dan/california
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Posts posted by dan/california
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56 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
I've never known what to make of it either. Something is definitely going on, but so far nobody has been able to explain what it is. The report that just came out was inconclusive as well. My guess is that it's Russia (the pattern of attacks lean towards a large state actor) and it's a neurotoxin. Russia has plenty of those and so it's more plausible than a wonder weapon. But why is there no trace of the toxin even though it is being looked for? I have no idea.
What I am pretty sure about is that US intel services have a good idea what is going on in terms of who is doing what. Keeping quiet is the best way to get more exact information. This is a spy game after all, so tipping one's own hand isn't generally the right move.
Steve
!00% agree on this. My guess based on zero non public information is that it a a very volatile compound that dissipates into the air quickly. With the Russians actively killing people all over Europe, like the pilot in Spain who defected, it is at least possible that someone will eventually get caught who knows something.
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2 minutes ago, riptides said:
So sad that person is an elected official.
Even worse....that that sort of drivel can be spouted and not a thing can be done about it.
Truth!
Edit: The extremely good news is that it sounds like she knows she has lost, finally. Keep your fingers crossed, and write your Congressperson AGAIN!
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Their might a vote on Ukraine funding tomorrow. This is the day to write your Congressperson if you are in the U.S..
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2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
So, basically, a fast moving drone with an autonomous targeting system. Obviously this is theoretically possible to do, and Ukraine has done so much with drones already, but it would be quite risky.
What I could see happening is recognizing flight patterns for military aircraft and then putting the killer drones into the general area with prohibitions on striking anything outside of compatible parameters (altitude, airspeed, etc.). It wouldn't be that hard to do something like that and have it work pretty reliably.
For example, send the drones to Russia's restricted air spaces and target anything within it. To be extra safe, restrict the altitude to below something like 10,000 feet or, if attacking aircraft landing/taking off crank it down to 1000 ft. That sort of stuff.
Now, whether the rumors you are talking about are true or not... this is coming.
Steve
What Ukraine SHOULD do is simply declare all of Russian airspacfe within a thousand kilometers of the Ukrainian border a war zone, and say if it moves, it dies. I will point out there is not a single civilian plane moving over Ukraine, to the best of my knowledge, why should Russia be any different?
44 minutes ago, chrisl said:You might get away with advance laying AT mines a few times, but eventually they'd start running smaller vehicles (service locomotives, or even trucks with train wheels) pushing a sacrificial train car or two (maybe with a very low plow, too) ahead of the trains. It would certainly slow things down, but not necessarily bring it to a halt.
But drones that drop AT mines just a short way in front of the moving train? You'd take advantage of the extemely long stopping distance and make it a lot harder to sweep the tracks. And maybe easier than hitting the moving locomotive.
Locomotives ought to be the single easiest thing to train an autonomous drone to hit. They are big, they run in fixed tracks, they have enormous, and hard to disguise signatures in infrared, and on five other types of detector. This strikes me as a great application for an EFP that fires straight down, from a drone flying horizontally. That copper lance straight through the boiler, or a diesel would be day ruining. Kind shocked both sides haven't had this going already.
Ukraine should start hitting locomotive repair facilities, too. Although I would keep shooting at oil refineries until there weren't any left as the single highest priority target for simpler drones. That is where a few ~20kg charges get the single biggest bang for the buck.
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4 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
One ray of light, and this is *strictly* barroom RUMINT, FWIW: I won't talk specifics here (and I don't know that much anyway), but it seems all air transport throughout European Russia at below mach speed will shortly become extremely unsafe. And even supersonic jets need to take off and land....
As rumoured, the necessary system is already in Uke hands, but they're trying hard to find a way not to have it splash RU civilian airliners by mistake. That wouldn't be a great look, given MH17. And you can absolutely expect the Russians to dangle airliners full of foreigners, especially Turks or Middle Easterners, in harms way.
...At a guess, when foreign carriers (looking at you, Turkish Airlines and Emirates) begin canceling routes to Russia with scant explanation, that will be proof that this is not just BS.
Now THAT is a rumor! And hopefully a true one.
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39 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
Dmitri is getting kind of whiny at this point though, not a great sign....
Two years in everybody is tired, and showing it one way or another.
