New war meta is crazy this season

Even still, there’s a difference between losing one AWACS and losing all of them.

On the tank side, some planned updates/replacements for the Abrams were very suddenly canned and went back to the drawing board. The DoD didn’t say why, but a good guess is that they saw how things were going for tanks vs drones in Ukraine, and decided that these new designs would be obsolete before they’re built.

Also a lot of the late Soviet Union military technology came from Ukraine, plus their military were also trained in the same kind of school of thought as Russia and still know it.

So it makes sense that, when push came to shove, the Ukranians would fast come up with asymetric war solutions against Russia, that Russia wouldn’t be as fast in effectivelly countering them and Ukraine would be quicker at developing new or adjusted solutions once Russia found a counter (or, more generally, that Ukraine would remain ahead of Russian in the cycle were each side develops a counter to the other side’s counters).

Had Russia’s initial blietzkrieg attack worked, it would’ve been a different story, but at this stage it makes sense that Ukraine has the technological edge, not just in the weaponry it gets from the West but also in their own weapons development, especially now that it has much better AA to protect the installations far away from the frontlines working on weapons tech.

They do not believe NATO ships are that vulnerable

Oh they are, so a shit ton is being done for anti missile, anti submarine, now anti flying drone, should be anti jet ski drone, anti submarine drone, etc.

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Yeah, this definitely feels like a doctrine and training problem. I can’t even imagine a scenario where the US or NATO lost half of any platform like that. Pearl Harbor, maybe? I remember how huge a deal it was when we found out our body armor and APCs sucked in 2001, and that was nothing like losing every missile ship.

Has a modern military ever gone up against an enemy using lots of small cheap drones though? I’m sure they have plans in place, just can’t recall if they’ve ever really been tested, aside from Russia with the results we see.

Ah, the classic blunder!

And US aircraft carriers have an honestly embarrassing amount of firepower, completely disregarding the jets. There’s a reason that they haven’t been sunk by anyone other than the USN since Midway. Apparently we have sunk several carriers since WWII, one with a nuke. It survived the first nuke, but the second sunk her. Though the Independence survived both nukes.

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Is Putin the Shitan Al Gain?

You missed the point (and i should have perhaps been clearer), the chap was saying “no navy”, i am pointing out that suicide drones are still part of that navy and Ukrainians had 15000 personal at the start of the war in the navy.

https://youtu.be/sHRbX3gDba8

Thats why i said, they are amazing value for money. But sould be interesting to know just how many boats it takes to take out 60 or so ships

If they keep this war up, with the current losses in manpower, for another 8 to 9 months, they won’t have enough Russian males to repopulate the country. Putin may be effectively killing Russia as a country. Unfortunately Ukraine may hit that point sooner since they have fewer people.

Russia’s high tech side of their military industrial complex is incredibly weak compared to the old USSR days

They’ve been screwed since like the '60s because of the gap in microprocessor tech.

It really depends on the kind of vessel though. China for instance has a ton of ships but less than tonnage than the US, and if you restrict that to ships that could realistically conduct long range opperations that tonnage is buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo even lower than the UK and Japan (not combined). So Russia could just be launching 40 new patrol boats next year, or maybe 2 actual ships and 38 patrol boats.

Please try not using initialisms that a general audience won’t know. That’s why i had to look up the previous one and quoted the info so other people wouldn’t have to look it up also. USV doesn’t even show up in a googling

EDIT

I found it, USV means a drone boat

Most US Navy ships have had CIWS systems since the 70s and have had many upgrades to their tracking systems since then. The US Army adopted the LPWS (C-RAM) which is basically a portable CIWS for land use. (The Russian version of the CIWS is called a Kortik.)

It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already CIWS-type systems for commercial ships operating in hazardous zones.

I have had the pleasure of standing next to a few CIWS systems during live fire testing and it’s quite the experience.

So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.

It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:

• Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what’s going to happen to you in response. That’s at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers’ naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
• It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it’s not like that’s new. Once it does go past the level of “we don’t want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we’re scared of the response,” and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They’re hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It’s not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn’t necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.

I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.