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What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

reuters.com

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Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#631

Post by selimthegrim »

InitialLastName wrote: post #538
selimthegrim wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm teaching in an ABET accredited program using MIT textbooks and I'm not impressed. If engineers want to avoid learning how to integrate by parts or use the chain rule it seems like a great idea. Arubis' comment above seems on point.

Are you saying that the current program lets them avoid learning those things, or that they should be allowed to avoid learning them? I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.

It's more an issue of what the students are retaining from calculus.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#632

Post by rootusrootus »

denton-scratch wrote: post #614
kyboren wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think this is the most viable offramp. Everyone gets to plausibly claim victory, if not total victory. Russia keeps the money pit dear to the hearts of many Russians and doesn't become a Chinese vassal state. Ukraine ends the bloodshed and saves their sovereignty for the cost of what they have already lost. There will be sticking points, for sure, notably around Putin himself, reparations, and yes, the status…

Sorry, but I don't think there's an offramp. I can't see the Russian leadership backing down from their stated goals. That means they have to subdue Ukraine, and probably Finland, Estonia and Poland too. If they don't win in at least Ukraine, then they have lost badly, and their economy is destroyed. I don't think they'll settle now for a piece of Crimea or a piece of Donbas. The entire story is that the whole of Ukr…

> Finland, Estonia and Poland

That would be a hell of an escalation. Emphasis on hell. Estonia and Poland are NATO members, which means WW3. And attacking Finland, though not yet a NATO member, would probably invite the largest response from Europe in memory. World war indeed.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#634

Post by water8 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #360
PaulHoule wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about more emphasis on fighters in the U.S. Also the U.S. put its best anti-aircraft missiles on ships.

The US blue-water navy has many similar problems to the Soviet Army. Specifically: operating out of range of land-based friendly fighters and interceptors. And since there are only so many carriers, naval aviation also can't be assumed. Consequently, SAMs are prioritized, compared to the army or air force.

That's what the KC-46 and KC-135 are for

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#635

Post by water8 »

thereddaikon wrote: post #349
PaulHoule wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about more emphasis on fighters in the U.S. Also the U.S. put its best anti-aircraft missiles on ships.

True. The Navy has spent more resources on perfecting SAMs than the Army or Air Force have. Standard Missile and Aegis are a very potent combination. So much so that they adapted it to ground based setups with "Aegis Ashore" which is literally the system taken straight off an Arleigh Burke class destroyer and installed as a ground based missile defense system.

I worked on the software for the Ageis and Iron Dome systems. The program got off to a rocky start but once we got things dialed in, it's accuracy became exceptional

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#636

Post by antisthenes »

brimble wrote: post #529
danenania wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even see how (b) is going to work at this point--with the massive flow of weapons and money that is coming from the West, and NATO safe havens on the borders, Russia will be playing whack-a-mole against insurgency forever no matter how much force they use. Imagine if the Iraq or Afghanistan insurgencies had had access to an endless supply of top-of-the-line weapons, orders of magnitude more funding, and 'safe…

> It seems like Putin went on tilt. It's hard to fathom any rational justification for this. At least destabilizing Ukraine is necessary to prevent near-term, rapid decline for the Russian Federation. Ukraine's energy production potential and proximity to Europe make them a likely serious competitor, at a time when renewables are already putting pressure on petrostates like Russia. Russia made Ukrainian resources in…

> This is part of a series of actions aimed at creating short- and mid-term economic stability for Russia, while also improving their strategic situation

I don't know if you're fully aware of what effect the sanctions are having or going to have on Russia, but anything resembling economic stability is absolutely NOT it.

Russia will face a humanitarian crisis, perhaps almost as severe as Ukraine itself, especially in its poorer regions, with anything resembling a tech industry evaporating nearly overnight, and massive unemployment following.

These effects will not dissipate in the short or mid-term.

At least I don't see them being resolved unless they massively pivot to selling petro-chemicals to China instead.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#637

Post by dmz73 »

lmohseni wrote: post #309
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean all I see when I look online is Russia attacking Civilians and not caring who they attack. Yes there is a degree of restraint because they are trying to take the country over, they cannot burn it to the ground, but they don’t really seem to care about civilians and keep committing war crimes, just now they directly bombed near a hotel and train station, people trying to flee the country. Saying they are ‘pro-c…

We have footage of cluster bombs striking civilian apartment buildings in Kharkiv: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZuKEwuZznw

That footage is not of a cluster bomb. Cluster bombs consist of many small bombs that spread over a large area and don't all detonate at once but instead detonate over longer period of time in order to maximize casualties and make area difficult to access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_munition.

NATO used cluster bombs in the 1990s bombing of Serbia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ni%C5%A1_cluster_bombing. If it is a war crime now, it was a war crime then, where are the prosecutions of those responsible? It has been 20 years and I don't see anyone being held accountable.

I think we are now seeing a clearer picture of what happens when there is a conflict in an urban area. In the past we got to see a video from a plane guiding a bomb to the building from above (Iraq wars) and assumed it was an isolated military installation. Then we saw news footage of residential buildings in various states of destruction and just never associated that with the above video of bombs dropping on buildings. If you drop bombs near residential area, there will be destruction in that residential area. Look at what truck bomb did in Oklahoma City bombing - that was one makeshift (but large) bomb that detonated outside a building and according to Wikipedia "The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, and destroyed or burned 86 cars".

Maybe this war will finally get people to see how destructive and wasteful they are but somehow I doubt it.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#638

Post by mmarq »

Cd00d wrote: post #353
jl6 wrote: post #261

I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…

suzerainty You can't just lob a hundred dollar word out like that! I spent several moments trying to figure out what your typo was before allowing the possibility that you didn't have one. a relationship in which one state or other polity controls the foreign policy and relations of a tributary state, while allowing the tributary state to have internal autonomy

It comes from Civilization V, where you could become the suzerain of city states.

;)

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#639

Post by davidhyde »

> “The confusion over how Russia has used its air force comes as President Joe Biden's administration rejects calls by Kyiv for a no-fly zone that could draw the United States directly into a conflict with Russia, whose plans for its air force are unclear.”

Perhaps Russia assumes that dominating the skies with more aircraft than Ukraine would force an international call for a no-fly zone. This would drag other countries into the conflict because the mandate would have to be enforced.

Re: What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped

#640

Post by empressplay »

Steltek wrote: post #331
jl6 wrote: post #261

I guess everyone's weighing in with their view, so why not? Firstly, we should be mindful that the fog of war is now in play, and a good amount of what we think we know is unverifiable. With that caveat out of the way... It seems that the Russian soldiers are making efforts to avoid attacking civilians directly. Counterexamples exist and could be explained by rogue units, incompetence, or hot-blooded revenge on local…

I figured it was that concerted civilian targeting will force NATO to act. Or perhaps that the close ties between the two countries is still somewhat able to override Putin's shitty bloodthirsty instincts in some ways.

When Biden said in the SOTU that Americans were going to be okay he basically put the last nail in the coffin of NATO intervention, sorry guys
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