ukraine is using cardboard rc planes with bombs inside to take out parked russian fighter jets. they’re supplied by some australian company and cost only like 5k AUS. the western military industrial complex is completely taken aback that a useful weapon can be that cheap. amazing ukranian ingenuity! they say
@itzpaquet In 2002 the US military did a simulation exercise. One of their generals on the red team defeated the American army using motorcycles and shutter-light messaging, so they stopped the simulation, changed the rules on him and kept restarting it until the USA won.
@Moon the reporting on it is pretty hilarious though. and the comments are like "well we don't have to do things like this because we have money so we should use it" there's a huge blind spot here and i love it.
@Ricotta@itzpaquet there's a ton of research in drone warfare but it doesn't seem to be deployed, I was seeing state of the art stuff being done in 2010 during my short, shameful stint in the defense industry.
@Moon@itzpaquet@Ricotta aren't Ukraine and hamas doing mostly drone stuff? And when's been the last time that a state actually win against guerilla tactics?
@Moon@itzpaquet tbh they had good reason to call bullshit his motorcycle couriers were driving at the speed of light to inform missile fire control systems missiles that outweighed in gross tonnage the small motor vessels they were platformed on
@itzpaquet@Moon >the comments are like "well we don't have to do things like this because we have money so we should use it" That sounds like a country that learned nothing after losing a 20-year, multi-trillion dollar guerrilla war to a bunch of shepherds
@Ricotta@itzpaquet@Moon large regular armies already couldn't win in Vietnam or in Afghanistan (and later, Afghanistan again). There's not one war the US has won since ww2.
@lain@itzpaquet@Moon It's not that they're mostly doing drone stuff, but they are using a lot of quadcopters and other small drones, and they're an absolute gamechanger.
This is an area where large regular armies can't really compete, because they're held back by red tape, contracts, procurement, and all that usual bureaucratic nonsense, while smaller, more irregular forces can pretty much do whatever they want with whatever they can get.
@Moon@itzpaquet The conspiracy-minded part of me thinks that war ending is a big reason why the US provoked Russia as much as they did in 2021-22, to put that gravy train back on the rails without any of that messy and unpopular military occupation business.
@awl@itzpaquet@mrsaturday it is an objective fact that we broke multiple promises with russia to not expand nato. not defending russia but this country is an active antagonist in the conflict.
@mrsaturday@itzpaquet john mearsheimer, the guy who wrote The Israel Lobby, has years of videos on YouTube about us antagonizing Russia, I don't remember if they're before 2014 though but at some point I found them and watched a bunch of them.
@awl@Moon@itzpaquet I don't because Ukrainians deserve their own country and to be their own people. I feel that way about any ethnicity, though. Fighting Western soft imperialism with hard imperialism and an inevitable ethnic oppression afterwards isn't anything I can support. They shouldn't have been dragged into this.
@Moon@awl It'd bring its own mess with it but that should be something Ukraine should agree to. However, Russians seem to think that Ukrainians aren't a separate identity, just uppity speakers of a Russian dialect in denial. Even if Russia only took Donetsk, Luhansk, and made them renounce any claims on Crimea, you'd have a lot of each ethnicity left behind on each side and you'd need a population exchange, and those rarely go well.
@Moon@awl@itzpaquet@mrsaturday pot and kettle, also not objective fact Russia wanted to join nato Russia liked the expansion of NATO It's literally post sex revoked consent, and there is a massive amount of recorded evidence for both my statements
Gorbachev, the man who signed the supposed "no expansion" agreements, has stated twice "what's the deal guys are you insane, we never made a no NATO expansion promise"
Russia signed multiple documents of cooperation with nato that included written statements of NATO expansion and Russia agreed with them, all the way up to at least 2009, maybe more but i do not know
@lebronjames75@awl@itzpaquet@mrsaturday there's multiple written and audio documentation of the promises but if later cooperation included expansion then I admit fault.