why didn't Bill Murray just talk to the groundhog about it? !ground-pog
Soaring US munitions demand strains support for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan
The U.S. has transferred tens of thousands of its bombs and shells to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. But it hasn’t given Israel everything it wants. That’s because the U.S. military lacks the capacity to provide some of the weapons Israel requested, according to Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ... Put simply, the U.S. assesses the health of its own inventories before sending weapons abroad. At times, those stocks don’t have any margin — and in some cases, the U.S. is even dipping below minimum inventory requirements, according to congressional staffers and former Pentagon officials.
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In addition to Israel, the Biden administration has sent an enormous quantity of materiel to Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Meanwhile, the U.S. is gearing up to rush an influx of arms to Taiwan in hopes of deterring a possible Chinese attack on the island, which Beijing considers a rogue province. The U.S. Defense Department already struggled to maintain robust munitions levels in the decades before the recent wars in the Middle East and Europe. But the shipment of arms to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan has placed intense pressure on the Pentagon’s inventory, forcing it to make challenging risk management assessments as it tries to move the defense industry from peacetime production to a wartime footing.
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The shortages are in part symptoms of a chronic issue, said a senior defense official, granted anonymity to discuss the closely held process. The Pentagon has long used munitions as a “bill payer,” neglecting their purchase in favor of platforms like ships or planes in the annual budgets, the official added. Over time, the low orders led to some companies exiting the market, which in turn reduces the number of businesses that will build those munitions and the speed at which they come off the line.
see, this is why you're supposed to have a state-owned arms industry, since when you leave things to the whims of the free market, obviously a ton of companies are going to go out of business during peacetime, like what do you expect to happen 
... the U.S. could use Javelin anti-tank missiles or Tomahawk cruise missiles against at least four major competitors: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But the military doesn’t necessarily expect to fight all four adversaries at once and may calculate requirements based on fighting two enemies at a time.
well damn, I sure hope we don't end up facing a couple crises at once! now, that'd be a real bad situation for us
... The U.S. often serves as a “backstop” for European allies, Clark noted, pointing to NATO’s heavy reliance on American munitions in its 2011 Libya campaign. “It’s not so much, are we going to have enough weapons to sustain our own capacity for a ground war, because we probably do,” Clark said. “It’s, do we have enough to sustain our own capacity to fight and also support our European allies who may need augmentation because clearly they don’t maintain the magazines to sustain themselves.” Others interviewed about the munitions requirements process also noted it lags behind real-world events and is closely tied to the Pentagon’s war plans, which usually project short conflicts instead of the reality of longer, protracted wars.
well, good thing protracted wars never happen!
But the U.S. could still quickly run through certain munitions even in a short conflict with a major adversary like China. A wargame conducted by the Center for a New American Security think tank and the House Committee on the Chinese Communist Party last year found the U.S. would run out of long-range, precision-guided munitions in less than a week in a fight with China over Taiwan. Outgoing committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., subsequently told Defense News that America’s inventory of long-range anti-ship missiles stood at 250 last spring, noting a conflict with China would require at least 1,000.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, the U.S. has also used weapons that could be relevant to an Indo-Pacific battle, like the Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawks, to respond to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes off Yemen’s coast. “Is it a sustainable, long-term strategy to use million-dollar munitions to shoot down drones and loitering munitions that are $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a piece?” Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., asked Gen. Michael Kurilla, the U.S. Central Command leader overseeing forces in the Middle East, during a House hearing in March.
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The Pentagon hopes the foreign aid legislation will allow it to continue large-scale arms transfers to friendly countries. And as the department replenishes systems to those three partners, it hopes the additional munitions demand will pump resources into lagging munitions production lines. A significant chunk of that will go toward increasing domestic munitions capacity in the U.S. ... But even with the foreign aid legislation, expanding industrial base capacity is no simple task. ... Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress in October that some contractors have required employees to work additional shifts to keep up munitions production rates, highlighting labor shortages in the industrial base.
