womble

Hah. Which Tory is "first division" if Wallace is second? In case you hadn't noticed, last time, it was Argentina who did the invading. Britain has some pretty far-flung interests which it is prudent to retain the capacity to defend at need. Defend. You know, like Ukrainians do. Not invade, like Russians. We should (and are) give Ukraine what we can. Most of the NLAWs that helped stop Russia's first attacks came from the UK. They got 800 Storm Shadows.. I don't think we have that many left on the RAF's establishment. We've promised them the entirety of the annual production of the cruise missiles. If we want to replace the ones we've given over already, we have to ramp up production (and I believe the statment implied that we were).

Word. It'd be nice if Starmer would keep him as Defence, when the Tories cave at the next election (to leave Labour or a Coalition holding the nasty, badly-cared-for crack baby that the economy will be by then) but that simply isn't going to happen. Stupid party politics.

Aren't the early ATACMS cluster munitions? Perhaps UKR value the range for hitting area targets that are currently out of range. What would the M39 do to a helo base?

Welcome aboard, and happy learning!

Nonsense (the bolded bit). Because the available western mobile systems are not candidates for this job, since they aren't capable of prosecuting an attack on an aircraft at tree-top level at A-t-G-ATGM engagement ranges. So we're not even considering "available Western systems". So that paragraph is a circular argument against a point that's not being made. Who said it has to be optimised "just for range"? If it can reach out to 10km at treetop height (and it'll probably have to climb a few hundred metre for visibility anyway), it can probably reach as high as an Igla or a Stinger, even if it has to leave the really high stuff to Starstreak. And since it's probably going to be vehicle-mounted, it can be larger than any of those (though keeping it trim will help with ammo count, obviously), so maybe it can do both anyway.

Shame on me for taking headline dates. Sorry. So Stinger is "only" 40 (Forty; four-zero) years old. I think the assertion that seekers have improved still stands... Maybe so. Would the helo be able to evade it, or even threat-detect it? I think maybe the problem might be that the helo won't sit still long enough for the Switchblade to complete its attack run (even if it's entirely unaware of the presence of loitering munitions), unless the Switchblade gets very lucky, or can arrange some sort of trap/surprise. Certainly you'd have to have put the Switchblade up and out well before the helo showed its face. The density of the picket line of loiterers you'd have to establish would likely be prohibitive, especially if no AH came to the party. They could be used on other targets of opportunity (like they're designed, after all), but they amn't comin' home...

Somebody put a video of an octocopter-type drone firing a missile up "a thousand pages" ago... It was a prototype, but prototype to service seems to be fairly quick in Ukrainian hands... A drone firing an existing MANPAD system sounds like a combination of systems that could fit the bill if conditions on the battlefield allow the drone to loiter ahead of the AH's target. There have been plenty of air-to-ground missiles fired by Predators and other "heavy fixed-wing" drones, over the years; would such a class of things make suitable forward platforms for air-to-near-ground missiles with passive seeker heads?

I never said MANPAD. I said "Mobile". Over 10km, the treetop height from which AH are launching is pretty much irrelevant in terms of fuel/flight characteristics. Stinger was designed originally in 1961. It's sixty years old, even if upgrades have been made. Seekers have improved "quite a lot" since then. It's entirely possible for a visual lock that doesn't need to be maintained so the missile sees the target before launch and can seek it out again, if it breaks visual contact. Missiles are a lot faster than choppers. Maybe it has to be a salvo of three to cope with lateral ducking, or maybe the missile just has to climb high enough to have a decent field of view behind whatever defilade the chopper is using. Conceptually, it's a piece of the proverbial, and well within current, even recent image processing. The asset probably needs to be vehicle mounted, just to pack a large enough motor, but Startstreak can fight gravity one-on-one for 10000m of climb; even a modicum of aerodynamic lift should be able to let that same engine drive a payload ten clicks horizontally. There's no certainty that even a full-on NATO effort could achieve total air superiority vs the latest Russian AD complexes; they've better SEAD than the Russians, but I don't think anyone was expecting Ukraine's Soviet-era AD to be able to deny even the Russians the freedom of the air, and it did, largely unsupported by Western systems. So even if ground-based AD is "second best", it may well be all that's available.

