The Cardboard Drone Dilemma

September 4th, 2023

As shown by Ukraine, cardboard drones are a very cost-effective way to destroy much more expensive military equipment.

And you know who has more expensive military equipment than anyone else in the world?

That’s right: Us.

Uncle Sam is the operator of billion dollar B-2s and fleet supercarriers. Enemies capable of getting cheap drones within striking distance of those assets could put a world of hurt on the Pentagon, as indicated by this cheap and crude YouTube satire:

Can U.S. military radar see cardboard drones? Either nobody knows, or only a small handful of U.S. military researchers know. Either way, I have to think they’re frantically researching that question right now.

Here’s a bit more on SYPAQ’s drones:

A low-cost “cardboard” drone that arrives flatpacked and is held together with rubber bands is giving Ukraine an unexpected edge on the battlefield.

It’s called the Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System, or PPDS for short, and is made by the Australian company SYPAQ.

It has been in Ukrainian hands since March, when the Australian government announced it would send at least 100 per month as part of a $20 million aid package, The Australian reported.

According to SYPAQ, the drone arrives in a package some two and a half feet long — and isn’t much more complicated than an IKEA product.

But the low-tech framework is packed with a military-grade guidance system.

SYPAQ says it’s quick to assemble the drone from its parts: a lightweight board frame, a propeller unit, and an avionics system which soldiers can program with a target location.

The drone can carry up to 6.6 pounds, making it useful for dropping off medicines or ammunition.

To adapt it for reconnaissance, soldiers simply “cut a hole” in the drone for a camera to see through, SYPAQ manager Michael Partridge told IT-focused news outlet The Register.

The finished build has a wingspan of around six and a half feet. It is so light it can be launched by catapult, or literally by being thrown like a giant paper plane, according to Australia’s 7News.

At a reported cost of around $3,500 each, they’re cheap by military standards.

That’s maybe not as cheap as the Flying Yeet of Death, but it has a much longer range.

Depending on its payload, it travels at around 37 miles per hour, and has a range of up to 75 miles. And when it arrives, soldiers can simply retrieve the cargo, detach the propeller and avionics module, and throw away the frame.

Although it’s known as the “cardboard drone,” there’s conflicting information as to what its main framework is actually made of.

Partridge told The Register that it’s made of waxed cardboard — a description repeated in nearly all media reporting so far. In a recent announcement the company coyly said it’s “known as the ‘cardboard plane.'”

But a product specification uploaded on the company’s website, likely in late August, describes it as being made from lightweight foldable foam board, which appears to match some images.

So the cardboard drone isn’t actually cardboard. C’est la guerre.

Cardboard is “transparent to radar, so harder to spot,” Oklahoma State University drone researcher Jamey Jacob told Popular Mechanics.

“The radar will pick up things such as electric motors, batteries, and propellers, but not the cardboard,” Jacob said.

That potential capacity for extra stealth gained media attention this week when Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia echoed claims by a prominent Russian military blogger that they were used to attack a Russian airfield.

Several details of the attack remain unconfirmed — including whether Corvo PPDSs were even involved — but the airfield was just within the drone’s reach from Ukraine.

Per the pro-Russian Telegram channel @fighter_bomber, Ukraine used a swarm-like formation of several unarmed Corvo PPDSs amidst drones packed with bombs, helping the swarm evade radar.

When you’re airframe only has to last 75 miles to hit a target, all sorts of cheap material possibilities open up: Foam, cardboard, wax-paper, Mylar.

Hell, maybe even that crappy hemp paper the potheads are always pushing will finally have a real use-case: Make war, not love.

In any case, the radar guys are going to be very, very busy over the next few months…

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Posted in Military, video | 19 Comments »

Israel’s War Against Color TV

September 3rd, 2023

Sometimes I stumble across something that just boggles my mind. Such as this video that explains that Israel, the most technologically advanced country in the Middle East, wasn’t just slow to adopt color television, but actively fought its adoption, going so far as to create a device that stripped out color.