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A former senior Pentagon official who now works in the defense industry, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to talk to the press, told Defense News the Pentagon is generally willing to take more risks on munitions inventory levels than in other areas, expecting that Congress will quickly fund replenishment efforts. “The mentality in the Pentagon is if I do get in a fight, Congress is going to be real responsive to give me as much money as I need,” the former senior defense official said. “Right now, we’re having a problem replenishing artillery for a war in Europe that we’re not even in.”
impressive, very nice... let's see the Hohenstaufens' HRE
the best kind of medieval border-gore is when the same guy owns territories that aren't contiguous, just everything being exclaves within exclaves on top of other exclaves 
tbf, with Giedi Prime they're at least doing it deliberately because of some lore mumbo-jumbo about how that planet's sun works
I mean, it still hurts my eyes to look at, but there was some vision involved. The desaturation elsewhere is a lot more glaring
And interior shots in particular piss me off, it's not just the lack of color, it's the lack of... anything. It's like people in Denis' Dune universe have just recently invented the concept of furniture, and haven't gotten around to figuring out interior decoration yet
like, I sort of get what's he going for, evoking some sort of coldness and desolation with the environments, I just think it looks like shit (and also feel like the setting with space feudalism and millennia-old feuds between noble families ought to not look like this, that's why I love the space landsknechts from the miniseries so much, it's a silly idea but for me it's absolutely perfect to have that as the uniform of the emperor's personal army)
the virgin generic sci-fi armor vs the gigachad space landsknecht
the miniseries wins just by virtue of having actual color, I'm so fucking tired of the desaturated color grading trend
an uneasy feeling but nothing specific to complain about
vibes-based performance evaluation
holy shit they made Metal Gear Solid VR training but for being a retail employee 
THEY EVEN HAVE AN AI RECREATION OF THEIR FOUNDER, they're just actually doing MGS2 
Egh, this comparison seems a bit iffy...
I sort of agree, but that's why I added the bit afterwards about desperate measures - Gazans are in exactly such a situation, fighting a foe that openly declares its intention to exterminate them. In such circumstances, a lot of things are justifiable that otherwise wouldn't be. The various rules of war can be useful in "normal" conflicts where a negotiated settlement can be reached, and following those rules can limit escalation and thus minimize damage to all parties involved, but if one side seeks to completely slaughter the other, that framework kind of falls apart - things have already escalated to one of the highest levels possible.
Poland was, until the Nazi invasion, not fighting a genocidal foe, and in fact had been the aggressor in their war against the Soviets, had participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia, and had some pretty wild expansionist ideas. So their case is rather different.
"the law requires every graduate to be an officer, so killing officers is actually killing the intelligentsia"
Um, maybe if you don't want that to happen, just... don't have that law? This is like conscripting child soldiers and then complaining that your enemy is murdering children. Like, if you're actually fighting a truly desperate conflict against a genocidal foe, like the Soviets against the Nazis, some desperate measures can be justified, but this is interwar Poland we're talking about here.
We've fully entered the "killing soldiers is actually genocide" phase of rhetoric (except when Western countries actually kill civilians, that's just regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage).
https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1780850610864267756
The US Army cancelled the XM1299 Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) system last month. ... The only way I can describe it at this point is total organizational failure. We're now on our third failed program to replace the M109 155mm self-propelled howitzer, and as usual for the US Army the interim solution - the M109A7, basically dropping the existing M109A6 Paladin turret onto a Bradley chassis - is going to end up as the permanent fix.
Let's walk through the history of this generational procurement failure. The M109 has been the US Army's 155mm self-propelled howitzer since before Vietnam, with the original short-barreled version (rather resembling a Russian 2S3) upgraded to sport what was then a very modern 39-caliber* cannon shortly after that war with the M109A1. Further upgrades followed, culminating in the M109A6, a modern weapon of the late Cold War era that was in some way groundbreaking but in some other ways quite dated. It had a lot of new electronics... and a manually-loaded cannon from the 1970s. When the Paladin entered service in the early 1990s the then-Soviet Union had already introduced the 2S19 in 1989 (featuring an autoloading 47-caliber 152mm cannon), and the Germans were hard at work on the PzH 2000 (with a semi-autoloading 52-caliber 155mm cannon). Both of these competing systems could fire three times the rounds of the Paladin at considerably longer ranges.
It wouldn't be an issue because the Army was working on a replacement already - the XM2001 Crusader, a thoroughly modern self-propelled gun with a 52-caliber 155mm cannon and an automatic transloader vehicle. It was the ultimate cannon to defend the Fulda Gap against the Red Tide... which was problematic at the time because that threat didn't exist any more and doubly so after 9/11. So like many Cold War legacy programs it was cancelled by Donald Rumsfeld during his apocalyptic tenure as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.
