chrisl

If you can afford to do that, it’s easier to just make them economically dependent and run things indirectly. Way easier, cheaper, and less unpleasant. It’s really the way of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.

That's where the asymmetry comes in. Right now and for the foreseeable future, it takes a good fraction of the world's military spending to be able to set up the precision ISR/targeting/kill chain. That's not likely to change because a) money, and b) energy. It takes enormous resources to put together the systems that make it possible, and it's not like there's a small, well defined set of stuff you can go buy to do it. Given how distributed microelectronic manufacturing is, I'm not even sure if the US could do it alone within any reasonable future. Countries will gradually figure out that wars of aggression are counterproductive and join the alliance, which might eventually be referred to as a "federation", gradually decreasing the number of wars on Earth to zero. And then there will be Rollerball.

You can't park satellites in LEO over a location, but you can fill the sky with huge numbers of them (Starlink is just the beginning), pissing off the astronomy community and providing continuous hi resolution ISR.

Already been prototyped. A cycling coach I used to ride with used to get approached by people with all sorts of training technology. One of them was a camera & goggle system where he could ride behind a rider with a camera and the rider would have what must have been very, very early VR goggles on and a radio in their ear. He'd give directions for adjusting their position and they could both see it from behind and feel the effect at the same time. I never heard of it getting to market, but he said it was really effective for getting riders to make changes that stuck.

They'll stop at the pre-2014 border. I can imagine them precision bombing military targets a hundred km or so inside of Russian borders, but going beyond the border puts them into the aggressor role and the Russians on the other side into the role of people defending their homes. It's *much* harder to pursue a war into another country than to defend your own - that's why Russia is struggling (and losing). Ukraine really has nothing to gain by aggression into Russia and a lot to lose. Post WWII history is full of powerful militaries that were capable of winning battles at will but incapable of actually taking over a country in a war of aggression. Those really don't work very well, even if they start out looking successful. I can imagine a negotiated peace agreement that demilitarizes something like 100 km into Russia - far enough that you can't use supply trucks to make more than one round trip in a day from one end to the other. Ukraine needs a buffer zone, but there's no reason it can't be on the RU side of the border. It's not like Russia will have a lot of stuff to equip bases with, anyway. Maybe let the Russians keep some MGs in bunkers and some RPG-7 crews within the DMZ to defend from Ukrainian invasion.

The big unknown seems to be how to take back a big area quickly with light infantry. The answer might be that you use precision indirect fires to make life so unpleasant that the occupier gives up and goes home.

That first link reminds me of a radio report I heard during GW2. Someone who knew that 1/8 casualties was during fuel movements realized also realized that a big fraction of the fuel was to power air conditioners for the tents, and that by improving the insulation on the tents they could reduce the need for fuel and also casualties in moving it. Here's an NYT article that also covers it.

No idea. I don't work on that side of things. But it's pretty simple to figure out what kind of accuracy in stellar knowledge works out to what dimensions on earth. At the time there were still aircraft that navigated using star trackers (and still may be). Detailed knowledge of stellar positions and motions can also help in precisely locating anything that can do stellar nav, and that in turn can be used to improve the precision of things that are using those things for nav.

Precision is a big part of the solution to the energy problem. The less stuff you need to accomplish the task at hand, the smaller the logistic tail and the less total energy you need, and the less energy you need to haul that energy around.

