Reports started to surface last month that Iran was supplying Russia with so-called suicide drones, sent to attack civilian targets in Ukraine. And now stunning new images of what those drones look like in the air have been captured by photographers in Kyiv as the city suffered fresh attacks on Monday.
[...] The drones appear to match the physical description of Iran's HESA Shahed-136 drone, a so-called "swarming" aerial weapon that's launched almost horizontally and contains a warhead in its nose. Russia has renamed the Shahed drones Geran-2, according to the Associated Press. Officially, Iran has denied supplying weapons to Russia since it first invaded Ukraine on February 24.
I am surprised that some sort of low-tech solution (besides a shotgun) hasn't been found against these relatively slow and vulnerable vehicles, and hopefully blanket drone bans aren't the result of this. [hubie]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Thursday October 20 2022, @05:46AM (14 children)
Weapon systems became more and more sophisticated in the past years. We got SAMs with higher and higher range, ceiling and speed to keep up with military planes that got faster and higher flying, with a proliferation in ECM, ECCM, ECCCM and so on to outdo and outsmart the enemy's potential to shoot you down and to avoid being shot down...
Only to now return to the time of sending masses of cheap flying objects, much like the bomber runs in WW2. Slow, low flying targets that have zero chance to outsmart any countermeasures ... because any countermeasures you could bring against it cost you more than the weapon does. These drones cost like 20k apiece. How much is the average Patriot missile again? 3 millions? And how many do you have?
Guess it's time to dust off the good ol' AAA guns from WW2 that can shoot flak shells to cover the sky in black puffs of deadly smoke.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday October 20 2022, @06:12AM (11 children)
I like your AAA idea. Do the flak shells explode at a predetermined distance? If so, is there any way to vary that so they pop near the drone?
I don't know much about the drones, like is the flight path preprogrammed? Or are they flown by someone watching, or some other guidance system? What I'm getting at is, can they be jammed? Or maybe an EMP gun could take one out before it hits the target?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday October 20 2022, @06:14AM
PS: "EMP gun" means Directed Energy Weapon [techlinkcenter.org].
(Score: 4, Informative) by Opportunist on Thursday October 20 2022, @08:34AM (2 children)
Old school, WW2 time, flak shells had a timed fuze that would explode after an adjustable amount of time, this is how the altitude they should explode at was determined. Around 1943, proximity fuzes became a reality, and I'd guess that these would be used today, too. With drones, fuzes that react to whatever EM signals they emit, may be a thing, but I think proximity fuzes would work well with slow flying drones.
With "drone swarms", firing a barrage of low tech, cheap flak guns may well be a very, very effective defense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2022, @05:21PM (1 child)
> I think proximity fuzes would work well with slow flying drones
Don't prox fuses sense metal (or magnetic materials, Iron/steel)? From the few pics I've seen it looks like these delta wing drones are mostly composite--glass fiber and epoxy, or similar. I guess they have a small gasoline or diesel engine (to get the long range), so there is some metal there, but not a large amount.
One article I read (on BBC) mentioned they navigate by GPS, following a preset program. This could have many zigs and zags using waypoints. GPS jammers could be effective, if the jammer is in range of the drone.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday October 20 2022, @07:16PM
Proximity can work on many triggers, but yes, metal is the most common one. Then again, these things still consist of enough metal to make it work, you can't really build an engine out of plastic. Hall sensors can be quite sensitive.
These drones also ain't exactly known for their high maneuverability. They can correct their flight path, but ain't built for fast course changes and high-g break turns. I kinda doubt that their guidance system would be able to deal with that kind of information either. Even if, flak shot in formation is quite hard to dodge. There's a reason that stuff is still not entirely mothballed even on today's battlefields, they are absolutely devastating for those pesky whirly birds called helicopters.
(Score: 3, Informative) by legont on Friday October 21 2022, @12:33AM (6 children)
Any disabled drone goes down and explodes typically over a highly populated area. In fact one of them brought down a fighter airplane that just machine gunned it.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 21 2022, @02:21AM (5 children)
Unless, it goes down and explodes typically over a sparsely populated area. Not every military target is in the middle of a city, right?
