I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground. Ukraine right now needs to invest in offensive capability, not defensive capability. If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.
In simplest term, it's like your neighbor parks their car on your driveway, you get police to issue fines, or maybe even get it towed. But your neighbor has money, so they keep paying fines, etc.. Your whole neighborhood supports you, so they would call the cops for you, go to town hall and all of that. In the end, you'll never win and get your parking space back. The only way is to park your and all your supporters' cars in their driveway, give them a taste of their own medicine.
At the moment the Ukrainian strategy, as well as defending themselves seems to be largely to take out the Russian oil industry and other economic targets with the aim that their economy collapses or at least they can't afford to keep the war going.
> If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.
How exactly do you picture it ending? No, really. Imagine you got everything you wanted. Everyone delivers max offensive capability to Ukraine. Ukraine brings the war to Russia in full scale. Putin, or his successors, give up. Then what?
At the end of the day, Russia will still be there, at Ukraine's borders. What happens?
(Unless you're one of those who imagine a split-up - a sentiment Putin absolutely has noticed and used in building domestic support, by the way. But either way, there will be something that used to be Russia at Ukraine's borders, and they may not be very happy about their neighbors after a full scale war.)
I'll listen to any plausible scenario - plausible to you I mean, I'll defer judgment for now. Don't worry about convincing me, just convince yourself. I just want to know what happy outcome you imagine after Ukraine has somehow brought the war to Russia and won.
This has barely more information, but enough to establish an order of magnitude:
> The drone developed under Project OCTOPUS was designed by Ukraine with support from UK scientists and technicians and has already proved successful on the battlefield, proving highly effective against the Shahed one-way attack drone variants used by Russia – despite costing less than 10% to produce than the drones they are designed to intercept.
What does a Shahed cost? https://www.twz.com/news-features/what-does-a-shahed-136-rea... says about US$50k, so they're saying that the Octopus drones cost on the order of US$5k, and "thousands" of them costs on the order of US$10M. So this is a single-digit percentage of Ukraine's yearly drone budget.
But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.
Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?
> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.
Of course they cost more per unit than Shaheds, because they wouldn't be using CH32V as sole CPUs and JLCPCB PCBA outsorces to do these. They're going to use proper defense parts and defense outsources that make Apple upgrade premiums look like paid junk food sauce packets in comparison.
If the interceptor-drone agreement followed the investment, the investment can't have been conditional on the agreement, so maybe the plant was intended to produce other drones, perhaps for sale to, for example, the Allance of Sahel States (ASS).
£200M is the same order of magnitude as Ukraine's total yearly spending on drones, I think.
"""
Microscopic invaders were more of the threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. [...]
Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]
What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]
It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic.
"""
This article doesn't provide enough information to be useful. Is "thousands" a lot? It depends on what kind of drones we're talking about. Ukraine produces on the order of ten thousand military drones per day, as does Russia. So the UK sending "thousands" one time might be insignificant. On the other hand, thousands of properly equipped Reapers would be enough to allow Ukraine to defeat and possibly conquer Russia—but nobody has or will ever have thousands of Reapers, which would cost on the order of 3% of the GDP of the UK.
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
Given that comment said “in the order of 10 thousand” and that he gave a single number and not a number for a particular day, I think we can assume that daily is a daily average.
Hi poszlem, just wanted to follow up on your offer here[1] to “delete [your] account if it turns out [the shooter of Charlie Kirk] was a right wing person.” Apologies I couldn’t respond because your inflammatory comment was flagged and dead before I could. But now that the shooter has been revealed to be a “right wing person” I am calling on you to delete your account. Really appreciate you sticking to your principles, but would encourage caution in letting situations play out before jumping to conclusions in the future.
I think something most people don't consider is that war is still about logistics. Every single soldier needs food, water, basic consumables, ammo, and more. And each group of soldier will need comms, fuel, and so on. With even a relatively small group of soldiers you rapidly enter into the domain of tons of supplies needed every single day. And in general the majority of an army isn't out there fighting, but participating in supply and logistics. It's called the tooth-to-tail ratio. [1] In WW1 it 2.6:1 logistics:combat, in the Vietnam War (with its lengthy logistics pipeline) it was 12.9:1!
