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New air superiority [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-24

Kos writes (my summary) that drones are the new air power. If he’s right, the USA and other supporting powers should work to provide Ukraine with enough drones and enough kinds of drones to overwhelm Russia in that area. At minimum, we should ask UA how many of the cheap, commercial ones they could use. They are already using a variety of drones — including some intended for toys — in a variety of ingenious ways. Here are some additional suggestions for additional ploys.

Passwords It is possible to wrest control of a drone from the enemy. If that ever becomes a viable threat, UA drones can prefix every direction with a use-once 2-byte password. NSA can provide them with pairs of thumb drives containing duplicate lists of essentially random bytes.

Counterbattery RU artillery defends the mine fields and trenches. Reducing their guns makes thr entire defense less effective.

Attack drones need not destroy the artillery piece. If they can report their position and take out the grew, the gun will remain there until a spy drone and UA artillery fire can destroy the gun.

Spy drones: I imagine teams of 3 crews each, a drone maintenance, launch, and retrieval crew, a drone-piloting crew of 2 not necessarily anywhere near the launch crew and a howitzer crew. UA already has radar which can identify the location of any firing artillery. The first pilot identifies an area in which RU artillery are firing, pilots the drone to that area, and then towards the closest gun that fired recently. Soon, the drone gets close enough to follow the enemy gun to its next location. The howitzer falls silent and moves to a new firing location. When it is in place, it waits for the drone to report that the RU gun has reached a new location. It fires at that location immediately, then moves. If it misses, it adds that correction to the path from its new location to the RU gun’s new location and fires again. They repeat until the spy drone records a hit.

When the possible flight time of the first drone is nearly up, the second pilot picks up another drone at the launch facility, flies it to near the RU gun, and turns it over to the first pilot. Then he flies the first drone back to the launch facility.

Again, the howitzer can use cluster ammo for its ranging shots (depending on RU location) and taking out the crew will freeze the RU gun in place. One howitzer can have a night team and a day team. When the drone isn’t in position to supply targeting information, the howitzer is available for other missions.

Live reckoning It is possible to interfere with GPS signals. Dead reckoning is available but leads to a cumulative error. If the operator has accurate maps, she can correct the position by occasionally orienting the drone to visible landmarks. ‘

Sentry sniping A drone with heat-detection or night vision capabilities and a small payload can sneak across the lines at night. When the operator detects the heat signature of a human, she can drop a fragmentation grenade on him. This may seem quite an effort to reduce the occupying forcse by one, but it also keeps a number of the others from sleep.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/24/2182780/-New-air-superiority

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