chrisl

The US really has to respond to a nuclear attack. Post-Soviet Ukraine was born with the world's third largest nuclear arsenal. They didn't have control over the launch/arming systems, but could have in a year or so. Instead they voluntarily gave up the entire arsenal in return for assurances of security. Failure to support Ukraine as much as possible (even now with conventional weapons) would basically toss out 50 years of work on non-proliferation. Not only would no state willingly disarm, but it will ensure a bunch of small (and less stable) states develop nuclear programs or work to buy nuclear weapons from other countries. Letting even a tactical nuke go unanswered would make all that happen even faster, putting everyone on Earth at much higher risk overnight. The current situation is already putting non-proliferation at risk - if Ukraine had kept and taken firing control of the nuclear weapons they inherited, none of this would be happening now.

I think the difference here is that people actually want to know when they're wrong so they can make better assessments in the future. It's not about the "narrative", it's about understanding what's happening, going to happen, and how either side can/will achieve a particular outcome. Ukraine is arguably better equipped and trained now than they were on Feb 24. They've been getting a steady supply of materiel from protected areas. First it was old Warsaw Pact stuff compatible with what they started with, and it underwent a transition to NATO stuff where the WP stuff is is running out and it's been possible to do the cross training. Russia burned all their best forces and equipment in the initial tank rush and have been struggling to recover ever since. Finally reverting to just walking artillery slowly over the ground and trying to bring in troops behind it. And back to the technical capabilities of the two forces - it started out as an interesting controlled experiment with essentially the same Soviet equipment and training on both sides, with one side augmented by a steady moderate level supply of NATO training for ~7 years, an assortment of fancy modern (and very effective) ATGMs, and the best air and spaceborne ISR money can buy. We've seen the results, and it tilts heavily toward Ukraine in the long run as long as the west keeps up the spending and ISR. As far as USSR/Russia spending all kinds of money to maintain parity, they blew a few major chances that left them decades behind in technology and have now set themselves up to not ever be able to catch up without a drastic change in how the country operates. Steve or Grigb or someone who studies history can probably tell you why, but I can point out the gaps and when they happened. In the late 60s/early 70s, VLSI started ramping up in the west and at the time the USSR likely could have done the same - they had no shortage of very intelligent people and the country was rich in natural resources. For whatever reasons, they never really had the electronics revolution that you see in the US/Western Europe/Asia. As noted earlier - they were still launching film capsules that take a month to return in 2015 (even the early US dropped capsules got caught in-flight by planes, James Bond style), while the US had digital cameras in space on 2.4 m telescopes with real-time return in 1976. In 2010, the NRO was giving away telescopes that size to other agencies, presumably because they're mostly obsolete. The USSR did have good optical capability, but mostly through the East German client state and not as part of the union. When the USSR collapsed, it left Russia with some excellent capability on access to space and a lot of really smart people. Had Russia made a strong effort towards joining the west and ramped up knowledge-based industries they might have had a chance. They didn't do it hard enough for long enough, and enormous numbers of their scientists and engineers went to the west. I've worked (and still work) with many, many scientists and engineers who were educated in and often started their careers in the USSR who are now very American (and still very smart). And with the latest mess they're facing another brain drain. So Russia really no longer stands a chance of ever catching up in the technology world. For evidence of this on the ground: how many of Russia's tanks/planes/helicopters have GPS receivers in them? How many of those are western made consumer devices (almost all). Why aren't they using GLONASS receivers (LOL)? Where do the cameras in their Orlan drones come from (Japanese consumer cameras)? Why aren't we seeing effective APS on RU tanks (they don't actually have them)? Why does Ukraine still have an Air Force (RU can generate radar signals but have 1970s processing of the return signal)? How did Ukraine hit a ship at sea that has a sophisticated AD radar/missile system (it's not sophisticated enough to deal with even a few simultaneous targets effectively)? What about RU PGMs (see the note about GPS - RU PGMs mostly navigate by dead reckoning, and even if they have GPS it's probably being degraded over Ukraine by the US)? Basically, they don't have the tech and won't in your lifetime. Some of the historians can explain why. I can only give really simplistic answers (an 8008 chip looks kind of lame in a parade full of tanks?). The USSR and Russia had the opportunities and blew them in favor of maintaining an extraction-based economy rather than a value-added based economy.

What Ukraine is doing to key bridges is some horror movie level messaging to Russia. "Watch, while we draw dotted lines on all the bridges you need for your supplies or your retreat" It's actually a kindness, because they'd probably let Russia retreat if they wanted to. Watch out for when they start actually spelling things out with 155 mm craters.

