Category: Wars & Other Fun Games

Swarming

Wars & Other Fun Games

Many years ago, back when we were still in the “win wars with boots on the ground” mindset, and when we were battling a weak or non-state enemy (e.g. Afghanistan), I suggested that ground support for the troops could be fairly cheaply (and adequately) be fulfilled by using in-theater two hundred WWII-era P-51 Mustang fighters armed with small smart bombs.  The idea of course was that such a high number could swarm the battlefield or area of interest to overcome any poorly-armed resistance.

Of course, this was before remote-controlled drones came on the scene to the extent they have, and Doug Ross gives an excellent overview of how this has changed modern warfare.

Military drones aren’t just one thing — they come in a huge range of sizes, costs, and purposes. On the low end, you’ve got $500 disposable quadcopters that soldiers fly into enemy positions. On the high end, there are $100 million surveillance drones that fly at 60,000 feet and can stay in the air for days. The key pattern is simple: the cheaper the drone, the more of them get used. The most expensive drones exist in small numbers, while the cheapest ones are built and destroyed by the hundreds of thousands. By 2026, militaries around the world have organized their drone forces into what’s called a “drone stack” — a system where different types of unmanned aircraft are layered by altitude, flight time, cost, and mission, covering everything from a single squad’s needs to an entire war zone.

Here’s an idea of the scale:

By 2025, Ukraine was building over 200,000 small attack drones per month.

So I had the right idea, but I just wasn’t thinking small enough.  Mea culpa.

Shooting Them Down

Self-Defense, Shooting Sports, Wars & Other Fun Games

Interesting stuff, this (via Insty):

I Have Seen the Future of Anti-Drone Warfare, and It’s Dirt-Cheap

I vaguely remembered reading something about the Sting a year or more ago, but I just learned today that they’re both dirt-cheap and extremely effective — mostly at shooting down Russia’s Geran-2 one-way attack drones, which are licensed copies of Iran’s Shahed that have caused us considerable trouble in Operation Epic Fury.

Ukraine needs tons of these things, because Geran is essentially a terror weapon aimed in large numbers — currently 100 to 200 per attack — at Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. Larger attack waves include anything from 300 up to just over 800 Geran-2s in one night.

So the concept behind Sting is simply enough: Make something cheap and fast to build, easy to use, yet still capable of knocking a Geran-2 out of the sky far enough out from its target for some degree of safety.

And the Ukrainians did just that.

Of course, that’s all well and good in a military context, and our own .dotmil needs to hop onto this with all due dispatch, if they haven’t done so already.  (I assume they have, but whatever.)

What interests me as a civilian, however, is a solution closer to home [sic], in that these little airborne nuisances can also be used by anti-social elements to both spy on people and, in the worst case, to kamikaze themselves into a target — such as, for instance, your home or similar.  Why go to all the trouble of kitting yourself up with a suicide explosive vest or a rifle in order to inflict death and damage on (say) a church or synagogue, when you can essentially outsource the suicide bit to something you hand-built in your garage?

And in the above scenario, how would ordinary people — say, adherents of the Second Amendment — defend themselves or their communities against such nefarious electro-mechanical mosquitoes?

I’m thinking of something like this, of course:

That’s the semi-auto 12ga Browning Silver Hunter (and of course there are less-expensive options because America).  This differs from your standard home defense shotgun, say a 12ga Mossberg Maverick 88:

…in that the Hunter is not a pump action device but semi-auto (ergo  a higher rate of fire) and it has a much longer barrel (ergo  much greater accuracy at distance, ask any bird shooter).

I’m interested in this concept because it raises a couple of practical issues such as the type of ammo that would work best to bring down a drone (00 buck, or perhaps something lighter?).  Obviously, a 12ga slug would end the flight path of a drone with spectacular effect, but it has to be accurate:  far easier to spread the terminal effect with shot… but which shot?  00 buckshot is excellent, but it also kicks like hell — and getting followup blasts off quickly with said semi-auto action means a quicker target re-acquisition time is necessary.  Would 7/8 birdshot do the trick as well?  For that matter, would a 20ga shotgun be as effective as a 12ga under such circumstances?  (Almost all semi-auto shotguns are offered in both chamberings.)

I’ve owned a 20ga semi-auto shotgun in the past, and I have to say that the effect downrange is almost as effective as a 12ga (if those watermelons and milk jugs are at all indicative), but the recoil was far less problematic.

Of course I think that the Silver Hunter is just dreamy, in so many ways:

…and yes, the addition of a red-dot sighting device may certainly be of assistance (even though I think it spoils the look of the gun).

Feel free to discuss this topic in Comments, of course.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, Wars & Other Fun Games

From this guy, talking about the Iranian Ass-Kicking Exercise and BritPM Starmer’s reaction thereto:

“Progressive realism has met reality: when the chips are down, nobody cares about international law; nobody cares about tolerance and diversity; nobody cares about human rights; nobody cares about doing the right thing. They care about winning.”

Yup.  It works at both the macro- and micro levels, btw.  (see:  Righteous Shootings)

Two Chessboards

Wars & Other Fun Games

Here’s a very perceptive look at the current fun and games in Iran, and the U.S. strategy behind them:

This isn’t one war, but two.

There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis. All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighbourhood.

But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.

America is in this fight because of China. Specifically, it is about dismantling the most significant Chinese forward base outside of East Asia.

Read the whole thing, I beg you, because it shows that far from being a silly cowboy playing with a loaded gun, Trump’s grasp of global strategy is so far removed from that of his political opponents (and even of most of his nominal political allies in the West) that it defies belief.

