acrashb

Correct, unless there is an export version of the Excalibur that has a different way of loading the data into the shell, which would be a possibility. Biggest implication of no digital systems for the M777 is that you lose the ability to self lay and self locate. In other words, you are operating at the same level as the rest of the majority of Russian/Ukrainian artillery.
It's good to see someone on OSINT finally noticed this, perhaps now I will stop seeing some of the outrageous claims about the M777.

China is much closer to becoming a peer space power.  They have much more electronics capability, even if they don't control all the knowledge.  They're the only country besides the US that has successfully landed on Mars, and they did it in a rather dramatic fashion - they skipped all the orbiters, stationary landers, and small rovers and just went straight to a full up combined orbiter+lander+big rover mission, and did it the first time out.  They aren't quite caught up, but they've been launching a lot and improving their capability rapidly.  On the bright side, if there were to be a conflict that probably makes them much less likely to just go shattering things into space debris because they'll have just as much to lose from an uncontrolled debris field.  They're more likely to develop capability to disable specific satellites without making a mess and would be able to develop the capability for it.  Russia had very little to lose by basically exploding a frag grenade in space - a few old satellites that might already be junk anyway.  
And it's already a mess up there and getting worse - Starlink is just getting started and they're already producing a ton of near misses all the time (link).  There are various proposals to try to collect some of the garbage, but I don't think anybody has really come up with a good technology or plan yet.  But with the cost to launch a swarm of cubesats to LEO, I can imagine that even if it becomes an even higher collision risk environment, short lifetime ISR cubesat swarms could become a thing.  Just launch a bunch, knowing they'll all be dead in a few months.

Absolutely possible (I work in information security), and reinforces recent comments by the Governor of the Bank of Canada about "open trade" vs. "open and secure trade".  The world's systems are likely to bifurcate after this - it's already started through sanctions.
For about a decade I have been talking to clients about risks in becoming dependent on, exposing intellectual or even physical property to, allowing confidential information / PI/PII/PD/PHI to leak into, or having significant reputational exposure to what I have called "strategic competitors" - this language was acceptable in business settings where politics can't be discussed.  It's resonated fairly well and will no doubt be even stronger in the near future.
The overall message is about flexibility in open societies, which many pages ago I likened to a faster OODA loop.  Peterson has spent a lot of his professional life studying authoritarian systems, to the point where he was asked to write the foreword to a reprint of the 1970s classic The Gulag Archipelago - so his thoughts around China are worth listening to even though one could not say he had serious academic credentials in the area.  Of course, to the extent that we lose the open nature of our society all bets are off, and there can be spurts of success and failure in the Chinese and Western systems - noise in the data that shakes the lives of thousands or millions of people.  History is messy.
Fantastic response, thanks, and good links.  Russia's backwardness is unsurprising given the overall state of their economy and that one can reasonably assume corruption affects the space program like everything else.  I'm less concerned about Russia's space supremacy (especially after the current war) but thinking to the future - China.

On the last point, the potential for "Kessler syndrome" makes the uncontrolled (anything other than deliberate de-orbiting) destruction of LEO satellites incredibly dangerous and irresponsible.  But I think it's inevitable, if / when there is a next peer-to-peer or peer-to-near-peer war, that LEO and other satellites will be in an active combat zone.  This extends even further the concepts of frontage and battlespace.
 

Absolutely possible (I work in information security), and reinforces recent comments by the Governor of the Bank of Canada about "open trade" vs. "open and secure trade".  The world's systems are likely to bifurcate after this - it's already started through sanctions.
For about a decade I have been talking to clients about risks in becoming dependent on, exposing intellectual or even physical property to, allowing confidential information / PI/PII/PD/PHI to leak into, or having significant reputational exposure to what I have called "strategic competitors" - this language was acceptable in business settings where politics can't be discussed.  It's resonated fairly well and will no doubt be even stronger in the near future.
The overall message is about flexibility in open societies, which many pages ago I likened to a faster OODA loop.  Peterson has spent a lot of his professional life studying authoritarian systems, to the point where he was asked to write the foreword to a reprint of the 1970s classic The Gulag Archipelago - so his thoughts around China are worth listening to even though one could not say he had serious academic credentials in the area.  Of course, to the extent that we lose the open nature of our society all bets are off, and there can be spurts of success and failure in the Chinese and Western systems - noise in the data that shakes the lives of thousands or millions of people.  History is messy.
Fantastic response, thanks, and good links.  Russia's backwardness is unsurprising given the overall state of their economy and that one can reasonably assume corruption affects the space program like everything else.  I'm less concerned about Russia's space supremacy (especially after the current war) but thinking to the future - China.

