Gpig

A hard watch, but informative.
 

After the Cold War was won, the UK had decades of downsizing their armed forces (A brief look at the British Defence Budget in the 1990s). According to that article the number of personnel in 1990 was 306,000. So by 2000 (according to the chart shown in the video), they had lost (cut) 200,000 or close to two-thirds and woke hadn't even been invented yet. That aside, he slaps "woke" on some memes but doesn't provide any real evidence for it's effect on recruitment, just some quotes from some nobs in the Torygraph and some broad assumptions.
But here are some numbers:
-as at October 2018, people from ethnic minorities (not including White minorities) made up 2.5% of officers in the UK regular armed forces, compared with 2.4% in April 2012
-for ranks below officer, 8.8% of all armed forces personnel were from ethnic minorities, compared with 7.9% in April 2012 ( https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/armed-forces-workforce/latest/ )
-that number has gone up to 10.1% as of April 2023 (compared to an estimated 16.1% of the total UK population). ( https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7930/ )
The disparity between the proportions for officers and non-officers shows me that the British armed forces really need to up their wokeness game.
And yeah, people should stop using the word woke if they don't know what it actually means.
 

druggier?  Umm I'm throwing the challenge flag on that one.  😛  I think the mid/late 70s have this generation beat on the druggie thing ESPECIALLY in regards to the military.
Funny thing, having integrated army units was once the "woke" thing.  Other than a few NAZI types running around I doubt anyone gives a second thought to integrated units anymore.
 
I'll admit to being confused sometimes by this generations challenges to orthodoxy but given what I've seen in my lifetime I take it for granted that my not understanding stuff has zero value on its importance to someone else so I mostly keep my trap shut and nod benignly as my neighbors kid goes on a rant and I understand only maybe half of it.  Just so long as their friends stay off my lawn.

And one more story with happy end, how drone team could spot and resque wounded soldier. In this time it was more hard - the guy hide behind knoked out vehicle, so drone hovered directly over him to determine it is own or foe and he is dead or alive. After soldier was recognized as own-alive, drone was charged with tea, flashlight and lighter - all this was dropped to soldier. The note was attached "If you can crawl follow the drone, rise a hand". But soldier likely lost own strenghth, so despite enemy was close, resque group was send and they could find and evacuate own comrade 
 

Sourse of this infornation is unknown, it's as if a list of dead on A-50 and IL-22 planes:
Russian TG writes, that Russian generals decided to share as official the version of friendly fire. They already pointed "guilty" AD unit and official version will be this was mistaken launch from Krasnodar region. But nobody in clear mind in troops don't believe in this 
The list of dead:
A-50:
lt. colonel V.Levchenko - vessel commander and other 5 members of crew (two majors, two captains, sen.lieutenant). This list is not complete.
IL-22:
colonel Burmistrov (allegedly)
There is no information eirther was present onboard ot not the deputy commander of Long-range aviation Command lt.general Pchela.
 
Some UKR sources hinted that Russian planes were hit by Patriots, but tracking radar was Ukranian/Soviet. This was a result of work of FrankenSAM program - integration of Soviet/Ukrainian AD systems into western. Probably Russian crew spotted radiation of UKR radar, but though they are safe, because S-300 can't reach them, but got Patriot missile. 
Air Force Command claimed this night first time was successfully used one of FrankenSAM system, which destroyed Shahed in 9 km from Odesa. Except project Patriot+UKR/Soviet radar, also exists two other - Buk+ Sparrow missiles and AIM-9+radar (I give up how it can work, maybe AIM-120 meant)

Leo 2A6, survived after ATGM hit
 

My wish for Christmas is 'Swan Lake' on Russian TV on repeat.

Amid Mi-24 and Mi-8 Ukraine uses some number of Mi-2MSB helicopters - Ukrainian upgraded Mi-2. Before the war there were even variants of armed Mi-2 and even ASW version, but thanks God, taxpayers money were saved to be wasted for these useless projects. Despite this Mi-2 still carry out own humble service as light transport helicopters for transporting small cargo, high-ranked officers and wounded.
This Mi-2 and his crew of GUR, resqued hundreds of lives, evacuating them from stabilization points to hospitals in the rear.
Accordong to Orix five Mi-2 were lost: two destroyed (one of them in crash) and three captured on Chornobaivka airfield.
  

We all know how long "soon" can take in your world, Steve. 😀

What do you know about HERA - Hunan ERA? 
UKR Javelin team of 14th mech.brigade hit Russian BMP with embarked infantry on the top. This is Syn'kivka area, Kupiansk direction. Red marks - previously destroyed Russian armor
PS. Extended version of this video (but with violence warning) - it's seen how first BMP has driven some dozen meters forward and halted, and how infanryman of teh second BMP was hit directly by 120 mm mortar shell
 

Another one of those things I would not think I would ever see in my life .
Neat. 🙂

To claim that multiculturalism is "Babylon" is a universal precursor to every version of fascist authoritarianism and the idea that cultural change via immigration destroys nations runs up against the obvious example of America as a superpower. Your approach to this subject is flat out Putinist.  
 

