Interesting take on why Russia is activating T-54/55 tanks.
My initial thought had been that Russia did very uneven maintenance so that for some reason very few of their reserve T-72 and other post-T-55 tanks are usable but somehow many T-54/55 are.
This take is that the T-54/55 are being called up for use as self-propelled artillery engaging in indirect fire at long distances, well outside the range of Ukrainian ATGM or tank fire.
As the most produced tank in history, there is plenty of surplus high explosive ammo for its 100mm gun.
If you are looking to fire randomly at a city several miles away, you might as well fire dirt cheap 100mm shells from a T-54/55 until the barrel fails rather than waste 125mm shells and wear out T-72 barrels (rendering them ineffective to then go to a direct fire mode). Even more the case for T-62 that use extremely short supply 115mm ammo.
I have become quite skeptical of just about all “defense news”. I just finished reading a glowing report on how effective the new F-35 was in a deployment to Europe during this Ukrainian War. Here’s a quote from the end of the piece:
“ Without those improvements, Andrle said, the F-35 can’t carry a slew of advanced cruise missiles and anti-air defense weapons.
“Slinging [Small Diameter Bombs] and shooting [Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles] … is not where we want to be in the next fight,” he said” [quoted from The Air Force Times]
Well, then, just where are all these jets suppose to be, if not shooting. ?Have we, indeed, simply built a reece bird with few combat skills. Kinda looks like that. AND all the Allies are buying into it. We will have one giant interconnected net —- showing us being shot down all over the place. Goodie, goodie.
OK. But read the quote. THAT is an attempt to paper over the A/C’s shortcomings. The AF bought a dud; now it’s trying to turn it into a purse. Note the veiled comments about “maneuvers that we don’t want to show in the air” - so need for more simulators (in the AFT article).
We keep pretending it’s our job to “defend the world”. ?Against whom. We have THE highest Defense Budget in the world - yet SS is going to run out of money sometime in the not-too-distant-future. Note that SS is something that Americans actually paid for - only to have the money outright embezzled from SS into general spending, and disappear forever.
Arguably, the Air Force bought a Swiss Army knife. It does a dozen different things, but none of them very well.
Apparently, the theory was to reduce overall development costs by designing a single aircraft for a range of different roles, instead of having a number of different planes each optimized for a narrower range of roles. MBA rules!
You know you’re getting old when you start seeing multiple McNamara follies being repeated. It isn’t just the TFX then, F-35 now.
Remember “Project 100,000”, a.k.a. McNamara’s Morons, when, starting in 1966, the requirement for being drafted into the military to the 10th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, equivalent to almost half of those drafted and recruited having IQs below 71, the usual threshold of retardation.
The Navy opened up the service to more prospective sailors who score at minimum levels on entrance examinations that test physical and mental aptitude on Dec. 5, Cmdr. David Benham, a Navy Recruiting Command spokesperson, toldMilitary.com. New guidelines will allow 7,500 recruits, or roughly 20% of the new active duty enlisted cohort, from the lowest acceptable aptitude level to join.
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The Air Force also relaxed entrance requirements. A new policy revealed in September allowed applicants who test positive for tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana, during their entrance physical a second chance to come clean, whereas under prior rules they would be automatically disqualified from service.
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The Army finished the year 15,000 troops, or 25% below its objective after reducing projected force size in August, when Secretary Christine Wormuth announced a reduction in total personnel goals for 2023 by 14,000 to 21,000 troops as a means of preserving quality over quantity. Nevertheless, “quality,” defined as 90% of new enlistees holding high school diplomas and at least 60% scoring above average on the fitness exam, also suffered, according to an Aug. 31 release.
You are missing the point, it is not a single aircraft. It is three different aircraft sharing the same name and artificially constrained to share a given number of parts and worst of all a software package.
It was probably less efficient than to make three different aircraft. Because with this, every time a change needs to be made on one of the three it then needs to be validated on the other two. And that feeds back for several validation cycles.
EVERYTHING you say was true of the TFX. You CANNOT build ONE airplane that does EVERYTHING. Recce birds have SR-71 type requirements. ?Is the F-35 much of an SR. I think not. ?Could you “map the threats” without something like the F-35. Absolutely! Drones come to mind as way cheaper and probably easier to hide from the enemy. ?Could the F-35 have been made a much better fighter. ALSO Absolutely!
This isn’t really a Swiss Army knife - it would be a cheap Chinese knockoff of a real fighter.
Sad thing is that those cheap Chinese knockoffs keep getting better & better every year – just ask the shrinking aging Navy how they stack up relative to the growing ultra-modern Chinese navy.
There were 3 choices in front of Our Betters:
Spend more & more on the war industry, cutting Social Security & regulations as required.
Cut US international obligations, shrink the war industry, and focus on protecting the US.
Stumble into kinetic & economic war which will destroy the US.
Unfortunately it is obvious which one they have chosen.
