3791

We’ll see. May just be tough talk at this point.

3792

I think the problem is you need a big shaped charge warhead to deal with modern armor, so you need a big missile to deliver it. If it’s going to be human-carried, then range and onboard guidance will suffer. The Dragon and TOW took the guidance out of the missile, but then needed the wire. The NLAW seems a good compromise.

3793

This is a really dumb thought, but I kept noticing the colored bands on their uniforms as well. Everything they use is really fricken similar, and I’m a Tenet apologist, so I’m just sitting here thinking “I wonder if they’re on the forward team, or the backwards team”.

3794

First Tweeter is Ukraine Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation:

3795

Explosives don’t necessarily damage tank armour. The rounds from these man-portable AT weapons will be shaped charges. I think that pretty much is the improvement you’re describing. I had basic training with the previous British model, the old LAW 80. It fired 9mm tracer rounds that were ballistically matched to the heat round, so the idea was you fired off a few of those to get the range, then switched to heat. As someone else said, it was like playing the bloody accordion. There were about 3 different safeties, then you had to keep the thing steady while switching the crappy plastic lever over to heat. I hope the NLAW is easier to actually use.

Oh, or pretty much what Scott said.

3796

I’m no military expert, and I don’t know who this guy is, but he sounds knowledgeable, his comments align with what I’ve read elsewhere, and it seems to reasonably explain some of the issues the Russians are facing. Take it all with a grain of salt:

3797

This is like the US’s recoilless rifles. You fire a 50 cal bullet to see if it hits the tank, then you fire the 90mm or 110m HEAT round. That was a suicidal system. The TOW and the Dragon basically replaced that.

3798

That’s my impression. Last UK Ministry of Defense update tweet from 12 hours ago said “Russia has yet to gain control of the airspace over Ukraine, greatly reducing the effectiveness of the Russian Air Force.”

3799

I remember seeing after the first invasion, there were nerds analyzing pictures of mangled tanks, and they thought they could see that some of the tanks were missing the explosives in the reactive armor tiles, which isn’t unlikely given Russia (and Ukraine’s) problems with manufacturing quality.

Someone at the plant could’ve been skimming money, or dealing with shortages, or they just decided to go “Eh, good enough”.

3800

I get that, the RPG round was somewhat of a penetrator, just not enough of one to get through modern armor. Again, I’m a know-nothing, but maybe a double-sized payload on the same platform could be good enough to have an effect. I’m still stuck on the idea of an urban war where the missile-based systems aren’t as applicable. Weird to think of a modern country like Ukraine having to resort to insurgency tactics, but here we are.

3801

This is the sort of thing that will wake up a lot of Russians and get them thinking about consequences.

Will credit card processing work? I don’t really know, but I suspect it will not.

3802

I’m guessing the Ukrainians

  1. have a very good understanding of the capabilities of Russian SAM, and possibly thanks to friendly Rivet Joint know exactly which SAM radars are operating where and when. (There’s a reason those things cost a billion dollars. Each.) So they put their planes up when and where it’s safe to do so and can hurt the Russians when they overextend.

  2. They’ve seeded stinger units all over the place, so while they can’t actually deny any area to the Russians, every so often a Russian plane will attempt an airstrike in the wrong place and someone will get lucky and it will get shot down.

  3. The Russians have never really needed to practice SEAD, and the Ukrainians have some old Soviet SAM systems. While these are nowhere near as good as the S-500, it’s not like the Russian planes are stealth fighters either.

Ultimately I think the Ukrainian air force and SAM systems are probably too few and too antiquated to keep this up for long, but they want to keep the Russian cautious for as long as possible.

3803

Not sure what it was, but looks like they hit something

edit: and it was deleted

3804

I am confused - why do you think missile systems aren’t effective? Missile based systems such as the NLAW and Javelin are effective - you just have to use top attack missiles like these against top armor which is much thinner.

3805

Sorry, in relation to Ukraine, not overall. My impression is that Ukraine will have to fight a retreating war, and an urban war, so emplaced weapons don’t make as much sense as they do when you’re facing an enemy head-on with all the mobility and standoff capability of a superpower. NLAWs and Javelins are part of that, but at some point I’m assuming it’s going to be amateurs shooting down at tank columns from apartments. The NLAW seems well suited to that, Javelin less so. Truly emplaced weapons like the Dragon/TOW seem to not be viable at all.

3806

An interesting if optimistic feeling thread.

The bit about a brigade only being able to actually field a much smaller number of properly trained troops (and presuambly properly maintained vehicles) thanks to corruption seems especially plausible.

3807

Saab website says: “You can fire down 45 degrees and can shoot from inside a building, from a basement or from the second floor of a building out of the range of most tanks.”

3808

From this morning’s Pentagon Briefing care of WashingtonPost reporter. (Click any tweet for full thread, these are just the intro and some of the highlights I thought people would find most interesting:)

3809
3810

grafik

context: not much, a couple joining the ukrainian forces (SPIEGEL.DE)