The War in the Ukraine

plawolf said:

I think we are going to start to see the beginning of the end of FPV drones as the Russians appears to be seriously going after their core vulnerability - human operators.

Right now it’s pretty rudimentary mostly down to tracking with their own drones and calling in fire missions on hideouts. But I don’t think it will be long before we see a whole new generation of UCAVs designed specifically to find and home in on FPV command signals and go straight for the operators exactly like how radar guided SAMs were soon countered with anti-radiation missiles.

We might see a lot of the same tricks and counters as was/is used in SAM vs fighters being applied here, but no matter how the arms races goes, the end result is that FPVs will never be as effective as they are right now, where there isn’t yet a proper counter against FPVs and similar repurposed commercial drones.

This is another reason why AI and drone swarms are the proper future successor of the current FPVs and DJIs.

The key question is how long the development and deployment cycle for the hard counter to FPVs will take. But it’s a question of when, not if these will emerge and once again revolutionise the battlefield.

In the meantime, expect a lot more footage of Ukrainian drone teams getting hit as the Russians have correctly marked them as high value, high priority targets. Even more so as Ukrainian conventional artillery forces continue their decline due to shortage of shells and increasingly, attrition of artillery and crews themselves from Russian full spectrum attack, and the Russians start to have more slack capacity to redeploy to hunt for drone operators.

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It boil down to cost. Nothing even comes near to cost efficacy of FPS drones when it comes to resource to kill ratio.

We have repeatedly seen UAV usage blunt battalion sized armored assualts. Mind you this is with a 5:1 artillery advantage for the Russians.

It doesn't take much to become a dangerous UAV pilot, counter-battery works because artillery pieces are slow and expensive. A full kit for a drone operator would easily come under 10k. Any sufficiently populated country can just spam UAV forever, it's not like it is using some specialised equipment. An competent artillery crew take weeks/months to train. Going after a mass produced drone operator has way less of a effect on capability in comparison.

tankphobia said:

It boil down to cost. Nothing even comes near to cost efficacy of FPS drones when it comes to resource to kill ratio.

We have repeatedly seen UAV usage blunt battalion sized armored assualts. Mind you this is with a 5:1 artillery advantage for the Russians.

It doesn't take much to become a dangerous UAV pilot, counter-battery works because artillery pieces are slow and expensive. A full kit for a drone operator would easily come under 10k. Any sufficiently populated country can just spam UAV forever, it's not like it is using some specialised equipment. An competent artillery crew take weeks/months to train. Going after a mass produced drone operator has way less of a effect on capability in comparison.

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Yep, it's quite easy to get pilots. JUst give them a cheap drone and let them practice one day or two.

It's console gaming level of competence...and they are mostly attacking static targets.

Kids fly FPV drones with ease after a couple of minutes... and some are doing insane manoeuvres with not a lot of time of practice.

tankphobia said:

It boil down to cost. Nothing even comes near to cost efficacy of FPS drones when it comes to resource to kill ratio.

We have repeatedly seen UAV usage blunt battalion sized armored assualts. Mind you this is with a 5:1 artillery advantage for the Russians.

It doesn't take much to become a dangerous UAV pilot, counter-battery works because artillery pieces are slow and expensive. A full kit for a drone operator would easily come under 10k. Any sufficiently populated country can just spam UAV forever, it's not like it is using some specialised equipment. An competent artillery crew take weeks/months to train. Going after a mass produced drone operator has way less of a effect on capability in comparison.

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We have also seen tanks take multiple hits of FPV drones and survive to keep fighting.

Just because the FPV drone footage ends with the scene of a tank does not mean automatically the tank is destroyed. We have seen time and time again tanks brushing off FPV drone attacks. That's how people can greatly miscount tank kills by thinking you don't need proof of aftermath. In fact this is the reason why the tanks have to be drone dropped with bombs down the hatch in order to assure an undeniable kill (yet some tanks even in this condition are still recovered and sent back to refit works). This is also why tanks now have roofs over their turrets to prevent quadcopters from finishing them off, allowing abandoned tank to be recovered.

And this is also why Iskanders and cruise missiles make it a point to target repair and refit centers. To make sure a vehicle that's dead, stays dead. So yeah, both sides do a lot of vehicular repair and recovery so yes, vehicles do return from the dead.

