dan/california

Among other things the casualties in these assaults appear to be so high they aren't even getting enough people back to learn much. Though of course their demise is on tape from at least three angles. I wonder if some of them aren't trying to hit mines intentionally since that maybe gives you a higher chance to have time to exit the vehicle. Depends on the vehicle obviously.

One of my biggest questions is do the Russians doing these assaults actually understand the odds? Or is the Russian army trying to shove fresh meat into the grinder before they understand what their chances actually are?

Video of Ukrainian FPV drones knocking out Russian artillery wholesale. Either the range of the FPV drones has gone up, or the continued deterioration in barrels and and ammo quality is forcing the Russians to get closer to the front lines. As Steve says we are rapidly approaching a battlefield where there are drones, and targets.

The full text of his announcement, I actually find the bit about the Kremlin allowing him to run as the perfect "tame" candidate to be somewhat persuasive. He is the perfect bogey man for Putin to wave around and scare everyone with the prospect of who is coming next.

The thing that doesn't get discussed enough is the exact mechanism that makes UAS so hard to target. Almost all previous generations of military radar use a doppler effect filter to render the mass of signals that comes back to the receiver intelligible. To rephrase, the radar ignores everything that is not going 200mph/300 kph. For 70 plus years after WW2 this was generally valid assumption. UAVS defeat this simple trick by being small and slow, the slow part is important. I assume everyone in the radar business is frantically trying to teach their systems to use some sort of AI based systems to use some other combination of signals. But as Steve has discussed at length, if the solution cost tens of millions, and you need thousands of them, you haven't actually solved the problem.

Dmitri is one of maybe three accounts on twitter that are consistently worth your time.

The fact we can't get the the bleeping contracts out there for enough 155 production nearly two edit; years, in is somewhere between pitiful, and actual self sabotage.

I should have specified that I was excluding actual battlefield results. I don't think videos have that much weight, there are just too many of them.

Just a reminder that BFC has as much power as anyone/thing outside the Senate Armed Services Committee to make that happen. The way the next games portrays modern and near future warfare is just about the biggest truly independent pressure factor out there. No pressure or anything...

Very interested in what our Polish friends have to say.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2023/09/07/army-approves-next-phase-for-augmented-reality-device/ U.S. has been doing development on a generally similar idea for years. No one seems to think it is ready for prime time. Given the vast failures of much of Russia's comms gear in this war, I would be REALLY surprised if this does much.

The spending bill is obviously a problem, buy I still think it will get done. There may be a messy compromise on what the U.S. is doing at the Mexican border, but we can fix that in a year or two if Biden wins reelection, and if he doesn't, well that doesn't really bear thinking about..... The oil sales quoted in the articles are an inevitable result of a decision at the beginning of the war to not try to truly cut off Russian oil sales. You can agree or disagree with that, but it is the decision everybody made. The fact that some of the Russian oil on the world market is squeezing into odd, and even embarrassing places is inevitable and not particularly remarkable. The two far more important numbers are the world price of oil, and the discount Russia has to give its buyers given the hassle of dealing the sanctions that do exists. Brent crude right now is ~$83 per barrel, considerably less than its peaks of the last couple of years. The price cut Russia has to give to move their oil is of course ot known exactly, but i would bet a lot of money it isn't zero.

Gorgeous, brilliant, and on the right side, really what is not to like?

This really kicks in if you are trying to get a sense of an entire country's public social media traffic, there just isn't any other way to do that. No real way to double check it either, except with a different AI.

Ukrainian FPV drones enforcing traffic rules deep into the left bank. Three point turn is huge no no, apparently. Edit: worth pointing out someone uploaded the footage from the car...

Yes, exactly this.

The narrative from the fighting around Krynky and points south has consistently been that Ukrainian artillery on the right side of the river is hammering the Russians. Russian counterbatterry seems to been ineffective at best, and frequently dangerous to the guns attempting it. Ukraine also seems to have drone superiority in this area. It MAY be that the Russians have decided to pull back out of range of at least some of the Ukrainian fires in the attempt to get their losses down to bearable levels.

The thing is at any point before 1900, perhaps even later than that, the Chinese assessment that the northern grasslands/tiaga wasn't worth fighting for was correct. The value of that territory has increased for at least four reasons. Most obvious of course is vast oil and mineral wealth that can be exploited with modern technology. The second is that global warming will probably make farming at those latitudes far more productive. The third, and closely tied to the second, that same warming will make farming in what have historically been some of Chinas biggest grain producing areas less productive. Last but not least while China may have hit it peak population, it is just really crowded. And then there is the small problem of the guy in charge of the other side. The kind of people who rise to power in autocratic systems just seem to want to pick fights whether it makes any sense or not, Putin being example A. None of this makes an even worse conflict inevitable, but it certainly justifies a great deal of wariness.

I can't find the NYT article from a few years ago that I really want, but what came up gives the gist of it.

He wasn't terribly clear, but wasn't wrong either. Northern China is VERY crowded, The Russian Far East is extraordinarily empty. A lot of Chinese are moving across that border, the amount encouragement they get from the Chinese government is unclear, but probably not zero. If Russia destroys the viability of its indigenous population in this area by sending a critical mass of its population to die in Ukraine this can only speed up the process. The CCCP would love to have a large Chinese minority in this are for future contingencies a majority would be even better. EDIT: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/12/why-are-siberian-russians-drawn-to-china.html Specifically a lot of Russian women are marrying relatively well off Chinese

And we aren't working at it nearly hard enough!

The whole article is excellent, but no regular reader of the thread will be surprised.