chrisl

It was also still well inside Russia so they may have thought it was safe to fly at altitude.

Don't they have rules about going outside the fuel/ammo dump to smoke? That big a fire for that long is probably going to mean that bridge is toast.

With that map, I'd be seriously tempted to make a really hard drive toward Crimea from Kherson, and maybe Zaporizhzhia at the same time, wait to see if RU sends reinforcements through Crimea, then take out both rail lanes and one road lane of the Kerch bridge. Then pause that attack once the outside lines are long and thin and start poking at wherever the Crimea reinforcements came from. The time to take out the Kerch bridge is right as they're about to wrap it up, while the repair equipment is still vulnerable, too.

It's hard to render airfields inoperable - all you need is a long flattish spot, and to do that all you need is a bulldozer or a bunch of conscripts with shovels and rakes. For all the things the RA does wrong, one thing they've historically done well is make aircraft that aren't very picky about runway quality. If you're bombing an airfield, you need to either hit the aircraft directly (or indirectly, as we saw in the airfield bombing that took a while to decide what actually happened on the ground), or hit the infrastructure that makes it more valuable than a bare flat spot: fuel storage tanks, fuel trucks, ammo dumps. IIRC, in the Syrian cruise missile attack, they were mostly targeting aircraft directly through hangar roofs or doors.

The room to room version will already have to be autonomous to deal with terrible RF reception. Even if there aren't people working on this, there are people working on this, because there are peaceful applications for it other than blowing up Russians.

That's gonna leave a mark if something sets it off while they're unbuttoned...

You're not even making sense. How do you overrun them in close combat when they're digging far enough behind lines that they're effectively out of artillery and drone range, let alone close combat range? Ukraine has so many drones that we're getting video of drones watching other drones that are watching other drones drop bombs or direct artillery. How much value is there in hitting trenches that are far enough behind lines that they might never even see combat? Ukraine will survive, even in the presence of nuclear blackmail, as long as the west continues on the support trajectory it's on. The UA has more better equipment than they started with, and have been able to muster enough troops that they've been able to make Russia pay enormously for a few city blocks in Bakhmut while at the same time sending very large numbers of troops for training in NATO training centers.

Why would you spend long range precision weapons on single guys in holes? Or on empty holes that were built as backup positions? It's better to spend your long range PGMs on things like concentrated forces and ammo dumps than to be shooting HIMARS at single mobiks. How would you overrun them if they're behind lines? Ukraine has lots of short/intermediate drone capability to reach out and touch someone once they get to those lines, and at much lower cost. (and I see a post from Steve popped up while I'm typing this and he probably beat me to the response).

And aren't infantry basically like gophers? You set them on the ground and they start digging? Everything I've seen in the videos makes Ukraine look like lots of nice diggable dirt, too. Not like my yard that's decomposed granite and bigass rocks.

No thanks. It's bad enough in the rain. But a lot of those trenches were dug when they were far enough behind lines that they weren't getting bombed by drones, let alone under fire.

You can learn enough to operate a small excavator enough to dig a trench in about 5 minutes of "training" and with about an hour of practice. Ask me how I know. If you're driving backward leaving the trench behind you it would be pretty straightforward (or zigbackward?) to make a zigzag trench. edit: and when we rented a dingo (basically a walk-behind bobcat) with a brushwolf and I was going at the giant blackberry vines with the cutter as vertical as I could go and sweeping down (like you'd do for zombies) it reminded me of a designer note that was either in the old SL notes or in The General or something "I want to use my flail tank to overrun the infantry with the flails!"

Some time ago I worked with a company that was going to get stuff manufactured in India. It was moderately high precision machining and polishing and then some processes that are also moderate precision for anybody in the semiconductor industry, but a major stretch for people outside that world. It was stuff that I could go to multiple companies in the US for each process and get competitive bids that I could count on them being able to deliver. The work was going to India because it was an international project where each country that was putting in money expected to spend most of it in their own country. So this process went to India. The only way they could do it there was like the old robber barons - the owner of the company that was doing it had to basically provide everything to the people doing the work: new facility, machines, education, transportation, on down to clothes and shoes. They did make some nice prototypes, but I dropped off the project after that and later it sounded like they were struggling with reliable manufacturing. It was probably very labor intensive and craft-style production, which makes repeatability tough, where in the US most of it would be been done in shops where a couple people would be running 5 or 6 heavily automated machines at a time. China went through all that many decades earlier with manufacturing and tech production. A lot of it is still robber baron style (Foxconn City), but the scale of it has become enormous and for a lot of things you can outsource the whole process, from engineering through production and even shipping. India is nowhere near that yet, as far as I can tell.

Sure, ultimately it will be decided by politicians, probably mostly within Russia on when they decide they've had enough. But a lot of bombs going in the direction of their forces in Ukraine can help them come to a better decision faster. The dollar value of stuff that the US is sending to Ukraine is small on the scale of the defense budget, and a lot of it was paid for long ago. For the US MIC it's a chance to clear out the old storage and sell new blingy stuff to both stockpile and test in Ukraine. And unless Xi decides he absolutely has to have Taiwan, China comes out ahead of India.

The Russian annual military budget is equal to about one year of Lockheed revenue. And Lockheed is just one of many large companies in the western MIC. Before, and running up to the war, the counterargument was always "but the Russian salaries are lower, so they have much greater purchasing power". Between the corruption and the poor quality (and often quantity) of equipment and maintenance, I think we've seen that that's not a very good counter. If you're talking only ballistic artillery shells and tank chassis there might be some validity (but the corruption really cuts into that), but if you're talking about combat effectiveness, there's a lot that no number of rubles can buy for Russia.

Maybe he just got to the last episode in season one of ****spoiler*****The Diplomat and decided that nobody would believe the Ukrainians could hit the Kuznetsov*****/spoiler*****

Just one little thing to add: You don't really want to be flying jet engines through an environment that's got a lot of drones buzzing around right where the action is and where the CAS jet is going to come through. Ingesting a drone in a jet engine is going to be like sucking in a big chicken (or swan, for the bigger ones) with a lot of random hard metal parts and magnet wire.

Probably the only thing they can hit is a city, but they can't pick a location within it with any accuracy. They may have demonstrated guiding some of their missiles with GPS, but given how little GPS/GNSS we've seen in the Russian kit, it's unlikely they ever had enough to put on many of their missiles. 1 km CEP is maybe fine if you're putting a nuke on the pointy end, but not for a bunch of HE. Shaheds and some cruise missiles may be slow enough that they can use consumer GPS, but ballistic missiles won't be.

Milo Minderbinder must have gotten the contract for implementation. Everybody has a share.

They're also normally armed by the propellant explosion, so to be useful on the drone they have to be pre-armed somehow before takeoff. I don't think I'd want an armed RPG coming back to me.

That's sort of expected usage of loitering munitions. The purpose designed ones, like the switchblade, have similar behavior: once launched, they're not coming back and the only question is what kind of target they're going to hit. If you know there's a target rich environment near the limit of your battery range, it lets you hit things farther away from yourself and keep yourself in a relatively safer environment further from the action.

The interesting thing I find about that video in particular is that it appears to be a missile hanging from a quadcopter, and coming in pretty quickly, rather than the usual fixed wing that seems to be standard for the loitering munitions that come from the western MIC.

I finally saw the video. Definitely aliens.

More seriously, it looks like there are at least a few satellites using 532 nm (green) for LIDAR, and if the clouds and angles are right it can be visible from the ground.

It’s not due to come in til 2130 eastern time (US) tonight. so it’s probably aliens.

Both stories are real and not exaggerated and were told to me directly by the people who experienced them. For the guy at the conference it was far enough in the past that it was more amusing to him than anything else. He kept his clearance for quite a long time. The other guy was pretty shaken by the whole thing, and I haven't kept track of where he is now. (edit: I just looked him up and he stayed at the facility for 20 years before moving on) The magic waiver doesn't suspend presumption of innocence, but it does make it easier to gather evidence that's admissible. But most of the time it's just used to gather information to either renew or remove a clearance. Inadvertent mishandling rarely leads to anything criminal, and doesn't generally lead to things like those two cases (one of which was just random nutjob guards). I actually expect there won't be all that much heat and light over the leak. How much was in it that would have surprised anyone here? Probably not much. The more notable things seemed to be the weird anomalies (Vagner, confusing miles and km, etc) and at most it probably gave some insight to RU into what kind of information NATO can collect. From what I saw, most of the data were relatively time sensitive and we only saw them well after they'd really be meaningful, if they were even accurate. The ship of the USG turns very, very slowly, and once this disappears from the press the kid will probably end up doing some time and that will be that. Not much will change about the way the US handles things.