27 ms·

A whole age of warfare sank with the Moskva

200 points by gpayan 4y ago

gerikson 4y ago
Twitter thread from Bret Devereaux with some critique of this piece. https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898?s=20 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898...
- rapnie 4y ago
  Guy has a blog. Rather sends 26 tweets for sake of convenience. Or is that for max exposure?
  - gerikson 4y ago
    Probably because his blog is for more planned essays. Twitter is good for one-off observations. I've personally started a "microblog" for that kind of stuff.
  - nomilk 4y ago
    Personally, I'm new to twitter, and I much prefer these long chains of tweets rather than long form blog posts or articles. These long chains of tweets allow one to give support, comment on, disagree with, share or like a particular sentence or idea, rather than the entire collection, thus allowing more nuance. Other advantages: - Quickly understand which tweets/sentences matter by scanning the likes - Debate can stem from any tweet, so discussion is immediately less conflated and more focussed on specific parts or ideas
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      Thank you. Lots of folks complain about twitter threads, few actually articulate any positives even when they find there to be some.
- fintechjock 4y ago
  I also thought of u/Sir_Budington's comment when this article was posted to r/CredibleDefense: > The thing is that things like anti tank and ship missiles are primarily defensive weapons, not offensive ones. Sure, a Javelin can wreck a tank, but it’s not going to break through a front line. Sure, a harpoon can sink a ship, but it’s not going to project power halfway across the world. A Patriot missile can shoot down a plane, but it’s not going to target moving targets 100 miles behind enemy lines, or provide CAS. > Does this mean that in recent years that the power balance has swung in favour of defenders? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean you get rid of offensive capabilities.
  - ckozlowski 4y ago
    Well said. To build on that, it also brings to mind a few of the more expert commentary on YouTube on "why the tank is not dead". Military History Visualized has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY (There's others as well, and he references them) My overall take away from the Atlantic piece is that they've fallen into the same trap as much of the rest of the internet. Large platforms have not been rendered obsolete because of the advent of these weapons, just as they weren't during the 70s with the first large battles involving Anti-tank and Anti-Ship missiles. (The former has a number of well-cited examples, but for the latter, I call attention to the Battle of Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia ) It's worth nothing as well that the Neptune AShM isn't really a revolutionary weapon, and is marginally improved over classes of AShMs developed in the 80s. It's notary comes from the fact that Ukraine essentially was able redevelop the capability of the old Kh-35, with modest improvements. It's not a next-gen missile such as a LRASM. Similarly, the Javelin, while effective and having gone through incremental upgrades, is not a wildly new weapon. It's been around for decades, and as we're finding along with the Stinger, the U.S. needs to reactivate the manufacturing to build them from scratch which has been dormant for decades. I draw attention to the fact that these are older weapons. Drones are giving troops in the field better ability to target than ever before, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the same difficulties apply. WaPo had an exclusive stating that it was U.S. Intelligence that gave the Ukrainians the necessary info to find and target the Moskava with their missiles. The weapons themselves are just one part in long chain of capabilities. So that's where I think this piece misses much, because it's ignorant of some of the other elements of how all this comes together. The U.S. has been aware of China's long range precision fires for quite some time, and while they're worrysome, they're not terrified. To paraphrase a quote I heard, "a long kill chain provides plenty of opportunities to disrupt it along the way." And that's where the Russians have failed. Not because they're being surprised for the first time by these weapons (they invented many of the earliest examples themselves!) but because they're not fighting effectively. As some commentators have noted, the supporting elements that would defend against these weapons are not in place, the systems designed to counter them are not active/maintained (which was probably the case of the Moskava), and the intelligence/reconnaissance that would have identified and monitored these threats are not in place. All of this contributes to failure. The Russians are not getting wrecked by guided missiles because they're so high tech, they're getting wrecked because they're inept.
- dmurray 4y ago
  Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html
  - dncornholio 4y ago
    God I hate twitter. Why they still hang on to their silly limited functionality, I don't know. Is it fear of change? Threadreader is even worse, with all those ads!
    - sgc 4y ago
      Try nitter.net
- Spooky23 4y ago
  It’s pretty weak critique. For my entire time on earth, the threat of missiles like Exocet is a material threat that is only countered by marginally reliable SAMs and point defense. Missiles and drones only get smarter, and defense challenges get more challenging. Even speedboats with rockets or explosives strapped to them are a threat to warships, who were mostly protected by obscurity - finding ships at sea is hard. Drones negate a lot of that. People will wave away the obvious by saying “The Russians are idiots”, “The ship was old”, etc, but the reality is a defender only has to fuck up once. The Russians should have (and may have in other scenarios) shot down that drone, but obviously failed. Even the mighty US Navy has trouble teaching sailors to steer ships. Operationally the US Navy is exponentially more capable than the Russians… but remember, you only need to screw up once. Fundamentally, the current operating model of big navies is on a path to irrelevance. Nerds can argue if the early ironclad battles were truly relevant, but the fact remains that whether that moment was key or not, the end result was the same.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Large vessels, aircraft carriers are sitting ducks for rockets. Even with some anti rocket defense. It costs large amounts of money to build big ships and it costs little to sink them.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Which is why aircraft carriers aren’t tooling around the ocean on their lonesome.
- lumost 4y ago
  An aircraft carrier can operate 400-1000km from a target, while moving at 40 kph. Much more time to mount an adequate defense compared to the Moskva 50km distance from the coast while sitting idle.
  - caycep 4y ago
    the issue is - what is the D21 (and brethren) capability? I think the war gaming w/ the late USSR and now China as the opposing force worried re theater-capable ICBMs. It's not like the carrier can hide these days...
    - ckozlowski 4y ago
      Can it not? I'd reverse the question: Can China find it? That's the part that I find missing from these discussions. Missiles like the D21 sound really deadly, but the information and communications needed to successfully target a carrier hundreds or thousands of miles away and deliver the weapon successfully is the much more difficult part of the equation. As the U.S. Navy (paraphrasing) said themselves, "The D21 has a long kill chain, and plenty of places to disrupt that kill-chain." Likewise, the carrier goes around with much more than it's planes and escorts. It has the information being fed to it from ISR elsewhere, from satellites overhead to pre-mission information, communications eavesdropping, etc to know what they're up against and when and where they might encounter it. That, in my opinion is far more important than the specifics and specs of such and such weapon. The success or defeat of a carrier battle group I think is going to depend far more on who knows what and when, and therefor, what's going on in the electromagnetic spectrum, than any singular missile.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Movska was an old ship, and was under consideration for scuttle, and like lots of old things had things that didn't work. From what I've read, the Moskva didn't even have its anti-missile defense systems online. Probably never saw the attack coming. https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1522608680595865606 https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1522608680595865606 https://twitter.com/GrangerE04117/status/1522643831736332288 https://twitter.com/GrangerE04117/status/1522643831736332288 https://news.usni.org/2022/05/05/warship-moskva-was-blind-to-ukrainian-missile-attack-analysis-shows https://news.usni.org/2022/05/05/warship-moskva-was-blind-to... Don't have other sources handy, sorry.
- kspacewalk2 4y ago
  In fact Moskva was refurbished in 2021, played a critical role in protecting the entire Black Sea Fleet whenever it left port with its very much online S-300 SAM, and likely didn't see the attack coming because of operator error and being distracted by the Bayraktar drone, not because of any lack of equipment.
- anovikov 4y ago
  It couldn't have it's main missile defence system engage these missiles because it only operates in 180 degree sector and the ship was turned into opposite direction because it was alerted by a decoy force of Bayraktar drones. CIWS could fire though, and apparently they did fire, but missed.
- _kbh_ 4y ago
  I find it hard to believe that a flag ship of a navy that was repaired in 2020 and was set to be in use until 2040, was meant to be scuttled in 2022. https://tass.com/defense/1173927 https://tass.com/defense/1173927
- frostburg 4y ago
  The Moskva had been recently refitted (possibly this involved embezzling the pertintent funds, but still), "it was ready to be scuttled" is just propaganda aimed at understating the loss.
- trasz 4y ago
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
I don't understand the USMC. They were active in Afghanistan- a landlocked country with zero.zero beaches. Reminds me of the German "paratroopers" who spend most of the war as overly qualified infantry.
- ranger207 4y ago
  The USMC has long been fighting for relevance. Fighting in Afghanistan was simply them doing literally anything just to do something
  - balletto 4y ago
    The Marine Corps proposed to take over most of the fighting in Afghanistan: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11military.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11military.htm... Agree that it was playing the game to justify its existence. Personally I think "the nation's ready response force" is a good and necessary mission.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Let's put it like this: The South China Sea isn't called Sea because it's landlocked.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  Part of the capabilities of the Marines is being able to move quickly and rapidly deploy anywhere which is useful in a shock or front line component to move in in front of slower sustainment forces like the Army.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  They are assault/shock troops. The Army has a sprawling operation and mission, but the Marines focus around that shock infantry model. The entire organization is focused around that, which has good and bad attributes.
- tra3 4y ago
  “Generation kill”, the book and the miniseries, is about marines invading Iraq in 2003 in unarmored humvees. Didn’t make sense then either.
