Letter from Prague

That has it's pros and cons. For a while, everyone was saying "Ukraine has huge benefit in that Ukraine can hit Russian MIC but Russia can't hit 'Ukrainian MIC' because it is in Europe and US". But that of course is benefit as long as the MIC delivers.

I know we talk about drones a lot when we talk about weapons. But one thing has been bugging me. The West has bet a lot on PGMs. Like instead of biggest booms, or using a lot of weapons, West uses small but precise weapons. But turns out those are trivial to defeat with GPS jamming and end up being rather ineffectual. So what next? What is being done to fix it? Didn't West lose most of its combat power when most weapons are possibly useless against peer enemy who will definitely have EW?

Yes. And it is pretty much part of his strategy as well - let me win or else.

Fascinating. If they do it, it's going to be the signature Russian short term thinking. I also want to say I'm glad seeing someone post on mastodon instead of Xitter (pronounces ****ter) so I can actually read it.

Haiduk if you don't like Western values then return all the Western help you've got. Maybe some country that doesn't have the LBGT and genders will help. Let me think of some of those for you: - Russia - China - Hungary (currently blocking EU aid) - USA with Republicans in charge (currently blocking US aid) - Hamas - Iran well seems you're out of luck. The people with your values do seem to be on the other side of the war. Maybe you should listen to you buddies Musk and Trump and Orban (who hate LBGT and genders as much as you) and just surrender.

Nuking Russia?/s

I think the drone vs HIMARS discussion depends on what countermeasures arrive, eventually. GMLRS arrives at almost a kilometer a second, while drone is much slower, so in theory GMRLS should be almost impossible to stop. But something moving kilometer a second is also going to be much more visible on radar while the drone might look like a bird, so who knows. I'm more curious about the GPS spoofing and other ECM. If Russians can make GPS guided munitions useless, the whole Western strategy of pounding things to dust with PGMs is kind of falling apart.

One more thing - someone said that that Ukrainians now seem to be stopping most Russian assaults by FPVs and not by artillery. How do we know whether that's because FPVs are more effective, or they basically ran out or artillery? Of course, that doesn't tell us much about the battlefields of the future, but still.

My favorite sentence of that chapter is "In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him." Gibson is a damned master of English language.

So what do you need to counter drones? A weapon, radar and some computer? We've seen Gepards but also dudes with machine guns being reasonably effective against Shaheeds and stuff, and while FPVs are much smaller targets, I wonder why has nobody built some anti-drone system which could be just machine gun connected to some servos and a computer and a radar. Like C-RAM but scaled from enormous gun to ... maybe even a rifle. Then you could plop it somewhere and have it work. For bonus points, put it on UGV and drive it around. We've already seen UGV with a machine gun, so it's just missing a radar. I guess that would still cost more than a drone and you could swarm it with many drones, but it's far better in cost effectiveness to using a traditional air defense system or nothing. As for hunter / counter drones, that is tricky - I don't know if the drone cameras are good enough to see other drones at a good distance. If not, then the counter drone would also need a radar and enough intelligence to recognize other drones from radar signature, and that's probably more expensive than normal drone.

I'm sure they launched 15 naval drones from the same five person pleasure yacht they run the huge and complicated operation to destroy NordStream from ... Anyway, as for the resources. I have heard that a few times (mostly about natural gas, EV minerals are a new one) and I'm confused how it's supposed to work. There are barely places in occupied Ukraine that are further than 100 km from the front line. Most are closer. Are Russians going to start building new mines and refineries (or gas drills or whatever) there? Full of new, expensive machinery? How long are they going to stay unexploded, considering Ukraine is now blowing up oil refineries hundreds of kilometers inside Russia? If there was a ceasefire, maybe. But Ukraine doesn't seem to want one, and neither does Russia for that matter.

With no way out of a worsening war, Zelensky’s options look bad or worse https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/06/ukraine-war-zelensky-options/ Where are these articles coming from? Is the war worsening? In what way?

I don't think so. Actual Ukrainians correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that lot of the far right in Ukraine traces its history to "the Nazis have treated us (or our ancestors) better than the Russians have", and meanwhile Russian Nazis might be white supremacists globally, but between white people they are definitely Russian-supremacists. So they might look similar if you look at their opinions on LBGT or economic policy they might look the same, the history and goals are quite different so of course they fight.

Oh, this is why Putin's relationship with Kadyrov is so good.

I'm just thinking. It seems that Russia started the info-op of trying to blame Ukraine for the attack in full. It might be interesting to watch Western media to see which are co-opted by Russia - just like we've seen who is a puppet when we say various German newspapers come with the nonsense about Ukraine blowing up Nordstream. Who will be the first to offer "investigative journalism" on how Ukraine might have been involved I wonder.

Is that not a Batman movie plot point? Man, life does imitate art.

People on reddit are claiming it was fake:

I don't think this is reliable information, because I don't think Medvedev is ever not this drunk and high.

If this is a false flag, it is literally 15 years old video game plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Russian. Then again, Putin already did it once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombings. I personally believe the claims that this is some separatists, because they can see the center getting weaker.

I'm sorry is that T-72 crewed by Russian rebels driving inside Russia with EU flag on it? What the F? What is this world anymore?

So you're telling me this is inaccurate?

What is a time on target for ballistic missile? I would intuitively expect them to be quite slow, so this destroyed HIMARS sounds like Ukraine making a mistake and reusing a hiding place, instead of Russian ISR getting faster. But I dunno.

Why would you assume they're telling the truth? Remember when Moskva went down they were pretending the crew survived using old and faked videos and stuff. Or maybe, hitting the ships while under the bridge means they can't maneuver and are easier to hit but it's also easier for crew to survive.

I don't want to pretend I'm an expert (unless we're talking machine learning or build a data warehouse) but even before the war, I read that the difference between Russian and Western navies is how much crew they have - Russian run much leaner and (at that time the article presented it as a good thing) rely on machines and automation instead having many people around "watchstanding". I think now we (possibly) see that this is not because the Russians are smarter than us, but because they lack the ability to attract competent people for their navy, train them and retain them (and have for decades) and this is how they make do. So they might not actually have that many guys with guns to go out and shoot drones.

I think the specific timing will depend on how successful the Ukrainian strategic strike campaign will go. Every factory, refinery and gas terminal out of commission shortens the Russian lifeline.