What is happening is that as Russian air defenses are knocked out near the frontline it creates gaps in Russian air defenses. In general Ukraine has been far more sophisticated and effective at hunting down Russian artillery and air defenses than Russia has been at hunting down Ukrainian ones.

There is no way for Russia to monitor all of its territory thoroughly with radar, and so every one of these holes in the frontlines is a window. Given Ukraine’s sophisticated long range strike capacity things are quickly tilting in Ukraine’s favor as Ukraine progressively exploits more and more of those windows.

In general Operation Spiderweb was a demonstration of the fragility of fixed wing strike aircraft, they require large static infrastructure and given the extremely long range of Ukraine’s strike drones distance away from the frontline is no protection.

It has been amusing watching people forecast the end of the helicopter and attack helicopter and one of the crucial reasons that conclusion is so comically off the mark is that helicopters are simply more survivable than fast jets as they can be resupplied and supported in the field with mobile assets, it is much harder to pin a helicopter and associated logistics down to a reliable location that can be struck with a ballistic missile or some other decisive long range strike capability. Operation Spiderweb demonstrated that fast jets are incredibly vulnerable to sabotage and long range strike given their rigid requirements for operation (long run way etc…).

Do all Incels go to Heaven?

What you have accomplished is to introduce a completely arbitrary and reductive continuum and stated both ends are bad… so what?

I don’t care either way what you think about capitalism, I am telling you to stop comparing capitalism to nature because it exposes that you clearly don’t know anything about nature.

The entire concept of life itself is very capitalist — You have to exploit all resources available to you so you can survive and thrive. Only some species share resources — that too if they are in abundance for them.

This is an incredibly inaccurate way to describe nature and you feed into narratives that capitalism is “natural” that stop us from thinking critically both about nature and humanity when you frame things in this way.

It is terrorism, there is no other word for it, it is arbitrary indiscriminate violence that is heavily propagandized to instill fear in others for fundamentally political and irrational aims.

Even if this was a war, which I agree it is absurd to claim there is any kind of war being threatened against the US here, this is still murder.

After a missile strike destroys a boat and leaves survivors clinging to burning wreckage, clearly neutralizing any possible threat as the missile strike victims are now in need of emergency rescue, it is a CLEARLY warcrime to leverage an overpowering military advantage to simply turn around and murder the survivors because… you can?

There is a logic and system of rules for what determines when lethal force is approved and necessary in most professional militaries, there certainly used to be in the US military although this administration is trying to destroy it as fast as possible with the hopes that it will make us some good reliable enemies and we will be dragged into another war that sufficiently distracts the US populace from how fucking stupid and incompetent these idiots are…

Bullshit, whatever platform launched these missiles was likely a predator drone, helicopter or fighter jet. Any of these platforms have the capability to outrun, outmaneuver and encircle a powerboat easily. Categorically “fog of war” doesn’t work here because there is no fog, there is just a military pointlessly murdering people like shooting fish in a barrel. The US military has the capability to read the writing on a tattoo off of a crew member at night on one of these boats from far enough away that the surveillance equipment wouldn’t even be detected by the crew, the idea that a fog of war existed for the US military here is darkly hilarious and evil and if taken at face value is basically an admission of stunning incompetence that in my opinion demands legal action and jail time.

This excuse is equivalent to saying you aren’t responsible for where all the bullets go when you shoot at a target on a shooting range because of the “fog of war” of target shooting… No… you have to CHOOSE to fire every bullet and you have to CHOOSE not to pay attention to what you are shooting at. There should NEVER be fog of war when you are target shooting, period! Most gun owners would look at you like you had three heads if you were talking about target shooting with a rifle and remarked that you would casually fire in a direction without knowing if it was safe and passing off the comment with a shrug and a laugh saying “well how am I supposed to know where the bullets went???!?”. Here it is so much worse, we are talking about using multi-million dollar military equipment to murder people in cold blood to “hopefully” start a bullshit war to cover for this administrations crimes and utter incompetence from top to bottom.

Maybe Hegseth is mistaking a “Fog Of War” for a crushing hangover from being constantly drunk?

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Meanwhile the planet is dying from all the increased emissions from data center usage.

These violations could trigger provisions in U.S. law that should block military assistance to individual units of the Philippine military who can be credibly accused of committing gross violations of human rights.