pueblito 4y ago
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  He also arrogated to himself the right to decide what anti-Semitism was when Maureen Dowd called someone a “neocon puppet master”
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents - they change more specific topics into more generic ones, which makes threads more repetitive and therefore less interesting. In the case of ideological topics, more generic also means more inflammatory, and we're trying to avoid bursting into flames here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (In case anyone's worried, this point holds regardless of which ideology the tangent is about, and the above is just a procedural comment and not a statement either way about the underlying ideologies.)
  - trasz 4y ago
    While the part at the end - about Ukraine - is clearly ideological blurb, the main part of that comment isn't ideological at all: it documents a somewhat shady track record of the source.
- bnralt 4y ago
  The guy also blamed the Anders Breivik atack on Muslims when it first happened, then tried to stealth edit when news about the attacker came out to make it seem like he wasn't saying it was Muslims, then got called out for the stealth edit and said he had actually wrote that it was an edit but the computer screwed everything up[1]. I was always kind of surprised that this was treated as no big deal. Also worth noting the unsettling fact that it seems almost all mention of this has disappeared from the internet (at least, the easily accessible internet). I was only able to find his refutation of the criticism below (which shares the basic facts of the above, but leaves out other criticisms like edits of the original piece that still weren't treated as such). Sometimes it seems like people have a better time finding bad things a random person said on Twitter a decade ago than acts of malfeasance from a major publication a decade ago. [Edit: Finally found an old blog post laying out the issue well by digging around Twitter and find a tweet from some years ago. Couldn't find it at all through Google, even when limiting the results to the week it happened and looking through every single result Google gave . Check it the blog post here[2].] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110809051022mp_/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/mumbai-comes-to-norway-updated/242380/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110809051022mp_/http://www.the... [2] https://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-shame-at-atlantic.html https://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-shame-at-atlantic.ht...
AnotherGoodName 4y ago
I think the more interesting part to think about is drones which were involved in this sinking. This is a very rapidly evolving area of warfare. Right now we're using drones like we used early WW1 aircraft. As spotters for long range weapons and very occasionally as direct bombers. We haven't yet developed drones that shoot down other drones cheaply. So we can spot enemy formations, ships, tanks etc. without any cost effective way to stop the small spotter drones. I see this changing soon. We will soon have small cheap drones that will take down nearby spotter drones and the balance will change yet again. So don't throw away old tactics and equipment just yet. There's a gap where we have no reasonable way to stop drones that will soon be addressed.
- _boffin_ 4y ago
  Actually... Anduril (Palmer's company) actually has one that's called the Anvil that does exactly what you're talking about: https://www.anduril.com/hardware/anvil/ https://www.anduril.com/hardware/anvil/
- ajross 4y ago
  > I see this changing soon. We will soon have small cheap drones that will take down nearby spotter drones and the balance will change yet again. That's hard to imagine. You can do the spotting job with a $400 consumer device. No piece of autonomous weapons delivery hardware in the modern world exists with a price tag less than 100x that amount. Drones are simply too cheap. If there's a reasonable countermeasure, look to ECM (though frankly modern broadband wifi is remarkably resistant there too, given all the "jamming" present in modern coffee establishments!) and not drone killers.
  - rr808 4y ago
    Right now they're shooting down small drones with $100k manpads. I'm not convinced drones are sensitive to ECM.
    - tazjin 4y ago
      Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons, which sounds kinda reasonable. Probably fairly quick to aim, and definitely very quick to deliver. Colourless, instant laser is the Star Wars we deserve, not the Star Wars we wanted, though ;)
anovikov 4y ago
Moskva sinking stands as just one of the numerous Russian failures in Ukraine. Just look at Belohorivka disaster where whole battalion tactical group was wiped out in the most stupid of circumstances. It doesn't mean that surface ships are outdated or cannot resist anti-ship missiles. U.S. Aegis-equipped destroyers faced multiple strikes of essentially, same missiles in the Gulf of Aden, launched by pro-Russian Howthi (both based on Soviet Kh-35), with no hits and no even close calls (as far known, CIWS was never activated).
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  It was helped by the fact that they were more or less launching them blind. The Ukrainians had the help of intelligence telling them where the Moskava was and where it was going, and that's crucial information for an AShM strike. I doubt the Howthis had that sorta targeting.
  - anovikov 4y ago
    They had direct targeting from a ground-based radar (which was later bombed by a Navy plane).
Steltek 4y ago
Sinking a ship via missile isn't a new thing (1980's, HMS Sheffield). One should be extremely careful drawing conclusions about military tech based on Russian performance. If I was an American captain, I wouldn't be worried about a lucky pair of missiles. A swarm of dozens of missiles would be a different story, however.
- Ichthypresbyter 4y ago
  >Sinking a ship via missile isn't a new thing (1980's, HMS Sheffield). Earlier than that- the Israelis lost the destroyer Eilat to Egyptian SS-N-2 Styx missiles in 1967. In fact, the Germans had quite a lot of success with air-launched anti-ship missiles in WW2, although it's debatable whether those count- they were more like guided bombs. Interestingly, though, this does seem to be the first case of a large warship being successfully sunk by a missile launched from dry land. Argentina hit HMS Glamorgan with a truck-launched Exocet in 1982, killing 14 of the crew, destroying the embarked helicopter, and achieving a successful mission kill, but it didn't sink. And Yugoslavia used an anti-tank missile to sink a small Croatian armed speedboat during the 1991 Siege of Dubrovnik. Every other sinking of a ship by a missile has involved one launched from the sea or air.
- nradov 4y ago
  In fact a US warship did successfully defend against a similar attack in 2016. https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-to-defend-from-yemen-cruise-missiles-attack https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-...
- bell-cot 4y ago
  You might want to read up on how the Sheffield sank - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sheffield_(D80)#Board_of_inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sheffield_(D80)#Board_of_i... . Some choice bits: - Argentine forces carefully analyzed their target, studied, trained, practiced, and drilled for the attack. Over and over and over. Almost as if they believed there was a real war on, and actually wanted to hit an enemy with their weapons... - British forces mostly couldn't be bothered to analyze their defenses for weaknesses. Let alone train, practice, or drill. Then they footgunned their best warning system, and didn't realize they were under attack until human-eyeball lookouts saw smoke from the rocket motors of the incoming missiles. Once warned, the bridge officers basically sat on their hands and gawked. (Vs., say, alerting the crew. Or trying to use some of the various anti-missile defense systems that the ship had.) - The ~5,000 ton "warship" was designed so poorly that one modest hit knocked out both her electrical and fire-fighting systems. Even back in WWII, having redundant critical systems was a well-known and much-valued feature of all real warships. - Hours into the crew's efforts to fight the fires (resulting from the missile hit), coordination and command of the fire-fighting efforts were somewhere between underwhelming and non-existent. Blunt Summary: The aircraft, missile, and anti-missile technologies used (or available) during the attack on the HMS Sheffield were no more than costumes and props in a play. The real meat of the play was a human story that would fit quite comfortably into the Old Testament. On one side was a small group of skilled and determined warriors, intensely focused on winning. On the other side was a crowd of clueless noobs, wandering through the scenery and telling themselves that they were a real army.
lettergram 4y ago
> The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. The US has been transitioning off tanks for a while now https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/03/22/goodbye-tanks-how-the-marine-corps-will-change-and-what-it-will-lose-by-ditching-its-armor/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021... I suspect, most systems will continue to move underwater for the navy. We will also likely couple it with autonomous drones and decoys
- caycep 4y ago
  yeah, I remember that was the whole idea re the Stryker divisions of the army too. reading that article, maybe that means there are longer range standoff weapons than Javelin/Stinger up the infantry's sleeve that we may not know about yet?
  - greedo 4y ago
    No, there's no magic bullets waiting to be unveiled for the infantry or Marines. Stinger is old, in some ways out of date, and a planned replacement was never given enough funding to proceed. Javelin? It's fine for the foreseeable future, until top-attack defenses get good enough to reduce its effectiveness. Things like Trophy APS might be the solution, but those aren't cheap. Eventually, the AGM-179 will replace the TOW/Hellfire/Maverick missiles, but this isn't really something soldiers will be humping around on raids like in Ukraine. These are heavy missiles (not counting their launch hardware), that require vehicles or aircraft to employ.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  The US hasn't been transitioning off tanks. One of the US's ground forces (the USMC) is getting rid of tanks, but the other ground forces (the actual US Army) is still retaining them. Indeed, one of the reasons that the USMC is getting rid of tanks is because it's arguing that the US Army can provide them when needed.
SilverBirch 4y ago
It seems almost bizarre that someone would try to take lessons on the US military from the Moskva. I mean.... you can but I think the lessons would be more along the lines of "Make sure you have well maintained military equipment with well trained personnel". All the reporting I've seen suggests that the Moskva was very old, wasn't refurbished very well, and even with these big caveats something must have gone seriously wrong for it to be sunk in the way it was. So taking that and drawing larger conclusions seems strange.
- SamBam 4y ago
  Yes, most of the consensus I've seen is that even if a modern ship somehow failed to intercept those missiles (which it probably wouldn't have), a modern and well-trained/motivated crew should have been able to immediately shut down the flooding and damaged caused by two comparatively small explosions, and prevented the ship from sinking. An entire ship sinking because of that level of damage is what was most mind-boggling, from what I understand. Regardless, the point of the article is less about the specifics of the Moskva, so I think it's a fair hook.
