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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Hoping and praying someone in the administration is able to convince Trump to align closer to Ukraine (even if only slightly) because of this.

The Ukrainians pulled off an absolute coup on Sunday. A third of a nuclear-armed country's strategic bomber fleet inoperable for the foreseeable future. Someone at NORAD probably said "they should have sent a poet" while looking at the satellite imagery.

If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US. We need to be on their good side.

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The US seems to have given up on the concept of being on the "good side" of anyone and retreated to the safety of bullying and threatening to invade Canada (as a "joke"?)

Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".

That's how Trumpism can gain any traction at all. The amount of international engagement Russia had as Putin made himself tsar was embarrassing, and to a person with no scruples if the money is right - like Trump - it just illustrates that the guardrails aren't really there.

> Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".

“The revolution eats its partisans” is the most accurate description of it. People on “the good side” turn against their peers for not being on the good side enough. To wit, people who turn away don’t generally first notice that the good side isn’t so good; they first notice being bullied by that side, then they reflect on what it means to support the good side’s points of view (spoiler: A crime against humanity).

> Most people have given up the concept of being on the "good side".

In US.

Oh, it's elsewhere, too. There are plenty of illiberal candidates winning elections across the West.

There's also an argument to be made that Europe more or less sold themselves out for cheap natural gas. Nordstream 2 was constructed after the Russians (at that point, under Putin's puppet Medvedev) had invaded Georgia.

Apparently the final tally was 12 planes, but still, an impressive display

Depends on whether you mean damaged or destroyed. Ukraine reports 41 damaged, 12 destroyed.

12 destroyed. Hard to tell if the others were only damaged, and of course, how badly.

The first casualty of war is the truth.

That being said, any sort of materiel loss on weaponry as important as strategic nuclear bombers is a massive problem for Russia. The logistics of repairing them, if possible, is going to be complex.

Do you know how many they still had operational? Not that many, somewhere between 50 (more realistic) and 100 (rather idealistic if the rest was fully gutted for equipment).

This was a massive damage, not directly interfering with war against Ukraine that much, but overall power projection. Plus a pretty good insult to russian's FSB and GRU services who had no clue, just like today's Crimea bridge blow.

> russian's FSB and GRU services who had no clue

I do not want to give any credit to russian secret service but as we have seen in 9/11 and 7th October - secret services in any country are sometimes clueless.

You'd think that they'd be a little more in-tune to this sort of thing given the fact that Russia is a far more controlled society than the US or UK, and that they're at war with a country on their borders.

Oh well. Nothing that vodka and a window can't solve.

"Display" being the operative word. Good for PR, and maybe good for NATO in some small way in the future, but it won't change the war or how many Ukrainians are getting killed. A lot of the Ukrainian "wins" in this war have been of that nature, which probably isn't surprising considering they're being planned by outsiders with other motives.

> If middle powers like Ukraine can do that to Russia, they can do that to countries like the US

Ukraine borders on Russia, but the US is separated by ocean from serious threats. Attack by UAVs of this sort seems nearly impossible.

Don’t we receive millions of containers of cargo annually, not to mention having fewer internal movement restrictions? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that someone could ship some drones around - the hardest part is avoiding explosives detector, but that’s a hard problem and the defense has the unenviable task of having to get it right millions of times.

Countries could be forward deploying these assets covertly in deniable ways in prep for future tensions?

I’d certainly plan for that if my job was physical security. It’s cheap by military standards and it’s not like we don’t have precedent with things like Russian deep-cover operatives. The commodification of the tech could make an adversary more confident in their ability to deny it if found, too, if everyone is using parts from China and open source software.

I think the key deterrent is that the U.S. has production capacity for the important systems and overwhelming capacity to strike back, so a rational foreign state isn’t going to think there’s a way they win by trying it. Terrorist groups might be a different story, so I’m really glad this wasn’t an option during Bush’s big adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan because however bad drone strikes are for military defense, they’re even worse for civilians.

I've long-wondered about the use of global container logistics for moving something like a small nuclear or chemical/biological weapon and just having it wait in-situ, until it needs to be activated.

I never considered drones, which is even more obvious, in hindsight.

Yeah, it’s frankly a big terrifying. Nukes are at least plausibly hard to shield from detection but drones don’t have a unique signature and there’s so much dual-use stuff that it seems too plausible that someone could get stuff through customs by claiming it’s civilian and then arming it right before use.

How does the ocean protect America from swarms of short range drones being launched from normal looking shipping containers on trucks being controlled from thousands of miles away?

The first volley would work of course but then container ships are gonna be nuked from orbit after that

Which would utterly destroy the US economy and do more damage than any drone attack.

Plus imagine if those attackers realize they can ship those containers from Mexico or Canada.

Pretty sure it would destroy whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers too though

> whoever is on the other side of those shipping containers

Could take a while to figure that out. It took days/weeks to figure out the 9/11 attacks with some certainty.

I'm not sure what that does for whoever initiates the attack. They still eventually get found out and unless they've managed to conquer the US, everyone is now bankrupt.

> everyone is now bankrupt

A good reason enough for a lot of people, no?

How far off are palm sized drones that have light weight solar panels on them that can flit about here and there and sit and wait and recharge in unobtrusive locations until they make their way to their target?

While not a land border, the Bering Strait does include two small islands, Big Diomede (Russian) and Little Diomede (US), which are only 3.8 kilometers apart.

The US contains, at a minimum, 10s of thousands of nationals from every middle power in the US. Sometime adversaries, like Iran and China, have more than a million nationals in the US. Every one of them has perfectly legal access to the technology which was used in this attack.

I think Ukraine could only have gotten away with this in the current situation where the US is detaching itself from supporting them, because if Russia genuinely thought that the US was behind taking out a large percentage of it's strategic nuclear fleet, the consequences of that are nightmarish to think about.

Those airplanes are one of the things that give Russia a second strike capability, and if they lose that capability, then they are going to be on a hair trigger in a nuclear crisis.

Other countries have hangars or bunkers to store their planes. That Russia doesn't, is really beyond comprehension.

Supposedly they had to be outside to comply with START provisions. But US keeps B-52s (and pretty much all fighters) outside. They might be under tin roofs in desert locations to keep cool. Not in bunkers.

Yeah, you can find plenty of examples of them sitting right out in the open. They're protected by two oceans, not by bunkers. A similar attack with trucks full of drones would make short work of them just as well.

Can you explain why they have tires on the wings?

START doesn't require that. Besides Russia quit START 2 years ago. Also wherever you got that information is 100% a russian disinfo distributor.

Well, Belgium stores their airplanes in hangars. It's great to protect them against the weather. You know what we don't do? Put tires on the wings.

You know what else is great about hangars? It's a super cheap defense against drone attacks that you saw from Ukraine.

Sure, you can give some examples of planes stored outside, and I can give examples of planes stored in bunkers (there are plenty of pictures from Russian airplane bunkers).

I have the feeling your comment is made in bad faith (=Russian propaganda). If not, please explain why Russians put tires on the wings.

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