That publicized video by the 72nd Mechanized Brigade actually failed to blunt that operation. Mappers including Suriyak gave the position to the Russians. The drones attacked and destroyed multiple MT-LBs. These are expendable junk for the Russians. You know why? They are made by the Kharkhiv tank plant back in the Soviet era. That's why the Ukrainians have tons of Gvozdikas which is an SPG made out of the MT-LB. So the Russians have piles of vehicles that were made in Ukraine that's going to have a limited usage life from the lack of parts. So much so they have been turning MT-LBs into ground suicide drones loaded with explosives used to demine fields.

The moment that operation had an unusual amount of MT-LBs should have set red flags alarming of a troll. The APCs and IFVs that were carrying the real troops has already disembarked them somewhere, leading you to this column with plenty of MT-LBs that's likely there as drone soakers, coupled with somewhat the unusual uncharacteristically lack of REBs.

Not long after, we got east of Novomikhailovka successfully assaulted and they are equipped with REBs.

An FPV drone is only good for like what 2 to 3km? An Arty can be as good as 20 to 40km in range and can even do 50 to 70. Artillery is capable of repeated fire unlike drones. Most especially with mortars which are greatly media underrated in the war despite them being everywhere. The Ukrainians know this and this is why they are still asking for shells galore.

It's the Russians have more of the drones, more UAVs, more of everything on top of having more artillery and missiles. Having drones is no counter to the other guy who has more drones and more of everything.

When an Iskander or FAB takes out an ammo depot, that may include drones stored inside it in addition to artillery, tank and small arms ammunition.

Should you wish to extend the FPV drone range by improving antenna techniques, you open the risk of having the signals intercepted and triangulated by ESM. That's how the Russians are able to track down Baba Yagas to their nest. Unlike FPV drones, Baba Yagas have far greater range (them based on agricultural drones) which is enough for them to reach out and bomb Russian small artillery and mortar units, including unlucky TOS units. This makes the Baba Yagas more trouble to the Russians than HIMARS. Once the nest is signal triangulated, Russian UAVs are on their way, to spot and target the nest with a Krasnopol.

generalmeng said:

In tucker's interview, putin said, he pulled back from kiev to show compromise, and hope the kiev can agree to the cease fire (negociated in Istanbul). i think specifically, he was referring to the two prone attack to seize kiev.
any truth to that? the timeline is so burry for me, i can't determine if that have any truth.

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That is what the Russians claim. But I think it is more complicated than that. The Russians invaded with like 150k-200k troops or something. That was clearly not enough to properly encircle Kiev let alone the wide front they were operating in. The Russian supply lines were also being attacked by partisans. Without Ukraine giving up in the initial stages the Russians would just continue bleeding manpower and resources without ever achieving proper encirclement.

I think the whole idea was to try to fix the garrison in Kiev defending the capital and hopefully get the Ukrainians to pull some of their troops in Donbass to go back to attempt to break the attempted encirclement of the capital. And then the Russians would just gain control of Donbass. Well that didn't work out, so the Russians just rolled back their overextended lines to something more defensible.

Still, several huge mistakes were made. For example the Russians should have issued a stop loss order like the US did in Afghanistan instead of just letting the 6 month contracts of the troops expire. And they should have started the mobilization right after the invasion started. Because they didn't issue a stop loss order, they had to send some of the mobilized troops without refresher courses right into the front. The whole mobilization process was also completely obsolete. But at least they solved that. It is completely automated and computerized now. The moment they are drafted they get forbidden from leaving the country. They get a text message with a notification to report to the office. No need to hand serve everyone their draft papers as if this was WW2. Or canvassing people out in the street like Ukraine is doing.

Atomicfrog said:

Yep, it's quite easy to get pilots. JUst give them a cheap drone and let them practice one day or two.

It's console gaming level of competence...and they are mostly attacking static targets.

Kids fly FPV drones with ease after a couple of minutes... and some are doing insane manoeuvres with not a lot of time of practice.

Click to expand...

We can even see from the recent iranian militia attack on US forces highly efficient ways to bypass air defences. Simply follow an enemy aircraft in and it'll get ignored as radar noise. This is just from militia level planning and intel.

Mass UAV usage is here to stay, as it moves Patisian activity from mild annoyance to supply line crippling, as seen in the numerous footage of very successful attack on supply trucks.

Tam said:

We have also seen tanks take multiple hits of FPV drones and survive to keep fighting.

