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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31367 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Realistically, Geran-2 is not the most credible threat. It's big, slow and loud, so you don't really need radars or AA missiles to counter them. Flak can shoot them down and acoustic or optical targeting is sufficient. Even Ukraine can protect most of its military infrastructure and the bulk of its dual-use critical infrastructure with sufficient countermeasures. If you can resist the voices of populists demanding that every single flying bomb over the centers of population has to be shot down no matter the cost, you don't really need to worry about them.

You didn't even read his comment.

They're flying them high specifically to make shooting them down with guns hard.

The amount of computerized heavy flak systems to cover a country the size of Ukraine (let alone the amount of gunners you'd need to train and sustain) is profoundly cost and logistics prohibitive.

If this worked, why aren't they doing this already instead of using expensive interceptors and then running out and asking for more.

Of course I did. Like @No_one correctly understood, I meant point defenses that shoot the drones down as they dive at the target. You can't cover a country the size of Ukraine, but you can protect the parts of your infrastructure that you can't just move underground or at least into a forest.

The interceptors are there mainly for cruise and ballistic missiles.

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Gepards are not the only things that can shoot down drones. Tunguska is not exactly a cutting-edge product (neither is Gepard), but it works.

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By now, most everyone has forgotten about the war.

I read this sentence, and my first thought was: which war? Israel-Gaza? Israel-Iran? Syrian civil war? Or (as it turned out) Russia-Ukraine?

You might have wanted to be more specific — or at least give an explanation why, out of all those ongoing conflicts, Russia-Ukraine is the war.

Or Sudan, or Myanmar

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Israel-Gaza aren't waging war

Is this you saying that Hamas doesn't represent Gaza, that without statehood Gaza can't be considered a political entity capable of international relationships such as existing in a state of war, that it's only a wider aspect of Israel's war against Iran due to Hamas being a proxy (unlikely, given that you state Israel-Iran is not a war), or that the war is so one-sided that it hardly counts despite Hamas's best efforts to put up a fight?

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doesn't involve continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies.

Did our war in Afghanistan involve "continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies"? For that matter, how about the Yugoslav wars?

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Yugoslavia.. there was a fair bit of pitched combat there, no?

Pitched, yes, but would you consider those fighting "armies" — particularly if you contrast "insurgencies" as something distinct, as your comment applies.

In any event, you seem to have a pretty narrow and idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes "a real war"; one which, it seems to me, most people do not share.

Israel and Iran seem to at least have stopped shooting at each other for the moment, but Israel and Gaza are still going at it.

why, out of all those ongoing conflicts, Russia-Ukraine is the war.

It was much more or a Current Thing than the other ones. You are allowed to not give a hoot about them, but Europe was in a COVID-tier psychosis at the beginning of Russia-Ukraine.

right now they depend on GPS systems for accuracy

Pretty sure they're using GLONASS, the Russian version of GPS.

At the end of the day war is mostly about mass. If there's broad technological and political parity (not a colonial stomp or a guerilla war), then it's about numbers. How can a European NATO of over 600 million lose to a Russia of 140 million? What level of unpreparedness and inexperience can counter 4:1 in numbers? And they have the defender's advantage too.

If Russia can quickly make lots of cheap jet drones, so can Europe. Anything Russia can do, Europe can replicate. The asymmetry is this: just as Russia can hammer Ukraine down in attritional fighting after early reverses, so can Europe to Russia.

Only if there's a political failure, if the whole edifice just implodes as the Turks nope out, the Serbs and Hungarians decide it's not their war, if Britain and France won't really use nukes to defend Polish or German territory... then Europe loses. But so long as they're united they can fight on to victory, if only by drowning Russia in men. The US need not even show up IMO.

Let the Gerans fly, let the Oreshniks blow up Patriot batteries, let the T-90Ms thrust into the Baltics, let the Russians run wild for 6 months. They've got a huge front to man from Finland to the Caucasus. They'll be hemmed in at sea. They'll still be facing vast reserves of wealth and manpower, a foe with time on his side and talent to spare. At the end of a long attritional war they'll have to fall back on their strategic nuclear forces to broker a peace.

I don't buy that they'd risk a war with NATO unless China suplexes the US in Asia, at which point we all have much bigger concerns.

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Nick, 30 ans is not willing to let himself be conscripted by the million by governments he know doesn't care about him one iota and sent to the eastern front. Do you think all the young 'citizens' of immigrant origins who don't care about Europe one bit would let themselves be conscripted by the million, without starting to chimp?

How hard can it be to conscript these migrants? The US conscripted blacks in ww2, despite an extensive segregation regime and discrimination... Just blare war propaganda about how the enemy is subhuman nazi-commie orcs looking to rape and murder everyone you love. Go out on the street and grab them, draft them. That's what the Ukrainians do and it works out for them despite horrific casualties. The real problem is that the migrants aren't good at fighting compared to Europeans or Russians. One Russian brigade could've kept Assad in power, tiny Russian forces easily coup African nations: the MENA riff-raff are no match for European troops,. Nevertheless, if the Ukrainian population pool were 500 million rather than 20-30 million, I can't see how they could possibly lose the war save nuclear escalation.

The Ukrainians surely know their govt is grossly corrupt and doesn't care about them, sending them on pointless cross-river incursions, defending random towns to the last man for political reasons. Yet they fight on.

However, I admit that if the political front collapses then Europe does lose.

