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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> And can still take on fixed wing aircraft,” including fourth, fifth, and even sixth-generation fighters, at least to some degree, is important, he continued. Crewed helicopters are still part of the threat picture, as well.

You can see how the Anglos are still way out of the loop when it comes to the latest developments in land-warfare not-involving Middle-Eastern goat-herders, as in this guy should have known that the Russian Ka-52s were pretty decisive in stopping the 2023 Ukrainian summer counter-offensive (that, and the Russian mine-fields), so that adding helicopters at the very end, with "btw, yeah, helis are still a thing" is quite disingenuous, if not stupid.

Also, dismissing "unmanned systems" (I think he means cheap drones):

> “They’re not particularly expensive. Their impact is probably way outsized.”

is also pretty damn stupid, as both the Russians and the Ukrainians could confirm.

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> The challenge that you have with unmanned systems today is you’re going to have to do something that is a little bit out of the ordinary to address all of them,” he said. “They’re not particularly expensive. Their impact is probably way outsized.”

This isn’t a dismissal of drones at all. It’s an acknowledgement of how diverse and inexpensive drones are.

A stinger missile is ~150k USD. A grenade duct taped to a drone is ~150 USD. That’s three orders of magnitude, so you can see why a manpad isn’t an economically viable countermeasure to most drones.

Electronic warfare/directed energy usually fits the bill for the smaller drone threat profile.

> Their impact is probably way outsized.

This is pretty dismissive in my book, as in not acknowledging that for the last 6 to 12 months (at least) most of the casualties in Eastern Ukraine have been caused by cheap drones. The same cheap drones that have also been a game-changer when it comes to using armoured vehicles, as they're not being used all that much anymore because they're death-traps, the two armies have switched to using cheap motorbikes (the Russians) and ATVs (the Ukrainians).

"Outsized" doesn't mean "small", it means "much more than you would expect out of something so small and cheap".

Maybe there is a language barrier involved here, but "outsized" in this context means drones have more of an effect per dollar than conventional techniques. It's talking about how big their impact is--that they can do a huge amount of damage with very little cost. This is congratulatory language, not dismissive. It's acknowledging the serious defense problem that drones pose. You can't rely on an expensive defense against an inexpensive offense.

And, conversely, the Stinger's target is the $150M aircraft. It's crazy how there are so many orders of magnitude.

Drones that can survive a modern contested environment are more like $10k+, even in the Ukraine with less technically sophisticated countermeasures.

The US has a few different extremely cheap anti-drone rocket systems under testing that roughly achieve cost parity per missile with a survivable drone. For example, this[0] system which allows an F-15 to carry 42 mini-missiles (+8 Sidewinders). These rocket pods have sometimes been mounted on vehicles historically, so I imagine these ones can be too.

[0] https://www.twz.com/air/f-15e-spotted-packing-big-laser-guid...

Eh... the Skywalker FPV drones controlled by a 5km fiberoptic cable are more on the order of $2,500 and can deliver a 10lb payload which is more than enough to critically damage almost anything on the modern battlefield (that's ~the flying mass of the 81mm HE mortars that NATO uses). The more expensive controller and base station is reusable as well -- you'll never be able to develop countermeasures that come anywhere close to cost parity with that.

That drone is not hardened against modern EW and countermeasures at all. The fiber optic link only solves the problem of not having military-grade RF networking tech for denied environments, which wouldn’t even be an issue for a modern military. It doesn’t protect the drone itself.

Wire-guided systems are ancient military tech. There are good reasons they were phased out decades ago.

Do you really think the Westerners will be able to beat the Russians at the EW thing? If yes, why haven’t they helped the Ukrainians do just that, consistently?

The US has actively downgraded and nerfed the equipment they’ve sent. That’s well-documented and standard US policy wherever they send military equipment. Ukraine received circa 1980 US military tech. Not exactly state-of-the-art.

And yes, the US is much more capable at EW than Russia. No one seriously believes otherwise, Russia doesn’t even have the ability to fabricate the materials necessary to be competitive.

The US does not share their state-of-the-art with their closest allies. There is no version of the world where they are sharing anything close to that with Ukraine. They reserve their most advanced capabilities for themselves.

> Electronic warfare/directed energy usually fits the bill for the smaller drone threat profile.