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Read Dmitri every day!
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Russian journalist who covered Navalny’s trial is arrested for extremism
Moscow court charged Antonina Favorskaya with participating in the activities of late Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
Putin is now cracking down so hard it is illegal, and dangerous, to report that there is a crackdown underway.
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We have been trolled successfully...
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2 hours ago, Haiduk said:
Russians accidently dropped 11 gliding bombs on own territory within a week, including heavy FAB-1500. Reportedly no one exploded. It's unknown what caused theese droppings - technical failures or, how it assumes lower screeb of miliatry TG channel, UKR may highlight bombers with radars, so pilots, warned about they are can be potential victim of SAM, just frorced to drop the bombs and make intensive evasive maneuvers to avoid potential threat.
They have shot down enough planes lately to make the radar warning receiver lighting up an extremely credible threat. When they stop responding to the radar, push a high grade SAM forward.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/us/politics/russia-north-korea-nuclear-weapons.html
Why Russia Is Protecting North Korea From Nuclear Monitors
The monitors have provided vivid evidence of how Russia is keeping Pyongyang brimming with fuel and other goods, presumably in return for weapons that Russia can use in Ukraine.
Russia at the very least encouraged Hamas, and has benefited greatly from the distraction. Does anybody think Putin wouldn't encourage the North Koreans, with whom he has a much closer relationship?
Although i guess it is worth pondering if the Russian sanctions busting might reduce pressure on Kim's regime in a way that makes it less likely to gamble. It still bears watching.
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Read Dmitri EVERY DAY!
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44 minutes ago, Kinophile said:
Syrsky continues saying the right things...
Reform is very much on his mind. He seems to have the combat vet's intolerance of REMFs, especially in an existential fight like this one.
https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3845632-oleksandr-sirskij-golovnovnokomanduvac-zsu.html
Damn right too.
Have to second this, results have not yet been determined, but Syrsky is giving every possible indication that he has the right idea.
1 hour ago, alison said:I suppose overreaction is in the eye of the beholder. The CBC reported just the other day that Russian security forces were making migrants' lives miserable after the attack, for no apparent reason beyond xenophobia/Islamophobia. This is already an overreaction from a western perspective.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-central-asian-migrants-1.7157109
Now, to be fair, cracking down on a few dozen migrant workers here and there in a population of 4 million who are already regularly rounded up and deported to begin with isn't going to win (lose?) hearts and minds, but the full extent of the response won't be felt overnight. Even the US took a month or so to really step things up after 9/11 with PATRIOT Act.
I think you're right, though, that terrorism isn't necessarily as effective in a country that is already authoritarian, because people don't have as much freedom to lose anyway. The Chinese government dealt with years of conflict related to Uyghur autonomy (stabbings, bombings etc) until they eventually rolled out the full panopticon and "reeducation" program which apparently has been a roaring success, stamping out terrorism in the country completely. The side-effect is that ethnic Han citizens living 3500km away now also have the privilege of having all their bags X-rayed every time they get on the subway, having their faces scanned and tracked across the city and - during COVID - the full Xinjiang experience of fenced-off communities, checkpoints and "papers, please". And yet, all those crackdowns didn't really trigger a significant public response, just the usual subdued grumbling. Meanwhile the dream of Uyghur autonomy is dead. So you gotta wonder what kind of grand strategy IS-K is playing at here.
20 hours ago, JonS said:Well, flip that around - at what point would you prefer a global nuclear conflagration than the alternative?
My partner grew up in part of Soviet Russia which now is not part of Russia. Being part of Russia sucked, absolutely (her father, for a small example, came within a whisker of being 'volunteered' for heroic cleanup duty at Chernobyl), but that's in the rear view mirror now. It wouldn't be though if WWIII had broken out.
Alison's post above has helped me clarify the answer I was trying to write to JonS. The the reason that totalitarianism must be opposed even more resolutely, and even if means running risk of a wider war, is that totalitarians are getting better at being totalitarian. Technology has flipped from enabling internal opposition to making it possible to crush it utterly at a much lower cost. If Ukraine falls, it may two or three hundred years before it can break free again, if there is even anything left. Expecting these awful regimes to fail due to their internal contradictions may be more than we can hope for. The West's choice is to fight, or lose, I don't think trying to ignore the problem is going to work.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/opinion/moscow-attack-putin-ukraine.html
Putin’s Next Escalation Is Coming
More of the the Russians are scary and unstoppable propaganda. I really do wonder how many of these people know what they are doing, and how many are just clueless?
