The U.S. has announced that it will supply Ukraine with 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones:
Loitering munitions are odd weapons that can be considered either explosive drones or flying artillery shells, depending on how you define them. The AeroVironment Switchblade 300 is small enough to be carried in the backpack of a soldier or guerrilla. Once Switchblade is fired from its launch tube, wings pop out and a propeller spins to carry the drone aloft. It almost sounds like a hobbyist’s flying machine or a child’s toy, but Switchblade is quite lethal.
Switchblade orbits a target area, looking down with its day and night cameras and relaying the imagery back to the operator, who controls the drone with a handheld controller. Once a suitable target is spotted, the operator commands the drone to dive on the target and explode (hence the “kamikaze” nickname).
To be clear, the range of the Switchblade 300 model isn’t great: 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) and an endurance of 15 minutes, and a cruise speed of 63 miles per hour. The warhead isn’t much more powerful than a grenade.
But so what? Just 2 feet long and weighing just 5.5 pounds, it can be carried as a disposable munition just like the M72 Light Antitank Weapon (which also weighs 5.5 pounds).
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For urban warfare, Switchblade could be particularly useful: a weapon that could be flown into a window, or that can fly over intervening buildings and hit a Russian patrol on the other side of the street. For hit-and-run insurgent warfare, the Switchblade 300 is light enough that dismounted troops — and civilian fighters — could get within a few miles of a road that a Russian supply convoy is traveling down. A Switchblade is small enough that the convoy probably wouldn’t see it coming, further demoralizing an already demoralized Russian army.
There are two versions of the Switchblade, the small one which is anti-personnel and anti-vehicle [soft-skinned], and the other, which is anti-tank.
Would it be permissible for the Russian military to shoot down the US plane (or torpedo the ship) carrying those weapons to the Ukrainians? And how would the US respond?
Given the high level of corruption in the Ukraine prior to the current troubles, and the Fog of War, and the Ukrainian kleptocrats inviting soldiers of fortune from around the world to come and help them (even though Twitter assures us that the Ukrainians are already winning hands down) — what are the chances that some of those weapons end up in the hands of people who will use them to harm the US?
Questions! Questions! Do the Swamp Creatures have any idea about how their virtue signaling could go wrong?
Acceptable to whom, Gavin?
If both sides are evil, realpolitik says play them against each other, so they never get around to attacking us. That’s the dark truth behind the sentiment of wanting to support the underdog.
This sucks for the civilians over there. How far does empathy extend? `Coz we’ve all got our own problems.
It’s seems to me the eastern Slavs are better at defense than offense. But they have a penchant for revenge, as Nazi Germany found out.