Down a rabbit hole last night and I saw that fiber-optic drones are the new thing in battle to evade electronic (radio) warfare. They literally spool out fiber optic line and are (obviously) limited in range to the length of fiber they carry. (But this can be 10,000 feet or so?)

That is to evade interference with the network link. AFAIK, the radio tech used is not designed to withstand modern denied environments, which makes it more vulnerable. The fiber optics are a cheap way of addressing that tactically and it is proven tech — a lot of older anti-tank guided missiles are controlled the same way.

Sophisticated electronic warfare systems are designed to affect much more than the communications link; they have to be effective against systems where the RF link tech is designed to survive heavy EW environments (such as what the US uses). EW and countermeasures are designed to attack the onboard systems themselves, since they are intended to be effective against fully autonomous systems that are not being controlled over a network link.

Why not use free-space optical at that point? Are they trying to send HD video back?

To point out the obvious, free-space optical broadcasts your position to the enemy. It is also notoriously subject to interference i.e. something blocking line of sight.

Yeah, video I saw they took the drone into a structure, no longer line-of-sight.

The largest fiber optic guided drones in common use now have ranges up to 20km but that takes a big spool of cable and there's a high risk of breakage. Most though have shorter ranges of 10km or less.

The arguably Anglo publication War on the Rocks is adamant that drones as employed in Ukraine today change everything and have been saying so for a long time. They also point out that western armies haven't caught up to that reality.

WoR is entirely irrelevant given how they dismissed the coming invasion in February 2022.

Ummm I don't remember that - can you give some more details?

I do remember them running articles like "what should NATO do if Russia invades". Which isn't a dismissal.

Of course, it would have been a really bad thing to dismiss & deride a Russian invasion that took Kiev in 4 days and ended with the partition and neutering of Ukraine with less than 1000 Russian dead. But I don't live in that reality, I live in the reality in which the Russians managed to pull of an even bigger foreign policy mistake than Iraq 2003. It's not got to the all time high of June 1941, but it's getting closer with every week that goes by.

Do you have a source on that? Their article from a month before the invasion seems like the opposite of dismissal: https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/putins-wager-in-russias-st...

> A large war in Europe is likely in the coming weeks. The current security architecture of the continent, the future of NATO, and America’s role in shaping security outcomes there are all at stake. Beyond Europe, this conflict would have profound implications for U.S. defense strategy, and may upset America’s best-laid plans to focus on the eroding military balance with China. Ukraine, whose fate hangs in the balance, may be at the center of the crisis, but Moscow has a greater goal in mind: the revision of Europe’s security order. The Russian armed forces have conducted a substantial buildup around Ukraine, with Moscow threatening unilateral military measures if it is not able to achieve its goals at the negotiating table.

It's quite expectable for someone who understands things about warfare, to make that mistake. See, Putin was seen as a guy who understands warfare, after all he was quite successful in Syria (or so it seemed, until he eventually lost 3 years later). So few could expect him to launch an invasion so badly unprepared and so doomed to fail: only way it could have succeeded, in a hindsight, was if indeed, Ukrainians were eager to get out of the dirty hands of 'fascists' and back to Mother Russia, but everyone who wasn't living in front of Putin TV 24/7 knew it wasn't the case. True, vast majority of analysis expected Ukraine to fold quickly and probably majority of Ukrainians believed the same thing, but if someone was a true expert, they should have foreseen it - and thus, believe that invasion threat was just a game Putin played to get Ukraine to concede to some of his demands peacefully. That was a very rational thing to expect for someone who understood things. But instead, it turned out to be what it was: just a major blunder.

Just as in 1941, actually. By 1941, entire world knew that Hitler was a military genius who never made a mistake. Who could expect a military genius to commit to such an absurdly foolish thing? And yet he did - and because no one could (rationally) expect it, he got all the advantage of surprise possible, and probably more of it than he ever expected - and yet he lost. Turned out to be not such a genius after all. But everyone who dismissed probability of him invading in 1941, had a point. Most rational and knowledgeable people should have dismissed that probability.

There are still some Anglo people that tell things as they are, but they don't seem to be in any decision-making position, like this guy from Lockheed Martin seems to be. It's about this latest group that I was talking about.

He’s literally just downplaying their weaknesses/competition, as any salesman is going to do. Expensive (or even relatively cheap!) manpads make no sense vs drones economically, and manpads vs low flying/nap of the earth helicopters, especially in forested terrain have always been of limited effectiveness.

