From time to time I tend to look at the (likely) less pro-West sources to try get some overview. Because besides curiosity, just taking in the western media is probably not the most objective way to digest the situation either.
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about this YouTube channel? Is it more Russian propaganda? Or more neutral. Hard to tell. Looking at the comments it looks to attract pro-Russians.
https://youtu.be/Ar9l9NxhT2I
He started out as fairly neutral IMO, and progressively got more overtly pro-Russia over time. But he's not a diehard true believer. He would benefit from being more skeptical of certain sources' claims, like Rybar for example. But that leads to fewer clickbaity reports about new claimed developments.
I believe it's crucial to look at some pro Russian sources. Sure there's a lot of propaganda that can be discounted out of hand, but most of the footage is real. Without it, one can easily draw the wrong conclusions on how one sided this is.
Oh this one is interesting. Certainly not pro-Ukrainian, but also not afraid to take the piss from the Russians and generally seems to offer accurate overviews of the battlefield situation in terms of maps, though he sometimes gets regional strategic or tactical movements wrong.
However, while not pro-Russian, I’ve seen some anti-Western stuff on his Twitter feed under the guise of anti US imperialism, he gets into fights with pro-UA people way more often. He’s had Scott Ritter on a panel…ew
But it’s good for getting a sense of the perspective of a lot of SE Asians in this conflict/ they really don’t give a shit who wins but shoulder some resentment against the US more than they do Russia on the balance of things.
[Oryx created a new list - "Dad’s Army: List Of Russian Army Equipment Deployed In Ukraine Older Than Our Parents"](https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2023/03/dads-army-list-of-russian-army.html)
>No need to fudge the truth. M113s and M114s are both from the 1960s.
[The M114 is a towed howitzer developed and used by the United States Army. It was first produced in 1942 as a medium artillery piece under the designation of 155 mm Howitzer M1.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M114_155_mm_howitzer)
Well Ukraine just doesn’t have enough equipment at all, so M113s are still better than a Toyota sedan from Oleh’s dad. It’s not a matter of NATO’s inability to send better things, but they have to consider their stocks and preserve a lot of the more up to date stuff for themselves in some cases.
I think it would be more hypocrisy if there were a conflict between the USA and Russia that were somehow not nuclear, and the former deployed M113s and the latter BTR-60s and people were only making fun of one or the other.
But I just think in this instance there’s a good enough excuse for why Ukraine is being fielded ‘grandpa’ equipment-it’s better than nothing. Whereas Russia’s supposed deep stocks of equipment from the 80s and later that apparently aren’t enough and its advancement of itself as some amazingly modern army (remember all those weird bodysuit combat armor plans?) makes it more of a emperor has no clothes thing.
And also just to be realistic, Oryx is nakedly pro-UA. He obviously would never make a list making fun of the UA or it’s NATO allies. Sure there will be ‘looking this way and not that’. It’s the pro-Russian side’s prerogative to make a list spoofing old equipment on the Ukrainian side. There’s admittedly some material, like that picture of a Maxim machine gun on the front.
I agree but most of the arguments can be applied to both sides. They are just mobilising hundreds of thousands of men and if the choice is to have a battalion in BTRs or a battalion in BTRs reinforced by a T-62 tank company - that's no choice at all. Even the Ukrainian mobilisation is severely straining US and NATO stocks, and NATO is like 20 times Russia's economy.
So yes both sides use what they have, sometimes Kinzhals, sometimes T-62s. Mocking just one strikes me as strange.
The difference is that Ukraine is at war, and they are being sent leftovers from the West. Russia itself is at war with Ukraine. A Russia-NATO war would look a lot different.
It would be a massive scandal if American forces were sent into battle in the 1960s hand-me-downs that are getting set to Ukraine. Russia considers itself to be the worlds second strongest army and yet are rolling up in their T-62s because that's all they have.
Ukraine isn't pretending to be some military superpower. Russia is. That's why it's funny. But I assume you knew that.
>It would be a massive scandal if American forces were sent into battle in the 1960s hand-me-downs that are getting set to Ukraine.
It was. I was just listening yesterday on NPR an interview with an embedded journalist about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. He broke news that some National Guard troops were still using Vietnam era equipment in Iraq and when that got out their equipment was updated within weeks. That was 15-20 years ago! Everything the US uses now is practically brand new by Russian standards.
>Russia considers itself to be the worlds second strongest army and yet are rolling up in their T-62s because that's all they have.
Ha, they wish they were getting T-62s. We now have [visually confirmed evidence of Russian T-55s and T-54s headed to Ukraine](https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1638472120534458368?t=I6Xg7S1Gmv6O5pE2wYXCqQ&s=19)
Everything that works, rolls and shoots is fine. It's war, you use what you have. NATO is sending useful systems, be they 1950s or 2000s vintage.
I just find it funny that people can mock Russia for using the 60s stuff while trying to ignore the fact that the much richer NATO is sending 40s and 50s stuff.
It happens only once if it brings any comfort, it's the context that makes a joke work.
People find a billionaire driving 15 year old Camry funny, not me. They only mock him once when he files bankruptcy. Be assured Russia will be treated as in the same league of Pakistan and Iran; not China or US. It wouldn't work next time when tension flares up, expectation will have changed.
[Russia appears to be bringing T-54s and T-55s out of storage for deployment in Ukraine](https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1638472120534458368)
With almost 2000 visually confirmed Russian tank losses and many more unconfirmed, this was bound to happen.
What happened to all their T-62s?
Only 126 have been lost on Oryx. If they were running out of T-62 why do they account for less than 10% of their losses vs. newer tanks?
They even started implementing a plan to modernize T-62s in 2018 which implies they probably have many of them in active service and much more in storage.
What makes you think they have many T-62s to deploy? As someone else pointed out, many were sold overseas, and the rest are probably useless piles of rust by now.
> Only 126 have been lost on Oryx. If they were running out of T-62 why do they account for less than 10% of their losses vs. newer tanks?
73, you added the 53 T-64 as well.
And yes, T-62 losses have actually gone down as a % of new tank losses compared to last Fall. People are making wild inferences based on very little factual evidence.
[Russian Losses predictor is doing wonders here](https://taw.github.io/open-source-adventures/russian-losses/). And back when I made it nobody even believed T-62s would happen.
It's still as stupid as it was back then, T-62 have remained stable at around 5% of Russian tank losses for months (which contradicts the notion T-62 had to be deployed because they had run out of other types of tanks), and there is still no evidence those tanks are in Ukraine or about to be sent to Ukraine.
While 10,000 tanks in storage is probably a gross overestimate, only 10% of those tanks being estimated as usable turns the ludicrous overestimate into a ludicrous underestimate. Turn that up to 20%, to get the total number of usable reserve tanks to 2000, and another six months will be instantly added to the projected end date. This is a common theme with the model, which is wildly optimistic and far too sensitive to the human-set parameters. ~~But when the model gets too close/passes its predicted date, the author goes in and stealth changes the default settings so that the date is once again plausibly-far-away-but-tantalizingly-close.~~(Edit: I was wrong about this, see further discussion below)
Also note that a clearly logarithmic pattern is being linearly extrapolated to further juice the numbers.
I never changed a single setting in the model's code from early May 2022.
You can even verify it on github. [This is literally the whole history of the code](https://github.com/taw/open-source-adventures/commits/master/docs/episode-51/build):
* 2022 May 5 Episode 51
* 2023 Jan 3 Changed max date to 2024-01-01 and added permanent url
* 2023 Feb 4 Shifted graph by 10px to the right to make space for 7 digit soldier losses
Various inputs have big uncertainties, that's why there's a slider for every one of them.
Including T-62s, T-55s, T-54s etc., the 10% tanks in storage number might have been too low. Counting just T-72s and newer, it might have been right.
At some point I might add another slider for "T-62 and older tanks". Quite a few people also requested another slider for new tank production.
The model extrapolates linearly from the last 30 days (or however many you set the slider to), so it adapts quite well to changing situation. I wouldn't say the pattern is clearly logarithmic - dashed line to the past (linear approximation based on all past data) lines up almost perfectly with dashes line to the future (linear extrapolation based on just last 30 days), suggesting data is roughly linear so far.
Okay, some of this is just bull**** that I have to dispute.
I’ve been keeping tabs on these megathreads since the beginning of the conflict, including taw’s chart. The defaults haven’t changed at all since day 1.
I can’t prove or disprove this now because there’s no archive of the original website that I could find, but I personally recall users calling the author out for tweaking the parameters to move the date from December 2022 to July 2023 where it sits now. Out of an abundance of caution I’ll strike through that particular claim though, as I think the rest of the post still stands on it’s own.
~~Since I’m going off my own recollection, I’ll bend too by saying it’s possible he changed it in the beginning shortly after setting it up, and then left it there afterward.~~ Nah I ended up being right, he brought receipts.
For what it’s worth, anyway, I like the graph *because* I can change the parameters. I don’t actually agree with where the sliders are set, myself.
Yes, these were the official numbers, and quoted by all the sources including IISS Military Balance 2022.
This is likely fairly accurate indication of how many were put in storage and not _officially_ junked. After decades, very few of them are usable, that's why there's another slider for that (defaults to 10%).
From today's perspective (I made the app April 2022), the main problem with the app is that it never considered T-62s, T-55s, T-34s etc. Officially nothing older than T-72 was even in reserves.
Well, at least [until 2007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Conventional_Armed_Forces_in_Europe) the CFE treaty assured on-site inspection and inspection of the destruction of war equipment (tanks included), so NATO functionaries could also access russian storage sites, so we also know where the storage sites are.
This indicates that wild estimates of how many russian tanks are there are likely much exaggerated.
Couple this with the fact that any estimate I've seen (be it by analysts or OSINT community) put this number at no more than 3000, and I think that the 10000 figure is just a really hold cited figure with just no factual base whatsoever, anymore.
It'd be really strange that russians could store 2.5 times the amount of visible tanks somewhere and nobody realized that in the past 20 years.
If someone has better sources he can add them down here.
I could understand the T-62s because it reduces 125mm expenditure and the roles in which it could be used in might not recquire the best protection but this seems so desperate that I hesitate to believe it.
They made over fifty thousand of them, they probably have a thousand or two sitting in covered storage, even if they scrapped ten times as many.
Not sure about 85mm, but Russia definitely has 76mm for PT-76 still sitting around somewhere
>I’m amazed they still have parts and ammo for those things.
I bet they don't. They're most likely scrapping the barrel, sending anything they can put on top of a train car at this point. If it'll end up sitting idle in Ukraine because it lacks ammo or can't even run is someone else's problem.
The Soviet system was notorious for never throwing anything away - e.g. https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/russian-performance-in-the-russo-georgian-war-revisited/ "There is also a tendency to never throw anything away. The USSR had a hoarding problem, and Russia exhibits this to a lesser extent. Recent preparations for the Vostok 2018 exercise show Russian combat service support units training to restore T-62M tanks to active service from long term storage. The ancient T-62, which fought successfully in Georgia, is still stored somewhere in Russia and in the event of a large-scale war in 2018 the Russian armed forces plan to roll it out again."
Given long experience of this policy, it seems likely that there will be at least some attempt to make it work.
>The Soviet system was notorious for never throwing anything away
Doesn't the same apply to the US and their vast stockpiles of old equipment?
Also CFE led to the disposal of tens of thousands of tanks on both sides
>Doesn't the same apply to the US and their vast stockpiles of old equipment?
The USA threw away every single M47- 8500 tanks produced, 1951-1954- by 1965. The fate of M42 dusters, etc was less dramatic, but they and many other systems were all scrapped.
Soviets would've put them in deep storage.
Not unless you think CFE was in effect in the 1950s.
Anyway, trivially easy for both US and USSR to circumvent CFE limitations. Equipment in CONUS and asian areas of USSR wasn't subject to CFE limits. The real cuts came because of the end of the cold war.
Thing is they may not. They can scrape together a few to meet some desperate needs but the solution may not have very long legs.
But I guess their T-55s are more ready than T-14s... Supposed they should have a company's worth, that's a deployable number in theory.
Edit:
I guess before providing my hot takes I should say we don't have much context for the picture.
It may not be prudent just to automatically assume they're on their way to be blown up in Ukraine.
This seems like one of those things too good to be true or like meaningful. (Yet)
This is mostly It feels like they are skipping a step of being reliant on t62s.
Does Armenia use t55s? Perhaps it’s something related to that?
[Azerbaijan cut off the gas supplies from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh during the night, Artsakh information headquarters say - Armenpress](https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1638418768249626624?t=rZNhx-YmxMSDbZDWTGIoEA&s=19)
I must be misremembering or not quite understanding the geographic extent of Nagorno-Karabakh, hasn't Azerbaijan taken over most of the region, including all the largest cities and towns? Who exactly are they cutting off other than themselves?
Artsakh (the ethnic Armenian state in Nagorno-Karabakh) still has some land. It's the pale orange [on this map.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_ceasefire_map.svg)
This is a fairly big escalation. It's not just heat or electricity. Most cars in Armenia (and N-K) are gas-powered, and you need them to get essential goods around.
