CayceG

The president was coming back from inaugurating a new dam in Azerbaijan. 

Which means that the only reasonable conclusion is that the French are behind it. 

What is every helicopter crash if not a hard landing. 

He's gotta be completely paste. The weather shots I've seen floating around on twitter are awful. Opaque fog. Misting rain. Just completely inadvisable to be flying through the mountains in. 

Very good use of Rileying a thread title.

22 minutes ago, elbobo said:

 

unfortunately there are also teaching another lesson to the rest of the world, don't ever give up your nukes

I keep seeing this, but the hard reality is Ukraine never had nukes. 

There were weapons on their territory. But the Ukrainian authorities never had the permissive action links needed to control them. They were Russia's nukes all along. And acting otherwise would have gotten Russia AND the US to invade and forcibly do a Project Sapphire on Ukraine. 

Tariffs are bad. What GB said is more to the point.

But if Chinese stuff is being "unfairly subsidized" then maybe we ought to unfairly subsidize our own high tech manufacturing. 

19 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

This situation is 100% on the US and other NATO allies for not allowing Ukraine to strike within Russia. Russia has been able to build up forces in Belgorod for months, but Ukraine can't use western artillery or HIMARS or anything else to hit them.

Is this true?

I would like to see a citation of the US specifically stating that Ukraine can't strike ANYWHERE inside Russia. Because what I've seen around the ATACAMS issue is in response to the bomber airfields that the cruise missile strikes originate from--not troop concentrations in Belgorod. 

The ISW's report this came from cites 2 articles.

The first is from December 2022 and is hopelessly out of date (and refers to the bomber airbase): 

Ukraine war: US neither encouraged nor enabled Kyiv to strike inside Russia - Blinken

WWW.BBC.COM

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Russia says a third site was attacked by drones on Tuesday, a day after two of its airfields were hit on Monday.

The second is an opinion piece that has a single citation.

Let Ukraine strike military targets in Russia with Western weapons

WWW.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

---

Amid gridlock in Congress and delays in European production, Ukraine’s allies must think creatively

Quote

Despite the weapons’ extended range, however, Ukraine won’t be able to use them to hit military targets inside Russia itself. Why? The US won’t allow it out of fear that American weapons taking out targets within Russia could escalate the conflict.

This links to a second article behind a paywall. Paywall bypass here:

https://archive.ph/BLREh#selection-2761.131-2773.148

But nothing in this article even gestures towards an actual policy prohibition on the use of these weapons. 

So this citation goes literally nowhere. And therefore, I'm skeptical that there's anything keeping Ukraine from using ATACAMS on the troops in Belgorod in terms of policy or conditional use. 

My take is that there's operational issues with HIMARS/ATACAMS in this area. We've already seen GPS jammers used to good effect and if the Russian concentrations are around populated areas, that in combination with GPS jamming might make the Ukrainians wary of turning a precision strike into an indiscriminate one. 

ISW report for ref:

I fly using my passport. 

What a great anthology. I love all the thread weaving from the Clone Wars to the sequel trilogy and TV series. Really well done, and some closure for Clone Wars fans!

It's this. 

From Pavel Podvig's twitter thread:

Quote

How exactly [the satellite] is linked to some nuclear weapons in space is unclear. The good news is that, in Stewart's words "this is not an active capability that has already been deployed." So, no nuclear weapons in space yet. Good to know. But Cosmos-2553 deserves a closer look.

20 minutes ago, GoldenTongue said:

Absolutely adored the finale - while Filoni has certainly struggled with consistent quality in the live action shows (Ahsoka is not holding up well for me on a repeat viewing, even as a "Rebels Season Five" fan service exercise), his work on the animated side remains absolutely stellar.  

 

This finale was actually the perfect example of this. If you look at the script (or just pay attention to the dialogue), it's pretty sparse. If this were in live action shot for shot, line for line, it would be similar to how Ahsoka didn't hold up. I don't know why that is, but Bad Batch's quality is just better. 

Filoni is better suited for the animated world as a writer and a big picture guy in live action. 

2 hours ago, 69los said:

Definitely wasn't the ending I was expecting.

 

  Hide contents

I was leaning towards the gloom side; at least 1 or 2 deaths to the squad. Omega will definitely be appearing again.

 

Same here. I was not expecting the ending we got. 

Bad Batch finale was really quite good!

I was completely satisfied in how it closed out. 

3 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

Time to go back to full ballistic weaponry! A big ball of iron launched in a parabolic arc doesn't care about jamming!

That would be area artillery!

Tauruses aren't going to win the war. The conversation around German hesitance to provide those is a silly side distraction. 

Man I cannot wait to see this company be forced to be sold off to Ford or GM. 

What is a SAM if not an anti-air one-way attack drone?

Rumor has it, Ukraine has reactivated its S-200 missiles in some way and are able to use them for long range air defense. It's what is suspected in the shoot down of those AWACS a while back too. 

39 minutes ago, Jwheel86 said:

 

I assume the latter, at least publicly, but if Israel comes to us wanting to hit the drone factories that are also supplying Russia... we gonna say no to letting them use a tanker in secret?

No, that's the single thing I support someone--anyone!--striking inside Iran. 

Quote

The official said that when Biden told Netanyahu that the U.S. will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran and will not support such operations, Netanyahu said he understood.
 

Could we take this to mean only support diplomatically? Like voicing support? Or does this mean actual material support like tanker, AWACS, etc logistical support?

Part of me thinks Iran will aim at some well-protected military installations with missiles that are all but intended to be intercepted. 

Iran seems to be really light-footed when it comes to the escalation ladder (especially in regards to our kinetic exchanges with them) so that's why I think this will be underwhelming. 

Now, how badly Tel Aviv overreacts... that's on them!

pointing at the sign

In all seriousness, I do believe that regardless of whatever intel we have, the Iranian response will be less than we anticipate.

17 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

 

Pictured: Not a Tu-95

I'm very into this. 

You're right. Christo Grozev is not a hack. 

But this report (which I watched earlier) still leaves most of the questions open. 

The real takeaways are something Grozev points out clearly:

1. The Russian GRU has an extensive network of spies and operatives actively doing shit all across Europe, Asia, and inside the US. 

2. The Russians are definitely working on some "headache gun" research, as proven by the paperwork. 

These two don't have to be combined. They likely aren't. 

The report and investigation doesn't address the questions surrounding the health effects and the fact that multiple studies have not identified differences on MRIs between Havana-brain and non-Havana-brains or actual health effects to motor control, balance, and other things reported by Havana Syndrome people. 

It is just as likely that the stress of working jobs in national security involving Russia while knowing that you are being surveilled by GRU agents is hitting some people. PTSD, depression, things of that nature, can manifest in bad symptoms sometimes. And if people are primed to believe it, it can turn into real symptoms. 

But whether Havana Syndrome is real, whether the Russians are behind it, whether there really is a headache gun... all that is effective is meaningless. The idea that the Russians might have this working capability and is attacking our people is powerful enough on its own. This IDEA has affected dozens of people and taken them out of this important work. And that's bad enough. 

40 minutes ago, finaljedi said:

 

Is anything big enough to withstand a ship that massive?

Yes. The bridge ultimately stopped it, after all.