tal

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

For people who don't want to listen to the podcast, I listened through and took notes while I listened through. This is the newest War on the Rocks interview with Michael Kofman.

• Ukranian forces made notable progress around Bakhmut over last two weeks.

• Further south, Ukranian forces made incremental progress, tried renewed push last few days around Verbove. Held by Russian Airborne, 76th Guards Air Assault Division. This is breach of second Russian line rather than a breakthrough; Ukrainian forces are not yet able to exploit the penetration. Russian forces being pushed back, but not collapsing at current moment.

• Q: What will we see when there is a breakthrough? A: When Ukrainian forces can move significant numbers of vehicles through gap without much Russian resistance and significant Russian retreats.

• Q: When do we say whether-or-not the offensive is a success or not? When would it be considered over. A: Offensives, for political reasons, are rarely declared over; they may peter out, but rarely are declared over. Ukraine may continue offensive into or through winter. The maximal goal would have been to reach the coast and secure Mariupol, sever Russian ground lines of communication. Minimal goals as stated by commander of offensive, Tarnovsky, is to get to Tokmak. Kofman thinks that if Ukrainian forces get to Tokmak, that could reasonably be considered a success for the offensive -- a qualified success, but a success nonetheless. That being said, offensive has been making progress through prepared defenses -- if slow -- and has been seeing more Russian attrition than Ukrainian, which is unusual for offensives. Around November timeframe, Ukrainian military will probably aim to maintain initiative and keep pressure on Russian military through winter. Not sure about manpower availability, but impression is that ammunition is available.

• Q: What are factors that will determine success of offensive? A: Force availability and availability of ammunition. Unlike Ukrainian forces at Bakhmut, forces on southern axis do have enough available force to be able to do limited rotations off the line. Need to keep in mind, though, that only portion of available forces are capable of performing assaults. Ammunition situation seems okay to Kofman. Weather also matters. Typically drier in south for longer, so it may be that weather may stay drier for longer. Ukraine mostly using dismounted infantry attacks, which are less-affected by mud, but not possible to achieve a breakthrough and exploit it without having vehicles available at front. If Ukrainian forces want to be able to exploit a penetration, turn it into a breakthrough, they will need the ability to have motorized logistics and push armored fighting vehicles through. Otherwise, will be long and slow slog.

• Q: Tell us about Zelenskyy's visit in Washington. A: I'm not involved in visit. Was about getting approval for supplemental spending package for Ukraine. For people who hoped that this particular offensive will put Ukraine in a position to quickly negotiate from a position of strength, seems unlikely; going to be longer war. Now clear that Ukraine will need support for an extended period of time; won't be able to wrap up support any time soon. Need to focus on sustainability of conflict. Ukraine probably going to focus on keeping pressure on Russia for renewed offensive in spring.

• Q: Tell us about strikes on Russian headquarters. A: Two campaigns. First, ongoing campaign by Budanov to bring war to Russian homeland. Part is targeting critical infrastructure, defense industrial output, headquarters, airfields, degrading myth of Russian power and status, encourage Russian elites to want to end war. Kofman sees value to this. Second campaign by Ukrainian general staff, using cruise missiles, against submarine, Russian Black Sea Fleet headquarters, Crimean targets. Aim to get Russia to pull out to Novorossiysk. To some extent, successful. Western intel helps with targeting. Two different campaigns by different parts of Ukrainian state, though mutually-supporting.

