The US military is used to fighting adversaries way below their own capabilities and doesn’t worry about conserving resources, because they like imagining that their supply chain will just deliver more. Iran has spent decades preparing for just this fight, and developed weapons, capabilities, and strategies to specifically exploit this weakness. Sending countless waves of cheap drones to expend expensive and hard to replace interceptor missiles is an attack aimed at both magazine depth and production capabilities. Every drone that gets intercepted by an expensive missile is a victory for whoever launched the drone, because it does damage by the millions of dollars just by destroying an, (or worse, multiple) interceptor missile(s), and depletes the interceptor stockpile.
Ukraine has figured out counter drone tactics quite well already, and will get better out of sheer necessity.
Ukraine has figured out how to counter shaheds - and it’s not some silver bullet, it’s a huge system of quick responders AND some of them are antiair drones teams.
Ukraine haven’t figured out what to do with enemy FPVs. Neither did russia. Which created a deep killzone out of the frontlines. Any serious discussions about defense strategy should be taking this experience as a baseline, not as some incident only applicable for the poor countries.
That’s because they are as wasteful and learning averse as they are capable on paper.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/eight-missile-for-one-drone-ukrainian-instructors-shocked-by-us-drone-defense-tactics-17085
The US military is used to fighting adversaries way below their own capabilities and doesn’t worry about conserving resources, because they like imagining that their supply chain will just deliver more. Iran has spent decades preparing for just this fight, and developed weapons, capabilities, and strategies to specifically exploit this weakness. Sending countless waves of cheap drones to expend expensive and hard to replace interceptor missiles is an attack aimed at both magazine depth and production capabilities. Every drone that gets intercepted by an expensive missile is a victory for whoever launched the drone, because it does damage by the millions of dollars just by destroying an, (or worse, multiple) interceptor missile(s), and depletes the interceptor stockpile.
Ukraine has figured out counter drone tactics quite well already, and will get better out of sheer necessity.
Ukraine has figured out how to counter shaheds - and it’s not some silver bullet, it’s a huge system of quick responders AND some of them are antiair drones teams.
Ukraine haven’t figured out what to do with enemy FPVs. Neither did russia. Which created a deep killzone out of the frontlines. Any serious discussions about defense strategy should be taking this experience as a baseline, not as some incident only applicable for the poor countries.