If they really decided to do it, they could make some kind on narrow-body bomber derivative of Il-96 in a few years.
>Converting a modern airliner design to a cruise missile carrier would be a trivial exercise for most industrial societies.
This wasn't even true when Boeing themselves presented turning 747s into cruise missile carriers. Instead, the US has put pallets of missiles into cargo aircraft, which is a much simpler option, though most countries have very few cargo airplanes!
Absolutely nothing about modern airliners translates to strategic bombers, this is true even if you just treat them as missile trucks.
Indeed, the soviets went the other direction, building the Tu-104 airliner out of the Tu-16 bomber, and it was pretty bad. The differences and optimizations of the two platforms have only diverged even more since then.
Most strategic bombers today are just cruise missile carriers; TU-95, TU-160, B-52, none of these are expected to be penetrating air defenses. The only bombers that are going to venture into an IAD are all stealth. Everything else will just die (and stealth bombers will too, just in lesser numbers).
https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sea-air-space-2023/2023...
Sure the resulting plane would not be optimized in a lot of aspects but they could do it.
> They also need to have control surfaces designed to take off with a full load and land empty. Airliners don't have to take that into consideration.
Is it the take off or the landing that would be the problem? If the take off could they use JATO?
1) whose structural characteristics were calculated with it pressurized at altitude, and instead fly it unpressurized
2) whose control surfaces were designed for a passenger/cargo load, and instead takeoff at max weight and land at minimum weight, with weight concentrated in bombs
3) with rocket assisted takeoff
?
Sure. Sounds great. Will probably, mostly work.
If you were to fly it unpressurized there would be no such massive forces because there would be no pressure differential. The structural requirements would be the same as they are for when the plane flies unpressurized at low altitudes.
If you didn't pressurize the cabin than the cabin would be at around 0.26 atm, which is the same as the outside air, and so there would not be that large outward force, and so much less tension.
But the plane should be fine with that, because that's also the situation in the plane at low altitude.
Reading more, the F-35 is designed to "operate above 50,000 ft, where outside pressure is near-vacuum" (quoting an LLM). The un-pressurized bombers of WW II couldn't operate at those altitudes (even though the crew wore heated clothing and breathed supplemental oxygen delivered through masks).
Also, The Russian government relies on projection of an image of strength not just externally, but internally as well. If the Russian government is seen as weak internally they might be more likely to take drastic actions to stay in power.
Put all these together, and it seems like the world might just be a bit more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Maybe that is the Ukrainian strategy - make Russia do something monstrous to a western power to force western action.
If you want to try to impose some deeper strategic meaning onto this, a more plausible one would be the reverse: that the more "western powers" pull back from supporting Ukraine, the more Ukraine is are forced to establish they are capable of less conventional, less predictable, more aggressive means of deterrence to compensate for the absence of strong western partners.
Ukraine has very strong interests, but they have in fact restrained themselves from doing things that will provoke a war involving NATO. The US government has put many restrictions on Ukraine that Ukraine has abided by.
MAD isn't "abstract", if by abstract you mean somehow unreal. It has kept the humanity from being destroyed for generations, and the US and Russia invest a lot in maintaining it.
The only person I see saying that is some random Internet commenter. I've always heard the opposite from professionals in the field, especially that any threat to capability is a threat to stability.
Strategic bombers make little sense, that's why everyone (even russians) are pushing for ballistic missiles instead. Strategic bombers used by Russia manly for terror with stockpile of soviet missiles.
It is very visible from the top, esp to aerial recon that use other signals in addition to radar signature
Where do people get these things? The B2 is awful for bombing low-tech insurgent forces - far too expensive to operate. Its whole purpose is defeating SAMs in particular and the best defenses in the world.
"By September 2024, three test aircraft were in service: one performing one or two flight tests per week, and the others involved in ground tests."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-21_Raider#F....
The US has only ~20 B-2s, to go with ~60 B-52s (originally built in the 1950s), and ~40 B-1Bs (~1980s tech). Only the B-2 could survive war with a peer, afaik; that was fine after the Cold War when there was no peer threat but now that China is a near-peer threat, the US needs many more bombers capable in a peer conflict and the B-2 production line was shut down decades ago (production was discontinued when the Cold War ended). They plan to build the B-21 in much larger numbers.
Also, the B-21 was built for conflict with China, where distances are much greater than in Europe.
I responded to this comment: "Destroying their entire strategic aviation forces would not meaningfully impact MAD."
With almost every country in the world, the US has first strike capability - the US could wipe out the country in hours or less, and only a few countries have a second strike capability to deter the US.
That had long been true with NK, a very belligerent enemy. But in the last couple of decades NK added a small nuclear arsenal. It's not enough for a MAD relationship with the US, but they could threaten great harm to US allies South Korea and Japan - imagine nuking Seoul and Tokyo - and possibly land one on US territory. It wouldn't destroy the US, but losing San Francisco is a serious deterrent.
Did the addition of NK's nuclear arsenal stabilize the situation by creating more deterrent, or destabilize it by emboldening NK? It's complex:
One factor is that the US has sworn off use of nuclear weapons in conventional conflicts, even ones they are losing, and have strictly adhered to that policy, not even using small tactical nukes. The US has an even stronger motive - it establishes a global taboo against nuclear weapon use that nobody has violated yet. NK is very aware of it because US generals recommended using nuclear weapons in the Korean War and the president declined - that may seem like too close a call for NK, and don't assume that NK understands the US nearly as well as you do (if you are American); miscalculations like that are common on all sides in international relations.
So now that NK has nuclear weapons, does that make a conventional conflict into a nuclear one, destabillizing the situation? What if the US believes they need to use nuclear weapons to prevent NK from using them on Seoul or San Franciso?
On the other hand, NK's nukes may prevent a conventional war. NK saw what happened to Iraq - everyone did, and many realized that actual nuclear weapons were their only defense if the US was going to ignore international law and sovereignty and engage in 'regime change'.
Given the economic/international stance of Russia for the past three decades and the maintenance level of their armed forces, their ability to execute a first-strike nuclear attack and succeeding is pretty low.
Neither of those two are obviously true, and so relying on the assumptions of MAD is dangerous.
I personally find it astounding that people still talk about MAD when even Reagan was scared into accepting it was flawed. You can see the big change in his foreign policy position before and after - from confrontation to negotiation. As much as I loathe most of Reagan's political views, in retrospect he's been proven a lot more astute at least in this specific area of foreign policy than basically everyone who still pushes MAD.
E.g.:
> "But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike"
If you think the other side is crazy enough to consider a first strike, MAD goes out the door and it becomes rational to consider preempting them if you think you have any chance at all to reduce the damage. And the greater damage potential the other side has, the more imperative this becomes.
MAD has for very long struck me as a rationalisation of an emotional desire to have the more destructive weapon, rather than a rational argument for this reason - there are so many scenarios where it increases risk rather than reduces it.
You then have a choice to make, and to Reagans credit he chose to try to pull things back from the brink, recognising it was more dangerous to try to one-up the Soviet Union than to talk to them.
Though it seems to me it's likely far more rational in general to posture even less, and intentionally back down to a point where you have enough to make an attack on yourself cost sufficiently more than it is worth to still deter, but little enough that preempting you isn't a matter of preventing total destruction. As a bonus the less aggressive posturing would seem less likely to make the other side think you're preparing to strike first.
I'm just speculating what, if any, geopolitical ramifications arise from this. Sometimes consequences happen even when you're 'the good guy'. Life is often not like the stories and things sometimes end up terribly even when you do everything right.
Any US adversary must be building sleeper cells in the continental US armed with drones from walmart/bestbuy ready to drop a grenade that will burn big and expensive planes/submarines/aircraft carriers, possibly even rocket silos or other parts of critical infrastructure.
If I were Iran/NK, or China, that would be my top priority, so that I could retaliate if USA attacks first
If you analyze from the US or Russian perspective, you presuppose/assert them as the entities with agency while denying Ukrainians theirs.
Any framing of an analysis that does not start from the frame of a Ukrainian with agency is suspect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNLP88aTg_8
> Author George Lakoff discusses his book "Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea" as a part of the Authors@Google series. This event took place Thursday, July 12, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saDHFomGW3A
> The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome author and professor George Lakoff to Google's New York office to discuss his new book, "The Political Mind".
