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I think we still may be thinking of different types of drones - there are the long-range plane-type ones like Russia's Shaheds/Lancets/Orlans and Ukraine's jury-rigged single-engine aircraft and some dedicated designs the names of which I don't remember, and then there are the low-flying helicopter types ranging from Ukraine's Baba Yaga to modded off-the-shelf FPV ones. The latter can easily fly between trees, buildings or stacks of containers; I don't see how you can engage them in a much larger area from a single point because in a busy industrial area there is simply no point near ground level that has line of sight of that much space. (You could of course place it in an elevated area and aim down, but then you are aiming towards the ground and I'm not sure what you would have to pay people to work in an industrial area covered by such a contraption.)
I see an abundance of FPV drone video streams from both sides where the drone actually flies into a vehicle with EW equipment. This usually plays out as some noise in the video stream that gets worse as the drone gets closer, but the target is hit all the same. I'm sure there are cases where the interference results in failure, but cases where it does not are not one-offs.
Since the whole "Russian economy collapse in a month" fiasco, I'd take Western predictions about the financial capabilities of its adversaries with a lot of salt...
That's a fair point, but what do we know about Chinese satellite capabilities? Russia's legacy kit is one thing, but I'd imagine China to actually be quite good at something of type "get a lot of good cameras and radios into orbit fast".
Interesting if true (but again, is that really the bottleneck for an adversary like China or even Iran?).
That's only really relevant for the scenario where naval drones attack ships, no? In the autonomous drone carrier scenario, they would not even get close to capital US surface ships.
Would the "submarine" element really be necessary? Do you think the naval tech gap between Russia and the US is so big that Russia can't track surface craft of the size of Ukraine's drone boats in the open sea but the US reliably can?
You lost me with the metaphors in this passage.
They've evidently failed with that in the case of Iran + proxies (and yet they are still not in an official state of war against either). What do you think would happen if, say, China did a drone-swarm warning shot against the US, say in the context of US saber-rattling against a blockade of Taiwan intended to break its resistance? It's hard to predict, but I could see a drone attack that manages to largely avoid human casualties failing to elicit the Pearl Harbor response and instead making public opinion lean towards "yeah, we don't need this war".
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