The idea that European nations are set blocs of ethnic groups is a recent, modern conceit. Britain, for one obvious example, is a melange of Irish, Scottish, German, Norman, Welsh, Cornish, etc. It only looks, if one squints hard enough, homogeneous because popular memory is short. This is true in some degree with every nation south of the Baltic Sea and more true the further east and south one goes. It is *especially* true of Ukraine. The idea that there is an unchanging "national culture" is also, on any timescale worth mentioning, an absurdity. France, as another example, had 40+ regional dialects that were only semi mutually intelligible to each other as recently as the last 150 years. "National culture" has always been effectively an elite choice of what dialect will be promoted, what traditions will be enshrined and what myths will be used to unite a particular state. And that unity, often, was achieved at the price of the toxic nationalism that tore Europe apart twice in the last 120 years and is tearing up Ukraine today. 
 

anti-vax 'communication'.  You mean baseless lies and misinformation?  
And what suppression?  At least in the US the lies were huge and everywhere and now there's big uptake in people not getting vaccinated for everything, not just covid.  We've already seen, in the US, outbreaks in children of whooping cough in anti-vax clusters.  And even a little polio.  
UKR is at war for survival and is completely within it's rights to censor things.  In societies not under this kind of threat, I don't want censorship.  I think it's best to counter lies w truth, though sometimes it takes a lot of people getting polio for them to figure out the truth I suppose.

Hey politics day. Well for my two cents.

According to the oh so helpful political campus and my lifelong voting record I'm a conservative. No way around it the truth is more than enough people with right wing views seem to have accepted the idea that Putin is not so bad, or Ukraine is not our problem. I think a lot of them think this way because they believe that our society is deteriorating, and Russia represents true traditional Christian values or whatever. Thing is Russia is basically just a mafia state. Some just don't like how much this war costs.

Well, that being said some folks on the left read "tankies" also give Russia a pass, because they still like Russia as it is a successor to the Soviet Union and they still think the Soviet Union is a force for good...Lets ask some of our friends from central and eastern Europe about that.

Anyway, I think the North American conservative movement needs more guys like Mitt Romney and Steven Harper as far as their understanding of the threat that Putin presents. As far as Russia goes, I think both of those guys would feel right at home on this forum.

What I always loved about this place is we have liberals and conservatives uniting to oppose an unjust war of aggression by a nation ruled by a man that we know is not our friend. 

Alright now that I said that I will go back to posting cool videos from Twitter. 🙂

Are you a nihilistic-liberal conservative?  Or maybe a hippie-who-grew-up conservative?  You gotta whole chaotic neutral vibe going. 

I know Steve told us to cut back on the China related talk, but this is cool what the Republic of China otherwise known as Taiwan is doing. 🇹🇼👍

A bit of statistics about this thread.
First post 11.2.2022.
Page 1000 on 7.7.2022, 2000 on 3.2.2023 and 3000 on 6.11.2023.
It took 146 days for the first 1000. Then 211 for the next and another 276 for the last. So we are slowing down.
With a bit of extrapolation, it will take 318 days for the next 1000 - that would be September 19, 2024. Let's hope we are discussion the end of the war by then.
 

I am pretty sure that automatically makes you a Canadian citizen.

And this is how we snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.  Ukraine will fight as long as it can and we should support them until that end.  Here we are discussing one possible end - I am not sure we are even at probable but we need to be ready for it.  Conversations well above my pay grade will land on how things finally resolve with respect to the war.  
After the war we need a modern day Marshall Plan.  One for the history books.  We turn Ukraine into South Korea in a month.  Even if EU and NATO somehow remain off the table there are plenty of other ways to secure that nation.  Not least of which would be stationing western troops on their soil a la the US 8th Army.  We need to follow through or we risk blowing the whole thing.  All the money spent to date will be lost if we leave Ukraine hanging during reconstruction.  If we double down on this and turn Ukraine into a regional economic powerhouse…a friendly democratic regional economic powerhouse, that is how we cement this as a major strategic victory.

An easy-ish way for the US and NATO to deal with drones would be to simply accept that its isn't practically solvable and therefore anything and everything under ~2,000' is to be shot down/destroyed.
Yes; that would mean denying themselves the use of drones. But given their dominance in all other domains of conventional warfare, denying drones to both sides would be a net benefit.

I get that you might be having a bad day but there is so much unwarranted angst in this post: absolutely nobody in “The West” argues that children should have the right to choose their gender.  No-one is emptying our churches (though there are many fewer people heading in) and less than nobody is “emptying churches so they can be turned into mosques”.
Reconsider the merits of whatever media source has told you these things.  You rightly identify that we are in a collision of systems but make no mistake: it is the enemies of our Western system who promote misinformation such as what you posted above in order to foster the very division you warn against.   Seeing through that, being less angry about things that aren’t happening and therefore being a part of a secure Western system is the best way to maintain focus and win. 

