I figure that’s because you’re unaware of how ludicrously complex and distributed the arms manufacturing industry is?
Lockheed et al are primarily systems integrators. They have sprawling networks of vendors that they’re orchestrating to produce “their” weapon systems.
The same kind of stuff happened during the Iraq war - makes the normal person feel like the regular Joe or Jane is getting a piece of the action. But in reality they just let you get a pass through %.
That movie War Dogs, while comical and inaccurate about a number of points, kinda was spot on about that one.
Not going to say "lost", myself, but Russia looks oddly weak. It's the country that planned the fight in advance and could stock up, yet is buying from Iran and North Korea and AFAICT its own latest tank model still hasn't even been used once. It's the country that has a large air force and is using waves of untrained infantry attacks instead of air power. It's the country with the larger population yet recruiting mercenaries abroad. It's the country that's lost control of the Black Sea against an opponent that has no navy.
Weasel words. When were Russian aircraft last seen over Kharkiv? Has the Russian navy kept or lost the ability to blockade Ukrainian shipping? You can say it was just a few missile attacks, but did the Russians keep their ability to blockade or not? And so on.
Probably the side that is expanding conscription and routinely kidnapping men off the street and throwing them onto the front lines with weeks or less of training.
Thats something that either happens routinely if youre desperate and short of men or doesnt - because it's deeply unpopular and you wouldnt do it if you didnt have to.
There are many signals which lack meaning (e.g. land taken) or can be fudged (e.g. casualties) but there are some signs of weakness like this one which can't be bullshitted or concealed.
> Probably the side that is expanding conscription and routinely kidnapping men off the street and throwing them onto the front lines with weeks or less of training.
One Washington post article from 2022 that relies heavily on implication is about equivalent in evidence to one RT article from 2022 that does the same.
If you follow the unfiltered war reports there are thousands of videos of Ukrainian kidnappings and zero Russian.
> If you follow the unfiltered war reports there are thousands of videos of Ukrainian kidnappings and zero Russian.
The WaPo article has direct video evidence of at least some. I follow a wide variety of unfiltered news sources about the war, and "zero" is a bald lie.
(Side note: callling conscription "kidnapping" is a little silly, too.)
I mean it’s easier to build something new than guess how a black box you don’t have access to works (short of spying on the manufacturing facility). I’m sure Russian missile technology has at least somewhat kept up.
Russia struggles to shoot down ATACMs, even with their most advanced SAMS, but they do have road mobile versions of Iskander which is pretty similar. They are just bigger and twice the cost.
I watch combat videos daily and Iskander is easily their most potent weapon after Lancet drones (and artillery). Patriot can't cover the whole massive frontlines.
The iskander and lancet drones are absolutely not used to nearly the same efficacy as atacms. Those things are regularly just hurled at low value civilian targets in large part because of poor targeting. They’re generally not the road mobile variety either.
The most potent weapon in their arsenal right now in terms of battlefield value are their helicopters and glide bombs
You seem to have a narrow information bubble. I've some a large number of effective Iskander strikes. The only reason it's not pumping out only A-tier videos like ATACMS is because Patriot defends the most important assets and S-400 (or their staff) is a paper tiger that can't handle a maneuverable ballistic missile. But that hasn't stopped it from dealing some important blows and being a very valuable weapon.
You're kinda arguing about something else, though.
Ukraine is hitting Russian air defenses with ATACMS, successfully and repeatedly. Corresponding attempts with Iskanders and Kinzhals to target the Patriots have largely failed.
There seems to be a wide gap in capability between the two scenarios - in either the attacking missiles, the defending systems, or both. Ukraine doesn't have enough Patriots to defend everywhere, but they're dramatically more effective than the Russian equivalents where they are stationed.
If nothing else, the war has been a huge advertising boon for Western defense contractors.
My assertion was Iskander is one of Russias best weapons, arguably more effective than Kalibr per rate of fire and very likely equivalent to ATACMS, or possibly better in terms of capabilities given it's a larger munition.
> There seems to be a wide gap in capability between the two scenario
This is entirely premised on Russian air defense being equal in high value areas vs Ballistic missiles (which is easily the hardest test, even for the US). Patriot systems were tested many times IRL against SCUD missiles during Desert storm and more recently vs Iran, plus general skill available in US R&D/military, while Russia never tested their S-400 systems in (real) combat and is notorious for poor maintenance/training.
Unless you equalize these 2 things it's a moot point. RU missile teams have had plenty of press about improving their operational effectiveness in the last year. AA has not.
Additionally, these systems aren't that sophisticated, it's GPS+inertial navigation+maneuvering+maybe some limited anti-EW. The rest is intelligence, EW, operators, etc. ATACMS was designed in the mid 1980s after all...
> They failed so badly that Germany had to send systems they can’t spare. Again. That’s why the US is now literally requisitioning new deliveries to send them to Ukraine.
"We want more! As many as you can spare!" is not typically what you say when the system sucks. There's a reason Patriot batteries are sought after, and countries are leery of loaning theirs.
> “If you foolishly believed Ukrainian numbers,” you forgot to add.
I mean, there's a drone video of an S-400 battery getting wiped off the map upthread. It doesn't seem to be all that unusual.
> the Chinese are taking notes
They would be wise to. Taiwan is as well; I'd imagine they're investing heavily in drone jet skis, Javelins, and other things the Ukranians have used well against Soviet-style weaponry.
The US Army announced that the first PrSM batch has been delivered in December 2023.
Operational testing is expected in 2024, with low-rate initial production, full-rate production, and initial capability testing expected in 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office’s 2023 Weapons Systems Annual Assessment.
