An admission and disavowal of a very popular post like that takes honor and the ability to suppress one's ego in service of the better arguments by other people.
Commendable admission, though I think it might have been even better to let the original post stand as it was so everyone can see for themselves the ("erroneous") post.
For the record, I was one of the people who upvoted the original post, only to later also upvote some of the replies that best argued against it. Cheers.
There will always be enough drones, I guess, to finish off no matter who or what is protected by this Arena system. On the other hand, the protection time may be extended long enough to make large-scale attacks with tanks and APC's over a certain distance feasable again? That would be a game changer, it seems.
It all comes down to the rate of fire and the number of possible shots...
If the Russians continue developing their laser system—which is a safe bet, and usually happens faster than the West is willing or able to fund—
then the problem is solved: a reasonably well-developed laser can fire tens of thousands of pulses and—provided it has a sufficient power supply—keep doing so for weeks or even longer.
That solution would be a breakthrough; it wouldn't just protect tanks—infantry and fortified positions would gain at least some protection, too...
...Right up until the first drone shows up that burrows through the ground...
It used to be the stuff of bad American movies—the kind where the Americans *always* win and save the world...
you understand the concept of "range," right? drone coverage extends 30km and up. Fiber drones strike even at ranges bordering 60km. Once you "break through"?!?!? WTF are you even talking about?
As of August 1, 2026, China has placed an export ban on all potentially dual-use components—not just electronic ones.
That is certainly nothing new.
What is new, however, is that a violation of this export ban is now classified as an act endangering national security, which could therefore carry the death penalty.
once the other team is forced to release drones in a stream it will be much easier to find the source of said stream and delete it. An assault is supported by the own drone team looking for them
they can't do spectrum mapping in real time without it. Rubicon has been using recorded spectrum analysis to find UAV crew locations for some time but it's always backward looking by definition.
These tanks should be protected with some antidrones units among those tanks that only have one purpose, to fend of attacking drones. And this Arena system shuld only then take care of leakers. But it wont be easy task.
Those shrapnels will perforate every human inside 10-20m.
I think the best solution is to deploy tanks en masse and do a quick run. To simply overwhelm by numbers. How many drones can Ukraine operate at the same time on a small section of the front?
It does not apply to armoured vehicles, or NRTK ground robots. They could indeed create a protective "dome" to allow larger units to proceed. In case that comes to mass production in time, it could spell the revival of mobile warfare to some extent.
True as long the personel is travelling inside the BMP, the mobile artillery or rocket launcher. But I dont think anyone wants shrapnel flying around when you have high-explosive rockets on your roof….
The BMP is by design an infantry-carrying vehicle used to transport small numbers (seven soldiers plus Commander and turret man) of infantry to the point of attack. A BMP with no infantry? What's the sense of sending it, then? If no actual infantry are required for whatever the mission is, don't send an automated BMP. There are plenty of other measures available to carry out whatever destructive mission you planned that does not require live soldiers.
No nukes please we want to continue this trip a tad longer. What you are suggesting will more likely come from the evil anglozionazi filth taking a major ass kicking from Iran. So drop that nonsense before the entire planet resembles the Rump Ukrapper dumpster fire. Z already without fiZZling the entire planet.
I enthusiastically support your idea, provided that all this is implemented around your place of residence ! You dick! I guess it doesn't matter to you if nuclear weapons are deployed in Europe, well imagine, we wouldn't be sad if there was a war in your country !
Well, the bad news is that I think the Russian, Chinese, and Northern Korean strategic planners might also consider your house as a starting point ! Good luck !
Russia does not tanks+infantry anymore for a long time. Since the decision was made to make Arena work against drones it was forgotten doctrine. People overhype drones so much lately, they don't see that shield vs sword race is eventually will be in favor of shield, just give it time.
That's why people who say tanks and armored vehicles are thing of the past are wrong. Drones have so many potential vulnerabilities it's demise is matter of time. We don't know yet which will click, but it's inevitable.
Will drone warfare then die? No, it's still going be a useful tool, one of many
It is always easier and cheaper to engineer a countermeasure against a new capability than it was to develop the capability in the first place. I guess the inherent lesson is to maximize your use of the capability while it still gives you an enormous advantage, and wipe out the enemy, like if France had machine guns and the English were still armed with the longbow.
The article fails to discuss a point I consider fundamental:
Just as Formula 1 cars drive innovation for ordinary automobiles, the Arena system can be tested on the battlefield to generate innovations for other areas, such as the protection of public buildings, refineries, and targets of strategic value.
I think Simplicius let us do the discussion and speculation.
They have now tried EW against drones and monstrous cages and before that found out that reactive armour wasnt protection enough because those operators goes directly to the weak spots on every vehicle.
And as was shown in a video they went low for the sprocket wheel to eventually avoid detection.
Yes. Arena-M will be in the limelight for a monthm or three, then we will se ad-hoc solution, new solution, better solution, entirely different solutions. Its a great time to be an inventor these days.
I think its time to go from single trees to the wood so to say.
There are no front-lines any more (has never been since WW1) and we have gone from strongpoints controlling line-of-fires, approaches, height in a 2-3 lines configuration to these death bubbles.
You cant break a line anymore - a breaktrough is not taking a tree-line and getting through to the nearby village or another tree-line, not even to next village. Defense is more like soap-bubbles consisting of a firegroup with a large amount of drones. Pop one bubble. you have three or four more bubbles around you. And the reach/diameter of the bubble is way bigger than what a classical platoon held before.
I think the Military have to think how they can create a large area 3x5 km totally extinct of any electronic devices right before an attack. A large EMP or a couple of small ones frying most of the devices. And then move forward.
Not until those guys are wearing powered armor a la "Starship Troopers" I'd guess.
Between the weight of defense system, power supply and sensors? And the air blast from actuating it + shrapnel and additional blast of destroyed incoming munitions, a soldier couldn't easily carry it and would likely be injured or dead after it fired off of his load bearing gear.
It would be easier to replace meat soldiers with combat ground drones than equip meat soldiers with micro miniature explosive/projectile anti drone systems & enough armor to survive using them IMHO.
Arena-M is a system designed specifically for point-defense of armored vehicles. Due to the detonation of the interceptors and their dispersal of high-velocity shrapnel, their use on unarmored vehicles and equipment would be extremely hazardous.
People hyping Iran missiles have no idea about capabilities of Russian missiles. Russia's missiles are a lot more advanced.
China is boring, because they are absolutely untested and while they are untested they are shit by default. Their missile tests are notoriously rigged and laughed up by Russian observers.
The elephant in the room is ridiculously shit performance and stats of US equipment. When you start comparing anything from US to anything from Russia they are like 2-3 generations behind. How that happened, after nose-to-nose race in Cold War era is the biggest why.
Zaluchny. Another clown for Ukraine. He also said that it will take 12 years for Nato to cover the gap regarding the new realities of modern war.
If HIMARS single-handedly enabled the ”liberation” of Cherson he omits the fact that Ukraine blew the Kachovka dam and that Surovikin realized that west bank of Dniepr i possible to defend. He is quite dumb.
He also stated the ”law of physics” were a single new weapon is invented out of the blue and THEN the tactics and implementation develops. Absolute nonsense although the civilian small drones were equipped with grenades and fits his law of physics. Every weapon developed in the History of Warfare was developed from a NEED and clear thoughts of its USAGE. Not the other way around. Once a weapon was in place it could of course be used in another way due to innovation on the battlefield or elsewhere.
I like that Simplicius once again is going technical and this time raised a couple of questions.
The Arena-M will not be a Russian wunderwaffe for long and is already ”obsolete” if it only can take out 7-10 threats when we know that an enemy can flood the approach with 20, 50 drones.
But that is because Russia continues with the drip-like assault of one or a couple of tanks supporting the likewise small groups of infantry.
If Russia deploys 12 Tanks at once and as Simplicius suggested, a few dedicated Arena-M defensive vehicles among them, the Ukrainies would need maybe 200 drones to deplete the formation and then another 100-200 to halt the advance. They will need plenty of operators then. Time will be crucial to get deep in to create havoc in the defensive lines.
Another questions:
1. how close can the tanks follow each other not to trigger the defense of another tank?
2. the canisters seems to be placed for an overhead attack - what if the drones simply apporach from the side? The canister killing the Javelin in the video was placed to counter from the side. Likewise easy to approach a tank with 5 drones from the same direction to deplete that side.
>If HIMARS single-handedly enabled the ”liberation” of Cherson he omits the fact that Ukraine blew the Kachovka dam and that Surovikin realized that west bank of Dniepr i possible to defend
They didn't blow up the dam. And it wasn't Surovikin who realized anything.
What happened was that they threatened to blow up the dam and Putin made yet another treasonous deal, but didn't even have the courage to announce it himself, he pushed Surovikin and Shoigu to take the PR hit while he himself characteristically disappeared (just as he has disappeared now once again -- he did have some visits to the Far East, but on the pressing topic of dozens being killed by enemy bombing on beaches in Krasnodar and deep inside Russia nearly every day he is keeping entirely silent).
Then they blew up the dam anyway nine months later.
If it had been up to Surovikin Kherson would still be Russian now. And a lot more than that. Because a credible counter threat would have been issued for something like the Hoover dam (just one Zircon with the appropriate warhead fired from a sub off the northwest Mexican coast would do the job there) and the US would have backed off while the necessary resources would have been mobilized long before November 2022 to push the AFU out of HIMARS range for striking any bridges.
Which is why Surovikin was removed in January 2023 and then exiled.
”They didn't blow up the dam. And it wasn't Surovikin who realized anything.
What happened was that they threatened to blow up the dam and Putin made yet another treasonous deal”
* Ukraine blew the dam and drowned some russians downstreams is one theory, the other one that on June 6 2023, the Russians did it to hinder an Ukrainian offensive. No traces of a deal between Putin and Yermak. No traces of a an official threat from Ukraine to blow the dam/bridges.
* The retreat from Cherson happened in nov 2022, 7 months before the blew-up (so I wrote it sloppy in my comment - because I mixed it up with the Antonov bridge). It was clear that Russia couldnt defend the westbank of Dniepr and perhaps the focus on the other Oblasts and the threat to Crimea from the north made them to do the retreat, shortening the defensive line. Surovikin was commander then.
* Surovikin was fired in August 2023 primarily because he supported Prigosjin.
>Ukraine blew the dam and drowned some russians downstreams is one theory, the other one that on June 6 2023, the Russians did it to hinder an Ukrainian offensive.
Absolute nonsense. First, lots of Russian soldiers downstream either drowned or barely escaped the flood, i.e. they were caught by surprise. Second, why would Russia blow up its own gigantic dam that will cost many billions to rebuild?
>No traces of a deal between Putin and Yermak. No traces of a an official threat from Ukraine to blow the dam/bridges.
There was no need for an official threat -- there were already repeated strikes on the dam and the Antonov bridge. Unofficially you have no idea what messages were exchanged.
And it wasn't the Ukrainians who blew up the dam, most likely it was done by UK/US special forces with a small nuke floated to the dam from further upstream. It certainly wasn't a HIMARS strike that did it with its puny 100-kg charge -- it was already hit many times that way. To this day no video has been released of the explosion even though videos of the HIMARS strikes from security cameras around the dam were regularly posted prior to that.
>The retreat from Cherson happened in nov 2022, 7 months before the blew-up (so I wrote it sloppy in my comment - because I mixed it up with the Antonov bridge).
You further mixed it up -- the Antonov bridge was blown up by Russia itself as it retreated.
>Surovikin was fired in August 2023 primarily because he supported Prigosjin
Surovikin was appointed commander of the SMO in late September 2022. Then started a serious bombing campaign in October 2022, after the Crimean bridge was blown up. And then when the Ukraining energy system was on the brink of collapsing in early January 2022 he was removed from that position and the strikes stopped. That is what I was referring to.
>It was clear that Russia couldnt defend the westbank of Dniepr
No, it wasn't clear at all. First, there is the matter of what was and wasn't done between March and November. But even in November 2022 a lot could have been done to save the city.
Putin just refused to do it.
Also, notice how Putin never mentioned Kherson after that. With the sole exception of his June 2024 demands. Then he never mentioned it again for the next two years either.
What does that tell us?
It's a regional capital of the Russian Federation, FFS. And the Supreme Commander just ignores its existence and the fact that it is in enemy's hands, never vowing to return it. How absurd is that?
I wrote that Ukraine blew the Dam. You wrote in reply they didnt - they only threatened. I then answered that there are two narratives out there but I of course stand with that Ukraine blew it. Now you argue about that it wasnt Ukraine but US/UK using nukes….
And in Nov 2022 a massive explosion did damage the dam and bridge. It was primarly the rail and road section destroyed. So there was two attacks on the complex - memory fades fast.
The Antonov bridge. Ukraine did everything to blow that bridge. Himars was used. Of course the Russian blew it after withdrawal.
So, in conclusion, the West bank was impossible to defend without proper supply ways.
I understand that the narrative of traitor Putin is your focus and that developments on the front lines up according to that.
I agree fully that Putin abandoned Cherson and pretended to not see it as an issue. I think he, in a pragmatic, way was forced to see the reality (or futility to defend the area). Remember, those where the times when Russian BTG:s hasnt fully learned or adapted to Ukrainian attacks of groups with AT-weapons by hundreds.
If Putin keeps disappearing, it's your chance, Great Marshal, to nip in and take the conduct of the war into your own hands and it will all be over by Christmas (again).
It was bleedin' obvious that any Russian troops on the west bank of the Dneipr could be cut off simply by blowing up the relevant bridges. No need for any conspiracy theories.
It has also been "bleedin' obvious" for five years that any Ukronazis on the east bank of the river would be cut off sumply by blowing up the relevant bridges upstream of Kherson.
And what would be a bigger loss? Less than 10,000 km2 in Kherson or all of the left bank?
So why was blowing up those bridges never threatened in response to the attacks on the Antonov bridge and the Khakhovka dam?
Why was it also never threatened to blow up some of the key dams in the US? Russia could have threatned to blow up the Hoover dam and even sent a conventional Zircon to some cliffside in the Grand Canyon to send a message that it means business. Let's see how the US likes it with Las Vegas, Phoenix and much of Southern California becoming unlivable.
But Putin took the L instead of fighting back. Because victory was never the objective, making yet another shitty deal that would let him preserve his rotten internal system continues to be the goal.
Do you really think that there is no difference between what was Russian territory on the west bank and what is still Ukranian territory on the east bank? Do they look even vaguely similar in size? Nothing is impossible, or even difficult for them that don't have to do it, eh?
I can't decide whether you are being deliberately obtuse or just don't have the ability to see the point I am making. Sigh, I suppose I will have to spell it out. There were relatively few bridges linking the part of Kherson on the west bank to the rest of the oblast. Thus it would be relatively easy for the Ukranian army to attack and destroy the Russian troops stranded on the wrong side of the Dnipr before those bridges could be rebuilt. The same does not apply to the vast Ukranian-held territory on the east bank of the river from the Belarus border to the Russian oblasts in the south.
As for the rest of your comments, I would expect that any Russian soldier reading them would be very thankful that you are just some keyboard warrior filled with the reckless courage of the non-combatant and not in charge of any part of Russian military strategy.
This is the dumbest take I think I've ever read. "Fighting back" by your definition, would be single-handedly generating an actual US public consensus to kill more Russians. Russia has had zero reason for aggressive, desperate kneejerk reactions. Lets just make one the fuck up to get more people killed.
Ah, so once again we have the brilliant logic of "Russia should not fight back when NATO bombs it because then NATO will bomb it" on display here.
Let me remind you what fighting back means here -- it means within a few hours there is no physical NATO presence in Eurasia and nothing to attack Russia with; the only way to attack Russia that the US will have left is with ICBMs, SLBMs and Tomahawks from ships and submarines, i.e. taking it to an all-out exchange.
Which the US will not do because then it will lose everything.
That asymmetry in Russia's favor -- the US fights through proxies and will never sacrifice itself in order to reatliate over the proxies no longer existing, therefore Russia can eliminate the proxies and win the war -- has always existed.
It has so far been very effectively countered by the other asymmetry that works in the West's favor -- the Western elites are fighting this war in order to preserve and enhance their elite position while for the Russian elites fighting the war seriously means jeopardizing their internal position because it cannot be done without going back to some kind of communist system, and that's an absolute anathema.
