311–320 of 367 posts
None of this explains HOW is it that the Russians are able to produce artillery shells at 7 times the rate of the entire Western world, while being sanctioned? If they can do it, why can't we? [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufactur...
> while being sanctioned Sorry? When did Russia became dependent on the Western steel or explosives?
I really really enjoyed the piece[0], but boy, you think this is bad, wait until we're exchanging missiles with a peer military. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of missiles[1] in the air at the same time, in a kaleidoscopic dazzle of altitudes, velocities, sensor profiles. Every combat simulation seems to turn into what you might call a "magazine fight" - i.e., who runs out of bullets first. We'll probably burn throu…
I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece so much. Honestly, I expected to get 20 views on the whole thing, as I felt like a crazy person researching this area for like 6 months. That collapsed in the belief I probably can't do much to help, at which point I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else in the wilderness. I did speak to a few missile manufacturers facing the same thing, including DOD's lack of urgency, w…
[0] I keep my sanity by staying grounded in lightweight markup and developer tools - there's really nothing you do in the Big XML world that you can't do in vanilla Asciidoc on standard tooling.
[1] Real hard for me to not put that acronym in quotes. The IETM as a thing is a bit of an open joke. Each IETM implementation is basically a completely nonstandard, homebrewed content browser. Think if you went back in time to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and then just had every single hardware manufacturer go absolutely nuts making their own idea of what that means. Then you make up "IETM Levels" of capability defined by total non-sequiturs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while being sanctioned Sorry? When did Russia became dependent on the Western steel or explosives?
They may not need raw materials, but they need the equipment for manufacturing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently they're modified jet-skis with cheap FPV navigation equipment. Yeah. I read about that recent sinking, momentarily cheered for Ukraine, and then thought about the larger implications and was like... man the USN is screwed, huh?
Eh. The USN is prepared to deal with speedboats piloted by suicide bombers. Does the jetski drone test ship security in a way that those do not?
- A peer/neer-peer adversary can presumably throw a very large number of simultaneous drones at a USN vessel. I don't know how feasible it is rustle up 10 or 100 reliable simultaneous human suicide bombers.
- The jet ski drones can surely be physically smaller than a speedboat that needs to hold a human
- The jet skis can trade some of that size back and armor themselves against CIWS etc in ways that would be less practical for a suicide boat
The US government-owned facilities are not the only US source of 155mm rounds. NAMMO [1] is a major manufacturer, and they have a facility in Mesa, AZ. Here's their marketing video for 155mm rounds.[2] Nammo's management complains that they are being offered 3-4 year contracts, and they need 10-15 year contracts to build new factories. Peacetime demand for large-caliber ammo is very low, so when there's not a war on,…
> Here's a modern 155mm shell forging plant in Germany.[3] > [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNtmrYeBwWQ That appears to be a Serbian company, though?
It should probably be restated that instead of the conflict in Ukraine catching our production capacity off guard, that rather it was our production posture along with denuclearization and disarmament of Ukraine that set the stage for the conflict. I’m not a “team America world police” advocate, much more the opposite. Even as stated in the article, most production is more interested in a deterrent. Hate ‘em or hate…
It should probably be restated that instead of the conflict in Ukraine catching our production capacity off guard, that rather it was our production posture along with denuclearization and disarmament of Ukraine that set the stage for the conflict. I’m not a “team America world police” advocate, much more the opposite. Even as stated in the article, most production is more interested in a deterrent. Hate ‘em or hate…
> Hate ‘em or hate ‘em, nukes are a deterrent to open war. This is demonstrably false. Nukes have allowed those who have them, to bully (wage asymmetric warfare on) those who don't. Would the USA have been so cock-sure about murdering 5% of Iraqs population, if it didn't have nukes?
Air or missile strikes against US territory are very difficult to pull off. Only China or Russia would have any chance to overwhelm US missile defenses. Anything small-scale would be answered by conventional strikes and a ground invasion. No nukes are warranted unless entire cities get slagged or nukes or biological or chemical weapons are used.
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Even the attempt to make them again might provoke China to react. Eventually with an invasion, after slagging the facilities with cruise missiles or air bombardment. They will be committed to overwhelm any air defense to accomplish that. What to do with them anyways? Taiwan would need plentiful supply of them and a reliable delivery mechanism. Japan surrendered because the US had total air superiority and bluffed abo…
> Japan surrendered because the US had total air superiority and bluffed about their supply of nukes. This is at best disputed, and alternative explanations have a great deal more supporting evidence.
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> these shells have been redirected to Israel and are being used in Gaza The front in Gaza is not Israel's only wartime front, not in the current conflict and not during past conflicts: Currently, Israel needs this ammunition to defend itself from Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon that have engaged in heavy indiscriminate rocket launching against Israeli civilian populations in the Northern Israel. At least 65,000…
This is very clearly not what the ruling says. And it is intellectually evasive to characterize as such, given that information about the ruling is widely and immediately available.
And I don't mean "evasive" in terms of spin, polish or oversimplifying. But rather, of an overt attempt to obfuscate the nature of the ruling.
There's no way that you, yourself, can plausibly believe the above statement you just made.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How? How US can be loosing a war it doesn't fight in? It's the same as saying that North Korea is loosing against Ukraine because they deliver ammunition to Russia. A fallacy. And even if you'd want to use that metric. How exactly loosing zero US personnel at the cost of getting a real-life assessment of NATO combined mobile warfare against the Soviet artillery superiority doctrine is a lose situation for US?
Which assessment of NATO mobile warfare we can talk about when there's literally no NATO's biggest asset - aviation and no biggest enabler or mobile warfare - battlefield isolation?
But I'd say that this makes it even the more valuable lesson. Battlefield characteristics is still very close and Russians (now) are acting like they would act against the NATO-trained forces.
And, of course, it's liberal on my part to put Ukrainian Army in the basket of NATO forces as that is only true for maybe a year (after the first rotations ended).
That being said. I think that there's unprecedented amount of military intel US is getting out of this conflict for pennies on the dollar.