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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2642 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?

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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.

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