Re: Israeli Faces From Earlier Today :-)

On 3/8/2024 7:55 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 8 Mar 2024 16:25:22 -0600, Physfitfreak wrote:
 

But by themselves, they inflict good damage if they make it to their
targets. So either way, they're too bad for the enemy. Damned if you hit
them in the sky, and damned if you don't  The expense inflicted can be
up to orders of magnitude higher than the cost of each.

 iirc, the Ukes scored some own goals shooting down missiles. I don't have
to subscribe to sci.physics to know that what goes up is generally going
to come down someplace, hopefully not on your condo.
 This escapes certain segments of the US diversity that think firing .44
Magnums into the air to celebrate New Year's Eve is a good thing.
 

The weapons that kill off those Shahed 136 and 131's before they reach their targets are much more expensive than the drones themselves. The damage that the debris can make on the ground aren't that important unless when they contain bioweapons or something of that nature.
Americans in their bases in Iraq and Syria were trying not to use their Patriots to hit those little drones with. Instead, they were using some sort of device that after launch would create a hundred or two explosions in the general area of the incoming drone. This, almost always, worked, and was much, much cheaper than using anything sophisticated as Patriots. But I'm sure, even the cost of such device was at least ten times higher than each of those little drones. So either way, those drones caused some form of damage. So they work like a win-win weapon.
Plus, the few of the drones that happened to survive that device, created serious damage on the warehouses and caused fires, etc, even killed some people in the bases sometimes, without such events getting reported to the media. One of the news outlets (Lebanese) said recently that Americans reported only a total of 3 losses of life, while somewhere else disclosed the actual number of dead were 186 or something. So even the very few times that the drones made it to the base grounds, they caused significant loss of personnel as well, if the Lebanese source was reliable.
Anyway, this point, the "damned if you kill them in the sky, damned if you miss", is just one of several important features of those Shahed little drones. One other is, they can fly in the area of interest for long periods of time (24 hours), hiding high in the sky but ready for immediate use! The moment a reconnaissance drone identifies a target on the ground in the area, one or several of these little drones will attack right away. Some give the most importance to only this feature of them and name that type of drones after it ("loitering munition"). But other features of them are each quite important also. On some, a simpler form of reconnaissance device can be mounted to make them function as a reconnaissance drone as well (the Chinese one in that exhibition has it as a permanent part of the drone), in the absence of dedicated and better reconnaissance drones. Their warheads are also versatile, with several different kinds for different targets, all up there in the area of action, sometimes tens and tens of them, and selected for use for each specific target.
So overall, they're extremely cost-effective. They weren't made to rip their own people off with them. They were made for defending those people. I think they got their first use by Houthis (the Aramco refinery hit) when Saudis paid Israelis for a few raids in a row, a day or two apart, inside Iraq, hitting Shiite sites. It did its job well! Such paid raids didn't happen again. Even when USA recently did the same raids, they kind of let the targets know a few days in advance to cut the damages down. Why? Because Americans damn well remember the Aramco hit. The Americans assets in that region are also their liability. So do not underestimate the role that just these two little drones have in defending those people. Iran sells a lot of them to many countries in the world, in all continents, including the Americas. In fact the demand is so high that the waiting time to get their orders is long. There is a reason for Chinese getting interested in them. Soon Iran alone will not be able to meet the demand adequately. And Russia is building their own Gerans for their own use, at this point. Ukraine war isn't even nearly close to end. So China has stepped in to fill the gap. For what Iran sells, the money goes to the militia, not the military. It is their product.
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