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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

What's crazy is there's lots of videos of Ukranians shooting drones from open-cockpit propeller planes that barely cost more than the drones!

I think in a serious drone war we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.

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We're already moving beyond that to having interceptor drones which are cheaper and far more expendable.

In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship off your coast will open hidden flaps and unleash 10K drones all at once erasing couple bases before they even know whats up.

Enough with the ace combat fanfics. In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship would not be allowed to hang around with potentially a shitload of drones in its containers.

In a serious drone war, the cargo ship wouldn't know it was carrying containers full of drones, as we saw in Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb[0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb

Wouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?

Like that tens of times unaffiliated cargo ships dragged anchor for tens of kilometers to dredge fiberoptic cables in the Baltic.

Warships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms.

I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.

In the Second World War, the most effective defence against Germany's V1 was getting a fast plane to fly alongside it with its wingtip under the V1's wingtip. They didn't actually "bump" the V1s, just got one wing into a kind of "ground effect" which caused it to roll beyond the capability of the gyro to compensate.

They're doing this to take down all sorts of stuff the Russians are lobbing at Ukraine.

In a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy.

Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.

So Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.

America does not want to prepare for that kind of conflict. It wants B2 bombers because those look cool when they fly over during the Superbowl.

Ukraine is a real war and it is about men and women crawling in the mud constantly terrified of getting blown up. It is literally battle of the Somme again. How do you recruit college kids for that?

You don't recruit them, you draft them.

Bone spurts will take care of that draft (I’ve read that in the President’s Biography…)

Thank god I'm too old. Although I suppose you're never too old for a human wave assault...

Laws are mutable.

Men aged 25 to 60 are subject to conscription under martial law in Ukraine.

Yugoslavia did the same in the 30s, conscripting everyone 21 to 50 before turning Communist.

Japan widened it to 18 to 60 by the time they lost WWII.

The key difference is that "swarms of inexpensive drones" can be made in "swarms of normal looking residential garages". The entire enterprise can be decentralized making it much tougher to target with strategic weapons.

I was thinking that. For most of the last sixty years Russia / the USSR was the peer adversary usually mentioned for NATO to fight. I think they look weaker than they are because Ukraine has actually been pretty competent in the fight.

Re. no swarms of drones because the factories have been bombed, do people really think that'll work on China?

In a serious war why would an adversary like China not put their drone factories deep underground, deep in the territorial interior?

Drones can be made in ordinary civilian houses and apartments. It's too expensive to dig an underground factory just for that, and even if they do (let's assume an abandoned mine could be used), they would still have vulnerable power supply and vulnerable transport. Power plants, transmission lines, rail tracks, bridges are part of the targeted infrastructure. The further they are from the front, the more a logistical nightmare it becomes to move them to where they're needed.

I would guess that there's a big difference between assembling a drone (which can easily be done in a kitchen) and mass-producing parts such as batteries and gas engines for drones that have to fly more than a few dozen kilometers.

Even a single Group 3 UAS like Shahed is larger than a lot of kitchens. They can't be assembled in civilian houses.

You're confusing short range, highly Ukraine-specific Group 1 quads with long range OWA drones.

The US doesn’t have air supremacy in Iran. We have air dominance, but shoulder mounted infrared guided (bypasses stealth paint to go after engine exhaust) AA is still taking out the occasional F35 and A10.

RU/UA is special because RU completely screwed up the first 3 weeks of the war (likely because of the culture of sycophancy Putin has, similar to Trump) and was driven out of central UA. Russia is too proud to admit they lost and UA wasn’t allowed to attack into RU territory until their suppliers (US, EU) were confident RU wouldn’t nuke us in retaliation. Now UA is busy dismantling RU’s economy and war making industry. Ultimately it’s not comparable to any other war of our lifetimes for several reasons.

UA drone factories aren’t in large industrial buildings. They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled. RU largely has a very few mega military vendors who make drones / missiles and they have consolidated their efforts in a few (now vulnerable) locations.