(Score: 0, Troll) by legont on Friday October 21 2022, @02:43AM (4 children)
Unfortunately most Ukrainian military targets are in the cities. They use civilians as shields. It's especially makes sense for them as the population in the conflict zones accessible by low tech drones are mostly russian speaking and pro Russia.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday October 21 2022, @02:53AM (3 children)
Yes, yes, I've heard the propaganda - neonazis all of them, threatening mother Russia, killing is too good for 'em. I just want to point out that most Ukrainian military targets aren't in cities and you (and others [soylentnews.org]) have failed for the past eight months to find any example of Ukrainian military hiding behind civilian shields.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 22 2022, @01:43AM (2 children)
Not surprising to hear from you - our local Nazi lover.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 22 2022, @03:45AM
The obvious rebuttal here is who acts like a Nazi here? It's the Russians.
I can point out (again [soylentnews.org]) the parallels between the Nazi actions leading up to the invasion of Poland in 1938 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It takes a peculiar, willful blindness to whine about Nazi-loving when it's the opposite.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 25 2022, @04:54AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday October 20 2022, @08:15PM (1 child)
Lo tech never went out of style. A bunch of guys from the USA got injured in Vietnam from carefully concealed, sharpened bamboo sticks in the ground.
When it comes to the stark realities of surviving war, people use whatever works. Sand bag armor and good ol' diggin' for protection also never lost their cachet. I've been on US Civil War battle fields where you can still see trenches that were dug, and they're digging them in Ukraine on both sides. You can't get much more low-tech than a hole in the ground.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Friday October 21 2022, @02:51PM
Hell, most of the IED in Afghanistan were leftover WW2 artillery shells left behind when the Soviets withdrew. Initially just primed and buried in the road to go off with pressure. They got a little 'high tech' when rigging them to a cell phone was thought up.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday October 20 2022, @07:17AM (7 children)
The drones don't fly particularly high but certainly high enough that a shotgun would pose very little chance of disabling one until they descend near to their target - which is where exactly? Having somebody in the right place at the right time who is content to shoot at a target close-by which they know is full of high explosive is not something that you will get too many volunteers for, I imagine.
Many radars use some form of processing gate to remove slow moving returns from the display. Otherwise the screen becomes cluttered with spurious emissions from large birds, pylons and other everyday objects. People watched the first agile aircraft doing Cobra manoeuvres and, while they demonstrated a superb level of engine control, they could not see an operational need for it. Then they remembered the Harriers in the Falklands that were able to defeat some form of aircraft and missile attacks causing the attacking system to lose radar lock when the Harrier's speed dropped below a certain threshold. The missiles have improved but, as others in this thread have pointed out, using a multi-million dollar weapon system to defeat swarms of drones costing next to nothing means you will quickly use up all of your valuable assets in a very short time.
There are jamming devices available - and we have featured some of them on this site over recent months - but there are not enough to ensure that the whole country can be protected by them.
There is also the problem of detecting the drone and predicting where it will go next so that you can alert the appropriate defences. AAA (small calibre) will work if you have enough of it in the right places, but large AAA shells do not arm themselves until they are well away from the firing point which would probably mean that the shell would have passed the range of the target itself - which is why the small calibre is required.
Drones are not a particularly easy target to hit if used correctly. Buzzing over some neighbour's yard watching their daughter sunbathe topless isn't the problem here.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday October 20 2022, @08:28AM
Opportunist has the right idea though, these are pre-WWII style aircraft which could be met with WWII-era countermeasures, something like either the Dowding System (UK) or the Kammhuber Line (Germany). Problem is that no-one has operated anything like this for around eighty years, so it'll take some time to set up. Once set up however it evens the playing field a bit since you're no longer using $1m air defence systems to shoot down a $20k drone, any old Bofors pulled from a museum will do.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday October 20 2022, @08:43AM (5 children)
The drones are fairly slow (~150mph cruise speed) and fly low, which make them a prime target for AAA shells. You don't even need sophisticated radar to spot, track or shoot them, that's a mistake that was already made when jet fighters became a thing, when military strategists thought that the time of AAA guns is over because they can't be tracked. You don't need to track them. You can fire AAA guns in formation and to saturation point.
AAA shells are cheap. Dirt cheap. And those drones are not exactly known for their agility. You can fairly well predict their flight path. Saturate the air in front of them with exploding shells and wait for them to crash into it.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday October 20 2022, @11:29AM (4 children)
I've always thought that a pulsejet would be cheaper to manufacture than even these lawnmower engines, so the low-tech missile of choice might be some kind of V-1 style thing. It could approach at a level slightly higher than what the small caliber AA can reach (about 4km) and also fly zig-zag, which is a trivial matter, if "software" isn't completely alien to the maker. Also, to keep the cost of one missile around the cost of one AA shell, it could use discarded mobile phones for flight control. The camera could provide terrain matching if GPS drops out.
How would you defend against these (once the low-tech attackers have figured out that the defenders were using an IMSI catcher to confuse the phones and prevented that...)?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 20 2022, @12:34PM (2 children)
Really? Is it so hard for you to imagine the countermeasure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday October 20 2022, @03:06PM
Well yes, in the end, only even-cheaper interception will be effective. When there's a saturated stream of attackers, the kids might have a hard time ("the bombers always get through", the old saying goes), so it's probably more effective to use some sort of semi-autonomous defense AI. Ultimately it'd mean there would be a showdown in what used to be game AI programming.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday October 20 2022, @03:24PM
It's frickin' phones on drones the whole way down.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday October 20 2022, @02:36PM
Pulsejets have their own difficulties. They're notoriously unreliable, mostly due to a very short lifetime of some of their parts. This is of course less of a concern in one-use weapons, but the only weapon that ever used such a propulsion, the Fi-103 [wikipedia.org], only had about a 20% success rate of reaching its target at all. Not even counting the ones that missed.
That latter part can of course be corrected with modern technology since the Fi-103 only had a very basic navigation system (basically "aim at launch and have it drop after it went far enough according to inertia navigation"), but you can't easily fix physics.
Also, even WW2 era flak cannons could reach targets at 10km height, so trying to put those flying bombs out of reach of cannons is probably not going to work too well.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 20 2022, @10:07AM (4 children)
These things mostly depend on GPS for navigation. First thing to do is take that away, which is pretty easy and cheap to do across a few square km.
Next, if they have human remote pilots, blind them via radio interference again. Harder because there are many more command and control frequencies and the signals can be broadcast much more strongly, but it is still feasible, especially if you can target the receivers with directionally focused high power RF energy.
As for detection of incoming threats, I imagine these have a fairly unique audio signature, especially if they are flying below 100m off the ground. Still hard to cover a wide area with cheap connected detectors, but maybe possible to surround high value targets with an effective detect and repel network.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday October 21 2022, @12:42AM (3 children)
No, it's not easy to jam GPS signal. That's because a powerful radar can transmit the signal directly to the airplane in question.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 21 2022, @02:16PM (2 children)
>it's not easy to jam GPS signal.
That depends on how much infrastructure the drone operator is capable of deploying. Typical drones that rely on satellite GPS are quite easy to jam, and some demos have been done where the signal isn't just jammed but actually spoofed to fool the drone into thinking it's somewhere it's not with the location controlled, to a degree, by the spoofer.
When powerful radar is transmitting signal directly to the drone, anti-radiation missiles, drones, etc. can follow those transmissions to their sources...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 22 2022, @01:51AM (1 child)
Well, Ukraine front is 1000 miles wide that defense has to cover. Meantime an attacker just needs to provide a beam a few hundreds meters wide. It could be done from ground as well as from aircraft.
Now, I do not know if Russia has this capability, but any future military will.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 22 2022, @01:20PM
>any future military will.
Any well funded, professionally organized and run military will. The current demonstration is how those factors stack up for Russia and her allies vs Ukraine and hers.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday October 20 2022, @10:26AM (18 children)
Russia is spending a lot of effort and money attacking civilian infrastructure. They seem to be concentrating on electrical infrastructure: substations and such. The intent is obvious: if you can't win militarily, try to demoralize the civilians, and maybe they'll tell their government to give up.
Isn't it time for the Ukraine to return the favor? What effect would it have on the Russian population, if they were the ones suddenly without electricity?