On the last point, the potential for "Kessler syndrome" makes the uncontrolled (anything other than deliberate de-orbiting) destruction of LEO satellites incredibly dangerous and irresponsible.  But I think it's inevitable, if / when there is a next peer-to-peer or peer-to-near-peer war, that LEO and other satellites will be in an active combat zone.  This extends even further the concepts of frontage and battlespace.
 

Talking about China. Came across this youtube post by one of my heroes, Jordan Peterson. Why China will fail.
https://youtu.be/Hf1D9-zSOME
 

Couldn't disagree more. As often mentioned in the past weeks Russia has to be brought to it's knees and cleansed of all filth that makes her start wars and export misery to it's neighbours. Putin might be replaced by a more moderate and reasonable leader, but it will not take long before another dangerous bastard will grab power. It's not just Putin and his gamg, it's a country, a people, a culture and a way of thinking that has to be rooted out, before we're going back to 'business as usual', whatever that means with Russians...

I see this river crossing as proof the Russians are getting better. At that one airport, they landed helicopters in the same location 7 times to see them get hit each time, here they only attempted to cross 5 times. 

I'm familiar with him, and actually sat next to his former book agent on a plane a week or so before this past xmas (by dumb luck).  We didn't talk about Zubrin, but I think we did talk about space.
Russia is probably 40-ish years behind in space ISR assets, much like they're behind in things like microelectronics and NVG.  Most of it has the same root in the Soviet Union failing to try to copy Silicon Valley from the 70's on (and probably earlier).  The USSR and later Russia were/are fine at building big things made of lots of metal that spit out fire - tanks, missiles, rockets.   But without microelectronics they can't keep up with the kind of data volume that you can collect and integrate if you have relatively cheap high performance sensors and cheap, fast computers.  They've been able to buy some of those things to an extent, like the Thales targeting systems, and presumably microcontrollers for various things, but they can't do the kind of mass production that makes fancy chips appallingly cheap.
I came across an article (linky here) a while ago about when the big divergence between US and USSR capability happened in space. It's by one of the space journalists who figured out the capabilities of the first KH-11 in 1977 (launched in 1976) and sat on it for a year until a spy sold the details to the Soviets.  KH-11 can do about 10 cm (4 inch) resolution on  the ground, and there are 5 of the latest few versions in space right now.  And the NRO is giving away telescopes that size to other agencies, because they presumably have better. One of the things that the Aviation Week journalists held off  on publishing even longer was the existence of a second satellite network whose sole purpose was to be able to relay images in realtime from the KH-11.  So the US had realtime 10 cm resolution on the ground in 1977.  Russia was still returning film capsules in 2016.
And "New Space" has changed things drastically - commercial companies can give you multiple daily revisits of any location on earth at resolutions between 20 cm and 3 m.  Basically, kids in a garage in the US can make and launch cube sats cheap enough to do 3 m resolution more or less hourly.  If you have several billion dollars you could do half meter resolution that often, and there's probably a commercial market for it.  The stuff you need to do that is export controlled, and just about all the high res imaging companies are US based for that reason. The USG is the largest customer for those data.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is becoming comparably cheap and there are multiple companies doing that, too. And it can see through clouds.  And those companies also tend to be US based for similar reasons to the optical imagers.
There were some twitter posts early on about likely degradation of GPS over Ukraine, figured out from looking at the errors reported on ADS-B data.  There was speculation that it was Russia doing it, but it seems more likely that it was the US/NATO.  Ukrainians know where they are and have maps, but the Russians appear to have lousy mapping and were using some commercial GPS units, so even being able to mess them up by putting them a couple roads over from where they were supposed to be could help UA.
And that doesn't even get into the SIGINT and ELINT stuff.  But three things are happening to ISR from space right now - the cost of launch is going down fast, the cost of making stuff to launch is going down fast, and the size of the electronics you need to make that stuff work is going down fast.  So the west has tons of space ISR going on, both commercial and government.  And Russia, well, doesn't.  They have two optical satellites that are getting old and probably don't have anywhere near comparable performance to western stuff.  They probably have some SIGINT and ELINT satellites, but the lack of a microelectronics base makes it likely that those are very limited in capability.
All of which leads to the Russian anti-satellite test in November.  There was speculation at the time that it was intended to produce a ton of debris to blind the west so that they could do exactly what they did.  They did succeed in making a mess, but didn't take out any significant satellites.  And even if they took out a few, there are so many that they wouldn't be likely get them all, and the three letter agencies tend to keep some sitting around on the ground for launch-on-demand, so they could launch above the debris if they needed to.
edit: here's where Russia is with ELINT/SIGINT satellites and SAR, which is basicaly nowhere:
 

