dan/california

The Baba Yaga octocopters are just lightly modified agricultural drones. The Ukrainians have taken out entire battalions with them, cumulatively. Virtually all the FPV drones are the 21st century equivalent of a 32 Chevy hopped up to run moonshine, it can barely be called engineering. They have accounted for several motor rifle division worth of vehicles at this point. Whoever gets purpose built semi autonomous drones drones to the battlefield first in quantity is going to win this war. That is if all those drones do is make decently packaged, halfway thought out, versions of things somebody, somewhere, can already do. If they think of even one or two new tricks along the way....

Thanks!

Twitter is hating me more than usual, can you post the full text?

Sometimes that inspires people to find a bigger rock...

I think the las two post are now showing me different twitter posts than they were 20 minutes ago. I suspect Twitter is losing what is left of its "mind", and if somebodies post doesn't make sense, that might be why.

Russia is pushing propaganda and disinformation on every possible channel. Indeed I think the ritual suicide charges they keep doing on the actual battlefield have more to do with propaganda than any meaningful military goal.

Two things from ISW we haven't already discussed. I wonder how Putin feels about air defenses that are not controlled by the Kremlin?

Per Baneman..... Russian staff school forgot to mention this was supposed to be a joke. I do think Black Adder's prescription for the morale problem is dead on though, in the Russian context.

It gets back to the quality of the recruitment pool, or rather the lack there of. It isn't like the Russians are doing even a fifth of what a NATO military considers adequate training either.

I keep wondering what you have to do wrong to get assigned to drive one of these. I also find it hilarious that they make them drive around by themselves. "It will all be fine, we promise", also" don't get closer than one kilometer to any friendly unit".

I am not deeply familiar with The Diplomat, but this article seems well researched. They conclude that Siberia has significant untapped agricultural potential now, and that it could increase greatly with climate change.

There are approximately ten million people in the eastern third of Russia. The population of China, shrinking though it may be, is well over a billion. I don't think that is is a sustainable situation in the long term. Of course Russia has moved the long term even closer by preferentially mobilizing men from this part of Russia. The_Capt mentioned however many months ago that the level of pressure would depend on if and how much Global warming increased the areas agricultural potential. I need to go find the current best guess on that question.

Given that every attempt at a real attack seems to take thirty or forty percent casualties, if not more, the obvious answer would be about three. But that is probably to low, because they use tanks for things besides armored banzai charges. The casualty rate for low commitment shoot and scoot missions is probably quite a bit lower. Still, even if my numbers are off by quite bit the odds living to spend the money they may or may not actually be paying you seem rather low. At a minimum it seems worse than either the Eighth Air Force B-17 crew, or the German U-boat fleet, and both of those were horrible.

100% agree, and we actually need to export more gas to keep Europe supplied. And the more we export the less the Russians can charge, regardless of who they arfe selling to. The ban was a bad idea to start with, or brilliant way to get a bit of negotiating leverage the administration will be just as happy to give back.

Two things about the last video stand out to me. It looked like all the Russian vehicles were getting hit from the same side, and none of them had their turrets turned towards the threat. Am I looking at this right, or are the cuts in the video confusing me? If they are all getting hit from the same side before they can even turn their turrets? That implies either epically bad radio/SOP for the Russians, or whatever blitzed them had a very high rate of fire. Is it possible that the column got flanked by a couple of Ukrainian tanks, and these were main gun hits? Were they seen coming so far in advance that at least three ATGM systems were set up for the perfect ambush? I have looked at a truly excessive amount of video of Russian stuff blowing up, and this looked different to me.

This sounds more like the pre GPS cruise missile guidance systems than true AI. Although there could be another layer to the software obviously. Either way it is fantastic they can't be diverted by GPS jamming.

Related question on what Iran can and can't help the Russians with, do they make their own artillery barrels? Do they have a meaningful number in stock? Like wise the North Koreans, they have sent quite a bit of ammunition, have they sent any barrels or complete guns? Could they?

Every week matters at this point, when it is a race between Russian Shaheed production, and Ukrainian SAM procurement. Related question, how much light aircraft traffic is there in Russia normally? How big of an inconvenience would it impose on the Russian regime and economy if they had to ban all non-military light aircraft, just to simplify the threat picture?

Other possible topics to argue about...

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.

!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.

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!