will develop much in Russia's favour going forward
In that case events of the next year will probably shock you.
I'm not sure how you figure there was an 'original plan of "levy a crushing defeat"' - don't know how that would have worked with zero NATO troops and minimal assistance to Ukraine. I think it was more hoping Russia would behave like a normal civilised country and not murder their peaceful neighbours. That one obviously didn't pan out but you can't win them all.
>I think it was more hoping Russia would behave like a normal civilised country
Theyre acting like the countries who are currently supporting a Nazi-level genocide were trying to set up a string of offensive military bases along their most vulnerable border.
This is why they were only sanctioned by western countries. The global south that faced the full brunt of western colonialism is better able to appreciate how unpredictable and threatening we actually are.
I was going to say that you're drinking Russia propaganda out of the fire hose then I saw that:
> They have a casualty exchange ratio of 44:1 at this point
What the heck are you talking about, even Russian MoD communication isn't as ridiculous.
How do you think a country of 32 million inhabitants count withstand for three years against a country of 150M with such a grotesque figure (that's the kind of ratio you'd only see in colonial wars in the XIXth century against hunter gatherers). There was not even enough Ukrainian male in age of fighting at the start of the war to make that figure work.
> So yes, the bet is paying off.
Putin has reinforced his internal power, so yes the bet is paying off, that was the only real goal from the start. After all war is just the continuation of internal politics through other means.
> In that case events of the next year will probably shock you.
Ah yes, like the events of 2022 were supposed to shock us as well: The special military operation overthrowing the Nazi government of Ukraine by taking Kiyv in three days…
Which is why you want "cost less than 10% of the Russian systems destroyed."
How do we know this? Aren't some defense tech companies (anduril?) publicly disclosing shipment of new weapons to Ukraine?
How exactly do you picture it ending? No, really. Imagine you got everything you wanted. Everyone delivers max offensive capability to Ukraine. Ukraine brings the war to Russia in full scale. Putin, or his successors, give up. Then what?
At the end of the day, Russia will still be there, at Ukraine's borders. What happens?
(Unless you're one of those who imagine a split-up - a sentiment Putin absolutely has noticed and used in building domestic support, by the way. But either way, there will be something that used to be Russia at Ukraine's borders, and they may not be very happy about their neighbors after a full scale war.)
I'll listen to any plausible scenario - plausible to you I mean, I'll defer judgment for now. Don't worry about convincing me, just convince yourself. I just want to know what happy outcome you imagine after Ukraine has somehow brought the war to Russia and won.
>The war gradually inflicted a high cost on the Soviet Union as military, economic, and political resources became increasingly exhausted. (wikipedia)
and the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 and collapsed in 1991. I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade. They are currently losing about 1000 soldiers a day and have a deficit of ~$100bn/yr, 17% interest rates and 20% of their oil refining capacity taken out by Ukrainian drone strikes which are escalating.
But you remember, even though the US foreign policy establishment basically got every single outcome it wanted from supporting the rebels in Afghanistan, right up to the split up of the Soviet Union and Russia becoming a republic run on Chicago school of economics principles by a pro-US president, in another couple of years they instead got Russia back as an enemy state and al Qaeda.
Also, while the situation ended up back in a pretty bad place for the US, that's nothing to where Afghanistan ended up. I think the US should try pretty hard avoid winning, if winning means the same as the way they won in Afghanistan. And Ukraine should definitively avoid an Afghanistan-style victory at all costs.
They only need to keep going longer than their opponent. Ukraine has fewer soldiers and resources than Russia and currently has almost no offensive capability, as seen on the battlefield. All they can really do is defend, and even then they’re still losing ground, not much, but still losing territory. Here in the West, we’re facing economic problems, high debt, and a shortage of weapons production, especially in the EU. I’d like what you’re saying to happen, but that’s wishful thinking. And Afghanistan wasn’t the primary or even a major reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse.
> I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade
They have oil, gas, and minerals that the rest of the world needs, and they have an internal propaganda machine that lets them hold out for a long time. I remember "experts" saying Russia would collapse economically in 2023, then in 2024 for sure, and that they’d run out of rockets. Now it’s 2025, and that collapse isn’t even on the horizon.