The “Leahy law,” a term for two such provisions that came into focus during Israel’s war [edit genocide not war] in Gaza, ensures that no foreign military unit guilty of human rights violations receives U.S. assistance until it has taken prescribed remediation efforts. Its namesake, former U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, was banned from the Philippines in 2019 after supporting a critic of Duterte.

“A major goal of the Leahy law is accountability,” said John Ramming Chappell, the advocacy and legal advisor at the U.S. program of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “This is a cornerstone law when it comes to human rights and security assistance in the United States.” Chappell said that, while the white phosphorus incident would not fall under the auspices of the Leahy law, it “raises questions about how security forces in question are identifying civilians and determining civilian status,” a duty of allied militaries under international humanitarian law.

The Leahy law has had little effect in stemming human rights abuses within the Philippine military, despite a history of U.S. government concerns with its behavior. Charles Blaha, who served as director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights from 2016 to 2023, said his department focused on the Philippine police, who killed thousands in Duterte’s deadly drug war, and did not recall the law being applied to military units involved in the counterinsurgency

…

“Human rights can get outweighed by other factors,” Blaha said…

I don’t know exact numbers here because it hardly matters but I do know 16mm of armor is a joke against a sustained .50 burst from close range. You have to remember even in ideal circumstances for the Russian crew they are still inside of a metal vessel being repeatedly slammed by an incredible amount of force and inveitably violent vibration/shockwaves. I have no idea what kind of special hell it would be experiencing that, but it isn’t the kind of thing the human body could sustain for long whether the armor is penetrated or not.

Yeah but a Ukrainian drone hunting helicopter pair would have atleast one helicopter carrying much heavier more capable sensors than a shahed could physically carry which leaves this tactic with the basic issue that a helicopter can see much farther than a shahed can along multiple dimensions and can perform under any degree of jamming.

This seems like swimming out into the ocean and trying to hunt a shark with a knife to me… I mean theoretically it could work sure?

So what is the plan here? How does the shahed detect the helicopter? How does the shahed determine it is locked onto an enemy target and not a friendly one? Helicopters will absolutely be vulnerable to jet powered shaheds but only if they are deployed without the intention of working in close concert with friendly AntiAircraft units and reconnaisance/surveillance drones.

Best case scenario a forward shahed somehow detects the helicopter from a sufficient standoff range and communicates to a shahed further back carrying an AA missile to launch it blindly towards the helicopter and then I just guess they hope the missile doesn’t lock on to another shahed in the swarm?

I have ADHD and the way RFK talks about autism genuinely scares the shit out of me.

The cruelty and proudly brandished anti-intellectualism are the point.

The problem with having an internal set of critical thinking skills is it doesn’t quickly and efficiently scale.

Antitank missiles or heavy machine gun fire will absolutely mess this kind of armor up bad after a certain point, it all just ends up catching on fire and blinding/trapping the crew inside especially if the armor doesn’t have situational awareness or unimpeded turret travel to respond to and suppress incoming threats. That being said I am sure Ukraine is a lot more thoughtful how it deploys these in general and I am sure there are definitely appliations for this kind of armor under heavy assault conditions against thick drone walls. My point is I just don’t think this is representative of the future of armor design as when it comes to armored vehicles everything always comes down to mobility, mobility, mobility and every successful armored vehicle is just barely light enough to not become obsolete on a dynamic battlefield. There is little chance in my eyes that the future of armored vehicles is a commitment to doubling down on bulkier and bulkier defensive armor rather than leveraging other advantages and capabilities to create survivability for the crew. This isn’t to say I think armor is obsolete, what I am saying is that poorly manuverable armor was already hopelessly obsolete a long time ago before drones even entered the picture.

Yes, Russia has had to heavily rely on North Korean artillery ammunition supply and that reserve stock has run out. It was poor quality to begin with as well.

The real problem for Russia though is they can’t protect their artillery from being hunted down by Ukraine so they can’t deploy it in as forward threatening positions on assault and thus for Ukraine fiber optic drones, glidebombs and mines are far more of a realistic threat to armor.

It seems like a decent optimization for an environment where drones are the primary threat but these circumstances were artificially engineered in the Ukraine war from Ukraine being severely underequipped with artillery reserves and traditional AT such as javelins.

My point is optimizing for defending only against drones makes armor extremely vulnerable, massive targets for direct fire weapons and artillery (artillery vulnerability being from reduced mobility and situational awareness).

Perfect target practice for one of these.