kluge

Light and radio are the same phenomenon, just different frequencies (or wavelengths, or even worse, wavenumbers if you're a spectroscopist).  One of the best optical system designers I know got his start as a radio astronomer and I met him because he was hired to do the fancy things radio people do (with wavelengths of meters) in the optical (wavelengths of half a micrometer).  RF is just a bunch photons of a lot lower energy than optical photons. And we can build incredibly sensitive sensors for both, with very different implementations (thanks quantum mechanics!)
Most of the discussion so far has been pretty accurate on the practical differences, which are many.  A "mirror" in the RF can be an umbrella lined with hardware cloth that looks like trash in the optical.  Lasers still have optics, but you can make the beam very narrow with very small sidebands so it's hard to detect, at least over battlefield ranges.  There's still beam spread that depends on your wavelength and optical system - most of the lasers I use are attached to optical fibers so that they emit light in a wide cone at low enough intensity that they're eye safe.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/house-speaker-anthony-rota-resigns-over-nazi-veteran-invite-1.6577796
 

Magic around absolving Galizien soldiers from responsibility for warcrimes lies in excluding from their list members of police detachments that were from the same wave of volunteers you mentioned before. These were recruits from OUN-M initially unfit for regular service, directed into auxiliary service outside from frontline divison but later (after its restructurization) amalgamated into- namely 4th and 5th Galician Volunteer SS Police Regiments. They participated in following massacres, together with Germans:
-2.II.1944 Prehoryłe and Smoligów, unkown casualties (investigation still ongoing)
-28.II.1944 Huta Pieniacka, 800+ civilians murdered/ some burned in houses
-12.III.1944 Palikrowy, 368 civilians bound together and machine-gunned
-16.IV.1944 Chodaczkowo Wielkie, 250-850 civilians murdered
-24.VII.1944 Iwonicz- 72 prisoners from AK and Bch taken and shot/bayoneted.
-Numerous pacification actions with numbers of killed below 100 (usually 30 people here, 40 there). There are also relations of singular Jew huntings but since they were formed vey late, they weren't "necessary" anymore on big scale.
-Anti-partisan actions in Yugoslavia, of which less is known (if somebody has some info, feel free to share)
This is what we judge them the for in Europe, not for the fact that they did fight for free Ukraine or not. Even if they weren't in proper SS, they did serve in the same machine, took orders and share its ideological conotations, uniforms and crucially- actions. Also it is not true they were vouched entirely afterwar; there was simply no possibility in post-45 world to entirely check what you did in turmoil of late WWII in these lands; simply burning documents and creating new identity was also not unheard of, albeit to my knowledge less in Galizen itself, as it was kept as coherent unit. Gen. Anders is particulary to blame here too, as he allowed 8 thousands members of former Galizien and UNA (not all of them SS ofc.) to escape to West without checks, giving them Polish passports collectivelly (even late D. Doncev managed to escape this way after pleading with Giedroyc). It's good they were spared the fate of Cossacks, but not that those guilty sliped away.
Overall it's shame somebody in Canadian Parliament allowed such episode to happen (Russian propaganda has a feast on something real...finally), especially given how many Canadian soldiers died fighting SS in Normandy. I observe that lately, perhaps due to novelty that become complicated history of CEE lands suddenly appearing in western public discourse, we get way too lax and uncritical with our global approach to these ideologies, didn't we? We prefer not to see widespread far-right symbolic in AFU, have already difficult discussions about OUN-B past, and now we relativize heritage of even more obvious SS auxilia? Well, that goes fast.
On other side you are right that history of some people joining SS in Central and Eastern Europe was very complex, especially for Balts, crushed between Soviet Scylla and Nazi Haribda. Also not all Ukrainians serving as German auxilia were indeed happy to initially serve along SS, like Pavlo Shandruk, who refused to take over Galizien and only very late in war took command in UNA :https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Pavlo_Shandruk
 
I hear in some news that Gen. Tieplinski, chief of VDV, was effectively moved from command on Southern front and Gierasimov took over manual control. So fingers crossed it is true. 🤞On otehr side, similar situation was suppose to happen many times already.