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    If the missiles managed to blow the Moskva's ammo, that would certainly be enough to explain the sinking. That would've been a lucky hit however.
- nimbius 4y ago
  navies in general are in a very pondersome position in the 21st century. Most missile technology has significantly outpaced their ability to operate uncontested in blue water. this has led to endless, aimless voyages, rattling the chains of kissingers soft power to evermore capable adversaries who simply arent as interested as they were 50 years ago. These fleets are expensive to maintain. without a purpose like the cold war which afforded constant meaningful training, they become little more than a floating maritime exercise in cleaning and cooking. The accident rate of the US navy in the past decade serves as far more of a teachable resource than the Moskva.
- 4y ago
kderbyma 4y ago
Atlantic is the war mongers journal of choice after the economist lol
indymike 4y ago
The sooner we fully adopt loitering munitions (like the switchblade), drones, and divest of easy targets for drones, missiles and loitering munitions (which are really suicide drones) the better.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I'm guessing the B52's will outlive the switchblades by a factor of 10. Switchblades are a bit like 1914 "bombers". Useless by 1916.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Agreed. In fact, you know what a B-52 can hold a whole lot of? Little drones that can loiter for an hour or so looking for whatever their ML aglos think is 'enemy' before devolving down to essentially cluster munitions when their battery is about to die.
  - indymike 4y ago
    Yes, switchblades themselves are probably not the long term answer, but the point is that missiles and loitering munitions really obsolete lumbering, large vehicles.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Interesting take. But your use of missiles can actually be extended back tens of thousands of years. I think it has happened many times that the invention of some new missile weapon (or other defensive weapon) had people think that some kind of offensive form of combat became obsolete. Maybe the first time would be when thrown spears or stones made the big brute with a club obsolete. While in fact, up until now, this has gone back-and-forth numerous times. Disciplined infantry made chariots obsolete, until cataphracts and knights arrived. Longbows defeated knights for a moment, until they switched to plate armor. Pikes/crossbows defeated knights, until they dismounted and picked up a Pollaxe, or later, as cuirassiers used pistols to harass. Muskets and rifles defended well, until Napoleon used artillery, cavalry and manouver to give the attacker an advantage again. Automatic rifles and machine guns led to trench warfare, until the Brits invented tanks. Anti-tank guns defended pretty well vs tanks, until Guderian invented Blitzkrieg. Shaped charges threatened tanks, until reactive armor was invented. Actually, the general pattern that may be surprising to many, is that the key attribute for a weapon/platform to act offensively, is usually high survivability tactically, which allows them to advance, strategically. By comparison, platforms that have high firepower, but low survivability are often great defensively, as they allow counterattacks, but less useful when advancing. So my prediction, going forward, as that at some point (next month or in a 100 years, I don't know), the large platforms will be equipped with defenses that allow them to regain enough survivability to be used offensively.
exabrial 4y ago
> And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune. Absolutely incorrect analysis. The signature marine weapon is the Poseidon P8. This is a heavily modified Boeing 737 NG configured for maritime intelligence and attack. This is what sank the Moskva. If you read the analysis from intelligence reports, the Neptune is a rather unremarkable anti-surface missile with underwhelming capabilities. The Poseidon hovered hundreds of miles away and relayed the combat information to Ukraine commanders when the Moskva was weakened; and more than likely, when its short range defenses were down (likely due to Russian Incompetence). No doubt the Poseidon has watched every Russian Naval asset to figure out they were taking down defense radars and they devised a plan to sneak a relatively crappy Neptune missile in. I think the defining age is intelligence, but then again, hasn't it always been? It's just taking on new forms. One of the most important and urgent projects the Air Force will undertaken is AWACs replacement with another 737 variant that has PESA, AESA, ELINT, AEW capabilities to this platform and provide the same level of battlefield intelligence on solid ground as we have that the P8 provides for maritime.
- avar 4y ago
  > Poseidon P8. This is a heavily modified Boeing 737 Max[...] It's a variant of the 737-NG, not the 737-MAX.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    ah yes, you are correct
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The fact that Ukraine seems to have had, or had access to, uncannily accurate intelligence does seem to be the signature fact of this war. Arms without targeting are at best areal suppression weapons. Russia's impressive-looking mobile rocket-launcher batteries appear formidable, but their effect seems largely to be producing a few seconds of terror over a few hectares of land. Ukraine's ability to target individual generals with precision, to distract and destroy naval flagships, to down helicoptors, to drop munitions on or through tank hatches, to land artillery and rockets with precision on massed troops and materiel ... has been tremendously effective. The shot:kill ratios seem to be extremely high. At the same time, the US has telegraphed Russian moves, plans, and force structures with precision as well. What the state and source of this intelligence is varies. Part clearly comes from near-theatre sources such as the Poseidon, other AWACS assets, and probably other capabilities in Nato Europe, Turkey (itself both part of Europe and Nato, though notable for its position on the Black Sea and control of the Bosperous). Much all but certainly from satellite observations. And I'd suspect a considerable degree is based on signals intelligence. Russia does not control those domains, and has been unable to establish clear control within them. This is unlike, say, any major US campaign of the past 30 years, whatever other concerns might have as to their legitimacy, with the exclusion of satellite capabilities. To date, Russia has not felt it has the ability to move against those intelligence assets. It certainly has the ability to do so should it choose, and a more general conflict might result in that. But for now, it is pinned down in a fishbowl. Effect here though seems to be a combination of intelligence as to enemy position and operations, the ability to deliver force to specific points of need, invulnerability of observation posts, and a general popular support within the theatre of operations. As well as remarkable material support from outside entities. This will be (and all but certainly is being) studied in war colleges and curricula for generations.
flyinglizard 4y ago
Anti-platform weapons have met their match with countermeasures like the Israeli Trophy system against ATGMs which brought tanks back into warfare in full force. Anti drone weapons are everywhere. Aircraft have stealth and DIRCMs. The problem with Moskva was tactical - it was a sitting duck without adequate protection. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
nazavo 4y ago
A cool thing about Neptune is the technology wasn't property tested for the prime time before and is relatively fresh technology! Ukrainian forces had used them successfully and have proven the high precision weapon know-how is still going strong in the country.
- cpursley 4y ago
  Neptune is just an upgraded Russian antiship missile tech from the late 80s. But clearly still pretty effective with the right targeting.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jcranmer 4y ago
It's annoying when articles like this blindly repeat misinformation: > On March 9, 1862, the Union warship Monitor met its Confederate counterpart, Virginia. After a four-hour exchange of fire, the two fought to a draw. It was the first battle of ironclads. In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete. Ouch, false. The ironclad ships that the US built were what became known as "[river] monitors"--they were at best barely seaworthy, since they had no freeboard worth speaking of, so any sea that was mildly stalled would cause the ships to founder. In no way were they ships-of-the-line, or capable of threatening ships-of-the-line, and the first ironclad ship-of-the-line would have been HMS Warrior, built before the US ironclads. > On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning. Even worse than the previous paragraph. Aircraft carriers did not render battleships obsolete at Pearl Harbor, which involved a fleet of old battleships at a state of low readiness. If the Japanese thought battleships obsolete, why did they bring them to the Battle of Midway 6 months later? One of the things that I think is poorly comprehended by much of the lay public is that military technology really is "part of a complete package". There isn't a single technology that beats everything else; instead, it tends to end up closer to a rock-paper-scissors scenario where it turns out you need all of the weapon systems to avoid being defeated by one of them. For example, in WW1-ish naval warfare, a large capital ship like a battleship is vulnerable to torpedoes, which means it needs a fleet screen of light units to avoid the torpedo threat, but those units are vulnerable to the powerful capabilities of battleships, which requires capital ships of their own to threaten. What makes technology obsolete isn't "this can be countered by something else," it's "this capability can be provided by something better."
- Hayvok 4y ago
  The seaworthiness of Monitor or Merrimac was immaterial to the contemporary discussion around ironclads. It was a transformative moment. There were plenty of sea-worthy ironclads already in European fleets but there had not been a battle yet between two ironclads. As usual with militaries, there had been lots of debate around how effective the new weapons system would be. Merrimac sailed into Hampton Roads (near Chesapeake Bay) and wasted two pretty good wooden Union frigates. The Union then sent in the Monitor. The two ships spent four hours pounding away at each other at point blank range, and still managed to steam away under their own power. The cannonballs just bounced off the armor. Two ships that, as you said, were barely sea worthy. (Some contemporary writers said the same - not a fair test!) "News of the action at Hampton Roads took the British public, press, and Parliament by storm. Large wooden steamers were clearly helpless against smaller armour-plated foes. Ironclads were fighting ironclads. Perhaps most significantly, the Americans had produced them in far less time and expense than either England or France." [1] Lord Lyons (British ambassador the U.S.) wrote to Lord Russel (Foreign Secretary), "This is, I suppose, the severest test to which the system of coating vessels in iron armour has yet been exposed." Admiral Milne, head of the British North Atlantic Squadron was "agog" at the results. Commander Hewett of HMS Rinaldo actually watched the battle and had the same reaction. What was proved was that the weapons system of wooden ships-of-the-line was obsolete. Ironclads were now conclusively the future. [1] "Seagoing purposes indispensable to the defence of this country:" Policy Pitfalls of Great Britain's Early Ironclads
