I’m not sure if the explosives on the drones are powerful enough to sink the ships. But striking the helms does the job of disrupting shipping, preventing ecological fall out, and forces Russia to spend resources rescuing and repairing the ships.
True, I hadn’t considered the ecological angle.
Here’s a link that’ll be free to read for a month-ish from now. NATO Leader Sees Industrial Capacity Needed For Credible Deterrent | Aviation Week.
Nothing much surprising. More like Captain General Obvious giving a briefing. But still nice to see somebody talking about the disconnect between peacetime production rates and wartime expenditure rates.
I’ll quote the lede here so this post will still have meaningful content after the free link expires.
Logistics, logistics, logistics! War is a contest of logistics and morale. And much of morale is based on logistics (i.e. are the fighters well supplied with what they need to be as comfortable, healthy, and entertained as possible when they’re not fighting).
And of course being adequately supplied w ammo & operational machinery. Nothing ruins morale more than being an unarmed sitting duck.
That’s logistics!
Well I would believe that technology and aptitude are also important, a hundred Roman Legions with the best logistics in the universe leaded by Paulus and Varrus would probably lose against a modern combined arms brigade with some supply problems but good leadership.
Moderating
Yes, that is accurate, but moving a little too far off topic.
If anyone wants to continue this what-if, take it to a new thread.
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
No one expected that Russia, supposedly a first-rate military power, could be held off this long. The war was expected to be long over (presumably by Ukraine’s defeat).
Especially Putin. It did show that long term corruption and being run by a Dictator, can ruin a top military.
Have they ever had an actual top military that hasn’t relied on having thousands of nukes to justify that top ranking? Just look at Afghanistan as an example. They spent several years and had the advantage of being right next door, yet they couldn’t win a war in Afghanistan. The US won the war with them (though obviously not the peace) from halfway around the world in a matter of a month or so. That doesn’t sound like top level to me.
At least judging by the number of planes and armor they had, the Soviet Union/ Warsaw Pact was stupendous. Yet between WW2 and Afghanistan the USSR didn’t actually do much other than Hungary, Czechoslovakia and some border skirmishes with China. How well Soviet troops would actually do against a determined peer enemy probably kept Kremlin planners awake at night.
The Soviet Union managed to retain control over the eastern half of Europe following the end of the Second World War, which I think is good evidence that they were a top tier military force at the time. As the years rolled on by, the Warsaw Pact’s strategy against NATO forces was to overwhelm them with numbers in a short period of time ideally with a surprise attack. It sure sounds like that’s what Russia tried with Ukraine.
Russia’s a lot weaker than the Soviet Union was back in the 80s, so it’s hard to make direct comparisons. I think NATO expected the Soviets to penetrate pretty far into Europe if they launched an attack, but who knows? Maybe they would have screwed that up too.
I do remember reading a paper written in the 1950s arguing the Soviet Union would never start a war with the United States. The author posited the Soviet Union lacked the political stability to engage in a long, costly war, and would avoid such a situation if possible. I wish I could remember the author’s name.
This could be “Pravda Means Truth” by Robert A. Heinlein. I don’t have a copy of it handy but the Google AI summary sounds like it’s close to what you are thinking of.
It definitely wasn’t Heinlein. The author either ran in academic circles or government (though he wasn’t an elected official). I imagine other authors, Heinlein included, came to similar conclusions.