Just because the FPV drone footage ends with the scene of a tank does not mean automatically the tank is destroyed. We have seen time and time again tanks brushing off FPV drone attacks. That's how people can greatly miscount tank kills by thinking you don't need proof of aftermath. In fact this is the reason why the tanks have to be drone dropped with bombs down the hatch in order to assure an undeniable kill (yet some tanks even in this condition are still recovered and sent back to refit works). This is also why tanks now have roofs over their turrets to prevent quadcopters from finishing them off, allowing abandoned tank to be recovered.

And this is also why Iskanders and cruise missiles make it a point to target repair and refit centers. To make sure a vehicle that's dead, stays dead.

That publicized video by the 72nd Mechanized Brigade actually failed to blunt that operation. Mappers including Suriyak gave the position to the Russians. The drones attacked and destroyed multiple MT-LBs. These are expendable junk for the Russians. You know why? They are made by the Kharkhiv tank plant back in the Soviet era. That's why the Ukrainians have tons of Gvozdikas which is an SPG made out of the MT-LB. So the Russians have piles of vehicles that were made in Ukraine that's going to have a limited usage life from the lack of parts. So much so they have been turning MT-LBs in ground suicide drones loaded with explosives used to demine fields.

The moment that operation had an unusual amount of MT-LBs should have been red flags alarming of a troll. The APCs and IFVs that were carrying the real troops has already disembarked them somewhere, leading you to this column with plenty of MT-LBs that's likely there as drone soakers, coupled with somewhat the unusual uncharacteristically lack of REBs.

Not long after, we got east of Novomikhailovka successfully assaulted and they are equipped with REBs

Click to expand...

Of course FPS UAVs aren't some godly weapon in that they'll turn the tide of battle by themselves, often times there isn't enough oomph in their payload to mission kill tanks, sure. But the vans, trucks, IFVs and APCs are all a single rpg warhead away from having a very bad day. You cannot conduct a offensive purely using tanks.

From the heavy use of UAVs, even in a losing battle the Ukrainians are able to inflict quite heavy losses on Russian equipment at a low cost. If Ukraine wasn't doing this, Russia would've just ran through them with an armored thrust. Instead they need to sacrifice equipment in a feint just to divert attention away.

tankphobia said:

We can even see from the recent iranian militia attack on US forces highly efficient ways to bypass air defences. Simply follow an enemy aircraft in and it'll get ignored as radar noise. This is just from militia level planning and intel.

Mass UAV usage is here to stay, as it moves Patisian activity from mild annoyance to supply line crippling, as seen in the numerous footage of very successful attack on supply trucks.


Of course FPS UAVs aren't some godly weapon in that they'll turn the tide of battle by themselves, often times there isn't enough oomph in their payload to mission kill tanks, sure. But the vans, trucks, IFVs and APCs are all a single rpg warhead away from having a very bad day. You cannot conduct a offensive purely using tanks.

From the heavy use of UAVs, even in a losing battle the Ukrainians are able to inflict quite heavy losses on Russian equipment at a low cost. If Ukraine wasn't doing this, Russia would've just ran through them with an armored thrust. Instead they need to sacrifice equipment in a feint just to divert attention away.

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The Russians are willing to sacrifice cheap vehicles to save human lives. Whereas Ukrainians are willing to sacrifice human lives to save their vehicles (see Rabotino-Verbove). That has been the essential difference of their offensives.

I should mention there has been Russian assaults that the Ukrainians failed to counter or respond to, by the lack of both artillery and drones. (Them drones use a lot of Chinese parts, which is a problem).

But like the Ukrainians, the Russians are cheap. That's why every offensive is also covered with swarms of drones that precede to hunt every trench, dugout, and shelter. If it's not FPV drones then it's night vision quadcopters. There are at least three Russian drone operators (call signs Udai, Dreamer, and Moses) with video verifiable 200 kills or wounded with each of them, two of them operated on the Krynki beachhead (Dreamer and Moses). The problem with the Ukrainians they waste their missiles and resources in useless Cold War naval ships and civil targets like bakeries in Lisychansk and markets in Donetsk instead of real useful targets. The one smart move the Ukrainians did all month was to successfully target a drone training school of the Sudoplatov by HIMARS. You can be sure that the Russians are hunting down and disabling Ukrainian drone infrastructure, such as the possible places where the drones are made as well as the places they train. They have been doing these with one strike after another. That inevitably brings you back to why missiles are still the apex weapon.

tankphobia said:

It boil down to cost. Nothing even comes near to cost efficacy of FPS drones when it comes to resource to kill ratio.

