Eric Schmidt writing about the Ukraine / Russia drone war, not very +ve for Ukraine.
(www.foreignaffairs.com)
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The changes brought by modern drone warfare are absolutely shocking, and in a way no one from the Establishment wants to admit. In the West, for two decades "drone warfare" has meant total impunity incinerating brown people all over the world with skyborne murderbots.
Those days are over. As some indication, we can take two data points from vastly different conflict zones:
In the Red Sea, one of the types of anti-ship drones used by the Houthis costs about $2,000 a piece. The air defense missiles used to shoot them down cost about $2,000,000 each. I suppose no one in the US military is much concerned about that--there being an infinite supply of dollars--but those complex units are manufactured painfully slowly.
Over in Ukraine, a Spetnaz operator from a drone battalion was interview by "Texas" Bentley last fall:
Russian Spetsnaz Operator Explains How Drones Are Changing Modern Warfare (TID 10/7/2023)
In the embeddeb video interview, he more or less casually mentions:
Those are Rambo++ numbers. And if you've seen video of toy quadcopters dropping grenades into trenches full of guys that never saw it coming, it's all too believable.
If only these toys had cost $25M each, the US military would have been far more interested.
Yeah, I've been watching the videos ontheync
https://theync.com/channels/8/war/page1.html
As if being in the infantry wasn't already stressful enough without the grenades chasing you
One thing I noticed about those grenade-dropping videos is that, almost always, the targets never even looked up. A few times I could even see that the drone was only at an altitude of 50m, plenty close to hear. WTH were they thinking?
Finally, I heard it mentioned a couple of times that--for the Ukrainians, anyway--there are always drones flying and the noise is constant. They did hear them, they just ignored it.
Even if you survive all that, can you even imagine the PTSD from anything whirring and buzzing? Unimaginable.
I've noticed an uptick recently of individual troops being hit by FPV drones, which previously seemed to get saved for vehicles.
And we never see the ones who miss but there must be some.
Firing a rifle has a tendency to drop your hearing for a little bit. I know i sure as hell notice a difference when i have to rush out with the shotgun and don't have ear plugs in. If they've been in a firefight recently or done any suppressive fire to help someone move positions, their hearing might NOT be picking up that drone noise as easily as it would if you’re entrenched and hiding and not firing.
That's a good point. I saw an interview maybe a year ago with an English mercenary who went back home after just a few months. He estimated that he had lost about 40% of his hearing from the continuous shelling.
The addendum to that was his answer when the interviewer asked if any of the shelling had been close. He said that (IIRC) one had hit as close as 100m.
As far as being life-threatening from fragmentation, as long as you're in a trench or on the deck it doesn't sound that close. But having these enormous rounds rain down around everyone and blow up anywhere in the vicinity has got to be ear-shattering. Literally.
just wait until they use those cheap drones to take out a Domestic Right Wing Extremist Ruby Ridge Waco style.