chrisl

We call them cope cages but if nothing else it still prevents a drone from flying over and dropping a grenade down an open hatch.

Umbrella of what? They have about enough material to make ONE uranium warhead nuclear weapon. They have a missile program, but really no way to mount and deliver a U weapon on a missile. They have NO capability at all of creating a Pu warhead weapon, which would be required for missile delivery. A Pu warhead is significantly smaller. Their one and only method of possibly getting Pu was the Arak reactor and that was permanently reconfigured under the terms of the JCPOA to not be a source of Pu for a weapon. They could process enough U for a weapon, do a test, then have to start processing more U for another weapon, which will take some time, although not a year as under the terms of the JCPOA. But even so, should they do so, I would expect an immediate and violent response by the US and UK at a minimum, to cripple their nuclear infrastructure. A lot is buried and it wouldn't all be destroyed but certainly would be significantly set back.
Highly, highly unlikely. Russia is a party to the JCPOA. They have no interest in having a nuclear armed Iran that close to them or their former -stans, which is a big reason they were a party to the agreement in the first place. The Bushehr power reactor in Iran is under IAEA safeguards and part of that is that Russia provides all the fuel, and they receive the spent fuel back. Iran has no capacity to reprocess fuel to extract Pu even if they held on to the spent fuel, and even if they did have that capability, Pu from spent fuel from a PWR is wholly unsuitable for nuclear weapons use. (That's why the DoD has special purpose reactors to do that). They would have needed the spent fuel from the Arak reactor and that is no longer in play. Even though the US withdrew from the JCPOA (a supremely stupid act, IMO), many of its requirements still exist. 
Dave

Also the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war and the eve of a historic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. 
The only similarities with the RU "offensive" are that it's the same week and Iran is providing weapons to both (but I doubt coordinating with either, let alone both).

Also the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war and the eve of a historic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. 
The only similarities with the RU "offensive" are that it's the same week and Iran is providing weapons to both (but I doubt coordinating with either, let alone both).

Not a link. I mean...if you were Hamas looking at reporting since 2/22 that makes it clear the US is literally reading over Putin's shoulder are you going to coordinate a highly secrecy dependent attack on Israel with Moscow? Categorically no.

I think he's saying that both countries are extremely unlikely to have shared their plans with anyone else (i.e each other) based on those traits.

when vehicle weighs many tons and is not going very fast, like typically less than 50km/hr, I am quite sure air resistance is the least of the fuel expenditures.  Especially for a tracked vehicle and especially driving over dirt.  I'd be shocked if it were even a measurable difference.  These are fuel guzzling behemoths and I think the only thing that would make a difference is increased mass, of which these cages don't seem to be much relative to the starting mass.

The issue is the next layer of deep strike that the Ukrainians have not been permitted to do. If the Kerch bridge was in the water, and the weakest links in the rail system in the parts of Russia immediately surrounding Ukraine were under relentless missile attack this thing would be in a completely different place. Jake Sullivan has decide he would rather the Ukrainians lose than that take that risk. Given his brilliant piece about the state of the Mideast last week, i think he needs to go.

so it seems something was attacked? A warship and a tug damaged? 
According to rybar it was possibly a fully submersible drone that was lurking outside the harbour waiting for ships to leave. That is a scary thought - a self deploying, fully guided naval minefield outside your harbour...
 
Edit: how do you even defend against that? If Russia does regular sweeps for mines they are vulnerable to drone attacks, if they only sweep just before they want to leave harbour they telegraph their intentions and are also vulnerable to drone attacks. If they don't sweep they get hit by mines...
Edit 2: and if the mines (submersible drones) can move then they can just move away from the minesweepers and then reposition later. Russia would need to run a full anti-submarine warfare operation against a few $50k drones that can just be easily replaced. All those ships and helicopters tied up chasing ghosts while more drone ships or Neptune missiles are waiting to strike...
Edit 3: and think of the costs of anti-submarine warfare. Aviation fuel, sonar buoys, wear and tear etc. To try and find a $50-100k drone that might not even be there. 

Yes, and no. Ukraine was basically #3 in the world for software engineering before this conflict, after US and China. A lot of that talent has been channeled into armaments, ISR, drones etc., and Ukraine will have the world’s best dataset on small drone usage. There is a significant amount of money in this as the US gear up for the war with China. We are fortunate that god loves us so much that he gives us a practice war for warmup where we get to test out all the small drone stuff we suck at and that our enemies are good better at than us.

