TheVulture

Also from the department of over-cooked advertising spiel on British drones and lasers, BAE and Sentinel Unmanned recently announced they'd done the first successful firing or a class IV laser from a drone, which makes it sound like they've mounted some high power laser weapon on a drone, but turns out to be a laser target designator for guiding precision munitions. In know we've discussed in the past the tendency for military procurement to take a concept like a $500 drone used for spotting and produce a $50,000 drone to do the same job better, but not 100x better. This longreach drone looks to fit that description: https://www.baesystems.com/en/product/longreach----a-groundbreaking-elevated-targeting-capability And look how many important sounding acronyms they get in to the key features list: Multi-role platform Static and covert loiter capability CLASS IV NATO (STANAG 3733) Compliant Laser Designator with SEESPOT and laser rangefinder Compatible with precision strike weapons including APKWS® and Brimstone™ Suitable for targeting indirect fires Advanced situation awareness, STANAG 4609 Target recognition & tracking AES256 Link Encrypted MESH enabled – radio agnostic ATAK integrated SATCOM integrated Precision landing Autonomous mission capability In-built safety features including emergency parachute Hardened for operations in GNSS-challenged environments Looks cool though...

For those who remember the British 'Dragonfire' anti-drone laser test from January, Grant Shapps (UK defence secretary) is now talking about possibly delivering it to Ukraine relatively soon. It's timeline was originally aiming to be in service 2032 (assuming it can be made to work adequately). The time line was accelerated to 2027, because I'm sure it's possible to finish R&D 5 years sooner just because politicians have decided. Now Shapps is saying it may be delivered to Ukraine even sooner than that because a system that is 70% done next year is better then one 99.9% done in 3 years. More realistically, Ukraine needs any air defence it can get, and the system gets to be tested heavily in real conditions, which will probably improve design iteration. So I guess we'll see whether it can become a meaningful and cost effective anti-drone system or whether its a white elephant. Edit to add: whatever the rationale behind the decision making, announcing it now has a lot more to do with timing of domestic and European politics, and the content of the announcement likewise. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68795603

I wonder how much the F-4 Vietnam experience plays in to this (I'm probably mis-remembering the aircraft involved - apologies if so - and possibly this is one of those 'truisms' that turns out to be an urban myth or at least not quite as simple as usually described). The F-4 was initially designed without a gun / cannon, since it had air-to-air missiles that would supposedly render the gun obsolete - anything dangerous would be destroyed by missiles (or destroy the F-4 by missiles) before they ever got close to gun range. Turns out that the anti-air missiles didn't perform as reliably as hoped, and they did find themselves in dogfighting range without a gun to fall back on. New versions were quickly developed that did have a gun, and all US planes since then, including the F-35 which is very much meant to not be a dogfighter, still carry a gun, because the cost of including it is relatively small, and the downside of not having one if you happen to find yourself in a situation where it's the best option is comparatively large.

It's because they are all familiar with the default Combat Mission UI and think that rifles should be green. They are probably wondering if it turns yellow when the owner is injured.

Yes, the idea that the four of them just got in the car they had at the scene, and then stayed together and drove down a major road until the got caught 500km away is... curious. I could kind of believe it if they were expecting it to be a suicide attack and didn't have an escape plan, but were so surprised that they could just get in the car and drive off that they thought they'd give it a go with no real plan. If they had an escape plan prepared in advance, then this surely wasn't it. Of course, do we believe what Russia says about how and where they were captured?

Just for reference, here's a map with Bryansk oblast outlines, and various routes - Red is quickest way out of Russia to Belarus, Blue is quickest way out o f Russia avoiding Belarus (i.e Ukraine), green is the route to Belarus via Bryansk.

The only mention of location I've seen (in English) has been "the Bryansk Region", which would usually mean "Bryansk Oblast" rather than specifically the city of Bryansk. The M3 from Moscow runs through Bryansk oblast to Ukraine and within 20km or Bryansk city. You could turn off the M3, go through Bryansk and on to a road to southern Belarus, but that's not the shortest way out of Russia into Belarus (it's about 560km, while the shortest route from Moscow is straight toards Minsk and 400km). If the goal is to get from Moscow, out of the country as quickly as possible, and avoiding Belarus which is not really getting out of reach of Russia, then 500km straight down the M3 to Ukraine (through Bryansk oblast) is the shortest and fastest route.

Yup. If Russia decides to sees this as an opportunity to whip up some nationalist revenge against someone (whether Ukraine, Ingushetia or whoever else) then it really doesn't matter that much who actually did it or what the rest of the world thinks : the future actions of Russia will be driven by where Russia decides to place the blame and what they choose to do about it.

Some people will take that as conclusive proof that the US is behind it, some people will take it as conclusive proof that they said that as a public warning to the Russians that they knew the Russians were planning a false flag attack, and majority will take it as evidence that whatever they already believed is correct.

Not necessarily. "False flag" doesn't have to mean "we did it ourselves"; it can equally be 'helping' a genuinely hostile group to carry out an attack by supplying funding, gear and making sure the security apparatus remains ignorant and unprepared to respond. But we don't even have enough information for speculation at the moment.

I read an interesting discussion with a Russian guy who had grown up in the USSR, with him being unable to understand how anyone would ever vote against whoever was in power. His thinking was that the president could order people to vote for him, and not doing so would be insubordination and get punished. And this worked all the way down the chain: officials at various levels, police, judiciary, election organisers, all follow their orders because not doing so would lead to punishment from above. People tried to explain that in an established democracy it doesn't work like that. The fundamental difference is that (almost) everyone believes in the the rule of law. There are laws around how to hold fair elections, and anyone violating the laws to try and fix the result is very likely to face punishment. His counter was always "but why wouldn't the authorities just order people not to punish the rule breaking and punish the people trying to do things 'fairly'". He couldn't seem to wrap his head around the idea that once there is a critical mass of people who follow the rule of law, anyone trying to break the law to fix an election is very much taking a big risk and on their own Anyone who might shield them from consequences becomes liable to consequences from higher up, up to an including the supreme court (or equivalent) and police who aren't under the power of politicians and protected from the consequences of following the law rather than the whims of the head of state. So in an established democracy, enough people believe in the rule of law, following the law shields you from punishment, and anyone trying to subvert that is knowingly taking a risk that might well get them punished - even the people tyring to subvert the rule of law work on the assumption that the rule of law holds sway and that they are violating societal norms. In Russia, from what this guy is saying, enough people believe that following orders from above is what shields you from punishment, and following what the law says rather than what you are told to do is going to get you punished. Trying to follow the law and disobey the wishes of the president is what is violating societal norms, and is the same kind of conspiratorial risk-taking in Russia that trying to steal an election would be in an established democracy. It was an interesting insight into his mindset that he just couldn't make the mental leap to understand how a society might function where everyone (or close enough to everyone to count) valued following the law more than following orders, and that was what protected people. He always fell back on "but what if someone punished them for that". So yeah, democracy does kind of require a society built on the foundation that democracy works and the rule of law reigns, and it is a self-sustaining system that functions very differently to the culture that the USSR and Russia had (and probably had before the USSR as well form what I gather)

That could be a reasonable thing to do though. The point of that kind of wargame isn't like playing through a Combat Mission scenario to see who wins and by how much,. It is to practice co-ordination in the real world and to test doctine. If you've gone to the trouble and expense of getting a significant US fleet there for the exercise, and they've all been sunk on the first day, then you could a) play on to the bitter end in a losing scenario, and have all the USN people sit on their hands for two weeks b) note that their is a fatally exploitable deficiency in your fleet defense doctrine, make a note to start looking at solutions, and restart the exercise with that avenue banned so that you can meaningfully test how other things behave. b is valid, as long as they don't sweep the whole fatal vulnerability under the carpet and forget about it, but treat it as a problem that needs to be solved and quickly.

If the fire had caused enough damage that the engine fell off, then their might well be significant damage and weakening in the wing above as well (and e.g. in the electrics and mechanisms for the flaps for landing).

And simultaneously cutting down on their reliance on Chinese imports to bring critical manufacturing capability back to domestic/ allied locations.

Don't waste the weight on the seababy and draw the extra attention. Instead have separate support surface drones with MGs or AGLs and a good supply of ammo that put down the suppressive fire while the seababies head in

Modern hull thicknesses are probably in the 10-50mm range depending on the ship, as opposed to the 200-300mm (or more) of WW2 era battleships, so not exactly armoured, but probably still enough that there's a substantial difference for an explosion outside it vs inside (depending on the explosion size obviously. The Tsar Bomba' blast isn't going to be noticeably attenuated by 10mm of steel)

Hard to be entirely clear from the drone footage, but it looks like certainly 2, possibly 3 drones hit against the armoured hull, and one managed to hit a breach in the side from a previous hit where the interior of the ship was visible. There are at least 2 distinct explosions shown, one of which has a large secondary explosion a few seconds later. 4 explosions are shown in total, but it's not clear whether any of them are shown repeatedly / from other angles. But as with the previous two drone sinking, it looks like they once again managed to get a drone to hit an already damaged point and detonate behind the armour, which proved fatal to the ship the last two times (although the Segei Kotov is three times the displacement of tyre previous corvette sunk, the Ivanovets).

Ukraine seem to be getting very good at this "asymmetrical conventional war" approach. The Black Sea Fleet, which vastly overmatched the Ukrainian navy, has been pretty much neutralised. In the early says they were launching cruise missile strikes from near Odessa. Now they won't even go as far as Sevastopol, and operationally seem to be limited to ferrying supplies with their decreasing supply of landing ships. The Russian air force also has massive superiority in numbers and modern equipment, and yet are losing aircraft at an impressive rate and have lost two of their A-50 planes (and no-one seems to know really how many airworthy ones they actually have now). Of course the air force is still a problem and not neutralised (hello, glide bombs and cruise missile salvos), but it's obvious that Ukraine are forcing the Russians to be more cautious and conservative with their air power than they'd ideally like.

Mostly off-topic mini-documentary on the prototype soviet Su-47 that never entered production (courtesy of Growling Sidewinder, who is a combat flight sim guy (DCS)). It's only 9 minutes long, so not a big time investment. I mention it though because there is a short bit at the end about the Russians having restarted some testing with it as part of research in to forward-swept wings on drones to give much better manoeuvrability with a view to drone vs drone combat. More of a curious titbit than anything substantial.

The flares have been used for some time before that launch, and the launch is from the other side of the aircraft line of flight to the video that shows the hit. So in one video we have A-50 moving right to left, and an explosion behind the aircraft where presumably an IR seeker hit a flare. Then the plane explodes. In the other video from the Russian base we have the A-50 moving left to right (on approach to land at the base), and after a fair bit of flaring, a SAM launch which appears to be about the right timing to be the missile that hit the A-50 Possible scenario: UKR SF got to a few miles from the base where they could hit the A-50 coming to land. Man portable IR seeking SAM launched (e.g. Starstreak) but hits flare. Base air defence launches and hits A-50. Either they were trying to intercept the UKR missile, confused about the situation (fog of war) or just panic. A-50 trying to avoid IR missile behind is hit by radar guided missile from the front. EDIT: Not starstreak - I don't think that is IR guided from what I've read.

If you draw a line after the big Ukrainian gains of Kherson and Karkhiv, and look at what has changed purely in terms of territory since then, Russia gained Bakhmut last winter, then there was the Ukraininan summer offensive which didn't achieve strategic objectives in terms reaching Tokmak, and now we've had Avdiivka. I think if you add all that up, Ukraine comes out comfortably ahead, although neither side has changed the size of the Russian controlled territory by even 1%. If someone is seeing this as Russia having the upper hand, they're seeing what they want to see.

Well, Navalny's died in jail in Siberia. Surprised he lived this long. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-68316979

Like most Russian propaganda, it's probably not really meant to be believed or disbelieved. It's meant to cause arguments and distrust, widen divisions and increase mutual suspicion between those who chose to believe it and those who chose not to. Whether Putin would actually prefer Biden or not is a completely unrelated Issue. It's meant to generate heat, not shed light.

Yes, both videos clearly have at least a second drone hitting precisely on the area badly damaged by the first hit, and causing big explosions (the second drone is pretty much going to be inside the armour when it triggers). That they've done it successfully two attacks in a row implies that it's something that can be pulled off now with a reasonable degree of confidence with the people and equipment they have. That really does seem like a game changer for naval warfare in near-coastal regions (might be harder to pull off in the mid pacific). The race is on to find an effective counter.

Today's Perun has a good high-level overview of the Chinese military that is worth a listen for anyone interested in the China / Taiwan / US situation. Also has the wry observation that China is modernising its navy partly to be able to protect its international trade, which it is very dependent on economically. Particularly with the US, Japan and Korea. But the main geopolitcal threats it sees to its international trade are from the US, Japan and Korea. So it is trying to build a navy to compete with those countries in order to be able to protect its trade with the same countries....