  • Israel resisted instituting a TV broadcasting service in the first place, and first Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion was opposed to the idea.
  • But wealthy Israelis still bought TVs, which could pick up signals from Cyprus (which started TV broadcasting in 1956), Lebanon (1959), Egypt and Syria (1960), and Jordan (from 1968).
  • Despite Ben-Gurion’s opposition to TV, the Israeli government wanted to use TV for educational purposes, and was worried that the Arab-language TV broadcasts that could be found in cafes contained propaganda.
  • When Levi Eshkol took over as prime minister in 1963, he reversed the no TV policy. In 1965, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was formed, and in 1966 B&W Israeli TV was finally introduced by Israeli Educational Television (IET). (In America, the 1966-1967 season was when networks finished their transition to all-color programming.)
  • IBA launched its B&W broadcasting on May 2, 1968, Israeli independence Day, sharing a frequency with IBE, and only broadcasting three hours of programming (two hours in Hebrew and one in Arabic) three days a week.
  • France, the Soviet Union and Lebanon started broadcasting color in the SECAM format in 1967. Israel, like the UK and much of Europe, used PAL format.
  • Jordan and Egypt used PAL, and they started broadcasting in color in 1974. Jordan even broadcast a news program in Hebrew!
  • So Israel quickly greenlit color TV to combat the Arab color menace, right? Wrong. PM Golda Meir was opposed, describing color TV as “artificial and unnecessary.” Despite IBA investing in color equipment!
  • “Yitzhak Rabin and his government continued to double down on their anti-color stance. They attempted to crack down on the import market. Their fears even extending to a drop in value of the national currency, the Israeli Lira. However, the stance was firmly rooted in the belief that color television was a luxury expense reserved for the few rich and wealthy, leaving the vast majority behind black and white TV was seen as a sort of social equalizer.” No color for you, bubbe, because Social Justice!
  • “The Israeli government of the day felt it necessary to invent a new system to neutralize color television for good. The Mekhikon, or the color eraser or color killer, is an invention that is unique to Israel’s television history.”
  • The video doesn’t do a good job of explaining how it works, so here’s the Wikipedia explanation:

    When a receiver is tuned to a monochrome transmission, the displayed scene should have no color components. However, if there is a hardware failure in the color killer stage, false color patterns may be displayed even during monochrome transmission.

    In normal color reception, high frequency luminance is mistaken for color, causing relatively invisible false color patterns. The reason for this invisibility is due to a key feature of NTSC/PAL, chroma/luminance frequency interleaving, where these false patterns are in complementary colors for adjacent video frames, allowing the human eye to average out the false color patterns. If, during a monochrome transmission, a color killer failure allows the color processing to be activated when it shouldn’t, a chroma subcarrier in the color processing stages is regenerated with no reference, causing that subcarrier to have enough frequency error that the chroma/luminance interleaving feature of NTSC/PAL no longer works, allowing the aforementioned false color patterns, overlaying the otherwise monochrome picture, to be much more visible by the human eye….

    In a color TV waveform, a reference pulse, called the burst, is transmitted along the back porch portion of the video signal. If the transmitted signal is monochromatic, then the burst is not transmitted. The color killer is actually a muting circuit in the chroma section which supervises the burst and turns off the color processing if no burst is received (i.e. when the received signal is monochromatic.) The main purpose of the color burst in the first place is a reference for the receiver to regenerate the chroma subcarrier, which in turn is utilized to demodulate the color difference signals….

    The government ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to cease broadcasting in color. As it was impractical to remove the chrominance signal from programs previously recorded in color, this was accomplished by simply omitting the burst phase signal from the broadcast. The “damaged” signal triggered the “color killer” mechanism in color television sets which prevented the appearance of color pictures. This method was named Mehikon (Hebrew: מחיקון “eraser”).

  • Note that all this was only happening at Israeli broadcasting stations. It didn’t do jack squat about those Arab broadcasts they seemed so worried about.
  • Naturally, this stupidity brought about its own technological reaction: The Anti-Color Killer, “a device to go with your new set restoring the damaged burst phase signal and allowing you to watch color programs exactly as they were filmed.” But you had to fiddle to get the color right, and then fiddle again every 15 minutes or so.
  • “Store owners who sold the device reported that nearly everyone who bought a color set from them also purchased the anti-eraser.”
  • Despite all the effort to keep color out, the Israeli government permitted a few color broadcasts: The visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1977, and (I kid you not) The Eurovision Song Contest in 1979.
  • IBA finally started allowing color broadcasts to go out in 1981, and the Mekhikon was finally retired in 1982…just before the World Cup.
  • Israel finally went to full color on all broadcasts in 1983.

    • Bureaucratic stubbornness kept Israeli broadcasts in black and white long after the vast majority of the world’s countries had switched over. Haiti, Bulgaria, Yemen and Oman all got color broadcasts before Israelis.

