fireship4

"Exist" in this case.

"Exist" in this case.

Well I guess it depends on whether we see an overt or back channel attempt to start negotiations for a cease fire / peace treaty from Russia. If Russia can get out of the conflict and keep it's land bridge and the two breakaway regions, then it would still claim a victory. Zelensky already said no to any discussions without Russia exiting all Ukrainian terrain but if people in his inner circle are also seeing the writing on the wall in terms of the lack of a strategic breakthrough and the dwindling of western support... could get interesting.
The above probably makes me sound pro-Russian to some extent and I'm definitely not, I'm just disappointed it may end up like this. Any ceasefire that leads to Russia keeping anything will be a political loss for many like Biden I'd imagine, and has to lead to questioning of the tactics used by the West to support a friend and ally when they are under attack.
Unsure if this is been shared before but for a bit of history diversion. Good to see David Glantz still going....
 

You are baiting me, right?  “Why they fail” is because this guy has zero idea what he is talking about.  Maybe less than zero.  As in, people lose knowledge just by watching his video.
Starting with the flail is the first hint.  A flail is for admin and rear area clearances.  I know some militaries still have them on assault vehicles but everyone in the business agrees they are dumb.  On the modern battlefield the flail is suicide anywhere but clearing parking lots for Bde HQ.  
Minebots - IED work, not for combat clearing.  At least not yet.
Rollers.  Ok, these are not designed to work in isolation.  In fact it is his entire problem.  Minefield clearing is a team sport.  This guy is pointing to player positions and trying to figure out which one is best at “playing football”.  Plough and rollers are the primary breaching systems.  Rollers are designed to 1) detect a minefield, normally through a strike, and 2) prove a minefield after a plough tank has done a breach.  
Every plough tank can only clear a safe lane “that every one must follow”.  Sorry bald YouTube guy we have yet to invent an area clearance plough.  Ploughs are at the center of mechanical breaching.  But they are also tricky and terrain dependent.  Ploughs and rollers are designed to work together in a team.  With their friends, explosive breaching and engineering vehicles.
So opposed minefield breaching is one of the hardest operations to pull off.  Right next to amphib on the difficulty scale.  You normally have multiple breach lane attempts that use the mechanical and explosive systems. Explosive systems still need to be proven after the breach, normally by rollers.  And engineer vehicles for complex obstacles like AT ditches or dragons teeth in the middle of a minefield.  Adding more systems ups the complexity a lot requiring a lot of training and skill to pull off in the time windows needed to be successful.
Breaches fail when the breaching teams fail.  However that is why multiple breaches are done…we expect half to fail from the outset.  Further based on density and cover, one has to scale the number of breaches to try and get a single success.  In Ukraine the densities are so high we are likely talking double NATO doctrine: so Cbt Teams are likely shooting for 4 lane attempts instead of 2.  
Of course this violates concentration of mass restrictions we are seeing on the modern battlefield.  So one either goes small platoon bites and infantry infiltration.  Or establish conditions for a major breaching op, and risk most of one’s breaching assets.  Establishing those conditions has proven to be the hard part.
Minefield breaching operations as we define them in NATO are failing because the battle space is denied to concentration of mass.  RA ISR can even pick up large concentrations of forces and pick out the breaching vehicles.  We have not created the defensive bubble to fix that.  So minefield breaching is not failing because of individual systems.  It is failing because land warfare as we know it is kinda broken right now.  Until we either fix it, or figure out a new way to do these things…we are kinda stuck.

The attacks were not at the ship as far as has been publicised: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/uss-carney-shot-down-more-missiles-drones-over-longer-period

Some ballpark (or beer coaster) calculation wrt to shooting done the current generations of drones with lasers.
A quad-copter propeller weighs roughly 3-5 g. Most plastics have a heat capacity of 2 J / kg K. Most plastics also melt or burn or get weak enough at 200 °C.
So you need about 2000 J (or Ws) to heat up a propeller by 200 °C.
Let's assume 10% of the laser's output actually reach the target (wild guess). Dividing the energy needed (2000Ws) by the power, and you get the time you need on target.
Another good guess: a drone can accelerate with roughly 20 m / s^2. With that, I calculated the distance a drone could move (or deviate from its current flight path) until its propeller melted. Assuming it has a heat sensor and reacts automatically.
Laser power - time to melt - dodge distance
20 kW - 1 s - 10 m
50 kW - 0,4 s - 1,6 m
300 kW - 0,067 s - 0,045 m
First, it is easy to see why they aim for higher power. The target can hardly move away in time before it dies.
Secondly, it is easy to see how to defeat this threat to drones: use steel blades. 250x times the heat capacity and 8x the melting point. You'd need lasers in the GW range to defeat that.
I don't even know how long and how often you can fire these things. But it is probably less than you need against a swarm.
You could also try to attack other things than propellers on a drone, but that is even easier to shield.
You can probably punch a lot of holes into this calculation, but I guess the direction is clear. Lasers are not the solution for fast, maneuverable drones.
I'd put my money on kinetic attacks, e.g. bullets. MG on a 2-axis motorized mount paired with some acoustic & optical sensors. Put that on a UGV that follows your squad, and you have a mobile 300m bubble that keeps the drones away from your neighborhood.
 

