Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets were spotted equipped with advanced targeting pods that allow the integration of laser-guided weapons—including the US-made APKWS II precision rocket system, which enables far more cost-effective engagements against drones. A photo of the upgraded jet was published by the Telegram channel Avia OFN on December 4.
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These pods are essential: without them, Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) II rockets cannot be employed. The system has emerged as one of the most affordable and effective ways to destroy drones, avoiding the high cost of expending traditional air-to-air missiles.
You are 100% right, for example the original Shahed drones were pretty cheap, but now they need more sophisticated guidance systems so Ukrainians can’t take them down by spoofing them, and they are made faster to avoid being shot down. The result is that 1 new Shahed is almost 10 times as expensive as the original!
With the Russian economy becoming more and more stressed, it is getting harder and harder for Russia to scale up or keep up with Ukraine.
If EU manages to release the frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, Russia will be in a very dire economic disadvantage next year.
Also Ukrainians are innovating new more efficient and cheap systems, while Russia can only make better systems that are way more expensive. So new innovation seems to be better in Ukraine, despite Russia has both bigger population to draw from and a bigger economy. But the efficiency in methods in Ukraine are way way better than Russia.
There are a lot of smart Russians. Most of them are in the west, applying their skills to civilian applications and getting paid well for it. Over a drink, they will talk about how Russia has gone to shit and there was nothing for them. The ones who stayed behind would have been the ones who either couldn’t leave or didn’t want to.
Yeah the experience on older military equipment is just as important too though! Just for kicks and giggles let me pose the question, how many Ukrainians do you think Russia has trained to be extremely good at shooting a Browning M2 .50 cal heavy machine gun accurately by flooding Ukraine’s skies with Shaheds?
Certainly a whole lot of Ukrainians are involved in air defense that aren’t necessarily front line soldiers and you have to stop and think about whether it is really “winning” to start training your enemies general populace on how to shoot heavy machine guns extremely well.
Do you know what weapon will be in every single war until humans go extinct? …and maybe after that too who knows? The Browning M2 .50 cal machine gun.
Russia is training tons of Ukrainians to get obnoxiously good at doing things with a M2 that you probably shouldn’t be able to do with an M2 like shooting down cruise missiles and such, and let me stress that at the end of the day after artillery and drones it is crew served weapons such as the M2 that decide combat at the the infantry level whether they be mounted on ground robots, tripods or vehicles. So TL;DR Russia is training Ukrainians to be extremely good at one of the most decisive infantry combat weapon ever made by refusing to stop flooding Ukraine’s skies with flying bombs… to me that is NOT a winning strategy.
I use the M2 just for example here but the principle applies generally.
See Ukraine getting the M119 105mm howitzer as another specific example of Russia defeating itself by forcing Ukraine to procure and become efficient at weapons far superior to Russia’s own.
I’m guessing that considering Ukrainian military superior skills, 1 for each major city should be enough. 😋
OK just kidding, I get your point, Russia has made the entire Ukrainian population part of the war. Which makes Ukraine outnumber Russia even with a fourth the population.