Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

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>Give Ukraine a couple hundred longer-range missiles

while it would make a lot of pain to Russia, it wouldn't change the strategic situation. Russia is ok with taking the pain (more precisely Putin and his ilk are ok with subjecting Russia to the pain)

You need strategic hits, a knock-out, making it physically impossible for them to continue as it is the only language they currently understand. So, for example, Russia has like 10K of S-300/400 missiles. That is key part of the strategic defense of Russia (notice how Russia recently had a hysteric meltdown when just one drone hit their strategic defense radar thus slightly impacting their defense against ICBMs/etc. and also notice that just a drone was able to hit such a valuable target) Ukraine can build several thousands of large drones (cheap, simple, like say German V-1, can be built for less than $5000 each including modern navigation, Germans built 20K of V-1 in year in just one factory inside the mountain) and fire them to the targets in Russia choosing routes, altitudes and targets such that Russia would have to use S-300/400 instead of say shorter range BUK/Tor/Pantsir (Russia is big and most of the coverage is naturally by the S-300/400). After several thousands of such drones Russia would be put into impossible situation - either to let those large drones (original V-1 had 850kg warhead, ie. double that of Tomahawk/Storm Shadow/SCALP) fly and hit the targets or to run out of strategic air defense.

Hmm.

Can Russia really not build counter-drones with the same capabilities?

Or is your suggestion more of "do something along these lines, choosing specifically something Russia cannot currently defend against and complete this attack before Russia even knows it needs to build the factory to make the counter drones to defend against it"?

counter-drones for 650km/h drones (taking V-1 as an example) is basically supersonic air defense missiles, much more costly and complicated and take more time and resources to build (and requires radars/launchers/etc. in addition to the missiles - all that is cost and complexity and there is very limited production capacity for that hardware). And to cover even just European part of Russia isn't really possible with short-range ones. So, you need something fast and long-range and being able to hit moving target in the air. And even if short rage were enough - I don't see Pantsir missile price, and the TOR missile is $800K. S-300 is much north of it. So even if all your drones, say 20K drones, which cost you $100M, were to be shot down just by TOR/Pantsir, your enemy is out at least, bare minimum, $10B - and to build all these missiles significant portion of military production capacity should be dedicated to it (basically no way to build 20K such missiles in a year, and also hitting each target 100% by one missile is not real).

If you look at the map you'll see a strategic problem of Russia waiting to be exploited (and no plausibly possible factory building would help to prevent it) - when moving from the Ukraine/Russia border the Russian territory becomes more and more vast, and there is no good way to defend it from mass cheap attacks.

Ah, so it's an inherently asymmetrical force, with the advantage to Ukraine to perform the attack? It can't just be defended against by pairing (or even 10-to-1-swarming) identical V1-class drones from Russia to be used as interceptors?

>Ah, so it's an inherently asymmetrical force, with the advantage to Ukraine to perform the attack?

yes. Before cheap modern electronics, the costs of attacking vs. defending missiles didn't have such orders of magnitude difference. Drones, ie. cheap electronics, changed the game.

>It can't just be defended against by pairing (or even 10-to-1-swarming) identical V1-class drones from Russia to be used as interceptors?

To intercept you still need to be faster (transsonic and especially supersonic doesn't come cheap/simple), to have radars, a large one on the ground for detection, and seeker on the interceptor (that is cost and complexity) or to guide interceptors using the ground radar (that would mean much less simultaneously attacked targets by your interceptors, less distance and other issues like with intercepting low-flying targets, etc.)

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