Not to worry, the Army had a backup plan! Enter Future Combat Systems, a program that happened because the Army brass saw the Air Force make the F-35 too big to fail and thought that was a good procurement model. The XM1203 Non-Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C), developed as one of the FCS "family" of tracked combat vehicles, sporting a lightweight 39-caliber 155mm cannon with a high-speed autoloader and minimal crew requirements. It would have been the ideal cannon for the lightweight expeditionary Army of the post-Cold War era... and then Iraq happened. The bad part of Iraq where we were losing a hundred guys killed every month with no end in sight. After the Republicans were routed in the 2006 elections and Rumsfeld shown the door his successor, Robert Gates, axed the entire program as yet another Rumsfeld-era boondoggle with no value to win the War on Terror.
This left the Army's fleet of increasingly-worn out M109A6s soldiering on into the 2010s, and replacement vehicles were needed. Enter the M109A7 - basically a program to drop the existing M109A6 turret onto a suitably adapted Bradley chassis to ease maintenance and recapitalize the fleet. The M109A7 didn't offer any actual new capability, but it would keep the Field Artillery in business until a new cannon could be brought into service, because it was now the late 2010s and most serious armies on the planet had moved on to autoloading long-barrel systems.
Enter ERCA, the US Army's plan to leapfrog the competition with a fantastically long 58-caliber 155mm cannon... mounted on the same Bradley-derived chassis of the M109A7. If you take a short survey of modern tracked, armored, long-barrel SPGs - 2S19, 2S35, K9, PzH 2000, etc. - you'll notice that they're all quite heavy, with most of them built on a tank chassis or a specialized heavy artillery chassis. That capability isn't free. The Army was trying to stuff an even longer autoloading cannon onto an IFV chassis, and ran into easily-predictable issues with weight and then - once they cut capability to fix it - into equally predictable issues with bore wear given the extreme ranges they were trying to drive this cannon to (70+ kilometers for a gun about 10% longer than cannons maxxing out at half that). So that program got cancelled last month for what were basically technical feasibility issues.
In any event the US Army's current plan seems to be to go to war with the M109A7 and, if the performance of similar 39-caliber systems in Ukraine is any indication, lose the counter-battery fight and get a lot of artillerymen killed manning obsolescent guns.
Xi Jinping held a ceremony to welcome the President of the Federated States of Micronesia to visit China.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1779037694783627336
People often say that China is not very good in soft power but this is an example of something that they unarguably do much better that the West: treating all countries, no matter how small (we're talking Micronesia here, about 100k inhabitants), the same when their leaders visit China, with all the State's honors and personal reception by the President.
I don't think Micronesia - or any similarly small country - got the same type of welcome in Washington. In fact I checked and the President of Micronesia visited Washington in 2023 and was received by... the White House’s Indo Pacific coordinator.
This sends a clear message of respect, and of abiding by the principle inscribed in the UN Charter that all nations are the same.
As often with China, their messaging isn't so much in grand declarations but rather symbols that shows their commitment to certain principles. As such we often don't get the messaging ourselves because interpretating symbols is not soo much in our culture. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact. If you're Micronesian for instance in this case, you understand the messaging extremely well.
https://twitter.com/S_Mahendrarajah/status/1778804475618107467
‘Iran will bomb Israel tonight!’
Nah. That was an attention grabber. Daily headlines that an Iranian strike is ‘imminent’ or ‘in 48 hours’ prompt me to explain military and intelligence purposes that lead Iran to feed data to U.S. intel sources. This in turn generates news headlines. These purposses include PSYOPS, concealment (by Iran of their plans), and deceit (of Israel). The Russian terms Maskirovka (concealment; маскировка) & Dezinformatsiya (deception; дезинформация) are popular—among an older generation of intel analysts—given KGB’s superlative use of Dezinformatsiya to advance Maskirovka. Iranians are no slouches in this respect if IRGC’s operations in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria are yardsticks. But this will be IRGC’s biggest op yet.
