chrisl

What you wrote there is consistent with my experience living there for a year as a student in the late 80s and then going back to visit again in the late 2010s. A lot of social progress was made in that time, and Susan Neiman wrote a whole book about how the process went, including before and after the wall came down that's also consistent with your much, much shorter summary.

I'll add a little to what @dan/california said. The history of wars of aggression by "superpowers" in the post WW II era has not been all that favorable for the superpowers if the defenders were motivated and had outside supplies. So I'd say it's more that Russia lost when they rolled over the border. Ukraine really loses even if they win - they've had their country devastated by an unprovoked hostile war initiated by an army that doesn't seem to think committing war crimes is a problem. I thought it would take much longer than it has for Russia to get schooled - I hadn't been following closely since 2014 and believed the claims about the RU military (though from the pre-invasion satellite pics I had doubts about the number of men relative to equipment, which seem to have been borne out). Why is it not over? When a bunch of drunks roll into a country with ~150K troops (followed by another 200K or so) carrying guns and driving in armored things with big guns it's still an awfully dangerous thing to go about kicking them out. Just because they're strategically incompetent and tactically very limited doesn't mean they can't spew a bunch of HE out of tubes 15 km away and make your life miserable while you go about kicking them out. Or shoot bullets at you when you go to evict them up close. Or launch HE at you from over their border using planes outside the range of your air defense so you have to go about picking off individual missiles and drones out of the sky. Russia really doesn't have the resources to keep it up, and doesn't have the resources to improve on the technical side of their capabilities. Their position stagnated months ago and is in decline - they're not gaining anywhere and aren't likely too. Can they make some gains by throwing 500K untrained men into the line? Sure - as mentioned a thousand or so pages ago they can literally drown the Ukrainians in the blood of Russian soldiers for a while. But that's not something they can maintain, or that the soldiers are likely to continue to play along forever with as they clamber over piles of bodies of their comrades. What do they have to gain by dying for Putin? Ukraine is well supplied with arms from sources that are untouchable by the RA. And those suppliers have apparently been taking large groups of Ukrainians out of Ukraine to train them in environments that are also untouchable by the RA. So yes, Russia can keep things miserable in Ukraine for a while, but as already noted, it's having a serious impact on the future of Russia as a country.

Even in fairly well understood and controlled engineering of complicated aerospace systems it's difficult to do probabilistic risk assessments. The consequences are usually not hard to know, though they can be hard to quantify, but the probabilities of bad events occurring are just really not easy to come up with from first principles, nor are there generally good statistics of a relevant situation to point to. So we set requirements with a lot of margin and test beyond those margins, and most of the time it's reasonable for getting high reliability. Simulating probabilities from detailed models is "non-trivial" - collections of interacting things generally behave very different from the individual things, and it's taken ages for us to go from understanding atoms to understanding collections of identical atoms in various arrangements, and then collections of non-identical ones. Predicting the the mechanical outcome of a missile launch isn't hard - it's pretty easy to know where it's going to go. Predicting the higher level effect of that is much harder and depends on a lot of things we're not likely to ever be able to measure or quantify effectively. Predicting the "boom" effect of launching a lot of missiles or shells is pretty straightforward, and something at the CM scale can do it well (as CM usually does). Predicting the effect that that will have on any particular larger scale that involves morale and collective social decisions isn't likely to be quantifiable any time soon.

Some of the text in the first article gives the impression that the author has had a bad experience playing CM with tanks against armored clown cars.

If we’re making unrealistic lists of things that might actually make a difference, put me down for a dozen EA-18s and 100 F-35s with medium range air to ground and long range air to air missiles. Air supremacy would give extremely effective CB fire, destruction of RA supplies at unreasonably long distances from where they’re needed, and get rid of some RU aircraft before they can even launch toward Ukraine.

And selling equipment to both sides. Aside from quadcopters, right at the start of the Terra video they mentioned the Eco-Flow generator. Those are portable multi kWh battery packs that are also made in China. Presumably they're using them to charge the drone (made in China) batteries.

About 2 seconds in you can see an earlier attempt (another Igla?) just missing. I had to watch a few times trying to decide if it was a hit or the self-destruct of a miss, but the guys shooting the video probably could see both the missile and the Igla the whole time.

Did he get all the way to the end of the books/movies?

That carrier is always on the verge of burning or sinking. When they manage to get the engines running it generates a continuous smoke screen/signal and the rest of the time gets hauled around by a tug. It didn’t need any help catching fire.

The RA is likely also very limited in what they can buy commercially without going through some laundering. Commercial satellite companies are subject to export rules and Russian access to anything good may be low or nonexistent.

It apparently used to be a thing in the PNW to some extent, though wood stoves are probably much more common.. Our place in Portland had an oil tank that had to be removed before the seller could sell it, and also had two wood stoves (one EPA approved, one not, so the latter also had to go). The primary heating is now natural gas, but there's a nice wood stove in the living room that will warm about half the house. My best guess it that it was originally wood, then oil, then replaced with gas. When Texas was having the the big cold snap a few years ago that made the news, Portland had an ice storm that took out electricity, but it didn't even make the news as far as Hillsboro. Everybody just got out their chainsaws and cut up the trees that fell in their yards (free wood!) and fired up the wood stoves.

FWIW, cyclocross in icy conditions is a nightmare of a different sort. Decades ago, when I lived in a cold place, there was CX in the early winter and late winter. Early winter was mud and wet snow. Late winter was snow and ice. The fun part is that the ice develops ruts and if you're going down a hill you have to get into the correct rut out of a horrible mishmash of ruts, because once you were in, you were following it like a rail. Some ruts led to the continuation of the course, and others led to things like trees and picnic tables.

Just a matter of time until the gunner has two joysticks - one for selecting the drone's view (with the drone flying automatically to provide the view) and the other to target what the drone sees. If they're integrated and you have good local coordinate systems you can have tanks indirect firing AP over the horizon at other armored vehicles. The advantage over rockets is velocity of the round making it harder to intercept, along with size and ROF, so a tank can carry more AP shells than ATGMs and put more of them over the horizon in less time. Fancy versions might include having the drone paint over the horizon targets with a laser and rounds that look for the laser indicator.

The additional complicating factor of any Russian attempt at a major offensive is that unlike in Feb, Ukraine has no reason not to pre-emptively destroy any concentrations of Russian military force that it can detect and hit, no matter which side of the border it's on. And anything vaguely like a big offensive will require a lot of stuff that will be very easily detected. So any time Russia starts to accumulate anything like a useful mass of men and materiel, it's going to get hit before it can be used in an offensive.

You basically have to do a supply chain analysis regularly, all the way back to everything that goes into it, and keep enough stock on hand to use at the highest likely rate for long enough to ramp up the supply chain to produce at at least the same rate you're using it. Just doing the analysis is non-trivial, and you have to do it regularly because something you spec today may not exist in production two years from now, let alone ten. With anything electronic the obsolescence time can be less than a year, and the production ramp up can be a year or more. And then there are things where the part number and name stay the same, but there's substantial difference in formulation that can mess up processes that depend on it. And if there's no commercial market for something that goes into what you need, you have to either stockpile it or maintain an artificial market if you don't want to lose the capability.

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.