Childish Gambino is apparently a modern prophet

Lmao dude what the fuck would you propose be used against a quarter million kamikaze UAVs?

And more importantly: the defenders need to get lucky every single time. The attackers only need to get lucky once.

How many Standard + SEARAM + ESSM + CIWS rounds do you think a single base and two surface flotillas could expend in a sustained saturation attack like that? Not how many in the magazines - how many can be effectively expended over a given span of time. Also, take into the account that a part of this strategy typically includes salting the mix with much more modern and capable and fast ASMs/AGMs.

Saturation attacks are the strategy the Soviet (and now Russian) Navy centers their doctrine upon for a reason. And that reason is the USN CVBG. Cheap, numerous drones make that strategy a lot more effective.

You are grossly underestimating the difficulty of dealing with a saturation attack, much less a sustained one. That sort of attack would likely almost certainly overwhelm the defensive resources of Guam with a couple CVBGs parked offshore.

…you should look into what this shit is doing to Ukraine. They’re quite difficult and tedious to intercept, and they are cheap enough that it’s not that hard to launch saturation attacks.

Put another way: if NK just converts a bunch of factories and cranks out, like, a quarter million of them over a few years (they’re very simple - I don’t think that’s an insane proposition, seriously), that becomes an existential conventional strike capability, especially if you factor in their artillery assets too. They could ruin every single military and industrial zone in SK in a single strike if they built up a stockpile like that. Seriously, hundreds to thousands of small weaponized UAVs per target where the target list is in the hundreds is not something that modern day IADS could hack - much less economically. The only systems that are going to be able to effectively deal with massed and sustained attacks like that are directed energy weapons, which are only now being rolled out operationally in relatively small numbers, and I’m not sure SK has a system like that ready for deployment.

It’s not about how much SK can produce.

It’s about the fact that SK is now going to have to create a whole new IADS layer to defend against these cheap tactical kamikaze drones / prop-driven cruise missiles.

South Korea is going to be (justifiably) Big Mad about that

It’s the Kirkland Passport - it’s actually just a rebranded US passport, but cheaper, and only Costco is allowed to sell it.

Lmfao they’re slipping. It’s really telling. Putin is losing control. His conventional forces must be in pretty dire straits.

Maybe losing another meaningful fraction of his nuclear forces will help him feel better.

Honestly, no it couldn’t. That’s not a credible threat. And it’s not just about materiel losses. They sent most of their trainers to the front lines a few years ago. You… just don’t do that. It makes it impossible to regenerate your forces.

It’s weird; it really is like they’re taking the “melodramatic Galadriel” approach to geopolitics - that is to say, “ALL SHALL LOVE ME, AND DESPAIR”

I would legitimately take Camacho over orangeboi. Camacho at the very least pointedly consults an expert.

It would be really hilarious if it turns out that they’re like “yeah sorry it’s just uninteresting rocks and terrestrial strata”

The whole mineral rights stuff is going to be interesting to see play out. Because Zelenskyy, and Ukrainians in general, should very much beware Yankees bearing “gifts” at this point, because we are not the same country we were 6 months ago.

Side note about how deeply fucking weird the Musk family is:

Errol Musk had not one, but two children with his own step daughter, and the second was fully intentional.

They’re already having catastrophic demographic issues. That would only speed their fall.

Serious question: what’s the card Russia would play to “escalate the retaliatory response” here?

• they already invaded a peaceful neighboring country - once unofficially in 2014, and then converted it to an official invasion in 2022
• they are clearly not able to exert any more conventional force on Ukraine, because they’ve been hollowing out their own military to do what they’ve accomplished so far
• they’re already (and, history note, have been for literal centuries) working to ethically cleanse and culturally genocide Ukraine
• they’ve already used chemical weapons in more than a few places
• they’re not going to use bioweapons, because that’s just gonna boomerang back into their face
• they’re not going to start using tactical nukes, because that would sure as fuck get the Bundeswehr and Wojsko Polskie and Forces armées françaises and friends to directly commit a bunch of tank divisions and air support to the conflict
• theyre not going to start using strategic nukes because that would end with (yes, a lot of other catastrophic damage, but) Russia effectively ceasing to exist

Russia’s response here is, in the realm of geopolitical calculus, essentially meaningless, and not a credible retaliatory response.

Or put another way: Russia isn’t playing any geopolitical cards as a response because it can’t.

No, it’s pretty obviously being used as a noun here.

“You don’t want anyone wildly distorting your politics, which he has a unique capability to do. But it’s a zero-sum game,” Kerr said. “Anything that he does that moves more toward Democrats hurts Republicans.”

inhales

it’s not a zero sum game, you fucking flaccid parsnip