In simplest term, it's like your neighbor parks their car on your driveway, you get police to issue fines, or maybe even get it towed. But your neighbor has money, so they keep paying fines, etc.. Your whole neighborhood supports you, so they would call the cops for you, go to town hall and all of that. In the end, you'll never win and get your parking space back. The only way is to park your and all your supporters' cars in their driveway, give them a taste of their own medicine.
The Economist discussing that https://archive.ph/Rjuzy
They can't cut off the Druzhba pipeline because they need to keep Hungary and Slovakia happy.
Most long wars in the last century become trench wars; maneuver warfare is too expensive (in terms of materiel) to sustain between adversaries who are at all balanced; the Iran-Iraq War is a good example of this. Additionally, most small/proxy wars are used as testing grounds for either validating new weapons, or checking the viability of old/expired munitions; Ukraine is being used this way, but so was Libya.
It seems that any decisive action is too risky for Western leaders to contemplate. Western leaders seem willing to 'stir the pot' in places like Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, but never want to commit decisive resources. The threat of nuclear escalation seems to be too high for the minuscule popularity that one might win as a victor in Ukraine. Non-nuclear countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, etc.) could commit ground and air forces to Ukraine's aid with little to no risk of any consequences, but even they are unwilling to do so. The sad part is that the lesson being taught here is that China will be able to conquer Taiwan with almost no risk of foreign intervention, no matter how long it takes them.
Firstly "In April 2001, George W. Bush publicly announced the American defense of Taiwan"..."This framework was approved by President Donald Trump in 2018" (wikipedia)
Secondly there's a sea in between China and Taiwan meaning it could largely be defended by a no fly zone. In Ukraine once Russia troops have crossed the border it isn't easy to get rid of them without a lot of messy ground warfare.
The only real difference here is that the U.S. has even fewer advantages in this hypothetical conflict. China, like Russia, has hypersonic missiles and drone swarms both of which are aircraft carrier killers and carriers are still the U.S.’s main way to project power so far from home. According to Pentagon estimates, in a war with China, the U.S. would only have about a month’s worth of ammunition. The supply chain situation would be a disaster, and Japan and South Korea likely wouldn’t risk directly supporting the U.S. because they’d be stuck right within China’s range, not thousands of kilometers from home.
Whatever’s written on paper is meaningless if the country guaranteeing your security has too much to lose, it’s just paper. Ukraine had guarantees, Poland had guarantees in 1939, and plenty of other countries in history had guarantees that didn’t hold up. What really matters are actual capabilities, war scenarios and costs.
Colby knows that[1], because he has all the data and understands the political reality. And the reality is that the U.S. could lose the war, and all the economic and political consequences of losing its hegemony would follow.
All of America’s enemies in history were weaker than the U.S. In the last 100 years, the U.S. hasn’t fought an opponent anywhere near its level of strength. Even in WWII, three quarters of Nazi Germany’s forces were destroyed by the Soviet Union, that’s a fact you won’t see in Hollywood movies about brave heroes. Now the U.S. would be facing the world’s factory, a country with the resources, political system and industrial capacity to actually win that war.
1. https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/09/pentagon-...
Ukrainian government even officially proposed that some time ago as I remember.
The US has definitely used the Ukraine war as a way to wear out the Soviet stockpiles out of Russia.
The EU just hasn't either political will or capabilities to really help Ukraine win.
Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops in German territories. But that's exactly what is happening in Ukraine war.
The EU on the other hand is under existential threat from Russia so they (we, actually as I'm French) really ought to do something serious to help Ukraine not only stabilize the front line and wear down Russia, but win this war.
But because we underinvested in defense for decades (because the Western Europe couldn't imagine a conflict was possible with their biggest trade partner, and because eastern Europe was too keen on trading political influence inside the EU to the US in exchange for security guarantees against Russia without having to build a capable military on their own) we ended up in 2022 with little capabilities to really help Ukraine.
And because of the obsession with public spending and debt reduction, countries refused to seriously invest seriously in their industrial capabilities to supply the Ukrainians with a war-changing amount of ammo and other assets. (the fact that South Korea alone was able to give more ammo to the Ukrainians than the whole of EU in 2023 is a sad joke really).
I can't really blame the US, they played their own interests while minimizing consequences for them (and that's also why they wanted to avoid escalation in priority). But I do blame European leaders, including my own president, for not taking this matter as seriously as they should have. (For a full 10 month in 2023 Les forges de Tarbes, France's main production of 155mm shells, has been stuck with no way of producing anything because they couldn't pay their suppliers because they lacked liquidity to do so, this was utterly ridiculous and should have been solved with a single phone call. But nobody in charge bothered, for almost a year…)
EU as an entity is under threat. But only few members bordering Russia actually feel the threat. Russia is not going to invade France or Spain anytime soon, they are relaxed.
