Italy's Defense Ministry has opened a €5.14 billion ($5.86 billion) procurement for a new main battle tank and vehicles built on it, according to a record published Sept. 21 in the database of Italy's National Anti-Corruption Authority (ANAC). The entry,
A bunker. 😜
Mainly the lacking anti-air. Ukraine had barely anything and is often relying on Western high tech in very small numbers or rather primitve measures of manual guns against slow flying mopeds, Russian ones constantly fail to meet the performance they should have on paper.
But a lot of the tactics already exist and adaption is procurement. See for example the mobile anti-air guns most NATO countries lacked or had phased out as too unimportant, so ancient Gepards were bought back from 3rd world countries. That problem was entirely self-created. The tactics and tech to defend mobile units against air threats (including drones) existed for many decades and were just neglected in years where asymmetric warfare was more relevant.
Sorry, I was away from Lemmy for a while.
Well, do you have a favourite bunker siege? Of course not, there aren’t any. If the enemy is upon you, a bunker won’t help for long; they’ll dig in or drop grenades down your ventilation or something. Or destroy all access points turning it into a kind of tomb, like we’ve seen the US do in Iran.
Meanwhile, a castle was a thing you hide inside, to wait out an enemy right next to you, because there was no good way to take it on with muscle-powered weapons and no flight. They’re just fundamentally different tools filling completely different roles. While both are heavily built stone things, the resemblance is fairly superficial.
It’s two very different things to say “exist” and “have been planned for, organised for and trained in”. Aspects of drone warfare will resemble some historical thing, sure, but that doesn’t change much from an NCO’s perspective.
A drone in the air littoral is a very different from from a plane in the blue skies. The Gepards were “white elephants” because they’re useless against any modern manned aircraft - they fly either too high, or nape-of-the-earth, preventing a good shot. Maybe some officer somewhere expected attritable drones to arrive, and make them worth something again, but for most people, it was a black swan event.
Anti-air missiles, which are relevant to that problem, were never sent anywhere.
The ill advised swing to “unconventional warfare” (read: mostly not war) happened, that’s true, though. It was just one aspect of how complacent the West got after the Cold War ended.