"Хуйзнаетtalkers/Huiznaettalkers"?
"Хуйз нает": "Hui zna-et": "Who the f*ck knows".
 

"Show me on the map where the Russians touched you."

According to most strict Orthodoxal behavior rules, women, especially married, strongly recommended to wear a scarf not only in church, but also out of the home in the street. Also not recommended to wear jeans or other trousers and not allowed to be present in this closes in the church. So, most religious Orthodoxal women in former USSR really similar to Muslim women in Sharia countries - they wear long dresses or skirts, closing legs almost to ankles. Also these dresses or jackets should cover whole arm or at least a half. And of course a scarf, covering hair
One more of "Russian world" and "orthodoxal sharia" example. This banner with a citation of influent  Russian orthodoxal priest Aleksiy Chaplin
Main problem of modern Orthodoxia and as a matter of fact Russia - this is that we have forgotten to be slaves. Christianity is a religious of conscious and freewill slavery 

His full sentense is next:
All modern society worships to the idol of rights and freedom, and only Russian Orthodox Church still stubbornly asserts that a human is a disenfranchised slave... Only Orthodoxal slaves are capable to great feat of self-sacrifice in time of war and peace. Even USSR could restore itself in limits of Russian Empire due to slavery psychology, keeping on subconscious level of Russian nation. For a slave a prestige of his master is his prestige. To commprehend the Truth we must stop "to turn on brain" and strat indeed to consider ourselves as nothing and to call ourselves as nobody. In a word, we must grow a slave inside ourselves. The way to God slavery lies through the slaveship for human: children for parents, wife for husband, christian to church hierarchy, citizen to state with all officials and "siloviki" ("force structures"), including President. So, how dare you can name yourself "slave of God" if you didn't learn how to be a slave for a human? Only by nurturing a slave inside ourdelves we can revive that Russia, which we didn't keep, but also come to Kingdom of God, where doors are closed for all "free", who not in Christ.  
Despite this is enough radical speech, but it mostly reflects Russian Orthodox Church doctrine as well as psychology of many Russians. So, if somebody on West to this time try to appeal to some ratio in Russian authorities - it's useless. And this is a reason why Ukrainian authorities at last started to push out Russian Church from Ukraine. And this is not about faith freedom, because Russian Church (or it branch in face of Ukrainian Orthodox Cherch of Moscow Patriarchy) is turning into some sort of "Russian ISIS", brainwashing a people to be a slaves and live in fear and humility in front of power of srongest.  
   

Few months ago two Dutch entrepeneurs, who had businesses in Russia (I don't what kind or how long, and I was pretty shocked that they would keep on doing that), were interviewed about their experience with "average" Russians.
I was very surprised when they said that NOBODY gave a flying f*ck about the war with Ukraine. The interviewer (Dutch) couldn't believe that and asked them to elaborate. Well, as if it was the most normal thing ever, the entrepeneurs explained that in all of their contacts with all kinds of people from different backgrounds, the sentiment was the same: absolutely nobody cared!
And to make things even more surprising, when the interview ended, one of the businessguys said: "I'm going back to my business now (Few hundred kilometers east of Moscow, I believe) and I just wanna tell you one more thing: I have lived for years in Russia now, but I also do not give a **** about that war with Ukraine. Why would I?"
I hardly could believe it. Even though I understood that centuries of endless repression and terror create this kind of childlike behaviour (when young children see something scary or awful, they close their eyes and put their hands in front of their face, because they assume that if you ignore something unpleasant, it may as well not exist at all), I hadn't expected it to be so bad.
But it does indicate that Western "righteous information" or "propaganda" being brought upon Russians (or however you will call it) will not make any difference at all. It's like giving information to a stone, and expecting the stone to become less hard because of the info.

