Agiel

Just goes to show that the "General's tank" and the "Tanker's tank" are quite often two different things

I think it comes more from analysis of cost and result. If Lada said they could build a car that has equal if not superior performance, comfort, and utility to a Mercedes-Benz E-Class coupé for only half the cost, one would rightly be skeptical. Right now, Uralvagonzavod has potentially made a design that can be "very good," but all that performance very likely has come at great cost in development, so the idea that anyone other than a country for whom money is no object (i.e. India) could afford it in operationally significant quantities is a bit suspect. Might even be that to rein in the cost the version that eventually enters service will be somewhat less impressive than initially advertised.

The amount of PGM howitzer rounds you need to destroy an MBT are quite variable. Sometimes you'll get lucky and knock it out with just the one. Other times you need the whole battery to nail it, and even then you might get _only_ an immobilise for your troubles.

I suppose it illustrates the point that an excellent _platform_ and and excellent _program_ are not necessarily the same thing.

Though I certainly cannot 100% excuse the Vincennes incident, during the Tanker War the US Navy was basically in a non-declared state of war with Iran (and to a lesser extent, Iraq). There was already a case where acting imprudently lead to lethal consequences with the USS Stark (apparently the "Gun Boss" who had the key to arm the Phalanx was in the head at the time), and the US Navy had just finished the largest single naval engagement since WWII with Operation Praying Mantis.

As an ELINT aircraft the Su-24MP does not operationally carry any weapons (apart from two AA-8 Aphid/R-60 missiles with 6lbs blast frag warheads), so it was likely that as soon as it was determined that that was what it was (likely when the Fencer turned on its OECM pods), they figured there wasn't any real reason to treat it as something overly belligerent.

Well, <<une armée marche à son estomac>>. There's a guy on Youtube who does taste tests of MREs from all over the world: http://youtu.be/8FzQs0Wrvkg

I think there's been cases of A-10s in Afghanistan being loaded with inert training rounds since there was barely anything worth using even HE-I anti-personnel rounds over.

Honestly the presence of the Su-25 does seem incongruous to me. We have seen in both Syria and the real-life Ukraine how those fleets were rapidly depleted against even a third-rate air-defence environment. Some might attribute it to low to mediocre training standards of the pilots (that said, I cannot claim to know for certain just how affected the Ukrainian Air Force was by their country's "Peace Dividend"), but that doesn't change the fact that there is a technical limit to what you can do with these aircraft when it comes to survivability. After all, in the times seasoned vets in Zeroes went up against newbies in F6F Hellcats, they got worked all the same.

Excellent piece from the pre-eminent Richard Aboulafia of Teal Group:

Unfortunately many of the *successful* UN peackeeping operations were contingent on both of the belligerents already having very little stomach to continue the fight, and were looking for some diplomatic "out" to the predicament. The presence of UN peackeepers, who may or may not seem militarily impotent, offers them a way of bowing out of hostilities with some degree of "dignity" by making it seem like they were acquiescing to the authority of a higher organisation that represented the world community.

A lot of PGMs of that vein usually have a back-up INS mode that keeps track of GPS data from either the launching platform (assuming that it wasn't in a communications denied environment) or the last time the round itself had a good GPS fix, and would switch to INS guidance mode if it figures out that "something is wrong". That said, it *is* INS guidance, so circular error probability might suffer given the accumulated deviations that result from minute errors, changes in atmospheric conditions, and so forth.

I've found this excerpt to be shockingly relevant these days:

I wouldn't give myself too much credit . Was just condensing a document by Andrew Jaremkow. He and Willi Odermatt are those guys in my head who have equations scribbled all over their household walls and floors in chalk figuring this stuff out. Generally, my knowledge extends to the historical development and qualitative aspects of weapons systems and platforms and the mathematical things fly over my head.

There are four primary reasons why dU is used over Wolfram Heavy/Tungsten Alloys: 1. Density: In their purest forms depleted uranium has a density of 18.6 grams per cubic centimeter vs 17.5 to 18.5 grams per cubic centimeter for Tungsten. That said, how much it comprises the actual composition of the penetrator varies. 2. As you have said, cost: Depleted uranium is ostensibly "free," being a waste product of the uranium enrichment process. Superpower countries like the US, Russia, France, the UK, China, and so forth have long and established nuclear industries, so they had plenty of the stuff lying around. Using depleted uranium also potentially frees up a country's supply of Tungsten for non-combat purposes (for instance, edges of machining tools). 3. The pyrophoric effect: When a depleted uranium penetrator gets through the armour plate, shards of it get shaved off and spontaneously combust, which can be especially deadly if it touches off the ammunition storage. 4. (Most importantly) Adiabatic shearing: When the rod strikes plate, narrow bands of weakness form throughout, and bits off the tip get shaved off to form a chisel like point that punches a more energy-efficient hole. Apparently the Germans have replicated the effect with the 120mm DM53/63 series of rounds, but they expended a considerable amount of money and effort in doing so, which brings us back to point 2. Of course dU catches a lot of flak because of the belief that it is a "nuclear" material. Uranium in all its forms *is* a carcinogen, even in its depleted form, but in that case it is totally derived from the fact that uranium is a heavy metal, not from it being radioactive. In that respect, it is identical to Tungsten, which is just as bad for you if you somehow eat a piece of it or it enters an open wound.