It seems the Russians are dropping air-burst incendiary weapons onto Ukraine, videos linked below. This is certainly visually impressive and doubtless monumentally intimidating… but damned if the engineer in me doesn’t wonder about how incredibly inefficient this seems to be. I mean… it looks like a *lot* of the WP magnesium is burning up while still in the sky. What’s you’d want is for it to burn in the *ground,* where it could do some damage. Clearly a lot of it is making it to the ground, but every bit that combusts Up There is that much less to do actual damage Down Here. Clearly these sort of weapons need to be set off somewhere above the ground for maximum area effect, but these seem to be getting set off way too high. I’m fuzzy on the legality of using incendiary weapons like this against civilian areas. I know it was a popular pastime during World War Two, but it was my understanding that the rules have changed a bit since then. But then, invading a sovereign nation in order to annex their territory is *also* supposed to be disallowed, and yet here we are.
We see it quite often in Kharkiv region. pic.twitter.com/CIZOIF68Dd
— Ognivo_v (@VOgnivo) August 17, 2022
I just saw this on TikTok pic.twitter.com/Rm5TOQh6bs
— 🌧 (@woerayne) August 17, 2022
UPDATE: more vids
Yeah, it’s visually damned impressive. It just seems like a *lot* of the incendiary potential is getting wasted. Which, under the circumstances, is a good thing, since these seem to be attempts to turn neighborhoods into firestorms.