July 18 — Day 1240 — The Blitz Revisited, Drone and Missile Data, Military Intelligence in the Pentagon
Hi All!
All things good and bad come to an end and the war hasn’t gone anywhere. The following was written mostly from outside Ukraine. The only real perspective “outside” gave me is that, yes, really, major nations and millions of people really can have a giant conventional war in progress next door or close to next door, and for them it’s like weather in Antarctica: Probably unpleasant for the people there, but not really having to do anything with me.
Drone Wars
Sitting in peaceful Europe, it was appalling how little the news outside Ukraine communicates the scale of the Russian strikes for the past couple of weeks. The information is there, it’s widely confirmed, Ukraine is being subjected to the most intense long-term wartime air bombardment of a country, by some metrics, since Vietnam. I go through some hard numbers in another section, but generally, hundreds of drones, nightly, dozens of strikes, nightly. Usually a single city is targeted. Dozens of people injured or killed, nightly. I’ll leave the hard statistics to someone who loves filling in spread sheets, but, in layman’s terms, the number of Russian strike weapons flying into Ukraine every night probably maths out to 300–3,000 air engagements somewhere over Ukraine every 24 hours.
For reference, during the Battle of Britain, the single biggest German air raid took place on on September 7, 1940, when around 300 German bombers, escorted by 600 fighters, attacked London, killing about 430 civilians and injuring 1,600. The German “Blitz” against targets around London and south Britain lasted 57 days. I’ve swiped a colorized pic taken following a Luftwaffe raid on London, image recently published by Daily Mail. Doesn’t look much different from Kyiv or Dnipro or Kharkiv, does it?
This is not to imply what the Germans did to the British with their bombardment during WW2 is comparable to what the Russians are doing to the Ukrainians now, the level of destruction of life and property in south Britain was an order of magnitude worse. But, in terms of aircraft in the air and air space over which battles are being fought, my contention, more than comparable.
I know people in multiple Kyiv neighborhoods who some nights lost count how often there was firing in the sky on a given night. Although one certainly can’t compare the Russian bombardmant of Ukraine with the Allied bombing of Germany or the US bombing of Japan or Vietnam, the Russian air bombardment campaign against Ukraine is huge and in layman’s terms probably comparable to the Battle of Britian or NATO’s bombardment of Serbia.
Yet, by the news that I see in Europe, what the Russians are doing to Ukraine translates to one or two Ukrainian buildings blown up every few nights and a few second of video of Ukrainian women standing in their robes next to a smashed apartment block, and some ambulances and rescue crew running around.
In the States, aside from outliers like CNN, it seems like the war is just Trump arguing with Putin and the Ukrainians are just sitting passively. The soap opera about Melania Trump, Friedrich Merz and the Patriot missiles is getting reported in all manner of detail — yet it seems like Ukraine and the Russian air bombardment is this random, boring process where nothing is happening and people in Ukraine are sitting around living most normal lives and waiting for the Great Powers to decide their fate. Anyone actually living in Ukraine sees things very differently.
This is leaving aside the ground war, which as intense as the air war is right now, is where by far the war is being decided and the giant majority of lives are being lost. I’ll focus on the ground guys next review, but, the lead image is “Viking”, a fairly well-known Ukrainian Mi-24 pilot, who recorded a video honoring not flyboys nor even ground crew, but the paratroopers of 25th Airborne Brigade, which had its birthday this week.
Ukrainian Air Defenses and Smoke in the Air!
Zelensky last week said that the Russian Shahed threat was, although serious and substantial, coming under control. Based on the numbers (see below), this is at least optimistic and possibly inaccurate.
However, there seems to be a spike, at least, in reports of Ukrainian air defenses beefing up.
According to the sources I’m reading, no one has come up with a Ukrainian air defense silver bullet. The government/air force are hinting at better data fusion of incoming aircraft trajectories, I’m seeing mobile air defense teams saying they seem somehow to be getting into Shaheds’ path faster, and the Ukrainian military information people are talking up the appearance of an interceptor drone called an Odin (pictured), who list speed is about 50 percent faster than a Shahed and supposedly the Odin has A/I that flies the interceptor into the Shahed during the terminal phase. Image.
Yuriy Myronenko, head of the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, talking to Ukrinform, claimed Ukraine is manufacturing interceptor drones in scale and that production is going to be “tens of thousands”. As far as I know he didn’t mention the Odin specifically, which would be par for the Ukrainians, they typically have seven or eight weapons development projects going, each run by its own personal team of mad scientists/geeks, usually financing is mostly crowd-sourced, and the military top brass aren’t doing much except not interfering.
So how many airborne Russian explosives are getting through? Based on the numbers published by the Ukrainian air force, simple answer, Russian Shahed drones, between 10 and 30 percent of the drones depending on the night, target, drone routing and probably things like weather and whether or not the Ukrainian rat patrol teams were drinking last night. Image from Ukrainska Pravda from a report on an all-female MG crew operating in Bucha.
Russian cruise missiles are by that data sitting ducks, Ukrainian air defenses seem to shoot them down almost without exception.
Russian ballistic missiles (in this category I’m subsuming S-400 and Kinzhal missiles, which are difficult Mr. Picky might argue aren’t REALLY ballistic) pretty much always get through. This is primarily because the US for the sake of imposing a ceasefire in the Russo-Ukraine cut off supplies of Patriot missiles to Kyiv, which can shoot down ballistic missiles. I don’t see the logic but the White House did.
In detail, here’s Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine for the month of July 2025, reduced to statistical form, based on numbers published by the Ukrainian air force. The first figure is total targets detected in Ukrainian air space. The second is number of drones claimed shot down by all means. The third is the number of drones probably jammed. Subtract the second and third number from the first number, that’s a reasonable estimate of the number of Russian “hits” by drones. Missile shoot downs and hits are separate from the drone numbers.
