Russia is going down in history as the only country to lose a naval war against a country with no navy.
Not their first time I believe, they lost their navy before getting to who they needed to fight, whom iirc rescued them instead because they felt so sorry for them
That will be a relief for us Dutch, who lost a naval engagement against an infantry regiment:
We didn’t lose a war with them, but the Barbary Pirates were giving the US trouble before we had a Navy… I also wouldn’t call the first war we had with them entirely successful, but we certainly didn’t lose it.
The US spent trillions of dollars over decades to do what the Ukrainians have done with some fancy remote controlled toys
War is a great driver of technological innovation.
The airplane was first flown in 1903. When WWI broke out, airplanes were nothing more than fruit crates with wings, with a canvas covering and the equivalent of a lawnmower engine. They could literally tear themselves apart doing acrobatic flying. The first time they tried to mount a machine gun in front of the pilot, he shot up the propeller.
By the end of the war, only a few years later, they had aluminum frames, turbocharged engines, and machine guns that were synced to the crankshaft, and fired between the propellers. They could handle the twists and turns of the most acrobatic dogfight. Without the war, it’s doubtful that the aviation industry would have been as motivated to advance so quickly.
Very true. And the more I learn about post-War plane development the more I see that a lack of field experience meant stupid designs and terrible planes
Spending those trillions was the point, that it bought the world’s most powerful military was a bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 keeps amusing me.
The main goals of a live wargame like this are to 1) learn lessons, and to 2) get everyone simulated combat experience. This means you need to run as many scenarios as possible and to make sure every unit gets to participate.
If Red team sinks all the landing ships on round one, does that mean your infantry doesn’t get to war game and learn lessons (after all, the infantry are all ‘in lifeboats’)? Fuck no. You take extensive notes on what red team did, restart the war game, but this time mandate the infantry land. It would be a colossal waste to not learn lessons in your infantry unit or to not allow them to accumulate simulated combat experience simply because their boats sank in the first round.
You’re right, but that’s not what they did it seems. They didn’t just restart it. They did things like requiring the red team to leave their AA radar on, so they could be targeted. They required them to not use AA against certain targets. They made them not use certain weapons systems. They also didn’t allow them to use tactics freely.
The point is, like you said, to learn. It isn’t to re-enforce doctrine. It’s to find out where it fails so it can be fixed. They wanted a show to say the US military can’t be defeated, not to learn how to fight an asymmetric war against a gorilla force.
Nice to meet you, General Peter Pace 🫡
That will always be funny. "Stop! We shouldn’t learn and adapt. We just want to show off with a live fire parade!
I’m no naval expert, but in 2025, a $400 million dollar sub sounds like something ordered from Wish.
Real OceanGate vibes.
It’s Russia, you might not be far off.
Hey it will work as a sub at least once!
It submerges perfectly just fine.
A single use sub.
Seems sub par
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Oopsie poopsie subbie bloopsie
Good job Ukraine!
So it’s 2 subs now… against a country without ships
Why did it never occur to me that drones should go underwater? This is brilliant!
It’s more difficult as you need to be able to communicate with it and water blocks a lot of radio frequencies pretty well.
you need to be able to communicate
Not necessarily. Piloting the weapon into position with internal navigation, then having the thing recognize and engage targets autonomously is becoming common with drones.
Also, you can just trail a very long wire behind the thing to communicate with home base. This is how torpedoes have worked going back to the Cold War.
True and there have been numerous advances in and deployment of drones with anti jamming basically dragging 5-20miles worth of fiber cable behind them. makes the landscape look like a giant spiderweb though so that’s neat.
Fly by wire extends to more than torpedo’s, missiles too
Torpedos, sure but I’m impressed that the wire in fly by wire missiles can withstand the fire coming out the back. Even if placed away, they’d still be in the jet stream.
The wire is glass fibre optic so I guess whatever temperatures glass can withstand for the brief moment that segment of the wire is near the heat - remember it’s continually extending cable
Just like air drones in Ukraine carrying kilometres of fibre optic cable, sea drones may do the same
and water blocks
You’ve lost me here.
I thought you were talking about Minecraft for a second there when I read “water blocks”
Aqua sheep
The second submarine!?
If they keep this up they might significantly cripple one part of Russia’s nuclear triad.
A good number of bombers got taken out, so two parts is not entirely out of the question.
Sir the drone has hit the second submarine
Ahh admiral, this is a very nice submarine you’ve got here. Very… pretty. It would be a shame if something were to… happen to it.
“What sick man sent BABIES to fight me?!”
“Is this a sub for ants?!”
This might be a warning against Russia from using their submarines again Ukrainian shipping in retaliation to Ukraine’s strikes on shadow fleet vessels.
So far they’ve used an Iskander but that’s probably uneconomical. Now it might be even scarier for a Russian sub to sail around in the Black Sea, of which I think only 3 can be operational.
Next step, the Kerch Bridge please
Idk why I expected a picture of the drone, but I was disappointed.
Why are we calling torpedos “drones”?
It’s a crewless, marine weapons platform.