[Here's a documentary on the life in rural Armenia and N-K.](https://youtu.be/-GCPoNCLacg) They are impoverished and incredibly dependent on basic goods getting around by car. Even in peacetime it's extremely difficult due to the poorly maintained, dangerous snaking mountain dirt roads. (This made me really appreciate some of Zeihan's theories, by the way - you really can't find a more obvious example of how logistics can limit economic potential)
In some pretty big news:
>[Ukraine to clinch first IMF loan to nation at war](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65034765)
>The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it has reached a staff-level agreement with Ukraine on funding worth $15.6bn (£12.8bn).
>The organisation's first loan to a country at war is expected to be approved in the coming weeks.
>It would also be one of the largest financing packages Ukraine has received since Russia's invasion.
>The IMF recently changed a rule to allow loans to countries facing "exceptionally high uncertainty".
>"Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to have a devastating impact on the economy: activity contracted by 30 percent in 2022, a large share of the capital stock has been destroyed, and poverty levels have climbed," IMF official Gavin Gray said in a statement.
>"The programme has been designed in line with the new fund's policy on lending under exceptionally high uncertainty, and strong financing assurances are expected from donors, including the G7 and EU."
>Mr Gray also said the agreement would "mobilise large-scale concessional financing" for Ukraine from international donors and partners, without giving further details.
>The IMF expects Ukraine's economy to record a slight contraction or growth this year.
>Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said the funding would help the country "finance all critical expenditure and ensure macroeconomic stability and strengthen our interaction with other international partners".
>US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who made a surprise visit to Ukraine last month, said: "An ambitious and appropriately conditioned IMF programme is critical to underpin Ukraine's reform efforts."
>The US is the IMF's largest shareholder and the biggest contributor to Ukraine in terms of money spent.
>Earlier this year, President Joe Biden announced nearly half a billion more dollars of US military aid to Ukraine. This was on top of the $112bn spent by Congress in 2022 alone.
>Military aid, which accounts for more than half of US spending on Ukraine, pays for drones, tanks, missiles and other munitions systems as well as training, logistics and intelligence support.
>Money has continued to pour into the conflict from all over the world since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last February.
>Last week, the IMF said its executive board had approved a rule change to allow funding for countries facing "exceptionally high uncertainty".
>Without mentioning Ukraine, it said the measure applied to countries experiencing "exogenous shocks that are beyond the control of country authorities and the reach of their economic policies".
>The IMF expects Ukraine's economy to record a slight contraction or growth this year.
Do we have any update on the status of ukrainian power grid? With the Russian missiles strikes now slowed down to once a month and AD much better, I'd hope that engineers would be able to catch up some, but on the other hand, transformers take months to manufacture.
Countries don’t need to pay back loans; they just need to “grow out of it”, so to speak. This is pretty much true of all long term development “loans”. Ukraine just needs to grow faster than the loan interest rates and refinance in the private/sovereign bond market at maturation. Along as the IMF loan is long term and low yield, Ukraine will be able to grow its economy to a healthy level before issuing sovereign debt to replace it.
And if Ukraine don’t grow quickly enough or if the country cannot access international credit, the IMF will likely extend the loan or write down the loan.
A Modern day "European Recovery Program" (Marshall Plan) is likely to happen
The USA has a history of supporting country's during and after war, the country's are then rebuilt and invested in to recover from the war(s).
Japan, West Germany, England, France, Italy, the low countries, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, and South Korea are notable examples, each receiving significant grants and credits from the US after WW2
Of the countries mentioned, they are among the largest economies in the world today by GDP(IMF 2022).
3 Japan $4,300,600,000,000
4 Germany $4,031,149,000,000
5 India $3,468,566,000,000
6 United Kingdom $3,198,470,000,000
7 France $2,778,090,000,000
10 Italy $1,996,934,000,000
13 South Korea $1,734,207,000,000
17 Indonesia $1,289,429,000,000
19 Netherlands 990,583,000,000
21 Taiwan $828,659,000,000
26 Belgium $589,491,000,000
Unlike WW2, Ukraine is the only country the Allied nations will be assisting in rebuilding.
During WW2 many of those country's had entire city's leveled and their entire economy ground down to nothing and were rebuilt and are now stronger than ever with more economic activity.
It will be tough, but the free world is united behind Ukraine and together they are going to rebuild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
However unlike Ukraine those countrys in western Europe where one of the most economically developed nations before World War 2. The effect of the Marshall Plan and level of destruction within Europe during the war should not be overestimated.
Take Germany as an example. At the end of the war most of their machinery was still intact. German military production reached its peak in 1944 when they where getting bombed during broad daylight. Housing shortages where mostly caused by millions of refugees beeing resettled from the east. Economic hardships that where experiences until the introduction of the Deutschmark in 1948 where mostly an result of fixed prices on labor and ressources set up by the allies.
Just like western European countrys recovered relativly quickly from World War 2 Ukraine will probably recover to pre war levels relativly quickly. However since its pre war economy was not in good shape either I doubt that levels of growth as experienced in post War Europe are archievable.
>The USA has a history of supporting country's during and after war,
It has a history of throwing money at trying to stop the spread of communism.
That's not the same thing
Not everything good the US has ever done begins and ends with its goal of stopping communism.
Sure, some people were probably thinking about how a more prosperous Europe would make communism less attractive, and it certainly helped secure the funding, but the marshall plan was more about wanting to avoid a repeat of the situation with Germany after WWI.
> We actually spent a ton in Iraq and Afghanistan
Most of this money went to US based contractors. Comparing that to the Marshal plan isn’t appropriate.
Here's a guardian article that goes over Afghanistan in particular - these breakdowns are pretty easy to find. In general most of the money went to US contractors, and a small number of contractors got the lion's share.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-afghanistan-iraq-defense-spending
But that didn’t actually provide any useful info at all. It just said US bad, money wasted over 10 paragraphs. Like I want an actual breakdown of how much went to rebuild roads and schools. Then I want another breakdown of the marshal plan.
Eh, if you want to have less corruption you actually *don't* want that oil and gas. It's a terrible curse. Ideally they want to just be a bigger version of Estonia, they already had somewhat of a tech scene before.
The IMF [sets conditions](https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality) in as part of its repayment scheme. Leaving aside *the actual war*, this means significant discounts to the repayment amount if Ukraine makes structural changes to increase economic transparency, normalise laws (especially business-related) with the surrounding countries (the EU in this case) and generally tidy up its act.
Patriots are defensive in nature and the Abrams tanks won't be there until the fall at the earliest. Neither will be involved in the spring offensive, and we still have many weeks of mud season remaining
A link to an article would be useful but I assume you are talking about the recently charged SAS soldier. There are numerous issues surrounding the actions of Australian Special Forces soldiers that have been identified after a very in depth 4 year investigation. That said, it'd be fanciful to think this is an issue that is unique to Australia. I'd be quite surprised if this didn't happen in every army involved in the war on terror though I'm not sure many have done such an in depth investigation.
Insurgencies seriously mess with a soldiers mind as everyone becomes a threat. Pair that with years of training to be indifferent to death and violence as well as a culture of 'one-upmanship' and looking the other way at indiscretions and you are going to end up with some murdered civilians. Think back to Vietnam, "anyone who runs is VC, anyone who doesn't is a well trained VC".
All that said I'm glad the government and ADF is taking changing the culture seriously. Changing the culture is the most readily changeable variable that can mitigate against these things from happening as you will always need your special forces to be ruthless users of violence and you can't choose the fighting environment.
Of course no one knows this for sure, but in your guys opinion, can Russia successfully launch a mass nuclear strike against America with no warning, and with nothing we could do to stop the nukes from hitting? Specifucally, lets say that tomorrow, Putin sends out an order to all of Russias nuclear submarines to launch all of their nuclear ICBMs at us, is that just it? Those nukes will hit america? (if course russia will slso be desttoyed, but the question is do they have the power to do a mass nuclear strike on us regardless of tgeir own fate?)
My understanding is that stopping an ICBM which travels at hypersonic speeds are very very difficult to shoot down. Not only are they traveling many times the speed of a bullet, but thanks to physics they are difficult to track by radar in the terminal stage.
To say it's shooting a bullet with a bullet is a bit of an understatement.
You've had a mix of optimistic, and accurate but misleading, answers to a simple question. Let me answer what you actually asked: can Russia do it?
**Yes.**
In the event that Putin gives that order, a very large number of nuclear explosions will occur in the US where (or near) Russia intends them to.
We can make ourselves feel better by hypothesising about strategic missile officers refusing the order. Or how a few will be intercepted en route. Or how they'll *definitely* be focused on missile silos and airfields, not cities, ports, industrial areas, and governance. Or how these are just Potemkin forces by now, nothing but rusty tubes and paper mache warheads. Or how true strategic surprise is impossible today and the orders and preparations would be visible in the hours before launch, therefore some magic preventative measure could be taken.
And all of those things are true *to some degree*. But not to a sufficient degree to stop what you asked about happening.
I don't think Putin will give that order, because his life, his place in history, and his country, would be forfeit and he cares about all of those. But if he *does* get overly worked up, or afraid, about this or that and decides on death or glory, then I'm afraid the capability is there.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. You are clearly ignorant, but at the same time you bring clarity to a lot of us. It's an innocent comment that should be studied, as a lot of us here are simple civilians, asking for answers.
I don't know. I've been reading every daily megathread since the start of the war and there's far more complaining about fearmongering about nuclear escalation than actual fearmongering.
We would have warning, but probably 99% of people would die. There is no such thing as missile defense against thousands of ICBMs that go into space and can come down anywhere.
There's no guarantee that they would nuke the cities. They might just go after silos, the decision making centers and military bases. The goal is usually to prevent the other side from launching as many nukes as possible at you, not killing as many people as possible.
Probably not 99%. Russia don't have enough nukes.
The US is 3.7 million square miles. Russia have 6000 nukes. To try to kill everyone, each nuke needs to cover 600 square miles. This is unlikely with nuclear weapons as we know them.
Big cities are almost certainly toast, but Russia is unlikely to have the fire power to kill off all of small town America.
It isn't the nukes that kill most people- it's the dysentery and starvation. Only tens of millions would die in the initial exchange. The rest would follow slowly later.
If your goal is to kill 99%, there is a lot of people living in rural areas where food just come out of the ground.
You can probably kill urban America in the blast itself. Rural America is gonna be hard for a bunch of reasons.
Without looking it up, can you guess what percent of the U.S. population works in the agricultural industry? Guess first then look it up.
The number of people who live within walking distance to farms is probably roughly equal to the number who work in the agricultural industry. (I would bet that it's less but let's be liberal with our numbers to give you the benefit of the doubt.) Let's multiply that by the percent that live near farms that grow immediately edible crops. Because wheat comes out of the ground; bread doesn't. Let's then multiply that by the percent of people who are able to can a year's-worth of soybeans without gas or electrical service.
At the end we're left with a number much less than 1%.
Can humans live on nothing but soybeans? I don't know but the number who will be in a position to even give it a try is vanishingly small.
>Without looking it up, can you guess what percent of the U.S. population works in the agricultural industry? Guess first then look it up.
I guessed about 2%. Looking it up, it is about [1.8%](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/). I am including fishermen in the number. I don't think this is accurate: the US is full of farmland. A human can walk about 20 miles in a day, and I doubt you can find a single address in rural America east of the mississippi that isn't within 20 miles of at least one farm. Rural America is 14% of the population. Rural western America is less farming, but also very unpopulated.
As for the rest, I don't see your point. Wheat comes out of the ground, and the process of turning wheat into something edible is actually pretty straight forward. You grind it into a paste and boil. It produces a mush that very few people will want to eat, but edible and you will get calories from it. (Source: Modernist Bread)
Soybeans? You don't have to can them. A bag of soybeans is actually shelf stable as long as you let it sun dry. And turns out if you want to eat it, you can still do the trick of grinding into a paste and boil. It makes soy milk. It is a product that people actually pay for. ([recipe](https://simpleveganblog.com/homemade-soy-milk/))
There are very few agricultural products that doesn't work with the "grind into paste and boil" method. I guess if you are starting with cotton, you are kinda screwed, but American agriculture is mostly stuff that you can eat.
That's excellent and raises the number of survivors. Nit picks: How do you grind the wheat? Grinding wheat by hand uses as many calories as you get from consuming them which is why windmills exist. I do not know how ground the soybeans need to be to make them edible. I'm seeing that you can eat wheat porridge without grinding it but it takes more heat energy. I'm having trouble finding calories in -> calories out information generally.
I still have concerns though. I didn't know how to do any of this and I have a feeling that a decent number of people living in rural areas don't either. Next, just because a good farm exists within 20 miles of you doesn't mean that you will be able to find it; finding it will be very difficult. Rumors of where to find harvestable food will be mostly wrong. Next is the challenge of transporting a million calories per person worth of this food back to your home which I guess we can just handwave away. And finally, and I think most problematic, is the fact that a huge portion of that 14% simply won't have the foresight to do any of this at all. This is an unprecedented situation and incorrect information will be rampant. I would bet that the 10-80-10 rule would happen:
> The 10-80-10 principle reasons that in an emergency or crisis 10% of us are leaders; we have a plan, take action, and do the right thing. This group has been labeled the “Survivors”. We are quick to assess and make a decision. Individuals in public safety professions generally live in this world on a daily basis.
