Trump: “You have no cards.”
Zelenskyy: [I have 117 aces in the hole]
This was followed by an underwater demolition attack on the Kerch Bridge this morning. The bridge supports are said to be in “emergency condition”, whatever that means.
Slava Ukraine!
It means that Russians will continue to use it until it collapses and kills some of them.
You hate to see it…
That’s a shame.
I lost mine and I still can’t find it
This is a legendary operation. Impressive on so many levels.
It’s a dirty job but someones gotta do it
While I cheer Ukraine’s innovation, this also worries me about it being used by domestic terrorism and other bad actors. What is the defense for this type of attack?
Exactly. I’m sure law enforcement types are terrified by this sort of thing.
At scale, the defense is that the logistics of this attack were incredibly difficult and required probably hundreds of people over a couple of years to plan and execute, all while maintaining opsec.
But a smaller version, one or two drones in a crowd? I don’t think there is a defense.
That genie has been out of the bottle for most of this war. We don’t even get the grenade dropping videos anymore. Seems like ages ago at this point.
I posted another of Noah Smith’s substacks upthread about how the US is losing the drone production race to China. He provides some rather interesting context on the recent Ukrainian drone attack here:
"As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.
That’s obviously a terrifying thought. How can the U.S. defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield."
Russia’s defense against this type of attack was to pile tires on top of the aircraft sitting outside. I’m not kidding.
The “phalanx” gun system plus improved radar seems to be the only/best defense.
Until we have AI drones that hunt the other drones who hunt the…
What could possibly go wrong?
We some kind of net for the sky…
…and maybe get AI to control it…