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
Right- I think Palantir make much smaller drones, and way faster and more maneuverable, that could take out these slow moving Russian ones very easily. The capability comes more from the software than the parts list - doesn't add to the per-unit cost.
Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that as NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
> Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
Agreed - if we're pitting the manufacturing capabilities of NATO (maybe disregarding USA, given Trump's aversion to action) vs Russia then my money would be on NATO, assuming they are motivated to do it.
He's referring to nukes. War between NATO and Russia is a non-starter because there's no viable way it doesn't almost immediately escalate to nukes, especially when all parties would be aware of this creating even more an incentive to be the first to try, and inevitably fail, at a preemptive nuclear strike to completely disable the opposing forces' nuclear options.
I'm not a tactician with any experience, just thinking this through at my keyboard, but I'm not even sure drone v. drone is the answer here.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
Russia has started to fly Shahed drones much higher after Ukrainians became effective with shooting low-flying ones with mobile low cost AAA guns. This made drones easier to detect with radars and shoot with missiles, but missiles cost like 10-100 times more then drones and is not sustainable.
Russia also started to deploy mobile anti-drone guns and there a lot of vides that show their effectiveness but Ukraine still fly drones low as Russia still willing to use expensive missiles against them on massive scale.
> Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
pulsejets would certainly be cheap, but they'd have terrible fuel efficiency, which is one of the most important attributes for a drone - how long can you loiter and how far can you go?
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
I think they go up to like 5000 feet so within anti aircraft gun range but you'd need a lot of such guns to cover the long Ukraine border and they are not cheap. Drones may be more practical.
They used to go 5000 ft or so. Now " fly between 2,000 to 5,000 meters to evade small arms fire, while the high-altitude reconnaissance drone Shahed 147 can reach 18,288 meters (60,000 feet). "
Radar directed anti-aircraft artillery with analogue computers for trajectory prediction, firing proximity fused shells, were extremely effective against V-1 bombs. Far more so than interceptor aircraft.
They were effective because Germans targeted mostly London where one could have dense defenses and V-1 flew relatively low. With drones few kilometers up this is simply not effective.
NATO has many times the industrial capacity Russia has. Fater 3 years of war Russia has adapted to war production but if NATO decides to do the same Russia will be outclassed quickly.
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
Russia is already in a low level conflict with NATO even if it's just NATO countries supplying equipment to Ukraine and Russia trying to hack NATO politics.
Why would you need a nuke to take out a drone factory? There's lots of ways to disrupt production, starting with super low-tech things like drone attacks, assuming you have the intelligence to know where they are being produced.
> "UK defence secretary John Healey has outlined new plans to send thousands of interceptor missiles to Ukraine every month, with the Ukrainian-developed UAV to be shared with the UK to help in the fight against Russia."
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
The drones are rather large: https://osmp.ngo/collection/shahed-131-136-uavs-a-visual-gui... and have a flight ceiling of about 4000m. It is probably roughly comparable to WW2 aircraft, given that it's driven by a piston prop engine. That suggests the need for similar technology such as "flak" anti-aircraft shells. However, that requires line of sight and has limited accuracy, while not being all that cheap to deploy. So if these guided interceptors can be built cheaply, with a decent hit rate, they might end up being cheaper than conventional AAA.
One approach is directed energy, there are laser guns like the UK's dragonfire (there are many others out there too) however these have problems in dusty or foggy conditions for obvious reasons. There are also microwave effectors which are used to fry the electronics on drones. These take advantage of the advances in Gallium Nitride based power electronics (and other even more exotic materials).
It'd be interesting to see how short that range really is.
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.
Geran-2's are far too large to be taken out with shotguns. Furthermore, you'd have to anticipate where they would want to strike. Drones, missiles, or lasers are likely the only way to stop them.
Probably a step forward to deal with the hundreds of shahed drones that Russia is sending to Ukraine and now it seems occasionally Poland. I'm curious what design they are going for. There is one possibility here https://youtu.be/Otyn_tXP0Uo
Some of the drones that entered Poland the other day were made from styrofoam. The cost to intercept probably need to go close to 100$ because the drones that attack are going super cheap.
