Letter from Prague
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Posts posted by Letter from Prague
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3 hours ago, ArmouredTopHat said:
Complacency kills rearing its ugly head yet again it seems.
It is not just complacency - it probably is more efficient to do it that way, if you can't get hit. Not everything Russians do is dumb, sadly.
Which makes me wonder, did the Russians not expect the West to change stance? Is it arrogance? Or did they expect it but were not able to pivot in time?
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25 minutes ago, keas66 said:
Viko is clearly Version 3 or 4 of the Standard Russian Troll who keeps putting in an appearance here now . Why people even bother to converse this propaganda account I don't understand . Block it .
Story goes, they get paid for post they make and for every person that responds to them. Which is why they write the most provocative **** to enrage / engage people.
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1 minute ago, dan/california said:
Personally I would expand it all the way to Tagenrog Airbase, but that s just me...
You misspelled Vladivostok.
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Everyone knows GenX don't exist, there's only Boomers, Millennials and Zoomers. Stop this misinformation!!!!!!
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I think Swedish "AWACS" going to Ukraine is pretty interesting.
If whoever provides Ukraine with ISR now pulled the support, they would be pretty screwed. Once this arrives, they have some safety margin for it. Makes me think Sweden is thinking forward in case there's changes in who the Commander in Chief in US is or something.
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3 minutes ago, Eddy said:
One thing I definitely don't think we will see is close air support. I thinks that as dead as the dodo now.
I think we have seen ... I dunno ... standoff close air support?
I think both Ukraine and Russia has used glide bombs from a distance to hit tactical targets, tho Ukrainians also strike strategic targets and Russia does terror bombing. And Ukraine seems does it by jury-rigging Western bombs on Sukhois and MiGs so it seems to be worth quite a bit of effort for them.
I don't think the current (months long) Ukrainian campaign against Russian air defence (including the AWACS they shot down) was just for making their refinery targeting drones go further. It makes me think they're betting on the F-16s.
At the very least, it would allow them to keep more safely and effectively doing what they're doing with the planes they currently have, which are probably very much past their shelf life.
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While no magic bullet, 85 F-16s is actually of a lot of planes. Sweden for which it was said "they will greatly expand NATO air capabilities with their powerful air force" has 71 Gripen. My country has 12. Finland has 50 F-18s and Germany has 140 Eurofighters. Poland has 36 F-16s.
That makes me think 85 new planes can do a lot of work. Of course the other question is how many missiles and bombs do they come with.
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They will never leave EU because then the gravy train stops. NATO, maybe.
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I'm still not convinced the early warning radar is not a Russian psyop. Ukraine has been going after Russian air defence pretty strongly last few months - whether to increase efficiency of their strategic strikes or in anticipation of F-16s which should arrive "this summer" or some other reason I don't know. And they have been successful too, if the information on Russia removing air defence from basically everywhere else on their borders is correct.
It is suspicious that radars are now suddenly untouchable. I wonder if this will extend to S-300 and 400 as well, those are ballistic missile defence and as such part of nuclear defence too.
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57 minutes ago, ZellZeka said:
Do you want to say that the moods of the Czechs differ from the moods of the Slovaks who are close to them in spirit and worldview?
Yes. Based on being one and living in the country.
Also based on the election results - most of the parties with actual presence are pro-West, including the populists (who had some anti-war messaging in the presidential elections and it is thought that's what lost them the elections). There is one pro-Russian far right party nobody wants to touch with about 10 % of votes. The president is former NATO general and heavily in support of Ukraine.
Meanwhile Slovakia has just (2023) elected openly pro-Russian and anti-West parties and (2024) openly pro-Russian and anti-West president. Though given that the Slovak prime minister recently got shot for his pro-Russian stance, I'm feeling the results are not that one-sided either, the country is pretty divided. They might follow Hungary's path or they might not.
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EDIT: got too angry, deleting this.
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4 hours ago, ZellZeka said:
Take the Czech Republic for example. Pro-Russian sentiments here are no less strong than in Hungary or Slovakia.
Excuse me?
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This whole talk about "what about the Russian collapse, we must prevent it" makes me pretty angry.
Russia will genocide, invade, pillage, rape, murder, steal, because that's what they have always done. The list of Russian atrocities just from this latest installment is pages long, and USSR before was same or worse, and Russian Empire before was same or worse. Russian fracture and civil war just means they will for a while do this to each other and not to other people.
Yes, loose nukes are a problem, but remember that both nukes and delivery systems are difficult and extremely expensive to maintain. They would only be a problem for a short time before they stop working, and last thing every warlord of Whatever Oblast wants is the whole world going after them.
For reasons I don't quite get, people of Western Europe (especially Germany and France) and US (to lesser extent) tend to empathize more with Russian murderers than with the people of Eastern Europe the Russians terrorize. Throughout this war we have seen again and again people of West care more about not insulting, angering, embarrassing or inconveniencing Russia than they cared about Eastern European lives (which for now is Ukrainians but we know others are next).
When people talk about "we must not let Russia collapse, even at the cost of Ukraine losing the war" it is hard to not see it that way as well. That's why people see NATO as a joke, because West seems to care more about Russian feelings than about Ukrainian (and soon Estonian and others) hospitals being bombed.
Screw it. Russia should collapse into a bloody civil war (and we should take no refugees from there) and if that means Iran gets nukes and nukes Saudis so be it.
