Apr 052022
 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought guided missiles to the fore, to a very great cost of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and basically anything that moves. Anti-tank guided missiles have proven to be perfectly capable of turning kinda-modern armor into scrap metal. Swatting aircraft is a somewhat more difficult task, but it’s being done. The video below seems to show a Ukrainian-made “Stugna-P” anti-tank missile (a manually-controlled laser guided missile that can be set on a tripod and fired remotely) promptly deleting a Kamov KA-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter. The Stugna-P would seem a  *terrible* missile for going after a moving aircraft, but this one was hovering… and I don’t care how armored your chopper is, if it gets hit with a missile meant to take out a modern main battle tank, your chopper will do like what this one did, and immediately fall from the sky as flaming wreckage.

For as long as there have been projectile weapons there has been armor. And since then there has been a constant competition between the two for supremacy. And right now, it’s pretty clear that arms (in this case ATGMs) have the advantage over armor. We don’t know how well a truly modern MBT such as the Abrams would hold up against missiles like these, but it’s safe to assume the answer would be “not well.” The traditional response of adding even more armor to the tank is likely not tenable; the M-1 is already so massive that merely transporting it is a problem. So the future of defending vehicles will have to be active: not just the reactive armor that Russian tanks are covered with and that doesn’t seem to be doing them much good, but point defense systems that use guns, lasers, missiles, jets of explosively generated molten metal, blast waves, hell, maybe even force fields. None of these will be “cheap.” This will put effectively-armored vehicles outside the reach of many militaries in the face of relatively inexpensive missiles. Perhaps for a time war will simply be cost ineffective. Won’t that be a hell of a thing.

 Posted by at 8:12 am
Apr 042022
 

Satellite images from March 19th show bodies laying in the streets of Russian-occupied Bucha. The Russians decamped from Bucha March 30, so it seems that they killed civilians in the streets and left them there for at least 11 days. That’s just *strange.*

Bucha is on the outskirts of Kyiv, near Hostomel Airport, final resting place of the AN 225 Mriya. Seems the Russian forces enjoy killing things and just leaving them there to rot. One of the photos in the article shows a woman holding a cat walking past two bodies… said to be those of her husband and her brother. Numerous other photos of bodies, included mass graves seen from both ground level and from space. Kinda hard to hide this sort of thing these days.

Satellite images show bodies lay in Bucha for WEEKS – disproving Russia’s wild claims that more than 400 corpses were brought in AFTER Putin’s troops left the Ukrainian town in a massive hoax

 Posted by at 8:48 pm
Apr 032022
 

One of the more shameful facts to come from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is how many Americans on the political right are siding with Putin. It is a minority, but the fact that *any* American right wingers would side not only with a dictator, but one who clawed his way to power within a communist system, is to some degree baffling and to a large degree irritating and stupid.

One of the reasons why some right wingers are siding with Putin is because Putin is “against the gay Agenda” and such. Yeah, well… Hitler liked affordable cars, good highways and dogs, but that’s not reason enough to side with him. Still, here we are. One of the big points against the “LGBTQAWTF agenda” is that they deny biology: men are not women, women are not men, and they’re not interchangeable. This is a fact which cannot be rationally denied; those who argue otherwise are arguing madness. Fine, whatever. How is this relevant to Ukraine? Well, Russian forces were driven out of the Ukrainian town of Bucha and left a bunch of civilian corpses in their wake. This is backed up not only by video from the scene, but interviews with eyewitnesses and satellite recon photos showing mass graves while under Russian occupation. The Russian Defense Ministry, of course, denies it all, blames everything on the Ukrainians, because of course they do. The “statement” is HERE. Again, how is this relevant to this post? In amongst the expected nonsense that basically boils down to “nuh-uh,” there’s this gem:

“Of particular concern is the fact that all the bodies of people whose images were published by the Kyiv regime, after at least four days, have not stiffened, do not have characteristic cadaveric spots, and blood has not turned up in the wounds.”