> George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute, a think tank in Berkeley, CA. He is author of "Don't Think of an Elephant!", "Moral Politics", "Whose Freedom?", and coauthor of "Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook", as well as many books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics. In this talk Professor Lakoff speaks about his latest work The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. In "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In "The Political Mind", George Lakoff explains why.
Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.
Not necessarily, Russia's successful intelligence efforts for regime change in the US may have nullified US response.
Instead, find clear instances where the US is doing things like no longer sending Patriot missile launchers and missiles to Ukraine. [1]
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-working-allies-deliveries-patr...
Watch it, then try saying nothing has changed. You seem like someone with a strong world view that's strong because you reject anything that challenges it.
Oh, that's real brave, yeah. Did you even read that before you linked it?
These allies need agreement from the US government to transfer these systems to Ukraine. Some like Israel, probably transferred these to Ukraine in exchange for other US systems like THAAD
The reason the United States is asking allies in Europe to relocate their Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine is because Ukraine has an immediate defensive need. The countries that are not the United States and not in the Pacific don't have an immediate need for these missile batteries. Either they get them from a US NATO ally (under the US security guarantee) or they don't get them at all - dealer's choice. If the US "abandoned Ukraine" or policy somehow fundamentally shifted, we wouldn't see things like this take place.
The United States has to facilitate the movement of materials and equipment like this because the US is the country that actually has the power to defend NATO allies (France, UK, Poland, etc. can as well but they need the US) so it's up to the US to understand global security needs and make determinations of where assets can be moved or repurposed. In this sense, the US is sending the Patriot launchers to Ukraine.
The person responding to me was making baseless claims about the US withdrawing support. I don't think anything has fundamentally changed. You can read responses for yourself where people state things like the US stopped intelligence sharing which isn't true.
If you want to make a claim that my post is nonsense and my citation, which was just a simple example in a reply to someone who didn't provide any citations of their own, was "half-assed" why don't you bring your own original thoughts and citations and articles and we can discuss them instead of just pointlessly criticizing the character of what I wrote instead of what I actually wrote?
I do agree that there was a shift in US policy towards Ukraine with the new administration. However, Russia being Russia, it looks like it is all going back to the previous policy
I mean, kinda, but there's no other way to address a weird implication like they posted. That's another reason it was a dumb point.
At a minimum, the US stopped giving targeting intel to Ukraine; that itself is a pretty fundamental change.
only done to maintain plausable deniability that USA is not an active party of a conflict
Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.
The US government and others have taken the risk very seriously and Ukraine has restrained itself from doing things that might provoke a Russia-NATO war.
You are also omitting the Russian perspective, which sees NATO in Ukraine as potentially existential.
>Russian doctrine now includes the use of nuclear weapons (look up 'escalate to de-escalate'), and Russia has threatened their use.
Russian doctrine has always included first strike possibility, and has threatened nuclear war constantly since they ran out of legitimate threats. But these have all been public threats, not actual threats. The intention is to get a country's citizens to reduce their support for Ukraine, not genuinely warn a country's leaders of possible escalation risk.
The day that Russia ACTUALLY goes "no seriously, we will nuke if you do that", average citizens will not hear it. Diplomacy is not conducted through CNN.
What is fake about it if they are actually former soldiers who have practiced in this field? Who are you and why should anyone listen to you? As far as I can tell, you are just some commenter on the Internet.
> ideology
I see - you mean to ridicule everyone and hope something sticks. Your ideas are similarly ignorant.
Maybe you should learn what you are talking about. It's a serious subject.
I think it's more an excuse to try to restore their empire.
Russia huffed and puffed about Finland or Sweden joining NATO to be a red line and waving the nuke stick.
This is how wars actually start - ignorant people, ignorant publics, demanding escalatory actions.
> why is having a defensive alliance in Ukraine more existential than having it in Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Norway which also border Russia?
The answer is pretty obvious. The Baltic states joined NATO when the relationship with Russia wasn't adversarial. Also, Russia wasn't at war with them.
A lot of wars start because Russia decides it wants to start them to grab some neighbors stuff including WW2 where they allied with Hitler to get half of Poland.
You are in a democratic society where public opinion has a strong effect and where we influence each other. Also, if you don't take your posts seriously, why should anyone else?
Nuclear missile subs are very good at hiding (they've been doing it for 60+ years) and the ocean is a big place.
1 Borei is what, 96 MIRVs?
Which is the point... even one missed is unacceptable.
Do you have some basis for that? I've never heard it, I would be very surprised if either country allowed any part of their triad to be disabled, and both invest enormous resources in other parts of their triads.
Because technology was rapidly advancing, it was unclear whether any breakthrough (e.g. high altitude SAMs, etc.) might suddenly nullify one leg.
If that were the only leg, the game theory response would be for the nullifier to immediately launch a first strike, to take advantage of their no-doubt temporary superiority.
Now as to whether Russia's other triad legs are credible MAD components on their own... numbers do matter.
With their strategic airforce being degraded post-USSR without replacement and amidst recapitalization of the Deltas to Boreis, it's questionable is Russia can afford to maintain an effective three leg triad in the intermediate term.
And if the other legs atrophy, there's also an incentive for the US and China to invest more in nullifying the remaining leg(s).
By comparison, Russia keeps bombing civilian targets in a futile attempt to terrorize Ukrainians into surrendering. Or maybe just out of sheer spite.
Either way, it seems Putin is not at all interested in peace, which means the only way to stop this war is to stop Russia's ability to wage this war. The claim that Putin might resort to nuclear strikes in response to Ukraine defending itself, is pure propaganda aimed at cowing defenders into compliance. If he actually wanted to launch nukes, he'd have done so already.
Blame Putin for being a vicious bully, not the kids he's brutalizing for provoking him by defending themself from the assault.
Putin (Russia) is to blame for the war, but that's irrelevant to this issue. Ukraine is still responsible for the consequences of its actions. Putin starting the war makes it legitimate for Ukraine to assassinate Putin, for example; but if killing Putin makes Ukraine less safe or causes other negative outcomes, Ukraine is responsible for choosing the best set of outcomes. Maybe Russia will use tactical nukes - is that what Ukraine wants? They need to assess the risks and make the best choice; blame is irrelevant.
The consequences are no different than when we tried that in the 30s. Appeasement doesn't work. Bullies and madmen only respect force.
If "neener neener I'll nuke you" works for Putin to take literally all of Ukraine, why would they stop? Why wouldn't China take something? Why wouldn't India? Why wouldn't the US?
Offensive use of nukes, even implicitly threatening offensive use of nukes, is a step too far for everybody.
The bandwagon to war, which is what you've joined, is the biggest mistake you can make. Almost no dynamic - maybe besides ethnic nationalism - kills more people and destroys more societies and nations.
It is not. This is what you're asking from Ukraine.
Unlike you, I want this war to end in a way that it doesn't pop up again in a few years. Russia has a long history of wars of aggression. In the past two decades, they took land from Georgia in 2008 and got away with it. Took Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 and got away with it. Do you really think Putin will stop if this invasion will also turn out to be successful?
Demanding Ukraine to surrender will only strengthen Putin and his belief that he can continue waging war. Rewarding him with more land will no more deter him from further aggression than it did with Hitler in 1938 and 1939.
This is the best opportunity to stop him and prevent WW3. Every expert recognizes this. It's only Putin's propaganda that tries to convince us that surrendering to him will somehow being peace. But if you listen to what Russian media and politicians are saying, you'll hear that they're already talking about Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia and even Poland. Putin has spoken about his desire for a Eurasian empire from Vladivostok to Lisbon. That might sound ridiculous, but he could get it if people keep surrendering land to him. The only way to stop him is to stop him.
> This is what you're asking from Ukraine.
No, life isn't as simple as you want it to be. You need to make decisions that accomplish and balance many complex problems. 'It's the other person's fault' may simplify things in your mind, but your failure to make a good decision will have the same outcome regardless.
And the fact that Ukraine is so unwilling to condemn their future generations to Putin's oppression is a massive stroke of luck for other European countries who might otherwise be next in Putin's plans. Keeping the war confined to Ukraine and ensuring a Ukrainian win there, is by far the best option for European security. Strengthening Putin is the worst option, and giving him a victory here will do exactly that.
be careful whom you are advising to back down in fear.
