Die Ukraine beweist, dass Drohnen die Zukunft des Krieges sind – der Westen sollte aufmerksam sein

Welcome to the [Peanut Gallery](https://www.nuttyspectacle.com/)! Today is a good day to talk about the future of war.

Please remember that I know nothing.

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**[Ukraine:](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-11-2024)**

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There’s a book idea bouncing around my head that’s about a Forever War. Imagine, if you will, a world where all production is automated, including the manufacture of weapons, and imagine if those weapons were also automated. Artificial intelligence: robots killing robots, no humans involved. Automated war. Each side forever adapting, struggling and fighting to better kill the other in an ever-evolving struggle for unobtainable dominance. Humans would be bystanders in this world. They’d huddle in their little bunkers, trembling in terror, waiting for one side or the other to slaughter them in their holes.

Anyway, let’s talk about drones.

>Ukrainian drone operations continue to play a critical role in constraining Russian mechanized maneuver and preventing Russian forces from fully exploiting Ukraine’s ongoing manpower constraints.

Drone operators are rapidly becoming the backbone of the Ukrainian armed forces. These are the guys responsible for flying all those quick little things you see over on /r/CombatFootage. But they also do more, much, much more—most of which fails to make it to the Reddit highlight reel. It’s hard to quantify the value of an infantry-piloted bomb, waiting above the Russian lines.

But let’s try to quantify it: what is the value of Kurakhove? Pokrovsk? Kursk? Ukraine is fighting an entirely defensive war, and the Ukrainian drone operators serve as the critical eyes of their army. They guide artillery, smack enemy infantry, and disable mechanized assaults. Drone operators are versatile in a way rarely seen in an emerging technology on the battlefield.

We know these things, but sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves of the revolutionary times in which we live.

Zelensky went on an interview the other day where he blamed the recent Ukrainian retreats on poor morale. It’s hardly surprising. After three years of war, and the manpower currently plaguing the Ukrainian army, rotations are slow in coming and the soldiery are disgruntled. They don’t know how long this war will continue, nor when they will see their families again, and by the looks of things, they’ll have to endure at least one more winter spent on the frontlines.

It’s the drone operators who have ensured Russia is unable to capitalize on the Ukrainian’s degrading morale.

>Ukrainian drone operators, particularly in the Pokrovsk direction, have successfully degraded Russian forces’ mechanized capabilities and have slowed Russian forces’ ability to make gains by forcing Russian infantry to advance primarily at foot pace.

Yeah, I’d creep and crawl too if someone threatened to hit me with a bomb whenever I went out under the open sky.

Ukrainian drones are domestically produced. They are immune to whatever bullshit Donald Trump intends to pull and will always be available. I am not scared of Trump pulling Abrams out of Ukraine. Nor am I scared of Ukraine losing access to Bradley’s or F-16s or ATACMs. Because I know that so long as Ukraine has drones and artillery shells, they’ll be fine.

>Ukrainian forces struck a defense industrial factory in the Udmurt Republic for the first time on the morning of November 17

With drones. They struck the factory with drones, because drones aren’t just for the front lines, boys and girls.

[The Udmurt Republic](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Udmurt+Republic,+Russia/@55.9356947,44.7786093,5.5z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x43e3e2af724d4051:0x102a3a583f19530!8m2!3d57.0670218!4d53.0277948!16zL20vMDI5am03?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTExMy4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D) is a little over 900 kms (600 miles) east of Moscow, so about 1,400 kms (800 miles) from Kharkiv. I just want to give you those numbers so that you’re aware of the threat radius Ukraine’s drones currently present to Russian infrastructure.

Ukraine hit something called the Kupol Electrochemical Plant. It’s a factory which produces components related to the TOR air defense system and radar for the S-300s (also apparently drone parts). They’re critical components of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB). If disabled, and that’s a huge if because we still don’t know the full extent of the damage, the removal of Kupol will result in enormous bottlenecks in the Russian supply chain.

>Russian forces damaged Ukrainian energy infrastructure during the largest missile and drone strike since August 2024 on the night of November 16 to 17.

More drones, just from the shitty side. Sorry, folks. The enemy innovates too.

Last night Ukraine experienced one of the largest strategic strikes of the war. Russia hurled 120 missiles and 90 drones. Of them, Ukraine disabled 42 drones, mostly through electronic warfare, and 100 of the missiles, including the big one: a Zirkon hypersonic cruise missile. Not bad given the scale.

Unfortunately the missile attack did significant damage to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. A thermal plant is now offline. Power outages crisscrossed the Ukrainian energy grid. These attacks have an effect, and the Ukrainian populace are enduring much. This is the third year of these strikes and there doesn’t appear to be any easy end to them. The one saving grace for Ukraine is that these attacks aren’t targeting military assets, only civilian ones.

>Russian forces are innovating their long-range strike packages to include decoy Shahed drones and Shahed drones with thermobaric warheads, likely to confuse and exhaust Ukrainian air defenses and increase the damages of long-range strikes.

Like I said, the enemy is adapting.

I do question the value such adaptations bring, however. Decoy Shaheds are still Shaheds in all but payload. True, Russia saves by limiting the part that goes ‘boom’, but is that really the most expensive part of the Shahed? To create a convincing decoy you still need to create something that can fly. Spit balling here, but that’s got to be something like 70 percent of the cost of a product, right? Please, if I’m out of line here, someone speak up.

Anyway, if Russia is still expending 70 percent of the effort needed to make a Shahed to create a decoy then it’s not really a decoy. It’s an unfinished Shahed. That’s probably why Ukraine only bothered to shoot down 42 of them last night. The rest simply weren’t a large enough threat to waste a Patriot missile.

>The New York Times (NYT) and Washington Post reported that US President Joe Biden has authorized Ukrainian forces to use US-provided ATACMS in limited strikes against Russian and North Korean military targets within Kursk Oblast.

Huge news! Perhaps it’s the threat of Trump, or maybe Biden is simply not scared of Putin’s nuclear bloviating, but he’s finally stopped holding the Ukrainians back…in one section of the front. Kursk, specifically. This new allowance is restricted to Kursk Oblast and is, in part, a (weak) response to news that North Korea sent 10 thousand to the region. Honestly, I can’t help but feel lifting this prohibition should have been done a long time ago, but that’s typical for my feelings towards the Biden administration. He’s too cautious. That said, I’m not dead in nuclear fire, so maybe I should just shutup and trust the old man to do his job.

While the removal of the prohibition is, at best, a minor win for Ukraine, it opens the door to other nations lifting their own prohibition. Already there are rumors that France and the United Kingdom have authorized Ukraine to use Storm Shadow on Russian soil. It’s unknown whether they’re following Biden in limiting this allowance to Kursk Oblast, or if it’s Russia more broadly, but there’s movement. That’s more than we had yesterday.

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>Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Head off the Department of Combating Crimes Committed in Conditions of Armed Conflict, Yuri Bilousov, reported on November 1 that Russian forces have executed at least 109 Ukrainian POWs since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and that Russian forces have intensified the number of POW executions they commit in 2024.

[Please give Ukraine what they need to bring this war to an end.](https://u24.gov.ua/)

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‘Q’ for the Community:

* Drone technology continues to advance at a breakneck pace, supplementing and outright replacing many traditional weapon systems. How will Ukraine’s domestic drone program evolve over the next year?

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* Join the conversation on /r/TheNuttySpectacle!