Ukrainians get some
Those sneaky b******s in Ukraine… If you had asked the world what chance they had against the full might of the mighty Russian military a few years back, I suspect that no one would have given them more than a few months, much less three years. With a boatload of surrogate help, they are proving us really wrong.
Their latest was a doozy (as Wretched would tell us, a contraction of “It’s a Deusey”, meaning a Deusenberg, a high end inter-war car brand.)
The undertaking by Ukraine’s Security Service, codenamed “Spiderweb,” involved more than 18 months of painstaking planning and great risk. It was personally overseen by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy said 117 drones were used in the operation in which four military airfields were attacked resulting in the severe damage or destruction of 34% of Russia’s fleet of air missile carriers.
Seems the Ukrainians smuggled in bunches of FPV drones. (First Person View, guys – do keep up. Yeah, I just learned it too.) They were consolidated in containers, driven to locations near the four major Russian airfields, and the operators cut loose to play.
Social media footage shared by Russian media on the day of the attack showed drones rising from inside the containers. By the end, over 40 Russian warplanes were severely damaged or destroyed with costs estimated to be around $7 billion, according to Ukraine’s security service.
A third of the Russian air missile carriers? That is some serious damage. Also noteworthy:
Russia’s Defense Ministry in a statement confirmed the attacks, saying they damaged aircraft and sparked fires on air bases in the Irkutsk region, as well as the Murmansk region in the north. It said strikes were also repelled in the Amur region in Russia’s Far East and in the western regions of Ivanovo and Ryazan, the ministry said.
Go look at a map – Irkutsk is 2,500 miles from Ukraine. A handful of air forces in the world have that kind of range… but using trucks and drones, a relatively small country did that kind of damage that far away. Lesson to be learned there.
Strategic aircraft, including the A-50, Tu-95 and Tu-22M, were destroyed in the attack, according to the SBU.
Moscow has previously used Tu-95 (pictured above – ed.) and Tu-22M long-range bombers to launch missiles at Ukraine, while A-50s are used to coordinate targets and detect air defenses and guided missiles. Ukraine has long hoped to degrade Russia’s ability to deploy bombers that launch deadly missile barrages against Ukrainian cities, against which Kyiv has limited means to respond.
Now we get to my favorite part of this… what, to Russia and Putin, must be that rancid cherry on the sh** sundae (earliest mention I see of that phrase was none other than Hondo ‘way back September 11, 2014 TAH . Credit where credit is due.) was this last little tidbit.
The complex operation was directed from an office that was next door to an office of the Russian security service, the FSB, Zelenskyy said, without elaborating on where in Russia it was. AP
Nice touch. Whether true or not, the FSB is going to be busy chasing its tail for a while.
Category: None, Russia, Schadenfreude, Ukraine
Now actually think.
These strategic bombers were lined up, out in the open, because of Nuclear Arms Treaties with the United States. America does the same. It allows satellites to check on bomber fleets to avoid “misunderstandings.”
Now, you fool, Russia is going to hide their strategic bombers.
Plus.
NATO has plenty of enemies. No sad faces when the Houthis do this, with Russian tech and Intel, at Ramstien.
Good.
As soon as they do that we can get ours out of that same stupid lineup. Right now they are crazy vulnerable to the same type of attack from the Chinese.
The oceans no longer protect us. They haven’t for a long time. People in this country need to wake the fuck up to that fact before it is too late.
Well, I am so glad you are smarter than negotiated treaties to reduce the risk of nuclear war. Thank you for your amazing enlightenment and expertese on this subject.
And thank you for your brilliant analysis of current events and how decades old obsolete treaties fit into the framework of modern times.
Being willfully obtuse is still obtuse.
Any other senate approved negotiated international treaties you want to throw away based on your expert feelings?
Just wondering. Please enlighten us.
Pretty much all of New Start needs to go away. The Chinese have announced in the last couple of years a huge expansion of their nuclear capability into the 2030s that we can’t match because of the treaty. Under current conditions we should be able to match that of Russia, NORKS and China combined. Not that it matters, it expires next year anyway.
Love your treatie duel today guys.
I’ve thought for a long time that the way to do a modern day Pearl Harbor attack was to put missile carriers in containers and load them on the top layer of boxes on container ships. A couple of such ships in each major US port would do a lot of damage.
Guess I need to update my doomsday scenario thinking. With the number of trucks that move over the borders, and the vast wilderness areas of Mexico and Canada that get zero surveillance where such an attack could be assembled, it would be possible to stage an attack of this type but with 50 times the number of drones used by Ukraine. It could hit not just military targets but also power plants, refineries, natural gas pumping stations and other things that would tend to catch fire and/or explode.
But not the subs. And that would be the end of China, if not most life on Earth.
