Jon Stewart took exception: "This is how we're doing this? 2 am? Mar-a-lago basement? no lighting? You don't even have one of those influencer halo things? You just go down in the basement? and this is what we're wearing? Blazer, no tie, shirt unbuttoned? Looking more like the father of the bride settling up with the caterer? ... and not to nitpick, but baseball hat? ... " and it goes on.
And they likely used hair style that requires absurd amount of maintennance. If there were women in the group, they likely used expenasive and painful body modifications on top of that. Republicans have own style, they are big on looks, after all.
I mean MAGA styke plastic surgeries there: botox, lip augmentation, jaw contouring, microneedling, facials, chemical peels and so on.
Body modification like that is a status symbol amoung republican women. Both high level women around Trump and in normal level republican areas with serious plastic surgeries industries.
Asymmetric warfare, a concept that costed the USA a few trillions before. A patient observer of the war in Ukraine could have updated some war doctrines. If you are an American tax payer, I would understand it if you were banging your head on the table right now. These flying lawn mowers are perfect for a Denial of Dollar (DoD) attack.
> A patient observer of the war in Ukraine could have updated some war doctrines.
A patient observer? Any random idiot of the street that cares to watch the news occasionally could've figured that out.
> If you are an American tax payer, I would understand it if you were banging your head on the table right now
Oh I am, and my representatives hear from me very, very often. Unfortunately, it falls on deaf ears. Seemingly no one around me cares, and our leaders certainly don't. I feel like I'm going insane and living in some kind of weird bizzaro world.
> I feel like I'm going insane and living in some kind of weird bizzaro world.
You're (probably) not going insane. Much of humanity's leadership is going insane, and their cult-like worshippers are right there with them. You're just bein' the "odd man out" tryin' to stay sane in a crazy world ruled by crazy people with way too much money and power.
Shooting Patriots at flying lawn mowers (I suppose you mean Shaheds, Gerberas, and the like) is crazy. Patriots are key to shooting down ballistic missiles.
To the best of my knowledge, the explosives-laden lawn mowers flying over Ukraine are mostly destroyed by cannon fire from the ground, cannon / machine-gun fire from aircraft (including converted GA aircraft), and interceptor drones.
I expect the US armed forces to be testing oodles of various cheap drones by now. E.g. the US has used Shahed-lookalike drones while attacking Iran recently.
I'm unsure if Ukraine has used patroits against ballistics. My understanding is that is a low count in the Russian mix. Cruise missiles and jets are their primary targets in Ukraine (aiui)
US just have too much money as moving to use interceptor drones is very simple when you have the need.
Russia and Ukraine both ultimately scaled up volunteer started development and production of that "fastest drone on Youtube" for the interceptor role. Cheap, simple, and works against pretty much any prop-driven drone used there.
Russia did start to use those hobby jet engines instead of props on the attack drones, and that made them go 600km/h instead of 200km/h. I'm yet to see the interceptor drone for that - it will also have to use, while smaller, such a hobby jet engine. Again laughably cheap - $3K Alibaba. (there are some other options too, i think we'll see them in time too (if anybody have few mils to burn - ping me :). Anyway, the guys are having wonderful time as their hobby became the eye of the global multibillion hurricane of hot military tech. Even the Blackwater guy - the one who was riding the money tsunami back in the Iraq time - got into it by just recently becoming some C-exec in a pre-IPO Ukranian drone developer)
AA artillery (radar guided, I'm sure even better improvements with modern tech could be made) seems like a pretty easy win here as well? Cheap bullets, downside being populated areas might impose a risk due to low-flying objects and the interception trajectories needed.
i was going to say, CRAM would be effective at a close, slow moving, predictable target. The rounds self-destruct based on a timer if they miss so you're not raining bullets all over the place. It's is also portable and can be parked almost anywhere. I'm not sure if the burst is configurable but slow moving drones are easier to hit than a missile so it seems like the burst duration could be turned down too. You'd have to figure out a way to keep them from shooting down _everything_ though.
> low-flying objects and the interception trajectories needed
that is the key. It is much more easy from all the aspects - logistics, cost, agility, etc... - to patrol, discover and intercept from a higher flying drone. The drone can (and will be) added with AI (already some) and can come closer for the AI to work better, to make sure and can abort the attack if there is a mistake, while AI on classic radar guided AA requires expensive optics to do that at distance.
