UK launches Project Octopus to deliver interceptor drones to Ukraine
shephardmedia.com105 points by tim333 a day ago
105 points by tim333 a day ago
I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground. Ukraine right now needs to invest in offensive capability, not defensive capability. If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.
In simplest term, it's like your neighbor parks their car on your driveway, you get police to issue fines, or maybe even get it towed. But your neighbor has money, so they keep paying fines, etc.. Your whole neighborhood supports you, so they would call the cops for you, go to town hall and all of that. In the end, you'll never win and get your parking space back. The only way is to park your and all your supporters' cars in their driveway, give them a taste of their own medicine.
>"I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground. Ukraine right now needs to invest in offensive capability, not defensive capability. If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end."
Most long wars in the last century become trench wars; maneuver warfare is too expensive (in terms of materiel) to sustain between adversaries who are at all balanced; the Iran-Iraq War is a good example of this. Additionally, most small/proxy wars are used as testing grounds for either validating new weapons, or checking the viability of old/expired munitions; Ukraine is being used this way, but so was Libya.
It seems that any decisive action is too risky for Western leaders to contemplate. Western leaders seem willing to 'stir the pot' in places like Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, but never want to commit decisive resources. The threat of nuclear escalation seems to be too high for the minuscule popularity that one might win as a victor in Ukraine. Non-nuclear countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, etc.) could commit ground and air forces to Ukraine's aid with little to no risk of any consequences, but even they are unwilling to do so. The sad part is that the lesson being taught here is that China will be able to conquer Taiwan with almost no risk of foreign intervention, no matter how long it takes them.
NATO members really can't commit their own forces directly in Ukraine. There's an enormous difference between supplying weapons versus engaging in direct combat. A middle ground would be to encourage volunteers from their own militaries to join the Ukrainian military, and not prosecute them for violating neutrality laws.
The situation is a fair bit different with Taiwan.
Firstly "In April 2001, George W. Bush publicly announced the American defense of Taiwan"..."This framework was approved by President Donald Trump in 2018" (wikipedia)
Secondly there's a sea in between China and Taiwan meaning it could largely be defended by a no fly zone. In Ukraine once Russia troops have crossed the border it isn't easy to get rid of them without a lot of messy ground warfare.
First point means nothing, Russian occupation proved it both in 2014 and 2022. Security assurance from USA doesn't mean anything.
I agree with you on both counts, but I'm not sure I would count on any president post-GWB to actually defend Taiwan. Nobody seems to have put much behind the Minsk Agreement. Even if they did, I'm not sure how long that would last if nobody else supported them. Can you imagine any of the (mostly european) countries which cry so loudly about Ukraine (while unwilling to commit forces), actually sending meaningful support to Taiwan?
That's hardly relevant. The USA was never really a direct party to the Minsk Agreements. The European countries have mostly disbanded their navies so they lack the capability to defend Taiwan even if they wanted to. Any meaningful assistance would have to come from other regional allies such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam.
No invasion is necessary. Just cutting of undersea cables, bringing communications and finance to a halt with a total information blackout, and then blockade the island from shipping. They'd be left with no choice but to negotiate a surrender.
> The situation is a fair bit different with Taiwan.
The only real difference here is that the U.S. has even fewer advantages in this hypothetical conflict. China, like Russia, has hypersonic missiles and drone swarms both of which are aircraft carrier killers and carriers are still the U.S.’s main way to project power so far from home. According to Pentagon estimates, in a war with China, the U.S. would only have about a month’s worth of ammunition. The supply chain situation would be a disaster, and Japan and South Korea likely wouldn’t risk directly supporting the U.S. because they’d be stuck right within China’s range, not thousands of kilometers from home.
Whatever’s written on paper is meaningless if the country guaranteeing your security has too much to lose, it’s just paper. Ukraine had guarantees, Poland had guarantees in 1939, and plenty of other countries in history had guarantees that didn’t hold up. What really matters are actual capabilities, war scenarios and costs.
Colby knows that[1], because he has all the data and understands the political reality. And the reality is that the U.S. could lose the war, and all the economic and political consequences of losing its hegemony would follow.
All of America’s enemies in history were weaker than the U.S. In the last 100 years, the U.S. hasn’t fought an opponent anywhere near its level of strength. Even in WWII, three quarters of Nazi Germany’s forces were destroyed by the Soviet Union, that’s a fact you won’t see in Hollywood movies about brave heroes. Now the U.S. would be facing the world’s factory, a country with the resources, political system and industrial capacity to actually win that war.
1. https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/09/pentagon-...
If you look at Russia's performance where there has been water in the way it's been kind of terrible. Their navy in the Black Sea kept getting hit by missiles and naval drones and has had to go hide and they've been largely unable to cross the Dnieper river.
