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Technologies are obsoleted at ridiculous rates during the war. Anyone still remember how HIMARS was supposed to win the war? Indeed it was absolutely fantastic
by rdtsc 1y ago
Technologies are obsoleted at ridiculous rates during the war. Anyone still remember how HIMARS was supposed to win the war? Indeed it was absolutely fantastic at first, but everyone sort of stopped talking about it. It turns out Russians zoomed in on the weakest spot of these types of weapons - reliance on GPS. As soon as they started jamming that, the effectiveness of a whole slew of those types of weapons went way down. So now there is a whole rush to create anti-jammable GPS technology.
Same thing with drones. They are a game changer but then Russians figured out they can use drones too. Moreover, they were the first ones to field fiber optic drones. Those things are bonkers. As in, if someone told me "this defense company is creating fiber optic drones" I could have bet it's a corruption scheme as the idea just seems to implausible yet here it is, now both sides use them.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoIn fairness, Ukraine received nerfed versions of most of that tech from the US, increasing its susceptibility to things like GPS jamming. A lot of it was downgraded to circa 1980-1990s capability levels, which is still adequate for a lot of the Soviet era tech Russia is using. It would likely be a mistake to overfit what is happening in the Ukraine to US capabilities.