IMHO

Fascinating! So it's somehow similar French paras of the 1st Indochina war - quickly deployable, but stuck forever once deployed. Certainly they didn't have helos but I still believe they can be compared. I was kind of surprised somewhere deep inside that pics and vids of light infantry maneuvers remarkably lack Humvees. Helos - yes, but not Humvees. But I somehow assumed it was just due to (rather poor) choice of cameramen.

@IICptMillerII, certainly your description is better! I was just trying to oversimplify the Objective Force in half a line Please correct me if I'm wrong: certainly Stryker provides capabilities that didn't exist before but they provide these capabilities to the forces that heavily relied on HMMWV before. This wording is accurate?

If you recall the original idea was that Stryker would replace HMMVW. Namely would provide tactical and operational mobility without compromising the deployment time. It's just because Stryker turned out to be such a success it comes across now as "bad Bradley". But in reality it's a just a "better Humvee".

Sure. Int'l road sign for stop is in English. And it's used in Russia as well.

A rule of thumb is below 10 tons of Gross Vehicle Weight wheeled vehicles have acceptable off-road mobility and wins big in O&S costs and reliability. You should not forget that caterpillar system weighs many times more than wheeled one and it requires more powerful - hence heavier - engine and transmission. And the latter will be bigger in volume as well so it will require additional weight in armour if we are talking about armoured vehicles.

Give me Abrams' 65 tons... PS By the way these are pics from standard Russian tank training facilities.

And now Russian official Mad Max vehicle

Underground autobahns of Eastern Ghouta

I don't know if these particular guys belong to Spetsnaz. I took the pic from just a collection of a section of fun on a Russian military forum. A decade ago this type of camo was exclusively issued to SOF of MoD but now one can literally buy this type of camo in a Voentorg (military surplus shop). Colloquial name - yes. Formal is SpN - Spetsialnogo Naznacheniya, "spetsnaz" has become way too abused. But SpN does not necessary mean tough guys - some obscure chemical or electronics guys may be SpN as well.

Clone Wars

A fancy drone fighting toy by the name Repellent is on the right. And a strategic (sic!) EW system

There are rumours the development program for the new long range strategic bomber is effectively closed (pushed till after 2030). Production of the overhauled Tu-22M will be restarted instead. May be we will finally stop trying to build a near-peer to the US military at not so near-peer 10% of their budget.

"I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!" (c)

We don't know what system revision they used. May be PAC-2 may be PAC-3. DoS approved PAC-3 sale in Jul, 2015. Do you know if they are up and running? I assume three years is enough for some to make it to KSA, is it not?

To add to @Saint_Fuller's: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/21/world/patriot-missile-s-success-a-myth-israeli-aides-say.html "Moshe Arens, who was Israel's Defense Minister in the gulf war; Gen. Dan Shomron, who was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force during the war, and Haim Asa, a member of an Israeli technical team that worked with the Patriot missile during the war, say that one or possibly none of the Scuds was intercepted by the Patriots" "Mr. Arens, asked how many Scuds were intercepted by Patriots, said that "the number is minuscule and is in fact meaningless." All concurred with a 1991 report by the Israeli Air Force concluding that "there is no evidence of even a single successful intercept" although there is "circumstantial evidence for one possible intercept." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/04/world/middleeast/saudi-missile-defense.html (an extended and much more interesting version of what's published in Foreign Policy) Some U.S. officials cast doubt on whether the Saudis hit any part of the incoming missile, saying there was no evidence that it had. During the first Gulf War, the United States claimed a near-perfect record in shooting down Iraqi variants of the Scud. Subsequent analyses found that nearly all the interceptions had failed.

Never seen it done live...

Have you READ the article? Because it's not based on pics but on estimated trajectories of warheads and debris. As I said I was wrong to include the picture from another source. Do you have good analyses from others? It would be interesting to read.

