One hell of a lot of RW Americans were enraged that we pulled out of Afghanistan and disrespected the many GIs killed there by not staying abd thereby killing even more. Pulling out was wasting their sacrifice.
It isn’t just Russians who don’t understand.
I don’t think that had much at all to do with actually pulling out and everything to do with trying to find a reason to blame/hate Biden.
Never mind
In Afghanistan, we’d already “won the war”, in the sense that we’d achieved military supremacy. The problem was that we weren’t interested in building the peace after that, and we never had any real objectives for that military supremacy to achieve.
Which was of course doubly irrational, since it was Trump who negotiated the pullout.
Quite. We were the proverbial dog who’d caught the car. Oops.
More a dictator’s mindset, the people doing the dying aren’t the one making the decisions. Putin fears he will look weak and lose face if Russia admits failure, and the people dying aren’t Putin and therefore their lives have no value. So he’s been throwing away tremendous amounts of people and resources to win the war despite the fact that he’s long since passed the point where it will be worth the cost. His pride and fear demand it.
It’s just that matters have long since reached the point where he’s already lost plenty of face. Not to mention objectively greatly weakened Russia. And while he may not care about the lives of Russians, that doesn’t mean their loss doesn’t hurt Russia.
It’s the dictator’s delusion; they tend to regard people as worthless to justify how they treat their populace, but that doesn’t change the reality that the populace is a key resource for any nation (for obvious reasons).
I think you are being misled by your cultural prejudices here, “the west” is prone to the exact same mindset.
I got this argument from my mom re Vietnam. My response was that the dead soldiers were already dead and beyond caring. The ones to whom it mattered were still alive.
One of my favorite bumper stickers
Support our troops. Bring them home.
It usually starts appearing on cars about 2 years into any conflict. When there are enough dead Americans that the jingoistic crap starts sounding real hollow to anyone with any sense of history. Or a KIA relative.
It sounds like the military equivalent of the old sunk cost fallacy.
I kind of suspect that as technology advances, we’re going to have a whole drone war that goes on independent of the troops on the ground. Like strike drones trying to attack ground troops, and a whole other set of fighter/interceptor drones that intercept those drones and each other. And probably autonomous ones as well, especially the fighter/interceptor ones.
Plus we’ll almost certainly see better point-defense systems for tanks and fixed positions than we see in Ukraine right now. That probably isn’t such a hard problem to solve, it’s more of a money and time type thing.
The question is what is it about drones that make them so useful. It has to be something with the dramatically lower cost and ease of use of those sorts of things vs. what say… a wire guided r/c (not really radio controlled) helicopter with a closed-circuit TV camera and a mortar shell?
Also, where is the line between a drone and a missile drawn?
I think that what’s making drones especially revolutionary is that lately, most new weapons development has been done by fat, happy nations like the US. We’ll make multimillion-dollar munitions, because we can. Ukraine, though, can’t afford that: They’re fighting for their lives. So they’re instead making whatever cheap thing they can, and accepting that there will be tradeoffs for being cheap, but the upshot is that they can make a lot of them.
Usually, the justification for military (or military-adjacent, like police) hardware being so expensive is that it absolutely must be reliable. But what the military-industrial complex misses is that sheer numbers provide a lot more reliability. If you have a mission that requires 100 munitions, you can make 100 of them and make them all rock-solid reliable, but it’s a lot cheaper, and probably also more reliable, to make 300 of them that each have a 50% chance of failure.
What is more reliable than rock-solid reliable?
I think it comes down to synergy between much better control software, much better and cheaper inertial sensors, and the use of quad-rotors on most drones. They’re at a point they can fly fast when needed, but also low and slow, and transition easily between the two modes as needed, and they automatically maintain their stability, freeing the operators to think more about what job they want to accomplish, instead of just keeping the thing in the air. On traditional planes or helicopters, a big part of the pilot’s job is just trying not to crash. The actual attacking bits are secondary. Plus, being relatively cheap, it’s not a disaster if they do crash, unlike a plane or helicopter.