A total of 110 PrSMs are expected to be procured in fiscal 2024 and 190 in fiscal 2025
It's fairly ridiculous to claim that ATACMS M57(?) last produced a few years to decade ago which are still our best-in-class available for operational use until ~2025+ are "30 years" old tech. The number of PrSMs we'll have by end of next year would last us about 24 hours in a great power war.
It’s really quite reasonable. The basic capabilities of the ATACMS are not hugely changed and have been available for decades. Russia does not have an equivalent that is demonstrably deployed effectively. They’re also not the focal point of US military development.
The quality of Russian equipment being deployed right now is really bad. The limiting factor here is not “science”.
Russia does not have an equivalent that is demonstrably deployed effectively.
Ukraine is being hit with Iskander-M all the time, e.g. just days ago at Myrhorod taking out SU-27s.
The quality of Russian equipment being deployed right now is really bad.
And yet Ukraine is still losing territory, countless men, and the war. This blasé attitude is just bizarre, as if NATO has a secret stock of wunderwaffen about to be arrive and deliver the coup de grâce any day. NATO has spent a quarter trillion dollars+ on this proxy war, staked its credibility on it, and is losing.
It is Russian propaganda narrative to claim, that Russia is fighting NATO. There might not be some Wunderwaffe somewhere, but nato is also not providing everything it has and all the quantities. The conflict cannot be compared to fighting nato. The co flict is some nato countries drip sending equipment to another country, and also far from sending all quantity they have.
If they breathlessly announced they were dismantling one of our howitzers, we'd joke about them being 60 years behind. It doesn't mean those howitzers aren't useful weapons, but...
Probably because you can't GPS jam a dumb artillery shell. otoh:
US-made weapons augmented by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites for position updates in Ukraine are now susceptible to Russian electronic warfare (EW) jamming ... The weapons affected may include the 155mm Excalibur artillery projectiles, Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and weapons rounds used with the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), among others, depending on how they are employed by the weapons operators.
An unnamed source reportedly familiar with the classified report told the NYT that in the worst-case scenario, only one in 19 Excalibur rounds was hitting its target, where the report said the cost per successful strike skyrocketed from $300,000 to $1.9 million between January and August 2023.
Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.
> Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.
The US military-industrial complex is probably extremely grateful for the chance to do the same, here. Very useful if there's ever a direct conflict.
Excalibur, GLSDB, JDAM, and ATACMS all have GPS-aided inertial guidance and can be set to fall back to just inertial; the US has long been aware of the likelihood of GPS jamming in a hot war, and certainly plans to employ the same sort of jamming themselves against potential enemies.
I fully expect there's a lot of work being done on cheap anti-jammer drones that home in on a jammer's signal; it's like a big "come get me!" signal. We already have HARM missiles for radar for a similar purpose.
For example here [0] - Russian Glonass Kometa antennas with 4 elements to reduce effects of EW warfare. Great samples for Western military complex of bleeding edge Russian EW countermeasures.
Or when Russians appears to have lost a jamming pod above Ukraine [1] Again bleeding edge EW tech which Russia just lost.
> Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.
If Ukraine is just leaving the GPS guidance turned off entirely and relying on inertial guidance, then whatever secrets Russia has discovered in ATACMS really are academic.
Yes, we fairly reasonably believe that Russia's struggle to make progress against a smaller neighbor using NATO hand-me-downs is heavily indicative of how they'd do against all of NATO using B-2s, F-22s and F-35s.
It isn't hubris. Before the invasion western analysts were misled into believing Russian capabilities had or were near parity with modern western systems - one of the factors in the widespread assumption in western capitals on Feb 24, 2022 that Ukraine would fall in days. But Russian systems have mostly performed poorly in this war. Meanwhile Western systems have proven highly capable in all recent wars.
Vietnam was a failure, Iraq was a failure, Afghanistan was a failure.
I concede that NATO would put in more effort against Russia, but how about better not finding out in the first place? Russia would also put in more effort.
> I concede that NATO would put in more effort against Russia, but how about better not finding out in the first place?
I mean, that's the point. That Russia's obvious takeaway from Ukraine should be "we'd lose fast and badly against actual NATO".
As with Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a loss in Ukraine is most likely to come from the West going "eh whatever good enough we're out", not superior tech on the Russian side.
Yep. Some things we can always rely on in America: death, taxes, and being lied into forever wars repeatedly. And an enthusiastic chorus of cheerleaders for those wars, I might add.
It's worth noting, before 1941 the United States hadn't begun its lend-lease program to the Russia military, which was a major factor in its later success. Without it the German assessment would likely have proven correct.
Would be interesting to know how they got a intact ATACMS.
It was clear from the beginning that every weapon system used in Ukraine could and probably would land on the black market, that’s why Israel didn’t provide any own weapon system fearing it would land in the hands of their enemies.
It's not inconceivable that a Russian counter-battery strike could force Ukrainian troops to flee (or kill them) but leave behind some intact equipment.
>It was clear from the beginning that every weapon system used in Ukraine could and probably would land on the black market, that’s why Israel didn’t provide any own weapon system fearing it would land in the hands of their enemies.
This is Zed propaganda/fake news , a soldier can't put a missile in his pocket and go home and exchange it for alcohol.
I think the main concern is Ukrainians that are loyal to Kremlin and smuggle information witch is more easy then selling big stuff on the black market.
Given how many tanks Ukrainian farmers stole from Russian soldiers, this would not surprise me greatly.
That said, the end of the first paragraph is "Russian state media reported on Thursday" — even after the ink is dry on the ultimate settlement of the peace negotiations that have not yet started, we won't know for sure how many stories like this are propaganda.
With earnest effort reverse engineering the secrets of that defected tank, Russian engineers and technicians will soon learn the secrets of... the T-64. Bound to come in handy.