Quillbert182 4y ago
I agree that missiles are the future, but unless the enemy is coming to you as is the case with Ukraine, then you are going to need a platform to deliver the missiles.
ttul 4y ago
“So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger.” Weren’t these the signature weapons because Ukraine doesn’t have much of an air force? It’s true that the Javelin and Stingers (etc.) have been remarkably effective; however, it’s not like the US ought to ditch its expensive aircraft in favor of shoulder-launched weapons.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > Weren’t these the signature weapons because Ukraine doesn’t have much of an air force? It's because they're cheap, easy to deploy, and effective. And Russian planes need to fly low because of other anti air weapons and a general lack of precision munitions.
imwillofficial 4y ago
It didn’t sink, it literally pulled into port 4 days later. This is disinformation posing as analysis.
m3kw9 4y ago
When you bet on your current ship defences to intercept new hypersonic missiles, you are taking too big of a bet.
- itslennysfault 4y ago
  Huh? Neptune isn't hypersonic. In fact, it is subsonic.
flyinghamster 4y ago
There was a harbinger of this in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, when Argentine forces sunk HMS Sheffield with Exocet missiles. Also, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020 was showing the effectiveness of drones, and I'm sure Ukraine was taking notes.
orwin 4y ago
Burg. Don't talk about the Maginot if you don't know shit about the second World War. I swear hoi4 players have more knowledge than the author. I skimmed the comments and it seems the author was wrong about a lot. I thought the Atlantic was a better than average paper, the quality must have declined.
fractallyte 4y ago
From the article: “When you look at what weapons are on top of the Ukrainians’ wish list,” Moulton told me, “it isn’t towed howitzers. Top of their list are armed drones, anti-tank missiles, and anti-ship missiles.” Actually, no! Why is this still being rehashed?? Zelensky specifically requested: artillery, artillery shells, Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, armored vehicles, tanks, air defense systems, and military aircraft. He said: “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.” (Liberation Without Victory, The Atlantic, https://archive.ph/nz2Da https://archive.ph/nz2Da) And while Javelins, and other missiles, have proven invaluable in taking out armored vehicles, the more effective weapon has been artillery (often targeted with the aid of drones).
- greedo 4y ago
  Artillery just isn't sexy enough to capture the media's attention. The King Of Battle has knocked out far more vehicles in Ukraine than any ATGMs.
- paganel 4y ago
  Thank you for this comment, I had to scroll all the way down to read some good-sense (I had made a comment basically identical to yours when it comes to artillery+drones a little earlier). I think it all comes down to the "educated" Western audiences only following this conflict through the eyes of the Western media, which Western media has its own incentives (about which this is not the place to write at length), suffice is to say that their reports don't accurately reflect the situation on the battleground. What does reflect the situation on the battleground is the videos coming from both side (Ukrainian and Russian) which clearly show that artillery (plus cheap commercial drones used as spotters) is bringing in most of the losses. The greatest military Russian defeat [1] in this war until now was the result of artillery and drones, not of javelins, not of any fancy and expensive Western-provided weapons. Later edit: This [2] is good, old artillery in use (in this case by the Russians). There's no javelins nor drones all by themselves that can take those artillery pieces out. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqbam9/new_drone_footage_of_the_failed_russian_bridge/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqbam9/new_drone_f... [2] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1528738177741201410 https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1528738177741201410
paganel 4y ago
> o far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. The author (a veteran US Marine) is, obviously, well more versed in this than me, a computer programmer, but I'd say that he's wrong here. The signature weapon of the war right now is artillery, on both sides, that's why most recently it was artillery pieces that the US sent to Ukraine. Artillery has been a mainstay of the wars on the Ukrainian-Russian steppes ever since Napoleon. What this war brought new to the table, a thing which might be the real revolutionary part of this war (at least when it comes to military doctrine), is the deadly artillery + cheap aerial drones combo, it has brought havoc to both sides. Those Russian convoys were not destroyed by javelines, but by targeted Ukrainian artillery strikes (with the help of said cheap drones). Inside of the cities (Mariupol, mostly, from where most of the images have come when it comes to urban combat in this war) the tanks have still shown their worth, as in it was mostly with tanks (and, again, with artillery) that the Russians managed to destroy (and thus conquer) most of the city (they also used some aviation to drop bombs on Azovstal, but that was towards the end of the Mariupol battle). An interesting apparition was that of the BTR-82 [1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/twraun/russian_soldiers_fall_back_while_being_covered_by/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/twraun/russi...
jacquesm 4y ago
One thing I noticed about this war is that in the beginning a lot of planes were downed, this slowed to a trickle and then almost entirely stopped once the Western front disappeared and only the Eastern remained. I'm not quite clear on whether that is because they are no longer flying sorties because they're too afraid of surface-to-air defenses, whether they are out of planes or some other reason (such as the defenders no longer being able to down enemy planes).
- mhh__ 4y ago
  I think there's still a trickle of SU-25s being shot down.
giantg2 4y ago
"So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune." If you look at it solely from the Ukrainian point of view - yes. The Russians are relying heavily on platforms, even if they are losing. That doesn't mean that there isn't value in those platforms, just that they are being misapplied. For example, a tank is much more valuable to use against another tank than to use against dispersed ground troops. We would likely see them being valued differently in a near-peer conflict that was more coordinated/strategic (one of the biggest enemies of the Russians has been their leaders' own greed and lack of preparation, training, and coordination). War is largely about economics. Of course using man-portable anti-platform weapons is ideal - you can destroy equipment that takes months or years to build at .1% of it's cost. Just like using left over or homemade munitions for IEDs can generate a lot of damage (physical and economic), especially over the course of a decade or two.
- lnsru 4y ago
  Where are any economics in Ukraine war? Russian loses are comparable to whole army of a small country.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    I'm not sure what you're asking. The west is helping Ukraine economically, especially with the delivery of weapons on a scale that they would not be able to normally pay for. The west is also implementing sanctions to hurt Russia economically (there are even some articles coming out that it is affecting daily life in Russia now). And the losses sustained by Russia in the war will take years or even decades to recover from since they can't build or finance equipment as fast as they are losing it (not even getting into the personnel side of things). It's unsustainable.
alaricus 4y ago
Wasn't the Turkish Bayraktar drone also involved in the sinking of Moskva? Not to rain on the "feel-good" parade, but Moskva was laid down in 1976 and launched in 1979. It was older than most people on HackerNews. Don't treat it as bleeding edge technology.
- dotopotoro 4y ago
  Also, It was decommissioned then reinstated. However it was still a flagship.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tlear 4y ago
Absolute garbage of an article. It is S300 an ancient AA platform that denied Russia Air supremacy, it is combination of Artillery and drones not Javelin that been most lethal and it most definitely not a completely unimpressive Neptune that is equivalent of a missiles that went into device half a century ago.. wait Russia still easily blockades Odessa In Donbas now war resembles most the WW2 with mass of artillery being exchanged for drone directed artillery. Not Javelin, not any other man portable anything can dislodge Russian or Ukranians for that matter. Massed drone directed artillery and rocket artillery is the current go to. Those ideas of infiltrating marines to Chinese islands are so idiotic as to defy all belief.. I hope whoever came up with that is on the first boat there Last but not least perhaps journalist writing for Atlantic can read some book about WW1? Like something basic that covers eastern front? Offense did not go anywhere and no Somme was not a bayonet charge ffs
wrp 4y ago
"Flagship" needs some clarification. If you follow naval affairs, this may seem too obvious to mention, but the term "flagship" does not indicate anything about the technical capabilities of a vessel. It just means the ship where the commander of a fleet has his office. The Moskva, despite being antiquated, was probably chosen as flagship just because it had the most room. Also, a plea to everyone posting technical details. Please provide links to sources. It has been extremely hard finding solid data on this war.
rapjr9 4y ago
There seems to be an assumption here that the enemy will always have a platform-centric approach to war. What if both sides have an anti-platform-centric approach? Do they shoot at each others portable MANPAD's? A hybrid approach seems necessary, tanks and ships and planes have specific uses when the opponent is not platform-centric and Stinger's and Javelin's and Neptune's can be used against platforms. Something not mentioned in the article is that unmanned platforms are likely to take over. Why put a person inside any of these craft when they can be remotely controlled? Autonomous weapons (killer robots) don't seem likely to be able to distinguish combatants from non-combatants for some time to come, so remote control seems more likely. Also, tanks, planes and ships can't do a lot to win battles in urban terrain. At best they can obliterate infrastructure. Still, it is obvious that smart weapons are making a big difference in Ukraine. You would think that the major powers that invented smart weapons and have stockpiled them would not have been surprised when they turn out to make a difference. I think the major surprise here is the sudden increased perception that a war between peer powers is not a thing of the past. I would guess that all the major powers are not ready today to fight each other in earnest for more than months or half a year in a non-nuclear war. China and Russia would not be able to get critical parts, and the USA would have to ramp up new manufacturing capability very quickly (it imports ingredients for high explosives from China?) Note that this would be extremely expensive for all countries, it would turn a large part of useful and beneficial production capacity into building an unproductive war economy. Citizens everywhere would suffer, even if none of the new weapons were ever used.