This is a problem, aye. And promising though they seem, from what simulations can tell us, the F-16/AMRAAM combo isn't quite up to it. What sortof puzzles me is that an ATGM (with a massive warhead to punch through MBT armour) can be effectively launched at 10km range, but "mobile" SAMs struggle to manage that sort of engagement envelope. Starstreak has a ceiling, AIUI of 10km, but won't reach out that far (I don't know the dynamics of why) laterally. Or perhaps Startstreak is rare or fills a more important niche in the AD complex than "Keeping the AHs off our spearpoint formations". But it seems like it should be a fairly important programme to develop a relatively portable missile that at least matches the range of the threats that the tip of the spear is going to face, and mount it on a chassis that can keep up and survive in the general environment the tip of the spear is expected to exist in. And then send them all to Ukraine.

And large chunks of that money are kept outside Russia. The international community needs to decide that that should all be turned over to Ukraine. London, aka Moscow-on-Thames is one of the greatest concentrations of illicitly-gotten wealth, and the UK government should be leading the way in recovering that money for Ukraine. The oligarchs might feel differently about Putin when his antics have chopped a zero off the end of their fortune.

There's going to have to be some surgery done on the globalised economy. The richer nations have largely managed to amputate Russia from their energy supply chains. Currently, Russian petro is really cheap because the market for it is small. And China is the largest beneficiary. If "we" got serious, we could buy Saudi oil and gas at market prices and resell it at a loss to the nations that are still dependent on Russian oil. Or we could "persuade" the rest of the extraction industry to increase output to compensate for the loss of Russian hydrocarbons. The bonanza of low priced oil would end, but it wouldn't have started if it wasn't for the war. None of what needs to be done is without cost. None of it is easy. But letting Russia keep lobbing missiles at a liberated Ukraine is costly, and difficult. At the very least, it maintains the "excuse" that "there's a war on" that people keep using to justify ****ty economic and environmental decisions, and throws Ukraine under a bus. Maybe Russia will "come to its senses" in some manner (change of regime) once UKR achieve the humiliation of the invading armies, but it's going to need pressure in that direction, if it's even at all possiblbe. They might try, and if the political will is there to impose radical sanctions, they might find it costly to their ability to interdict it, since it's an obvious consequence which the sanction-imposing nations would have to have a plan to deal with, in order to avoid embarrassing climbdowns. Said ability to interdict would be limited anyway if the BSF can't use Sevastopol as their base any more. We are talking about a scenario where RUS has been completely thrown out of Ukraine, after all.

Given the RUS understandable aversion to being cut off, surrounded and wiped out, I'm not sure why UKR would even start poking around in actual Bakhmut "proper" rather than continuing to push back the flanks and make the place a salient that can be bypassed and reduced/ignored later. It's not like there are any civilians there whose suffering needs to be taken into account. Let the invaders starve, if they don't just give up, assuming they don't withdraw once in danger of envelopment.

Iran is not producing "hundreds per day" of the Shaheeds. Maybe I'm getting hung up on what was meant to be hyperbole. Russia doesn't care much what the rest of the world thinks, but if so-called "Ukronazis at the gates of the Motherland" start doing to Russia what Russia has been doing to Ukraine (even if the targets are all legitimate military installations/formations), every accidental civilian casualty (there will be some) will be all over the Internet and "balanced" Western media, eroding future support for the Ukrainian cause. Ukraine won't have the international investment that would make its rebuilding less painful and slow, and it seems to me that in such a situation, it's not impossible for the Ukrainian attitude to the rest of the world to change from gratitude to resentment. And I wouldn't blame them one bit.

I'm sure diplomatic efforts are under way to persuade those putative "friends" that it's actually in their better interests to remain on good terms with the West, and incidentally help maintain the rules-based world order from which they have benefitted from since about 1945. If Russia survives being kicked out of Ukraine in any form which retains the will and means to cause Ukraine grief in a material (rather than simply political) sense, that tooth is, to torture your metaphor some, rotted below the gum line, out of reach of the pliers, and no one wants to go in with the drill because the patient has a knife to the dentist's belly that they will definitely use if you hurt them that much. Sanctions have a way to go. Shell are still shipping Russian LNG because "honouring contracts". I'm sure they aren't alone. Those profiteering SOBs need to be told they're allowed to drop Russian product like hot cakes. Sanctions need to be made transitive, so that nations which ignore them get sanctioned too. Dirty money should be seized (and sent to Ukraine). There are so many ways sanctions can be extended, all the way to full, active blockade. Each has a cost, for sure, but the cost of leaving Ukraine to wither once their heroes have defeated the invaders would be similar to not having helped out in the first place.

