• bluGill
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    445 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      165 months ago

      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.

      • @khannie
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        165 months ago

        You may bet your bollix that tank designers are earning really good overtime at the moment.

        • @mojofrododojo
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          95 months ago

          You may bet your bollix that tank designers are earning really good overtime at the moment.

          something tells me drone and EW designers are pulling even more OT than the tank guys.

    • @someguy3
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      5 months ago

      They do not believe NATO ships are that vulnerable

      Oh they are, so a shit ton is being done for anti missile, anti submarine, now anti flying drone, should be anti jet ski drone, anti submarine drone, etc.

    • @Aceticon
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      5 months ago

      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.

    • RubberDuck
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      65 months ago

      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.

      • bluGill
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        25 months ago

        So would I. Those in the military who are talking give me the impression they have done tests and while the results are classified (thus I don’t know what the truth is) they have counter measures (which again are classified so I don’t know what they might be)

    • @Jimmyeatsausage
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      65 months ago

      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.

      • @Maggoty
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        45 months ago

        To be fair we knew they sucked. Which is why we were working to get them replaced for the iraq war on an emergency basis.