>radar guided
FPV, in visual and IR, cost pennies and available in millions of units from Alibaba, while those military radars cost a lot and not many of them are available.
The radar guided AA is used and works where needed and there not much other options - like for cruise missiles, 850km/h. You can see videos - the window of opportunity is usually short as cruise missile is also relatively low flying.
We can make plenty of those rockets. They are cheaper than Shaheds! Though that doesn't count the plane time! $20k per hour per plane at least.
As the cat and mouse game continues, Shahed style weapons used against countries with any meaningful defense, like "drone interceptors" or helicopters or old warplanes, the munitions will continue to evolve towards "Just a guided missile at this point", where the situation again transitions back to the economics of cruise missile vs patriot.
The Hydra pods can be used against any precision weapon up to subsonic cruise missiles, so their versatility and pricetag only gets more effective, while every effort making the Shahed more survivable only makes it more expensive and harder to build.
In an interesting twist, a good air force now ends up doing good work against cruise missiles.
If cruise missiles try to go faster, supersonic, to make these Hydra pods ineffective, they end up getting more expensive rather quick, at which point the $4 million patriot missile makes sense.
The Patriot isn't even a fiscally efficient anti-missile system. The Israeli Iron Dome can intercept subsonic cruise missiles and costs about $100k an interception.
Most "Missile Defense" munitions are expensive because they have to be capable against ballistic missiles, which are much more difficult to intercept. MANPADS are sometimes effective against cruise missiles and they are often cheap and plentiful, though putting them in the right place at the right time is the hard problem there. The Hydra pods are actually better in that case because a modern jet will reposition rather quickly. Then the problem becomes noticing the incoming munitions early enough to get a plane on its tail.
All this still depends on industry to build it though. These missiles are cheap in bulk but that still requires the factory exist, and that isn't always cheap or easy or fast. In Ukraine, drones get a secondary benefit of being a very survivable industry, as it uses entirely commodity components and even 3D printed parts so it can easy disperse and scale however you can manage.
APKWS used in Ukraine with Vampire (Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment) system mounted on tracks. no planes required
>The Israeli Iron Dome can intercept subsonic cruise missiles and costs about $100k an interception.
prices quoted on Israeli news in past few years are typically around $20k to $40k. $100k was initial pricing before mass production. Obviously it can shoot down shaheds as well
Israel also fielded Iron Beam late last year. It has 10km distance and $2 per shot price (this is even if you use PG&E electricity)
from the last paragraph of the wiki article you linked
> In June 2020, BAE announced they had completed test firings of the APKWS from a ground launcher for the first time
so it seems like they've got them launching from the ground. That seems like a real possibility to defend against these kinds of drones. However, I don't think it's a problem of technology or cost right now but of availability.
The point is it takes an enormous fucking ball sack to refuse help to Ukraine in their hour of need while Iranian drones are raining down on their citizens and then when we need some help to ask them for their expertise
What is history-textbook gall is denying your benefactor a modicum of assistance. We have given them more than enough aid to get whatever help we asked for (which was probably negligible anyway).
> "U.S. Central Command, meanwhile, is asking the Pentagon to send more military intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September, according to a notification obtained by POLITICO"
(billion dollars a day and that's before replacing all the weapons)
It's important to separate the short range quadcopters that are easily built in small workshops from the long distance winged drones that can weigh several hundred pounds (like the Shahed drones).
The latter, as they're built by Russia currently, require a decent size facility to build en mass.
It's not the kind of thing Hamas could build in their tunnel system, for example.
I agree with your second point that interceptors will become depleted though and this is a serious problem.
Ukraine is building long range drones as well. Look to the strike stats inside Russia, many well over 1000km.
The IRGC is significantly more resourced than Hamas, building enough to fire off 100s a week should be no issue for them. They can build ballistic missiles, they twice struck an oil refinery in Bahrain today: https://bsky.app/profile/elhamfakhro.bsky.social/post/3mgd5o...
I agree, it would be hard to stop Iran from producing a significant number of long range drones (hard to stop it from getting the parts it needs when it route them through the Stans or the Caspian sea).
Note that neither Ukraine or Russia have air supperiority. It would be much harder for IRGC to build and launch hundreds of drones with basically predators stalking the sky & strikes from manned jets availalbe on short order.