Because improving production of that sort of ordnance by three orders of magnitude is going to happen. Ukraine's ability to strike into Russia becomes magnified once they hold their entire border again, but they are already adjacent for quite a long stretch and it's not dissuading the Russians one iota. In fact, the Kremlin would welcome an aerial drone assault campaign from Ukraine, since it would allow them to intensify the "defense of the Rodina" narrative for both internal and international consumption.

A real worry, if Russia somehow survives as a going concern after having been evicted from UKR. Remember in 1984 that the various powers who Airstrip One had always at war with didn't engage in any intense actual "warfighting", there was just the occasional rocket bomb hitting London and killing a few Proles. In that book, it served The Party's purposes of maintaining the eternal external enemy; an unrepentant RUS wouldn't need to do much more to ruin UKR chances of renaissance. The fact that RUS continually bombs civilian locations without the supporters of UKR tightening the screws of sanctions and tit-for-tat increasing their military aid packages makes me somewhat fearful that if RUS survives with missile production lines and political will intact, that even evicting them won't be enough. Maybe "The West" will get proper shirty with a RUS that has no military business in UKR any more lobbing HE at Kyiv, and wind up the sanctions til the Russians stop. Or maybe the forces of relations-normalisation will be in full swing as soon as the armies are out of AK range of each other across the pre-'14 borders. I hope for the former but fear the latter will be the case.

I wonder whether the FSB told Putin that Prig was going to Putsch, but Putin couldn't believe he'd go that far, so told them to leave him be.

Depends how high the wire is, and how bright the searchlights and how alert the guards... Only 80% joking.

An example covered by "...more directed", for me. Malice of a hostile state actor directing (via subtle or not-so-subtle means) a mouthpiece. Incompetence though, that's another possible reason for people to espouse such unrealistic aspirations, and an even better reason to ignore that author...

Not just history: current events and the future prospects for lasting peace... Naivete perhaps, or something more... directed? Or just a narcissistic unwillingness to accept that their world view is pretty divorced from reality.

While I'm sure most of the folk here would, in isolation, agree that UKR firing SS and ATACMS at "legit military and logistical targets" inside Russia-proper should be allowed, it might be too-swift a temperature jump for that frog we're trying to boil without it feeling like it needs to leap out of the pot. What I'd do is set up a lot of target solutions for inside-Russia nodes, and hit them all with as many launchers simultaneously as could be brought into range, just once right at the point of smashing through Russian lines in Ukraine. "Oops, sorry. Won't do it again." But the damage will be done, the disruption maximised, and we can all live with the bluster that will dribble out of the Kremlin. Lots of preconditions to set, like better missile defense across UKR (there would definitely be a Kindjahl tantrum) and alternative arrangements for any HIMARS targets that would be left un-serviced by the alteration in engagement range for those systems...

Wikipedia says there are 3700 ATACMS manufactured in total. A lot of those are "awaiting upgrade" though, and I can't offer a guess how useful the unupgraded ones would be to UKR at this point.

Storm Shadow's tandem HEAT/HE warhead probably works better against hardened targets than ATACMS's "Penetrating hight explosive blast fragmentation warhead". They also have, AIUI, different flight profiles, so will challenge AD in different ways. It's another long ranged tool in Ukraine's box.

There isn't different code for the AI. What you're seeing is your very own confirmation bias off a small sample. Until you can provide data rather than anecdote, it's not even worth considering the possibility. So set up some fire missions and do some stats on a few hundred teams, and maybe someone will buy what you're selling. Publish the scenario so other people can validate your results. It's how science works, ya know?

To administer buddy aid, a pTruppe needs to be in the same AS as the casualty for "a while" without being bothered by too much incoming fire. Doesn't have to be the Schreck's original ammo carrier/loader, but it's probably a good idea to leave that fellow there, since he's probably the one with the ammo, and if you don't have an element with which the carrier can share ammo pick up the tube, you'll only have the ammo that the actual TubeGuy was carrying. If the Shreck-remnant is "a bit rubbish", but you have a "better" (greater experience, better motivation and leadership) small team from the same formation that can share with the remnant, it might be worth having that element grab the Tube.