    Bureaucratic inertia is quite a force…

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    Posted in Regulation, video | 3 Comments »

    Fast, Cheap and Out of Control

    September 2nd, 2023

    If you were worried that the United States military hadn’t picked up on the importance of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War, it appears that someone in the Pentagon was indeed paying attention.

    The Pentagon committed on Monday to fielding thousands of attritable, autonomous systems across multiple domains within the next two years as part of a new initiative to better compete with China.

    The program, dubbed Replicator, was announced by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies conference here.

    “Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” Hicks said.

    Hicks and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady will oversee the program, with support from Doug Beck, director of the Defense Innovation Unit. Further details, Hicks said, will be released in the coming weeks.

    Replicator rests on two assumptions. The first is that China’s core advantage is mass — “more ships, more missiles, more people,” as Hicks said — and that the United States’ best response is to innovate, rather than match that pound for pound.

    The second is that attritable, autonomous systems are the right form of innovation. Hicks pointed to the war in Ukraine, in which cheap, often commercial drones have proven indispensable on the battlefield for reconaissance, targeting, and attacks. Russia too, she said, appeared to have a similar mass before launching its invasion last February.

    However, this program is squarely focused on China. Hicks called this moment a “generational challenge to American society.”

    ”We’ll counter the [People’s Liberation Army’s] mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat,” she said.

    Even so, Hicks noted the Pentagon will remain focused on its core systems. “America still benefits from platforms that are large, exquisite, expensive, and few,” she said. Instead, she said, Replicator is particularly focused on accelerating DoD’s recent investments in autonomous systems.

    Replicator’s goal of fielding small drones in high numbers and on a rapid timeline echoes calls from former DIU director Mike Brown for the Pentagon to better leverage commercial innovation to deliver capability at scale — an approach he called a “hedge strategy.”

    House appropriators have backed that idea in their fiscal 2025 defense spending bill. The legislation would allocate $1 billion toward establishing a DIU-managed hedge portfolio made up of low-cost drones, agile communication and computing modes and AI capabilities.

    The Department of Defense requested $1.8 billion for artificial intelligence for fiscal 2024 and was overseeing more than 685 related projects as of 2021. Replicator is intended to pull those investments together and further scale production, Hicks said.

    Insert your own hedge funds and Skynet jokes here.

    The strategy makes a good deal of sense…up to a point. The fast and cheap portion makes a lot of sense, given Ukraine’s use of dirt cheap flatpack cardboard drones we talked about earlier this week.

    It’s the out of control/autonomous portion of description, combined with the aggressive timeline, that I question. As far as I can tell, all of Ukraine’s drones have been human guided rather than autonomous.

    Lots of work on AI has been done over the last few years, and its entirely possible that AI drone tech is farther along than we know, but having been involved in numerous large software projects for multiple companies, I can tell you things always seem to take longer than they should even when the federal government isn’t involved. Long term, having autonomous or semi-autonomous drone will give you a lot of extra capabilities, but I’m very skeptical about that two year timeline.

    Also, unless we plan to launch those drones from Taiwan itself, I’m skeptical that we’ll have suitable naval launch platforms ready. Flying a few drones off the deck of destroyer is easy, flying thousands for a real drone swarm is probably impossible. You don’t want to try running drone and manned planes off fleet carriers at the same time.

    Can you run them off an amphibious assault ship? Probably, as a temporary expedient, but that’s going to limit your helicopter and F-35B takeoff and landing windows. Longer term, you’re probably going to need to construct ships designed with specialized launchers to send a whole lot of drones in a short space of time.

    I’ve been talking about the inevitability of drone swarms in combat for some time. The goal is entirely feasible, I just question the “two years to fight China” timeline.

    I sure hope the Pentagon powers that be have a manned drone swarm program backup on hand…

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    Posted in Military | 19 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for September 1, 2023

    September 1st, 2023

    A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Unemployment rate surges (unexpectedly!) as every single monthly payroll estimate this year has been revised downward. Those who assured us that federal government economic data would never be altered simply to help boost Democrats were lying to us.
    

  • Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
  • Prosecutor confirms that it was indeed Biden corruption in Ukraine.

    Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.

    To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.

    Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.

    Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.

    “I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.