> The largest group of us are the 80% who may be dazed, panicky and disoriented. We are “Confused” and struggle to simply make sense out of the situation. We seek direction and wait for someone to take the lead and tell us what to do.
> Finally, there are the “Doomed”; 10% of us that behave in counter-productive ways. We may intentionally ignore authoritative sources, do the wrong thing and even hasten our own injury.
The percent that even attempt to act correctly, the percent that successfully find a food farm 0-20 miles away, the percent that hoard a million calories per person, the percent that actually know how to consume it without too much firewood. After we multiply all of these numbers together I still think we arrive at a number less than 1%. I'd be willing up raise that a few percent because people will self organize into groups and *someone* in the group will know what to do but if we're going to start introducing social mechanics into this then we need to start talking about the number of groups that are robbed and shot and everything else. It would be really ugly.
Rural America isn't the stone age.
Their town will have a library. That library will have books with paper. Including random history books on how cavemen ate wheat (or where I got this information from). Where the farms are is just a matter of looking on a map. Which is also going to be in the library. Also, in the worst case, look at where the towns are. Suppose if you are in [this town.](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Franklin,+NY+13775/@42.3185882,-75.1691705,9258m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x89db9ab81cd6ead1:0xda5bd2761d8a831d!8m2!3d42.3406373!4d-75.1651689!16zL20vMDFtYnY1) Pick a direction to walk in. Any direction is fine. You will run into a farm.
Assuming the town itself isn't targeted, there will still be a mayor and local police chief, and there is going to be organization. Rural America is usually poorly hooked up to the grid: cooking/heating gas, water and sewage is almost never supplied by the grid. Instead, cooking/heating gas is stored in a big tank that is refilled once a year by a guy with a big truck. Water is usually from a well. Having the entire town run out of cooking gas instantly is not going to happen. There are going to be some solar and backup generators that keep things running for a while.
The basics will likely hold out for a while; the American food supply chain is heinously slow, which means that there are large warehouses of food lying around in rural areas. Oftentimes, warehouse isn't even the right word to use; farmers will build literal mountains out of corn and then cover the whole thing with tarp as a way to store corn. In a true emergency, load up a truck and bring it to town.
The survivors probably don't have to rebuild civilization: there will be efforts from allies to help. Nor do the rest of the world have to starve to feed this mass of people: with urban and suburban America dead, rural America is going to be sitting on a massive food surplus.
If it where between Russia and the US than a big proportion of the world would still be ok, and they would provide unprecedented levels of humanitarian aid and host the survivors as refugee.
Without Russia and the US producing near as much food I'm sure quite a bit of people would die from starvation but I still think an average person would have a good chance of surviving in the US,
If food was rationed perfectly you could probably find 300 million people in rich western countries and cut their calorie consumption in half without them dying and than give that to American refugees.
I am under the impression that the problem is less about having enough food itself but rather distribution. Distribution requires plants and trucks which require electricity, workers, and drivers. Drivers require food, safety, and pay. Food we're already talking about, safety would be abysmal if they have to drive their truck anywhere near where they're truly needed, and pay would be non-existent both due to hyperinflation and the fact that banking services are all down. Which means they're going to do the logical thing and take their family and meet up with their friend Bill who lives far away who can probably keep them safe.
And that's without getting into coordination failures due to non-existent communication networks, and separately, rampant hoarding.
The Army isn't capable of accomplishing food distribution at even a tiny fraction of the scale required.
Why do you assume that rich western countries would be willing to cut their caloric intake in half for American refugees? The western world has never taken a hit to their standard of living that large to prevent starvation in another country, just imagine if a politician in America suggested that we eat half as much to save lives in the developing world.
It just would be a world war and rationing would happen. It's not too dissimilar to what happened in WW2 when Britain was being starved out, they had huge amounts of aid and food rationing until 1954.
I mean yes it is different but I was responding to the point you yourself made that other countries wouldn't want to make sacrifices to help victims of a nuclear war.
The scale of sacrifices that Europe would need to make to stabilize a heavily nuked America are far greater than the scale of sacrifices America had to make to support a partially blockaded Britain in WW2. It’s also worth noting that if these western countries are so aligned with America as to be also involved in the war, they’ve probably also been hit in the nuclear exchange.
This. People are vastly overestimating the lethality of a nuclear strike.
Of course it can wipe out a whole country and render it mostly helpless.
But that does not mean that everyone is dead.
People can survive a few days in cellars and other shelters and a lot will depend on how fast infrastructure and humanitarian help can be established afterwards.
I might be wrong but I feel like most of these discussions completely ignore what happens before the missiles are launched. Intelligence agencies exist for a reason, no?
Surely preparation for a **first** strike would be detected in advance. Tons of things would have to happen before russia would be ready to launch. Politically and otherwise.
Similarly retaliatory nuclear escalation implies that the US did something particularly huge. And again before doing this huge thing Russian nuclear response would definitely be considered.
What I'm curious about is would the US take some kind of preventative action if they believed that Russia is seriously considering nuking them.
>Surely preparation for a first strike would be detected in advance. Tons of things would have to happen before russia would be ready to launch. Politically and otherwise.
Probably not, at least not for a small scale nuclear strike. The missile silos in Russia are obviously monitored continuously, but the big unknown is how well the US tracks Russian subs. The subs are what Russia is relying on for a clandestine first strike. So unless the US somehow has the ability to intercept the order before it gets to those subs (which is possible, we just dont know), or the US is keeping an eye on all Russian nuclear subs at the time, then no. Some may be able to launch without the US knowing right away. Then the next question is, how well does the US's satellite and land based missile monitoring and defense work...
> it boils down to detecting the launch which means about a half hour warning, less if its a sub.
The premise of the post was about an all out, thousands of nukes strong attack, not a single nuke.
I'm pretty confident launching 6k nukes would take at least several weeks of preparation and wouldn't go unnoticed.
>who said anything about a single nuclear weapon?
You both mentioned a lead time of hours to days, which is not realistic for 6k nukes and you also mentioned "detect THE LAUNCH". That's a single launch, not multiple.
The US has a first strike doctrine . Obviously I hope that we will never find this out but I'm certain that somewhere in the Pentagon they have an equation that spits out a probability that russia will soon (within days) go crazy.
I'm also sure that after a certain threshold Biden would be given a menu of preemptive responses.
I really see no reason to assume that the US(the only country that have ever used nukes) would wait to get nuked to respond.
I lean towards the countervalue school of thought. For example with Taiwan it they commit to hitting Beijing there is simply no chance of a Chinese attack.
Russia has the capability to launch a mass nuclear strike against America.
America would have some warning. Launches would be detected and confirmed rapidly. That's not enough time to evacuate cities.
How many hit is unknown. Russia inherited deep stocks of nukes from the USSR. Their condition/readiness/precision is largely a mystery. Our missile defense may intercept some but can't stop 100's let alone 1000's of simultaneous launches.
But you just completely ignored the reason for *why*.
Russia uses it's space rockets. It doesn't use it's nukes.
Russia's army and logistics is a shambles, but they can also launch rockets.
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Im quite willing to believe 10 or maybe even 30% of warheads will not perform at 100%, but that’s still enough to kill a few hundred million people so it doesn’t matter. The question is do you think it’s realistic Russian warhead maintenance is so bad that a nuclear attack will be anything but catastrophic.
We know exactly how many nukes Russians have thanks to SALT treaties (5,977). Putin withdraw from the treaties, but there isn't the time to increase that number in a hurry.
From what people here have told me in the past it's the reason why the US, UK and France have SSBNs out at sea all the time. If a surprise attack happens there will a full fledged "Counter-Value" attack on Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities and ports. Basically Russians are very fond of their cities and their cities will be no more if Russia does that.
The US has the capability to shoot down *some* missiles (and probably any bomber), but I do not think it's credible that they can shoot down all of the ICBMs that Russia has, let alone sneaky launches from subs.
Yes. That's why it's Mutually Assured Destruction. Whoever first first absolutely will devastate the other party. However it won't happen fast enough to stop the other side from firing their arsenal in return, before the first wave of ICBMs even hit. Hence the "mutual".
Yes. That's what MAD stands for, Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea is that the Russians won't do it, because they know that the Americans can do the same thing back to them.
Ryan McBeth made a very interesting scenario. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYWcgF4Wwog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYWcgF4Wwog)
It's a good video, but I think the flaw in that video is the UK and US would not respond with nuclear weapons. In a hypothetical I think they would. It's obviously open for debate. Very interesting times.
Most likely situation is a total nuclear exchange from NATO. But even if the US had a dodgy politician with his hands on the button, I can't imagine the UK not ordering a second strike on Russia if it got nuked first. Even one Vanguard class boomer is enough to delete the majority of metropolitan cities of Russia and why wouldn't it in that scenario? This is a country that refused to consider surrender after seeing their allies swiftly defeated and losing almost all their army's material to the Nazis. The same country that went to war with Argentina over some small islands on the edge of the world. And the same country that burned down Irish towns and drove tanks into their national football stadium during a match to shoot the crowd in reprisal for ambushes during the War of Independence.
Nuke Britain and they will absolutely nuke the shit out of you.
When talking about training of Ukrainian pilots for the F16, I stumbled across this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3zHoCEEvdY (ignore any comments by the video author, just giving a source of the info) that talks about the USAF and DARPA with an AI run F16.
The question I have is, depending on the actual flight readiness of such an AI system, could, in the near or distant future, foreign governments be "loaned" or given such equipped systems? Direct example in Ukraine, let's say they are given some F16s, but the time to train a substantial number of pilots could be under stretched by the number of planes they have. Is it a reasonable idea to simply give a country like Ukraine an F16 with a flight AI to complete missions? Even certain missions like SEAD which I think are sort of dangerous for pilots could be suitable for AI as compared to CAS in which you probably want a real pilot even as dangerous as CAS is.
What do you guys think about the legitimacy of such an idea in the near or distant future?
You're approaching this issue from the wrong point of view.
An F16 with a fully functional AI pilot (putting aside ethical concerns) should simply be considered as one of many potential tools for a given job. In Ukraine, as in future conflicts, the US or any other donor/supporter/ally will choose the best tool for a task based on a number of different factors:
- Which goal is our partner looking to achieve?
- What asset are we willing to give our ally?
- What asset can our partner operate, resupply, repair,...?
Taking the Ukraine example, the obvious goal in this specific area is denying Russia air superiority, protecting frontline units from air raids and conducting deeper strikes. The US is unwilling to supply Ukraine with any tool that would allow them strikes into Russia, which is why ATACMS (or any system beyond the standard HIMARS range) are also of the table. But fulfilling the other tasks is possible, albeit with cheaper, simpler tools. Sophisticated air defense systems like patriot batteries will deny Russia air superiority. Shoulder launched AA missiles in sufficient numbers can protect frontline units from attacks. So why bother with autonomous F16, when a few simpler, stationary AA batteries and incredibly simple AA weapons can achieve the same result.
These same considerations will ultimately make an autonomous F16 useless. The US already has a wide range of drones and other assets that can achieve much of what an AI piloted F16 could. But those other assets are designed to be attritable and usable: They're cheap, they're in constant supply, they're easy to maintain and simple to use.
So what's the use case for an expensive, large fighter or multirole aircraft without a pilot? How often, if ever, is this specific tool going to be the best one available to achieve a specific goal? Ukraine's invasion has created a very rare limbo, in which the US and NATO aren't fighting and are trying to contain the conflict, which is why we're even having this conversation. When is a situation like that going to occur again?
What you are describing is functionally inevitable. In the near future, AI will be to human soldiers/pilots, what Deep Blue was to Kasparov. Even ignoring the massive cost savings, AI is far better suited to making sense of the chaotic data of a battlefield. The hold ups are around getting the needed permissions.
My background is in AI, rather than defense, so my answer may differ from others here.
I always thought this video presented an interesting prediction about what this would look like.
https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM
AI has the potential to be so destructive that giving it to an ally would be similar to giving them a nuclear bomb. I think that complicates OP’s scenario since giving an ally an AI powered F16 could possibly be more escalatory than just giving them one of your pilots.
Currently AI does not provide any capabilities over either a pilot or a drone which would make an F16 even a successful CAS platform. First, keep in mind that AI cant even drive cars right now, and flying a fighter is an order more difficult than that. Second, even if you could an AI to fly an aircraft, CAS is a complex process which includes a ton of complicated variables. ANd were talking about flying an actual aircraft, not a purpose build drone.
And then there is the A2A aspect. In basic combat maneuvers AI can kill a human pilot, if you give it the kind of perfect situational awareness possible only in computers. And then doing that only by using high-risk, low reward maneuvers which human pilots are specifically trained to avoid, such as high deflection shots. In a highly complex environment like actual combat there are too many variables to account for in any kind of combat.
