TheVulture

That's something Dan Carlin (historical podcaster) had mentioned several times: other people may have copied the concept of the Greek hoplite or the Roman legion, but without the whole apparatus of the culture, mindset and society that created them, you don't actually have a hoplite or legion and it doesn't function the same way. You just have something that looks similar on the surface. And likewise the western military system is something that the west evolved as an effective way for people from western cultures to fight. It isn't automatically going to work the same way if you just copy it and plug in people with different culture, social norms and attitudes.

Semi on-topic, but Eastory youtube channel (WW2 eastern front oriented channel) has put up a video on the role of the Donbas region in the Russian civil war (1918/19) and in WW2, with a view to suggesting why it might be important terrain in the current war.

UK defence secretary has gone to the US for short notice face to face meetings. Not clear whether something is up that they couldn't discuss remotely of whether this is Prime Minister Lizz Truss desperately trying to have something to talk about other than her disastrous political situation.

Pilot, most likely. Only counts as a sub-munition if he lands heavily on someone.

Particularly for Iran. If intercepting the drones with air defense systems is not cost effective in terms of cost of drone vs cost of air defence consumables (but very necessary in terms of 'cost' of damage), then a better solution might be to 'intercept' them between Iran and Russia, or try and remove Iran's will or ability to provide the drones in the first place. Of course, that it politically and militarily a much tougher task.

I suppose one difference is that a suicide drone could presumably be returned to base and land without detonating its warhead, whereas a cruise missile is not going to come home and land nicely to let you re-use it if it can't find a suitable target. Don't know if the Shahed drones can actually do that (and it certainly not how Russia is using them) - but it's a possible distinction in behaviour.

Exactly. There is no way that the operational cost of the to tier package is costing starlink $54,000 per year. It's probably like a lot of services: the top tier package has a massive markup because it is aiming at very rich customers who can afford to pay 10x the price to get 20% better service. Much like buying top end graphics cards or computer parts. The $4,500 per month figure only becomes relevant if Starlink is turning down commercial customers who would pay that much because it doesn't have the spare bandwidth, due to reserving X amount for Ukraine. (Although I'm pretty sure that standard business practice for an oversubscribed service would be to increase the price until demand matched supply again).

According to the SpaceX figures shared with the Pentagon, about 85% of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine were paid – or partially paid – for by countries like the US and Poland or other entities. Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month per unit for the most advanced service. (Over the weekend, Musk tweeted there are around 25,000 terminals in Ukraine.) — CNN, October/14/2022. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/#paragraph-4de74b4a-e6fa-5ddd-937e-d10fb1ae88bd I don't think starlink is losing money because of what it is providing to Ukraine - that mostly seems to be paid for. I suspect its more that Starlink's business model is losing money, because satellites are expensive and they haven't got enough uptake to cover the initial costs incurred.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63255617 I'm guessing that means that they've basically run out of missiles that they're prepared to use up for now.

The 3 years is, if I'm reading it right, the penalty for being in a plane flying over Norwegian airspace. I don't think it is implying anything about the potential penalty for being convicted of spying.

It's the wrong time of day, for one thing, and has different vehicles on the road. It's fake.

Ukraine announces the liberation of several settlements in Kherson Novovasilivka, Novohryhorivka, New Kamyanka, Trifonivka and Chervony in the Beryslav district of the Kherson region. https://t.me/info_zp/18378 Since these are all pretty much level with Dudchany then I suspect they were essentially abandoned by Russia over a week ago, and this more a case of Ukraine moving in to what was no man's land, possibly as the start of a new push.

Given Elon Musk's record of being less than honest, and of relying for his defence in court on the idea that people shouldn't believe what he says, I don't think he should get the benefit of the doubt on anything.

For what it's worth, measuring from google maps satellite view, the width of the roadway is about 30 meters, and the distance between the far sides of the rail bridge and road bridge comes to 61m

Considering all the faff Lukashenko went through resisting the pressure from Russia to get involved at the start of the war, when it was believable (to many media commenters at least) that Russia might win, I don't see him getting involved now when Russia is clearly the underdog at the moment. So it's probably just a warning to Lukashenko: "you're not going to catch us off guard; we see what you're doing". Just as an added but of incentive for him to do nothing, or his army to tell him where to stuff it if he does do something stupid.

That was my thought. The bridge may well be structurally unsound, but I'd bet that is a sight more stable than some of the pontoon bridges militaries regularly use. Them's the hazards of war.

One of the other clips of what looks like the same phone footage from that room looking at those screen starts off with a second or two of the vehicles moving backwards on the bridge, making it look a lot more like they are reviewing the CCTV footage shortly after the incident to try and figure out what happened.

But look at how bright the headlights and tail lights are in the footage due to the exposure levels the to the twilight conditions. It's hard to gauge taking that in to account.

I suppose another important question now is how much capability does Ukraine have to hit the site to prevent repairs. A missile strike might not have taken down the bridge, but it can probably do a number on some cranes and a repair crew trying to get the rail line back in service.

If it was a military explosives truck, then there probably wasn't any opportunity to hit a truck carrying 2 tons of explosives away from Crimea. It's all going the other way.

Under the bridge doesn't seem very likely. Stepping through the CCTV footage, the first frame that isn't just vehicles on the road is a mostly saturated frame of the blast - consistent with a very large explosion on the to of the bridge. Under the bridge your expect to see a few frames of light coming from under the bridge before the surface began to break, and you'd have a lot more debris falling down from the sky in the aftermath I'd have thought. Truck bomb seems consistent with the video.

Putin gets a tractor from Lukashenko as a 70th birthday present. Perhaps they think, based on what everyone has seen in Ukraine, that this is the way to start restocking the Russian tank stocks. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63176124

Sounds like they've been listening to the Iranians too much: the general Iranian world view is that Britain is behind everything and just using the USA as its puppet.

Also as a little sanity check, military observation satellites go as low as possible to get the best view they can, so they operate in low earth orbit. For satellites in low earth orbit, the *maximum* time the satellite can be above the horizon is 20 minutes. So a system targeting a single spy satellite is going to go from pointing more of less due west, to straight overhead, to due east in the space of under 20 minutes. It is tracking a relatively fast moving target. If it is just pointing straight up all the time and not moving, then it certainly isn't directly targeting a satellite in low earth orbit. However ifc it is just being a very bright light to cause atmospheric scattering, and act kind of like a fog over the area, then that might be plausible, but then talk about its range is irrelevant: is effect is purely locally on the lower atmosphere. And a wide array of normal search lights might just do a better job (won't swear to that: there may be some specific mechanism in atmospheric physics that the laser is meant to stimulate).

The speed of advance on a wide front looks a lot like a deliberate (ish) Russian withdrawal to try and establish a defence further back, rather than Ukraine overrunning the Russians everywhere at once, but it's all just rumours and guesswork for us at the moment - AFU are understandably keeping quiet about where they are exactly, and Russian bloggers probably aren't in a hurry too come out with a comprehensive list of bad news either.