According to the open-source intelligence (OSINT) site Molfar, Ukraine has sunk or damaged nearly 60 ships of the Russian Navy.
How, for fuck sake, Russia managed to lose 60 ships to a country that has NO NAVY ?!?
Holy! Shit!
Because it is easier to deny your enemy terrain than it is to keep it.
And Ukraine does have a navy. It is just made up out of very angry remote controlled low observable high speed boats that carry a ton of explosives and don’t have to come home because they want to hug your ship and make it sad.
This is a whole paradigm shift, and it’s not new.
So you have a billion dollar aircraft carrier. How many million dollar missiles can you shoot at it before it sinks? Generally, it’s not a thousand.
Same deal all down the line. A tank is fantastically more expensive than an antitank rocket.
Just the way the world works. You can iterate and improve a small munition way faster than a huge ship.
Tanks are different, it is more or less normal they blow up from time to time, a destroyer not so much. Like an AWACS for example, should never get picked out of the sky.
Great anyways that russia is losing both in ridiculously high numbers.
Even still, there’s a difference between losing one AWACS and losing all of them.
That is the meme, but when I talk to military people they point out Russian incompetence. They do not believe NATO ships are that vulnerable. Ukraine is using a lot of tanks, but because they are using them according to good military doctrine they are not taking nearly as many losses. Note that Ukraine and Russia both got their tank instructions from the old Soviet playbook not a NATO book (though Ukraine as had NATO training as well), there is nothing about using a tank well Russia shouldn’t know, but they are failing to follow their own book on how to use tanks.
On the tank side, some planned updates/replacements for the Abrams were very suddenly canned and went back to the drawing board. The DoD didn’t say why, but a good guess is that they saw how things were going for tanks vs drones in Ukraine, and decided that these new designs would be obsolete before they’re built.
Also a lot of the late Soviet Union military technology came from Ukraine, plus their military were also trained in the same kind of school of thought as Russia and still know it.
So it makes sense that, when push came to shove, the Ukranians would fast come up with asymetric war solutions against Russia, that Russia wouldn’t be as fast in effectivelly countering them and Ukraine would be quicker at developing new or adjusted solutions once Russia found a counter (or, more generally, that Ukraine would remain ahead of Russian in the cycle were each side develops a counter to the other side’s counters).
Had Russia’s initial blietzkrieg attack worked, it would’ve been a different story, but at this stage it makes sense that Ukraine has the technological edge, not just in the weaponry it gets from the West but also in their own weapons development, especially now that it has much better AA to protect the installations far away from the frontlines working on weapons tech.
Sure pointing to Russian incompetence is easy. I would like to see how NATO ships fare in a training exercise against a pack of 10 Magura V’s. I’ll bet they will find it is much harder than they thought.
These things are so low in the water they dissapears between the waves for radar and other tracking systems, they can move slow to get close and be within the outer defense layers before they are spotted. And now they even come with deployable mines, grad missiles or even anti air missiles.
Yeah, this definitely feels like a doctrine and training problem. I can’t even imagine a scenario where the US or NATO lost half of any platform like that. Pearl Harbor, maybe? I remember how huge a deal it was when we found out our body armor and APCs sucked in 2001, and that was nothing like losing every missile ship.
It’s not that simple. If it was the American military wouldn’t be effective because manpads, javelins, and torpedos would have taken out all the aircraft, tanks and ships.
The military is a fighting unit and protects itself very well. At least, it does it it’s working right. When you have a military being destroyed by a vault interior opponent, it’s because they are fucking to their military…or someone is trying to occupy Afghanistan.
Has a modern military ever gone up against an enemy using lots of small cheap drones though? I’m sure they have plans in place, just can’t recall if they’ve ever really been tested, aside from Russia with the results we see.
This shift happened in the 1930’s. Land based naval bombers prevented the Germans from operating surface ships anywhere near the English coast. Japanese carriers routinely ferried bombers to support naval landings. And of course the US built their entire Pacific fleet around carriers.
A landmass isn’t anything more than a giant, unsinkable, carrier in naval strategy.
So you have a billion dollar aircraft carrier. How many million dollar missiles can you shoot at it before it sinks?
For Russia’s aircraft carrier? Zero. That thing was always catching fire and had to be towed everywhere.
And US aircraft carriers have an honestly embarrassing amount of firepower, completely disregarding the jets. There’s a reason that they haven’t been sunk by anyone other than the USN since Midway. Apparently we have sunk several carriers since WWII, one with a nuke. It survived the first nuke, but the second sunk her. Though the Independence survived both nukes.
This is a whole paradigm shift, and it’s not new.
Got me confused. Are you saying these tactics are new or not? I vote for new, mostly, kinda, but both at once. Sorta.
Tanks aren’t about to go out of style, though. The goal is to not let anti-tank weapons in range of your tanks - as it has been since WWII, just moreso as time goes on. Maybe ditto for ships that aren’t Soviet rustbuckets crewed with drunks, although I think even that is in question these days.
Also, funny enough, the average weapon is getting more complicated and expensive as time goes on. At least for the West, a skilled soldier continues to cost more than whatever they operate, so survivability is worth it even if it means less volume.
Drones and missiles. Air power long ago surpassed ship power and a landmass makes one hell of an aircraft carrier.
Marine drones. Basically remote control exploding speed boats, some with rockets on them. They basically attack like hyaenas bringing down a zebra.
Ukraine has a navy. The navy just – for the moment – doesn’t have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.
You really gotta count how many cheap boat Ukrainians lost trying to sink 60 ships. Ofc they (suicide boats) are much, much, much cheaper and cause no crew casualties being remotely controlled. So it is super cost effective, And most importantly safe, but if you count pure numbers i am sure Ukrainian losses of those boats are massively higher.
But the fact that russians can still use their missles ships to launch missiles is a big issue. Even if there are fewer of those ships, its not 0 :(… Yet
You really gotta count how many cheap boat Ukrainians lost trying to sink 60 ships.
That’s like counting cruise missiles as aircrafts.
In the time it would take the current Russian defense industry to build and deploy one of these new missile ships, Ukraine could build and deploy a thousand of these little RC Boat Bombs from 1/1000th the cost.
They’re literally making these boats out of rebuilt engines and 3d printed parts. Russia won’t recover from this war in our lifetime as long as they embrace Putin style leadership.
Thats why i said, they are amazing value for money. But sould be interesting to know just how many boats it takes to take out 60 or so ships
If they keep this war up, with the current losses in manpower, for another 8 to 9 months, they won’t have enough Russian males to repopulate the country. Putin may be effectively killing Russia as a country. Unfortunately Ukraine may hit that point sooner since they have fewer people.