This issue here is that, if slice-and-hold works again, Russia will keep doing it.  Might as well give up now and give them everything - which isn't acceptable.  The big question if Putin does what ISW is suggesting: will the nuclear threat again be a bluff, or this time be real?

This issue here is that, if slice-and-hold works again, Russia will keep doing it.  Might as well give up now and give them everything - which isn't acceptable.  The big question if Putin does what ISW is suggesting: will the nuclear threat again be a bluff, or this time be real?

Crimea was taken in 2014, in less than 10 years (8 to be exact), they make out like a bandit by being able to claim a region as worth risking nuclear war and getting it legitimated? Hell no. Might as well just declare the same for Donbas. Hell, why not heartened them to hold Kherson while your at it? Same principle applies, just ethnic cleanse the hell outta it and claim ignorance 3 months down the line. 

Still much too good for you. You will be subjected to watching  Eurovision contests over and over again.

One of the questions we probably won't get answered for at least a year or three is how many hundreds of Nato analysts, and how many gigawatts of server farm were expended every day to turn the several zillion incoming ISR streams being generated into a coherent picture of the battlefield that is handed to the Ukrainian General Staff as a bow-tied present every morning, and again after afternoon tea. The Russians have essentially never generated even a tank company sized surprise action that I am aware of, much less anything on a scale that might matter. Anyone who actually wants to win the next war is going to have to figure out how to deal with that.

No, not really - all he was/is asking for is some proper oversight into how this money is going to be spent. Without going off into tangents, the U.S. has been spending a lot of money recently on weapons for Ukraine (while ignoring some other critical, domestic issues), so it's only rational that someone with some sense stood up and said, hold on, where exactly is this money going?

I get the impression that river crossing had been preceded by someone with shoulder boards and a very red face pound the desk angrily and yelling that he doesn't want excuses, he wants it done NOW!

Its on the to-do list.  Right after "combined arms" and "logistics", and slightly in front of "do not try the same water crossing more than three times [baby steps]"

When this war is over Ukrainians will remember this battle like Americans remember the Alamo or Greeks remember the battle of Thermopylae.

https://news.sky.com/story/as-boris-johnson-heads-to-finland-what-will-it-mean-if-the-finns-join-nato-12610045
Finland's prime minister and president have said the historically neutral country, which fought the Soviets in WWII and lost, must seek membership of the defensive pact. 
 
Let me be the first to congratulate Vlad Putin on rescuing NATO from the dustbin of history.  Actions, meet consequences.  I expect Sweden to follow soon.

If they keep trying, eventually they’ll just be able to drive across on the wrecks.

Wait, he's supposed to find Buckaroo Banzai not John Whorfin! [/🤓]

 

Steve, I think you are being sarcastic so prolly ignore what I'm about to say...
RANT BEGINS:
Otherwise... this is pure history revisionism by WOKE elements of our society.  We may not like this history (whether we are leftwing or rightwing) but by your reasoning we should knock down/deface practically every monument erected over our civilization's history.  Why, because practically every person who has lived until very recently has been some sort of racist.  (and many still alive are some sort of racist, just misinformed/unenlightened, but may still be good people).  You can't go around defacing historical sites because you disagree with their politics.  That's happened throughout history and is disgusting.  We would have no history if you burned every temple or book, knocked down every statue because you don't agree with some segment of that belief.  And as for the USA (or any country) naming a ship or a base after a US historical figure, it can't.  Why? Because by your reasoning, none of them are perfect by today's standards.
:RANT ENDS
This thread is really not the place to discuss this anyway.  If you disagree with me Steve, I would be glad to discuss this using your PM system.  Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to say.

