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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

The AI part in this piece seems a bit premature, as far as I can tell from the promotional videos of successful combat, all of the drones are piloted. The more interesting thing is how each combat brigade for Ukraine (and one can only assume something similar for Russia) has drone operators in addition to the dedicated drone support units as detailed here: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpke... Does anyone know if any NATO countries are adapting to this or ideas to break the stalemate on the frontline where neither side can use armored vehicles very effectively due to their drone vulnerability besides the Russians throwing men and equipment into the grinder to soak up Ukrainian ammunition?

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NATO countries rely on massive air superiority. Something neither side in that war has, hence their stalemate.

NATO armed forces have comparatively small amounts of armoured ground vehicles and artillery.

They need to and want to learn from the current war, but still keep in mind that their circumstances are different.

Air superiority means nothing when the opposing side has meat for the meat grinder and it's widely spread out. The West has gotten ridiculously invested in "smart bombs" which cost a fortune and as a result we have less of them. Meanwhile the enemy has no problem sending tens of thousands of waves of small squads to their death.

In fact a study came out in 2022 that made the Pentagon panic because it's estimated in a war with China, the US will deplete its entire anti-ship missile stockpile in only a week.

>Air superiority means nothing when the opposing side has meat for the meat grinder and it's widely spread out.

Western attack helicopters are just one prong in the meat grinder that would grind up enemy infantry formations and entrenchments far quicker than they can be replenished.

NATO vs Russia in a conventional war is basically the West hitting the delete button. Nuclear blackmail is about the only thing sparing Russian forces from that fate.

A war with China is more of a defensive situation. If large-scale infantry combat even had the opportunity to take place I'd be surprised.

That said it's always prudent to plan for the worst contingencies however remote.

Well I hope they're better than the Russian attack helicopters. They lasted ... I want to say about 3 weeks.

What's the plan, btw, if the west does not have air superiority due to Russians, or Iranians, having drones, and the west running out of smart rockets before they run out of drones, and the denial of communications works about as well for the West as it worked for Russia? (meaning, drone communications can be disrupted at 5 meters, which means the drone explodes 10 cm from your ass as opposed to directly in your face)

>Well I hope they're better than the Russian attack helicopters. They lasted ... I want to say about 3 weeks.

NATO forces are very, very good at combined arms actions in conventional wars. Assets aren't used unless there's a fairly high assurance of surviving and accomplishing the mission.

>What's the plan, btw ...

Western military planners have been watching the Ukraine conflict closely and are aware of the threat that cheap commercial drones pose, seeing as they're partly responsible for the phenomenon.

>meaning, drone communications can be disrupted at 5 meters, which means the drone explodes 10 cm from your ass as opposed to directly in your face)

The US in particular excels at dominating the EM spectrum. I wouldn't be surprised if enemy drones wholesale fall out of the sky en masse or are otherwise rendered totally ineffective.

> NATO forces are very, very good at combined arms actions in conventional wars. Assets aren't used unless there's a fairly high assurance of surviving and accomplishing the mission

And how likely are NATO forces to run out of combined arms ammo after 2 weeks?

We didn't think that we were going to have to fight Russia, or to help our allies kill Russians by the hundreds of thousands. Generals are often criticized for wanting to "fight the last war," but it seems that contrary to all conventional wisdom, that is exactly where the West is headed.

At least, if somebody doesn't take Putin out.

unfortunately war with russia would very likely be the last war as we and they would be nuked back into the bronze age

This isn't that probable actually.

Russia doesn't have nearly the amount of nukes they used to. Apart from the dismantling, all signs point to many of them being unusable due to lack of maintenance (due to corruption). What they have left are smaller bombs.

The fear is overblown.

Nuclear arsenals and capability are regularly assessed by the FAS. The latest numbers leave Russia with around 1,710 currently actively deployed strategic nuclear weapons. [1] And somewhere around 4,000 nuclear warheads beyond that. These figures are just estimates, but do account for dismantling, obsolescence of dated capabilities, and so on.