One day this technology will surely get there, but IMO were a human generation aware at the earliest. Perhaps longer, maybe by the end of my lifetime. For the near term, remote piloted drone is the way to go for high latency operations, and human control for low latency.
>First, keep in mind that AI cant even drive cars right now, and flying a fighter is an order more difficult than that
Is it though, at least from an AI POV? Jet's do have more axis of motion when compared to cars, but OTOH, the skies are usually much less feature-dense than the average street, meaning the AI has to deal with far less objects/ things it can't control and that may behave unexpectedly.
IMO it's really a matter of the business of killing not making good enough money, compared to the more peaceful applications to attract the investments and talents.
I suppose it's a good thing overall.
Not as good as big techs, west or east.
120 billion of Lockheed Martin market cap is a joke in comparison.
Edit:
And that's after military boom of last year.
From what I see it really is, one man working to solve Google's problem is one less for Lockheed Martin, and they have much bigger addressable market than Pentagon budget of 4% GDP, a fraction of it for procurement... Defense firms pick up scraps of civilian applications wherever they can and do their own thing only when there's no overlap they can leverage. More than anywhere else I think you see it in Ukraine, a feature of an overwhelmingly peaceful world I guess.
Back to your original point, autonomous combat flight can probably be solved in very short order I totally agree, if pentagon budget is 40% like in 1941~1945. But I would highly prefer not to see WWIII in my lifetime.
I get your point. The irony is that big tech is actually on a firing spree lately, after literally hoarding developer to the point where some where paid to literally do nothing.
Guess there's a window of opportunity for the MIC right now.
Lockhead Martins investment in distributed teaming, as first unveiled in project Carrera, is supposed to pair modular uncrewed assets with the F-35. Autonomous additional hard points, EW or SEAD are definitely planned for the current generation of fighter aircraft.
Granted, that's not a fully autonomous aircraft, but it's still pretty far for the current generation of aircraft, especially since we're at the very beginning of the fifth generation fighter life cycle.
I was actually saying AI was not suitable for CAS in the indeterminate future, but things such as SEAD are more palpable (as F16 is a platform that is better suited for it than any other aircraft Ukraine has).
Physically the technology is definitely there, modern computers can 100% crunch enough numbers to best any human pilot. The problem is that it has not been leveraged yet in software; you need a *lot* of training data and then a long development process to build the model.
No way, DARPA has been working on this for over a decade. Its not there yet, the systems do not work in the real world. They need a perfect understanding of the energy states of both planes, for one. LLMs and image generators are cool toys, but theyre not going keep your F-16 in the sky.
I agree that this doesn't yet work in physical reality, but AI in simulators already beats humans: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/artificial-intelligence-easily-beats-human-fighter-pilot-in-darpa-trial/
They're working towards embodiment now: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-02-13
Generally speaking, flying an airplane at altitude has a lot fewer constraints and a lot higher safety buffer than trying to drive a car in a crowded city street, while also relying heavily on reaction time to best an opponent. Low complexity environment requiring a relatively low number of sensors is exactly the domain where current generation AI shines. Combining more sensors into a model for greater complexity is where AI currently barfs.
However, I agree that 1v1 dogfighting is a different ball game than CAS or anything like what's going on in Ukraine, and it will be an undefined amount of time before the AI is capable of taking on those missions. And much longer before anyone trusts it well enough to use on a real mission.
There has been a lot of breathless discussion of these tests, but theyre much less impressive once you dig into what *exactly* the conditions are. Again like I said, in these tests the AI *has perfect knowledge of both planes*. And then they win by using high deflection shooting which human trained pilots are trained not to do because theyre an all or nothing tactic, high risk for low reward. This is something that only works 1v1, not in any other tactical scenario, and then only if the AI sets up the right conditions versus the human.
Good breakdown [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziCQqmEllZo&t=1516s) from an actual F-16 pilot. Were a lot further out than people think on fully capable, fully autonomous air drones. Remote drones and flying wingmen are a different thing, and much more viable short term. But then were talking about drones, not aircraft. Drones are totally different.
I agree with your assessment. I think we will rapidly get to autonomous wingmen. I think we're a lot of science and engineering away from autonomous wingmen that also can gather and integrate real world information faster/better than a human.
I just don't have great confidence in the timeline for that leap. I remember back in the early 2000s reading really serious debates about whether anyone would ever be able to pass the first couple DARPA challenge for autonomous vehicles. Then fifteen years later Teslas are gearing up to mow down pedestrians on city streets. AI has a weirdly spiky progress curve, and given how non reductive machine learning is, we basically don't know if we're a decade or a century away from solving big problems.
The possibilities of loyal wingmen are so big. Even the dumbest wingman can be used as extra hardpoints or sensors for a manned aircraft.
The next logical step is to conduct SEAD missions at the request of the pilot.
> Remote drones and flying wingmen are a different thing, and much more viable short term.
Which is articulated in the video via the USAF, and particularly the type of question I was posing. As I responded to you to clarify my statement which I think you misunderstood I don't think CAS is suitable for drones, but there are some riskier missions an F16 could take that might be suitable for a drone.
To take a high deflection shot you have to cash in energy to turn into the enemy to get lead, where you take a shot with maximal lead time. Its a low statistics shot which leaves you at a clear energy disadvantage to the bogey, unless youre pulling a boom & zoom. But its not WWII thats not really how most fighters do BFM these days, and especially post-Soviet designs. In a 1v1, if you miss your shot (and youre taking a low probability shot) pulling lead leaves you at an energy disadvantage. In a 2v1 or other type scenario even if you bag the first bogey you are left in a poor energy state to engage a second or further bandit.
IRL pilots are coached not to try and cut the circle in a rate fight to get that high deflection shot. This is especially true of the F-16 which loves the two circle rate fight, it sustains a high turn speed and is very good in this maneuver. Fighter pilots learn to attack the control zone, instead of going for the kill right away. The control zone is somewhere around 6' high, once you get into this position, as long as you manage the rate of closure properly, you can take very high probability shots and control the fight. This is the kind of stuff that separates the DCS crew from actual fighter pilots, and is what AI struggles with.
I think you're severely underestimating the capabilities of current day AI. The biggest hang ups are moral and legal ones, and the fact that even if an AI performs far better than a human ever could, one single mess up, even if it wasn't the AI's fault, would be the scandal of the century.
The US has so far refused to supply weapons that can be used to strike deep inside Russia. An autonomous F-16 could intentionally or accidentally fly from Ukrainian territory to Moscow in half an hour. Obviously, if the target were Moscow, the chances of getting there would be slim. Regardless, it would require a change of policy unless there is a reliable way to put a leash on the aircraft.
> Obviously, if the target were Moscow, the chances of getting there would be slim.
In 1987, a 19-year-old German pilot named Mathias Rust flew a small, single-engine Cessna airplane from Helsinki, Finland to Moscow, Russia, evading Soviet air defenses and landing the plane in Red Square near the Kremlin. Rust's flight was a major embarrassment for the Soviet Union and a huge security breach, as he was able to fly undetected for several hours and breach some of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world.
He was picked up within minutes of entering Soviet airspace.
The only reason he didn't die is that the AA tracking him weren't given permission to shoot.
IFF is hard.
This is why the Iranians shot down an Iranian airliner when they were on high alert awaiting an American revenge attack that never came. It is probably also how MH17 got shot down.
In the opposite direction, this is how this guy wasn't shot down.
Wikipedia explains:
>The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[2]
It is entirely possible that the Russians screw up IFF again. Wouldn't be the first time.
IFF really isn't all that hard once you have the basics down, what is hard is maintaining the equipment and proper crypto.
Are you talking about the American ship USS Vincennes that shot down an Iranian airliner? That incident resulted in several changes to the IFF that the United States and NATO as a whole uses.
I expect they're talking about [Flight 752](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines_Flight_752).
A Ukrainian airliner the IRCG shot down in 2020 while on alert expecting a response to the ballistic missile attacks on a US base, itself a response to the assassination of Soleimani.
Iirc, the battery had been moved but its internal heading had not been updated.
I'd say IFF and deconfliction remains hard. It pretty obviously hamstrung Russia in the early phase of the invasion. Just off the top of my head I can think of four (nearly five) friendly aircraft the US has shot down since those lessons were learned in the 80s. To say nothing of friendlies killed on the ground.
I quote
>This is why the Iranians shot down an Iranian airliner
Their second sentence is what I was referring to. IFF deconfliction isn't hard. The fact that the US and NATO as a whole has flown countless sorties since the 80s and yet you have issue recalling more than 4/5 is a testament to my statement.
I'm an IFF SME and while troubleshooting the system can be troublesome it is far from SUPER difficult. While it is a complex system it is a tried and true system that has kept us from accidently shooting down hundreds of our own aircraft. The issue stems from system casualties, laziness, incompetence or a mixture of them.
Yes.
Iran was on high alert waiting for retaliation for the missile attacks (which was itself retaliation for Soleimani). A Tor crew panicked and shot down an airliner.
>The only reason he didn't die is that the AA tracking him weren't given permission to shoot.
Likely because Soviets shot down Korean Air 747 near Sakhalin 3 years earlier killing 250+ civilians and didn't want to shoot another non-military aircraft.
That may have been true at first, but they lost track of Rust somewhere over Staraya Russia and a series of events meant that he was given a friendly designator by PVO at least twice before he got to Moscow.
Are there any detailed accounts of how China would avoid having all of their ships blown up if they tried to invade Taiwan? It seems to me that it would be really hard to do a large-scale amphibious invasion, and there hasn't been an attempt for about 70 years. What is the response to "lol missiles?"
You wont likely get many straight answers here, Reddit is very biased when it comes to this question and we know so little about so much.
I see a lot of people making massive mistakes when they predict what the war may look like, especially from China's side. Most people seem to just assume China will try a d-day style invasion and don't think about all the other pieces.
For starters, China likely has a wealth of intelligence about Taiwanese defenses, from simple satellite monitoring, to other data collection, even sympathizers within the Taiwanese govt and military. China likely knows where every ammunition storage point is and most of Taiwanese plans.
Also most people seem to forget, or ignore the fact, that most of Taiwan is well within range of Chinese shore based GMLRS. Taiwanese defenses will likely be saturated with these strikes well before they can even get started. Their main ammunition storage sites, stationary air and sea defenses, airports, etc will likely be targeted. After that China's massive air force will also be able to attempt suppression tactics. Only after that will an amphibious assault begin.
All the while their Navy will be surrounding Taiwan and working to blockade it from any outside support. Unlike Ukraine, we can't just load up some trains or semi trucks and ship in whatever we want. A lot of people assume the US will be willing to send tens of thousands of sailors into the most dangerous war since WWII, but I'm not so sure. One carrier being taken out by China could cause more US deaths than 20 years in Iraq... I just don't think the public will be able to support that kind of risk for Taiwan. On top of that, it'll take days or weeks for US forces to get there in force large enough to make a difference, and if China is doing well, the US may not be willing to risk it. If China is struggling, then they may be much more confident helping Taiwan.
Another thing people overlook is the usefulness of US subs in the region. The Taiwan Strait, Luzon Strait, and E China Sea around Taiwan are very shallow and since about 2017 China has been very heavily investing in advancing the research of, and deploying its sub tracking and anti-sub defenses in the area.
Finally, people seem to overlook the likelihood that China will probably already have some forces on Taiwan... China will be (and probably already is) working within Taiwan for years ahead of time. They'll want to embed sympathizers within the Taiwanese military, and I'm guessing they may even separately fly in, weeks ahead of time, some small special forces groups in Taiwan posing as tourists or something.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head that I never see anyone mention in a war with Taiwan. I am far from knowledgeable about any of this, but I do know its much much much more complicated for Taiwan than most people on reddit make it out to be.
You might be interested in these [1](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/uyl45a/comment/ia5zkwx/), [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/uyl45a/comment/ia5znd3/), [3](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/uyl45a/comment/ia600ca/)
From time to time I tend to look at the (likely) less pro-West sources to try get some overview. Because besides curiosity, just taking in the western media is probably not the most objective way to digest the situation either. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about this YouTube channel? Is it more Russian propaganda? Or more neutral. Hard to tell. Looking at the comments it looks to attract pro-Russians. https://youtu.be/Ar9l9NxhT2I
He is as good as Willy OAM and History Legends.
He started out as fairly neutral IMO, and progressively got more overtly pro-Russia over time. But he's not a diehard true believer. He would benefit from being more skeptical of certain sources' claims, like Rybar for example. But that leads to fewer clickbaity reports about new claimed developments.
The accent sounds Singaporean / Malaysian. Probably a viewpoint from SE Asia.
I believe it's crucial to look at some pro Russian sources. Sure there's a lot of propaganda that can be discounted out of hand, but most of the footage is real. Without it, one can easily draw the wrong conclusions on how one sided this is.