We often joke about Trump playing four-dimensional chess while his opponents are stuck to a chessboard.  The above article shows exactly how that 4-D chess game actually works.

I am very impressed that this appeared in the normally-silly Daily Mail.  As far as I can tell, not one American news publication has come close to this succinct analysis,  instead busying themselves with the minutiae of the campaign.

Related Actions

Military, Wars & Other Fun Games

First up, there’s this excellent thought from Bill Lehman (and read all of it because it’s excellent):

Take down their military structure. All of it. Take out their Quds Force, the entire IRGC in as far as we can find it, and leave their government, their military and their military logistics a pile of burning rubble. I would be a fan of flying a few hundred supply runs over Iran, C-17s and C-5s, full of crates of rifles, and ammunition, and dropping them, for the People of Iran to use, to finish the job. Then we need to LEAVE.

And here’s a manifestation of the above:

Thousands of Kurdish fighters have launched a ground invasion in Iran, according to a US official.  The Kurdish militias, based across the border in Iraq, began the offensive in northwestern Iran on Wednesday.  The Kurdish groups are widely seen as the most well-organized faction of the fragmented Iranian opposition and are believed to have thousands of battle-hardened fighters. 

President Donald Trump on Sunday night spoke with the heads of Kurdish militant groups in Iraq to discuss the situation in Iran.  The CIA was exploring plans to arm the Kurdish forces with the aim of sparking a popular uprising, CNN reported Tuesday. 

Yeah, I’m all over this idea, as long as we remember that sometime not so long ago we armed a group called the Taliban to rebel against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan, and that didn’t work out so well.  And I’m also a little apprehensive that these guys are coming over the border from Iraq — FFS, that whole area is a snake pit, isn’t it?

And just to remind everyone:  the PKK (main Kurdish political party) is soft-core Muslim but hardcore Marxist.  If that combination isn’t a toxic brew, I can’t think of a better one.  None of which bodes well for the future.

Me, I’d prefer to drop those rifles and machine guns into towns and villages all over Iran, after first notifying the local resistance leaders — we know who they are, right, CIA? — where and when the guns are going to arrive so that they aren’t just taken by the IRGC fanatics when the crates hit the ground.  Using history as a pointer, this would be akin to randomly air-dropping guns into Nazi-occupied Europe, only to have the SS intercept the shipments and use them for their own purposes, i.e. killing resistance fighters (and a few Jews, just for fun).

It’s all a little complicated and so on, but in this case, anything is better than dropping American boots on the ground to handle the thing.  Once again, a history lesson:  Afghanistan and a little further back, Vietnam.

Guns and ammo are cheap;  American lives are expensive, and worth more than the game.  Especially in this Middle Eastern shit pit.

Whatever

Politics, Third World, Wars & Other Fun Games

This whole Iranian adventure has been framed in terms of its being “regime change” for Iran, and I don’t care.

Frankly, I’m uneasy with the entire concept of “regime change” as a foreign policy goal, because if history has taught us anything — especially in the Middle East — it’s that most of these noble efforts are pretty much doomed to failure, because the entire premise is faulty.  Changing a regime is no guarantee that the next regime will be any better than the previous one.

Here’s the unalterable fact:  democratic capitalism, as a concept and guiding socio-political principle, doesn’t work outside the confines of Western civilization, and by “Western civilization” I mean pretty much the United States.  This is because Western civilization cannot coexist within a nation along with lunatic and highly-flawed political systems like Marxism and/or lunatic medieval social systems like Islam.

One only has to see how the UK, to use but one example, has been undermined by the baleful effects of both the above — Marxism as a home-grown poison (hello, Labour Party) and Islam as an imported poison (hello, untrammeled Muslim immigration).

And that’s within a nation which pretty much gave birth to democratic capitalism.  (They did, too;  we just perfected it.)  Now try to see how well democratic capitalism has worked in other countries which have never had that system as a bedrock principle — Iraq, Syria, Egypt, China, the whole of Africa etc. — and all you’ll find is a constant and comprehensive list of failures.  You can change regimes, by all means:  but the plain fact of the matter is that democratic capitalism is probably going to fail as the “new” regime will pretty much be just a (watered-down at best) copy of earlier regimes, none of which have espoused democratic capitalism.  They’ll be kleptocracies like all the African shitholes, or neo-Communist like Vietnam, or military juntas like [insert South American country of choice here].  (Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean junta, by the way, was very much the exception.)

So I’m simply regarding the destruction of the current Iranian Islamic regime as a side-benefit of the whole exercise.

What we should be stating, in no uncertain terms, is that any regime which exports terrorism or socio-political poisons like Islam or Marxism are on notice that the United States may, at our own discretion, pound these regimes back into rubble rather than allow them to subvert peace and prosperity — the two are very much linked — in the names of their respective ideologies.  “Regime change” is very much a subset of that goal, and not its primary purpose.  (SecWar Pete Hegseth, at least, has the right of it.)

That the United States should be hesitant, indeed resistant to the idea of allowing said poisons into our own country should most definitely be a guiding principle and not government policy.  The noble sentiment on the base of the Statue of Liberty should not only not be taken as government policy, but should also contain the codicil:

“And don’t try to change our country to be more like yours of origin because we’ll toss you out if you do.”

The essence of what I’m saying is that we should not be beguiled into changing our own regime from democratic capitalism into any flavor or subset of the above excrescences.

You may argue with me on any of the above, but you’d be wrong.