Ruzzia already has soviet tanks,
and a Russian stole an helicopter and defected.
But my imagination fails me to see how a soldiers is smuggling a missile, it won't fit in his pockets/ass and he can't ride it to Kremlin and they must be some good kilometers behind the font lines. so tell me how you imagine this happening ?
>My point is that if defecting in a tank though frontline is possible, finding means to move a rocket will be even easier
Really, but you also failed the imagination test on how to do it.
AFAIK this is all Ruzzian propaganda for idiots int he West, same idiots that believe Zelenksy bought a new mansion and sports car this week or that Macron and Obama's Wives are men.
I am sure it is much easier to grab rocket secrets by using the KGB methods then a soldier smuggling a rocket in a way nobody seems to imagine yet.
Did you see today Ruzzian shit propaganda? There was a video a week ago I think where a Ruzzian soldier that was wounded was mercy killed by other Ruzzian soldier, the Zeds on the reddits were defending this move and seems that today or yesterday the Ruzzian national TV used this video but labeled as Ukrainians doing it and considering it evil. I am waiting to see the online trolls spinning this, they were paid to comment that is normal what the Ruzzian did and now they are paid to claim the video is about Ukrainians.
I can’t find a claim in the article that they have an intact one.
They get ones in various states of brokenness because Ukraine throws them towards them. For example, https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldiers-atacms-attack-luha... says “The source said the footage showed a "Ukrainian ATACMS strike, with 4 ATACMS, including one dud, hitting a Russian training area in Mozhnyakivka, Luhansk Oblast."”
You'd have to be either a liar or a fool to publicly admit that you've deciphered something about your opponent's secret capabilities. The allies didn't go bragging to the Nazis every time that they broke the enigma machine.
There's a whole field of study, named Kremlinology, dedicated to deciphering what was it that the people there actually meant by saying this and that.
I used to think that I had some additional insight, hailing from a country neighbouring Russia, but it takes being born on former soviet territory to fully understand their line of thinking.
It's not that it's particularly sophisticated - just utterly foreign to anyone even west-adjacent.
It's wishful thinking to say "All we had to do was give them what they wanted." I'll skip the tired historical comparison, but just point out that we can't know the counterfactual.
I certainly do not deny American entitlement and exceptionalism, and I think it's a massive mistake on our part. But nobody in the US (or Europe) has any designs on Russian territory. Our mistake as about how we treat our friends, not our enemies.
The Ukraine war was put NATO even more on Russia's borders, and Putin has been NATO's greatest salesman. It's hard to foresee an outcome that doesn't end with Ukraine (in whatever territory it can keep) joining NATO.
America definitely needs to fix its attitude. But Russia appears intent on completely misunderstanding us, and doing so in ways that get its ass kicked. That's not good for anybody, but Russia least of all.
> Russian territory is stupendously rich in vital natural resources, to the extent that sooner or later it will become a super power just on this account alone. I'm not just talking about oil but fresh water and oxygen too.
"Mr. President, we must not allow a̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶-̶s̶h̶a̶f̶t̶ an oxygen gap!"
Russia will always have an adversarial relationship with Europe. Russia is huge. Its borders are essentially indefensible and (justly or not) it will always be insecure about its own territorial integrity unless it controls the countries around it as buffer states.
Russian territory is stupendously rich in
vital natural resources, to the extent that
sooner or later it will become a super power
just on this account alone.
So why hasn't this happened yet?
Russia is resource-rich but sparse. There are riches in the ground, but everything is 1,000km from everything else. This makes it hard to transport goods and also hard to have a prosperous middle class outside of Moscow or a few other cities.
Also, considering what has gone on with Russian natural gas, many countries don't exactly love the idea of relying on Russia for crucial resources.
Russia also has poor farmland and can't feed itself easily without grain from places like Ukraine. Maybe after 50 years of global warming some tundra will thaw and then they can grow wheat in Siberia.
I'm not exactly "blaming" Russia here. Russia's territorial concerns are, well... hey... you know, the Cold War really happened, and the wounds are still there. Both sides.
I think this is pretty effective. These systems cost a lot to develop. If they are worthless then that money could definitely have been better spent elsewhere. There is a real sense of worry about the financial burden of Ukraine conflict amongst Ukraine's supporters
> These systems cost a lot to develop. If they are worthless then that money could definitely have been better spent elsewhere.
We're basically using Ukraine to dispose of an outdated system ("In 2007, the U.S. Army terminated the ATACMS program due to cost, ending the ability to replenish stocks"; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM-140_ATACMS) we intend to deprecate.
There's little indication they're worthless, and an article breathlessly citing someone saying "This is a signal to the whole world, not just the West, that Western weapons are no match for Russian arms" is not a change to that.
It's kind of a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.
USSR/Russia has always loudly overstated the capabilities of its military and military hardware.
The US tends to stay mum about the capabilities of its hardware and when it talks about them, it tends to understate.
Even when the F-22 shot down that Chinese balloon (a hilarious use of cutting-edge air power) it was more impressive than it might have seemed at first glance. For years the claimed ceiling of the F-22 was 50,000 feet. But then they mentioned that it shot the balloon down from a height of 58,000 feet. Now the Wikipedia article (after years of edit fights) seems to have settled on 65,000 feel and the official USAF page says "above 50,000 feet". Maybe a trivial example but kind of representative.
(Don't get me wrong, the US "flexes" military might in other gaudy ways. I'm not saying we are humble and Russia is not. It's just funny how the two countries go about it differently....)
released more for internal propaganda, and/or the countermeasures are already well known enough to the AFU / NATO that there is no reason to be coy about it.