It's not unheard of for Israel to attack Iranian weapons plants, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did so in response to this attack.  So there's some chance that it could reduce availability of Iranian weapons and ammunition for Russia.  Even without a direct attack, transportation could get harder.  So I don't really see any upside for Russia, and some real potential down side.  Particularly since Israel's support to Ukraine has been relatively modest so far.  

Huh? Ill-conceived? Correct me if I'm wrong but for me this looks fairly good for Hamas...
1. In the newspapers I read today, Israel has almost completely replaced Ukraine.
2. Hamas has shown that Israel, with one of the most modern militaries is still vulnerable. To dudes on motorbikes, no less.
3. Israel is going to retaliate massively. Netanjahu has to. That means a lot of destroyed livelihoods. -> Next generation of Hamas fighters.
4. This is likely to strengthen Netanjahu in some way (doesn't have to, but it is rarely the levelheaded people who are called for in such a situation). He is already not everyone's darling in the West.
5. With the situation in Ukraine, Taiwan on the horizon and nasty pictures from Gaza soon to arrive on our screens, the West is likely to put pressure on Israel because it can't afford the distraction. Escalation or compromising will both hurt Israel's government.
Hamas can't win in a direct military confrontation (for long). But they don't have to. Terror organization or guerilla (which is a matter of perspective more often then not), they just need to survive and give a good show for their audience every now and then.
 

Specialists in military aviation will invariably say that cutting rails via bombardment is wasteful. They are repaired too quickly and too cheaply to bother. And if you are so accurate that you can destroy a rail in front of a train, then you probably can hit a locomotive directly.
The only static railway targets worth taking down are apparently bridges.

It's not unheard of for Israel to attack Iranian weapons plants, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did so in response to this attack.  So there's some chance that it could reduce availability of Iranian weapons and ammunition for Russia.  Even without a direct attack, transportation could get harder.  So I don't really see any upside for Russia, and some real potential down side.  Particularly since Israel's support to Ukraine has been relatively modest so far.  

It's not unheard of for Israel to attack Iranian weapons plants, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did so in response to this attack.  So there's some chance that it could reduce availability of Iranian weapons and ammunition for Russia.  Even without a direct attack, transportation could get harder.  So I don't really see any upside for Russia, and some real potential down side.  Particularly since Israel's support to Ukraine has been relatively modest so far.  

It's not unheard of for Israel to attack Iranian weapons plants, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did so in response to this attack.  So there's some chance that it could reduce availability of Iranian weapons and ammunition for Russia.  Even without a direct attack, transportation could get harder.  So I don't really see any upside for Russia, and some real potential down side.  Particularly since Israel's support to Ukraine has been relatively modest so far.  