The US would only need to bring an aircraft carrier to the general area and then could base aircraft in Taiwan. Even if the Chinese military was stronger than the US it'd be a difficult task for them.
At the moment the Ukrainian strategy, as well as defending themselves seems to be largely to take out the Russian oil industry and other economic targets with the aim that their economy collapses or at least they can't afford to keep the war going.
The Economist discussing that https://archive.ph/Rjuzy
That will not happen. Even the southern branch of the Druzhba pipeline is still carrying some Russian crude through Ukraine to Hungary and Slovakia. This is all mirage. Russian oil gets mixed in India and then gets back to EU. Only U.S., Canada, the EU, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and a few others sanctioned Russia. So over 140 countries did not sanction Russia and can buy oil from them without any mixing and outside the Western price cap system. Cutting Russia off completely from the global oil market would send prices through the roof, and most countries don’t want that. That’s why Ukraine has reportedly been reminded behind closed doors not to hit Russian oil exports too hard.
Ukraine is targeting refineries rather than Crude production/supply. This impact refined oil exports and domestic supply and is causing Russia pain. Oil refineries are also very soft target.
They can't cut off the Druzhba pipeline because they need to keep Hungary and Slovakia happy.
NATO doesn't intend to ever fight a trench war. The war in Ukraine is a useful testing ground for certain weapons but I don't think they care much about trench warfare in general. NATO doctrine has always been to destroy the adversary's air defense system first, then rely on air dominance to enable maneuver warfare on the ground. Neither Russia nor Ukraine had much in the way of functional air forces so they had to fall back on more primitive attritional tactics.
> I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground
Ukrainian government even officially proposed that some time ago as I remember.
Anyone who read about Spanish civil war could tell Ukraine was going to become 2020s (30s?) equivalent of 1930s Spain
I don't see that. Ukraine doesn't really have a civil war. Zelensky doesn't seem a Franco type.
> I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground
The US has definitely used the Ukraine war as a way to wear out the Soviet stockpiles out of Russia.
The EU just hasn't either political will or capabilities to really help Ukraine win.
No one has/had political will to help Ukraine win. USA actually had will to help Russia to continue invasion.
Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops in German territories. But that's exactly what is happening in Ukraine war.
The US had limited interest in the Ukraine winning and a lot to gain from Russia wearing down until they are far from even dreaming of being a peer adversary.
The EU on the other hand is under existential threat from Russia so they (we, actually as I'm French) really ought to do something serious to help Ukraine not only stabilize the front line and wear down Russia, but win this war.
But because we underinvested in defense for decades (because the Western Europe couldn't imagine a conflict was possible with their biggest trade partner, and because eastern Europe was too keen on trading political influence inside the EU to the US in exchange for security guarantees against Russia without having to build a capable military on their own) we ended up in 2022 with little capabilities to really help Ukraine.
And because of the obsession with public spending and debt reduction, countries refused to seriously invest seriously in their industrial capabilities to supply the Ukrainians with a war-changing amount of ammo and other assets. (the fact that South Korea alone was able to give more ammo to the Ukrainians than the whole of EU in 2023 is a sad joke really).
I can't really blame the US, they played their own interests while minimizing consequences for them (and that's also why they wanted to avoid escalation in priority). But I do blame European leaders, including my own president, for not taking this matter as seriously as they should have. (For a full 10 month in 2023 Les forges de Tarbes, France's main production of 155mm shells, has been stuck with no way of producing anything because they couldn't pay their suppliers because they lacked liquidity to do so, this was utterly ridiculous and should have been solved with a single phone call. But nobody in charge bothered, for almost a year…)
>> The EU on the other hand is under existential threat from Russia
EU as an entity is under threat. But only few members bordering Russia actually feel the threat. Russia is not going to invade France or Spain anytime soon, they are relaxed.
> Our threat is not Russia bringing its troops across the Pyrenees - Pedro Sanchez
> He also wrote that a 5 percent defense spending goal would jeopardize the country’s welfare system,
> Sánchez said that 17% of this year’s military spending would go to natural disaster relief.
The Spaniards are the only ones outright saying it, but seem very obvious that the silent (and overwhelmingly economical) majority in EU think this way
Spain is part of NATO and the EU though and so kind of obliged to help defend EU and NATO countries near Russia.
Which is a very short-sighted view, because a Russia that manages to expand its territory is a Russia that will look to continue to expand into a now-weaker Europe.
That's the key problem yes.
The economic consequences of the war have been severe for Germany though, but they don't seem to care that much unfortunately…
At the beginning of the Ukraine war, Rheinmetall of Germany "could not" deliver artillery shells because they were busy manufacturing a large order from Hungary aka Putin's submarine in the EU. Ridiculous.
>No one has/had political will to help Ukraine win
All of the main neocon actors (e.g. lindsay graham) say this. The idea that western military resources are unlimited is a neocon article of faith.