Plus the ATACMS still work with inertial guidance. that creates ever-increasing errors as the travel time increases but is often good enough for hitting strategic targets.
Article claims that ATACMS have been highly effective, but all 5 missiles launched at Crimea recently were shot down.
As usual, everything is completely unclear in this stalemate war where both sides regularly claim overwhelming successes yet nothing has changed for 2 years.
Its only completely unclear if you think that the words of a dictatorship is equally trustworthy as a democracy plus the journalism of the rest of the free world.
What would due diligence look like? Instead of sniping at comments, please link the correct approved journalistic version of the 5 ATACMS missiles that have or have not been shot down over Crimea.
If the whole attack, including the beach incident, was staged, link to that.
> Article claims that ATACMS have been highly effective, but all 5 missiles launched at Crimea recently were shot down.
Which is not at all in contradiction. The ATACMS could have been highly successful but not any longer. In fact, this would be exactly what you would expect if the claims in the article are true.
> As usual, everything is completely unclear in this stalemate war where both sides regularly claim overwhelming successes yet nothing has changed for 2 years.
Yeah it’s insane Russia continues in this war of aggression where they’re gaining no land, losing people at a clip of 2-3:1, losing its most modern weaponry against the decades old cast offs of the West, is reduced to begging North Korea for help, has probably already lost significant amounts of land to China, and all this against a country that until a decade ago didn’t barely had a military.
People bashing Russia military but asking why Russia is attacking Ukraine are not figuring out that is exactly the reason for the war.
Ukraine border is too close to Moscow, it is easy to go from Ukraine to Moscow and Russia know they would fail to defend themselves from a NATO land invasion from there. Thus why they are willing to pay a very high price to ensure this won't happen.
I think also Russia doesn't want the headache of defending against a nuclear attack launched from Eastern Ukraine or the headache of worrying whether anti-ballistic missiles stationed in Eastern Ukraine might provide a decisive factor in a neutralization of Russia's ability to launch a nuclear retaliatory strike.
The US really doesn't have to think about these things because there are oceans between it and any potential adversary powerful enough to threaten it: any defense of the US would rely mostly on its navy and air force. In contrast, the most destructive wars are those fought with land forces, e.g., WW I, WW II, the Chinese Civil War and the one time (namely, the US Civil War) that a big land war was fought in North America. (The American Revolutionary War was a mild affair compared to the 4 wars I just listed because unlike the 4 wars I just listed, the homeland of one of the combatants was never in jeopardy.)
The US security establishment is privileged because it does not need to become competent at sharing a land mass (or, worse, a plain such as the European Plain shown in the link below) with nations with high military potential:
Putin thought he would control Kyiv in 2 weeks and that gambit failed miserably and if he were to leave Ukraine now he would look extremely weak and likely get overthrown and/or executed.
That’s why the war continues.
If it had anything to do with NATO, but maybe you didn’t notice that as a direct result of this war 2 nations with borders with Russia have joined NATO and those 2 nations are significantly more useful members for NATO with a highly advanced defense industry in the case of Sweden, and a history of kicking Russian ass against significant odds in the case of Finland.
And even the nonsense of NATO entering Russia is ridiculous. NATO is made of functioning countries that want to basically just do trade. The last thing they want is a war with a nuclear power. Heck, 2.5 years into a very clear war of aggression by Russia where there is no uncertainty about Russia’s moral guilt and the illegalness of its invasion as well as the legality of Ukraine’s defense of itself, NATO has just given Ukraine the permission to strike on Russian soil but even then in a highly limited area and only indisputably military targets.
All the evidence for decades, including, for example, efforts by the U.S. to increase free trade with Russia, the Brits inviting Russian oligarchs to buy up their key football clubs and all the land in London, and Germany deliberately making itself dependent on Russian gas, has shown that NATO countries want Russia to be a partner in the community of nations and have absolutely no interest in Russia’s largely worthless land.
The only ones bashing the Russian military are the Russian leaders who’ve been exposing the fact that the mighty Russian military isn’t even capable of taking down a military staffed nearly entirely by civilians and using discards from the Cold War which they are learning how to use in the middle of the war.
The Russian military is an absolute embarrassment, and to the extent the Russian leadership and further, the Russian people, continue to allow this illegal war of aggression to continue under their names, it’s an embarrassment to them as well.
When your rallying cry is “we have a history of enduring fighting bitter battles with massive loss of life to gain little to no useful territory” to justify continuing this war where you’re losing badly and embarrassing yourself on the world stage with a begging bowl aimed at North Korea, you’ve shown yourself to not be a serious nation in the 21st century.
The invasion has made Ukrainian membership of NATO much more likely. So if concern over NATO proximity was indeed the reason for Putin's adventure - rather than a hubristic thirst for imperial conquest - it seems to be backfiring pretty badly for the Kremlin.
> Ukraine border is too close to Moscow, it is easy to go from Ukraine to Moscow and Russia know they would fail to defend themselves from a NATO land invasion from there. Thus why they are willing to pay a very high price to ensure this won't happen.
Ironically, pushing Finland into NATO, bringing Moscow into SRBM range of an actual NATO member. Oops.
NATO was never, ever, ever going to start a land war against Russia.
The idea that it would have even the slightest interest in doing so is just absolutely fucking absurd.
It's just pure scare imagery that the Russian deep state puts out -- to feed its internal narratives ("The West out to encircle us, only the Russian state can protect you"), and to confuse and mollify external opposition to its blatantly aggressive actions against neighboring states.
That's the second time in this thread that I've seen this "Russia lost significant land to China". So far as I am aware, the border has not moved. So what are you referring to?
> all 5 missiles launched at Crimea recently were shot down
So Russia finally managed to chalk up a few wins? They were losing S-300 and S-400 sites at an alarming rate... to ATACMS. That's moderately ridiculous, since S-400 is supposed to be state of the art Russian military export technology.