Russians would say they don't care about Germany/Poland

But if they go in on the Baltics and NATO gives up then NATO is a complete joke, they're dispensed to the cuck chair of history. Poland would be on their own. Germany would be on their own. And only then would they truly be in danger because Poland or Germany alone are no match for Russia. Surely you know how much the 'Putin Soviet Empire Imperialist Expansion Warstarter' crowd howls now, they'd be screeching and wailing if Putin did go in on the Baltics. Their frame is already dominant in elite circles and would only be further strengthened by an invasion. Taking Putin's word that he won't go further would be too much of a humiliation for these people.

As to ...what talent? NATO, the organisation, basically exists as sinecures for officers. European armies are small and have zero experience with modern warfare and not much critical equipment. No vast reserves of artillery. Shortages of air-defense missiles. Drone components would have to come from China, too.

The industrial capacity Europe retains is still considerably more than Russia in terms of machine tools, steel and especially high-tech industries. And let's remember that this is still Europe, these are the people who conquered almost all of the world. Even appallingly misled there's still latent competence on the continent. There isn't so much in the way of artillery but the raw fundamentals are just superior to Russia. A scale-based advantage beats a time-based advantage in a long war. European armies are small? They'll learn and grow in battle like America in WW2, like Ukraine and Russia today. They have some 2 million professional soldiers!

The US may well lose in Asia but at that point it's a new world order and all bets are off, NATO may well disintegrate or we see full WW3 or something else.

Yeah but recent immigrants are very literally mobile towards wherever suits them and know the right buttons to press in terms of media representation. Where was this hypothetical black American conscript going to bail off to? Europe was a complete mess at the time, people were fundamentally far less mobile.

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Eventually lasers will render this obsolete again, I suppose.

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Range issues, power issues, and the fact reflective/ablative coating hasn't even been explored yet makes me bearish on lasers.

The USA's most recent DEM-SHORAD trial got sent back to the drawing board, if I remember correctly

I'm somewhat surprised I haven't seen anyone develop a miniature-CIWS to counter drones yet. Something like a small phased array radar paired with a 22LR (lol) minigun (you don't want to have to manually cycle it when it misfires) at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck". Nothing about the small quadcopter drones has enough redundancy to take much of a hit, it seems (and I doubt drone-dropped explosives do either), so I doubt it would take much firepower. Speed, precision, accuracy, and attentiveness are all problems that can be solved mechanically (see the CIWS). An effective range of even 100m would at least protect a moderate-value mobile asset pretty well.

at a price point that allows "slap one on every vehicle larger than a pickup truck"

This sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting lol

True, but the idea of low-cost accurate cruise missiles was too much to ask for a couple decades ago. I don't see a reason the counter technologies (and current FPV drones seem weak to hard counters) can't see a similar volume production tradeoff.

Small phased array radar is going to bring down thunder and fire on you. If you're spewing out EM emissions on the front lines of a modern battlefield you're going to be in trouble. Better off with electro-optical or infra-red, something passive.

What if they come in like a flock, 5 or 10 or 20 from multiple angles to overwhelm the turret? I've seen videos of that happening against even these up-armoured, orky looking vehicles. They achieve mission-kill eventually, then the crew have to flee because they're stuck. Then they die. 5 or 10 or 20 FPV drones won't cost that much compared to the minigun CIWS integration, especially if AI guided. And the drones kill not just the CIWS but the vehicle as well.

LPI radar exists, but if drones are the specific concern you could just listen acoustically (or IR) to only turn it on when it's actually necessary to emit. Drones are loud.

Lidar (leveraging self-driving car sensors) might also be worth considering, but could still be prone to detection.

Small phased array radar is going to bring down thunder and fire on you. If you're spewing out EM emissions on the front lines of a modern battlefield you're going to be in trouble.

For now, you could go with 80 GHz automotive radars. Extremely short range, most current military radar equipment won't detect those ultra high frequencies, and it always could just be a newer Mercedes on adaptive cruise control.

Also, the sensors are cheap (because automotive sensors are a cut-throat business) completely integrated packages (even the phased antenna array needs to be directly on-chip), and at that frequency it's trivial to not only detect the quadcopter, you detect every single moving blade of its propellers, and the rounds you're shooting at it.

The bigger issue is also just that if your countermeasure is close range CIWS you're not in a great spot to begin with. That's deep in the survivability onion.

That's why they fly them high up now

There's no new cheap missile to take them down

There is actually, the APKWS laser-guided rocket, which has already been used by US fighters to take down Geran-type weapons.

A single F-15 can carry fifty of these, [edit: sorry, at least 42, although I'm sure larger pods could be introduced] introducing video game ammo logic to real life and allowing a squadron on station can defend a vast territory from even hundreds of Gerans pretty easily and more effectively than static air defenses (Gerans are slow and ~easy to detect if they are flying at 3km). At somewhere around $20 grand it trades nicely in cost with a $70,000 cruise missile.

Ukraine can't use this particularly effectively because it has been unable to degrade Russian air defenses and fighter coverage (and in fact I wonder if Russia modified their Gerans to fly at higher altitudes specifically to deny fighter interceptors ground clutter cover). NATO's air forces and capability to degrade air defenses are vastly superior to Ukraine's, so the APKWS is a more viable defense strategy for them.

People have often claimed that a wunderwaffe would soon massively shift the tide of the war, and they've been wrong every time in this conflict so far. Some like HIMARs have legitimately moved the needle, but it wasn't a revolution, just a needle-change that was soon adapted to (with some minor costs associated with the adaptation).

I haven't heard Perun talking about this much and he's been a pretty good barometer for the tempo of the war so far. He actually had a video out recently that went into the use of drones as anti-drone weapons, so I don't see why those couldn't be adapted to this.

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