  • “Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
  • China tried to seize another island in the South China Sea. It didn’t go well for them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Mitch McConnell’s brain is broken, as he freezes up the second time in two months.
  • Dispatches from the groomer menace: “Woman Says Her Daughter Was Sex Trafficked After School Hid Gender Transition.”
  • Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
  • By contrast, Richardson ISD won a grant to support the gay agenda in schools.
  • Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
  • Also, Texas voters will get a chance to vote on a right to farm constitutional amendment in November.

  • Remember flash mobs of people rampaging through stores looting and beating random people? One just happened again in California.
  • Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced knee–J) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
  • Ecolooneys protest Burning Man by blocking roads, promptly get beatdown from tribal police.
  • “Disney Stock Plunges To 9 Year Lows After Multiple Woke Box Office Failures.”
  • Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Colin Furze offers up a bunch of helpful shop tips.
  • “Texas Governor Signs Legislation Making It Legal To Make Climate Protestors Dance By Firing Six-Shooters At Their Feet.”

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 3 Comments »

    Brandon Herrera Running For Congress

    August 31st, 2023

    I somehow missed this news when it broke a couple of weeks ago, but firearms YouTuber Brandon Herrera, AKA TheAKGuy, is running against incumbent Republican congressman Tony Gonzales for the Texas 23rd U.S. congressional district in the 2024 Republican primary.

    Brandon Herrera, a YouTube influencer with a focus on firearms, has announced that he is challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for Texas’ congressional district 23 seat.

    Herrera, who has over 2 million YouTube subscribers, had been hinting towards a congressional run for weeks on his YouTube channel. He previously made an appearance at a congressional hearing earlier this year after being invited by U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) to testify against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

    Congressional District 23 is a rural, majority-Hispanic area that encompasses western San Antonio and contains a large span of the Texas-Mexico border—including Uvalde, Eagle Pass, and El Paso county.

    Herrera first announced his run at the Young Americans for Liberty conference and then in a YouTube video.

    “Several Republicans who swore to defend gun rights, to protect borders, just in general, putting the rights and interests of the American people above their own, turn their back on these values,” Herrera said.

    “There can be no more incumbent politicians who vote time and time again against the interests of the American people without fear of losing their positions,” he continued.

    Herrera calls himself a “Second Amendment absolutist” and has repeatedly criticized Gonzales for being the sole Texas Republican member of the U.S. House to vote for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a Biden-backed law meant to enact stricter background checks for gun purchases.

    Here’s his campaign announcement (which looks like it was filmed in a hotel room):

  • “I have a deep love for the values that this country was founded on, the ideas of freedom of self-governance. You see, America was never supposed to be the country that gave you everything you always wanted. It was simply a place that gave you the freedom and the opportunity to chase those things for yourself to pursue happiness to build great things.”
  • “I’m working with groups like The Firearms Policy Coalition, National Association for Gun Rights, and Gun Owners of America.” Notice who’s missing?
  • “Tony Gonzalez claimed to be in favor of gun rights, but he voted in favor of Biden’s post-Uvalde gun control and claims he would do it again.”

    • And here he is at Young Americans for Liberty:

  • “ATF is out of control.”
  • “They are a regulatory body that does not have the Constitutional authority to write the law, yet they write the law. They’re banning FRTs [forced reset triggers], they’re banning arm braces, they’re banning bump stocks. All things, I will remind you, comply to the letter of the law and were actually previously approved by the ATF for sale.”
  • “The American experiment was about having the freedom to be who you want to be, to live how you want to live to do what you want to do. Unless that means you want to fuck kids. That’s that’s when the wood chipper gets hungry.”

    • Here’s his website. His six highlighted issues (gun rights, immigration, budget deficits, censorship, leftwing control of education and abortion) are all solidly conservative, but he might want to throw up paragraphs about the lousy Biden economy and protecting the oil and gas industry (TX-23 includes big chunks of Eagle Ford and Permian Basin fields).

    Herrera is one of the biggest gun bloggers in Texas, but sometimes it’s difficult to translate “internet famous” into electoral success. (In 2015, Fark’s Drew Curtis drew a paltry 3.7% of the vote as an independent in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race.)

    On the other hand, Second Amendment rights are a hot-button issue for Texas Republican voters, and Herrera has just under 3 million subscribers on YouTube. If 1/10th of them sent him $5 each, his campaign would have enough money to run a competative race.