Until the ammo runs dry, those birds in the sky need something to fire, and contrary to what dear leader says, we don't have a forever supply and usage is significantly above production.
Fight fire with fire. Anti-drone drones that are near cost parity. Or make some investments to develop, cheap, mobile, relatively short ranged point-defense systems. A middle ground between CWIS and CROWS or a CROWS-like system optimized for drone defense. The engagement distance will be close, but it turns the asymmetry back around.
This is what Ukraine is doing, but it will always be imperfect. Shahed style drones don't fly a straight path. Ukraine has built out an auditory detection network using cheap phones, has mobile response teams for different types of incoming threats, yet it is still not enough.
Given the resources we are using today, while still seeing drones and ballistics get through, does not bode well for a 100% reliable system.
For the anti-drone drones, the factory for the non electric components is row after row of 3D printers, the drones only need to work for one mission.
I posted this earlier.
This is a really terrible setup and I still dont understand why Ukraine keeps doing it in 4th year. One injection molding machine will produce more parts than a row of 50 3D printers and Ukraine is already full of companies running plastic injection manufacturing.
While I love the idea of sticking it to Trump, this is the wrong approach. The right approach (which Zelensky is doing) is for Ukraine to sell defense drones to countries that now need them (US, Isreal, Gulf States).
Ukraine gets money while scaling their manufacturing and everyone else gets drones that actually work and are continually being refined in the field.
Ukraine has been using cheap interceptor drones (models Sting/Bagnet/etc) combined with sensor networks to intercept slower prop driven Geran-2. Then Russia upgraded to jet engine on Geran-3, with higher speeds that are more difficult for prop interceptors to catch. Ukraine switched back to using machine gunners from aircraft to help take those out until they develop faster intercept drones.
If Zelensky wants to turn it into a capitalist enterprise then he should be careful with that game, because US could easily ask to be given hard assets in return for the $100B+ in aid we give them, or just reduce aid by exactly the amount they are charging for their drone help.
US has given more aid to Ukraine than any other country, and has $400M more allocated for this year. So lets cut the bullshit about excluding all the times anything other than $0 was supplied -- it's putting a major spin and presenting things in a deviously false way.
This kind of rhetoric is why we're bitter about it. We give the most out of anyone, yet there is still this sort of welfare queen bullshit of vell vwhat have you done for uz lately when something simple is asked back like some help with drones. Despite giving more than anyone, the best thanks we can get is "but that one time, you gave us $0, so none of this counts" and by the way, if you want drones then fuck you pay me. The sense of smug entitlement is off the charts.
You're unwittingly displaying why the kind of lies Trump told to get elected worked. Of course Trump was totally being fraudulent about his "no new wars" rhetoric (his rhetoric about having Europe pick up their share did have some truth), but there's a reason why his rhetoric worked.
You are anthropomorphizing the government of Ukraine. At the start of the war they needed US money and weapons and asked for it. We gave it to them. They survived.
Then we withdrew support. They survived anyway. Now, they have expertise and equipment that we could really use. Now you want the US government to simply demand the equipment as payment for the help earlier? They will say no.
The money and weapons we gave them earlier weren't wasted. It bought the survival of Ukraine and a bunch of dead Russians. It also bought the existence of a country that has effective and critical defense equipment.
Now, by buying drones from Ukraine, we make our military assets dramatically safer, save money, hurt our adversaries, and increase our effectiveness all at the same time. But you're complaining about Ukraines "tone".
Your terms are acceptable, and you're totally right, what was given before were aid so they have no hard obligation to reciprocate. You want to boil it down to open market operations and I have no qualms with that as that favors the US taxpayer way more than it would Ukraine.
We will buy whatever wish we want to buy at market prices, and if they want more money they can give us their minerals or hard assets at market rate in exchange and eliminate the $400M allocated to them and all the other handouts since this is now a capitalist tic for tat endeavor per your proposal. From here on out, if they want anything, intel, whatever: fuck you pay us. They have a lot of excellent farm land and minerals and transferring those to the US in a purely capitalist trade for any further cash or military assistance could be a fair deal since you're rejecting a reciprocal aid approach.