The best info I've been able to find is that Russia launched their last film-drop satellite in 2015. They currently have only two electro-optical satellites in orbit, both past their design lifetime, and which may or may not still be functioning. They're literally 40 years behind - the US launched its first electro-optical satellite in 1976. They also have no history of launching synthetic aperture radars, which would let them see through clouds. When you see how few ISR assets they have in space, it's much more obvious why they did the anti-satellite "test" last fall that made a big mess of debris: they may have had nothing at all at risk if their two optical satellites aren't very effective. And given that they don't seem to be able to make optical array sensors for their own UAVs, they probably aren't making them for their satellites and may have very marginal sensors on them. The Russian space industry is good at making big things out of lots of metal and with lots of propellant - the Soyuz is one of the most reliable launch vehicles in history - but they've got nothing when it comes to electronics fab, and that's what enables the mass ISR capability.

Hangs up Safari on laptop and phone, but loaded with Mozilla. I'm not sure what page element was the problem, but Mozilla was blocking most of the embedded links.

The article notes that they're installing GPS guidance systems in them. There's no way the ground-based radar system can provide guidance to ground targets - it needs LOS. And even if they had radar and command systems in the air, a radar designed for aircraft with just sky in the background isn't going to be useful against ground targets. So the Russians put some kind of GPS guidance system in them, but given their home grown electronics capability and their limited ability to get western GPS units, they're probably using some really bad GPS systems.

What about burrito coverins?

GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo all use one band in common, but Galileo and newer GPS satellites also use additional bands that are 350-400 MHz away. I think any modern consumer “GPS” device you buy in the west will use all three. Depending on how broadband the jamming is, it could affect just older GPS and all GLONASS, or could affect them all.

The smaller switchblades might be useful against the ammo trucks if they had better range - unfortunately limited to 10 km. The larger switchblades (up to 50 km) would do it, but it's not clear how many, if any, have actually made it to Ukraine. Bayraktars would also do it - UA seems to still be getting new deliveries but there are a lot fewer video releases lately.

Not just luring the artillery, but becoming a sink into which the RA can just keep throwing resources because it's easy to get them there by rail. So Russia is like a drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because the light is better there, and UA keeps coming over and making jangly noises, but is going to to find the keys over in the dark where they got dropped and go steal RA's car (or keep destroying BTGs). It's easy for the RA to keep feeding the attack there, so they do regardless of the futility and it just saps their resources faster.

Yes - higher speed threats like gun rounds and ATGMs you'd deal with differently than drones and tanks that haven't fired yet. The threats all have different characteristics. But if you can get a detailed battlefield picture at the right ranges, basically at least to the 5 km of longer range ATGMs, you can mitigate a lot of those threats before the high speed rounds are even coming in. The thing I'd want to avoid is having a central "castle" target that's providing the anti-drone capability, because once it's gone you're back to square one. But at the speeds drones move you can do things like track and correlate radio and thermal signatures from different sensors to triangulate and track them. Similar to MLAT mode of ADS-B, where the difference is that for MLAT the target is going out of its way to make its signal clear and tracking a hostile UAV would require some correlation of signals across devices, particularly if it can go autonomous (and silent) once it's near a target.

That just has "Target" painted all over it, and for a technically advanced opponent, the lasers and radar are a screaming beacon saying "Yo, here I am!!!". The sensor system needs to be more distributed, which is at least plausible now with the speed and size of modern computing. Basically everything on the field needs to be feeding data to a system that integrates it all to create Borg spotting. Because it is, but without quite doing the implants. Counter UAV will be provided by a distributed system that has multiple sensor types and multiple response systems, so there won't be a single "anti-UAV vehicle" that can be taken out to make the rest easy targets. Counter drone would be "managed" from behind the lines using data gathered from everybody. Counter UAV fire can be a mix of lasers, projectiles, RF interference, and mechanical (e.g. net dragged into the props), depending on the UAV and who's around. Lasers are nice, but the kind of high energy lasers needed to take out UAVs at long range probably aren't going to be small for a while, will probably be fairly fragile, and are potentially big beacons. Every soldier and vehicle should eventually have at least one drone that's coupled to their VR goggles. The VR goggles will mix a straight through view of the world with the Borg spotting above, combined with eye tracking, so that when the soldier looks somewhere they get a fusion of direct view, a personal drone view, and the overlay from the fusion system telling them what's behind any obstacle in the direct view. And they'll be able to target things that are out of direct LOS because the integrated system will be like Longbow on steroids - they'll target the tank before it ever knows they're there. At least if the counter UAV systems worked. More like Nicolas II...