I first mentioned this concept way back in the thread, but I think we can expand it right down to the tactical for drone warfare:

Forces survive under counter-drone snowdomes enabled by EW and air defence assets.
Under a friendly snowdome, forces fight with drone supremacy (re. artillery direction, strike, logistics etc).
Fighting under an enemy snowdome, in the face of enemy drone supremacy, is suicidal.
The result is stalemate.

However, snowdomes are not impermeable.
Gaps and weaknesses exist due to the effects of terrain, the performance of human operators and the availability and technical characteristics of EW-AD equipment.
An attacker can penetrate snowdomes by exploiting these gaps and weaknesses, then widen them by neutralising EW-AD assets.
If an attacker suceeds in compromising a snowdome, it collapses.
In this case, there is a race between attacker and defender to maximise damage and re-establish the snowdome, respectively.
If the defender is successful, the attack takes on the characteristics of a raid with attacking forces maximising damage before getting caught under the re-established snowdome and being destroyed or forced to evacuate.
If the attacker is successful, the defending forces are destroyed or forced to evacuate, and the attacker can extend their snowdome coverage into the new area.

Rinse and repeat, bite and hold with drones.

Right now, I'd go out on and limb argue that an early interation of this is going on in Ukraine. Drones aren't available in the mass needed to really flood and sanitise compromised areas. Instead, they act as enablers for artillery with some limited strike capability (ie. nade dropping and kamikazes).
So while snowdomes spring up, collapse and flicker on and off along the front, the exploitation element either isn't there to take advantage or is slowly grinding it's way through villages and minefields.

Give it a few years, we'll get there. In the meantime, I think it's a good lens to look through.
And there's probably some air force types looking at it saying "Welcome to our world!"

As was said, this is basically COTS and lacks those features. The evolution will look something like so:
First, The software on the base station (phone, or laptop, or whatever) will get some smarts: Target recognition, target tracking, speed/distance estimation etc. This is easy to do, and easy to scale (in terms of distributing the software across the military) and easy to update with the newest version. Slowly, the smarts will be shifted over to the drone (hardware + software). A beefier base station gives you better machine learning capabilities, of course.
Next, The drone will get a small amount of smarts, but still need the smarter base station. This allows the drone to negate some EW effects, and increase battery life. For example, it can follow a route and phone home when it sees interesting stuff. The problem is that updating the software on the drone (or a bunch of them) is marginally more involved than the phone or laptop software update.
Eventually, the drone will have software capable of doing everything on its own. Obviously this isn’t a stretch in the very near future. If you’ve ever played with OpenCV and your own drone, and it’s pretty easy to write a little program that tracks your face 90% reliably (and we’re talking minimal training data, like 30 images or so) and a bit more work to control your drone programmatically to follow the face and keep it a set scale (so constant distance). Hardware isn’t a problem; a modern smartphone has enough power to run your regular image recognition algorithms easily (but deep learning probably is relegated to the base station).
 

Ok, let me present The_Capt's theory of the trajectory of the tank.  And then maybe we can tie this one off and just wait and see.
1.  Denial - Western militaries will simply ignore the data from this war.  They will rest easily in the certainty that "we will do it better".  Then we will have a major failure.  If we are lucky it will be in training.  The idea of tanks and even heavy mech will hit a major and unavoidable wall that we cannot rationalize away.  This will likely be a long process after we spent billions on next gen tanks.
2.  Anger - We will try to protect the tank, just so we can keep it viable.  Layers upon layers of systems, R&D, new tank variants and just obscene amounts of money.  No one is going to tell us we can't use the tank!  Some may work for awhile but eventually the pressure against this capability will become too much.
3.  Bargaining - We will narrow the employment of the tank.  We will save it for very specific points in a campaign.  We will tie them to decision points in order to preserve the value of the tank.  Eventually pressure will continue to mount as someone else does what a tank is designed for, with something else for much less.
4.  Depression - We will push the tank back.  Someone will figure out how to put a big HE PGM round on a tank and we will employ the thing like we see in Ukraine today.  10kms back, a heavily armoured SPG lobbing shells in the space between infantry and artillery.  This weird work will continue until someone points out that we already have systems to do all this.  
5.  Acceptance - A sad vestige of another age, some bureaucrat is going to do the math on the cost/benefit of the old girl and time for museums. The worm will turn and every "visionary" will claim they knew the tank was done "way back in 2022".  Staff college papers will be written and the world will keep on spinning.
We gotta keep the rotation going.  I think we should have Canada bashing day based on that stunt we just pulled in Parliament as we hosted and celebrated a proud veteran of the Waffen SS.

