dan/california

Their might a vote on Ukraine funding tomorrow. This is the day to write your Congressperson if you are in the U.S..

What Ukraine SHOULD do is simply declare all of Russian airspacfe within a thousand kilometers of the Ukrainian border a war zone, and say if it moves, it dies. I will point out there is not a single civilian plane moving over Ukraine, to the best of my knowledge, why should Russia be any different? Locomotives ought to be the single easiest thing to train an autonomous drone to hit. They are big, they run in fixed tracks, they have enormous, and hard to disguise signatures in infrared, and on five other types of detector. This strikes me as a great application for an EFP that fires straight down, from a drone flying horizontally. That copper lance straight through the boiler, or a diesel would be day ruining. Kind shocked both sides haven't had this going already. Ukraine should start hitting locomotive repair facilities, too. Although I would keep shooting at oil refineries until there weren't any left as the single highest priority target for simpler drones. That is where a few ~20kg charges get the single biggest bang for the buck.

Now THAT is a rumor! And hopefully a true one.

Two years in everybody is tired, and showing it one way or another.

Read Dmitri every day!

Putin is now cracking down so hard it is illegal, and dangerous, to report that there is a crackdown underway.

We have been trolled successfully...

They have shot down enough planes lately to make the radar warning receiver lighting up an extremely credible threat. When they stop responding to the radar, push a high grade SAM forward.

Russia at the very least encouraged Hamas, and has benefited greatly from the distraction. Does anybody think Putin wouldn't encourage the North Koreans, with whom he has a much closer relationship? Although i guess it is worth pondering if the Russian sanctions busting might reduce pressure on Kim's regime in a way that makes it less likely to gamble. It still bears watching.

Read Dmitri EVERY DAY!

Have to second this, results have not yet been determined, but Syrsky is giving every possible indication that he has the right idea. Alison's post above has helped me clarify the answer I was trying to write to JonS. The the reason that totalitarianism must be opposed even more resolutely, and even if means running risk of a wider war, is that totalitarians are getting better at being totalitarian. Technology has flipped from enabling internal opposition to making it possible to crush it utterly at a much lower cost. If Ukraine falls, it may two or three hundred years before it can break free again, if there is even anything left. Expecting these awful regimes to fail due to their internal contradictions may be more than we can hope for. The West's choice is to fight, or lose, I don't think trying to ignore the problem is going to work.

More of the the Russians are scary and unstoppable propaganda. I really do wonder how many of these people know what they are doing, and how many are just clueless?

Seems like it ought to be worth a whole file box of federal indictments.

Given the ever increasing efficiency of totalitarian repression, I have serious doubts about rolling back any gains Xi and Send several hundred of them at every refinery in Russia, and then start on airfields, electrical substations, and train control boxes.

https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Scenario-Annie-Jacobsen-ebook/dp/B0CBGWMFSN/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YWUVD4QVTI8Z&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Zr6o1rRmHleDimx5fEmVk5oq7ffMqWdcBxCl2KHY4pcJoJVAwq_Xg80DkdJ8QH0WvGwk0FP63u0ywzp_1EZSZYdsfhntyypeXOfdsU2zH1wQumgX9uU6eKPCjKVoef_sXXyYeB75e4Pkk7xFWFJBnGgjbC762G4APfNHnM1W6YpyMaYJx-Cbht8rceQwWNZXGCBTlGd0oMfVEBC_EXz4TG8t4zacQAARPS8uT9bZeXQ.-VSBCq10hQYc9tAYO60dkV4kkN2Bm4wUK-LTQPFSo4s&dib_tag=se&keywords=annie+jacobsen&qid=1711660983&s=digital-text&sprefix=annie+%2Cdigital-text%2C142&sr=1-1 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lawfare-podcast/id498897343?i=1000650769923 The podcasts is with the author of the book, about the book. The book is about a somewhat contrived scenario that results in a full nuclear exchange. Which is...wait for it...bad! The following is pure speculation, and I have no knowledge of the authors motivations beside what she gives in the podcast. Knowingly or otherwise I think this book, and a lot of similar "oh isn't it all horrible stuff" is part of a Russian propaganda campaign to scare the West into giving him Ukraine. What absolutely nobody who is pushing this line will answer though, is what do we do when Putin demands Poland and the Baltics while Xi launches an invasion of Taiwan? Because if shaking the magical nuclear stick works, why would they stop?

Not sure if this was posted earlier or not. The details of the navies procurement fiascoes is certainly interesting in a train wreck kind of way. The really interesting bit though is that he spends the live five minutes of the video more or less begging for future procurement decisions to be tested in good and competitive simulations before you spend several tens of billions of dollars. So can we have a modern game now? Pretty please? Land warfare or the Taiwan straight, I'm flexible.

The presumption of doing much of anything is that they don't have enough drones to kill us all. It usually seems to be a bad assumption. And since pretty much every tech trend seems to makes drones better faster than it makes drone defense better, this thing is going nowhere very fast. If one side could actually break that paradigm they could probably win a major operational level victory in a week, but the only thing I see evidence for is better drones, and artillery being directed by better drones, and mines being delivered by better drones, and mines that ARE better drones. Until there is actual proof to the contrary...

Oh there is no question about that. It is exactly what that mass consists of that is in question. To put it another way, how close to the FEBA can a dog sized robot survive, how close can soldier survive, how close can a manned vehicle survive, and so on. Because the answer has a a lot to to with what that mass needs to consists of. Then there is the little problem that the answers to these questions might be changing so fast nobody can afford to keep up.

Stealing that!

This article was not exactly convincing. It detailed Pentagon procurement disasters going back decades. All but dismissed the way drones have utterly dominated the war in Ukraine, and did not even mention the vast U.S./NATO ISR complex and deep strike systems that represent hugely successful Pentagon programs. It is just an anti war screed written by someone stuck in the worst of 1970s this is all a racket propaganda.

Lead paragraph of a longer piece.

We are flying blind without information about how this is being received in the Tajik community and broader Central Asian community. Twitter seems to hate me more by the day, has Kamil Galeev checked in on this? I seem to recall he is Tajik, albeit not exactly typical.

But in Beirut, and even Chechnya, the Russians only had one goal, to pacify their problems with the situation. They absolutely did not care about how much collateral damage they did, AT ALL. They have a different problem now with the economic dependence on Central Asian labor that their economy has developed. The war in Ukraine of course has made this dependence much worse. Probably the Russians usual brutalist approach can put the lid back on, but it is not a guarantee. Smoking accidents in unfortunate places have already had a real effect on the Russian war effort in Ukraine, a whole new source of such problems could matter.

Just trying to step back and understand the problem a little bit, Tajik language is very closely related to both Dari and Persian. These languages have been relevant to the Western intelligence community for a while now. That is probably why the U.S. seems to be at least as aware of what is happening in Russia as the FSB is. That said, what are the publicly available Tajik language sources we ought to at least be aware of? Are there Tajik Telegram accounts with some history being reality adjacent? How have those accounts responded to this whole thing so far? I mean press freedom in Tajikistan is not even a concept, so all that is going going to give you is the government line. I keep coming back to big intelligence mistake at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. We had clearly penetrated the Russians communications more or less completely, but we believed the Russians own assessment of how the war was going to go. At least until the Russian army got stuck in around Kyiv, and then they and we, realized that what it was stuck into was meat grinder. I assume we still have pretty good insight into the Russian assessment of this whole thing, the private assessment, not the the propaganda BS, but do we understand how good that assessment is? It turned to matter quite a lot the last time the Russians got high on their own supply, are they about to repeat the mistake?