Certainly. All counterfeiters get better over time. And the Chinese Navy exists today thanks to our profligate Federal spending, the interest on which the Chinese have been collecting - and using - to build their military. We could have done the same, had we not had the people in charge, of both parties, who have spent our future into hell.
There have been two times in our history our debt has exceeded our GDP - now and in WWII. After WWII, the Congress got down to it, and paid off the debt. Not so today. This is solvable. It just requires a firm commitment to it.
As for the Chinese Navy, I doubt it’s nearly as dangerous as everyone says. The Chinese have lots of experience putting down unarmed opponents - civilians. Fighting a real war OTOH, is not something that has gone well for them. Some of that will be their attitude about how to fight. Were you to turn our Navy loose with those who know how to fight, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. OUR problem is that we are culling out the war fighters from the herd, and if it comes to it, we will probably have to fight much as we did against the Japanese - as the underdog until we can catch up. This, too, is doable, but it will cost lives getting there.
Without doing any digging – there may be two conflicts worth considering.
First, effectively the US fought Mao-era Chinese forces directly back in the second half of the Korean war. US military was forced back. Admittedly the Chinese military at that point was primitive – stories about the second waves being sent to attack US positions with no guns; they were expected to pick up guns from their dead comrades in the first wave. And admittedly the US held back from using its then-full military superiority, such as nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, an objective observer would have to count the retreat of the US forces in Korea as a win for China – albeit a very expensive win.
Second, China invaded Vietnam in 1979 after the US left (recognizing that most of us would count Vietnam as a political loss by the US rather than a military defeat). China apparently saw their special military operation in Vietnam as a punitive expedition and eventually withdrew, but again the objective observer would have to count that as a Vietnamese win.
Score so far: Vietnam > China > US.
As Sun Tzu and many others over the years have noted – NEVER EVER UNDERESTIMATE YOUR ENEMY!
I recall that in 2006 a Chinese diesel-electric Song-class sub surfaced in the midst of a Kitty Hawk Battle Carrier group near Okinawa. This was quite a shock at the time and, I think a Navy head or two rolled. Over the years, as well, the Chinese have made no secret of their intent to be able to deal kinetically with US aircraft carriers by various means - including ballistic (and maybe now hypersonic) weapons. The US military now spiffily postures its politically correct equity and environmental attributes. I only hope it isn’t resting on its laurels when it comes to actual war fighting.
We have long held naval exercises where the surface Navy just doesn’t think like a submariner! And that’s going to kill them. Our OWN sub guys have said just this. The qualify of the troops is great; they just need great officers to lead.
But good luck with that, when any officer who shows promise is bundled off to a “finishing school” - congressional aide,pentagon aide, general staff aide, etc. Guess what this leaves to lead at the sharp end.
This Firing Line discussion between William F. Buckley Jr. and Nicholas Romanov (“the great-great-great-grandson of Czar Nicholas I, who was the great-grandfather of Czar Nicholas II, the last Russian Czar”), recorded on February 22, 1990, offers some historical insight into the origins of Ukrainian national identity (15:36):
Buckley: Let me ask you as a historian, when the United Nations was set up, the Soviet Union insisted on having three votes, insisting the Ukraine and Belorussia were separate states. We recognize it as a fiction. What historical basis did they have in making that claim?
Romanov: For White Russia? None. For Ukraine? Unfortunately, there is some basis in the fact that Ukraine began to exist as an entity at the end of the First World War, but then the creation of Ukrainian nationalism was fostered by the Germans and by the Austro-Hungarians. It served their general plan to weaken the Russian Empire, to take away or separate from it the wheat and coal-producing areas and probably get economic control over it. They pushed a separate language, a dialect, asserting that it was a national dialect. I know most Ukrainians will be mad at me but frankly, the great Ukrainian writer Gogol wrote in Russian, not in Ukrainian. It’s a dialect. There’s less difference between Russian and the Malorosiia of Ukraine than between German and Schweizerdeutsch.
The remainder of the interview is primarily concerned with the history of the Baltic states and their separation from the Soviet Union.
Looks like Russian is about as distant from Ukrainian as Czech. Belarusian, Polish, Slovak and Bulgarian are closer to Ukrainian than Russian. But a Russian speaker wouldn’t recognize that - only a multilingual would.
One simple metric proposed by this paper is to compress a concatenation of two documents in two languages, and use the length of the compressed file as a measure of similarity. Using the Universal declaration of human rights as the base document, and using hierarchical clustering to simplify the distance matrix, yields this (unfortunately Russian and Ukrainian are not included):
AND all of this would have been apparent to any who actually knew Eastern European history from about the 8th century on. The kingdom of the Serbs then encompassed ALL that territory, accounting for the strong similarities between the languages of Poles, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Serb, Bulgarian, and to a degree Romanian. Speak any of those languages and you find you can basically understand much said in any of the others.
