Thread by @TrentTelenko

These complaints about RuAF casualties being utterly horrible and beyond anything this Russian medical worker has seen tracks with the latest column from James Dunnigan's Strategypage dot com

Patterns of Drone War Casualties🧵
1/

https://twitter.com/UKikaski/status/1822592927664619551

Dunnigan's report is not surprising. 

There is a whole lot going on accounting for the increased lethality of small AFU drones.

The Russians have a trifecta of institutional collapse that makes their troops lamost defenseless versus small drones. 

2/
strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/a…

First, the RuAF have no thorax ballistic body armor for about 95% of their troops and certainly no class IV ceramic plates to spread out impact shock.

3/

Second, ~95% of Russians lack a modern Kevlar or better helmet. 

Of that 95%, maybe half are given Soviet steel pots with many having bolts through them reducing ballistic resistance. 

The rest seem to being given paintball sports plastic & nylon "armor."

@secretsqrl123 has posted many examples.

4/

Third, Russian medical logistics have utterly collapsed.  Ukrainian FPV drones have created a 10 km "death zone" for all motor transport and Russian motor transport for medical supplies weren't good to start with. 

The upshot is most Russians wounded by drones are dying from blood loss when they are not killed outright due to a lack of blood clotting bandages and Casevac.

5/

The problem going forward is less about grenade munition dropping drones than FPV drones having warheads that utterly outclass any Western body armor.

By my count there are at least four or five overlapping revolutions in military affairs that are...


6/

https://x.com/Tendar/status/1736366179730460990

...downstream from the reality of FPV drones...maybe more. The following that may qualify as "revolutions" off the top of my head:

1. Kinetic effectiveness
2. Logistical effectiveness
3. Cost effectiveness
4. Lowered barriers to entry
5. The triumph of mass/cheap over the few/expensive.

7/

For the kinetic piece, thermobaric warheads for FPV drones in the anti-personnel role are superior to HE/fragmentation in both likelihood of inflicting a casualty and the severity of the casualties inflicted, allowing for equal mass of their warheads.

8/

The thermobaric warhead is not limited to line of sight from the point of detonation to the target because its "point of detonation" is the surface area of a sphere containing the unburned fuel, i.e., it can go around corners as the sphere expands.

9/

https://x.com/JustinKellyOTT/status/1642528490401456132

That means a thermobaric warhead detonating a short distance from an infantry crouching in a deep foxhole or under an AFV will send some of its fuel over the foxhole/under AFV's & down into it.

Plus the fuel sphere can go around corners in a trench.

10/

https://x.com/FPVDronesUa/status/1790343678948417646

That increases the likelihood of inflicting casualties.

Thermobaric weapons also inflict burns and more collapsed lungs as well as fragmentation casualties.

11/

The fact is that FPV drones can and have repeatedly chased infantry into hardcover with thermobaric grenades that no amount of Class IV body armor can save you from.


12/

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1816819751768715501

I've seen several video clips of a Russian infantry squad hiding in a burnt out BTR or a bunker to avoid an FPV drone strike.  

And the f—king FPV flies into their cover and detonates its thermobaric grenade.

13/

https://x.com/RALee85/status/1653145410402172931

And we know it was a thermobaric FPV grenade in the case of the burnt out BTR because the only things that could actually burn were the clothes, kit and bodies of the now KIA Russian infantry squad.

14/

Western militaries are going to need HALO Master Chief, Star Wars Stormtrooper or Warhammer 40K Space Marine hard carapace blast & heat-resistant body armor suits to have even a chance of surviving a FPV's small thermobaric munitions'.

15/

And I guarantee you that every FPV or drone dropped grenade aimed at US infantry is going to have a thermobaric warhead of some kind because of how much the US military invests in the individual effectiveness of its infantrymen.


16/

https://x.com/war_noir/status/1736631961630781553

This makes the Western military power's investment in Class IV body armor obsolescent overnight.  

Obsolete with an elephantine procurement system where "good enough right now" isn't enough because the system wants one single solution that is "NASA perfect."

Which makes things too costly and too few to make a difference, assuming it isn't obsolete before deployment.
17/

Drones require a huge ecosystem of solutions which means a large number of small vendors pursuing many different technological approaches that the US DoD procurement organizations are simply not staffed either in terms of numbers or the technical skills

18/

...to write cost effective requirements for low unit cost, mass production based, peer to peer attritional warfare.

Small FPV with thermobaric warheads could easily produce a true military revolution by itself.

Only it isn't by itself.

19/19

https://x.com/golub/status/1822172687260590085

@threadreaderapp unroll please