In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.
I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.
If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.
Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.
I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground. Ukraine right now needs to invest in offensive capability, not defensive capability. If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.
In simplest term, it's like your neighbor parks their car on your driveway, you get police to issue fines, or maybe even get it towed. But your neighbor has money, so they keep paying fines, etc.. Your whole neighborhood supports you, so they would call the cops for you, go to town hall and all of that. In the end, you'll never win and get your parking space back. The only way is to park your and all your supporters' cars in their driveway, give them a taste of their own medicine.
At the moment the Ukrainian strategy, as well as defending themselves seems to be largely to take out the Russian oil industry and other economic targets with the aim that their economy collapses or at least they can't afford to keep the war going.
The Economist discussing that https://archive.ph/Rjuzy
> I'm slowly starting to think that NATO/EU is using Ukraine as a trench war test ground
The US has definitely used the Ukraine war as a way to wear out the Soviet stockpiles out of Russia.
The EU just hasn't either political will or capabilities to really help Ukraine win.
> If they don't bring the war to Russia in full scale, it'll never end.
How exactly do you picture it ending? No, really. Imagine you got everything you wanted. Everyone delivers max offensive capability to Ukraine. Ukraine brings the war to Russia in full scale. Putin, or his successors, give up. Then what?
At the end of the day, Russia will still be there, at Ukraine's borders. What happens?
(Unless you're one of those who imagine a split-up - a sentiment Putin absolutely has noticed and used in building domestic support, by the way. But either way, there will be something that used to be Russia at Ukraine's borders, and they may not be very happy about their neighbors after a full scale war.)
I'll listen to any plausible scenario - plausible to you I mean, I'll defer judgment for now. Don't worry about convincing me, just convince yourself. I just want to know what happy outcome you imagine after Ukraine has somehow brought the war to Russia and won.
The original press release from HMG is https://www.gov.uk/government/news/groundbreaking-ukraine-te... .
This has barely more information, but enough to establish an order of magnitude:
> The drone developed under Project OCTOPUS was designed by Ukraine with support from UK scientists and technicians and has already proved successful on the battlefield, proving highly effective against the Shahed one-way attack drone variants used by Russia – despite costing less than 10% to produce than the drones they are designed to intercept.
What does a Shahed cost? https://www.twz.com/news-features/what-does-a-shahed-136-rea... says about US$50k, so they're saying that the Octopus drones cost on the order of US$5k, and "thousands" of them costs on the order of US$10M. So this is a single-digit percentage of Ukraine's yearly drone budget.
The main article has that the Ukrainians are investing US$271m in UK plants so presumably more than $10m worth.
But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.
Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?
> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.
> But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.
But does it cost more than the Shahed plus the target of the Shahed? That it the equation Ukraine is using.
That's a different question; I'm just saying it contradicts the "less than 10%" claim in the article and the press release.
Of course they cost more per unit than Shaheds, because they wouldn't be using CH32V as sole CPUs and JLCPCB PCBA outsorces to do these. They're going to use proper defense parts and defense outsources that make Apple upgrade premiums look like paid junk food sauce packets in comparison.
My guess is that they will producing a lot of the interceptor drones and keeping the plant there for a long time even if the war ends.
If the interceptor-drone agreement followed the investment, the investment can't have been conditional on the agreement, so maybe the plant was intended to produce other drones, perhaps for sale to, for example, the Allance of Sahel States (ASS).
£200M is the same order of magnitude as Ukraine's total yearly spending on drones, I think.
""" Microscopic invaders were more of the threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. [...]
Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]
What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]
It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic. """
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
This article doesn't provide enough information to be useful. Is "thousands" a lot? It depends on what kind of drones we're talking about. Ukraine produces on the order of ten thousand military drones per day, as does Russia. So the UK sending "thousands" one time might be insignificant. On the other hand, thousands of properly equipped Reapers would be enough to allow Ukraine to defeat and possibly conquer Russia—but nobody has or will ever have thousands of Reapers, which would cost on the order of 3% of the GDP of the UK.
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223912 ballparks the program at US$10M.
~~deleted, misread the article, I thought this was about a different drone program~~
Interception drone can't be similar to Shaheed.