But that is just a despicable act of treason, not something to take seriously as an argument.
Right, so within a few short hours, Russia will have what? Murdered millions of innocent people, gone down in world history as exactly the type of villian transnational jewry try to paint it as, played DIRECTLY into the hands of eurojew elites desperate to destroy the last faint pulses of europe, and opened the door to nuclear armageddon? All to further cripple a presently dying anglojewish empire and stop a few intermittent, idiotic drone strikes and the odd military assassination? If this is this is your "serious," totally brilliant worldview, what's your joke take?
LOL, you implying here that it's was Putin's call to leave right-bank Kherson. I am amazed by your ability to know what is happening in Kremlin's high security rooms.
It's all much simpler, it's was Surovikin call (and correct one). He is legendary for a reason (and his opala stint, yet utterly successful one, in Africa only proves that)
Stop reading mind of Putin. Just stop. For the love of god.
And stop giving Russian minister of defence capabilities they do not possess. They can't order General Staff anything, it's outside of his purview, it's not US. General Staff Chief >>> Minister of Defence. Period.
>If Russia deploys 12 Tanks at once and as Simplicius suggested, a few dedicated Arena-M defensive vehicles among them, the Ukrainies would need maybe 200 drones to deplete the formation and then another 100-200 to halt the advance. They will need plenty of operators then. Time will be crucial to get deep in to create havoc in the defensive lines
It was certainly true until some time in 2024 that a Soviet tank army would have punched a huge strategic breakthrough even with the AFU having drones, by just crushing the defense lines with mass. Once you get behind the drone units there isn't much to stop you there. Yes, there would be major losses, but you would make a breakthrough. It's not as if the GPW was won the way the American won the first Gulf War.
I am not sure if that is still true today with the further proliferation of drones and the creation of multiple echeloned defense lines on the Ukronazi side.
In the end Russian elites got once again played by the West as the fools that they are with the post-Cold war disarmament. Just as they converted the ships, submarines and military aviation that kept the USSR safe into megayachsts and private jets, so did the tanks turn into expensive limousines. All imported, of course.
The result was that there were no Soviet tank armies ready to punch a hole through the AFU lines. Then the moment of opportunity when that was still possible was characteristically missed.
> Once you get behind the drone units there isn't much to stop you there
There would be other drone units awaiting for you. Modern armies keep reserves in the rear and defend deep precisely to account against potential breakthroughs of the frontline of defence (being called 'front'line for a reason).
Moreover the Russians tried attacking in manoeuvre with tank formations at the start of the conflict, but in all instances they failed even before FPV drones became commonplace, because of Ukrainian access to satellite surveillance. Wherever Russian Russian tanks roamed, they were sitting ducks for artillery and infantry ambushes.
If an armoured spearthrust made any sense, there should be a second wave following, but the drone operators are not one-time use only. After the first wave, they'd see on satellite the second and destroy that as well. I have seen photos and videos of storerooms filled with tens of thousands of drones stacked on top of each other so I'd assume there aren't supply problems
Understand this. But my calculation was that at battle-group of 12 Tanks and a few Simplicius-Arena M-area defenders would absorb about 200 drones. The second echelon would absorb another 200. How many operators do Ukraine have that can manage that amount of drones if the breakthrough goes with some speed. 10-15 minutes of running&battle should achive about 10km of advance and well into the 2nd defenseline.
10 operators cant manage that much drones during that time. I doubt 30 can either.
Its a speculation of course but somehow you need to overwhelm the drone-operators.
Arithmetic checks out. Why haven't they tried this yet with turtle tanks? After all, these also absorb tens of drones before giving out. That's because they cannot gather the followthrough wave of infantry required to compel Ukrainian command to order a sector retreat as the hole in their defence is getting exploited. They cannot gather this infantry group behind the frontlines, because it would be spotted from satellite and destroyed at range beforehand
Infamously they rolled into Kharkov and other cities under strict orders not to fire unless fired on.
Well, they got fired on, from ambushes, and annihilated.
There was also no real systematic effort to suppress anything the way there would have been if it had been a proper operation, because there were no such orders (or rather, Putin went with the red pen through the plan the General Staff had put together and struck all that out), which is how the deal was sealed on the overall fiasco of the first month
God forbid, there were 1.5M inhabitants in Kharkhov, the civilian casualties would have had catastrophic effects on the optics of the SMO. Plus in urban settings the tanks work like cannons with direct fire, the main job is for the infantry. With rifle fire would have been a total carnage and a humanitarian catastrophe.
Ok, I see. Yes, those few GAZ-trucks and light vehicles got smashed pretty quick in Charkov. I dont think Putin ordered these suicidal mission but there where certainly some ”orders of conduct” and a false anticipation of quick capitulation of Ukrainian forces.
Oh, what a crock. The main thrust of the battlefield at the time was artillery, and the only regular-force Russian military to enter Kharkov proper in 2022 were Spetsnaz units which have no armour. No Russian tanks 'rolled into Kharkov' under delusionally-silly ROE or otherwise - are you sure you are talking about this century? The right to self-defense overrides any ROE in any military and you do not need orders to tell you you may fire if fired upon.
The 'ambushes' you speak of occurred on narrow approach highways to Kharkov, where the terrain heavily favoured the defenders. The red-pen strikeouts in the plan and orders not to fire unless first fired upon are just lunatic fantasies in this action-movie script you are writing. There is zero evidence of either of these, while all the elements of the supposedly-wizard defense by the Ukrainians came from the Ukrainians, just as you might expect.
The entire thrust against Kharkov was poorly planned, poorly supported and poorly executed. Russian units abandoned significant numbers of working tanks and other vehicles, which were taken over by the Ukrainians. But there were no tanks 'rolling into Kharkov', and it can hardly be 'infamous' if it never happened. I'm sure you are aware that Putin's state-service career was in the KGB, most of his assignment in East Germany. He was never a military officer of any reasonable description, certainly not a tank officer. Why do you imagine he would personally vet battle plans for the armoured forces? Or the artillery, or the Navy, or any other aspect of warfare he knows nothing about from practical experience? Christ, you're like that biographer for 'The Duke Of Death' in "Pale Rider".
Donbass fortress belt, build for almost a decade, was designed to exactly prevent tank formations punching holes. Just remember how the big UKR summer offensive got blow apart. Mainly by well placed mobile ATGM teams + mines (and helicopters?). This was even before drones.
Did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why the Donbass fortress belt had to be attacked head on when there were 600 km of wide open space between Kiev and Kramatorsk to go through?
Might have been the shelling of Novorussia. Flanking the fortressbelt or invading Lissabon would simply have taken to long but i am shure you will enlighten my little pessant brain.
The placement is misleading, the canister fires upward but the shrapnel still kills objects which come even from low attitude. Just check the bottom reference video I posted where the canister shoots up but kills the ATGM traveling much lower below it.
Ok, I was sloppy noticing that. So it gets out overhead the tank but sligtly to the side and then explode in a cupola of shrapnel with the right direction. The other one was directed overhead. Wonder how they solved that!
The green maggot in Kiev and the human devil Mileicocksky in occupied Palestine and sundry freeloading chosenite psychopathic scum living off their bankrupt $lumville tax cattle are not long for this world. The IOU fiat filth ex Saudimercan toilet paper dollah is swirling the crud caked bowl of its filthy history. Karma time for the anglozionazi empire of filth and the parasite that owns it.
Now I cannot be bothered to read the whole exchange you had with GM, but given that the Kakhovka dam was blown up just a few weeks before the start of the vaunted 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporozhzhia, with hindsight I'd say it is Russia that reaped the most benefits.
In fact, the consequent flooding went mostly over lower ground areas on the eastern side of the big river, with the result of shortening the Russian defensive line and anchoring the cover of their left flank, also against possible AFU amphibious operations from their side of the reservoir landing behind the Russian line.
Russians obviously knew very well in advance the offensive was going to come, and the clear priority at the time was to relieve the western outskirts of Donetsk city still in the hands of the AFU. Marinka and Avdivka were fortified outposts from which the Ukros liberally shot artillery rounds at the Donbas capital. The Russians bagged those in the following Autumn/Winter campaign, after the counteroffensive exhausted itself. The AFU a part from the Sudzha campaign never quite took the initiative to that extent again, from then on limiting themselves to local attacks in Chasov Yar, Kupiansk and towards villages in the newly opened Dnepropetrovsk front.
Kherson, in comparison to the Donbas line, still is a secondary concern, and more so considering it is located in a vulnerable open steppe position with the large lower course of the Dnepr severing it from Russian controlled territory behind it, but for a few bridges. Its defence would cost preciously limited efforts, reserves and resources.
Plausible it is. As things were, someone blew/damaged the road and railtracks on the Dam in nov 2022. I dont remember if the retreat was complete or not. The Antonov bridge was attacked by the Ukrainians the whole time.
Russia probably then blew it when retreat was complete.
And could be that they drowned their own people in June 2023 to hinder any attempts to cross the river from Ukraine safeguarding Russian left flank.
Its irrelevant when discussing with GM because his points are very different from others. Its more about treason, hidden US/UK nukes, and what could have been. My point is that the Dam/Bridges was a weakness when Russia was on the Westbank of Dniepr but became a defense when they was on the Eastern bank. Blown they represented a defense for both Ukrainian and Russian surprise attacks. Left they would enable attack for both sides. So both sides could have blowned them.
I largely agree with you, except for the timing of the attack on the dam coinciding with the start of the counteroffensive makes me think it was the Russians.
That's because you weren't following events at the time.
Russian soldiers downstream drowned and had to run for their lives with the waters rapidly flooding in when it happened, i.e. they didn't know about it and had not been pulled to higher ground.
I am one of the earliest subscribers to Simplicius' Garden of Knowledge.
A quick check online tells that Russia acknowledged 59 deaths due to the flood after the dam explosion. No military casualty is specified. The only account I can find is this one https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1778407/ukraine-war-dam-attack-russia-putin in which Ukrainian troops stationed on the other side report having seen Russian soldiers being swept away by water from their positions. The piece goes on noting how the dam was the only connection between the two sides of the Dnepr from Zaporizhzia down to the sea. Plans for the Ukrainian 2023 counteroffensive had to be significantly revisited because of the dam explosion.
They have repeatedly proven they can mass produce military hardware. The Soviet legacy. And if they cannot cover the needs alone they can always get help from N. Korea and possibly China.
"Russia will experiment and find something that works to kill drone swarms. I am certain."
They already have it. They just lack the will/desire/need to use it. The simplest way of killing drone swarms is depopulating the countries that make those drone swarms. The only reason Kiev has any drones at all is that Russia for geopolitical reasons has decided not to depopulate the countries that are manufacturing those drones (or drone components for assembly in Nazi-held parts of Ukraine).
Depopulate 20mil plus people is quite task. I am happy Russia is not willing to pay the political price to do that. First of all they are not Israel / West and second of all there are extensive family relations between Ukr and Ru. On top of that a few basment drohne factorys are very simple to hide.
Across the UK and all Europe? Nope, it's easy. Takes about 15 minutes, max. Well, to be completely fair it is somewhat of a task but not in the sense you intended: the hard part is the target planning to only eradicate 20 million instead of 200 million while you're annihilating the military infrastructure of the states which attacked Russia. Killing off 200 million or more of them is trivial. Keeping it limited to a mere 20 million takes real skill.
"second of all there are extensive family relations between Ukr and Ru. "
Oh, I didn't mean Nazi-held Ukraine. I meant the countries that are *making* those drone swarms, and them ain't be Nazi-held Ukraine, as they say in the US.
Excluding utterly irrelevantly low "home" production, the determinative majority of drones said to be "built" in Nazi-held Ukraine are simply assembled from parts and major subassemblies built in the US, UK and Europe or are fully built and assembled outside of Nazi-held Ukraine. The "basement drone factory" thing is pure propaganda for morons if you think they're doing more than unpacking foreign production and doing very simple assembly in those basements. Without foreign production, where the things are actually built, they don't get no stinkin' drone swarms. (By God, it's fun to use American idiom... I feel like I'm right back in the US again doing that...)
That's where this is heading. As Russia slowly but steadily eradicates the Nazi state in Ukraine the Europeans, UK, and (possibly) the US will struct into a suicidal attack on Russia that will trigger their annihilation as nation states. "Depopulation" is hyperbole because they won't actually be completely depopulated. But it will be at least a decimation in the true sense (1/10th) of the Roman word.
I am not shure if i follow your thinking. Somehow the term depopulate gives me Israel vibes. Not my cup of cay. That said, as a German in exile i would rater prefer a Oreshnik on Rammstein / Drohne factorys in south Germany / the NATO logistic hubs in Romania and Poland but i reckon that is all crazy talk / thinking. Those non Galician Babushkas / woman and remaing teens and kids would have gone if they could have. They dont deserve any more stress and suffering. Once again depopulation is buzzword which dose not work. Look at Gaza. Europe(Poland, Hungary, Romania) will simply close the borders just like Egypt dose with Gaza.
You beat me to it as I watch in amazement the small robots that have lasers on them in an exercise a few months ago and if you can get a good power cell a laser would do the trick with rapid bursts and good solid state batteries could provide the energy. We all know how far ahead Russia is in build and design.
Within the atmosphere the laser power is limited by absorption in the air ( high optical power density causes reflective index change leading to self focusing leading to ionization of air molecules = power loss)
Also lasers are better suited against stationary targets or those which are closing on a steady bearing without maneuvering; a laser, unless it is a very powerful one where weight and portability are not considerations, requires a bit of time to focus on an area so as to raise spot heat above the mean hull penetration level (MHPL).
Basically needs a stable firing solution to keep the laser spot at cm2 sized spot, which is not easy. If you can aim that well even a 22LR bullet will take out a drone , for a fraction of the cost and size of a high power laser and its power supply.
Reminds me of the high energy X-ray lasers proposal as part of Star Wars - it needed a nuclear explosion to power it which the top brass wasn’t really told about until president Reagan was briefed
LASER weapons may eventually have their day, in space or at very high altitude. In fact, I've done the math on what those thousands of existing Starlink satellites with rather accurate aiming systems and 5 watt or so output com LASER systems could do if all the ones in visual range fired at the same target at around their LEO altitude. I would guess someone else has thought of doing this too, whenever satellite on satellite warfare commences.
But at near sea level atmosphere density, with weather? And with present day lack of sufficiently portable power supplies? LASERs are a non starter.
But who knows, maybe someone will figure out cheap, safe to carry solid fueled chemically pumped LASERs capable of fast cycling & self cooling with a light output in the range of the energy a medium rifle cartridge propellant load can deliver. Then we get our ray guns...
The 2 problems with combating drones is 1) The volume of production and 2)Low cost.
They do have a flaw though and it's they aren't very durable.
A system like this makes the most sense. I suspect they'll make those charges into something that can be quickly replaced like a magazine of bullets. Sort of like loading a pez dispenser.
Theoretically, this negates cheap drones. The charges are likely cheaper or similarly priced to a drone and they don't need to be super precise or powerful to knock out a drone. The tank basically spitting out a cantine full of explosives should do the trick.
Question becomes how do you operate troops around it. You don't need some grunt trying to run up and jump on the trank for a ride and catch a charge in his lap.
Simply tell dismounted Infantry, or whomever, to stay away from the tanks. Or maybe the system can be turned off if dismounted friendlies are in the area. Maybe not maybe - I'm sure they can switch it off; how else would the crew mount/dismount?
Doctrine/SOPs would change to accomodate the system.
The key question will be cost ratios. Even if it takes 100 drones to kill a tank, if the tank is more expensive and takes longer to make than 100 drones, it’s still a worthwhile exchange, in theory.
That’s on the strategic level. On the tactical / operational level, there will be the second question of how many drones are actually immediately at hand versus how many tanks are attacking. If attacking tanks can soak up enough drones to deplete what’s locally available, that has operational value beyond the attritional effects at the strategic level.
Didn't even read the post, just scrolled right down to read Generalissimo Mangiamerda's very astute and totally impartial analysis of why it's complete bullshit.
Ah, yes, what is a few thousand Russian civilians dead. No big deal.