It's weird coz it is possible to count the number of e.g. shells and air defense missiles manufactured and stockpiled and it is plainly obvious that it is not enough and was never enough. That is why Ukraine losing was inevitable.
>Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops
Imagine the USA supplying weapons to a leader who is actually just like Hitler while he is committing a genocide.
You dont have to imagine too hard.
>>> stockpiled and it is plainly obvious that it is not enough and was never enough
War is not only the 155mm shells. NATO has so many weapons stockpiled for war with USSR, they could send everything to Ukraine and it will help a lot. As an example, just check how many old Abrams the are in storage and never will be used and how many have been sent.
>War is not only the 155mm shells.
In this war it is most:
>Artillery has been known as the “king of battle” for centuries, and this largely remains true today. In the Russia-Ukraine war, artillery fire accounts for about 80 percent of the casualties on both sides.
https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/weapons-war-race-between-ru...
>NATO has so many weapons stockpiled for war
Many, like the F16 proved expensive and fairly useless.
And, at some point they had to start deciding whether to strip their inventories bare or hold back weapons deliveries to Ukraine.
So, while there are many stockpiles, theyre not necessarily much help.
In a supreme act of irony the NATO member that stripped its inventories the most now has America threatening its territory.
>Artillery fire accounts for about 80 percent of the casualties
is no longer the case. Now it's drones https://www.army-technology.com/news/drones-now-account-for-...
which I guess show that things can change. If it had been a NATO vs Russia war it would have been air power or maybe nukes which everyone wants to avoid.
The switch to drone warfare may be a problem of Russia. They had a clear advantage in artillery but it's more even with drones and western collaboration like this Project Octopus may give Ukraine the advantage. (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/a-western...)
I can believe that 80% of Russian casualties are drones, however that's more of an artefact of a dire shortage of artillery on the Ukrainian side.
Drones are the one thing theyve got left. It makes sense theyd hype them up. It also makes sense that military-industrial complex lobbying machinery like your website would hype up whatever seems to be working - it fills their order book.
>The switch to drone warfare may be a problem of Russia.
Body bag exchange ratios have recently topped ~40:1. Actual casualty ratios are (being generous, here) probably 25:1 at this point.
> is no longer the case. Now it's drones
Now, yes. But we wasted two years of war before going to that point and during this entire time Russia has outgunned Ukraine by almost an order of magnitude, mostly because shells where a scarce resource for the AFU, which is a shame.
And artillery still is far from irrelevant even now.
> It's weird coz it is possible to count the number of e.g. shells and air defense missiles manufactured and stockpiled and it is plainly obvious that it is not enough and was never enough.
It's all a matter of investment in industrial capacities, especially for mundane early-twentieth century technology like 155mm shells.
It's not inevitable that North Korea is able to supply more shells than any individual NATO member, you know.
>It's not inevitable that North Korea is able to supply more shells
It is if American military exceptionalism is treated as an article of faith, which it was, so here we are.
Scaling up industrial production was never treated as a serious problem and still isnt because all you need, apparently, as OP said, is political will.
Putin made a bet on American and western hubris and it seems to have paid off.
Others tried to invade Russia and failed. The way to beat them is through bankrupcy. The US managed to do that to the USSR once. The Ukrainian strategy of taking out their refineries is good. Regarding interceptor drones, Russia can't complain that the West is giving them offensive weapons. Although I fail to see how anything short of lasers or microwave weapons to fry the drones' circuitry would work against large drone swarms.
I was actually quite amazed that US doesn't really see Ukraine as proving ground for their weapons. I guess they don't really want to find out if they are any good in practice. So far they just implied they were good because they were expensive, but for example tanks weren't really all that useful.
> US doesn't really see Ukraine as proving ground
How do we know this? Aren't some defense tech companies (anduril?) publicly disclosing shipment of new weapons to Ukraine?
> If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.
How exactly do you picture it ending? No, really. Imagine you got everything you wanted. Everyone delivers max offensive capability to Ukraine. Ukraine brings the war to Russia in full scale. Putin, or his successors, give up. Then what?
At the end of the day, Russia will still be there, at Ukraine's borders. What happens?
(Unless you're one of those who imagine a split-up - a sentiment Putin absolutely has noticed and used in building domestic support, by the way. But either way, there will be something that used to be Russia at Ukraine's borders, and they may not be very happy about their neighbors after a full scale war.)
I'll listen to any plausible scenario - plausible to you I mean, I'll defer judgment for now. Don't worry about convincing me, just convince yourself. I just want to know what happy outcome you imagine after Ukraine has somehow brought the war to Russia and won.
It's looking a bit like Russia's adventure in Afghanistan. With that, after a decade:
>The war gradually inflicted a high cost on the Soviet Union as military, economic, and political resources became increasingly exhausted. (wikipedia)
and the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 and collapsed in 1991. I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade. They are currently losing about 1000 soldiers a day and have a deficit of ~$100bn/yr, 17% interest rates and 20% of their oil refining capacity taken out by Ukrainian drone strikes which are escalating.
