dan/california

Except for the countries and organizations that just don't care. The potential for terror attacks is LARGE.

Oh they are working on that bit, like they mean it...

Above is one of the clearer examples from WW2, bad weather and bad choices had bad results, the war went on. The bombers came back the next day with a better visibility and a better plan. The breakout that resulted pretty much went all the way to Rhine. In the current conflict at least 5%, and perhaps a multiple of that, of the Russian Air Force's casualties have been friendly fire. I am sure they aren't happy about it, but they haven't had the sense to quit and go home, yet at least. Even the Ukrainians have lost a few planes to friendly fire. Brave men get in the cockpit every day and go out again anyway.

First of all there are no truly reliable methods of ensuring civilian safety in an active combat zone, there never have been. There are armies and nations that try to be discriminate, and armies and nations that don't bother. But perfection in a peer to peer shooting war where both sides are jamming and obscuring everything they possibly can, in any way they can think of is unattainable. The expression that there is no such thing as friendly artillery is about as old as anything that deserves to be called artillery. The thing we aren't talking about enough is that there are degrees of jamming, and degrees of control. A live video going one way, and second by second flight commands going the other are by far the situation with the highest requirements for consistency and fidelity. As soon as anything less than that is required all sorts of intermittent communications options become viable. A the very simplest level you send out a first wave of drones to engage the very front line of enemy positions. You simply tell that first wave to self destruct or take whatever its current best target is, or simply hit a set of coordinates that was thought to be relevant at a specified time. So now, even in a 100% jamming environment your other forces are clear to proceed to their first phase line. At the next level up you have expendable transmitters that can broadcast a short but very high power signal to tell your drones to change kill boxes, and can even have a safety that any drone that doesn't receive a signal by the time specified crashes /self destructs. And the variations go on forever, but all of them are vastly more tolerant of reduced bandwidth than needing full time video one way, and full time control signals the other.

Clearly that is where things are going to go. But given how few cases of drones killing other drones we have seen it is clearly a hard problem. If was any an easy problem their would thousands of videos of succesful engagements, instead of a handful. It may be the new version of the bomber will always get through.

Interesting video of a guy trying to break the drone speed record. It can be long and slow in places, so I will summarize. A moderately competent two person father and son team with a nice garage shop build a drone that can go 500KPH. They have about .000000001 percent of the resources of Lockheed-Martin. This is exhibit A of we haven't seen anything yet, and BTW helicopters are OVER.

"Modern" attack helicopters are completely obsolete. People have just spent so much money on them over the years that don't want to admit it just yet. Between cheap, expendable, and VERY soon autonomous drones, and things like the later models the Israeli spike missile that have a ~40km range, it makes zero sense to invest in expensive helicopters. At least the U.S. canceled the program for a next generation model. The Russians got good use out the Ka-52s last year because of all the things NATO would bring to this fight that Ukraine didn't have. Good airborne radar at the right range is just one of MANY of those capabilities. They were also using the helicopters because they were they only thing in inventory that could fire their very best long range ATGM. I don't think anyone else is going to make that mistake again for a while. Whatever you want to say about the helicopter it is a very good missile. Ukarine is lucky tey don't more of them on more platforms. These are smart motivated people, but at the same time this third year engineering student stuff. They are throwing large amounts of semiskilled labor at the problem to get thee production they need. For Ukraine, at this moment, this necessary and appropriate. So a lot of discussion about drone costs. A new Iphone costs less than $2000, by even the most pessimistic assumptions. It has an approximate infinity of processing power, and three great cameras. There is just no reason for the brains of a drone to ever cost more than that. so even if all the other bits, including a nice tandem/EFP warhead come out to $5000, you still have a DELUXE FPV drone for $7000. Except it won't be FPV, all the operator will have to do is confirm the coordinates of the kill box, and pull the safety on the warhead. The Pentagon needs to invest in the drone equivalent of a Gigafactory to make them by the tens and tens of thousands. And they need to have a come to Jesus conversation with the defense industry about the way they get paid. We can afford to overpay somewhat for hardware engineering and development that works. Getting overcharged on a per piece basis is just not viable anymore.

