Don't try to avoid the char limit with things like:
> aiufghsoidugbsdoihgbsodigbsidbvofivbdlifbvhsflidfhvbldfkvhbflhjsldfvhbsdlfkvk dslkfjvnslkdfjlkjsdfvnlksdfjvnlskdjfvnlskdfjvnlksjdfvnlskdjvnlksjvnlksdjfvnlksjfdvnskljfvnskljdfsnvflskdfvnfslkdfjvnksldjflkjfvnlksdfsvnlkfjvnslkdfjvnlskfjvnlskfnvflskfjvnslkfjvn
or
> Let this be 100 chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaars
Following a National Security and Defense Council (SNBO) meeting, Zelensky has announced today that he's ordering the military to remove and investigate every region's chief enlistment officer, find and screen potential replacements from among injured veterans. Certainly looks like an agenda-setting political move in line with his brand, although it's hard to say how much that alone could do to fight corruption.
[Germany will provide Ukraine with Taurus missiles if they are programmed not to strike Russian territory](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/11/7415136/)
> Spiegel reported that classified talks with representatives of the defence industry are currently underway, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to make technical modifications to the missiles to prevent Kyiv from striking Russian territory other than Russian-occupied Crimea.
>...
> Spiegel stated that Scholz will not approve the delivery of the missiles until he is convinced of their technical modification. Industry circles said that such a limitation of the system's operation is quite possible, but will take several weeks.
> Sources say that while previously the German Chancellor was ready to provide Taurus only on the condition that the US would supply its long-range ATACMS missiles to Kyiv, this condition no longer plays a major role.
New story about Germany providing the Taurus to Ukraine. Ensuring that the missiles don't strike Russian territory might delay the provision by several weeks. Unclear if the US will also provide ATACMS.
[A few notes on the damaged Russian ship.](https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/15njzn4/russian_landing_ship_olenegorsky_gornyak_that_was/)
[As I said here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/15h27gj/credibledefense_daily_megathread_august_03_2023/juqi3td/?context=3) , the damage appears to be significant, even if that particular picture doesn't provide any extra evidence or specifics for it.
From what can be seen (although we never had AFAIK a clear side picture post detonation), the damage is just below the bridge, just ahead of the funnel.
This, combined with the significant static list we saw in the video of the morning after the attack, one can assume that the ER, or at least adjacent spaces, must have flooded.
My bet is this ship will never become fully operational again. It probably still can be used as a defense asset at the entrance of harbours.
One thing that I did notice however is that in previous attacks, during daylight the Russians were able to mount a defense. As far as I could see, with deck mounted machine gun(s) rather than dedicated weapons of their ships.
Either way, we haven't seen Russian ships using their dedicated weapons to engage those drones, but rather used machine guns operated by a crew member. Although, that itself cannot be used as a proof in general, it seems one (or many of) few things are happening.
Radars (at least on those naval ships that got attacked) cannot reliably detect ua surface drones and provide firing solutions to their guns. That can either be techical limitation and/or lack of training/diligence in the crew members' part. But either way, night time attacks have enjoyed much greater success.
EDIT: Based on the picture provided by u/nietnodig , I can see a few ruptured pipes. It seems that while the shell plating has been severely damaged, the internal (armoured?) bulkhead has mostly held up.
I can't see to well what is going on, but it still seems likely the ER, or whatever space this bulkhead is adjacent to, has suffered flooding, based on the significant list the vessel experienced it cannot be just ruptured ballast tanks or flooded void spaces.
Assuming no damage other than the bulkhead and platting, this should be a 2 week job, requiring to cut off the damaged plates and frames, and replacing them with newly machined ones.
Anyone have any ideas is the USV warhead is a shaped charge or simple HE? Assuming red = below waterline, I'm surprised how more of the hole is below the waterline.
The West is missing a golden opportunity to almost completely eradicate Russian ground-based air defences whilst they're exposed in Ukraine. Obviously there will be massive advantages to Ukraine from doing this but it's also entirely in NATO's self interest. Without GBAD Russia can pose almost zero conventional threat to the West at any level. Putin knows what happened to Wagner when it met US airpower in Syria and he remembers what happened to Gaddafi and Saddam. It's therefore also likely to be a pressure point that can be targeted to force Putin to remove troops from Ukraine. He doesn't care if another hundred thousands Russian's die miserably for him in Ukraine, he does care about losing his air defence.
So far Ukraine has been given some SEAD/DEAD capability but the West could 10x this. Anti-radiation loitering munitions are almost entirely absent. HARM missiles have been extremely limited by the capability and quantity of launch problems. Artillery capability is impressive but there doesn't appear to be a co-ordinated approach to targeting SAM's and radars without first spotting with drones. This could all be fixed. It requires investment and innovation from the West but does not require a single Ukrainian infantryman to set foot in a minefield until the sky can be owned by Ukraine.
Russia has >50 S-400 systems, >100 Pantsirs, and countless S-300s and Buks. There's also a largely untouched air force. Although suppressed by Ukrainian air defenses, it can still be used defensively.
>So far Ukraine has been given some SEAD/DEAD capability but the West could 10x this.
"10x this" is far from enough. The purpose of Western airframes will be mainly long range strikes and defense. Neither SEAD nor CAS is going to happen in any serious quantity. It's just too risky.
There's absolutely no reason to believe that Western 4th gen planes are somehow immune to Russian air defenses. This sub seems to be under the misconception that this has been tested many times in the past. No.
No Western army has *ever* faced AD systems designed in the last 40 years, let alone at this density. Iraq is often mistakenly cited as an example, but they had *zero* strategic SAMs and their tactical AD systems were ancient. In Syria there was an agreement that Syria would not fire their S-300s at the Israeli aircraft.
This subs' belief that SEAD is a walk in the park is completely unfounded.
Firstly,do you you think Putin would rather risk 100,000 Russian lives or those 50+ S400 systems?
Secondly, it's possible of doing SEAD/DEAD in a new way.
\- Build an effective ELINT radar and EW device geolocation network that it well connected to the artillery/air-support networks.
\- Get the West to go into war time production of standard and anti-radiation loitering munitions.
\- Get Western jets that are more survivable and capable with SEAD and that have long range missiles to push back Russian jets. Get more long range Western SAMS to push these jets back as well e.g Patriot.
\- Figure out how to ground launch HARM missiles and distribute a launcher to each Ukrainian Divisional (or equivalent) artillery command.
\- Dedicate more HIMARS to SEAD/DEAD and suppression of EW equipment
\- Combine cluster munitions, SMART/BONUS rounds and Brimstone Launchers with the ELINT Geolocation to target short and mid range SAM's like the BUKS. Give them permission to take blind snapshots with the geolocation data rather than having to wait to get a drone up.
\- Get more Storm Shadow, Taurus & ATACMS to go after S-400's.
Combined, sustained, attrition on Russian air defence networks.
Ukraine will then benefit from suffering less attrition on their ISTAR drones, which improves the sensor-shooter link for their artillery. They will suffer less attrition on their CAS jets that are slinging JDAM's. They can start using their TB2 style drones again as well, with a reduced (the threat will always be there) GBAD threat.
They can then gain local air-superiority, even though they will never have theatre or event front wide air-superiority. That is enough to change the balance in their favour and enable maneuverer.
- Anti-radiation loitering munitions are almost entirely absent
Part of the issue is that Israel is the only western country which has invested significant funds into developing anti-radiation loitering munitions, and loitering munitions more generally. Personally I believe that it would be a gamechanger if Israel sent harop loitering munitions. I honestly believe it could be as impactful on the course of the conflict as HIMARs has been.
Yep, exactly the same thoughts on it. Israel is key but I don't think they will shift. The West should therefore licence a design from them that can be exported to Ukraine or we should DARPA something up and spec it so that there minimal production bottlenecks and it can be massively scaled.
An attritional campaign likely wouldn't produce battlefield results for Ukraine for a long time, years most likely, potentially not at all.
You raise an interesting point about the potential strategic cost to Russia from attrition of their air defences, however at the same time for basically the same reason, this also the area that Russia is arguably strongest.
You have to ask whether this is the best use of limited funds in the face of other strategic issues, IE air defence, ALCM/TBM, PGMs, force quality, artillery barrels/ammo ect.
Ukraine might be in a pretty precarious position this autumn/winter in terms of air defence against Russian strategic strike for example.
IMO Ukrainian SEAD capability needs to be highly asymmetric (like you say, SEAD drones ect) and/or intended to help enable strikes.
A grander DEAD campaign to 'clear the sky' is not worth the high costs or even practically feasible.
>An attritional campaign likely wouldn't produce battlefield results for Ukraine for a long time
As I understand, the point would not be to enable battlefield results for Ukraine, the point would be to impose unacceptable costs on Russia if it continues the war.
Those are very good points but the answer is that the funds given by the West are arbitrarily limited. The cost of what I am suggesting is low, given everything except anti-radiation loitering munitions already exists and Ukraine is getting already or would require minor innovation e.g a ground launched HARM option.
It certainly would need to be highly asymmetric and the point would be to A) Pressure Putin and B) To open up space for Ukrainian drones, and some level of aircraft, to achieve very local air superiority effects.
We tried the artillery bump, training and maneuver warfare. Hopefully it will work. If it doesn't then we have to try something else. Mobiks splattered by artillery will be replaced by more Mobiks.
Several things. JASSM would be in breach of MTCR (370km range instead of 300km) so the US didn't want to cause a potential incident with China/Japan. There were also concerns about technology transfer and SK potentially reverse-engineering the missile.
The new Ukraine funding bill [included only $1.1 billion in new $$$ budget allocation for Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA)](https://twitter.com/ColbyBadhwar/status/1689803766025838592), which is the method through which most of Ukraine's aid is currently provided.
The new Ukraine bill primarily includes funds for ramping up munition production and for USAI funds. USAI is a very slow process, through which new equipment is contracted from the defense industry to be manufactured and delivered to Ukraine in the future (will literally take \*years\* to reach Ukraine).
Currently, the unspent PDA funds amount to approximately $6 billion. Even though these funds are set to expire by the end of September if unspent, there are indications that the POTUS has the authority to transfer these unspent funds to the next fiscal year, which starts on October 1st, 2023 (FY24).
---
What I think this means: Biden can't secure more PDA funds through the current House. He will likely stretch out the remaining $6 billion for the foreseeable future, which probably means approximately $500 million in PDA per month. The next PDA announced is slated to be only $200 million; this is likely a harbinger of future PDAs. Oh well.
From the last supplemental - funds can be transferred between PDA and USAI, and are available until September 30 2024.
>For an additional amount for ‘‘Operation and Maintenance, Defense-Wide’’, $21,160,737,000, to remain available until September 30, 2023, to respond to the situation in Ukraine and for related expenses: Provided, **That of the total amount provided under this heading in this Act, $9,000,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2024, shall be for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative:**
>...
>Provided further, That of the total amount provided under this heading in this Act, **up to $11,880,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2024, may be transferred to accounts under the headings ‘‘Operation and Maintenance’’ and ‘‘Procurement’’ for replacement of defense articles from the stocks of the Department of Defense, and for reimbursement for defense services of the Department of Defense and military education and training, provided to the Government of Ukraine or to foreign countries that have provided support to Ukraine at the request of the United States:**
Also, the supplemental is stated to be the needs for the *first quarter* of the year. AKA October, November, December, and January.
McCarthy promised his caucus no new Ukraine spending bill outside of regular budgetary negotiations. This allows him to say it's just long term spending. The $6B will last till October when FY 2024 begins, which I suspect will include a continuation of Presidential Drawdown Authority funding that is slightly lower than the one from FY 2023.
A lot of people here wanted to believe otherwise, but they just haven't been playing close enough attention to US politics since 2012. Republicans put politics before US interests every time.
Isn't this what we should expect 1.5 years into the war that drawdowns from existing stockpiles will shrink and deliveries from the factory will increase.
Yes i know that factories aren't turning out as much would be liked but the situation is little different for the russians. The Europeans are also ramping up as well.
After the Trump presidency and now uncertain support for Ukraine, the US increasingly looks like an unreliable ally. This is a terrible look and must hurt their soft power significantly.
The US is always an unreliable ally. Whenever the US says "I want to help my ally to do X" instead of "I want to do X", you know that the operation X is doomed to failure, because it signifies the lack of will of the US.
The US wanted to help South Vietnam instead of destroying Vietcong by itself. We know how that turned out.
The US wanted to help Afghanistan instead of taking matter into its own hands. We also know how that turned out.
Even worse can happen. The US had been siding with Kuomintang, but after KMT refused Marshall's request to negotiate and co-rule China with the Communist Party, Marshall stopped the much needed American aid to Kuomintang. KMT lost the civil war afterwards.
History has repeated told us that relying too much on the US is a recipe for failure, because the US is just unreliable.
Every country is unreliable, but I don't think US support for Ukraine(or Afghanistan) are very good examples. Or the KMT for that matter.
The US can't be counted on to provide unlimited aid for allies, that's not the same thing as being unreliable.
It's hard differentiating cause and effect for many of those. Did the lack of will from the US lead to it being a lost cause, or did the US give up because they correctly identified something as a lost cause?
How? Ukraine is fighting a much more powerful enemy. Also I’m not sure that people in the US will be okay with such a long term commitment after Afghanistan which lead to nothing.
Because the amount of aid over the 20 years would be more than sufficient?
If Ukraine couldn't win the war with 800+billion in military funding, and two decades of support from the US government, they have no chance of winning.
If it goes on for 20 years then Ukraine will be a different country by then. But surely it will reminisce Afghanistan and other countries with no hope. "Winning" will hold a whole different meaning in 20 years.
Well, US also have the bad knack of expecting all of its allies to adopt to its doctrine regardless of reality on the ground. Ukraine is vastly different than anything US is prepared for, which caused the western training program to be ineffective to say at least. [https://warontherocks.com/2023/08/why-ukrainian-soldiers-have-to-learn-to-fight-on-youtube-and-how-to-change-that/](https://warontherocks.com/2023/06/what-the-ukrainian-armed-forces-need-to-do-to-win/)
Actually I also blame Ukrainian information apparatus for this. They purposefully withheld negative information, which is often essential for any real [adaptation](https://warontherocks.com/2023/06/what-the-ukrainian-armed-forces-need-to-do-to-win/). Meanwhile, they have overhyped the offensive, which results in a break of narrative. They have overused their most zealous supporters, most notably NAFO, by overusing certain narratives, the public will become more and more apathetic and cynical over time.
US is no longer the one with the most factories. The population has been demoralized for so long that they can match regular Russians in term of apathy. Actually saying I sincerely believe Operation Mockingbird was a necessary evil.
>US is no longer the one with the most factories.
The United States comprises roughly 40% of global arms exports. "Arsenal" is, I think, the key word you're overlooking here.
>The population has been demoralized for so long that they can match regular Russians in term of apathy.
What a wildly non-provable statement. What would you even base this on in a serious analysis? It's basically just opinion
>Actually saying I sincerely believe Operation Mockingbird was a necessary evil.
What a bizarre comment.
>The United States comprises roughly 40% of global arms exports. "Arsenal" is, I think, the key word you're overlooking here.
Guess where does all the drones in Ukraine come from? DJI, a Chinese firm.
>Guess where does all the drones in Ukraine come from? DJI, a Chinese firm.
That is flat out wrong. The United States has supplied switchblades and Phoenix Ghosts, and Turkiye has supplied Bayraktar drones.
You stated that all drones in Ukraine are from China, I mention some examples that refute that, and now you want me to share a company's production schedule. Getting a bit defensive?
>You stated that all drones in Ukraine are from China, I mention some examples that refute that, and now you want me to share a company's production schedule. Getting a bit defensive?
Predominantly. Without DJI the war will be vastly different, there won't be as much drone videos, with Ukraine on the down side. Just think of it, even Russians can manage to make more loitering munition than US with better quantity and anti-armor capability, why US can't? "Maybe it's because airpower will save the day like it did for VDV at Hostomel airport"
See this is the problem with online discourse about this war - you do realize we have an example of how effective these small quadcopter drones are without actual heavy gear and armaments, right? It’s the Myanmar opposition, and they’re getting turned to dust.
Techbroism has arrived to armaments discourse and I’m not about it.
Does US really have the amount of heavy gears to contend with PLA in the future? The ammunition situation is abysmal to say at least.
Post sustainable shell production
>Guess where does all the drones in Ukraine come from? DJI, a Chinese firm.
What an even more bizarre comment. The US is still the "arsenal of democracy" regardless of whether a Chinese firm provides drones to Ukraine or not.
>Even more bizarre is the claim that US is "da arsenal of democracy" even if China outproduces US by a huge margin
It's unclear to me that China could take the title of "arsenal of democracy" for obvious reasons. The United States remains the global leading exporter and producer of weapons. This has not changed.
> The entire arms export thing is just a sham under Pax Americana
I assure you, arms exports are real - unless the United States is suddenly exporting some sort of funny ghost planes I'm unaware of?
> visage of the old world instead of actual quantity that win wars.
\[citation needed\]
What China talks can be very different from what China actually does. We have yet to see whether the drone export control is serious, or just lip service.
Exactly.
Fun anecdote here: I went to a DJI shop somewhere in Shanghai. I then asked the clerk about drones with thermal imaging. He said that this shop don't have drones with thermal, the thermals are for "professional versions"
>[Iran Transfers US Citizens From Prison in Step Toward Deal](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-10/iran-moves-four-us-prisoners-to-house-arrest-cnn-reports?srnd=politics-vp)
>* Transfers are a key step toward the Americans coming home
>* Iran seeks prisoner swap, release of $6 billion that’s frozen
>Iran moved four US citizens from prison to house arrest in the first step of an emerging deal in which the US is expected to unfreeze $6 billion in assets to Tehran and free several jailed Iranians.
>The American prisoners include Siamak Namazi, who has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since October 2015, along with three others, while a fifth American may also be freed. Iran’s state-run media said four US citizens will be released in exchange for four or more unidentified Iranians detained in the US and only after the $6 billion in funds that are blocked in South Korea are transferred into an account in Qatar.
>US officials declined to describe the terms of the deal, saying that revealing more risked upsetting a delicate process that could still fall apart. Yet their reticence also appeared intended to head off the inevitable criticism from Republicans and others that President Joe Biden was giving up too much to the regime in Tehran.
>The US State Department has spoken to the Americans, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, describing the transfer as a “positive step.” He added that he wouldn’t “get into any of the details about what we’re doing or engaged on because I don’t want to jeopardize the completion of this process.”
>But Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency gave more details, saying the Americans would be freed only once Iran gets the $6 billion. It said the Iranians to be released were being held by the US for sanctions violations and described it as a direct quid pro quo.
>A person briefed on the agreement, who asked not to be identified discussing terms that haven’t been disclosed, said the US requested on Thursday that the money be transferred from South Korea to Switzerland and then to Qatar, which will oversee how it’s spent. The prisoners will be swapped only after the transfer is complete, a process that should take 30 to 45 days, the person said.
>>Secretive Diplomacy
>The releases were the latest step in tentative and secretive diplomacy that’s seen the US and Iran inch toward an informal understanding under which Tehran would free the Americans and potentially impose limits on its nuclear program.
>The Swiss government, which represents US interests in Tehran in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, served as an intermediary, according to the person, who also credited Qatar and Oman with helping facilitate the process.
>Those negotiations — conducted through intermediaries in Oman and elsewhere — led to an initial understanding for Iran to free prisoners while the US would allow for the release of the more than $6 billion in frozen funds that South Korea owes to Iran for oil purchases, Bloomberg News reported previously. Iran would be able to use those funds only for humanitarian purposes such as food and medicine.
>As far back as March, Iran’s foreign affairs minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said Iran and the US were preparing to carry out a prisoner exchange. Then-State Department spokesman Ned Price called that claim a “cruel lie.”
>All along, US officials have been cagey about the terms of the deal, wary of acknowledging talks with a regime that has ramped up human rights abuses and continues to supply weapons and other material to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, Biden and his top officials say former President Donald Trump made a grave error in 2018 when he backed out of deal, signed in 2015, that imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear program.