200 points by gpayan 4y ago

Twitter thread from Bret Devereaux with some critique of this piece. https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898?s=20 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1528581923446181898...

rapnie 4y ago
Guy has a blog. Rather sends 26 tweets for sake of convenience. Or is that for max exposure?
- gerikson 4y ago
  Probably because his blog is for more planned essays. Twitter is good for one-off observations. I've personally started a "microblog" for that kind of stuff.
- nomilk 4y ago
  Personally, I'm new to twitter, and I much prefer these long chains of tweets rather than long form blog posts or articles. These long chains of tweets allow one to give support, comment on, disagree with, share or like a particular sentence or idea, rather than the entire collection, thus allowing more nuance. Other advantages: - Quickly understand which tweets/sentences matter by scanning the likes - Debate can stem from any tweet, so discussion is immediately less conflated and more focussed on specific parts or ideas
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    Thank you. Lots of folks complain about twitter threads, few actually articulate any positives even when they find there to be some.
fintechjock 4y ago
I also thought of u/Sir_Budington's comment when this article was posted to r/CredibleDefense: > The thing is that things like anti tank and ship missiles are primarily defensive weapons, not offensive ones. Sure, a Javelin can wreck a tank, but it’s not going to break through a front line. Sure, a harpoon can sink a ship, but it’s not going to project power halfway across the world. A Patriot missile can shoot down a plane, but it’s not going to target moving targets 100 miles behind enemy lines, or provide CAS. > Does this mean that in recent years that the power balance has swung in favour of defenders? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean you get rid of offensive capabilities.
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  Well said. To build on that, it also brings to mind a few of the more expert commentary on YouTube on "why the tank is not dead". Military History Visualized has a good video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPth_xqBXGY (There's others as well, and he references them) My overall take away from the Atlantic piece is that they've fallen into the same trap as much of the rest of the internet. Large platforms have not been rendered obsolete because of the advent of these weapons, just as they weren't during the 70s with the first large battles involving Anti-tank and Anti-Ship missiles. (The former has a number of well-cited examples, but for the latter, I call attention to the Battle of Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Latakia ) It's worth nothing as well that the Neptune AShM isn't really a revolutionary weapon, and is marginally improved over classes of AShMs developed in the 80s. It's notary comes from the fact that Ukraine essentially was able redevelop the capability of the old Kh-35, with modest improvements. It's not a next-gen missile such as a LRASM. Similarly, the Javelin, while effective and having gone through incremental upgrades, is not a wildly new weapon. It's been around for decades, and as we're finding along with the Stinger, the U.S. needs to reactivate the manufacturing to build them from scratch which has been dormant for decades. I draw attention to the fact that these are older weapons. Drones are giving troops in the field better ability to target than ever before, but the fundamentals haven't changed and the same difficulties apply. WaPo had an exclusive stating that it was U.S. Intelligence that gave the Ukrainians the necessary info to find and target the Moskava with their missiles. The weapons themselves are just one part in long chain of capabilities. So that's where I think this piece misses much, because it's ignorant of some of the other elements of how all this comes together. The U.S. has been aware of China's long range precision fires for quite some time, and while they're worrysome, they're not terrified. To paraphrase a quote I heard, "a long kill chain provides plenty of opportunities to disrupt it along the way." And that's where the Russians have failed. Not because they're being surprised for the first time by these weapons (they invented many of the earliest examples themselves!) but because they're not fighting effectively. As some commentators have noted, the supporting elements that would defend against these weapons are not in place, the systems designed to counter them are not active/maintained (which was probably the case of the Moskava), and the intelligence/reconnaissance that would have identified and monitored these threats are not in place. All of this contributes to failure. The Russians are not getting wrecked by guided missiles because they're so high tech, they're getting wrecked because they're inept.
dmurray 4y ago
Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528581923446181898.html
- dncornholio 4y ago
  God I hate twitter. Why they still hang on to their silly limited functionality, I don't know. Is it fear of change? Threadreader is even worse, with all those ads!
  - sgc 4y ago
    Try nitter.net
Spooky23 4y ago
It’s pretty weak critique. For my entire time on earth, the threat of missiles like Exocet is a material threat that is only countered by marginally reliable SAMs and point defense. Missiles and drones only get smarter, and defense challenges get more challenging. Even speedboats with rockets or explosives strapped to them are a threat to warships, who were mostly protected by obscurity - finding ships at sea is hard. Drones negate a lot of that. People will wave away the obvious by saying “The Russians are idiots”, “The ship was old”, etc, but the reality is a defender only has to fuck up once. The Russians should have (and may have in other scenarios) shot down that drone, but obviously failed. Even the mighty US Navy has trouble teaching sailors to steer ships. Operationally the US Navy is exponentially more capable than the Russians… but remember, you only need to screw up once. Fundamentally, the current operating model of big navies is on a path to irrelevance. Nerds can argue if the early ironclad battles were truly relevant, but the fact remains that whether that moment was key or not, the end result was the same.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Large vessels, aircraft carriers are sitting ducks for rockets. Even with some anti rocket defense. It costs large amounts of money to build big ships and it costs little to sink them.

ghaff 4y ago
Which is why aircraft carriers aren’t tooling around the ocean on their lonesome.
lumost 4y ago
An aircraft carrier can operate 400-1000km from a target, while moving at 40 kph. Much more time to mount an adequate defense compared to the Moskva 50km distance from the coast while sitting idle.
- caycep 4y ago
  the issue is - what is the D21 (and brethren) capability? I think the war gaming w/ the late USSR and now China as the opposing force worried re theater-capable ICBMs. It's not like the carrier can hide these days...
  - ckozlowski 4y ago
    Can it not? I'd reverse the question: Can China find it? That's the part that I find missing from these discussions. Missiles like the D21 sound really deadly, but the information and communications needed to successfully target a carrier hundreds or thousands of miles away and deliver the weapon successfully is the much more difficult part of the equation. As the U.S. Navy (paraphrasing) said themselves, "The D21 has a long kill chain, and plenty of places to disrupt that kill-chain." Likewise, the carrier goes around with much more than it's planes and escorts. It has the information being fed to it from ISR elsewhere, from satellites overhead to pre-mission information, communications eavesdropping, etc to know what they're up against and when and where they might encounter it. That, in my opinion is far more important than the specifics and specs of such and such weapon. The success or defeat of a carrier battle group I think is going to depend far more on who knows what and when, and therefor, what's going on in the electromagnetic spectrum, than any singular missile.

jonnycomputer 4y ago

Movska was an old ship, and was under consideration for scuttle, and like lots of old things had things that didn't work. From what I've read, the Moskva didn't even have its anti-missile defense systems online. Probably never saw the attack coming. https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1522608680595865606 https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1522608680595865606 https://twitter.com/GrangerE04117/status/1522643831736332288 https://twitter.com/GrangerE04117/status/1522643831736332288 https://news.usni.org/2022/05/05/warship-moskva-was-blind-to-ukrainian-missile-attack-analysis-shows https://news.usni.org/2022/05/05/warship-moskva-was-blind-to... Don't have other sources handy, sorry.

kspacewalk2 4y ago
In fact Moskva was refurbished in 2021, played a critical role in protecting the entire Black Sea Fleet whenever it left port with its very much online S-300 SAM, and likely didn't see the attack coming because of operator error and being distracted by the Bayraktar drone, not because of any lack of equipment.
anovikov 4y ago
It couldn't have it's main missile defence system engage these missiles because it only operates in 180 degree sector and the ship was turned into opposite direction because it was alerted by a decoy force of Bayraktar drones. CIWS could fire though, and apparently they did fire, but missed.
_kbh_ 4y ago
I find it hard to believe that a flag ship of a navy that was repaired in 2020 and was set to be in use until 2040, was meant to be scuttled in 2022. https://tass.com/defense/1173927 https://tass.com/defense/1173927
frostburg 4y ago
The Moskva had been recently refitted (possibly this involved embezzling the pertintent funds, but still), "it was ready to be scuttled" is just propaganda aimed at understating the loss.
trasz 4y ago

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

I don't understand the USMC. They were active in Afghanistan- a landlocked country with zero.zero beaches. Reminds me of the German "paratroopers" who spend most of the war as overly qualified infantry.

ranger207 4y ago
The USMC has long been fighting for relevance. Fighting in Afghanistan was simply them doing literally anything just to do something
- balletto 4y ago
  The Marine Corps proposed to take over most of the fighting in Afghanistan: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11military.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11military.htm... Agree that it was playing the game to justify its existence. Personally I think "the nation's ready response force" is a good and necessary mission.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Let's put it like this: The South China Sea isn't called Sea because it's landlocked.
rtkwe 4y ago
Part of the capabilities of the Marines is being able to move quickly and rapidly deploy anywhere which is useful in a shock or front line component to move in in front of slower sustainment forces like the Army.
Spooky23 4y ago
They are assault/shock troops. The Army has a sprawling operation and mission, but the Marines focus around that shock infantry model. The entire organization is focused around that, which has good and bad attributes.
tra3 4y ago
“Generation kill”, the book and the miniseries, is about marines invading Iraq in 2003 in unarmored humvees. Didn’t make sense then either.

