dan/california

If Dmitri wants to talk, I want to listen...

Decoys of more or less everything is the future. Indeed it seems to be heavily utilized in Ukraine now. It is rapidly becoming the only way of obfuscating anything, and the best counter Lancets.

You need a few flesh and blood people as far forward as possible to ensure your network isn't feeding you crap. There has been an unpleasant demonstration of this recently.

There has to be some combination of lasers, drones that kill drones, and tunable jammers that can literally listen for the drones frequency and then swamp it. If that combination is not technically feasible we are back to my $100,000 ghillie suit, and doing everything VERY slowly. The age of denial and drone on drone combat as the new face of war may be upon us. The new book from the RUSI guy has truly mind bending specs on what can be achieved with military grade sensor hardware, as opposed to Chinese toys. Think being able to ID people at kilometers, and vehicles at tens of kilometers with passive sensors in five different ways, ten times that if the systems go active. Of course a zillion Chinese toys may be better in the end than fewer better platforms. It is going to be on heck of a new arms race. Edit; Hopefully he will forgive a brief quotation " “a vibrometer is substantially more sensitive, being able to listen – for example – to a pigeon’s heartbeat at 30 km.” Excerpt From The Arms of the Future Jack Watling https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0 This material may be protected by copyright.

Perhaps we will get to see that nice new Abrams unit come in to bat clean up. It would be terrible if the Russians wound up a a kilometer or two behind their start line when it was all over with.

Another TOS-1 departs for the afterlife with a TRULY spectacular boom. I wonder what they have to threaten the crews of these things with to get them to even go near them. The guys behind this one, perhaps the people charged with making such threats? Any way I am guessing they will double the follow distance to the next one, if they aren't to concussed to do anything besides drool.

Drones are the essential element of why the war works the way it does. We all know that. An effective technological solution that grounded one side drones would almost certainly result in a huge swing in the battlefield. The big question is does this solution exists, and can one side deploy it at scale faster than the other side can adapt. The other known tech shift that is just hanging out there waiting is much greater AI/autonomy/swarming. Could one side do that scale fast enough to matter.

Apologies if this is more Gaza War than you want on the thread, but it seems VERY relevant. feel free to remove it if needed. If the Israelis just allowed Spike missiles and other tech that they have already sold to various European militaries to be sent to Ukraine, It would have a non trivial impact. If they send Ukraine the full military sales catalogue and tell them to order whatever they want.... Edit: Then we get to the fascinating question of helping Poland and Ukraine set up production lines.

Reading these two post together seems to sum up the situation nicely. My biggest question at this point is can an offensive be pushed in weather bad enough to ground the drones? This is basically how Wagner took Soledar. The extremely low troop density at line of contact would seem vulnerable if the fires complex was not able to work normally.

If they get 12,000 across, and a bridge up, they will find some more. They don't have to be the worlds best troops to shoot up supply convoys and artillery parks. Brilliant timing with several Russian brigades, and the operational ammo reserve being burnt to a cinder at Aviidka, and the ATACMS panic just good and started. Brilliant timing for a convincing fake, or the real deal either one.

I am sure they are working on it. But I think it requires a drone with two or three orders of magnitude more sophistication from the drone. Killing expensive sensors with cheap drones is certainly not perfect, but is very much good enough.

Drones killing sensors is the new face of war. Discussed at length in the "Arms of the Future" book from RUSI.

You might feel better in a day or two, if this is real. According to a quick read Poima is past all of the swampy stuff, and not much more than a rifle shot from the main road into the bridge to Kherson City, when there was a bridge to Kherson City. Maybe it is just a bigger raid? But maybe not? The exact moment when you just gave the entire Russian army an ATACMS panic would be the moment, now wouldn't it? Edit: And Putin is in China too, which makes it that much harder to get his permission to redeploy a battalion or two. It would also be rather embarrassing if the Southern front collapsed while he was having a state dinner with Xi.

Al Jazzera set this up to make Hamas look bad, on live TV, is REALLY big stretch.

Israel hitting the Hospital with Biden literally due to visit tomorrow would make less than no sense. A Palestinian rocket either gone wrong, or intentionally fired at the hospital is entirely believable. More to the point than believability is that there will be multiple drone feeds, satellite data, radar, and who knows what else. Given the U.s. carrier group in the area some of those assets are probably U.S. instead of Israeli. They Israelis are not going to lie to Biden's face about this when he probably has independent data. It would just be dumb. And some of that data will be public shortly is my guess. Iron Dome radar probably has the exact track.

They needed two hundred not thirty. Given the issues with clearing mine fields I not sure if make more sense to commit these to an attack, and try to finally, truly break the Russian lines, or keep them as their last and final operational reserve. I think thirty Abrams would smash any conceivable Russian breakthrough if well handled.

Something coming straight at you is the easiest shot to make. The question is it worth the immense hassle of issuing every third soldier a modified bird gun. For all that the extended chase cenes make compelling video, most people get taken out by something they effectively never saw. I keep coming back to the idea that it ought to be possible to build small UAVs just to take out other UAVs. It must be harder than I think it is or we would be seeing it already. A lot of RWS turrets with anti UAV capability popping up in dribs a and drabs, but as The_Capt never tires of reminding us, at even a couple of hundred thousand dollars each the number requires quickly exceeds the ENTIRE defense budget of most countries.

The Egyptian government depends entirely on the the people who pay its bills, its grain import bill most of all. Those people have not been Egyptian for a very long time. At the moment the Egyptian government is a solely own subsidiary of the Saudi's with minority shares held by various other Gulf monarchies. Why anybody is bothering to talk to the Egyptians themselves is a mystery to me.

Now give them the ones that will put the Kerch bridge in the water! Edit: And put out the production contracts so that the Russians know the Ukrainians can keep shooting them FOREVER.

So the Palestinian cause and people are everything, unless WE have to do something....

It is a better read by the light of burning Russian helicopters.