Russian lives don't matter.
The trend also doesn't matter (compare how many were dying six months ago and how many now).
The reason 27 million died under Stalin is that he had no military-technical means to prevent it.
In 2022 there was no reason why more than 20-30,000 Russians should have died in order to take physical control over the whole of Ukraine all the way to Uzhgorod and Novovolinsk.
And in 2014 that would have been a single-digit thousands, if even that.
That it is hundreds of thousands now is entirely on Putin. For whom Russian lives don't matter either. Only oligarch lives and comfort and Jewish lives do.
Lmao. As I said twist like a pretzel all you want. Nobody said Rus lives do not matter. Cut the crap.
You frame your position as if he would be the only one with nukes. If everybody had nukes like today, and Stalin used them, there would be more than 27 million dead Soviets.
There were no options to take the whole Ukraine in 2022. This is laughable position. Even less so in 2014.
Russia can safely wipe out all of Europe and physically evict the US from Eurasia, there will be no all-out exchange, and if there is one, then it was always inevitable anyway. There is literally nothing to lose here. That will also absolutely make sure nobody ever dares fire a single shell across the border into Russia, from any direction.
It isn't being done because that would be the end of the Russian oligarchy in its current form.
That is not a good reason why it is not being done. I should not have to explain that.
In short, as Andrei Martyanov sometimes says, Russia turned out not to be a gas station masqueraded as a country, but rather a vast military academy with an immense training camp, all of it masqueraded as a country. And no charlatan or well-paid NATO bigwig realized this beforehand.
No, the actual shift is from a gas station with nukes to a former gas station without nukes.
Yesterday Tobolsk, today Orsk. Every single day some large petrochemical installation is burning. Deeper and deeper.
The Komsomolsk-on-Amur refinery is also burning today, and obviously no drones flew there from Ukraine, but they could have been fired from somewhere nearby. There is no clarification on what caused it, and one can't help but be suspicious.
Meanwhile the threshold for firing the nukes in response to the strategic bombing of Russian territory that was defined by Putin's own fucking nuclear doctrine and Putin's own repeated very public statements was crossed years ago and is violated every single day. But no nukes have been fired, i.e. Russia effectively doesn't have them.
2) What is your suggestion? Keep taking hits until Russia is destroyed conventionally?
3) It was Putin, not me, who said "Why should the world exist if there is no Russia in it". And who signed the current nuclear doctrine that he then refused to follow.
1. No, you don't realise it because you think it's not true. That's why I pointed it out, because I think it is true. One of us is going to be wrong. Do you really want to find out the hard way? What if you were wrong, are you going to say "Aw, shucks" as you die from radiation poisoning?
2. Unlike you, I don't pretend to be a military or political expert, so I have no suggestions.
3. No he didn't and what is the relevance of that, anyway?
The relevance is that if you refuse to follow your own official nuclear doctrine, you have completely destroyed the deterrence status of your country.
The nuclear doctrines exist for a reason, and for that reason they were also taken extremely seriously.
Now Putin has made a total mockery of that most serious matter.
The consequence is that that yesterday 13 people were killed and another 80 wounded, many of them critically, in a NATO bombing some 1200 km deep inside Russia. And this is trending towards becoming a daily occurrence now
Luckily, Russia's nuclear deterrence is not aimed at people like you. The people that it is aimed at realise that all you need for deterrence is nuclear weapons and the ability to use them before similar weapons are used against you. This Russia has in spades, no matter what Putin says.
Putins at the VERY LEAST could have made a conventional strike into NATO territory and then evaluated what the response posture was.
But he does nothing, clinging to the hope that the EU will undergo a political transformation or economic collapse before Russia gets eviscerated by EU drone production.
Putin is a sort of clown now, really. His speeches are just fantastic of course, but none of them have any weight. They're meaningless. Everyone now knows, including Turkey, that you can kill Russians and attack Russia without any consequences.
this last point is the problem- no investment was made in deterrence against the EU since the INF was abrogated by the JUSA in response to the Iskander-K (a ground launched Kalibr).
EU invested in Ukranus as its long range solution to hit Russia.
The Iskander-K wasn't REMOTELY WORTH losing this treaty over if RF was not going to take advantage of the situation. They had from 2019 on and yet the Iskander-M sits still at 500km range tho they may have gotten one out to 650 at some point according to AFU. Still wholly inadequate.
Realistically it's not just Western wonder waffle which turns to shit after 4-6 weeks, so who knows if the Arena-M armour will lead to a Hollywood style mechanized armour assault. Probably not. Those Russians keep avoiding low IQ actions, how dare they!!!
It's interesting how few people, even after 4 years, haven't caught on to the fact that the USA and Russia don't want to use their newest and best tech on the battlefield, especially at the beginning of a conflict, so their enemy cannot study and create countermeasures. It's why I believe the USA won't bring out a Patriot or thaad version 2.0 unless it's in an existential direct war with a rival (Iran doesn't count). I'm sure the USA has sci-fi tech, discombobulated bodies tech, but they'll never reveal it unless absolutely necessary.
So the Arena-M system increases the shelf life of obsolete tech. Russia will retrofit T72s and avoid using T90s because it's all a show and tell game.
Just because the future of war is robotics and missiles doesn't mean the human meat grinder can be replaced right now, and until this happens, aircraft carriers and tanks and armor in general sounds better than not having it, even if it's obsolete.
If anything, everyone should be more respectful of the dead.
I think the satellite system is more interesting. The Russians shifted their talk about an ongoing conflict with the West recently and concurrently we're learning of them concretely upgrading and expanding their systems and tech (and we see the damage Iran did to the USA in the middle east, obviously no help from Russia or China pfffft). The West, thanks to 360° and plenty of mentally latent people, has talked a great game since a long time, and also been critical of tech bros because hating grabs headlines, but except for maybe the USA and France, I don't see much hardware tech systems development and expansion, especially top end stuff like satellites. So it means European civilians will suffer humiliation and whatever demonstrative act the Russians do to avoid ww3.
I really pity Germans. Before the Ukraine war, Germany's reputation was excellent for industrial tech. Today they're pfffft. The idea of retooling their Audi and Porsche plants to produce inexistent wonder waffle military tech, maybe in 3-5 years from now, it's low IQ. Merz looks incredibly fascinatingly low IQ. And he's black rock. It makes me wonder. So I pity Germany being ruled by such a pathetic political class (then I look at Italy and I think, oh brothers, we're so screwed).
But who needs that expensive crap when the "smart" phone jabbing zombies are already "crowd controlled". Look at this vertical pork comedy of the absurd in Britland as an import midget pig goes full SS and the sheeple howl but do nothing.
This war is based on using only negotiated technologies. Drones and robots would become "useless junk" if EMPs and EMFs (Electro-Motive Pulses and fields) were used. We saw it all yeas ago in The Matrix. The problem is, both sides have the technology and the strongest versions of EMPs are nuclear and they take out entire civilizations such that 90% of the target population is dead in one year - like US and Canada. Russia also tries to function under the rules of war while NATO does not. Neither side uses napalm or phosphorus on the battlefield, but NATO relies on terrorizing populations, just like Israel.
Actually, I don't think technology is Russia's problem - TARGETING IS. Look at the effectiveness of Iranian hits versus Russia's, or Ukraine's success hitting Wildberries. They are hitting capital. The Odessa Port is capital yes, but what about hitting data centers, communications nodes, and most of all banking. What Russia is doing is not affecting US and European capital markets. All wars are BANKER WARS, and we all know Black Rock and the Rothschild's banks (Metz and ) are directly involved. There is no money without computers, wires, and transmission lines. And Bill Gates? Isn't Gates represented somehow in Ukraine, have some vulnerable computers somewhere? In fact, targeting Epstein related oligarchs of the West like Gates could be very effective. Russia certainly has a biotechnology war crimes case against him that actually included the involvement of Epstein. And then there is very vulnerable Musk who is both Epstein'ed and full of vulnerable technology including Starlink. I would be as happy to see Putin pound our Epstein'ed rulers penniless as the Ukrainians would be to see the Russians bomb the police stations - so why don't they??? Kiev airport is defenseless. The government is defenseless yet functioning diplomatically, with staged actors, with terrorist drones.
Having an effective PR campaign like the Iranians that point out the Epstein connections filling Western governments would be quite effective. Problem is, Russia Today and most of Russia's news outlets are compromised by people who want to criticize Saudi Arabia for their capital punishment techniques rather than Israel for Genocide. In one article, an RT interviewee threatened Putin from Israel. Israel (and maybe Turkey) is Russia's kryptonite, but they will defeat Ukraine.
Why doesn't Turkey cut off its flow of oil to Israel? Where do they get their oil? 100% comes from Russia I hear, and much of the rest goes to Europe. Hummm. What if Russia cut the flow of oil to Turkey during Hormuz crisis?
Well Russia is intentionally not hitting anything outside Ukraine and there are reasons, which we can agree or disagree with.
As for the emp stuff, well, that's just ww3 escalation. I agree with the general opinion there is no such thing as a tactical nuke and the escalation resulting from the use of such weapons will almost certainly escalate to ww3 gloves off. So personally I'm glad no one has been retarded enough to use them.
I think you're mistaken on the targeting. My understanding is Russia is highly precise, or else we'd have a lot more civilian deaths. Ukraine hitting the wildberries depots makes great PR videos but isn't going to actually affect the war.
Also, war isn't like a Hollywood movie. Years ago I also thought Russia would shock and awe its way to victory, but eventually I just decided Simplicius has done some great analysis over the years, as have many independent analysts, and I'm not going to second guess the Russian strategy. About six months ago I started to suspect Russia was intentionally slow rolling the war to bleed the West dry.
Russia's lack of a PR war using Lego videos has drawbacks, certainly, but they're winning a lot of hearts and minds by using the minimalist strategy and the West, by being maximalist on narratives and propaganda have lost an incredible amount of credibility. Russia knows it can't win a PR war inside the West, but outside the West, they win by not saying much as the West discredits itself. I'm not saying it's the best strategy, but it's not bad considering that by doing nothing the West is loosing the PR war. I keep wondering how Western audiences who hear about Ukraine constantly winning by retreating are going to react if the front lines collapse.
Turkei is a part of NATO. Erdogan talks a big game but at the end of the day is just as corrupt as anyone and will do as he's told. Some say eventually he'll try to take Cyprus and loose, then get dethroned and the Kamalists will take over. Who knows.
Essentially we are in agreement on technology. It is a contained war, except the West cheats. So no EMPs or nukes and we have a drone dominated go slow battlefield. But Iran didn't win the war (or at least the initial battles) based on the ground. It won by targeting capital markets and capital intensive oil and water infrastructure. These wars all hurt European, Arab, and Pacific Rim economies, but not the US's because US markets are rigged and the money from Europe is running to us.
The second point is that our government, if not the world, is being run by the Rothschild's through the Epstein mafia of rapists, murders, torturers, cannibals, and Satanists including Trump, the Clintons, Musk, Gates, and the Royal Family. Epstein said he served the Rothschilds. All wars are banker wars. Do you and does Putin see the real enemy here? Target the Epstein class in PR and destroy their Ukrainian assets and the world will cheer.
The bond market will hurt the US. The US bailed out Japan in the currency market so Japan would not have to sell US Treasury bonds. If the gulf states cannot sell enough oil, they will have to sell the bonds to maintain their standard of living. The selling causes interest rates to rise. If rates go to 5%, the US goes bankrupt and no more reserve currency.
Yeah I also think financial markets are interesting these days, as is the reverse yen carry trade.
I don't think the US goes bankrupt at 5%. I think human financial creativity and ingenuity will find a way. For instance, using Japan as an example shows us the Treasury department could just grow their balance sheet to infinity by outright buying equities and all the bonds.
The problem is whether anyone has a choice to break away. Like no one ever considers how the Saudi Dinar is pegged to the USD, or the swap arrangements between the USA and Dubai. Even the Euro unofficially is pegged to the USD. Did everyone notice DJT threatening Switzerland yesterday?
The plan is CBDCs. Trust the plan as there is no alternative.
I suggest not making a big soup of everything all the time. A good rule of thumb is power is always hidden.
On Iran I have a contrarian opinion. I think eventually Israel will go for Samson and it'll end the war and 50/50 bring ruin on itself.
I suggest you look into the Orthodox Christianity prophecies. According to these Russia is the eschaton, which Thiel is trying to mimic by blaming Greta.
The same problem as with lasers - energy! Even with the most modern accumulators, these robots have very limited operational time. To use this robots in a defined environment is possible, like BMW or Tesla are testing right now, there are charging stations everywhere or the robot is connected to power cables.
Necessity is a great motivator for tech innovation. A great case in point is what you mentioned about lasers. Anti aircraft/missile lasers have been under development for decades and occasionally we still hear about them, but on the battlefield they're still using interceptors and c-ram's etc. so.
"Anti aircraft/missile lasers have been under development for decades and occasionally we still hear about them, but on the battlefield they're still using interceptors and c-ram's etc. so."
That's because wishing doesn't change physics. The problem with lasers as weapons is that it's easy to defeat them using... mirrors. Lasers are just light. A good mirror (like the mirrors which are used to aim lasers) bounces them away without being destroyed in the process. Polish your ordnance to a mirror finish and laser light reflects off them.
So instead of lasers the focus is on directed energy weapons that don't use visible light but other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. That comes with all sorts of technical challenges, like making tightly collimated beams, steering/aiming them, getting enough energy into the thing, and, again... reflectance.
It turns out that for battlefield use a really fantastic directed energy system with a good balance of real-world factors is concentrating kinetic energy into a solid phase material and flinging that solid phase material at the target... that would be a bullet or other projectile.
There are three other problems with energy weapons.
1) Supplying it with energy, to start with. The Pentagon's experiments mostly have involved Navy ships, where huge amounts of power can be continually supplied.
2) Heat dissipation. They're still fairly inefficient in turning electricity to light, and rapidly become the biggest infrared target in the area. Swarm a laser system with three dozen drones and it's likely to need to shut down to cool before the job is done.
3) Materials to build the things. China controls **ALL** the strategic mineral supply chains to fabricate high tech weaponry, and they have no interest in helping to build the weapons we want to use against them.
Yeah, the energy source is certainly an issue. To get around that there have been a few ideas for one-shot lasers in highly specialized applications that are pumped by explosive sources.
There's a technology for creating short, extremely strong energy pulses. The idea is you initiate a magnetic field in a coil of wire using a small electric current (from a battery) and then you collapse the field with high explosives where the extraordinarily rapid and powerful collapse converts the power of the high explosives into a much larger current. They can be small, often as small as cylinders a foot long and half a foot in diameter and for a brief moment they can generate power enough for a small town. Bigger ones can produce even more power for that brief moment.
The US and everybody else have fooled around with ideas to connect those things to one-shot lasers for a one-shot device you could put in orbit to take pot shots at satellites, warheads, and so on. There are still the practical limitations on aiming, the easy defeat of light-frequency lasers with reflective coatings and so on. But such one-shot lasers would be useful for very specialized applications such as blinding remote sensing satellites like the very high res, multibillion dollar US photoreconnaissance satellites by overloading their imaging chips.
Another, more dramatic idea, is pumping x-ray layers with the energy flow from a nuclear primary. You get a single shot of a very, very powerful x-ray beam that would be hard to reflect. In theory, if you could aim the thing and otherwise have a rapid enough response cycle and be able to discriminate warheads from decoys it could burn through a warhead or warhead bus during coast phase up in space. But such a thing could be easily defeated by launching plenty of cheap warheads plus decoys, as those would be a lot less expensive than all the aiming and other infrastructure required to keep such an x-ray weapon in space for many years and yet be ready for use on a moment's notice.
Of course, one-shot devices that are explosive generator pumped lasers or nuclear explosive pumped x-ray lasers do NOT make sense for naval, air force or army weapons. So that's probably a guarantee they'll get funded for a billion or two in the US.
Corruption destroys everything in the West. Apart from astronomical costs, the engineers and workers simply have no incentive and no will any more to work for the epstein class. They just work-to-rule. So, I really think the NATO defense industry is not able to develop anything useful any more.
The purpose of any defense system is to increase survivability. If the Arena-M's are taking out 7 FPVs per vehicle, that is significant because it takes 2 to 4 operators to send in these 7 FPVs - much less the overall 20 actually needed for a kill.