I agree, actually. It looks a lot like Afghanistan.
But you remember, even though the US foreign policy establishment basically got every single outcome it wanted from supporting the rebels in Afghanistan, right up to the split up of the Soviet Union and Russia becoming a republic run on Chicago school of economics principles by a pro-US president, in another couple of years they instead got Russia back as an enemy state and al Qaeda.
Also, while the situation ended up back in a pretty bad place for the US, that's nothing to where Afghanistan ended up. I think the US should try pretty hard avoid winning, if winning means the same as the way they won in Afghanistan. And Ukraine should definitively avoid an Afghanistan-style victory at all costs.
So what. From the USA perspective, that outcome was still a lot better than having the old USSR in place. Keep the pressure on and maybe a few more of the outlying regions will break away. A long and bloody internal civil war would be ideal but anything that keeps Russia poor and weak would be a win.
Ukraine is different because Ukraine is fighting under one identity, that of their legitimate elected government. Afghanistan's Communist government was deposed by the warlords, who then began carving fiefdoms for themselves, which eventually gave rise to corruption, then the counter-corrupt-govt movement (the Taliban), and eventually a safe haven for Al Qaeda. That was also the reason for the US nation-building efforts in Afghanistan to fail miserably.
> I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade.
They only need to keep going longer than their opponent. Ukraine has fewer soldiers and resources than Russia and currently has almost no offensive capability, as seen on the battlefield. All they can really do is defend, and even then they’re still losing ground, not much, but still losing territory. Here in the West, we’re facing economic problems, high debt, and a shortage of weapons production, especially in the EU. I’d like what you’re saying to happen, but that’s wishful thinking. And Afghanistan wasn’t the primary or even a major reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse.
> I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade
They have oil, gas, and minerals that the rest of the world needs, and they have an internal propaganda machine that lets them hold out for a long time. I remember "experts" saying Russia would collapse economically in 2023, then in 2024 for sure, and that they’d run out of rockets. Now it’s 2025, and that collapse isn’t even on the horizon.
> Ukraine has fewer soldiers and resources than Russia and currently has almost no offensive capability
No offensive capabilities and yet russian refineries keep burning reducing its capability to produce fuel to the point that the fuel in Russia is most expensive it has ever been by a large margin. No vehicles run on crude and russia will eventually have to walk their soldiers to the front lines.
> I remember "experts" saying Russia would collapse economically in 2023
Experts weren't necessarily wrong. It's just hard to notice collapse of something that's already almost a failed state that constantly lies about how things are.
Security guarantees for Ukraine, basically. Ideally full NATO membership. Then Russia will be extremely hard pressed to try again. This is what Ukraine is fighting for, they are practically screaming it at anyone who will listen, and pretty much the only situation in which they will stop fighting (in fact, they would potentially allow some territory to remain occupied if there was a strong guarantee (not just a promise from Russia) that Russia could advance no further.
And what exactly is the alternative, in your mind? Ukraine gets conquered, and what, they all live happily ever after under the gracious and gentle hand of Putin and sing kumbaya for getting reintegrated back into the glorious USSR?
Also, you're framing this as if Ukraine is the aggressor. Maybe if Russia didn't want to be left as an "angry" neighbour, they shouldn't have started their 1000 day special military operation.
>> How exactly do you picture it ending?
With a peace agreement. Russia withdraw its troops, ends occupation and pays for the inflicted damage. Sounds fair, no?
Thank you. It's an answer, but it's very light on the details.
How do you deal with the fact that the large majority of the population in Crimea (and probably a lot of Donbas too) preferred union with Russia over staying in Ukraine? Do you deny them the vote for a generation? Ethnically cleanse them? Or do you give them a big hand on the rudder in the new unified Ukraine, like they used to have? Either solution seems like it's a powder keg for war to break out again.
So do war reparations, of course. That's basically how WW2 happened. As I see it, the best case scenario of Russia paying for all the damages is that it becomes an impoverished breeding ground for a lot of vengeful terrorism. Maybe you're more optimistic?
Also, is this peace agreement really more likely to happen if Moscow has been London blitz-droned into submission? When did your country last sue for peace in such a situation, and how long did that last? I don't have much sympathy for "political realists" in practice, but in theory, I agree with them that you should expect other states to behave like your state would have behaved.
>> fact that the large majority of the population in Crimea
It's not a fact but propaganda from RussiaToday.
How about to go the Russian way: put troops there, make them do a referendum, be sure people see guns and Ukrainian flags. Anyone who will not make a Ukrainian passport soon will be deported or imprisoned. They are ok if Russia do it - then once more will be also accepted.
