Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Enough said.

Potentially a break through to the troops in Mariupol.

https://twitter.com/militarylandnet/status/1513972931323478020?s=21&t=ov1vqhTHZPPfWhSZ9jWkZA

The face to face meetings with Macron and the Austrian Chancellor Nehammer yesterday might seem like they produce nothing but they do have a value for western intelligence. Macron and Nehammer are under no illusions that they were going to show up to Moscow and Putin would stop the war at their request, it is not about that. Putin is the adversary in war here so any opportunity for western leaders to meet him face to face should be taken as it allows an opportunity to assess his state of mind and his health, if he is truly a madman with nuclear weapons or if he is just bluffing. As the Japanese strategist and philosopher Musashi once said "Know your enemy and know his sword"

The other value in continuing to meet him is that Putin is surrounded by yes men who are scared of telling him the full truth of this war. Meeting a western leader is an opportunity to show Putin how badly his war is going despite what his generals are telling him. Now maybe Putin knows how badly it is going and he doesnt care. Or maybe the Russian figure of only 1,500 soldiers dead is disinformation coming direct from own generals who are too scared to tell Putin the truth of 10,000+ Russian soldiers dead for fear of their own safety. If the latter is the case him being shown how badly his war is going does has a value for Ukraine, especially if it results in a purge of Russian military leadership which in turn will destabilise the Russian armys war effort.

Yes. The account on Twitter just confirmed this. https://twitter.com/militarylandnet/status/1513985790149373954?s=21&t=tek8yKyaoS7I6Tw3zgTwow

Interesting, combined with the further $670m in funding that's been slated...

And it would even be better if NATO just came in and stopped this war. It can be done once it stays in Ukraine.

No food, no ammunition.

They are not going to throw stones.

Something I have speculated on for years is the mysterious great hole in US air capabilities. Why don't they have something with KC-130 like capabilities, but with SOA stealth? The capability to insert and drop things into contested areas seems like such an obvious capability you would want to have. Stealth HALO insertions and deployments of special forces behind enemy lines, or as in this instance, dropping supplies behind enemy lines and in contested airspace.

Here's an idea:

"Joint Precision Air Drop System, a GPS capable parachute which delivers supplies from thousands of feet away from a forward operating base.

...

However, the JPADS aerial delivery can be dropped from an altitude of up to 20,000 feet and 10 miles away from the point of impact. It’s also designed to land within 150 meters of the point of impact, Hughes said." https://www.dvidshub.net/news/66315/lifeliners-using-more-precise-higher-air-drop

This has me wondering if they could drop it from even higher over the Black Sea and have it steer from international airspace to Mariupol. I know the airs thinner, but lighten the load...

The Ukrainians would tinker for a weekend and add an ultralight engine, fuel tank and remote starter to the pallet and quadeuple it's horizontal range by the Monday.

If they went at Finland with a nuke, it could also be the end of the Russian state. They're not going at Finland either way. It's snowy and heavily forested with a military force that is trained to fight a defensive war in those conditions. Plus, Finland would most likely receive similar support from NATO to what Ukraine is getting.

The Russians for all their talk and threats against countries outside of Ukraine, have nothing to back it up. Right now it's not looking likely that they can ever take the whole of Ukraine. They've lost in the north of the country, admitted defeat. That's no kind of force which could prosecute a wider war. All they can do is throw conscripts at it and try to wind them up with Nazi talk, but all they'll be good for is eventually being used as sandbags. The only thing I'd say to Finland is that they've been too accepting of Russian refugees.

I don't think Putin was ever going to get control of the narrative. It wasn't Gary Glitter's lack of media skills which scuppered his chances of recovering from the child porn charges. It was that some acts are just too heinous to defend, and this is also true with Putin and his quest to brutally subjugate Ukraine. It's much easier to win a P.R. war when you are so clearly on the right side of history, as Zelenskyy and Ukraine are.

Right now Russia haven't a notion of attacking Finland. They're creaking under the strain as it is. And Finland would hit them on home soil where it hurt. You'd also guarantee that Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia as well as Sweden all get involved as it be all too close for comfort. When that happens Poland would break ranks too as Russia can't fight that war without Kaliningrad.

So they'd go from fighting one country to 6 in the blink of an eye. With fronts a thousand km apart. I think it would then inconceivable the Belarussians would seize the day and take their opportunity to overthrow Lukashenko. It would be a bigger disaster than operation barbarossa

Er, have you seen the size of a B-2 bomber, or the new replacement, the B-21 (I don't expect you to have seen this one :-)) with a rumoured 66m wingspan? The B-2 bomber is reputed to have a frontal radar cross secton one tenth that of an insect.

By comparrison, A KC-130 has a 40.4m wingspan, which interestingly, is about the same as the RQ-180 stealth drone.

Passive stealth may be making way for active stealth. It seems likely that the AN/ASQ-239 Barracuda ECM system on F-35s may incorporate active radar jamming by suppression of return signals, in the same way noise cancelling headphones generate an inverted phase waveform of an acoustic signal to suppress it.

The airframe of the French Rafale is not particularly stealthy in form and it lacks the surface absorption coatings as well, however it has a highly classified Spectra ECM suite that is speculated to use this method to reduce the planes effective radar cross-section substantially:

"To compensate, the Rafale boasts an advanced Spectra electronic warfare system that supposedly can reduce the Rafale’s cross-section several times over—it is rumored by reflecting back signals using ‘active canceling.’" https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/just-how-stealthy-are-frances-rafales-f42s-66727

So there would very likely be no problem making an airframe large enough to have a KC-130 type role but that was also very stealthy.