No doubt the Arena-M designers will now look at ways to increase ammunition capacity.
As for armored assaults: it isn't the drones per se that make armored assaults risky - it is anti-tank mines. The fact that Ukraine is focusing so much on FPVs and so little on mines, is just another example of their misguided military industrial focus. Let's not forget: the primary reason the Ukrainian "Drive to Crimea" was stopped cold by the anti-tank mines of the Surovikin line. Anti-tank mines don't need operators and they're certainly much cheaper than these FPV drones.
It's a cat/mouse game. I don't think we've heard the end of it. I think it's curious we're still seeing old tanks retooled and not the T-90s. I think this is an interesting data point.
Tbh I don't think it's reasonable to say mines (or shoulder RPGs) are more lethal than FPVs. Your view discounts logistics and training operators, and mines can be cleared and are static barriers. I think all tech are tools have their pros/cons.
I also don't think the Ukrainian assault failed just because of mines. But who knows maybe you're right on this.
Mines are not the end all, be all but they are a critical part of defenses. Clearing mines, especially if there is artillery/FPV/CAS behind it, is very difficult, slow and painful.
As for the tanks: the T72 hull is basically the same as the T90. Why not use the hull and upgrade the gun and defenses?
Mines also don't need operators, not really, and certainly far fewer than FPV drones.
I am not saying there is no role for FPV drones - there is. But it is far, far less than the end-all, be-all that Ukraine has made it out to be.
Nor would I accept that FPV drones are any less of a logistic challenge than mines. Among other things, huge percentages of drone motors, batteries, control systems etc are sourced from China - not made in Ukraine whereas I am 100% sure that Russia makes every last part in their anti-tank mines, down to the last screw.
As for the Drive to Crimea: given that this entire campaign was predicated on speed and assault power, it is very safe to say that the mine fields built around the Surovikin line completely fucked that strategy up.
I think it's important to separate the presidential administration and the USA more broadly. There's many factions.
I think there's many possibilities for what's up in Iran. For sure this is the end of the unipolar moment which started in 1989, but it's not the end of American hegemony.
Consider the possibility, however remote, of the USA trying to flush out China and/or Russia, or both, to give it causus belli for instance.
I keep repeating the story of the B2. It's interesting because it's real. The B2 was unveiled to the public during the first Gulf war in Iraq in 1991. It was totally unsuited for that war (the desert heat degraded the cloaking tech). The problem was the B2 entered production in 1983 and had been created to bomb Moscow, and the USAF reasoned they could only keep it a secret for a limited time. For it to enter production in 1983 means prototypes were flying in the 70s and it was being designed in the 50s and 60s, with early prototypes flying in the 60s.
Now think back to the panic over lights in the sky in November 2024. Realistically they were all drones, plus maybe some space aliens, who knows. Point is, we're on a need to know basis and we will never know before they tell us. So maybe sci-fi tech doesn't exist, or maybe there's tech already around that's even worse than nukes but it's all conspiracy theory so don't believe the tin foil hat brigade, except when it turns out many decades later they were correct.
That's no longer the case in 2026. The US has outsourced its manufacturing and is increasingly being overtaken by China in technology. The US is more of a financialized economy than an industrial / technology based economy. That's also why the US is struggling with hypersonic missiles like the Kinzhal from Russia and building something comparable or replacing Chinese rare earths.
The B2 was from a different era when the US led the world in technology (in the case of the B2, it led in radar absorbent materials and computer technology - the B2 is not naturally aerodynamically stable). It's also a highly flawed bomber because it's so expensive and the flight to maintenance ratio is so poor.
The closest thing that we have seen to some "Skunkworks" project is actually the Russians with the Oreshnik missile. The Oreshnik missile is a game changer because it cannot be detected by the US SBIRS system, except briefly on launch and during the descent stage.
Again, the US is in an existential war for its hegemony. Losing to Russia and Iran will fundamentally change the US position in the world order that it has enjoyed since the USSR broke up. If there was some secret weapon, it would have been deployed against Iran.
There's a reason why Zelensky is so desperate abd begging for weapons and money all the time.
There's also a reason why the Trump administration is flailing and making incoherent messages they are not going to be able to back up to the point where TACO’s a meme.
Well, Ukraine is in a total war for survival, so it makes sense Z would do whatever it takes to get money and weapons.
Strategically the USA lost the Iran war after 48 hours. The unipolar moment has ended. I'm not sure, but I think in previous articles even Simplicius has addressed this. USA Western hemisphere hegemony is a separate matter altogether.
I think it's useful to separate the DJT administration from the MICC from the USA from other internal and external factions of the USA, etc.
USA has thrown everything it has in its arsenal against Iran except nukes you can bet on that.🎯
usa has no wonder weapons thats hollywood fantasy , the jews have made certain everything that can be used has been used against Iran including War Crimes against humanity.
Remember how the anglo-american-judeo establishment fights , it fire bombs and terrorises, lets see how civilians fared in ie Tokyo , pre nukes.
The most devastating U.S. firebombing of Tokyo occurred on the night of March 9–10, 1945, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths. This single raid is often cited as the deadliest conventional bombing in history, surpassing even the immediate death toll of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
Key facts about this event:
· Scale of Attack: 279 B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries on the city in under three hours.
· Damage: The firestorm destroyed 16 square miles of the city and left approximately 1 million people homeless.
· Casualty Variation: While the figure is commonly placed at over 100,000, some historical accounts estimate the death toll was around 83,000–86,000. This variation often stems from different contemporary reporting methods, but the event is universally acknowledged as a catastrophe of immense proportions.
Lets see Germany
The Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany, carried out by the USAAF and RAF, resulted in an estimated 600,000 to 1 million German civilian deaths .
The most notorious single event was the bombing of Dresden (Feb 13-15, 1945). While Nazi propaganda inflated the figure to 200,000, a historical commission later confirmed approximately 25,000 casualties .
· Cologne (1942): ~45,000 made homeless, relatively fewer casualties due to shelters .
This campaign was controversial—the total civilian losses exceeded all US and UK airmen killed over Germany (~83,000) , and today such area bombing could be classified as a war crime .
Back to Iran
You're likely referring to a report about the U.S. "Operation Midnight Hammer" strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities (June 2025).
One pilot described the explosion at the Fordow facility as "like the sun had burst out of the mountains," noting the light and fire "did not feel real". This is very similar to atomic bomb descriptions—a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb test was recorded as "500 times brighter than the sun", and eyewitnesses said the Hiroshima blast "outshone the sun".
However, Operation Midnight Hammer used conventional bombs—specifically, 14,000-kg GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) dropped by B-2 stealth bombers. The blinding flash came from conventional explosives striking a fortified mountain target, not a nuclear detonation.
The EU should have stayed the EEC becaue its doomed to fail economically when you dont combine the finances.
Here is Martin W Armstrongs take :
Core Structural Failure: No Debt Consolidation
Armstrong’s primary critique is that the euro was created without consolidating national debts into a single European/federal debt (the “Hamiltonian model” that worked for the early United States).
• Each member state kept its own sovereign debt. Euro-denominated national bonds then served as banking-system reserves. This left disparities intact: stronger countries (e.g., Germany) vs. weaker ones (Greece, Italy, Spain, and ultimately France as a bigger risk). 
• Without a true national debt, there is no single interest-rate market or deep capital market comparable to U.S. Treasuries. Investors still treat members separately (“Do I want Germany, Italy, or France?”), so the euro cannot compete as a reserve currency with the dollar. 
• He says Helmut Kohl (Germany) insisted on no consolidation because a referendum would have failed; officials told him they would introduce the currency first (“Phase I”) and handle debt later (“Phase II”). Phase II never happened. 
• Result: Brussels dictates fiscal rules to members without true federalization, creating ongoing budget crises, bailouts, and political friction. The system cannot survive long-term.
In late July 2026, the United States conducted a rare coordinated currency intervention with Japan, in which the New York Fed sold euros (rather than dollars) 👈🤝from U.S. reserves to buy Japanese yen on behalf of the Treasury, helping push the yen higher from near 40-year lows around 164 per dollar. This first joint U.S.-Japan effort to strengthen the yen since 1998 was designed to curb excessive volatility without signaling a weaker-dollar policy, though it was executed without prior notice to the European Central Bank and has since seen some of the yen’s gains partially reverse as markets tested further official support.
EU: “thankyou USA we will go broke for ukraine and you can laugh behind our back's”
When they wanted to save money by closing the mental institution's decades ago and sending all the inmates on to the streets not a few went into politics and are in charge in the west , thats the only conclusion i can come to with regards to the state of affairs today.
May I suggest a swarm of magnetic drones, about 20 cm in diameter each, charging on the body of the tank (solar?), then swarming around it in protective posture? They would take on and land to charge, in a permanent buzzing cloud around the tank. Trucks full of them would come behind to replenish exhausted supplies. Each tank could have 30-50 explosive drones.
Interspersed with dedicated Arena-M vehicles that are also equipped with EW at a ratio of 4 or 5 to 1 withe armored vehicles and tanks also carrying the Arena-M with a few turtles in the front would be quite the assault group.
>Putiata confirmed the units told him that one Arena system destroyed 7 FPVs and that on average it took up to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank.
So how is that better than the turtle/hedgehog tanks? We have seen plenty reports of those taking dozens of drones to disable.
And why did those disappear too?
>the only reason the tanks were hit was due to the total expenditure of the Arena-M canister ammunition:
Well, duh. There are too many drones and no solution that relies on a limited magazine will truly work. You need something that can shoot down a practically unlimited number of drones.
If we were to fantasize, and Russia is best positioned here, having both actually developed a functional 1K17 back in Soviet times and having the small reactor technology today at a level nobody else has, one could develop a super armored ultraheavy nuclear powered tank with dozens of lasers that can shoot in parallel. And even that will not be a solution, entirely aside from how many years it would take to develop and put in production in significant numbers, because it will still be vulnerable to missiles and to the destruction of the fragile sensors on the outside.
The only solution to the drone problem is to deny the enemy access to drones. It has been true since day one, it remains true today.
>In short, it sounds like the Arena system essentially shot down everything in sight and only after running out of ammo were the tanks able to be hit.
Yeah, just like Russian AD is the best in the world and shoots everything down until it is overwhelmed. And then we end up with drones making it to Tobolsk and Omsk.
Because you can't win a war by just sitting in the corner and taking punches. You have to actively fight back at some point. But Russian leadership doesn't want to do it for reasons that, if they were ever to be sufficiently widely understood, would have the whole Russian elite hanging from lampposts the next day.
The UK ambassador, a former commander-in-chief disguised as a war strategist? NATO's 20th-millennium weapons, which have never been dismantled except in low-level exercises, and the warfare of this same organization, designed to divert funds, was incapable of subduing peasants in sandals in all its conflicts. This former commander-in-chief was unable to drive the Russians out of Ukraine despite having three to four times the weaponry and troop superiority. All this is very academic, but it doesn't work on the ground. All these experts that Simpli presents in every article will be experts in cosmology tomorrow. Since 2015, we've been presented with Ukraine's 40th-millennium military technology, and now its experts in the art of war and weaponry of a nation that, in fact, disappeared as a result of the war. I've never read or heard a serious analysis from any quarter, and for good reason: it would require the ability to integrate the multitude of parameters, which would take weeks, even months, of intense work. War for and by dummies. No, Russia isn't technologically advanced; the West is far behind, it's different.
!
?! - Just a reminder that I can nearly always do it if I want... ;-)
The firsties assault team.Glad to meet you.
Sorry, folks. Too many people liking my top UNTRUE statement about these Area-M units. I felt I had to delete it.
An admission and disavowal of a very popular post like that takes honor and the ability to suppress one's ego in service of the better arguments by other people.
Commendable admission, though I think it might have been even better to let the original post stand as it was so everyone can see for themselves the ("erroneous") post.
For the record, I was one of the people who upvoted the original post, only to later also upvote some of the replies that best argued against it. Cheers.
There will always be enough drones, I guess, to finish off no matter who or what is protected by this Arena system. On the other hand, the protection time may be extended long enough to make large-scale attacks with tanks and APC's over a certain distance feasable again? That would be a game changer, it seems.
The area of drone coverage is limited at the front. Once you break thru (assisted by Arena-M protection) drone swarms are no longer a threat.
Remember that the FPV's have a limited range and actual manned drone units have to be deployed to send them off and control them.
Modern armies defend deep. There are reserves behind the lines, and sure enough plenty of drones to equip them with.
he might not understand that drones can fly in any direction...
It all comes down to the rate of fire and the number of possible shots...
If the Russians continue developing their laser system—which is a safe bet, and usually happens faster than the West is willing or able to fund—
then the problem is solved: a reasonably well-developed laser can fire tens of thousands of pulses and—provided it has a sufficient power supply—keep doing so for weeks or even longer.
That solution would be a breakthrough; it wouldn't just protect tanks—infantry and fortified positions would gain at least some protection, too...
...Right up until the first drone shows up that burrows through the ground...
It used to be the stuff of bad American movies—the kind where the Americans *always* win and save the world...
are you stoned?
you understand the concept of "range," right? drone coverage extends 30km and up. Fiber drones strike even at ranges bordering 60km. Once you "break through"?!?!? WTF are you even talking about?
Agree - same thought!
Not so sure about that Herman. The key components for drones come out of China and they are tightening Western access.
As of August 1, 2026, China has placed an export ban on all potentially dual-use components—not just electronic ones.
That is certainly nothing new.
What is new, however, is that a violation of this export ban is now classified as an act endangering national security, which could therefore carry the death penalty.
Did you know that?
once the other team is forced to release drones in a stream it will be much easier to find the source of said stream and delete it. An assault is supported by the own drone team looking for them
that would be true IF RF had proper sat comms
they can't do spectrum mapping in real time without it. Rubicon has been using recorded spectrum analysis to find UAV crew locations for some time but it's always backward looking by definition.
The reality behind logistics tell another story. Ukrainian defenders do not have unlimited drones.
Nor do they have unlimited drone operators who have a very short lifespan these days.
These tanks should be protected with some antidrones units among those tanks that only have one purpose, to fend of attacking drones. And this Arena system shuld only then take care of leakers. But it wont be easy task.
Those shrapnels will perforate every human inside 10-20m.
I think the best solution is to deploy tanks en masse and do a quick run. To simply overwhelm by numbers. How many drones can Ukraine operate at the same time on a small section of the front?
Good point. Forget that idea.
Good point, but ..
It does not apply to armoured vehicles, or NRTK ground robots. They could indeed create a protective "dome" to allow larger units to proceed. In case that comes to mass production in time, it could spell the revival of mobile warfare to some extent.
True as long the personel is travelling inside the BMP, the mobile artillery or rocket launcher. But I dont think anyone wants shrapnel flying around when you have high-explosive rockets on your roof….
There should be no personnel inside the BMP.
The BMP can be totally automated.
The BMP is by design an infantry-carrying vehicle used to transport small numbers (seven soldiers plus Commander and turret man) of infantry to the point of attack. A BMP with no infantry? What's the sense of sending it, then? If no actual infantry are required for whatever the mission is, don't send an automated BMP. There are plenty of other measures available to carry out whatever destructive mission you planned that does not require live soldiers.
Bait them out. Then a Small tactical nuke with EMP all along the front and roll. Take out space based as well with high atmosphere EMP as well
No nukes please we want to continue this trip a tad longer. What you are suggesting will more likely come from the evil anglozionazi filth taking a major ass kicking from Iran. So drop that nonsense before the entire planet resembles the Rump Ukrapper dumpster fire. Z already without fiZZling the entire planet.
I enthusiastically support your idea, provided that all this is implemented around your place of residence ! You dick! I guess it doesn't matter to you if nuclear weapons are deployed in Europe, well imagine, we wouldn't be sad if there was a war in your country !
Thats the best part, most strategic planners believe it will expand to your front door.
Well, the bad news is that I think the Russian, Chinese, and Northern Korean strategic planners might also consider your house as a starting point ! Good luck !
Russia does not tanks+infantry anymore for a long time. Since the decision was made to make Arena work against drones it was forgotten doctrine. People overhype drones so much lately, they don't see that shield vs sword race is eventually will be in favor of shield, just give it time.
