🧐 There’s a serious problem in this video that most commentators, including the NYT, which reported it, have overlooked, and it’s not the friendly fire 👇

That’s Russia eating its own cost-exchange ratio dog-food. What do I mean by this?

The cheapest operational MANPADS in the Russian inventory is the Strela-2 (SA-7 Grail), followed closely by the newer Igla series (SA-18/SA-24). While modern variants like the Verba cost upwards of $200,000 per missile, older Soviet-era systems represent the most budget-friendly tier of anti-aircraft defense.

Tl;dr: The cheapest MANPADS missile Russia can muster is $50k a pop.

Even if we just account for the missile, and expect a 1:1 missile-to-drone intercept ratio, which is - as the footage clearly shows - very unrealistic, then Russia is exposed to the most dangerous weapon in warfare since the full-scale invasion began: defeat by cost-exchange ratio.

That Ukrainian drone costs less than the missile. And Ukraine hasn’t even cranked up the production numbers (and thus the economies of scale) to 11, yet. That’s still to come. Germany and Ukraine and other nations are signing contracts for production in the thousands.

This means that Russia, which has notoriously underinvested into interceptor drones and pilots (and autonomy), might be facing a very critical moment in the war, where Ukraine has established (via path forging and intelligence) viable paths to daily air defense saturation (the ring around Moscow is functioning, but barely, and magazines are drying up) and breach.

If this trend continues, and if the evidence continues to mount, what we’re looking at might be the country that brought you maritime theater superiority without a navy beginning to exert what can only be defined as airspace superiority.

Russia will likely scramble and get the interceptor development going. But it looks pretty dim for them if they don’t.