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tal, 7 months ago

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• Q: What about ATACMS. Will they make a difference? A: Well, everything makes a difference, but what matters is how many and what type. Ballistic missiles not cruise missiles. Three major uses for Ukrainian long-range precision-guided weapons were (1) ground lines of communication like bridges (air-lauched cruise missiles better), (2) command-and-control points like hardened bunkers; cruise missiles also better there, (3) logistic points/ammo points for which short-range ballistic missiles like ATACMS are more-useful. Ballistic missiles can be useful for time-sensitive targets relative to cruise missiles since they reach their targets more-quickly. Most likely that Ukraine will get cluster munition version. This version is shorter-range, about 160 km. Ukraine probably most-wanted the unitary warhead version. Cluster version will put Russian forward operating bases for helicopters, forward assembly areas, and time-sensitive targets at risk. For time-sensitive targets, need to have intelligence to know what to hit. Inherent assumption that the US or other folks with ISR capability will provide information. Not sure how short the loop is for US to decide to send intel or Ukraine to decide that they want to act on it. Also, probably treated as a strategic weapon by Ukraine, under control of Ukrainian general staff, may have a lot of people in loop to make decision. All this may make it hard to use ATACMS against time-sensitive targets. Some people have argued for using ATACMS against Russian air defenses. Russia has a lot of S-300 systems; one will run out of ATACMS before Russia runs out of S-300s. Also, hitting air defense is only really especially useful if one is going to exploit this, use air power. Russia also has forward-deployed S-400s that are more-important. Good complement to existing Ukrainian abilities, especially cluster munitions aspect, doesn't overlap much with existing capabilities. Not a game-changer on its own, though. Is a notable development.

tal, 7 months ago

It'll move faster, but putting a jet engine on it will also increase the cost and decrease the range, and low cost and long range are Shahed's strong points.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Over the past year, Ukraine has built more onshore wind turbines – 19 of them – than England.

My impression is that it's easier to deal with NIMBY people when there's a war on. A lot of people don't like wind turbines near them.

I was in a conversation on the unitedkingdom community the other day and found out why the UK hasn't built any new airports near London or expanded existing ones -- because people near any chosen site always object.

I was looking at one site north of London that existed that they were talking about expanding -- Stansed Airport -- and hitting resistance on. I wondered how it got past objections to be built in the first place. Turns out it was originally built by the US Army in World War II.

“Windfarms are more resilient than thermal power plants. You need 50 missiles to destroy a windfarm, as opposed to just one. There is a big difference,” Timchenko said.

Yes, though with low-end stuff like Shaheds -- if they're accurate and powerful enough to bring it down -- hitting a wind turbine is still a good trade. A wind turbine is maybe $3 million, and a Shahed $20,000.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

There was going to have to be a long-term Shahed solution different from what is being done now even without any increase in frequency, because the old HAWK SAMs that the US dug up, while numerous, are not in production any more, so they will ultimately run out. They only buy time for a different solution. So there will be some plan in place that is being worked on.

We also already knew that there was going to be an increase in Shahed frequency coming. Maybe not the specific month when it was happening, but we knew that Russia was building more production capacity, so at some point, it was going to happen.

My guess is that one or more parties -- probably one of which is the US -- have been working on an air defense more-tailored to Shaheds and similar drones. If I had to guess, it might be a gun-equipped jet UAV, or at least one using very inexpensive air-to-air rockets or air-to-air missiles. The munitions there are inexpensive, and all that is necessary is that the cost of operation to bring down a Shahed be lower than the cost of the Shahed.

My guess is that the plan for the post-HAWK phase is not to switch to trying to hit targets in Russia more-quickly than Russia hits targets in Ukraine. If it were, there wouldn't have been any benefit in waiting. You'd have expected to have seen strikes already.

I also would guess, though with less certainty, that the plan does not rely on creation of some form of new inexpensive SAMs. An aircraft doesn't require putting many of the defenses in a given location; with SAMs, one has to choose where to place to spread out defenses, and the attacker can always choose to concentrate attacks on a given location. As long as potential targets are dispersed around the country, it's hard to cover them with SAMs, especially short-range ones.

EDIT: Ukraine announced that they were working on something like that late last year:

https://ukranews.com/en/news/905036-ukraine-will-be-engaged-in-development-of-drones-that-could-counter-shahed

Ukraine will develop air-to-air drones that could shoot down other drones, such as Shahed.

This was announced by the Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov in an interview with ABC.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Two Russian Shahed 131/136 kamikaze drones hit a house in Lyman, Donetsk Oblast, in the morning of Oct. 1, acting Governor Ihor Moroz reported.

I wonder why? That seems like an odd choice of weapon.

Shaheds are notable for their range coupled with their low cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahed_131

It has a 15 kilograms (33 lb) warhead and has a range of 900 kilometres (559 mi).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136

Range has been estimated to be anywhere from between 970–1,500 km (600–930 mi) to as much as 2,000–2,500 km (1,200–1,600 mi

But Lyman is only about 13 km from the front. You could even hit it with artillery from territory controlled by Russia.

tal, 7 months ago

I would assume that it's neither a UI issue nor a problem with the source data, but rather a limitation of the routing engine.

