This is exactly what concerns me.  Lots of new technology doesn't work out.  That's ok, but we need to learn from it and move on.  Spending more time and money on stuff that doesn't work is a dis-service to our nation.

This is just ONE video of one being hit but you should be able to get the idea...

(there are several videos like this dude. wake up...)









Seriously doubt that Ukraine can 'buff that shit out'.

Tell us all some more lies about how NO American or NATO troops have been killed in this conflict so far dude and then remind us how we 'trained' the Ukrainians to operate all of our 'state of the art' NATO equipment all by themselves...

(no freaking way any of that hardware is operated by anything other than NATO or American troops dude - that level of training does not happen overnight)  





Take a wild guess what happens to the kids in this picture AFTER their dad gets rounded up / press-ganged into 'service' with the UAF and is promptly sent to the front to be used as cannon fodder in a conflict that they will never 'win'.




Those kids and that family (what remains of it) are screwed for a long, long time. :(

I am trying to remember the last time that we 'helped' any country out with our 'regime change' crap and it somehow actually 'helped' the people living there...

Ronald Reagan once said:


He was not joking there... :(

Wow now I'm convinced that Russia is superior to the West. My whole life is a lie.

The Patriot's effectiveness has long been debated.  It's not a bad system, but has not enjoyed complete operational success:

The attacks devastated Saudi oil fields and the oil-processing plants at Abqaiq.  U.S. officials have described 17 points of impact on the facility, and satellite imagery of the aftermath show regular, accurate points of impact on the facilities in question. (2019)

The truth is that whether the intercepts are successful or not, the cost of defending is massive:
30 US Patriot PAC-3 MSE launch at a cost of $5 million per missile. That’s $150 million gone within 2 mins.

It's okay, American's didn't need the money anyway... the un-elected Federal Reserve will just print more money and America will create new tent cities for those who can't afford a home:



Biden and his Neocon bosses call this "a smart investment"

I would speculate that the Russians are even winning on that ground.
Seems like they are adapting and overcoming far more quickly than the West.
For sure all of these lessons are not being wasted...and passed on to the Chinese

I never worked on this one but I know guys that have and their accounts all jive with this 100%. It was my impression that it was somewhat cobbled together and more of a prototype level of maturity. Of course I can’t say it wasn’t refined beyond that level at some point, but I’m suspicious it wasn’t.

It was a proposal the US mil previously passed on.

Russia does excel with their electronic warfare.  It’s not so much that the US lacks the technology.  It’s that Russia has no reservation about subjecting their own people to the unhealthy amounts of radiation they produce.

The argument is very much an oversimplification.  Russia has long been a hot mess held together by authoritarianism, as a democratic process would split it up pretty quickly.  That said the Russians do certain things better that anyone else:



Electronic Warfare and Air Defense for 2.  

With Russia's adversaries heavily invested in technological warfare and airpower, then EW and Air Defense are smart investments.

Neat. I used to teach RNGW and the associated concepts professionally, in an effort to counter those Russian efforts once we identified they were going to be a problem.

A huge part of the western hubris that is causing us to fail is our inability to change our frame of reference when dealing with problems.  We look at everything in war as tank on tank, causing more casualties = victory.  The new coalition of our competitors have spent their last 10 years pivoting their military capacity and doctrine to address this, as they have no desire to go head to head with the west, and have no ability to come close to parity with tactical force-on-force.  They have found every hole in our methodology and spent significant resources developing asymmetric means to exploit them.

The western lense and our inability to see past it is why we aren't successful in Ukraine. It's on full display every single day on this board.

This.  Test and refine until it works.

I think the West  would need to have cohesive and specific goals for a meaningful discussion on this.

Failures of specific weapons systems to enable strategic victories in a proxy war certainly aren't a reflection of the quality or effectiveness of other weapons systems.

Perhaps the most ominous part of General Cavoli's recent testimony before Congress  was that the Russian Army was not only larger, but also "...the Russian military in the past year has shown an accelerating ability to learn and adapt to battlefield challenges both tactically and technologically...and has become a learning organization that little resembles the chaotic force that invaded Ukraine two years ago."

So in summary after two years of fighting, massive economic sanctions, and billions of dollars in weapons and cash sent to Ukraine, Russia is now stronger than it was before the war started.

They aren't, the sidebar was on the macro situation, not a specific weapons system.

With that said, even the employment of a lot of our more successful systems is being mitigated by asymmetric or low technology TTPs and countermeasures which we as a force never applied enough importance towards.