>> Maybe you're more optimistic?
There are €300b of frozen Russian money, also a 10% reparation tax on oil export could finance the rebuild of Ukraine.
I mean, you can ask this question about literally every war. It ends with a heavily armed border, and uneasy peace until Russia gets a leader that realizes that wars of attrition destroy attacker's nation wealth just as much as defender's. Maybe Putin achieves the immortality he's dreaming about, or maybe Russia never gets a leader like that, well, at least Ukraine would get an opportunity to build up a nation that is too costly to invade.
> At the end of the day, Russia will still be there, at Ukraine's borders.
We can pave over it and turn it into parking lot on the side of the highway to China which border will start right behind Ural mountains.
The original press release from HMG is https://www.gov.uk/government/news/groundbreaking-ukraine-te... .
This has barely more information, but enough to establish an order of magnitude:
> The drone developed under Project OCTOPUS was designed by Ukraine with support from UK scientists and technicians and has already proved successful on the battlefield, proving highly effective against the Shahed one-way attack drone variants used by Russia – despite costing less than 10% to produce than the drones they are designed to intercept.
What does a Shahed cost? https://www.twz.com/news-features/what-does-a-shahed-136-rea... says about US$50k, so they're saying that the Octopus drones cost on the order of US$5k, and "thousands" of them costs on the order of US$10M. So this is a single-digit percentage of Ukraine's yearly drone budget: not insignificant, but far from game-changing.
The main article has that the Ukrainians are investing US$271m in UK plants so presumably more than $10m worth.
But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.
Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?
> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.
> But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.
But does it cost more than the Shahed plus the target of the Shahed? That it the equation Ukraine is using.
That's a different question; I'm just saying it would contradict the "less than 10%" claim in the article and the press release.
It would maybe also not be a great idea to field weapons that cost more than their targets, because, measured in dollars, it means you're doing more damage to yourself than to the enemy. Economically speaking, it's like a handgun that shoots both backwards and forwards. If you're immensely richer than the enemy—and the UK's GDP is almost twice the size of Russia's, even before you add in Ukraine's GDP, Poland's GDP, Germany's, etc.—it can still be a winning strategy. But it's still pretty galling.
My guess is that they will producing a lot of the interceptor drones and keeping the plant there for a long time even if the war ends.
If the interceptor-drone agreement followed the investment, the investment can't have been conditional on the agreement, so maybe the plant was intended to produce other drones, perhaps for sale to, for example, the Allance of Sahel States (ASS).
£200M is the same order of magnitude as Ukraine's total yearly spending on drones, I think.
I think Ukraine is investing large sums into its arms industry and it will probably continue as a large part of its economy, exporting arms after the war is over.
They would after all be in a strong position as one of the only countries to have successfully fought a major power in recent times.
Probably a better position than the Taliban, actually, who actually won the war and recouped all their lost territory. That seems unlikely to be in the cards for Ukraine.
Of course they cost more per unit than Shaheds, because they wouldn't be using CH32V as sole CPUs and JLCPCB PCBA outsorces to do these. They're going to use proper defense parts and defense outsources that make Apple upgrade premiums look like paid junk food sauce packets in comparison.
You're equating the cost of building the factories producing these drones with the cost of Shaheds alone. What do you think is the cost of a factory to build those Shahed drones in Iran? Why would you even include the CapEx as part of the cost ratio here? Mind boggling.
This article doesn't provide enough information to be useful. Is "thousands" a lot? It depends on what kind of drones we're talking about. Ukraine produces on the order of ten thousand military drones per day, as does Russia. So the UK sending "thousands" one time might be insignificant. On the other hand, thousands of properly equipped Reapers would be enough to allow Ukraine to defeat and possibly conquer Russia—but nobody has or will ever have thousands of Reapers, which would cost on the order of 3% of the GDP of the UK.
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223912 ballparks the program at US$10M.
~~deleted, misread the article, I thought this was about a different drone program~~
Are you guessing at random, or do you have more information about Project Octopus than the article contains?
best to not make assumptions since it ultimately makes one look like, well...
Only by taking annual production (4 million) and averaging it daily, but that's not daily actual production and includes all drones (many small FPVs).
Given that comment said “in the order of 10 thousand” and that he gave a single number and not a number for a particular day, I think we can assume that daily is a daily average.
You mean, because maybe most drone production stops on Sundays or something?
Under these circumstances, if the UK is sending thousands of small FPVs it would be insignificant.
I don't think they are your usual small FPVs. They should be designed to take out incoming Shaheds at high altitudes.
Do Shaheds fly at high altitudes? Are we talking about Shahed-136 here? I thought flying low was one of their main advantages! I don't think Anvil can reach high altitudes. I mean it's a battery-powered quadcopter.
We're speculating based on very little information here. At least you didn't spell it "Shaheed".
