Well I'd say yes and no about the 20mm Vulcan. I think there's going to be a new drone doctrine which comes about with this, and weapons like the 20mm will be the best counter of currently available tech, but I think it will come up short if you start seeing these drones used to their full potential. So this is something I've thought for years about drones, both kamikaze drones and with more conventional air to surface missile type drones (really just A type aircraft without pilots). The biggest advantage of a drone over a piloted aircraft is the lack of a pilot. The lack of the pilot means that when one is lost, your only actual loses are material. This means, the more you minimize that material loss, the more meaningless the loss of said drone becomes for your forces. With that in mind, the most practical way to use drones is as aerial cannon fodder.
I'm going to tl;dr this.
Until you start getting truly autonomous drones, and they're about 60% of the way there with stuff like the Switchblade, the US counter for the low-flying grenade droppers both sides have been using is to basically sweep the radiowaves and microwave pulse the frequency frying the coms equipment, or lay down so much interference operations are impossible. They also have fun systems that can crack the flight control's encryption. These are super secret squirrel systems because they don't want any slick operators to have a jump start on countering them. So they aren't getting sent to Ukraine for the obvious reason (slavs).
Drones like the Reaper are (semi) immune from this - they are getting their controls from space, not the ground, and flying high. You could still microwave their comsuite, but the radios are up top so the whole drone body is an insultator, and then you have signal attenuation. tl;dr: You'd need to sight in the drone and used a focused microwave beam.
OTOH, Reapers are thus flying high and easier for traditional AA to detect and engage.
Soledar is such a massive shitfest when it comes to the infospace I'm taking anything and everything with a massive grain of salt.
Yesterday a lot of the Pro-Russian sources that are pretty accurate and worth looking through were saying Soledar has completely fallen, then it became the central area of Soledar, and now it seems central Soledar wasn't actually captured and is instead no man's land and a Ukrainian counterattack may or may not have been the cause of that.
yeah, I can't believe that Vatniks and Yookniks both are rushing to claim victory. We'll see who's there next week.
also
> Pro-Russian
>Accurate
KEK.
>unless they are killing 10 for every ukrainian lost, the attrition numbers aren't on their side.
lol I'm going to go out on a limb and say the "K/D ratio" is probably pretty close on both sides. Ultimately, Ukraine refuses to even so much as hint at their loses, and are now trying to conscript people who've fled the country with the help of the countries they're in. Just by pure brutally honest war math, the casualty ratios are likely increasingly favoring the Russians. This is because the Ukrainian force composition should be steadily declining in overall training quality since you're introducing more and more untrained, or minimally trained conscripts into the fighting pool whereas Russians are mostly replacing loses with at least semi trained reserves, and what sounds like a "back door draft" similar to what the US did during the Afghan surge.
Edit:
To evidence what I said about just attacking to inflict casualties, I'd argue that Wagner being the ones to carry out the attack was not coincidental.
I need to self correct: I was confusing Russian with USSR population counts; the pre-invasion numbers are 40 million vs 145 million, ukraine is winning attriation at 4 to 1. Russia also can't full commit, so just pulling number out of my ass we'll say they can only commit half their numbers. so maybe 2 to 1.
This is also making a bunch of (incorrect but maybe not incorrect enough to matter) assumptions about similar demographics and discounts the Donbros, so probably take the 4 to 1 to 5 to 1.
Wagner supposedly gets a bonus if they take Bakhmut which sounds about as plausible as anything.
Bakhmut is being made overly important; I think the Gettysburg comparison is apt - just like Gettysburg was on the way to New York, Bahkmut itself doesn't have any great strategic importance its just on the way to somewhere. The primary draw of focus is there are enemy forces there you can fight. Russia has a brigade near by, so Ukraine needs to position two incase they break through the lines. Ukraine as two so Russia needs to station three incase Ukraine counter-attacks ....on and on. It definitely is not strategically important enough to justify the loss of life & equipment - this applies to both sides but more so for Russia being they could stop attacking and focus somewhere else. Ukraine both doesn't want to cede territory to Russia and doesn't want to have to try to retake it being there isn't any great positions to attack it from the west. I'd think Russia would be more wanting to push Ukraine further back from their major rail hub in the north, but whatever. Slavs gonna Slav.
tl;dr: They are fighting for Bakhmut because the other side has troops in Bakhmut. If the russians are shelling Bakhmut, they aren't shelling a place that moderately intact.
Ukraine is wisely taking the opportunity to deplete Russian forces before the impending Russia
invasion denazification of Odessa.
The Ukrainian Draft Push does not say what you think it says.
Populations before invasion:
Ukraine - 40 million
Russia - 150 million
LOL FUCKING HOHOLS IMPLEMENTING A DRAFT HOW HARD CAN THEY BE GETTING OWNED LOL WHY WOULD A COUNTRY FOUR TIMES SMALLER THAN THE ONE INVADING IT NEED TO DO A DRAFT FUCKING LOL
anyway here's how the russian mobilization was completely based and why shrink wrapping trees because they have no tents triggers the left.
Worse for Russia, they are charging across the open under the guns with no cover.
No cover AND ground too hard to dig fighting positions.
(they have some cover and taking the area gives them cover for the swing south to Bakhmut)
People will be writing about this battle for centuries.
Pressing X on this one. I don't think Bakhmut will matter in two years.
There's no slick tactics, just a meat grinder.
If this is mentioned at all, it'll only be as a footnote in papers about early drone warfare.
I love how this thread has permanently become 1-dumb-Ukie-bait post followed by 20 quotes of it for every page. Before the Keffals downtime, every highlight was breakdowns of the actual territory that's changed hands, recent videos from the front lines, analyses of the technology used by both sides, etc. I can't even remember the last drone or bodycam video I saw in this thread now.
There hasn't been any yuge changes in the front lines. So this there isn't anything big to talk about there.
Not everyone cares to see slight variations of the same war porn set to eurodance beats. Both sides are still using about the same kit so its really hard to tell who is killing who (deep.txt) and for all the casual observer can tell from infrared we're watching Russian
friendly comrade fire incidents. They promise me that's a Russian T-72 doing the pringles impersonation, but who the fuck knows.
Also most of the footage has no date stamps, so it could be from last week or last year; a few pages back the Vatniks were outted as reposting Airsoft LARPers gear spreads as a dead & looked burger merc.
Maybe just start a "Jerk off to war porn" thread if you only care about seeing contextless drone footage.
we don't let grunts make decisions on the ground
Who let your civie ass out of the kitchen?