I realize that a strategy like that has risks. However, this is war. Russia is attacking civilian targets. Trying to be gentlemanly and chivalrous seems like a...suboptimal strategy. If Russia also had to spend time and resources keeping the lights on, they might have less time and money to buy Iranian drones.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2022, @11:19AM
Russia has fumbled a lot, but does Ukraine have the resources to strike targets in Russia anywhere near the same scale? I know they tried a couple of drone attacks before, and the bridge operation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 20 2022, @01:14PM
Why? At the scale Ukraine could, won't weaken the Russian army, so it's wasted ammunition and troups.
Besides, they don't have the range to do it with the missiles NATO gave to them [eurasiantimes.com] and both parties (still) have enough ground-air missiles to made sure the Ukraine airspace is unsafe for any expensive airship (plane or helicopter).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Insightful) by leromarinvit on Thursday October 20 2022, @01:19PM
No. Civilians are never a valid target in war. Even civilians of a nation that commits war crimes (by targeting civilians on the other side). If they did that, they'd instantly lose the moral high ground they currently enjoy, and maybe some of the western support as well. At least it would make arguing "the're both crazy warmongers, let them hit each other's heads all they want, we won't care" a lot easier.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 20 2022, @01:19PM (8 children)
I think Ukraine should double down on the bridge attack: go after every bridge, rail, and road within 1km of the border. When new easy transport supply lines are identified, go 5km into Russia to cut them, when those are all done, go 10km, etc. until the war is being fought inside Russia.
I know: the threat is nuclear retaliation, but how long are we going to let that bully-stick justify invasion and mass destruction without reprisal?
Iranians have been studying / developing drone technology intensively for 10+ years - 10-12 years ago I was working for a small US drone development company and there was a lot of Iranian academic activity in the drone development space, contests with cash prizes for various drone challenges held within Iran - at the time there were a couple of small companies in Florida competing with each other, not the Iranians, but on a similar level of development. Ours demonstrated a hand-grenade "suicide drone" attack on a pickup truck, achieved "engine kill" plus fatal wounds to both crash test dummies inside on the first (and only) try. That drone was selling for about $10K per copy at the time, with another $50K for the ground station to control it. It was hybrid: autonomous flight on pre-programmed routes, or remote control with a couple of onboard cameras for over-the-horizon control. However, it was in no way "hardened" to countermeasures - being used for a variety of civilian, police, and Afghan war applications where there were essentially zero counter-measures employed against it. I'd imagine a lot of the development in the past 10 years has been around sustaining operations in the presence of active countermeasures: multiple system GPS receivers, multiple command and control radio channel links (probably SDR), dead reckoning navigation in the absence of control signals, etc.
Anyway, if there was a point to the last paragraph, it is that Iran/Russia don't have the only low cost weaponized drones on the planet...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 20 2022, @02:24PM (1 child)
Develop low cost easily deployed legged robots that walk far over the border into the invading country, locate rail, bridges and roads, and cut those transportation routes. They don't make much noise. They don't trigger air defense systems.
Build a wall you say? Some small wheeled robots can jump over high things and then keep on going. Maybe some type of large scale ground robot invasion would be something that there are not well developed defenses for.
That is not as severe as destroying their power, water and sewer facilities. But it would inflict some pain.
Just make sure the robots' electronics are destroyed by the robot's own munition so their microprocessors cannot be harvested and used for enemy porpoises.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 20 2022, @02:41PM
Walls are symbolic, when the shit hits the fan they don't stop anything serious. The power of the Berlin Wall wasn't in the wall, it was in the men with machine guns monitoring it, and the police / secret police "handling" people who got on the wrong side.
Unfortunately, legged robots are relatively expensive, cool if you have 'em, but not a good strategy for suicide bombers - low flying aircraft are probably quite a bit cheaper per pound of explosive delivered, kamikaze missions and not.
I'd really like to see vacuum tubes developed up to the level of an Intel 4004, not in complexity but in capability - maybe they could do analog registers...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 22 2022, @02:05AM (5 children)
That's exactly what Russian "sofa warriors" are saying. The truth is it is very difficult to bring down a bridge. That's especially difficult for a bridge that Soviet Union built having a nuclear war in mind.