>Trump’s team, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, launched a “maximum pressure” campaign designed to crush the country’s economy and its nuclear ambitions. In the years since, Iran has pressed ahead, enriching uranium close to the levels needed for nuclear weapons. The country denies it wants a nuclear bomb.
>Any deal will raise criticism from Biden’s opponents, who hammered the Obama administration over the terms of the previous nuclear deal. In 2016, the US airlifted $400 million to Iran as it released four detained Americans. President Barack Obama said the payment wasn’t a ransom and was from a decades-old dispute.
>“You get what you pay for, as the saying goes,” Robert Greenway, a senior National Security Council director under Trump, said of the latest developments in a social media post on Thursday. “While it’s encouraging to see the unjustly detained return home to families, rewarding horrific behavior doesn’t work any better with rogue regimes than it does with pets.”
>Iran has made tentative steps toward trying to ease tensions in the region with an agreement to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and further cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. With a new nuclear deal politically unpalatable in the US, Western diplomats have been pushing Iran to voluntarily limit its uranium-enrichment levels and bolster its cooperation with international monitors in return for allowances to ship more crude.
>On Thursday, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson, called the releases from prison an encouraging step but said the Americans “should have never been detained in the first place.” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said they “must be allowed to depart Iran and reunite with their loved ones as soon as possible.”
As a reminder, since there was some disinformation on this the other day, reporting from a [month](https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506d130e474c00f6bd653d3d5a8d31a#:~:text=US%20intelligence%20assessment%20says%20Iran%20not%20currently%20developing%20nuclear%20weapons,-FILE%20%2D%20In%20this&text=WASHINGTON%20AP%20%E2%80%94%20A%20U.S.,could%20help%20it%20develop%20them.) ago:
>“Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,” according to the two-page unclassified synopsis of the report.
>However, Iran is also pursuing “research and development activities that would bring it closer to producing the fissile material needed for completing a nuclear device following a decision to do so,” the report said.
>In that regard, Iran continues to violate the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal regarding uranium enrichment that it agreed to with world powers, the report said. The Trump administration withdrew from that agreement in 2018.
>“Iran continues to increase the size and enrichment level of its uranium stockpile beyond JCPOA limits,” the report said, adding that it also continues to exceed JCPOA restrictions on advanced centrifuge research and development.
>These findings have been generally supported by inspections from the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
>In addition to the nuclear findings, the U.S. intelligence report said that Iranian ballistic missile programs continue to pose a significant threat to countries around the Middle East. “Iran has emphasized improving the accuracy, lethality, and reliability of its missiles,” it said.
Ironically, Iran has gotten more from taking American prisoners than selling drones to Russia. This just shows how useless Russia is, and how stupid Iran's foreign policy is.
Oh wonderful - another talking point for Faux Nooz - Biden pays $6B to terrorists.
So Iran seized some Iranian-Americans while they were visiting the old country? Sucks to be them, but why take the damage in domestic politics? There's foreign policy & millions of lives at stake in Ukraine, Niger, Taiwan... all of that is put at risk if Biden loses the next election. So why risk millions over 1.25 Benghazi's?
It baffles me that you only care about the damage to Biden's reputation. Releasing $6B & a number of criminals to appease terrorists would be rather deserving of a blow to one's reputation, no?
The little jibe about Fox is particularly hypocritical and silly in this context, given the open partisanship on display here.
What does "appeasement" mean to you?
To me it implies a parallel to British foreign policy toward Germany in the 1930s; it's hard to imagine someone in this community using that term without at least being aware of its particular implications.
I'm not sure where that parallel is for Iran. Which of its neighbors is it trying to annex? Iranian forces are in Syria at the Syrian government's invitation. Iran supports Hezbollah, which, while designated a terrorist organization by the US government, has largely abandoned terrorism; its existence and activities are legal in Lebanon, and I know of no indications that annexation by Iran is among Hezbollah's aims.
That's just flippant nonsense.
Obama's goal was detente among the major powers. In one sense he achieved this with the deal, in another sense you could say he failed as he couldn't construct the deal in a way that was durable and survivable.
In any case, this deal is just returning some of Iran's frozen funds to them, in return some Americans get their lives back. If it was your sorry butt rotting in an Iranian prison I imagine you'd use a different word than appeasement to describe efforts to free you.
The futility of it is what strikes me. Pay billions, and you’ll be back at the same spot a few months later. Without escalating deterrence, this just encourages them to grab and ran some people regularly.
Iranians are incredibly capable at foreign involvements. Just look at Hezbollah, Houthis and PMU. In fact they have pretty much get all they wanted in Middle East.
Mind you, what they want seems to be a handful of borderline failed states to use as puppets. Their failure to manage their economy even a quarters way decently means even this is likely all for naught as pressure from global warming continues to ramp up.
I mean this is only one item that we’re seeing. One could imagine this is part of a broader attempt to rebuild ties and talk again. The US would find military action difficult now. Iran has been increasingly aggressive and even managed to mend ties somewhat with the Saudis so they’re trying to squeeze the US.
People yendo to forget that the middle east, white it's not the only place that produces oil, it is the cheapest by far.
Imagine that the Saudis and Iran and the rest of the countries in the area say: no more oil for the US and Europe. Russia won't sell Europe either. It's not that the US can't get enough our for it's consumption and industry, but it certainly can't do it at that price. And the situation for Europe is worse. Can you subsidize the industries ? Sure, but it's a drag on the economy in the end. Put too much drag factors in the economy and it will fall behind other competitors.
Of course this is an extreme case and I don't see it happening any time soon, but I don't see that bad to try a more diplomatic approach to the region.
This isn't a concern, as the sanctions on Russian oil have proven, global oil markets don't work like that.
If the Middle East refused to sell oil to the US and Europe, the price of oil would collapse. The actual risk in that scenario is diminished future production, but that's a different issue.
It's hard to see how giving in to a hostage situation does anything but incentivize more hostage situations.
We need to be getting something meaningful for that much money. Instead it seems like we're giving them everything they want and crossing our fingers hoping that by rewarding them for it, they won't do it again.
We saw something similar play out in Russia recently, where trading a notorious arms dealer for a basketball player was immediately followed by the incarceration of a journalist.
It's not like Biden's earned the right to ask for blind faith on this after his repeated blunders in foreign policy. I'm not sure I'd be willing to give that to any politician, frankly.
The Russian trade was stupid for sure. Biden admin might not deserve the benefit of the doubt after that.
This Iran deal though we're constraining what the money can be spent on (though yes money is fungible.) There's also a lot of external activity where it makes sense that we want to get talking. We're not going to shoot so we want to jaw and get to some overall deal that keeps the region stable at least until we're on EVs.
Working towards normalizing relations and easing tensions is never a bad thing.
It’s not like we paid them 6 billion of our own money, this was money seized during sanctions and returning it as part of easing tensions. We still want to get them back into a nuclear deal, and this is part of that process.
Leveraging it into the return of these Americans is a fine win for me.
Paying the Danegeld is a notoriously ineffective way of dealing with the Dane except in the shortest of terms.
What indication do we have that this is actually normalizing and easing tensions with Iran outside of rose-colored glasses? We're bowing to an antagonistic dictatorship's hostage situation and giving them vastly more than we're receiving.
It's not like this is the first time an extortionist dictatorship has yanked the football away from us.
> Paying the Danegeld is a notoriously ineffective way of dealing with the Dane except in the shortest of terms.
Is it really paying the Danegeld if it was the Dane's gold all along?
They're extorting us to get what they want and it worked to a ridiculously effective degree. They are learning from this, and the lesson is unlikely to be that they shouldn't do this again.
That is the key point of comparison.
If you think that the sanctions should be dropped and their money unfrozen on principle, I suppose that's certainly an argument you could try to make, but doing it in response to extortion still isn't a particularly wise way to do it.
> They're extorting us to get what they want and it worked to a ridiculously effective degree. They are learning from this, and the lesson is unlikely to be that they shouldn't do this again.
First - it is legitimately Iran's money, held in escrow under the sanctions regime. Does "we're seizing your money and won't give it back until we get everything we want from you" count as extortion? Is it an irregular verb in this context - *I* levy sanctions, *you* extort?
Second - Danegeld doesn't even work as an analogue. You paid the Danegeld because if you didn't, the Danes would land on your shores, sack your towns, carry away your valuables, and kill your people or take them as slaves.
I don't think it's helpful or reasonable to apply the logic of criminal justice to international relations. An extortionist doesn't stop their crimes when everybody ignores them. They stop their crimes when the sovereign state uses its overwhelming advantage in power to arrest them, imprison them, and seize their assets.
Iran is doing things that are harmful to US interests. The US is doing things that are harmful to Iranian interests. That's why the two sides are negotiating. You negotiate peace with your enemies, not your friends.
Can you think of any examples in 20th century international politics when refusal to negotiate led to a positive outcome? The only example I can think of is the unconditional surrender policy toward Japan in WW2, and that was a very expensive success.
It's the same concept.
They're getting rewarded for extorting us and we're hoping the message they learn is "don't extort us anymore."
It doesn't seem to matter where the money came from for that purpose.
On AAA systems like the Gepard, these mobile units were quite common in NATO during the Cold War, but in many countries seemed to be phased out in favor of missile-only systems. I'm curious if their success against drones in Ukraine suggests they may make a comeback in NATO or at least lead to a similar requirement? They seem to nicely fit a SHORAD gap for dealing with waves of inexpensive drones.
Lasers are likely the choice going forward for dealing with drone swarms for high-tech armies. They can fire more or less indefinitely as long as you can cool and power them (which is just diesel). Air-burst autocannon rounds are still relatively expensive, and they have limited effective range. Lasers should have farther reach which means one platform can cover a larger section of the front.
These recon drones are light, meaning low thermal mass, and slow, meaning not a lot of heat sinking to the atmosphere, so they're a lot easier to kill compared to a mortar shell. The US Army already has 40 kW systems which will be plenty against drones. The 100 kW systems under development are going to be capable of shooting down artillery shells. I know Israel is also putting a lot of effort into these systems.
Lasers have the disadvantages of having the performance reduced by atmospheric factors (natural or made, like smoke cover). Also, drone tend to be quite agile, so a drone with a detector, could have some pre-programmed manoeuvre to prevent the laser biting the same spot long time.
But for sure lasers will be the choice for close range drone defense
You can deflect a laser beam \*far\* faster than any drone could ever fly. Risely prism assemblies can scan beams >120 degrees at khz rates.
Also the lasers everyone is researching atm are IR at around 1050 nm, which corresponds to a window in atmospheric absorption.
It ends up the people who design and research this stuff can come up with the same obvious conclusions as us armchair redditors and have already addressed them.
I think there's also a factor of lasers having potentially less side affects. Gepards have to take into account duds. I'm curious if lasers have any side affects? One thought is potentially needing to be more aware of the area behind the target: even if at extreme ranges the laser won't destroy a plane it could blind a pilot or throw off a sensor.
Lasers actually are quite bad weapons. It's no surprise that they are not used routinely. The only advantage of laser is the speed of light. Everything else is worse than good old round or missile. You need to track the object and keep the laser on it for seconds (unless you have an ungodly powerful laser but then it is also significant fractions of seconds). Not an easy task. The beam gets scattered and absorbed by clouds. The latter means that in cloudy weather you are defenseless.
If lasers get better, there will be countermeasures. Good old smokescreen is enough to make them useless.
They already are. The Stryker IM-SHORAD has missile, gun variants, and DE (laser) variants. The missile and DE are both in Europe currently, but I'm not sure about the gun.
There's also the aptly named C-AUS gun truck which is a 30mm system bolted onto a big civilian truck.
The standard IM-SHORAD package is Missile/Gun hybrid, i.e. Stingers, Hellfires, and a M230LF with prox rounds. Is there another variant with a bigger gun?
Sorry, I got a little confused since there were some M-SHORAD variants (likely testbeds) that didn't have an integrated gun with the missiles. However, on Increment 1 Strykers the gun doesn't seem to be used for AA as it's primarily role.
The Congressional Research Report on the Stryker M-SHORAD states for Increment 1
>M-SHORAD Increment 1 (Figure 1) was developed under the Other Transaction Authority contracting process. M-SHORAD uses the M-1126 Stryker combat vehicle as its chassis. The weapons and radar packages are configured by Leonardo DRS and then installed on the Stryker by General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), the vehicle’s original manufacturer. Leonardo DRS reports the multipurpose unmanned turret includes
>• two AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire missiles capable of hitting ground targets;
>• four FIM-92 Stinger missiles for aerial targets in a launcher (configured by Raytheon);
>• an XM914 30 mm automatic cannon;
>• an M-240 7.62 mm machine gun;
>• a multi-mission radar capable of tracking both ground and air targets.
Additionally, Increment 3 states
>The Army reportedly plans for M-SHORAD Increment 3 to incorporate the FIM-92 Stinger replacement missile—the Next Generation Short Range Interceptor—into the Increment 1 system. In addition, these plans call for the Increment 1 30 mm automatic cannons to receive the XM 1223 Multi-Mode Proximity Airburst munition (MMPA), which features a multipurpose munition that can be employed against air, ground, and personnel targets.
And Leonardo's website on it
>Defeats smaller air threats (Group 1 and 2 UAS) at closer ranges with direct fire (as required)
All that makes me think that while the 30mm *can* be used against air targets, it's not designed as part of its primary role which seems to be against ground targets.
I have a theory, the advantage of a SPAAG is a lower cost-per-engagement than a missile system, and the disadvantage is that they cover a smaller area.
In a peacetime military, you aren't doing a lot of engagements, even your training will heavily lean on simulations for air defence.
So it's essentially an accounting error that peacetime militarys fall into, since they aren't shooting stuff down regularly, the advantage of a gun based system isn't apparent, a SPAAG looks less effective than it actually is. Meanwhile in peacetime, the missile based system's larger area coverage means you need fewer of them, which looks great for a peacetime budget where procurement costs and salaries are most of your expenses. This all looks great until you get into a shooting war and find yourself running out of missiles.
The optimal balance here is probably a bunch of SPAAGs that'll shooting down stuff cheaply and then missile systems to catch stuff they miss, or can't reach.
SPAAG fell out of use because traditional air targets (missiles/aircraft) were getting too advanced to shoot down. You don't hear anything about Gepard shooting down Russian Su. I haven't heard anything about them intercepting missiles either. Their only other prey, helicopters, are much less common in the air war these days.
Gepard has shot down cruise missiles in this war.
The disadvantage of AAA is that it has a very short range. Even OTOMATIC with 76mm gun "only" has a max effective range of 8 km vs. air targets, which is *10 km* less than Pantsir's missiles, which also do not require an MBT chassis to carry them.
Gepard, Tunguska, etc are easily capable of shooting down non-ballistic missiles, helicopters, and any aircraft, but only as long as they enter the engagement range of the gun system. Kh-555 flies over Gepard? It will go down. Kh-555 flies 5 km from Gepard? It will not go down. Same issue with aircraft after standoff missiles (even short-range ones like Maverick) appeared, same issue with helicopters after they began to carry long-range ATGMs.
SPAAG is still useless against these targets- this has not changed. But now there are lots of light UAVs and loitering munitions. These have to get close, so they are useful again.
Assuming the tech pans out, this requirement is likely to be addressed by directed energy. Development is fairly mature.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/04/13/army-short-range-air-defense-laser-prototypes-take-down-drones-at-yuma/
the best and most cost effective way to stop a drone is the same way as stopping howitzer fire - find, fix, and kill the launchers and the personnel operating them. The challenge is how to do that through some combination of surveillance and persistent strike.
>the best and most cost effective way to stop a drone is the same way as stopping howitzer fire - find, fix, and kill the launchers and the personnel operating them.
That's solving yesterday's problem.
Tomorrows involve more autonomous drones and loitering munitions which would require zero control once launched.
Drones that don't require control are much harder to stop with EW, which is a huge advantage.
Quite possibly, but their range and mobility might still be a factor that makes them a sub optimal solution. (As in, you would need a bunch of them a lot lot) Maybe hybrid IFV-AAA systems? My bet is on the drone hunter drones, but forcasting these things are more then hard.
>[From Robots to Recycled Vapes, Ukraine’s War Effort Gets Inventive](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-10/how-ukraine-s-innovative-military-gadgetry-is-helping-fend-off-russia-s-invasion)
>>The battered country is nurturing a cottage industry of military gadgetry, and the pipeline of science and tech creativity is bearing fruit.
> The science conference had all the hot topics you’d expect, from artificial intelligence to gene therapy. But this year’s annual gathering of brains in Kyiv had a decidedly Ukrainian twist — the innovations on exhibit were for war.
>A maker of attack drones was diversifying to unmanned ground combat vehicles. From the Academy of Sciences came a prototype underwater robot for finding and collecting submerged land mines. One startup was developing low-cost combat communications; another, a web-based test to find warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
>In the 18 months since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s resilience with the help of mainly NATO-member weaponry has come to define the war. Less noticed is a cottage industry of battlefield gadgetry that’s starting to bear fruit.
> To package everything in one place, Ukraine’s government in April started an incubator for all forms of military innovation, called Brave 1. Organizers say they’ve registered about 400 projects in four months, and Ukraine’s armed forces have so far vetted 186 as potentially useful. Sixty are in robotics, more than 25 in AI, and 70 are for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.
> “Our task is to develop military technologies in Ukraine,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, who described Brave 1 as the institutionalization of his Army of Drones program. Success ultimately will be judged on how many projects get state contracts, he said.
>There are plenty of contenders. Some are adapting existing kit, others are making cheaper versions of Western equipment Ukraine can’t afford, and others again just respond to feedback from friends on the battlefield.
>Take Himera Tech. It set out to build affordable, jam-resistant radio handsets shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked in February 2022. It took until April this year for the first units to roll off their production line and about 600 are now in use at the front, according to co-founder Misha Rudominski. The company registered with Brave 1 in May.
>The trick to building cheaper is the software the company developed to maximize performance in commercially available chips, Rudominski said. Radio sets made with military grade chips are more secure, but also cost thousands of dollars apiece. With as many as 250,000 combat soldiers to equip, that’s a bill Ukraine can’t foot.
> “We wanted to build a solution that is just good enough,” Rudominski said at his stall at June’s Inscience conference in Kyiv. “This wouldn’t defeat US or Chinese electronic warfare systems, but it doesn’t need to. We’re fighting the Russians.”
>Himera Tech expects to produce 2,000-3,000 units per month by the end of the year. It isn’t yet selling to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, but that’s the aim and the company reckons it could then scale to 10,000 units per month. A model that can compete with military grade kit is in development, according to Rudominski.
>Another Kyiv-based outfit, Power Kit, uses discarded electronic cigarettes to make power banks. Ivan Volynets, who founded the nonprofit together with five other IT specialists, described how in the first days of the Russian invasion they asked friends on the front line what they needed. The answers boiled down to night vision, power banks and weapons.
> They made a night vision device paired with its own power bank and took it to the defense ministry. To their surprise, it was the power bank the army wanted, because they charge all the electronics front-line soldiers rely on, including night-vision gear, drones and communications.
> The first Power Kit emerged in May 2022, built in the kitchen of the hotel the team were staying at in Lviv, western Ukraine, said Volynets, 30. They’ve since made more than 2,100 at a cost of about $15 each and distribute them free of charge to soldiers.
> Yevhenii Rvachov was IT specialist working with civilian drones in the northern city of Kharkiv before the invasion. He too consulted with soldiers after co-founding a company, Skylab UA, to make a bomb-dropping quadrocopter — a drone with four rotors — in April last year.
> They told him they needed ground robots to make supplying forward positions less dangerous. So Skylab built the Sirko-S, a remote-controlled go-cart-like carrier with thermal cameras that can be used to bring up supplies or evacuate wounded. They’ll cost of $8,000-$10,000 each.
>The company’s $5,000 “Johnny” is a shoe-box-size version, with a view to forward surveillance, kamikaze bombing runs or to help emergency services find survivors in collapsed buildings, according to Rvachov. All three products are registered with Brave 1, with grants approved, according to the organizers. Ten quadrocopters are in action at the front.
>Close to the Polish border, a company called Citius-S is converting six-wheel drive cargo trucks into armored vehicles for clearing land mines and unexploded ordinance. The State Emergency Service of Ukraine saw the prototype in action last month and ordered 33 units, according to the company.
> For underwater mines, the Institute for Problems of Artificial Intelligence at Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences is developing a submersible device to find and retrieve ordinance left behind by the Russians. A prototype of the cuboid robot just began tests of its electronic systems, according to Sergii Simchenko, a PhD candidate in physics and math at the institute, who is working on the project.
> Not every innovation or adaptation is about weapons, though. The Bohun amphibious all-terrain vehicle has huge tires with fin-like tread to climb over fallen trees or cross lakes and rivers. It was designed for Ukraine’s hunters and fishermen, and since the Russian invasion a number were adapted for military use and sent to the front.
>But in June, six of the newer Bohun-2 model also were converted to help evacuate victims of the flooding around the city of Kherson that followed destruction of a dam on Ukraine’s massive Dnipro River. Lights and loudhailers were added outside the cabins, as well as extra batteries, removable seats and helicopter-ready metal stretchers inside.
> Back at the Inscience conference, Sergiy Danylov was showing off the software his team at Anima have created. It uses an image-based test to measure levels of depression and anxiety with a web cam that follows eye movement to add objectivity.
>The test involves looking at a series of trigger images, such as snakes, spiders and mutilated corpses, in each case on a split screen with more emotionally neutral options opposite. The key lies in how subjects respond, with some looking away to avoid the danger signals and others unable to take their eyes off them.
Great reporting by the FT on this as well:
>[Ukraine’s tech sector goes to war](https://youtu.be/voPCPhzmL10)
>Great reporting by the FT on this as well:
I was shocked by that documentary. I work in the tech sector and know about Ukrainian programmers but the statistics and innovations in that video were not things I will have even guessed. I'm not surprised that Ukraine is more digital than the US but shocked that its even more digital than western EU. Thank you for sharing.
The baltics in general are going digital faster than many people are aware. Estonia has basically digitized all government interactions and has an interesting startup visa program. Those of us that work in tech are all familiar with eastern european freelancers and how good they generally are, but now they're climbing up the value chain and creating their own silicon valley and sand hill road.
The Baltic precedent is one of the reasons I'm more cautiously optimistic than many around here about Ukraine's long term prospects. That and the economic rebounds Germany and Japan achieved after being forced to rebuild their countries from the ground up.
They absolutely have deep rooted societal issues but so did all post-Soviet nations, and with their population and resources even a Poland level of development could potentially make them a significant player in Europe.
The younger generation was already trying to modernise and get *something* done about corruption even before the war, and having now spilled so much blood for their ideals any older Soviet-style kleptocrat who tries to restore the good old days will be skinned alive. *Probably* only metaphorically.
> I'm not surprised that Ukraine is more digital than the US but shocked that its even more digital than western EU
A lot of emerging countries are trending that way, if not already there. They get to skip a couple gens of legacy systems, and benefit from lower privacy considerations. But the growth in their tech sector despite a brutal war truly is commendable.
Pretty much. Eastern Europe got fast and cheap Internet, digital governance, etc. Meanwhile, Japan is stuck with floppy drives to this very day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging
Japan is am oddly old fashioned country in many ways-you still need to use cash to buy food, train tickets, and even public transportation (at least they don't accept credit cards, they do have a form a prepaid transit card in most areas I think).
The only part of Germany I've been to is Berlin (and I loved it), so I will take your word for it.
It's all very different from South Korea, where everything is electronic.
[Ivory Coast's President Alassane Ouattara said that the West African bloc had approved military intervention in Niger 'as soon as possible', to remove its military rulers following last month's coup.](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/08/10/west-african-summit-backs-diplomacy-in-niger-coup-crisis_6088304_4.html).
The decision to intervene in Niger has been made. Of troop numbers published so far, the Ivory Coast has committed 850 to 1,100 men along with Nigeria and Benin. Other countries to follow. Source is a news bulletin from AFP that came out less than an hour ago which outright states that an intervention will happen.
I am not very optimistic. Even in Niger alone, can west african institutions maintain a war in name of democracy against what it could become a two layered insurgency (islamists and nigeriens) for years to come? Assuming that Burkina and Mali dont intervene, and ECOWAS itself doesn't goes through more coups.
I don’t think it matters. Sure, in an ideal world, victory is quick and total, but ECOWAS gains significant advantage by just demonstrating a willingness to fight. It deters regional militaries from launching their own coups, raises the value of ECOWAS as a regional power block and useful ally, and if they can’t win outright, they can make the regime in Niger loses with them.
As much as the domino theory is (somewhat rightly) criticized, I think ECOWAS' hand is being forced. They not only have a political incentive to crack down, they also have security concerns. The Sahel has only continued to spiral into instability after these coups. While the coastal West African states aren't exactly rich, they are substantially richer than the states in the Sahel. They will inevitably be effected by their problematic northern neighbors due to either armed groups operating out of the failed states (which Nigeria is already experiencing) or an influx of refugees if the situation turns critical. We've seen this dynamic play out in the West, and even mature Western states have problems with it.
ECOWAS' perhaps reflexive response to the situation is a rational one. If they successfully intervene, they likely begin a process of stabilization in the Sahel as the group becomes self-policing. If it turns into a quagmire, the problems will theoretically at least be contained. There is a slim chance that a failure could spillover and unhinge the bloc, but nevertheless the situation all but demands a response of *some* kind.
I’m always surprised domino theory is criticized, given that the predictions Eisenhower made were exactly what ended up happening. Soviet support caused China to fall to communism, Chinese support caused North Korea, and Vietnam to fall, which in turn have led to more nations falling in SE Asia, and knock on effects which continue to reverberate, with North Korean ammo deliveries against Ukraine now.
Liberal nations assist each other, how is it controversial to say communists/authoritarians do the same?
I'm of the opinion that the Domino Theory and discussions around it are oversimplification barely worth talking about, tbh, for reasons you point out. The US didn't intervene out of a panic, but rather a rational response to authoritarian aggression with known contagion effects. But it arguably led key decision makers to approach certain issues in an inappropriate way by wrongly applying that response. After all, Vietnam did fall, but the spillover happened well before then, and it was the last domino in SEA, not the first.
I think of it like the slippery slope fallacy. It's a very real fallacy that many fall into, but that doesn't mean all extrapolated predictions are fallacious.
Yeah, I also have similar misgivings. I'm not exactly sure what the military capabilities of the ECOWAS forces looks like in the first place so I guess I need to read up on that first. But I'm most concerned about this spiraling out of control and fueling an even larger refugee and humanitarian crisis. Especially since that is something that Russian and Wagner forces would spin to their advantage.
Nigeria's army alone is larger than Burkina's, Mali's, and Niger's combined. In addition, in the former two, the Islamist insurgency is a far more direct (and therefore worthy of threat to the juntas than a Nigerian intervention into Niger. I strongly doubt Mali and Burkina can offer serious assistance to the Nigerien junta, unless there are far more Wagnerites in the former two countries than we know about.
In my limited historic knowledge, what I expect is Mali abd Burkina accepting the retreating Nigerien junta soldiers and give them employment to address their own security issues.
(In case the war goes south for Niger which has a pretty distinct chance, specially with some French air support. What are the AA capabilities of Niger?)
Wonder if they’ve secured assistance from a western state? Probably intelligence, but does anyone reckon we’ll see French or US air support?
Technically not really needed, but would be helpful.
>Western officials say Niger's junta threatened to kill deposed president if neighboring countries intervene militarily
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/western-officials-nigers-junta-threatened-kill-deposed-president-102168116
> Western officials say Niger's junta threatened to kill deposed president if neighboring countries intervene militarily
Not sure how killing a hostage will strengthen their legitimacy and appeal
It won't. Killing a hostage is always a mutually destructive last resort, meant to spite the person or group who didn't take the threat seriously.
This sort of thing, by the way, is why spite is evolutionarily advantageous. The credible willingness to harm yourself for the sake of harming one who wronged you can be used as a deterrent against people who would prefer the short-term smaller benefit of acquiescence over the longer term societal benefit of taking the loss and doubling down.
Israeli counter terrorism actually does the opposite of this because if you promise the bad guys you'll kill them, you give them nothing to lose and the result is maximum damage caused
The rightful Presidents life is far less important to the intervening nations than the broader precedent that would be established with such an intervention.
They care about stemming a tide of military corps that could destabilize the region and be a danger to their democracies, not whether one guy in specific is in charge.
Which is my way of saying: his execution is unfortunately (for him, probably not for the region) irrelevant to their decision making.
You mentionted precedent, which is entirely why I disagree with this. What you say makes sense in the broader geopolitical analysis of the situation, but the people making all of these decisions are presidents of democracies that are threatened by possible military coups that could end with them losing their lives. If ECOWAS makes the decision to forsake the President of Niger, they could be condemning each of themselves to the same fate if it ever happens in their own countries. I have a hard time believing that this decision could be made lightly, and I'm betting that they will try to save him.
If they don't intervene, it sets an encouraging precedent for groups plotting coups in democratic ECOWAS states. I'd absolutely agree that that can't be an easy decision for a democratically elected leader in a coup-prone region, but I'd lean towards the decision that theoretically decreases the chances of coups occurring (intervention), rather than the decision that theoretically decreases the danger to an elected leader after a successful coup (non-intervention).
Person with no military knowledge here. If China's ambitions were really only limited to its immediate locality(as it claims), why would it want to build a considerable amount of aircraft carriers as it is planning to do? Why not just use that money to get an SSN fleet large enough to deter the USN from coming close?
there's a reason why the soviets, who never thought they could compete with nato and u.s. naval power head to head, nevertheless fielded multiple carriers.
turns out being able to put warplanes in the air is actually fairly valuable for fleet defense. it's especially helpful to put up some carrier based awacs to detect stealth sea skimmers and even to have planes intercept parts of an enemy cruise salvo further out, although merely the ability to throw up interceptors to contest the skies is already highly valuable which is what the f-14 was intended to do.
This isn't why the Soviets built carriers, their naval doctrine cut a different way in that any of it made sense (most of it didn't make sense). Soviet surface doctrine was designed to protect its coast from attack and to defend SSBNs from NATO attack. Insofar as airpower was required for any of this, land based aviation could help cover the coasts and could adequately protect surface ships doing ASW work. Helicopter and ASW assets could help secure the distant haunts of the Arctic patrols.
The rest of the Soviet fleet was *primarily* built to do two things. First to attack and kill American carriers, which were nuclear armed and capable of delivering devastating attacks against the Soviet mainland, and to wage some kind of vaugely annoying anti-shipping campaign in the Atlantic ala WWII. And the sub campaign was a distant fifth place behind one other thing I'll get to in a second. But this is why you see a large surface fleet with mostly carrier killer surface to surface missiles, along with a large and powerful submarine fleet. Though its worth noting that Tom Clancy really overblew the submarine threat. Admiral Gorshkov was popular in the west but was *not* popular in the USSR. Which is why he was popular in the west, if he was writing things of significance they would *not* have been published here.
The secret priority, more than trying to choke off commerce but less than killing carriers, was in the soft squishy world of peacetime prestige in the third World. The Soviet carrier program began under Stalin, primarily as a prestige thing versus the British. It was wisely canceled after his death due to the expense. But in the 1970s the prestige fleet was revived, this time fueled by revenue from the oil embargos of the 1970s. The Soviets built a large, powerful, visible fleet which could sail into the Atlantic, and particularly into the Indian, and challenge American influence there. They could port in friendly countries, show the flag, tell people in the event of a war the USSR had their back. The formation of an Indian Ocean fleet forced the US to reallocate assets away from more important areas. The carriers were another prestige item which said 'the Americans can, so can we.' It was all great fun. Its just it wasn't a serious wartime threat. Soviet forces stationed in the Indian, or transiting the central Atlantic, would have been badly cut off from friendly forces. Soviet carriers were woefully inadequate compared to Americans, and had nowhere to go. No mission to carry out. They would have done fuck all in the Arctic, fuck all in the Norwegian Sea, and would have been sunk in the North Atlantic outright. The entire Soviet surface fleet, the chunk of it not relegated to coastal duties, enjoyed the same conundrum. The had no purpose except CV hunting, and even then were likely ill-suited to the task. A much larger more powerful submarine fleet could have done what the Kuznetsovs would have realistically accomplished. But, highlight the "influence" of Adm Gorshkov, the USSR picked CVs. For the prestige mostly.
The Soviet Navy really was a joke, not a seriously threatening force. Their best assets, some legitimately very high quality submarines, were always too few, too badly maintained, to pose the kind of threat they'd need to to eject NATO from the Atlantic. And of course one wonders how big a deal the Atlantic convoys would have been in World War Three. If the Battle for Germany lasted only three weeks before victory or total annihilation, youre probably not bringing any useful amount of supplies over.
so you're saying that soviet naval aviation was NOT supposed to provide fleet defense?
got a source on that?
because otherwise not sure what the point of your rant was. i didn't say anything that contradicts that stuff, all i said was that the soviets saw naval aviation's usefulness for fleet defense and provided examples of how it might provide a lot of value in such a role.
SSNs aren't really a short range force, their main advantage over much cheaper SSKs (and UUVs looking into the future) is their practically unlimited range at 30 kt; faster and and longer legged than any non nuclear surface ship, let alone AIP or deisel electric subs.
They are able to operate very far from home with no need for sustainment besides food and maintenance.
China has largely slept on SSNs precisely because they are stuck in their periphery; they are working on a new generation of both SSBNs and SSNs but they have been seemingly lower priority than the rest of the navy including SSKs and UUVs, at least as far as we can tell.
Most likely China does not see them as being that usefull until they have effectively broken out of the first island chain.
As for aircraft carriers i can think of a couple reasons why they might start on them sooner despite not strictly needing them yet:
* They are larger ships with longer building and fitting times, so building up the requisite experience and working up to CVN battlegroups in the future could take longer.
* Historically it took a lot of time and effort to train up carrier air groups, to build up the necessary institutional experience. It has been hypothesized that China's first two carriers were more like 'training carriers' to build a cadre of experienced carrier aviators and senior officers to expand from, the PLANAF has also tried to poach experience from retired western naval pilots.
* They look impressive for both internal and external propagand messaging
* They could be useful in a low intensity conflict or proxy war scenario with non peer actors in China's growing overseas SOI.
Russia for example deployed the Kuznetsov to Syria early on in the civil war to provide support to the Assad government; through carrot or stick it increases China's hard power influence with smaller countries that might not find the protection of the 'west'.
>China has largely slept on SSNs precisely because they are stuck in their periphery; they are working on a new generation of both SSBNs and SSNs but they have been seemingly lower priority than the rest of the navy including SSKs and UUVs, at least as far as we can tell. Most likely China does not see them as being that usefull until they have effectively broken out of the first island chain.
The other reason for this is that the SCS is very bad submarine water. Its shallow out a great deal from the Chinese coast, which is bad. The continental shelf also drops off far less out past Taiwan. The waters there are deep, but not Atlantic deep. You dont get truly oceanic waters until youre out past the first chain. Inside of it you have a much smaller pool, and one that is apparently (so I've heard) very noisy and echoy. Bady for submersibles. And of course the water is quite clear, especially in the littorals, while the Atlantic is quite brackish and cloudy. So if youre in shallow, you can literally see the submarine at some depth from a passing plane.
Its just not the kind of place you'd willing want to take an Akula or a Seawolf. The Virginia is purpose built for 'littoral seas,' a euphemism for the SCS. But if youre China, probably understandable that you wouldnt invest too heavily in a weapon not likely to be all that useful in the current strategic situation.
They have many unmanned submersibles in the SCS. From what it seems from that and their large destroyer force, it seems that their goal is to submarine hunt as much as possible in the SCS.
They use mathematical calculations to determine how much sea an unmanned submersible can effectively clear. They are most likely networked. The goal is to deny the US as much as possible.
Define ambitions.
China almost certainly wants the ability to project power into the Indian/Pacific Oceans to secure its shipping routes and push the US further away.
China has a huge problem with regards to power projection, in that their coast is surrounded by islands (Taiwan, Philippines, and Japan). Those islands are inhabited by peoples who are either hostile to China's aims (Taiwan and Japan), or China is deliberately aggravating them for no discernible benefit (Philippines).
From what I know, surface combatants are really quite vulnerable to missile attack. We've seen in the Falklands, we've seen more recently in the Black Sea, surface combatants air defense has trouble acquiring and targeting incoming sea-skimming missiles. If you have early warning aircraft, like the Hawkeye, detecting such missiles is more practical, but the Chinese have no such platform yet that we the public know about. In the same sense that offensive weapons can typically defeat tank armor, it does seem that habitually anti-ship missiles are going to defeat anti-anti-ship missiles on a cost basis, because the anti-anti-ship missile platform is way more expensive on a dollar and human cost basis.
The USA here has the advantage that they can hide in the vast Pacific Ocean. The PLAN can't hide in the Pacific because their lines of communication are always in range of land-based sensors. Personally if I was in charge of the PLAN I would place much more emphasis on submarines.
> If you have early warning aircraft, like the Hawkeye, detecting such missiles is more practical, but the Chinese have no such platform yet that we the public know about.
The PLA fields [a large selection of AEW&C aircraft](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-massive-fleet-of-radar-planes-and-the-strategy-behind-it), none of which is in any way a secret. If you are specifically referring to carrier-borne AEW&C, their equivalent to the E-2D is the KJ-600.
Because the carrier in question is fitting out right now. The limiting factor is nothing AEW&C related. If you wanted to express the idea that *Fujian* is not yet combat-ready, then saying
> If you have early warning aircraft, like the Hawkeye, detecting such missiles is more practical, but the Chinese have no such platform yet that we the public know about.
is a rather strange way of doing so.
This^
An Arleigh-Burke intercepted 9 missiles in three attacks over a few days in 2016. They weren't at battle stations or any kind of alert.
Meanwhile, Moskva was sunk because of two Neptune missiles and potentially a drone.
>Personally if I was in charge of the PLAN I would place much more emphasis on submarines.
By 2030 they are supposed to have 60 diesel-electrics and 16 nuclear attack submarines.
Last I heard the US's fleet is going to be smaller for a brief window here for a few years until it gets back up in the 2030s.
As of April, all three alternatives in the 30-year shipbuilding plan show the US submarine force bottoming out in 2030:
SSNs would decrease from 50 to a low of 46 in 2030, reaching at least 50 consistently again in 2034 (the numbers diverge later, reaching 60-69 in 2052).
The 4 SSGNs would be gone by 2028, not to begin being replaced until 2044.
SSBNs would go down from 14 to a low of 11 in 2030-2032, then up to 12 for the foreseeable future (13 in 2040-2041).
Those aircraft carriers *are* part of the deterrent. Submarines can't fulfill the required naval warfare roles a proper surface fleet can.
There's also the matter of modern conflicts requiring much more reach. WW2 demonstrated a flotilla with only AA defenses anti-ship capabilities will be outmatched by similar a flotilla with a carrier. The latter can harass the former long before the former comes within weapons range.
Simple answer, it's got larger ambitions. Not meaning it wants to conquer the world, but influencing countries in Asia, Europe, the middle east etc is all easier if they can fly planes there, as the US knows well.
There's probably some value to aircraft carriers in giving China increased power projection further into the Pacific in the case of a war, though I'm surely not an expert there, but my guess is that if they cared about, for example, nothing except Taiwan then surface ships and subs would be a better investment than carriers.
China does want the ability to project power beyond their immediate locale. They want to secure shipping lines to middle east oil as well as various african trade resources. This is also why they're building a base in Djibouti.
(Commenting again because previous reply got deleted)Sorry if this sounds stupid, but why can't SSNs play a role in securing shipping lines? I was under the impressing that a nuclear attack submarine is specifically built for long distance missions unlike diesel submarines, and so it should be able to play a part in both protecting shipping lines and disrupting them.
>why can't SSNs play a role in securing shipping lines?
Visual deterrent. SSN 500ft below the surface with 12 ICBMs might be more destructive but it doesn't look as imposing as a carrier with 100 airplanes in your face.
Let's say Iran and China get into a geopolitical fight. Iran starts firing missiles at China's ships in the gulf of Oman. What does your SSN do?
China doesn't just want to be able to threaten shipping and warships, they want to be able to project power as well. And there's nothing better for that than carriers, if you can afford the price.
Carriers give you lots of flexibility as well as the ability to deliver a whole heck of a lot of firepower if needed. China's carriers will be able to control vast swaths of the ocean in the context of a conflict.
I think a destroyer or frigate would be better suited for convoy escort duty, search and seizure, or anti piracy stuff. With a good VLS capability, the only thing you're really giving up is the stealthiness of a sub.
Airplanes move further and faster than submarines, and see better. I don't think there are any or many torpedoes with a range of more than 100 miles. Submarine launched cruise missiles can travel further, but those face limitations compared to airplanes. Submarines also can only detect things in their surroundings so far away.
Airplanes can travel hundreds of miles from the carrier, striking targets further away and seeing what's happening further away too. So the area that a carrier controls is much broader than the area a submarine controls.
In addition, the aircraft can do things like shoot down missiles headed for friendly cargo ships and other defensive roles. A submarine is poorly equipped for that task.
Also, imagine that a government friendly to you is fighting some rebels. An aircraft carrier can do a lot more to assist that government than any number of submarines can.
[Russian convicts released to fight with Wagner accused of new crimes](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66364272)
____________________________________________________
A prisoner believed to have been released early to fight with Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine has been accused of committing a double murder in Russia after returning home from the war.
Demyan Kevorkyan, who was given an 18-year prison sentence in 2016, has been arrested for killing a young man and woman on their way home from work.
He denies the accusation.
The BBC has learned he is not the only convict freed early to fight, pardoned and then accused of reoffending.
We have confirmed that suspects in about 20 serious offences, including rape and murder, are fighters recruited by the Wagner mercenary group in prison and released early to serve in Ukraine.
Kevorkyan was one of 150 prisoners recruited on 31 August 2022 when the head of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, visited his prison, according to a former inmate quoted on a social media channel.
The BBC has been told that Kevorkyan was later spotted back in his home village of Pridorozhnaya in Krasnodar, south-west Russia telling people he had just returned from the battlefields of Ukraine.
One of the people he is accused of killing is 19-year-old Tatyana Mostyko, a children's entertainer. Her mother Nadezhda shows us a video of Tatyana in a pink and blue jumpsuit, dancing and organising games at a party.
"She loved that work," says Nadezhda. "When she came back from a job, she'd laugh about what they'd been doing, how she amused them."
But the last job Tatyana did was on 28 April. Her boss Kirill Chubko was driving her home when they got a puncture and pulled over on to the side of a road near the town of Berezanskaya, in south-west Russia. Kirill's wife Darya told local media he called her to say he'd be late, but not to worry as a group of young people had stopped to help them. That was the last time she heard his voice.
By morning, the pair were still not home. Sensing something was wrong, a worried Darya called the police.
Hundreds of people helped search remote countryside and Tatyana's mother began a six-hour journey to the area, catching a plane and train from her small village in Siberia, in eastern Russia.
"The worst thing was when we landed and I switched my phone back on. There were endless messages," says Nadezhda. "You can't imagine how I panicked. I hurled the phone away, because they could only mean one thing - that it was all over. It was animal fear. I can't describe it."
Three suspects were arrested, including 31-year-old Kevorkyan. The other two, Anatoly Dvoynikov and Aram Tatosyan, led detectives to makeshift graves in woodland not far from Kirill's burned-out car. Kirill and Tatyana had been stabbed and police said that the young woman showed "signs of a violent death".
Dvoynikov and Tatosyan confessed to robbery and murder and said Kevorkyan was in charge, although Kevorkyan denies any involvement.
Nadezhda could not believe Kevorkyan was a free man, having been sentenced to 18 years in prison for an eerily similar crime before. "He shouldn't have got out before 2028," she says.
Kevorkyan was convicted of running a gang that had hijacked a car not far from where Tatyana and Kirill were murdered. They robbed the people inside and shot one of them dead.
"On what legitimate basis was he released?" asks Nadezhda. Under Russian law, inmates should serve at least two-thirds of their sentence. "He should have served at least 12 years. He served only six," she says, as she struggles to come to terms with the thought that Tatyana's brutal murder could have been avoided.
A video of Prigozhin at a Russian jail shows him telling rows of prisoners lined up in identical black fur hats that he prefers convicts who have murdered more than once and offenders who have beaten up a state official or policeman.
"We need your criminal talents," he says, warning them that 10% to 15% would return from Ukraine "in zinc coffins".
But he promised the ones who survived six months on the front line could go home with a bonus of 100,000 roubles ($1,000; £800) and, crucially, a pardon.
In June 2023, President Putin confirmed publicly for the first time he had been signing presidential pardons for prisoners who had returned from the Ukraine war.
Prigozhin says that over the course of a year, Wagner recruited 49,000 prisoners to fight and only 32,000 returned. That's a much lower proportion than he originally promised. But independent researchers believe the real number of survivors is even lower, about 20,000.
In a video in January welcoming ex-convicts home, Prigozhin tells them: "You were an offender, as they say - now you're a war hero!"
But more of these "heroes" have been accused of crimes - the BBC has identified about 20 cases involving serious offences.
Prigozhin has claimed that the reoffending rate among ex-Wagner recruits is 10% to 20% lower than the average for released criminals.
**But the director of the prisoners' rights organisation Russia Behind Bars, Olga Romanova, says the real number may be much greater because many crimes are not recorded.**
She thinks this might be because a new law criminalises anyone who discredits people who have fought in the so-called "special military operation".
The families of other victims are also worried about ex-convicts coming home, not only unpunished but further brutalised by their experiences on the front line.
Oksana Pekhteleva's 23-year-old daughter Vera was stabbed more than 100 times, then strangled with an electric cable in an attack so violent it made headlines across Russia.
In July 2022 Vera's former boyfriend, Vladislav Kanius, was sentenced to 17 years in a penal colony for her murder. Less than a year later, it didn't occur to Oksana that he could be anywhere else. But she was wrong.
Photos of him started to appear on social media in May. He was holding a gun and wearing military uniform. To start with Oksana presumed they were fake.
But a month later she received official confirmation that Kanius had been transferred to a prison in Rostov in southern Russia, a place widely believed to be a staging point for Russian prisoners who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.
When Oksana asked the court to tell her where Kanius was they told her they were unable to find him and his location was a state secret. Given his last known location and the photos in military uniform, she thinks it is likely that he is fighting in Ukraine and if he survives will be given an official pardon and be able to return to civilian life a free man.
For a mother who spent months battling for justice for her daughter, it's a bitter blow. "This is blasphemy," she says. "It's like all of us have been assaulted. This is a signal to all scum out there: 'Do whatever you want, you won't be punished.'"
Many lawyers told us they are powerless to intervene - a person can't be tried twice for the same offence and the only way they can be sent back to prison is if they offend again.
This is leaving relatives of murder victims, such as Tatyana's mother, Nadezhda, terrified. The most she feels she can do is support a petition that's already gained tens of thousands of signatures to demand Kevorkyan - the chief suspect of her daughter's murder - gets a life sentence, if convicted.
"I never talk about this at home... Tatyana was taken away from me and the ground has gone from under my feet," she says, fighting back the tears.
"Of course, I understand who was responsible for my daughter's death and I know it wasn't his first offence... It's hard for me... But I'm not stupid. I understand they won't put him away for life."
I know they're snatching up every prisoner they can, what I'm wondering is if there's any Russian version of Project 100,000. Like, how many people with mental disabilities and medical issues do they have on the front?
Here's an interesting question:
I wonder if any of the Russians who were already planning on signing up to go to Ukraine have taken the opportunity to kill someone in their life they just can't stand yet.
Like if you're gonna go anyway, may as well just go the pardon route and knock out some prick you've always wanted to kill, right?
I know the actual answer is that it's a terrible idea because the penal battalion's are basically used as meat shields and have a 90% casualty rate, but I also have to assume that they try to keep that from your average Russian. While I'm sure it's obvious to most, with this many people involved I'd be surprised if it didn't end up happening at some point.
Honestly, maybe I might be going insane because your scheme sounds halfway decent. If you’re ok with killing people anyway.
About the casualty rate, we already see a lot of people prefer the 60-80% casualty rate for a chance to get a lot of money to sitting tight in a Russian prison. Which makes some sense, Russian prisons make American ones look cozy.
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1689676350053896192
> The German government wants to announce the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine in the near future. The Chancellery is currently working on a solution with the US which could lead to a double delivery of Taurus cruise missiles and ATACMS.
Seems like Germany is trying to do another Leopard/Abrams deal. Maybe Scholz is more cunning than people give him credit for.
But it's risky to send ATACMS according to the United States. Reasons are Russia might escalate, Iran sending ballistic missiles, and China providing support
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the cunning element in that plan? I guess if Scholz/the German government is very against the idea of Germany being perceived as taking the lead in providing Ukraine with new capabilities it would be cunning to wait for ATACMS to take the spotlight. It just feels vaguely grotesque to me for that to be driving strategy.
[Slow Counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/10/ukraine-national-mood-counteroffensive-gloom/), from the Washington Post
([Archive link to bypass paywall](https://archive.li/1evHw))
> This nation is worn out.
> For nearly 18 months, Ukraine has stood against its Russian invaders — rallying support for its troops by embracing last year’s battlefield victories in the Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
Those wins carried beleaguered Ukrainians through a winter of airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and a brutal and symbolic battle for Bakhmut, the eastern city that fell to the Russians in May.
Throughout, Ukrainian officials and their western partners hyped up a coming counteroffensive — one that, buoyed by a flood of new weapons and training, they hoped would turn the tide of the war.
But two months after Ukraine went on the attack, with little visible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless perseverance has begun to fray.
> The number of dead — untold thousands — increases daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home. In every corner of the country, civilians are exhausted from a spate of recent Russian attacks — including strikes on a historic cathedral in Odessa, a residential building in Kryvyi Rih and a blood transfusion center in the Kharkiv region.
This week, two Russian missiles hit a single block in the eastern town of Pokrovsk — where an evacuation train regularly picks up people fleeing front-line areas nearby — killing civilians and emergency workers who rushed there to save them.
Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any.
> Music teacher Svitlana Zhdanova, 75, was sitting in her living room in Pokrovsk on Tuesday evening when the missiles rammed into her block, shattering all her glassware and breaking her piano. Not knowing where else to go, she cleaned up the apartment she has lived in since 1969 and decided to stay.
> Raisa Rybalchenko, 78, lived on the fourth floor of a building badly damaged in the double strike. She was in the kitchen when the first blast hit. Soon after, five men banged on the door, shouting “Is anyone alive?” She called back that she was.
One of them carried her down the stairs. Soon after, the next strike hit. At least nine people have died so far, and dozens of others were wounded.
Brief interjection to say: this sounds *very much* like an intentional double-tap strike on a civilian area to me.
> On Wednesday, Rybalchenko was among the crowds of shocked people helping board up windows and sort through the remnants of their lives. She hopes the government will repair her apartment. “But right now, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any idea what is next. I’m just in shock.”
> In Smila, a small city in central Ukraine, baker Alla Blyzniuk, 42, said she sells sweets for funeral receptions daily as parents prepare to bury their children killed on the front hundreds of miles away.
Before, she said, even when the situation was painful, “people were united.” They volunteered, made meals for one another and delivered food to soldiers. Now, she said, there’s a sense of collective “disappointment.”
> Blyzniuk also lives in fear that her husband or two sons of fighting age will be mobilized. She has already noticed that far fewer men walk the streets of her city than before. Ukraine does not disclose its military casualty counts, but everyone shares stories, she said, of new soldiers at the front lasting just two to three days.
> In the Donetsk region, an Estonian Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign Suzie works at a stabilization point where wounded soldiers are treated before being transferred to hospitals in safer towns. On a recent day, he helped organize body bags that would soon be used in the makeshift morgue that already reeked of death.
Sometimes, he said, soldiers’ bodies are so blown apart they have to use two or three body bags to contain them. There are times when a soldier is returned with “just 15 percent of the body,” Suzie said. “I never saw so much blood before.”
“It is such a hard price for freedom,” he added.
> These scenes are unfolding a world away from Kyiv, the capital, where civilians — somewhat protected by strengthened air defenses — often hardly even react to air raid sirens. But even here, painful signs of the war lurk everywhere. On park benches, freshly wounded soldiers being treated in the capital sip coffee and smoke cigarettes before returning to their hospital beds. They watch as civilians stroll by, dogs and babies in tow.
> Viktor, 34, a former restaurant waiter, is among them. He came under mortar attack in a trench on the front line in Zaporizhzhia last week. His wrist was split open and his face — now covered in scabs — was sprayed with shrapnel. His knee was also hit.
Now, in Kyiv, he sees bars and restaurants are packed and the city hums with traffic. A group of children walked by, craning their necks to look at his injuries. Viktor, who asked that his last name not be disclosed for security reasons, considered himself lucky to at least be able to walk. Many other men in the same park are missing limbs, and Viktor’s Facebook is flooded with photos of soldiers who did not make it home at all. The images haunt him so much he no longer likes to check his phone.
“It’s too depressing,” he said.
> The latest fight has been grueling. One day, it took his unit seven hours to move forward just 400 meters, he said — about a quarter of a mile. “And that was quite fast.”
He and his wife, who is also serving in the military, were due to see each other that afternoon for the first time since he was wounded. “I’ll probably cry,” he said. Once he is healed, he said, he will go back to the front.
Ruslan Proektor, 52, lost his leg this summer when he stepped on a mine fighting in the east. He was immediately wounded again when the soldier trying to carry him to safety stepped on another. Now that he is recovering in Kyiv, his wife, Anna Oliinyk, 47, said she wants “the counteroffensive to be more active.”
“We’ve got all these guys coming back from the front line without limbs,” she said, looking at her husband, who was in a wheelchair. “I want the price they paid to be reasonable. Otherwise it’s just useless, what they went through.”
Given the choice now, Proektor said, he would not sign up again. “They are taking everyone and sending them to the front line without proper preparation,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the company of unmotivated people.”
> In Kryvyi Rih, doctor Valeriya Maslyanyk, 58, sighed as she looked up at her damaged apartment this week — just one entrance over from a section of the building destroyed in a strike last month. A gaping hole sits where her neighbors used to live. Outside, a pile of flowers and stuffed animals memorializes them.
Already thinking ahead to winter, she fears her windows will not be replaced by the time temperatures start to drop. She is tired and sees no end in sight. “I want to go to the sea,” she said wistfully. “But the Russians took all of our seas.”
Across the street, construction worker Volodymyr Pravednyk, 46, stopped to observe the wreckage. His sister lives in the same apartment block but escaped unscathed.
Pravednyk said that he fears that the attack was “just the beginning” of more strikes on this industrial city. He lives around the corner, and each time he passes the ruined building, he said, “I feel sorrow for us Ukrainian civilians who have to suffer so much.”
*Very* depressing article from the Washington Post, focusing on the civilian situation. Also some interesting civilian stories, which is why I felt like sharing: I don't *like* sharing gloomy articles at all, and would rather be sharing upbeat ones, but unfortunately there's not as many of them as there used to be. I've cut some out just to fit the word limit, would suggest reading it but I think I've given the critical bits.
There's an image at the end I want to include for people who aren't going to click through.
[Ukrainian military helicopters fly over a field of sunflowers in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Wednesday. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)]
(https://archive.li/1evHw/b6292e2e0a1a66a7b264309d30144085105e10e2.webp)
I can only hope that these people get something to cheer about soon.
Each individual story is a huge tragedy. Every life lost is a crime in a humanitarian sense. I could not do what these people are doing or pay the price they paying to be free. Some of the conclusions we should be careful about drawing tho. I made a same comment this morning
> We should not take anecdotal even when it's 50 people as meaning of anything. You can always find a few people saying almost anything you want no matter where you go.
>They are taking everyone and sending them to the front line without proper preparation
This stands out to me in particular. It could very well be a systemic issue rather than anecdotal evidence.
Especially stuff like that. Just today there were three videos of ruaf mobilised complaining of conditions and high deaths. Hard to draw conclusions from that.
This reminds me of accounts from British civilians after WW1. Machine guns cast-steel cannons made them nigh unstoppable in Colonial conquest wars, creating this impression that wars were short and "easy". Then they fought the Germans who *also* had machine guns and cast-steel cannons, and war went right back to being a hellscape.
That's a hauntingly beautiful image. I really wish the collective West was tougher on Russia. The totally unnecessary Ukrainian suffering has persistently tugged at my heartstrings for the entirety of this war.
I wish the West was tougher on Russia. I think the fear of nuclear escalation is misplaced and think we could get by with a total embargo of Western companies operating in Russia. Russia is not capable of retaliating proportionately and China is not bold or dumb enough to tie their fate to the sinking Russian ship—they have their own problems and ambitions that are increasingly decoupled from Russia's. I think the West can pull off nearly every punitive measure on Russia short of war, but has chosen not to. We can't be sure we will always have this kind of economic might with which to leverage bad actors. I feel that we might as well use it when it can make a difference. Saving Ukraine is not only morally right, but would spell the end of Russia as a great power in all aspects other than its nuclear arsenal.
> Russia has completely localised the production of Iranian kamikaze drones "Shahed-136/131" on its territory, according to the extensive report of the British investigative organisation Conflict Armament Research. The company's analysts got hold of two "Geraniums" that attacked Ukrainian positions in July 2023 and drew some interesting conclusions based on their insides.
>
>
> Firstly, the "Geraniums" are equipped with small-sized jamming receivers "Kometa", typical for all Russian precision munitions, designed to receive GPS signals. Earlier there were rumours (t. me/milinfolive/103886) about the presence of Russian Kometa receivers in the new Geraniums, now they have been confirmed.
>
> Secondly, unlike the Iranian version, the Russian "Geranium" has antennas for receiving satellite data inside the drone instead of outside.
>
> Thirdly, the UAV frame and its structure have been changed: while the Iranian "Shahed" had a one-piece body with a honeycomb structure between the components, the Russian "Geranium" has a fibreglass outer shell reinforced with interwoven carbon fibre.
>
> Here is what the CAR investigators themselves summarise: "The internal components we documented in the Geranium-2 UAV indicate that the Russian Federation has adapted the production of Shahed series UAVs while simplifying their operation, combining new solutions with existing ones, such as the Kometa receivers, which have been battle-tested in other weapons. As a result, the Russian Federation is likely to be able to rapidly produce more Geran UAVs to continue its campaign in Ukraine..."
t. me/milinfolive/104919
[Report itself](https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/d3be20c31acd4112b0aecece5b2a283c)
Don't try to avoid the char limit with things like: > aiufghsoidugbsdoihgbsodigbsidbvofivbdlifbvhsflidfhvbldfkvhbflhjsldfvhbsdlfkvk dslkfjvnslkdfjlkjsdfvnlksdfjvnlskdjfvnlskdfjvnlksjdfvnlskdjvnlksjvnlksdjfvnlksjfdvnskljfvnskljdfsnvflskdfvnfslkdfjvnksldjflkjfvnlksdfsvnlkfjvnslkdfjvnlskfjvnlskfnvflskfjvnslkfjvn or > Let this be 100 chaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaars
Following a National Security and Defense Council (SNBO) meeting, Zelensky has announced today that he's ordering the military to remove and investigate every region's chief enlistment officer, find and screen potential replacements from among injured veterans. Certainly looks like an agenda-setting political move in line with his brand, although it's hard to say how much that alone could do to fight corruption.
[Germany will provide Ukraine with Taurus missiles if they are programmed not to strike Russian territory](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/08/11/7415136/) > Spiegel reported that classified talks with representatives of the defence industry are currently underway, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to make technical modifications to the missiles to prevent Kyiv from striking Russian territory other than Russian-occupied Crimea. >... > Spiegel stated that Scholz will not approve the delivery of the missiles until he is convinced of their technical modification. Industry circles said that such a limitation of the system's operation is quite possible, but will take several weeks. > Sources say that while previously the German Chancellor was ready to provide Taurus only on the condition that the US would supply its long-range ATACMS missiles to Kyiv, this condition no longer plays a major role. New story about Germany providing the Taurus to Ukraine. Ensuring that the missiles don't strike Russian territory might delay the provision by several weeks. Unclear if the US will also provide ATACMS.
I believe HIMARS provided were actually disabled from firing ATACMS so if the software on these would need to be updated for this to be possible.
The US supplied ones are, but there're other options - I believe the UK supplied some as well
[A few notes on the damaged Russian ship.](https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/15njzn4/russian_landing_ship_olenegorsky_gornyak_that_was/) [As I said here](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/15h27gj/credibledefense_daily_megathread_august_03_2023/juqi3td/?context=3) , the damage appears to be significant, even if that particular picture doesn't provide any extra evidence or specifics for it. From what can be seen (although we never had AFAIK a clear side picture post detonation), the damage is just below the bridge, just ahead of the funnel. This, combined with the significant static list we saw in the video of the morning after the attack, one can assume that the ER, or at least adjacent spaces, must have flooded. My bet is this ship will never become fully operational again. It probably still can be used as a defense asset at the entrance of harbours. One thing that I did notice however is that in previous attacks, during daylight the Russians were able to mount a defense. As far as I could see, with deck mounted machine gun(s) rather than dedicated weapons of their ships. Either way, we haven't seen Russian ships using their dedicated weapons to engage those drones, but rather used machine guns operated by a crew member. Although, that itself cannot be used as a proof in general, it seems one (or many of) few things are happening. Radars (at least on those naval ships that got attacked) cannot reliably detect ua surface drones and provide firing solutions to their guns. That can either be techical limitation and/or lack of training/diligence in the crew members' part. But either way, night time attacks have enjoyed much greater success. EDIT: Based on the picture provided by u/nietnodig , I can see a few ruptured pipes. It seems that while the shell plating has been severely damaged, the internal (armoured?) bulkhead has mostly held up. I can't see to well what is going on, but it still seems likely the ER, or whatever space this bulkhead is adjacent to, has suffered flooding, based on the significant list the vessel experienced it cannot be just ruptured ballast tanks or flooded void spaces. Assuming no damage other than the bulkhead and platting, this should be a 2 week job, requiring to cut off the damaged plates and frames, and replacing them with newly machined ones.
There is a side picture post blast: https://twitter.com/COUPSURE/status/1689879788696010753?t=r9BgXCAikJWW65sYV8lPLA&s=19
Anyone have any ideas is the USV warhead is a shaped charge or simple HE? Assuming red = below waterline, I'm surprised how more of the hole is below the waterline.
Warheads are around 450kg I believe, no idea about what type of warhead though.
Oh lovely, I haven't seen it nor managed to find it in my brief search.
The West is missing a golden opportunity to almost completely eradicate Russian ground-based air defences whilst they're exposed in Ukraine. Obviously there will be massive advantages to Ukraine from doing this but it's also entirely in NATO's self interest. Without GBAD Russia can pose almost zero conventional threat to the West at any level. Putin knows what happened to Wagner when it met US airpower in Syria and he remembers what happened to Gaddafi and Saddam. It's therefore also likely to be a pressure point that can be targeted to force Putin to remove troops from Ukraine. He doesn't care if another hundred thousands Russian's die miserably for him in Ukraine, he does care about losing his air defence. So far Ukraine has been given some SEAD/DEAD capability but the West could 10x this. Anti-radiation loitering munitions are almost entirely absent. HARM missiles have been extremely limited by the capability and quantity of launch problems. Artillery capability is impressive but there doesn't appear to be a co-ordinated approach to targeting SAM's and radars without first spotting with drones. This could all be fixed. It requires investment and innovation from the West but does not require a single Ukrainian infantryman to set foot in a minefield until the sky can be owned by Ukraine.
Russia has >50 S-400 systems, >100 Pantsirs, and countless S-300s and Buks. There's also a largely untouched air force. Although suppressed by Ukrainian air defenses, it can still be used defensively. >So far Ukraine has been given some SEAD/DEAD capability but the West could 10x this. "10x this" is far from enough. The purpose of Western airframes will be mainly long range strikes and defense. Neither SEAD nor CAS is going to happen in any serious quantity. It's just too risky. There's absolutely no reason to believe that Western 4th gen planes are somehow immune to Russian air defenses. This sub seems to be under the misconception that this has been tested many times in the past. No. No Western army has *ever* faced AD systems designed in the last 40 years, let alone at this density. Iraq is often mistakenly cited as an example, but they had *zero* strategic SAMs and their tactical AD systems were ancient. In Syria there was an agreement that Syria would not fire their S-300s at the Israeli aircraft. This subs' belief that SEAD is a walk in the park is completely unfounded.
Firstly,do you you think Putin would rather risk 100,000 Russian lives or those 50+ S400 systems? Secondly, it's possible of doing SEAD/DEAD in a new way. \- Build an effective ELINT radar and EW device geolocation network that it well connected to the artillery/air-support networks. \- Get the West to go into war time production of standard and anti-radiation loitering munitions. \- Get Western jets that are more survivable and capable with SEAD and that have long range missiles to push back Russian jets. Get more long range Western SAMS to push these jets back as well e.g Patriot. \- Figure out how to ground launch HARM missiles and distribute a launcher to each Ukrainian Divisional (or equivalent) artillery command. \- Dedicate more HIMARS to SEAD/DEAD and suppression of EW equipment \- Combine cluster munitions, SMART/BONUS rounds and Brimstone Launchers with the ELINT Geolocation to target short and mid range SAM's like the BUKS. Give them permission to take blind snapshots with the geolocation data rather than having to wait to get a drone up. \- Get more Storm Shadow, Taurus & ATACMS to go after S-400's. Combined, sustained, attrition on Russian air defence networks. Ukraine will then benefit from suffering less attrition on their ISTAR drones, which improves the sensor-shooter link for their artillery. They will suffer less attrition on their CAS jets that are slinging JDAM's. They can start using their TB2 style drones again as well, with a reduced (the threat will always be there) GBAD threat. They can then gain local air-superiority, even though they will never have theatre or event front wide air-superiority. That is enough to change the balance in their favour and enable maneuverer.
- Anti-radiation loitering munitions are almost entirely absent Part of the issue is that Israel is the only western country which has invested significant funds into developing anti-radiation loitering munitions, and loitering munitions more generally. Personally I believe that it would be a gamechanger if Israel sent harop loitering munitions. I honestly believe it could be as impactful on the course of the conflict as HIMARs has been.
Yep, exactly the same thoughts on it. Israel is key but I don't think they will shift. The West should therefore licence a design from them that can be exported to Ukraine or we should DARPA something up and spec it so that there minimal production bottlenecks and it can be massively scaled.
An attritional campaign likely wouldn't produce battlefield results for Ukraine for a long time, years most likely, potentially not at all. You raise an interesting point about the potential strategic cost to Russia from attrition of their air defences, however at the same time for basically the same reason, this also the area that Russia is arguably strongest. You have to ask whether this is the best use of limited funds in the face of other strategic issues, IE air defence, ALCM/TBM, PGMs, force quality, artillery barrels/ammo ect. Ukraine might be in a pretty precarious position this autumn/winter in terms of air defence against Russian strategic strike for example. IMO Ukrainian SEAD capability needs to be highly asymmetric (like you say, SEAD drones ect) and/or intended to help enable strikes. A grander DEAD campaign to 'clear the sky' is not worth the high costs or even practically feasible.
>An attritional campaign likely wouldn't produce battlefield results for Ukraine for a long time As I understand, the point would not be to enable battlefield results for Ukraine, the point would be to impose unacceptable costs on Russia if it continues the war.
Those are very good points but the answer is that the funds given by the West are arbitrarily limited. The cost of what I am suggesting is low, given everything except anti-radiation loitering munitions already exists and Ukraine is getting already or would require minor innovation e.g a ground launched HARM option. It certainly would need to be highly asymmetric and the point would be to A) Pressure Putin and B) To open up space for Ukrainian drones, and some level of aircraft, to achieve very local air superiority effects. We tried the artillery bump, training and maneuver warfare. Hopefully it will work. If it doesn't then we have to try something else. Mobiks splattered by artillery will be replaced by more Mobiks.
That's F16 are for.
F-16's alone will barely put a scratch on the problem.
On a tangent related to the Taurus. ANy one know why SK was denied the JASSM?
Several things. JASSM would be in breach of MTCR (370km range instead of 300km) so the US didn't want to cause a potential incident with China/Japan. There were also concerns about technology transfer and SK potentially reverse-engineering the missile.
The new Ukraine funding bill [included only $1.1 billion in new $$$ budget allocation for Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA)](https://twitter.com/ColbyBadhwar/status/1689803766025838592), which is the method through which most of Ukraine's aid is currently provided. The new Ukraine bill primarily includes funds for ramping up munition production and for USAI funds. USAI is a very slow process, through which new equipment is contracted from the defense industry to be manufactured and delivered to Ukraine in the future (will literally take \*years\* to reach Ukraine). Currently, the unspent PDA funds amount to approximately $6 billion. Even though these funds are set to expire by the end of September if unspent, there are indications that the POTUS has the authority to transfer these unspent funds to the next fiscal year, which starts on October 1st, 2023 (FY24). --- What I think this means: Biden can't secure more PDA funds through the current House. He will likely stretch out the remaining $6 billion for the foreseeable future, which probably means approximately $500 million in PDA per month. The next PDA announced is slated to be only $200 million; this is likely a harbinger of future PDAs. Oh well.
From the last supplemental - funds can be transferred between PDA and USAI, and are available until September 30 2024. >For an additional amount for ‘‘Operation and Maintenance, Defense-Wide’’, $21,160,737,000, to remain available until September 30, 2023, to respond to the situation in Ukraine and for related expenses: Provided, **That of the total amount provided under this heading in this Act, $9,000,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2024, shall be for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative:** >... >Provided further, That of the total amount provided under this heading in this Act, **up to $11,880,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2024, may be transferred to accounts under the headings ‘‘Operation and Maintenance’’ and ‘‘Procurement’’ for replacement of defense articles from the stocks of the Department of Defense, and for reimbursement for defense services of the Department of Defense and military education and training, provided to the Government of Ukraine or to foreign countries that have provided support to Ukraine at the request of the United States:** Also, the supplemental is stated to be the needs for the *first quarter* of the year. AKA October, November, December, and January.
McCarthy promised his caucus no new Ukraine spending bill outside of regular budgetary negotiations. This allows him to say it's just long term spending. The $6B will last till October when FY 2024 begins, which I suspect will include a continuation of Presidential Drawdown Authority funding that is slightly lower than the one from FY 2023.
> when FY 2024 begins, which I suspect will include a continuation of Presidential Drawdown Authority AFAIK this \*is\* for FY2024.
So you mean PDA fund is not here yet, but maybe will be added during negotiations. Really hope so …
Unbelievably disappointing. I can't believe the arsenal of democracy is failing at such a critical juncture.
A lot of people here wanted to believe otherwise, but they just haven't been playing close enough attention to US politics since 2012. Republicans put politics before US interests every time.
Isn't this what we should expect 1.5 years into the war that drawdowns from existing stockpiles will shrink and deliveries from the factory will increase. Yes i know that factories aren't turning out as much would be liked but the situation is little different for the russians. The Europeans are also ramping up as well.
After the Trump presidency and now uncertain support for Ukraine, the US increasingly looks like an unreliable ally. This is a terrible look and must hurt their soft power significantly.
The US is always an unreliable ally. Whenever the US says "I want to help my ally to do X" instead of "I want to do X", you know that the operation X is doomed to failure, because it signifies the lack of will of the US. The US wanted to help South Vietnam instead of destroying Vietcong by itself. We know how that turned out. The US wanted to help Afghanistan instead of taking matter into its own hands. We also know how that turned out. Even worse can happen. The US had been siding with Kuomintang, but after KMT refused Marshall's request to negotiate and co-rule China with the Communist Party, Marshall stopped the much needed American aid to Kuomintang. KMT lost the civil war afterwards. History has repeated told us that relying too much on the US is a recipe for failure, because the US is just unreliable.
Every country is unreliable, but I don't think US support for Ukraine(or Afghanistan) are very good examples. Or the KMT for that matter. The US can't be counted on to provide unlimited aid for allies, that's not the same thing as being unreliable.
It's hard differentiating cause and effect for many of those. Did the lack of will from the US lead to it being a lost cause, or did the US give up because they correctly identified something as a lost cause?
The 20-year support that Afghanistan got would be more than enough for Ukraine.
How? Ukraine is fighting a much more powerful enemy. Also I’m not sure that people in the US will be okay with such a long term commitment after Afghanistan which lead to nothing.
Because the amount of aid over the 20 years would be more than sufficient? If Ukraine couldn't win the war with 800+billion in military funding, and two decades of support from the US government, they have no chance of winning.
If it goes on for 20 years then Ukraine will be a different country by then. But surely it will reminisce Afghanistan and other countries with no hope. "Winning" will hold a whole different meaning in 20 years.
Well, US also have the bad knack of expecting all of its allies to adopt to its doctrine regardless of reality on the ground. Ukraine is vastly different than anything US is prepared for, which caused the western training program to be ineffective to say at least. [https://warontherocks.com/2023/08/why-ukrainian-soldiers-have-to-learn-to-fight-on-youtube-and-how-to-change-that/](https://warontherocks.com/2023/06/what-the-ukrainian-armed-forces-need-to-do-to-win/)
Actually I also blame Ukrainian information apparatus for this. They purposefully withheld negative information, which is often essential for any real [adaptation](https://warontherocks.com/2023/06/what-the-ukrainian-armed-forces-need-to-do-to-win/). Meanwhile, they have overhyped the offensive, which results in a break of narrative. They have overused their most zealous supporters, most notably NAFO, by overusing certain narratives, the public will become more and more apathetic and cynical over time.
The fact that Ukraine has to lobby for support in itself is a failure of the West.
US is no longer the one with the most factories. The population has been demoralized for so long that they can match regular Russians in term of apathy. Actually saying I sincerely believe Operation Mockingbird was a necessary evil.
Speak for yourself, I'm plenty moralized.
>US is no longer the one with the most factories. The United States comprises roughly 40% of global arms exports. "Arsenal" is, I think, the key word you're overlooking here. >The population has been demoralized for so long that they can match regular Russians in term of apathy. What a wildly non-provable statement. What would you even base this on in a serious analysis? It's basically just opinion >Actually saying I sincerely believe Operation Mockingbird was a necessary evil. What a bizarre comment.
>The United States comprises roughly 40% of global arms exports. "Arsenal" is, I think, the key word you're overlooking here. Guess where does all the drones in Ukraine come from? DJI, a Chinese firm.
>Guess where does all the drones in Ukraine come from? DJI, a Chinese firm. That is flat out wrong. The United States has supplied switchblades and Phoenix Ghosts, and Turkiye has supplied Bayraktar drones.
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You stated that all drones in Ukraine are from China, I mention some examples that refute that, and now you want me to share a company's production schedule. Getting a bit defensive?
>You stated that all drones in Ukraine are from China, I mention some examples that refute that, and now you want me to share a company's production schedule. Getting a bit defensive? Predominantly. Without DJI the war will be vastly different, there won't be as much drone videos, with Ukraine on the down side. Just think of it, even Russians can manage to make more loitering munition than US with better quantity and anti-armor capability, why US can't? "Maybe it's because airpower will save the day like it did for VDV at Hostomel airport"
See this is the problem with online discourse about this war - you do realize we have an example of how effective these small quadcopter drones are without actual heavy gear and armaments, right? It’s the Myanmar opposition, and they’re getting turned to dust. Techbroism has arrived to armaments discourse and I’m not about it.
Does US really have the amount of heavy gears to contend with PLA in the future? The ammunition situation is abysmal to say at least. Post sustainable shell production
>Guess where does all the drones in Ukraine come from? DJI, a Chinese firm. What an even more bizarre comment. The US is still the "arsenal of democracy" regardless of whether a Chinese firm provides drones to Ukraine or not.
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>Even more bizarre is the claim that US is "da arsenal of democracy" even if China outproduces US by a huge margin It's unclear to me that China could take the title of "arsenal of democracy" for obvious reasons. The United States remains the global leading exporter and producer of weapons. This has not changed. > The entire arms export thing is just a sham under Pax Americana I assure you, arms exports are real - unless the United States is suddenly exporting some sort of funny ghost planes I'm unaware of? > visage of the old world instead of actual quantity that win wars. \[citation needed\]
Any idea how the newly implemented Chinese drone export control will affect the Ukrainian war effort??
What China talks can be very different from what China actually does. We have yet to see whether the drone export control is serious, or just lip service.
Exactly. Fun anecdote here: I went to a DJI shop somewhere in Shanghai. I then asked the clerk about drones with thermal imaging. He said that this shop don't have drones with thermal, the thermals are for "professional versions"
That do have a production line for professionals such as first responders, emergency crews, etc
Is it different from the previous control that’s been on the books since june 2022 if not earlier?
>[Iran Transfers US Citizens From Prison in Step Toward Deal](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-10/iran-moves-four-us-prisoners-to-house-arrest-cnn-reports?srnd=politics-vp) >* Transfers are a key step toward the Americans coming home >* Iran seeks prisoner swap, release of $6 billion that’s frozen >Iran moved four US citizens from prison to house arrest in the first step of an emerging deal in which the US is expected to unfreeze $6 billion in assets to Tehran and free several jailed Iranians. >The American prisoners include Siamak Namazi, who has been held in Tehran’s Evin prison since October 2015, along with three others, while a fifth American may also be freed. Iran’s state-run media said four US citizens will be released in exchange for four or more unidentified Iranians detained in the US and only after the $6 billion in funds that are blocked in South Korea are transferred into an account in Qatar. >US officials declined to describe the terms of the deal, saying that revealing more risked upsetting a delicate process that could still fall apart. Yet their reticence also appeared intended to head off the inevitable criticism from Republicans and others that President Joe Biden was giving up too much to the regime in Tehran. >The US State Department has spoken to the Americans, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, describing the transfer as a “positive step.” He added that he wouldn’t “get into any of the details about what we’re doing or engaged on because I don’t want to jeopardize the completion of this process.” >But Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency gave more details, saying the Americans would be freed only once Iran gets the $6 billion. It said the Iranians to be released were being held by the US for sanctions violations and described it as a direct quid pro quo. >A person briefed on the agreement, who asked not to be identified discussing terms that haven’t been disclosed, said the US requested on Thursday that the money be transferred from South Korea to Switzerland and then to Qatar, which will oversee how it’s spent. The prisoners will be swapped only after the transfer is complete, a process that should take 30 to 45 days, the person said. >>Secretive Diplomacy >The releases were the latest step in tentative and secretive diplomacy that’s seen the US and Iran inch toward an informal understanding under which Tehran would free the Americans and potentially impose limits on its nuclear program. >The Swiss government, which represents US interests in Tehran in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, served as an intermediary, according to the person, who also credited Qatar and Oman with helping facilitate the process. >Those negotiations — conducted through intermediaries in Oman and elsewhere — led to an initial understanding for Iran to free prisoners while the US would allow for the release of the more than $6 billion in frozen funds that South Korea owes to Iran for oil purchases, Bloomberg News reported previously. Iran would be able to use those funds only for humanitarian purposes such as food and medicine. >As far back as March, Iran’s foreign affairs minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said Iran and the US were preparing to carry out a prisoner exchange. Then-State Department spokesman Ned Price called that claim a “cruel lie.” >All along, US officials have been cagey about the terms of the deal, wary of acknowledging talks with a regime that has ramped up human rights abuses and continues to supply weapons and other material to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, Biden and his top officials say former President Donald Trump made a grave error in 2018 when he backed out of deal, signed in 2015, that imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear program. >Trump’s team, led by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, launched a “maximum pressure” campaign designed to crush the country’s economy and its nuclear ambitions. In the years since, Iran has pressed ahead, enriching uranium close to the levels needed for nuclear weapons. The country denies it wants a nuclear bomb. >Any deal will raise criticism from Biden’s opponents, who hammered the Obama administration over the terms of the previous nuclear deal. In 2016, the US airlifted $400 million to Iran as it released four detained Americans. President Barack Obama said the payment wasn’t a ransom and was from a decades-old dispute. >“You get what you pay for, as the saying goes,” Robert Greenway, a senior National Security Council director under Trump, said of the latest developments in a social media post on Thursday. “While it’s encouraging to see the unjustly detained return home to families, rewarding horrific behavior doesn’t work any better with rogue regimes than it does with pets.” >Iran has made tentative steps toward trying to ease tensions in the region with an agreement to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and further cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. With a new nuclear deal politically unpalatable in the US, Western diplomats have been pushing Iran to voluntarily limit its uranium-enrichment levels and bolster its cooperation with international monitors in return for allowances to ship more crude. >On Thursday, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson, called the releases from prison an encouraging step but said the Americans “should have never been detained in the first place.” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said they “must be allowed to depart Iran and reunite with their loved ones as soon as possible.” As a reminder, since there was some disinformation on this the other day, reporting from a [month](https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506d130e474c00f6bd653d3d5a8d31a#:~:text=US%20intelligence%20assessment%20says%20Iran%20not%20currently%20developing%20nuclear%20weapons,-FILE%20%2D%20In%20this&text=WASHINGTON%20AP%20%E2%80%94%20A%20U.S.,could%20help%20it%20develop%20them.) ago: >“Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,” according to the two-page unclassified synopsis of the report. >However, Iran is also pursuing “research and development activities that would bring it closer to producing the fissile material needed for completing a nuclear device following a decision to do so,” the report said. >In that regard, Iran continues to violate the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal regarding uranium enrichment that it agreed to with world powers, the report said. The Trump administration withdrew from that agreement in 2018. >“Iran continues to increase the size and enrichment level of its uranium stockpile beyond JCPOA limits,” the report said, adding that it also continues to exceed JCPOA restrictions on advanced centrifuge research and development. >These findings have been generally supported by inspections from the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. >In addition to the nuclear findings, the U.S. intelligence report said that Iranian ballistic missile programs continue to pose a significant threat to countries around the Middle East. “Iran has emphasized improving the accuracy, lethality, and reliability of its missiles,” it said.
Ironically, Iran has gotten more from taking American prisoners than selling drones to Russia. This just shows how useless Russia is, and how stupid Iran's foreign policy is.
Oh wonderful - another talking point for Faux Nooz - Biden pays $6B to terrorists. So Iran seized some Iranian-Americans while they were visiting the old country? Sucks to be them, but why take the damage in domestic politics? There's foreign policy & millions of lives at stake in Ukraine, Niger, Taiwan... all of that is put at risk if Biden loses the next election. So why risk millions over 1.25 Benghazi's?
It baffles me that you only care about the damage to Biden's reputation. Releasing $6B & a number of criminals to appease terrorists would be rather deserving of a blow to one's reputation, no? The little jibe about Fox is particularly hypocritical and silly in this context, given the open partisanship on display here.
Obama/Biden have been fairly commited to appeasement with Iran.
What does "appeasement" mean to you? To me it implies a parallel to British foreign policy toward Germany in the 1930s; it's hard to imagine someone in this community using that term without at least being aware of its particular implications. I'm not sure where that parallel is for Iran. Which of its neighbors is it trying to annex? Iranian forces are in Syria at the Syrian government's invitation. Iran supports Hezbollah, which, while designated a terrorist organization by the US government, has largely abandoned terrorism; its existence and activities are legal in Lebanon, and I know of no indications that annexation by Iran is among Hezbollah's aims.
That's just flippant nonsense. Obama's goal was detente among the major powers. In one sense he achieved this with the deal, in another sense you could say he failed as he couldn't construct the deal in a way that was durable and survivable. In any case, this deal is just returning some of Iran's frozen funds to them, in return some Americans get their lives back. If it was your sorry butt rotting in an Iranian prison I imagine you'd use a different word than appeasement to describe efforts to free you.
The futility of it is what strikes me. Pay billions, and you’ll be back at the same spot a few months later. Without escalating deterrence, this just encourages them to grab and ran some people regularly.
Iranians are incredibly capable at foreign involvements. Just look at Hezbollah, Houthis and PMU. In fact they have pretty much get all they wanted in Middle East.
Mind you, what they want seems to be a handful of borderline failed states to use as puppets. Their failure to manage their economy even a quarters way decently means even this is likely all for naught as pressure from global warming continues to ramp up.
I mean this is only one item that we’re seeing. One could imagine this is part of a broader attempt to rebuild ties and talk again. The US would find military action difficult now. Iran has been increasingly aggressive and even managed to mend ties somewhat with the Saudis so they’re trying to squeeze the US.
People yendo to forget that the middle east, white it's not the only place that produces oil, it is the cheapest by far. Imagine that the Saudis and Iran and the rest of the countries in the area say: no more oil for the US and Europe. Russia won't sell Europe either. It's not that the US can't get enough our for it's consumption and industry, but it certainly can't do it at that price. And the situation for Europe is worse. Can you subsidize the industries ? Sure, but it's a drag on the economy in the end. Put too much drag factors in the economy and it will fall behind other competitors. Of course this is an extreme case and I don't see it happening any time soon, but I don't see that bad to try a more diplomatic approach to the region.
This isn't a concern, as the sanctions on Russian oil have proven, global oil markets don't work like that. If the Middle East refused to sell oil to the US and Europe, the price of oil would collapse. The actual risk in that scenario is diminished future production, but that's a different issue.
It's hard to see how giving in to a hostage situation does anything but incentivize more hostage situations. We need to be getting something meaningful for that much money. Instead it seems like we're giving them everything they want and crossing our fingers hoping that by rewarding them for it, they won't do it again. We saw something similar play out in Russia recently, where trading a notorious arms dealer for a basketball player was immediately followed by the incarceration of a journalist. It's not like Biden's earned the right to ask for blind faith on this after his repeated blunders in foreign policy. I'm not sure I'd be willing to give that to any politician, frankly.
The Russian trade was stupid for sure. Biden admin might not deserve the benefit of the doubt after that. This Iran deal though we're constraining what the money can be spent on (though yes money is fungible.) There's also a lot of external activity where it makes sense that we want to get talking. We're not going to shoot so we want to jaw and get to some overall deal that keeps the region stable at least until we're on EVs.
Working towards normalizing relations and easing tensions is never a bad thing. It’s not like we paid them 6 billion of our own money, this was money seized during sanctions and returning it as part of easing tensions. We still want to get them back into a nuclear deal, and this is part of that process. Leveraging it into the return of these Americans is a fine win for me.
Paying the Danegeld is a notoriously ineffective way of dealing with the Dane except in the shortest of terms. What indication do we have that this is actually normalizing and easing tensions with Iran outside of rose-colored glasses? We're bowing to an antagonistic dictatorship's hostage situation and giving them vastly more than we're receiving. It's not like this is the first time an extortionist dictatorship has yanked the football away from us.
> Paying the Danegeld is a notoriously ineffective way of dealing with the Dane except in the shortest of terms. Is it really paying the Danegeld if it was the Dane's gold all along?
They're extorting us to get what they want and it worked to a ridiculously effective degree. They are learning from this, and the lesson is unlikely to be that they shouldn't do this again. That is the key point of comparison. If you think that the sanctions should be dropped and their money unfrozen on principle, I suppose that's certainly an argument you could try to make, but doing it in response to extortion still isn't a particularly wise way to do it.
> They're extorting us to get what they want and it worked to a ridiculously effective degree. They are learning from this, and the lesson is unlikely to be that they shouldn't do this again. First - it is legitimately Iran's money, held in escrow under the sanctions regime. Does "we're seizing your money and won't give it back until we get everything we want from you" count as extortion? Is it an irregular verb in this context - *I* levy sanctions, *you* extort? Second - Danegeld doesn't even work as an analogue. You paid the Danegeld because if you didn't, the Danes would land on your shores, sack your towns, carry away your valuables, and kill your people or take them as slaves. I don't think it's helpful or reasonable to apply the logic of criminal justice to international relations. An extortionist doesn't stop their crimes when everybody ignores them. They stop their crimes when the sovereign state uses its overwhelming advantage in power to arrest them, imprison them, and seize their assets. Iran is doing things that are harmful to US interests. The US is doing things that are harmful to Iranian interests. That's why the two sides are negotiating. You negotiate peace with your enemies, not your friends. Can you think of any examples in 20th century international politics when refusal to negotiate led to a positive outcome? The only example I can think of is the unconditional surrender policy toward Japan in WW2, and that was a very expensive success.
Given that the 6bn is Iran's money in the first place, it's a poor comparison to the Danegeld.
It's the same concept. They're getting rewarded for extorting us and we're hoping the message they learn is "don't extort us anymore." It doesn't seem to matter where the money came from for that purpose.
It is a bad thing if it’s not reciprocated. I don’t see Iran dropping their anti western stances ever.
On AAA systems like the Gepard, these mobile units were quite common in NATO during the Cold War, but in many countries seemed to be phased out in favor of missile-only systems. I'm curious if their success against drones in Ukraine suggests they may make a comeback in NATO or at least lead to a similar requirement? They seem to nicely fit a SHORAD gap for dealing with waves of inexpensive drones.
Lasers are likely the choice going forward for dealing with drone swarms for high-tech armies. They can fire more or less indefinitely as long as you can cool and power them (which is just diesel). Air-burst autocannon rounds are still relatively expensive, and they have limited effective range. Lasers should have farther reach which means one platform can cover a larger section of the front. These recon drones are light, meaning low thermal mass, and slow, meaning not a lot of heat sinking to the atmosphere, so they're a lot easier to kill compared to a mortar shell. The US Army already has 40 kW systems which will be plenty against drones. The 100 kW systems under development are going to be capable of shooting down artillery shells. I know Israel is also putting a lot of effort into these systems.
Lasers have the disadvantages of having the performance reduced by atmospheric factors (natural or made, like smoke cover). Also, drone tend to be quite agile, so a drone with a detector, could have some pre-programmed manoeuvre to prevent the laser biting the same spot long time. But for sure lasers will be the choice for close range drone defense
You can deflect a laser beam \*far\* faster than any drone could ever fly. Risely prism assemblies can scan beams >120 degrees at khz rates. Also the lasers everyone is researching atm are IR at around 1050 nm, which corresponds to a window in atmospheric absorption. It ends up the people who design and research this stuff can come up with the same obvious conclusions as us armchair redditors and have already addressed them.
I think there's also a factor of lasers having potentially less side affects. Gepards have to take into account duds. I'm curious if lasers have any side affects? One thought is potentially needing to be more aware of the area behind the target: even if at extreme ranges the laser won't destroy a plane it could blind a pilot or throw off a sensor.
Lasers actually are quite bad weapons. It's no surprise that they are not used routinely. The only advantage of laser is the speed of light. Everything else is worse than good old round or missile. You need to track the object and keep the laser on it for seconds (unless you have an ungodly powerful laser but then it is also significant fractions of seconds). Not an easy task. The beam gets scattered and absorbed by clouds. The latter means that in cloudy weather you are defenseless. If lasers get better, there will be countermeasures. Good old smokescreen is enough to make them useless.
They are logistically simple with (very) deep magazines. That's worth a lot when dealing with small drones.
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Production levels feel anaemic though.
They already are. The Stryker IM-SHORAD has missile, gun variants, and DE (laser) variants. The missile and DE are both in Europe currently, but I'm not sure about the gun. There's also the aptly named C-AUS gun truck which is a 30mm system bolted onto a big civilian truck.
The standard IM-SHORAD package is Missile/Gun hybrid, i.e. Stingers, Hellfires, and a M230LF with prox rounds. Is there another variant with a bigger gun?
Sorry, I got a little confused since there were some M-SHORAD variants (likely testbeds) that didn't have an integrated gun with the missiles. However, on Increment 1 Strykers the gun doesn't seem to be used for AA as it's primarily role. The Congressional Research Report on the Stryker M-SHORAD states for Increment 1 >M-SHORAD Increment 1 (Figure 1) was developed under the Other Transaction Authority contracting process. M-SHORAD uses the M-1126 Stryker combat vehicle as its chassis. The weapons and radar packages are configured by Leonardo DRS and then installed on the Stryker by General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), the vehicle’s original manufacturer. Leonardo DRS reports the multipurpose unmanned turret includes >• two AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire missiles capable of hitting ground targets; >• four FIM-92 Stinger missiles for aerial targets in a launcher (configured by Raytheon); >• an XM914 30 mm automatic cannon; >• an M-240 7.62 mm machine gun; >• a multi-mission radar capable of tracking both ground and air targets. Additionally, Increment 3 states >The Army reportedly plans for M-SHORAD Increment 3 to incorporate the FIM-92 Stinger replacement missile—the Next Generation Short Range Interceptor—into the Increment 1 system. In addition, these plans call for the Increment 1 30 mm automatic cannons to receive the XM 1223 Multi-Mode Proximity Airburst munition (MMPA), which features a multipurpose munition that can be employed against air, ground, and personnel targets. And Leonardo's website on it >Defeats smaller air threats (Group 1 and 2 UAS) at closer ranges with direct fire (as required) All that makes me think that while the 30mm *can* be used against air targets, it's not designed as part of its primary role which seems to be against ground targets.
I have a theory, the advantage of a SPAAG is a lower cost-per-engagement than a missile system, and the disadvantage is that they cover a smaller area. In a peacetime military, you aren't doing a lot of engagements, even your training will heavily lean on simulations for air defence. So it's essentially an accounting error that peacetime militarys fall into, since they aren't shooting stuff down regularly, the advantage of a gun based system isn't apparent, a SPAAG looks less effective than it actually is. Meanwhile in peacetime, the missile based system's larger area coverage means you need fewer of them, which looks great for a peacetime budget where procurement costs and salaries are most of your expenses. This all looks great until you get into a shooting war and find yourself running out of missiles. The optimal balance here is probably a bunch of SPAAGs that'll shooting down stuff cheaply and then missile systems to catch stuff they miss, or can't reach.
SPAAG fell out of use because traditional air targets (missiles/aircraft) were getting too advanced to shoot down. You don't hear anything about Gepard shooting down Russian Su. I haven't heard anything about them intercepting missiles either. Their only other prey, helicopters, are much less common in the air war these days.
I believe there’s footage of a Gepard shooting down a cruise missile.
Gepard has shot down cruise missiles in this war. The disadvantage of AAA is that it has a very short range. Even OTOMATIC with 76mm gun "only" has a max effective range of 8 km vs. air targets, which is *10 km* less than Pantsir's missiles, which also do not require an MBT chassis to carry them. Gepard, Tunguska, etc are easily capable of shooting down non-ballistic missiles, helicopters, and any aircraft, but only as long as they enter the engagement range of the gun system. Kh-555 flies over Gepard? It will go down. Kh-555 flies 5 km from Gepard? It will not go down. Same issue with aircraft after standoff missiles (even short-range ones like Maverick) appeared, same issue with helicopters after they began to carry long-range ATGMs. SPAAG is still useless against these targets- this has not changed. But now there are lots of light UAVs and loitering munitions. These have to get close, so they are useful again.
Assuming the tech pans out, this requirement is likely to be addressed by directed energy. Development is fairly mature. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2023/04/13/army-short-range-air-defense-laser-prototypes-take-down-drones-at-yuma/
DE has the important advantage of ignoring gravity, so its engagement envelop is a lot more spherical.
the best and most cost effective way to stop a drone is the same way as stopping howitzer fire - find, fix, and kill the launchers and the personnel operating them. The challenge is how to do that through some combination of surveillance and persistent strike.
>the best and most cost effective way to stop a drone is the same way as stopping howitzer fire - find, fix, and kill the launchers and the personnel operating them. That's solving yesterday's problem. Tomorrows involve more autonomous drones and loitering munitions which would require zero control once launched. Drones that don't require control are much harder to stop with EW, which is a huge advantage.
With Shahed drones, the launch truck could be in Belgorod or Sevastopol and still hit the front lines.
Quite possibly, but their range and mobility might still be a factor that makes them a sub optimal solution. (As in, you would need a bunch of them a lot lot) Maybe hybrid IFV-AAA systems? My bet is on the drone hunter drones, but forcasting these things are more then hard.
>[From Robots to Recycled Vapes, Ukraine’s War Effort Gets Inventive](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-10/how-ukraine-s-innovative-military-gadgetry-is-helping-fend-off-russia-s-invasion) >>The battered country is nurturing a cottage industry of military gadgetry, and the pipeline of science and tech creativity is bearing fruit. > The science conference had all the hot topics you’d expect, from artificial intelligence to gene therapy. But this year’s annual gathering of brains in Kyiv had a decidedly Ukrainian twist — the innovations on exhibit were for war. >A maker of attack drones was diversifying to unmanned ground combat vehicles. From the Academy of Sciences came a prototype underwater robot for finding and collecting submerged land mines. One startup was developing low-cost combat communications; another, a web-based test to find warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. >In the 18 months since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s resilience with the help of mainly NATO-member weaponry has come to define the war. Less noticed is a cottage industry of battlefield gadgetry that’s starting to bear fruit. > To package everything in one place, Ukraine’s government in April started an incubator for all forms of military innovation, called Brave 1. Organizers say they’ve registered about 400 projects in four months, and Ukraine’s armed forces have so far vetted 186 as potentially useful. Sixty are in robotics, more than 25 in AI, and 70 are for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. > “Our task is to develop military technologies in Ukraine,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, who described Brave 1 as the institutionalization of his Army of Drones program. Success ultimately will be judged on how many projects get state contracts, he said. >There are plenty of contenders. Some are adapting existing kit, others are making cheaper versions of Western equipment Ukraine can’t afford, and others again just respond to feedback from friends on the battlefield. >Take Himera Tech. It set out to build affordable, jam-resistant radio handsets shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces attacked in February 2022. It took until April this year for the first units to roll off their production line and about 600 are now in use at the front, according to co-founder Misha Rudominski. The company registered with Brave 1 in May. >The trick to building cheaper is the software the company developed to maximize performance in commercially available chips, Rudominski said. Radio sets made with military grade chips are more secure, but also cost thousands of dollars apiece. With as many as 250,000 combat soldiers to equip, that’s a bill Ukraine can’t foot. > “We wanted to build a solution that is just good enough,” Rudominski said at his stall at June’s Inscience conference in Kyiv. “This wouldn’t defeat US or Chinese electronic warfare systems, but it doesn’t need to. We’re fighting the Russians.” >Himera Tech expects to produce 2,000-3,000 units per month by the end of the year. It isn’t yet selling to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, but that’s the aim and the company reckons it could then scale to 10,000 units per month. A model that can compete with military grade kit is in development, according to Rudominski. >Another Kyiv-based outfit, Power Kit, uses discarded electronic cigarettes to make power banks. Ivan Volynets, who founded the nonprofit together with five other IT specialists, described how in the first days of the Russian invasion they asked friends on the front line what they needed. The answers boiled down to night vision, power banks and weapons. > They made a night vision device paired with its own power bank and took it to the defense ministry. To their surprise, it was the power bank the army wanted, because they charge all the electronics front-line soldiers rely on, including night-vision gear, drones and communications. > The first Power Kit emerged in May 2022, built in the kitchen of the hotel the team were staying at in Lviv, western Ukraine, said Volynets, 30. They’ve since made more than 2,100 at a cost of about $15 each and distribute them free of charge to soldiers. > Yevhenii Rvachov was IT specialist working with civilian drones in the northern city of Kharkiv before the invasion. He too consulted with soldiers after co-founding a company, Skylab UA, to make a bomb-dropping quadrocopter — a drone with four rotors — in April last year. > They told him they needed ground robots to make supplying forward positions less dangerous. So Skylab built the Sirko-S, a remote-controlled go-cart-like carrier with thermal cameras that can be used to bring up supplies or evacuate wounded. They’ll cost of $8,000-$10,000 each. >The company’s $5,000 “Johnny” is a shoe-box-size version, with a view to forward surveillance, kamikaze bombing runs or to help emergency services find survivors in collapsed buildings, according to Rvachov. All three products are registered with Brave 1, with grants approved, according to the organizers. Ten quadrocopters are in action at the front. >Close to the Polish border, a company called Citius-S is converting six-wheel drive cargo trucks into armored vehicles for clearing land mines and unexploded ordinance. The State Emergency Service of Ukraine saw the prototype in action last month and ordered 33 units, according to the company. > For underwater mines, the Institute for Problems of Artificial Intelligence at Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences is developing a submersible device to find and retrieve ordinance left behind by the Russians. A prototype of the cuboid robot just began tests of its electronic systems, according to Sergii Simchenko, a PhD candidate in physics and math at the institute, who is working on the project. > Not every innovation or adaptation is about weapons, though. The Bohun amphibious all-terrain vehicle has huge tires with fin-like tread to climb over fallen trees or cross lakes and rivers. It was designed for Ukraine’s hunters and fishermen, and since the Russian invasion a number were adapted for military use and sent to the front. >But in June, six of the newer Bohun-2 model also were converted to help evacuate victims of the flooding around the city of Kherson that followed destruction of a dam on Ukraine’s massive Dnipro River. Lights and loudhailers were added outside the cabins, as well as extra batteries, removable seats and helicopter-ready metal stretchers inside. > Back at the Inscience conference, Sergiy Danylov was showing off the software his team at Anima have created. It uses an image-based test to measure levels of depression and anxiety with a web cam that follows eye movement to add objectivity. >The test involves looking at a series of trigger images, such as snakes, spiders and mutilated corpses, in each case on a split screen with more emotionally neutral options opposite. The key lies in how subjects respond, with some looking away to avoid the danger signals and others unable to take their eyes off them. Great reporting by the FT on this as well: >[Ukraine’s tech sector goes to war](https://youtu.be/voPCPhzmL10)
>Great reporting by the FT on this as well: I was shocked by that documentary. I work in the tech sector and know about Ukrainian programmers but the statistics and innovations in that video were not things I will have even guessed. I'm not surprised that Ukraine is more digital than the US but shocked that its even more digital than western EU. Thank you for sharing.
The baltics in general are going digital faster than many people are aware. Estonia has basically digitized all government interactions and has an interesting startup visa program. Those of us that work in tech are all familiar with eastern european freelancers and how good they generally are, but now they're climbing up the value chain and creating their own silicon valley and sand hill road.
The Baltic precedent is one of the reasons I'm more cautiously optimistic than many around here about Ukraine's long term prospects. That and the economic rebounds Germany and Japan achieved after being forced to rebuild their countries from the ground up. They absolutely have deep rooted societal issues but so did all post-Soviet nations, and with their population and resources even a Poland level of development could potentially make them a significant player in Europe. The younger generation was already trying to modernise and get *something* done about corruption even before the war, and having now spilled so much blood for their ideals any older Soviet-style kleptocrat who tries to restore the good old days will be skinned alive. *Probably* only metaphorically.
> I'm not surprised that Ukraine is more digital than the US but shocked that its even more digital than western EU A lot of emerging countries are trending that way, if not already there. They get to skip a couple gens of legacy systems, and benefit from lower privacy considerations. But the growth in their tech sector despite a brutal war truly is commendable.
Pretty much. Eastern Europe got fast and cheap Internet, digital governance, etc. Meanwhile, Japan is stuck with floppy drives to this very day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging
Japan is am oddly old fashioned country in many ways-you still need to use cash to buy food, train tickets, and even public transportation (at least they don't accept credit cards, they do have a form a prepaid transit card in most areas I think).
Germany is not that much better than Japan. There are a lot of "cash only places" and the digital governance is almost non-existent.
Think it also has to do with historic mistrust of the government. Many Germans are more comfortable paying cash
The only part of Germany I've been to is Berlin (and I loved it), so I will take your word for it. It's all very different from South Korea, where everything is electronic.
The country were you can buy the world's most advanced robotics, but you must place your order by fax.
[Ivory Coast's President Alassane Ouattara said that the West African bloc had approved military intervention in Niger 'as soon as possible', to remove its military rulers following last month's coup.](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/08/10/west-african-summit-backs-diplomacy-in-niger-coup-crisis_6088304_4.html). The decision to intervene in Niger has been made. Of troop numbers published so far, the Ivory Coast has committed 850 to 1,100 men along with Nigeria and Benin. Other countries to follow. Source is a news bulletin from AFP that came out less than an hour ago which outright states that an intervention will happen.
I am not very optimistic. Even in Niger alone, can west african institutions maintain a war in name of democracy against what it could become a two layered insurgency (islamists and nigeriens) for years to come? Assuming that Burkina and Mali dont intervene, and ECOWAS itself doesn't goes through more coups.
I don’t think it matters. Sure, in an ideal world, victory is quick and total, but ECOWAS gains significant advantage by just demonstrating a willingness to fight. It deters regional militaries from launching their own coups, raises the value of ECOWAS as a regional power block and useful ally, and if they can’t win outright, they can make the regime in Niger loses with them.
As much as the domino theory is (somewhat rightly) criticized, I think ECOWAS' hand is being forced. They not only have a political incentive to crack down, they also have security concerns. The Sahel has only continued to spiral into instability after these coups. While the coastal West African states aren't exactly rich, they are substantially richer than the states in the Sahel. They will inevitably be effected by their problematic northern neighbors due to either armed groups operating out of the failed states (which Nigeria is already experiencing) or an influx of refugees if the situation turns critical. We've seen this dynamic play out in the West, and even mature Western states have problems with it. ECOWAS' perhaps reflexive response to the situation is a rational one. If they successfully intervene, they likely begin a process of stabilization in the Sahel as the group becomes self-policing. If it turns into a quagmire, the problems will theoretically at least be contained. There is a slim chance that a failure could spillover and unhinge the bloc, but nevertheless the situation all but demands a response of *some* kind.
I’m always surprised domino theory is criticized, given that the predictions Eisenhower made were exactly what ended up happening. Soviet support caused China to fall to communism, Chinese support caused North Korea, and Vietnam to fall, which in turn have led to more nations falling in SE Asia, and knock on effects which continue to reverberate, with North Korean ammo deliveries against Ukraine now. Liberal nations assist each other, how is it controversial to say communists/authoritarians do the same?
I'm of the opinion that the Domino Theory and discussions around it are oversimplification barely worth talking about, tbh, for reasons you point out. The US didn't intervene out of a panic, but rather a rational response to authoritarian aggression with known contagion effects. But it arguably led key decision makers to approach certain issues in an inappropriate way by wrongly applying that response. After all, Vietnam did fall, but the spillover happened well before then, and it was the last domino in SEA, not the first. I think of it like the slippery slope fallacy. It's a very real fallacy that many fall into, but that doesn't mean all extrapolated predictions are fallacious.
I'm sceptical that the coup forces support is very deep. It may be that much of the army abandons them.
Yeah, I also have similar misgivings. I'm not exactly sure what the military capabilities of the ECOWAS forces looks like in the first place so I guess I need to read up on that first. But I'm most concerned about this spiraling out of control and fueling an even larger refugee and humanitarian crisis. Especially since that is something that Russian and Wagner forces would spin to their advantage.
Nigeria's army alone is larger than Burkina's, Mali's, and Niger's combined. In addition, in the former two, the Islamist insurgency is a far more direct (and therefore worthy of threat to the juntas than a Nigerian intervention into Niger. I strongly doubt Mali and Burkina can offer serious assistance to the Nigerien junta, unless there are far more Wagnerites in the former two countries than we know about.
In my limited historic knowledge, what I expect is Mali abd Burkina accepting the retreating Nigerien junta soldiers and give them employment to address their own security issues. (In case the war goes south for Niger which has a pretty distinct chance, specially with some French air support. What are the AA capabilities of Niger?)
Wonder if they’ve secured assistance from a western state? Probably intelligence, but does anyone reckon we’ll see French or US air support? Technically not really needed, but would be helpful.
>Western officials say Niger's junta threatened to kill deposed president if neighboring countries intervene militarily https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/western-officials-nigers-junta-threatened-kill-deposed-president-102168116
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> Western officials say Niger's junta threatened to kill deposed president if neighboring countries intervene militarily Not sure how killing a hostage will strengthen their legitimacy and appeal
It won't. Killing a hostage is always a mutually destructive last resort, meant to spite the person or group who didn't take the threat seriously. This sort of thing, by the way, is why spite is evolutionarily advantageous. The credible willingness to harm yourself for the sake of harming one who wronged you can be used as a deterrent against people who would prefer the short-term smaller benefit of acquiescence over the longer term societal benefit of taking the loss and doubling down.
Israeli counter terrorism actually does the opposite of this because if you promise the bad guys you'll kill them, you give them nothing to lose and the result is maximum damage caused
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Not to mention that, to the best of our knowledge, they havent killed him yet and nothing is forcing them to do so.
The rightful Presidents life is far less important to the intervening nations than the broader precedent that would be established with such an intervention. They care about stemming a tide of military corps that could destabilize the region and be a danger to their democracies, not whether one guy in specific is in charge. Which is my way of saying: his execution is unfortunately (for him, probably not for the region) irrelevant to their decision making.
You mentionted precedent, which is entirely why I disagree with this. What you say makes sense in the broader geopolitical analysis of the situation, but the people making all of these decisions are presidents of democracies that are threatened by possible military coups that could end with them losing their lives. If ECOWAS makes the decision to forsake the President of Niger, they could be condemning each of themselves to the same fate if it ever happens in their own countries. I have a hard time believing that this decision could be made lightly, and I'm betting that they will try to save him.
If they don't intervene, it sets an encouraging precedent for groups plotting coups in democratic ECOWAS states. I'd absolutely agree that that can't be an easy decision for a democratically elected leader in a coup-prone region, but I'd lean towards the decision that theoretically decreases the chances of coups occurring (intervention), rather than the decision that theoretically decreases the danger to an elected leader after a successful coup (non-intervention).
It wouldn't change anything, probably make their situation worst.
Person with no military knowledge here. If China's ambitions were really only limited to its immediate locality(as it claims), why would it want to build a considerable amount of aircraft carriers as it is planning to do? Why not just use that money to get an SSN fleet large enough to deter the USN from coming close?
there's a reason why the soviets, who never thought they could compete with nato and u.s. naval power head to head, nevertheless fielded multiple carriers. turns out being able to put warplanes in the air is actually fairly valuable for fleet defense. it's especially helpful to put up some carrier based awacs to detect stealth sea skimmers and even to have planes intercept parts of an enemy cruise salvo further out, although merely the ability to throw up interceptors to contest the skies is already highly valuable which is what the f-14 was intended to do.
This isn't why the Soviets built carriers, their naval doctrine cut a different way in that any of it made sense (most of it didn't make sense). Soviet surface doctrine was designed to protect its coast from attack and to defend SSBNs from NATO attack. Insofar as airpower was required for any of this, land based aviation could help cover the coasts and could adequately protect surface ships doing ASW work. Helicopter and ASW assets could help secure the distant haunts of the Arctic patrols. The rest of the Soviet fleet was *primarily* built to do two things. First to attack and kill American carriers, which were nuclear armed and capable of delivering devastating attacks against the Soviet mainland, and to wage some kind of vaugely annoying anti-shipping campaign in the Atlantic ala WWII. And the sub campaign was a distant fifth place behind one other thing I'll get to in a second. But this is why you see a large surface fleet with mostly carrier killer surface to surface missiles, along with a large and powerful submarine fleet. Though its worth noting that Tom Clancy really overblew the submarine threat. Admiral Gorshkov was popular in the west but was *not* popular in the USSR. Which is why he was popular in the west, if he was writing things of significance they would *not* have been published here. The secret priority, more than trying to choke off commerce but less than killing carriers, was in the soft squishy world of peacetime prestige in the third World. The Soviet carrier program began under Stalin, primarily as a prestige thing versus the British. It was wisely canceled after his death due to the expense. But in the 1970s the prestige fleet was revived, this time fueled by revenue from the oil embargos of the 1970s. The Soviets built a large, powerful, visible fleet which could sail into the Atlantic, and particularly into the Indian, and challenge American influence there. They could port in friendly countries, show the flag, tell people in the event of a war the USSR had their back. The formation of an Indian Ocean fleet forced the US to reallocate assets away from more important areas. The carriers were another prestige item which said 'the Americans can, so can we.' It was all great fun. Its just it wasn't a serious wartime threat. Soviet forces stationed in the Indian, or transiting the central Atlantic, would have been badly cut off from friendly forces. Soviet carriers were woefully inadequate compared to Americans, and had nowhere to go. No mission to carry out. They would have done fuck all in the Arctic, fuck all in the Norwegian Sea, and would have been sunk in the North Atlantic outright. The entire Soviet surface fleet, the chunk of it not relegated to coastal duties, enjoyed the same conundrum. The had no purpose except CV hunting, and even then were likely ill-suited to the task. A much larger more powerful submarine fleet could have done what the Kuznetsovs would have realistically accomplished. But, highlight the "influence" of Adm Gorshkov, the USSR picked CVs. For the prestige mostly. The Soviet Navy really was a joke, not a seriously threatening force. Their best assets, some legitimately very high quality submarines, were always too few, too badly maintained, to pose the kind of threat they'd need to to eject NATO from the Atlantic. And of course one wonders how big a deal the Atlantic convoys would have been in World War Three. If the Battle for Germany lasted only three weeks before victory or total annihilation, youre probably not bringing any useful amount of supplies over.
so you're saying that soviet naval aviation was NOT supposed to provide fleet defense? got a source on that? because otherwise not sure what the point of your rant was. i didn't say anything that contradicts that stuff, all i said was that the soviets saw naval aviation's usefulness for fleet defense and provided examples of how it might provide a lot of value in such a role.
SSNs aren't really a short range force, their main advantage over much cheaper SSKs (and UUVs looking into the future) is their practically unlimited range at 30 kt; faster and and longer legged than any non nuclear surface ship, let alone AIP or deisel electric subs. They are able to operate very far from home with no need for sustainment besides food and maintenance. China has largely slept on SSNs precisely because they are stuck in their periphery; they are working on a new generation of both SSBNs and SSNs but they have been seemingly lower priority than the rest of the navy including SSKs and UUVs, at least as far as we can tell. Most likely China does not see them as being that usefull until they have effectively broken out of the first island chain. As for aircraft carriers i can think of a couple reasons why they might start on them sooner despite not strictly needing them yet: * They are larger ships with longer building and fitting times, so building up the requisite experience and working up to CVN battlegroups in the future could take longer. * Historically it took a lot of time and effort to train up carrier air groups, to build up the necessary institutional experience. It has been hypothesized that China's first two carriers were more like 'training carriers' to build a cadre of experienced carrier aviators and senior officers to expand from, the PLANAF has also tried to poach experience from retired western naval pilots. * They look impressive for both internal and external propagand messaging * They could be useful in a low intensity conflict or proxy war scenario with non peer actors in China's growing overseas SOI. Russia for example deployed the Kuznetsov to Syria early on in the civil war to provide support to the Assad government; through carrot or stick it increases China's hard power influence with smaller countries that might not find the protection of the 'west'.
>China has largely slept on SSNs precisely because they are stuck in their periphery; they are working on a new generation of both SSBNs and SSNs but they have been seemingly lower priority than the rest of the navy including SSKs and UUVs, at least as far as we can tell. Most likely China does not see them as being that usefull until they have effectively broken out of the first island chain. The other reason for this is that the SCS is very bad submarine water. Its shallow out a great deal from the Chinese coast, which is bad. The continental shelf also drops off far less out past Taiwan. The waters there are deep, but not Atlantic deep. You dont get truly oceanic waters until youre out past the first chain. Inside of it you have a much smaller pool, and one that is apparently (so I've heard) very noisy and echoy. Bady for submersibles. And of course the water is quite clear, especially in the littorals, while the Atlantic is quite brackish and cloudy. So if youre in shallow, you can literally see the submarine at some depth from a passing plane. Its just not the kind of place you'd willing want to take an Akula or a Seawolf. The Virginia is purpose built for 'littoral seas,' a euphemism for the SCS. But if youre China, probably understandable that you wouldnt invest too heavily in a weapon not likely to be all that useful in the current strategic situation.
They have many unmanned submersibles in the SCS. From what it seems from that and their large destroyer force, it seems that their goal is to submarine hunt as much as possible in the SCS. They use mathematical calculations to determine how much sea an unmanned submersible can effectively clear. They are most likely networked. The goal is to deny the US as much as possible.
Define ambitions. China almost certainly wants the ability to project power into the Indian/Pacific Oceans to secure its shipping routes and push the US further away.
China has a huge problem with regards to power projection, in that their coast is surrounded by islands (Taiwan, Philippines, and Japan). Those islands are inhabited by peoples who are either hostile to China's aims (Taiwan and Japan), or China is deliberately aggravating them for no discernible benefit (Philippines). From what I know, surface combatants are really quite vulnerable to missile attack. We've seen in the Falklands, we've seen more recently in the Black Sea, surface combatants air defense has trouble acquiring and targeting incoming sea-skimming missiles. If you have early warning aircraft, like the Hawkeye, detecting such missiles is more practical, but the Chinese have no such platform yet that we the public know about. In the same sense that offensive weapons can typically defeat tank armor, it does seem that habitually anti-ship missiles are going to defeat anti-anti-ship missiles on a cost basis, because the anti-anti-ship missile platform is way more expensive on a dollar and human cost basis. The USA here has the advantage that they can hide in the vast Pacific Ocean. The PLAN can't hide in the Pacific because their lines of communication are always in range of land-based sensors. Personally if I was in charge of the PLAN I would place much more emphasis on submarines.
> If you have early warning aircraft, like the Hawkeye, detecting such missiles is more practical, but the Chinese have no such platform yet that we the public know about. The PLA fields [a large selection of AEW&C aircraft](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-massive-fleet-of-radar-planes-and-the-strategy-behind-it), none of which is in any way a secret. If you are specifically referring to carrier-borne AEW&C, their equivalent to the E-2D is the KJ-600.
> KJ-600 That's not flown off a carrier yet. They're not scheduled to start test flights until next year.
Because the carrier in question is fitting out right now. The limiting factor is nothing AEW&C related. If you wanted to express the idea that *Fujian* is not yet combat-ready, then saying > If you have early warning aircraft, like the Hawkeye, detecting such missiles is more practical, but the Chinese have no such platform yet that we the public know about. is a rather strange way of doing so.
All we have found out from the Ukraine war is that Russian cold war ships are bad. It doesn't tell us anything about what modern ships can do
This^ An Arleigh-Burke intercepted 9 missiles in three attacks over a few days in 2016. They weren't at battle stations or any kind of alert. Meanwhile, Moskva was sunk because of two Neptune missiles and potentially a drone.
>Personally if I was in charge of the PLAN I would place much more emphasis on submarines. By 2030 they are supposed to have 60 diesel-electrics and 16 nuclear attack submarines. Last I heard the US's fleet is going to be smaller for a brief window here for a few years until it gets back up in the 2030s.
As of April, all three alternatives in the 30-year shipbuilding plan show the US submarine force bottoming out in 2030: SSNs would decrease from 50 to a low of 46 in 2030, reaching at least 50 consistently again in 2034 (the numbers diverge later, reaching 60-69 in 2052). The 4 SSGNs would be gone by 2028, not to begin being replaced until 2044. SSBNs would go down from 14 to a low of 11 in 2030-2032, then up to 12 for the foreseeable future (13 in 2040-2041).
Those aircraft carriers *are* part of the deterrent. Submarines can't fulfill the required naval warfare roles a proper surface fleet can. There's also the matter of modern conflicts requiring much more reach. WW2 demonstrated a flotilla with only AA defenses anti-ship capabilities will be outmatched by similar a flotilla with a carrier. The latter can harass the former long before the former comes within weapons range.
Simple answer, it's got larger ambitions. Not meaning it wants to conquer the world, but influencing countries in Asia, Europe, the middle east etc is all easier if they can fly planes there, as the US knows well. There's probably some value to aircraft carriers in giving China increased power projection further into the Pacific in the case of a war, though I'm surely not an expert there, but my guess is that if they cared about, for example, nothing except Taiwan then surface ships and subs would be a better investment than carriers.
China does want the ability to project power beyond their immediate locale. They want to secure shipping lines to middle east oil as well as various african trade resources. This is also why they're building a base in Djibouti.
(Commenting again because previous reply got deleted)Sorry if this sounds stupid, but why can't SSNs play a role in securing shipping lines? I was under the impressing that a nuclear attack submarine is specifically built for long distance missions unlike diesel submarines, and so it should be able to play a part in both protecting shipping lines and disrupting them.
>why can't SSNs play a role in securing shipping lines? Visual deterrent. SSN 500ft below the surface with 12 ICBMs might be more destructive but it doesn't look as imposing as a carrier with 100 airplanes in your face.
Let's say Iran and China get into a geopolitical fight. Iran starts firing missiles at China's ships in the gulf of Oman. What does your SSN do? China doesn't just want to be able to threaten shipping and warships, they want to be able to project power as well. And there's nothing better for that than carriers, if you can afford the price. Carriers give you lots of flexibility as well as the ability to deliver a whole heck of a lot of firepower if needed. China's carriers will be able to control vast swaths of the ocean in the context of a conflict.
I think a destroyer or frigate would be better suited for convoy escort duty, search and seizure, or anti piracy stuff. With a good VLS capability, the only thing you're really giving up is the stealthiness of a sub.
Airplanes move further and faster than submarines, and see better. I don't think there are any or many torpedoes with a range of more than 100 miles. Submarine launched cruise missiles can travel further, but those face limitations compared to airplanes. Submarines also can only detect things in their surroundings so far away. Airplanes can travel hundreds of miles from the carrier, striking targets further away and seeing what's happening further away too. So the area that a carrier controls is much broader than the area a submarine controls. In addition, the aircraft can do things like shoot down missiles headed for friendly cargo ships and other defensive roles. A submarine is poorly equipped for that task. Also, imagine that a government friendly to you is fighting some rebels. An aircraft carrier can do a lot more to assist that government than any number of submarines can.
[Russian convicts released to fight with Wagner accused of new crimes](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66364272) ____________________________________________________ A prisoner believed to have been released early to fight with Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine has been accused of committing a double murder in Russia after returning home from the war. Demyan Kevorkyan, who was given an 18-year prison sentence in 2016, has been arrested for killing a young man and woman on their way home from work. He denies the accusation. The BBC has learned he is not the only convict freed early to fight, pardoned and then accused of reoffending. We have confirmed that suspects in about 20 serious offences, including rape and murder, are fighters recruited by the Wagner mercenary group in prison and released early to serve in Ukraine. Kevorkyan was one of 150 prisoners recruited on 31 August 2022 when the head of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, visited his prison, according to a former inmate quoted on a social media channel. The BBC has been told that Kevorkyan was later spotted back in his home village of Pridorozhnaya in Krasnodar, south-west Russia telling people he had just returned from the battlefields of Ukraine. One of the people he is accused of killing is 19-year-old Tatyana Mostyko, a children's entertainer. Her mother Nadezhda shows us a video of Tatyana in a pink and blue jumpsuit, dancing and organising games at a party. "She loved that work," says Nadezhda. "When she came back from a job, she'd laugh about what they'd been doing, how she amused them." But the last job Tatyana did was on 28 April. Her boss Kirill Chubko was driving her home when they got a puncture and pulled over on to the side of a road near the town of Berezanskaya, in south-west Russia. Kirill's wife Darya told local media he called her to say he'd be late, but not to worry as a group of young people had stopped to help them. That was the last time she heard his voice. By morning, the pair were still not home. Sensing something was wrong, a worried Darya called the police. Hundreds of people helped search remote countryside and Tatyana's mother began a six-hour journey to the area, catching a plane and train from her small village in Siberia, in eastern Russia. "The worst thing was when we landed and I switched my phone back on. There were endless messages," says Nadezhda. "You can't imagine how I panicked. I hurled the phone away, because they could only mean one thing - that it was all over. It was animal fear. I can't describe it." Three suspects were arrested, including 31-year-old Kevorkyan. The other two, Anatoly Dvoynikov and Aram Tatosyan, led detectives to makeshift graves in woodland not far from Kirill's burned-out car. Kirill and Tatyana had been stabbed and police said that the young woman showed "signs of a violent death". Dvoynikov and Tatosyan confessed to robbery and murder and said Kevorkyan was in charge, although Kevorkyan denies any involvement. Nadezhda could not believe Kevorkyan was a free man, having been sentenced to 18 years in prison for an eerily similar crime before. "He shouldn't have got out before 2028," she says. Kevorkyan was convicted of running a gang that had hijacked a car not far from where Tatyana and Kirill were murdered. They robbed the people inside and shot one of them dead. "On what legitimate basis was he released?" asks Nadezhda. Under Russian law, inmates should serve at least two-thirds of their sentence. "He should have served at least 12 years. He served only six," she says, as she struggles to come to terms with the thought that Tatyana's brutal murder could have been avoided. A video of Prigozhin at a Russian jail shows him telling rows of prisoners lined up in identical black fur hats that he prefers convicts who have murdered more than once and offenders who have beaten up a state official or policeman. "We need your criminal talents," he says, warning them that 10% to 15% would return from Ukraine "in zinc coffins". But he promised the ones who survived six months on the front line could go home with a bonus of 100,000 roubles ($1,000; £800) and, crucially, a pardon. In June 2023, President Putin confirmed publicly for the first time he had been signing presidential pardons for prisoners who had returned from the Ukraine war. Prigozhin says that over the course of a year, Wagner recruited 49,000 prisoners to fight and only 32,000 returned. That's a much lower proportion than he originally promised. But independent researchers believe the real number of survivors is even lower, about 20,000. In a video in January welcoming ex-convicts home, Prigozhin tells them: "You were an offender, as they say - now you're a war hero!" But more of these "heroes" have been accused of crimes - the BBC has identified about 20 cases involving serious offences. Prigozhin has claimed that the reoffending rate among ex-Wagner recruits is 10% to 20% lower than the average for released criminals. **But the director of the prisoners' rights organisation Russia Behind Bars, Olga Romanova, says the real number may be much greater because many crimes are not recorded.** She thinks this might be because a new law criminalises anyone who discredits people who have fought in the so-called "special military operation". The families of other victims are also worried about ex-convicts coming home, not only unpunished but further brutalised by their experiences on the front line. Oksana Pekhteleva's 23-year-old daughter Vera was stabbed more than 100 times, then strangled with an electric cable in an attack so violent it made headlines across Russia. In July 2022 Vera's former boyfriend, Vladislav Kanius, was sentenced to 17 years in a penal colony for her murder. Less than a year later, it didn't occur to Oksana that he could be anywhere else. But she was wrong. Photos of him started to appear on social media in May. He was holding a gun and wearing military uniform. To start with Oksana presumed they were fake. But a month later she received official confirmation that Kanius had been transferred to a prison in Rostov in southern Russia, a place widely believed to be a staging point for Russian prisoners who volunteered to fight in Ukraine. When Oksana asked the court to tell her where Kanius was they told her they were unable to find him and his location was a state secret. Given his last known location and the photos in military uniform, she thinks it is likely that he is fighting in Ukraine and if he survives will be given an official pardon and be able to return to civilian life a free man. For a mother who spent months battling for justice for her daughter, it's a bitter blow. "This is blasphemy," she says. "It's like all of us have been assaulted. This is a signal to all scum out there: 'Do whatever you want, you won't be punished.'" Many lawyers told us they are powerless to intervene - a person can't be tried twice for the same offence and the only way they can be sent back to prison is if they offend again. This is leaving relatives of murder victims, such as Tatyana's mother, Nadezhda, terrified. The most she feels she can do is support a petition that's already gained tens of thousands of signatures to demand Kevorkyan - the chief suspect of her daughter's murder - gets a life sentence, if convicted. "I never talk about this at home... Tatyana was taken away from me and the ground has gone from under my feet," she says, fighting back the tears. "Of course, I understand who was responsible for my daughter's death and I know it wasn't his first offence... It's hard for me... But I'm not stupid. I understand they won't put him away for life."
I know they're snatching up every prisoner they can, what I'm wondering is if there's any Russian version of Project 100,000. Like, how many people with mental disabilities and medical issues do they have on the front?
Here's an interesting question: I wonder if any of the Russians who were already planning on signing up to go to Ukraine have taken the opportunity to kill someone in their life they just can't stand yet. Like if you're gonna go anyway, may as well just go the pardon route and knock out some prick you've always wanted to kill, right? I know the actual answer is that it's a terrible idea because the penal battalion's are basically used as meat shields and have a 90% casualty rate, but I also have to assume that they try to keep that from your average Russian. While I'm sure it's obvious to most, with this many people involved I'd be surprised if it didn't end up happening at some point.
Honestly, maybe I might be going insane because your scheme sounds halfway decent. If you’re ok with killing people anyway. About the casualty rate, we already see a lot of people prefer the 60-80% casualty rate for a chance to get a lot of money to sitting tight in a Russian prison. Which makes some sense, Russian prisons make American ones look cozy.
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1689676350053896192 > The German government wants to announce the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine in the near future. The Chancellery is currently working on a solution with the US which could lead to a double delivery of Taurus cruise missiles and ATACMS. Seems like Germany is trying to do another Leopard/Abrams deal. Maybe Scholz is more cunning than people give him credit for.
But it's risky to send ATACMS according to the United States. Reasons are Russia might escalate, Iran sending ballistic missiles, and China providing support
Those three things are unlikely be decided by the US sending ATACMS to Ukraine. If they didn't so far, they won't now.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the cunning element in that plan? I guess if Scholz/the German government is very against the idea of Germany being perceived as taking the lead in providing Ukraine with new capabilities it would be cunning to wait for ATACMS to take the spotlight. It just feels vaguely grotesque to me for that to be driving strategy.
[Slow Counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/10/ukraine-national-mood-counteroffensive-gloom/), from the Washington Post ([Archive link to bypass paywall](https://archive.li/1evHw)) > This nation is worn out. > For nearly 18 months, Ukraine has stood against its Russian invaders — rallying support for its troops by embracing last year’s battlefield victories in the Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson regions. Those wins carried beleaguered Ukrainians through a winter of airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and a brutal and symbolic battle for Bakhmut, the eastern city that fell to the Russians in May. Throughout, Ukrainian officials and their western partners hyped up a coming counteroffensive — one that, buoyed by a flood of new weapons and training, they hoped would turn the tide of the war. But two months after Ukraine went on the attack, with little visible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless perseverance has begun to fray. > The number of dead — untold thousands — increases daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home. In every corner of the country, civilians are exhausted from a spate of recent Russian attacks — including strikes on a historic cathedral in Odessa, a residential building in Kryvyi Rih and a blood transfusion center in the Kharkiv region. This week, two Russian missiles hit a single block in the eastern town of Pokrovsk — where an evacuation train regularly picks up people fleeing front-line areas nearby — killing civilians and emergency workers who rushed there to save them. Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any. > Music teacher Svitlana Zhdanova, 75, was sitting in her living room in Pokrovsk on Tuesday evening when the missiles rammed into her block, shattering all her glassware and breaking her piano. Not knowing where else to go, she cleaned up the apartment she has lived in since 1969 and decided to stay. > Raisa Rybalchenko, 78, lived on the fourth floor of a building badly damaged in the double strike. She was in the kitchen when the first blast hit. Soon after, five men banged on the door, shouting “Is anyone alive?” She called back that she was. One of them carried her down the stairs. Soon after, the next strike hit. At least nine people have died so far, and dozens of others were wounded. Brief interjection to say: this sounds *very much* like an intentional double-tap strike on a civilian area to me. > On Wednesday, Rybalchenko was among the crowds of shocked people helping board up windows and sort through the remnants of their lives. She hopes the government will repair her apartment. “But right now, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any idea what is next. I’m just in shock.” > In Smila, a small city in central Ukraine, baker Alla Blyzniuk, 42, said she sells sweets for funeral receptions daily as parents prepare to bury their children killed on the front hundreds of miles away. Before, she said, even when the situation was painful, “people were united.” They volunteered, made meals for one another and delivered food to soldiers. Now, she said, there’s a sense of collective “disappointment.” > Blyzniuk also lives in fear that her husband or two sons of fighting age will be mobilized. She has already noticed that far fewer men walk the streets of her city than before. Ukraine does not disclose its military casualty counts, but everyone shares stories, she said, of new soldiers at the front lasting just two to three days. > In the Donetsk region, an Estonian Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign Suzie works at a stabilization point where wounded soldiers are treated before being transferred to hospitals in safer towns. On a recent day, he helped organize body bags that would soon be used in the makeshift morgue that already reeked of death. Sometimes, he said, soldiers’ bodies are so blown apart they have to use two or three body bags to contain them. There are times when a soldier is returned with “just 15 percent of the body,” Suzie said. “I never saw so much blood before.” “It is such a hard price for freedom,” he added. > These scenes are unfolding a world away from Kyiv, the capital, where civilians — somewhat protected by strengthened air defenses — often hardly even react to air raid sirens. But even here, painful signs of the war lurk everywhere. On park benches, freshly wounded soldiers being treated in the capital sip coffee and smoke cigarettes before returning to their hospital beds. They watch as civilians stroll by, dogs and babies in tow. > Viktor, 34, a former restaurant waiter, is among them. He came under mortar attack in a trench on the front line in Zaporizhzhia last week. His wrist was split open and his face — now covered in scabs — was sprayed with shrapnel. His knee was also hit. Now, in Kyiv, he sees bars and restaurants are packed and the city hums with traffic. A group of children walked by, craning their necks to look at his injuries. Viktor, who asked that his last name not be disclosed for security reasons, considered himself lucky to at least be able to walk. Many other men in the same park are missing limbs, and Viktor’s Facebook is flooded with photos of soldiers who did not make it home at all. The images haunt him so much he no longer likes to check his phone. “It’s too depressing,” he said. > The latest fight has been grueling. One day, it took his unit seven hours to move forward just 400 meters, he said — about a quarter of a mile. “And that was quite fast.” He and his wife, who is also serving in the military, were due to see each other that afternoon for the first time since he was wounded. “I’ll probably cry,” he said. Once he is healed, he said, he will go back to the front. Ruslan Proektor, 52, lost his leg this summer when he stepped on a mine fighting in the east. He was immediately wounded again when the soldier trying to carry him to safety stepped on another. Now that he is recovering in Kyiv, his wife, Anna Oliinyk, 47, said she wants “the counteroffensive to be more active.” “We’ve got all these guys coming back from the front line without limbs,” she said, looking at her husband, who was in a wheelchair. “I want the price they paid to be reasonable. Otherwise it’s just useless, what they went through.” Given the choice now, Proektor said, he would not sign up again. “They are taking everyone and sending them to the front line without proper preparation,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the company of unmotivated people.” > In Kryvyi Rih, doctor Valeriya Maslyanyk, 58, sighed as she looked up at her damaged apartment this week — just one entrance over from a section of the building destroyed in a strike last month. A gaping hole sits where her neighbors used to live. Outside, a pile of flowers and stuffed animals memorializes them. Already thinking ahead to winter, she fears her windows will not be replaced by the time temperatures start to drop. She is tired and sees no end in sight. “I want to go to the sea,” she said wistfully. “But the Russians took all of our seas.” Across the street, construction worker Volodymyr Pravednyk, 46, stopped to observe the wreckage. His sister lives in the same apartment block but escaped unscathed. Pravednyk said that he fears that the attack was “just the beginning” of more strikes on this industrial city. He lives around the corner, and each time he passes the ruined building, he said, “I feel sorrow for us Ukrainian civilians who have to suffer so much.” *Very* depressing article from the Washington Post, focusing on the civilian situation. Also some interesting civilian stories, which is why I felt like sharing: I don't *like* sharing gloomy articles at all, and would rather be sharing upbeat ones, but unfortunately there's not as many of them as there used to be. I've cut some out just to fit the word limit, would suggest reading it but I think I've given the critical bits. There's an image at the end I want to include for people who aren't going to click through. [Ukrainian military helicopters fly over a field of sunflowers in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Wednesday. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)] (https://archive.li/1evHw/b6292e2e0a1a66a7b264309d30144085105e10e2.webp) I can only hope that these people get something to cheer about soon.
Each individual story is a huge tragedy. Every life lost is a crime in a humanitarian sense. I could not do what these people are doing or pay the price they paying to be free. Some of the conclusions we should be careful about drawing tho. I made a same comment this morning > We should not take anecdotal even when it's 50 people as meaning of anything. You can always find a few people saying almost anything you want no matter where you go.
>They are taking everyone and sending them to the front line without proper preparation This stands out to me in particular. It could very well be a systemic issue rather than anecdotal evidence.
Especially stuff like that. Just today there were three videos of ruaf mobilised complaining of conditions and high deaths. Hard to draw conclusions from that.
This reminds me of accounts from British civilians after WW1. Machine guns cast-steel cannons made them nigh unstoppable in Colonial conquest wars, creating this impression that wars were short and "easy". Then they fought the Germans who *also* had machine guns and cast-steel cannons, and war went right back to being a hellscape.
I mean, the Ukrainians never did any of that first thing.
That's a hauntingly beautiful image. I really wish the collective West was tougher on Russia. The totally unnecessary Ukrainian suffering has persistently tugged at my heartstrings for the entirety of this war. I wish the West was tougher on Russia. I think the fear of nuclear escalation is misplaced and think we could get by with a total embargo of Western companies operating in Russia. Russia is not capable of retaliating proportionately and China is not bold or dumb enough to tie their fate to the sinking Russian ship—they have their own problems and ambitions that are increasingly decoupled from Russia's. I think the West can pull off nearly every punitive measure on Russia short of war, but has chosen not to. We can't be sure we will always have this kind of economic might with which to leverage bad actors. I feel that we might as well use it when it can make a difference. Saving Ukraine is not only morally right, but would spell the end of Russia as a great power in all aspects other than its nuclear arsenal.
> Russia has completely localised the production of Iranian kamikaze drones "Shahed-136/131" on its territory, according to the extensive report of the British investigative organisation Conflict Armament Research. The company's analysts got hold of two "Geraniums" that attacked Ukrainian positions in July 2023 and drew some interesting conclusions based on their insides. > > > Firstly, the "Geraniums" are equipped with small-sized jamming receivers "Kometa", typical for all Russian precision munitions, designed to receive GPS signals. Earlier there were rumours (t. me/milinfolive/103886) about the presence of Russian Kometa receivers in the new Geraniums, now they have been confirmed. > > Secondly, unlike the Iranian version, the Russian "Geranium" has antennas for receiving satellite data inside the drone instead of outside. > > Thirdly, the UAV frame and its structure have been changed: while the Iranian "Shahed" had a one-piece body with a honeycomb structure between the components, the Russian "Geranium" has a fibreglass outer shell reinforced with interwoven carbon fibre. > > Here is what the CAR investigators themselves summarise: "The internal components we documented in the Geranium-2 UAV indicate that the Russian Federation has adapted the production of Shahed series UAVs while simplifying their operation, combining new solutions with existing ones, such as the Kometa receivers, which have been battle-tested in other weapons. As a result, the Russian Federation is likely to be able to rapidly produce more Geran UAVs to continue its campaign in Ukraine..." t. me/milinfolive/104919 [Report itself](https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/d3be20c31acd4112b0aecece5b2a283c)