You don't want to be these guys....

Even that lost productivity has been quantified by the actuaries.  I don't keep close track, but it's in the few $M range - that's what an insurer will pay out to compensate a family for the loss of a person.  Last I knew (quite a while ago) it was about $3M.  Call it $5M today, and that's the lifetime earning value + loss of companionship.  Figure that the economic value to the economy is maybe 3x that because their employer is on the exploitive side, and it's about the cost of one MBT.
Coming from the POV of someone who develops technology that is MilTech adjacent, it's not necessarily the direct fire high velocity gun on a moving platform that's dead (although I think its role is going to change), it's the huge pile of junk that you have to pile onto that platform to protect it that's dead.  We're at a point that modern infantry-carried AT weapons have a range to the horizon (or at least to the next treeline for NLAW) and the warheads can penetrate *any* amount of armor that you can reasonably slap on, including ERA and maybe APS.  If your APS is firing, you probably need to hope you have a fast enough reverse gear, because the cheap AT weapons are going to come in fast enough to overload it.  
So that pile of armor/era/electronics/CIWS that you're hauling around is mostly just sucking up resources (fuel, maintenance) and not helping you offensively because things are at a point where "If you're seen, one shot will kill you".  If you want a high velocity gun on a mobile platform, the system to protect it probably needs to revolve more around keeping it invisible and in motion more than protecting it from things that go boom.  Maybe light armor for protection from small arms/shrapnel, but anything more is just reducing mobility.  Which is the AMX-10, or the CAESAR for indirect fire.  Remove the need to put people in it and you have Steve's UGV mini-tank.  Way smaller logistics tail, way less energy consumption, and you can make it electric or PHEV so that its idle power consumption (and waste heat signature) is close to nothing.
Back to the high velocity direct fire guns.  We're already seeing how direct fire isn't that great against guys in holes - the flat trajectory limits you to hitting the edge of the hole, which is a tough target and doesn't distribute the boom very well.  So indirect fire or drones are better there.  Trench clearing really seems like it should be done by LandShark Mk I or CandyGram drones that can fly in and go around the corners or blow the doors to the dugouts.  Those can be cheap and autonomous and even launched from close outside the trench.  Like hand delivered DPICM with some minimal brains.  And why send a guy when you can send a grenade with wings?  But  if you need to hit a vehicle near the front lines, direct HV is effective and harder to defend against than a slow rocket.  But in an environment where the average infantryman can hit a vehicle out to his LOS (even at the horizon) you don't want to expose that gun.  "Direct fire" will start to include flat trajectory indirect fire slightly over the horizon, like a tank version of the Apache longbow.  And to avoid radiating a "send your precision guided arty here" signal with the radar system, it will be directed by targeting systems (drones or radars) that are physically separated and may have at most a minimal two-way connection to keep the radiated signals down.

2) The entire tank system infantry system is too damn fragile.  Even the tank infantryman itself is pretty fragile.  The thing need only take a few  one sub-munition hits and one can knock out  hurt the engine the heart, or the gun an arm, or the track a leg.  Then all of the support systems from forward repair hospitals to recovery, to logistical support are also heavy, hot and easily spotted.  So now one has to bubble wrap that entire system just to keep the tank infantry in motion - even assuming away all the threats to the tank infantryman itself.  I am pretty sure our gas trucks infantrymen burn die as well as Russian ones.

