The Russians have been flying Antonov-124s (their big boy transport planes) in and out of the enclave continually for the last few days.
I'll preface this by saying I have no experience whatsoever with Minuteman and have no desire ever to. But test failures are not THAT uncommon. Most of our flight test articles are equipped with flight termination charges, so if something goes wrong we terminate. Usually an "anomaly" means it was deviating from the planned trajectory in a significant enough way that we didn't want it getting unstable and become uncontrollable, so the range safety officer hits the button and it kills itself. This can happen for a lot of reasons...a tailfin locks up, IMU gets rattled, etc. For minuteman since it has no control surfaces, could be something like a bad stage separation where the v-band didn't quite get out of the way. What comes next is the worst 3 letters for missile engineers, FRB (failure review board). The FRB will tell you if you have a true anomaly, or if there is something systemic that's a huge issue (like say you find a manufacturing defect that is in a large number of rounds, or there is a previously unknown issue with the lifecycle of the propellant grain). The good news is we build most of our stuff to insane specs so that we can avoid big mistakes. Part by part testing, all up round testing, lot testing for materials, etc. But, it's hard to build things that are so massive and packed full of energetics to sit around in silos for 30+ years and just function perfectly with no failure. All that said, shit happens. Pratt and Whitney just discovered micro contaminants in a powder they use for making high precision turbine blades and it's going to cost the company 7 billion dollars to go replace them all.
Some good stuff in here. Probably a staging issue, shouldn't be too concerning. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...tic-missile-self-destructs-during-test-launch
I never looked to much at our stuff (other than some satellite launches) but in terms of other countries, ballistic missile tests fail pretty often for a number of reasons, and as KP said, it makes a lot more sense to do a controlled detenation of a potentially rogue missile than let it keep going and hit something, be it a school or a satellite (ICBM apogee can be 4x as high as the lowest satellite orbits)
Yeah the Twitter replies saying NK has better nukes than us is hilarious. Their shit fails OFTEN, not to mention their tests are just glorified rocket motor tests since they aren’t really worried about re entry and just getting as high as possible.
Complete layman question : do we even need ICBM's anymore? Don't we have enough sub-based nuclear weapons to pretty much wipe out all of humanity? I'm quite certain I am missing a LOT of angles to this, but since we are on the subject, I'd thought I'd ask
It’s part of the concept of the nuclear triad of having the ability to retaliate via land launched ICBMs, submarine launched SLBMs, and bomber launched missiles and bombs. Less likely an initial strike can take out all three capabilities.
This is a great post. Saw a couple guys talking somewhere about how failure rates are all taken into consideration when we do planning for the types of situations where these would be fired. We expect a few duds and even had a fairly significant failure rate at one point with our ICBMs which we didn’t talk about for years. Regarding this launch; I saw this and it’s seemed to be a decent guess at what might have happened.
Subs can (in theory) be tracked (although as far as public knowledge goes, an Ohio never has been) and you know where they're coming in and out of. Stealth can in theory be defeated with good enough radar, and, again, at a certain level you know where they're coming from (easy to tell if all the B2s suddenly leave their base of a bunch of B1Bs show up in Guam). I PERSONALLY think we could get away with SRBMs and ALBMs/gravity bombs, but I'm sure a bunch of Representatives with ICBM-supporting military bases in their districts believe otherwise.
This is some crazy stuff- video from a hamas fighter running up and putting an IED on and IDF tank then they guy runs back to his hole and hits a 2nd tank with an RPG. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/hamas-fighter-shown-placing-bomb-on-israeli-merkava-tank
NYTimes has an article where Ukraine's top commander said the fighting has reached an impasse and they need advances in electronic warfare to break the deadlock Paints a very grim picture. Their counteroffensive has wound down without achieving its objectives. The GOP won't fund further support. Russia is comfortable sacrificing huge numbers of troops and somehow the economic sanctions in place haven't stopped the growth of their military production... Is there any hope of Ukraine winning this war in the face of GOP resistance? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/world/europe/ukraine-zaluzhny-war.html
Video showing the trophy system working and taking out the incoming rpg rounds https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/5IvmxYWGGA Video showing hamas hitting a ton of idf armor from super close range. https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/SZekcGR7ir
This seems confusing to me. Why have your elite troops chasing fighters in another country when it could be leverage closer to home. My only thought is this could be an opportunity to partner with other allied SOF troops in learning tactics and best practices on raids and targeting troops. It could be a win win, in helping eliminate Wagner troops in Africa while growing the SOF skills for Ukraine soldier; but otherwise I can not see a reason for this type of engagement. Others much smarter than I am, can probably offer better explanations.
Who knows what's going on in Sudan... I know the RSF (heavy ties to Russia, UAE, and probably the Saudis) are winning and there are heavy civilian casualties. Formal government armed forces have support from Egypt and Ukraine. Millions of internally displaced and hundreds of thousands of refugees in neighboring countries that are suffering from violence (and sexual violence), disease, and hunger. Besides Gaza (obviously) and maybe Ethiopia, it's probably the most dangerous place on the planet for civilians at the moment.
Increasingly, I don't think either side can win a decisive victory in this war. Russia maybe if / when Trump wins the election next year.
It does seem more negative the last week or so I am assuming there would be more internal issues the longer this dragged on inside Russia but Putin has survived that. he constantly throws bodies to be killed and it seems like no one in Russia cares to say this is enough to have a real opposition to it grow. the psychology of Russians man
Has there been any accurate reporting on Ukrainian losses this summer? I assume really fucking bad given the lack of movement along a heavily mined front line and given Russia's superiority in the air, but I'd be curious to see some numbers.
No I wouldn't make those assumptions about losses and Russia's airpower isn't a thing that's inflicting mass casualties. Not sure your going to find accurate anything these days
it is hard to follow outside this thread . I don’t go on X as much outside of sports and Threads still isn’t live in Europe . Cable News doesn’t cover it anymore
It’s sad that Ukraine is going to have to concede this territory to Russia. We fucked up not giving them more and better weapons earlier.
most accurate estimates are somewhere between .25 and .33 of Russian losses. Casualties are closer than deaths because of how bad Russian battlefield medicine is. The Russians are going to have lost 300k+ in 2 years without batting an eye.
May be first confirmation that Abrams are now in Ukraine https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...be-our-first-image-of-an-m1-abrams-in-country
B-21 made first flight https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/b-21-raider-has-flown-for-the-first-time
Russia seems to have paused mobilization which has allowed Ukraine to bleed out a bunch of Russian forces the last two months Probably the weakest Russia has been in the last 18 months is right now Congress get your shit together