dan/california

Putin has zealously pursued a strategy of not allowing anyone to get to his right, and attack him from that side. I would argue that has been his play since 2/24/2022, if not well before. Among other things that is the only conceivable reason he turned down the rather good offer Zelensky made him March 2022. His ever more obvious problem is that this leaves ~80% of the country to his left stewing in the ever greater dissatisfaction and misery that Putin's disastrous, ruinous, and lost war is inflicting on them. Even with a totalitarian system that makes Orwell look like an optimist that might matter eventually.

There is a LOT of other stuff at the same site.

If war really is imminent in the Taiwan Straight, these need to getting a plane to Taiwan while the paint is still drying. If the best intelligence is that the Chinese haven't lost their minds, they need to be on the way Ukraine with same sense of urgency. The army grinding through its gradual peacetime development process on this system reflects a lack of strategic imagination.

The clearest possible example in this war is helicopters being used to deliver unguided rockets by launching them on a upward trajectory from their own side of the FEBA with an aiming system that is approximate at best. You simply cannot convince me those rocket pods could not have been mounted on a heavy duty pickup truck and aimed with an iphone for a twentieth the total cost/effort, and a considerably high chance to hit what they are aiming at.

Macron is going to get a nastygram from the POTUS, albeit probably a private one. The Chinese are trying to square their rhetoric on Taiwan with their position on Ukraine. Their answer seems to imply the entire Western world should have gone to real wartime ammo production six months ago.

Actually, all you need to do is make the logistical footprint a big parts of the points system. When you get smacked with what you can support instead of one Abrams people would make different choices. And helicopters would just go away...

If only we had a good simulator to test some of these ideas in? Anybody have any leads?

Speaking of the worst humanity has to offer, Prigozhin is running his mouth more than the pickle. Which is saying something, since the pickle seems to practically be begging to demonstrate whether or not he can fly.

If those laser equipped Strykers work they should be rolling out of the factory and into a C-5 bound for Ukraine before the paint is dry.

Their delusion about BEING the Cuban government is a separate issue.

I have been saying for literally fifteen years, since CMSF came out, that a real indirect fire FCS on a 40mm grenade launcher is the greatest untapped improvement out there. At this point there is no technical reason you couldn't literally have the drone operator looking at a cursor showing where the grenades are going to go, and his own fire button. It would have wrapped up this little engagement with a fifth of the time and a fifth the ammunition. Yes there would be system integration hassles, yes there would need to be some safety checks by the crew manning the gun, but still....

Absolutely outstanding post. How much do you think Ukraine's ability to hammer command posts all the way to battalion level and higher has interfered with the staff level learning process you describe? Or was the Russian system just hopeless from the beginning?

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/defense-aerospace-report/id1228868129?i=1000610011817 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/geopolitics-decanted-by-silverado/id1614010500?i=1000609231727 Two excellent podcasts. One is essentially entirely about Ukraine, and the other one discusses some of it at length with a relevant member of congress. One question they inspired, but did not discuss. Would it be possible to mount an AMRAAM, or IRIS-T missile on an M-26 rocket motor much the way they did the SDB, and thereby vastly increase its range and engagement envelope?

This is the video I was thinking of, these guys give every possible indication that they would rather not drop that grenade. This an example of a defense contractor trying to build an armed military drone from scratch. I would definitely classify this as a "heavy" model. But it gives an idea of what is floating around out there in development. Interestingly it mentions collaboration with Turkish partners.

This , once armed these improvised FPV drones might be way too dangerous to bring back for recovery. Since they are improvised I am sure there are forty different ways a dozen different shell, rockets and grenades are fiddled with to ensure the go off when the drone hits its target, but I am guessing just about all of them make them less safe to handle. With drones you lose the ability to use the very high Gs of being launched/fired as the primary arming step for the fuse. Far better to send them after almost any Russian target, or even a suspected Russian target. Although both sides seem to employ the kamikaze drones with higher flying recon only drones when possible.

I realize we see a lot of tape of these drones because using them generates video more or less automatically, and nobody post their misses. Even so we are seeing a LOT of video of these things hitting Russian targets. The above implies persistent ISR and enough of the FPV drones to essentially smash everything that moves. Even if that is only in localized high priority areas...

The way we sometimes get three video feeds, and two detailed accounts of a single small unit action continues to blow my mind. After the war it will probably even be possible to assemble close to that level of detail fro BOTH side of the same action in many cases.

This package is essentially all munitions and logistics equipment. I quite like the line about precision aerial munitions.

How does troll taste?

Might I propose human sandpaper attacks? Their goal after all is to wear away the Ukrainian defenders, little by little. No one expects the sandpaper to survive the project.

It is true that a LOT of the real information about missiles, radars, sonars, long range drones, and, and.... is classified. But unless the U.S. Navy is in vastly better shape than the U.S. Army, the planners have underestimated the quantity of munitions required for a real war by a lot. Interestingly very little of that kind of information has shown up in the Air National Guard leak.

If I can be forgiven for misquoting the the current U.S. President, the choice is not between the U.S. led system, and some mythical utopia. It is between the U.S. led system and some combination of Xi Jinping thought and whatever you want to call the nationalist/mafia insanity running Russia. Europe could of course increase it defense spending to six percent of GDP for fifteen years, because that is what it would take to compensate for decades of barely spending one. Resolve the vast array of issues that must be addressed to prevent Hungary or similar from selling its veto to Putin, and take a number of other difficult steps to become the world power its economy and population would imply it should be. If Europe did ALL of those things it could take a third seat at the table with the U.S. and Russia/China, I regard them as a single block at this point. Frankly the U.S.would rather relived, although I am sure there would be the obligatory whining. Anyone care to give odds on this actually happening?

China thinks they have the right to rule from the Caspian Sea to Guam, and dictate to terms to everybody else. Between Xinjiang and the six months of Xi Jinping thought campaign it couldn't possibly be any clearer HOW they intend to rule everything they can take. The only question is will we let them?

The 1 in ten that does the killing. This guy may be edging into 1 n 100 territory. I am pretty sure he just broke an entire Russian platoon by himself. Right time, right, right place and a bleep load of luck always matter, of course. Perfectly stated.

You are making the same assumptions about Xi's rationality that everyone made about Putin's. That assumption is at least somewhat debatable. Xi might decide he could care less about the economic damage, and that he is determined to go down in the books as the guy who took Taiwan back. Apparently it is a disorder that aging absolute dictators get. The only real guarantee he won't do that is the U.S. having the ability to sink the Chinese navy in a weekend and maintain at least air denial over Taiwan.