No offensive capabilities and yet russian refineries keep burning reducing its capability to produce fuel to the point that the fuel in Russia is most expensive it has ever been by a large margin. No vehicles run on crude and russia will eventually have to walk their soldiers to the front lines.
> I remember "experts" saying Russia would collapse economically in 2023
Experts weren't necessarily wrong. It's just hard to notice collapse of something that's already almost a failed state that constantly lies about how things are.
With a peace agreement. Russia withdraw its troops, ends occupation and pays for the inflicted damage. Sounds fair, no?
How do you deal with the fact that the large majority of the population in Crimea (and probably a lot of Donbas too) preferred union with Russia over staying in Ukraine? Do you deny them the vote for a generation? Ethnically cleanse them? Or do you give them a big hand on the rudder in the new unified Ukraine, like they used to have? Either solution seems like it's a powder keg for war to break out again.
So do war reparations, of course. That's basically how WW2 happened. As I see it, the best case scenario of Russia paying for all the damages is that it becomes an impoverished breeding ground for a lot of vengeful terrorism. Maybe you're more optimistic?
Also, is this peace agreement really more likely to happen if Moscow has been London blitz-droned into submission? When did your country last sue for peace in such a situation, and how long did that last? I don't have much sympathy for "political realists" in practice, but in theory, I agree with them that you should expect other states to behave like your state would have behaved.
It's not a fact but propaganda from RussiaToday.
How about to go the Russian way: put troops there, make them do a referendum, be sure people see guns and Ukrainian flags. Anyone who will not make a Ukrainian passport soon will be deported or imprisoned. They are ok if Russia do it - then once more will be also accepted.
>> Maybe you're more optimistic?
There are €300b of frozen Russian money, also a 10% reparation tax on oil export could finance the rebuild of Ukraine.
Also, you're framing this as if Ukraine is the aggressor. Maybe if Russia didn't want to be left as an "angry" neighbour, they shouldn't have started their 1000 day special military operation.
We can pave over it and turn it into parking lot on the side of the highway to China which border will start right behind Ural mountains.
> The drone developed under Project OCTOPUS was designed by Ukraine with support from UK scientists and technicians and has already proved successful on the battlefield, proving highly effective against the Shahed one-way attack drone variants used by Russia – despite costing less than 10% to produce than the drones they are designed to intercept.
What does a Shahed cost? https://www.twz.com/news-features/what-does-a-shahed-136-rea... says about US$50k, so they're saying that the Octopus drones cost on the order of US$5k, and "thousands" of them costs on the order of US$10M. So this is a single-digit percentage of Ukraine's yearly drone budget: not insignificant, but far from game-changing.
Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?
> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.
But does it cost more than the Shahed plus the target of the Shahed? That it the equation Ukraine is using.
It would maybe also not be a great idea to field weapons that cost more than their targets, because, measured in dollars, it means you're doing more damage to yourself than to the enemy. Economically speaking, it's like a handgun that shoots both backwards and forwards. If you're immensely richer than the enemy—and the UK's GDP is almost twice the size of Russia's, even before you add in Ukraine's GDP, Poland's GDP, Germany's, etc.—it can still be a winning strategy. But it's still pretty galling.
£200M is the same order of magnitude as Ukraine's total yearly spending on drones, I think.
They would after all be in a strong position as one of the only countries to have successfully fought a major power in recent times.
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223912 ballparks the program at US$10M.
Under these circumstances, if the UK is sending thousands of small FPVs it would be insignificant.
We're speculating based on very little information here. At least you didn't spell it "Shaheed".
There are already available different FPV designs used to successfully intercept Shaheds, loitering munitions and reconnaissance drones.
Really I’d like it to be a learning opportunity, even though people like this seem to be incapable of learning lessons (will update here when they jump to conclusions without evidence on the next one) or of following principles (I don’t need to update, there’s no way they will follow with their commitment to delete their account). The lesson is to wait for some facts to come in before jumping to extreme conclusions.
As an anti fascist that uses to run black lives matter protests, whoever these antifa folks are they never invited me to their club!
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
>Robot team captures Russian soldiers in world-first unmanned assault: Ukraine claims https://interestingengineering.com/military/ukraine-robot-te...
