Cheap Iranian drone downed $25M US Army helicopter–maybe by chance(arstechnica.com) |
Cheap Iranian drone downed $25M US Army helicopter–maybe by chance(arstechnica.com) |
Component / part Company Company country Public factory / manufacturing-origin info
TJ150 turbojet engine PBS Velka Bites Czechia EU Czechia; manufacturer is PBS Velka Bites
TW1721 GNSS antennas, block of 4 Calian / Tallysman Canada Canada / West Ottawa, Canada manufacturing publicly stated by Calian/Tallysman
AD9361BBCZ RF transceiver Analog Devices USA USA COO/assembly: South Korea; wafer diffusion: Taiwan
MIMXRT1052 microcontroller NXP USA / NXP USA / Netherlands West Distributor COO often China; NXP PCN references SMIC8 40nm wafer fab
N63A0QI chip Intel USA USA Exact COO not found publicly
STM32F405 microcontroller units STMicroelectronics Switzerland / France / Italy Europe / Switzerland Probably Manufactured in China
ADIS16480 inertial measurement unit Analog Devices USA USA COO: Philippines; ADI PCN adds IMI Philippines as approved assembly site
TMS320F28335PGFA microcontroller Texas Instruments USA USA COO/assembly: Philippines; wafer diffusion: Japan
The drones run on literally whatever is available because any Western-built one is restricted to Iran or Russia.
History often repeats itself. In a similar way, Great Powers like France refused to study the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 because it was something that happened in barbarian lands far away from glorious Europe, so it was obviously irrelevant to them, right? And then the shock of industrial warfare almost shattered the French army in summer 1914.
The USA is the Russia of the West nowadays.
(I would add that this is sarcasm, but it is reality for a lot of people sadly)
Why does Iran have the right to fire drones into other countries?
Maybe because the Israel-US axis decided it was a good idea to start bombing them earlier this year? Could be that?
Perhaps, and this is a long shot, they see military equipment close to their border as a threat?
People get weird like that when countries start bombing their schoolgirls into minced meat.
If America hadn't started bombing Iran in the first place this wouldn't have happened anyway. Things would have been peaceful and oil prices would have been fine.
This is why you don't used manned systems to hunt unmanned ones ...
The US military is sitting on decades of older equipment. The Ukraine conflict started four years ago. Complaining that the US has not overhauled its inventory in just four years is unreasonable and unrealistic.
This has not seemed to be a problem for the countries using them; what makes the US so uniquely inefficient?
Interesting that the Ukrainians can design, develop, produce and deploy a new type of a drone in something like 6 weeks.
Of course, they are in a life-or-death struggle and thus cannot afford a decade of paper wars with various lawyerly and MBA types who want to have their say.
That said, the US cannot afford those either, but it is under the illusion that it still can. Structural ossification at its best, and the result is ... inability to beat an impoverished, long sanctioned Middle-Eastern authoritarian regime into submission.
Furthermore, Choppers arent obsolete and if you got em, it makes sense go use them.
Currently it's hard for any nation to meaningfully adapt, as the new tech develops far faster than any governement procurment process.
Both UA and RU still operate helicopters, but their survival envelope has tightened drastically and they won't even try to fly a chopper over a wide body of water anywhere near the enemy. To survive in a drone-infested war theatre, a chopper must fly really low and mask itself using terrain features as much as possible.
On Iran, describing the US as "inable" to win is structurally incorrect. The US could always win the war whenever it wants to. Same with Russia vs Ukraine. Both the USA and Russia have ICBMs. Neither choose to use them, for political reasons.
The Ukrainian drone industry isn't particularly expensive, BTW, and mostly grew up from private sector grassroots. Ukrainian military has had its own share of problems with ossified Soviet-era leadership. They were able to route around these, though. The US does not want to do this so far; probably too much money involved, and not enough risk to rock those boats (or yachts).
On Iran, describing the US as "inable" to win is structurally incorrect. The US could always win the war whenever it wants to.
Are you sure, with the shortages of equipment that take years to replenish? In what sense? I am not even sure if the US has enough naval capability to make a D-day-like landing in Iran right now. That requires specialized ships and training.
The US could probably win the war if it went in fully: as you say, if it was fully mobilized and restructured into a war economy like Ukraine. But that is already quite a bad situation to be in. If a superpower needs to do this in order to fight someone like Iran, it is not really a (conventional) superpower anymore.
The US could also wipe Iran using nuclear missiles, but the political ramifications of such a step would be catastrophic.
So could Pakistan. Pakistan has enough nukes to wipe Iran off the Earth (not that they want to). But no one mistakes Pakistan for a superpower just because they have deliverable nukes.