Ukraine attacked Moscow on Wednesday with at least 11 drones that were shot down by air defences in what Russian officials called one of the biggest drone strikes on the capital since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.
The war, largely a grinding artillery and drone battle across the fields, forests and villages of eastern Ukraine, escalated on Aug. 6 when Ukraine sent thousands of soldiers over the border into Russia’s western Kursk region.
For months, Ukraine has also fought an increasingly damaging drone war against the refineries and airfields of Russia, the world’s second largest oil exporter, though major drone attacks on the Moscow region - with a population of over 21 million - have been rarer.
Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences destroyed a total of 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region, 23 over the border region of Bryansk, six over the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region.
Why aren’t we just sending them millions of small drones instead of all the bigger stuff?
Because the drones are made in China and China wants Russia to genocide so that they can get away with their genocides. It would be nice if we started manufacturing again, but we seem to have trouble getting anything done.
I don’t really want us to get any further into the murder-drone business than we already are, but it does seem to be the way conflicts are going.
Maybe war could just become entirely drones, so instead of people dying it could be a giant game of BattleBots.
I think it was Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age that had clouds of nanomachines constantly at war with each other creating a fog of dead and dying machines that people would just walk through pretty much ignoring it. I read that a long freaking time ago, so I’m sure that memory is, to some degree, degraded.
Or we could go further and just simulate the battles so even the land is safe from war.
It does seem odd that we aren’t making more drones. Given how big a roll they are playing, it seems like we wouldn’t want China to have access to so many more than we do.
Same reason most mass-market consumer goods aren’t made in western countries - its more profitable to have them made in China and other low(er) wage (and lower employment standards in general) countries.
And in the decades since that shift to offshoring manufacturing started, China has developed infrastructure and expertise in manufacturing, while those same capabilities have atrophied in the US and other countries who import those cheap products.
We are!
Organisers of the Army of Drones campaign say they have built or purchased an extra 3,300 drones. Some 400 people have even sent their own hobby drones in the mail.
Drones aren’t the be-all and end-all, especially at this stage in the war. They can cause a lot of damage but countermeasures are being used more and more and you can’t win a war with just drones.
Ukraine is doing fine building their own drones. They seem to have a fast iteration cycle with their growing drone industry. Their priority for foreign aid is artillery shells, missile systems, and vehicles/planes which is harder for them to produce en mass