Looking at your link, it does seem to say that support is experimental.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

I don't really understand what it's intended to defeat, though. Like, it's not clear to me that this does work.

Humans are pretty easily picking out the fake ones, and that's with just relatively low-resolution commercial satellite footage and a single static image. So it's not likely going to help if humans pick the target.

There are missiles that can recognize a target -- a tactic for anti-ship missiles, where the target is moving, and you just put a missile in the general vicinity and have it home in on the right thing. Those might use optical inputs as one input, though I don't know if something like this would fool them. But I doubt that something like that exists for specific aircraft on the ground or that that's what Ukraine is using. At least one airfield strike was conducted using those Australian cardboard drones, which are about as simple as a drone can get. They aren't going to be homing in visually themselves.

tal, 7 months ago

Rheinmetall recently announced that they were starting up a facility in Ukraine.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10/business/rheinmetall-german-tank-factory-ukraine/index.html

Rheinmetall will open an armored vehicle plant in Ukraine within the next 12 weeks, shrugging off concerns other Western defense companies reportedly have about building a presence in the country while it is at war with Russia.

I am guessing that the factor is more that Ukraine's considered to have a decent-enough air-defense situation now that it's reasonable to start operating factories without worrying about them getting hit with missiles or something.

tal, 7 months ago

I have no idea what program you're using to move files, but I would guess that it's internally calling rename().

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/rename.2.html

rename() renames a file, moving it between directories if required

oldpath can specify a directory. In this case, newpath must either not exist, or it must specify an empty directory

I imagine that you're trying to move a directory to a directory that already contains that a directory by that name, and the destination directory isn't empty.

tal, 7 months ago

EV batteries are huge, hard to repair, and expensive.

Hmm. Seems like one could make multiple smaller batteries.

tal, 7 months ago

If the issue producing the high repair costs is large batteries, though, one would get lower repair costs.

tal, 7 months ago

That’s like if stone henge was knocked down

It was. Just not recently.

It also looks like bits are still coming back these days:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/stonehenge-missing-piece-england-scli-gbr-intl/index.html

Missing piece of Stonehenge monument returned after 60 years

“The last thing we ever expected was to get a call from someone in America telling us they had a piece of Stonehenge,” Heather Sebire, English Heritage’s curator for Stonehenge, said in a news release.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

In this case, they were part of Russian fortifications; it's showing that Ukrainian forces have taken those defenses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_teeth_(fortification)

tal, 7 months ago

republic candidate

Republican candidate

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Well, whoever does that for closed-source software is going to basically have to do what they have done. Probably some kind of cross-distro fixed binary target, client software to do updates, probably some level of DRM functionality like steamlib integration.

If it's not Steam, it's gonna be something that has a lot of the same characteristics.

Personally, I kind of wish that there was better sandboxing for apps from Steam (think what the mobile crowd has) since I'd rather not trust each one with the ability to muck up my system, but given how many improvements Valve's driven so far, I don't feel like I can complain at them for that. A lot of the software they sell is actually designed for Windows, which isn't sandboxed, and given the fact that not all the infrastructure is in place (like, you'd need Wayland, I dunno how much I'd trust 3d drivers to be hardened, you maybe have to do firejail-style restrictions on filesystem and network access, and I have no idea how hardened WINE is), it'd still take real work.

Their use of per-app WINE prefixes helps keep apps that play nicely from messing each other up, but it isn't gonna keep a malicious mod on Steam Workshop or something from compromising your system.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Hmm. I was wondering if the National Trust would object to plantings -- I dunno if you can do that in national forests here in the US -- but it looks like they do plant stuff:

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/support-us/plant-a-tree

Help plant more trees

For only £5, you can plant a tree that will tackle climate change and support life for years to come. Your support will help to plant and establish 20 million trees by 2030.