From the perspective of someone who develops technology (I do aerospace, but not splody things, though I've been around some directed energy stuff), what you're trying to do is increase the amount of energy you deposit on the target, and ideally only the target of interest. From 50,000 ft, there are two ways to do it - you can increase the energy density at the source or you can increase the energy density at the target. Most of the history of weapons and splody things is increasing the energy at the source, with modest work on the energy at the target. Bow and arrow to black powder to TNT to modern propellants propelling a pointy thing (kinetic energy only) or shell of black powder to TNT to tritonal, and increasing the amount of energy sent downrange by increasing rates of fire and masses of fire (lots of tubes, whether it's shoulder to shoulder lines of the Napoleonic era or bunches of 152 mm tubes today). There appears to have been a major shift in western development that is all about precision of depositing that energy downrange. There are a lot of reasons behind it, and it's been used and improved for decades, at least since GW1, but now we're seeing it in a peer conflict with Ukraine on the precision side and Russia on the mass side. Some time ago, I worked on a space thing to do high precision astrometry - measuring positions of the stars to an unbelievable precision. The US Navy was working on a similar mission at the same time, with a only a little lower precision - they and the USAF still do navigation by the stars (even if there might sometimes be a few layers of things in between). I worked out what the precision mapped to on the surface of the earth: a few cm. They didn't want to target a building, or even the door of a bunker like we saw on videos in GW1. They wanted to be able to hit the doorknob. If you can reliably hit a doorknob 1000 km away with a modest amount of high quality HE, you don't need to get 10x the energy density into the warhead. That precision brings a lot of advantages. It makes your logistics a lot easier if you don't need to bring tons and tons of HE shells up to within 20 km of the front every day. Way fewer trucks and truck drivers at risk, and less manufacturing committed to keeping that supply of trucks. And so on.. And it reduces your risk of having the current Russian problem of those tons and tons of HE falling victim to stray butts because big tobacco has infiltrated your country. And it reduces collatoral damage - you don't have to bomb Belgorod flat and get RU civilians all worked up, you can blow up the ammunition dumps and the oil storage facilities without any stray shells (aside from what flies out of the ammo dump) going into civilian areas. Increasing the energy of the splody part by making 10x more powerful HE runs you into the problem of having big ammo dumps full of stuff that you really don't want to be around when someone drops a butt in the wrong place. And to get that precision you need a lot of resources - it's not just making a missile with a 5 cm CEP. You need all the ISR to precisely find targets, the sensors for moving targets, the communication systems to convey that information to the control room or missile, etc. You still need some mass, or at least ROF+retargeting speed. Kind of like late in a game of Asteroids when there are a zillion asteroids coming at your one ship - if you can't fire and retarget fast enough, all the precision in the world won't help.

And Borg spotting is only going to get more extreme and more asymmetric. I was seeing job ads more than a decade ago to develop hardware/software for AR systems that were essentially Borg wearables. So not only do you get the space and drone based ISR that has been used so effectively, but it's just mixed into your goggles and follows your field of regard. Look at that hill over there and the display accurately shows the location of the guy behind it who was spotted by a drone or another team member 3 km away, enabling you to aim the precision guided grenade launcher into his coffee cup without you ever spotting him directly. And it's going to be a very, very asymmetric capability. It's going to be all about who's got precision sensors and bandwidth and how fast they can move. The problem everybody seems to be having in Ukraine is moving long distances quickly, but a few freight containers full of those robodogs from Alibaba might fix that if the people riding them are all kitted up with integrated sensors.

They should really pull back to Siberia if they want to avoid whatever it was that sent the fireballs up at the airport in Crimea.

It's hard to tell the order because there are always edits or enough choppiness that it could hide edits. The twitter link Steve posted on p 1164 has one video that shows the twin explosions and then a single later. There's a second clip that also shows the twin explosions. When the two go, there's already well dispersed smoke so there's no mushroom cloud from the previous one. But for the single fireball there's also already well dispersed smoke. So I'm starting to think it was 1...pause...2...pause....1. And we never see the first one because nobody pointed their cameras that way until the first one went off that we don't see. They were just recording the post-fireball smoke and got three bonus fireballs. It's not a particularly interesting direction to be taking video at the beach if there aren't fireballs going into the sky, so nobody recorded the first one. That would be consistent with the four similar sized craters.

There are definitely some interesting flights. There's a pair of King Airs that tend to cruise the Kaliningrad border together. One's a Guardrail series that looks like the aircraft version of Pinhead from Hellraiser, but the other one just comes up as a vanilla King Air. And they're always together.