The argument is, in part, that the bodies aren’t stiffened. What causes corpses to go rigid? Rigor mortis, a chemical reaction that causes the muscles to tense up. But… rigor mortis doesn’t last forever. It typically starts up within a few hours… and it fades away, leaving the muscles slack, within another 12 to 48 hours. So bodies left in the street for *four* days? Rigor mortis is *long* since over. The Russian government is arguing that rigor mortis operates in ways that science says it doesn’t. As to the lack of blood: I’ve seen a lot of videos of people getting shot. Sometimes people *fountain* blood. And sometimes they hardly bleed at all. If the first shot stops the heart… the blood stops flowing. And all the civilians in the street kinda seem like a message: they were probably shot somewhere else and dragged there. Beyond the psychological value to displaying the corpses of your slain enemies, it’s a dandy way to delay pursuing forces: Not only do you not want to run over human bodies, you don’t want to run over human bodies that may well have been boobytrapped.

 

Virtue signalling time: most of the Russian troops I kinda feel sorry for. They didn’t sign up for this, and at least initially, you could see a reluctance on their part to screw with the Ukrainian citizens. But recently that reluctance seems to have evaporated. Whether that’s because the Russian troops have been traumatized by having their asses handed to them by Ukrainian forces, or because they’ve been forced into it by their leadership, or because the worst of what we’re seeing is actually being done not by run of the mill Russian soldiers but by Syrian, Chechen or other rather more barbaric forces, I don’t know. In any event, if the reports of slaughtering civilians and mass rapes are true… they gotta go. Off this planet, out of the food chain, evacuate the gene pool, ASAFP.

 Posted by at 7:14 pm
Apr 032022
 

The video in this news piece has it all:

A month ago I mentioned (I think… that was a lifetime ago) that I thought it odd how tolerant the Russian soldiers were of Ukrainian civilian protestors. That has clearly come to an end. With Russian military defeats, failures and frustrations, the soldiers are falling back on old school barbarism… rape and murder on a virtually industrial scale. Once again, reality teaches us that people who screech about Nazis are not to be trusted… they stared into the abyss and the abyss didn’t just stare back, it moved in and set up shop.

 Posted by at 12:52 pm
Apr 012022
 

… but I understand.

Now Putin can bleat and whine about those awful, awful Ukrainians attacking Russia. Putin will be forced to respond/escalate.

That said, alternate take: this was done to *make* Russia retaliate, to throw more bodies into the war effort. Why might this be a good idea for the Ukrainians? The war so far has been so monstrously incompetent that it’s a safe bet that the retaliation for this will be even more filled with unthinkery and dumbassery, leaping into the fire without making the least bit of a plan. If the Ukrainians planned this far ahead, the Russians might dump a buttload of troops and equipment directly into a big woodchipper made of RPGs, Javelins, Stingers, NLAW and snipers.

More likely, thought, some Ukrainians just got pissed off and took their shot.

 Posted by at 7:13 pm
Mar 312022
 

One where the sort of toys you can buy at WalMart or Best Buy can help you dial in your mortar gunnery:

Mortars aren’t my field of specialization, so I’m curious about the little cloth bags they’re tying to the mortar rounds. My *guess* is that these are smoke charges of some kind to help the drone spot where they’re landing?

 

 

Bonus: Now it can be told… the reason why Putin is in such a foul mood.

 Posted by at 8:14 pm
Mar 312022
 

There’s a lot stupid about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The fact that it happened in the first place, of course. The fact that there are so many people in the west who think Putin is anything but a cheap villain. The use of inadequate weapons. The lack of preparation. The lack of logistics. The failure to dominate the skies first. And on and on and on. But this… this is on a whole new level of mind-boggling stupidity.

Russian Troops Suffer ‘Acute Radiation Sickness’ After Digging Chernobyl Trenches

And…

Workers at Chernobyl site say Russian soldiers drove through the highly-radioactive ‘Red Forest’ with no protective gear

Is the Russian leadership *trying* to destroy the Russian military?

Forty years ago, when Soviet missiles were pointed almost directly at my head, I would have cheered on Soviet soldiers being abused and wasted in this fashion. Now it’s just freakin’ sad.

 Posted by at 10:56 am
Mar 292022
 

Russian trucks try to get the hell out of Dodge. Two of the soldiers get left. Womp womp.

YouTube says this video is age restricted.  Not sure why… no death or destruction on display, just military incompetence or panic. I suppose if I was a Russian truck driver in Ukraine and I found out there was a drone looking down at me, I’d want to unass ASAP too. But, damn, son.

 Posted by at 12:25 pm