Psychological Operations (PSYOPS)
Israelis are bullies unaccustomed to being punched in the mouth. They are wearing adult diapers and begging Washington for help. ‘Please daddy, don’t let the mullahs hit me.’ Fear of the punch is damaging Israelis’ mental health. U.S. has been begging Iran not to hit their ‘baby,’ but refusing to chastise the bully for violating the Vienna Convention. It behooves Iran to maintain a high level of psychological pressure on Israelis. When the blow falls, Israelis may be relieved! Meanwhile, they are swallowing Immodium, Valium, and Ambien like M&M’s.
Concealment and Deceit
The goal is for Iran to conceal its activities while deceiving Israel and USA. Disinformation is used as an ‘active measure’ to advance deception.
Preparations for war generate electronic communications (‘chatter’) and physical movements of people and equipment. ‘Chatter’ are the electronic signals and communications captured by SIGINT (signals intelligence) services (NSA, GCHQ, etc.). Even if an intercepted signal (e.g. email) is encrypted and the ciphertext cannot be decrypted, its existence suggests ongoing activity. To illustrate, if an officer at a missile depot in Camp X rarely receives a call from Tehran, but now receives calls daily, pattern analysis indicates that something is going on. Thus, it benefits IRGC to generate activities—electronic chatter and physical movements—that are harvested by enemy electronic intelligence systems. The best place to hide a needle is in a stack of needles. IRGC will generate needless activities to feed the enemy. Hence headlines like ‘Khatm al-Anbiya base is on high alert’; and ‘Iran is deploying air defenses around Tehran’ (this was done long ago, although more units may be added). Somewhere in the midst of these ‘needles’ is hidden the real ‘needle.’
An added benefit is that IRGC intelligence and the Ministry of Intelligence will be able to identify leaks by individuals (human intel; HUMINT) and compromises to their electronic communications systems. If, for example, a headline appears that ‘100 drones and missiles will be launched,’ this will help intel officers identify the source(s) of the information.
https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1778682534123172215
The MV Dali collided with the Key Bridge in Baltimore three weeks ago and so little has been done for remediation that if this was happening in Russia or China we'd have people writing Ph.D dissertations on this website about poor state capacity and shaken trust in "regimes." ⬇️
Let's look at the current status of things three weeks in:
- M/V Dali remains aground and has not been freed from bridge debris, let alone unloaded, refloated, and evacuated to drydock
- Practically no progress has been made clearing debris, because:
- The handful of small floating cranes on site are obviously not up to the task, because:
- Apparently the Biden Administration decided this would be an ALL AMERICAN salvage effort and refused to bring in foreign crane ships with far greater capacity, thus:
- Workers are being endangered by being ordered to cut the bridge debris into small chunks manageable by the low-capacity cranes on site, complicated by the fact much of this work must be done underwater
- The Port of Baltimore remains closed to all heavy traffic and authorities expect it to remain closed through at least May, which is very optimistic
- Officials expect a replacement bridge might be inaugurated in a decade, which could itself be optimistic
Let's be real - if this had happened in China the port would have been open in days and construction on a replacement span would be underway as we speak. This incident is beginning to illustrate the decline in the real state capacity of the United States of America in the starkest possible terms.
The bit in the middle about that diner is my favorite, it's just so illustrative of Bethesda's approach.
There's literally a skeleton in this woman's house! Like, it's just... sitting there, the remains of a dead body, right next to her! It's been there for over two centuries!
It's very strange they are in a literal war for survival but are not drafting 18yr olds. What's the deal? Doesn't make sense.
I love how it never occurs to these dweebs that maybe it simply isn't actually a "war for survival". There's someone in the thread going on about how the Soviets had an even lower conscription age during WW2, and like... yeah, it was fucking WW2! And if you believe this is any way comparable to the Nazi invasion of the USSR, then your analysis of the war is so devoid of any connection to reality that you might as well be talking about a fictional conflict.