The reason strategic weapons are generally tracked is largely because these are the massive weapons, both literally and in terms of capacity. For instance a modern strategic nuke on the smaller end would generally be around 500kt of yield. The largest bomb ever detonated, Czar Bomba, was 50,000kt of yield. For contrast, the nuke dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15kt. Even if our estimate is wrong by 90% in the happy direction, that's enough power to effectively destroy any country countless times over, including the US. Furthermore, those 4000 'rando' warheads are indeed going to be small relative to strategic nukes - but "small" in this case again means sizes of up to ~100kt, once again several times the power of Hiroshima.

I find the propaganda gradually trending towards 'nuclear war wouldn't be so bad' to be quite disconcerting. Let's at least wait until we're a multiplanetary species before we decide to start offing ourselves on a massive scale. Or even better, never do it in the first place. The Fermi Paradox is a real thing, and could be easily explained by people's inability to escape their own self delusions.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_weapons_of_mass_des...

I doubt Russia's nukes still work. They would create a localized environmental atrocity where they landed, but that's about it.

It costs a king's ransom to maintain a nuclear arsenal, as Ukraine well understood when they made the decision to give their own weapons up. The people charged with maintaining Russia's nuclear weapons since the fall of the USSR had absolutely no incentive to do anything but divert the funds for their own purposes. That's just how the Russians roll.

Meanwhile, ours will most likely work as intended. The question is, does Putin feel lucky? Well, does he? (Don't answer that, please -- I don't actually want to know.)

Your statements are only as good as your assertion that you know “how the Russians roll”. Great. Can you support that?

(Shrug) I can read and watch the news, just like you can. A country of congenital losers made up a bunch of fairy tales about Nazis to justify an incompetent war of conquest against their peaceful neighbor. They said it would take three days, and now, over two years later, they are bumming weapons from North Korea.

You tell me: what should I think of Russia, given the evidence at hand? They are still powerful enough to cause immense pain and suffering outside their borders as well as inside. If they were content with the latter, that would be one thing, but we have Putin's word that they are not.

Global warming can be stopped by nuclear winter only.

> NATO countries rely on massive air superiority. Something neither side in that war has, hence their stalemate.

Vks has superiority at least along the front line since this spring maybe winter. What they dont have is supremacy

NATO I believe isn't really setup for a long and wide ww1 style conflict like in Ukraine. I understand the plan in case of a russian invasion was always to use nukes at one point.

I think the plans shifted as the cold war progressed.

Cold war era NATO is a different beast than today's, and we're talking about something like the timespan of 50 years.

US has air superiority. Other NATO air forces are likely weaker than Russians.

This isn't what air superiority means. It occurs when one side is able to safely fly, and their opponent isn't. It's likely to be an obsolete concept in any sort of peer to peer war due to widespread anti-air weaponry, yet it's very near an assumption in NATO war doctrine, because that doctrine has been developed over decades of invading countries with no ability to defend themselves.

> It's likely to be an obsolete concept in any sort of peer to peer war due to widespread anti-air weaponry, yet it's very near an assumption in NATO war doctrine, because that doctrine has been developed over decades of invading countries with no ability to defend themselves.

That's too strong an assumption. The USAF 's bread and butter is supersonic stealth jets that can enter a territory, fire RF missiles to take out anti-aircraft radar, and leave faster than anything can catch it. Repeated hit and run attacks that wear down ground defenses until they can fly unchallenged. That's on top of the massive arsenal of precision guided missiles that will take out any static installation identified by constant global satellite surveillance.

NATO doctrine has always been geared towards countering the Sovet Union/Russia, despite the counter-terrorism detour the US took.

This is not really how it works in practice. The fastest craft ever made, by an extremely wide margin, was the amazing SR-71 Blackbird - yet another marvel from the Apollo era! [1] It hit mach 3.3 (2200 mph)! For contrast the F-35 hits mach 1.6, and Russia's SU-57 hits mach 2. Russia's workhorse anti-air system is the S-400. It has a range of 400k with a max speed of mach 14! It's also a mobile system.

