chrisl

That kind of thing can be a lot harder than it sounds, as we got to see over the past couple years. It's not just the assembly plant where they put the bang in the bombs, but all of the supply chain that leads to that. The metal suppliers that provide particular alloys, the chemical suppliers that produce the components of the explosives, their suppliers of precursor materials, etc. And you're trying to do it in a world that has spent decades tuning everything to be just-in-time, carefully forecasted so there's no slack in anybody's supply chain because it costs money to keep extra material around, or even worse, buy it and have it go to waste.

It's possible the piers underneath were hit with something, but yeah, it doesn't look like any kind of explosion damage from the top. And you'd kind of expect more asymmetry/twist to the buckling if something had hit the piers

And what's he going to get with that money? There are very limited sellers available, and their access (Iran) or willingness (China) to provide the stuff he really needs is limited. Russia can spend 1/3 its budget on war materiel, but do they have the factory capacity to do that? do they have the capability to increase the factory capacity on the necessary short time scale to do it? Or will the factory owners just pocket the extra rubles (worth less and less) beyond their current or at most slightly expanded capacity?

Launch a feint against Crimea that looks like a major offensive, wait until Russia has transported a lot of resources into Crimea to defend it, then use the newly demonstrated remote drone/missile capability to blow sections of all four "lanes" (2 rail, 2 road) of the Kerch bridge.

A really nice feature of this is that it’s passive detection and so it won’t be sensitive to anti-radiation missiles, especially if the cell transmitter is moved away from the acoustic sensors and connected via cable.

Probably just someone dropped a crate unloading a shipment of cigarettes from China.

So how's the air defense around Putin's dacha?

I realized earlier this year that probably half the really annoying problems I've had to deal with in 30 years in science and aerospace have been related to plastics. Cured epoxy resins (filled and unfilled) to be more accurate, but essentially plastics. They're an enormous PITA and much more processing and history dependent than metals. Their properties generally don't match book values/spec sheets that closely and you have to characterize them for your particular application and process, and usually control the process very carefully. They have time dependent properties that also depend on temperature. They can have multiple transitions in properties that depend on their history and what temp you're using them at. They're extremely non-linear, so doing analysis to predict their behavior can be a mess. They can be anisotropic, so their properties in one orientation are (sometimes very) different than their properties in another orientation. They can have hidden damage that causes sudden catastrophic failure where a metal would have showed signs for a long time and not killed you. It's really easy to screw up a design that uses plastic resins and have it be perfectly fine until it's suddenly a disaster. They can also be extremely strong and have amazing strength to weight ratio and durability if well engineered. I pretty much only ride carbon fiber bicycles anymore. I beat the hell out of them and the one frame failure I've had was an aluminum dropout getting bent (I've broken a couple steel frames). We use them all the time in aerospace, often exploiting their quirky properties. Modern jet aircraft are full of them, but are tested to extremes. I agree that I wouldn't count on the Shahed plastic problem getting resolved over the winter. All those ships in the med would have to fire any missiles over NATO countries, which is unlikely to end well for the missiles or the Russian Mediterranean fleet.

And even the USSR didn't have the self-contained industrial base. They depended heavily on Lend Lease equipment that came largely from the US. Including some ~400K trucks, 11K aircraft, millions of tons of food and enormous amounts of ordnance. They wouldn't have had the mobility to chase Germany back across the border without enormous numbers of 2 1/2 ton trucks supplied by the US. All that stuff from the current version of the arsenal of democracy is going to Ukraine side this time around.

They didn't say anything about the Ukrainian air observation networks - the NATO AWACS and other observation platforms that can track aircraft from untouchable airspace, and babushkanet. The speed of communication that Ukraine seems to have on the ground enhances the effectiveness of MANPADs - we've seen it in a few videos where the guys on the ground know that a plane is coming and have time to get ready with their MANPADs for when it comes into targeting range.

If they can hit the port in Sevastopol they can hit subs in port.

And sometimes everything in the world falls into place at once. This ad was just recently posted for an NYC rat Czar. It's a must-read Imagine someone creative enough to conscript the rats into minesweeping in Ukraine.

