dan/california

The man needs to have his inevitable window incident sooner, rather than later.

The only thing that will prevent trump and Biden from being the nominees, and the names on the ballot in November, is their own health. So look at whatever actuarial table you prefer, and those are the odds. I do mean health though, if either one had a fall that required major orthopedic surgery or some similar event I think he would be toast instantly. Going to be a fun year. Indeed Hailey may limp campaign along for months longer than she otherwise would simply hoping to get lucky.Going to be a fun year. Their are two extra twists, if either party replaced their current de-facto nominee the odds of that party winning go UP, assuming they have the sense to pick someone inoffensively competent like a swing state governor who doesn't make enemies for fun. Nikki haley mets that qualification in my opinion, btw. The second twist is that if this happened on the the Republican side that persons position on Ukraine would be a total crapshoot.

You can't mass for a mass attack, it is more or less suicidal.

I wouldn't say it is good news, but it is totally expected. Desantis has run one of the worst campaigns in U.S. political history. He may in fact set a new record for the mount of money spent per vote received. Just to be clear the article above is from last MAY... Desantis is just not a good candidate, and the crater he just made has been a clear inevitability for most of a year.

Now I have a border line silly question, but it is good to ask one of those occasionally. Would it be possible hang a Patriot PAC-2 missile on an F-16? I mean the Russians managed to fire and Iskander from a Mig-31. I realize it would an ENORMOUS integration project, but if PAC-2 missies could be fired from 40,000 feet and just below mach-1 it would add at last a 100km to their range wouldn't it?

So clearly Russian aviation is becoming somewhat more competent in its employment, and this is a bad thing. My question, for those who know more about air to air combat than i do, Is can F-16s, with the very longest range radar guided missiles, meaningfully push back at the Russian planes doing these missions. Or is the overlapping of the range of various Russian SAM systems, the distance from witch the glide bombs can be launched, and Russian air to air missiles such that really pushing them back isn't feasible at acceptable risk.

Yes it is, and a workable way of knocking them down on the scale required seems to nowhere close.

This is by far the most comprehensible article I have read about new chemistries for explosives, and solid fuel propellants. Edit: I suspect the materials science work Google has been cranking out will move this field right along.

There was point in the last two decades where a militarized version of this with a remote turret woulds have made a lot of sense. I think the advances in drones and NLOS ATGM systems have moved well past it now though. It is far better to launch things straight up, from another ten kilometers back.

And there ought to be a whole team of NATO observers in that command post learning how it actually works.

The army is still thrashing around looking for an APS that justifies its price tag and logistical burden. Brilliant! Allow me to rephrase, assuming it can do what I laid out above, ten seconds per target, a thousand shots before the whatever the critical piece is burns out, and ten thousand dollars per shot. Allow me to also stipulate fifty million per turret, and you need two per ship. That would still be a system worth buying, because with something that works at least that well large warships are just not going to be a thing. The Houthi's have been firing between five and twenty five drones/missiles at a time. The Navy seems to be able to deal with that with existing systems, albeit expensively. Sometime very soon, someone, somewhere is going to launch two hundred of the bleeping things, and at that point current ships missile magazines simply are not big enough. So there really are two choices, figure out a drone defense that can handle truly large scale attacks, or get used to a world where no surface warship is much bigger than a rigid inflatable outboard. I have mostly come to agree with The_Capt that just isn't a solvable problem for tanks/ifvs. I think armies can adapt to that world. Just given the realities operating in the open ocean, it much less clear to me that navies can adapt to an all small platform world.

I think it sort of got lost in the reporting about the less successful Strike in St Petersburg. This points out both the bad job a lot of media is doing on Ukraine now, and the importance of sheer volume in a drone strike campaign. Launching attacks alike this at five refineries or military important factories every day, or even every week, and properly destroying one of them is still a huge success for Ukraine. Doubly so since it makes Russia put air defenses nearly everywhere west of the Urals. I am sure you are correct about the accounting, and being a naval system mostly, lets call it a ship sized system. But lets take a reasonable worst case. If it is actually 10,000 dollars a shot, but can knock down a drone every ten seconds, I am just guessing on the numbers fwiw, it would still be a massive bargain compared to the million dollars missiles we are shooting at Houthi drones this week. That would be cheap enough that defending against a low level but long term harassment campaign was doable. Even if some piece of the system burns out after a thousand shots, that is a lot of "ammunition" compared the at most a couple of hundred missiles in vertical launch cells that is standard now. Edit:Crossposted with The_Vulture. I don't think rational military planning is the metric here. It is a question about Kim's state of mind. I also don't completely rule out that the Russians gave North Korea some critical missing technology for their missiles as payment for all that ammunition. So maybe Kim thinks his missies are far more capable that they were two years ago.

They are ALREADY at the front. I guess they get to lead the next storm Z assault.

Kristof is pretty much an out and out peacenik. At the very least his attitude is extremely dovish, he just issued what amounts to a hair on fire war warning about North Korea doing something absolutely crazy. Anybody else seeing weirder noises than usual from the hermit kingdom?

Much better footage of the the Bradley encounter

The one thing you have to remember about Prig is that he was not promising peace and bread, he was promising to fight harder and more competently. This might have limited his revolutionary appeal. More generally I think if Russia really has a bottom up political convulsion it will be very much like the Arab Spring. A random spark in a random place, except the fire department manages to pour gasoline on it instead of water.

And Russian workforce demographics were awful before Putin's three day SMO turned into an endless meat grinder. The only question about the war is what has done more damage? The actual casualties, or the mass flight of and entire generation of technically competent people who had the skills and resources to leave.

And then all that water is going to freeze into a glacier that will be there until May...

Pretty much everything the Russians built after 1970 has that autoloading carousel hanging under the turret. That seems to pretty much make all of them bombs on treads if something penetrates in the general direction of the center of mass of the vehicle. Hitting the back of the turret in a dive is pretty much a bullseye in that regard.

And if that is true and now they are down one of ~six functional AWACS, and an IL22 besides, the Russian choices start to get really unpleasant.