> He also wrote that a 5 percent defense spending goal would jeopardize the country’s welfare system,
> Sánchez said that 17% of this year’s military spending would go to natural disaster relief.
The Spaniards are the only ones outright saying it, but seem very obvious that the silent (and overwhelmingly economical) majority in EU think this way
The economic consequences of the war have been severe for Germany though, but they don't seem to care that much unfortunately…
All of the main neocon actors (e.g. lindsay graham) say this. The idea that western military resources are unlimited is a neocon article of faith.
It's weird coz it is possible to count the number of e.g. shells and air defense missiles manufactured and stockpiled and it is plainly obvious that it is not enough and was never enough. That is why Ukraine losing was inevitable.
>Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops
Imagine the USA supplying weapons to a leader who is actually just like Hitler while he is committing a genocide.
You dont have to imagine too hard.
It's all a matter of investment in industrial capacities, especially for mundane early-twentieth century technology like 155mm shells.
It's not inevitable that North Korea is able to supply more shells than any individual NATO member, you know.
How do we know this? Aren't some defense tech companies (anduril?) publicly disclosing shipment of new weapons to Ukraine?
How exactly do you picture it ending? No, really. Imagine you got everything you wanted. Everyone delivers max offensive capability to Ukraine. Ukraine brings the war to Russia in full scale. Putin, or his successors, give up. Then what?
At the end of the day, Russia will still be there, at Ukraine's borders. What happens?
(Unless you're one of those who imagine a split-up - a sentiment Putin absolutely has noticed and used in building domestic support, by the way. But either way, there will be something that used to be Russia at Ukraine's borders, and they may not be very happy about their neighbors after a full scale war.)
I'll listen to any plausible scenario - plausible to you I mean, I'll defer judgment for now. Don't worry about convincing me, just convince yourself. I just want to know what happy outcome you imagine after Ukraine has somehow brought the war to Russia and won.
>The war gradually inflicted a high cost on the Soviet Union as military, economic, and political resources became increasingly exhausted. (wikipedia)
and the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 and collapsed in 1991. I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade. They are currently losing about 1000 soldiers a day and have a deficit of ~$100bn/yr, 17% interest rates and 20% of their oil refining capacity taken out by Ukrainian drone strikes which are escalating.
But you remember, even though the US foreign policy establishment basically got every single outcome it wanted from supporting the rebels in Afghanistan, right up to the split up of the Soviet Union and Russia becoming a republic run on Chicago school of economics principles by a pro-US president, in another couple of years they instead got Russia back as an enemy state and al Qaeda.
Also, while the situation ended up back in a pretty bad place for the US, that's nothing to where Afghanistan ended up. I think the US should try pretty hard avoid winning, if winning means the same as the way they won in Afghanistan. And Ukraine should definitively avoid an Afghanistan-style victory at all costs.
They only need to keep going longer than their opponent. Ukraine has fewer soldiers and resources than Russia and currently has almost no offensive capability, as seen on the battlefield. All they can really do is defend, and even then they’re still losing ground, not much, but still losing territory. Here in the West, we’re facing economic problems, high debt, and a shortage of weapons production, especially in the EU. I’d like what you’re saying to happen, but that’s wishful thinking. And Afghanistan wasn’t the primary or even a major reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse.
> I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade
They have oil, gas, and minerals that the rest of the world needs, and they have an internal propaganda machine that lets them hold out for a long time. I remember "experts" saying Russia would collapse economically in 2023, then in 2024 for sure, and that they’d run out of rockets. Now it’s 2025, and that collapse isn’t even on the horizon.
With a peace agreement. Russia withdraw its troops, ends occupation and pays for the inflicted damage. Sounds fair, no?
How do you deal with the fact that the large majority of the population in Crimea (and probably a lot of Donbas too) preferred union with Russia over staying in Ukraine? Do you deny them the vote for a generation? Ethnically cleanse them? Or do you give them a big hand on the rudder in the new unified Ukraine, like they used to have? Either solution seems like it's a powder keg for war to break out again.
So do war reparations, of course. That's basically how WW2 happened. As I see it, the best case scenario of Russia paying for all the damages is that it becomes an impoverished breeding ground for a lot of vengeful terrorism. Maybe you're more optimistic?
Also, is this peace agreement really more likely to happen if Moscow has been London blitz-droned into submission? When did your country last sue for peace in such a situation, and how long did that last? I don't have much sympathy for "political realists" in practice, but in theory, I agree with them that you should expect other states to behave like your state would have behaved.
It's not a fact but propaganda from RussiaToday.
How about to go the Russian way: put troops there, make them do a referendum, be sure people see guns and Ukrainian flags. Anyone who will not make a Ukrainian passport soon will be deported or imprisoned. They are ok if Russia do it - then once more will be also accepted.
>> Maybe you're more optimistic?