If you have the budget, still worth buying to have in the quiver, but they’re playing to the older more conservative players not selling the new hotness and they know it.

If you send your troops or vehicles forward without defense they will all get killed. You are not going forward in order to exercise your vehicles and you are not defending your vehicles and troops for the sake of simply preserving them. You are doing it in order to be able to go forward and win.

Armies that can't conduct an offense are unable to win wars. At best they are able to wait for wars to finish. Remember the nightmare of the columns in the north of ukraine in 2022 - TB2s (remember them?) ranging up and down blowing up operationally relevant assets without being hindered. If those troops had had a way of protecting themselves it's possible that they could have been resupplied and evacuated. If that had happened, or if they had been able to refuel and push south Russia might have won, it was pretty close anyway. Imagine the value of avoiding 3 years of this conflict.

What are you talking about exactly?

>"Expensive (or even relatively cheap!) manpads make no sense vs drones economically, and manpads vs low flying/nap of the earth helicopters, especially in forested terrain have always been of limited effectiveness."

My point is that this isn't just an competition of economic exchange. The capability that a viable organic air defence option gives to a military unit shouldn't be understood in terms of "we spent $50m while they spent $500k". This is because if the $50m spend enables your units to successfully prosecute an offensive the value is potentially 1000x, or more.

Making your enemy spend $50m to defend against something you spent $500k on is a viable strategy for crushing your enemies economy. It works even better when you turn around and do it 100 times. If the enemy still can’t actually prosecute the offensive successfully to actually get out of the mess.

The US never wanted Russia to ‘lose’ the Ukraine war. They wanted them stuck in a never ending Vietnam, grinding their economy and a generation of young men (young men they were already in short supply on!) into paste for nothing. And it’s been working.

if the enemy can't actually prosecute the offensive successfully. If they can, you find yourself kneeling in front of a hastily dug trench.

You are right about the US and Russia though. It has suited everyone apart from the Russians and Ukrainians for the Russians to pick up this tar baby. I don't know if the rest of the world sees it, but a big part of the mess is courtesy of the British as a part of an extended and excruciating revenge play for the Russians messing about in Salisbury. Vashe zdorov'ye you bastards.

Notably, and remarkably topical [https://kyivindependent.com/enemy-bombers-are-burning-en-mas...].

Isn't hitting a heli just always going to be easier than hitting the faster fixed wing aircraft? Given that it is relatively low-hanging fruit from a technical perspective, it's sensible that they're not prioritized by engineers.

Most def. You can use a MANPADS for a helo, a fighter, a heavy, but the helo will be much higher probably of intercept.

Yes. But afaik some helicopters do have better armor than other aircraft, so while they are easier to hit, they might be harder to damage or take down.

Helicopters all have a big unarmored target on top -- the rotor disk. Get a nice chunk of metal in there and they become falling armed rocks.

You can't substantially armor a rotor; they are designed to survive approximately one hit by a 23mm round.

A 23mm round is the size of a banana. An AA missile such as a Stinger is intended to explode near the target, not necessarily making contact, and to produce shrapnel to create a large enough "kill zone" such that precision and contact are unneccesary.

But that shrapnel will be smaller and slower than the 23mm round, so I'm not sure that a non-direct hit would suffice.

Existing MANPADS focus mostly on the helicopter threat; fast movers are realistically a little out of their reach. That statement isn't saying it's designed for targeting jets first and helicopters also, it's saying it's adding the capability to target jets on top of what Stingers could do to helicopters

How would the war look if one side had total air dominance as the "Anglos" fight?

I don't think that drones would play as large of a role. They're only playing such a large role because the air is contested.

I think that they give adversaries another card to play.

Drones mean that you can do a bunch of tasks that previously needed air dominance without that dominance, or even when you are dominated - like the Houthis are showing. With drones you can surveil and strike even while your enemy kills everything that goes 20m above the ground.

If you can contest the air at the same time I would say that their role becomes greater - as the Ukrainians have showed. But drones do make air dominance less decisive, even as it remains very desirable.

It's all shades of gray. TAD doesn't make drones useless and drones don't make fighter jets useless. They all provide options. I just think their role is inflated because of the lack of TAD.

yes - agree, people look at a picture and don't look at what's not in the frame or what other pictures can look at.

