The Ukrainian military has gotten so creative with what they’ve had available. I can’t wait to see what they do with all those F16s.
Slava Ukraini
Just like noone in NATO ever dreamed of an offensive patriot battery… but Ukranians made it work.
They never had to. They’ve always had far superior firepower in every conflict.
Very true, curb stomping 3rd rate dictators and terrorists in the outlands is different from peer on peer warfare.
But still, ukranians writing the book on this kind of stuff and on the new types of drone warfare. It is Impressive.
Of course. No doubt about that.
I wouldn’t consider it peer to peer, they’re fighting Russia they’re basically the short bus of wealthy countries
They were considered the 2nd military in the world by most before Ukraine. I hope we knock them out of the top 10.
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Both planes cruise at around 100 miles per hour and blend in with civilian air traffic, making them difficult to intercept.
And the ruzzkis are not aware that there is some plane coming from Ukrainian airspace travelling 100s of kilometres around their forlorn country? They are that blind on the border to an active battle ground? And why would there be so much civilian air traffic near that battle ground that they can’t oversee all air traffic?
Remembers me btw of German bumblehead Matthias Rust who flew a small single engine plane into ruzzia and landed in front of the Kremlin - in the middle of cold war. They simply didn’t see him coming until he parked his plane right in front of their door.
Also it is a pretty long border with Ukraine and the Ukranians have been hard at work dismantling Russian radar and detection capabilities.
Static radar sites are long gone and the mobile radars are Prime targets for himars, storm shadow, scalp, Harm ER, atacms and homebrew drones.
The occupation of Crimea is very expensive in terms of radar losses, and I would not be surprised if the east of Russia has no more radar coverage at all.
And the there was the hunt for those radar planes, epic show of ingenuity… twice… so not lucky.
And when they identify one of these they still need to act. How quickly and efficiently can they get interceptors up in the air and vectored in? How operational are their ground-based anti-air capabilities and do they dare shoot something down? And how much coverage do they actually have?
Well as proven with mh17 the buks are pretty good at taking down airliners.
Such a system can shoot at a maximum range of 30km. How many refineries and ammo depots does Russia have to protect? It’s a huge bloody country which makes it very hard to cover with radar and air defence.
The edge that allowed Russia to win against powerful invading armies bites them in the ass here. So much real estate is hard and expensive to protect.
During the height of the Cold War, a kid flew across Europe in a small, slow plane and landed on the damn Red Square. Another guy landed a helicopter on the White House lawn.
Buk is 50km, but s300 already over 100 and s400 does 400km range. And for even shorter range you have pantsir and shilka.
But indeed, so much real estate. And the refineries are very vulnerable.
Can you imagine… at this development pace in a year suck a plane will carry 10 autonomous drones with thermite charges that deploy on target and spread even more chaos.
The asymmetry between the cost of defense vs. offense here is absurd.
The operation of air defense networks, missiles, and fighter jet interceptions, all to try to down kit aircraft costing less than the average Porsche sports car. Fancy-pantsy capabilities that required billions not long ago can be had for cheap. It’s no longer the exclusive realm of low-flying supersonic or stealth aircraft to strike the heart of the enemy. What required billions of R&D can be somewhat achieved on the cheap.
Well no. The cost of defence is not actually what pricetag the system is you use to shoot something done. It is what you are defending and an oil refinery is probably in the hundreds of millions, literally a high-profile target
They have supersonic jets. How difficult would it be for a Su27 to intercept a driverless sport plane?
Still a win for Ukraine if the Russians have to start burning a lot of precious flight hours on checking out every aireal anomaly.
The fuel is (relatively) nothing. Interceptors have to haul ass and that means going full throttle for periods which translates into countless hours of maintenance on those planes. This immobilizes the aircraft after the mission and the ground crew to work on it. It also consumes spare parts and reduces the overall lifetime of the airframe.
China does this to Taiwan by playing chicken at the edge of their defensive zone, forcing a smaller air force to keep up with the interceptions.
That was my point indeed… flight hours translate to wear and tear, maintenance and spare part usage. And sourcing some of the spare parts is getting harder and harder by the day.
Some defense industry in Russia is already buying back airframes from abroad… this reduces the value of the Russian defense sector as these countries can shop elsewhere.
And countries with large Russian military hardware stocks cannot get parts in the foreseeable future… so they also cannot wage war without serious risks to their own readyness.
Maybe they decided is was not worth it and they prefer losing refineries and fuel storage rather than using jet hours
If they lose a few more refineries, that will certainly cut into their jet hours.
They did know, he was actually intercepted by a fighter jet at one point, who followed him for some distance, and was picked up on radar multiple times. They weren’t sure if he was hostile or not though.
Russia was anticipating an attack using jets and ballistic missiles, they likely didn’t consider a Cessna a threat.
To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.
As a result, at the time, the “ready aircraft” were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn’t available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/911-takedown-never-happened-180955222/
Orders had come from Vice President Dick Cheney for her squadron to get airborne and stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington D.C. Penney and her squadron leader, Mark (“Sass”) Sasseville, were to launch first. With no live missiles on board, they had nothing but their aircraft to use as a weapon. It would take upwards of an hour to assemble and load the missiles on to a jet. Another pair of F-16s would stay until missiles could be loaded, but Penney and Sasseville were to take off immediately.
“I’m zipping up my G-suit when Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’ [Meaning that he would ram into Flight 93’s front end.] I would take the tail,” she said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Who told you would have to ram the airplane? Who ordered you?’ But no one did. What was said was all that was said.”
In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.
Wow. That’s a fascinating little nugget that I never heard before. Thanks.
I’d heard this story before, and having fighter aircraft on standby with no weapons seemed utterly ridiculous at the time, and still does.
As does taking an hour to load them.
Those self sealing stem bolts take some time to actually seal.
They’re saving missiles for passenger airlines and their own aircraft and quadcopters. Can’t be bothered to shoot down every Cessna.
Maybe they’re flying these drones at very low altitudes to avoid conventional detection. I imagine it’d be through less densely populated areas as well for part of the way.
If they actually used a tactical nuke or attacked a Nato member and we retaliated by shooting hundreds of cruise- and ballistic missiles into Russia, I wonder how many they would actually be able to intercept. I’m starting to get the feeling that not many.
With their ordinance failure rate and low detection, russia should be happy with 1% intercepted.
The raids have somewhat throttled Russian gasoline production, but probably not enough to have an immediate impact on the economy—and thus on the long-term war effort. “These are spot strikes,” energy expert Hennadii Rіabtsev
I read that they had lost almost 20% of their refining capacity already, which sounds very significant to me.
There may be two factors there.
First, I think that the text is talking about those converted ultralight planes, not all long-range strikes. You had smaller drones; these were probably Ukrainian special forces operating behind enemy lines.
Second, I think I saw a similar quote, and IIRC, in the text I read, it wasn’t “20% of capacity”, but “strikes against refineries that comprise 20% of capacity”. The strikes didn’t necessarily shut a given refinery down fully.
Good point. It’s a bit unlcear. This is from a month ago and I know it edged up since then:
“In terms of damage, the strikes have probably disrupted more than 10% of Russia’s refinery capacity, maybe more than 15%. Depending on the extent of the damage, repairs could take considerable time,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Even if it’s true, there’s a huge capacity of oil refinery in Belarus which Ukraine doesn’t want to target for obvious reasons
One of these days someone is going to use a drone they bought of amazon to commit an act of terrorism and people will wake up to just how dangerous these things can be.
I’m shocked a world leader hasn’t been killed by a consumer drone yet.
I’d like to see a couple hit the skyscrapers in the Moscow financial district.
Lol got em