Every munition is just one link in the kill chain. Even if the munition itself is 99.999% reliable, everything else cannot be. And munitions in the real world are not 99.999% reliable.
Being able to affordably diversify the attack with multiple rounds always increases the PK.
What’s happening now, as mentioned by others, is the price of far smarter AI-ed munitions is cratering to tiny fractions of the price of traditional munitions.
When you can send a thousand new weapons against a target for the same price as one single old weapon, it really doesn’t matter how good the old one was; the new ones are more likely to succeed for the same money.
And better yet, with 1000 of them you can probably prosecute 3 or 5 or 10 targets with still higher certainty of a kill than the one shot at just one target with the exquisite, and exquisitely expensive, old munition.
Every enemy environment is a “target rich environment” if your munitions are cheap enough.
I sort of wonder if there’s more to @horatius’s commentary about low and slow; it seems to me that regular old AT missiles were extraordinarily effective early on, and that they were what effectively drove armored vehicles from the battlefield, not drones.
But drones have kept them away by being able to just sort of cruise around and find enemy tanks, vehicles, and troops. And at a really CHEAP price, all things considered.
In WW2, on average it was 25,000 rounds per man killed. That’s somewhere between about $8800 and 15,000 per kill depending on the size and price of each round (lower bound is 5.56 NATO, and the upper bound is 7.62 NATO estimated prices of 35 and 60 cents per round).
I somehow doubt these little Ukrainian drones we see blowing up single soldiers in combat footage cost anywhere near $8800 dollars. So it’s a net positive for them to just put a bunch of them up and fly them around until they can blow up some poor bastards who are trying to take a crap behind the lines somewhere. Plus you get all the morale lowering benefits on the Russian side.
And that economy only scales as you move up in target value. I imagine that the cost per tank destroyed in the early parts of the war was FAR higher than $8800 per tank. But I doubt the drone cost scales the same way.
Though we don’t have any statistics (that I know of) about how many drones it takes to make a kill - it’s possible it also takes a large number of drones for each enemy soldier killed like your example of bullets in WWII. I’m pretty sure “one drone, one kill” is not the case.
Yes, that’s a major factor as well. Aside from everything else that makes drones useful, they can get to places traditional weapons often could not. It used to be, if you were in a good foxhole or behind a solid structure, you were relatively safe from small arms fire, and pretty safe from mortars and artillery, barring a near-direct hit on your position.
But now we see small drones that can fly through small gaps in the protection, and then maneuver to find a target that no bullet could ever hit. Suddenly a lot of the “safe” spots on a battlefield have become just as deadly as an open field.
It’s long been said that being in an artillery barrage is terrifying specifically because there’s nowhere to hide.
Being in a drone-infested battlefield where they might enter your seemingly secure hiding areas at any moment is psychologically like living under a continuous artillery barrage 24/7. That’s gotta be hard first on sleep, then morale, then finally on subsequent mental health altogether.
If you survive long enough to have any “later”.
Russia’s tank woes were exasperated by tactical and logistical failures on their part. Their armor should have been screened by infantry, there should have been some reconnaissance to provide their forces with early warning, and of course they should have had air support. The poorly trained and unsupported Russian forces were completely unprepared for a well trained, well equipped, and motivated Ukrainian military. Russia is completely unprepared to take on a military force with decent equipment and training.
Mod-Nudge
We’re not fully off topic yet, but as a reminder, this thread is about End of War predictions, less on general drone utility/efficiency, except on how it may End the War/Influence the Peace. Again, not fully off topic yet, but if we’re going to go towards bullet/drone efficiency per kill, there’s a better thread from last year:
Or feel free to spin off a new thread in light of current information.
Again, just to remind us all of the OP’s topic, and to make sure we don’t drift too far.
ETA - I have just created a general thread for discussing drones including civilian and military use over in MPSIMS, since this is not the only thread where people want to dive into the efficacy and gritty details.