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It's like we have become allergic to actual news or something. Why is every topic here now a snoozefest.
Here are a few suggestions. Pick up the ball and go
Conventional war in Eastern Europe
Genocide in Middle East
Unprecedented invasion of America
Unsustainable price increases in Western world
Canadian retroactive 'Hate Speech' laws
Lady flashing her tits at the Times Square portal
Lomez getting doxxed and turning out to be handsome, but also Jewish
Milei singing in a superhero costume
Eurovision being even more Satanic and odd than usual
Lizzo at the Met gala looking like a chicken nugget and being physically carried around by white attendants
GME and AMC popped 100% again for some reason
JK Rowling might get arrested for calling a man a man
Literally just pick a topic that's not obtuse guys. We're all collectively losing the reason to visit.
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That’s not it at all!
The only one of those which even suggests why we’d avoid the subject is 1. I guess some people probably don’t want to talk about a losing team? But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.
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There are lots of reasons to oppose Russia/push back on (perceived) Russia partisans even if one thinks Ukraine is doomed. But you may be right if I’m typical-minding.
Interesting that you blame corruption. My intuition at the start was Russia rolling in and destroying major C&C. Maybe not on Desert Storm level, but something relatively fast. In that case, the industry of either side wouldn’t matter too much. Frankly, I assume that’s what Russia expected, too. If they’d known how much money and experience they’d lose to get this far, I would like to think it wouldn’t have happened.
But given that Ukraine didn’t shatter, and instead got this awful slog—now the production is key. And they sure can’t do it on their own dime. As critics have observed, we dumped most of our old and cheap munitions, and are struggling to spin up new production. So is this failure because of corrupt or incompetent procurement? Or were we just not expecting it to come to this?
I realize this sounds like I’m saying “nah, we’d totally win if we weren’t holding back.” Hubristic, right? But there really is a lack of political will. Our politicians even fought over sending the old stuff to this small, faraway, non-NATO country. If that level of intervention was unpopular, is it so surprising that we haven’t kept up in shell production?
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Russian lancets paired with Orlan-10s are insane cost-effective weapons that are the biggest organic capability that Russians have used to truly wreck Ukrainians, and the Russians deserve every bit of credit for developing an insanely capable platform themselves.
Without getting into too much details, small form factor UAVs are where the west is absolutely fucking smoked. Russia can spit out Orlans at 1/10 the price of a worthless Switchblade, not a single fucker uses the meme level Black Hornet or any other US platform, and thats not even getting into what China is doing. A boeing insitu is like a cool buck and a half, but Chinese WZ are literally 20% of the price and even that is considered way too expensive for the Chinese. Commercial off the shelf parts bought off Taobao are allowing Ukraine to offset Russias immense artillery advantage, and trust me that the Chinese are way fucking ahead of the USA on that. I talked in other threads about air supremacy and I stand by that, but even a hundred F35s can't take out a thousand AV500, let alone 10k jury rigged Mavic 2 EAs.
The gutting of European manufacturing in favor of precision strike capabilities made sense in 2000 to mid 2010s, but the game has changed with small form factor drones. Every unit knows it, but fucking Rheinmetall is still dicking around with maaaybe one composite cabled tether UAV for their new panther while China is integrating drones at 2:1 ratio per combatant. I used to think the only thing that will stop China is their retarded focus on grenade launchers at the squad level, but the fucking drone swarms spat out of flatbed trucks is a goddamn nightmare worse than skynet.
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Orlans are the 2-3 hour recon drone you are talking about. Small quads have only a 20 to 30 minute lifespan, meaning they have a range of about 10km (and realistically we are looking at 4-5km) at best, compared with the 40km+ with Orlan and Lancet. The orlan is low observation, deep recon capable, with laser guidance. IR is really shit, the 640x480 sensors don't have digital zoom and drones don't show up on 2015 era IR optics till about 2km away at best, because they are a flat profile from front. Nafo gloats about how its all COTS shit but orlan is damn good and cheap for what it does. Deep recon LO with lasing means the lancets dont need their own onboard guidance, only initial telemetry. The last meter probability kill with Orlan 30 is way above artillery spam and way cheaper than slinging kinzhals or the retarded pitchup rocket spam.
GBAD is basically toast once it lights up against a drone swarm becsuse of dynamic targeting, you dont even need mounted ATGM when the drone is itself the munition. Chinese drone swarms are fire-and-forget with ranges of 30km as they are tube launched winged UAVs, not quadcopters, so the outer radius for them to.be spotted is really large. Trucks are also hard to spot far behind the frontline, as we see the brits use blowpipes off trucks and the HIMARs trucks took like 2 years before they got hit, so killing launchers before they shoot off the payload is really tough.
Of course, but the AV500 is dirt fucking cheap. Around 40-120k per unit, including munitions, and thats with CAIC markup. China can churn these out by the hundreds per week, and there is no way for NATO air superiority conops to just put enough metal in the air to counter that. Until Skynex, Iron Beam or Loyal Wingman come up at scale, an AV500 or loitering munition swarm of 40 munitions per salvo can get through even a russian Pantsir+Shilka screen. Iron Beam is the best option to kill swarms though, and Rafael says they are a year from deploying it at scale, but you still need to spam Iron Beam units. About 4 seconds on target to kill, and pretty short range.
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