Well to be frank, your dilemma between "radicals" is because the Russian public did nothing as all opposition that was otherwise was suppressed and eventually choked out.  There was a time when public action could have preserved your ability to chose, but as you say, that time has passed.  This means you are at more difficult choices but anything right now is better than nothing.
As to the "golden bridge to retreat", hey man, that is on you guys and it can be filed under "Things to Consider Before Invading Another Nation for Zero Reasons".  I did not see Russia moving to lend a hand with our extraction from Afghanistan either.  This is big-boy pants time, you break it you buy it and clean up your own messes. 
I have no doubt the Russian people don't know what we know...that is because the same jerks that pulled you into this mess control your media - which in hindsight was another bad idea and we in the west should take note.
As to how Russia is losing, we have literally written pages on this.  Russia is losing this war by just about every metric I can think of to be honest - Tactically thru Strategic.  The biggest proof of this is that gong show up at Kyiv, one does not burn 20-30% of ones ready field force in a "feint", then recruit every three-legged one eyed dog and merc you can find (seriously, Ethiopians?!), stuff them together with broken units in three weeks and send them out for another doomed offensive in the Donbas.  These are not the signs of "minor setbacks". 
My bet is the Russian political level is going to move the strategic goalposts again.  I suspect they will declare victory and liberation, followed by "free and fair elections" because the Crimea playbook.  And then dig in and cry crocodile tears as the UA with western help attacks them, justifying whatever crazy comes next.  This is assuming that the whole Russian Army doesn't simply collapse under its own weight in a couple weeks.  Then there will be a very loud popping sound when those sanctions finally break the Russian economy.
 

I can't remember what book it was in now, but something about the Cold War the Able Archer exercise where the world came close to becoming ash. Caspar Weinberger and other defense officials under Reagan were astounded to learn that the Soviets were extremely apprehensive of the NATO war-games, which simulated a heightened nuclear alert as well. The Soviets were 99% positive that Able Archer was the prelude to an invasion of the Warsaw Pact by NATO. Soviet reasoning was that it was EXACTLY what the USSR would do and then roll right into West Germany from the exercises. 
The US officials were dumbfounded to find this out, because they could not understand how the USSR would believe that. The reason: NATO would NEVER attack the Soviet Union, and they didn't understand how they could think that NATO would. They had NO idea of the Soviet mentality about this.
Blinders.
NATO practiced DEFENDING Western Europe from Soviet invasion. We never practiced an invasion of the Warsaw Pact, only local defensive counterattacks.
NATO will not attack Russia. It seem @DMS is under the same mis-apprehension that the Soviets were 34 years ago.
Dave

No, Russia is being judged by it actions, not what it says.  We have a saying in the west.  "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck.... therefore it is a duck."   The acts of Russia in Bucha, Maruipol, all over Ukraine are in full display for the world to see.  Ergo, if Russia troops acts like uncouth, uncivilized barbarians, we are within our rights to call them out for it.

That is a really important point.  In many ways China in 2022, looks a lot like late 19th century US.  Its expansion is largely economic, not military or colonial.  China has made a lot if underhanded deals, but they have not overtly invaded anyone as far as I know since those border clashes with Vietnam back in 79; hell, our track record in the West is worse than that.
Everyone in the mainstream seems worried that China will take this as an opportunity to invade Taiwan; however, I think it will be far more subtle and smart than an open invasion (please god, we have had enough).
And another really good point.  China is not a rogue power, like Russia.  It is playing by a set of rules that it wants to master and hold the pen on the re-write so it can negotiate from strength for the next hundred.  This means negotiation both externally and internally, this is how the "grown ups" have to play the game.
My honest bet is that China will continue to attack the Black Elephant in the room, the internal divisions within western democracies, the US in particular.  If we cannot get over ourselves, I think we are in serious trouble in 20 years.