Recent tactic adaptation is to fly at altitude 2-3 km to avoid mobile ground air defense groups.
There are already available different FPV designs used to successfully intercept Shaheds, loitering munitions and reconnaissance drones.
[flagged]
I can't endorse this. WP says the shooter "remains unidentified", but also you shouldn't silence people for disagreement, even foolish disagreement.
"22 year-old Tyler Robinson is a white Mormon from Utah from a gun-loving Republican family" But I agree with not silencing.
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c07vz1r0j3ro says he confessed, but the very meager information it provides on his political leanings suggests he was not right-wing; https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/12/us/tyler-robinson-charlie... says the shooter engraved antifa slogans and symbols on his bullet casings, and that Robinson criticized Kirk to his family for "spreading hate" and registered as an independent voter, not Republican.
Hiii not sure who you are, so not sure how much weight your endorsement carries. That being said, the shooter has been identified as a very right wing person. I’m not trying to silence anyone, but they did, of their own accord and apropos of nothing, commit to deleting their account if their ridiculously early conclusion was wrong.
Really I’d like it to be a learning opportunity, even though people like this seem to be incapable of learning lessons (will update here when they jump to conclusions without evidence on the next one) or of following principles (I don’t need to update, there’s no way they will follow with their commitment to delete their account). The lesson is to wait for some facts to come in before jumping to extreme conclusions.
He seems to have been identified as antifa, actually? It's his parents who are the right-wing people. At this point it's hard to be very sure if anything, of course.
I'm not clear what you mean when you say "he identified as antifa" because it sounds like you're saying he identified as some member of some club called antifa. I've noticed that USA politicians often use this mythical "antifa" entity as a scapegoat and I fear you might have fallen into this usage pattern inadvertently?
As an anti fascist that uses to run black lives matter protests, whoever these antifa folks are they never invited me to their club!
Having more and better drones now matters more than having more soldiers
I think something most people don't consider is that war is still about logistics. Every single soldier needs food, water, basic consumables, ammo, and more. And each group of soldier will need comms, fuel, and so on. With even a relatively small group of soldiers you rapidly enter into the domain of tons of supplies needed every single day. And in general the majority of an army isn't out there fighting, but participating in supply and logistics. It's called the tooth-to-tail ratio. [1] In WW1 it 2.6:1 logistics:combat, in the Vietnam War (with its lengthy logistics pipeline) it was 12.9:1!
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
Yes and no. That's people what actually hold the ground. No drone will capture a city. But they can help assault team to survive/advance.
They haven't done a city yet but
>Robot team captures Russian soldiers in world-first unmanned assault: Ukraine claims https://interestingengineering.com/military/ukraine-robot-te...
>the attack employed a combination of FPV (first-person view) kamikaze drones and ground robotic complexes (GRCs) to penetrate and neutralize fortified Russian positions that had previously repelled human-led offensives.
> No drone will capture a city.
I think that assumption will quickly need to be reevaluated. Drones definitely can empty a city if there's enough of them and they are so doing their thing for long enough. People can't eat concrete and plants don't grow without the sun.
>> Drones definitely can empty a city if there's enough of them
As well as dumb WW2 era bombs. But even if the city is leveled to the ground you need a lot of ground troops to capture it. We've seen this recently in east Ukraine as well.
Emptying is not capturing, and also I would suggest you look up how effective strategic bombing usually is.
Clearly you need more than one drone to hold a city. But do you need more like one drone per thousand people, one drone per ten people, ten drones per person, or a thousand drones per person? Clearly at some point you cross the threshold.
Drones are cheaper to replace than people.
>> Drones are cheaper to replace than people.
Only for western country.
It's true just about anywhere. Maybe if a militant group was really cut off from global markets it would be an exception.
But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.
More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.
> cost less than 10% of the Russian systems destroyed
One wonders how they have managed that, or how they know.
This article has a little more https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/09/11/uk-to-p...
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
This kind of thing https://thedefender.media/en/2025/08/dyki-shershni-showcased...
>Sting interceptor hits 315 km/h, shoots down over 200 Shaheds and Gerberas
>Sting costs about $2,500
Not sure what design the UK will make.
Wow and Stings are reusable! I thought they would be single use.
Being able to recharge them changes logistics a lot. You can have very mobile teams for defense in depth to decimate swarm attacks.
there are jet powered shaheds with speeds around 600km/h
I think Ukraine is working on jet powered interceptors for those. (https://youtu.be/cmQpycW0Y2s?t=170)
interceptors equipped by shotguns.
i see shaheds in this case equipped with ultrasonic sensors to detect anything in range that will trigger "evasive maneuvers".
The main virtue of the shaheds is they are fairly cheap and simple so the Russians can send hundreds. If you try making them capable of evasive maneuvers and the like you lose some of that.
