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Is the attack helicopter dead?

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Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#451

Post by nabla9 »

MarkMarine wrote: post #218

In the war I fought in, there was a markedly different approach to combat air ops between even just the different service branches. The Army tended to use the Apache like it was a flying tank, hovering and delivering ordinance; the Marines (which is where I fought) flew as low and as quickly as possible even while sending rounds and hellfire missiles downrange. The marines were not losing aircraft in anywhere close t…

Your experience is against insurgency and irregular force. Near-peer enemy with better weapons is different case.

Kosovo war for example. US deployed two battalions of AH-64s in Task Force Hawk into Albania, but never send them over the border. Their task would have been just what they were designed for, but risk reward ratio was just too high. Serbs would have been able to cause them massive casualties.

For most cases combining drones for targeting with field or rocket artillery achieves the same.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#452

Post by Havoc »

All piloted combat aircraft seem questionable at this point.

More weight, more vulnerability, more ethical issues, less ability to take high g force, more expensive, more focus and endurance issues, more constraints on taking risks.

When bombing runs are guided bombs anyway and air to air is all about over the horizon missiles anyway then there really questions around why you need a human in it at all.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#453

Post by guappa »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #383
guappa wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This needs a very large "citation needed" banner.

Ah yes, the "source?" argument. The classic cry of people who want to disagree but have nothing productive to add to the discussion. I could point you to literally dozens of books on the Pax Americana and its decline (google is your friend) and America's de facto empire, as well as historical studies of the Pax Brittanica and the Pax Romana. Or Chinese histories that discuss the waves of peace and prosperity followin…

What you call "policing" they call "exploiting". Every single country that has dared to vote too left wing has had CIA or USA army having something to say about it.

This happened in europe, south america, and middle east.

> I suspect you won't read any of them though

That's very unacademic of you to suspect I won't read "the books", which you didn't even bother to list.

I have read this book in the summer. Perhaps you want to give it a read and step out of your bubble? https://www.amazon.it/del-marcio-Occidente-Piergiorgio-Odifr...

> Pax Brittanica

That's now how you spell it.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#454

Post by energy123 »

hnbad wrote: post #442
Demiurge wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many steps would you guess are left between US and Russia?

Given that neither side has directly attacked the other yet? Almost all of them. Using nuclear weapons against an opponent who has enough nuclear weapons to retaliate is a "flip over the chess board and stomp on the pieces" move. Presently the US isn't even playing against Russia, at best it's sitting behind Russia's opponent and whispering chess moves into their ear.

There's also gradations of nuclear exchange, including a limited exchange (i.e. not against cities) that doesn't necessarily escalate to a strategic exchange. While obviously extremely dangerous and unpredictable, some think you can skirt that line successfully in a war.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#455

Post by simiones »

nine_k wrote: post #199
wongarsu wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently most air-defense systems heavily depend on rockets, so you can just send more of those cheap easy targets than the enemy air defense has loaded rockets. Of course everyone sees this happening in Russia right now and is adapting their next generation, if they weren't already doing so. But that will only shift the sweet-spot for saturation attacks, not eliminating them

The Israel's "Iron Dome" is supposed to include lasers, and they did use lasers to shoot down incoming rockets. In a stationary setting, like a factory or a bridge, lasers can be hard to overload, with their fast targeting, straight-line shooting, and the cost of a shot measured in single dollars. Small / cheap / slow drones with 1-2 kg payload would be an easy target. Tanks / APCs / IMVs / other armored devices that…

The Iron Dome was easily overwhelmed with the ~200 ballistic rockets fired by Iran recently, many of which hit the military bases they were targeting. So it I think the point stands.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#456

Post by simiones »

bee_rider wrote: post #252
HKH2 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America lost the Vietnam war. Do you think Vietnam is America's near peer? Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.

> America lost the Vietnam war. Do you think Vietnam is America's near peer? I was responding to somebody who said Ukraine was Russian’s near-peer. I didn’t say they should be considered peers now, just that they certainly weren’t when the choice was made to go to war. The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I w…

> They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.

NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, and has been conducting joint military excercises with Ukraine ever since, the last one happening ~1 year before the Russian war of aggression started. The current huge NATO support for Ukraine also proves the military closeness - to the point that many of the major victories NATO weaponry firing NATO rockets with NATO targeting details to targets identified by NATO intelligence, only with Ukrainian soldiers pushing the trigger.

Not to justify Russia's clear war of aggression in any way, just explaining that Ukraine absolutely was, and likely still is, moving towards NATO membership.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#457

Post by guappa »

hnbad wrote: post #409
guappa wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA doesn't kill many civilians because Obama defined that "if you die in a drone attack you weren't a civilian". https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/opinion/2012-05-29/ana...

Specifically, the US considers anyone who is male and "of fighting age" not a civilian - and the "male" part is often optional. This does somehow still result in a lower ratio of dead civilians than when applying the same definitions to Russia or Israel. This shouldn't be seen as a way to excuse the behavior of the US but rather as a way to recontextualize the actions of the latter two, whether you support or oppose…

I don't think it helps anyone to separate what israel does from what USA does. Everything that israel does is authorized and aided by the USA. It'd all stop the very second the USA told them to stop.

Related reading. https://chomsky.info/20210512/

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#458

Post by simiones »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #253
cjbgkagh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old ‘Russia will not use nukes because they have not used nukes’ routine so people can feel safer about poking the bear. There is always a first time and I’m very thankful that it hasn’t happed yet. To me a near peer implies that either side has a good chance of losing the war. It’s my opinion that Russia has not yet been at a real risk of losing this war and thus has not yet had a need to use nuclear weapons. I’…

Both the US and the USSR lost major wars during the Cold War without resorting to nuking their opponent when they felt they were "at a real risk of losing a war". In Vietnam and Korea, the Soviet involvement was considerably more than the current Western involvement in countering the Ukraine invasion. Soviet pilots on Soviet planes killed Americans in American planes. Soviet operators of Soviet-made SAM sites shut do…

> The reality is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent against existential threats, and all else is a bluff. So it's not a risk of losing this war that will push Russia to commit such murder-suicide, but an existential threat to its own survival as a nation.

Note that there have been numerous documented cases of near nuclear launches, especially in the 60s and 70s, it is by no means a bluff or an idle risk.

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#459

Post by happakid7 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #186
booleandilemma wrote: post #160

I hope our military is thinking about drones, because when WW3 starts our enemies are going to have millions of tiny software-controlled drones and if we're still fighting like we're in WW2 it's all over for us.

The US military pioneered drones at every scale and price point, and has been deploying them operationally in very large numbers for decades. They have by far the most mature and diverse capability of any country at this point. Also, the drones being used in Ukraine by both sides would not survive in a more sophisticated electronic warfare environment.

Are the Russians not using sophisticated electronic warfare?

Re: Is the attack helicopter dead?

#460

Post by simiones »

oneshtein wrote: post #435
ceejayoz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enriching uranium is within the capability of a nation-state the size of Ukraine. Sure. But standing up a program makes you an international pariah. “We’re keeping this” would have had a bit less uproar. > Physical access to a nuke does not let you disable the PAL. They are constructed so that they are embedded within the device, and cannot be disabled or altered without deconstructing significant parts of the warh…

Ukraine is free to develop nukes for self-defence because it's attacked by nuclear country.

No country in the world is free to develop nukes, for any reason. Some still do, of course, but it is expressly forbidden by international laws and agreements.
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