Its worth noting this was a daylight attack. Russia doesn't seem to have been able to take down the ATACMS missiles that struck the Vitino Center for Long-Range Space Communications complex later that night.
2 years ago, Russia was in full control of the Black Sea. Russia's IFV, tank and artillery storage depots were still well-stocked with vehicles. It was still able to fly A50 spy planes over the Sea of Azov and Black sea. Ukraine had no practical means of waging a campaign against Russian oil refineries, it had HIMARS, but no western tanks, Bradley IFVs, Patriot, Samp-T and NASAMs batteries, no Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles, no prospect of western jets and their weapons systems.
For balance, Ukraine still had its power stations, tens of thousands of its soldiers were still alive. Bakhmut and Avdiivka hadn't been razed, Vuhledar hadn't been shattered, and it had yet to spend part of its force on an poorly-judged counter-offensive.
No matter how deadlocked it might seem today, a position isn't a stalemate when so much around either side's ability to wage war is in flux.
This sounds like propaganda positioning mainly for their internal consumption. ”Look how we quickly deciphered this tricky American technology, it’s just another 3 days and Kiev is ours. And it has a quadruple safety system, how silly of those Americans! Let’s laugh at them together!”
This a mid-80s technology and if they really just discovered something important and valuable about the technology, they would keep their mouths shut. If they put it out as a press release, it’s precisely because they didn’t discover anything new.
Predication: Russia's claims are overinflated as usual; US Military will use this to get more money to increase lead. Net result: Will end up even farther ahead. 20 years from now, we'll find out this was also a lie.
Russians: How is it possible that this missile can track its location anywhere?
Sir, we’ve found it uses GPS.
Wow, we never would have guessed that. Sneaky Americans. Now that we know their secret, we can defeat them!
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is - whichever is greater - it obtains a difference or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position that it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is is now the position that it wasn't, and if follows that the position that it was is now the position that it isn't. In the event that the position that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation. The variation being the difference between where the missile is and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows: Because a variation has modified some of the information that the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it know where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice versa. And by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
This far along into the war, their personnel have already figured out how to engage ATACMS with the S-300 and S-400 (although recent losses of S-400 units to ATACMS show they aren't doing really well at it [0] ). We already know they're jamming GPS and ATACMS is still getting through with inertial guidance. Maybe some of this newfound knowledge will benefit their engineers somehow when designing new weapons, but it's not very new stuff, and their industry is not well positioned to exploit it.
Very likely radar is in the middle of the launchers, from comments:
S-300/400 TEL have to stay close to the Radar for mainly two reasons.
The Radar vehicle also has the generator supplying the TELs with electricity.
and the even more important reason is that the radar data can only be transmited over a short distance so if the TEL is too far out it can't get data from the Radar anymore.
Edit: max range for a S-300 is 120m between the TELs and the Radar and since the S-400 is actually just a S-300PM3 its probably the same or at least very similar
Ah. Quite different than the Patriot then. Thanks for explaining.
I just assume the missiles they launched were trying to intercept incoming ATACMS rounds and they either failed to intercept, or they were outnumbered. Not a good day for the Russian side.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadhttps://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/m...
I find it amusing Lockheed Martin cares about small business arms component suppliers
Lockheed et al are primarily systems integrators. They have sprawling networks of vendors that they’re orchestrating to produce “their” weapon systems.
That movie War Dogs, while comical and inaccurate about a number of points, kinda was spot on about that one.
e.g. https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-19#FAR_Subpart_19_2
Thats something that either happens routinely if youre desperate and short of men or doesnt - because it's deeply unpopular and you wouldnt do it if you didnt have to.
There are many signals which lack meaning (e.g. land taken) or can be fudged (e.g. casualties) but there are some signs of weakness like this one which can't be bullshitted or concealed.
That'll be "both of them".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_mobilization
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/16/russia-mobil...
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-troops-complain-lack-trainin...
If you follow the unfiltered war reports there are thousands of videos of Ukrainian kidnappings and zero Russian.
The WaPo article has direct video evidence of at least some. I follow a wide variety of unfiltered news sources about the war, and "zero" is a bald lie.
(Side note: callling conscription "kidnapping" is a little silly, too.)
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/precision-stri...
I watch combat videos daily and Iskander is easily their most potent weapon after Lancet drones (and artillery). Patriot can't cover the whole massive frontlines.
The most potent weapon in their arsenal right now in terms of battlefield value are their helicopters and glide bombs
Ukraine is hitting Russian air defenses with ATACMS, successfully and repeatedly. Corresponding attempts with Iskanders and Kinzhals to target the Patriots have largely failed.
There seems to be a wide gap in capability between the two scenarios - in either the attacking missiles, the defending systems, or both. Ukraine doesn't have enough Patriots to defend everywhere, but they're dramatically more effective than the Russian equivalents where they are stationed.
If nothing else, the war has been a huge advertising boon for Western defense contractors.
> There seems to be a wide gap in capability between the two scenario
This is entirely premised on Russian air defense being equal in high value areas vs Ballistic missiles (which is easily the hardest test, even for the US). Patriot systems were tested many times IRL against SCUD missiles during Desert storm and more recently vs Iran, plus general skill available in US R&D/military, while Russia never tested their S-400 systems in (real) combat and is notorious for poor maintenance/training.
Unless you equalize these 2 things it's a moot point. RU missile teams have had plenty of press about improving their operational effectiveness in the last year. AA has not.
Additionally, these systems aren't that sophisticated, it's GPS+inertial navigation+maneuvering+maybe some limited anti-EW. The rest is intelligence, EW, operators, etc. ATACMS was designed in the mid 1980s after all...