The Mangust design is quite interesting
>steered by the pilot until, at around 200 meters (650 feet), its auto-guidance system takes over and autonomously completes the interception. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57595
Still seems to be a prototype though - not sure they've hit any shaheds.
Size and range.
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
Right- I think Palantir make much smaller drones, and way faster and more maneuverable, that could take out these slow moving Russian ones very easily. The capability comes more from the software than the parts list - doesn't add to the per-unit cost.
I think Anduril not Palantir?
Yes - thanks.
The Anduril kit is expensive. "Costing from $125,000 to $500,000 per unit" https://www.businessinsider.com/anduril-roadrunner-raytheon-...
Probably a step forward to deal with the hundreds of shahed drones that Russia is sending to Ukraine and now it seems occasionally Poland. I'm curious what design they are going for. There is one possibility here https://youtu.be/Otyn_tXP0Uo
Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that as NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
> Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
Agreed - if we're pitting the manufacturing capabilities of NATO (maybe disregarding USA, given Trump's aversion to action) vs Russia then my money would be on NATO, assuming they are motivated to do it.
> NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that
I think the plan is that the war is over in 10 minutes ... so why care.
Will nato go to war if Russia sends a few drones over a member state?
Of course not.
Nuclear powers would only use nuclear weapons if it's the last resort.
So when in the salami tactics world does it get used?
It's not exactly a new scenario:
Riots in West Berlin, buildings in flames. East German fire brigade crosses the border to help. Would you press the button? The East German police come with them. The button? Then some troops, more troops just for riot control, they say. And then the East German troops are replaced by Russian troops. Button? Then the Russian troops don't go. They are invited to stay to support civilian administration. The civilian administration closes roads and Tempelhof Airport.
I heard it would take 24 hours...
He's referring to nukes. War between NATO and Russia is a non-starter because there's no viable way it doesn't almost immediately escalate to nukes, especially when all parties would be aware of this creating even more an incentive to be the first to try, and inevitably fail, at a preemptive nuclear strike to completely disable the opposing forces' nuclear options.
Russia may do low level stuff like drones into Poland that is not bad enough to launch a nuclear war over.
But why? We have many examples of war activities between states with nukes.
If tomorrow russia will occupy three NATO countries: Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia - nobody is going to use nukes.
We only have one direct example - Pakistan and India, and nukes came out within hours of the conflict starting, and it was settled rapidly afterwards.
And I do think conflict in the Baltics would leak to nuclear war rapidly. Formal military alliances must be upheld, or they mean nothing. If the positioning of nuclear weapons didn't immediately end the war (as in Pakistan-India) then there would likely be limited launches of tactical weapons at invading forces. At that point we reach the crisis point. Either the war ends there, or we get retaliatory nuclear launches at which point the most likely scenario is the majority of the northern hemisphere becoming a depopulated wasteland.
Ye there are so much romantic fantasies roaming around I don't recognize the 'Overton window' anymore.
Best to strike production capability than pay for missiles to shoot them down.
There is still a taboo against a nuclear weapons state directly striking another nuclear weapons state, under its own flag.
Why would you need a nuke to take out a drone factory? There's lots of ways to disrupt production, starting with super low-tech things like drone attacks, assuming you have the intelligence to know where they are being produced.
Might want to check the French position there. But you don’t need nuclear weapons to take out munitions factories.
>you don’t need nuclear weapons to . . .
GP never implied that the strikes he refers to are nuclear strikes.
It's hard to take out factories. The UK did a lot of bombing of German factories in WW2 and production still went up.
> "UK defence secretary John Healey has outlined new plans to send thousands of interceptor missiles to Ukraine every month, with the Ukrainian-developed UAV to be shared with the UK to help in the fight against Russia."
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
Practice makes perfect.
There's some guy in Damascus who knows more about the real world use of the TOW than the people who built it.
> when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers
It's amazing what you can do when your choices are, in essence, "be destroyed" or "become an expert"
Ukraine was one of the key technology hubs of the USSR - well capable of making their own missiles, etc.
Someone elses war to upskill our own ability to wage war at a fraction of the cost? It's a weapons development dream for any Govt / R&D company
Hell, Poland asked Ukraine to provide some instructors to help them after the recent escalation of airspace violations they had.
Ukraine is seen as backwards because they are open about fighting corruption, which is taboo in the West.
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
This is something that has happened in so-called 'civilized' countries before, and it will happen again if they ever face a war of that scale.
Which is why the US pretty much immediately leaned into the laser guided rocket pods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...
About $22k before we even ramp up production. Any NATO aircraft can carry a large loadout of them, and they turn any long distance, slow moving drone into target practice.
NATO has many times the industrial capacity Russia has. Fater 3 years of war Russia has adapted to war production but if NATO decides to do the same Russia will be outclassed quickly.
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
Russia is already in a low level conflict with NATO even if it's just NATO countries supplying equipment to Ukraine and Russia trying to hack NATO politics.