I will say the drone thing has revived my interest in shotguns. I am thinking BB Magnums 3” shells out of at least a 20” barrel and more barrel length being better. Either modified or full choke in semiautomatic with a large capacity and with the semi-auto being critical. You would have to dump as many shells as possible, as fast as possible.
A full choke should give a 40” cloud at 40 yards, which is kind of tight with about 90 pellets. A perfect spread would give about one pellet every 5”.
My Police Special 11/87 that I nearly sold a few years ago (but no interested buyers) fits the bill nicely.
A quad 50 would be worlds better but who has the cabbage for that many rounds, not to mention the four class III guns. A few years ago I did see someone make up at quad 22 out of four 10/22 donor rifles. However it suffered because it could only trigger one rifle at a time. As well as poor accuracy of the design and the general unreliability of very large capacity 10/22 magazines (40+ rounds).
But how to practice duck hunting with those special ducks? They aren’t going to line up nicely like on the skeet and trap range so I can just pull the trigger the same way every time. Need to practice all ways including straight at you because hitting a moving aerial target is hard.
Check out the Mossberg 940 Pro Snow Goose.
12+1 is a lot more than 6+1. Plus it its still in production. Seems a solid choice.
In William Forstchen’s trilogy of “One Second After” that exact scenario is what popped the EMP nuke over the central US. Less than five (5) minutes warning from launch to “lights out”. And that was written long before the advent of hypersonic missiles. We have plenty of foreign enemies that are capable of just such an attack.
Flip side of that is we have roughly 91 THOUSAND containers arrive in this country every day, guesstimates of 22 MILLION a year. You can pack a whole bunch of various and sundry weapons/drones/warheads/whatevers in that many containers and no way in hell that they can or will be checked. Tying into the past posts on the ChiComs buying up land near military bases and here we are. Coming to a high value target near you…soon.
Different reports show different levels of damage done to Ivan’s fleet, but no way, no how will Ivan (read Pootin’) let this attack go unanswered. No love lost for Pootin OR The Z Man, just glad that we were able to get some of our very own out of that meat grinder before it was too late. My sympathies lie with the ones still caught up in it. My concerns is that the Euro Trash are just itching to kick off WWIII and believe that a “Limited Nuclear War” can be “won”. And we are going to be sucked into it.
Prepare…
Lights Out by HallfFast (David Crawford) was an interesting toe dip into that pond. It never really got “yucky” for that crew and everything seemed to always go their way but it was good read nonetheless. A real lights out event would likely be a bit more road warrioirish.
Alas Babylon – worth a read.
That one is on my “Round2it” list.
In your scenario, trucks wouldn’t even have to cross the border to strike Huachuca.
Yes, indeed…
Fire the missiles a few miles offshore, throw the containers over the side, and continue on to your destination port to deliver your remaining cargo as if nothing happened.
After this failure to detect this attack, I wonder how many agents and or officers will be retired to spend whats left of their lives in a Dacha somewhere.
The defenestrations will continue until morale improves.
Pretty good update of the strikes:
Confirmed Losses Of Russian Aircraft Mount After Ukrainian Drone Assault
So what is the range of the average drone (especially the ones that Z Man used)?
Now military is going to have to beef up roving security to not just close in (100 yards?), but to MILES around any given base.
Lots in the comments!:
1) I always take BDAs with a large grain of salt (no pun intended with all the treaty talk) – whatever the attacker says, divide in half immediately. However many civilian casualties the attacked sustains, reduce even more.
2) Only thing to stop a drone is counter-drone fire or concealment. Straight lines – who cares? With FPV drones, the operator just adjusts fire on the fly. Most of these drones just used explosives as mini kamikazes, they say, and just flew into the target. Shotguns, by the way, have very limited range – maybe 80 yards on a really good day. ‘WAY too close.
3) The A50 is Russia’s AWACs plane and they have very few left (4-6 before the strike.) If only two were damaged, that’s still a third of a rare asset. They built about 500 TU-95 Bear, however, so killing a few of them has nowhere near the effect.
I’d say probably 75 yards on BB shot is going to be all you are likely to get on target at best. Which begs the question; Do you want a grenade going off 50-75 yards away or in your face? Because I would argue that anything farther away is better than in your face. If you can even be 30’ away, your odds of surviving climb dramatically.
Also, not all drones go boom.
Unless you are Bob Munden or Jerry Miculek reborn your best bet with a budget and current tech is going to be lots of pellets in the sky.
Love it. This ranks right up there with delivering death or serious injury via pagers, or popping Iraqi nuclear reactors, for balls and deviousness. Well done.
I still don’t want to fund their corruption or let them bleed us dry in terms of our magazine depth but I still love watching them hammer Russians and I’m okay with funding that—and ONLY that.
If only our Puzzle-Palace Pontiffs would learn from this.
Didn’t happen before/during WWI or WWII or Korea or ‘Nam or…