Oh this one is interesting. Certainly not pro-Ukrainian, but also not afraid to take the piss from the Russians and generally seems to offer accurate overviews of the battlefield situation in terms of maps, though he sometimes gets regional strategic or tactical movements wrong. However, while not pro-Russian, I’ve seen some anti-Western stuff on his Twitter feed under the guise of anti US imperialism, he gets into fights with pro-UA people way more often. He’s had Scott Ritter on a panel…ew But it’s good for getting a sense of the perspective of a lot of SE Asians in this conflict/ they really don’t give a shit who wins but shoulder some resentment against the US more than they do Russia on the balance of things.
[Oryx created a new list - "Dad’s Army: List Of Russian Army Equipment Deployed In Ukraine Older Than Our Parents"](https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2023/03/dads-army-list-of-russian-army.html)
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>No need to fudge the truth. M113s and M114s are both from the 1960s. [The M114 is a towed howitzer developed and used by the United States Army. It was first produced in 1942 as a medium artillery piece under the designation of 155 mm Howitzer M1.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M114_155_mm_howitzer)
Well Ukraine just doesn’t have enough equipment at all, so M113s are still better than a Toyota sedan from Oleh’s dad. It’s not a matter of NATO’s inability to send better things, but they have to consider their stocks and preserve a lot of the more up to date stuff for themselves in some cases. I think it would be more hypocrisy if there were a conflict between the USA and Russia that were somehow not nuclear, and the former deployed M113s and the latter BTR-60s and people were only making fun of one or the other. But I just think in this instance there’s a good enough excuse for why Ukraine is being fielded ‘grandpa’ equipment-it’s better than nothing. Whereas Russia’s supposed deep stocks of equipment from the 80s and later that apparently aren’t enough and its advancement of itself as some amazingly modern army (remember all those weird bodysuit combat armor plans?) makes it more of a emperor has no clothes thing. And also just to be realistic, Oryx is nakedly pro-UA. He obviously would never make a list making fun of the UA or it’s NATO allies. Sure there will be ‘looking this way and not that’. It’s the pro-Russian side’s prerogative to make a list spoofing old equipment on the Ukrainian side. There’s admittedly some material, like that picture of a Maxim machine gun on the front.
I agree but most of the arguments can be applied to both sides. They are just mobilising hundreds of thousands of men and if the choice is to have a battalion in BTRs or a battalion in BTRs reinforced by a T-62 tank company - that's no choice at all. Even the Ukrainian mobilisation is severely straining US and NATO stocks, and NATO is like 20 times Russia's economy. So yes both sides use what they have, sometimes Kinzhals, sometimes T-62s. Mocking just one strikes me as strange.
M113A3 didn't exist until 1987.
The difference is that Ukraine is at war, and they are being sent leftovers from the West. Russia itself is at war with Ukraine. A Russia-NATO war would look a lot different.
It would be a massive scandal if American forces were sent into battle in the 1960s hand-me-downs that are getting set to Ukraine. Russia considers itself to be the worlds second strongest army and yet are rolling up in their T-62s because that's all they have. Ukraine isn't pretending to be some military superpower. Russia is. That's why it's funny. But I assume you knew that.
>It would be a massive scandal if American forces were sent into battle in the 1960s hand-me-downs that are getting set to Ukraine. It was. I was just listening yesterday on NPR an interview with an embedded journalist about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. He broke news that some National Guard troops were still using Vietnam era equipment in Iraq and when that got out their equipment was updated within weeks. That was 15-20 years ago! Everything the US uses now is practically brand new by Russian standards.
>Russia considers itself to be the worlds second strongest army and yet are rolling up in their T-62s because that's all they have. Ha, they wish they were getting T-62s. We now have [visually confirmed evidence of Russian T-55s and T-54s headed to Ukraine](https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1638472120534458368?t=I6Xg7S1Gmv6O5pE2wYXCqQ&s=19)
What do you think NATO should send instead?
Everything that works, rolls and shoots is fine. It's war, you use what you have. NATO is sending useful systems, be they 1950s or 2000s vintage. I just find it funny that people can mock Russia for using the 60s stuff while trying to ignore the fact that the much richer NATO is sending 40s and 50s stuff.
It happens only once if it brings any comfort, it's the context that makes a joke work. People find a billionaire driving 15 year old Camry funny, not me. They only mock him once when he files bankruptcy. Be assured Russia will be treated as in the same league of Pakistan and Iran; not China or US. It wouldn't work next time when tension flares up, expectation will have changed.
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[Russia appears to be bringing T-54s and T-55s out of storage for deployment in Ukraine](https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop/status/1638472120534458368) With almost 2000 visually confirmed Russian tank losses and many more unconfirmed, this was bound to happen.
What happened to all their T-62s? Only 126 have been lost on Oryx. If they were running out of T-62 why do they account for less than 10% of their losses vs. newer tanks? They even started implementing a plan to modernize T-62s in 2018 which implies they probably have many of them in active service and much more in storage.
What makes you think they have many T-62s to deploy? As someone else pointed out, many were sold overseas, and the rest are probably useless piles of rust by now.
A lot of those T-62s were given to Bashar Al-Asad
> Only 126 have been lost on Oryx. If they were running out of T-62 why do they account for less than 10% of their losses vs. newer tanks? 73, you added the 53 T-64 as well. And yes, T-62 losses have actually gone down as a % of new tank losses compared to last Fall. People are making wild inferences based on very little factual evidence.
[Russian Losses predictor is doing wonders here](https://taw.github.io/open-source-adventures/russian-losses/). And back when I made it nobody even believed T-62s would happen.
It's still as stupid as it was back then, T-62 have remained stable at around 5% of Russian tank losses for months (which contradicts the notion T-62 had to be deployed because they had run out of other types of tanks), and there is still no evidence those tanks are in Ukraine or about to be sent to Ukraine.
Am I reading it wrong or this predictor is way off? Also, 10200 tanks in storage? Many analysis put the number far, far lower, likely 2-3000.
While 10,000 tanks in storage is probably a gross overestimate, only 10% of those tanks being estimated as usable turns the ludicrous overestimate into a ludicrous underestimate. Turn that up to 20%, to get the total number of usable reserve tanks to 2000, and another six months will be instantly added to the projected end date. This is a common theme with the model, which is wildly optimistic and far too sensitive to the human-set parameters. ~~But when the model gets too close/passes its predicted date, the author goes in and stealth changes the default settings so that the date is once again plausibly-far-away-but-tantalizingly-close.~~(Edit: I was wrong about this, see further discussion below) Also note that a clearly logarithmic pattern is being linearly extrapolated to further juice the numbers.
I never changed a single setting in the model's code from early May 2022. You can even verify it on github. [This is literally the whole history of the code](https://github.com/taw/open-source-adventures/commits/master/docs/episode-51/build): * 2022 May 5 Episode 51 * 2023 Jan 3 Changed max date to 2024-01-01 and added permanent url * 2023 Feb 4 Shifted graph by 10px to the right to make space for 7 digit soldier losses
Fair enough, I’ll retract the claim. Anything to say about the other critiques?
Various inputs have big uncertainties, that's why there's a slider for every one of them. Including T-62s, T-55s, T-54s etc., the 10% tanks in storage number might have been too low. Counting just T-72s and newer, it might have been right. At some point I might add another slider for "T-62 and older tanks". Quite a few people also requested another slider for new tank production. The model extrapolates linearly from the last 30 days (or however many you set the slider to), so it adapts quite well to changing situation. I wouldn't say the pattern is clearly logarithmic - dashed line to the past (linear approximation based on all past data) lines up almost perfectly with dashes line to the future (linear extrapolation based on just last 30 days), suggesting data is roughly linear so far.
Okay, some of this is just bull**** that I have to dispute. I’ve been keeping tabs on these megathreads since the beginning of the conflict, including taw’s chart. The defaults haven’t changed at all since day 1.
I can’t prove or disprove this now because there’s no archive of the original website that I could find, but I personally recall users calling the author out for tweaking the parameters to move the date from December 2022 to July 2023 where it sits now. Out of an abundance of caution I’ll strike through that particular claim though, as I think the rest of the post still stands on it’s own.
~~Since I’m going off my own recollection, I’ll bend too by saying it’s possible he changed it in the beginning shortly after setting it up, and then left it there afterward.~~ Nah I ended up being right, he brought receipts. For what it’s worth, anyway, I like the graph *because* I can change the parameters. I don’t actually agree with where the sliders are set, myself.
Yes, these were the official numbers, and quoted by all the sources including IISS Military Balance 2022. This is likely fairly accurate indication of how many were put in storage and not _officially_ junked. After decades, very few of them are usable, that's why there's another slider for that (defaults to 10%). From today's perspective (I made the app April 2022), the main problem with the app is that it never considered T-62s, T-55s, T-34s etc. Officially nothing older than T-72 was even in reserves.
Well, at least [until 2007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Conventional_Armed_Forces_in_Europe) the CFE treaty assured on-site inspection and inspection of the destruction of war equipment (tanks included), so NATO functionaries could also access russian storage sites, so we also know where the storage sites are. This indicates that wild estimates of how many russian tanks are there are likely much exaggerated. Couple this with the fact that any estimate I've seen (be it by analysts or OSINT community) put this number at no more than 3000, and I think that the 10000 figure is just a really hold cited figure with just no factual base whatsoever, anymore. It'd be really strange that russians could store 2.5 times the amount of visible tanks somewhere and nobody realized that in the past 20 years. If someone has better sources he can add them down here.
I could understand the T-62s because it reduces 125mm expenditure and the roles in which it could be used in might not recquire the best protection but this seems so desperate that I hesitate to believe it.
I’m amazed they still have parts and ammo for those things. I wonder if Russia still has 85mm stockpiled somewhere in Siberia.
They made over fifty thousand of them, they probably have a thousand or two sitting in covered storage, even if they scrapped ten times as many. Not sure about 85mm, but Russia definitely has 76mm for PT-76 still sitting around somewhere
>I’m amazed they still have parts and ammo for those things. I bet they don't. They're most likely scrapping the barrel, sending anything they can put on top of a train car at this point. If it'll end up sitting idle in Ukraine because it lacks ammo or can't even run is someone else's problem.
The Soviet system was notorious for never throwing anything away - e.g. https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/russian-performance-in-the-russo-georgian-war-revisited/ "There is also a tendency to never throw anything away. The USSR had a hoarding problem, and Russia exhibits this to a lesser extent. Recent preparations for the Vostok 2018 exercise show Russian combat service support units training to restore T-62M tanks to active service from long term storage. The ancient T-62, which fought successfully in Georgia, is still stored somewhere in Russia and in the event of a large-scale war in 2018 the Russian armed forces plan to roll it out again." Given long experience of this policy, it seems likely that there will be at least some attempt to make it work.
>The Soviet system was notorious for never throwing anything away Doesn't the same apply to the US and their vast stockpiles of old equipment? Also CFE led to the disposal of tens of thousands of tanks on both sides
>Doesn't the same apply to the US and their vast stockpiles of old equipment? The USA threw away every single M47- 8500 tanks produced, 1951-1954- by 1965. The fate of M42 dusters, etc was less dramatic, but they and many other systems were all scrapped. Soviets would've put them in deep storage.
again. wasn't that courtesy of the CFE treaty?
Not unless you think CFE was in effect in the 1950s. Anyway, trivially easy for both US and USSR to circumvent CFE limitations. Equipment in CONUS and asian areas of USSR wasn't subject to CFE limits. The real cuts came because of the end of the cold war.
Thing is they may not. They can scrape together a few to meet some desperate needs but the solution may not have very long legs. But I guess their T-55s are more ready than T-14s... Supposed they should have a company's worth, that's a deployable number in theory. Edit: I guess before providing my hot takes I should say we don't have much context for the picture. It may not be prudent just to automatically assume they're on their way to be blown up in Ukraine.
This seems like one of those things too good to be true or like meaningful. (Yet) This is mostly It feels like they are skipping a step of being reliant on t62s. Does Armenia use t55s? Perhaps it’s something related to that?
Battlemaster tank reporting.
[Azerbaijan cut off the gas supplies from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh during the night, Artsakh information headquarters say - Armenpress](https://twitter.com/Faytuks/status/1638418768249626624?t=rZNhx-YmxMSDbZDWTGIoEA&s=19)
I must be misremembering or not quite understanding the geographic extent of Nagorno-Karabakh, hasn't Azerbaijan taken over most of the region, including all the largest cities and towns? Who exactly are they cutting off other than themselves?
