There are early reports of a “Spider Web 2.0” attack. Ukrainian drones, hidden in grain bins, attacked and destroyed a train loaded with tanks, ammo, etc.
NATO will soon need Ukraine just for their expertise in modern warfare.
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Yeah I just dmor and learned that Ukraine manufactures their drones, or at least a great number of them. I probably shouldn’t have been at all surprised, but effective Ukranian drone warfare spells bad news for the rooskies.
I wasn’t joking about them making them in caves from scraps. Well, the scraps part isn’t true, but these things are assembled from off-the-shelf circuit boards and electric motors.
The parts for one of the tank-buster drones cost about $1,000 and can be assembled by anyone with a modicum of practice and a soldering iron. I don’t imagine these cargo drones are much different.
Not great news for an invading force, sorry not sorry to say.
I’d lazily assumed they get all this shit from China and that at some point China would tuen off the tap. Glad to know I was wrong.
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I have no idea where they source this stuff, but I imagine their European allies are facilitating the supply.
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They have sourced a bunch of their stuff from anywhere they can get it. But don’t underestimate their internal manufacturing capabilities. For example, the car manufacturing supply chain took a huge hit all around the world, including Asia, when the war started because a significant part of the wiring harnesses industry comes from Ukraine.
It’s easy to admonish Russia for their attacks on civilian population centers. Things are not that simple since the Ukrainians have embedded much of their distributed manufacturing capabilities, including 1’s of people cranking out hundreds of drones from their apartment, into these civilian areas and the Russians have conspirators everywhere directing the strikes.
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I would say it’s super simple given Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place.
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No fucking shit! Why is that so easily dismissed? If Russia wants to cease being “admonished”, or having their shit blown the fuck up, then they should just get the fuck out of Ukraine!
Some of these kids would be old enough to fight or build weaponry by now…so totally legit, I suppose.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-mariupol-theater-c321a196fbd568899841b506afcac7a1
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This is fantastic. Shows how close the drones were delivered, to this location at least. I love how the drone pilot takes time to survey the preceding damage before casually landing on a bomber and blowing it the fuck up.
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Pretty sure I read these were AI piloted.
Trained Ukrainian pilots. One per drone. Trained for over a year.
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Makes sense. The on-board computing power to run any AI would be considerable for something about to blow up.
I’m too lazy to look this up, but did each drone just have an explosive charge attached to it? Did it just land (or get near enough) to the target and the explosive was remotely detonated?
Yep. Very basic little carnage machine.
I’ve seen drone footage of one being flown into the open door of a Russian APC. The looks on the faces of the poor fuckers inside who are about to be ended was as you might expect. Pure “WTF”.
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“7 seconds to die” by John Antal came out when the russian invasion of ukraine began back in february of 22. The book is an analysis of the armenian azerbijan war that was decisively decided in azerbijan’s favor because of its use of drones and other unmanned systems. I recommend it as a way to think about what’s happening in ukraine, but also to note how outdated this “cutting edge” analysis is just a few years later.
Probably mentioned before, but institute for the study of war covers the russian invasion of ukraine well, including developmets with ai and machine learning systems. Its a usa think tank, so covers conflicts from that viewpoint.
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Ahh. AI assisted to overcome latency. Still fascinating.
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