I'm not a tactician with any experience, just thinking this through at my keyboard, but I'm not even sure drone v. drone is the answer here.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
> Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
pulsejets would certainly be cheap, but they'd have terrible fuel efficiency, which is one of the most important attributes for a drone - how long can you loiter and how far can you go?
Russia has started to fly Shahed drones much higher after Ukrainians became effective with shooting low-flying ones with mobile low cost AAA guns. This made drones easier to detect with radars and shoot with missiles, but missiles cost like 10-100 times more then drones and is not sustainable.
Russia also started to deploy mobile anti-drone guns and there a lot of vides that show their effectiveness but Ukraine still fly drones low as Russia still willing to use expensive missiles against them on massive scale.
The issue is not the cost, but availability of AA missiles. Russia is capable of sending 500+ drones in a given day. After few weeks/months any stockpile of missiles will be consumed.
a bunch of shotguns or service rifles is not going to help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
In that case, yeah, I could see aerial drones being a response.
It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.
I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.
I think they go up to like 5000 feet so within anti aircraft gun range but you'd need a lot of such guns to cover the long Ukraine border and they are not cheap. Drones may be more practical.
>the Skyranger, a twin radar-guided 30mm gun turret made by Rheinmetall, making this the natural choice for the German Army. The gun system costs around $12 million https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/09/10/why-so...
and ammo is about $600/round apparently.
EDIT:
They used to go 5000 ft or so. Now " fly between 2,000 to 5,000 meters to evade small arms fire, while the high-altitude reconnaissance drone Shahed 147 can reach 18,288 meters (60,000 feet). "
Eh, yeah, that's pretty far up to hit with small arms fire, at least until it begins to drop for terminal descent.
The answer is simple, but not easy - you own the ground they launch from. Range is limited, so you need to add more of it between you and them. Otherwise the problem is inherently an asymmetric one - drones cost 100k. Solutions cost much more than that. You can't win on a cost basis. You have to win on a strategic basis.
Radar directed anti-aircraft artillery with analogue computers for trajectory prediction, firing proximity fused shells, were extremely effective against V-1 bombs. Far more so than interceptor aircraft.
They were effective because Germans targeted mostly London where one could have dense defenses and V-1 flew relatively low. With drones few kilometers up this is simply not effective.
last estimation was around 170 per day
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/07/21/russia-...
question "NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones."
Is there not cheaper auto-shotgun type devices around? To spray the sky. It doesn't take an entire missile or even bullet to damage a drone does it?
The drones are rather large: https://osmp.ngo/collection/shahed-131-136-uavs-a-visual-gui... and have a flight ceiling of about 4000m. It is probably roughly comparable to WW2 aircraft, given that it's driven by a piston prop engine. That suggests the need for similar technology such as "flak" anti-aircraft shells. However, that requires line of sight and has limited accuracy, while not being all that cheap to deploy. So if these guided interceptors can be built cheaply, with a decent hit rate, they might end up being cheaper than conventional AAA.
One approach is directed energy, there are laser guns like the UK's dragonfire (there are many others out there too) however these have problems in dusty or foggy conditions for obvious reasons. There are also microwave effectors which are used to fry the electronics on drones. These take advantage of the advances in Gallium Nitride based power electronics (and other even more exotic materials).
These drones probably have US semiconductors in them. If only there was a backdoor ...
Bullets have short range. So now you have to carpet the land with AA guns.
It'd be interesting to see how short that range really is.
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.
Geran-2's are far too large to be taken out with shotguns. Furthermore, you'd have to anticipate where they would want to strike. Drones, missiles, or lasers are likely the only way to stop them.
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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223113 and marked it off topic.
Please don't do this on HN.
No? If the bullet casing engravings are his as the Beast says, he's either antifa or trying to frame antifa, and the father's testimony that Tyler deplored Kirk's spreading of hate seems compatible with only the former. But we don't know much for certain this soon.
Also cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45224133.
Also, I looked at your comment history, and you seem to be using Hacker News almost entirely for "political or ideological battle", in this particular case trying to bully someone into silence for disagreeing with you on a political issue. If you keep doing that, you will probably be banned, and I can attest that the last time I saw you get banned from a space I was in for doing that, multiple people came forward to tell me privately about the psychological abuse you'd subjected them to. You can't escape accountability indefinitely.
what are you talking about? psychological abuse? banned from what space? sorry, but you've clearly got me mixed up with someone else.
Some of the drones that entered Poland the other day were made from styrofoam. The cost to intercept probably need to go close to 100$ because the drones that attack are going super cheap.
In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.
I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.
If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.
Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.
They already do 1000s a day AFAIK but for long range they use iranian based design which costs more
""" Microscopic invaders were more of the threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. [...]
Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]
What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]
It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic. """
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age