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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2660 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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One of my country prominent liberal politicians called the Ukraine army the best in Europe. Deadly serious and with a straight face. In a fit in a response to the USA actions lately.

Do you think there is any merit in that or early symptoms of USA derangement syndrome?

Most European armies have been shaped by their NATO membership: Poland has 1000 tanks (and plans to upgrade to 2000) because it sits on the frontline, but it has inadequate air defenses, air force and long-range weaponry, since it expects other countries behind it to provide that. The only country that has really been preparing for a one-on-one war is probably Finland, but their plans are purely defensive in nature: mobilizing all men, hiding in the taiga and bleeding Russia dry.

Could Ukraine, if it so wished, defeat Poland in a surprise attack if Poland left NATO? Probably not, since it doesn't have enough armor for a breakthrough. Could it defeat Poland in a sustained offensive? Again, probably not, but neither could Poland defeat Ukraine.

Drones are an important defensive weapon, but (a) they aren't exactly rocket science and most countries will have enough of them soon and (b) they don't solve the new stalemate the way tanks and infiltration tactics solved in in 1918. Without some new fancy anti-drone AA that can clear the skies long enough to reestablish the fog of war and allow armor to cross the no man's land it's a competition of mobilization efforts.

Could someone like the UK skip this whole footslogging business and degrade the opponent with air force and ship-launched missiles? Well, there's a reason why Russia uses its air force to drop guided glide bombs and Ukraine uses its air force to hunt down cruise missiles: both armies have sufficient AA to make achieving air superiority hard. Not impossible, and the UK is probably better at using its aerial assets, but it's going to be hard to hunt down every Buk and Tor and donated Patriot and secret airfield.

I think the fancy anti-drone AA tech already exists in the form of EMP weapons.

I have not encountered any EMP weapons that do not cause significant collateral damage against all unhardened electronics in the area around the weapon. (If there have been any recent developments in this area I'd love to hear about them.)

If your response to a $100 quadcopter is to destroy $5k in security cameras, have you really come out ahead?

It means that one side has to withdraw all its unhardened electronics from the area before deploying the EMP weapon, obviously.

You're going to withdraw all your unhardened electronics from the area in the 30 seconds before the quadcopter flies over in your direction?

You can of course try to ensure that you have no unhardened electronics around beforehand - but now that essentially means 'no unhardened electronics near the battlefield' - and unhardened electronics are useful. Not to mention fairly ubiquitous in civilian installations.

Makes you wonder why there are no EMP guns in every platoon and on every tank already, knocking drones out of the sky left and right. Anyway, there are optical wire-guided drones already that have a Faraday cage protecting their electronics.

We already had those, they were called TOW Missiles!

More seriously, I get the impression we are working on plenty of counter-UAS weapons. Military procurement is just slow.

A single TOW missile costs $100000, if I remember correctly. How much does a suicide drone cost? $1000? $5000?

A TOW needs to explode a tank. If you need to explode a temu special, you can probably cut some corners.

What do drones explode, then? Even the cheapest ones that simply drop ordnance basically perform a top attack like the best AT missile. FPV drones fly into the weakest point of the tank's armor.

For the optical, wire-guided kind, probably more than $5K, but much less than the TOW.

For the bargain versions deployed in Ukraine? Maybe even less.

It sure looks like mid-21st century is mostly about small expendable drones and defending against them. (The Turkisk Bayraktar was effective early on, but you can put >1000 grenades on Home Depot quadcopters for the price of a Bayraktar, and not that many of them are flying any more). Ukraine and Russia have orders of magnitude more experience with this type of war than anyone else, and Ukraine are better at it than Russia.

So the claim that Ukraine currently have the best army in Europe, or even the world, seems plausible, and it will remain that way until the other Great Powers adapt their doctrine, training and equipment to reflect the new reality of drone-primary warfare.

I think that might be true, but is more of a story about how terrible the rest of Europe is than how awesome the Ukraine Army is.

I would expect at least some units are these days excellent at things like holding off a large-scale offensive with a hodgepodge of improvised equipment and donated castoffs. They might now be among the best in the world at modern drone warfare.

On the other hand, they still seem terrible at putting together a solid combined-arms offensive of the type that would be necessary to actually drive the Russians out of their country.

Combat experience counts for a lot, and they certainly aren't lacking for equipment either. A few dozen Ukrainian military advisors on the ground in Syria with knowledge of modern drone warfare were sufficient to turn the tide of that conflict decisively against the Assad regime. The French have done a lot of counterinsurgency work in Africa and I might trust them more with operations requiring precision, but if I were fighting a high-intensity war I'd want guys on my side who know how. Perhaps you were implying that Russia's army is clearly superior and the best in Europe, and certainly in a numerical sense they are, but I don't know about man for man.

The army specifically? Doesn't strike me as particularly absurd. Their army is the largest in Europe (apart from Russia of course), has lots of great equipment thanks to Western aid, and most importantly, is battle-hardened.

Discounting Russia, it's definitely the largest (googling provides 800k-900k troops vs closer to 200k each for France, Germany, Poland, Italy) and surely has the most combat veterans. Via aid, it's got a hodge-podge of tech and equipment but some of that stuff is advanced and high quality. Morale may be all over the place, but they've held on far far longer and better than most expected.
Given the length of time for training, the larger and richer other European countries could raise better militaries given a few years to build up, but they aren't there right now in Feb 2025.

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