Are you guessing at random, or do you have more information about Project Octopus than the article contains?
best to not make assumptions since it ultimately makes one look like, well...
Only by taking annual production (4 million) and averaging it daily, but that's not daily actual production and includes all drones (many small FPVs).
Given that comment said “in the order of 10 thousand” and that he gave a single number and not a number for a particular day, I think we can assume that daily is a daily average.
Hi poszlem, just wanted to follow up on your offer here[1] to “delete [your] account if it turns out [the shooter of Charlie Kirk] was a right wing person.” Apologies I couldn’t respond because your inflammatory comment was flagged and dead before I could. But now that the shooter has been revealed to be a “right wing person” I am calling on you to delete your account. Really appreciate you sticking to your principles, but would encourage caution in letting situations play out before jumping to conclusions in the future.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45204065
I can't endorse this. WP says the shooter "remains unidentified", but also you shouldn't silence people for disagreement, even foolish disagreement.
You mean, because maybe most drone production stops on Sundays or something?
Under these circumstances, if the UK is sending thousands of small FPVs it would be insignificant.
Having more and better drones now matters more than having more soldiers
I think something most people don't consider is that war is still about logistics. Every single soldier needs food, water, basic consumables, ammo, and more. And each group of soldier will need comms, fuel, and so on. With even a relatively small group of soldiers you rapidly enter into the domain of tons of supplies needed every single day. And in general the majority of an army isn't out there fighting, but participating in supply and logistics. It's called the tooth-to-tail ratio. [1] In WW1 it 2.6:1 logistics:combat, in the Vietnam War (with its lengthy logistics pipeline) it was 12.9:1!
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth-to-tail_ratio
> cost less than 10% of the Russian systems destroyed
One wonders how they have managed that, or how they know.
This article has a little more https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/09/11/uk-to-p...
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
This kind of thing https://thedefender.media/en/2025/08/dyki-shershni-showcased...
>Sting interceptor hits 315 km/h, shoots down over 200 Shaheds and Gerberas
>Sting costs about $2,500
Not sure what design the UK will make.
there are jet powered shaheds with speeds around 600km/h
Size and range.
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
Right- I think Palantir make much smaller drones, and way faster and more maneuverable, that could take out these slow moving Russian ones very easily. The capability comes more from the software than the parts list - doesn't add to the per-unit cost.
Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that as NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
> Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
Agreed - if we're pitting the manufacturing capabilities of NATO (maybe disregarding USA, given Trump's aversion to action) vs Russia then my money would be on NATO, assuming they are motivated to do it.
last estimation was around 170 per day
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/07/21/russia-...
> NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that
I think the plan is that the war is over in 10 minutes ... so why care.
I heard it would take 24 hours...
He's referring to nukes. War between NATO and Russia is a non-starter because there's no viable way it doesn't almost immediately escalate to nukes, especially when all parties would be aware of this creating even more an incentive to be the first to try, and inevitably fail, at a preemptive nuclear strike to completely disable the opposing forces' nuclear options.
Russia may do low level stuff like drones into Poland that is not bad enough to launch a nuclear war over.
Ye there are so much romantic fantasies roaming around I don't recognize the 'Overton window' anymore.
I'm not a tactician with any experience, just thinking this through at my keyboard, but I'm not even sure drone v. drone is the answer here.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
Russia has started to fly Shahed drones much higher after Ukrainians became effective with shooting low-flying ones with mobile low cost AAA guns. This made drones easier to detect with radars and shoot with missiles, but missiles cost like 10-100 times more then drones and is not sustainable.
Russia also started to deploy mobile anti-drone guns and there a lot of vides that show their effectiveness but Ukraine still fly drones low as Russia still willing to use expensive missiles against them on massive scale.
> Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
pulsejets would certainly be cheap, but they'd have terrible fuel efficiency, which is one of the most important attributes for a drone - how long can you loiter and how far can you go?
a bunch of shotguns or service rifles is not going to help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
In that case, yeah, I could see aerial drones being a response.
It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.
I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.
I think they go up to like 5000 feet so within anti aircraft gun range but you'd need a lot of such guns to cover the long Ukraine border and they are not cheap. Drones may be more practical.
