>>65611048
It’s a valid question - there’s a reason why everyone ends up fighting the previous war for the first six months of a new one. For one, peacetime military is usually pretty rigid & not very innovation friendly. Keep your head down, advance, retire. Same goes for military procurement in peacetime - you have to buy stuff, you don’t have a lot opportunities to test it (relative to wartime) & you will end up with a stockpile. So again - you play it conservative.
Russians have a terrible yes-man culture, that didn’t help, but I think their issue is less old ways of thinking (unless you count literal Mongol-Tartar corruption culture), and less a culture of lies & dodging responsibility. They could have the most up to date doctrine and gear and still fuck up.
Currently you have the debate of “have drones made conventional weapons obsolete”, which was actually already ongoing before the Ukraine war, except for air power & smart weapons. Turns out if no one has air superiority - tanks and ifvs still work fine. Ukraine in general is a 4 year period of technological advances that get countered by other advances. Tanks move - tanks get stopped by mines and arty - tanks move with uav support and in cope cages. Fibre optic drones were all the rage a year ago, way less so now. So conclusions are kinda messy & procurement for NATO is, as a result, kind of a bitch.

In Finland, the current drone effort is criticized by many.

The training drones suck, the whole drone age is not integrated into conscript training sufficiently and - the worst of them all - there is no consensus on what the "best" drone of each type is because the whole idea of "massive component storage --> drone" is not there and the thinking is focused around what a good "model" is. This thinking does not adapt very well.

>Fibre optic drones were all the rage a year ago, way less so now.
What happened recently to diminish their lustre in the online community?

>>65611224
This is gonna sound insane but I think Finland should train every soldier to be a drone operator for atleast basic commercially available or local workshop tier FPVs simply because of how effective they can be even at the hands of fresh conscripts. I wonder if its possible to train every conscript to craft IEDs and FPVs to give a future Russian invasion another taste of "log war"

>>65611234
I think Russians still use them pretty heavily, but price of optic fibre went up like 6x, so Ukrainians switched to different solutions - like the directional AI supported ones they use for long range strikes.
>>65611239
That’s roughly what’s happening in the Baltics, slowly but surely. Drone workshops in schools and so on.

>>65611234
Snags

>>65611234
Stockpiles ran out, demand soared, producers start price gouging

>>65611324
>supply demand curve doesn't exist, it MUST be unfair

>>65611329
War profiteers will be hanged, anon

>>65611048
>I can concieve is the introduction of a new firearm and ammo for the purpose of reaching longer range and piercing body armor at the expense of ammo capacity and having to lug around more weight
The funniest part was that all of those attacks could be stopped dead in their tracks by putting a camera balloon into the air.

It's the most consistent story from both Iraq and Afghanistan - harassing assault happened whenever no camera balloon was up/drone was patrolling and they always ended as soon as that was corrected.

>>65611048
Military leaders are always out of touch to the current times. We have many examples of A. facing B., but B get's wrecked by A because A thinks what they have is enough for what was done to win 50 years ago.
More money is spent on R&D than ordnance quality, and most of those projects are scrapped by the old guard. Procurement of anything better is always a bureaucratic mess by Staff Officers that have never visited the frontline.

>>65611234
The drones have AI that can take over to guide them in the terminal phase now.

By the time the drone is close enough for a portable jammer to disrupt its control signal, it's already got a target in its sights and will finish the job on its own if it loses connection with the operator.

>>65611048
What blew up?

>>65611048
What blew up today?

>>65611523
>Kill everyone who makes your weapons
>Wonder why you have no weapons
Zigger mentality

>>65611206
>For one, peacetime military is usually pretty rigid & not very innovation friendly. Keep your head down, advance, retire. Same goes for military procurement in peacetime
other way around, cold war US procurement was forward-thinking and futurist to a fault
they were absolutely obsessed with cutting edge technology as a solution to their problems and constantly looked to unproven but promising systems to even the odds

a lot of these gambles did pay off, like PGMs, thermal sights, and miniaturization of electronics allowing for a full digitization of their aircraft avionics

but its also why they kept pushing out untested pieces of crap like the M60A2 and the sheridan
they put way too much hope in tech before it was ready and you ended up with super prototypes that looked good on paper but had poor reliability

compare this to WW2 where they preferred iterative development using tech that worked, even slowing down development of the T20 because they didnt want to slow down production of the M4

>>65611893
>futurist to a fault
If you compare the technological leaps of the Soviet armies and look at what non-US NATO forces fielded, and at the criticisms of NATO Active Defense, the conclusion is that the US just barely won the Cold War and really did not have an all-conventional deterrent edge until about 1985.

>>65611893
>but its also why they kept pushing out untested pieces of crap like the M60A2 and the sheridan
How would your air dropped tank able to outgun T-64 look like?

>>65612599
the problem with the sheridan is not that it wasnt capable, the GLATGM is a very impressive technical achievement for its time
the problem is that they looked at the new toy and shoved it into service without really thinking about anything other than its potential performance

the sheridan has an infamously rocky start, like forgetting that you need things other than anti-armor missiles
and the missiles being an extreme fire hazard due to having also been made with then-new caseless technology
and the missiles eventually gassing the crew because it didnt have enough ventilation

these were eventually all fixed, but it was a symptom of weapons development at the time being more concerned with increasing tech level instead of on the ground useability

>>65611048
forgetting the way s of combat put prussia where it is today

>>65611523
But the war profiteers are in China