(This was written in somewhat of a bad mood.)
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We had few discussions about cyber - here's an interesting article I stumbled upon today:
Cyber Security: A Pre-War Reality Check
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/cyber-security-pre-war-reality-check/
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So how are the autonomous drones handling IFF?
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Addendum: "breaking" modern encryption isn't really a thing. You would need quantum computers that don't really exist at the moment, or more time than until the end of the universe to do something like that - even the dumbest CPUs that cost $1 a piece have integrated modern encryption nowadays.
What is usually attacked is when whoever built the device, hardware or software, made a mistake or cut some corners, like not implementing encryption at all or not generating encryption key properly or messing up some code or even left a backdoor. That's where you might see a difference between Raytheon and DJI drones.
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Modern CPUs have dedicated hardware for encryption, so that is not really a concern unless in very very constrained environments.
When you watch a youtube video on a phone on a tablet, that video is going through at least two layers of encryption - your device's connection to your wifi or to mobile network is encrypted, and all connections between web browser or app and Google's servers are encrypted as well.
That doesn't mean there aren't vulnerabilities, especially if the protocol designer is kind of a dummy, like in my favorite talk here:
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15 minutes ago, poesel said:
Hmm, not so sure about this part (I totally agree with the rest). Military drones are in their infancy and so is EW wrt to drones.
Devices that blast loudly to drown the spectrum are surely on the way out. But there are other ways. You could attack the transmission protocols and try to take over the drone. Or attack the video transmission to spy on the drone, or even fake it. Or put an EMP blaster on a drone and try to fry others. Or have cheaper EW emitters than the means to find and destroy them (economic attrition).
I'm no expert in this matter, but I think it is too early to dismiss EW.
And that's even before you get to the overlap between EW and direct energy weapons. For non-autonomous drone, short and well targeted blast can destroy receivers and render it uncontrollable without needing to broadcast in all direction all the time. Lasers can destroy cameras at way lower power levels than that are needed for vaporizing something.
None of this means drones are defeated - but I think "we haven't seen majority of the arms race yet" is pretty safe position. It also makes me somewhat frustrated that I don't see major Western militaries investing into this, but maybe it's just classified.
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I think whoever is going to figure out long range cheap and precise weapons is going to rule the world, basically. Imagine Ukraine had few thousand Storm Shadows instead of like 50. The war would be probably over by now.
Shaheds meanwhile deliver on the cheap and long range but not on the precise. Russia had a lot of missiles of various types, but they don't seem to deliver on the precise or cheap either. FPVs are cheap and precise but not long range.
The only case where we have seen all three is with the Ukrainian naval drones - and the effect has been devastating. I don't know if the Ukrainian plane drones used for refinery hunting count as cheap and precise, but they seem to be having effect as well.
But delivering on something cheap is kind of hard because the MIC wants its cut. So who knows where we'll end up.
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Big part of suicide drone autonomy is cameras and image processing, and we can make cheap cameras (in visible spectrum) and cheap chips that are pretty good at image processing. Basic communication is also easy, motors, batteries, everything is COTS and already accessible.
Once you go into things like "every drone can see in far infrared" or "every drone has satellite uplink" or "every drone has AESA radar or similarly complex electronics so it can become anti-radiation missile" or something, that is where I can imagine things might get expensive.
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So the Starlink. Do we know if it was Russian EW or just Musk turning them off before the offensive on Putin's order?
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So instead of one drone with tandem warhead you have tandem drones with single warheads. I guess that works.
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1 minute ago, FancyCat said:
If the details on targeting using HIMARS from a year ago remain true, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/09/ukraine-himars-rocket-artillery-russia/
then the statement is not useful, it really depends on whether the U.S approves the targets and whether Ukraine still follows on U.S approval these days vs a year ago.
I think this is evolving quite a bit as time goes on.
I remember when Ukraine first got HIMARS, US specifically modified it so it won't fire ATACMS even if Ukraine got it from somewhere else, to "prevent escalation". Now they actually have ATACMS from US.
I'm curious if Blinken meant the statement that Ukraine can target whatever it wants now. Although "they can target whatever they want but if they hit Russia we'll stop supporting them" is still technically "they can target whatever".
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2 hours ago, The_Capt said:
This one is still bizarre to my eyes. Not the objectives or plan - opening up a new “front” has a lot of pluses from the Russian side, not the least of which getting the West all flustered. It was how Russia appears to have tried this. If the reports of this attack being done largely by dismounted infantry are in fact accurate then something is going on. Either this was an RA tactic based on battlefield realities, or the RA does not have enough mech left to make a proper go of it…or a combination of both. I mean conducting an operational advance with dismounted infantry is something from WW1. I think there was this sort of action during the Iran-Iraq war but again, this is not normal. I for one am really interested in how this all went down as it may provide some clues as to the health of the RA.
I thought Ukraine attacked with dismounted infantry as well - except then we call it "infiltration" and "fog eating snow".
What is the difference in how Russia does it and how Ukraine does it? There's probably some nuance I'm missing. I think in that nuance we might see some answers?
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I mean Slovakia was already on their way to Orban-style dictatorship (which technically has elections but due to media and justice control they are a sham), this will just speed things along.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Which is super important because when (or if, if you're optimistic) the Orange Man gets second term, the US-provide ISR will surely stop.
That's why Sweden gave Ukraine those AWACS/spy planes.