Why not find solutions that work?
> back down in fear.
It's not about fear - it's not about blame, or 'should', or anything but consequences, lives and property, blood and treasure. The destruction of a war with Russia would be immense.
Why don't you find solutions that protect Ukraine and prevent war with Russia?
Your proposal?
Ukraine does have to balance nuclear stability, and I expect they have - I can't say if they made the right choice, but it's a very serious question. On HN people can dismiss it in a thousand ways, but it's not a serious analysis.
I would guess that the primary things that should happen are,
NATO, especially the US, needs to make it clear that they will spend whatever it takes for however long it takes to win. If Russia believed that, they would leave Ukraine now. NATO and the US have order of magnitude more economic resources than Russia - Russia can't compete if NATO seriously invests.
And Ukranians need to defend their country. A large portion of their population refuses to fight. That undermines manpower, a critical issue; it raises questions in Russia's mind about Ukraine's motivation to win, which prolongs the war; and it must raise questions in international leaders' minds (though none talk about it, I would guess so they don't undermine support for Ukraine).
I don't know that either of those things will happen, and the status quo sadly continues.
For me, NATO needs to secure the left of the Dnipro river. This would free up manpower and material on Ukraines side, to fully focus on the front-lines. It would also send a clear message to Russia that we mean business.
Also, when Russian jets fly over NATO territory, they should be shot down, just like Turkey did.
I have the feeling the West is giving enough material for Ukraine to survive, but not enough to really push back.
It's a bit naive to think you should avoid escalation now to risk an even higher risk in 20 years.
Russia can stop this war at any moment. It's fully their decision if they want to shoot nukes or not. None of the consequences of military operations of Ukraine should be placed in their shoes. And you claim you are not blaming Ukraine, but on the other hand you actually are.
The reality is if they were nuked and no one reacted, in a matter of months they would be nuking Russia.
Even in the extreme example of white Australians trying to pass as Malaysians, special forces have pulled of plenty of raids without the need for native language speakers.
Even if you need someone highly fluent who can pass as a native, most of the time there's a nearby country where they have some kind of grudge against the belligerent. I can think of a lot of potential theatres where finding an enemy of a belligerent who can pass as a "native" would not be difficult. North / South Korea, China / Taiwan, The Middle East ... conflicts often occur in places where there's a lot of conflict.
Also, in a war, often the military and civilian sector are stretched thin. Russia can't spare the troops to guard everything as well as they could in peacetime, and even if they could search every vehicle they can't afford to gum up their logistics.
There is no need to do so because they did employ a civilian drivers who never knew what 'cargo' they are hauling. Just like in the previous attack on the bridge.
You've described half of the Ukrainian population.
Maybe the drones were pre-programmed for a particular destination (given to the Ukrainians by the US and its reconnaissance satellites), i.e., no drone operators needed.
There are countless ways around this beginning with just asking someone to buy a sim card on your behalf.
And you don't need to permablock it, few minutes would be enough.
It does not help a lot with end-to-end encryption though
If the drone will be controlled by a human operator till the end, then it might win for the drone design to avoid the complexity of a sensor to detect impacts and of the aforementioned mechanism.
Also, landing on an airplane wing is easier to train for and to test than a mission plan that involves a drone that explodes on impact.
...and more importantly it is also easier to automate, i.e. autoland on wing spar, detonate, mission complete.
I had a friend who was gaming on his phone that was tethered to his desktop about a decade ago and after he disabled some power saving stuff in the settings on android he was getting a reasonable 100ms ping that had negligible jitter.
They either used the trucks as a relay for the operators far away or the drones themselves were automated.
It would not be necessary, as you pointed out, plenty of Ukrainians still live in Russia and they are free to drive trucks. Best of my knowledge, there is nothing like interment of Japanese that happened in US during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
I know many people like that either. I personally spent some time in Moscow, nobody ever knew I’m not a local. Same goes for a friend, we both were laughing at them being unable to recognise we’re not locals.
I believe this might be truer for small distant regions, where people might have their own local accent there. Plus not too many people to blend in that easily. But in general, even if one speaks differently, it might not take too long to adapt to speak like everyone else.
I'd suggest reading "The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939" by Terry Martin [0]
"The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products.This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state."
[0] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7591/97815017...
Everyone else reading this nonsense, go read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, where he writes exactly that very time frame. You’d learn a lot of new things about the USSR and its attitude towards minorities.
I've read and watched enough of Timothy Snyder to know that he's quite biased when talking about modern affairs, so no, I don't have Gell-Mann amnesia and don't feel like trusting him when he writes about history.
And please tell how the USSR forced you to "forget your own languages and culture"?
I’m telling you to back off, I don’t like you and your attempts to diminish me and westplain me something you don’t know personally, basically spreading Russian propaganda how wonderful it was under Russian occupation during the Holodomor timeline. I wish you to get blocked on here sooner than later.
This half?
"The name Novorossiya, which means "New Russia", entered official usage in 1764, after the Russian Empire conquered the Crimean Khanate, and annexed its territories, when Novorossiya Governorate (or Province) was founded. Official usage of the name ceased after 1917, when the entire area (minus Crimea) was annexed by the Ukrainian People's Republic, precursor of the Ukrainian SSR." [0]
Maybe because it used to be a part of Russia and was gifted to the Ukraine by Lenin, the evil bolshevik? Hmm...
>Latvia and Estonia have huge parts of their population who don’t speak local national languages, but speak only Russian.
Because they are children and grandchildren of Russians who migrated there after the WW2 and now are subjected to discrimination by local nationalistic government.
Not "migrated", but ordered population transfer by Stalin [0]
> now are subjected to discrimination by local nationalistic government.
Please elaborate. As a resident I am not aware of any discrimination. (Unless you're talking about some of these Russians refusing to move back to Russia, refusing to learn the local, official language of their country and still wanting to have the citizenship of the country they are living in)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
I sus you are another putin-troll.
Back? Those Russians were born in that country and you suggest they must move to Russia because they are ethnic Russians? It's called ethnic cleansing.
>refusing to learn the local, official language
Do you realize that you are writing this in the thread where another commenter condemns the USSR for forcing everybody to learn Russian language?
>still wanting to have the citizenship of the country they are living in
That's how it works in the civilized countries - citizenship is gained by the birth right, not by the ethnicity of their parents.
I don't have to respond further to obvious propagandists.
You, on the other hand, are justifying ethnic cleansing when it is committed in the 21st century by supposedly liberal democratic government.
Nah, you don't need an 'NVidia chip' for this purpose, a reasonably modern mobile phone will do and has all the sensors you want. Just add a battery, 4 motors with propellers and something (other than the battery) which goes boom and voilà, an autonomous drone. Some [1] mobile [2] phones [3] even have their own thing-that-goes-boom [4] built in from the factory to make this project even easier to accomplish.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcoU2mXJJ3k
[2] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252212685
[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/6281000/iphone-explosion-video...
You are completely, utterly clueless.
Also, these are remote airbases where all the strategic bombers are stationed. Fighter jets would not be there in significant numbers if any since they are needed in other bases closer to the front-lines and also some at the borders.
In in of the videos you could see a Mi-8 which was ignored because of it's insignificance compared to the primary targets.
At the very end, you can even see how the bombers were hit: a drone strikes the right wing of a Tu-95, causing the internal fuel tanks to catch fire and spill burning fuel. The wing then breaks off and collapses.
Why were they loaded with fuel?
They also have a pattern of engaging in massive attacks right before major diplomatic events.
Russia and Ukraine have peace discussions scheduled for June 2 so Ukraine probably (and apparently correctly) anticipated Russia would be loading up for a bombing campaign the night before.
Could also just be fuel vapors in the tanks going off too. Do bears have rigid tanks? In WW2 there was a big difference in survival between planes that did vs ones with bladders that collapsed as fuel was consumed.
From another article (although maybe journalist is making shit up):
The attacks that went after the heart of Russia's strategic [bomber] capabilities and one arm of its nuclear deterrent should serve as a global wake-up call.
Here's a primer on how these things work in Russia.
You can be as careful as you want, if they decide they want confrontation with the US, they'll make up a reason.
