Bulletins and News Discussion from August 12th to August 18th, 2024 - Marshall Plan: Now As Farce - COTW: Ireland
Image is of one of Ireland's only manned navy ships, the Samuel Beckett. Image sourced from this BBC article.
Putler has been HUMILIATED by the Kursk offensive and this proves that Russia's army is in tatters and unable even to defend its own territory. However, it is simultaneously true that Russia poses an existential threat to countries thousands of miles away, as this recent Politico article demonstrates. Ireland - a country that immediately springs to mind as one surrounded by enemies - is being bullied due to its lack of military.
Despite bearing responsibility for 16 percent of the EU’s territorial waters, and the fact that 75 percent of transatlantic undersea cables pass through or near Irish waters, Ireland is totally defenseless. And I mean completely unable to protect critical infrastructure, or even pretend to secure its own borders. [...] Ireland’s “navy” of six patrol vessels is currently operating with one operational ship due to chronic staff shortages. [...] Ireland simply has no undersea capabilities. How could it, when it barely spends 0.2 percent of GDP on security and defense? And it has, in effect, abdicated responsibility for protecting the Europe’s northwestern borders.
For all we know, the dreaded sea-people from the Bronze Age Collapse could soon emerge from the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately, things are even worse up in the skies. Ireland has no combat jets, and it’s the only country in Europe that can’t monitor its own airspace due to the lack of primary radar systems. Instead, the country has outsourced its security to Britain in a technically secret agreement between Dublin and London, which effectively cedes control over Irish air space to the Royal Air Force. This must be the luck of the Irish — smile and get someone else to protect you for free.
While this is very silly, rearmament has long been a part of US imperial strategy on an economic level. Desai, discussing the US imperial strategy in the WW2 period:
By 1947 [...] the domestic postwar consumer boom was nearing its end. While financing exports became more urgent, the 1946 elections returned a Congress unlikely to approve further loans. Now the Truman Administration concocted the ‘red menace’ to ‘scare the hell out of the country’, enunciated the Truman Doctrine of US support for armed resistance to ‘subjugation’ which launched the cold war, and Congress granted $400 million to prevent left-wing triumphs in Greece and Turkey in 1947.
One reading of history states that the US was so intimidated by the USSR that this forced a policy of massive arms production even outside of official wartime. Why this arms production is not occurring today can be puzzling, and (very reasonably) explained by neoliberals exporting industrial production overseas. However, a different historical reading can explain both the first Cold War, and the ongoing situation in which American weaponry is being almost purposefully given in insufficient numbers to give Ukraine a chance of victory and thus only prolonging their suffering (while generating massive profit for the military-industrial complex):
In this sense the Cold War was not the cause of US imperial policy but its effect. It combined financing exports with fighting combined development by national capitalisms as well as communism. When such ‘totalitarian regimes’ threatened ‘free peoples’, ‘America’s world economic responsibilities’ included aid to countries battling them.
By selling massively expensive weapons to Europe, America could simultaneously guarantee export markets for its industries, trap Europe into reliance on American industries at the expense of their own, and divert European funds away from constructing factories which could compete with American ones. Providing a way to defend against Soviet communism (and now Russian "imperialism") is merely a happy side-effect, and so the lack of effectiveness of American weaponry is causing no great panic among the military-industrial complex, nor an urgent plan to quintuple artillery shell production or Patriot missile production - the deals for F-35s and such are still there, and they are what matter.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Ireland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section. Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war. Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language. https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one. https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts. https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel. https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator. https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps. https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language. https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language. https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses. https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Top Gun: Maverick but Tom Cruise training a bunch of Ukrainian pilots and teach them how to maneuver the planes like he did in the 1986 blockbuster film.
When they say “retired” here they don’t mean elderly. They mean active service western pilots who decide to “retire” at age 38 and then “volunteer” for the Ukrainian Foreign Legion
One former F-16 pilot told Insider he wouldn't want to fly missions over Ukraine right now, saying that the aircraft can't outmatch Russia's air-defense systems.
Fourth-generation fighters "have no business in a modern-day battlefield," John Venable, a 25-year veteran of the US Air Force, told Insider in a recent interview.
In a commentary published on the think tank's website last month, Venable wrote that the F-16 was not suited for Ukraine's air force for several reasons, including that the S-400 could outsmart the F-16's targeting systems and that it could target the fighter jets before they're in range to fire weapons like Small Diameter Bombs.
"Giving Ukraine more MiG-29s will not help the battlefield. And even if we gave them modern F-16s — I would say more modern F-16s — it's not going to change or influence the battlefield in a year, much less in time for a spring offensive," he told Insider in an interview this week, referring to Ukraine's much-anticipated counteroffensive.
Venable said that when he was flying F-16s over Europe earlier in his career as a pilot, his aircraft had solid jamming pods that worked against threats posed by the SA-6 and SA-11 Soviet-era SAM systems. He said that he would have felt comfortable going up against the integrated Soviet air defenses in the 1980s and 1990s knowing he was backed by HARM targeting systems designed to take those on.
"The threat would've been high. There would've been a good possibility that I would've been shot down, but also at least an equal possibility that I could have made it to the target, hit my target, and then I drop successfully and then egress safely from the battlefield," Venable said.
But there's since been a "whole leap in capabilities" from those to the current Russian SAM systems that have evolved over time. "I had a fighting chance back then," he said. "Today, there is no fighting chance."
If you follow chud military pilot youtube channels, this has been the discourse since the beginning of the war.
Everyone said their biggest fear is SAM. Some faceless operators from 300km away will take you out and you’ll only realize what’s coming moments before your plane disintegrates.
Nope, modern air defense systems like S-300 (or Patriot for that matter) use radio-command guidance and do not give a warning until the few seconds before impact when it starts to illuminate the target.
From the Patriot manual (declassified):
The missile is command-guided by radar to a point just prior to intecept. It is at this point that the unique TVM guidance mode begins. In the TVM mode, the radar set sends out a special waveform that illuminates the target. The radar sends an encoded uplink message to the missile that commands the missile to open its receiver for detection of the TVM waveform energy reflected from the target. The missile then encodes and sends boresight errors via downlink message back to the radar. Guidance computations are then made by the WCC and sent back through the radar to the missile via uplink message. This process continues until intercept.
From some book about S-300:
The missile 5V55R employs an improved radio-command guidance method for targeting. This method combines radio-command guidance in the initial and middle stages of the trajectory with the "target tracking through the missile" method in the final stage. Guidance commands for the 5V55R missile are generated based on the coordinates of the target and the missile measured by RP, and the target tracking data from the onboard radar sight of the SAM – a method similar to that used in the American "Patriot" system.
True, although there's quite a drop off in reaction times and tolerance to g forces even in pilots of that age, probably less of an issue for bomber/transport pilots but anyone trying to dogfight is gonna be at a disadvantage
Why are they so hungry for F16s? I mean desperstly dripping begging groveling for F16's. They aren't even the best plane we have. The F18 has far more varents and utility. Or even the A10s given the ground assets. Must be some defense contractor itching to destroy our current F16 stock so there demand for the new multi trillion dollar wunderwaffe. The DoD must realize the F16s would be doomed.
Isn't it because there's a lot of second-hand F-16's available? They're getting replaced by the F-35 anyways and shipping them off to Ukraine is a way of getting European vassals to pay the US for another round of costly upgrades and repair work.