    TX-23 used to be a full-blown swing district, with Will Hurd and Gonzalez winning by narrow margins, but it’s gotten redder thanks to redistricting and a Hispanic swing toward the GOP thanks to Biden’s feckless border policies. Swing districts tend to produce squishy congressmen like Hurd and Gonzalez.

    Pretty much nothing about Herrera makes me think he’d be squishy.

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Elections, Guns, Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, video | 6 Comments »

    They Want You To Stop Eating Meat And Dairy, But The Gavin Newsoms Of the World Will Always Be Able To Eat At The French Laundry

    August 30th, 2023

    When radical leftwing city officials push insane, impossible policies, are they merely engaging in virtue signaling, hope to profit off graft for the issue, or want to inflict as much pain on ordinary Americans as possible?

    That’s the question to ask about Houston and Austin signing on to an agenda to eliminate meat and dairy consumption by 2030.

    Two Texas cities are participating in an emissions-cutting program that seeks to end meat and dairy consumption.

    According to the organization, “C40 is a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.”

    Although largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg, C40 has other donors including FedEx, Google, and the Clinton Foundation.

    Both Austin and Houston are listed as participating cities, with “membership operat[ing] on performance-based requirements, not on fees.”

    Houston is a “Megacity,” according to the C40 membership ranking. Megacities are “Cities that show exceptional climate leadership at the global level, and have an urban population that currently/is expected to exceed 3 million or more people by 2030.”

    Austin is in the “Innovator” membership category, which includes “cities that show exceptional climate leadership at the global level, but do not meet the population/size criteria of a Megacity.”

    Altogether, the participating cities make up a quarter of the global economy.

    According to C40 Cities Executive Director Mark Watts, “As always, C40 has adopted a science-based approach and that science is clear: average consumption-based emissions in C40 cities must halve within the next 10 years. In our wealthiest and highest consuming cities that means a reduction of two-thirds or more by 2030.”

    Watts stated this in a report from C40 Cities in 2019 entitled, “The Future Of Urban Consumption In A 1.5°C World.” The report lays out “ambitious targets” for cities to meet regarding the urban consumption of building materials, food, clothing and textiles, private transportation, electronics, and household appliances, as well as private aviation travel.

    The report defines “ambitious targets” as the following:

    “Target level of ambition for consumption interventions that is more ‘ambitious,’ based on a future vision of resource-efficient production and extensive changes in consumer choices. This level was typically informed by expert judgment rather than existing research.”

    Under meat and dairy consumption, the ‘ambitious target’ would be 0 kilograms of either for all citizens.

    Of course, the idea that a large city in Texas is going to give up meat is absolutely bonkers. Barbecue is one of the biggest civil religions in Texas, only slightly behind football. You might as well ask Frenchmen to give up wine. And I’d really like to see leftwing apparatchiks attempt to close down every taqueria in Houston, as the beat-downs they’d receive would be epic.

    We could ask why liberals continually push policies that they would hate living under themselves, but we all know the answer to that: They’ll never live under the rules they apply to others. You have to give up private vehicles and all air travel in the name of global warming, but they’ll feel no compunction in continuing to jet off to Davos because they’re special. The Gavin Newsoms of the world will always eat at the French Laundry, no matter how much they slam you for daring to leave your house to buy a hamburger.

    Rules are for the little people. Nancy Pelosi will never give up here freezer full of high-end ice cream, but she’ll happily castigate you for daring to ignore the dictates of the ruling nomenklatura.

    Those pushing eating the bugs will never have to eat the bugs themselves. The point is to make you eat the bugs…

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Global Warming, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Dave Smith on Rogan: The Deep State vs. Trump

    August 29th, 2023

    If you’ve been following this blog for a a while, very little in this Joe Rogan interview with Dave Smith will be new to you. But this is a nice explanation of how the early part of the Russiagate hoax developed if you weren’t paying attention to the blow-by-blow revelations at the time.

  • They start out with playing Schumer’s famous clip that the intelligence community has “six ways to Sunday” to get back at you.
  • They go through the foolishness of the Russiagate hoax, the bogusness of the Steele Dossier, the strangeness of the Carter Page wiretap, and the lies made on the FISA application.
  • Carter Page “was approached by a group of Russians to see if he would turn and work for them. And the CIA were, like, ‘Yes he was, and he came right back to us and told us about it.’ And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant, the FBI said ‘He was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it.'”
  • “They’re grasping at straws and it’s very clear they’ve weaponized the legal system against this guy.”

