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Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

Russia has made a lot of mistakes that have nothing to do with Ukraine. I find it difficult to draw any accurate or useful conclusions from the war that translate to the US or Western armies other than don't repeat Russia's mistakes.

I certainly wouldn't base any opinion on the effectiveness of helicopters in general on Russian performance in the current war.

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> I find it difficult to draw any accurate or useful conclusions from the war

How about the side that can out produce and outspend (or has friends that do) will come out on top. Same lesson from ww2 . The tricky bit it to stay standing till then

Same lesson that every RTS or 4x game has ever taught me! Just need to have the generals play more command and conquer.

Maybe they were playing Total War Warhammer instead, that would explain why they put their leaders so close to the front line...

It seems hard to generalize lessons about wars. I remember commenters who thought the couple day timeline was realistic, presumably because they were used to the way the US invades countries. Most armies aren't Russia, most aren't the US...

I dunno, maybe we need to get, like, France and the UK to duke it out again? (kidding obviously).

> I certainly wouldn't base any opinion on the effectiveness of helicopters in general on Russian performance in the current war.

Sure but (and I could be wrong here) isn't this the first time that modern Russia helicopters has gone up against modern MANPADS in a near peer type of conflict?.

Id say it shows at least the effectiveness of different MANPADS against specific countermeasures no?.

If the conclusions you want to draw are about Russia, fine. But it's simply not comparable to how Western armies function. I don't see how you're going to remove all the noise from the data like lack of maintenance, bad training, lack of readiness, outdated hardware, bad doctrine execution, bad leadership, etc.

I think there will be statistics for the performance of Russian helicopters against western MANPADS from Afghanistan during the 80s. I'm not expecting that the MANPADS will have got worse since then.

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