If that were true then why is my country spending an order of magnitude more on support than it ever saw in trade?
https://www.international.gc.ca/country-pays/ukraine/relations.aspx?lang=eng#
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/campaigns/canadian-military-support-to-ukraine.html#
By your paradigm there is no stark national interest for Canada to spend billions in supporting your country.  Sure Russia is doing dirty but it is a country that we historically do much more trade with than Ukraine: https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/exports/canada
https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/exports/canada
We live under the security umbrella of the US and are 9 timezones away.  Beyond diaspora - and last we recognized that relationship it did not work out so well (https://www.reuters.com/world/canada-house-speaker-apologizes-recognition-veteran-who-fought-nazis-2023-09-24/)…why in the hell should we spend that much taxpayers money on Ukraine?  A non-NATO, non-EU, non-5EYES, non-G7 nation that is at war with another nation we historically did about 3-4 times more trade with?
No, I reject your premise as it does not match the facts.  Do nations work toward interest?  Absolutely.  However, those interest are expressed as far more than money and fear - and they should be.  We are in this because we tried to build a world where nations were not permitted to do what Russia is doing right now.  Where unilateral invasions are in fact against the law.  We built that world to get and stay well,  we also built it because we actually care enough about humanity that we would prefer we don’t destroy ourselves through narrow minded greed.  There is no hard geopolitical or economic reasons for Canada to be spending this amount of money on supporting your nation in this war.  There are some incredibly powerful morale and ethical ones, and as bafflingly ignorant as a we can be at times, those things still matter.
We got rid of AP landmines because they did more harm than good.  Not some weird “hey everyone let’s disarm Ukraine so Russian can maul them later - tee hee”.  Same definitely goes for nukes - sorry but Eastern Europe was a hot mess after the USSR fell and no junior partner still trying to figure which way was up was going to be keeping hands on strategic weapons.  Frankly Ukraine was not that important to anyone’s calculus in the 90s and 00s to put that together - you may recall we kinda had our hands full.  
So I think we are done here.  You want to be a bitter old man dreaming reasons why “everyone screwed you” and why “we all owe you”, I can’t stop you.  But the reality is that our sin in the west was we simply did not care.  We were focused on other things while Russia kept sticking its toes over the line while getting people hooked on cheap energy.  There was no conspiracy, there was neglect.  But Ukraine was and is an independent nation that needs to own it mistakes as well - and there were many.  In the end all that added up to an embolden Russia that leaned in to far too fast…and here we are.
We support Ukraine because we all owe it to each other to ensure that we do not fall back into dictators doing whatever they want to grab power.  We fought two of the largest wars in human history in the last century when we allowed that to happen.  It is bigger than money and geopolitics.  It is bigger than whatever grudges, bias or prejudice you bring onto this.  This is about global order and the right thing to do.

Like most of your other theories, come up with one shred of supporting evidence.  Of course there was diplomacy but no one coerced Ukraine into giving up land mines.  The fact that Ukraine still has cluster munitions is proof that coercion was not the primary method of trying to get people to sign on to any of these treaties.  Prove it.
Again the West can’t win.  We somehow blindly trusted Russia and then violated agreements not to contain them through NATO expansion. We forced Russia’s hand and let them do dirty through inaction- at the same time.  Here is the truth and you can go back to the Budapest Memo debate we had on this…Ukraine agreed to all of the arms reductions the each step on the way.  Ukraine was paid millions for those reductions and signed off on every one.  Ukraine signed off on guarantees - weak as they were - as well.  So now that things have obviously gone sideways, you want to forget all that and put all the blame on the US/West for this mess?  You want to forget gross political corruption in defence - that is still happening according to some - that very likely would have seen all those MANPADs sold off to a highest bidder, many in those VEOs we faced for 20 years?  Are we to honestly believe that you are saying with a straight face that Ukraine would have held onto all that weaponry for a rainy day 20-30 years later?
The West’s failure was in not acting decisively and with unity back in 2014.  We definitely did not step up and push back hard enough.  That is a fair point.  Further we definitely could have moved faster in late 21.  The rest of your narrative is unsubstantiated, and frankly self-serving.  The West does not owe Ukraine a damned thing based on its failures.  
It owes you support because it is the right thing to do.  Ukraine is an independent nation that was minding its own business when Russia decided to invade and murder.  That is why we support Ukraine.  Not some bizarre construct of culpability pulling half the facts from the 1990s.

I’m not going to get too involved in the US political discussion but I will say it’s hard for me not to laugh every time I hear American people refer to “the far left” of the American political establishment.  I’m sorry but by the standards I’m familiar with American politics really doesn’t have a left wing to speak of.  From an external point of view American politics starts about as far to the right as exists in any western country and finishes with “the squad” somewhere around what would be considered the centre or maybe centre-left anywhere in Europe.
Are attempts to appeal to the US “centre” maybe failing because the political “centre” has in fact drifted so far to the right?

A friend and I have substantial experience in this area and I figured it might be worth a stab (many years ago we had an unsuccessful embedded hardware startup), as there is a relatively small band of frequencies used by the majority of small drones. You need to cover 700-1300mhz and the two WiFi ranges and you are solid (so an RTL-SDR and then a wifi chip), and I’m pretty sure it’d be easy to classify drones roughly by frequency and by the signals sent over the wire (at least for WiFi enthusiasts like us). This is an EE grad student semester project in terms of complexity level for a prototype. Productionizing it would cost $50-200k.
As I posited many pages ago, I think there’s a realistic, near-term path to build an anti-radition drone to go after drone operators or drones in the air themselves. You take the above signal detector + some basic computer vision setup running on something like a rasberry pi, and have it go after a certain signal. Tracking the drone is easier because of the omni antenna and larger signal (sending video) and the fact it is moving so triangulation is easier even with one antenna.
Edit: Think of this as counter-battery, but for drones.