  • It was determined by the powers that be, you know, with the corporate media, the Deep State, all of the establishment, that he was unacceptable. And that’s not new to Donald Trump. There were a lot of candidates who have been determined to be unacceptable. Ron Paul was was unacceptable. Bernie Sanders was unacceptable. Tulsi Gabbard was unacceptable. And you saw the machine weaponized against all of them to keep them out. But Trump beat the machine. The difference is Trump won… the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning. And part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the illusion of inevitability that I think progressives rely on.

  • “It doesn’t make people reluctant, it makes people more convinced that there’s a conspiracy against him. It makes people more convinced that there’s corruption that’s fighting against him.”

    • Indeed.

    (Previously.)

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    Posted in Economics, Elections, video, Waste and Fraud | 9 Comments »

    Ukraine Now Using Dirt Cheap Kit Drones Made Out Of Cardboard

    August 28th, 2023

    If you thought the Flying Yeet of Death was cheap, the Ukrainians have announced they just used a drone that looks even cheaper to hit a Russian airbase:

    (A follow-up video suggests they may not have hit much, if anything, but I’m more interested in the drone than the strike.)

    The Australian SYPAQ Corvo UAV is the drone reportedly used. “These drones are made out of cardboard, making them almost invisible to radar. They can carry a four to five kilogram payload have a range of between 40 to 120 kilometers, and a flight time of one to three hours. These are dirt cheap and can be made in the thousands.” It ships in a flatpack kit.

    Here’s a closer look at them:

    I suspect that SYPAQ represents a goodly portion of the future of drone warfare: Numerous and ultra-cheap, but capable of taking out much more expensive enemy vehicles and equipment.

    High tech and low cost is a very cyberpunk approach to warfare.

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    Posted in Military, video | 11 Comments »

    Is It Finally Time To Retire The A-10?

    August 27th, 2023

    If you’ve been following the A-10 Thunderbolt II (AKA Warthog) saga here, you’ll remember that the Air Force tried to kill the A-10 back in 2015, going so far as to accuse airmen who opposed retiring the A-10 of treason. Then in 2016 the Air Force appeared to give up on the idea, possibly due to congressional opposition to the idea.

    Well, the Air Force is back to wanting to kill the A-10, and this time they may succeed.

  • “The US Air Force is charging ahead with plans to retire the old A-10 Warthog attack jet within the next five years, but there’s only one problem: there’s no dedicated close air support platform to replace it.”
  • “In the 2023 version of the National Defense Authorization Act, congress approved the Air Force requests to begin divestment of the current A-10 fleet, citing the aircraft is too old, too slow and too expensive to maintain.”
  • “The Air Force seems to be getting its way this time, with a set timetable to replace the 54 A-10s from Moody Air Force base with F-35a by 2028, and plans to retire the rest of the fleet soon to come.” As Jerry Pournelle once said, “USAF will always retire hundreds of Warthog to buy another F-35. Always, so long as it exists. And it will never give up a mission.” The F-35 is certainly a more modern, capable and flexible aircraft than the A-10, but it also costs about $79 million each, which makes me think that the Air Force is going to be very leery about letting it be used for close air support. By contrast, the lifetime cost of the A-10 is about $14 million per plane.
  • Back when the A-10 was first proposed, opponents argued that the role of close support could be handled by the F4 Phantom II, which brings home just how old the A-10 is, since the Phantom was retired from combat use in 1996.
  • Back when the GAU-8 30mm Gatling gun was developed, guided missile technology was new and finicky tech. That’s no longer the case. “When a laser-guided Maverick can hit a tank more accurately from 22km away, the 1.2 km range of the G8 looks a lot less impressive.”
  • The A-10 is easy to fly but slow, with a max speed of 439MPH.
  • Thick titanium armor provides solid protection to proximity explosions, less to direct hits. (Remember, in 2003 an A-10 managed to make it back to base even though it was missing most of a wing.)
  • The A-10 kicked ass in Desert Storm. “Final tally for the A10 in the first Gulf War was an impressive 987 tanks and 1,355 combat vehicles for only 6 planes lost. Another 14 A-10s were damaged but able to fly back to base, suggesting that the A-10 survivability was keeping pilots alive in that conflict.” Caveats: A lot of those kills were with Maverick missiles, and Desert Storm was 32 years ago.
  • In Iraq and Afghanistan, the A-10 was praised for how well it performed close air support, but also criticized for friendly fire and civilian casualties.
  • “Emphasis on keeping the A-10 and rugged and cheap delayed major upgrades to the plane sensor and fire control systems until the mid-2000s. The $2.2 billion A-10C upgrade program finally updated the
    Warthog’s cockpit from the 1970s era tech it had first flown with.”