Russia managed to jam Starlink at the schwerpunkt of their attack in border regions of Kharkiv Oblast. That is significant in and of itself since it is the first time they have managed that. I find it even more interesting though that they revealed the capability, and only took a few kilometers of border area. You want to get more than a medium sized propaganda win when you roll out a zero day exploit like that one.

If this is true, and Ukrainian gunners are back to the volume of fire they actually need? It presents at least the possibility of a couple of new factors involved in the Kharkiv push by Russia. Either they made the whole plan assuming their minions in Congress would actually be able to keep the aid blocked? Or could have been a last throw of the dice before trainloads of new ammo worked there way through the supply system. Perhaps with a force/plan that they really wanted to let wait for six more weeks.

It is the new combined arms.

The time tested method is convincing them they will die if they stay.

Russia has knocked down a lot of dominoes across the Sahel by being willing to apply a moderate amount of forces and resources absolutely ruthlessly.

The Russians are as eager as ever to remind us all that surrender is not an option.

Not sure this a picture of the whole situation, but it certainly isn't bad news.

The first question is did what did the Ukrainians have on the other side of that line. It is at least possible that Ukraine had thinned their forces in this area too much. Depending on how much of a problem it is to not be able to fire NATO ordinance into Russia proper, and the force levels available? They may have known for weeks they were going to lose some ground here? It was simply the best of a bad set of choices. While Ukraine losing some border areas isn't great, the real question as always is can Russia achieve anything with this minor success besides filling up military cemeteries all over Russia.

If only someone with an excellent record of building military sims would put out one focused on the current war? Edit: If all you did was give it only to the Ukrainian military it be a significant contribution to their war effort. Pixeltruppen dying to demonstrate an idea is awful hurts a lot less than real people.

A not insignificant part of the problem is that we are rampming up production at about one quarter the rate we ought to be. In addition to actually restricting our options, it makes us looks unserious, which encourages Putin to stay the course. All of the off ramps seem to involve a state funeral for a certain someone, and that event has yet to be scheduled.

The above is true, but it is also true that the less you have to make up from whole cloth the more effective it is. So the good news is that he was mostly just a guy that randomly went crazy as he got old. The bad news is that assassinations in what used to be the Hapsburg Empire have a rather poor track record for setting off powder kegs.

If, big if, this was a drone? Someone has figured that train hunting AI.

We have spent the last two years learning that can be a very good problem to have.

A LOT obviously, but from where we started there really wasn't any other choice. It is the Chinese who really lose here, it has cost them THEIR chance to catch us flat footed and sound asleep.

They way to make a statement would be giving the Ukrainians permission to drop about twenty ATACMs on Taganrog airbase. That would force the Russians to respect the possibility everywhere else, in addition to whatever damage it did. This is the good news. and this This might be the bad news. We still are not doing a great job of acting like their is a war on.

Another long serving figure out at the Russian MOD.

Ukrainian morale and recruitment are bad because no one wants to sign up for a war they suspect their side might be losing. The Ukrainians feel that way in large part because the MAGAT faction in the U.S. managed to screw up the aid flow for months. What is needed now is strong enough statement of western support to convince the Ukrainians we are not just stringing them along. And in return the Ukrainians need to mobilize several hundred thousand people. The fastest way convince the Ukrainians we mean it is to put people on the ground in the support roles that takes a decades training to be good at. Contract/NATO aircraft maintainers are the most obvious case but there are a lot of similar technical jobs that the crash six week course just doesn't work for. If we really want to make a splash we need to go from strongly discouraging former F-16 pilots from volunteering for Ukraine, to strongly encouraging it. Everybody assumed that the the Russians would be the tiniest bit rational about throwing good money and lives after bad. We were wrong, we all need to take a deep breath and stay in the fight.

I can envision a U.S. version of the Tugunska on a Bradley chassis with a gun, SAMs, and that new laser widget they say might, maybe work. But The_Capt is right, they would come at a minimum of fifteen million dollars each, there would never be even ten percent of the number needed, and it still doesn't solve for mines and actual artillery. It would of course be THE priority target for said artillery. Big, expensive, and few is over. I freely acknowledge i didn't always think that, but the evidence is in. If it can't knock down anything short of an incoming Iskander, it needs to cheap, small, and able to hide.