Depends on who you bribe.

Again, I think you’re vastly overestimating the capability of a quadcopter drone to inflict serious damage on hard infrastructure.

But hey, maybe I’m not only wrong, but so are all of the Ukrainian sabotage teams and they’ll stumble across your advice here and realize what a great idea it is.

You put so much effort into that post, that I almost feel bad pointing out that you probably should have read the comment I was replying to… you know, the one above my comment.

But, if you’re having a hard time locating it, I pasted the relevant quote that I was responding to:

“…opportunity for a movie-like secret mission with a bag full of consumer drones…”

But yeah, I guess if you completely ignore the actual text I was responding to, you might of had a fair point.

Most of the smoking memes were about ammo depots hit by HIMARS, not sabotage. The fires at factories may have been sabotage (although I expect that the base rate of fires at Russian factories is fairly high) but they seem like the sort of thing a Ukrainian sympathizer acting alone might do rather than something coordinated by Ukraine. I suppose I was expecting bigger explosions, so to speak.

A helpful note to consider: Some of the longer range drones Ukraine has deployed are in fact civilian aircraft that have been modified to fly remotely. These are fairly slow and not highly maneuverable. Certainly not enough to dodge bullets or missiles.

The drones are now precise enough to target hearts and minds, leaving most of the body intact to be taken over by other drones

Also, to add to the other poster’s point, in a medieval siege, the defenders have every reason to believe the attackers will happily let every man, woman, and child behind the walls die gruesome deaths to starvatiom or disease. That’s why, when it came down to the wire, cities would submit.

In modern times, cultivating a believable military posture of, “Surrender, or we will personally execute every last motherfucking one of you” is politically dicey. Look at the news stories coming out of Gaza about supplies running low thanks to Israeli interference. Right, wrong , or indifferent, the international community (as well as your domestic community, if those that disagree with these sorts of tactics are allowed to make their voices heard) tends to look down their noses at targeting noncombatants populations. So, due to these complications (which were largely absent or less impactful from warfare in the time of Genghis Khan) wholesale slaughter of civilian life isn’t really openly used. In fact, guidelines like “proportionality” are invented which dictate the level of response you can give certain provocations and what not.

So, if you’re a modern day commander being tasked with taking an urban center, the closest way to approximate a medieval siege would be to absolutely carpet bomb everything. Make it known that you will happily let every single person in Moscow die, if not send them to the afterlife yourself. While you’re bombing the suburbs, you’ll also need to encirce the whole city to prevent supplies from being delivered, since you can’t guarantee every bomb will hit it’s target and need starvation to provide additional assurance to the population that, if they maintain their current course, they are doomed.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t going to allow that, and you know it, so you commit to the level of bombing deemed acceptable by the world at large. At best, you wind up in a situation like London during the Blitz. Your bombing runs are effective, in that they disrupt the daily life of citizenry, and cause some infrastructure damage and loss of life. However, you’re never going to be allowed to scale up to the point where your victims feel they have no way out but to submit. There’s enough plausible deniability that, even when a bomb hits close to home (literally or figuratively), the victim is more pissed at the bomber than their government.

Ye olde sieges cut off supply lines and forced the defenders to subsist on rations. Once those started running low, they started starving. Eventually the options were starve to death or surrender. These sieges frequently lasted months and sometimes years. Given travel times, it could also be weeks before anyone realized something was wrong and mobilized a force to break the siege.

Ukraine can only do infrequent drone raids. In order to properly siege Moscow, they would need to lock down all ways in and out of the city, and keep it that way for months, possibly longer given modern food preservation techniques and the viability of backyard farming. Additionally, sieging a city no longer prevents the people from communicating with the outside world, meaning other Russian forces would respond in days.

The most successful besiegers were probably the Romans. It wasn’t so much the act of laying siege that caused cities to surrender, it was the utter, uncompromising determination of the Romans to see the siege through to the end, and the atrocities they would commit on the surrendering population that made them so successful. Surrender immediately and you don’t get enslaved or butchered… hold out and things will go very, very badly.

I don’t recall all the details but there was one siege in western Europe where the mayor of the town declared ‘you won’t take us: we have supplies for four years in our store houses’ to which the Roman commander replied ‘then we’ll take you on the fifth year.’

Or take Masada, a supposedly impregnable fortress built on a mountaintop. First the Romans built walls all the way around it, both to contain the Jewish ‘rebels’ but also to protect the Roman siegeworks from any potential rescue force. Then they just built a ramp. A massive, massive ramp, that reached all the way up to the fortress walls (which weren’t that strong because who builds a strong wall when your fortress is perched on top of a mountain?). Then they wheeled up some siege engines, smashed their way through the walls and discovered most of the inhabitants had commited suicide rather than face capture.

Yeah exactly. Sieges don’t work except when they do.

Are you including Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that?

Those weren’t prolonged grinding attacks on the civilian population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria

This strategy might have only worked with the destruction of cities by nuclear weapons in Japan.

The resolve of the German population was not broken by the bombing of civilians. If they wouldn’t have hit the military production capabilities and invaded with ground forces the war would have dragged on much longer (and Germany lacked vital resources in their territory, unlike Russia).

So even if your suggestion to bomb the civilians wouldn’t be quite reprehensible by itself, it’s extremely unlikely that this would end the war on it’s own.

Just look at the numbers of soldiers Russia has lost, this didn’t seem to faze the support of the general population so far either (families and friends if those who died it who were severely injured).

So terrorism. You want to literally terrorize civilians for military gain. What is wrong with you?

Don’t start nothin, won’t be nothin.

I think it was Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age that had clouds of nanomachines constantly at war with each other creating a fog of dead and dying machines that people would just walk through pretty much ignoring it. I read that a long freaking time ago, so I’m sure that memory is, to some degree, degraded.

The 80s movie robojox basically has this as it’s central premise, cept they were piloted.

Heavy, existential sigh.

Or we could go further and just simulate the battles so even the land is safe from war.

Same reason most mass-market consumer goods aren’t made in western countries - its more profitable to have them made in China and other low(er) wage (and lower employment standards in general) countries.

And in the decades since that shift to offshoring manufacturing started, China has developed infrastructure and expertise in manufacturing, while those same capabilities have atrophied in the US and other countries who import those cheap products.

Sure. But it has no impact on any of us. It’s just headlines to boo or cheer.

People are clapping like seals at the latest reported horror of war. But they don’t really suffer or benefit in any way.