Comments by "Titanium Rain" (@ChucksSEADnDEAD) on "The Truth About Ukraine's Bayraktar TB2 Drone: Project Ukraine" video.

@DroneStrike1776 If your enemy has airspace dominance, you're fugged anyway.
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"With air supremacy, drones have zero impact" - But they do. Look at the extensive use of drones during the GWOT. Insurgents and terrorists had no air force, but a drone could stay up for hours on end observing their movements.
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They have a lot of fiberglass construction which makes them less reflective to radar, and fly higher than most short range defenses.
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This is a very weak take. The NLAW is a step between an unguided launcher like the LAW or AT4 and something more advanced. The Javelin has greater range and is a truly guided missile, while the NLAW's on board guidance is just used to predict the rough position of a moving vehicle. On a moving vehicle, the max effective range of the NLAW is only 400m.
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Airplanes existed before tanks. "Up-armored" APCs are still vulnerable to many weapons.
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@pogo1140 A bunch of men in jeeps armed with .50 cals and incendiary ammo gave the Luftwaffe hell in Africa. This isn't unique to drones. If you perform raids behind enemy lines you can hit less defended but critical pieces of the puzzle. You could wipe out the drone command and control. You could wipe out the fuel and ammo trucks. You could drive to the enemy capital and kill the president and his entire chief of staff. If you can do it and have the opportunity, go for it.
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@SevenSixTwo2012 This is where it gets tricky because of physics. There's bands of the EM spectrum which are less susceptible to "stealth". They're used in over-the-horizon radar. There's Doppler clutter reduction. Basically, you can detect objects you're tuned to look for, but detection doesn't mean you can target it. Many defense radars are not tuned for these bands because they'd be useless without the accuracy to lock on. These less-accurate readings are used by air defense systems to know a threat is incoming, and scramble fighters or have defenses ready to take it out. There's also probably Doppler clutter rejection so that the radars aren't actually picking up millions of birds as they're pretty slow compared to incoming missiles or jets. When it comes to mobile vehicles like the Shilka, Tunguska, Pantsir, Tor, SA-8 Osa, etc they're not meant for that level of air space defense.
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The issue is that cutting edge goes a long way. Between a drone and a 5th gen aircraft flying overhead, I'd rather than the 5th gen just slapping my enemy back to the stone age.
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But they're now asking for tanks. Now that the initial offensive is over and now they need to fight to recapture Donbass, they want tanks.
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@josephmeador1529 No, it's because they need more than just BMPs/BMDs. The USMC no longer uses tanks because it wants to shift to the Pacific, and if it needs tanks they'll ask the Army to cover for them. I know about 73 Easting. That's not proof that the tank is dead, that's proof of the superiority of technology and proper training. I don't know if you've seen the video people have been talking about lately, from Syria, where a tank climbs on an embankment, fires a round, scuttles back down and a missile passes over it. A properly trained tank crew can fire a round at a Bradley before the TOW missile hits. The problem is that Russia will attempt to secure as much gains as possible before they can declare "victory". At some point, they still stop throwing equipment and men at Ukraine. This is unfortunate, but Ukraine needs to deny the land bridge to Crimea and regain access to the Azov sea otherwise they'll end the war in a much more fragile position.
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@josephmeador1529 You can't wage war on Soviet Russia armed with Panzerfausts. That's at best a delaying tactic. A $30,000 NLAW won't slap an army back to the 2014 borders. The Soviets had T-34s. You're trying to suggest they'd be marching into Berlin by foot and RPG-1 in hand.
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Speaking of bullets, they cost cents and can be fired really fast. Wouldn't that mean that infantry has had it?
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@Frenchfrys17 That's partly because the Russians have poor SEAD doctrine and equipment, and also lack the necessary precision weapons. Were the Russians capable of covering their strikes and able to conduct precision bombing at a high tempo, they'd be death from above. When you're dropping unguided bombs and you're afraid of the very few S-300s still active, yeah you won't be pulling your own weight.
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@Frenchfrys17 They really haven't. I'd say the drone can do 10% of the job but at 1% of the cost. The cost disparity really drives home how important they are, but they cannot replace the manned aircraft. Looking at the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, you can see how lack of manned aircraft leads to drones being used for... targeting information so that ground based systems can strike. There's also the fact that SEAD operations may not even need to pick off air defense systems, they can get by on just forcing them to shut the radars down. It really is important to consider that if one side has drones and the other has a force of 5th gen aircraft, with the future new HARM or with 4th gen carrying current HARMs, the side with the drones will be able to produce more casualties with artillery and missile strikes. But the side with the 5th gen will target command and control centers, government buildings, power plants, industry, etc. You can't "win" a war if enemy air power can pummel a nation back to the stone age with relatively cheap PGMs and selecting a few critical targets.
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@Frenchfrys17 I'm not overlooking anything. Airborne targeting is one thing. Usually what for? Artillery spotting, or maybe even targeting for laser-guided artillery. Now look up Operation Opera or the Iranian raid on the H-3 airbase in Iraq. These are operations you cannot conduct by drone. Air to air missiles depend on the platform's radar and own altitude and speed. You need a big, powerful radar to feed the missile an initial track, and your range is determined by your own altitude and speed at the moment of firing. Well, one of the reasons these drones are hard to fight is that they're kind of slow. A F-35 is at this point as cheap as a 4th gen. Stealth isn't increasing cost by much. It's not 1990 anymore. The force with drones facing a modern air force will get slaughtered. Sure, the drones may help increase the kill count on the ground by a few thousand like in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but the nation with the real air force is going to just enjoy the free reign over the skies to bomb every supply vehicle and make sure that eventually there's no laser guided artillery shells to fire.
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