pueblito 4y ago

selimthegrim 4y ago
He also arrogated to himself the right to decide what anti-Semitism was when Maureen Dowd called someone a “neocon puppet master”
dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents - they change more specific topics into more generic ones, which makes threads more repetitive and therefore less interesting. In the case of ideological topics, more generic also means more inflammatory, and we're trying to avoid bursting into flames here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=generic%20discussion%20by%3Adang%20-flamewars%20-flamewar&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (In case anyone's worried, this point holds regardless of which ideology the tangent is about, and the above is just a procedural comment and not a statement either way about the underlying ideologies.)
- trasz 4y ago
  While the part at the end - about Ukraine - is clearly ideological blurb, the main part of that comment isn't ideological at all: it documents a somewhat shady track record of the source.
bnralt 4y ago
The guy also blamed the Anders Breivik atack on Muslims when it first happened, then tried to stealth edit when news about the attacker came out to make it seem like he wasn't saying it was Muslims, then got called out for the stealth edit and said he had actually wrote that it was an edit but the computer screwed everything up[1]. I was always kind of surprised that this was treated as no big deal. Also worth noting the unsettling fact that it seems almost all mention of this has disappeared from the internet (at least, the easily accessible internet). I was only able to find his refutation of the criticism below (which shares the basic facts of the above, but leaves out other criticisms like edits of the original piece that still weren't treated as such). Sometimes it seems like people have a better time finding bad things a random person said on Twitter a decade ago than acts of malfeasance from a major publication a decade ago. [Edit: Finally found an old blog post laying out the issue well by digging around Twitter and find a tweet from some years ago. Couldn't find it at all through Google, even when limiting the results to the week it happened and looking through every single result Google gave . Check it the blog post here[2].] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110809051022mp_/http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/mumbai-comes-to-norway-updated/242380/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110809051022mp_/http://www.the... [2] https://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-shame-at-atlantic.html https://flapola.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-shame-at-atlantic.ht...

AnotherGoodName 4y ago

I think the more interesting part to think about is drones which were involved in this sinking. This is a very rapidly evolving area of warfare. Right now we're using drones like we used early WW1 aircraft. As spotters for long range weapons and very occasionally as direct bombers. We haven't yet developed drones that shoot down other drones cheaply. So we can spot enemy formations, ships, tanks etc. without any cost effective way to stop the small spotter drones. I see this changing soon. We will soon have small cheap drones that will take down nearby spotter drones and the balance will change yet again. So don't throw away old tactics and equipment just yet. There's a gap where we have no reasonable way to stop drones that will soon be addressed.

_boffin_ 4y ago
Actually... Anduril (Palmer's company) actually has one that's called the Anvil that does exactly what you're talking about: https://www.anduril.com/hardware/anvil/ https://www.anduril.com/hardware/anvil/
ajross 4y ago
> I see this changing soon. We will soon have small cheap drones that will take down nearby spotter drones and the balance will change yet again. That's hard to imagine. You can do the spotting job with a $400 consumer device. No piece of autonomous weapons delivery hardware in the modern world exists with a price tag less than 100x that amount. Drones are simply too cheap. If there's a reasonable countermeasure, look to ECM (though frankly modern broadband wifi is remarkably resistant there too, given all the "jamming" present in modern coffee establishments!) and not drone killers.
- rr808 4y ago
  Right now they're shooting down small drones with $100k manpads. I'm not convinced drones are sensitive to ECM.
  - tazjin 4y ago
    Russia said they're shooting down drones with laser weapons, which sounds kinda reasonable. Probably fairly quick to aim, and definitely very quick to deliver. Colourless, instant laser is the Star Wars we deserve, not the Star Wars we wanted, though ;)

anovikov 4y ago

Moskva sinking stands as just one of the numerous Russian failures in Ukraine. Just look at Belohorivka disaster where whole battalion tactical group was wiped out in the most stupid of circumstances. It doesn't mean that surface ships are outdated or cannot resist anti-ship missiles. U.S. Aegis-equipped destroyers faced multiple strikes of essentially, same missiles in the Gulf of Aden, launched by pro-Russian Howthi (both based on Soviet Kh-35), with no hits and no even close calls (as far known, CIWS was never activated).

ckozlowski 4y ago
It was helped by the fact that they were more or less launching them blind. The Ukrainians had the help of intelligence telling them where the Moskava was and where it was going, and that's crucial information for an AShM strike. I doubt the Howthis had that sorta targeting.
- anovikov 4y ago
  They had direct targeting from a ground-based radar (which was later bombed by a Navy plane).

Steltek 4y ago

Sinking a ship via missile isn't a new thing (1980's, HMS Sheffield). One should be extremely careful drawing conclusions about military tech based on Russian performance. If I was an American captain, I wouldn't be worried about a lucky pair of missiles. A swarm of dozens of missiles would be a different story, however.

Ichthypresbyter 4y ago
>Sinking a ship via missile isn't a new thing (1980's, HMS Sheffield). Earlier than that- the Israelis lost the destroyer Eilat to Egyptian SS-N-2 Styx missiles in 1967. In fact, the Germans had quite a lot of success with air-launched anti-ship missiles in WW2, although it's debatable whether those count- they were more like guided bombs. Interestingly, though, this does seem to be the first case of a large warship being successfully sunk by a missile launched from dry land. Argentina hit HMS Glamorgan with a truck-launched Exocet in 1982, killing 14 of the crew, destroying the embarked helicopter, and achieving a successful mission kill, but it didn't sink. And Yugoslavia used an anti-tank missile to sink a small Croatian armed speedboat during the 1991 Siege of Dubrovnik. Every other sinking of a ship by a missile has involved one launched from the sea or air.
nradov 4y ago
In fact a US warship did successfully defend against a similar attack in 2016. https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-to-defend-from-yemen-cruise-missiles-attack https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-...
bell-cot 4y ago
You might want to read up on how the Sheffield sank - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sheffield_(D80)#Board_of_inquiry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sheffield_(D80)#Board_of_i... . Some choice bits: - Argentine forces carefully analyzed their target, studied, trained, practiced, and drilled for the attack. Over and over and over. Almost as if they believed there was a real war on, and actually wanted to hit an enemy with their weapons... - British forces mostly couldn't be bothered to analyze their defenses for weaknesses. Let alone train, practice, or drill. Then they footgunned their best warning system, and didn't realize they were under attack until human-eyeball lookouts saw smoke from the rocket motors of the incoming missiles. Once warned, the bridge officers basically sat on their hands and gawked. (Vs., say, alerting the crew. Or trying to use some of the various anti-missile defense systems that the ship had.) - The ~5,000 ton "warship" was designed so poorly that one modest hit knocked out both her electrical and fire-fighting systems. Even back in WWII, having redundant critical systems was a well-known and much-valued feature of all real warships. - Hours into the crew's efforts to fight the fires (resulting from the missile hit), coordination and command of the fire-fighting efforts were somewhere between underwhelming and non-existent. Blunt Summary: The aircraft, missile, and anti-missile technologies used (or available) during the attack on the HMS Sheffield were no more than costumes and props in a play. The real meat of the play was a human story that would fit quite comfortably into the Old Testament. On one side was a small group of skilled and determined warriors, intensely focused on winning. On the other side was a crowd of clueless noobs, wandering through the scenery and telling themselves that they were a real army.

lettergram 4y ago

> The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. The US has been transitioning off tanks for a while now https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/03/22/goodbye-tanks-how-the-marine-corps-will-change-and-what-it-will-lose-by-ditching-its-armor/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021... I suspect, most systems will continue to move underwater for the navy. We will also likely couple it with autonomous drones and decoys

caycep 4y ago
yeah, I remember that was the whole idea re the Stryker divisions of the army too. reading that article, maybe that means there are longer range standoff weapons than Javelin/Stinger up the infantry's sleeve that we may not know about yet?
- greedo 4y ago
  No, there's no magic bullets waiting to be unveiled for the infantry or Marines. Stinger is old, in some ways out of date, and a planned replacement was never given enough funding to proceed. Javelin? It's fine for the foreseeable future, until top-attack defenses get good enough to reduce its effectiveness. Things like Trophy APS might be the solution, but those aren't cheap. Eventually, the AGM-179 will replace the TOW/Hellfire/Maverick missiles, but this isn't really something soldiers will be humping around on raids like in Ukraine. These are heavy missiles (not counting their launch hardware), that require vehicles or aircraft to employ.
jcranmer 4y ago
The US hasn't been transitioning off tanks. One of the US's ground forces (the USMC) is getting rid of tanks, but the other ground forces (the actual US Army) is still retaining them. Indeed, one of the reasons that the USMC is getting rid of tanks is because it's arguing that the US Army can provide them when needed.

SilverBirch 4y ago

It seems almost bizarre that someone would try to take lessons on the US military from the Moskva. I mean.... you can but I think the lessons would be more along the lines of "Make sure you have well maintained military equipment with well trained personnel". All the reporting I've seen suggests that the Moskva was very old, wasn't refurbished very well, and even with these big caveats something must have gone seriously wrong for it to be sunk in the way it was. So taking that and drawing larger conclusions seems strange.

