Russia Invades Ukraine. Volume 4

good grief, I am amazed they were ever allowed access

that psycho Musk I guess

Thank you for sharing this.

How is Musk responsible for terminals bought on the black market and operated in an area with a starlink service? You can easily limit where they are used, but not the nationality of the person is using them.

Whatever the solution was starlink were involved in fixing it. It says that in the article.

What was going to happen?

Where does it say that??

This is an example of where you put "smart" technology on an old end effector. (Like a GPS guided artillery fuze) I have no information about how they did this but it's possible to make some guesses.

1: The Russians don't have AWACS coverage, they didn't have many before the war and their average availability is unlikely to have been high. They've subsequently lost a number of them and need to operate then further back to avoid being hit by upgraded SA-5 missiles. They can't maintain coverage of the whole front line of Ukraine 24/7 as that would require dozens of aircraft.
2: Once past the screen of Russian SAM systems on the front line it becomes basically impossible to cover every terrain masked route between Ukraine and a radius of 2000km around it with ground based radar. You'd essentially need a radar in every valley.
3: In theory you could have standing patrols of fighters with look down radars that would find this target relatively easily. The issue being that maintaining such a large standing patrol 24/7 would burn through the available flight time of Russia's fighter force very rapidly.
4: The other reasource that the Russians have to detect this threat is an over the horizon radar. Ukraine have been hitting this.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/04/17/u...
5: One potentially advantage of a slow speed "drone" is that a model aircraft with a radar reflector looks the same. The attack could potentially have been covered with a large amount of decoys, they could even be launched by the attack drone itself.
6: Intelligence; Ukraine likely have a good idea where the Russians are placing their air defence systems based on US electronic intel satellites and synthetic radar/optical satellites plus AI to trawl through the data. Hence they can plot routes through the defences and hit targets without a point defence system.
7: SEAD, the initial penetration of the Russian AD network on the front lines is likely achieved by timing it to coincide with other attacks and threats. Thus creating a temporary hole in the radar coverage, the SAM systems on the front line aren't going to be emitting very much for these reasons and will only emit if another information source indicates that they would be able to hit something. Also see previous point about saturation with decoys.
8: The WWII comparison is interesting, the big differences are The RAF had literally thousands of fighters and was able to keep dozens in the air at any time. The V1 didn't fly low enough to terrain mask and was conveniently illuminated by it's engine at night. The RAFs radar was under zero SEAD threat and also had the channel which created a perfect environment to detect the V1s over and to mount a belt of radar guided guns on the edge of. The RAF knew where the launch sites were and where the target was, the V1s flew in a straight line. It is notable that planes like the Lysander flew low and slow at night to drop people off on the German side of the channel.
9: This probably won't last forever, the Russians will do something like a belt of aerostat mounted radars which will provide a 24/7 airborne radar coverage. It's also likely that a low cost interceptor which could be a civil aircraft with pods of laser guided rockets could be a method of dealing with saturation attacks of cheap slow munitions.

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/17892896245247...

Next UK delivery to Ukraine.

Wow!

Shoigu being replaced

Aren’t they making progress though? Second front not good for Ukraine