dan/california

Nothing moves the tech along like a shooting war.

Odds of a general war would seem to be increasing. I would say the odds of an Iranian nuclear test are rising by the second, as well. We wasted eighteen months of warning to really get munitions production in gear. we are going to regret that. Doesn't mean the contracts shouldn't go out Monday morning.

Nobody can line up like this in Ukraine and live. The fact that the IDF can do it with impunity is why Hamas has bitten off more they can chew.

Dmitri is on it today.

We haven't advanced an inch, and we can't treat all the wounded really screams sucess doesnt it.

The thing about the river crossing, is that if it works they won't need to be supplied over the Dnipro for long. If the operation is a success it should fracture the furtherest west portion of the Russian line almost immediately. They would be the Russian forces at the very highest risk. If Ukraine breaks thru their they would be able to feed supplies to crossing forces from their current supply lines to the southern front. I grant you there have been some first class disasters built on assumptions like that one. But the war is reaching a point where Ukraine might need to take a risk.

Does this illustrate/imply that one of the Russian's problems is that they can't move jammers up fast enough to cover an advance, so one of the many problems of the mobiks in a newly seized position is that drones can work them over far more easily and effectively?

I strongly suspect they were instructed not to. There may or may not be an issue with the number of missiles it would take to do a proper job, as well. Ukraine took at the S-400 on the east side of Crimea. I have expectations about the S-400 system guarding the bridge sooner or later.

I don't mean a full strategic campaign. I mean the Kerch bridge, and the three or four or five most important bridges in the Russian railway system feeding Ukraine. Make them truck everything another two or three hundred miles. Or at least break bulk and reload it, which would itself create the target of all targets.

No obstacle or entrenchment matters without the troops to man it.

Unhelpfully they don'y make clear what on track means, but in quantity these would be very useful. For the next war., these 155 ramjet boosted shells can shoot most of the way across the Taiwan straight. They are also talking about both GPS, and other guidance. It be rather useful if they could hit moving ships. A couple 155 rounds would turn a loaded roll on roll off transport ship into flaming wreck.

Complete military incompetence from reporters and spokespeople is a world wide problem. Half of them can't tell the difference between a sniper rifle and a PZH-2000 SPG.

And Hamas will promptly fire rockets from the middle of them.

The issue is the next layer of deep strike that the Ukrainians have not been permitted to do. If the Kerch bridge was in the water, and the weakest links in the rail system in the parts of Russia immediately surrounding Ukraine were under relentless missile attack this thing would be in a completely different place. Jake Sullivan has decide he would rather the Ukrainians lose than that take that risk. Given his brilliant piece about the state of the Mideast last week, i think he needs to go.

Maybe in a year or a decade, the disaster that just happened was a conceptual failure on the Israelis part. They assumed that Gaza was handled, and even the military could pretty much take Yom Kippur off. It is going to be a while before that happens again. Barring a WMD there are going to be enough people manning defences to prevent more than one or two people from getting thru anytime soon. Shoot first and and ask questions probably never is in full effect. There are significant long term costs to this, but it is certainly the new normal in the short term. I mean they spotted one guy trying to swim around towards Israel from Gaza, and depth charged him into goo... Right now it all comes down to does Hezbollah want to get Lebanon wrecked again.

Somebody, somewhere , in some NATO country needs to get a truly high volume production line built for a lightly militarized version of these things that can meet this demand before the Chinese decide to turn off the supply, or mess in with them in some way tht makes them less useful. We are not doing a great job of understanding that the state of the world simply requires a vastly higher level of munitions production. And drones are munition just as surely as 155 shells.

Driving a TOS-1 is not a safe profession. I still find it hilarious the other Russian personnel will go within a thousand yards of one. The crew gets to die lonely. Claims Ukraine hit a Russian ammo train in Melitipol. Depending on how many drones and or GMLRS Ukraine wanted to throw at the repair crew it might really crimp the Russians if true.

The following is purely a guess about what is going to happen, not a judgement on it. I think Israel is going to invade the the northern half of Gaza, and then stop. they probably won't let any Palestinians that flee back in.That will push the Misery in the Southern half high enough that the Israeli government can say the Palestinians have been truly punished. It will massively increase pressure on Egypt to let Palestinian civilians in, and shorten the the lines Israel has to guard by close to half. That will reduce the amount of forces they need in the south, and most of the army goes back north to glare at Hezbollah.

We have been slow, cheap and stupid about ramping up munitions production. With the second shoe already dropping in the Middle East, and China weighing its chances daily, it is time get serious about that. I am talking about cost plus contracts for tens of millions of rounds of 155, tens of thousands of rounds of GMLRS, and, and, and. What passes for the world order is hanging by a thread, and anybody that thinks you can negotiate with any of our opponents without credible deterrence is not paying attention. Credible deterrence was not any of the first seven ways I wanted to put that BTW.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chinatalk/id1289062927?i=1000631161341 Yes it seems like a weird link, but the guy who does China talk has relatives in Israel. This is just a cut and paste of a well known Israeli podcast. Three more or less prominent Israeli journalist talking about what happened. I am not sure who is more bleeped the Netanyahu government or the Palestinians.

ISW has a ton of detail on the Russian operation around Avdivka. The short version is that the they don't think the Russians are going very far, or very fast, and have taken very heavy losses. They do voice the possibility that the Russians will continue trying.

They set a date January 2023. So it is not perfectly current.

The thing that makes EVERYTHING, Russia does in Ukraine a criminal act is the utterly unprovoked, and illegal nature of the war itself. You can argue a great deal about who did the first bad/provocative thing in the middle east, but there is zero doubt who did the last one. And it was so bad they just don't get to run Gaza anymore, period.

Would it be able to engage Lancets as well?