US and others are working on weaponizing vast numbers of drones. They could drop 10's of thousands of emp shielded drones over the enemy. Totall overwhelm any defenses. Each drone could independantly target people, vehicles, bunkers, electrical systems, water systems, command & control buildings etc. With thousands of these going independantly after different target and exploding everywhere at once, the battle damage could be paralyzing.
They could be launched by huge cargo planes, cruise missles, soldiers on the ground or ships. Could fly through open windows, inside tunnel entrances, through open tank hatches, or even down hallways.
Massive, highly precise and destructive.
The reason this is not a likely scenario is the same reason every car on sale today is not electric. Any manufactured product takes time to get into production and electromagnetic shielding is not cheap or easy to make.
I work for a company that makes QA test equipment for the integrated circuit manufacturing industry. When an IC maker comes out with a new part, yields can be as low as single percentages. ie more than 90% of the production run is trash. The QA people use various tools to figure out why the failed parts are failed and then the engineers figure out how to improve the part to make it work.
Back around the time I started there they had a customer who was making parts to go on satellites and they were shielded to prevent damage from cosmic radiation, which is a similar process to EMP shielding. Functionally these parts were the same as off the shelf, simple ICs you could buy for pennies a piece, but the shielding increased their cost to $1500 a piece and they were made in very small numbers.
The shielding contributes to the insanely high prices for military grade electronics.
Production for these shielding drones is not online yet, and when it does come online these drones are going to be considerably more expensive than commercial drones. Even if built in large numbers a drone that is the equivalent of a $1000 commercial drone will probably cost more than $100K. Just like the expansion of electric car production is taking a lot longer than a lot of people would like, the roll out of drone manufacturing in the west is going to take time.
There can be no negotiations, since that would be a lesson for Russia that it has won and it can continue to Poland.
If in doubt, watch a lecture on
Russian war strategy by Finnish intelligence officer. The Russians retract only if they are defeated, otherwise they always only push forward.
That Shusko translation is a year old, but I think it's more true today than it was then. Russians tend to get rebellious when they lose a war. The Russian people are more tolerant than most cultures when it comes to sacrificing for a war, but they need to feel the sacrifice was worth it. They are in a situation now where nothing short of T-90s rolling up on the English Channel are going to feel like enough sacrifice.
But the west can't let Putin get away with anything he can spin as a win. It's not just to teach Russia that it can't go invading its neighbors, but to tell other would be expansive dictators that the post WW II order is still in place and expansive wars will not be tolerated.
But the west is also very concerned about a Russian collapse scenario. A Russian civil war has an unpredictable outcome and there are many ways a Russian civil war could turn into a lot of problems outside Russia's borders. Among them Russian rebel groups capturing Russian nuclear weapons and selling them on the black market to raise money for their war effort. A destabilized Russia could also lead to opposition groups in other countries rebelling.
There is also a lot of concern that a Russian break up scenario or a Russian collapse scenario would let Russia or large parts of Russia fall under China's direct influence. If China had the ability to strip Russia of its natural resources at will, they would be very difficult to stop.
While western leaders are very concerned about China and they are a potent military threat now that will be growing in the next decade or two, China is ultimately going to have some very severe internal struggles. The one child policy has left them with a dramatically top heavy population pyramid. Within a decade they are going to have more people in retirement than of working age and it looks like the smaller population is going to be a mainstay because even with the one child policy gone, the people who were born under that policy are showing no interest in having many kids.
Their entire economy is going to shrink and the cost of labor is going to skyrocket which is going to take them out of the business making cheap stuff for the rest of the world. All the manufacturing jobs that require cheap labor are going to move to other poorer countries. China is trying to reposition into making quality goods, but they aren't going to have a price advantage and they will be competing head to head with European and American products.
China's economy could collapse under this weight. They probably aren't going to be doing great during this strain. But they are big enough that they could project a lot of power over Siberia and being able to rape the region for resources on the cheap would help them keep the plates spinning a while longer.
So the west is faced with conflicting goals over Ukraine. On the one hand no leader in the west wants to see Russia rewarded for their war in Ukraine, but on the other hand they don't want to see Russia collapse or fall into civil war because most of the consequences of a Russia collapse scenario are not very good. And at least some of those scenarios lead to a stronger China, at least for a while.
Personally I think it's time to rip off the plaster (band-aid) and deal with the consequences of a Russia loss scenario. Things will get unstable for a while, but the west probably could build alliances with the new countries in SW Russia and bring them into the European fold. Also if the US and other western countries make it clear they will buy and loose nuclear weapons at top dollar (or Euro, or Pound), then most if not all the weapons that fall into rebel hands could be secured and disposed up safely. China may get into that game too because it's in their interest to secure them. Any nuclear weapons used in south Asia or the Middle East could put radiation clouds over China.
I'm not so sure about Poland and the Baltics. They are a part of NATO after all. But I have no doubt that it won't be long before a Russia that continues to be a Military Dictatorship will continue to attack Ukraine. It will only be a matter of time. And they will probably also go after Georgia and Armenia. They will also of course do their best to continue to undermine Moldova and perhaps also Montenegro (granted, I don't really know that much about Montenegro...). And they will continue to prop up other Military Dictatorships around the word. So Syria, and various Military Dictators in Africa. And they will continue to try and benefit strategically from their relationship with the other major Military Dictatorship on the planet – China. And they seem to also have 'quite the crappy influence' on countries like Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland and also the Czech Republic.
Russia would struggle to attack NATO if they won something in Ukraine. The army is broken at this point and it's going to take a long time to rebuild. But one presidential candidate in the US has pledged to take the US out of NATO if he wins. That would badly weaken NATO.
The US had to be involved in the air campaign on Libya because the US is the only NATO country with the command and control network to coordinate NATO operations. Without the US NATO would have to rebuild the command structure from scratch. A broken NATO would be vulnerable from Russia. If the Baltics couldn't rely on outside help, they would not be able to stand against even a weak Russian army.
