I wanted to bring the discussion back to this for a bit:
This is the land version of "F-22s got beaten by ... ". It's a gimped exercise where those NATO forces are purposely restricted to force some learning. That's not how actual wars would be fought. One of my frustrations these days is dealing with the over-learning from Ukraine where people who have never held a rifle think drones are the solution to absolutely every single problem.
So the casualties are all at the bases and cities getting hit in retaliation. And to be fair the Americans are doing worse than expected on that front.
So far I've seen footage of just a couple of ballistic missile strikes on the US bases. Patriot batteries doing the work, but a few still slip through. However, I've seen videos of about a dozen successful strikes on the military bases by the Shahed drones (on top of all the civilian airports, residential buildings and shopping malls they struck across the Arabian peninsula).
Look at these strikes on US bases as a perfect example of a point I will try to articulate:
In all these and many more videos I've seen the drones are flying in slow, unopposed, most of the time in broad daylight, there are no tracer rounds in the air, no flack, not even any sounds of machine gun fire in the background.
And if you ask me, that is a clear failure to learn valuable lessons about drone warfare from Ukraine.
Because Ukrainians shoot down hundreds of Shahed drones with each wave the Russians send their way. Some get through, but the majority are downed. And this is how they do it:
Freaking pre-WW1 Maxim machine guns mounted on a pickup technical! They also mount miniguns on civilian helicopters. And they also use WW2 era piston engine trainer-fighter planes to chase down the Shaheds. But the majority of how they defend the entire country from Shaheds is using these mobile anti-air machine gun teams that manage to shoot down Shaheds in the dead of night.
If you are going up against hoards of cheap loitering munitions and kamikaze drones, you can't rely on expensive air defenses. No one in their right mind should be shooting down a $20K shahed with a $4.19M Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missile.
You need cheap point defenses against cheap drones. Even any WW2-era anti-air tech would do, let alone the myriad of point defense options US has. But where are the C-RAMs? APKWS? Where are Coyotes? Where are any artillery/gun based systems?
None of these are seen or heard in the videos of strikes on US bases. Maybe the Americans also thought that the threat of drones is overblown and the war they were going to be fighting was going to be different. So far 4 American soldiers paid for this failure to learn from Ukraine with their lives.
www.canada.ca