"We want more! As many as you can spare!" is not typically what you say when the system sucks. There's a reason Patriot batteries are sought after, and countries are leery of loaning theirs.
> “If you foolishly believed Ukrainian numbers,” you forgot to add.
I mean, there's a drone video of an S-400 battery getting wiped off the map upthread. It doesn't seem to be all that unusual.
> the Chinese are taking notes
They would be wise to. Taiwan is as well; I'd imagine they're investing heavily in drone jet skis, Javelins, and other things the Ukranians have used well against Soviet-style weaponry.
And yet Russia has needed to turn to North Korea for munitions supply.
Operational testing is expected in 2024, with low-rate initial production, full-rate production, and initial capability testing expected in 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office’s 2023 Weapons Systems Annual Assessment.
A total of 110 PrSMs are expected to be procured in fiscal 2024 and 190 in fiscal 2025
It's fairly ridiculous to claim that ATACMS M57(?) last produced a few years to decade ago which are still our best-in-class available for operational use until ~2025+ are "30 years" old tech. The number of PrSMs we'll have by end of next year would last us about 24 hours in a great power war.
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2024/03/07/lockheed-precision...
The quality of Russian equipment being deployed right now is really bad. The limiting factor here is not “science”.
Fun bonus if you want to watch some people die:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1dv3086/north_kore...
Ukraine is being hit with Iskander-M all the time, e.g. just days ago at Myrhorod taking out SU-27s.
The quality of Russian equipment being deployed right now is really bad.
And yet Ukraine is still losing territory, countless men, and the war. This blasé attitude is just bizarre, as if NATO has a secret stock of wunderwaffen about to be arrive and deliver the coup de grâce any day. NATO has spent a quarter trillion dollars+ on this proxy war, staked its credibility on it, and is losing.
Fun bonus if you want to watch some people die:
Things people who have lost their humanity say.
Ukraine is losing territory at a glacial pace. Meanwhile Russia is giving away (selling) territory to China.
Russia is also losing men att a rate of 5-to-1 or thereabout.
Losing the war? Pfft. Russia is throwing away all their equipment, countless of lives and ruining their economy in the ground... For nothing.
US-made weapons augmented by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites for position updates in Ukraine are now susceptible to Russian electronic warfare (EW) jamming ... The weapons affected may include the 155mm Excalibur artillery projectiles, Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and weapons rounds used with the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), among others, depending on how they are employed by the weapons operators.
An unnamed source reportedly familiar with the classified report told the NYT that in the worst-case scenario, only one in 19 Excalibur rounds was hitting its target, where the report said the cost per successful strike skyrocketed from $300,000 to $1.9 million between January and August 2023.
Being able to test GPS jamming techniques against intact munitions isn't some hypothetical academic problem.
https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/33448
The US military-industrial complex is probably extremely grateful for the chance to do the same, here. Very useful if there's ever a direct conflict.
Excalibur, GLSDB, JDAM, and ATACMS all have GPS-aided inertial guidance and can be set to fall back to just inertial; the US has long been aware of the likelihood of GPS jamming in a hot war, and certainly plans to employ the same sort of jamming themselves against potential enemies.
I fully expect there's a lot of work being done on cheap anti-jammer drones that home in on a jammer's signal; it's like a big "come get me!" signal. We already have HARM missiles for radar for a similar purpose.
There are definitely many ways to make those jammers disappear. Ukraine will inevitably find a way to do it on the cheap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-in_Attack_Weapon
Or when Russians appears to have lost a jamming pod above Ukraine [1] Again bleeding edge EW tech which Russia just lost.
[0] https://mil.in.ua/en/news/russians-use-bombs-equipped-with-e...
[1] https://www.twz.com/ukraine-just-captured-one-of-russias-mos...
If Ukraine is just leaving the GPS guidance turned off entirely and relying on inertial guidance, then whatever secrets Russia has discovered in ATACMS really are academic.
Yes, we fairly reasonably believe that Russia's struggle to make progress against a smaller neighbor using NATO hand-me-downs is heavily indicative of how they'd do against all of NATO using B-2s, F-22s and F-35s.
I concede that NATO would put in more effort against Russia, but how about better not finding out in the first place? Russia would also put in more effort.
This is hubris at its finest.
I mean, that's the point. That Russia's obvious takeaway from Ukraine should be "we'd lose fast and badly against actual NATO".
As with Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a loss in Ukraine is most likely to come from the West going "eh whatever good enough we're out", not superior tech on the Russian side.
• Analyzing the missile’s maneuverability will determine which anti-aircraft missiles it can evade.
• They might advise on disrupting the missile’s communication or disabling its GPS.
• This analysis would help the RF military quickly detect launch sites and missile locations.
It was clear from the beginning that every weapon system used in Ukraine could and probably would land on the black market, that’s why Israel didn’t provide any own weapon system fearing it would land in the hands of their enemies.
This is Zed propaganda/fake news , a soldier can't put a missile in his pocket and go home and exchange it for alcohol.
I think the main concern is Ukrainians that are loyal to Kremlin and smuggle information witch is more easy then selling big stuff on the black market.
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-soldier-defect-steal-tank-r....
That said, the end of the first paragraph is "Russian state media reported on Thursday" — even after the ink is dry on the ultimate settlement of the peace negotiations that have not yet started, we won't know for sure how many stories like this are propaganda.
> Given how many tanks Ukrainian farmers stole from Russian soldiers, this would not surprise me greatly.
How many though?
> we won't know for sure how many stories like this are propaganda.
But my imagination fails me to see how a soldiers is smuggling a missile, it won't fit in his pockets/ass and he can't ride it to Kremlin and they must be some good kilometers behind the font lines. so tell me how you imagine this happening ?
