Thread by @TrentTelenko

Do you all remember that guy on X talking smack to me about how expensive electronic warfare hardened FPV drones would be?

Ukraine has proven his near term analytical powers to be highly flawed on the subject of the high procurement costs EW hardened FPV drones.🤣🤣🤣⬇️

Drone🧵

https://twitter.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1720687437997908416

Sadly, the DoD is filled with these kind of guys whose worldview of drones is as a ROBOCOP class procurement/budget threat to their crewed "ED-209's" (F-35/LCS/M1299).

2/

Three years ago almost everybody was shocked when the Azeris conducted a complete CAS/BAI campaign in N-K using little plastic Bayraktars & miniature MAM-C/L LGBs.

Now no one is shocked that half of all RuAF guns, mortar & rocket systems killed in Oct 2023 died of drones
3/

Between April & June 2023 I tracked the systematic destruction of front line RuAF artillery systems to the tune of 700(+) systems.

The addition of masses of AFU grenade dropping and FPV drones with remote radio relay from other drones did 1/2 of that 700 number in Oct 2023.

4/

We have just seen in October 2023 a combat drone equivalent of the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Where tanks began to take a dominant position in fighting ground wars.

But rather than being an expensive addition to the cost of war. Drones are a cheap disruptive innovation
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...that is providing 1st tier military airpower, ATGMs & artillery fire support to non-nation state actors to kill tanks, jets, and large artillery guns. They are the chariots of the late bronze age collapse empires facing the cheap iron weapons (drones) of the Sea
6/

...peoples. And 3D printing is the iron weapon making production analog for 2023.

For those that doubt that thought:

Here is a drone killed Merkava. A drone would do the same to an M1A2 SepV3 Abrams or an M-10 Booker.

5/

https://twitter.com/AndreiBtvt/status/1715341670944838089

Here is a drone killed Ukrainian Mig-29 jet.

The US military lacks any fielded jammers or AA gun based integrated air defense capability to protect an F-35 from such an attack.

6/

https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1704157972937498935

And here is a UK SP artillery gun in AFU hands in the same class as a yet to be fielded in numbers by the US Army M1299.

7/

https://twitter.com/Russia_Ukraine9/status/1719656306146148529

The combat drone technology on display since 2017, when ISIS was plinking Iraqi M1A1 Abrams tanks, represents the kind of technological challenge to the Western way of war that digital camera technology did when Kodak
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...faced the shift to digital cameras.

Everything Kodak knew and experienced with cameras and photographic film left it's leadership as maladapted to new technology as those old late Bronze age chariot empires were to iron weapon wielding and bareback horse riding nomads.

9/

We can track this Kodak versus digital camera closing of Senior US Flag rank military minds to the Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) exercise where USMC General Van Riper destroyed the Blue Force carrier, USMC amphibious unit & 82nd Airborne Div. intervention force.

10/

...with cruise missiles, suicide boats and persistent chemical weapons.

Blue force lost 16 ships including a CV and 5 of 6 marine transports, and 20,000 men, in an afternoon.

11/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenniu…

I've 'highlight clipped' from the article below exactly where that mental closing of the mind happened in "MC02."

MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE: THE REAL STORY OF A CORRUPTED MILITARY EXERCISE AND ITS LEGACY
MICAH ZENKO

12/ warontherocks.com/2015/11/millen…

"White Cell" restarting the exercise to give the 82nd Division it's training objectives is legitimate.

What was not was ordering Red air defenses not only not to shoot, but turn on its radars and come out into the open to be killed was utterly corrupt & unprofessional.

13/

This was 4-years after Operation Allied Force where Serbian air defenses did exactly what Gen Van Ripper's Red Team did from 24 March 1999 to 10 June 1999.

And the Serbs killed an F-117, while preserving their integrated air defenses to war's end.

14/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bomb…

Gen Van Ripper was literally told during the exercise by JFCOM Commander Gen. Buck Kernan no one would pay attention to what the Serbs did:

"You are playing out of character. The OPFOR would never have done what you did.”🤯🤦‍♂️

The fact that "White Cell" also forbid Red Team
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...from using the chemical weapons they possessed, the objective over which the Blue Force started the war over, was just the unprofessional military cheating cherry on top.

Van Riper had good _professional_ reasons for resigning as the head of the Red Team during the...

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...remainder of the exercise.

Gen Van Riper succinctly summed up what happened MC02:

“War-gaming is not normally corrupted, but this whole thing was prostituted; it was a sham intended to prove what they wanted to prove.”

17/

It was also highly professional that Van Riper leaked the scale of the scale of the cheating in MC02.

Military careers are made for sacrifice.

Sacrificing your own for the ethical good of the military service is an act of profound moral courage.👏👏👏

18/

The one thing I've seen from watching the US military respond to the drone threat since 2017 is that they learned nothing from MC02.

Not one US Flag rank has publicly criticized the Pentagon policy of not buying Chinese off the shelf drones for units to train with at home.

19/

And the "small explosive boat" threat in the Persian Gulf is orders of magnitude worse since suicide tactics are no longer required with drones.

It is utterly foolish to put USN carriers inside the Persian Gulf without flotillas of its own boat-drones to counter this threat
20/

Sadly, I don't expect the US military to adapt their services to fielded Iranian/Chinese/RuAF drone threats unless and until they have taken heavy combat losses from them.

I hope I'm wrong.

I strongly fear...I won't be.

21/21 End

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