chrisl

The key technology is manufactured in the Netherlands, but also depends on US imported technology for some key parts. It's a very internationally intertwined tech. And the shift of a lot of semiconductor mfg to the US is already in progress, funded largely by the companies themselves.

Plain old torpedos are also precision assisted. A WWII US sub only carried 24 torpedos, and only fired a few very carefully aimed ones at any target. There were even homing torpedos in WWII that chased down the sound of their targets' screws.

It's an interesting paper and methodology, but I'm not so sure you can interpret publication and citation counts to mean that any country is in the "lead" in a technology. It would be better if they'd provided some validation of the approach. A better interpretation is that those show the relative emphasis of those technologies for those countries, and some indication of the time rate of advancement of those tech areas. The most interesting charts are the career flux charts that show the moves of researchers through their careers. China has been experiencing a brain drain for a long time, at least since the 1990s, as people leave for school in the west and don't go back. Increasing US anxiety over the national origins of researchers and technical workers in defense related industries has been about the best thing that happened to R&D in the rest of the world. Many people who would have been attracted here for school and then stayed for their careers are now not coming at all, or coming and then leaving for other countries for work. A number of countries increased efforts to hire US educated workers starting in the early 2000s. After the mortgage disaster in 2008, China made a huge effort to hire mid career US-educated Chinese back to China. The back of Nature was packed with ads for positions in Chinese universities where they'd set you up with startup packages that were essentially unimaginable in the US.

The trojan horse was used to "blow" the gates of Troy. But for the modern era, use of radar by the RAF to detect Luftwaffe formations that outnumbered them and be able to fight back with smaller numbers of aircraft. And later use of radar to detect U-boats and accurately bomb them on the surface, rather than having to carpet bomb the ocean.

The thing about Bakhmut that I keep coming back to is how small the gap is that Russia has to close, and they're not only unable to close it, they can't even deny Ukraine the ability to supply through it. The extreme edges of the pincer have been as little as 5 km to close the circle (I'm not sure what they are right now). If there were no trees, that's clear LOS for a human standing 6 ft tall from one arm of the Russian pincer to the other. And they can't even prevent Ukraine from supplying through it. It boggles the mind.

Impressive construction quality, if only they had managed to anchor the feet to the ground.

And we come back to the age old precision vs. mass. If you can see every vehicle in theater on the ground or in the air, and for targets you really care about tell if they picked up their coffee cup in the last 20 minutes, and then target them from halfway around the world without even sending people into harms way, you don't need 10^9 artillery shells. Especially if you can deny the opponent virtually all of their own ISR. With enough ISR and precision you don't even need as many individual munitions as there are enemy troops. The US/NATO isn't quite there yet (I think), but that's the clear intent and path. It's a combination of how US tech has developed since WWII and the range of adversaries that the US has pissed off on the way. It serves well in the fighting parts of things the US has gotten itself involved in (we lose in the "now what?" part), but it's not serving Ukraine as well as it could because of unwillingness to give them the full range of stuff for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad. NATO doesn't have enormous quantities of artillery because it's slow and expensive to move that stuff around in expeditionary actions. But if you have big fleets of deadly jets and suitably large fleets of refueling planes to get them close the theater, you can hit everything you want to hit without having to wait for cargo ships to sail halfway around the world.

That's pretty genius. It's giving the submunitions the precision that they wished they'd had when they were originally made.

The hypersonics can get through the Ukrainian AD, but how much accuracy do they have? Probably terrible, and if they're not careful they might accidentally hit Poland or Romania with a stray. They can probably avoid Poland by launching from far enough back that the missiles don't have enough energy to get there, but a nav or control system failure could send one off into left field. Maybe time to loan Moldova some directed energy ground systems and crews to protect their own airspace. Since they're not a belligerent they can get fully crewed systems.

Yeah, it looks like they used an "analog TV losing sync" transition to the credits. I'm not sure you can use that to extrapolate anything about what happened to the TOS-1

When you put it that way, it sounds a little like the Orient Express murder. Everybody blew a piece of the pipeline.