F35 capability is excellent for preparing the battlefield, such as the first few hours when softening up air defenses.

But don’t underestimate how much all countries are learning from watching RU/UA or US/Iran. Drones will continue to evolve to meet the gaps in affordable interception, affordable anti-5thGen aircraft, etc. UA now has armed land, sea, and air drones and each has variants like scout, bomber, interceptor, etc. we will continue to see specialization and comparative advantage evolve in the space.

>They have hundreds of office / home locations where the parts are printed / assembled

This shouldn't be a big surprise to Russia or anyone else, as it has precedent. German aircraft production peaked in 1944 at the height of allied strategic bombing.

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

The US absolutely has air supremacy in Iran. You don't roll out B-52s in a contested airspace. MANPADS have an abysmal ceiling height, they are largely irrelevant short of some very narrow circumstances.

Just for your benefit, stealth coatings and materials (not "paint") are a tertiary defence after shaping and electronic warfare.

Group 3 UAS can't be assembled in homes and office buildings in any meaningful numbers. They are too big. Even Group 2 is marginal. I think you're confusing Group 1 quadcopters with long range OWA drones like Shaheds.

The Super Turcano is a prop-driven aircraft that's often suggested for this role.

I wouldn't want to field those around a bunch of FPV interceptor drones.

Then you send a swarm and fly a few sacrificial drones them into the airplanes.

Yeah but that drone swarm costs as much as the Cesna so it neutralizes the cost advantage / disadvantage.

A pilot is pretty expensive.

In convential modern terms, sure.

In WWII terms they come as a function of aircraft production capability as the stategy was to keep putting fresh young faces in trainer cockpits and advancing everybody that didn't crash after a quick run down of controls and a couple of paired instructor flights.

I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".

> I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".

Worth noting that their mission was delivery flights with the produced aircraft (a handful of them saw combat, because if you're flying a fighter plane into a warzone your guns might as well be loaded, but it wasn't the main aim). Those who were intentionally flying into combat got a little more training AIUI.

And recovery flights of downed / incorrectly landed (wrt airfield) aircraft, crossing active zones while unarmed, international delivery across the globe, and officially no fighting stuff ... although that was somewhat divorced from practice in the asian theatre.

Still, thanks for chipping in with a "no true Scotswoman" pilot variation - of course bombardiers got training in sighting, navigators in map reading .. largely at that time combat pilots got experience or got dead while exposed to all the barrack room theory about tactics that may or may not survive enemy contact.

They're not fighter planes in Ukraine they're people with conventional weapons shooting at the drones when the planes get close!

A drone swarm can take out a swarm of Cessnas.

Realistically a Cessna single prop is roughly $100k (average between good condition used and some new ones). A Ukrainian interceptor drone is about $2k + cost of munition. And the Cessna requires an airfield, so it is geo-fenced, while an interceptor drone can take off from flat land or the back of a truck.

People need to wake up and realize the economics of war just changed by several orders of magnitude.

It’s a cat-and-mouse game. Drones won’t stay ignorant of fighters shooting them down for long.

It’s a lot cheaper to give them a rear camera than to just tolerate them getting shot down indefinitely.

> we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.

Pfft, get real - Robinson R22 light broomstick choppers with muster pilots and crop dusting family STOLs make far more sense for their agility, ground hugging, and rough short take off / landing field capabilities.

That quibble aside, I can see things going that way, until flooding waves of many drones push up the human life cost past being able to respond.

Either way, they still need to be backed by some agile radar capabilities - variations of the E-7A Wedgetail design for ground and air to keep sensing on the hop.

This wasn't unlike how the U.S. did it in Vietnam. They would have a small, unarmed helicopter fly low with an observer and an M-16 to spot (or more likely draw fire) with some Cobra and/or Huey gunships higher up. When the little bird found some targets the big ones would come down and lay waste to the entire area.

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