If you're not trying to be insulting, but you're being insulting anyway, you're a stupid asshole.

We don't. Feel free to read the news about Windows 11

Which American values? There's not one set.

For example, this nation was founded on racism and theft. Are those the traditional values you mean?

Well, at least SOMEONE has decided to find out whether it's a bubble or not the hard way.

Middle-range strike drones are much cheaper than JDAMs (smaller payload, but you don't care about that against trucks), longer range, and let you operate in fully contested airspace or even when the enemy has air superiority.

Aerial bombs are for entirely different purposes; they're for destroying fortified positions. Whether the aircraft should be manned or not is an entirely separate question, but one thing is unambiguous, it needs to be big enough to carry said bomb (aerial bombs are very heavy).

But again, complete overkill for a transport vehicle.

No, they'll tell you to go get your own training for it, for which you can get a nice student loan!

What it means is the number of jobs contracts and people can't afford things, and since the masses of asses think dumb shit about UBI we can't have that either, so a lot of people are going to have to die.

hurble durble false hope, then I shall present my own false hope!

The will never do what it is supposed to. And when it is capable of doing it then it will replace us all. We'll find out about it when the bombs drop.

I am pretty certain, that until recently the Englisch speaking population of the planet was capable of pronouncing Uranus correctly.

And I am also pretty sure that modern time English speaking astronomers still pronounce it correctly.

And in non English languages, your "joke pronunciation" simply does not happen: as it makes no sense at all.

Hint: Uranus does not contain the sounds for You, or Your or anus.

Re, the terrain of Donbas: compare, at the same zoom level:

Donbas

To a stereotypically flat place in the US, like, say:

Kansas

Unless you mean the "Smoky Hills" of Kansas:

Smoky Hills

Though their relief is only about 2/3rds that of that in Donbas. Donbas's relief is more like that of the Piedmont Province (the area west of the Appalachians), the dissected till-plains of southern Iowa / northern Missouri, the Tennessee / Kentucky western highland rim, or the low glaciated plateaus of the northeastern US (NE. Pennsylvania to southern NY).

It's not as forested as it used to be, but still has sizable patches left, such as along the Siversky Donetsk, mainly pine. Maybe the area east of the Appalachians would be a good reference for the mix of farmland with residual forest patches (well more than midwest states like e.g. Kansas). Defensive lines are commonly built in the forested areas, for greater cover.

Oh, and also (re: NERA) worth noting that there would be a brief boost in energy transfer to the generated gas from cell discharge. You wouldn't come close to fully discharging a cell (that requires lithium diffusion), but it can effectively instantaneously discharge the double-layer capacitance at the electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and very rapidly oxidize lithium at the anode surface (such as the SEI) / reduce species at the cathode. So in a way, not an entirely non-reactive armour, and somewhat reminiscent of the reactive-but-not-explosive NERA variants where they mix nitrate salts into the elastomer to make the reaction more energetic and gas-generating.

It seems that the most effective "drone defense" thusfar has been "moving in small groups or individually, at night or in bad weather, and then hiding in a basement until there's enough people / supplies to push further".

It's clear that armoured vehicle design needs to change. But hangar/turtle tanks hardly seem a durable approach either (even in Ukraine their use has fallen off). I'm still very much a believer in hybrid armoured vehicles, where you have a battery pack with several dozen km of range, and one or more generators powering it.

From a direct survivability perspective, if you use a non-flammable li-ion chemistry (there are plenty, it just means sacrificing some energy density - still requires managed venting / air control systems, however) and have cells in parallel connected by multiple busses, spread out across the vehicle's footprint, it becomes almost impossible to take out the entire power supply, just individual cells. Likewise, since electric motors are compact, you can have 1-2 motors on each axle, and again it becomes almost impossible for a drone to get a mobility kill that way (reducing approaches only to trying to disable the tracks themselves). If they take out the generator/generators, the vehicle still has its electric power to fall back on, and while it's not going to be making some deep push anymore, it can still keep fighting, and retreat when needed.

From an indirect survivability perspective, you have the ability to advance silently when needed (no engine noise, greatly reduced thermal signature), and since modern batteries have so much power density, you have the ability to have a higher top speed, which has proven critical for safety in drone-dense environments. You also have a lot of electrical power, for drone-detecting radars, drone jammers, anti-drone weaponry (lasers, microwave, etc), and so forth.