That's why people who say tanks and armored vehicles are thing of the past are wrong. Drones have so many potential vulnerabilities it's demise is matter of time. We don't know yet which will click, but it's inevitable.
Will drone warfare then die? No, it's still going be a useful tool, one of many
It is always easier and cheaper to engineer a countermeasure against a new capability than it was to develop the capability in the first place. I guess the inherent lesson is to maximize your use of the capability while it still gives you an enormous advantage, and wipe out the enemy, like if France had machine guns and the English were still armed with the longbow.
The article fails to discuss a point I consider fundamental:
Just as Formula 1 cars drive innovation for ordinary automobiles, the Arena system can be tested on the battlefield to generate innovations for other areas, such as the protection of public buildings, refineries, and targets of strategic value.
I think Simplicius let us do the discussion and speculation.
They have now tried EW against drones and monstrous cages and before that found out that reactive armour wasnt protection enough because those operators goes directly to the weak spots on every vehicle.
And as was shown in a video they went low for the sprocket wheel to eventually avoid detection.
Yes. Arena-M will be in the limelight for a monthm or three, then we will se ad-hoc solution, new solution, better solution, entirely different solutions. Its a great time to be an inventor these days.
I think its time to go from single trees to the wood so to say.
There are no front-lines any more (has never been since WW1) and we have gone from strongpoints controlling line-of-fires, approaches, height in a 2-3 lines configuration to these death bubbles.
You cant break a line anymore - a breaktrough is not taking a tree-line and getting through to the nearby village or another tree-line, not even to next village. Defense is more like soap-bubbles consisting of a firegroup with a large amount of drones. Pop one bubble. you have three or four more bubbles around you. And the reach/diameter of the bubble is way bigger than what a classical platoon held before.
I think the Military have to think how they can create a large area 3x5 km totally extinct of any electronic devices right before an attack. A large EMP or a couple of small ones frying most of the devices. And then move forward.
"perhaps even assault troops."
Not until those guys are wearing powered armor a la "Starship Troopers" I'd guess.
Between the weight of defense system, power supply and sensors? And the air blast from actuating it + shrapnel and additional blast of destroyed incoming munitions, a soldier couldn't easily carry it and would likely be injured or dead after it fired off of his load bearing gear.
It would be easier to replace meat soldiers with combat ground drones than equip meat soldiers with micro miniature explosive/projectile anti drone systems & enough armor to survive using them IMHO.
Arena-M is a system designed specifically for point-defense of armored vehicles. Due to the detonation of the interceptors and their dispersal of high-velocity shrapnel, their use on unarmored vehicles and equipment would be extremely hazardous.
Perhaps miniaturizing them to fit on some kind of backpack frame for the individual soldier. .
Iran and China capabilities might match those Russia inventions
People hyping Iran missiles have no idea about capabilities of Russian missiles. Russia's missiles are a lot more advanced.
China is boring, because they are absolutely untested and while they are untested they are shit by default. Their missile tests are notoriously rigged and laughed up by Russian observers.
The elephant in the room is ridiculously shit performance and stats of US equipment. When you start comparing anything from US to anything from Russia they are like 2-3 generations behind. How that happened, after nose-to-nose race in Cold War era is the biggest why.
You do realize that Iran is doing some of China's tests for them?
That's the biggest mistake that all westerners make over and over again - underestimating the other side and never see anything coming.
Zaluchny. Another clown for Ukraine. He also said that it will take 12 years for Nato to cover the gap regarding the new realities of modern war.
If HIMARS single-handedly enabled the ”liberation” of Cherson he omits the fact that Ukraine blew the Kachovka dam and that Surovikin realized that west bank of Dniepr i possible to defend. He is quite dumb.
He also stated the ”law of physics” were a single new weapon is invented out of the blue and THEN the tactics and implementation develops. Absolute nonsense although the civilian small drones were equipped with grenades and fits his law of physics. Every weapon developed in the History of Warfare was developed from a NEED and clear thoughts of its USAGE. Not the other way around. Once a weapon was in place it could of course be used in another way due to innovation on the battlefield or elsewhere.
I like that Simplicius once again is going technical and this time raised a couple of questions.
The Arena-M will not be a Russian wunderwaffe for long and is already ”obsolete” if it only can take out 7-10 threats when we know that an enemy can flood the approach with 20, 50 drones.
But that is because Russia continues with the drip-like assault of one or a couple of tanks supporting the likewise small groups of infantry.
If Russia deploys 12 Tanks at once and as Simplicius suggested, a few dedicated Arena-M defensive vehicles among them, the Ukrainies would need maybe 200 drones to deplete the formation and then another 100-200 to halt the advance. They will need plenty of operators then. Time will be crucial to get deep in to create havoc in the defensive lines.
Another questions:
1. how close can the tanks follow each other not to trigger the defense of another tank?
2. the canisters seems to be placed for an overhead attack - what if the drones simply apporach from the side? The canister killing the Javelin in the video was placed to counter from the side. Likewise easy to approach a tank with 5 drones from the same direction to deplete that side.
>If HIMARS single-handedly enabled the ”liberation” of Cherson he omits the fact that Ukraine blew the Kachovka dam and that Surovikin realized that west bank of Dniepr i possible to defend
They didn't blow up the dam. And it wasn't Surovikin who realized anything.
What happened was that they threatened to blow up the dam and Putin made yet another treasonous deal, but didn't even have the courage to announce it himself, he pushed Surovikin and Shoigu to take the PR hit while he himself characteristically disappeared (just as he has disappeared now once again -- he did have some visits to the Far East, but on the pressing topic of dozens being killed by enemy bombing on beaches in Krasnodar and deep inside Russia nearly every day he is keeping entirely silent).
Then they blew up the dam anyway nine months later.
If it had been up to Surovikin Kherson would still be Russian now. And a lot more than that. Because a credible counter threat would have been issued for something like the Hoover dam (just one Zircon with the appropriate warhead fired from a sub off the northwest Mexican coast would do the job there) and the US would have backed off while the necessary resources would have been mobilized long before November 2022 to push the AFU out of HIMARS range for striking any bridges.
Which is why Surovikin was removed in January 2023 and then exiled.
I need more sources on that claim.
???
The threat that the Khakhovka dam would be blown up was cited as one of the reasons for the withdrawal.
Sorry for not being concrete. This:
”They didn't blow up the dam. And it wasn't Surovikin who realized anything.
What happened was that they threatened to blow up the dam and Putin made yet another treasonous deal”
* Ukraine blew the dam and drowned some russians downstreams is one theory, the other one that on June 6 2023, the Russians did it to hinder an Ukrainian offensive. No traces of a deal between Putin and Yermak. No traces of a an official threat from Ukraine to blow the dam/bridges.
* The retreat from Cherson happened in nov 2022, 7 months before the blew-up (so I wrote it sloppy in my comment - because I mixed it up with the Antonov bridge). It was clear that Russia couldnt defend the westbank of Dniepr and perhaps the focus on the other Oblasts and the threat to Crimea from the north made them to do the retreat, shortening the defensive line. Surovikin was commander then.
* Surovikin was fired in August 2023 primarily because he supported Prigosjin.
>Ukraine blew the dam and drowned some russians downstreams is one theory, the other one that on June 6 2023, the Russians did it to hinder an Ukrainian offensive.
Absolute nonsense. First, lots of Russian soldiers downstream either drowned or barely escaped the flood, i.e. they were caught by surprise. Second, why would Russia blow up its own gigantic dam that will cost many billions to rebuild?
>No traces of a deal between Putin and Yermak. No traces of a an official threat from Ukraine to blow the dam/bridges.
There was no need for an official threat -- there were already repeated strikes on the dam and the Antonov bridge. Unofficially you have no idea what messages were exchanged.
And it wasn't the Ukrainians who blew up the dam, most likely it was done by UK/US special forces with a small nuke floated to the dam from further upstream. It certainly wasn't a HIMARS strike that did it with its puny 100-kg charge -- it was already hit many times that way. To this day no video has been released of the explosion even though videos of the HIMARS strikes from security cameras around the dam were regularly posted prior to that.
>The retreat from Cherson happened in nov 2022, 7 months before the blew-up (so I wrote it sloppy in my comment - because I mixed it up with the Antonov bridge).
You further mixed it up -- the Antonov bridge was blown up by Russia itself as it retreated.
>Surovikin was fired in August 2023 primarily because he supported Prigosjin
Surovikin was appointed commander of the SMO in late September 2022. Then started a serious bombing campaign in October 2022, after the Crimean bridge was blown up. And then when the Ukraining energy system was on the brink of collapsing in early January 2022 he was removed from that position and the strikes stopped. That is what I was referring to.
>It was clear that Russia couldnt defend the westbank of Dniepr
No, it wasn't clear at all. First, there is the matter of what was and wasn't done between March and November. But even in November 2022 a lot could have been done to save the city.
Putin just refused to do it.
Also, notice how Putin never mentioned Kherson after that. With the sole exception of his June 2024 demands. Then he never mentioned it again for the next two years either.
What does that tell us?
It's a regional capital of the Russian Federation, FFS. And the Supreme Commander just ignores its existence and the fact that it is in enemy's hands, never vowing to return it. How absurd is that?
You twist and turns GM…
I wrote that Ukraine blew the Dam. You wrote in reply they didnt - they only threatened. I then answered that there are two narratives out there but I of course stand with that Ukraine blew it. Now you argue about that it wasnt Ukraine but US/UK using nukes….
And in Nov 2022 a massive explosion did damage the dam and bridge. It was primarly the rail and road section destroyed. So there was two attacks on the complex - memory fades fast.
The Antonov bridge. Ukraine did everything to blow that bridge. Himars was used. Of course the Russian blew it after withdrawal.
So, in conclusion, the West bank was impossible to defend without proper supply ways.
I understand that the narrative of traitor Putin is your focus and that developments on the front lines up according to that.
I agree fully that Putin abandoned Cherson and pretended to not see it as an issue. I think he, in a pragmatic, way was forced to see the reality (or futility to defend the area). Remember, those where the times when Russian BTG:s hasnt fully learned or adapted to Ukrainian attacks of groups with AT-weapons by hundreds.
If Putin keeps disappearing, it's your chance, Great Marshal, to nip in and take the conduct of the war into your own hands and it will all be over by Christmas (again).
It was bleedin' obvious that any Russian troops on the west bank of the Dneipr could be cut off simply by blowing up the relevant bridges. No need for any conspiracy theories.
It has also been "bleedin' obvious" for five years that any Ukronazis on the east bank of the river would be cut off sumply by blowing up the relevant bridges upstream of Kherson.
And what would be a bigger loss? Less than 10,000 km2 in Kherson or all of the left bank?
So why was blowing up those bridges never threatened in response to the attacks on the Antonov bridge and the Khakhovka dam?
Why was it also never threatened to blow up some of the key dams in the US? Russia could have threatned to blow up the Hoover dam and even sent a conventional Zircon to some cliffside in the Grand Canyon to send a message that it means business. Let's see how the US likes it with Las Vegas, Phoenix and much of Southern California becoming unlivable.
But Putin took the L instead of fighting back. Because victory was never the objective, making yet another shitty deal that would let him preserve his rotten internal system continues to be the goal.
Do you really think that there is no difference between what was Russian territory on the west bank and what is still Ukranian territory on the east bank? Do they look even vaguely similar in size? Nothing is impossible, or even difficult for them that don't have to do it, eh?
Of course Ukraine had a lot more to lose in a war of the bridges.
That is the whole point I was making.
Putin had that leverage and refused to use it. In the end he lost both the territory and the bridge and the dam.
And, as a delayed consequence, life in left-bank Kherson and increasingly in Crimea too has become impossible.
I can't decide whether you are being deliberately obtuse or just don't have the ability to see the point I am making. Sigh, I suppose I will have to spell it out. There were relatively few bridges linking the part of Kherson on the west bank to the rest of the oblast. Thus it would be relatively easy for the Ukranian army to attack and destroy the Russian troops stranded on the wrong side of the Dnipr before those bridges could be rebuilt. The same does not apply to the vast Ukranian-held territory on the east bank of the river from the Belarus border to the Russian oblasts in the south.
As for the rest of your comments, I would expect that any Russian soldier reading them would be very thankful that you are just some keyboard warrior filled with the reckless courage of the non-combatant and not in charge of any part of Russian military strategy.
This is the dumbest take I think I've ever read. "Fighting back" by your definition, would be single-handedly generating an actual US public consensus to kill more Russians. Russia has had zero reason for aggressive, desperate kneejerk reactions. Lets just make one the fuck up to get more people killed.
Ah, so once again we have the brilliant logic of "Russia should not fight back when NATO bombs it because then NATO will bomb it" on display here.
Let me remind you what fighting back means here -- it means within a few hours there is no physical NATO presence in Eurasia and nothing to attack Russia with; the only way to attack Russia that the US will have left is with ICBMs, SLBMs and Tomahawks from ships and submarines, i.e. taking it to an all-out exchange.
Which the US will not do because then it will lose everything.
That asymmetry in Russia's favor -- the US fights through proxies and will never sacrifice itself in order to reatliate over the proxies no longer existing, therefore Russia can eliminate the proxies and win the war -- has always existed.
It has so far been very effectively countered by the other asymmetry that works in the West's favor -- the Western elites are fighting this war in order to preserve and enhance their elite position while for the Russian elites fighting the war seriously means jeopardizing their internal position because it cannot be done without going back to some kind of communist system, and that's an absolute anathema.
But that is just a despicable act of treason, not something to take seriously as an argument.
Right, so within a few short hours, Russia will have what? Murdered millions of innocent people, gone down in world history as exactly the type of villian transnational jewry try to paint it as, played DIRECTLY into the hands of eurojew elites desperate to destroy the last faint pulses of europe, and opened the door to nuclear armageddon? All to further cripple a presently dying anglojewish empire and stop a few intermittent, idiotic drone strikes and the odd military assassination? If this is this is your "serious," totally brilliant worldview, what's your joke take?
GM -
Why are you asking us these questions?
You're the one with access to President Putin's and the General Staff's brains.
Great Marshal. heh.
LOL, you implying here that it's was Putin's call to leave right-bank Kherson. I am amazed by your ability to know what is happening in Kremlin's high security rooms.
It's all much simpler, it's was Surovikin call (and correct one). He is legendary for a reason (and his opala stint, yet utterly successful one, in Africa only proves that)
Stop reading mind of Putin. Just stop. For the love of god.
And stop giving Russian minister of defence capabilities they do not possess. They can't order General Staff anything, it's outside of his purview, it's not US. General Staff Chief >>> Minister of Defence. Period.
No, it wasn't Surovikin's call.
Putin made another treasonous deal and Surovikin and Shoigu were pushed forward to take the blame while Putin disappeared.
>If Russia deploys 12 Tanks at once and as Simplicius suggested, a few dedicated Arena-M defensive vehicles among them, the Ukrainies would need maybe 200 drones to deplete the formation and then another 100-200 to halt the advance. They will need plenty of operators then. Time will be crucial to get deep in to create havoc in the defensive lines
It was certainly true until some time in 2024 that a Soviet tank army would have punched a huge strategic breakthrough even with the AFU having drones, by just crushing the defense lines with mass. Once you get behind the drone units there isn't much to stop you there. Yes, there would be major losses, but you would make a breakthrough. It's not as if the GPW was won the way the American won the first Gulf War.
I am not sure if that is still true today with the further proliferation of drones and the creation of multiple echeloned defense lines on the Ukronazi side.
In the end Russian elites got once again played by the West as the fools that they are with the post-Cold war disarmament. Just as they converted the ships, submarines and military aviation that kept the USSR safe into megayachsts and private jets, so did the tanks turn into expensive limousines. All imported, of course.
The result was that there were no Soviet tank armies ready to punch a hole through the AFU lines. Then the moment of opportunity when that was still possible was characteristically missed.
And here we are today...
Yes. They could have done it otherwise.
Ukraine have had plenty of time to dig anti-tank ditches, deploy dragonteeth and mine everything. So its stickier now to get through.
> Once you get behind the drone units there isn't much to stop you there
There would be other drone units awaiting for you. Modern armies keep reserves in the rear and defend deep precisely to account against potential breakthroughs of the frontline of defence (being called 'front'line for a reason).