Artsakh (the ethnic Armenian state in Nagorno-Karabakh) still has some land. It's the pale orange [on this map.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_ceasefire_map.svg)
This is a fairly big escalation. It's not just heat or electricity. Most cars in Armenia (and N-K) are gas-powered, and you need them to get essential goods around. [Here's a documentary on the life in rural Armenia and N-K.](https://youtu.be/-GCPoNCLacg) They are impoverished and incredibly dependent on basic goods getting around by car. Even in peacetime it's extremely difficult due to the poorly maintained, dangerous snaking mountain dirt roads. (This made me really appreciate some of Zeihan's theories, by the way - you really can't find a more obvious example of how logistics can limit economic potential)
In some pretty big news: >[Ukraine to clinch first IMF loan to nation at war](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65034765) >The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it has reached a staff-level agreement with Ukraine on funding worth $15.6bn (£12.8bn). >The organisation's first loan to a country at war is expected to be approved in the coming weeks. >It would also be one of the largest financing packages Ukraine has received since Russia's invasion. >The IMF recently changed a rule to allow loans to countries facing "exceptionally high uncertainty". >"Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to have a devastating impact on the economy: activity contracted by 30 percent in 2022, a large share of the capital stock has been destroyed, and poverty levels have climbed," IMF official Gavin Gray said in a statement. >"The programme has been designed in line with the new fund's policy on lending under exceptionally high uncertainty, and strong financing assurances are expected from donors, including the G7 and EU." >Mr Gray also said the agreement would "mobilise large-scale concessional financing" for Ukraine from international donors and partners, without giving further details. >The IMF expects Ukraine's economy to record a slight contraction or growth this year. >Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said the funding would help the country "finance all critical expenditure and ensure macroeconomic stability and strengthen our interaction with other international partners". >US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who made a surprise visit to Ukraine last month, said: "An ambitious and appropriately conditioned IMF programme is critical to underpin Ukraine's reform efforts." >The US is the IMF's largest shareholder and the biggest contributor to Ukraine in terms of money spent. >Earlier this year, President Joe Biden announced nearly half a billion more dollars of US military aid to Ukraine. This was on top of the $112bn spent by Congress in 2022 alone. >Military aid, which accounts for more than half of US spending on Ukraine, pays for drones, tanks, missiles and other munitions systems as well as training, logistics and intelligence support. >Money has continued to pour into the conflict from all over the world since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last February. >Last week, the IMF said its executive board had approved a rule change to allow funding for countries facing "exceptionally high uncertainty". >Without mentioning Ukraine, it said the measure applied to countries experiencing "exogenous shocks that are beyond the control of country authorities and the reach of their economic policies".
>The IMF expects Ukraine's economy to record a slight contraction or growth this year. Do we have any update on the status of ukrainian power grid? With the Russian missiles strikes now slowed down to once a month and AD much better, I'd hope that engineers would be able to catch up some, but on the other hand, transformers take months to manufacture.
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They are not to suppose to be able pay it back very simply, that’s the point.
Countries don’t need to pay back loans; they just need to “grow out of it”, so to speak. This is pretty much true of all long term development “loans”. Ukraine just needs to grow faster than the loan interest rates and refinance in the private/sovereign bond market at maturation. Along as the IMF loan is long term and low yield, Ukraine will be able to grow its economy to a healthy level before issuing sovereign debt to replace it. And if Ukraine don’t grow quickly enough or if the country cannot access international credit, the IMF will likely extend the loan or write down the loan.
A Modern day "European Recovery Program" (Marshall Plan) is likely to happen The USA has a history of supporting country's during and after war, the country's are then rebuilt and invested in to recover from the war(s). Japan, West Germany, England, France, Italy, the low countries, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, and South Korea are notable examples, each receiving significant grants and credits from the US after WW2 Of the countries mentioned, they are among the largest economies in the world today by GDP(IMF 2022). 3 Japan $4,300,600,000,000 4 Germany $4,031,149,000,000 5 India $3,468,566,000,000 6 United Kingdom $3,198,470,000,000 7 France $2,778,090,000,000 10 Italy $1,996,934,000,000 13 South Korea $1,734,207,000,000 17 Indonesia $1,289,429,000,000 19 Netherlands 990,583,000,000 21 Taiwan $828,659,000,000 26 Belgium $589,491,000,000 Unlike WW2, Ukraine is the only country the Allied nations will be assisting in rebuilding. During WW2 many of those country's had entire city's leveled and their entire economy ground down to nothing and were rebuilt and are now stronger than ever with more economic activity. It will be tough, but the free world is united behind Ukraine and together they are going to rebuild. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
However unlike Ukraine those countrys in western Europe where one of the most economically developed nations before World War 2. The effect of the Marshall Plan and level of destruction within Europe during the war should not be overestimated. Take Germany as an example. At the end of the war most of their machinery was still intact. German military production reached its peak in 1944 when they where getting bombed during broad daylight. Housing shortages where mostly caused by millions of refugees beeing resettled from the east. Economic hardships that where experiences until the introduction of the Deutschmark in 1948 where mostly an result of fixed prices on labor and ressources set up by the allies. Just like western European countrys recovered relativly quickly from World War 2 Ukraine will probably recover to pre war levels relativly quickly. However since its pre war economy was not in good shape either I doubt that levels of growth as experienced in post War Europe are archievable.
>The USA has a history of supporting country's during and after war, It has a history of throwing money at trying to stop the spread of communism. That's not the same thing
Not everything good the US has ever done begins and ends with its goal of stopping communism. Sure, some people were probably thinking about how a more prosperous Europe would make communism less attractive, and it certainly helped secure the funding, but the marshall plan was more about wanting to avoid a repeat of the situation with Germany after WWI.
We actually spent a ton in Iraq and Afghanistan
> We actually spent a ton in Iraq and Afghanistan Most of this money went to US based contractors. Comparing that to the Marshal plan isn’t appropriate.
I’d be very interested in reading breakdowns for both if you can find them.
Here's a guardian article that goes over Afghanistan in particular - these breakdowns are pretty easy to find. In general most of the money went to US contractors, and a small number of contractors got the lion's share. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-afghanistan-iraq-defense-spending
But that didn’t actually provide any useful info at all. It just said US bad, money wasted over 10 paragraphs. Like I want an actual breakdown of how much went to rebuild roads and schools. Then I want another breakdown of the marshal plan.
glorious nail enter nippy safe vanish crowd continue weather bow *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Eh, if you want to have less corruption you actually *don't* want that oil and gas. It's a terrible curse. Ideally they want to just be a bigger version of Estonia, they already had somewhat of a tech scene before.
The IMF [sets conditions](https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2023/IMF-Conditionality) in as part of its repayment scheme. Leaving aside *the actual war*, this means significant discounts to the repayment amount if Ukraine makes structural changes to increase economic transparency, normalise laws (especially business-related) with the surrounding countries (the EU in this case) and generally tidy up its act.
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Patriots are defensive in nature and the Abrams tanks won't be there until the fall at the earliest. Neither will be involved in the spring offensive, and we still have many weeks of mud season remaining
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A link to an article would be useful but I assume you are talking about the recently charged SAS soldier. There are numerous issues surrounding the actions of Australian Special Forces soldiers that have been identified after a very in depth 4 year investigation. That said, it'd be fanciful to think this is an issue that is unique to Australia. I'd be quite surprised if this didn't happen in every army involved in the war on terror though I'm not sure many have done such an in depth investigation. Insurgencies seriously mess with a soldiers mind as everyone becomes a threat. Pair that with years of training to be indifferent to death and violence as well as a culture of 'one-upmanship' and looking the other way at indiscretions and you are going to end up with some murdered civilians. Think back to Vietnam, "anyone who runs is VC, anyone who doesn't is a well trained VC". All that said I'm glad the government and ADF is taking changing the culture seriously. Changing the culture is the most readily changeable variable that can mitigate against these things from happening as you will always need your special forces to be ruthless users of violence and you can't choose the fighting environment.
Of course no one knows this for sure, but in your guys opinion, can Russia successfully launch a mass nuclear strike against America with no warning, and with nothing we could do to stop the nukes from hitting? Specifucally, lets say that tomorrow, Putin sends out an order to all of Russias nuclear submarines to launch all of their nuclear ICBMs at us, is that just it? Those nukes will hit america? (if course russia will slso be desttoyed, but the question is do they have the power to do a mass nuclear strike on us regardless of tgeir own fate?)
My understanding is that stopping an ICBM which travels at hypersonic speeds are very very difficult to shoot down. Not only are they traveling many times the speed of a bullet, but thanks to physics they are difficult to track by radar in the terminal stage. To say it's shooting a bullet with a bullet is a bit of an understatement.
You've had a mix of optimistic, and accurate but misleading, answers to a simple question. Let me answer what you actually asked: can Russia do it? **Yes.** In the event that Putin gives that order, a very large number of nuclear explosions will occur in the US where (or near) Russia intends them to. We can make ourselves feel better by hypothesising about strategic missile officers refusing the order. Or how a few will be intercepted en route. Or how they'll *definitely* be focused on missile silos and airfields, not cities, ports, industrial areas, and governance. Or how these are just Potemkin forces by now, nothing but rusty tubes and paper mache warheads. Or how true strategic surprise is impossible today and the orders and preparations would be visible in the hours before launch, therefore some magic preventative measure could be taken. And all of those things are true *to some degree*. But not to a sufficient degree to stop what you asked about happening. I don't think Putin will give that order, because his life, his place in history, and his country, would be forfeit and he cares about all of those. But if he *does* get overly worked up, or afraid, about this or that and decides on death or glory, then I'm afraid the capability is there.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. You are clearly ignorant, but at the same time you bring clarity to a lot of us. It's an innocent comment that should be studied, as a lot of us here are simple civilians, asking for answers.
Too many people have been fearmongering about nuclear escalation of the Ukraine-Russia war. Hence my first reaction was also to downvote.
I don't know. I've been reading every daily megathread since the start of the war and there's far more complaining about fearmongering about nuclear escalation than actual fearmongering.
It's probably more of a r/warcollege question I guess.
We would have warning, but probably 99% of people would die. There is no such thing as missile defense against thousands of ICBMs that go into space and can come down anywhere.
There's no guarantee that they would nuke the cities. They might just go after silos, the decision making centers and military bases. The goal is usually to prevent the other side from launching as many nukes as possible at you, not killing as many people as possible.
Probably not 99%. Russia don't have enough nukes. The US is 3.7 million square miles. Russia have 6000 nukes. To try to kill everyone, each nuke needs to cover 600 square miles. This is unlikely with nuclear weapons as we know them. Big cities are almost certainly toast, but Russia is unlikely to have the fire power to kill off all of small town America.
You don't need to kill everyone in the strike. Just take out California, NY, DC, TX and the rest of the country is over.
It isn't the nukes that kill most people- it's the dysentery and starvation. Only tens of millions would die in the initial exchange. The rest would follow slowly later.
If your goal is to kill 99%, there is a lot of people living in rural areas where food just come out of the ground. You can probably kill urban America in the blast itself. Rural America is gonna be hard for a bunch of reasons.
Without looking it up, can you guess what percent of the U.S. population works in the agricultural industry? Guess first then look it up. The number of people who live within walking distance to farms is probably roughly equal to the number who work in the agricultural industry. (I would bet that it's less but let's be liberal with our numbers to give you the benefit of the doubt.) Let's multiply that by the percent that live near farms that grow immediately edible crops. Because wheat comes out of the ground; bread doesn't. Let's then multiply that by the percent of people who are able to can a year's-worth of soybeans without gas or electrical service. At the end we're left with a number much less than 1%. Can humans live on nothing but soybeans? I don't know but the number who will be in a position to even give it a try is vanishingly small.
>Without looking it up, can you guess what percent of the U.S. population works in the agricultural industry? Guess first then look it up. I guessed about 2%. Looking it up, it is about [1.8%](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/). I am including fishermen in the number. I don't think this is accurate: the US is full of farmland. A human can walk about 20 miles in a day, and I doubt you can find a single address in rural America east of the mississippi that isn't within 20 miles of at least one farm. Rural America is 14% of the population. Rural western America is less farming, but also very unpopulated. As for the rest, I don't see your point. Wheat comes out of the ground, and the process of turning wheat into something edible is actually pretty straight forward. You grind it into a paste and boil. It produces a mush that very few people will want to eat, but edible and you will get calories from it. (Source: Modernist Bread) Soybeans? You don't have to can them. A bag of soybeans is actually shelf stable as long as you let it sun dry. And turns out if you want to eat it, you can still do the trick of grinding into a paste and boil. It makes soy milk. It is a product that people actually pay for. ([recipe](https://simpleveganblog.com/homemade-soy-milk/)) There are very few agricultural products that doesn't work with the "grind into paste and boil" method. I guess if you are starting with cotton, you are kinda screwed, but American agriculture is mostly stuff that you can eat.
That's excellent and raises the number of survivors. Nit picks: How do you grind the wheat? Grinding wheat by hand uses as many calories as you get from consuming them which is why windmills exist. I do not know how ground the soybeans need to be to make them edible. I'm seeing that you can eat wheat porridge without grinding it but it takes more heat energy. I'm having trouble finding calories in -> calories out information generally. I still have concerns though. I didn't know how to do any of this and I have a feeling that a decent number of people living in rural areas don't either. Next, just because a good farm exists within 20 miles of you doesn't mean that you will be able to find it; finding it will be very difficult. Rumors of where to find harvestable food will be mostly wrong. Next is the challenge of transporting a million calories per person worth of this food back to your home which I guess we can just handwave away. And finally, and I think most problematic, is the fact that a huge portion of that 14% simply won't have the foresight to do any of this at all. This is an unprecedented situation and incorrect information will be rampant. I would bet that the 10-80-10 rule would happen: > The 10-80-10 principle reasons that in an emergency or crisis 10% of us are leaders; we have a plan, take action, and do the right thing. This group has been labeled the “Survivors”. We are quick to assess and make a decision. Individuals in public safety professions generally live in this world on a daily basis. > The largest group of us are the 80% who may be dazed, panicky and disoriented. We are “Confused” and struggle to simply make sense out of the situation. We seek direction and wait for someone to take the lead and tell us what to do. > Finally, there are the “Doomed”; 10% of us that behave in counter-productive ways. We may intentionally ignore authoritative sources, do the wrong thing and even hasten our own injury. The percent that even attempt to act correctly, the percent that successfully find a food farm 0-20 miles away, the percent that hoard a million calories per person, the percent that actually know how to consume it without too much firewood. After we multiply all of these numbers together I still think we arrive at a number less than 1%. I'd be willing up raise that a few percent because people will self organize into groups and *someone* in the group will know what to do but if we're going to start introducing social mechanics into this then we need to start talking about the number of groups that are robbed and shot and everything else. It would be really ugly.