the Soviet ending for Yuri's Revenge is absolutely amazing
Soviet troops parading down Wall Street, as the stock market closed forever... the new golden age of space exploration... who knows what the future may hold, as communism leaves the boundaries of our planet, and expands across the solar system
The release also is on the side which feels like people could bump into
that was an actual problem on the AR-10 and early AR-15 prototypes, so they added a bit of fencing around the button to help against that
AK's catch has more mechanical leverage
this turns out to actually be very important in harsh conditions - see see this freezing rifle test for some examples of release button systems freezing up: [1], [2], and for comparison how easy the AK magazine catch was
Ostensibly, the advantages of the release button are ergonomics
- the first is the ease of inserting the magazine, but this doesn't actually have anything to do with the release button - it's the magwell helping you guide the magazine in, and there's nothing stopping you from having a magwell on a gun with an AK-style catch, like the G36 for example, or even just aftermarket modifications for the AK itself
- the second is ease of removing the magazine, since you can just push the button with your index finger and have the magazine drop free, instead of needing a whole hand to push the catch and pull the mag out. Now, the actual utility of this outside of tacticool larping seems dubious - soldiers in real life aren't just discarding mags left and right, they're typically trying to retain them, and in that case you'll be needing your other hand to take the magazine and put it back in a pouch anyway. Plus, if you're in a situation where the difference in reload speed between the two methods actually matters, you're probably dead anyway, since the likelihood of actually pulling off a fancy tactical reload under stress goes down pretty hard. But disregarding that, if you really need this feature, there's again nothing preventing a catch system from implementing it - AKs have had extended magazine releases for a long time (although those do have the disadvantage of increasing the risk you pointed out of something accidentally bumping into the catch, since there's just more catch to bump into), and HK figured out a pretty neat system for the G36, where the catch has another section that doesn't extend downwards, but backwards, towards the trigger guard, where you can push it with your index finger.
an interesting note is that Stoner, the guy who designed the AR, would use precisely an AK-style catch on one of his subsequent rifles instead of a button:
Did these guys do a terrorist attack on FaceTime
I mean, didn't that mass shooter in New Zealand literally do that (live-stream on Facebook specifically)? So there's some precedent at least.
Is the police response that slow?
I mean... yes? A patrol car could respond pretty quickly, but terrorist attacks require specialized units which take time to actually be put into action, and further time to actually figure out the situation, how many militants they're dealing with, and so on - just rushing guys in without a plan can very well make the situation worse, as the Russians themselves painfully learned at Beslan.
The simple reality is, there's no way for the state to actually ensure complete security in a massive metropolitan area without declaring martial law and deploying like, several army corps worth of cops or paramilitaries (which of course has political consequences, and besides, you could just suffer an attack somewhere else anyway). With this incident in particular, I also read reports that there were false shootings/bomb-threats being called in - you can essentially paralyze state security services that way, since they kind of have to respond, but there's no way for them to effectively respond to everything, and so the real attacks can slip through.
Determined terrorists will pretty much always be able to slip through the cracks eventually - it's just that, fortunately, contrary to GWOT-era propaganda, there actually aren't all that many well-equipped groups around to do stuff like that, and they're mostly fighting insurgencies in their own homelands rather than executing attacks in faraway capital cities.
god is with you captain bolsonaro
Y'know, somehow, I feel like the guy who's been hit by like a dozen consecutive plagues doesn't actually have God's favor? I dunno, just a vibe I'm getting.
I love how the Booker has kicked of this "discourse" among military "experts" about whether it's a tank or not - it's a fucking assault gun! Like, an armored vehicle that's meant primarily to provide direct fire support to infantry (as opposed to a tank, which also does maneuver warfare)... we have a perfectly good term for that already. And we even have prominent examples of it from WW2, you couldn't have fucking missed those, right? Are people so unimaginative they just can't conceptualize of this being an assault gun because it happens to have a turret instead of the turretless casemate design of WW2 Stug and SU/ISU vehicles? Are they so MBT-brained they can't even imagine types of armored vehicle other than a 60-70 ton piece of shit, and that there might actually be uses for them?
I mean, even the name of the program which produced it - Mobile Protected Firepower - is just a fancy corporate way of saying assault gun (Firepower being the gun part, obviously, and Mobile and Protected being in reference to it providing direct fire support when assaulting enemy positions - just Mobile Firepower would be regular old self-propelled artillery, which is usually only protected against small arms & shrapnel since it provides indirect fire at large distances and isn't supposed to get shot at). And yet, dipshits like this guy keep writing articles about "light tank this, medium tank that", and pretending like they're actual military analysts, with their whole smug "you say it's not a tank yet it has armor and a cannon, checkmate" 