If they don't feel confrontation is in their best interest, you can hit Moscow with a Tomahawk and, magically, no one will notice anything but a clapping sound.
That is true, but they also perceive interests that can result in confrontations, for very real reasons.
No, it's almost as if Ukraine has a good reason to blow up the planes that airstrike them.
They were nuclear-capable bombers that have regularly been used to attack Ukraine with conventional weapons (mostly cruise missiles.)
> Also if they are part of Russia's strategic military assets, then wouldn't Russia wonder if the US was a secret puppetmaster?
Increasing distrust between Putin and the Trump Administration would also be a coup for Ukraine, but, no, I don't think that's a real threat here.
In practice, Ukraine has significantly reduced Russia’s _capacity_ for such aggression with this move. Russia only has a limited number of working bombers, and they’re irreplaceable.
Arrogance. My Diamond Star stays fuelled. But I’m not committing imbecilic war crimes.
Would assume that drones do not drop cumulative ammo, but the shrapnel ones. Those tires in theory should have protected from smaller pieces flying around causing a mess of a damage.
Russian media reports of 2-4 planes being destroyed while others are damaged. Think this dumb cheap hack actually helped a lot in minimizing the effectiveness of the strike.
Also, I don’t know why you would consider the reports in russian media. There’s more than 4 planes being destroyed on video.
The proven historical rule of thumb is take ukrainian reports, take russian reports, and the truth is in the middle. You'd have to question your own sanity to trust numbers from either side blindfoldingly
No it isn't. Russia's reports are complete fabrications.
Sure. But the solution isn't to interpolate Russian and Ukraininan claims, as the former have been proven time and again to be complete fabrications. Instead, a good M.O. is to take Ukraininan claims with a grain of salt until corroborated by either open-source or third-party analysis.
The real marker is immediate numbers. I bet even Russians yet to find out how many aircrafts have they irrecoverably lost, however we get numbers reported as if they are confirmed.
Cheap
Source? (Kyiv was agitating for Western aid in 2022. It would be odd for them to be downplaying the threat.)
[1] https://www-pravda-com-ua.translate.goog/articles/2022/12/19...
However, there’s this one weirdo who held official position (if I’m not mistaken) yet he was spilling similar nonsense for … well, he may still do that, I’m not aware. He’s this infamous Mr Arestovych, all I’m aware is him pushing Russian narratives these days and not holding any official position these days. I’ve heard him being even sanctioned for treason-like something, but I’m really not following him much to tell more.
That’s who came to my head first, as he’s quite infamous for this ‘Russia will fall within 2…3 weeks.’
"Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky denied on Wednesday that his government had been involved in the explosion on the Crimean Bridge separating the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, from mainland Russia.
“We definitely did not order that, as far as I know,” Zelensky said during an interview with Canada’s CTV television network. " [0]
>how Russia is killing its innocent civilians
What does Kiev regime says about how Ukraine is killing innocent Russian civilians? Like blowing a bridge exactly when a passenger train was passing under it leading to deaths of civilians including children? [1]
[0] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-did-zelensky-deny...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/01/deaths-as-russ...
I suspect the definition of front line has changed with drones.
kinda risky to be anywhere around them due to secondary explosion risk
Probably not many if any, they weren't attacked with area munitions but with FPV drones they were attacking bomber bases, specifically aiming to reduce offensive capability, there's not a lot of reason to target non-bomber other aircraft.
There are no evil countries. There are people making choices, and they can always make other choices. Things aren't fixed and Russia can still have a different and better future.
Sometimes defeat is required for change and sometimes change can only come from the outside.
In the end of the day, we cannot name anyone as evil. Hence everyone is equally good, and Russia isn’t different to any other country, the US, the collective EU. As much as North Korea aren’t much different to South Korea.
That’s the narrative I see you pushing. Ask all those so-called ‘good Russians’ are they okay with Russia shrinking, losing some territories (meaning giving freedom for some nations they enslaved, e.g Ichkeria, Tatarstan etc). Most of these so-called ‘liberal Russians’ would be against it. They just wanted the same Russia but without Putin. Not realising it’s their country, their system, their culture, who created that Putin. Most, if not all, generations of Russian rulers were like that. They will create a thriving environment for growing another Putin, another Stalin, another Ivan the terrible, within a generation, unless they’re defeated and forced to reconsider some things. Did you know they started glorifying of Stalin already? The maniac who killed more people than Hitler is praised as a cool guy once again, because most of those who could remember the days of Stalin are long dead now. The constantly pick the wrong heroes, and hence their culture produces Putins en-masse. Also, it must be said loudly he isn’t an independent figure, he’s a front-end for a complex system. Eliminating him now isn’t about ‘now things would be completely different’ is only about creating temporal havoc inside Russia, so they’ll stop ducking with others, and bringing that havoc to others.
So, to me, and many others who know the history of the USSR, that’s an evil empire indeed. And unlike the third reich, they were never punished for their crimes. Even the opposite, they’re (the Russians) and the most suffered from the WWII, belittling the devastating consequences of that war for the millions of people of Belarus and Ukraine. Russia barely felt that war, but now they yell from everywhere they eliminated the fascism single-handedly. Very useful when actually that’s them who created the very same regime, nurturing it for at least over a century now.
It’s mostly about ‘we are saints, everyone else’s are against us’ narrative. With ‘but we are still invulnerable victors, after all’ which some other nations are tricked to believe. And hence fear.
If Russian lives were valued, they wouldn't have started the conflict, much less continued it they way they do.
So no, for Ukraine I don't see what purpose targeting civilians would bring.
Whether or not they value individual lives, putting a hospital out of commission will be something they will need to divert resources to.
Also, some of the Western kit comes with restrictions on what exactly and how far they can hit inside Russia.
2.2 million in 2024. Some of those could be diverted to worthwhile targets for deterrence purposes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/12/45-million-...
> Twenty-five people,[15] including five children,[1] were reported to have been killed in the attacks, while 108 people,[3] including 17 children, were injured.[2]
Here is from 2024: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-jets-helicopter-airc...
Needed to get 32 more.
Hard to know whether to be seriously impressed or seriously concerned - if Europe decided that enough was enough and started helping Ukraine with troops if they decided the Russian nuclear threat was a paper tiger we're in for some very interesting times.
How is having chaotic power vacuum in any way worse than having Putin?
most importantly USA doesn't want putin dead, because his next successor could be smarter and more brutal
Russia has 6000 warheads, so each western city and each silo and bunker can be targeted with more than one warhead
Also, do they invest enough to keep it working? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165277
So, which 6,000 are you talking about?
>because his next successor could be smarter and more brutal
Why would they? Putin's actions, imo, seemed to be able rebuilding the greatness of the ussr, he's former KGB.
Maybe the next person would just be happy with power over one of the largest countries in the world. Plus the end of the war would make him quite popular with the general public
THAN release launch codes to every local military commander.
It's ironic that while Ukrainian supporters like you dream about terrorist attacks, Putin himself doesn't order strikes against Kiev government.
You are hopelessly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Volo...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program#Biden_a...
But sure, it could have been bad intelligence or it could be accurate. Given the brazen assassinations Russia has committed/attempted under Putin though, I see little reason to dismiss it simply because sometimes other intelligence has been faulty.
What was the source of that information, the CIA director himself?
And Putin has ordered multiple attempts to assassinate various presidents of Ukraine, including Zelensky. Putin as commander of this brutal war is absolutely a valid target.
Bonus: now it’s so noticeable, the time zones in Linux. When I’m interacting with some old distros, it was Europe/Kiev, now it’s Europe/Kyiv. Mostly only Russians and their ‘supporters’ (usually just bots from the suburbs of St Petersburg) continue to write Kiev. Plus some people who are not interested in the topic, like at all. Or those who happen to read what Russians distribute. Next time you see Kiev anywhere, pay your attention at what narrative that person is pushing.
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
By all accounts the Ukrainian attack took a year to execute. It's the kind of planning that was behind the explosive pagers that Israel cooked up.
It's a new kind of automated terrorism - who knows what is planted around Russia now and when the Ukrainians will set it off.
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
But this wasn't that. This was taking out bombers. If anything, it reduces the amount of terror.
> By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia.
By that definition, every war is terrorism. And maybe it is, but this war was started by Russia. Russia is still the only terrorist state in this war, no matter how you spin this.