SamBam 4y ago
Yes, most of the consensus I've seen is that even if a modern ship somehow failed to intercept those missiles (which it probably wouldn't have), a modern and well-trained/motivated crew should have been able to immediately shut down the flooding and damaged caused by two comparatively small explosions, and prevented the ship from sinking. An entire ship sinking because of that level of damage is what was most mind-boggling, from what I understand. Regardless, the point of the article is less about the specifics of the Moskva, so I think it's a fair hook.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  If the missiles managed to blow the Moskva's ammo, that would certainly be enough to explain the sinking. That would've been a lucky hit however.
nimbius 4y ago
navies in general are in a very pondersome position in the 21st century. Most missile technology has significantly outpaced their ability to operate uncontested in blue water. this has led to endless, aimless voyages, rattling the chains of kissingers soft power to evermore capable adversaries who simply arent as interested as they were 50 years ago. These fleets are expensive to maintain. without a purpose like the cold war which afforded constant meaningful training, they become little more than a floating maritime exercise in cleaning and cooking. The accident rate of the US navy in the past decade serves as far more of a teachable resource than the Moskva.
4y ago

kderbyma 4y ago

Atlantic is the war mongers journal of choice after the economist lol

indymike 4y ago

The sooner we fully adopt loitering munitions (like the switchblade), drones, and divest of easy targets for drones, missiles and loitering munitions (which are really suicide drones) the better.

trashtester 4y ago
I'm guessing the B52's will outlive the switchblades by a factor of 10. Switchblades are a bit like 1914 "bombers". Useless by 1916.
- monocasa 4y ago
  Agreed. In fact, you know what a B-52 can hold a whole lot of? Little drones that can loiter for an hour or so looking for whatever their ML aglos think is 'enemy' before devolving down to essentially cluster munitions when their battery is about to die.
- indymike 4y ago
  Yes, switchblades themselves are probably not the long term answer, but the point is that missiles and loitering munitions really obsolete lumbering, large vehicles.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Interesting take. But your use of missiles can actually be extended back tens of thousands of years. I think it has happened many times that the invention of some new missile weapon (or other defensive weapon) had people think that some kind of offensive form of combat became obsolete. Maybe the first time would be when thrown spears or stones made the big brute with a club obsolete. While in fact, up until now, this has gone back-and-forth numerous times. Disciplined infantry made chariots obsolete, until cataphracts and knights arrived. Longbows defeated knights for a moment, until they switched to plate armor. Pikes/crossbows defeated knights, until they dismounted and picked up a Pollaxe, or later, as cuirassiers used pistols to harass. Muskets and rifles defended well, until Napoleon used artillery, cavalry and manouver to give the attacker an advantage again. Automatic rifles and machine guns led to trench warfare, until the Brits invented tanks. Anti-tank guns defended pretty well vs tanks, until Guderian invented Blitzkrieg. Shaped charges threatened tanks, until reactive armor was invented. Actually, the general pattern that may be surprising to many, is that the key attribute for a weapon/platform to act offensively, is usually high survivability tactically, which allows them to advance, strategically. By comparison, platforms that have high firepower, but low survivability are often great defensively, as they allow counterattacks, but less useful when advancing. So my prediction, going forward, as that at some point (next month or in a 100 years, I don't know), the large platforms will be equipped with defenses that allow them to regain enough survivability to be used offensively.

exabrial 4y ago

> And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune. Absolutely incorrect analysis. The signature marine weapon is the Poseidon P8. This is a heavily modified Boeing 737 NG configured for maritime intelligence and attack. This is what sank the Moskva. If you read the analysis from intelligence reports, the Neptune is a rather unremarkable anti-surface missile with underwhelming capabilities. The Poseidon hovered hundreds of miles away and relayed the combat information to Ukraine commanders when the Moskva was weakened; and more than likely, when its short range defenses were down (likely due to Russian Incompetence). No doubt the Poseidon has watched every Russian Naval asset to figure out they were taking down defense radars and they devised a plan to sneak a relatively crappy Neptune missile in. I think the defining age is intelligence, but then again, hasn't it always been? It's just taking on new forms. One of the most important and urgent projects the Air Force will undertaken is AWACs replacement with another 737 variant that has PESA, AESA, ELINT, AEW capabilities to this platform and provide the same level of battlefield intelligence on solid ground as we have that the P8 provides for maritime.

avar 4y ago
> Poseidon P8. This is a heavily modified Boeing 737 Max[...] It's a variant of the 737-NG, not the 737-MAX.
- exabrial 4y ago
  ah yes, you are correct
dredmorbius 4y ago
The fact that Ukraine seems to have had, or had access to, uncannily accurate intelligence does seem to be the signature fact of this war. Arms without targeting are at best areal suppression weapons. Russia's impressive-looking mobile rocket-launcher batteries appear formidable, but their effect seems largely to be producing a few seconds of terror over a few hectares of land. Ukraine's ability to target individual generals with precision, to distract and destroy naval flagships, to down helicoptors, to drop munitions on or through tank hatches, to land artillery and rockets with precision on massed troops and materiel ... has been tremendously effective. The shot:kill ratios seem to be extremely high. At the same time, the US has telegraphed Russian moves, plans, and force structures with precision as well. What the state and source of this intelligence is varies. Part clearly comes from near-theatre sources such as the Poseidon, other AWACS assets, and probably other capabilities in Nato Europe, Turkey (itself both part of Europe and Nato, though notable for its position on the Black Sea and control of the Bosperous). Much all but certainly from satellite observations. And I'd suspect a considerable degree is based on signals intelligence. Russia does not control those domains, and has been unable to establish clear control within them. This is unlike, say, any major US campaign of the past 30 years, whatever other concerns might have as to their legitimacy, with the exclusion of satellite capabilities. To date, Russia has not felt it has the ability to move against those intelligence assets. It certainly has the ability to do so should it choose, and a more general conflict might result in that. But for now, it is pinned down in a fishbowl. Effect here though seems to be a combination of intelligence as to enemy position and operations, the ability to deliver force to specific points of need, invulnerability of observation posts, and a general popular support within the theatre of operations. As well as remarkable material support from outside entities. This will be (and all but certainly is being) studied in war colleges and curricula for generations.

flyinglizard 4y ago

Anti-platform weapons have met their match with countermeasures like the Israeli Trophy system against ATGMs which brought tanks back into warfare in full force. Anti drone weapons are everywhere. Aircraft have stealth and DIRCMs. The problem with Moskva was tactical - it was a sitting duck without adequate protection. I wouldn’t read too much into it.

nazavo 4y ago

A cool thing about Neptune is the technology wasn't property tested for the prime time before and is relatively fresh technology! Ukrainian forces had used them successfully and have proven the high precision weapon know-how is still going strong in the country.

cpursley 4y ago
Neptune is just an upgraded Russian antiship missile tech from the late 80s. But clearly still pretty effective with the right targeting.
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jcranmer 4y ago

It's annoying when articles like this blindly repeat misinformation: > On March 9, 1862, the Union warship Monitor met its Confederate counterpart, Virginia. After a four-hour exchange of fire, the two fought to a draw. It was the first battle of ironclads. In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete. Ouch, false. The ironclad ships that the US built were what became known as "[river] monitors"--they were at best barely seaworthy, since they had no freeboard worth speaking of, so any sea that was mildly stalled would cause the ships to founder. In no way were they ships-of-the-line, or capable of threatening ships-of-the-line, and the first ironclad ship-of-the-line would have been HMS Warrior, built before the US ironclads. > On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning. Even worse than the previous paragraph. Aircraft carriers did not render battleships obsolete at Pearl Harbor, which involved a fleet of old battleships at a state of low readiness. If the Japanese thought battleships obsolete, why did they bring them to the Battle of Midway 6 months later? One of the things that I think is poorly comprehended by much of the lay public is that military technology really is "part of a complete package". There isn't a single technology that beats everything else; instead, it tends to end up closer to a rock-paper-scissors scenario where it turns out you need all of the weapon systems to avoid being defeated by one of them. For example, in WW1-ish naval warfare, a large capital ship like a battleship is vulnerable to torpedoes, which means it needs a fleet screen of light units to avoid the torpedo threat, but those units are vulnerable to the powerful capabilities of battleships, which requires capital ships of their own to threaten. What makes technology obsolete isn't "this can be countered by something else," it's "this capability can be provided by something better."