How does one provide cover from smart-DPICM raining from the sky?  This is a criticism I have about the entire "tank defence", it picks a few threats and goes "we can solve for that".  What it fails to do is recognize:
1) The technology to defeat any counters is moving too fast.  As Steve notes every time a solution is found, two more pop up.  Ok, we layer APS on everything to counter those pokey and vulnerable ATGMs.  Then someone builds an ATGM with sub-munitions, so Javelin 2030 (tm) splits into 6 smart attack vehicles and APS can't keep up.  Oh wait there is more...standoff EFP.  Worked very well for insurgents in Iraq and is aching for a comeback.  Now you could have a ATGM that essentially explodes 50m out and drives a slug thru your tank.  Now APS needs to push out even further.  The trends of lighter, smaller, cheaper and smarter are accelerating anti-tank weaponry to the point that the tank is trending towards marginalization.
2) The entire tank system is too damn fragile.  Even the tank itself is pretty fragile.  The thing need only take a few sub-munition hits and one can knock out the engine, or the gun, or the track.  Then all of the support systems from forward repair, to recovery, to logistical support are also heavy, hot and easily spotted.  So now one has to bubble wrap that entire system just to keep the tanks in motion - even assuming away all the threats to the tank itself.  I am pretty sure our gas trucks burn as well as Russian ones.
The tank is being squeezed, along with the rest of mech.  And it is also being replaced.  If the job was to hurl energy at targets from 2kms+ back, well we kinda got that covered off without needing 50 ton behemoths to do it.  Infantry support...this one is interesting especially in this war.  Between ISR and UAS, infantry and artillery have formed an unholy union.  Add in UAS attack capability and if infantry need something under cover to die there are ways to do it not involving a multi-million dollar vehicle that needs a Broadway production just to keep it rolling from A to B.
I am sure people will still buy tanks.  They built battleships for years even after they were pushed out.  But the trend will be lighter, longer, lethal and cheaper.  We will see militaries de-aggregate into lethal mist.  If someone brings expensive, big, hot and heavy to a fight that mist will simply rust the entire heavy system to ash.  No, mist on mist is where this is going.  
   

I think that this is a little too fast to judge(tank death). We have seen very fast progress of anti-tank weaponry such as FPVs in this war(just think of what were the capabilities and usage cases of drones at the beginning of this war and what are 1.5 year later), but not much was done in regard to defense. In my personal view, after this war no country from the "first world" would go to war unprepared for such threat.
There are multiple responses to FPVs, PGMs and ATGMs alike as all of them base on two main characteristics to be effective:
- they fly faster/slower and have more/less degree of manuveribility.
- they carry exposives as a means to kill things
These two properties make these weapons vulnerable and easy to kill by anything that CAN hit them, so the only problem is to deploy defensive weaponry, which actually can. My personal bet here are readily available ultra-short range AA by strapping together machine gun and visual/radar targeting. You can make it en masse and at least the usage is cheap enough to rip through any number of attacking drones. At least from economical perspective. Also personal rifles will HAVE to be able to shoot down small drone up to 500m or more without major issues. Rifles will slowly drift from offensive weapon to something like last resort defense. Ballistic computers should also be already able to provide something like that. For tanks and other vehicles we will se just evolution of APS + ultra-short AA as above. Dedicated AA vehicles will also provide some area cover just like normal air defense today.
What I would NOT invest in is electronical warfare. We already see some attempts to make these weapons autonomus and this will be standard, if this war will take another 2 years or so, making electronic warfare against drones/PGMs pretty much useless. Welcome to Skynet World.
 

I always loved that painting.

As much as it pains me to give my HUMINT brethren any credit it’s also pretty likely that there are more than a few residents of Sevastopol that know/hear things and hate the Russian occupier.