Yeah. I think it was originally a IR&D between Boeing/Saab.i think you can fire a whole mlrs battery of these for the cost of one atacms too which was why it was appealing.

Looks like Russia has a new barrage jammer that's probably causing the issues.
https://www.ocnus.net/article.php?Electronic-Weapons-Russian-GPS-INS-Disruption-in-Ukraine-66596

That can be easily solved with a barrage of glsdbs and a HARM If they can get the harm within range.

The key is the lack or early learning curve of TTPs for this thing in the article. I'm sure they'll get it unfucked. These seem like a pretty solid deal if they can get the gn&c updated or find a way to get some updates into the INS earlier and/or a better INS with lower drift.

Remember what Austin said "our goal is to weaken the Russian military".   Its just like John Mearsheimer said in one of his videos recently   "America has the reverse of the Midas touch".  Basically everything we touch turns to shit.  Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and especially Ukraine.   It never ends.  

One thousand and one thank you's!  Hubris is our greatest problem.  It restores my faith in humanity to hear that there are professionals out there working the reality of the situation.

It's Boeing. I have zero confidence it will get unfucked.

There is a reason Raytheon/LM/General Atomics looked at it and said "nope". Namely: "let's fire an air dropped IRU out of a rocket launcher, it should work"

That seems to be pretty typical for Russia.  Russia either succeeds with a massive surprise attack or epically fail, learn from it, and re-double their efforts.

Definitely.

As icky as the testbed theory is, and as much as everyone hates to admit it, we are seeing some epic failures being played out in real time (on both sides). How do you breach a two mile thick minefield with defensive lines stacked on the other side without air superiority and ability to flood the ground ahead with mechanized forces? It just isn't possible. Static trench warfare in 2024... What a world.

The question ends up being, can the US fill the gaps in capabilities for both the Pacific pivot and the possibility of a protracted land war in Europe (involving US forces)?

Measure
Counter-Measure

Store of warfare hasn't changed...

Counter-counter:

Give the first GLSDB of a volley a "Home on GPS Jam" seeker head, problem solved.

So our weapons systems need to be not only teenager Grunt Proof but also Drunken Ukrainian Proof?

Prox fuses have been around since late WW2 and we have White Sands and Eglin AFB for testing these sort of things. Plenty of soft sand at White Sands, and shit ton of mud at Eglin.

If the wet ground/mud not returning a reliable feedback signal to the Prox has been a known quantity, did the contracting officers think it doesn't rain in Afghanistan and Iraq or something?

The targets they're hitting aren't typically going to be the sources of spoofing or jamming.

The problem is we are learning lessons based off Ukraine, not us. A lot of these problems they face would be solved by us in a weekend, versus 2-3 years of stagnation.

GPS denial against 20 year old ordnance? Again, no surprises there.

The ROI here for lessons learned is nowhere remotely near level.

Glide bombs arent deviating far enough to become HARM missiles.

Would be a nice " surprise, cock fags!" UPGRAYEDD though.

I'm thinking that these are small local GPS jammers are probably co-located with the GLSDB targets, so minimal deviation required. So make a $50K GPS jammer killing GLSDB.

If it is a high powered jammer, a brigade or division level asset, then that is a target worthy of a $500K HARM.

I'm not a rocket surgeon, but what if they make a GLONASS version?

How bad or is their level of shittiness so bad that its classified?

So, both factors combining with each other, and being exacerbated by the munition not having the anticipated forward velocity because all of its smash has been converted to lift and minimum airspeed before stall, to maximize glide distance:  all of that means the bomb isn't dudding, but is going off way, way too early and giving the target a shrapnel shower at best.  In some ways, maybe better effects against dug-in troops lacking overhead cover, but those aren't the kinds of targets these sorts of bombs are employed against.

Thanks, TIL...

You realize our adversaries also get to test their tech against ours.  It's not a one sided affair.

Not a problem for NATO forces, at least that part.  If it's broadcasting that heavily, it's visible, and if it's visible, it dies.  F-35 conducting SEAD and other Day 1 elimination of the Red electronic ORBAT is an obvious attack vector; I'm sure there are plenty of others.  

None of which UKE has though.

I would think most jammers/spoofers probably cover the whole spectrum. All the GNSS constellations are all in similar L-band frequencies. If a mobile phone has a chip to handle almost all of them now it would be a pretty big oversight to just focus on one constellation.

It's enormously frustrating that Russia is at a industrial capacity to make 2-3 million artillery shells a year. And the US's goal is to reach 1million per year in 2025...... . Like, come on guys, this is way more serious then how you are all acting.