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20 minutes ago, cesmonkey said:
Seems like it ought to be worth a whole file box of federal indictments.
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9 minutes ago, JonS said:
Well, flip that around - at what point would you prefer a global nuclear conflagration than the alternative?
My partner grew up in part of Soviet Russia which now is not part of Russia. Being part of Russia sucked, absolutely (her father, for a small example, came within a whisker of being 'volunteered' for heroic cleanup duty at Chernobyl), but that's in the rear view mirror now. It wouldn't be though if WWIII had broken out.
Given the ever increasing efficiency of totalitarian repression, I have serious doubts about rolling back any gains Xi and
2 hours ago, Kraft said:Range several hundred kilometers.
Please note the high quality tail fin art.
Send several hundred of them at every refinery in Russia, and then start on airfields, electrical substations, and train control boxes.
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id498897343?i=1000650769923
The podcasts is with the author of the book, about the book. The book is about a somewhat contrived scenario that results in a full nuclear exchange. Which is...wait for it...bad!
The following is pure speculation, and I have no knowledge of the authors motivations beside what she gives in the podcast. Knowingly or otherwise I think this book, and a lot of similar "oh isn't it all horrible stuff" is part of a Russian propaganda campaign to scare the West into giving him Ukraine. What absolutely nobody who is pushing this line will answer though, is what do we do when Putin demands Poland and the Baltics while Xi launches an invasion of Taiwan? Because if shaking the magical nuclear stick works, why would they stop?
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Not sure if this was posted earlier or not. The details of the navies procurement fiascoes is certainly interesting in a train wreck kind of way. The really interesting bit though is that he spends the live five minutes of the video more or less begging for future procurement decisions to be tested in good and competitive simulations before you spend several tens of billions of dollars.
So can we have a modern game now? Pretty please? Land warfare or the Taiwan straight, I'm flexible.
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
This video clearly demonstrates the futility of trying to hide once it's clear they know where you are. Because wherever you go to hide, they'll know that's where you are. In the case of this video, these guys put themselves into a perfect place to die. They stood a much better chance of surviving if they kept moving. At least up to a point, because you can't keep moving forever. The presumption that you can is the underlying flaw of maneuver warfare.
Steve
The presumption of doing much of anything is that they don't have enough drones to kill us all. It usually seems to be a bad assumption. And since pretty much every tech trend seems to makes drones better faster than it makes drone defense better, this thing is going nowhere very fast. If one side could actually break that paradigm they could probably win a major operational level victory in a week, but the only thing I see evidence for is better drones, and artillery being directed by better drones, and mines being delivered by better drones, and mines that ARE better drones. Until there is actual proof to the contrary...
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3 hours ago, The_Capt said:
“mass precision beats everything”.
Oh there is no question about that. It is exactly what that mass consists of that is in question. To put it another way, how close to the FEBA can a dog sized robot survive, how close can soldier survive, how close can a manned vehicle survive, and so on. Because the answer has a a lot to to with what that mass needs to consists of.
Then there is the little problem that the answers to these questions might be changing so fast nobody can afford to keep up.
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1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:
In uni, we used to call these guys the 'Sandalistas'
Stealing that!
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27 minutes ago, zinz said:
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/03/the-pentagons-silicon-valley-problem-andrew-cockburn/
I think many here also ride the Ai hipe train. Might be an interesting read @The_Capt
This article was not exactly convincing. It detailed Pentagon procurement disasters going back decades. All but dismissed the way drones have utterly dominated the war in Ukraine, and did not even mention the vast U.S./NATO ISR complex and deep strike systems that represent hugely successful Pentagon programs. It is just an anti war screed written by someone stuck in the worst of 1970s this is all a racket propaganda.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
I can tell you from painful personal experience that you can be bleeping near crippled from long COVID while every test they can think to run comes back negative. On some level Havana Syndrome is same kind of the same thing.