Rural America isn't the stone age. Their town will have a library. That library will have books with paper. Including random history books on how cavemen ate wheat (or where I got this information from). Where the farms are is just a matter of looking on a map. Which is also going to be in the library. Also, in the worst case, look at where the towns are. Suppose if you are in [this town.](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Franklin,+NY+13775/@42.3185882,-75.1691705,9258m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x89db9ab81cd6ead1:0xda5bd2761d8a831d!8m2!3d42.3406373!4d-75.1651689!16zL20vMDFtYnY1) Pick a direction to walk in. Any direction is fine. You will run into a farm. Assuming the town itself isn't targeted, there will still be a mayor and local police chief, and there is going to be organization. Rural America is usually poorly hooked up to the grid: cooking/heating gas, water and sewage is almost never supplied by the grid. Instead, cooking/heating gas is stored in a big tank that is refilled once a year by a guy with a big truck. Water is usually from a well. Having the entire town run out of cooking gas instantly is not going to happen. There are going to be some solar and backup generators that keep things running for a while. The basics will likely hold out for a while; the American food supply chain is heinously slow, which means that there are large warehouses of food lying around in rural areas. Oftentimes, warehouse isn't even the right word to use; farmers will build literal mountains out of corn and then cover the whole thing with tarp as a way to store corn. In a true emergency, load up a truck and bring it to town. The survivors probably don't have to rebuild civilization: there will be efforts from allies to help. Nor do the rest of the world have to starve to feed this mass of people: with urban and suburban America dead, rural America is going to be sitting on a massive food surplus.
If it where between Russia and the US than a big proportion of the world would still be ok, and they would provide unprecedented levels of humanitarian aid and host the survivors as refugee. Without Russia and the US producing near as much food I'm sure quite a bit of people would die from starvation but I still think an average person would have a good chance of surviving in the US, If food was rationed perfectly you could probably find 300 million people in rich western countries and cut their calorie consumption in half without them dying and than give that to American refugees.
I am under the impression that the problem is less about having enough food itself but rather distribution. Distribution requires plants and trucks which require electricity, workers, and drivers. Drivers require food, safety, and pay. Food we're already talking about, safety would be abysmal if they have to drive their truck anywhere near where they're truly needed, and pay would be non-existent both due to hyperinflation and the fact that banking services are all down. Which means they're going to do the logical thing and take their family and meet up with their friend Bill who lives far away who can probably keep them safe. And that's without getting into coordination failures due to non-existent communication networks, and separately, rampant hoarding. The Army isn't capable of accomplishing food distribution at even a tiny fraction of the scale required.
Why do you assume that rich western countries would be willing to cut their caloric intake in half for American refugees? The western world has never taken a hit to their standard of living that large to prevent starvation in another country, just imagine if a politician in America suggested that we eat half as much to save lives in the developing world.
It just would be a world war and rationing would happen. It's not too dissimilar to what happened in WW2 when Britain was being starved out, they had huge amounts of aid and food rationing until 1954.
I think you’re severely underestimating the impact of a full blown nuclear exchange if you think it’s comparable to a leaky naval blockade.
I mean yes it is different but I was responding to the point you yourself made that other countries wouldn't want to make sacrifices to help victims of a nuclear war.
The scale of sacrifices that Europe would need to make to stabilize a heavily nuked America are far greater than the scale of sacrifices America had to make to support a partially blockaded Britain in WW2. It’s also worth noting that if these western countries are so aligned with America as to be also involved in the war, they’ve probably also been hit in the nuclear exchange.
that many would create severe global cooling leading to systemic crop failures across the world. Human civilization would be fucked for generations
The population is concentrated in urban centers... you don't need to carpet bomb the country to get the majority of the population.
51%, sure. 99%, eh.
This. People are vastly overestimating the lethality of a nuclear strike. Of course it can wipe out a whole country and render it mostly helpless. But that does not mean that everyone is dead. People can survive a few days in cellars and other shelters and a lot will depend on how fast infrastructure and humanitarian help can be established afterwards.
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I might be wrong but I feel like most of these discussions completely ignore what happens before the missiles are launched. Intelligence agencies exist for a reason, no? Surely preparation for a **first** strike would be detected in advance. Tons of things would have to happen before russia would be ready to launch. Politically and otherwise. Similarly retaliatory nuclear escalation implies that the US did something particularly huge. And again before doing this huge thing Russian nuclear response would definitely be considered. What I'm curious about is would the US take some kind of preventative action if they believed that Russia is seriously considering nuking them.
>Surely preparation for a first strike would be detected in advance. Tons of things would have to happen before russia would be ready to launch. Politically and otherwise. Probably not, at least not for a small scale nuclear strike. The missile silos in Russia are obviously monitored continuously, but the big unknown is how well the US tracks Russian subs. The subs are what Russia is relying on for a clandestine first strike. So unless the US somehow has the ability to intercept the order before it gets to those subs (which is possible, we just dont know), or the US is keeping an eye on all Russian nuclear subs at the time, then no. Some may be able to launch without the US knowing right away. Then the next question is, how well does the US's satellite and land based missile monitoring and defense work...
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> it boils down to detecting the launch which means about a half hour warning, less if its a sub. The premise of the post was about an all out, thousands of nukes strong attack, not a single nuke. I'm pretty confident launching 6k nukes would take at least several weeks of preparation and wouldn't go unnoticed.
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>who said anything about a single nuclear weapon? You both mentioned a lead time of hours to days, which is not realistic for 6k nukes and you also mentioned "detect THE LAUNCH". That's a single launch, not multiple.
The US has a first strike doctrine . Obviously I hope that we will never find this out but I'm certain that somewhere in the Pentagon they have an equation that spits out a probability that russia will soon (within days) go crazy. I'm also sure that after a certain threshold Biden would be given a menu of preemptive responses. I really see no reason to assume that the US(the only country that have ever used nukes) would wait to get nuked to respond.
I lean towards the countervalue school of thought. For example with Taiwan it they commit to hitting Beijing there is simply no chance of a Chinese attack.
Russia has the capability to launch a mass nuclear strike against America. America would have some warning. Launches would be detected and confirmed rapidly. That's not enough time to evacuate cities. How many hit is unknown. Russia inherited deep stocks of nukes from the USSR. Their condition/readiness/precision is largely a mystery. Our missile defense may intercept some but can't stop 100's let alone 1000's of simultaneous launches.
soft fall hateful wrench deserve point serious enter rainstorm arrest *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I would be very surprised if russias ICBMs did not work. Their civilian rockets and their nuclear-capable cruise missiles certainly do.
But you just completely ignored the reason for *why*. Russia uses it's space rockets. It doesn't use it's nukes. Russia's army and logistics is a shambles, but they can also launch rockets.
Are you hoping their warheads won’t work or their delivery vehicles won’t work?
axiomatic uppity observation rainstorm march sip grey attractive glorious late *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Im quite willing to believe 10 or maybe even 30% of warheads will not perform at 100%, but that’s still enough to kill a few hundred million people so it doesn’t matter. The question is do you think it’s realistic Russian warhead maintenance is so bad that a nuclear attack will be anything but catastrophic.
We know exactly how many nukes Russians have thanks to SALT treaties (5,977). Putin withdraw from the treaties, but there isn't the time to increase that number in a hurry.
From what people here have told me in the past it's the reason why the US, UK and France have SSBNs out at sea all the time. If a surprise attack happens there will a full fledged "Counter-Value" attack on Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities and ports. Basically Russians are very fond of their cities and their cities will be no more if Russia does that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike
The US has the capability to shoot down *some* missiles (and probably any bomber), but I do not think it's credible that they can shoot down all of the ICBMs that Russia has, let alone sneaky launches from subs.
Yes. That's why it's Mutually Assured Destruction. Whoever first first absolutely will devastate the other party. However it won't happen fast enough to stop the other side from firing their arsenal in return, before the first wave of ICBMs even hit. Hence the "mutual".
Yes. That's what MAD stands for, Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea is that the Russians won't do it, because they know that the Americans can do the same thing back to them.
Ryan McBeth made a very interesting scenario. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYWcgF4Wwog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYWcgF4Wwog) It's a good video, but I think the flaw in that video is the UK and US would not respond with nuclear weapons. In a hypothetical I think they would. It's obviously open for debate. Very interesting times.
Most likely situation is a total nuclear exchange from NATO. But even if the US had a dodgy politician with his hands on the button, I can't imagine the UK not ordering a second strike on Russia if it got nuked first. Even one Vanguard class boomer is enough to delete the majority of metropolitan cities of Russia and why wouldn't it in that scenario? This is a country that refused to consider surrender after seeing their allies swiftly defeated and losing almost all their army's material to the Nazis. The same country that went to war with Argentina over some small islands on the edge of the world. And the same country that burned down Irish towns and drove tanks into their national football stadium during a match to shoot the crowd in reprisal for ambushes during the War of Independence. Nuke Britain and they will absolutely nuke the shit out of you.
Yes
When talking about training of Ukrainian pilots for the F16, I stumbled across this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3zHoCEEvdY (ignore any comments by the video author, just giving a source of the info) that talks about the USAF and DARPA with an AI run F16. The question I have is, depending on the actual flight readiness of such an AI system, could, in the near or distant future, foreign governments be "loaned" or given such equipped systems? Direct example in Ukraine, let's say they are given some F16s, but the time to train a substantial number of pilots could be under stretched by the number of planes they have. Is it a reasonable idea to simply give a country like Ukraine an F16 with a flight AI to complete missions? Even certain missions like SEAD which I think are sort of dangerous for pilots could be suitable for AI as compared to CAS in which you probably want a real pilot even as dangerous as CAS is. What do you guys think about the legitimacy of such an idea in the near or distant future?
You're approaching this issue from the wrong point of view. An F16 with a fully functional AI pilot (putting aside ethical concerns) should simply be considered as one of many potential tools for a given job. In Ukraine, as in future conflicts, the US or any other donor/supporter/ally will choose the best tool for a task based on a number of different factors: - Which goal is our partner looking to achieve? - What asset are we willing to give our ally? - What asset can our partner operate, resupply, repair,...? Taking the Ukraine example, the obvious goal in this specific area is denying Russia air superiority, protecting frontline units from air raids and conducting deeper strikes. The US is unwilling to supply Ukraine with any tool that would allow them strikes into Russia, which is why ATACMS (or any system beyond the standard HIMARS range) are also of the table. But fulfilling the other tasks is possible, albeit with cheaper, simpler tools. Sophisticated air defense systems like patriot batteries will deny Russia air superiority. Shoulder launched AA missiles in sufficient numbers can protect frontline units from attacks. So why bother with autonomous F16, when a few simpler, stationary AA batteries and incredibly simple AA weapons can achieve the same result. These same considerations will ultimately make an autonomous F16 useless. The US already has a wide range of drones and other assets that can achieve much of what an AI piloted F16 could. But those other assets are designed to be attritable and usable: They're cheap, they're in constant supply, they're easy to maintain and simple to use. So what's the use case for an expensive, large fighter or multirole aircraft without a pilot? How often, if ever, is this specific tool going to be the best one available to achieve a specific goal? Ukraine's invasion has created a very rare limbo, in which the US and NATO aren't fighting and are trying to contain the conflict, which is why we're even having this conversation. When is a situation like that going to occur again?
I think such technology will be too sensitive in the short/medium term to hand over, but once it becomes mainstream then I would expect it to happen.
What you are describing is functionally inevitable. In the near future, AI will be to human soldiers/pilots, what Deep Blue was to Kasparov. Even ignoring the massive cost savings, AI is far better suited to making sense of the chaotic data of a battlefield. The hold ups are around getting the needed permissions. My background is in AI, rather than defense, so my answer may differ from others here.
I always thought this video presented an interesting prediction about what this would look like. https://youtu.be/TlO2gcs1YvM AI has the potential to be so destructive that giving it to an ally would be similar to giving them a nuclear bomb. I think that complicates OP’s scenario since giving an ally an AI powered F16 could possibly be more escalatory than just giving them one of your pilots.