Giving one example, you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war
Yes, great point.
> you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war
I wrote above,
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
And as you say, it brings the war home somewhat. Imagine the response of Americans if a military base on US territory was attacked successfully.
We can debate the definition of 'terrorism', but a fearful pscyhological effect was, I suspect, the primary aim of the attack.
And that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do (if you attack legimmate targets, which Ukraine did). I think people on this thread think 'terrorism' is an insult.
I don't think this is causing fear as the citizens do not feel threatened, as these are military targets. I think the feeling is more of the sort of "humiliation", which can indeed have valid political implications that may affect the war.
Putting aside that, denying the enemy its strategic bombing methods has various advantages in a war, such as less damage to infrastructure and in this case increasing domestic morale due to military success, and reducing Russian ability to demoralize by bombing cities
Yeah, like the Blitz Terror bombing in WW2. But this isn't that. They attacked strategic enemy assets, so it's not terror bombing.
Are. You. For. Real?
The planes terrorised Ukraine each and every night. Now obviously they’re gonna do it less. Since they mostly target civilians, it might not do much to the frontlines situations, and technically you can be correct here …
But my dude, are you aware you mostly push a Russian side in this thread? Eliminating so many war targets is a huge benefit for Ukraine. They eliminated one third of their strategic aviation, literally overnight.
Also, why can't drones just infiltrate a country in little spurts from the borders, pausing near power lines to inductively power themselves.
A lot of this stuff is terrifying, and conflicts like the ukraine are basically funding/inventing nightmares.
Imagine if every IoT appliance decided to burn down/self destruct and every phone with satellite connectivity decided to weaponize its battery pack. If every car with cell service connectivity decided to accelerate with brakes disabled at once. If every access point/router decided to make itself inoperable/turned into a bot net removing home internet all at once and likely shifting traffic to cell towers which could overload them resulting in zero communication. Imagine that as many devices as possible were programmed or constructed in a way to create failure on a specific date or period.
Sounds insane, but I would have said the pager thing sounds insane too. All those things definitely sounds possible to me.
At a certain point, you as a country can only be said to be capable of what you can do without external aid. The possibility that your Allies will always remain as such, either at their behest, or your own, is simply never zero.
Queue the Globalist's in the crowd going "The entire point was to maximize the amount of time before peace broke down through economic interdependence. Wrong. They optimized for that metric while maximizing the vulnerability to supply chain based attacks. They made individual countries less resilient and accepted the risk that if a much greater worldwide action potential was actually reached, everyone would be potentially fucked.
Have you seen a footage of "fire dragon" drones?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6uLfermPU
Spring Surprise??!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMArt_155
You can actually see video of these in action in Ukraine. Bofors has also produced the BONUS round which is basically identical in action.
"In the early morning hours of 29 December 2023, Russia launched what was seen to be the largest wave of missiles and drones yet seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, with hundreds of missiles and drones hitting the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other cities across the country."
You have to wonder how much of that time was inventing/creating the actual capability on top of planning/rehearsing. Would be an interesting story in the mold of the "Dam Busters".
The trucks used for the delivery were acquired (along with the mobile homes the drones were launched from that were on their beds) in Russia, as I understand it, not driven from Ukraine (of course, the drones still needed to be delivered from Ukraine for the attack packages to be assembled.)
Is it such an amazing idea? Imagine the shoe is on the other foot - would you normally be able to drive a truck full of drones into a country at war, say Israel? This puts a target on civilian vehicles.
> In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Again, is it such an amazing idea? Do you want to make people in charge of nuclear weapons more jumpy and likely to make a rash decision?
Also they didn't drive a truck into Russia. The trucks were acquired and modified in Russia. And according to Russia they are not in a war. They are in a "special military operation"...
It's amazing in how effective it was, and the asymmetry of the destruction compared to cold-war assumptions.
“Amazing” is the correct word for it
I read one operator describe the forests as being like Mirkwood from the Hobbit. Eerie.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/1kzy817/field...
https://www.tiktok.com/@united24.na/video/748403971532320286...
https://www.tiktok.com/@united24.media/video/748912820925079...
Sparkling in the sky (they track and kill the men in this video after the 10 second mark so you might stop there) - https://x.com/ng_ukraine/status/1891534054811439380
High def footage, 60 fps until they hit.
They are definitely useful for civilians, but seem dangerous. If you hit them on a motorbike etc. If you google kites and banned Chinese lines and road accidents its quite gory, but before the illegal kite lines accidents didn't seem to happen. So something should work for optic fibers.
Run one to your mates house 10km away for the pay-per-view?
Define “we.” The defence community has been deeply engaged with what’s going on in Ukraine since ‘22. (And the supremacy of sensor fusion in India’s air battle with Pakistan.)
Alas it feels optimistic to hope that asymmetric confrontation would be downtrodden people of the earth against bad world damaging take-take-take pests. Merely a science fiction. The world having powerful forces working strongly for the world rather than self interest: hardly believable science fiction.
It's cheaper now, it's easier to pull off remotely, but most airports already were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. It feels like the primary mechanism that protected civilian airports is that the weapons you'd use aren't easy to get, and states didn't want to supply their sponsored terror groups with that kind of weaponry because it'd be dangerously close to an act of war and very hard to deny.
Individually, you were never safe by default. Your safety depends on not being an interesting target.
Hello, cyberpunk future. Imagine Luigi with Ukraine's strike capabilities. 10 years from now? 5?
Ukraine isn't wealthy, but it's still an entire country.
We’re in a strategic imbalance. Cold War air defences were trained on high-value targets, like strategic bombers and spy planes. So currently our air defences are overspecced for something like this.
Nothing about drones makes them inherently undetectable. You just need a different model. I suspect those should be commonplace within 20 years, potentially a decade.
> at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal
I could see ownership being restricted in wartime. More likely is eager air defences shredding birds on perimeters.
Probably not. Most of the history of war is weapons getting stronger and stronger and defence getting harder and harder. E.g. in ancient times a shield or simple palisade could protect you, now even tanks and trenches are not safe. The days of being able to build a wall along a border and hold it against a peer adversary are long gone and not coming back.
The whole Ukraine war thing seems a bit anachronistic like something from the last century. I think it isn't coincidental that Putin spends a lot of time reading about past centuries (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...)
But times have moved on.
Three years ago: "Oh stop nobody can do a decapitation strike. Russia's security concerns are bogus".
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fb...
If the average citizen had a good understanding of what an industrial war looked like and what was possible, they'd (taking an optimistically charitable view) have spent the 20s and 30s being a lot more vigorous in trying to keep the peace. Like the efforts we say from the 40s to around the 2010s where people who remembered WWII put huge amounts of effort into not letting it happen again.
Which is why Ukraine spent the last year hitting softer targets like oil and factories.
Weight doesn't seem to imply effectiveness I guess.
Why are they so effective in Ukraine and Russia if there are so many solutions? Why do all the experts say they will transform warfare?
I guess after today's attack, that treaty is dead.
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or concealment practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms.
Anti-drone nets or simple hangars won't violate it.
Also going back to the time of slave trade and genocide of native Americans seems a bit rich…
realistically speaking, this destroys NATO
There is a pretty good argument here for at a minimum reforming NATO. Some major points include that the US appears to be bluffing about having useful support to offer Eastern Europe through the NATO structure, also appears to have different defence priorities than Europe does, NATO itself failed to preserve peace and Europe looks like it has militarily atrophied to a pretty significant extent under NATO.
It is not clear how the situation will ultimately be interpreted, but the US's involvement here is pushing Europe towards being the next middle east. That isn't a great outcome.
Also, WW2 happened despite the Empire, and the UK wasn't really in a good place to fight it when they did — as in "we don't have enough guns and uniforms for everyone" not ready, despite having ended the military cutbacks 5 years before the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rearmament_before_Worl..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Small_Arms_Company#..., https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/8-facts-about-clothes-rationi...
We don't have much choice really. Western Europe + Turkey are not going to put up with Russia rolling into Western Europe or Turkey. We have nukes and more money, people and kit than Russia.
Please tell me what would happen if Putin states "Job well done in Ukraine, all Nazi's are killed", and then withdraws his troops. NATO is going to invade Russia?