Just remember, every single infrastructure object in Ukraine was build by Soviets who built it assuming a nuclear war with the west.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 22 2022, @01:23PM (4 children)
IDK about Ukraine, but in East Germany that meant that infrastructure is few and far between, harder targets individually, but not very many targets to take out - sort of the opposite of the "Los Angeles defense" against nuclear strikes, where the damn thing is so big and spread out that you can't really take it out with just a couple of bombs.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Troll) by janrinok on Saturday October 22 2022, @01:57PM (3 children)
Bridges tend to be built where bridges are needed. They don't get spread out to make them difficult targets. The Russians built bridges in East Germany where they had planned to have logistics routes as they charged westwards.
Power generation is centred on places that can generate power. Dams for hydroelectric generation, nuclear facilities where there are all the things necessary for such things; the appropriate terrain, water for cooling etc. The transmission of the power generated is often by cables and pylons and they get routed from A to B at high voltages which is more efficient. But the power then has to be reduced down to usable voltages and that is where the transformer stations which are currently being targetted by the Russians are found. In and around industrial complexes or areas of conurbation.
The Russian choice of targets is very logical and is exactly what the west has done in every conflict since WW2. Defences, supply routes, weapon manufacturing, infrastructure. It it just that the Russian concept includes the civilian population which the west did during WW2 but doesn't do now as it is considered a war crime, Even the Dambusters' famous raid on the German dams would now be considered as a war crime. But for the Russians it is simply another aspect of targetting - witness Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. They do not consider war crimes in their planning.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 22 2022, @04:09PM (2 children)
I live in a river city which, frankly, needs smaller bridges more closely spaced. Along a 40km stretch of river with approximately 1 million people living on both sides, many having daily business on the opposite side, we have a single huge bridge in the middle of that 40km (with many bridges downtown the big bridge 20km upriver, and the next bridge 20km further). As you might imagine, every crash on that bridge is a major event with people delayed in their river crossing by hours because the alternatives are so far away and not able to handle the excess traffic. In an invasion, that bridge (5km from a large military base) would likely be an early target.
>Russians built bridges in East Germany where they had planned to have logistics routes as they charged westwards.
Thus, target the bridges. The routes from Berlin to Hamburg were pretty sparse on bridges, maybe they weren't planning a ground invasion of Hamburg.
>nuclear facilities where there are all the things necessary for such things; the appropriate terrain
Like Three Mile Island and Fukushima? Rethinking "appropriate location" would seem to be a global need.
>They do not consider war crimes in their planning
Which is a political choice with known consequences, which apparently are not yet sufficient to deter such actions, and may actually encourage them for isolationist leadership.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday October 23 2022, @01:14AM (1 child)
The guy you are answering to is a troll. Russians do not target civilians.
In the spring, Russians would not even target military barracks.
For 6 months Russians would do all their bombings at night to make sure all the workers are safely sleeping at home.
Even over the last two weeks, only 330 and lower kV power is targeted. 750 kV backbone is left alone.
Just compare to what the US would typically do to an enemy.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday October 23 2022, @12:37PM
I consider both sides difficult to evaluate due to the propaganda machines.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2022, @03:47PM
You're really not thinking cleraly about what those risks are. Ukraine is not waging a war, they're defending themselves and they seem really disciplined about scope creep.
Maybe, just maybe, Ukraine has deciced that IF THEY DO THAT otherwise uninvolved Russian civilians may in fact remember it for a very fucking long time, and more importantly, Ukrainian citizens will also remember it for a very fucking long time.
What kind of people you are is what you have to live with long after the invaders are repelled.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday October 20 2022, @05:53PM
There is now enough history of aerial bombardment of civilians that we understand the consequences. (WWII: Germans bombed British, British bombed Germans, US bombed Japan, Vietnam war: US bombed North Vietnam.) Bombing a civilian population does not make them think "War is terrible, so we should surrender." It makes them think "The people we are at war with are monsters, so we must never surrender to them." Putin would love for Ukraine start attacking Russian civilians. It would convince the Russian civilians that the war is worth fighting.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Thursday October 20 2022, @07:22PM (3 children)
I kinda doubt at this point that there is a way to change Ukrainian minds concerning the war. Pretty much everyone had in some way lost something to the bloody Russians and at this point I'm fairly sure that the general sentiment is that they'd sooner freeze to death in total darkness before willingly giving Putin a glass of water if he was drowning.