There are €300b of frozen Russian money, also a 10% reparation tax on oil export could finance the rebuild of Ukraine.
> The drone developed under Project OCTOPUS was designed by Ukraine with support from UK scientists and technicians and has already proved successful on the battlefield, proving highly effective against the Shahed one-way attack drone variants used by Russia – despite costing less than 10% to produce than the drones they are designed to intercept.
What does a Shahed cost? https://www.twz.com/news-features/what-does-a-shahed-136-rea... says about US$50k, so they're saying that the Octopus drones cost on the order of US$5k, and "thousands" of them costs on the order of US$10M. So this is a single-digit percentage of Ukraine's yearly drone budget: not insignificant, but far from game-changing.
Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?
> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.
But does it cost more than the Shahed plus the target of the Shahed? That it the equation Ukraine is using.
It would maybe also not be a great idea to field weapons that cost more than their targets, because, measured in dollars, it means you're doing more damage to yourself than to the enemy. Economically speaking, it's like a handgun that shoots both backwards and forwards. If you're immensely richer than the enemy—and the UK's GDP is almost twice the size of Russia's, even before you add in Ukraine's GDP, Poland's GDP, Germany's, etc.—it can still be a winning strategy. But it's still pretty galling.
£200M is the same order of magnitude as Ukraine's total yearly spending on drones, I think.
They would after all be in a strong position as one of the only countries to have successfully fought a major power in recent times.
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223912 ballparks the program at US$10M.
Under these circumstances, if the UK is sending thousands of small FPVs it would be insignificant.
We're speculating based on very little information here. At least you didn't spell it "Shaheed".
There are already available different FPV designs used to successfully intercept Shaheds, loitering munitions and reconnaissance drones.
Really I’d like it to be a learning opportunity, even though people like this seem to be incapable of learning lessons (will update here when they jump to conclusions without evidence on the next one) or of following principles (I don’t need to update, there’s no way they will follow with their commitment to delete their account). The lesson is to wait for some facts to come in before jumping to extreme conclusions.
As an anti fascist that uses to run black lives matter protests, whoever these antifa folks are they never invited me to their club!
One wonders how they have managed that, or how they know.
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
This kind of thing https://thedefender.media/en/2025/08/dyki-shershni-showcased...
>Sting interceptor hits 315 km/h, shoots down over 200 Shaheds and Gerberas
>Sting costs about $2,500
Not sure what design the UK will make.
i see shaheds in this case equipped with ultrasonic sensors to detect anything in range that will trigger "evasive maneuvers".
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
Drones are cheaper to replace than people.
Only for western country.
But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.
More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
I think the plan is that the war is over in 10 minutes ... so why care.
Of course not.
Nuclear powers would only use nuclear weapons if it's the last resort.
So when in the salami tactics world does it get used?
It's not exactly a new scenario:
Riots in West Berlin, buildings in flames. East German fire brigade crosses the border to help. Would you press the button? The East German police come with them. The button? Then some troops, more troops just for riot control, they say. And then the East German troops are replaced by Russian troops. Button? Then the Russian troops don't go. They are invited to stay to support civilian administration. The civilian administration closes roads and Tempelhof Airport.
If tomorrow russia will occupy three NATO countries: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia - nobody is going to use nukes.
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
Practice makes perfect.
There's some guy in Damascus who knows more about the real world use of the TOW than the people who built it.
It's amazing what you can do when your choices are, in essence, "be destroyed" or "become an expert"
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...
About $22k before we even ramp up production. Any NATO aircraft can carry a large loadout of them, and they turn any long distance, slow moving drone into target practice.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
Russia also started to deploy mobile anti-drone guns and there a lot of vides that show their effectiveness but Ukraine still fly drones low as Russia still willing to use expensive missiles against them on massive scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.
I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.
>the Skyranger, a twin radar-guided 30mm gun turret made by Rheinmetall, making this the natural choice for the German Army. The gun system costs around $12 million https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/09/10/why-so...
and ammo is about $600/round apparently.
EDIT:
They used to go 5000 ft or so. Now " fly between 2,000 to 5,000 meters to evade small arms fire, while the high-altitude reconnaissance drone Shahed 147 can reach 18,288 meters (60,000 feet). "
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/07/21/russia-...
Is there not cheaper auto-shotgun type devices around? To spray the sky. It doesn't take an entire missile or even bullet to damage a drone does it?
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
Please don't do this on HN.
Also cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45224133.
Also, I looked at your comment history, and you seem to be using Hacker News almost entirely for "political or ideological battle", in this particular case trying to bully someone into silence for disagreeing with you on a political issue. If you keep doing that, you will probably be banned, and I can attest that the last time I saw you get banned from a space I was in for doing that, multiple people came forward to tell me privately about the psychological abuse you'd subjected them to. You can't escape accountability indefinitely.
In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.
I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.
If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.
Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.
Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]
What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]
It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic. """
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age