If the Western Europe stopped clutching their pearls and actually started getting to work. I can imagine the combined industrial might of the West producing 155 shells; we could reach parity or superiority with shell production. Even if each individual country in of itself is not going gangbusters on artillery ammunition.

To be fair, the US and the West is an air power fighting force. So we're apparently flying by the seat of our pants, in trying to get the stuff Ukraine it needs for the type of fighting they do. but...... IT'S BEEN 2 FUCKING YEARS! Yeah our industrial might wasn't super in 1941; but we we're killing it by 1943.

Preach it. We have to be very careful not to take lessoned learned from the Ukraine war. It'd be like the Royal Navy with all her Dreadnoughts and shit in 1905 watching gunboat battles between two mid-teir powers and being all like "oh shit, we better adjust our tactics to meet this new dynamic!". lol

Anyone else starting to see a comparison between the Germans testing weapons in Spain before WW2, and the U.S. testing weapons in the Ukraine before going at it with China?

Not until the US starts supplying Ukraine with B21s, F35s, LRASMs, JASSMs, AIM-260s, and laser defensive systems.

Military manufacturing in 1941 was 2-3 steps removed from factories making toasters and tractors.  That is not the case anymore.



If any of this were that simple we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.

The effects are pretty wide ranging.

I am sure anything is possible with enough time and money.

They should demand a full refund for what they paid for them…oh wait…nevermind

Not anymore.

The war in Ukraine has catapulted the Patriot up there and show it is the most effective air defense system in the world.

18 nations operate the Patriot. Compare that to the S400 with 6 current operators. Even the S-300 which is a fairly successful system has less operators than the patriot with 16.

Russians in Ukraine are rocked weekly by strikes deep in areas guarded by S400s and S300 systems.



This is the remains of an S400 battery in Dzhankoi in crimea after a visit by Atacms. The S400 is stated by Russia to be able to take down ballistic missiles.

As you can see it failed. I take that back, it successfully stopped the missile..with the entire battery . Remember, these are the oldest models of Missiles. What's going to happen should Russia ever face off against the PRSM and latest blocks of the Atacms?



It was last year in May that Russia lost 4 extremely expensive aviation assets to patriot missiles near the border in Bryansk oblast. It was also a Patriot system that took down a Russian Awacs over the sea of Azov earlier this year and damaged the IL22 support plane.

https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2023-05-16/a-black-day-russias-air-force-day-446-war







A Pac3 is around 4 million.

The missiles it is shooting down cost:

kh-101/55/555- 13 million
Kalibr-6.5 million
Iskander-3 million
Kinzhal-10 million

And remember, that's not even the most numerous system. Ukraine has 3 patriot batteries with some spare launchers. Most of the patriot systems aren't from America.

I'd run out of room listing all the various systems Ukraine has.



So we need to spend more on entitlements? I thought the problem was excess spending?


Good

Helping Ukraine is a good investment for us all.

We can break one of the primary threats to America in Europe while we focus on securing peace in Asia







Yeah, because SDGLB is such a hot commodity for gangs



What gang and black market is going to be using a rather specific ground launched munition that allegedly doesn't work?



Yes and no.

Patriot and IRIS-T systems in Kharkov  were supposedly operated by French troops serving in the AFU "foreign legion", many of whom got wiped out in Russian cruise missile strikes. All telegram sources, but this is one possible reason for Macron's meltdown where he was threatening to send thousands of regulars to Ukraine for a bit. They also didn't have great coordination with the air defense operators in that area, who ended up shooting down the IL-76 transport plane loaded with Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Ukraine PR will deny both the foreign operators of missile systems, and the shooting down of their own POWs, but lists  of names are available in both cases. Intel Slava on telegram had a list of 30 french mercenaries who were killed in Kharkov this year (t.me/intelslava/54888). It also makes total sense that complex systems like air defense would have to be operated by foreigners, just look at how the F-16 training program is going, months of delay because the potential ukrainian pilots can't even speak english, etc. Imagine them training operators for a batch of patriot systems all at once.

Does it use star tracking too?

Can you point out where the command vehicle is? The power generation units? The launchers can be dozens of kilometers (or miles) away from the command vehicle or further with Link16.

2 German supplied truck launchers were destroyed (from the patriot system). Those are one part of the larger patriot battery. You are claiming it's a battery destroyed. That's clearly not the case.