Spaceborne ISR is still very limited to a small set of countries. Partly because the technology that's needed is very export restricted by the countries that have it - Russia was in a better position than almost any other country to compete and was still limited to film-drop imaging into the late 2010's. China has quite a lot of assets in space, but it doesn't look like it even is at the performance of what's commercially available for rent yet. The benefit to them, despite the lower performance, is that they own it and it can't be shut off by another country that the commercial satellite operator might be based in. And there's probably not much that isn't at least roughly known to amateur satellite watchers, and well known to major space powers. It's very hard to hide satellites. You might hide one from amateurs satellite watchers for a little while, but the orbital debris people will notice it pretty quickly and then there will be a bunch of telescopes with adaptive optics looking at it to figure out what it does. If it's optical it's pretty easy to figure out its performance if you know its size and orbit, and if it's an active radar you can figure out its performance limits from what it's radiating. And that's from the ground. If you've got a bunch of your own stuff in space you can get a pretty good look, unperturbed by atmosphere.

The only purpose of heavy will be to transport energy for the light - it will be hosed in a fight, so it has to stay hidden, like a queen bee or ant. But rather than the workers bringing food, they'll come to it to refuel/recharge. It might be part of the long range transport for the light things, like an aircraft carrier for aircraft, but it won't be part of the fight. Heavy HE will come from long range, guided all the way in by the network of gnats (or rats with cameras). The heavy core probably won't be necessary for integration - most of the swarm will have enough compute on board to do networked coordination, like a flock of crows, with maybe a few swarm members having some extra compute on board to do some of the integration.

I know people who have attached cameras to the heads of rats. Pointed in at their brains. Putting cams on rats for ISR would be a lot easier.

Now imagine the UA guys have VR goggles that are spatially registered. They'd get overlays of the locations of the russians as they're sneaking up, even when completely out of LOS, so they can either accurately launch a few grenades out of the trench or wait presighted for them. Or the UA guys could just have left a UGV there and gone back to smoke cigarettes and watch om TV while the russians sneak up on it while it tosses grenades precisely in their midst. The UGV will be battery operated, so it won't have much thermal profile when it's not moving or shooting, and it will be dressed in local vegetation.

Didn't Peter Sellers star in the movie version of that in 1959?

I suppose the risk is that uncrewed equipment gets so effective that the game just gets tied to the ISR and the drones IRL and we never see it…

I don't think he's saying that one shouldn't have cost-effective anti-recon assets. It's more that he's pointing out that the NG solution in the video, while kind of cool, is just just a big (expensive) fat target for something coming from over the horizon, probably swarmed, and produced at a small fraction of the price of the gun platform. Armored vehicles in the future environment are going to be more like aircraft carriers are today - a big platform to get the smaller uncrewed things close enough that they can do their work, while keeping the base mobile, well protected, and difficult to detect. AFV-mounted autocannons may turn out to be part of the last line of defense, much like CIWS on ships, but they aren't likely to be effective primary anti-drone systems for very long, if ever.

From a CM perspective this is sort of ideal. It means that for modern titles they won't have to develop ways to simulate sufficient fog of war for the player because proper Borg spotting will be the norm for one side. The other side will simply see an empty field and watch all their stuff get blown up.

Erdogan, or maybe Xi since China isn't NATO, could do a Lawrence of Arabia.

He had another op ed in the NYT in July urging the US to work on negotiating a cease-fire then, presumably with something like the lines at the time. I saw the first one about the "weapons won't help" some time ago but well after Ukraine had shown itself to be quite effective and Russia not so much. None of his analysis seems to be based on much real insight into the actual situations he's writing about.

I can see Ukraine choosing to let the RA slip out the back rather than destroying Kherson. Post US election Russia isn't going to be getting much, if any relief from western aid to Ukraine, so they needed to bug out before winter. The UA could have plastered the shores at the ferry crossings to destroy retreating RA units, but that would have stopped the retreat and pinned them in the city. Then the choice would be for the UA to go in (bloody) or to drag out the siege into winter (brutal for civilians). All those Russians who slipped out can be HIMARSed later in open, or at least less dense areas, where a major city won't be destroyed in the process. Or not. How Ukraine did this is also a message to us in the west: "The UA is about retaking Ukraine, not vengeance, and if Russians leave quietly we can let them live." Now if Ukraine can finish off the Kerch bridge and get at least fire control over the land bridge, Russia might give up on Crimea.

It was part of the latest US aid package, sending underemployed crisis actors from Hollywood.

Since it’s not useful for anything heavy it’s only useful as a foot escape route for Russians. Ukraine seems to have enough control of the sky that they can conduct river crossings at will. Even more so after they move back into Kherson.