As I understand it,  It's a common misperception that land wars function separately from naval campaigns.
Both domains reinforce the other, providing unique services and support that one domain does not have but the other does. 
Fundamentally, every naval campaign is about the protection/denial of sea trade, because nothing else but ocean going ships can move the same volume and quantity of goods and material. Trains are simply not equivalent
But ships need bases, so land warfare is need to protect/acquire those. The naval bases and trade ports can intake a huge amount of material (because ships,  above) which can allow for large scale supply of an inland campaign. Think Pusan,  cherbourg etc. 
Sevastopol serves the same function,  even more so with the Kerch bridge in play. 
I suspect the bridge will be the last bit of Russia to go.. 
 

All of the above - but also the whole reason we are even now talking about Poland relations is because Russian fleet makes it difficult for Ukraine to export grain via the sea.
Ane the fleet will be important part of the occupiers supplying themselves if Ukraine manages to blow up the Kerch bridge, cut the rail connection, etc

Consider in US small coke is like half liter and small car has six tons, I hope it's at least a thousand.

Poland used this war to get rid of it's old military junk, get compensated for it by the EU and order new stuff for it's armed forces. As simple as that.

Morawiecki's words were misreported, as he did not declare a policy shift, but stated as a matter of fact that Poland at the moment is not supplying arms to Ukraine, because it needs to rearm itself. This is generally true because most of assets that Poland could spare have been donated already and the new deliveries have yet to be realised. The press being the press reported this in a way which both creates controversy and satsifies the biases of the writers and the readers.
Still what Morawiecki refers to is important to understand the present crisis in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Poland was determined to help from the beginning and had a significant stock of post-soviet stuff which blended relatively well with Ukrainian assets. This caused Polish aid to be hugely important in the first period of the war. By now, we have largely shot our bolt and do not have so much to give anymore. Western European aid is on the rise, and countries like e.g. Germany can help Ukraine in EU accession negotiations which Poland cannot. Therefore, our value as an ally has decreased, apparently to the extent that Zelenski decided to prioritise the profit marigins on the sale of grain over UKR-POL relations. As long as we do not close the border or the Jasionka airport - which is not going to happen - Ukrainians will continue to benefit from most of Poland's value as an ally in this war.  Also, he may be counting on currying favour with the EU commission and Western European governements by creating a difficult situation for the PiS govt shortly before the elections.
Conversely, most of Ukraine's value as an ally to Poland is realised via Ukraine defending itself and killing Russians. At this stage it seems they are capable of doing it without Polish aid deliveries, with Poland acting just as an airhead and land bridge to UKR, so I expect this will be the equilibrium on which the matters will settle: we will keep providing the passive support plus training, repair services and deliver under the existing contracts. Cheering for Ukraine's wins and enthusiasm for post-war close cooperation will decrease, money and asset collection among the general populace will fall away, etc. - but these have always been optional and had no impact on the general direction of the war.
BTW this is exactly the course of events which was predicted by many Polish political analysts of the "realist" persuasion.
 

Azerbeidzjan attacks Ngorno-Karabach.
Air attacks, border-crossings.
Even Russia "concerned" about this escalation.

Usual hype and unverified info. This ship was attacked as far as on 14th of September, but was just damaged. Allegedly damaged. Author of this tweet wrote this in later comment, but too late- a "sensation" already flies around internet

Lebensraum, well that is a golden oldie.  Good old fashion greed and conquest.  Well at least they are telling the truth now and not trying to dress it up as anti-Nazi, anti-NATO, anti-whatever…it is a pure and simple land grab.  

"Leaked" 🤣   Well, I am an expert with 38 years of submarine construction and testing, and as a subject matter expert I can say that that submarine is truly f-ed, FUBAR, SNAFU, scrap metal. 
Aren't you glad I'm here to provide you with my expert opinions?   😀
And kudos to Ukraine. Nice shot. 
Dave

Re: the sub images:

I love how someone went to all the trouble of pixelating the background.

Looks like a job for Duct Tape: