TheVulture
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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...
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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.
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2 hours ago, photon said:
You could maybe talk me into the main gun being useful for shore bombardment, but good gravy - if you're firing at hostile vessels, how many things have gone badly wrong by that point? I'm really curious when was the last time a ship fired its main gun at another ship in anger?
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.
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36 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:
One detail that hit me is that the Russian tv showed a AK 47, painted in phosforus green. That same AK 47 was shown in the released ISIS video. Not sure what to make of that. Perhaps ISIS expected Putin to blame Ukraine for this terror attack, or is this a 'normal' thing to do by ISIS?
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.
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2 minutes ago, Haiduk said:
Some adequate people in Russia ask - well, you are Takiks and just made bloody murdering. Your faces are on each police patrol, around the city activated plan of interception. And you... even not wearing other clothes, sit all four in the same car, on which you arrived to make the attack, keeping own passports with you and drive... no, not to Petrovskiy market area, where huge Central Asian migrants getto, where you can just lost for authorities. You drive to Ukraine - through huge Fridays's evening traffic jams on the exits from Moscow, you drive through all these checkpoints, police, SOBR, which already hunting for you, through Rosgvardiya posts on the roads in rears of Russian troops in Bryansk oblast, through deployments of troops, through zero-lline positions, minefields, drones in the air - so even is Ukrainian side "prepared a window", what other Russian forces would be doing?
And other comment form Russian social media - if you try to escape after terrorist attack to Bryansk oblast almost to Belarusian border and spend about 5 hours for this through Moscow Friday's evening traffic jams - immediatelly communicate with Formula-1, you will get a contract %)
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?
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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.
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16 minutes ago, Beleg85 said:
t touched here, that supposed attackers were intercepted on the road in Bryansk...leading to Belarus actually, not Ukraine. I can fully imagine them trying to shelter there for some time (or already having fixed contacts) and then possibly trying to cross into Europe disguised as poor refugees.
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.
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11 minutes ago, omae2 said:
Nah its exactly the opposite. It doesn't matter what the world thinks its whats russians thinks that's matter.
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.
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3 minutes ago, Kraft said:
US intelligence is quite impressive in their ability to know of these things ahead of time
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.
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7 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
Major terrorist attack (gunmen) underway in Moscow. Not posting footage, it's horrible. 4 x Gunmen, don't look Ukrainian, darker skins, so not a false flag op.
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.
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8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
All of this is true. There can be no free vote without a free society. Period.
I know we've said this many times already, but Russians are very akin to the "battered wife syndrome" in that they accept their fate because they think they deserve it, don't know it could be otherwise, think it could be worse, etc. Whatever the rationalizations are, the end result is the same... people who are conditioned to support something that objectively isn't worthy of their support.
And every time we have this discussion I remind people that even in the most free, open, and old democracies there are people who exactly the same as the Russian electorate. A strong indication that biology plays a very strong role in extremist culture. Add societal apathy and selfishness to the mix and the numbers of people willing to support an authoritarian leader goes up considerably.
Russians have never known democratic values, therefore they can't possibly understand their benefits. Which is one reason, perhaps THE reason, that Russia is waging war on Ukraine with such viciousness. Ukrainians, on the whole, "get it". The last thing Putin needs is them showing Russians a new way to live.
Steve
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)
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49 minutes ago, chrisl said:
the funny thing is that they refloated the fleet (because he destroyed it on the first day of a two week exercise) and he did it again. Then they just kept changing rules until they validated that they could defend themselves from conventional attacks that they were designed for and pretended attackers would do what they were asked. Or something like that.
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.
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2 hours ago, Kinophile said:
Not sure of the timeline. It's much lower there so is it possible the engine burned through its support and fell? Puts this vid after the seen ones where its higher with flames. Engine matches.
Still, four engines down to 3 and it pancakes? Can't even level off?
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).
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5 hours ago, OldSarge said:
Well, A broken clock is correct twice a day!
This war has exposed the weakness of the U.S. supply chain in a peer to peer conflict as well - 155mm shells, Javelins, microprocessors, etc. And like the European's we're looking into ways to shore up our weak points.
I can see why Xi isn't too happy with Vlad, he surely doesn't want to see both the EU and the US ramping up when his own economy is in a slump.And simultaneously cutting down on their reliance on Chinese imports to bring critical manufacturing capability back to domestic/ allied locations.
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1 minute ago, Kinophile said:
How long before...
We see HMGs mounted on seababies, raking those CIWS during attacks?
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
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8 minutes ago, JonS said:
Warships, especially the little ones, don't really have meaningfully "armoured" hulls anymore, do they? Strengthened, sure, so they can better deal with heavy weather and battle damage, but not armoured as such.
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)
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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).
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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.
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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.
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1 hour ago, Grigb said:
I completely agree. But we have following video:
This is undoubtedly a Russian military facility. And someone is launching a missile not far away from the camera (to the hilarious surprise of the man behind camera). The only option I can think of is that UKR SF have adamantium balls and launched missiles from very close to a Russian military facility.
If the facility is RU AD-based, that explains why RU is so fond of blaming AD again; only higher-ups would know the truth. The vast majority of RU officers would simply know that missiles were fired from the direction of the RU AD base, indicating that these MF made a mistake again.
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.
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Just now, The_Capt said:
One man's copium is another's despairium. And vice versa. Every time the UA loses a small town, the Doom fanbois come out of the woodwork. I think some are trying to leverage western sentiment to put pressure on allies for more support - "see we are on the verge of losing". Others are pushing pro-Russian crap and trying to convince us that there is no point - "see how mighty Russia cannot be beaten...just like in WW2". Funny how things stay so quiet when Ukraine takes back a small town.
Neither side really knows what they are talking about.
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.
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Well, Navalny's died in jail in Siberia. Surprised he lived this long.
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26 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
Looks like Putin is a Biden fanboy
This has gotta be a ploy.
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.
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9 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
Called it! Also how they took out the Ivanovets - I think that was up to 10 drones involved f and at least 2 hit the same spot.
No ship at sea can resist being hit repeatedly and quickly in the same exact hull section. Not guaranteed to sink but very guaranteed to lose mobility, which 8s death in a swarming attack.
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.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
More likely that we're going to get back to the mid-2023 situation where Russia is no longer able to make incremental gains and Ukraine can push them back slightly in a few places. I'm not expecting anything dramatic personally - just a shift in the media narrative which is currently "Russia is slowly grinding Ukraine down".