dan/california

Total honesty, I didn't realize it was that old. And it ties into the current mess in the U.S..

From Financial Times

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/battleground/id1617276298?i=1000644425258 This hour plus view of the Italian campaign is so good I am going to have to fire up the Italian game.

YES!

This is also his audition to be Trump's Vice President...

Other than that Mr Speaker, how was the play.

Sadly that rabbit hole is currently the most important front in the Ukraine War. That is both wrong and tragic.

This must have been actively coordinated with Trump's efforts to sink the Ukraine aid bill.

The risk calculation is very different when your other choice is bleeding to death in a muddy trench.

They are in fact VERY stupid. This war has lasted 23 months longer than they thought it would. Unfortunately Putin's grip on power is still so tight is doesn't matter, and somewhere between 500 and 1500 mobiks feed themselves to the meat grinder every day. Unfortunately the Ukrainians are bleeding too, we a have to keep getting them enough help for as long as it takes to run out of something the Russian army can't stay in the field without.

Some intern at at least counts and categorizes them. Supposedly the pay quite a bit of attention to number of letters they get on a topic. If you are motivated enough to write them, you are motivated enough to vote. Billindc might have a better answer.

If your in the U.S. this is the moment to write your Senators and Congressperson AGAIN!

Apologies if this was already posted, I missed it if it was.

Given the cost, the Pentagon would be the perfect customer. Apple might want to quietly create a defense subsidiary.

This is the only must pass bill this year, aside from the actual budget. I would even forgive the Dems for protecting Johnson until November if it got this thru. It isn't like anything else more significant than naming a post office is going to pass regardless.

They literally only need ~3 Republicans to go all in on supporting this, and threaten to vacate the chair and vote in Jeffries. Not saying that will happen but if any Republicans do it I hereby promise to donate to their campaigns, and buy their books.

It turns out wiper fluid is a very important item in a war zone if you are lucky enough to still have a windshield. And drones are just better at moving targets, they are probably even better that really expensive gun launched PGMs most of the time, and cost only a tiny fraction. I grant that ability to simply suppress a whole tree line isn't nothing, but with the ever rising counter battery threat that is a lot of rounds to stand and fire. The_Capt also mentioned that FPV drones were better because they could be aimed at the most vulnerable spots. Given the number of FPV drones that seem to to do the last hundred yards/meters on prayer I am less than sure about this factor. And a slightly better autonomous drone that just fired an explosively formed projectile straight down at the center of mass as viewed from the top would seem to cover most of the bases. RPG warheads aren't used because they are perfect, merely because they are around.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-3-2024 Perhaps there are things stirring below the frozen surface of Russian politics.

Carrying a message from Trump perhaps?

All complaints about pathing in the game will be refrred to this video forevermore.

the problem with artillery ammunition, and barrels, is that they have to withstand absurdly high stress. Above is a very technical article from decades ago proving that a slightly cheaper grade of steel was not going to work. Virtually nothing in the civilian economy operates at the same kind of stress levels. So there is exactly as much capacity out there as the government has been willing to pay for. The single biggest lesson of this war is that we weren't paying for even a fraction of enough. What makes this much worse is that production machinery, and the machines to make the production machinery are just as specialized, and the capacity for all of it has withered with three plus decades of very low demand. Resurrecting all of that is requires serious engineering AFTER we get of our rear ends in gear and write the checks, and contracts to pay for it. We have done an absolutely crap job of doing that in a coherent way, that admits this problem isn't going away next week. Rheinmetal and the various U.S. defense contractors need SIGNED CONTRACTS to even get started. Two years in many of those contracts STILL aren't signed. It is a an epic case study in refusing to admit there is a war on. There is real engineering being done on dragging whole process from 1950s tech up to something modern, but please note the 2025 delivery date for the first new model shells. Drones are pretty much the polar opposite in terms of the difficulty of manufacturing. Every single piece that goes into them is common civilian tech. The actual warheads are usually RPG rounds simply because there are warehouses full of them around. There is nothing particularly complicated about designing warhead for drone use that would be lighter, cheaper and more effective. Because drones do not undergo the enormous stresses that being fired even from a RPG, much less a 155mm artillery barrel impose. Any thin wall tubing would work just fine. Soda cans would probably work just fine. Someone just has to decide to order five million of the bleeping things and it ought to be possible to put together a factory in six months that can make a thousand of them an hour with out ever being touched by a human hand. Somebody just has to make a decision and write a contract. The Ukrainians seem to have been trying to get this underway, but nobody else is trying nearly hard enough. In regard to the Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil infrastructure, it is has been known since 1945 that attacking oil infrastructure is most effective method of conducting a strategic bombing campaign. Refineries, and chemical factories, are the linchpin of the modern world. They are big, flammable, impossible to hide, and there are not that many of them. Ukraine should focus on them almost exclusively. The strike someone mentioned on a critical factory for Lancet production is the exception that proves the rule.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-february-2-2024 Open-source investigations indicate that Russian forces are benefitting from Ukraine’s ammunition shortage and inability to conduct sufficient counterbattery warfare. Ukraine-based open-source organization Frontelligence Insight stated on February 1 that Russian forces previously established stationary artillery firing positions for long periods of time from late 2022 to early 2023 when ammunition shortages limited Ukrainian counterbattery warfare capabilities.[20] Frontelligence stated that Russian forces began to concentrate their artillery in a similar way in January 2024, suggesting that Ukrainian forces are again running low on artillery ammunition. Frontelligence stated that Ukrainian forces can sometimes strike Russian artillery but overall lack adequate ammunition for effective counterbattery fire. Frontelligence stated that the lack of Ukrainian counterbattery fire allows Russian artillery to largely destroy settlements, making it nearly impossible for Ukrainian forces to defend the settlements. Frontelligence stated that many of Ukraine’s FPV drones lack the range to strike the numerous Russian artillery pieces deployed 15 to 24 kilometers from the frontline.

Yes, and even over a decade ago things like this happened... Nobody watns to be the goat in a military version of that disaster. The problem at the moment is figuring out whether your force is more at risk due to moving to slowly to hand stuff over to AI, or to quickly. The seems to be ever more from being wrong in either direction.

You would be amazed at how difficult it is to do this.