Even MANPADs, which are extremely cheap (relative to an aircraft) pose a major threat. For instance the now somewhat dated FIM-92 [2] can hit mach 2.2. This is why even though Ukraine's air defenses are overall somewhat limited, Russian aircraft rarely if ever go for deep missions. Air superiority is probably just impossible in modern times against a peer adversary.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger

In practice by the time a frontline S-400 knows that there is something there, supersonic jets at cruising altitude already have too much kinetic energy to intercept. It doesn't matter if an anti-aircraft missile is capable of mach 14 if it's got less than the radar horizon worth of distance to accelerate and catch the target. A full AA system depends on a massive early warning radar system to launch interceptors and AA missiles, one that will quickly get destroyed by RF missiles in a real engagement.

MANPADs like the FIM-92 have an effective firing range that is a small fraction of the flight ceiling of jets, regardless of the missile's max velocity. They're not a threat unless a jet is flying very low for close air support or when lacking precision munitions, and the operator gets very lucky.

The reason I mention MANPADs is because of the target domain after air superiority is achieved. For instance helicopters have been used extensively in US invasions in the Mideast thanks to sustained air superiority. That quickly goes out of the picture when there's MANPADs everywhere. Even in the Israeli conflict, which is extremely asymmetric, helicopters have proven highly vulnerable.

As for the numbers stuff, all modern air defense systems have independent integrated radar of at least their engagement range, and do not rely on external radar systems, though of course everything works much better with layering and cooperation. An F35 at max speed (which it is only capable of reach at high altitude for very brief periods of time) is hitting about 1975 km/h. An S-400's engagement and radar range is about 400km. That's an engagement radius of more than 12 minutes at max speed. The engagement window would be smaller with a low & slow approach, but then you start running into various other risks, even going back to MANPADs.

One could try a long-range stand-off but that's unlikely to prove effective without getting into the primary way to disable anti-air defenses - overwhelm them. But that's extremely non-trivial even if the systems are in relative isolation, let alone if they're part of a comprehensive anti-air system. And all of this for one system. Again I would appeal to Ukraine. Their anti-air defenses are relatively limited yet it's been more than enough to greatly limit the engagement capabilities of Russia's Su-57s.

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Actually I also completely failed to mention another major factor. If this sort of war breaks out, satellites are going boom shortly thereafter, the global internet would follow in short order. This will further reduce the chances of any sort of effective elimination of anti-air.

> In practice by the time a frontline S-400 knows that there is something there, supersonic jets at cruising altitude already have too much kinetic energy to intercept.

The Swedish air force could routinely (16% of the time) get a fighter jet based missile lock on a frigging SR-71 in the 80s! 40 years later, altitude and speed do not help as much as you think. And radars are networked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

Getting a missile lock isn't the same as hitting it.

Citing the hard specification of various military hardware does not an analysis make. You neglected entirely the soft components, which is why we see severe under performance of the Russian air force in Ukraine.

It is unclear if the US will prevail against a peer adversary in an air war, but if anybody is able to achieve air supremacy, it would be the US and their allies.

> The USAF 's bread and butter is supersonic stealth jets that can enter a territory, fire RF missiles to take out anti-aircraft radar

F-35 can't super-sonic cruise. The choice was to be slow but stealthy.

Supersonic missiles are very vulnerable to a debris in the sky. Instead of catching of a missile, a drone can be blown up in advance on predicted trajectory of the supersonic missile.

The US is the greatest air power in the world bar none, and they're trained to disable and dismantle the opposition force's air defense and capabilities. It would be a mistake to think the US is weak in their SEAD game.

And that's not counting the rest of NATO.

I would not say that they will succeed in a peer to peer war, but NATO have the greatest chance to achieve air supremacy against any peer opponent.