Really, but you also failed the imagination test on how to do it.
AFAIK this is all Ruzzian propaganda for idiots int he West, same idiots that believe Zelenksy bought a new mansion and sports car this week or that Macron and Obama's Wives are men.
I am sure it is much easier to grab rocket secrets by using the KGB methods then a soldier smuggling a rocket in a way nobody seems to imagine yet.
Did you see today Ruzzian shit propaganda? There was a video a week ago I think where a Ruzzian soldier that was wounded was mercy killed by other Ruzzian soldier, the Zeds on the reddits were defending this move and seems that today or yesterday the Ruzzian national TV used this video but labeled as Ukrainians doing it and considering it evil. I am waiting to see the online trolls spinning this, they were paid to comment that is normal what the Ruzzian did and now they are paid to claim the video is about Ukrainians.
[1] SOTA as of 1991
[2] According to Kremlin propaganda
They get ones in various states of brokenness because Ukraine throws them towards them. For example, https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldiers-atacms-attack-luha... says “The source said the footage showed a "Ukrainian ATACMS strike, with 4 ATACMS, including one dud, hitting a Russian training area in Mozhnyakivka, Luhansk Oblast."”
I used to think that I had some additional insight, hailing from a country neighbouring Russia, but it takes being born on former soviet territory to fully understand their line of thinking.
It's not that it's particularly sophisticated - just utterly foreign to anyone even west-adjacent.
It's wishful thinking to say "All we had to do was give them what they wanted." I'll skip the tired historical comparison, but just point out that we can't know the counterfactual.
I certainly do not deny American entitlement and exceptionalism, and I think it's a massive mistake on our part. But nobody in the US (or Europe) has any designs on Russian territory. Our mistake as about how we treat our friends, not our enemies.
The Ukraine war was put NATO even more on Russia's borders, and Putin has been NATO's greatest salesman. It's hard to foresee an outcome that doesn't end with Ukraine (in whatever territory it can keep) joining NATO.
America definitely needs to fix its attitude. But Russia appears intent on completely misunderstanding us, and doing so in ways that get its ass kicked. That's not good for anybody, but Russia least of all.
"Mr. President, we must not allow a̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶-̶s̶h̶a̶f̶t̶ an oxygen gap!"
If space industry will get going in next 50 years, then this is going to be completely irrelevant.
Russia is resource-rich but sparse. There are riches in the ground, but everything is 1,000km from everything else. This makes it hard to transport goods and also hard to have a prosperous middle class outside of Moscow or a few other cities.
Also, considering what has gone on with Russian natural gas, many countries don't exactly love the idea of relying on Russia for crucial resources.
Russia also has poor farmland and can't feed itself easily without grain from places like Ukraine. Maybe after 50 years of global warming some tundra will thaw and then they can grow wheat in Siberia.
I'm not exactly "blaming" Russia here. Russia's territorial concerns are, well... hey... you know, the Cold War really happened, and the wounds are still there. Both sides.
Russia is already dependent on North Korea munitions and drones from Iran ffs
For reference, in 2003 the US military deployed half-way around the world and captured Baghdad in 3 weeks
Nuclear super-power Russia has not been able to reach Kiev - just 6 hours away - in 28 months of open conflict
Kremlin never hides it's imperialism. Maybe just listen to that?
Yes, we should have seen their invasion before it started and helped Ukraine defend against it better.
Because, surely, you're not suggesting that we should have let Russia rape, murder and pillage Ukraine (and other countries) without any resistance?
Actually the West did listen, and as a result took the crucial step of formally denying the NATO memberships requests of Ukraine and Georgia in 2008.
But Russia invaded anyway -- because all this NATO noise was never the real reason they sought to pacify Ukraine in the first place.
We're basically using Ukraine to dispose of an outdated system ("In 2007, the U.S. Army terminated the ATACMS program due to cost, ending the ability to replenish stocks"; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM-140_ATACMS) we intend to deprecate.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Strike_Missile is intended to replace it and has seen its first deliveries last year.
There's little indication they're worthless, and an article breathlessly citing someone saying "This is a signal to the whole world, not just the West, that Western weapons are no match for Russian arms" is not a change to that.
USSR/Russia has always loudly overstated the capabilities of its military and military hardware.
The US tends to stay mum about the capabilities of its hardware and when it talks about them, it tends to understate.
Even when the F-22 shot down that Chinese balloon (a hilarious use of cutting-edge air power) it was more impressive than it might have seemed at first glance. For years the claimed ceiling of the F-22 was 50,000 feet. But then they mentioned that it shot the balloon down from a height of 58,000 feet. Now the Wikipedia article (after years of edit fights) seems to have settled on 65,000 feel and the official USAF page says "above 50,000 feet". Maybe a trivial example but kind of representative.
(Don't get me wrong, the US "flexes" military might in other gaudy ways. I'm not saying we are humble and Russia is not. It's just funny how the two countries go about it differently....)
Plus the ATACMS still work with inertial guidance. that creates ever-increasing errors as the travel time increases but is often good enough for hitting strategic targets.
As usual, everything is completely unclear in this stalemate war where both sides regularly claim overwhelming successes yet nothing has changed for 2 years.
Its only completely unclear if you think that the words of a dictatorship is equally trustworthy as a democracy plus the journalism of the rest of the free world.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-accuses-kyiv-usi...
So either Russia shot down 4 of the 5 missiles and they landed in apartment buildings, or the one that landed on the beach was also shot down.
Or they staged everything, including blowing up apartment buildings.
Unlikely, since Defense Secretary Austin had emergency phone calls after the beach incident.
Regarding the stalemate, maps shown at the Institute for the Study of War also show little change. No need for Russian sources here.
Of course, not all free media is competent and Reuters is making the exact same mistake of blindly citing Russian sources without doing due diligence.
If the whole attack, including the beach incident, was staged, link to that.
As far as I know, there isn't one. The only thing we have is Russian sources, which by their track-record is only fairy tail propaganda.
Republishing such a story is not due diligence. Doing their own research would be.
Which is not at all in contradiction. The ATACMS could have been highly successful but not any longer. In fact, this would be exactly what you would expect if the claims in the article are true.
> As usual, everything is completely unclear in this stalemate war where both sides regularly claim overwhelming successes yet nothing has changed for 2 years.
Yeah it’s insane Russia continues in this war of aggression where they’re gaining no land, losing people at a clip of 2-3:1, losing its most modern weaponry against the decades old cast offs of the West, is reduced to begging North Korea for help, has probably already lost significant amounts of land to China, and all this against a country that until a decade ago didn’t barely had a military.
Ukraine border is too close to Moscow, it is easy to go from Ukraine to Moscow and Russia know they would fail to defend themselves from a NATO land invasion from there. Thus why they are willing to pay a very high price to ensure this won't happen.
The US really doesn't have to think about these things because there are oceans between it and any potential adversary powerful enough to threaten it: any defense of the US would rely mostly on its navy and air force. In contrast, the most destructive wars are those fought with land forces, e.g., WW I, WW II, the Chinese Civil War and the one time (namely, the US Civil War) that a big land war was fought in North America. (The American Revolutionary War was a mild affair compared to the 4 wars I just listed because unlike the 4 wars I just listed, the homeland of one of the combatants was never in jeopardy.)
The US security establishment is privileged because it does not need to become competent at sharing a land mass (or, worse, a plain such as the European Plain shown in the link below) with nations with high military potential:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_plain.png
That’s why the war continues.
If it had anything to do with NATO, but maybe you didn’t notice that as a direct result of this war 2 nations with borders with Russia have joined NATO and those 2 nations are significantly more useful members for NATO with a highly advanced defense industry in the case of Sweden, and a history of kicking Russian ass against significant odds in the case of Finland.
And even the nonsense of NATO entering Russia is ridiculous. NATO is made of functioning countries that want to basically just do trade. The last thing they want is a war with a nuclear power. Heck, 2.5 years into a very clear war of aggression by Russia where there is no uncertainty about Russia’s moral guilt and the illegalness of its invasion as well as the legality of Ukraine’s defense of itself, NATO has just given Ukraine the permission to strike on Russian soil but even then in a highly limited area and only indisputably military targets.
All the evidence for decades, including, for example, efforts by the U.S. to increase free trade with Russia, the Brits inviting Russian oligarchs to buy up their key football clubs and all the land in London, and Germany deliberately making itself dependent on Russian gas, has shown that NATO countries want Russia to be a partner in the community of nations and have absolutely no interest in Russia’s largely worthless land.
The Russian military is an absolute embarrassment, and to the extent the Russian leadership and further, the Russian people, continue to allow this illegal war of aggression to continue under their names, it’s an embarrassment to them as well.
When your rallying cry is “we have a history of enduring fighting bitter battles with massive loss of life to gain little to no useful territory” to justify continuing this war where you’re losing badly and embarrassing yourself on the world stage with a begging bowl aimed at North Korea, you’ve shown yourself to not be a serious nation in the 21st century.
Ironically, pushing Finland into NATO, bringing Moscow into SRBM range of an actual NATO member. Oops.
The idea that it would have even the slightest interest in doing so is just absolutely fucking absurd.
It's just pure scare imagery that the Russian deep state puts out -- to feed its internal narratives ("The West out to encircle us, only the Russian state can protect you"), and to confuse and mollify external opposition to its blatantly aggressive actions against neighboring states.
So Russia finally managed to chalk up a few wins? They were losing S-300 and S-400 sites at an alarming rate... to ATACMS. That's moderately ridiculous, since S-400 is supposed to be state of the art Russian military export technology.
2 years ago, Russia was in full control of the Black Sea. Russia's IFV, tank and artillery storage depots were still well-stocked with vehicles. It was still able to fly A50 spy planes over the Sea of Azov and Black sea. Ukraine had no practical means of waging a campaign against Russian oil refineries, it had HIMARS, but no western tanks, Bradley IFVs, Patriot, Samp-T and NASAMs batteries, no Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles, no prospect of western jets and their weapons systems.
For balance, Ukraine still had its power stations, tens of thousands of its soldiers were still alive. Bakhmut and Avdiivka hadn't been razed, Vuhledar hadn't been shattered, and it had yet to spend part of its force on an poorly-judged counter-offensive.
No matter how deadlocked it might seem today, a position isn't a stalemate when so much around either side's ability to wage war is in flux.
This a mid-80s technology and if they really just discovered something important and valuable about the technology, they would keep their mouths shut. If they put it out as a press release, it’s precisely because they didn’t discover anything new.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-found-dart-like-myst...
Ah, yes. The logical conclusion.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/06/12/ukrainian-a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1czed3k/stri...
S-300/400 TEL have to stay close to the Radar for mainly two reasons.
The Radar vehicle also has the generator supplying the TELs with electricity.
and the even more important reason is that the radar data can only be transmited over a short distance so if the TEL is too far out it can't get data from the Radar anymore.
Edit: max range for a S-300 is 120m between the TELs and the Radar and since the S-400 is actually just a S-300PM3 its probably the same or at least very similar
I just assume the missiles they launched were trying to intercept incoming ATACMS rounds and they either failed to intercept, or they were outnumbered. Not a good day for the Russian side.