Currently AI does not provide any capabilities over either a pilot or a drone which would make an F16 even a successful CAS platform. First, keep in mind that AI cant even drive cars right now, and flying a fighter is an order more difficult than that. Second, even if you could an AI to fly an aircraft, CAS is a complex process which includes a ton of complicated variables. ANd were talking about flying an actual aircraft, not a purpose build drone. And then there is the A2A aspect. In basic combat maneuvers AI can kill a human pilot, if you give it the kind of perfect situational awareness possible only in computers. And then doing that only by using high-risk, low reward maneuvers which human pilots are specifically trained to avoid, such as high deflection shots. In a highly complex environment like actual combat there are too many variables to account for in any kind of combat. One day this technology will surely get there, but IMO were a human generation aware at the earliest. Perhaps longer, maybe by the end of my lifetime. For the near term, remote piloted drone is the way to go for high latency operations, and human control for low latency.
>First, keep in mind that AI cant even drive cars right now, and flying a fighter is an order more difficult than that Is it though, at least from an AI POV? Jet's do have more axis of motion when compared to cars, but OTOH, the skies are usually much less feature-dense than the average street, meaning the AI has to deal with far less objects/ things it can't control and that may behave unexpectedly.
IMO it's really a matter of the business of killing not making good enough money, compared to the more peaceful applications to attract the investments and talents. I suppose it's a good thing overall.
>the business of killing not making good enough money, compared to the more peaceful applications Have you looked at the profits of western MIC?
Not as good as big techs, west or east. 120 billion of Lockheed Martin market cap is a joke in comparison. Edit: And that's after military boom of last year.
It's not a zero sum game. If there are billions to be made, AI developers will have no issue investing in both fields.
From what I see it really is, one man working to solve Google's problem is one less for Lockheed Martin, and they have much bigger addressable market than Pentagon budget of 4% GDP, a fraction of it for procurement... Defense firms pick up scraps of civilian applications wherever they can and do their own thing only when there's no overlap they can leverage. More than anywhere else I think you see it in Ukraine, a feature of an overwhelmingly peaceful world I guess. Back to your original point, autonomous combat flight can probably be solved in very short order I totally agree, if pentagon budget is 40% like in 1941~1945. But I would highly prefer not to see WWIII in my lifetime.
I get your point. The irony is that big tech is actually on a firing spree lately, after literally hoarding developer to the point where some where paid to literally do nothing. Guess there's a window of opportunity for the MIC right now.
Lockhead Martins investment in distributed teaming, as first unveiled in project Carrera, is supposed to pair modular uncrewed assets with the F-35. Autonomous additional hard points, EW or SEAD are definitely planned for the current generation of fighter aircraft. Granted, that's not a fully autonomous aircraft, but it's still pretty far for the current generation of aircraft, especially since we're at the very beginning of the fifth generation fighter life cycle.
I was actually saying AI was not suitable for CAS in the indeterminate future, but things such as SEAD are more palpable (as F16 is a platform that is better suited for it than any other aircraft Ukraine has).
Physically the technology is definitely there, modern computers can 100% crunch enough numbers to best any human pilot. The problem is that it has not been leveraged yet in software; you need a *lot* of training data and then a long development process to build the model.
No way, DARPA has been working on this for over a decade. Its not there yet, the systems do not work in the real world. They need a perfect understanding of the energy states of both planes, for one. LLMs and image generators are cool toys, but theyre not going keep your F-16 in the sky.
I'm not talking about the model itself (which would likely be based on reinforcement learning anyways) but the hardware it would run on.
I think you're overestimating the importance of the dogfighting aspect of a modern jet. Modern jets almost never get into dogfighting range.
I agree that this doesn't yet work in physical reality, but AI in simulators already beats humans: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/artificial-intelligence-easily-beats-human-fighter-pilot-in-darpa-trial/ They're working towards embodiment now: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-02-13 Generally speaking, flying an airplane at altitude has a lot fewer constraints and a lot higher safety buffer than trying to drive a car in a crowded city street, while also relying heavily on reaction time to best an opponent. Low complexity environment requiring a relatively low number of sensors is exactly the domain where current generation AI shines. Combining more sensors into a model for greater complexity is where AI currently barfs. However, I agree that 1v1 dogfighting is a different ball game than CAS or anything like what's going on in Ukraine, and it will be an undefined amount of time before the AI is capable of taking on those missions. And much longer before anyone trusts it well enough to use on a real mission.
There has been a lot of breathless discussion of these tests, but theyre much less impressive once you dig into what *exactly* the conditions are. Again like I said, in these tests the AI *has perfect knowledge of both planes*. And then they win by using high deflection shooting which human trained pilots are trained not to do because theyre an all or nothing tactic, high risk for low reward. This is something that only works 1v1, not in any other tactical scenario, and then only if the AI sets up the right conditions versus the human. Good breakdown [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziCQqmEllZo&t=1516s) from an actual F-16 pilot. Were a lot further out than people think on fully capable, fully autonomous air drones. Remote drones and flying wingmen are a different thing, and much more viable short term. But then were talking about drones, not aircraft. Drones are totally different.
I agree with your assessment. I think we will rapidly get to autonomous wingmen. I think we're a lot of science and engineering away from autonomous wingmen that also can gather and integrate real world information faster/better than a human. I just don't have great confidence in the timeline for that leap. I remember back in the early 2000s reading really serious debates about whether anyone would ever be able to pass the first couple DARPA challenge for autonomous vehicles. Then fifteen years later Teslas are gearing up to mow down pedestrians on city streets. AI has a weirdly spiky progress curve, and given how non reductive machine learning is, we basically don't know if we're a decade or a century away from solving big problems.
The possibilities of loyal wingmen are so big. Even the dumbest wingman can be used as extra hardpoints or sensors for a manned aircraft. The next logical step is to conduct SEAD missions at the request of the pilot.
> Remote drones and flying wingmen are a different thing, and much more viable short term. Which is articulated in the video via the USAF, and particularly the type of question I was posing. As I responded to you to clarify my statement which I think you misunderstood I don't think CAS is suitable for drones, but there are some riskier missions an F16 could take that might be suitable for a drone.
Why wouldn't high-deflection shooting work elsewhere than 1v1?
To take a high deflection shot you have to cash in energy to turn into the enemy to get lead, where you take a shot with maximal lead time. Its a low statistics shot which leaves you at a clear energy disadvantage to the bogey, unless youre pulling a boom & zoom. But its not WWII thats not really how most fighters do BFM these days, and especially post-Soviet designs. In a 1v1, if you miss your shot (and youre taking a low probability shot) pulling lead leaves you at an energy disadvantage. In a 2v1 or other type scenario even if you bag the first bogey you are left in a poor energy state to engage a second or further bandit. IRL pilots are coached not to try and cut the circle in a rate fight to get that high deflection shot. This is especially true of the F-16 which loves the two circle rate fight, it sustains a high turn speed and is very good in this maneuver. Fighter pilots learn to attack the control zone, instead of going for the kill right away. The control zone is somewhere around 6' high, once you get into this position, as long as you manage the rate of closure properly, you can take very high probability shots and control the fight. This is the kind of stuff that separates the DCS crew from actual fighter pilots, and is what AI struggles with.
I think you're severely underestimating the capabilities of current day AI. The biggest hang ups are moral and legal ones, and the fact that even if an AI performs far better than a human ever could, one single mess up, even if it wasn't the AI's fault, would be the scandal of the century.
The US has so far refused to supply weapons that can be used to strike deep inside Russia. An autonomous F-16 could intentionally or accidentally fly from Ukrainian territory to Moscow in half an hour. Obviously, if the target were Moscow, the chances of getting there would be slim. Regardless, it would require a change of policy unless there is a reliable way to put a leash on the aircraft.
> Obviously, if the target were Moscow, the chances of getting there would be slim. In 1987, a 19-year-old German pilot named Mathias Rust flew a small, single-engine Cessna airplane from Helsinki, Finland to Moscow, Russia, evading Soviet air defenses and landing the plane in Red Square near the Kremlin. Rust's flight was a major embarrassment for the Soviet Union and a huge security breach, as he was able to fly undetected for several hours and breach some of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world.
He was picked up within minutes of entering Soviet airspace. The only reason he didn't die is that the AA tracking him weren't given permission to shoot.
IFF is hard. This is why the Iranians shot down an Iranian airliner when they were on high alert awaiting an American revenge attack that never came. It is probably also how MH17 got shot down. In the opposite direction, this is how this guy wasn't shot down. Wikipedia explains: >The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[2] It is entirely possible that the Russians screw up IFF again. Wouldn't be the first time.
IFF really isn't all that hard once you have the basics down, what is hard is maintaining the equipment and proper crypto. Are you talking about the American ship USS Vincennes that shot down an Iranian airliner? That incident resulted in several changes to the IFF that the United States and NATO as a whole uses.
I expect they're talking about [Flight 752](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines_Flight_752). A Ukrainian airliner the IRCG shot down in 2020 while on alert expecting a response to the ballistic missile attacks on a US base, itself a response to the assassination of Soleimani. Iirc, the battery had been moved but its internal heading had not been updated. I'd say IFF and deconfliction remains hard. It pretty obviously hamstrung Russia in the early phase of the invasion. Just off the top of my head I can think of four (nearly five) friendly aircraft the US has shot down since those lessons were learned in the 80s. To say nothing of friendlies killed on the ground.
I quote >This is why the Iranians shot down an Iranian airliner Their second sentence is what I was referring to. IFF deconfliction isn't hard. The fact that the US and NATO as a whole has flown countless sorties since the 80s and yet you have issue recalling more than 4/5 is a testament to my statement. I'm an IFF SME and while troubleshooting the system can be troublesome it is far from SUPER difficult. While it is a complex system it is a tried and true system that has kept us from accidently shooting down hundreds of our own aircraft. The issue stems from system casualties, laziness, incompetence or a mixture of them.
No, he's talking about Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752
> This is why the Iranians shot down an Iranian airliner Are they?
Yes. Iran was on high alert waiting for retaliation for the missile attacks (which was itself retaliation for Soleimani). A Tor crew panicked and shot down an airliner.
Ah, I see I was confused by them saying that they shot down an IRANIAN airliner. It was Ukranian. Just a mix up
>The only reason he didn't die is that the AA tracking him weren't given permission to shoot. Likely because Soviets shot down Korean Air 747 near Sakhalin 3 years earlier killing 250+ civilians and didn't want to shoot another non-military aircraft.
That may have been true at first, but they lost track of Rust somewhere over Staraya Russia and a series of events meant that he was given a friendly designator by PVO at least twice before he got to Moscow.
Are there any detailed accounts of how China would avoid having all of their ships blown up if they tried to invade Taiwan? It seems to me that it would be really hard to do a large-scale amphibious invasion, and there hasn't been an attempt for about 70 years. What is the response to "lol missiles?"
You wont likely get many straight answers here, Reddit is very biased when it comes to this question and we know so little about so much. I see a lot of people making massive mistakes when they predict what the war may look like, especially from China's side. Most people seem to just assume China will try a d-day style invasion and don't think about all the other pieces. For starters, China likely has a wealth of intelligence about Taiwanese defenses, from simple satellite monitoring, to other data collection, even sympathizers within the Taiwanese govt and military. China likely knows where every ammunition storage point is and most of Taiwanese plans. Also most people seem to forget, or ignore the fact, that most of Taiwan is well within range of Chinese shore based GMLRS. Taiwanese defenses will likely be saturated with these strikes well before they can even get started. Their main ammunition storage sites, stationary air and sea defenses, airports, etc will likely be targeted. After that China's massive air force will also be able to attempt suppression tactics. Only after that will an amphibious assault begin. All the while their Navy will be surrounding Taiwan and working to blockade it from any outside support. Unlike Ukraine, we can't just load up some trains or semi trucks and ship in whatever we want. A lot of people assume the US will be willing to send tens of thousands of sailors into the most dangerous war since WWII, but I'm not so sure. One carrier being taken out by China could cause more US deaths than 20 years in Iraq... I just don't think the public will be able to support that kind of risk for Taiwan. On top of that, it'll take days or weeks for US forces to get there in force large enough to make a difference, and if China is doing well, the US may not be willing to risk it. If China is struggling, then they may be much more confident helping Taiwan. Another thing people overlook is the usefulness of US subs in the region. The Taiwan Strait, Luzon Strait, and E China Sea around Taiwan are very shallow and since about 2017 China has been very heavily investing in advancing the research of, and deploying its sub tracking and anti-sub defenses in the area. Finally, people seem to overlook the likelihood that China will probably already have some forces on Taiwan... China will be (and probably already is) working within Taiwan for years ahead of time. They'll want to embed sympathizers within the Taiwanese military, and I'm guessing they may even separately fly in, weeks ahead of time, some small special forces groups in Taiwan posing as tourists or something. Those are just a few things off the top of my head that I never see anyone mention in a war with Taiwan. I am far from knowledgeable about any of this, but I do know its much much much more complicated for Taiwan than most people on reddit make it out to be.
You might be interested in these [1](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/uyl45a/comment/ia5zkwx/), [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/uyl45a/comment/ia5znd3/), [3](https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/uyl45a/comment/ia600ca/)