dan/california

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.

I wonder if they are more scared of Ukraines air defenses, or their own...

The known unknowns, and a reminder that their are unknown ones as well.

As useful as FPVs are, it always good to have a few more tools in the box. Furthermore we aren't talking about any new tech. My Iphone has a compass, an inclinometer, and a GPS. The rest of it is just packaging and software. Even with a nice high durability and waterproof case we are talking about a few hundred dollars if ordered by the tens of thousands.

They need a universal system for everything from 120mm mortars on down. Specify a mounting rail that will go on everything, and just have a glorified cell phone with a menu that you can pick what you just stuck it on, and the comm protocols to communicate with a drone. We have seen some videos of Bradleys appearing to do drone corrected indirect fire with devastating results, even though I am pretty sure that was voice only. The gunner in the Bradley ought to be getting video directly from the drone with a cursor showing where the rounds are going to impact. And course it would work the same way with a UGV.

This is a pure guess, but I strongly suspect this is a counter attack on a Russian unit that managed to make it through the main defensive belt. The CV90 was driving like it was completely unworried about mines, or long rage fires, and clearly the Ukrainians wanted that batch of Russians gone soonest. The book is mostly OK, but he posits more technological change than I think is possible by the date he sets the war. Some of the stuff he speculates about we are not going to see until 2040 or later, and nobody can accuse me of being a pessimist on technological progress. The way the Russians are recruiting in European russia amounts to ethnic cleansing, I believe this is a matter of deliberate policy There is just no reason anymore for anything bigger than a 40mm grenade to be delivered by direct fire. UGVs with a mix of machine guns, 25mm auto cannon, and 40mm grenade launchers can be backed up by whatever kind of PGM it is most economical to bring to bear. If I may push one of my favorite pet ideas, even 40mm grenade launchers should be set up for accurate drone directed indirect fire. I am at the point if bribing Steve to put that in the next modern game just to prove my point.