Moreover the Russians tried attacking in manoeuvre with tank formations at the start of the conflict, but in all instances they failed even before FPV drones became commonplace, because of Ukrainian access to satellite surveillance. Wherever Russian Russian tanks roamed, they were sitting ducks for artillery and infantry ambushes.
Agree. But you could have second echelon in the attack, pushing through with fresh laden Tanks and troops…
If an armoured spearthrust made any sense, there should be a second wave following, but the drone operators are not one-time use only. After the first wave, they'd see on satellite the second and destroy that as well. I have seen photos and videos of storerooms filled with tens of thousands of drones stacked on top of each other so I'd assume there aren't supply problems
There are supply problems within the immediate battle.
Those storerooms are not on the battlefield.
I don't think Ukrainian logistics have reached such a critical point yet
Understand this. But my calculation was that at battle-group of 12 Tanks and a few Simplicius-Arena M-area defenders would absorb about 200 drones. The second echelon would absorb another 200. How many operators do Ukraine have that can manage that amount of drones if the breakthrough goes with some speed. 10-15 minutes of running&battle should achive about 10km of advance and well into the 2nd defenseline.
10 operators cant manage that much drones during that time. I doubt 30 can either.
Its a speculation of course but somehow you need to overwhelm the drone-operators.
Arithmetic checks out. Why haven't they tried this yet with turtle tanks? After all, these also absorb tens of drones before giving out. That's because they cannot gather the followthrough wave of infantry required to compel Ukrainian command to order a sector retreat as the hole in their defence is getting exploited. They cannot gather this infantry group behind the frontlines, because it would be spotted from satellite and destroyed at range beforehand
>Moreover the Russians tried attacking in manoeuvre with tank formations at the start of the conflict
At the start of the conflict the Russian military was severely handicapped by absurd rules of engagement imposed by the Kremlin.
The hypothetical Soviet Army deep armored push we never got to see because of that.
...
What was those rules of engagement?
Infamously they rolled into Kharkov and other cities under strict orders not to fire unless fired on.
Well, they got fired on, from ambushes, and annihilated.
There was also no real systematic effort to suppress anything the way there would have been if it had been a proper operation, because there were no such orders (or rather, Putin went with the red pen through the plan the General Staff had put together and struck all that out), which is how the deal was sealed on the overall fiasco of the first month
God forbid, there were 1.5M inhabitants in Kharkhov, the civilian casualties would have had catastrophic effects on the optics of the SMO. Plus in urban settings the tanks work like cannons with direct fire, the main job is for the infantry. With rifle fire would have been a total carnage and a humanitarian catastrophe.
Ok, I see. Yes, those few GAZ-trucks and light vehicles got smashed pretty quick in Charkov. I dont think Putin ordered these suicidal mission but there where certainly some ”orders of conduct” and a false anticipation of quick capitulation of Ukrainian forces.
FSB is most to blame and military planners.
Oh, what a crock. The main thrust of the battlefield at the time was artillery, and the only regular-force Russian military to enter Kharkov proper in 2022 were Spetsnaz units which have no armour. No Russian tanks 'rolled into Kharkov' under delusionally-silly ROE or otherwise - are you sure you are talking about this century? The right to self-defense overrides any ROE in any military and you do not need orders to tell you you may fire if fired upon.
The 'ambushes' you speak of occurred on narrow approach highways to Kharkov, where the terrain heavily favoured the defenders. The red-pen strikeouts in the plan and orders not to fire unless first fired upon are just lunatic fantasies in this action-movie script you are writing. There is zero evidence of either of these, while all the elements of the supposedly-wizard defense by the Ukrainians came from the Ukrainians, just as you might expect.
The entire thrust against Kharkov was poorly planned, poorly supported and poorly executed. Russian units abandoned significant numbers of working tanks and other vehicles, which were taken over by the Ukrainians. But there were no tanks 'rolling into Kharkov', and it can hardly be 'infamous' if it never happened. I'm sure you are aware that Putin's state-service career was in the KGB, most of his assignment in East Germany. He was never a military officer of any reasonable description, certainly not a tank officer. Why do you imagine he would personally vet battle plans for the armoured forces? Or the artillery, or the Navy, or any other aspect of warfare he knows nothing about from practical experience? Christ, you're like that biographer for 'The Duke Of Death' in "Pale Rider".
Donbass fortress belt, build for almost a decade, was designed to exactly prevent tank formations punching holes. Just remember how the big UKR summer offensive got blow apart. Mainly by well placed mobile ATGM teams + mines (and helicopters?). This was even before drones.
Did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why the Donbass fortress belt had to be attacked head on when there were 600 km of wide open space between Kiev and Kramatorsk to go through?
Wuff Wuff teach me pet me.
Might have been the shelling of Novorussia. Flanking the fortressbelt or invading Lissabon would simply have taken to long but i am shure you will enlighten my little pessant brain.
The placement is misleading, the canister fires upward but the shrapnel still kills objects which come even from low attitude. Just check the bottom reference video I posted where the canister shoots up but kills the ATGM traveling much lower below it.
Ok, I was sloppy noticing that. So it gets out overhead the tank but sligtly to the side and then explode in a cupola of shrapnel with the right direction. The other one was directed overhead. Wonder how they solved that!
Zaluzhnyi publicly stated that Ukraine should model aspects of its future national defense after Israel - destroy them both....
The green maggot in Kiev and the human devil Mileicocksky in occupied Palestine and sundry freeloading chosenite psychopathic scum living off their bankrupt $lumville tax cattle are not long for this world. The IOU fiat filth ex Saudimercan toilet paper dollah is swirling the crud caked bowl of its filthy history. Karma time for the anglozionazi empire of filth and the parasite that owns it.
Now I cannot be bothered to read the whole exchange you had with GM, but given that the Kakhovka dam was blown up just a few weeks before the start of the vaunted 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporozhzhia, with hindsight I'd say it is Russia that reaped the most benefits.
In fact, the consequent flooding went mostly over lower ground areas on the eastern side of the big river, with the result of shortening the Russian defensive line and anchoring the cover of their left flank, also against possible AFU amphibious operations from their side of the reservoir landing behind the Russian line.
Russians obviously knew very well in advance the offensive was going to come, and the clear priority at the time was to relieve the western outskirts of Donetsk city still in the hands of the AFU. Marinka and Avdivka were fortified outposts from which the Ukros liberally shot artillery rounds at the Donbas capital. The Russians bagged those in the following Autumn/Winter campaign, after the counteroffensive exhausted itself. The AFU a part from the Sudzha campaign never quite took the initiative to that extent again, from then on limiting themselves to local attacks in Chasov Yar, Kupiansk and towards villages in the newly opened Dnepropetrovsk front.
Kherson, in comparison to the Donbas line, still is a secondary concern, and more so considering it is located in a vulnerable open steppe position with the large lower course of the Dnepr severing it from Russian controlled territory behind it, but for a few bridges. Its defence would cost preciously limited efforts, reserves and resources.
Plausible it is. As things were, someone blew/damaged the road and railtracks on the Dam in nov 2022. I dont remember if the retreat was complete or not. The Antonov bridge was attacked by the Ukrainians the whole time.
Russia probably then blew it when retreat was complete.
And could be that they drowned their own people in June 2023 to hinder any attempts to cross the river from Ukraine safeguarding Russian left flank.
Its irrelevant when discussing with GM because his points are very different from others. Its more about treason, hidden US/UK nukes, and what could have been. My point is that the Dam/Bridges was a weakness when Russia was on the Westbank of Dniepr but became a defense when they was on the Eastern bank. Blown they represented a defense for both Ukrainian and Russian surprise attacks. Left they would enable attack for both sides. So both sides could have blowned them.
I largely agree with you, except for the timing of the attack on the dam coinciding with the start of the counteroffensive makes me think it was the Russians.
That's because you weren't following events at the time.
Russian soldiers downstream drowned and had to run for their lives with the waters rapidly flooding in when it happened, i.e. they didn't know about it and had not been pulled to higher ground.
I am one of the earliest subscribers to Simplicius' Garden of Knowledge.
A quick check online tells that Russia acknowledged 59 deaths due to the flood after the dam explosion. No military casualty is specified. The only account I can find is this one https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1778407/ukraine-war-dam-attack-russia-putin in which Ukrainian troops stationed on the other side report having seen Russian soldiers being swept away by water from their positions. The piece goes on noting how the dam was the only connection between the two sides of the Dnepr from Zaporizhzia down to the sea. Plans for the Ukrainian 2023 counteroffensive had to be significantly revisited because of the dam explosion.
Russia will experiment and find something that works to kill drone swarms. I am certain. Can they mass produce it? That is the question.
They have repeatedly proven they can mass produce military hardware. The Soviet legacy. And if they cannot cover the needs alone they can always get help from N. Korea and possibly China.
"Russia will experiment and find something that works to kill drone swarms. I am certain."
They already have it. They just lack the will/desire/need to use it. The simplest way of killing drone swarms is depopulating the countries that make those drone swarms. The only reason Kiev has any drones at all is that Russia for geopolitical reasons has decided not to depopulate the countries that are manufacturing those drones (or drone components for assembly in Nazi-held parts of Ukraine).
Depopulate 20mil plus people is quite task. I am happy Russia is not willing to pay the political price to do that. First of all they are not Israel / West and second of all there are extensive family relations between Ukr and Ru. On top of that a few basment drohne factorys are very simple to hide.
Russia has pinpointed 11 areas that they can hit and shut down ukraine Topcor.ru 10/2025, Russian military officer .
The result millions will move west .
Russia will need to do this to stop the civilian deaths via drones fired from the Terrorist state.
The Donbass was the fillet of the terrorist state and its slowly coming back to normalcy BACK in Russias hands.
"Depopulate 20mil plus people is quite task."
Across the UK and all Europe? Nope, it's easy. Takes about 15 minutes, max. Well, to be completely fair it is somewhat of a task but not in the sense you intended: the hard part is the target planning to only eradicate 20 million instead of 200 million while you're annihilating the military infrastructure of the states which attacked Russia. Killing off 200 million or more of them is trivial. Keeping it limited to a mere 20 million takes real skill.
"second of all there are extensive family relations between Ukr and Ru. "
Oh, I didn't mean Nazi-held Ukraine. I meant the countries that are *making* those drone swarms, and them ain't be Nazi-held Ukraine, as they say in the US.
Excluding utterly irrelevantly low "home" production, the determinative majority of drones said to be "built" in Nazi-held Ukraine are simply assembled from parts and major subassemblies built in the US, UK and Europe or are fully built and assembled outside of Nazi-held Ukraine. The "basement drone factory" thing is pure propaganda for morons if you think they're doing more than unpacking foreign production and doing very simple assembly in those basements. Without foreign production, where the things are actually built, they don't get no stinkin' drone swarms. (By God, it's fun to use American idiom... I feel like I'm right back in the US again doing that...)
That's where this is heading. As Russia slowly but steadily eradicates the Nazi state in Ukraine the Europeans, UK, and (possibly) the US will struct into a suicidal attack on Russia that will trigger their annihilation as nation states. "Depopulation" is hyperbole because they won't actually be completely depopulated. But it will be at least a decimation in the true sense (1/10th) of the Roman word.
I am not shure if i follow your thinking. Somehow the term depopulate gives me Israel vibes. Not my cup of cay. That said, as a German in exile i would rater prefer a Oreshnik on Rammstein / Drohne factorys in south Germany / the NATO logistic hubs in Romania and Poland but i reckon that is all crazy talk / thinking. Those non Galician Babushkas / woman and remaing teens and kids would have gone if they could have. They dont deserve any more stress and suffering. Once again depopulation is buzzword which dose not work. Look at Gaza. Europe(Poland, Hungary, Romania) will simply close the borders just like Egypt dose with Gaza.
"depopulate".....ok....dude...STFU
Hell, wreck transport infrastructure.
I am not aware of any drone that can deliver itself to the front, assemble itself, and send itself into battle.
Lasers will ultimately render drones largely obsolete but thats probably a couple of years away yet
You beat me to it as I watch in amazement the small robots that have lasers on them in an exercise a few months ago and if you can get a good power cell a laser would do the trick with rapid bursts and good solid state batteries could provide the energy. We all know how far ahead Russia is in build and design.
Within the atmosphere the laser power is limited by absorption in the air ( high optical power density causes reflective index change leading to self focusing leading to ionization of air molecules = power loss)
Yup. LASERs are for space or very high altitude.
Also lasers are better suited against stationary targets or those which are closing on a steady bearing without maneuvering; a laser, unless it is a very powerful one where weight and portability are not considerations, requires a bit of time to focus on an area so as to raise spot heat above the mean hull penetration level (MHPL).
Basically needs a stable firing solution to keep the laser spot at cm2 sized spot, which is not easy. If you can aim that well even a 22LR bullet will take out a drone , for a fraction of the cost and size of a high power laser and its power supply.
Reminds me of the high energy X-ray lasers proposal as part of Star Wars - it needed a nuclear explosion to power it which the top brass wasn’t really told about until president Reagan was briefed
No, they won't. The rate of fire is too low.
And they are ineffective against ATGMs and PGM artillery shells.
and a torpedo is ineffective against a tank.
Has anyone ever tested that assertion? If one could overcome the delivery problem, torpedoes carry a heck of a bang.
Well there is one Fairey Swordfish left at RNAS Yeovilton.....
LASER weapons may eventually have their day, in space or at very high altitude. In fact, I've done the math on what those thousands of existing Starlink satellites with rather accurate aiming systems and 5 watt or so output com LASER systems could do if all the ones in visual range fired at the same target at around their LEO altitude. I would guess someone else has thought of doing this too, whenever satellite on satellite warfare commences.
But at near sea level atmosphere density, with weather? And with present day lack of sufficiently portable power supplies? LASERs are a non starter.
But who knows, maybe someone will figure out cheap, safe to carry solid fueled chemically pumped LASERs capable of fast cycling & self cooling with a light output in the range of the energy a medium rifle cartridge propellant load can deliver. Then we get our ray guns...
Ukhazaria got a case of the worries!
🤭
If these little doppler radars of Arena-M work, why not install an automatic shotgun and kill FPV drones all day long?
They kill with a cloud of shrapnels. The radar only detects them. Drones fly like Wasps - unpredictable so you need a large killzone/diameter.
Shotgun is all about shrapnels... I have aliexpress 40eur tracker, works like a dream.
Yes but you need a spread of 1 meter in 3m distance?
And you need to direct the shotgun pretty fast. But who knows and who would have guessed that Doppler radars would be on every tank. :-)
The 2 problems with combating drones is 1) The volume of production and 2)Low cost.
They do have a flaw though and it's they aren't very durable.
A system like this makes the most sense. I suspect they'll make those charges into something that can be quickly replaced like a magazine of bullets. Sort of like loading a pez dispenser.
Theoretically, this negates cheap drones. The charges are likely cheaper or similarly priced to a drone and they don't need to be super precise or powerful to knock out a drone. The tank basically spitting out a cantine full of explosives should do the trick.
Question becomes how do you operate troops around it. You don't need some grunt trying to run up and jump on the trank for a ride and catch a charge in his lap.
The only real solution to the drone problem right now is to seal the enemy's borders and make sure they receive no drones.
Simply tell dismounted Infantry, or whomever, to stay away from the tanks. Or maybe the system can be turned off if dismounted friendlies are in the area. Maybe not maybe - I'm sure they can switch it off; how else would the crew mount/dismount?
Doctrine/SOPs would change to accomodate the system.
The key question will be cost ratios. Even if it takes 100 drones to kill a tank, if the tank is more expensive and takes longer to make than 100 drones, it’s still a worthwhile exchange, in theory.
That’s on the strategic level. On the tactical / operational level, there will be the second question of how many drones are actually immediately at hand versus how many tanks are attacking. If attacking tanks can soak up enough drones to deplete what’s locally available, that has operational value beyond the attritional effects at the strategic level.
>But only a single month later, he says, the HIMARS was rendered completely useless.
I am sure the people of Belgorod are sleeping safe and sound knowing that.
Didn't even read the post, just scrolled right down to read Generalissimo Mangiamerda's very astute and totally impartial analysis of why it's complete bullshit.
