We are now beginning to enter the stage of the war where Russia is unable to sustain a general offensive all the way up and down the frontline and must resort to terrorism to project fear and the illusion of unstoppable, corrupted power.
Expect more and more of this crap as Russia is less and less able to credibly fight a ground war.
Remember, acts of terrorism definitionally rely on propaganda creating mass panic for their power as if the perpetrators of the terrorism possessed true power they would have resorted to actual coordinated military action such as fighting on the frontline or taking territory.
In otherwords if Russia chooses to attempt something like this, it is by definition a sign of extreme weakness on their part as was the lazy attempt to claim Ukraine tried to assassinate Putin.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/01/01/frontline-report-2025-12-31/
^ Abrams were literally just used by Ukraine to successfully counterattack at the absolute most intense flashpoint of the war currently. Yes an Abrams was immobilized, but the crew survived and the operation was a success…
Fundamentally you really can’t get more efficient than a howitzer, which doesn’t mean that fiber optic drones aren’t devastatingly effective weapons but the difference is artillery can keep firing over and over and over and over and over again. What a lot of people don’t realize is the velocity part of the equation when it comes to the destructive energy an artillery shell imbues, the only real inefficiency is velocity lost to air resistance.
Yeah, I’ve seen this, cool shit, but in my mechanized brigade aemor crews were literally forced to become pilots of different unmanned vehicles due to bmps and other armor becoming one way ticket. Even modern machines like maxxpro are single use machines (they do work great and actually hold multiple hits) that can return but they are rare. Kozaks, hammers, various toyotas are far more popular for logistics and moving people to and from positions.
Artillery piqued in ww1 we never will return to 5 meterdeep trenches and walls of fire with million shells fired in a single day. 🥴 Not to say it’s useless but they require a lot of time to get going and actually hit something.
Well yeah, unfortunately Ukraine still has mostly an inventory of Russian design lineage armor. There is a reason Russians ride into battle on top of these machines, they know being inside is suicide which is supposed to be the point of an APC… Compare that to M113s which Ukraine still considers useful for armored transport roles even if the armor is light and the design is ancient as heck.
No, literally the opposite is true, if you have a reconnaisance drone and it spots an enemy 1km away from itself behind enemy lines… at that moment the absolute quickest thing you could possibly do other than launch a missile or direct fire cannon is instantly send fire mission instructions to an artillery battery ready to fire. Just think of this in basic terms of abstracted logistics, along the chain of logistics by definition artillery is the speediest “last mile/10km” delivery asset for a munition intended to be delivered to an enemy target.
The scarier problem artillery poses than response time speed though is that you don’t know an artillery barrage is coming until it hits there is no reacting, the very nature of an artillery shell is comprehending it only after it has arrived. This is the basic reality that forces modern warfare to be fundamentally about mobility, communication and reconnaissance not raw power and armor.
Drones have radically changed warfare, and are absolutely better at lots of things than howitzers but my point is that drones supercharge howitzers they don’t make them obsolete. This can be true even if drones are the best tools to hunt howitzers with, war is contradictory like that…
RL example of artillery working:
Same situation with drones: 15 minutes in 50 fpvs, 5 bombers worked, enemy is probably dead.
Artillery is situated far so it won’t be hit and they can’t stand in one place for longer then 5-10 minutes.