And no, I think that not attacking Russia is a pretty solid strategy at this point because the general sentiment towards the war is shifting to the negative more and more with every day in Russia. It's basically "why the fuck are our young boys getting slaughtered for?" If you attack Russia, they suddenly have a reason. The same reason Ukraine already has. These bloody bastards are killing our kids, send them to hell.
That justification is lacking for Russians right now. There is no justification for this war for the average Russian. And it shows in the general support for it. It's much like how it was for the US during the Vietnam war: Why the fuck are you sending our boys to die for no fucking reason?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday October 20 2022, @09:02PM (2 children)
I don't think there's any kind of code duello between Zelensky and Putin. For Ukraine, the risk of total war is the risk of nuclear escalation. The Ukrainian strategy is to go for the tried and true, "Make this another Afghanistan". It's worked before, and since Russia has stated that they consider nuclear weapons on the table if there's an "existential threat", the risk of going for total war seems too great. Also, there's no telling how the general population will turn when you ratchet things up. Remember Khatami in Iran? He was somewhat reform minded, then right after 9/11 GWB labeled Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil" along with Iraq and North Korea. Result? More hard-line leaders and a more active nuclear program. Despite the people's general desire for reform, they didn't like that label and I seem to recall a lot of sources citing that as pushing people back toward the hard-liners--to the extent that elections actually matter there.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Opportunist on Friday October 21 2022, @06:42AM
Ukraine has no reason to escalate. The war is actually not running that badly for them, and time is on their side. Economically they're propped up by some of the most powerful economies on the planet, they get all the intel they could wish for from the best intel system on the planet, the only thing lacking right now is some kind of heavy weapons.
Why should they now not only risk an escalation and give Russia a justification to escalate, along with what would probably be a reason for Russians to support the war? To cite Vietnam again, I'm fairly sure the anti-war movement would have been dealt a serious blow if Vietnam somehow attacked on US soil.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday October 23 2022, @01:27AM
You keep forgetting that Ukraine was taken over by a Nazi regime. An elected president was overthrown - twice. Yes, the same guy elected and than overthrown two times. At least half of Ukrainian population and likely 3/4 are deeply against the regime in Kiev. Zelensky himself was elected on his promises to stop the war in Donbass. He continued to shell his own people. They - Urkanians in Donbass - were shelled and killed for 7 years by Nazi regime in Kiev. Russian language was prohibited in Ukraine. All the Russian books burned. Kindergartner children shamed for having Russian names. The population of Ukraine hates Kiev and now is hates all the West too.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday October 20 2022, @03:30PM
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160317-the-man-who-tried-to-make-a-supergun-for-saddam-hussein [bbc.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by jb on Friday October 21 2022, @02:02AM (1 child)
Perhaps it's just me, but "suicide drone" sounds very much like a "modern" (i.e. buzzword-compliant) description of the German V1 flying bomb ("doodlebug") that was used to attack civilian targets in London way back in 1944...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 21 2022, @11:34AM
How far does that analogy go? Are the Iranian drones made in underground factories by slave labor? Are the uber-brilliant Iranian drone engineers likely to be collected after the war to become the core of US and USSR rocketry and space programs?
Personally, I don't think that Godwin-ing this makes much sense.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday October 21 2022, @06:15PM
Block the sale, or transport, of these drones from Iran to Russia. If the Iranians were smart, they've delivered only a relatively small batch of these drones to Russia. (It looks like the drone attacks have grown out of an attempt to revenge the attack on Crimea Bridge, i.e. their usage wasn't really planned, and their logistics not well organized.) That would give Iran leverage in the nuclear-deal negotiations with the West, which haven't ended as far as I know.
The true mystery here is why Russia's Army does not have its own drones [in battle/Syria]: given that NATO is holding regular exercises with them for at least well over a decade, and Western armies have been using them since the 80s.