Busy Saturday, so enjoy a couple of Suchomimus videos about a Crimean oil refinery that Ukrainian drones made blow up real good.
Here’s footage of the refinery burning bright in the forests of the night:
And follow-up footage of the fire mostly controlled, but showing two oil storage tanks totally destroyed and several others damaged:
“This oil storage facility is one which supplied the Black Sea Fleet, so we’re going to have to wait and see if it’s loss will have an impact on operations from there.”
It remains an open question how much Russia has actually used its Black Sea Fleet since the sinking of Moskva over a year ago. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention, or maybe not much news leaks out, but we don’t hear a lot about the black Sea Fleet playing a significant role in the conflict beyond occasionally participating in the missile wave attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
Also, one wonders how much gasoline and diesel is flowing into Crimea without the Kerch Strait Bridge back at full rail capacity. I see only one other oil refinery in all of Crimea, a tiny one near Voinka Boihka that could just be a storage facility. And given the lack of visible cars and trucks in Google map images, it may not even be active.
All the more reason to believe that a counterattack taking Melitopol would make Russian resupply of troops in Crimea exceptionally difficult…
Tags: Black Sea, Crimea, drone, logistics, Military, oil industry, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sevastopol, Suchomimus, Ukraine, video
This drone strike against a dominant military power by an inconsequential and second-rate country signals the end of US military dominance abroad.
Drone swarms can target cargo transport planes as readily as they may strike at carrier groups.
Our multi-billion dollar platforms are asymmetrically matched against cheap and plentiful unmanned weapons. Absent the ability to intercept this novel development, we risk the same fate being visited on the Russians.
Something to worry about? Yes.
But:
1. It’s been quite a while since Russia has actually been a “dominant military power.”
2. Unlike Russia, the U.S. has a whole host of sophisticated sensors on land, see, and air, and will likely have myriad effective countermeasures to deploy, even at a tactical level, which Russia seems incapable of doing.
It is a concern. But a fleet of short distance, low-cost swarm drones isn’t going to get close enough to, say, a carrier group to do any damage, and longer range, higher cost drones are fairly likely to be detected and dealt with before getting within range of hitting same.
Could you build a long-range, low-cost drone swarm sufficiently large to take out a carrier group? Possibly. But I think you’d need to dedicate about a billion dollars to doing and, and even then, it’s an expensive and chancy proposition, and probably not the best risk-reword project for that sum of money.
As opposed to, say, a large enough drone fleet from Taiwan to sink every single Chinese ship crossing the Taiwan strait in a given 24 hour period. That strikes me as a more realistic goal for that some of money than hitting a carrier group some 600 nautical miles away…
Y’know… Sometimes, I feel like I’m living in a world filled with people who are brain-damaged, mostly with some form of short-term memory loss.
Does nobody f*cking remember the Iranian strike on the Saudi oil facilities, lo these many years ago? Did you all think that was a one-off, or something?
Swear to God, the next war? I hear the assholes in charge claiming that the “unprecedented UAV attacks” that crippled US interests overseas were “unforeseen and unexpected”, I’m gonna drive to wherever they’re making that damn claim, get up on the podium with a baseball bat and start breaking knees. NONE of this crap that’s been “unforeseen” in the last thirty years was actually “unforeseen”, it was actively ignored because ain’t nobody seeing a way to make money off it, and it hits along doctrinal fault lines and boundaries that nobody has responsibility for, yet.
Swear to God, it’s just an unending Groundhog Day of epic f*cking stupidity.
Where a lot of this crap comes in is because of the parochial “branch proponentcy” organizational BS we go in for. It isn’t just Navy, Army, Air Force BS either–Within each service, you have branch structures like the Air Force with its transportation vs. tactical vs. strategic crap, and in the Army it’s Aviation, Infantry, or whatever. Something new like UAVs come in, and if it’s logically a part of a branch’s particular area, no problem. The issue with UAV assets is that everyone can and should be using them, so they’re really nobody’s damn problem in particular, and that leads to trouble. It’s like with the IED campaign… The Army saw things as being “Engineers keep roads open and maintained, Transportation uses them, and whoever is commander in that area is responsible for tactical/operational issues”. Which failed miserably in the face of the IED campaign as it was fought; nobody wanted to spend the money to do someone else’s job, and nobody wanted to to distract themselves from their oh-so-very-important mission.
As a result, the whole IED campaign looked a lot like someone taking advantage of that whole Flächen und Lückentaktik thing I keep railing about, wherein they drove right up a doctrinal “boundary gap” and ass-raped us with our own inability to deal with it conceptually or organizationally.
I am less and less a fan of how we do organization. The idea of “Branch” or “Service” is nuts; you’re a combatant? You fight; how you fight is immaterial. Enemy appears? You fight; I don’t care that you’re a transportation company, the enemy is right there shooting at you. You stop what you’re doing, you kill them until they’re no longer a threat. Anything else? Failure waiting to occur.
The You Tube narrator doesn’t seem familiar with the architecture of API 650 floating dome oil tanks or their piping systems. These tanks are always completely independent of one another to prevent fire contagion.
The aerial image strongly suggests that two tanks were struck, by two drones. Neither tank which was struck was very full of oil products, judging by the soot zones.
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