See some of my earliest posts here. Russia has the launch capability to do it but they’re literally more than 40 years behind in instrument capability. They were still launching telescopes that dropped film capsules around 2015. The US launched its first electro-optical satellite in the mid 1970s. The Hubble design was derived from it. It’s cheap to do if you live in the US, Europe, or Japan. It’s doable at lower performance if you’re China (who are rapidly catching up), and basically impossible if you’re Russia because you can’t get the electronics. Planet Labs is on a path to do it commercially in the optical, as are some other commercial companies doing SAR. Physics works the same in the classified world as out of it. You can estimate that if someone moves a bicycle in Ukraine, a computer in the US will notice within a few hours. There’s higher resolution than that available at lower revisit rates.

And if it zooms away, you probably should, too!

You’re safe from small grenades if you’re not directly underneath, but you could get a little drone-directed 155 instead. I don’t think we’ve seen Russians surrender to a drone yet, but it’s probably just a matter of time.

Yeah- so they fly a bunch, and it gives them frequent coverage across the planet. If you can cover anyplace at one latitude at high frequency then you cover everything at that latitude at the same frequency. No propulsion required. It’s really not possible to restrict your observations to a region in longitude, and you get anything you want within the latitude you cover. The nature of orbit means that you don’t ever really do continuous high res of anything (even the US can’t), but you can do very frequent, especially if you’re ok with a mix of instruments and can integrate their data. Revisit time also depends on your satellite design- side looking capability can get you more frequent observations with a single satellite. It’s shockingly cheap (in national budget kind of money) now to put up something that can give you revisit times in hours at decent resolutions. Even with Maxar’s relatively small set of birds you can get multiple views per day of anywhere. I looked at the start of this at what it would cost to build hourly coverage of every point on earth, and it’s pretty affordable. Just hand over your amex card… Geo actually kind of sucks for ground observation (except maybe for elint). It’s good for big wide field of view weather and telecom, but it’s way cheaper and easier to fly more stuff lower to get high res than it is to try to put something ginormous in Geo to get the same performance. A telescope has to be 70x bigger in diameter at geo to get the same resolution as at 500 km LEO. That kind of thing is very easy to spot from the ground - amateur astronomers take pictures of JWST out at L2 and it’s only 3x the diameter of a KH-11. And god help you if a little sunlight gets into your 150 meter telescope…

Once you’re in sun-synchronous orbit, global coverage is literally free. It’s actually kind of impossible to make non-geosynchronous satellites that don’t have complete coverage of whatever latitudes they cover- it’s the nature of orbit. Sun-sync orbits are set so you get the same illumination at the same latitude on every pass. And most of China’s satellites are in mid altitude high inclination orbits. Including some SAR that don’t care what the illumination of the earth is- they just use the sun for power. There are a few that have the highly elliptical orbits that are used for high res imaging, and those probably have perigee over the latitudes of the South China Sea, but most of their stuff is flying orbits that have global coverage at altitudes that can give you reasonable performance. They aren’t at a level comparable to the US on performance, but they do have global capability that doesn’t suck. Yes, everybody flies constellations, but they’re really about revisit rate, particularly if you’re doing things that have narrow field of view or can’t look sideways.

It may also indicate decreased Russian counter drone capability or increased UA drone capability. It may also indicate that some new intermediate range PGMs (*cough* GLSDB *cough* Switchblade 600) have arrived in the region and they can be used with impunity.