Ahaha... My blue heart goes to you Certainly that's https://foreignpolicy.com/author/jeffrey-lewis/ I just copied the text for reader's convenience

Pic and the text are from different sources. I was more interested in the text so mixing them together may have been a mistake. It's Foreign Policy text, together with Congressional hearings results, NY Times investigation etc.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/28/patriot-missiles-are-made-in-america-and-fail-everywhere/ On March 25, Houthi forces in Yemen fired seven missiles at Riyadh. Saudi Arabia confirmed the launches and asserted that it successfully intercepted all seven. This wasn’t true. It’s not just that falling debris in Riyadh killed at least one person and sent two more to the hospital. There’s no evidence that Saudi Arabia intercepted any missiles at all. And that raises uncomfortable questions not just about the Saudis, but about the United States, which seems to have sold them — and its own public — a lemon of a missile defense system. Social media images do appear to show that Saudi Patriot batteries firing interceptors. But what these videos show are not successes. One interceptor explodes catastrophically just after launch, while another makes a U-turn in midair and then comes screaming back at Riyadh, where it explodes on the ground. It is possible, of course, that one of the other interceptors did the job, but I’m doubtful. That is because my colleagues at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and I closely examined two different missile attacks on Saudi Arabia from November and December 2017. In both cases, we found that it is very unlikely the missiles were shot down, despite officials’ statements to the contrary. Our approach was simple: We mapped where the debris, including the missile airframe and warhead, fell and where the interceptors were located. In both cases, a clear pattern emerged. The missile itself falls in Riyadh, while the warhead separates and flies over the defense and lands near its target. One warhead fell within a few hundred meters of Terminal 5 at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. The second warhead, fired a few weeks later, nearly demolished a Honda dealership. In both cases, it was clear to us that, despite official Saudi claims, neither missile was shot down. I am not even sure that Saudi Arabia even tried to intercept the first missile in November. The point is there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia has intercepted any Houthi missiles during the Yemen conflict. And that raises a disquieting thought: Is there any reason to think the Patriot system even works? In fairness, the system deployed in Saudi Arabia — the Patriot Advanced Capability-2 or PAC-2 — is not well designed to intercept the Burkan-2 missiles that the Houthis are firing at Riyadh. The Burkan-2 flies around 600 miles and appears to have a warhead that separates from the missile itself. But I am deeply skeptical that Patriot has ever intercepted a long-range ballistic missile in combat — at the least, I have yet to see convincing unclassified evidence of a successful Patriot intercept. During the 1991 Gulf War, the public was led to believe the that the Patriot had near-perfect performance, intercepting 45 of 47 Scud missiles. The U.S. Army later revised that estimate down to about 50 percent — and even then, it expressed “higher” confidence in only about one-quarter of the cases. A pesky Congressional Research Service employee noted that if the Army had correctly applied its own assessment methodology consistently, the number would be far lower. (Reportedly that number was one — as in one lousy Scud missile downed.) According to a House Committee on Government Operations investigation, there was not enough evidence to conclude that there had been any intercepts. “There is little evidence to prove that the Patriot hit more than a few Scud missiles launched by Iraq during the Gulf War,” a summary of the investigations concluded dryly, “and there are some doubts about even these engagements.” This report — which called on the Pentagon to declassify more information about the performance of the Patriot and request an independent evaluation of the program — never saw the light of day. A fierce lobbying campaign by the Army and Raytheon spiked it, save for a summary. Against that background, you can imagine that I was pretty skeptical of the Pentagon’s claims that the Patriot shot down Iraqi ballistic missiles in 2003 — claims that have generally been accepted uncritically. And when I heard that missile defenses were protecting Riyadh, I wanted to see for myself — and, unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised by what I found.

Yepp, exactly, as you said! HQ button is missing on the adversary screen so one cannot switch between views. Thanks for the information, I always thought it's just an icon - not a control element.

Depends on the fuze and I don't know which one they use for thermobaric But IMHO CDTE thermobaric should be a joke IRL. 25mm is too small a caliber to produce enough FA mixture to generate any decent overpressure wave.

Just a funny off-topic: US Army closed access to all *.mil resources from RUS IPs. Not that people who have to go around the Not-So-Great Russian Firewall every day can't get access but it's funny

AirBurst High Explosive