>the Skyranger, a twin radar-guided 30mm gun turret made by Rheinmetall, making this the natural choice for the German Army. The gun system costs around $12 million https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/09/10/why-so...
and ammo is about $600/round apparently.
EDIT:
They used to go 5000 ft or so. Now " fly between 2,000 to 5,000 meters to evade small arms fire, while the high-altitude reconnaissance drone Shahed 147 can reach 18,288 meters (60,000 feet). "
Radar directed anti-aircraft artillery with analogue computers for trajectory prediction, firing proximity fused shells, were extremely effective against V-1 bombs. Far more so than interceptor aircraft.
They were effective because Germans targeted mostly London where one could have dense defenses and V-1 flew relatively low. With drones few kilometers up this is simply not effective.
NATO has many times the industrial capacity Russia has. Fater 3 years of war Russia has adapted to war production but if NATO decides to do the same Russia will be outclassed quickly.
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
Russia is already in a low level conflict with NATO even if it's just NATO countries supplying equipment to Ukraine and Russia trying to hack NATO politics.
Best to strike production capability than pay for missiles to shoot them down.
There is still a taboo against a nuclear weapons state directly striking another nuclear weapons state, under its own flag.
Why would you need a nuke to take out a drone factory? There's lots of ways to disrupt production, starting with super low-tech things like drone attacks, assuming you have the intelligence to know where they are being produced.
Russia stockpiles drones.
> "UK defence secretary John Healey has outlined new plans to send thousands of interceptor missiles to Ukraine every month, with the Ukrainian-developed UAV to be shared with the UK to help in the fight against Russia."
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
Practice makes perfect.
There's some guy in Damascus who knows more about the real world use of the TOW than the people who built it.
> when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers
It's amazing what you can do when your choices are, in essence, "be destroyed" or "become an expert"
Ukraine was one of the key technology hubs of the USSR - well capable of making their own missiles, etc.
Someone elses war to upskill our own ability to wage war at a fraction of the cost? It's a weapons development dream for any Govt / R&D company
Hell, Poland asked Ukraine to provide some instructors to help them after the recent escalation of airspace violations they had.
Ukraine is seen as backwards because they are open about fighting corruption, which is taboo in the West.
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
This is something that has happened in so-called 'civilized' countries before, and it will happen again if they ever face a war of that scale.
Sure. My point stands.
question "NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones."
Is there not cheaper auto-shotgun type devices around? To spray the sky. It doesn't take an entire missile or even bullet to damage a drone does it?
The drones are rather large: https://osmp.ngo/collection/shahed-131-136-uavs-a-visual-gui... and have a flight ceiling of about 4000m. It is probably roughly comparable to WW2 aircraft, given that it's driven by a piston prop engine. That suggests the need for similar technology such as "flak" anti-aircraft shells. However, that requires line of sight and has limited accuracy, while not being all that cheap to deploy. So if these guided interceptors can be built cheaply, with a decent hit rate, they might end up being cheaper than conventional AAA.
One approach is directed energy, there are laser guns like the UK's dragonfire (there are many others out there too) however these have problems in dusty or foggy conditions for obvious reasons. There are also microwave effectors which are used to fry the electronics on drones. These take advantage of the advances in Gallium Nitride based power electronics (and other even more exotic materials).
These drones probably have US semiconductors in them. If only there was a backdoor ...
Bullets have short range. So now you have to carpet the land with AA guns.
It'd be interesting to see how short that range really is.
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.
Geran-2's are far too large to be taken out with shotguns. Furthermore, you'd have to anticipate where they would want to strike. Drones, missiles, or lasers are likely the only way to stop them.
Probably a step forward to deal with the hundreds of shahed drones that Russia is sending to Ukraine and now it seems occasionally Poland. I'm curious what design they are going for. There is one possibility here https://youtu.be/Otyn_tXP0Uo
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Some of the drones that entered Poland the other day were made from styrofoam. The cost to intercept probably need to go close to 100$ because the drones that attack are going super cheap.
In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.
I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.
If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.
Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.
They already do 1000s a day AFAIK but for long range they use iranian based design which costs more