Rereading this outstanding history of Normandy again. The thing that stands out is the enormous effect of absolute air supremacy. The Germans were bombed, bombed again, and then bombed with real intent. For all of the amazing effects of PGMs and drones it is not clear to me that they bring the same weight to bear, at least i the quantities available to the Ukrainians. The Luftwaffe of course was essentially a non factor in France. The anonymous sources whinging about Ukrainian tactics are asking them to do something we didn't attempt even in 1944.
Yes on occasion we bombed our on side, but we bombed the Germans a GREAT deal more.
Fair warning: The entire document amounts to a long full length book.

https://nitter.net/

Your last post was February 28th 2022, and it has been pinned up on the right of the thread under 'popular posts' since then,
Everything OK now?  Relatively speaking?

The meme template that keeps on giving:

Supposedly a long leaked  memo about the state of Russian drone procurement and operations by Dmitri Rogozin, who used to run Roscosmos.
S

Yes I get the feeling if and when their systems of destabilisation break down, things across the West might start to work a little better.  On the other hand, constant stresses and criticism do encourage us to firm up our ideals and seek workable answers to difficult questions and social conflicts.
EDIT: Although China is a bigger threat in other ways, I don't feel they would have the same effect in the propaganda sphere, off the top of my head it would be more about building relationships and economic leverage/bribery.

I'm not the biggest fan of Ben Wallace (although he's one of the better of the Tory party), but on this I think the quote being thrown everywhere rather misrepresents what he said - it's rather more in line with what people on this thread have said that Ukraine can't take western support for granted in the sense that they need to be politically savvy about how public statements can sound to the western public. I.e. don't say stuff and present an attitude that is going to give leverage to the political factions that are rather more pro-Russian. Quoting a BBC article:
 
Ben Wallace's comments in full
More now on the latest comments from UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace.
In his briefing with reporters, he said that Ukraine had to remember it was asking countries to give up their own stocks of weapons.
“There is a slight word of caution which is, whether we like it or not, people want to see gratitude,” he said. “My counsel to the Ukrainians is sometimes, look, you are persuading countries to give up their own stocks.
"And yes, the war is a noble war and yes, we see it as you doing a war not just for yourselves but also our freedoms. But sometimes you have got to persuade lawmakers on the Hill in America [US Congress].
"You have got to persuade doubting politicians in other countries that it is worth it, it’s worthwhile and they are getting something for it. That’s just the reality of it.”
He said there would sometimes be "grumbles" from US lawmakers, but he insisted that Ukraine would join Nato.
“The win here for Ukraine is the sort of cultural acceptance that Ukraine belongs in Nato.
"You have heard the [UK] prime minister say Ukraine belongs in Nato and the word 'belongs' implies it's fate, implies it’s going to happen.”

Yes I get the feeling if and when their systems of destabilisation break down, things across the West might start to work a little better.  On the other hand, constant stresses and criticism do encourage us to firm up our ideals and seek workable answers to difficult questions and social conflicts.
EDIT: Although China is a bigger threat in other ways, I don't feel they would have the same effect in the propaganda sphere, off the top of my head it would be more about building relationships and economic leverage/bribery.

LMAO
 
 

here is the latest:


Taking Stock of the Ukrainian Offensive 07072023.mp3    

Good point.
 

Er, I don't think you get sent to the Hague for breaking a voluntary treaty.

Ya I got that part, it was weak reframing which does not really help beyond those who already agree with the position...hell I agree with the position and thought it off key.  There is no way we can park policy on "the is no such thing as Great Powers" - it is right up there with that Chatham House piece from yesterday.
Of course there are Great Powers, they would be the ones who deter, coerce and compel us be it above or below the waterline.  The questions are - how do we expand/sustain our option spaces while compressing theirs?  Quickly followed by "setting conditions to negotiate from positions of strength".  Russia, China and/or Mole People, that is the central issue.  What seems to break a lot of these policy types is the fact that we may need to renegotiate the RBIO in the process as the status quo appears to have fun off and joined the circus.
Back to Russia the issue to my mind is how do we defeat a Great Power without making things worse?  Carefully, it would appear.
Edit - to follow up, now the concept of Medium Power (one my nation seems to think is a thing) might be the idea worth tossing out.  I am beginning to think a state is either Great or Small, Medium really doesn't seem to mean anything beyond a collectivism dream that is starting to fray on the edges.

I've always been an area studies guy myself so it's never revved my engines much either. But this sort of thing *is* influential in how conflicts get explained to the public at large so we need to pay some attention. One need only look at how Mearsheimer is *still* being approvingly quoted by the Musk supplicants on Twitter to see that real world political implications come from what are often just very dry intellectual exercises in policy justification. Seen in that light, Phillips is attempting to lower the resistance to arming Ukraine and raise resistance to deferring to Russian interests. Call it another front in the war if you will.