dan/california

I am a broken record on this but the fact the U.S. is going to spend a bunch of money on a new manned helicopter gives me doubts the message is getting thru.

Not worth the hassle or the missile. It would just give the Chinese an excuse to send the Russians more ammo. What SHOULD happen is that she is utterly blacklisted in all countries supporting Ukraine. And if some suitable legal interpretation can be found the next time she transits a Western airport, perhaps should could be inited to stay a while at government expense.

The whole thing today is worth a read.I really liked the bit about the guy in charge of air defence for Moscow being charged with "corruption". Nothing to see here, everything is fine

The nice folks at RUSI are trying to help BFC get the new game out the door

Two observations, the first is that the T55s may have stood up better to to decades of open storage in a harsh climate. If the same part on all those thousands of T-72s has failed due to corrosion that could be huge problem for getting them back in service. The second observation is that if you are bringing back sixty year old tanks, to fire thirty or more year old ammo, because that is all you can get, your bleeped. The tanks are presumably far less effective indirect fire platforms than actual artillery of the same age among other things. Of course with the ammo they are probably shooting accuracy has left the building, anyway.

The quote that stuck out in the original essay about the training problems was approximately "We only have a couple of drones, and we can't use those because of bureaucratic reasons". There is some excuse for not having many drones around, since Ukraine is literally sucking a vast percentage of the world supply.The not allowed to use them bit though is a case study in how lose the opening phase of the next war. It goes back to something Mick Ryan wrote in the last week or two. Very approximately it said that one of the West's greatest failures in this whole thing was never making decisions at war time speed. The fact that Ukraine MIGHT get M-26 rockets a 14 months after they asked for them, and two or three months after we started delivering 155 DPICM is the most obvious case in point.

LNR is trying to round up the the last platoon worth of "able bodied" cannon fodder. I have a strong suspicion their definition of able bodied is something along the lines of having three limbs that sort of work. Progress seems to accelerating.

This a a case study in a peacetime military organization taking to long to ingest obvious lessons. The only reason this does not deserve a full scale rant is that every availabe drone is probably going to Ukraine. When this war ends ,one the best Ukrainian units needs to be invited to the biggest U.S./NATO training areas for a full up exercise. I suspect that would be an incerdible learning experience for everyone involved Probably if you approach from below, But if you get above it then it is actually pulling the drone towards the helicopter. Any charge the will kill a bmp2 will relieve the helicopter of a rotor blade, and that isn't something helicopters survive. Edit: the ideal helicopter hunter would not be a quad copter. You want something like a WarMate fixed wing drone. very soon something similar will have AI that IDs helicopters and ask "should I kill this immediately".

Russia's time in charge of Chornobyl was not cheap or pleasant.

The echoes of Prig's big weekend may not be over...

Apparently Russia has managed to recruit some small number of Cubans. I wonder if they will live long enough to freeze to death.

Great post!

South Korea has been a fabulous success story. Nor did I ever say it was a U.S. mistake, pretty sure we advised against it. And no I am not saying we should have forced the issue. But the fact remains they gave North Korea the worlds most valuable hostage, effectively. 75 years and counting and that is more of a problem every day, not less. I am sure everyone hoped the North would fade away into irrelevance, or become a Chinese province, or, or, just so happens it was a bad bet. I mean even the weather is way better in Busan and similar.

Very little, but the real mistake was made in ~1954. When South Korea rebuilt the old capital, instead starting over a couple of hundred miles south and out of any possible tube artillery range. Keep in mind that Seoul was at least as obliterated as Bakmuht is now. It probably cost more to clean it up than it would have to start over somewhere further south, but the South Koreans were attached to the symbology of Seoul. So they built one of the worlds greatest cities in range of an approximate infinity of North Korean artillery. If they hadn't done this I suspect the entire history post 1954 would have been very different.

There definitely are dirt poor kleptocracies. The thing about the dirt poor ones though is that the only trouble they are able cause anybody outside their borders is a spray of refugees. Admittedly that does upset things when the volume is high enough, but it just doesn't hold a candle to the problems the ones with money cause.

I greatly appreciate the response from a professional artillery officer. At least two out of three of these reasons, though, get at the same fundamental issue for the Russians I was speculating about. They are desperately on the enablers, and the enablers for the enablers, to conduct the artillery fight competently. Hopefully that is going to result in them losing the artillery battle in an accelerating way where fewer and fewer Russian guns get hammered ever harder and ever more quickly, even as Ukraine has more fire support capacity to support units on the offensive.

The West has a truly golden chance to do well while doing good. All of our major competitors/problems/enemies except Chine are pure gas station economies. Hydrocarbons ARE their economy, and among many other bad things funds the suppression of their own people. A real push, and Biden is trying, to combine mileage standards and electrification of transportation is the single best geopolitical move we have. Whatever reduction in Global warming that gets us is a pure bonus.

The reason everything else is starting to work. Ukraine has enough drones, enough counter-battery radar, and enough PGMs to continually one one shot Russian artillery.

Claims Poland still has these in production, and these are newly built guns.

Why would you emplace three guns that close together? Only thing I can come up with is that they only had one minimally competent artillerymen for all three guns?

There may be some slight hint of a method behind the tires on the wings idea.

Ukraines one clear success is finally, mostly, winning the artillery battle. The thing is though, that enables everything else, like committing more forces to the fight, at a higher density.Hopefully the whole thing will start to roll down hill.

At the end of the day it is between them and the rock.

It is a read the whole thing kind of day.