Just for the sake of examples as I don't have any real insight, consider a tritium-boosted weapon that's expected to have a yield of 1MT. If this is set to detonate at the altitude that maximises the area of destruction, but the tritium was last replaced in 1990 and has been slowly decaying without replacement since then, then it's a nasty fireball in the sky that you can sit directly underneath with minimal risk.*
Part of the reason the Soviets went for ever-bigger nukes was that they couldn't aim very well (also a reason for the US to briefly attempt air-to-air nukes, which is how I know you can hang around under an exploding fission bomb without ill effect). If the avionics are all filled with some combination of Soviet-era vacuum tubes but the vacuum leaked, and/or old-and-leaky electrolytic capacitors that no longer hold charge, they won't even reach any specific target.
US anti-missile defence has been improving over the years. I wouldn't want to hubristically claim they're now "good" (I mean, look at the US space industry outside SpaceX), but the defences are likely to be better than they were when the USSR was still a peer.
Someone might have decided it was much cheaper to get fuel for a nuclear a nuclear reactor by replacing a bomb's core with the same volume of depleted uranium.
And of course, if they are ordered to fire, the submarines might accidentally sink themselves instead, like the Kursk did.
* My best guess is that an unboosted primary is about 15kt, but this is still true for somewhat larger primaries as https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ says a 1MT nuke maximising 5psi overpressure damage area would be at 3120 m altitude. I assume that if I were in-the-know for exactly what yield was in the un-boosted primary, I'd be under some obligation of secrecy.
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1929166249348476968
video of the self-destruct: https://bsky.app/profile/militarynewsua.bsky.social/post/3lq...
https://nitter.poast.org/Osinttechnical/status/1929149970566...
its after the attack and drones gone. Those idiots were lucky, there is another video from a truck that malfunctioned and caught fire on side of the road. russian forces the door, enters and boom. Appeared booby trapped.
„at least 13 Russian warplanes were destroyed and more were damaged.“
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3999621-ukraine-updates...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/01/europe/ukraine-drones-russia-...
Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones
https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite
https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community
There's some interesting stuff happening on the financial side as well with the Lindsey Graham bill - this thing https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/05/28/new-us-senate-...
I'll bet Russia is curious too.
These launches specifically seem to have also used on-board AI targeting models trained on photos of the plane models to hit, I assume as a fallback in case mobile connection isn't available inside the bases (and photos on some Telegram channels seem to show usage of the FOSS autopilot system ArduPilot (https://ardupilot.org))
The targets weren’t moving. As long as you have a cell connection in the trailer and up-to-date satellite imagery, you could send the coördinates and even flight path to the drones ahead of time and then have them deal with minor obstacles on their own.
Camera locking on to a parked plane, should be fairly easy to do the job.
[1] https://nitter.net/bayraktar_1love/status/192915556386414634...
Interesting that they claim the attack was shared with the Trump admin ahead of time. That seems very unnecessarily risky as well considering where Trump's loyalties lie
Starlink is a joke here but "satellites" in general are not
“Everywhere” meaning undefended airspace into which one masses a significant fraction of one type of strategic armament.
This was the savvy exploitation by Kyiv, once again, of Russian operational incompetence.
> there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets
You want to try driving a truck up to a USAF base? (EDIT: Where strategic arms, e.g. B-2s, live.)
This is a novel threat vector. It needs to be protected against with vigilance. That to requires active effort to counter doesn’t mean it’s OP. Just that defensive perimeters need to be expanded, units not needlessly amassed, air defences kept in check and those perimeters constantly (and completely) monitored.
The air mobility command in the Bay Area is similarly totally surrounded by urban civilization.
I think it would be reasonable to assume that almost everything except for explosives were commercial off-the-shelf parts and trivial to acquire.
Isn’t Tinker mostly logistics, intelligence and AWACS? Don’t get me wrong, that’s important. But you’re not taking out a significant fraction of any U.S. armament hitting Tinker with drones.
but if all aerial refueling fleet is damaged, like KC-135 Stratotankers then it will be over very quickly.
or blowing up Navy's ice cream supply depots and it will be over as well
One can compensate for the loss of AWACS with satellites and low-flying drones in the way one can compensate for a sprained ankle with crutches. See the recent Pakistan-India skirmish, which Pakistan appears to have won on account of sensor fusion powered by its AWACS.
They sent the planes for suicide mission without suppressing enemy air defense. Indians planes flew too close to the border without suppressing AD.
Pakistani planes flew from highland valley which was invisible from radio perspective
>Anduril has clinched a $642-million contract to supply counter-drone technology for the US Marine Corps (USMC).
And that's ignoring all the other functions the 25k+ people working there serve.
This drone attack worked because small explosives detonated close to an airframe can do catastrophic damage. That simply isn’t true for most equipment, civil or military. (The exception at Tinker being the AWACS.)
Tinker being nuked would be a strategic disaster. Dozens of drones causing small-arms damage around the base would be embarrassing, but nothing on the order of America losing a third of anything in its possession.
The analog would have to be us putting e.g. most of one class of unit at Tinker simultaneously for maintenance.
I count over 60 aircraft on the Google Maps image of Tinker, not all of them AWACS (there are less than 20 AWACS total so most of these planes aren't AWACS). And that's not counting what may be in hangars which could also be a target of this hypothetical attack. USAF has about 5500 aircraft, so this accounts for over 1% of the current USAF air fleet. It's not as critical an attack as what's happened in Russia, but it's still very damaging.
It's an operational airfield so it has large fuel tanks which would be targeted and are hardly immune to small explosives themselves. Attacking those and the ensuing fires would be costly to repair and recover from. That alone, ignoring any attacks on aircraft, could lead to months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks (if the aircraft survived the attack).
They’re slow to make, critical to modern war and we don’t even have two dozen of them. (I think at least a quarter of our AWACS are at Tinker. Hence the analogy to Russia concentrating its bombers.) For everything else we have redundancy in droves.
> not all of them AWACS
Yup, refuelling, logistics, cyberwar. Nice to have. But not critical and few among many.
> months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks
You’re not detonating fuel tanks at Tinker with drones. (Not unless they’re storing munitions within blast range of the tanks.)
I’m not arguing such a strike wouldn’t be damaging. It just would not be disabling to scale of this attack. It would also be unusual for the highways around bases to be unrestricted during major wartime. (Or drones to remain uncontrolled, for that matter.)
Why are you so certain of this? IIUC (I am far from an expert) the insurgents in Iraq regularly utilized improvised shaped charge devices to attack armored vehicles. I don't understand those to have been particularly large or heavy. Consider that fiber FPV drones are carrying upwards of 2 kg of fiber (IIUC) in addition to the payload. Fuel tanks are stationary so you can dispense with the fiber.
Anyway, I invite you to visit America some day. I think it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation, usually much closer.
One type of a retiring aircraft. Not comparable to a third of Russia’s entire bomber fleet.
> it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation
Fair enough, in peacetime. Russia is at war.
The best way to protect them is maybe not invading and trying to commit genocide on a neighboring country.
It's like developing a good relationship with Ukraine wasn't a possibility, it had to be through corruption and now war.
This attack, potentially, might spell the end of that treaty.
START has long since been a dead treaty, replaced by New START. New START has two verification methods, none of which rely on overflight by satellites; instead, verification is performed by onsite inspections of nuclear facilities.
Though they are unlikely to exceed the treaty warhead numbers, as nukes are expensive. It's too bad really, the START treaties were some of the best "reduce military spending" treaties ever made. Trump called it a bad deal back in 2017 and told Putin that he didn't want to extend it because it was too favorable, which is dumb since it was only ever a boon to both parties.
Despite all the bluster and bullshit and "Super duper turbo America killer 9000" weapons like the Satan, Russia does like the START treaties and wanted to keep them going, at least until the war.
As of today(!), the US has suspended the VISAs of Russia nuclear weapon inspectors as retaliation.
Bairktars? Gone. Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while. What else?
Russians in comparison are great at scaling. Rockets flying daily, vespa-drones - daily, FAB bombs got wings and flying daily. That's the consistency what wins wars, not the greatest talent.
You haven't heard as much about sea drones because Russia was forced to stop naval operations close to Ukraine by them, after losing 1/3 of the Black Sea Fleet.
Though they still occasionally manage to make headlines doing other things, https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-naval-drones-shoo...