We have repeatedly seen UAV usage blunt battalion sized armored assualts. Mind you this is with a 5:1 artillery advantage for the Russians.

It doesn't take much to become a dangerous UAV pilot, counter-battery works because artillery pieces are slow and expensive. A full kit for a drone operator would easily come under 10k. Any sufficiently populated country can just spam UAV forever, it's not like it is using some specialised equipment. An competent artillery crew take weeks/months to train. Going after a mass produced drone operator has way less of a effect on capability in comparison.

Click to expand...

Just what unobtainium part do you think a drone will need to be able to home in on a drone command signal? The bulk of the development work will be on the software side, not hardware.

The software side can be massively simplified and expedited if they don’t even bother to try to distinguish between military and general background civilian comms and just have the counter drones home in on anything emitting the right (or wrong depending on perspective) kind of signal.

This means the counter to drones shouldn’t cost too much more than the drones themselves, and will be massively cheaper than the cost to train and equip an operator. Just like how ARMs are significantly cheaper than the SAMs they are designed to kill.

The other giant problem with your above assumption is that China will always provide you with the massive amounts of cheap drones and high tech parts you need to keep churning out industrial quantities of FPV drones.

Just look at how the American governments attempt to replace Chinese drones with anything else is costing and going to see just how quickly this entirely strategy implodes without China.

To seriously pursue such a strategy is to make China a cornerstone of your national defence via the backdoor. That’s some super-sneaky mega-wumao 5D Go move!

Not sure if indeed real ...

The markings in the aircraft are fake.

I do think the F-16AM with the Ukrainian pilot part of it is real. But this is nothing new really. We know they are training Ukrainian pilots in the Netherlands, UK, and the US. The UK seems to be used to do simulator training. The flight training seems to be going in the Netherlands and the US.

generalmeng said:

In tucker's interview, putin said, he pulled back from kiev to show compromise, and hope the kiev can agree to the cease fire (negociated in Istanbul). i think specifically, he was referring to the two prone attack to seize kiev.

any truth to that? the timeline is so burry for me, i can't determine if that have any truth.

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It is not possible to know the political answer to this, but official Russian military sources have already given their version of the Russian "withdrawal" to the north:

Speech of the Head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Colonel General Sergei Rudskoy​

In accordance with the decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief since February 24 this year. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are conducting a special military operation.

Its main goal is to provide assistance to the people of the Lugansk and Donetsk people's republics, who have been subjected to genocide by the Kiev regime for 8 years.

It was impossible to achieve this goal by political means. Kiev has publicly refused to implement the Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leadership twice in 2014 and 2015 tried to solve the so-called Donbass problem by military means, was defeated, but did not change its plans on resolving conflict by force in the East of the country. According to reliable data, the Armed Forces of Ukraine were completing the preparation of a military operation to take control of the territory of the people's republics.

In these conditions, it was possible to help the Donetsk and Lugansk republics only by providing them with military assistance. Which Russia has done.

There were two possible courses of action.

The first is to limit the territory to only the DPR and the LPR within the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which is enshrined in the constitutions of the republics. But then we would be faced with constant feeding by the Ukrainian authorities of the grouping involved in the so-called joint force operation.

Therefore, the second option was chosen, which provides for actions throughout the territory of Ukraine with the implementation of measures for its demilitarization and denazification.

The course of the operation confirmed the validity of this decision.

It is conducted by the General Staff in strict accordance with the approved plan.

The tasks are carried out taking into account minimizing losses among personnel and minimizing damage to civilians.

With the beginning of a special military operation, air supremacy was won during the first two days.

Offensive actions of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are carried out in various directions.

As a result, Russian troops blocked Kiev, Kharkov, Chernigov, Sumy and Nikolaev. Kherson and most of the Zaporozhye region are under full control.

The public and individual experts are wondering what we are doing in the area of blocked Ukrainian cities.

These actions are carried out with the aim of causing such damage to military infrastructure, equipment, personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the results of which allow not only to shackle their forces and do not give them the opportunity to strengthen their grouping in the Donbass, but also will not allow them to do so until the Russian army completely liberates the territories of the DPR and LPR.

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In any case, whether the "withdrawal" was done willingly or not, Ukraine won this battle and it was what guaranteed the survival of Zelensky's government, I still consider it the most important battle that Ukraine won: