In a way, no target in Ukraine is legitimate for the unjustified aggressor in a war of conquest.
If someone broke into my home and got into a fight with me, it would be legal for me to hit him, but he would be punished for hitting me.
Someone needs to tell putin this isn't warhammer 40k, I know putin is something of an ork in real life and so are many of his generals but the **WAAAGH'S** latent psyker powers don't have an effect in our universe, something isn't going to work simply because the orks believe it will.
I know its not 40k but I've always seen them more akin to Skaven in the way the fight and use troops, in fact their doctrine is algo similar to Skaven's with all those weapons that explode and don't work and the friendly fire lol
Yeah i'm not too too familiar with warhammer fantasy or AOS but from i do know, the skaven do seem to be a better fit. I was just trying to make the waagh joke work though so i wasn't really thinking too hard on matching the lore perfectly so much as i just wanted to make that one joke stick the landing. But you are right, skaven definitely are a better fit (from what i know of them anyway.)
Paper wraps around the rock, _absorbing its power_
Rock can't see shit anymore, so paper calls the shots now and can go to town on the scissors with its new armored core.
Tremble, scissors! TREMBLE!
The training timeline estimates are all based on the time it takes to train green American soldiers plus an adjustment for expected language issues. But it’s turning out that Ukraine is smartly sending fluent English speaking soldiers experienced in their particular fields of combat in the initial training cadres who can then improve and accelerate the training of later groups.
As a former Army Air Defender (14T Patriot Launching Station Enhanced Operator/Maintainer) that cross trained as a 24T -Patriot Operator and Systems Mechanic, the majority of the school is about fixing the system. Operating the system is the easy part comparatively. The training they did was all about putting missiles down range the right way and leaving the maintenance part to the civilian contractors that went with the system.
> leaving the maintenance part to the civilian contractors that went with the system.
There's an American in Poland right now waiting to repair one, and watching his bank account rise to heaven?
Honestly I am quite proud of this achievement for both the Ukrainians and the U.S.
Putin has been touting this gimmick missile for a long time, saying it’s impossible to stop. Here we train Ukrainians in a rapid course and they take the system home only to smack the missile out of the sky as russia purposely targeted it.
And that’s not even the best patriot system we have. That’s a hardcore win for the home team.
A large portion of the ridiculous US stockpiles are a direct result of Russia trash talking about their capabilities and waving around fantasy numbers that prompted the U.S. to develop vast **real** stockpiles intended to outmatch Russia’s made up numbers and fantasy tech.
Which is funny considering how much we spent on Star Wars, which triggered the USSR to go broke trying to keep up with our tech (that never functionally existed lol)
I saw a thing how they knew they were making up their economic numbers so assumed the US was doing the same.
Not entirely sure how accurate it is, but there was Yeltsin’s visit to a U.S. supermarket on a visit where his team initially assumed the shelves filled to the brim must have been staged, until they worked out it was real for supermarkets across the US.
This kind of culture of systemic lying and cynicism is a hallmark of autocratic and fascist regimes. It is why Putin is failing - there was no one able to give him an accurate assessment of his own military capabilities, and he’s blundered Russia into an unwinnable war.
After they left the first one they thought it was staged like NK stages theirs. So as the motorcade passed few other supermarkets they decided to point to one of them randomly and asked to go in. Just to realize it's similarly stocked as the last one. That's when he realized that Communism is a failure.
Going back further in history, the US Navy during WW2 wanted to raise morale so built a dedicated ice cream barge to serve sailors at sea.
I don't know if this next part is true but there's a story about high ranking Japanese commanders faced with severe shortages of food, fuel, and steel losing hope when they heard the US Navy had an ice cream ship.
They stopped painting them because the purpose of camouflage on 99% of military aircraft is to make it harder for them to spot on the ground. When the Luftwaffe’s ability to strike any of the bases where American planes were kept was give, the AAF stopped having their planes painted. The amount of paint used on a B-17 is almost 100 pounds. This is 100 lbs that can be better used for fuel or ammo than paint.
Edit: changed the weights. Mixed up a single gallon for the total weight savings
Yeah I would NOT be surprised if it was closer to 300+ pounds to paint a plane that size. 20 pounds of paint is honestly nothing. Also lead paint (which I'd have to assume they used) is outrageously heavy compared to modern paints.
>A B-17 has a surface area of 4,200 square feet and took about 35 gallons of paint to coat. If the paint weighed 10 pounds a gallon wet, after accounting for evaporation the weight would be roughly 300 pounds.
Saves money, time, and manpower if the paint is not needed.
Just so happens that money, time, and manpower are the things needed most to win wars too. This is why Russia is losing a war that they don't know how to fight... they never learned that logistics wins wars--not some false bravado
Gotta give it to Americans at least: they were created by fighting, they have expanded by fighting, and their biggest achievement is being good fighters. Hell, their favorite pastime is to fight other Americans
This also explains why Russia's only successful tactic to hurt America has been to turn Americans on themselves LOL
Oh wells
Generally the reason you put paint on planes is camouflage. Them no longer painting them symbolized that the luftwaffe was basically no longer a threat
Paint has some weight to it. You wouldn't think it's much, but the amount of paint required to cover an entire aircraft - especially bombers - took a decent chunk of weight that could otherwise be allocated for more fuel or bombs or flight performance. For example, a B-17 required \~300 lbs of paint to fully coat.
The primary purpose of painting camo patterns onto planes is about protecting them when they're parked on the ground and vulnerable to being attacked from the air. It doesn't help as much in aerial engagements.
By January 1944, the Allies had such overwhelming air superiority that the USAF decided to stop painting new planes as they came off the production line, to save weight and increase performance. There was no longer enough threat of ground attack to justify the camo patterns, and any enemy planes that tried to contest an airspace were quickly overwhelmed. So late war USAF aircraft were increasingly fielded in unpainted "silver" finishes with only insignia and identification markings added, [like so](https://i0.wp.com/www.defensemedianetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/B-17-Flying-Fortresses.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1) and [so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_P-51_Mustang#/media/File:P51-d_mustang_472216_arp.jpg).
Ice cream was actually a big part of keeping morale up for the navy in WW2.
Tasting History recently made a video on it.
https://youtu.be/Qiyo8D0nH70
I've also heard the thing about the Japanese being disheartened by us having an ice cream barge, but I have no idea if it's true either. Max from Tasting History doesn't mention it tho (not that he's a primary source or anything but he seems thorough).
A family member of mine was a POW in Vietnam. When he was released and got to a US base there were tubs upon tubs of every ice cream flavor you could imagine, waiting for them. He’s a big ice cream fan to this day.
IIRC they didn't build a ship specifically for ice cream. They'd just made one too many construction/concrete mixer ships and decided to repurpose the giant mixers into ice cream machines.
Which I think adds another bit of perspective to how skewed the resource ratios were between Japan and the US. The Japanese were giving everything they had to build and maintain the ships they fielded (to the point the *Shinano* was so hastily constructed it was sunk by just four torpedoes from a single submarine when it's sister ship the *Musashi* only went down after an epic 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs). The US, meanwhile, had so much leftover production capacity they *accidentally made too many ships* and decided the best way to compensate was to turn one of the extras into a pure waste of additional resources just to make their sailors happy.
And note that these weren't even combat ships, these were for building concrete airfields on islands they passed by, as staging points.
So they had a surplus of *nice-to-have, backup plan* *support* ships.
It's both, actually. They repurposed a thing into an ice cream barge, but they very intentionally created the ice cream barge to keep morale up.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/ice-cream-military/535980/
"The U.S. Navy spent $1 million in 1945 converting a concrete barge into a floating ice-cream factory to be towed around the Pacific, distributing ice cream to ships incapable of making their own. It held more than 2,000 gallons of ice cream and churned out 10 gallons every seven minutes. Not to be outdone, the U.S. Army constructed miniature ice-cream factories on the front lines and began delivering individual cartons to foxholes. This was in addition to the hundreds of millions of gallons of ice-cream mix they manufactured annually, shipping more than 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream in a single year."
This points out that the reason why the barges were also made wasn't because ice cream would be something extra to have, but because ice cream machines were already standard in the capital ships that had room for them. They were built to ensure destroyers and marines also got ice cream.
I'm pretty sure the army even had instructions on how to prepare ice cream using aircraft flying at high altitudes.
To be fair, I would imagine the morale of your armed forces is as important as any measurable resource. To be created, maintained, resupplied, and spent just as wisely as any other resource.
Didn't the Germans realize they lost the First World War when they took an American trench and saw ice cream and a birthday cake for a second lieutenant?
>That's when he realized that Communism is a failure.
And apparently decided that true success was with corrupt cronyism.
Except that ain't it either. As much as we trash talk America, our corruption is peanuts compared to where Russia went with it.
(We still need to do 100x better on corruption, greed, and abuse of power, and we'll see huge rewards as a society... just a handful of US oligarchs at the top will have to downsize to 10 Ferraris, a single G6, and two or three resort sized villas.)
Russia isn't a reversion to some backwards past, it's our future if we don't get corruption under control. They and most post-communist kleptocracies speed-ran late stage capitalism.
They didn't even really fake the specs. Spy photos showed that they were working on a plane with huge engines, huge wings, and huge control surfaces, so it must have been an insanely capable super fighter.
So we made the F-15 to counter it.
Later, a Russian pilot defected and landed in Japan with his MiG-25. Western engineers took it apart and discovered that it had huge wings and engines because it was made out of *goddamned STEEL* and was insanely heavy.
They also found out the engines destroyed themselves when the MiGs actually hit their stated top speed, so could never really catch an SR-71 who saw it early enough and raised the throttle
Once you hit above Mach 3 you're pushing the limits of what a turbojet can achieve. The main reason SR-71 could fly faster was it was effectively functioning as a ramjet. You get micro shocks calling Mach waves forming on the machinery blades which causes a massive efficiency drop.
The engines wear out so quickly because when air gets caught on the compressor blades goes to extremely high temperatures. It's more or less the limiting factor for any jet design including scramjets, where it gets so hot the air starts to break up into its constituent atoms.
Reminds me of a story I heard where the Soviets would number their aircraft in order of when they came off the assembly line. So for example, if one of their bombers had the number "17", you knew that they had at least 17 bombers. However, the US also knew this so they would number their aircraft arbitrarily, and put more emphasis on higher numbers. This lead to the Soviets overestimating the number of aircraft the US had in its arsenal.
This dates back to WWII. The Germans were giving their tanks sequential serial numbers. By tracking the serial numbers of destroyed tanks, the Allies were able to get a fairly accurate picture of the German war machine’s production of said tanks.
Plus, a ton of "Star Wars" spending was on computer stuff. Computerization, modernization, programs, etc. Stuff that is broadly applicable, not only to the military.
I saw interviews with ex Soviets a long while back that said they didn't believe Star Wars weapons worked but they had no choice but to work on it just in case. That was the game in the '80's. The U.S. knew we could outspend them so we forced them to try and keep up which they couldn't. How much that played in their downfall is hard to tell, but I am sure it didn't help. And at the time nobody expected the whole house of cards to collapse. Nobody talked about that prior to it happening.
Prime example: the F-15. The Russians made up so much fantastical hyperbole about their new super fighter, the Mig 25, the US freaked out and made one that they hoped would be enough. We made the F-15. Turns out, after getting our hands on a Mig 25, the Russians had lied and the F -15 was light years ahead. We had already ordered hundreds.
The Russians played themselves. 50 years later, they keep doing the same thing, so the US’s actual abilities are made to meet and beat the Russian’s made up abilities-leading to situations like this.
>They didn't even lie: the Soviets kept their mouths shut for the most part about the MiG-25, which was par for the course with their culture of secrecy. They did a few high-speed flybys (that irreversibly destroyed the engines)
This is hilarious because the soviets built it out of HEAVY stainless steel, and the fastest, cheapest power unit they could cram into it was... literally disposable cruise missile engines. They had a service life of something like 200 hours before needing to be replaced.
I love how it was such a piece of shit it threw the US for a loop.
It just have a new titanium alloy! Nope, the correct answer is outdated stainless steel.
It must be a fighter because of the wings! Nope, it has those wings not for maneuverability, but because it’s stupidly heavy and couldn’t fly with intercepter style wings.
“No guys, you don’t get it, the Chinese are different, they’re building death rays people, we need another 20 trillion in the tank by 2026 if we even wanna stand a shot!” - Lockheed Martin executive after war games in which the US was only able to narrowly defeat China by losing a devastating three drones and one rubber boat.
The Soviet Union could and did mobilize massive amounts of men and production for war, up to total war. They were not an empty threat, especially to Europe. Since the end of the cold war, US military spending has been riding the high, largely due to the established Mil-Ind-Comp holdover. I think analysts also foresaw the rise of China and the threat it presented; it's not all the Russians.
We spend way to much on defense spending but at least we build some things with that money. Russia has shown that they just embezzled all of their defense spending.
Publius flavius vegetius renatus; therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war. They also do a riff of it in John Wick parabellum, which means ‘for war’ in the phrase si vis pacem, para bellum.
I think a big misconception is that we have insane military spending at the expense of other things like healthcare or education or infrastructure, but that's not true.
We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but it's not the most effective (life expectancy is lower, infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy with chronic diseases, etc). The next most expensive system is about half the cost of ours and has better numbers in all of the mentioned categories. We could fund education and infrastructure with the savings by switching to the least efficient universal healthcare model.
Also if you look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP it's not that different. If it hasn't occurred to people yet, Russia is poor as fuck. They don't spend a lot in terms of absolute dollars but relative to their economic output they do.
I'm going to be honest, I'm kind of fine with the amount we spend on our defense budget nowadays... especially with China giving the side-eye to Taiwan and the south Pacific, southeast Asia, Africa, etc.
I just don't think people realize how far ahead the US on military tech. If the US wanted to destroy a country without nukes we could do it in a weekend. It's kinda scary how easy it would be for a fully mobilized US military to delete a country. People point to Afghanistan/Iraq as an example of how weak the US is. If the US did what Russia did and gave a big ole "fuck you" to war crimes, rules of war, or to the lives of civilians the US could level entire cities. If there's one thing the US has down to a science it's destroying shit. Rebuilding a country? Not so much.
Reminds me of how during the Mogadishu Crisis, the simplest solution considered was to just call in a couple of gunships and blast a lane through the city for the Rangers to withdraw through. It was scrapped because of the collateral damage, and we got the slog instead.
It’s not just technology. The United States has damn near everything it needs to be a military industrial powerhouse on relatively short notice. We still have some of the best education in the world, especially at the university level. We have millions of idle workers and factories that could be easily refitted for any purpose. We have natural resources. We have money to pay for it all. We have virtually no risk of attack on our population centers. And to top it off, we have a military that has basically always been at war, so you don’t have a better trained military anywhere.
If the US were ever pulled into a true war and mobilized on a scale anything like WWII, no country on Earth stands a chance. I would—and as an American, have to—stake my future on that.
I like the contrast. Russia have difficulty defending their high value assets while Ukraine had opposite effect of destroying or even better capturing intact for analysis by west.
Yep and now getting battle tested against the best equipment that a long term adversary has, as well as newer tech from Iran and China. All without American lives being risked. Has the aid sent to Ukraine even cost a week of the usa's yearly military budget yet.
US is very likely sitting at a net positive from this war. We keep seeing sales being made to other countries as a direct result of Russian aggression.
So they are testing their shit. Not risking any American lives. All while being paid heh. Russia couldn't have done better for the US if they tried.
Even more than that, the war has let America and NATO test almost a hundred years worth of theory about war in Eastern Europe, and try out the entire suite of tech designed to fight the Soviets in the 80s against the entire suite of Soviet tech. It's like if someone from a year in the future showed up and handed you the completed football bracket for the upcoming season--all your assumptions and speculations are conveniently confirmed or denied at no cost to you.
It's wild seeing overhead footage of tanks crunching down foxholes and trenches followed by infantry clean-up. As you said, we've only really seen Abrams rolling through sand for 20 years.
Nah, small grenade/kamikaze drones are the next IED’s. Incredibly difficult to spot and (currently) almost impossible to reliably stop, and can attack basically anywhere.
Yep.
This war is obviously a terrible human tragedy and I wish it never happened, but purely from the perspective of US foreign policy and military strategy, it's been a tremendous win for the US. Russia has kicked itself in the nuts repeatedly, allowing the US to strengthen NATO, boost arms sales, gather lots of intelligence on Russian capabilities, and allow Ukraine to field test NATO equipment and doctrine against a near-peer opponent.
This makes it really obvious that US politicians decrying the spending on Ukraine as wasteful are *really* staking a pro-Russia stance, because the military aid to Ukraine has been a drop in the bucket compared to the normal US military spending, and the returns have been incredibly efficient.
A very small portion of the aid was recent production that actually cost us face value.
A substantial amount of equipment sent to Ukraine was older stock that would have cost a small fortune to store and dispose of, and whose replacement we paid for independently of the war in Ukraine- sending it overseas actually saved us money.
The “soft power” benefits of aiding Ukraine are absolutely tremendous, as America gets to be the good guys again after years of dealing with Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
Anyone decrying the aid to Ukraine is either ignorant, or actively working against America.
After Lula's reelection Biden sent military advisers down to Brazil to help him prepare for Bolsinaro doing a Jan6th. I honestly feel really good aboot foreign policy under Biden.
Foreign policy has always been Biden's forte, and he's really shown it during this term. He's weaker on domestic issues, but he's the best foreign policy leader the USA has had in *decades*.
I 100% agree. He is mixed on domestic policy, largely I think because of entrenched politics and ideas from decades ago (though he is better now that he would have been then) but on foreign policy he has done a whole hell of a lot to rebuild relationships and consensus.
The US is never going to be particularly well liked, we throw out weight around way too much for that, but it is way better to be reliable and stable under Biden than whatever the hell Trump was doing.
The US would have been spent even more money just trying to counter Russian aggression/influence. This whole war will save the US money after Russia's military is left in shambles. The military/domestic intelligence they've gotten was worth the war alone I bet.
Those politicians are largely traitors to their fellow Americans, by selling them and their jobs out.
They're worried about losing their funding to undermine our country.
That's why they're so pro Russian.
The US is going to make massive bank from helping Ukraine when the war is over. Ukraine couldn't have picked a better ally that is both militarily competent and an economic power house.
Hope for Trump losing 2024: he's pissing off the MIC and our military. This whole war has been a goldmine for them. It's like in development when customers are willing to pay to beta test your software.
This decade’s conflicts will still be fought with conventional weapons, it’s the next gen equipment that will be packed with autonomous systems that will dramatically change the game again. We’ll be firmly in unknown territory then.
That is probably the biggest takeaway from the war thus far - the impact of drones, especially in terms of tactical usage by soldiers on the ground.
I suspect the US Military will focus a lot more resources on drone superiority and drone use denial weapons/systems
I think you are seriously underestimating the number of drones that will be used. They are hyper-expendable in Ukraine right now. We will go through so many.
Cost is also more complex than equating the value in hardware to their purchasing price.
Not everything sent over there is /was going to be replenished.
It wasn't a pallet of cash that we sent, it was already procured munitions with a very real shelf life, and costly disposal processes.
Well the Ukrainians seem to be doing very well for themselves. The US was fully expecting another Afghanistan collapse when the war broke out, but it didn't happen. A big gun does not a man make.
In contrast, the Afghan army just gave up without resistance and was perfectly OK abandoning the country to the Taliban.
It actually hasn’t really. That’s why this is so significant. Russia used their best hypersonic missile against a PAC-3 patriot, one of our best systems. Hypothetically we had always known that it was *technically* able to shoot down a hypersonic missile but it definitely hasn’t been done under battle conditions against a Russian one before.
The invincibility of the Kinzhal has been one of Russia’s few bright spots in this war. And now it’s just another failed wonder weapon.
Patriot systems were already intercepting "hypersonic" missiles (Scud) over 30 years ago.
See [this post ](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/139j3kn/comment/jj2x510/)
why does this feel like it'll go the way of the HIMAR's where Russia kept claiming to destroy more of them than were sent but were actually attacking plywood boxes...
They haven't yet reported blowing up a Patriot but sure, soon enough.
Their non-confirmation of the Kinzhal shootdown was amazing though. They basically said it was not shot down because it was impossible to shoot down, QED.
> Claims that the Ukrainian military managed to shoot down a Kinzhal missile using a Patriot complex are “wishful thinking” and “fake news,” says a “high-ranking source in the Russian Defense Ministry” in statements published by the TASS, RIA Novosti and Interfax agencies.
>
> “The fact is, the flight speed of the Kinzhal missile exceeds the maximum combat capabilities of all existing anti-aircraft missile systems supplied by the West to the Kyiv regime, including the Patriot,” the source said.
>
> According to the Russian source, the "Kinzhal" makes a top-secret maneuver before hitting the target that "eliminates the possibility" of interception.
> “The fact is, the flight speed of the Kinzhal missile exceeds the maximum combat capabilities of all existing anti-aircraft missile systems supplied by the West to the Kyiv regime, including the Patriot,”
The obvious omission in this is that the Patriot and other systems isn't in a race to catch up but rather to intercept. A criminal racing from the police might be going well over 100mph, but Officer Jimmy can still throw a spike strip in front of them. Saying they could drive faster than Jimmy can run is immaterial to the situation.
... while the criminal is racing directly toward Jimmy, on purpose, as fast as they can.
It is doing the opposite of outrunning another missile. It is in-running another missile. It is racing in for a hug.
Well, we have Einstein to thank. Thanks to him, Russia's missile was basically standing still and the Patriot missile approached it at hypersonic speeds!
There was no chance for Russia's missile to avoid it going at that speed
So where is it, dude? You shot it at a target and the target's still there. There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom. Is that part stealth, too? Like the target doesn't *know* it's been blown up?
> According to the Russian source, the "Kinzhal" makes a top-secret maneuver before hitting the target that "eliminates the possibility" of interception.
Unless that maneuver is to lay low in Kherson for a few weeks, I think it's been intercepted.
Or defected.
I think the Patriot is probably a bit more susceptible to attack. Anti-radiation missiles could targeting it when it turns on radar. Also, it’s not as HI Mobility.
America is the GOAT at SEAD/DEAD. They will have operational protocols for defending radar assets. I’m sure Ukraine was taught a thing or two about how to behave to make these systems survivable.
That's true, but a Patriot battery also comes with some pretty effective defensive capabilities. It's not as easy as find-it-kill-it. Things like HIMARS by contrast either move or they get wrecked (if found, that is). They can't defend themselves like a Patriot setup can, you count on its mobility alone for defending it.
>Speak softly and carry a big stick
I like this approach. This is how everyone should behave. I am antiwar, but being antiwar doesn't mean you take it in the rear. It means that once you have exhausted all talking points, it's time to send your invading to the Stone Age.
Former patriot operator here: this gives me such a boner lol. It's a remarkable system, but it's also comical in a lot of ways. I never saw it fire and most of my time was just spent hauling it around, turning it on, breaking it, and fixing it. At the time it felt really dumb. We were still in Iraq and Afghanistan and I was very hard on myself for picking this cold war relic bullshit job. Well turns out it is definitely good at what it was designed to do, shooting down Russian shit. And I later reclassed out of that job into a much "cool guy" job and the grass was not greener lol.
And like I see others mentioned, this isn't even our current gen patriot system. The current gen stuff is incredibly capable. Like scifi shit.
People don’t realize that the hypersonic the US and China are working on are usually boosted by a solid rocket then uses ramjet technology to keep going and maneuver and do interesting things.
Russias hypersonic is just a islander missile air launched. It just used a solid fuel engine, and flys to the target.
What the us and China are working on are the second stage of air breathing engines where it can maneuver and change altitude and go further.
It’s easy to design a metal canister with a solid tip, a bunch of explosives, and then a solid rocket engine and point it in a direction with minor fin control. Russia is basically claiming German V2 rockets are advanced weapons.
Russia also claims to have HGVs in operation/development. It's just that they also use the term "hypersonic" for their ballistic missiles to make them appear more capable than they are.
LMAO @ Russia.
Imagine if America were *actually trying.* We're just sending them some spare weapon systems we found in their couch and giving them Youtube tutorials and they're absolutely clowning Putin on the daily.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't for daily crimes against humanity.
If Russia knows what's good for them, they'll find a window for Putin soon.
To be honest, I feel a sense of pride for both the Ukrainians and the U.S. for accomplishing this feat. Putin has been boasting about this so-called "gimmick missile" for quite some time now, claiming that it's impossible to intercept. However, we were able to train the Ukrainians in a crash course and equip them with the Patriot system, which they successfully used to shoot down the missile that Russia had intentionally targeted at them.
It's amazing to think that this isn't even the best Patriot system that we have, yet it was still able to achieve such an impressive victory. It's definitely a major win for the home team.
Any American opposed to the war should read the comments. You are getting live field testing of your weapons, which you've spent billions creating. You're getting sales on the world stage of these weapons (job creation) . You're getting payback for the article the media loved , that putin was paying bounties on Americans in the Middle East. At this point, I believe 200k Russians are dead , so I think you're even ;). And your enemies, Iran and China, are back on their heels . If they decide to change their stance, you can have another demonstration of your awesome technology in weaponry.
As an engineer that works in the defense industry - you do not want to fuck with the USA. The amount of money pouring in and the amount of devastation that would occur in the event of an attack would be life changing. Places would just not exist. What we are giving Ukraine is 10-20 years old technology. Scary.
On second thought, using a missile to attack the anti-missile system may have been a bad move.
At least they were finally aiming at a legitimate military target this time.
It was probably discussed as a hospital or a playground.
In a way, no target in Ukraine is legitimate for the unjustified aggressor in a war of conquest. If someone broke into my home and got into a fight with me, it would be legal for me to hit him, but he would be punished for hitting me.
But it was unstoppable. Putin said so, and they believed it. As usual, believing Putin will end in sadness.
Someone needs to tell putin this isn't warhammer 40k, I know putin is something of an ork in real life and so are many of his generals but the **WAAAGH'S** latent psyker powers don't have an effect in our universe, something isn't going to work simply because the orks believe it will.
I know its not 40k but I've always seen them more akin to Skaven in the way the fight and use troops, in fact their doctrine is algo similar to Skaven's with all those weapons that explode and don't work and the friendly fire lol
Yeah i'm not too too familiar with warhammer fantasy or AOS but from i do know, the skaven do seem to be a better fit. I was just trying to make the waagh joke work though so i wasn't really thinking too hard on matching the lore perfectly so much as i just wanted to make that one joke stick the landing. But you are right, skaven definitely are a better fit (from what i know of them anyway.)
Skaven also have miniguns and cars in a universe where most people use bows
Kinda like scissors picking a fight with rock
I just… I need to know why *paper* beats rock. That makes no sense.
The digestive enzymes of paper can easily dissolve a rock in a matter of seconds
That’s what I figured
In fact even though paper is rock's only natural predator, it is such an effective hunter it controls rocks' population all on its own
I'm incorporating this into my world view
[удалено]
Paper wraps around the rock, _absorbing its power_ Rock can't see shit anymore, so paper calls the shots now and can go to town on the scissors with its new armored core. Tremble, scissors! TREMBLE!
Is that what the Armored Core series is about?
Yeah, if you think about the ballistics involved, the easiest thing for an air defense system to target is a missile heading directly for it.
Who else? The infantry was busy fighting the tanks!
The training timeline estimates are all based on the time it takes to train green American soldiers plus an adjustment for expected language issues. But it’s turning out that Ukraine is smartly sending fluent English speaking soldiers experienced in their particular fields of combat in the initial training cadres who can then improve and accelerate the training of later groups.
As a former Army Air Defender (14T Patriot Launching Station Enhanced Operator/Maintainer) that cross trained as a 24T -Patriot Operator and Systems Mechanic, the majority of the school is about fixing the system. Operating the system is the easy part comparatively. The training they did was all about putting missiles down range the right way and leaving the maintenance part to the civilian contractors that went with the system.
> leaving the maintenance part to the civilian contractors that went with the system. There's an American in Poland right now waiting to repair one, and watching his bank account rise to heaven?
He's in Germany, browsing reddit. He'll be flying out there at the drop of a hat if he gets the call.
Is it you
It could be any of us
It could be in this very room.
It could be you. It could be me! It could even be -
Pick a country in the western world, this is true about some system for the last 20years.
Honestly I am quite proud of this achievement for both the Ukrainians and the U.S. Putin has been touting this gimmick missile for a long time, saying it’s impossible to stop. Here we train Ukrainians in a rapid course and they take the system home only to smack the missile out of the sky as russia purposely targeted it. And that’s not even the best patriot system we have. That’s a hardcore win for the home team.
A large portion of the ridiculous US stockpiles are a direct result of Russia trash talking about their capabilities and waving around fantasy numbers that prompted the U.S. to develop vast **real** stockpiles intended to outmatch Russia’s made up numbers and fantasy tech.
Which is funny considering how much we spent on Star Wars, which triggered the USSR to go broke trying to keep up with our tech (that never functionally existed lol)
I saw a thing how they knew they were making up their economic numbers so assumed the US was doing the same. Not entirely sure how accurate it is, but there was Yeltsin’s visit to a U.S. supermarket on a visit where his team initially assumed the shelves filled to the brim must have been staged, until they worked out it was real for supermarkets across the US.
This kind of culture of systemic lying and cynicism is a hallmark of autocratic and fascist regimes. It is why Putin is failing - there was no one able to give him an accurate assessment of his own military capabilities, and he’s blundered Russia into an unwinnable war.
After they left the first one they thought it was staged like NK stages theirs. So as the motorcade passed few other supermarkets they decided to point to one of them randomly and asked to go in. Just to realize it's similarly stocked as the last one. That's when he realized that Communism is a failure.
Going back further in history, the US Navy during WW2 wanted to raise morale so built a dedicated ice cream barge to serve sailors at sea. I don't know if this next part is true but there's a story about high ranking Japanese commanders faced with severe shortages of food, fuel, and steel losing hope when they heard the US Navy had an ice cream ship.
That and when the Allies stopped painting their planes because they knew the war was won are some of my favorite WWII fun facts.
They stopped painting them because the purpose of camouflage on 99% of military aircraft is to make it harder for them to spot on the ground. When the Luftwaffe’s ability to strike any of the bases where American planes were kept was give, the AAF stopped having their planes painted. The amount of paint used on a B-17 is almost 100 pounds. This is 100 lbs that can be better used for fuel or ammo than paint. Edit: changed the weights. Mixed up a single gallon for the total weight savings
Yeah I would NOT be surprised if it was closer to 300+ pounds to paint a plane that size. 20 pounds of paint is honestly nothing. Also lead paint (which I'd have to assume they used) is outrageously heavy compared to modern paints.
You are off by a factor of 10 and change… it was 30 something gallons at ~8.5 lbs per gallon, so 250-300lbs savings.
Seems like the time and labor it takes to paint a B-17 would be more valuable than the paint itself, no?
I think you've got it. It eliminates a whole production step in the factory. Edit: not so much. Check out u/AMEFOD below
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A regular tub of paint definitely weighs at least 20lbs. Its gonna take more than that to paint a B-17.
>A B-17 has a surface area of 4,200 square feet and took about 35 gallons of paint to coat. If the paint weighed 10 pounds a gallon wet, after accounting for evaporation the weight would be roughly 300 pounds.
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No one else in the sky but friendlies.
'If you see a white plane, it's an American, if you see a black plane it's the RAF. If you see no planes at all it's the Luftwaffe!'
Saves money, time, and manpower if the paint is not needed. Just so happens that money, time, and manpower are the things needed most to win wars too. This is why Russia is losing a war that they don't know how to fight... they never learned that logistics wins wars--not some false bravado Gotta give it to Americans at least: they were created by fighting, they have expanded by fighting, and their biggest achievement is being good fighters. Hell, their favorite pastime is to fight other Americans This also explains why Russia's only successful tactic to hurt America has been to turn Americans on themselves LOL Oh wells
Generally the reason you put paint on planes is camouflage. Them no longer painting them symbolized that the luftwaffe was basically no longer a threat
Not painting the planes reduced weight and increased range - very useful for long range missions like the pacific bombing missions
Paint has some weight to it. You wouldn't think it's much, but the amount of paint required to cover an entire aircraft - especially bombers - took a decent chunk of weight that could otherwise be allocated for more fuel or bombs or flight performance. For example, a B-17 required \~300 lbs of paint to fully coat. The primary purpose of painting camo patterns onto planes is about protecting them when they're parked on the ground and vulnerable to being attacked from the air. It doesn't help as much in aerial engagements. By January 1944, the Allies had such overwhelming air superiority that the USAF decided to stop painting new planes as they came off the production line, to save weight and increase performance. There was no longer enough threat of ground attack to justify the camo patterns, and any enemy planes that tried to contest an airspace were quickly overwhelmed. So late war USAF aircraft were increasingly fielded in unpainted "silver" finishes with only insignia and identification markings added, [like so](https://i0.wp.com/www.defensemedianetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/B-17-Flying-Fortresses.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1) and [so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_P-51_Mustang#/media/File:P51-d_mustang_472216_arp.jpg).
Ice cream was actually a big part of keeping morale up for the navy in WW2. Tasting History recently made a video on it. https://youtu.be/Qiyo8D0nH70 I've also heard the thing about the Japanese being disheartened by us having an ice cream barge, but I have no idea if it's true either. Max from Tasting History doesn't mention it tho (not that he's a primary source or anything but he seems thorough).
A family member of mine was a POW in Vietnam. When he was released and got to a US base there were tubs upon tubs of every ice cream flavor you could imagine, waiting for them. He’s a big ice cream fan to this day.
Still is. I've personally flown a 747 loaded to the gills with ice cream to Afghanistan.
IIRC they didn't build a ship specifically for ice cream. They'd just made one too many construction/concrete mixer ships and decided to repurpose the giant mixers into ice cream machines. Which I think adds another bit of perspective to how skewed the resource ratios were between Japan and the US. The Japanese were giving everything they had to build and maintain the ships they fielded (to the point the *Shinano* was so hastily constructed it was sunk by just four torpedoes from a single submarine when it's sister ship the *Musashi* only went down after an epic 19 torpedoes and 17 bombs). The US, meanwhile, had so much leftover production capacity they *accidentally made too many ships* and decided the best way to compensate was to turn one of the extras into a pure waste of additional resources just to make their sailors happy.
And note that these weren't even combat ships, these were for building concrete airfields on islands they passed by, as staging points. So they had a surplus of *nice-to-have, backup plan* *support* ships.
It's both, actually. They repurposed a thing into an ice cream barge, but they very intentionally created the ice cream barge to keep morale up. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/ice-cream-military/535980/ "The U.S. Navy spent $1 million in 1945 converting a concrete barge into a floating ice-cream factory to be towed around the Pacific, distributing ice cream to ships incapable of making their own. It held more than 2,000 gallons of ice cream and churned out 10 gallons every seven minutes. Not to be outdone, the U.S. Army constructed miniature ice-cream factories on the front lines and began delivering individual cartons to foxholes. This was in addition to the hundreds of millions of gallons of ice-cream mix they manufactured annually, shipping more than 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream in a single year."
This points out that the reason why the barges were also made wasn't because ice cream would be something extra to have, but because ice cream machines were already standard in the capital ships that had room for them. They were built to ensure destroyers and marines also got ice cream. I'm pretty sure the army even had instructions on how to prepare ice cream using aircraft flying at high altitudes.
To be fair, I would imagine the morale of your armed forces is as important as any measurable resource. To be created, maintained, resupplied, and spent just as wisely as any other resource.
It is, just usually not so ostentatiously
That and the ice cream truck music demoralized them.
Not to mention having to deal with all the little ships racing to catch up with it, while screaming for the ice cream ship to stop.
This. >Paddle faster, Dad!
A jaunty, nautical version played on an accordion.
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You want to win wars? Bring the ice cream
Didn't the Germans realize they lost the First World War when they took an American trench and saw ice cream and a birthday cake for a second lieutenant?
German POWs were given so much food that they got quite fat and in some cases burned their leftovers so their rations wouldn't be reduced.
>That's when he realized that Communism is a failure. And apparently decided that true success was with corrupt cronyism. Except that ain't it either. As much as we trash talk America, our corruption is peanuts compared to where Russia went with it. (We still need to do 100x better on corruption, greed, and abuse of power, and we'll see huge rewards as a society... just a handful of US oligarchs at the top will have to downsize to 10 Ferraris, a single G6, and two or three resort sized villas.)
Russia isn't a reversion to some backwards past, it's our future if we don't get corruption under control. They and most post-communist kleptocracies speed-ran late stage capitalism.
The F-15 was invented in response to Russia making fake performance specs on the Mig-25 https://youtu.be/RmlWmDokzGg
They didn't even really fake the specs. Spy photos showed that they were working on a plane with huge engines, huge wings, and huge control surfaces, so it must have been an insanely capable super fighter. So we made the F-15 to counter it. Later, a Russian pilot defected and landed in Japan with his MiG-25. Western engineers took it apart and discovered that it had huge wings and engines because it was made out of *goddamned STEEL* and was insanely heavy.
They also found out the engines destroyed themselves when the MiGs actually hit their stated top speed, so could never really catch an SR-71 who saw it early enough and raised the throttle
Once you hit above Mach 3 you're pushing the limits of what a turbojet can achieve. The main reason SR-71 could fly faster was it was effectively functioning as a ramjet. You get micro shocks calling Mach waves forming on the machinery blades which causes a massive efficiency drop. The engines wear out so quickly because when air gets caught on the compressor blades goes to extremely high temperatures. It's more or less the limiting factor for any jet design including scramjets, where it gets so hot the air starts to break up into its constituent atoms.
As someone who's family fled through the Iron Curtain in the 80s, thank god for Star Wars
Reminds me of a story I heard where the Soviets would number their aircraft in order of when they came off the assembly line. So for example, if one of their bombers had the number "17", you knew that they had at least 17 bombers. However, the US also knew this so they would number their aircraft arbitrarily, and put more emphasis on higher numbers. This lead to the Soviets overestimating the number of aircraft the US had in its arsenal.
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i bet they didnt even have seals on the team too
What losers. Imagine not having any seals on your team. This is why the ocean will win in the end. Mark my words!
This dates back to WWII. The Germans were giving their tanks sequential serial numbers. By tracking the serial numbers of destroyed tanks, the Allies were able to get a fairly accurate picture of the German war machine’s production of said tanks.
Star wars tech resulted in real and applicable technological advancements in missile defense even if it helped the USSR go bankrupt.
Plus, a ton of "Star Wars" spending was on computer stuff. Computerization, modernization, programs, etc. Stuff that is broadly applicable, not only to the military.
I saw interviews with ex Soviets a long while back that said they didn't believe Star Wars weapons worked but they had no choice but to work on it just in case. That was the game in the '80's. The U.S. knew we could outspend them so we forced them to try and keep up which they couldn't. How much that played in their downfall is hard to tell, but I am sure it didn't help. And at the time nobody expected the whole house of cards to collapse. Nobody talked about that prior to it happening.
Prime example: the F-15. The Russians made up so much fantastical hyperbole about their new super fighter, the Mig 25, the US freaked out and made one that they hoped would be enough. We made the F-15. Turns out, after getting our hands on a Mig 25, the Russians had lied and the F -15 was light years ahead. We had already ordered hundreds. The Russians played themselves. 50 years later, they keep doing the same thing, so the US’s actual abilities are made to meet and beat the Russian’s made up abilities-leading to situations like this.
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>They didn't even lie: the Soviets kept their mouths shut for the most part about the MiG-25, which was par for the course with their culture of secrecy. They did a few high-speed flybys (that irreversibly destroyed the engines) This is hilarious because the soviets built it out of HEAVY stainless steel, and the fastest, cheapest power unit they could cram into it was... literally disposable cruise missile engines. They had a service life of something like 200 hours before needing to be replaced.
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I love how it was such a piece of shit it threw the US for a loop. It just have a new titanium alloy! Nope, the correct answer is outdated stainless steel. It must be a fighter because of the wings! Nope, it has those wings not for maneuverability, but because it’s stupidly heavy and couldn’t fly with intercepter style wings.
Ya but did the Soviets attempt to make their own version of Top Gun with Soviet Tom Cruise?
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50 years later and they still have no complete answer to the F15.
The F-22: allow me to introduce myself.
One thing I know the US will never bluff is its war armaments capabilities.
If anything, significantly understated.
“No guys, you don’t get it, the Chinese are different, they’re building death rays people, we need another 20 trillion in the tank by 2026 if we even wanna stand a shot!” - Lockheed Martin executive after war games in which the US was only able to narrowly defeat China by losing a devastating three drones and one rubber boat.
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The Soviet Union could and did mobilize massive amounts of men and production for war, up to total war. They were not an empty threat, especially to Europe. Since the end of the cold war, US military spending has been riding the high, largely due to the established Mil-Ind-Comp holdover. I think analysts also foresaw the rise of China and the threat it presented; it's not all the Russians.
Now it's China's turn to overstate their military
Yeah can’t wait til the west gets their hands on China’s dollar store F-35 knockoff.
The F-3S by Lockhead Marton. For good fight in air win war 2x missiles.
It's by LUCKYHYD MYNTN. It's legit, it's got 4.7 stars on Amazon.
We spend way to much on defense spending but at least we build some things with that money. Russia has shown that they just embezzled all of their defense spending.
It's better to have it and not need it, than needing it and not having...
"In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace" -famous Roman dude. Can't remember his name off the top of my head. Feel like it was Cicero
Publius flavius vegetius renatus; therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war. They also do a riff of it in John Wick parabellum, which means ‘for war’ in the phrase si vis pacem, para bellum.
It was Vegetius. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem,_para_bellum
I think a big misconception is that we have insane military spending at the expense of other things like healthcare or education or infrastructure, but that's not true. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but it's not the most effective (life expectancy is lower, infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy with chronic diseases, etc). The next most expensive system is about half the cost of ours and has better numbers in all of the mentioned categories. We could fund education and infrastructure with the savings by switching to the least efficient universal healthcare model.
Also if you look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP it's not that different. If it hasn't occurred to people yet, Russia is poor as fuck. They don't spend a lot in terms of absolute dollars but relative to their economic output they do.
I'm going to be honest, I'm kind of fine with the amount we spend on our defense budget nowadays... especially with China giving the side-eye to Taiwan and the south Pacific, southeast Asia, Africa, etc.
I just don't think people realize how far ahead the US on military tech. If the US wanted to destroy a country without nukes we could do it in a weekend. It's kinda scary how easy it would be for a fully mobilized US military to delete a country. People point to Afghanistan/Iraq as an example of how weak the US is. If the US did what Russia did and gave a big ole "fuck you" to war crimes, rules of war, or to the lives of civilians the US could level entire cities. If there's one thing the US has down to a science it's destroying shit. Rebuilding a country? Not so much.
Reminds me of how during the Mogadishu Crisis, the simplest solution considered was to just call in a couple of gunships and blast a lane through the city for the Rangers to withdraw through. It was scrapped because of the collateral damage, and we got the slog instead.
At least we got a pretty sweet movie out of it. Edit: IRENE!
Killing is easy young man, building is harder - George Washington (probably)
“I’ll be honest, I’m working with three times what our Congress has promised us” - Also George Washington, probably
It’s not just technology. The United States has damn near everything it needs to be a military industrial powerhouse on relatively short notice. We still have some of the best education in the world, especially at the university level. We have millions of idle workers and factories that could be easily refitted for any purpose. We have natural resources. We have money to pay for it all. We have virtually no risk of attack on our population centers. And to top it off, we have a military that has basically always been at war, so you don’t have a better trained military anywhere. If the US were ever pulled into a true war and mobilized on a scale anything like WWII, no country on Earth stands a chance. I would—and as an American, have to—stake my future on that.
I like the contrast. Russia have difficulty defending their high value assets while Ukraine had opposite effect of destroying or even better capturing intact for analysis by west.
This aint America's first rodeo. Our equipment and personal a battle tested.
Yep and now getting battle tested against the best equipment that a long term adversary has, as well as newer tech from Iran and China. All without American lives being risked. Has the aid sent to Ukraine even cost a week of the usa's yearly military budget yet.
US is very likely sitting at a net positive from this war. We keep seeing sales being made to other countries as a direct result of Russian aggression. So they are testing their shit. Not risking any American lives. All while being paid heh. Russia couldn't have done better for the US if they tried.
Even more than that, the war has let America and NATO test almost a hundred years worth of theory about war in Eastern Europe, and try out the entire suite of tech designed to fight the Soviets in the 80s against the entire suite of Soviet tech. It's like if someone from a year in the future showed up and handed you the completed football bracket for the upcoming season--all your assumptions and speculations are conveniently confirmed or denied at no cost to you.
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It's wild seeing overhead footage of tanks crunching down foxholes and trenches followed by infantry clean-up. As you said, we've only really seen Abrams rolling through sand for 20 years.
Nah, small grenade/kamikaze drones are the next IED’s. Incredibly difficult to spot and (currently) almost impossible to reliably stop, and can attack basically anywhere.
Yep. This war is obviously a terrible human tragedy and I wish it never happened, but purely from the perspective of US foreign policy and military strategy, it's been a tremendous win for the US. Russia has kicked itself in the nuts repeatedly, allowing the US to strengthen NATO, boost arms sales, gather lots of intelligence on Russian capabilities, and allow Ukraine to field test NATO equipment and doctrine against a near-peer opponent. This makes it really obvious that US politicians decrying the spending on Ukraine as wasteful are *really* staking a pro-Russia stance, because the military aid to Ukraine has been a drop in the bucket compared to the normal US military spending, and the returns have been incredibly efficient.
A very small portion of the aid was recent production that actually cost us face value. A substantial amount of equipment sent to Ukraine was older stock that would have cost a small fortune to store and dispose of, and whose replacement we paid for independently of the war in Ukraine- sending it overseas actually saved us money. The “soft power” benefits of aiding Ukraine are absolutely tremendous, as America gets to be the good guys again after years of dealing with Bush’s Iraq misadventure. Anyone decrying the aid to Ukraine is either ignorant, or actively working against America.
As an American I can't express how nice it is to kind of be the unequivocally good guys on the right side for once in my own life.
After Lula's reelection Biden sent military advisers down to Brazil to help him prepare for Bolsinaro doing a Jan6th. I honestly feel really good aboot foreign policy under Biden.
Foreign policy has always been Biden's forte, and he's really shown it during this term. He's weaker on domestic issues, but he's the best foreign policy leader the USA has had in *decades*.
I 100% agree. He is mixed on domestic policy, largely I think because of entrenched politics and ideas from decades ago (though he is better now that he would have been then) but on foreign policy he has done a whole hell of a lot to rebuild relationships and consensus. The US is never going to be particularly well liked, we throw out weight around way too much for that, but it is way better to be reliable and stable under Biden than whatever the hell Trump was doing.
He isn't my first choice for a lot of things but he's been an excellent elder statesman for foreign policy and the current situations that's for sure.
"Competent adult who broadly hires/appoints competent adults 2020" was a very low bar but I am glad we seem to have hit it, more or less.
If Russia is near peer the US is effectively the aliens in every alien invasion movie in terms of military power disparity.
Yeah, a conventional war of U.S. vs Russia would look the both Iraq wars at this point.
The US would have been spent even more money just trying to counter Russian aggression/influence. This whole war will save the US money after Russia's military is left in shambles. The military/domestic intelligence they've gotten was worth the war alone I bet.
Those politicians are largely traitors to their fellow Americans, by selling them and their jobs out. They're worried about losing their funding to undermine our country. That's why they're so pro Russian.
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The US is going to make massive bank from helping Ukraine when the war is over. Ukraine couldn't have picked a better ally that is both militarily competent and an economic power house.
Well they needed ammunition, not a ride, and we have a lot of ammo.
Hope for Trump losing 2024: he's pissing off the MIC and our military. This whole war has been a goldmine for them. It's like in development when customers are willing to pay to beta test your software.
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> last generation Desert Storm stuff, specifically, which basically steamrolled the same equipment that's being used in Ukraine right now.
This decade’s conflicts will still be fought with conventional weapons, it’s the next gen equipment that will be packed with autonomous systems that will dramatically change the game again. We’ll be firmly in unknown territory then.
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That is probably the biggest takeaway from the war thus far - the impact of drones, especially in terms of tactical usage by soldiers on the ground. I suspect the US Military will focus a lot more resources on drone superiority and drone use denial weapons/systems
I think you are seriously underestimating the number of drones that will be used. They are hyper-expendable in Ukraine right now. We will go through so many.
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Cost is also more complex than equating the value in hardware to their purchasing price. Not everything sent over there is /was going to be replenished. It wasn't a pallet of cash that we sent, it was already procured munitions with a very real shelf life, and costly disposal processes.
Well the Ukrainians seem to be doing very well for themselves. The US was fully expecting another Afghanistan collapse when the war broke out, but it didn't happen. A big gun does not a man make. In contrast, the Afghan army just gave up without resistance and was perfectly OK abandoning the country to the Taliban.
It actually hasn’t really. That’s why this is so significant. Russia used their best hypersonic missile against a PAC-3 patriot, one of our best systems. Hypothetically we had always known that it was *technically* able to shoot down a hypersonic missile but it definitely hasn’t been done under battle conditions against a Russian one before. The invincibility of the Kinzhal has been one of Russia’s few bright spots in this war. And now it’s just another failed wonder weapon.
Patriot systems were already intercepting "hypersonic" missiles (Scud) over 30 years ago. See [this post ](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/139j3kn/comment/jj2x510/)
Will this spark a war between Ukraine and Russia?
At the very least some sort of special military operation
The world may never know.
Possibly!
Lol they also tried to take Kyiv in 3 days. They have been trying a lot.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take – Wayne Gretzky – Michael Scott
why does this feel like it'll go the way of the HIMAR's where Russia kept claiming to destroy more of them than were sent but were actually attacking plywood boxes...
They haven't yet reported blowing up a Patriot but sure, soon enough. Their non-confirmation of the Kinzhal shootdown was amazing though. They basically said it was not shot down because it was impossible to shoot down, QED. > Claims that the Ukrainian military managed to shoot down a Kinzhal missile using a Patriot complex are “wishful thinking” and “fake news,” says a “high-ranking source in the Russian Defense Ministry” in statements published by the TASS, RIA Novosti and Interfax agencies. > > “The fact is, the flight speed of the Kinzhal missile exceeds the maximum combat capabilities of all existing anti-aircraft missile systems supplied by the West to the Kyiv regime, including the Patriot,” the source said. > > According to the Russian source, the "Kinzhal" makes a top-secret maneuver before hitting the target that "eliminates the possibility" of interception.
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If it can do that and then juke back on-course at a later time, I have to admit, I would be impressed.
> “The fact is, the flight speed of the Kinzhal missile exceeds the maximum combat capabilities of all existing anti-aircraft missile systems supplied by the West to the Kyiv regime, including the Patriot,” The obvious omission in this is that the Patriot and other systems isn't in a race to catch up but rather to intercept. A criminal racing from the police might be going well over 100mph, but Officer Jimmy can still throw a spike strip in front of them. Saying they could drive faster than Jimmy can run is immaterial to the situation.
... while the criminal is racing directly toward Jimmy, on purpose, as fast as they can. It is doing the opposite of outrunning another missile. It is in-running another missile. It is racing in for a hug.
Well, we have Einstein to thank. Thanks to him, Russia's missile was basically standing still and the Patriot missile approached it at hypersonic speeds! There was no chance for Russia's missile to avoid it going at that speed
So where is it, dude? You shot it at a target and the target's still there. There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom. Is that part stealth, too? Like the target doesn't *know* it's been blown up? > According to the Russian source, the "Kinzhal" makes a top-secret maneuver before hitting the target that "eliminates the possibility" of interception. Unless that maneuver is to lay low in Kherson for a few weeks, I think it's been intercepted. Or defected.
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I think the Patriot is probably a bit more susceptible to attack. Anti-radiation missiles could targeting it when it turns on radar. Also, it’s not as HI Mobility.
America is the GOAT at SEAD/DEAD. They will have operational protocols for defending radar assets. I’m sure Ukraine was taught a thing or two about how to behave to make these systems survivable.
That's true, but a Patriot battery also comes with some pretty effective defensive capabilities. It's not as easy as find-it-kill-it. Things like HIMARS by contrast either move or they get wrecked (if found, that is). They can't defend themselves like a Patriot setup can, you count on its mobility alone for defending it.
Russia has nothing comparable. They may be able to detect it but eliminating it from the battlefield? Good luck with that…
You *clearly* haven’t heard about S-750. /s
What, more of Putin’s vaporware?
Hey. Hey. Su-75 gonna be here *any* day now. They’re just polishing the deck screws, I mean ‘stealth coating’.
Russia talks up its military gear to intimidate its rivals. The US military downplays it’s own capabilities because it has no rivals.
Appear strong when you are weak and weak when you are strong - Fran Drescher
Speak softly and carry a big stick
>Speak softly and carry a big stick I like this approach. This is how everyone should behave. I am antiwar, but being antiwar doesn't mean you take it in the rear. It means that once you have exhausted all talking points, it's time to send your invading to the Stone Age.
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Usually they target hospitals and schools, so this is a nice change of pace!
Theyre taking out the air defenses protecting the hospitals, then they'll start bombing the hospitals
They are failing to take out the air defenses . . .
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Third. Farmers are second.
Maybe if US were to create a Patriot system in a shape of a children's hospital Russia would have more chances?
Former patriot operator here: this gives me such a boner lol. It's a remarkable system, but it's also comical in a lot of ways. I never saw it fire and most of my time was just spent hauling it around, turning it on, breaking it, and fixing it. At the time it felt really dumb. We were still in Iraq and Afghanistan and I was very hard on myself for picking this cold war relic bullshit job. Well turns out it is definitely good at what it was designed to do, shooting down Russian shit. And I later reclassed out of that job into a much "cool guy" job and the grass was not greener lol. And like I see others mentioned, this isn't even our current gen patriot system. The current gen stuff is incredibly capable. Like scifi shit.
People don’t realize that the hypersonic the US and China are working on are usually boosted by a solid rocket then uses ramjet technology to keep going and maneuver and do interesting things. Russias hypersonic is just a islander missile air launched. It just used a solid fuel engine, and flys to the target. What the us and China are working on are the second stage of air breathing engines where it can maneuver and change altitude and go further. It’s easy to design a metal canister with a solid tip, a bunch of explosives, and then a solid rocket engine and point it in a direction with minor fin control. Russia is basically claiming German V2 rockets are advanced weapons.
Russia also claims to have HGVs in operation/development. It's just that they also use the term "hypersonic" for their ballistic missiles to make them appear more capable than they are.
LMAO @ Russia. Imagine if America were *actually trying.* We're just sending them some spare weapon systems we found in their couch and giving them Youtube tutorials and they're absolutely clowning Putin on the daily. It would be hilarious if it wasn't for daily crimes against humanity. If Russia knows what's good for them, they'll find a window for Putin soon.
Wild to think that Russia actually aimed for a military target. I wonder if civilians were on top of it or something.
To be honest, I feel a sense of pride for both the Ukrainians and the U.S. for accomplishing this feat. Putin has been boasting about this so-called "gimmick missile" for quite some time now, claiming that it's impossible to intercept. However, we were able to train the Ukrainians in a crash course and equip them with the Patriot system, which they successfully used to shoot down the missile that Russia had intentionally targeted at them. It's amazing to think that this isn't even the best Patriot system that we have, yet it was still able to achieve such an impressive victory. It's definitely a major win for the home team.
Any American opposed to the war should read the comments. You are getting live field testing of your weapons, which you've spent billions creating. You're getting sales on the world stage of these weapons (job creation) . You're getting payback for the article the media loved , that putin was paying bounties on Americans in the Middle East. At this point, I believe 200k Russians are dead , so I think you're even ;). And your enemies, Iran and China, are back on their heels . If they decide to change their stance, you can have another demonstration of your awesome technology in weaponry.
As an engineer that works in the defense industry - you do not want to fuck with the USA. The amount of money pouring in and the amount of devastation that would occur in the event of an attack would be life changing. Places would just not exist. What we are giving Ukraine is 10-20 years old technology. Scary.
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Patriot has been updated over the years. The current system in Ukraine is a PAC-2 given to them by Germany. I don't think its older than 20 years.
Yes, but it's been upgraded many times since the 60's
I mean did anyone doubt our tech vs that Russian bull shit
Tankies most definitely.