By all means, share the videos. Patriot missile systems are still operating in Ukraine today despite Russian claims to have destroyed them. 2 launchers clearly destroyed and one battery damaged from last May when Russia tried the zerg rush approach at the Kyiv battery. Miraculously the missiles keep firing..almost like the hundreds of millions Russia spent in one failed attack did not work.



The trucks are clearly destroyed.

The Netherlands previously donated 2 extra launchers which means those systems are still fully capable and rounded out.

Speaking of systems being destroyed....

Let's discuss the Russian analog to the Patriot, the S400.

2 55K6A command post for S-400: (1, destroyed) (2, destroyed)

This is a command post for the S400. Destroyed. 2 have been destroyed so far.





This is from January of 2023. It's part of the S-400, a 5P85SM2-01 TEL with 5V55R missiles. First ever documented loss of the system in combat.







This is from September of 2023 when Ukraine struck Yevpatoriya where an S-400 battery was stationed.

Finally, a full-color, high-resolution @planet imagery of the Russian S-400 SAM positions near Yevpatoria that were hit by Ukrainian 'Neptune' rocket(s) last night after drones took out the radars, according to a source from @ServiceSsu. https://t.co/HIIQyr9i5N pic.twitter.com/67KnOd4zXv

Mark Krutov  (@kromark) September 14, 2023

From July of 2023. A 5P85SM2-01 TEL and a 92N6A radar were destroyed.





From October 2023



In August of 2023.

#Ukraine: A Russian S-400 air defense battery was targeted by Ukrainian forces in Cape Tarkhankut, Crimea- at least one TEL was hit and detonated, with other elements of the system nearby likely suffering damage. pic.twitter.com/GYmaAiOfiu

— \uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDE6 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) August 23, 2023

A live action video of the Russian S-400 battery in Tarkhankut, occupied Crimea, being hit. What's recording it?

A drone.

Over the s-400 battery

Approximately 3 launchers and a command vehicle destroyed last week in Dzhankoi, occupied Crimea. This was a few days ago.






Notice in the back the command vehicle. It's gone too.

The Dzhankoi battery was hit by Block 1 Atacms missiles. The oldest models that have not been upgraded. The S400 is supposed to be able to stop them.

Supposed to.

As a reminder this is what they look like pre-Western technology encounter





Correct-it didn't happen overnight. The Ukrainians were trained not far from me at Fort Sill.

Evidently it did happen because an absolutely idiotic Oklahoma State Senator, Nathan Dahm, tried to ban it.



Thankfully the DOD ignored it as they should have.

Here is what the US Army says about initial entry for the 14T MOS (Patriot operator/maintainer)

Sourced from here

REQUIREMENTS
10 weeks of Basic Training
13 weeks of Advanced Individual Training
87 ASVAB Score: Operators & Food

Imagine if you started with people who were already in the military, familiar with aid defense systems, and motivated to stop the eradication of their country.

My entry into the US Army/National guard was relatively simple. I had already been to boot camp (Parris Island, 2008..rah). I didn't need a conversion course or transition. I got uniforms, gear, and went to a 4 week MOSQ (years later) and later the leadership courses. These guys would be the same scenario.



He has to go serve in the Army.

Should we discuss the children who were kidnapped by Russian soldiers and "adopted" to Russian families? It is a textbook example of Genocide with the intent to destroy Ukrainian heritage, culture, and language.

Should we bring up the mass graves found in liberated areas?

In America people are arrested daily with violence used.

In Russia people are arrested daily with violence used over human rights including suppressing draft riots.

Only in Ukraine is that a problem.

If you look at the clothing that's not someone running from conscription or being drafted. That's a deserter. We write arrest warrants for people doing that here in the USA and they sometimes get picked up violently also..and we aren't at war

How does Russia handle deserters?



Ronaldus Magnus also said this:

Attached File


Let's ask Reagan about how he broke the USSR and liberated the people of Eastern Europe.

How is the Czech Republic doing?

Estonia?

Latvia?

Lithuania?

Poland?

Romania?

East Germany?




@aaron56

You may not have noticed the problem with inflation, but you would be in the minority:
By a wide margin, Americans view inflation as the top problem facing the country today

I misread the title and thought it was 'bombs FALL in Ukraine'. I thought, 'damn, the kick backs must not have been in the agreed upon amount'.

There isn’t a system better than PATRIOT in its class.

Mearsheimer is a socialist piece of shit who is wrong about most things he says. Quoting him just skylines yourself for being poorly informed.

Frenchmen operating Patriots and you got it all from Russian Telegram? Interesting.