I think I saw it in a twitter thread and the best explanation seemed to be that it was intentionally parked there as a fixed gun emplacement, but I like yours better.

I saw that article last night and thought it was weird that the reporters couldn't figure out that given the ISR imbalance and politics, nobody in the US admin can really talk about how much they might know even if they do have a lot of current detail.

So Type III fun then.

It's clear it was an internal detonation. I just don't know enough about how artillery get damaged to know if it had to be just poor maintenance (cement rats nesting in the barrel?) or could result from external damage like CB that could then cause that kind of internal explosion on a later round.

So that happened just from firing it and not because it was damaged at some point by CB fire? That can't have been fun to be around and must do wonders for their confidence in the equipment they're being given out of mothballs.

I saw a tweet a few days ago that claimed the UA now had more NATO caliber artillery shells than remaining Warsaw Pact caliber shells. If the west hadn't stepped in and started pouring in equipment and ammunition it's plausible that RU was going to win at least a short term military victory around now just by running Ukraine out of ammunition, even at enormous human and materiel cost. They'd still eventually lose because they'd be stuck with an insurgency that would never end, at much greater cost than their Afghanistan adventure, but they'd be in a position to at least temporarily claim conquest of Ukraine. The early success of the UA and the speed of western supply sort of flipped that on Russia - even with "full mobilization" at this point they'd be throwing progressively worse trained and equipped men into an effectively infinite supply of increasingly more effective weapons.

There were indications in the nav data that something was wrong but the reasons for it weren't chased down before the last opportunity to correct for it - it was the result of multiple failures and there were multiple opportunities to catch it. Ultimately a management and system engineering failure. And sadly, most of US aerospace uses imperial units to this day. NASA uses all metric and requires all work to be in metric by contract. As a result you sometimes see some interesting dimensions on drawings where some COTS part is obviously made in imperial and then just converted for the drawing. It's a lot like bicycle parts that are a weird mix of English, French, and Italian sizes and threads, but all expressed in metric units, except when they're not.

That had to be at around the limit of its range. That display is really impressive, too. I've done outdoor work with laptops and even on very cloudy days in fog it's easy for the background daylight to overwhelm the screen display. I have to bring a big piece of black fabric to put over my head and the display to be able to get a good view.

Indeed that's correct! There's a graphic on wikipedia showing the righthand rail position for a bunch of different gauges, all with the same lefthand. There's overlap at the bottom and only a small gap at the top. So for dual gauge tracks it looks like they just use longer ties and four rails, which adds another whole layer of complication to dual-gauging existing tracks.

And is there any legal reason that NATO couldn't enforce a safe transit shipping lane/zone from the air? It would largely be over international waters or NATO coastline, with just a very short zone in Ukrainian waters that could be easily protected by shore batteries. It may or may not be politically viable, but giving notice that vessels attacking non-belligerent commercial ships in will be immediately sunk is probably legally defensible under maritime law.

Near transition areas, probably, but there's more than just the rail gauge. If the standard dimensions of the rolling stock are different then you might run the risk of collisions with other trains or even parts of tunnels, especially in turns, or load bearing problems on bridges. Not to mention needing to get ahold of and lay that much extra steel rail at a time when transportation systems have been completely messed up for a couple years.

They can't outrun an ATGM by reversing and going back - if one's in the air already they have less than 20 seconds to get out of the IFV. The rocket will stay targeted on the vehicle if it moves, but it isn't going to follow them once they're out, and it at least gives them an opportunity to try to get captured rather than incinerated.

A few decades ago I got to do sort of a controlled experiment to test that. I was responsible for overseeing four teams of the top scientists in a particular flavor of space research and engineers from four big aerospace companies. 30 to 40 people per team. They were all given the same amount of money and about two years to come up with all the possible ways to do a particular thing in space (totally unclassified, but not really relevant here), and essentially no constraints, and they were all kept firewalled from each other except for one review in the middle to present all their ideas and one review at the end of detailed studies of the top few. I got to see them all throughout. More than 95% of what each team came up with was duplicated by all the other teams, and there were really only one or two unique-ish ideas on each team. They all narrowed it down to the same two basic distinct concepts, and we ended up with two groups each detailing versions of those. Because as you say, physics is the same for everybody, so if you ask a bunch of different experts how to to do the same thing, or what's possible given certain information, everybody is going to come up with similar answers. The situation in Ukraine is more complicated than physics, but there are also a bunch of people with relevant backgrounds trying to figure it out, and it helps that CM is heavily oriented towards being a quantitative model that gets a lot of testing against historical data.