  • “The Warthog is almost 50 years old at this point, meaning that aircraft are having to undergo more and more maintenance each year. These costs are adding up, to the point where newer platforms are becoming cheaper to operate per flight hour.”

  • As new technology enables new means of war-fighting, the Air Force appears to have finally convinced congress that other aircraft can do the same job but better. A big part of the argument for retiring the A-10 is a mirror of the original survivability argument from the 1960s: There doesn’t seem to be much room for a big aircraft that flies low and slow in a near-peer conflict, and likely hasn’t been for some time the A-10 has been effective as long as it has thanks to the low intensity of counterinsurgency warfare that U.S. has been fighting for 20 years. Besides a few man-portable launchers, the Taliban and ISIS didn’t have much air defense that could threaten the A-10, and so the Warthog thrived in the asymmetric warfare conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Experts say that won’t be the case against a potential enemy like China.

  • “The gun’s tank busting abilities aren’t sufficient against modern tank armor. The 30 mm API rounds used by the cannon can penetrate around 69mm of steel armor at 500 meters, but modern Russian tanks like T72-B3 have 80mm or more on the hull and sides and way more protection on the front.”

    • As much as I hate to admit it, these arguments are probably correct. The Russo-Ukrainian War has shown that the threat environment is deadlier than ever, with Russia’s air force unable to achieve air superiority over Ukraine, and Russia has reportedly limited sorties to it’s own airspace due to Ukrainian air defenses. Ukraine has shot down at least 30 Russian Su-25s, the Soviet close air support plane most broadly comparable in role and age to the A-10, which is more than they’ve shot down of any other aircraft type. And the Su-25 is over 100 MPH faster than the A-10.

    Also the rise in combat drone number, capability and variety means that the A-10’s close air support role is increasingly being taken over by cheaper, more flexible unmanned vehicles. A-10s would have been perfect for taking out those long convoys strung out on the road to Kiev, but a small swarm of drones with multiple missiles could have done the same thing if they were available, probably at lower cost and without losing pilots. (Some will point to the B-52 as example of older aircraft that are still useful on the modern battlefield, but their mission (high altitude and/or far away using standoff missiles) is the exact opposite of the A-10’s close air support mission.)

    Technology marches on, and there’s no reason you couldn’t have drones half the size and one-tenth the cost of an A-10 armed with 10-12 smart missiles replacing most of the A-10’s mission capabilities. Whether the Air Force will let that happen is another question, as the Sky Warden shows the Air Force never wants to give up a mission, but drones have proven too valuable in Ukraine to shove that genie back inside the bottle.

    Finally, note that when asked about obtaining A-10s, Ukraine’s own defense minister said they weren’t the right aircraft for the role.

    I have to reluctantly conclude that the time for the A-10 may indeed be drawing to a close.

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    Posted in Budget, Military, video | 17 Comments »

    The Burning Times

    August 26th, 2023

    Austin usually has hot, dry summers with a high pressure system parked over us for months on end, but this year it’s been the worst since The Great Drought of 2011, where something like 98% of the state was in stage four drought conditions.

    Thus far this year, the drought hasn’t been as bad (we had a decent amount of rain in spring), but the temperature has been more extreme, as this week saw a break from Austin suffering a record 45 days over 100°.

    ERCOT continues to warn of the possibility of rolling blackouts to shed load, but thus far has kept up with demand this summer, despite warnings earlier this year.

    Remember that favoring trendy green energy sources like solar and wind over natural gas was a big contributing factor to the 2021 ice storm blackouts. Hopefully Texas lawmakers have learned their lesson, and more reliable baseload power has come online since.

    As always, it’s best to be prepared with flashlights, batteries and maybe a portable power source to power fans and medical devices. (That’s the one that gets the best reviews on Amazon. I just got another power source, but since it came free as part of one of those “Redeem your company’s award points for merchandise from this catalog” type deals, I don’t have enough experience with it to recommend it yet.) You might also consider a home generator, like this one, but those are pricey, loud, and I have no direct experience with them, so you probably want to do some research if you’re going that route.

    Stay cool…

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    Posted in Texas, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

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