>the attack employed a combination of FPV (first-person view) kamikaze drones and ground robotic complexes (GRCs) to penetrate and neutralize fortified Russian positions that had previously repelled human-led offensives.
Drones are cheaper to replace than people.
Only for western country.
But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.
More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.
I think that assumption will quickly need to be reevaluated. Drones definitely can empty a city if there's enough of them and they are so doing their thing for long enough. People can't eat concrete and plants don't grow without the sun.
As well as dumb WW2 era bombs. But even if the city is leveled to the ground you need a lot of ground troops to capture it. We've seen this recently in east Ukraine as well.
And you don't have to capture anything. Just move your drone operators forward once it's safe.
One wonders how they have managed that, or how they know.
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
This kind of thing https://thedefender.media/en/2025/08/dyki-shershni-showcased...
>Sting interceptor hits 315 km/h, shoots down over 200 Shaheds and Gerberas
>Sting costs about $2,500
Not sure what design the UK will make.
Being able to recharge them changes logistics a lot. You can have very mobile teams for defense in depth to decimate swarm attacks.
i see shaheds in this case equipped with ultrasonic sensors to detect anything in range that will trigger "evasive maneuvers".
The Mangust design is quite interesting
>steered by the pilot until, at around 200 meters (650 feet), its auto-guidance system takes over and autonomously completes the interception. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57595
Still seems to be a prototype though - not sure they've hit any shaheds.
adding a few ultrasonic sensors, wires and writing extra 1000 lines of code not going to change BoM much
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
I think the plan is that the war is over in 10 minutes ... so why care.
If tomorrow russia will occupy three NATO countries: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia - nobody is going to use nukes.
And I do think conflict in the Baltics would leak to nuclear war rapidly. Formal military alliances must be upheld, or they mean nothing. If the positioning of nuclear weapons didn't immediately end the war (as in Pakistan-India) then there would likely be limited launches of tactical weapons at invading forces. At that point we reach the crisis point. Either the war ends there, or we get retaliatory nuclear launches at which point the most likely scenario is the majority of the northern hemisphere becoming a depopulated wasteland.
Of course not.
Nuclear powers would only use nuclear weapons if it's the last resort.
So when in the salami tactics world does it get used?
It's not exactly a new scenario:
Riots in West Berlin, buildings in flames. East German fire brigade crosses the border to help. Would you press the button? The East German police come with them. The button? Then some troops, more troops just for riot control, they say. And then the East German troops are replaced by Russian troops. Button? Then the Russian troops don't go. They are invited to stay to support civilian administration. The civilian administration closes roads and Tempelhof Airport.
They didn't suggest you would need to.
> low-tech things like drone attack drones
And which flag are they flying?
GP never implied that the strikes he refers to are nuclear strikes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...
About $22k before we even ramp up production. Any NATO aircraft can carry a large loadout of them, and they turn any long distance, slow moving drone into target practice.
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
Russia also started to deploy mobile anti-drone guns and there a lot of vides that show their effectiveness but Ukraine still fly drones low as Russia still willing to use expensive missiles against them on massive scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.
I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.
>the Skyranger, a twin radar-guided 30mm gun turret made by Rheinmetall, making this the natural choice for the German Army. The gun system costs around $12 million https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/09/10/why-so...
and ammo is about $600/round apparently.
EDIT:
They used to go 5000 ft or so. Now " fly between 2,000 to 5,000 meters to evade small arms fire, while the high-altitude reconnaissance drone Shahed 147 can reach 18,288 meters (60,000 feet). "
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
Practice makes perfect.
There's some guy in Damascus who knows more about the real world use of the TOW than the people who built it.
It's amazing what you can do when your choices are, in essence, "be destroyed" or "become an expert"
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/07/21/russia-...
Is there not cheaper auto-shotgun type devices around? To spray the sky. It doesn't take an entire missile or even bullet to damage a drone does it?
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.
Please don't do this on HN.
Also cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45224133.
Also, I looked at your comment history, and you seem to be using Hacker News almost entirely for "political or ideological battle", in this particular case trying to bully someone into silence for disagreeing with you on a political issue. If you keep doing that, you will probably be banned, and I can attest that the last time I saw you get banned from a space I was in for doing that, multiple people came forward to tell me privately about the psychological abuse you'd subjected them to. You can't escape accountability indefinitely.