How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Yet]

1 hour ago, Vet 0369 said:

Nah, they missed on purpose because the Russian Government, being headed by Humanitarians, ordered them to miss so they wouldn’t endanger innocent non-combatants.

nah, they just had to hit the moles, yay! mission completed.

[Gpig]

1 hour ago, Artkin said:

I can't even see what's being targeted in the video. Are we sure they missed?

It's a good question, as the video is quite pixelated. But if you frame by frame it (earlier, before the plane or bombs are in view), something box-like and smallish in the lower left of frame pops out in/over a few frames, parked on the grass where the second bomb lands. Could be a vehicle I suppose. But impossible to tell, really.

Edited May 26, 2023 by Gpig

[Tux]

8 hours ago, billbindc said:

b and c are simply two sides of the same coin.

My fault for rushing the post and not being clear enough.  B was supposed to suggest the messaging is being controlled by Putin, perhaps as further positioning for the upcoming how-have-we-lost-Bakhmut-so-soon blame game.  C is just Prigozhin yapping because Prigozhin yaps.

In any case maybe time will tell. 

[DesertFox]

21 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

When a WW2 bomber was described as accurate, that probably meant that it could reliably get its bombs to land inside a football stadium, not that it could snipe tanks.

Some De Havilland Mosquito Mk VI crews might want to disagree with your statement. 

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by DesertFox

[Tux]

17 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

Training certainly helps. There is certainly no doubt that my accuracy would have been better if I put as many hours into flight sims as I have into Combat Mission. But from what I've read and heard (and I think either Military History Visualized or Military Aviation History made a video on bomber accuracy in WW2) my experience in the flights sims gave me more or less the right impression. And that impression was that, in an era before PGMs, bombing is something you do to areas, not to specific points. When a WW2 bomber was described as accurate, that probably meant that it could reliably get its bombs to land inside a football stadium, not that it could snipe tanks.

I think this is the answer and I think being able to reliably put your bomb load into a football stadium would have made you one of the most accurate bombers of the war.

A small part of my impression is also based on a fair amount of sim experience. And bear in mind most wartime pilots never got half as much practise as today’s casual sim pilot, nor were they able to leave by instantly and reliably judging the results of their attacks with external camera views, live kill feeds and what-not. 

[DesertFox]

Something going Boom near Ivanhrad SE of Bakhmut

 

 

[Vacillator]

4 minutes ago, Tux said:

I think being able to reliably put your bomb load into a football stadium would have made you one of the most accurate bombers of the war.

Agreed, most drops were nowhere near that accurate.

[Tux]

2 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Some De Havilland Mosquito Mk VI crews might want to disagree with your statement. 

 

As much respect as I have for Pickard and the rest of the Amiens crews they were still aiming for something not much smaller than a football stadium…

The most impressive part of that raid was the piloting skill required to carry out such a low-level attack at all.  Flying so low down the poplar-lined avenue approaching the prison that they had to hold one wing higher than the other to avoid the tree-tops!

[DesertFox]

Follow up on Azovstal in Mariupol:

 

 

[Maciej Zwolinski]

4 hours ago, Seminole said:

I think the internal factor that Gorbachev wasn’t as bloodthirsty as predecessors had more to do with the collapse of the USSR than any external factor.  

The question is whether he could afford to be any more bloodthirsty, i.e. whether the army, security services, etc. would have followed such orders, after Brezhiev years of political quagmire,  after Afghanistan, etc. 

I do not know, but in communist Poland the moment when the gig was well and truly up was during the 1989 elections. They were designed to provide the communist side with a small, but safe majority. However, the commies got some important predictions wrong, and shockingly ended up as minority. Among those shocking events the most shocking was, that the Polish United Workers Party did not get majority even in the special voting points in army bases or police barracks. Even their own enforcers did not vote for them. At that moment they understood they do not have the military option as their BATNA and quickly folded. This was 1989, butI am wondering if Gorbatschov could have taken a more bloodthtirsty path a year or a couple of years earlier. Or whether he would have faced a military option directed against him instetad

[kevinkin]

1 hour ago, Centurian52 said:

inside a football stadium

Agree.

Precision and accuracy are often used interchangeably. Here is good way to see they are different technically:

https://sciencenotes.org/what-is-the-difference-between-accuracy-and-precision/

Still, most of time using them interchangeably gets the message across. But don't tell that to a FDA review board. 

Edited May 26, 2023 by kevinkin

[Tux]

5 minutes ago, Vacillator said:

Agreed, most drops were nowhere near that accurate.

I seem to remember the USAAF judged air raid accuracy by what proportion of bombs fell within 1,000ft of the target and I think, by this measure, average accuracy was 20-30%. 
 

And the USAAF was bombing under more favourable conditions than almost anyone else. 

[DesertFox]

Well, **** happens. Good luck collecting them...

 

 

[Huba]

Updated overview of Russian groupings in the occupied territories by col. Korowaj. It's in Polish, but should be easily understandable + Twitter translate is quite decent.

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Huba

[Splinty]

32 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Something going Boom near Ivanhrad SE of Bakhmut

 

 

You just Rick Rolled us! 

[DesertFox]

6 minutes ago, Splinty said:

You just Rick Rolled us! 

LOL! I usually watch the vids on Twitter without sound. Yeah, nice one 

[MikeyD]

What exactly creates such a big white cloud that rises so rapidly? Did someone blow up a building housing WP?

[DesertFox]

Wasn´t aware that these babies are still around? 4 days ago at RAF Fairford.

 

[DesertFox]

18 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

What exactly creates such a big white cloud that rises so rapidly? Did someone blow up a building housing WP?

Some fireworks and other stuff going boom like here in Turkey 2020? The plumes look similar from a distance 0:36 of that vid below:

Turkey: Injuries after explosions at fireworks factory visible for miles | World News | Sky News

Edited May 26, 2023 by DesertFox

[NamEndedAllen]

War fueling the advance of drone technologies

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/drone-swarms-got-targeting-system-updates-in-flight-in-recent-aukus-demo

[Battlefront.com]

39 minutes ago, MikeyD said:

What exactly creates such a big white cloud that rises so rapidly? Did someone blow up a building housing WP?

One possibility is advancing Ukrainian forces decided to smash something, another possibility is Russia decided to blow it before Ukraine captured it.

Steve

[kevinkin]

34 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Wasn´t aware that these babies are still around? 4 days ago at RAF Fairford

Maybe they can fill in the gaps in satellite passes and at times provide closer to real time intel. While the aircraft is old, it might be cost effective compared to building something from scratch. Airframe old but maintainable; plug and play brain new sensors. 

[Battlefront.com]

8 hours ago, MSBoxer said:

I don't think the west was a threat to the USSR or the Eastern Bloc.  The threat was to the expansion of their sphere of influence and territorial expansion.  Afghanistan in the eighties is a prime example.  In other words, the threat was not to their continued existence, but a threat to their ambitions.

Yup, and that is exactly what Putin's mindset has been for decades.  There's been 0.0000000% chance of NATO attacking Russian forces for any reason other than Russia engaging in an activity that provoked such an attack, so the Russian defense spending has been for reasons other than being threatened.

Steve

[dan/california]

6 hours ago, billbindc said:

North Korea of any era isn’t Russia of 1990 or today and Stalinist states don’t happen because there happens to be Stalinist sitting around. They happen because a lot of structural factors exist that make them possible. Putin would happily run that sort of state if he could right now and certainly possesses the ruthlessness to do it. Why hasn’t he? Because it wouldn’t work now and already didn’t by Gorbachev’s era.

Putin seems to be trying to see how far he can roll it back towards some approximation of real Stalinism. He has gotten a further down the curve than I thought he could with having a "heart attack".

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Never said THE sole cause, not once.  Most objective research and analysis see it as a major contributing factor in a 50 year program that encompassed a lot of efforts, economic not the least of them.

My push back against The Atlantic article is that the authors are suggesting that western military spending and the of the Soviet Union were entirely decoupled.  Worse Lebow and Stein have suggested the military arms race lengthened the Cold War and somehow we all could have come to love and hugs decades earlier.  Stein is a Canadian and comes from the deep Liberian humanist camp, to the point that political agenda creates a serious seed of doubt in objectivity.

The idea that 1) the Cold War was not a military contest and both sides military strategies were operating in glorious isolation and 2) right wing politics and the military industrial complex actually were the root cause of the conflict is utter nonsense and early 90s cloud shovelling.  Normally it would be simply hilarious, however it is dangerous motivated reasoning for the problems to our front.

 

3 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

As I said, we do largely agree. The disconnect may be the implication of how fundamental military spending was. If you weren’t meaning to assert this, my and possibly other pushbacks’ misunderstanding.

No one here suggested that, apart perhaps from my opinion in response to your thought experiment - that even with a “normal” degree of arms spending, the internal and often bizarre and/or cruel ideological rather than fact and market based economic and “governance” (autocratic , dictatorial) the USSR was a house of cards. Always one or two crises away from disintegration. 
 

BTW, I don’t think anyone is relying on a single Atlantic article for the discussion. It was a good one that’s run its course, raising some good points. Complex, huge society of disparate societies, filled with contradictions and bad decisions. No one single cause of longterm failure necessary. On that, I believe we all agree.
Thanks again.

Going to attempt a bike racing analogy here, please forgive me. Real pros can do ~350 watts all day long. But they have a limit, and every watt they exceed the limit by reduces the amount of time they can hold a given power level by exponentially. So your all day power is 350 watts, but one hour at four hundred watts would completely cook them, 500 watts they are five minutes and done. A thousand watts  for one minute is considered very strong, and nobody expects you to do much afterwards.  When you try to ride all day at a power level you can't hold bad things happen, even when the margin you are exceeding your limit by is quite small. The higher defense spending caused by competition with the West put the Soviet union over its all day limit.

Edited May 27, 2023 by dan/california

[MikeyD]

The US is going to have to pay the piper, itself, some  day for the past 75 years operating beyond its means playing 'global superpower', the same way Great Britain paid the price 75 years ago for its own previous century of global ambitions. Heck, that day may be closer than we think if the US is fool enough to default on its sovereign debt. Its a bad negotiating tactic  to threaten to shoot the hostage when you're holding yourself hostage.