I'm going to pick a little nit here. China has a metric buttload of earth observing satellites (i.e. spy capable)of various flavors in a variety of orbits. A little googling shows most of them in high-inclination sun-sync orbits (keeps the illumination of the spots they can see consistent) so that they can basically cover the whole earth regularly at roughly uniform resolution, with the revisit rate and max latitude dependent on their altitude. By having side-looking capability they get a higher revisit rate than strict down-lookers, though at different viewing angles. These kind don't cost much to task - adjust orientation without using propellant to look at different angles as they fly over a region. There are a fairly small number in very elliptical orbits - those are the ones that cost you to retask because you have to move the perigee to where you want it. They don't have a lot of them, and I agree it's unlikely they're spending propellant on Vlad. Even the optical observing satellites seem to mostly be in moderate altitude sun-sync orbits. But there are quite a few, and they probably in totally have pretty good revisit rates with some kind of observation or other. They can't really have a bunch of unknown satellites in highly elliptical orbits - it's hard to hide satellites because any punk with a telescope can sit around in the dark and track them. And there are hobbyists who do. All you can really do is try to hide their function - we don't necessarily know what all the Chinese satellites do. But it doesn't really affect your overall argument - even if China sets up a terabit/s pipe to the RA, Russia doesn't have the C4 or the precision to take advantage of it.

That was essentially why the former USSR members, including Ukraine, gave up their nukes. The systems were all set up for control from Moscow and it would have been a major undertaking to set up systems for control from Ukraine and change the control over on all the stuff inside their borders. Plus all the protections and maintenance programs. For a country that's not particularly rich, getting support from richer countries in return for giving up a high risk expense looks like a pretty good good deal. At least until Russia decides it wants to reunite with you.

You were a little off there - see the correction above.

That was easy. We had an external calibration standard that you could plug right into it and it only took a few minutes to check and adjust if needed. Fortunately its function depended on well understood physics and there was just one parameter that normally had to be adjusted slightly.

Right now the nukes are functioning exactly as designed. They're sitting in locked spaces keeping NATO and Russian troops from going directly at each other. The instant someone tries to blow up someone else with one, they've failed, independent of whether they explode.

One last example on legacy (because I think we're at a point where we more or less agree that some might work and some might not, but we don't want to gamble on it). In graduate school in the mid 90s I had a piece of legacy test equipment from the 60s. It had been acquired in the 70s, along with I think ten identical siblings, from the Navy as gov't surplus. I needed to use it for a few weeks at a time a few times a year. It was all discrete analog electronics, and IIRC didn't have any tubes. It was the only one left of the original 11, the others having been scavenged for parts over time. A modern replacement would have cost a few tens of $K, which we didn't have. Just about every time I turned it on I'd find some new failure mode and have to take it apart and diagnose and repair it. Fortunately it was used in continuous operation, so I'd typically turn it on, go through the diagnosis/repair cycle, then leave it on for a few weeks before powering it down and stowing it again. Fortunately it was from an era that was post-tube and pre-chip. Tubes by then were still marginally available, mostly from I think Hungary and then-Yugoslavia for guitar amplifiers, and had it used any logic chips from the early days of LSI I'd probably have had a hard time getting them by then (ebay was just starting up).

It sounds like it's kind of like what a lot of UA units seem to be doing with drones. At the smallest unit level (platoon or squad) they may just be pilots, but at only slightly higher levels it's sounded like they have people who do not just repairs, but also mods that add actuators for dropping whatever variety of small explosives are available. Some are shared designs that anybody can 3D print, but some are "custom" using whatever parts they get through their volunteer supporters/donors. It's a concept that's very alien to US government procurement.

Re your last question that's bolded: I didn't know so I had to search, but Russia is the only part of the former USSR that still (openly) has nuclear weapons. All the other countries disarmed and I don't think any have tried to rearm. But as far as what fraction ended up in other states? Ukraine as a modern country had the worlds third largest nuclear arsenal at its formation. and re the DC-9 example: There are actually 250 still in service with three different model numbers (DC-9, MD-80, and 717). They share a common parts set and if if they're flying in North America or Europe changes in parts manufacture goes through the same process as it does for newer aircraft (expensive). And yeah, I agree that even if they're decaying you can't count on 100% failure. But from the Russian perspective it's potentially a big game of roulette. I think people talk about red lines NATO is afraid to cross a lot without thinking about the red lines Putin is afraid to cross. He's been very, very careful not to hit anything across NATO borders. And if he really wanted to do some saber rattling he'd do some actual nuclear tests out in the middle of nowhere, but he hasn't. That would be extremely escalatory.