Here’s what jumps out to me:
- This is a real, ongoing, massed bombardment of Ukraine by Russia, it is a major military operation on a scale not seen since the Balkan Wars, and I would argue Russia attacks on Ukraine right now are roughly comparable to Nazi Germany’s air blitz against southern Britain in 1940–41.
- The Russian pattern clearly is 2–5 days of dozens of aircraft (drones and missiles) probably to feel out air defense locations across the country and prevent shifts of defense systems to other site, followed by 1–3 days of hundreds of aircraft concentrating on one or two Ukrainian cities.
- There seems to be a pretty clear link between cities “used” to air strikes and shootdown/intercept successes; relatively speaking the highest Russian success rates are against cities that aren’t often hit.
- It’s pretty obvious the Ukrainians are unable to stop ballistic missiles, and the only thing preventing Russian from leveling Ukraine is that it doesn’t have that many ballistic missiles.
- The numbers don’t particularly support Zelensky’s claim Ukrainian air defenses are “improving” vs. drones. However, and this is a little peculiar, the bigger the Russian effort, the more efficient the Ukrainians seem to be at cutting it up.
- I strongly suspect a real but for us unquantifiable factor is how much the US is effectively assisting Ukraine on a given day with incoming target data. Pete Hesgeth cut off US satellite data that pretty much blinded Ukraine’s air defense network to cruise and especially ballistic missiles for close to a week at one point. I am reliably informed that behind his back, from time to time, US/NATO officers pass on intelligence and even critical components to the Ukrainian air defense network. The point is that most likely the US still has influence on how Ukrainian air space is defended, it’s just that one day the influence might be positive and another it might help the Russians.
The West “Gets” It?
Yes, I have seen the “news” that Keith Kellogg talked to Zelensky about sharing Ukrainian drone tech with the US. I am skeptical: Ukrainian drone tech and Ukrainian manufacturing, if capitalized, would compete effectively with DJI and put pretty any much existing or potential US-based tactical drone manufacturer out of business. That being the case, I doubt very much the lawyers hired by the Raytheons and Boeings of the world to make sure Pentagon orders stay big and corporate, would allow Ukrainian drone manufacturers actually to assist the US military with better and cheaper drones. In other words, Kellogg in my view is blowing smoke and Secretary Hesgeth will fail in his attempt to make Pentagon contracting more efficient and less profitable for the small group of corporations currently at that feeding trough.
Another window on US military thinking and its stagnation was opened this week with the publishing of a brand spanking new US Army tank platoon tactical drills manual (APT 3–20.15, July 2025). The ignorance of the drone threat in modern war, as expressed in that official Pentagon publication is astounding.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FMy9X32iZL_OtcPH5OFL8ExLuhWCXBwt/view
Just to make clear this isn’t just one grumpy journo in a bad mood because he had to go back to work after summer vacation, I offer you the comment of a Canadian observer writing under @GrandpaRoy2, one of the most intelligent and even-handed writers on the tactical side of the war in any language. Part of the latest US armor doctrine is, in case of drone threat, for the tank platoon to separate itself into a 150m x 150m box and then each tank uses its weapons to blast FPVs incoming on any of the other tanks. He writes:
“The new US Army Tank Platoon Tactics Manual shows an incredible ignorance of the realities of FPV warfare. Apparently a platoon has lots of time on sighting an FPV to make hand signals, close hatches, signal HQ, and change formation. In the real world, they will have seconds. The plan to leave a track and break into a herringbone will most likely result in multiple landmine hits. And the laughable instructions to shoot canister at a rapidly moving FPV could only have have emanated from a General.”
I’ve attached two graphics from the field manual which, I repeat, is the official US Army “how to do it” for a small tank unit encountering FPV drones. Anyone, and I mean even grandmothers living somewhere near the line of contact, would tell you drone defense tactics as laid out in APT 3–20.15 are little less than suicidal. A tank platoon executing to those standards if attacked by an average Ukrainian FPV outfit would lose all its tanks and probably about 2/3 of its personnel killed or wounded, in maximum an hour, and it could be 15 minutes.
The really appalling part is that no officer or senior NCOs mostly from Armor Branch involved in printing this travesty took a public stand against this bone-headed doctrine. Certainly dozens, and probably nearly 100 US Army career professionals, my guess, had a crack at a draft of this pub and so had the chance to object effectively — you know, resign in protest — so that US tankers won’t go to war using imbecilic doctrine that almost certainly will get US service personnel uselessly killed and wounded: as we can see, no one did.
Think I’m exaggerating? Anyone usure, just go head, look at those images. Then think of a some of the drone-attacks-tank videos we’ve seen over and over and over in the past three years. Now ask yourself: on what planet could tactics like that be anything but a sure-fire plan to wipe out a US Army tank platoon worth about $20-$30 million once all the extra equipment and survivor benefits are taken into account? At the cost of maybe 5–6 FPV drones for each Abrams M1A3 burnt, or maybe $4–6,000 all in once the Scooby Doo van and the Red Bull the drone operators drink is included?
Just so I don’t seem to be picking on American tread-heads, to be fair, Defense Express just pointed out, citing Polish media, that the Polish army has decided that if they go to war with the Russians somehow their artillery expenditure volumes will be about an order of magnitude less than what the Ukrainians have found necessary?
continued…
I was SO excited to see this in my inbox. I've been really missing your coverage, Stefan. Thanks for coming back!
Welcome back Stefan! Glad you're alive and kicking and delighted to have another update from you.