They shot down an Su-30 with a naval drone around a month ago: https://www.newsweek.com/drone-naval-sukhoi-jet-2067633
So any more future attacks of such nature would all depend on how successfully the Ukrainian operatives in Russia are able to evade Russian security services.
Almost a bonus to have Russia jam its own airbases and increase surveillance if a follow up isn't possible.
I would see it as a reasonably sized box loaded with interceptor drones, they don't even have to explode. That's something we will see en masse shortly from the Russian side.
Actually nobody should take Russians as dumb and clumsy. They adapt fast. And they can benchmark fast too, thanks to ukrainians. The only open questions is whether the rest of the world accepts new situation, or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s
Standard kit on US military aircraft detect this and 5th gen platforms like the F-35 are designed to attack such systems.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the F-35 is that it is a combat aircraft, 1970s style but with better tech. In many regards, it is designed primarily as a state-of-the-art EW and AWACS-like system that can operate as part of a mesh. Yeah, it is still pretty good at the basic combat mission but the whole mesh EW/AWACS bit is its killer feature.
In the 20th century, you kill the AWACS/EW platforms, they are gone. A lot of effort went into both killing and protecting them. In the 21st century the AWACS/EW platform is a fluid organism comprising many stealthy cells because it is embedded into many platforms, and is much harder to kill because it isn’t a discrete target.
If you wanted to take out bombers regularly attacking you with F-35s, you don't have to reach the airfields, you just have to reach them somewhere between the airfields and where they release their weapons.
They reported it done in 2018 and 2 new aircrafts are promised to be brand new. I doubt anyone would be able to reliably prove they coming with old frame or not.
Or is it more about fail safety rather than distance?
It is the the most advanced flying weapons platform ever created, and the most misunderstood.
And an autonomous supersonic attack aircraft would cost..about as much as the F-35 because the F-35 is not principally expensive because of the pilot.
They don't have to replace them. They just have to destroy them.
You shouldn't be launching a patriot missile to take down a drone, that's the point
But they are vulnerable both in the air and on the ground. Recent Iran attacks over Israel and everyday Russian attacks show that shakhed flying vespa-drones can overload any air defense and deliver ammo for real cheap
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1kwsum...
https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/new_domestic_30_km...
Robust RF communication for denied environments is tech that exists, it just doesn’t seem to be present on the Ukraine/Russia battlefield. This is likely because so much of the drone tech is derived from consumer platforms and both sides have limited access to sophisticated military-grade RF silicon.
This claim, that FPV UASs equipped with explosives are more effective than F-35s as a blank statement does not sound meaningful.
Besides that, I doubt the US would have ever sold a single F35 to Ukraine just because of revealing radio-emission and reflection patterns to russian air defense, basically drawing F35 useless for future usage against Russia.
That wasn't really the subject of discussion, though.
If the US had unleashed it's airforce, led by F35s the war probably would have been over in a week with Russia's air defences and invading army taken out.
Like, if Ukraine lost the war today, folded up, surrendered, kaput. You'd still get organized splinter groups with funding from small nation-states or even motivated partisan groups. And they'd still be able to pull off things like this strike. Not much can stop them.
Yeah, the planning and patience here is unmatched. I don't think the US or even China could pull off this level of patience today. But the cost here, my god, this was just so cheap! And there is no telling about how many more of these Ukraine already has in RU too
And Ukraine and everyone else knows this. Maybe not mad Vlad, maybe not yet. But even is Vlad wins, he's going to have to deal with these kinds of strikes until Ukraine is free again. And that kind of paranoia is not cheap.
And every other nation also knows this now too. Small non-nation-state actors now have a playbook of how to cost you big time.
Or is conventional radar so noisy / limited that close range and object size is a real problem?
The engineers that design these things seem to have more imagination than their critics.
Covering an airbase will be expensive, and there's the problem of false positives; say you deploy 4 Skynex systems around an air base. Drones attack, you down them but the fratricide ends up damaging aircraft anyways. C-RAM has been around protecting bases in the Middle East for years, and those 30mm rounds have to land somewhere...
Actually no, the CRAM based Phalanx systems use self-detonating ammo. They explode after their tracer runs out. The Naval versions use kinetic penetration rounds with tungsten cores and do not self detonate.
Also they are 20mm
You are pretending that things that have proven solutions don’t actually have solutions.
I’m not saying the current set of solutions implementations is perfect but you are not making a credible argument that they don’t exist. Local battle-space sensing is very fast and very effective as a matter of record, at least in the US arsenal. That tech may not exist in the Ukraine/Russia theater but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Yes the technology exists to mitigate some of the risk. It's not deployed currently, and is very expensive. There are significant limitations to these systems, and most haven't seen combat.
You're trivializing a complex problem by pointing out that it's technically feasible, when it's more than just "we have the technology."
Show me a "proven system" in the US arsenal that can protect a large airbase from this type of attack. Not similar technology that the DoD has talked about converting to address this threat, but purchased, deployed systems.
Airplanes are so relatively fragile, that it's common for airbases and aircraft carriers to conduct FOD walks to make sure their runways are free of small pieces of metal debris that could be ingested by their engines. It doesn't take a lot to put an airplane out of commission.
These aren't A-10s with titanium bathtubs protecting their pilots. They're large, slow, aluminum skinned craft that have limited maneuverability, and are the quintessential "bomb trucks" for Russia.
For example, say we deploy an Arena/Trophy type system around an airbase? What are the ROE for its use? Do we keep it operating 24/7 or only when the threat level seems high enough? Most airbases in the US have small security detachments, and they have ROE that tell them not to blow up semi trucks that might have stalled on a road near the fence. So how do they counter an attack like Ukraine just pulled off?
Ukraine destroys small plane drones and loitering munition with drones with the help of radar guidance.
Also I’ve heard about the case when training on an FPV drone and accidentally leaving designated area in the city triggered an air raid alert.
We get to destroy an enemy by proxy and another country will take the punishment and blame for it.
It's perfect, as long as our ally doesn't run out of blood.
This was previously true, but I thought this policy changed as of last week?
May 26 2025: US, UK and allies to lift all range restrictions on weapons in Ukraine
Ukraine’s western allies, including the UK and the US, have agreed to lift all remaining range restrictions on the use of their weapons after President Trump issued his strongest criticism of President Putin yet.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/uk...
I don't see Ukraine winning this conflict in the long run, though, and if it goes on for too long, we'll see bitterness on the Ukrainian side directed at those they felt should have helped. Fighting to the last Ukrainian will eventually make an enemy of them imo.
It is advantageous for the US to keep the war going to a point, but the real focus for the US is the Pacific and the US would prefer to not have to worry about Europe and Russia and instead focus on China. But the US isn’t able to end this war one way or another. Only Russia can end the war (aside from Ukraine no longer willingly defending their country) either willingly or by some sort of internal event, barring some miscalculation where they attack NATO forces. Some theorize Putin will do that to get defeated so he can save face but I don’t think that is likely.
It is very short-sighted view. It is definitely not advantageous. USA has reaped the benefits of law-based world order in the last 70 years and which was the reason it has its wealth now.
The longer the war is going on, the more unstable the world becomes and the less it is there for USA to benefit from.
The whole strategy of the USA after WW2 was to keep world and especially Europe safe.
The problem is that letting Russia win will only accelerate the demise of the US, so it cannot just walk away even if everyone in White House really wants that.
Well that's why I wrote it's advantageous to a point. The one really clear advantageous thing for the United States is that Russia's military has been degraded, and their economy is obviously not doing quite as well as it otherwise might be either. And it caused Sweden and Finland to join NATO, Germany to decouple (to an extent) from Russian gas, and more.
> The problem is that letting Russia win will only accelerate the demise of the US, so it cannot just walk away even if everyone in White House really wants that.
Even if Russia won this wouldn't really result in a demise of the United States by any means - just a stronger Russia and a buffet full of other undesirable repercussions for our enemies to pick and choose from.
It was one and a half years in the making.
The US knew nothing about the operation.
If Trump had known about it, he probably would have told putin accidentally (or.. knowingly?)