Pithy stuff, old bean.
Zaluchny is a clown. Remember his laser-tunnel-drilling machines sneaking up behind Russian lines…
There is top down and bottom up perspective and this poem covers both. And this is the essence of the poem:
https://ruverses.com/alexander-tvardovsky/i-was-killed-outside-rzhev/11358/
'И у мертвых, безгласных,
Есть отрада одна:
Мы за родину пали,
Но она — спасена.'
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U4r8kUEHe8w&list=RDU4r8kUEHe8w&start_radio=1&pp=ygUh0K8g0YPQsdC40YIg0L_QvtC00L4g0KDQttC10LLQvtC8oAcB
I am sure all those people killed during the Stalin's leadership sleep safe and sound as well.
Stalin didn't have nukes, ICBMs and hypersonics.
4+ million civilian deaths per year vs how many in SMO? Few thousand per year?
Twist like a pretzel all you want.
Ah, yes, what is a few thousand Russian civilians dead. No big deal.
Russian lives don't matter.
The trend also doesn't matter (compare how many were dying six months ago and how many now).
The reason 27 million died under Stalin is that he had no military-technical means to prevent it.
In 2022 there was no reason why more than 20-30,000 Russians should have died in order to take physical control over the whole of Ukraine all the way to Uzhgorod and Novovolinsk.
And in 2014 that would have been a single-digit thousands, if even that.
That it is hundreds of thousands now is entirely on Putin. For whom Russian lives don't matter either. Only oligarch lives and comfort and Jewish lives do.
Lmao. As I said twist like a pretzel all you want. Nobody said Rus lives do not matter. Cut the crap.
You frame your position as if he would be the only one with nukes. If everybody had nukes like today, and Stalin used them, there would be more than 27 million dead Soviets.
There were no options to take the whole Ukraine in 2022. This is laughable position. Even less so in 2014.
Russia can safely wipe out all of Europe and physically evict the US from Eurasia, there will be no all-out exchange, and if there is one, then it was always inevitable anyway. There is literally nothing to lose here. That will also absolutely make sure nobody ever dares fire a single shell across the border into Russia, from any direction.
It isn't being done because that would be the end of the Russian oligarchy in its current form.
That is not a good reason why it is not being done. I should not have to explain that.
And one more thing - how were 1996 commies different from 1989 commies? How was 1989 Zyuganov different from 1996 Zyuganov?
what the fuck does Stalin have to do with anything?!
JFC the COPE you people go through to deny the obvious is staggering
In short, as Andrei Martyanov sometimes says, Russia turned out not to be a gas station masqueraded as a country, but rather a vast military academy with an immense training camp, all of it masqueraded as a country. And no charlatan or well-paid NATO bigwig realized this beforehand.
No, the actual shift is from a gas station with nukes to a former gas station without nukes.
Yesterday Tobolsk, today Orsk. Every single day some large petrochemical installation is burning. Deeper and deeper.
The Komsomolsk-on-Amur refinery is also burning today, and obviously no drones flew there from Ukraine, but they could have been fired from somewhere nearby. There is no clarification on what caused it, and one can't help but be suspicious.
Meanwhile the threshold for firing the nukes in response to the strategic bombing of Russian territory that was defined by Putin's own fucking nuclear doctrine and Putin's own repeated very public statements was crossed years ago and is violated every single day. But no nukes have been fired, i.e. Russia effectively doesn't have them.
You do realise, don't you, that if Russia starts using nukes, we're all going to die and that includes you? You may be suicidal, but I'm not.
1) No, I don't realize it because it is not true.
2) What is your suggestion? Keep taking hits until Russia is destroyed conventionally?
3) It was Putin, not me, who said "Why should the world exist if there is no Russia in it". And who signed the current nuclear doctrine that he then refused to follow.
1. No, you don't realise it because you think it's not true. That's why I pointed it out, because I think it is true. One of us is going to be wrong. Do you really want to find out the hard way? What if you were wrong, are you going to say "Aw, shucks" as you die from radiation poisoning?
2. Unlike you, I don't pretend to be a military or political expert, so I have no suggestions.
3. No he didn't and what is the relevance of that, anyway?
The relevance is that if you refuse to follow your own official nuclear doctrine, you have completely destroyed the deterrence status of your country.
The nuclear doctrines exist for a reason, and for that reason they were also taken extremely seriously.
Now Putin has made a total mockery of that most serious matter.
The consequence is that that yesterday 13 people were killed and another 80 wounded, many of them critically, in a NATO bombing some 1200 km deep inside Russia. And this is trending towards becoming a daily occurrence now
Luckily, Russia's nuclear deterrence is not aimed at people like you. The people that it is aimed at realise that all you need for deterrence is nuclear weapons and the ability to use them before similar weapons are used against you. This Russia has in spades, no matter what Putin says.
Putins at the VERY LEAST could have made a conventional strike into NATO territory and then evaluated what the response posture was.
But he does nothing, clinging to the hope that the EU will undergo a political transformation or economic collapse before Russia gets eviscerated by EU drone production.
Putin is a sort of clown now, really. His speeches are just fantastic of course, but none of them have any weight. They're meaningless. Everyone now knows, including Turkey, that you can kill Russians and attack Russia without any consequences.
A salvo of conventional missiles into a few dozne mansions while the right people are there would send a proper message.
Problem is the mansions are big so you would rather do this with 0.3-kt warheads, but still, it would be a start if it was some conventional missiles.
But he only has Oreshniks that can get there...
this last point is the problem- no investment was made in deterrence against the EU since the INF was abrogated by the JUSA in response to the Iskander-K (a ground launched Kalibr).
EU invested in Ukranus as its long range solution to hit Russia.
The Iskander-K wasn't REMOTELY WORTH losing this treaty over if RF was not going to take advantage of the situation. They had from 2019 on and yet the Iskander-M sits still at 500km range tho they may have gotten one out to 650 at some point according to AFU. Still wholly inadequate.
Get back on the pink ones already.
Great Motherfucker needs an intellectual enema.
Or write a Jean Le Carre-esque thriller. Either way, its reading fiction.
I cannot tell the fiction from what is evidence, especially his personal takes.
Realistically it's not just Western wonder waffle which turns to shit after 4-6 weeks, so who knows if the Arena-M armour will lead to a Hollywood style mechanized armour assault. Probably not. Those Russians keep avoiding low IQ actions, how dare they!!!
It's interesting how few people, even after 4 years, haven't caught on to the fact that the USA and Russia don't want to use their newest and best tech on the battlefield, especially at the beginning of a conflict, so their enemy cannot study and create countermeasures. It's why I believe the USA won't bring out a Patriot or thaad version 2.0 unless it's in an existential direct war with a rival (Iran doesn't count). I'm sure the USA has sci-fi tech, discombobulated bodies tech, but they'll never reveal it unless absolutely necessary.
So the Arena-M system increases the shelf life of obsolete tech. Russia will retrofit T72s and avoid using T90s because it's all a show and tell game.
Just because the future of war is robotics and missiles doesn't mean the human meat grinder can be replaced right now, and until this happens, aircraft carriers and tanks and armor in general sounds better than not having it, even if it's obsolete.
If anything, everyone should be more respectful of the dead.
I think the satellite system is more interesting. The Russians shifted their talk about an ongoing conflict with the West recently and concurrently we're learning of them concretely upgrading and expanding their systems and tech (and we see the damage Iran did to the USA in the middle east, obviously no help from Russia or China pfffft). The West, thanks to 360° and plenty of mentally latent people, has talked a great game since a long time, and also been critical of tech bros because hating grabs headlines, but except for maybe the USA and France, I don't see much hardware tech systems development and expansion, especially top end stuff like satellites. So it means European civilians will suffer humiliation and whatever demonstrative act the Russians do to avoid ww3.
I really pity Germans. Before the Ukraine war, Germany's reputation was excellent for industrial tech. Today they're pfffft. The idea of retooling their Audi and Porsche plants to produce inexistent wonder waffle military tech, maybe in 3-5 years from now, it's low IQ. Merz looks incredibly fascinatingly low IQ. And he's black rock. It makes me wonder. So I pity Germany being ruled by such a pathetic political class (then I look at Italy and I think, oh brothers, we're so screwed).
"I'm sure the USA has sci-fi tech, discombobulated bodies tech, but they'll never reveal it unless absolutely necessary."
Get ready for beam weapons mounted on antigravity platforms, straight from Area 51 (#@!^&**!)
Absolutely. And the day weird technology appears, try not to be on the receiving end.
Just wait for the slime orange outer earthers, the ones that suck out our pineal glands at a mile off. We're dooooooomed
You should look into sonic weapons for crowd control.
Old hat.
But who needs that expensive crap when the "smart" phone jabbing zombies are already "crowd controlled". Look at this vertical pork comedy of the absurd in Britland as an import midget pig goes full SS and the sheeple howl but do nothing.
https://modernity.news/2026/08/10/he-got-quite-a-shock-4/
This is what they used on 9 - 11, as Dr Judy Wood pointed out.
Undeniable.
chuckle snort and sputter....pure hollyweird; love it bigly.
This war is based on using only negotiated technologies. Drones and robots would become "useless junk" if EMPs and EMFs (Electro-Motive Pulses and fields) were used. We saw it all yeas ago in The Matrix. The problem is, both sides have the technology and the strongest versions of EMPs are nuclear and they take out entire civilizations such that 90% of the target population is dead in one year - like US and Canada. Russia also tries to function under the rules of war while NATO does not. Neither side uses napalm or phosphorus on the battlefield, but NATO relies on terrorizing populations, just like Israel.
Actually, I don't think technology is Russia's problem - TARGETING IS. Look at the effectiveness of Iranian hits versus Russia's, or Ukraine's success hitting Wildberries. They are hitting capital. The Odessa Port is capital yes, but what about hitting data centers, communications nodes, and most of all banking. What Russia is doing is not affecting US and European capital markets. All wars are BANKER WARS, and we all know Black Rock and the Rothschild's banks (Metz and ) are directly involved. There is no money without computers, wires, and transmission lines. And Bill Gates? Isn't Gates represented somehow in Ukraine, have some vulnerable computers somewhere? In fact, targeting Epstein related oligarchs of the West like Gates could be very effective. Russia certainly has a biotechnology war crimes case against him that actually included the involvement of Epstein. And then there is very vulnerable Musk who is both Epstein'ed and full of vulnerable technology including Starlink. I would be as happy to see Putin pound our Epstein'ed rulers penniless as the Ukrainians would be to see the Russians bomb the police stations - so why don't they??? Kiev airport is defenseless. The government is defenseless yet functioning diplomatically, with staged actors, with terrorist drones.
Having an effective PR campaign like the Iranians that point out the Epstein connections filling Western governments would be quite effective. Problem is, Russia Today and most of Russia's news outlets are compromised by people who want to criticize Saudi Arabia for their capital punishment techniques rather than Israel for Genocide. In one article, an RT interviewee threatened Putin from Israel. Israel (and maybe Turkey) is Russia's kryptonite, but they will defeat Ukraine.
Why doesn't Turkey cut off its flow of oil to Israel? Where do they get their oil? 100% comes from Russia I hear, and much of the rest goes to Europe. Hummm. What if Russia cut the flow of oil to Turkey during Hormuz crisis?
Well Russia is intentionally not hitting anything outside Ukraine and there are reasons, which we can agree or disagree with.
As for the emp stuff, well, that's just ww3 escalation. I agree with the general opinion there is no such thing as a tactical nuke and the escalation resulting from the use of such weapons will almost certainly escalate to ww3 gloves off. So personally I'm glad no one has been retarded enough to use them.
I think you're mistaken on the targeting. My understanding is Russia is highly precise, or else we'd have a lot more civilian deaths. Ukraine hitting the wildberries depots makes great PR videos but isn't going to actually affect the war.
Also, war isn't like a Hollywood movie. Years ago I also thought Russia would shock and awe its way to victory, but eventually I just decided Simplicius has done some great analysis over the years, as have many independent analysts, and I'm not going to second guess the Russian strategy. About six months ago I started to suspect Russia was intentionally slow rolling the war to bleed the West dry.
Russia's lack of a PR war using Lego videos has drawbacks, certainly, but they're winning a lot of hearts and minds by using the minimalist strategy and the West, by being maximalist on narratives and propaganda have lost an incredible amount of credibility. Russia knows it can't win a PR war inside the West, but outside the West, they win by not saying much as the West discredits itself. I'm not saying it's the best strategy, but it's not bad considering that by doing nothing the West is loosing the PR war. I keep wondering how Western audiences who hear about Ukraine constantly winning by retreating are going to react if the front lines collapse.
Turkei is a part of NATO. Erdogan talks a big game but at the end of the day is just as corrupt as anyone and will do as he's told. Some say eventually he'll try to take Cyprus and loose, then get dethroned and the Kamalists will take over. Who knows.
Essentially we are in agreement on technology. It is a contained war, except the West cheats. So no EMPs or nukes and we have a drone dominated go slow battlefield. But Iran didn't win the war (or at least the initial battles) based on the ground. It won by targeting capital markets and capital intensive oil and water infrastructure. These wars all hurt European, Arab, and Pacific Rim economies, but not the US's because US markets are rigged and the money from Europe is running to us.
The second point is that our government, if not the world, is being run by the Rothschild's through the Epstein mafia of rapists, murders, torturers, cannibals, and Satanists including Trump, the Clintons, Musk, Gates, and the Royal Family. Epstein said he served the Rothschilds. All wars are banker wars. Do you and does Putin see the real enemy here? Target the Epstein class in PR and destroy their Ukrainian assets and the world will cheer.
The bond market will hurt the US. The US bailed out Japan in the currency market so Japan would not have to sell US Treasury bonds. If the gulf states cannot sell enough oil, they will have to sell the bonds to maintain their standard of living. The selling causes interest rates to rise. If rates go to 5%, the US goes bankrupt and no more reserve currency.
https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/the-looming-crisis-bankers-will-not
Yeah I also think financial markets are interesting these days, as is the reverse yen carry trade.
I don't think the US goes bankrupt at 5%. I think human financial creativity and ingenuity will find a way. For instance, using Japan as an example shows us the Treasury department could just grow their balance sheet to infinity by outright buying equities and all the bonds.
The problem is whether anyone has a choice to break away. Like no one ever considers how the Saudi Dinar is pegged to the USD, or the swap arrangements between the USA and Dubai. Even the Euro unofficially is pegged to the USD. Did everyone notice DJT threatening Switzerland yesterday?
The plan is CBDCs. Trust the plan as there is no alternative.
I suggest not making a big soup of everything all the time. A good rule of thumb is power is always hidden.
On Iran I have a contrarian opinion. I think eventually Israel will go for Samson and it'll end the war and 50/50 bring ruin on itself.
I suggest you look into the Orthodox Christianity prophecies. According to these Russia is the eschaton, which Thiel is trying to mimic by blaming Greta.
you saw it in a fictional movie about a fucking virtual reality and you from this reason that...it's true?
dude, if they had a fucking EMP they'd have used it already...the war would be over by now
The same problem as with lasers - energy! Even with the most modern accumulators, these robots have very limited operational time. To use this robots in a defined environment is possible, like BMW or Tesla are testing right now, there are charging stations everywhere or the robot is connected to power cables.
Necessity is a great motivator for tech innovation. A great case in point is what you mentioned about lasers. Anti aircraft/missile lasers have been under development for decades and occasionally we still hear about them, but on the battlefield they're still using interceptors and c-ram's etc. so.
"Anti aircraft/missile lasers have been under development for decades and occasionally we still hear about them, but on the battlefield they're still using interceptors and c-ram's etc. so."
That's because wishing doesn't change physics. The problem with lasers as weapons is that it's easy to defeat them using... mirrors. Lasers are just light. A good mirror (like the mirrors which are used to aim lasers) bounces them away without being destroyed in the process. Polish your ordnance to a mirror finish and laser light reflects off them.
So instead of lasers the focus is on directed energy weapons that don't use visible light but other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. That comes with all sorts of technical challenges, like making tightly collimated beams, steering/aiming them, getting enough energy into the thing, and, again... reflectance.