Hayvok 4y ago
The seaworthiness of Monitor or Merrimac was immaterial to the contemporary discussion around ironclads. It was a transformative moment. There were plenty of sea-worthy ironclads already in European fleets but there had not been a battle yet between two ironclads. As usual with militaries, there had been lots of debate around how effective the new weapons system would be. Merrimac sailed into Hampton Roads (near Chesapeake Bay) and wasted two pretty good wooden Union frigates. The Union then sent in the Monitor. The two ships spent four hours pounding away at each other at point blank range, and still managed to steam away under their own power. The cannonballs just bounced off the armor. Two ships that, as you said, were barely sea worthy. (Some contemporary writers said the same - not a fair test!) "News of the action at Hampton Roads took the British public, press, and Parliament by storm. Large wooden steamers were clearly helpless against smaller armour-plated foes. Ironclads were fighting ironclads. Perhaps most significantly, the Americans had produced them in far less time and expense than either England or France." [1] Lord Lyons (British ambassador the U.S.) wrote to Lord Russel (Foreign Secretary), "This is, I suppose, the severest test to which the system of coating vessels in iron armour has yet been exposed." Admiral Milne, head of the British North Atlantic Squadron was "agog" at the results. Commander Hewett of HMS Rinaldo actually watched the battle and had the same reaction. What was proved was that the weapons system of wooden ships-of-the-line was obsolete. Ironclads were now conclusively the future. [1] "Seagoing purposes indispensable to the defence of this country:" Policy Pitfalls of Great Britain's Early Ironclads

Quillbert182 4y ago

I agree that missiles are the future, but unless the enemy is coming to you as is the case with Ukraine, then you are going to need a platform to deliver the missiles.

ttul 4y ago

“So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger.” Weren’t these the signature weapons because Ukraine doesn’t have much of an air force? It’s true that the Javelin and Stingers (etc.) have been remarkably effective; however, it’s not like the US ought to ditch its expensive aircraft in favor of shoulder-launched weapons.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
> Weren’t these the signature weapons because Ukraine doesn’t have much of an air force? It's because they're cheap, easy to deploy, and effective. And Russian planes need to fly low because of other anti air weapons and a general lack of precision munitions.

imwillofficial 4y ago

It didn’t sink, it literally pulled into port 4 days later. This is disinformation posing as analysis.

m3kw9 4y ago

When you bet on your current ship defences to intercept new hypersonic missiles, you are taking too big of a bet.

itslennysfault 4y ago
Huh? Neptune isn't hypersonic. In fact, it is subsonic.

flyinghamster 4y ago

There was a harbinger of this in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, when Argentine forces sunk HMS Sheffield with Exocet missiles. Also, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020 was showing the effectiveness of drones, and I'm sure Ukraine was taking notes.

orwin 4y ago

Burg. Don't talk about the Maginot if you don't know shit about the second World War. I swear hoi4 players have more knowledge than the author. I skimmed the comments and it seems the author was wrong about a lot. I thought the Atlantic was a better than average paper, the quality must have declined.

fractallyte 4y ago

From the article: “When you look at what weapons are on top of the Ukrainians’ wish list,” Moulton told me, “it isn’t towed howitzers. Top of their list are armed drones, anti-tank missiles, and anti-ship missiles.” Actually, no! Why is this still being rehashed?? Zelensky specifically requested: artillery, artillery shells, Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, armored vehicles, tanks, air defense systems, and military aircraft. He said: “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.” (Liberation Without Victory, The Atlantic, https://archive.ph/nz2Da https://archive.ph/nz2Da) And while Javelins, and other missiles, have proven invaluable in taking out armored vehicles, the more effective weapon has been artillery (often targeted with the aid of drones).

greedo 4y ago
Artillery just isn't sexy enough to capture the media's attention. The King Of Battle has knocked out far more vehicles in Ukraine than any ATGMs.
paganel 4y ago
Thank you for this comment, I had to scroll all the way down to read some good-sense (I had made a comment basically identical to yours when it comes to artillery+drones a little earlier). I think it all comes down to the "educated" Western audiences only following this conflict through the eyes of the Western media, which Western media has its own incentives (about which this is not the place to write at length), suffice is to say that their reports don't accurately reflect the situation on the battleground. What does reflect the situation on the battleground is the videos coming from both side (Ukrainian and Russian) which clearly show that artillery (plus cheap commercial drones used as spotters) is bringing in most of the losses. The greatest military Russian defeat [1] in this war until now was the result of artillery and drones, not of javelins, not of any fancy and expensive Western-provided weapons. Later edit: This [2] is good, old artillery in use (in this case by the Russians). There's no javelins nor drones all by themselves that can take those artillery pieces out. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqbam9/new_drone_footage_of_the_failed_russian_bridge/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/uqbam9/new_drone_f... [2] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1528738177741201410 https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1528738177741201410

paganel 4y ago

> o far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. The author (a veteran US Marine) is, obviously, well more versed in this than me, a computer programmer, but I'd say that he's wrong here. The signature weapon of the war right now is artillery, on both sides, that's why most recently it was artillery pieces that the US sent to Ukraine. Artillery has been a mainstay of the wars on the Ukrainian-Russian steppes ever since Napoleon. What this war brought new to the table, a thing which might be the real revolutionary part of this war (at least when it comes to military doctrine), is the deadly artillery + cheap aerial drones combo, it has brought havoc to both sides. Those Russian convoys were not destroyed by javelines, but by targeted Ukrainian artillery strikes (with the help of said cheap drones). Inside of the cities (Mariupol, mostly, from where most of the images have come when it comes to urban combat in this war) the tanks have still shown their worth, as in it was mostly with tanks (and, again, with artillery) that the Russians managed to destroy (and thus conquer) most of the city (they also used some aviation to drop bombs on Azovstal, but that was towards the end of the Mariupol battle). An interesting apparition was that of the BTR-82 [1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/twraun/russian_soldiers_fall_back_while_being_covered_by/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/twraun/russi...

jacquesm 4y ago

One thing I noticed about this war is that in the beginning a lot of planes were downed, this slowed to a trickle and then almost entirely stopped once the Western front disappeared and only the Eastern remained. I'm not quite clear on whether that is because they are no longer flying sorties because they're too afraid of surface-to-air defenses, whether they are out of planes or some other reason (such as the defenders no longer being able to down enemy planes).

mhh__ 4y ago
I think there's still a trickle of SU-25s being shot down.

giantg2 4y ago

"So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune." If you look at it solely from the Ukrainian point of view - yes. The Russians are relying heavily on platforms, even if they are losing. That doesn't mean that there isn't value in those platforms, just that they are being misapplied. For example, a tank is much more valuable to use against another tank than to use against dispersed ground troops. We would likely see them being valued differently in a near-peer conflict that was more coordinated/strategic (one of the biggest enemies of the Russians has been their leaders' own greed and lack of preparation, training, and coordination). War is largely about economics. Of course using man-portable anti-platform weapons is ideal - you can destroy equipment that takes months or years to build at .1% of it's cost. Just like using left over or homemade munitions for IEDs can generate a lot of damage (physical and economic), especially over the course of a decade or two.

lnsru 4y ago
Where are any economics in Ukraine war? Russian loses are comparable to whole army of a small country.
- giantg2 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you're asking. The west is helping Ukraine economically, especially with the delivery of weapons on a scale that they would not be able to normally pay for. The west is also implementing sanctions to hurt Russia economically (there are even some articles coming out that it is affecting daily life in Russia now). And the losses sustained by Russia in the war will take years or even decades to recover from since they can't build or finance equipment as fast as they are losing it (not even getting into the personnel side of things). It's unsustainable.

alaricus 4y ago

Wasn't the Turkish Bayraktar drone also involved in the sinking of Moskva? Not to rain on the "feel-good" parade, but Moskva was laid down in 1976 and launched in 1979. It was older than most people on HackerNews. Don't treat it as bleeding edge technology.

dotopotoro 4y ago
Also, It was decommissioned then reinstated. However it was still a flagship.

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tlear 4y ago

Absolute garbage of an article. It is S300 an ancient AA platform that denied Russia Air supremacy, it is combination of Artillery and drones not Javelin that been most lethal and it most definitely not a completely unimpressive Neptune that is equivalent of a missiles that went into device half a century ago.. wait Russia still easily blockades Odessa In Donbas now war resembles most the WW2 with mass of artillery being exchanged for drone directed artillery. Not Javelin, not any other man portable anything can dislodge Russian or Ukranians for that matter. Massed drone directed artillery and rocket artillery is the current go to. Those ideas of infiltrating marines to Chinese islands are so idiotic as to defy all belief.. I hope whoever came up with that is on the first boat there Last but not least perhaps journalist writing for Atlantic can read some book about WW1? Like something basic that covers eastern front? Offense did not go anywhere and no Somme was not a bayonet charge ffs

wrp 4y ago

"Flagship" needs some clarification. If you follow naval affairs, this may seem too obvious to mention, but the term "flagship" does not indicate anything about the technical capabilities of a vessel. It just means the ship where the commander of a fleet has his office. The Moskva, despite being antiquated, was probably chosen as flagship just because it had the most room. Also, a plea to everyone posting technical details. Please provide links to sources. It has been extremely hard finding solid data on this war.

rapjr9 4y ago

There seems to be an assumption here that the enemy will always have a platform-centric approach to war. What if both sides have an anti-platform-centric approach? Do they shoot at each others portable MANPAD's? A hybrid approach seems necessary, tanks and ships and planes have specific uses when the opponent is not platform-centric and Stinger's and Javelin's and Neptune's can be used against platforms. Something not mentioned in the article is that unmanned platforms are likely to take over. Why put a person inside any of these craft when they can be remotely controlled? Autonomous weapons (killer robots) don't seem likely to be able to distinguish combatants from non-combatants for some time to come, so remote control seems more likely. Also, tanks, planes and ships can't do a lot to win battles in urban terrain. At best they can obliterate infrastructure. Still, it is obvious that smart weapons are making a big difference in Ukraine. You would think that the major powers that invented smart weapons and have stockpiled them would not have been surprised when they turn out to make a difference. I think the major surprise here is the sudden increased perception that a war between peer powers is not a thing of the past. I would guess that all the major powers are not ready today to fight each other in earnest for more than months or half a year in a non-nuclear war. China and Russia would not be able to get critical parts, and the USA would have to ramp up new manufacturing capability very quickly (it imports ingredients for high explosives from China?) Note that this would be extremely expensive for all countries, it would turn a large part of useful and beneficial production capacity into building an unproductive war economy. Citizens everywhere would suffer, even if none of the new weapons were ever used.