Doesn't it depend on how stealthy is the F35? That will soon be almost the only game in town in Europe (outside of France).

NATOs doctrinal reliance on air is precisely the reason why russia has tremendous amount of aa systems deployed

>US has air superiority. Other NATO air forces are likely weaker than Russians.

A superior air force and air superiority are different concepts. The latter refers to a conflict-time status in a particular theatre.

That’s not what air superiority means - it’s not a relative measure of opposing air capabilities

You can deduct that NATO countries except US won't achieve air superiority against capable opponent(Russia, China), and their doctrine is not effective if new US president elect will decide so.

Maybe weaker than Russia before the war? They have been bled dry since.

But it doesn't really matter: collective defense is the whole point of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

> But it doesn't really matter: collective defense is the whole point of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I am not certain US will enter war with Russia in case of some escalation with European countries, especially if Trump will be elected.

What happens when the drones are used to target airplanes?

The drones are too small, cheap and numerous to use a modern fighter jet's weapons against.

Ukraine actually uses Russian fighting tactics.. that's the way they trained and were equipped. They're also very poor, with a gdp per capita (before the war) of 1/3rd of Russia's. So it looks exactly the way these countries are equipped and trained to fight: lots of artillery, loss of life, trench warfare. Ukraine has neither the training nor equipment to do combined arms warfare. So I wouldn't necessarily assume that a war with NATO will look like the war in Ukraine.

As far as drone defense, we already have KuRFS/Ku-720(mobile version)[0,1] radar to track drones/etc that works with a phalanx, 50-caliber guns, 30mm cannon, and coyote drones. We're also deploying a 50kw palletized laser (w/ KuRFS) with the DE MSHORAD program[2].

All of these programs predate the 2022 Ukraine invasion. The Coyote (designed at the start to take out small drones) first took flight in 2007[3].

0. https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...

1. https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/news/2021/10/11/rmd-proves-coun...

2. https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon_Coyote

Not trying to knock Raytheon, those are useful technologies, but those sometimes work against some targets (mostly on clean test ranges) and are not even close to a complete solution. Reliably detecting and tracking drones is a very hard problem.

The Russian way of war isn't a bad way to go, but of course the units that know how to best fight like the Russians are actually(or used to be) the Americans.

I don't think it's necessary true that the war devolves into a lot of loss of life and trench warfare. That's mostly the result of a stalemate. The Russians expected Ukraine to be a pushover. That didn't happen.

> They're also very poor, with a gdp per capita (before the war) of 1/3rd of Russia's.

It is the other way around. Ukraine has a GDP per capita that is (prewar) 3 times that of Russia's.

Ukraine: $5,663 vs Russia: $13,006 (From WP's Economy of {country} pages)

Russia's oil does a lot. Using oil/gas fuels supports Russia's war economy by creating demand and raising their prices in the commodities markets, in addition to contributing to the climate disaster.

From Warriors Ukrainian Telegram Channel

A snip from the post

The Analyst....

By this stage the Russians had lost most of their APC’s and tanks were standing well back acting more as artillery. The Russians then started the widespread use of what looks like golf carts and ATV’s to reinforce their infantry. Later they started using motorbikes.

With their armor gone the infantry were sent in meatwaves. *This lead the Ukrainians to mount their Octocopter heavy lift drones (which the Russians are generally very afraid of), with light machine guns to bring down the infantry attacks. While experimental these drones proved very effective, their only problem being recoil issues firing the gun. It’s planned to solve the recoil quite quickly, but using machine learning and thermal optical sights shows huge promise. This makes the drones less susceptible to having their control link severed - even if they do they can operate alone and return themselves to base. The day of the gun armed autonomous AI drone it seems, is here.*

The Russians continue infantry attacks but they have now stopped supporting them with any armor and have turned north instead, trying to find a weaker spot.

An outstanding and imaginative Ukrainian defense with limited resources yet again, blunts the relentless hammer blows of meatwave attacks backed by dwindling armor.

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