It is the US government that threw reciprocity overboard, openly and publicly humiliating allies and partners throughout the past year, threatening to invade several NATO allies, publicly mocking soldiers from allied countries who had fought and died in US-led wars, and kicking Ukraine at its most vulnerable moment in an attempt to coerce it into surrender. Not to mention global economic warefare in the form of illegal trade barriers. The US government championed isolationism, and this is what the first taste of isolationism feels like.
For most of the world, the US-Iran war carries minimal upside (the reduction of Iran-sponsored terror groups in the Middle East) for considerable risk (terror attacks on their citizens). Previously, allies and partners were willing to grant access to their airbases and provide other forms of support and put their citizens at risk to maintain good relations with the US, because that meant something. With Trump in the White House, the US has become an unreliable and unpredictible banana republic, where government action is not grounded in sound policy or long-term international relationships, but depends entirely on the moods of El Presidente and serves his personal wallet.
He has made time and time again clear that he is not bound by any earlier agreements and commitments, so it should not come as a surprise when others respond with the same and propose starting negotiations from a clean slate.
Congress has merely secured the financial pool; the decision on whether and how the money will be spent ultimately lies with the Secretary of War (Defense).
This is such a cunningly disingenuous portrayal though when you're just leaving it at that, the US has provided billions in aid already and allocated hundreds of million more for this year. Yet the counter argument here is to just ignore all of that and pretend like they've gotten zero through omission of all the times they haven't, while relying on a totally uncited assertion that none of this year's allocation has been spent.
Sure but the question is are they helping the U.S. that helped them. It's pretty clear that the Trump administration is a completely different beast than typical US administration. Look at things like its pro offensive war stance (see unofficial name change of DoD) or that it does not support Ukraine (see lack of funding/intelligence since Trump). Maybe Ukraine will think it's supporting the Americans that helped them and hurting the Americans that are pro or compromised by Russia by withholding aid and letting Trump wallow in what he's reaped.
I'll add that trump has made clear that U.S. administrations are not beholden to previous international policy decisions and so unless congress reins in the executive or trustworthy actors hold the mantle again other nations should treat the US with short term policy decisions in mind and not rely on long term reciprocation.
Imagine getting so much aid from the US and Europe only to start making ultimatums. If they dare to do such a thing, they should be the next ones to find out.
The real story is that the Patriot and other interceptor stockpiles Zelensky's asking for are now critically low, and tens of thousands of soft targets are hard to defend against cheap drones. This war is on course to set off a truly unprecedented global energy crisis within days, and the USA/allies don't currently appear to have any plan to fix it.
> on course to set off a truly unprecedented global energy crisis within days
That's not exactly how oil supply works. There's plenty of stockpiles which take months to burn through and only some places depend on Iranian oil. China is their biggest buyer and it's around 13.4% of China's oil imports.
it's not just about iranian oil. The strait is blockaded. Plus refineries in Kuwait, KSA and Bahrain were targeted. And LNG facilities in Qatar - which stopped and restarting will take ~1 month at least. Leading to this
To add to your comment, ~20%-25% of global oil production passes through the AG (Iran is only ~4% of current global production) @ ~21mbpd. The longer that oil can’t get out (Saudi’s have a 5mbpd pipeline to red sea, but only 2mbpd loading capacity), the quicker it will erase the current oil glut and eat into inventories. Most of the discounted oil China has been buying from Iran/Russia has actually been going into inventory. The strait itself is a narrow channel, and the main risk is mines and underwater drones. Sinking a few tankers in the strait would cause a lot of headaches.
>the USA/allies don't currently appear to have any plan to fix it
Their plan is to bomb Iran into the stone age so it can't produce any more drones or missile launchers. It's questionable whether they can succeed though.
It doesn't really matter, they are both responsible, because both attacked Iran illegaly. The major role of course has the US, Israel alone can't do much.
Trump should stop bootlicking Putin then and give Ukraine serious long range ground to ground missiles. Time for Putin to pay higher price for being a fascist scum.
If you look at the map, there is no place to stage it. The border with Turkey is very small. Staging in Iraq would mean troops under attack from both sides even before they cross the border.
The Kurds soundly control a mountain land corridor between Iraq and Iran, and have controlled that since even before the recent attacks. Iran is not in a position anytime soon to close that without air power that they don't have.
I don't think staging light infantry will be a problem but I don't think they'll successfully break out of the mountains, certainly not into any land that isn't already ethnically Kurd (or Baloch, but that's in the other corner of the country).