Yeah, I'm very aware of that, and I suppose that's a cue for getting a little into why we don't have anti-drone drones.
There are two parts to the anti-drone drone: detection and attack.  The detection is the hard part.  Destruction is easy - we already have no end of systems that can very accurately destroy anything that you give them coordinates of.  We can accurately fire projectiles, exploding projectiles, exploding projectiles full of razor sharp hoops, high energy beams of photons, rings with chains on them, rings with strings on them, giant wads of gooey stuff, or anything you want to take out a drone.  But you have to detect it.
For an anti-drone drone, there are sort of two categories of drone you're targeting: open loop (no comm back to the sender) and closed loop (some comm back to the sender, whether full two-way control, occasional updates, or whatever).  
Detection of the first type (no comm), which includes Shaheds, is tricky - unlike the F-35, these *start* with the radar cross section of a goose* and then you can make that even smaller.  These things are all small on visual and radar cross sections because you can paint them and they don't have a lot of metal.  You're going to track them with frustrating "visual" algorithms, where "visual" can mean different things in the optical vs. radar wavelengths, but you're still trying to pick out changes in the scene to decide where the thing is.  I'm not going to spend much time on it, other than to say that unless you have really high signal to noise and high resolution (both of which the target is trying to reduce), it's a lot harder than you think, and in general you're not going to get there with simple image differencing.  And this problem exists for commless drones whether you're using another drone, a gun, or a death ray to take them down.  Shaheds at least have a very characteristic sound that you can probably use for detection and targeting once they're within audible range.
Detection of the second type (active comm) is easy.  It's transmitting, and transmitting enough to get clear signal back to its operator, who is farther away than you are if it's attacking you.  Triangulation is old technology.  Piece of cake: you lock onto the frequency, have some kind of sensor so you know your own orientation relative to the sensor, and just maneuver in a way to make the signal from the drone stronger until you hit it and destroy it with whatever mechanism you prefer.  Or have a few sensors that are networked to give you the position (helloooo MLAT) and shoot it with your favorite method of action-at-a-distance.
Except for one problem: whose drone did you just destroy?
In the Ukraine environment, IFF is the hard part of doing radio based anti-drone systems.  There are tons of things flying around, as evidenced by the daily releases of yet another view of every bit of ground combat we ever see.  It's not quite Diamond Age concentrations of them, but they're working on it.  And they're all sorts of random drones, including commercial drones, custom drones made with commercial off the shelf parts, custom drones with a mix of commercial and special mil parts, totally custom mil drones, and who knows what else. And they're all using similar frequencies, because the combination of physics and the atmosphere force you to the same frequencies if you want a particular range and data rate at powers that you can reasonably supply to both the ground operator and drone with batteries.  If you don't sort out the IFF thing and you set an autonomous anti-radiation based anti-drone system loose, it's just as likely to attack its allied drones as the enemy drones, because it has no way to tell them apart.  That means you have to have your complete drone ecosystem integrated (ring that cash register over at Lockheed/Northrop Grumman/Raytheon!!) or you're just going to be attacking your own stuff.  
And part of why we aren't seeing even rudimentary versions of it in Ukraine is that it's not a function that people were already spending much effort on for commercial/hobbyist drones. You can't just pop over to Robotshop.com or Alibaba and order tunable RF sensor kits (or a few thousand of them) the way you can other types of sensor, or actuators for operating your 3D printed grenade dropper.  It's possible to get relatively inexpensive software-defined radio modules that are small (that's what feeds ADSBExchange so you can see who's flying around Ukraine), but the environment is so variable, along with the need to confirm what drone you're attacking, that at least for now you're going to need a human in the loop, even if you can semi-automate your remote control drone sensor.  And even with a human in the loop, nobody is painting national flags on their drones, so unless you know "this is one that our side makes" after you get up close to it (assuming you're doing that, rather than sending a death ray at it from 5 km), you really don't know who you're shooting down.  So the basic tech isn't all that hard, but because it's not just point and shoot or point and drop, it's a lot more dependent on integration of the whole system to be usable.
*geese, like all waterfowl, are incredibly mean and probably deserve to die. That's why there's a book entitled "Ducks and how to make them pay".  If we can do an autonomous system for drones, it should probably be immediately applied to geese and ducks.

Yes, but at the moment I am guided by the 0.7 liters of Madeira I drank. Rain outside the window, live concert of Depeche Mode 1993. And the lack of obvious successes of the Ukrainian armed forces. 
Many of my childhood friends are afraid of this call. But I think. that this is the duty of everyone who lived carefree in the 90s