dan/california

Thinking about the drone vs helicopter more. What you want is a longer endurance fixed wing drone. And allow me to reiterate that it is the best case for autonomy ever. There is not a civilian helicopter within a hundred kilometers of the front line, probably far more than that. Give the drone a a rational kill box and instructions to kill anything with a rotor, and a self destruct for when it runs out of fuel. I would even attempt to give it a non-gps guidance system to make it less jammable. Ukraine has to take far worse risks with civilian lives, and well the the Russians have been VERY busy proving they deserve to hunted like the unpleasant creature of your choice. Edit: ust realized I copied Fancy Pants.

This is also an extremely good case for an autonomous system. There are no neutral/civilian helicopters over a war zone. If you know you aren't using any helicopters in a given box, a fully autonomous drone that just looked for anything with a rotor blade makes a ton of sense.

The latest models of the AH-64 also have a radar mounted above the rotor. So if they are having to do their own spotting that is literally all they have to expose. Of course that emits so it has positives and negatives. With drones to do the spotting/target designation I think it makes more sense for the choppers to be a much cheaper missile hauler than ~30-50 million dollar wonder weapons various countries have been building lately, and or are considering.

It is a case study the minus of not using cluster munitions.The Storm shadow has a two stage war head that is heavily optimized for hardened targets like bunkers and the bridge pillars. if they are have finally found the brain cells to keep the choppers dispersed on the ground a Storm Shadow might only get one or two of them.

Don't actually know of a case, but NATO has an enormously detailed and robust procedures to ensure that our artillery doesn't accidentally hit one of our own aircraft. The quality of the Russians manual, and the adherence to it would have to be considered questionable given their performance at almost everything else, but if they have done it they haven't admitted it. Getting hit by the other sides arty is pretty much just plain bad luck, and again I don't actually know of a case. Their have been at least a couple of cases in this war of Russians planes getting shot down by their own sides SAMs because the crews were twitchy and/or incompetent.

Helicopters primary trick is staying too low to show up on ground based radar. Look down, shoot down radar, and AMRAMS can solve that problem from way, way back. And no helicopter on earth is going to outrun an AMRAAM. If they had to the F-16s could even hold at low altitude until they got the word there were helicopters coming forward, and pop up just long enough to lock the missile on.

NATO assumes it will have fighter planes to avoid this problem.

Their missiles outrange the man pads. If the helicopters can keep track of the farthest forward Ukrainian units they can take pop up shots from out of manpad range. It is a by the book employment of the helicopter.

Attrional/corrosive warfare in action, KIA is good, wounded is probably better, but the whole unit is being run absolutely ragged.

The whole thread is worth your time. We need to push stuff to Ukraine fast enough to stay ahead of the curve. The fact that there are not F-16s making Ka-52s too scared to come within 50 miles of the front line is exhibit A. Not equipping the stuff we sent with APS is example B.

This needs to be treated the way Mossad treated the people who ran the death camps. The people who run these camps need to hunted like diseased vermin for the rest of their lives.

A lot of good stuff on GeoConfirmed today, worth wandering over there.

Burn the orcs, burn every last one of them.

Not great for the vehicle, but perhaps far better than the alternative.

All true, but any Congress/Senate vote in support of Ukraine is good, doubly so if there is large scale bipartisan support.

The answer requires information on soil conditions and river flows we just don't have. Whether most of the revealed bottom in that reservoir is firm gravel or soft sticky silt makes a very large difference. How big the main channel is matters a very great deal. At least five other things matter, a lot. AFU general staff probably has those answers though. So if the entire Russian defense suddenly gets flanked by four mechanized brigades, well we will know, now won't we. Of course for many of the Russians in those defenses it would one of the very last things they ever get to ponder. Edit: and many of these factors change with time, weather, and the management of the dams upstream.

Could be they had to promise not to do that? It probably is the best defended site in Russia/Ukraine. It could be the storm shadows are easier to hit over water? A lot of possibilities, I doubt they will tell us which one.

I am always moved to hope the rifles are loaded.

The only conceivable utility of this silliness is that it gives these three guys an excuse not to go to Bakmuht and get killed. I am sure they are very enthusiastic, anybody else...

Bleep me, they just INVITED NATO's air force to join the war. How can such an invitation be refused? Three thousand sorties days will wrap thus thing up by the fourth of July

Write your Congressperson, just do it. Take five minutes.

Zero entrenchments, I wonder if this was about five minutes before they realized one of their counterattacks wasn't going to work out?

I freely admit this podcast is sponsored by Lockhead Martin and friends, but the people on it have decades of of experience in and around the Pentagon. There is a significant discussion of Ukraine, and Ukraines supply situation more or less in the middle.

There was a lot of slow learning, some pretty serious just NOT learning. The whole paper is long but very, very good. As a side point getting bleeped by the Boers did the the British army a great deal of good a ~decade later. Edit: The title "THE DECLINE OF CAVALRY 1900-1918"