I apologize because my experience with corporate culture has resulted in a strong and decisive conclusion that corporate leaders such as Musk and Cook, et al., could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Really. What they can do is order other people to fight their way out of paper bags. If I were somehow ever in an overloaded life boat, the first people I would push over the side would be the Musks and Cooks. Musk's "send me an email" just does not work in a life boat in a storm. sigh.
I realize that in our cultist society this is blasphemy, but really - if you are able to think any original thought, go for it. And for those of you who do not get it. Well, the best I can say is good luck.
The U.S. has traditionally been a high trust society. But not everyone in the U.S. is a person who can trust others. The recent political machinations in the U.S. represent the low trust segment of American society. The key to undoing it is to re-inculcate trust at a personal level, and at societal level. How that is actually done is a difficult problem with no readily obvious solution.
Unless the New York Times readers can figure out that the people they call "haters" are in fact suffering things there will be no alternative to those people who are capitalizing on that suffering. IMO.
As for trust, I believe one large step is to prevent targeting. Otherwise the alternative is to develop another business model. [Edit for spelling a tiny bit more of clarity]
I do not know if the US Army could adapt as effectively as the Ukrainians have. My guess is not. BWDIK. Certainly some recent US military actions do not seem to be adaptive.
So yes, the military is perhaps better than corporations at being adaptive. It is hard to imagine a military commander asking everyone to send an email every day. On the other hand, will the US Army do better than the Russian military when they face a highly adaptive situation?
My guess (though I repeat your BWDIK) is that the US military would adapt less quickly than the Ukrainians (if only because it's got a lot more doctrinal inertia), but more rapidly than the Russians did. There is a sub-genre of military history dedicated to figuring out how/why democracies - going back to antiquity - tend to punch above their military weight. The suppositions tend to cluster around 1.) they don't fight unless it's truly popular, which unlocks a comparative man-power advantage, and 2.) an egalitarian social / political structure makes distributed authority and acceptance of new ideas more possible / palative.
Unfortunately, the Russians have now adapted to drone warfare (even if they haven't matched the innovative pace of the Ukrainians), and I think Western Europe should be more scared of their military than they were two years ago. That's my cold hard-eyed real politiik case for supporting Ukraine: the West needs the world experts on this new military paradigm on-side. Perhaps the primary challenge this argument faces (particularly in the US - the Europeans don't all share this psychology) is a reluctance to admit (in culture or military doctrine) that "we" aren't The Best at something. The notion that OCS could be materially improved by importing any random captain from the Ukrainian front to teach a few classes is a tough one to swallow.
Disclaimer: I'm not military, only an observer through media, and through conversations with current and ex-military friends. Several of those military friends have become, in the past few years, super interested in flying drones in their spare time. They're already preparing to adapt, even if their commands are moving more slowly.
All of this can end tomorrow. Pull out of Ukraine, get rid of Putin, they’d probably even get most of the sanctions eased.
well current actions certainly aren't helping
That being said all you really need to do is install defensive netting at bases. You don’t even need hangers so relatively inexpensive retrofit. That will probably cause drones to shift to dropped minions but at least those are less accurate.
“ an embargo of all trade with a country or region, intended to damage or dislodge the government.”
I’m pretty sure if the US was in a position where their government was under thread from an economic blockade they’d consider it an act of war.
https://theprint.in/theprint-explorer/how-pakistan-got-the-n...
“Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.”
Fair enough. I think there is similarity in complaining about flagging and downvoting in a way there isn’t for moderation, but that isn’t made clear in the guidelines. Sorry :P
I worked a bit on SDI, "Starwars" and here it is, back on the table. An article about it felt like a memoir. (U) So in this regard, the future is the past. Drones are another matter, of course.
So is cyberwar. I worry about the internet going dark, but not enough to get an amateur radio license to stay in touch with family and friends, who would also have to do so, and under war or warlike conditions, the amateur bands could be silenced administratively.
it's called having a discussion about major current events, not drafting plans or writing studies.
One would think the implications of bundling drones 4000km into enemy territory to strike at their nuclear deterrent would be worth some discussion
Either way more countries will oppose russia after use of nukes.
Being a nuclear power also does not prevent war, as you can see what happens between India and Pakistan.
Russian media analysis believe that Ukraine's polity is now resigned to the fact that they can't really militarily defeat Russia alone. And so they've shifted their strategy to use Ukrainian military to create high impact media headlines, to please their western "financiers" and to psychologically demoralise the Russians. That does make sense as attacks like this while being demoralising doesn't really offer any real military breakthrough to the Ukrainians, nor is it likely to stop the Russian advances.
The Russians already occupy around 20% of Ukrainian territory which the Ukrainians have been unable to take back. Since last year, the Russians have reportedly captured nearly 2000+ kms more of territory from the Ukrainian forces (including the Russian regions that were under Ukrainian control). And the Ukrainians forces can't realistically launch another major counter-offensive as they are very wary of running out of manpower (Ukrainians have 1/4th the wartime population of the Russians, and thus can't replenish their military as much as the Russians can).
Thus, it is an undeniable fact that right now, the Russian military have the advantage and the Ukrainian military is losing the war.
What remains to be seen is how much longer is the Zelensky administration willing to gamble that Russian economy will soon collapse or Putin may be deposed or NATO or EU boots will soon join the Ukranian forces to fight the Russians?
Eh? These planes are regularly used to attack Ukraine, and they are irreplaceable (one odd dynamic of this war is that a lot of the Russian equipment is a legacy of the past; modern Russia simply does not have the industrial base to replace it, so unless they can somehow convince China to sell them bombers, every bomber lost is a permanent reduction in offensive capability.)
And the Ukrainians still don't have the ability (or are apprehensive) to launch a meaningful counter offensive, while the Russians keep advancing slowly.
As for the bombers being "irreplaceable" that's the western media fudging with the facts - yes, Russia is no longer manufacturing these particular old but operational strategic bombers any more and hence they cannot be replaced. But Russia has been able to revive production of the TU-160 (and its variants TU-160M, TU-160M2 - the largest operational bomber in the world) and has started manufacturing these new / revised supersonic strategic bombers since 2022 (Full production of Russia's Tu-160 bomber restarted after 30 years - https://newatlas.com/military/russias-tu-160-bomber-restarts... ). It has also developed prototypes of a new stealth bomber, the PAK-DA. So it is ignorant and incorrect to say that Russia doesn't have an industrial base any more to manufacture such kind of bombers. (I will however concede that sanctions are definitely interfering with Russians progress in this domain, and hindering fast production and research effort).
this war is bankrupting Russia the longer it continues
Any article that offends the sensitivities of the wing-nut mode of the highly bi-modal community is immediately flagged. Such as the recent article by the resident of Sri Lanka during it's civil war.
https://indi.ca/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121939
But somehow, traditional warfare news seems totally fine, despite the fact that this has nothing to do with tech, or vulture capital.
There really needs to be an "unflag" link for posts, to allow both sides of the "flag vs don't flag" debate to be represented.
So because a post was wrongly flagged (I haven't checked but I take your word for it) we should also flag other posts that the community wants?
Or maybe we should stop using flags as downvotes? Flags are for disinformation, off topic and low quality links, that kind of things, not for "things I personally don't find interesting".
I don't think it's as much "I don't find it interesting", as it is "I don't politically agree with this".
Specifically, I think there should be an "unflag" link, so that opinions to keep comments active can also be registered.
https://www.chron.com/news/article/hurricane-season-fema-chi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44165573
The FEMA chief not knowing there's a hurricane season...
The woke-nut mode of the highly bimodal distribution seems more inclined to just ignore what they don't like, but the wing-nut mode is constantly flagging articles that point out that we have elected a moron to the office of US presidency...
EDIT: Another example, same subject:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fema-staff-confused-after-h...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163750
Yea, Reuters, that "fake news" site 8-/
Now compare that to a country with no navy sinking a missile cruiser or downing an AWACS jet. Or, in this case, sending trucks thousands of miles into enemy territory to destroy strategic bombers. It's simply more interesting news despite how it makes you feel.
A long protracted war complete with the destruction of their strategic airforce and Black Sea Fleet was not something they would have even conceived of being the outcome back in January 2022.
That doesn't mean Ukraine "won". But barring any kind of black swan event in their favor, Russia definitely "lost".
Here's CNN three days into the war for example https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-mil...
It's not like he needed this bypass on a check on his power. He has done it to insult the US.