Ukraine hitting the nail on the head again:
 

It's the kind of thing that we'd never hear about being there, at least not for another decade or so, but could be used for city defense where there would be low risk of capture.  Make sure there are a lot of small arms in the neighborhood that can take credit for shooting down all the drones and missiles.

Light and radio are the same phenomenon, just different frequencies (or wavelengths, or even worse, wavenumbers if you're a spectroscopist).  One of the best optical system designers I know got his start as a radio astronomer and I met him because he was hired to do the fancy things radio people do (with wavelengths of meters) in the optical (wavelengths of half a micrometer).  RF is just a bunch photons of a lot lower energy than optical photons. And we can build incredibly sensitive sensors for both, with very different implementations (thanks quantum mechanics!)
Most of the discussion so far has been pretty accurate on the practical differences, which are many.  A "mirror" in the RF can be an umbrella lined with hardware cloth that looks like trash in the optical.  Lasers still have optics, but you can make the beam very narrow with very small sidebands so it's hard to detect, at least over battlefield ranges.  There's still beam spread that depends on your wavelength and optical system - most of the lasers I use are attached to optical fibers so that they emit light in a wide cone at low enough intensity that they're eye safe.

Even that lost productivity has been quantified by the actuaries.  I don't keep close track, but it's in the few $M range - that's what an insurer will pay out to compensate a family for the loss of a person.  Last I knew (quite a while ago) it was about $3M.  Call it $5M today, and that's the lifetime earning value + loss of companionship.  Figure that the economic value to the economy is maybe 3x that because their employer is on the exploitive side, and it's about the cost of one MBT.
Coming from the POV of someone who develops technology that is MilTech adjacent, it's not necessarily the direct fire high velocity gun on a moving platform that's dead (although I think its role is going to change), it's the huge pile of junk that you have to pile onto that platform to protect it that's dead.  We're at a point that modern infantry-carried AT weapons have a range to the horizon (or at least to the next treeline for NLAW) and the warheads can penetrate *any* amount of armor that you can reasonably slap on, including ERA and maybe APS.  If your APS is firing, you probably need to hope you have a fast enough reverse gear, because the cheap AT weapons are going to come in fast enough to overload it.  
So that pile of armor/era/electronics/CIWS that you're hauling around is mostly just sucking up resources (fuel, maintenance) and not helping you offensively because things are at a point where "If you're seen, one shot will kill you".  If you want a high velocity gun on a mobile platform, the system to protect it probably needs to revolve more around keeping it invisible and in motion more than protecting it from things that go boom.  Maybe light armor for protection from small arms/shrapnel, but anything more is just reducing mobility.  Which is the AMX-10, or the CAESAR for indirect fire.  Remove the need to put people in it and you have Steve's UGV mini-tank.  Way smaller logistics tail, way less energy consumption, and you can make it electric or PHEV so that its idle power consumption (and waste heat signature) is close to nothing.
Back to the high velocity direct fire guns.  We're already seeing how direct fire isn't that great against guys in holes - the flat trajectory limits you to hitting the edge of the hole, which is a tough target and doesn't distribute the boom very well.  So indirect fire or drones are better there.  Trench clearing really seems like it should be done by LandShark Mk I or CandyGram drones that can fly in and go around the corners or blow the doors to the dugouts.  Those can be cheap and autonomous and even launched from close outside the trench.  Like hand delivered DPICM with some minimal brains.  And why send a guy when you can send a grenade with wings?  But  if you need to hit a vehicle near the front lines, direct HV is effective and harder to defend against than a slow rocket.  But in an environment where the average infantryman can hit a vehicle out to his LOS (even at the horizon) you don't want to expose that gun.  "Direct fire" will start to include flat trajectory indirect fire slightly over the horizon, like a tank version of the Apache longbow.  And to avoid radiating a "send your precision guided arty here" signal with the radar system, it will be directed by targeting systems (drones or radars) that are physically separated and may have at most a minimal two-way connection to keep the radiated signals down.