It turns out that for battlefield use a really fantastic directed energy system with a good balance of real-world factors is concentrating kinetic energy into a solid phase material and flinging that solid phase material at the target... that would be a bullet or other projectile.
There are three other problems with energy weapons.
1) Supplying it with energy, to start with. The Pentagon's experiments mostly have involved Navy ships, where huge amounts of power can be continually supplied.
2) Heat dissipation. They're still fairly inefficient in turning electricity to light, and rapidly become the biggest infrared target in the area. Swarm a laser system with three dozen drones and it's likely to need to shut down to cool before the job is done.
3) Materials to build the things. China controls **ALL** the strategic mineral supply chains to fabricate high tech weaponry, and they have no interest in helping to build the weapons we want to use against them.
Yeah, the energy source is certainly an issue. To get around that there have been a few ideas for one-shot lasers in highly specialized applications that are pumped by explosive sources.
There's a technology for creating short, extremely strong energy pulses. The idea is you initiate a magnetic field in a coil of wire using a small electric current (from a battery) and then you collapse the field with high explosives where the extraordinarily rapid and powerful collapse converts the power of the high explosives into a much larger current. They can be small, often as small as cylinders a foot long and half a foot in diameter and for a brief moment they can generate power enough for a small town. Bigger ones can produce even more power for that brief moment.
The US and everybody else have fooled around with ideas to connect those things to one-shot lasers for a one-shot device you could put in orbit to take pot shots at satellites, warheads, and so on. There are still the practical limitations on aiming, the easy defeat of light-frequency lasers with reflective coatings and so on. But such one-shot lasers would be useful for very specialized applications such as blinding remote sensing satellites like the very high res, multibillion dollar US photoreconnaissance satellites by overloading their imaging chips.
Another, more dramatic idea, is pumping x-ray layers with the energy flow from a nuclear primary. You get a single shot of a very, very powerful x-ray beam that would be hard to reflect. In theory, if you could aim the thing and otherwise have a rapid enough response cycle and be able to discriminate warheads from decoys it could burn through a warhead or warhead bus during coast phase up in space. But such a thing could be easily defeated by launching plenty of cheap warheads plus decoys, as those would be a lot less expensive than all the aiming and other infrastructure required to keep such an x-ray weapon in space for many years and yet be ready for use on a moment's notice.
Of course, one-shot devices that are explosive generator pumped lasers or nuclear explosive pumped x-ray lasers do NOT make sense for naval, air force or army weapons. So that's probably a guarantee they'll get funded for a billion or two in the US.
Corruption destroys everything in the West. Apart from astronomical costs, the engineers and workers simply have no incentive and no will any more to work for the epstein class. They just work-to-rule. So, I really think the NATO defense industry is not able to develop anything useful any more.
Maybe you're correct. Ideological motivation is always superior to financial rewards, which is why reliance on mercenaries has drawbacks.
It's amazing how much money the USA spends on the military and how little value for money the tech is.
Your second paragraph seems to totally contradict the first
How so?
The USA oligarchy only cares about financial rewards.
OTOH perhaps you could make an argument that is their ideology.
Which oligarchy is that exactly? I don't think that's actually true.
The US will use their best stuff to defend Israel.
The purpose of any defense system is to increase survivability. If the Arena-M's are taking out 7 FPVs per vehicle, that is significant because it takes 2 to 4 operators to send in these 7 FPVs - much less the overall 20 actually needed for a kill.
No doubt the Arena-M designers will now look at ways to increase ammunition capacity.
As for armored assaults: it isn't the drones per se that make armored assaults risky - it is anti-tank mines. The fact that Ukraine is focusing so much on FPVs and so little on mines, is just another example of their misguided military industrial focus. Let's not forget: the primary reason the Ukrainian "Drive to Crimea" was stopped cold by the anti-tank mines of the Surovikin line. Anti-tank mines don't need operators and they're certainly much cheaper than these FPV drones.
It's a cat/mouse game. I don't think we've heard the end of it. I think it's curious we're still seeing old tanks retooled and not the T-90s. I think this is an interesting data point.
Tbh I don't think it's reasonable to say mines (or shoulder RPGs) are more lethal than FPVs. Your view discounts logistics and training operators, and mines can be cleared and are static barriers. I think all tech are tools have their pros/cons.
I also don't think the Ukrainian assault failed just because of mines. But who knows maybe you're right on this.
Mines are not the end all, be all but they are a critical part of defenses. Clearing mines, especially if there is artillery/FPV/CAS behind it, is very difficult, slow and painful.
As for the tanks: the T72 hull is basically the same as the T90. Why not use the hull and upgrade the gun and defenses?
Mines also don't need operators, not really, and certainly far fewer than FPV drones.
I am not saying there is no role for FPV drones - there is. But it is far, far less than the end-all, be-all that Ukraine has made it out to be.
Nor would I accept that FPV drones are any less of a logistic challenge than mines. Among other things, huge percentages of drone motors, batteries, control systems etc are sourced from China - not made in Ukraine whereas I am 100% sure that Russia makes every last part in their anti-tank mines, down to the last screw.
As for the Drive to Crimea: given that this entire campaign was predicated on speed and assault power, it is very safe to say that the mine fields built around the Surovikin line completely fucked that strategy up.
That's not quite true.
The US is using what it can to fight Iran because its hegemony is in question. Iran does count for that reason.
There isn't some magic science fiction weapon that we haven't seen.
I respectfully disagree.
I think it's important to separate the presidential administration and the USA more broadly. There's many factions.
I think there's many possibilities for what's up in Iran. For sure this is the end of the unipolar moment which started in 1989, but it's not the end of American hegemony.
Consider the possibility, however remote, of the USA trying to flush out China and/or Russia, or both, to give it causus belli for instance.
I keep repeating the story of the B2. It's interesting because it's real. The B2 was unveiled to the public during the first Gulf war in Iraq in 1991. It was totally unsuited for that war (the desert heat degraded the cloaking tech). The problem was the B2 entered production in 1983 and had been created to bomb Moscow, and the USAF reasoned they could only keep it a secret for a limited time. For it to enter production in 1983 means prototypes were flying in the 70s and it was being designed in the 50s and 60s, with early prototypes flying in the 60s.
Now think back to the panic over lights in the sky in November 2024. Realistically they were all drones, plus maybe some space aliens, who knows. Point is, we're on a need to know basis and we will never know before they tell us. So maybe sci-fi tech doesn't exist, or maybe there's tech already around that's even worse than nukes but it's all conspiracy theory so don't believe the tin foil hat brigade, except when it turns out many decades later they were correct.
In 1991, the US led the world in technology.
That's no longer the case in 2026. The US has outsourced its manufacturing and is increasingly being overtaken by China in technology. The US is more of a financialized economy than an industrial / technology based economy. That's also why the US is struggling with hypersonic missiles like the Kinzhal from Russia and building something comparable or replacing Chinese rare earths.
The B2 was from a different era when the US led the world in technology (in the case of the B2, it led in radar absorbent materials and computer technology - the B2 is not naturally aerodynamically stable). It's also a highly flawed bomber because it's so expensive and the flight to maintenance ratio is so poor.
The closest thing that we have seen to some "Skunkworks" project is actually the Russians with the Oreshnik missile. The Oreshnik missile is a game changer because it cannot be detected by the US SBIRS system, except briefly on launch and during the descent stage.
Again, the US is in an existential war for its hegemony. Losing to Russia and Iran will fundamentally change the US position in the world order that it has enjoyed since the USSR broke up. If there was some secret weapon, it would have been deployed against Iran.
Well, judging by your comment they've already lost, so.
But do check out HAARP.
I personally think we haven't seen anything yet.
There's a reason why Zelensky is so desperate abd begging for weapons and money all the time.
There's also a reason why the Trump administration is flailing and making incoherent messages they are not going to be able to back up to the point where TACO’s a meme.
They are losing.
Well, Ukraine is in a total war for survival, so it makes sense Z would do whatever it takes to get money and weapons.
Strategically the USA lost the Iran war after 48 hours. The unipolar moment has ended. I'm not sure, but I think in previous articles even Simplicius has addressed this. USA Western hemisphere hegemony is a separate matter altogether.
I think it's useful to separate the DJT administration from the MICC from the USA from other internal and external factions of the USA, etc.
USA has thrown everything it has in its arsenal against Iran except nukes you can bet on that.🎯
usa has no wonder weapons thats hollywood fantasy , the jews have made certain everything that can be used has been used against Iran including War Crimes against humanity.
Remember how the anglo-american-judeo establishment fights , it fire bombs and terrorises, lets see how civilians fared in ie Tokyo , pre nukes.
The most devastating U.S. firebombing of Tokyo occurred on the night of March 9–10, 1945, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths. This single raid is often cited as the deadliest conventional bombing in history, surpassing even the immediate death toll of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.
Key facts about this event:
· Scale of Attack: 279 B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries on the city in under three hours.
· Damage: The firestorm destroyed 16 square miles of the city and left approximately 1 million people homeless.
· Casualty Variation: While the figure is commonly placed at over 100,000, some historical accounts estimate the death toll was around 83,000–86,000. This variation often stems from different contemporary reporting methods, but the event is universally acknowledged as a catastrophe of immense proportions.
Lets see Germany
The Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany, carried out by the USAAF and RAF, resulted in an estimated 600,000 to 1 million German civilian deaths .
The most notorious single event was the bombing of Dresden (Feb 13-15, 1945). While Nazi propaganda inflated the figure to 200,000, a historical commission later confirmed approximately 25,000 casualties .
Other major firestorms included:
· Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah, 1943): ~46,000 civilian deaths .
· Cologne (1942): ~45,000 made homeless, relatively fewer casualties due to shelters .
This campaign was controversial—the total civilian losses exceeded all US and UK airmen killed over Germany (~83,000) , and today such area bombing could be classified as a war crime .
Back to Iran
You're likely referring to a report about the U.S. "Operation Midnight Hammer" strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities (June 2025).
One pilot described the explosion at the Fordow facility as "like the sun had burst out of the mountains," noting the light and fire "did not feel real". This is very similar to atomic bomb descriptions—a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb test was recorded as "500 times brighter than the sun", and eyewitnesses said the Hiroshima blast "outshone the sun".
However, Operation Midnight Hammer used conventional bombs—specifically, 14,000-kg GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) dropped by B-2 stealth bombers. The blinding flash came from conventional explosives striking a fortified mountain target, not a nuclear detonation.
The EU should have stayed the EEC becaue its doomed to fail economically when you dont combine the finances.
Here is Martin W Armstrongs take :
Core Structural Failure: No Debt Consolidation
Armstrong’s primary critique is that the euro was created without consolidating national debts into a single European/federal debt (the “Hamiltonian model” that worked for the early United States).
• Each member state kept its own sovereign debt. Euro-denominated national bonds then served as banking-system reserves. This left disparities intact: stronger countries (e.g., Germany) vs. weaker ones (Greece, Italy, Spain, and ultimately France as a bigger risk). 
• Without a true national debt, there is no single interest-rate market or deep capital market comparable to U.S. Treasuries. Investors still treat members separately (“Do I want Germany, Italy, or France?”), so the euro cannot compete as a reserve currency with the dollar. 
• He says Helmut Kohl (Germany) insisted on no consolidation because a referendum would have failed; officials told him they would introduce the currency first (“Phase I”) and handle debt later (“Phase II”). Phase II never happened. 
• Result: Brussels dictates fiscal rules to members without true federalization, creating ongoing budget crises, bailouts, and political friction. The system cannot survive long-term.
In late July 2026, the United States conducted a rare coordinated currency intervention with Japan, in which the New York Fed sold euros (rather than dollars) 👈🤝from U.S. reserves to buy Japanese yen on behalf of the Treasury, helping push the yen higher from near 40-year lows around 164 per dollar. This first joint U.S.-Japan effort to strengthen the yen since 1998 was designed to curb excessive volatility without signaling a weaker-dollar policy, though it was executed without prior notice to the European Central Bank and has since seen some of the yen’s gains partially reverse as markets tested further official support.
EU: “thankyou USA we will go broke for ukraine and you can laugh behind our back's”
When they wanted to save money by closing the mental institution's decades ago and sending all the inmates on to the streets not a few went into politics and are in charge in the west , thats the only conclusion i can come to with regards to the state of affairs today.
PERFIDIOUS ALBION
May I suggest a swarm of magnetic drones, about 20 cm in diameter each, charging on the body of the tank (solar?), then swarming around it in protective posture? They would take on and land to charge, in a permanent buzzing cloud around the tank. Trucks full of them would come behind to replenish exhausted supplies. Each tank could have 30-50 explosive drones.
Good idea!
I would go for about 21cm in diameter, though.
Welcome to the future (dystopia).
Interspersed with dedicated Arena-M vehicles that are also equipped with EW at a ratio of 4 or 5 to 1 withe armored vehicles and tanks also carrying the Arena-M with a few turtles in the front would be quite the assault group.
Interesting.
The Ukros will then just resuscitate attack helicopters and plucky infantry armed with Nlaws and hidden in buildings and treelines
they don't have any helos.
nor infantry lol
Lazarus type infantry - since I used the verb 'resuscitate' in my previous comment. They'd need a miracle wouldn't they
lol oh that's what you meant
they can just spawn right at the LoC like in a DCS! Exactly how the USA will "land invasion" Iran and/or NATO will enter the Ukranus.
But we know that in 1, Iran wouldn't let that happen, whereas Putin would offer them his ass and a bouquet of flowers
This development brings back into favour large attack formations. It is all in the maths.
>Putiata confirmed the units told him that one Arena system destroyed 7 FPVs and that on average it took up to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank.
So how is that better than the turtle/hedgehog tanks? We have seen plenty reports of those taking dozens of drones to disable.
And why did those disappear too?
>the only reason the tanks were hit was due to the total expenditure of the Arena-M canister ammunition:
Well, duh. There are too many drones and no solution that relies on a limited magazine will truly work. You need something that can shoot down a practically unlimited number of drones.
If we were to fantasize, and Russia is best positioned here, having both actually developed a functional 1K17 back in Soviet times and having the small reactor technology today at a level nobody else has, one could develop a super armored ultraheavy nuclear powered tank with dozens of lasers that can shoot in parallel. And even that will not be a solution, entirely aside from how many years it would take to develop and put in production in significant numbers, because it will still be vulnerable to missiles and to the destruction of the fragile sensors on the outside.
The only solution to the drone problem is to deny the enemy access to drones. It has been true since day one, it remains true today.
>In short, it sounds like the Arena system essentially shot down everything in sight and only after running out of ammo were the tanks able to be hit.
Yeah, just like Russian AD is the best in the world and shoots everything down until it is overwhelmed. And then we end up with drones making it to Tobolsk and Omsk.
Because you can't win a war by just sitting in the corner and taking punches. You have to actively fight back at some point. But Russian leadership doesn't want to do it for reasons that, if they were ever to be sufficiently widely understood, would have the whole Russian elite hanging from lampposts the next day.
Bit naive, really.
Just as Russia can respond to a drone threat, so NATO can respond to a Russian fight-back.
The situation is far too complex and fluid for simple solutions of the kind you always advocate for.
bingo.
The US has better limit technology AD than Russia. Its stuff got swamped by Iran. There's no defensive system that can compensate for sheer volume.
Russia needs to close off Ukranus so that the component chain for drone production and deployment is broken.
I cannot be any clearer on this than I was the last 50 times I said it.
The UK ambassador, a former commander-in-chief disguised as a war strategist? NATO's 20th-millennium weapons, which have never been dismantled except in low-level exercises, and the warfare of this same organization, designed to divert funds, was incapable of subduing peasants in sandals in all its conflicts. This former commander-in-chief was unable to drive the Russians out of Ukraine despite having three to four times the weaponry and troop superiority. All this is very academic, but it doesn't work on the ground. All these experts that Simpli presents in every article will be experts in cosmology tomorrow. Since 2015, we've been presented with Ukraine's 40th-millennium military technology, and now its experts in the art of war and weaponry of a nation that, in fact, disappeared as a result of the war. I've never read or heard a serious analysis from any quarter, and for good reason: it would require the ability to integrate the multitude of parameters, which would take weeks, even months, of intense work. War for and by dummies. No, Russia isn't technologically advanced; the West is far behind, it's different.