1,000,000 saplings have been planted so far thanks to your donations
14 species of tree have been planted including oak, beech and crab apple

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/03/national-trust-to-plant-1200-hectares-of-flower-filled-grassland-in-devon

National Trust to plant 1,200 hectares of flower-filled grassland in Devon

EDIT: Looks like we do it in the US too, and the program even has the same name:

https://plantatree.fs.usda.gov/

Donations to Plant-A-Tree will be used to plant trees on national forests throughout the U.S. and territories. You can select to have your donation go to where it’s needed most or to a specific national forest. Donations to where it’s needed most are received in the national office over the course of the year and are pooled and distributed annually to reforestation projects at various locations in the national forest system.

tal, 7 months ago

I can see limiting highly-restrictive speed limits, as there could be a broader public interest outside of the location placing the limit in having traffic moving. Like, when traffic is moving from point A to B to C, B may be on the only route from A to C and not care how long it requires to get from A to C. But B's restrictions still affect people at A and C.

But how does limiting traffic cameras make sense? I mean, either you have a speed limit or you don't. I can't see a good argument for limiting enforceability of speed limits.

tal, 7 months ago

the Pixels are actually worth it and very very good phones.

Not the longest-battery-life devices.

tal, 7 months ago

Yeah, I don't think that 90 is gonna be that large a chunk of the thing (though to be fair, it's probably some of the more-relevant aircraft). The fact that the Russian air force hasn't had a major role in the conflict had been commented on earlier.

That being said, I know that Russia has a tendency to keep a lot of not-very-serviceable hardware on-the-books when it comes to naval stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do the same for aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Air_Force

The precise quantitative and qualitative composition of the VVS is unknown and figures include both serviceable and unserviceable aircraft as well as those placed into storage or sitting in reserve. FlightGlobal estimated that there were about 3,947 aircraft in inventory in 2015.[71] According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the share of modern armament in the VVS had reached about 35% during 2014.[72][73] The figure was raised to 66% by late 2016[74] and to 72% by late 2017.[75]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_military_aircraft

From recent articles, it sounds to me like it's the norm for Russia not to put these in hangars, which would make everything visible to satellites, so it's possible that commercially-available satellite footage can identify aircraft that haven't moved in a long time, which may give some idea to the open-source intelligence people of what kind of proportion of aircraft are operable.

tal, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

My bet is that most of the manufacturers are not actually knowingly selling parts to Russia.

There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the western companies whose parts were identified.

They're selling to some company in Turkey or China or somewhere. Then that company either sells to a shell company (if it's a distributor) and that shell company sells to Russia or directly sells to Russia. You can't just go imprison the CEO of random company in Turkey. If you could, this would be a lot easier.

What this is is saying that entire countries might get cut off if they don't enforce this. Which might be the only way to do it, but it would be potentially a pretty major economic schism, at least if this extends to something like China.

Customs information was said to show that “almost all the imports to Iran originated from Turkey, India, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Costa Rica”.

My guess is that of those, only Turkey and India legitimately buy a lot of components.

However, the problem is that if you either (a) cut off a country or (b) get the country to effectively enforce sanctions, Russia is going to switch to whatever country is the easiest remaining source. So if push comes to shove, it's probably not just gonna be those six countries. I suspect that the end game here is really that you probably have to have either (a) or (b) happen for the whole world, which is a pretty serious undertaking. You basically are having to create a huge economic partition in the world, where countries either fall into the Sanctioning Russia camp or the Can't Get Western Components camp. Can it be done? Yes. Is it going to be economically-disruptive? Yes. And you're gonna need to coordinate this across a number of component-supplying countries for this to work; you cannot have the US ban component X but not Y while the EU is banning component Y but not X.

Also, some countries have corrupt justice systems or the like, and I would guess, even if they want to restrict re-exports, may have difficulty doing so. If someone knows that they can just buy off a judge if they get prosecuted for re-exporting something to Russia, penalties may not be much of a deterrent.

So, yeah, economic power is a potent lever, but it's gonna take some doing to use it correctly.

My bet is that what's gonna have to happen is that there is going to have to be a narrowed list of components that aren't used in a lot of products other than Russian military hardware. Then those secondary sanctions get applied to just those. Like, Russia is still gonna be able to get voltage regulator chips or fuel pumps, but will have a hard time getting infrared CCDs.