dan/california

Either someone has made a real tech breakthrough, which is not impossible, or someone has found a pet congresscritter to slip something in the budget for there brother in law. Publicly known rail gun tech is not ready for this. I did see something about the Japanese doing a CIWS system with a 40mm rail gun, but 155? And if it works there no reason not to shoot it at land targets... Edit: I think it is a misleading tweet, the Army is using some combination of a very high energy propellant, and the the emerging ram jet shell technology to boost the PROJECTILE developed for the navy rail gun program. They haven't lost their minds and tried to put an actual rail gun on wheels.

Which is great right up until the the 21st century equivalent of Gavrilo Princep tips the world into the crapper, and all the bills come due at once.

It needs to be made explicit that if the Russians start hitting dams, Ukraine gets cruise missies in quantity, and permission to hit any LOAC legal target in Russia with them.

Saractosaurus is EXTREMELY negative on the Ukrainian air defense situation, and the supply of western missiles in particular.

Whatever they are actually saying, they seem to implying that they will basically provide air defense for the westernmost parts of Ukraine. This would obviously have the effect of freeing up a lot of Ukrainian systems for use elsewhere. Edit: Maybe, i don't think this is a done deal.

The other thing the Russians wanted, but did not get, was to get in 152mm range of Kharkiv. That would have allowed them to make life unlivable there far more cheaply.

THIS! Edit: I will point out that being proven out in Ukraine has filled the order books for Patriot, NASSMS, Iris-T, Javelin, and HIMARS for the next hundred years.

And now we have the real point of disagreement...

You would get more data out of Ukraine in a month than currently exists in total. This really is a test for the military industrial complex. If they want to spend a the better part of a trillion this way, they need to put their chips on the table right now. Not spend the next decade whining that if Ukraine had had this stuff they would have done better.

If the pro armor/APS crowd is so convinced that current APS is effective then all it has to do to prove the point is ship a couple of brigades worth of equipped vehicles to Ukraine. While not cheap, this actually makes sense from a real world testing standpoint, before we bet the future of NATO land forces on the concept. If the vehicles so equipped wash the Russian blood off of their tracks in the Sea of Azov, well we have an answer, now don't we? Or at least some real data.

Just to look at a different aspect of the war for a moment, these Russian casualty figures are beyond nuts. Can Putin really keep feeding the meat grinder at this insane rate? Or does the Russian Army have a breaking point? I mean we are talking over a thousand casualties per square kilometer here.

And Ukraines drone supply is good enough that they send a second one to dispatch people that are already obviously wounded. Because apparently zinc coffins are the only way to reason with the Russians. By the way what is world price of zinc doing....?

So gen 1 of a whole sky scan is already out there. My guess is that it will not be the last. I would love to know the power, weight requirements, and field of view of the F-35 system, but I suspect all of that is classified. It would be an ideal sensor package for a stealthy drone.

Yes, but as I understand it is is mostly cued onto a target by radar, as opposed to searching the whole sky itself. A whole suite of technological improvements may be reaching the point where infrared search and track rates its own widebody jet platform. That is, if those platforms are still survivable at all. If I was the crew of the one working the Mariupol station I would have a pretty permanent negative outlook on my life expectancy. Russia doesn't have many of them left, and getting one or two more of them would have real strategic implications for the whole war. Budanov, and the entire Ukrainian airforce are quite aware of this fact.

The drain pipe drone video, smart Russians would go home.

=

Line of sight and the curvature of the earth.

Thermal imaging systems especially, jet engines have all the same big, hot, signature problems that AFVs do times ten, if not a hundred. Someone is is going to figure out how to find that signal. The other potential game breaker is whether AWACS and similar are survivable. We just put a SM-6 on a fighter plane. The Russians and the Chinese are certainly trying to do the same thing with an S400-S500 class SAM. Can we keep an AWACs alive when an entire squadron fires a S-400s from 250 miles out? Keep in mind that lifting that same missile to 50,000 feet and firing it from a straight and level flight profile is something an unmanned platform can almost certainly do. Send the Straight at the AWACs until they nearly out of fuel, or about to get hit, and then volley the actual missiles. Ten unmanned aircraft, and ten missies is a pretty good trade for an AWACS.

On one level the Olympics is an irrelevant distraction from more or less everything. And the Chinese are cheating even harder than Russians. At same time the fact that, with the Olympics being held in Paris this year, that some Russians still have jobs with IOC, and other Russians will be able to attend the games, is a big part of why Putin can lie to himself. I still go back to the visa ban issue, it has gotten harder for Russians to travel, but not nearly hard enough.

I wonder if the Russian MOD is even capable of finding most of the Indians it has shoved in the meat grinder at this point? Once you reach the point of sending guys back to the front on crutches suspect little distinctions like nationality are getting lost in the fog. I guess it does mean Russian recruitment efforts in India will be dialed way back.

Taking a risk of broadening the war before the U.S. election seems less than bright, even by Russian standards.

If there is a better way for the bad guys to clarify peoples thinking before the NATO summit, I can't figure out what it would be.

Well let me at least make an attempt. This missile is the way to knock back the glide bomb problem. It is the only even vaguely viable way of doing that I have seen, and Ukraine needs it YESTERDAY.

Droned in an outhouse, a metaphor for the entire "SMO".

Your regular reminder that mines are not a solved problem either.