One thing which the U.S. Air Force EDIT: Used to brag on was that no U.S. soldier had been killed by enemy munitions from the air in an active conflict zone since Vietnam --- drones definitely change the calculus in which this statement is made.

EDIT: and as pointed out below, were able to break this record, depending on how one defines airspace and conflict zone.

Sadly this is a past tense thing now since Rukban in Jan 2024 where 3 U.S. soldiers unfortunately were killed by an Islamist (Iranian backed) group with a drone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_22_drone_attack

> On 28 January 2024, an attack drone, launched by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—an Iranian-backed Shia militia group—struck Tower 22, a U.S. military outpost in Rukban, northeast Jordan. The explosion killed three U.S. soldiers and injured 47 others.

> The incident marked the first time U.S. troops were killed by enemy fire since the start of the Gaza war. President Joe Biden condemned the attack as "despicable" and pledged retaliation at a suitable time. The U.S. began retaliatory strikes on 2 February, hitting sites in Iraq and Syria. Iran denied any involvement in the attack.

What might have made this attack different, and hopefully some indications that lessons were learned:

> The failure of air defenses to intercept the drone was a key focus of the subsequent U.S. Central Command investigation of the attack. A U.S. preliminary report found that the hostile drone attacked around the same time an American surveillance drone was returning to the base, which likely led to confusion over whether it was an enemy drone and delayed a response.

And, the reason this belongs on HN imo:

> An Analog Devices employee was arrested in December 2024, and later charged with evading U.S. export controls and facilitating indirect sales of some of the technology used in the drone, via the Iranian military.

Thank you for that correction --- I've edited my comment to reflec that.

Can air be dominated against a powerful adversary in the age of relatively cheap AA?

I don't think we know, but it does look like the answer is Yes.

Both Iraq in 1991 and Iran in 2024 had extensive, developed, and expensive AA setups. The USA destroyed the Iraq assets by attrition, Israel surgically removed the Iranian ones.

Russia apparently has no SEAD or DEAD capability because they didn't and haven't even attempted to remove the Ukrainian air defence network.

I think this shows one of the key requirements for future European Air Force structures. Long range strike and SEAD/DEAD are going to be fundamental for creating the conditions for military dominance in the east.

Right, and one of the major weaknesses of NATO is that outside the US none of the other members have much SEAD/DEAD capability. They might train for it occasionally but they don't have entire squadrons which specialize in that mission.

100% - this must change.

In both those situations the reason it was possible is because they weren’t being resupplied. The Russians can’t achieve this because advanced aa is constantly flowing in from US and Europe so eliminating existing AA is not enough.

At the same time, despite their arguably modern capabilities, neither Russia nor Ukraine can fly their planes over contested regions, let alone get close to establishing air superiority. I am not entirely sure if we can compare Iraq/Iran setups (despite being same hardware) to an adversary who knows what they are doing like Russia/China.

>Russia apparently has no SEAD or DEAD capability because they didn't and haven't even attempted to remove the Ukrainian air defence network.

According to a Youtube video I watched about a year ago, Russia destroyed 2 Patriot batteries deployed to the front lines, causing Ukraine to decide stop deploying the system near the front, but rather to use them to protect the parts of Ukraine far from the front from missile and drone attacks. Around the same time, Russia started dropping a few dozen glide bombs per day on Ukrainian positions near or on the front (and this was months before I saw the news about Moscow's planning to deploy a new generation of glide bombs that can glide a lot farther).

That suggests that Moscow has made at least some progress on degrading Ukrainian air defenses at least in the area near the ground fighting because the Patriot system has a range of about 160 km against airplanes (less against missiles) which is a lot further than a (current generation) Russian glide bomb can glide.

> had total air dominance as the "Anglos" fight?

It will most probably come as a big surprise to the Anglos when they'll find out that they do not have any such dominance. Also see their surprise when they had to use their aircraft carriers against the Houthis, didn't go quite as they (the Americans) had expected.

Real war can be like that, is usually like that, i.e. it washes away in a second any previous misconceptions, it places you right in front of reality itself.

Assessing capabilities and priority by syntax of sales pitch lol

No lol about it, because even the concept of a "sales pitch" in the context of a potential existential war (against China or Russia, or against both at the same time, I'm talking from the US's pov) is kind of a lunacy, so, in that respect, of course that I'm taking the sales pitch-like discourse seriously, because many military procurement decisions are taken based on those sales pitches.

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