FWIW, not all NATO military aircraft transmit ADS-B. Some may not be capable of it and most, if not all, can switch it off. In the past I've had two pairs of CA National Guard fighters circling my neighborhood waiting to do an event flyover and I'll only see one beacon, and it won't give anything but position. That's even with the pairs not flying close together, but separate circles. Most of the military flyovers transmit something, but not all. And that's in a completely peacetime southern california (I've had some interesting flyovers). From watching ADSBExchange.com, there seem to generally be too many air tankers flying around the UKR border relative to the number of things that there are to refuel. Occasionally I'll see something line up and they'll circle together, but usually you don't see who's getting topped off, just the tanker. Along the UKR border they're only going to have it on if they want to be seen, otherwise you need to be there with binoculars to know who's really there.

The did it under a contract Мило Миндербиндерович had from the UA. Everybody has a share.

So when this is over, Ukraine TV will do a remake of The Americans called The Russians. But it will be a documentary series.

You have to get really lucky on a bright day. The auto-exposure will set the exposure time to be short, and the frame rate on any normal camera is going to be low, so there will be a lot of dead time between frame captures. If want to get really high speed you need to use a line-scan camera like is used for finish line photos. Those aren't cheap, but not outrageous for a 1 kline/s camera. They're not in the price range of anybody's security camera. Array capture high frame rate cameras are very expensive and spew out too much data to store reasonably unless you really, really need it.

The Beirut fertilizer explosion is estimated to have an energy of ~0.6 kT with large error bars, so possibly as low as 0.3 and as high as 1.1, based on speed of the shock front. That was much more destructive than this looks like, and it took about 2.7 kT of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse to do that. The explosive energy is lower than the amount of stuff partly because ammonium nitrate is lower stored energy density than TNT and partly because it was very non-optimized for producing a big blast. Bombs designed to be bombs should produce about what you expect from the mass, +- something due to different energy densities. NUKEMAP is probably overestimating because of multiple warheads blowing up moderately far apart. But to get an 0.5 kT explosion you still have to have something on the order of 0.5 kT of something. Thermobarics can give you more explosive energy for the same warhead mass because they don't have to supply their own oxidizer, but not orders of magnitude higher.

I'm guessing multiple thermobaric (I want to say 4) warheads, but I won't guess how they got there. Probably some RU soldiers faffing around with holiday fireworks and they dropped one or somefink. The things that bothers me about the pictures are: a) there aren't any really *big* holes in the ground that would indicate one (or three) ginormous HE bombs. b) all those planes surrounded by berms are just cooked, and only a few of them have visible craters within the view angle of their front opening. And most of the berms look pristine, even after the bomb. Something came in from above and set them on fire without banging around. c) there's no reports of steady barrage - it just went up, maybe from two hits. d) big shock wave spread over a long distance says airburst, especially when there's not a ginormous hole in the ground. A bomb that hit the ground will get too much of its energy directed back up by the dirt and not have as distant horizontal damage from the shock wave. e) the big fiery shock wave would have had enough energy to set off all the other holiday fireworks laying around to make all the little craters. f) everything is burned. planes burned. building burned. only thing not burned are the cement decoys. I have some pink flamingos made of cement, and the aircraft that didn't burn are probably similar. If I squint I can kind of guess the epicenters under where the bombs went off (extra black and charred) I suppose you could get something similar if you have a half dozen UA SOF troops with big fans and cans of gasoline filling the area with vapor and firing in a flare.

With a geolocated video that shows the flash and the time of arrival of the shock at the videographer you can estimate the amount of explosive that went up.

And submarine support facilities.

Well, yes. But it's one of those RU marketing things. It sounds better to say you've got a fancy thing that will discharge the battery than to say you're arming troops with a bow and arrow for drone defense and hoping they can hit something.

Things engineers do when they're bored #247. But I can imagine that once a bunch of former Warsaw Pact countries started joining NATO, there would probably have been some support for adapting NATO weapons to Warsaw Pact a/c.

I've been wondering about that for RU artillery shells lately. It seems like all they can do anymore is flatten a space with arty and then creep in, move a little forward, and repeat. Someone has got to be tracking how much they're using daily, how much they're losing daily, and how much they can make to predict when they'll be incapable of even pretending to advance.