The mass and volume of the battery pack (we're talking maybe ~250kWh for a rugged heavy armoured offroad tracked vehicle, ~60kWh that for a lighter-armoured road-optimized vehicle) isn't wasted. Cell cans are steel, and between the inner plate and outer armour you're basically forming a honeycomb structure (good for dissipating shocks and spray) with a lot of thermal capacity (cells are organics, e.g. generally high specific heats). With a proper design, you might even be able to get it to function as non-explosive reactive armour. Specifically, contrary to misconceptions that NERA requires elasticity, NERA works instead by a vapor pressure-bulging effect: the interlayer vaporizes and expands violently outward, causing bending of the metal plates it's sandwiched between, so the incoming metal jet is constantly hitting a different location as the bending progresses. NERA normally uses, but does not in any way require, elastomers for this role, simply because they're easiest to package between metal layers, but a properly engineered battery pack should be able to serve the same role. In NERA, you want as much gas pressure generated as rapidly as possible; the copper plasma jet effectively instantly converts e.g. ethylene carbonate, graphite, etc to gaseous CO2, H2O, etc (plus vaporized metals along with the vaporized steel). The keys that matters are that cells that (A) cells that are in parallel are distributed throughout the footprint of the vehicle (not concentrated in a single location), (B) shared buses create multiple distinct parallel paths between the cells within a given parallel group, and to the next series group; and (C) (required for any NERA) that generated gases are properly vented / handled.

A number of next-generation armoured vehicle designs are pursuing hybrid propulsion.

. I believe the record for most FPV drone hits survived by a single tank in Ukraine is now thirty-two,

The value of 32 small FPV drones is way less than the value of one tank. And in general you're likely to be talking about "hangar tanks" / "turtle tanks" when talking about things like that, but these take on *massive* disadvantages, including being extremely visible and easily targeted by larger drones or artillery (as well as bogging down easily, difficulty getting through confined areas, poor or no gun maneuverability, etc).

it's mostly flat and open.

Donbas is mostly rolling hills, much of it forested. And much of the combat has been in urban environments, which is about as complex terrain as you can get.

cheap FPV drones don't work if the other guy is on the far side the hill you're hiding behind, for example.

Uh, yes they do? They literally fly.

Small drones are munitions, and need to be thought of as that. Even non-FPV drones generally have quite short lifespans - for the smallest categories, just a few missions before they're shot down, jammed, or otherwise crash. They need to be stockpiled the same way you'd stockpile grenades or artillery shells (with the caveat that you'll have a much faster upgrade cycle on the electronics, and need to enable that). It also means short-cycle-life secondary cells, or even primary cells, as the power supply. E.g., with current tech, lithium metal or lithium sulfur are good candidates.

Middle-range strikes are increasingly proving invaluable as well in Ukraine this year. The ability to affordably take out a fuel or ammunition truck dozens of kilometers behind the front line is key.

It doesn't have to be the way it is, guys. You genuinely can just fix all of the things that are wrong in your system. But the first step is understanding that said things can be a lot better, and are elsewhere.

And I want to be clear, this isn't an "everything in or about the US is wrong" post**. This is about "US infrastructure in general" - the focus being on digital infrastructure, but arguably, it applies to physical infrastructure as well (the US is a laggard on high-speed internet, its electrical grid is famously unreliable, US high speed rail projects have been one disaster after the next, etc etc).

** If you want me to sandwich in a "US thing done right" as a counterpoint: the EU is politically dysfunctional, with any one state being able to veto collective action, allowing rivals to pick us apart one at a time. We have no common defense. Also, each state sets its own contrasting economic policies, yet all are on the same currency, so each one can drag the other down. I want to be clear, this isn't an "everything is perfect in the EU and everything is wrong in the US" post, the EU very much has its own problems! This is a post very specifically about US infrastructure compared to the rest of the world - and it's not simply a problem of funding. It's a problem of the US just running off with incompatible siloed system with hack patches tying them together and never putting forth any meaningful effort to fix things, with most people not even aware that you can do things better, and that most countries do.