Of all the weapons China is developing, gyrocopters rank very low among those I’m worried about. In truth, I wasn’t even aware they had them until this video popped up in my feed:
While I can construct some edge-cases where a gyrocopter might be better at the same price point (grid search in the mountains), but in just about all cases, a drone, a helicopter or an airplane is going to be superior.
The Kerch Bridge connecting Russia with occupied Crimea has been hit again.
Two people have died after an “attack” on the bridge linking the occupied Crimean peninsula to Russia.
Moscow has blamed Ukraine for the incident, alleging US and UK involvement, but Kyiv has not officially said it was responsible.
The Kerch bridge was opened in 2018 and enables road and rail travel between Russia and Crimea – Ukrainian territory occupied by Moscow’s forces since 2014.
Russia’s transport ministry said the bridge’s supports were not damaged.
The ministry said investigations were continuing, but unconfirmed reports said explosions were heard early on Monday.
It is the second major incident on the Kerch bridge in the past year. In October 2022, the bridge – which is an important supply route – was partially closed following a major explosion. It was fully reopened in February.
Ukraine had previously hit the Kerch Strait Bridge back in October of 2022.
Suchomimus has a video showing the damage. One of the road spans has been dropped by the attack, but not completely. It took several months to repair the road span damage from the last attack.
He says that a sea drone appears to be responsible.
With Russia’s supply lines in Zaporizhzhia under increasing pressure due to the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive there, even partially disabling the bridge is going to put more pressure on Russia’s logistics network to keep their troops supplied, not to mention encouraging even more Russians to get out of Crimea while the getting is good.
Now if Ukraine can just hit the rail span again…
Just as he did about a year ago, Nicholas Moran rates the realism of tank scenes in various movies and TV shows.
Good: Band of Brothers.
Bad: Rambo III (“Is he driving or is he gunning?” You can’t do both in any Soviet tank.)
More Biden crime family news, Toast Tab burns diners, and a judge blocks the Biden regime censorship. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.
“I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.
That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.
Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.
“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”
“For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”
She knows how to make a video for tiktok. 💓😂pic.twitter.com/5WGtaxY0eV
— The Best (@Figensport) July 9, 2023
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Peacekeeping missions in Africa have a way of humbling proud nations, like America in Mogadishu or Ireland in Jadotville. But while American and irish troops actually acquitted themselves well in their respective engagements, the same can’t be said for Chinese troops in the Battle of Juba, in South Sudan, in July of 2016.
The short summary is that two sides in the civil war had set up bases on either side of a UN refugee camp, and when fighting broke out, woefully unprepared Chinese peacekeeping troops got their asses kicked.
Takeaways:
Supposedly China implemented reforms after the dismal showing, but throughout history, China’s military has looked remarkably ineffective in fighting against theoretically smaller foes.
Although a lot of attention has been lavished on Ukrainian Forces getting Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and Abrams main battle tanks, we’ve also sent them 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Many of those have been involved in the Zaporizhzhia counter-offensive, and early reports had several being destroyed in early fighting (though crews reportedly escaped). How do Ukrainian crews like the Bradley compared to the Soviet BMP series IFVs they were using before?
As Ukrainian forces continue their counteroffensive against Russia, some soldiers say an American-supplied vehicle is making a key difference in their advances, and more importantly, saving lives.
The U.S. has provided has provided Ukrainian forces with Bradley Fighting Vehicles as part of aid packages since the beginning of the year and they have been heavily used in the counteroffensive Ukraine that launched in early June.
Two Ukrainian soldiers from the 47th brigade, Serhiy and Andriy, told ABC News that they and their crew wouldn’t be alive today if Bradley didn’t protect them from a battle early on in the counteroffensive where they were struck by mines, high caliber guns and attack drones.
“We were hit multiple times,” Andriy, who drove one Bradley, said. “Thanks to it, I am standing here now. If we were using some Soviet armored personnel carrier we would all probably be dead after the first hit. It’s a perfect vehicle.”
The Bradleys are armed with a 25mm automatic cannon, a 7.62mm machine gun, and a TOW missile system that can hit armored targets more than two miles away.
While a Bradley is way undergunned compared to a modern MBT, remember that Bradleys killed T-72s with TOW missiles in the Battle of 73 Easting, even though that’s not the tasked it’s designed for. And while the Bradley’s 25mm autocannon can’t defeat Soviet/Russian tank armor thicknesses with any but lucky shots, consensus is that the tungsten or depleted uranium rounds can penetrate any Russian vehicle below a MBT.
Andriy and Serhiy’s brigade was part of one of the first major assaults using significant amounts of Western-supplied armored, launched against heavily fortified Russian lines in the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine at the start of June.
As they advanced towards the Russian positions, protected by dense minefields, the Ukrainian troops came almost immediately under heavy fire. The vehicle behind Andriy was struck by an attack drone, killing his unit’s commander.
Andriy’s Bradley was then hit first by a 120mm mortar. Two 150mm shells then struck both sides of the vehicle, he told ABC.
“Almost all of my guys were concussed, and they were really disoriented,” he said. But the squad inside bailed out and managed to safely escape back to cover.
Crew survivability seems to be one of the biggest advantages Bradleys have over their Russian BMP counterparts, as covered in this video:
U.S./NATO doctrine has always placed a much higher value on crew survivability than Soviet/Russian doctrine. Ukrainians crewing Bradleys are keenly grateful for that difference.
Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin has evidently launched a coup against the Russian military leadership.
he owner of the Wagner private military contractor made his most direct challenge to the Kremlin yet on Friday, calling for an armed rebellion aimed at ousting Russia’s defense minister. The security services reacted immediately by calling for the arrest of Yevgeny Prigozhin.
In a sign of how seriously the Kremlin was taking the threat, security was heightened in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don, which is home to the Russian military headquarters for the southern region and also oversees the fighting in Ukraine.
While the outcome of the confrontation was still unclear, it appeared likely to further hinder Moscow’s war effort as Kyiv’s forces were probing Russian defenses in the initial stages of a counteroffensive.
Prigozhin claimed early Saturday that his forces had crossed into Russia from Ukraine and had reached Rostov, saying they faced no resistance from young conscripts at checkpoints and that his forces “aren’t fighting against children.”
“But we will destroy anyone who stands in our way,” he said in one of a series of angry video and audio recordings posted on social media beginning late Friday. “We are moving forward and will go until the end.”
He claimed that the chief of the General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, scrambled warplanes to strike Wagner’s convoys, which were driving alongside ordinary vehicles. Prigozhin also said his forces shot down a Russian military helicopter that fired on a civilian convoy, but there was no independent confirmation.
And despite Prigozhin’s statements that Wagner convoys had entered Rostov-on-Don, there was no confirmation of that yet on Russian social networks. Videos showed heavy trucks blocking highways leading to the city, long convoys of National Guard trucks were seen on a road outside Rostov-on-Don and armored vehicles were roaming the streets.
Prigozhin said Wagner field camps in Ukraine were struck by rockets, helicopter gunships and artillery fire on orders from Gerasimov following a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, at which they decided to destroy Wagner.
Seems insane on the surface, but people are bandying about the idea that 97% of the Russian army is invested in Ukraine.
Two random videos on the coup:
LiveUAMap snap of Rostov-on-Don:
Twitter post via Instapundit:
Prigozhin's audio message at 01:22 BST:
"The Head of General Staff is not calming down: a mistake of any African dictator is to deal air strikes at civilian areas. Right now in the air are two planes numbered 523 and 546 that are trying now to deal these strikes.
Remember,…
— Dmitri (@wartranslated) June 24, 2023
Also following news on Suchomimus’ Discord.
I got stuff to do right now, but this is the sort of fast-evolving story that deserves an open thread. So talk away with news here.
Developing…
Update: Quick state-of-play video from Suchomimus:
Update 2: BBC has a liveblog on the coup.
Update 3: Random non-coup observation: Reporting from Ukraine hasn’t updated in two days. I don’t treat that guy as gospel, but I don’t think he’s missed a posting day since shortly after the war began.
Update 4: Never mind, there he is:
Busy as hell and I have a cold, but I soldier on. LinkSwarm! Russian coup! Texas! Pedophiles! Portland! Braaaaiiiinnnnnns!
I cover the world!
The City of Dallas is requiring employees to undergo taxpayer-funded transgender reeducation training any time one of their co-workers comes out as “transgender.”
According to internal documents obtained from the City of Dallas by The Dallas Express, “non-transitioning” employees are being forced to undergo reeducation training “to support an inclusive and productive workplace environment for all employees.”
The City of Dallas’ “gender transition toolkit” explains that a transitioning employee should find a “trusted” supervisor or manager as a “first point of contact” to help them through their workplace transition.
The document includes a list of gender terms and definitions. It then moves on to require employees to work with gender-confused co-workers, allowing the “transitioning” employee to use whichever bathroom or locker room at work they feel most comfortable with, ignoring the comfort of other employees.
In the summer of 2020, Portland, Oregon, became the poster child for American urban disaster zones. During the day, tens of thousands of citizens protested peacefully against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But everything changed after dark. Nonviolent demonstrators with jobs, school assignments, and kids to raise went home; hundreds of anarchists swarmed in to take their place and waged a low-grade insurgency against the city. They fought pitched battles with the cops—throwing rocks, frozen water bottles, fireworks, buckets of excrement, and even Molotov cocktails. They attacked coffeehouses, immigrant-owned restaurants, mom-and-pop retail stores, banks, museums, churches, bus stops, and the Multnomah County Democratic Party headquarters with baseball bats, crowbars, and hammers. Most were military-age white males wearing all-black clothing and hiding their faces. The violence kept up, night after night, week after week, and month after month, into the winter, long after the rest of America had calmed down. My city had become the most politically violent place in the country, and I got worried e-mails from people I knew around the world—even in the Middle East!—asking me if I was okay and why on earth this was happening.
A crime wave followed. Shootings and homicides exploded 300 percent between 2019 and 2022, robberies rose 50 percent in 2022 alone, vehicle thefts hit record highs, and work-order requests for graffiti removal shot up 500 percent between 2020 and 2022. The City of Roses suffered 413 shootings in 2019 but 1,306 in 2022 and nearly twice as many homicides as San Francisco, though Portland is only three-fourths its size. Meantime, statewide crime actually declined from 2019 to 2021.
The homelessness crisis also intensified. The slow-motion collapse of Oregon’s mental-health infrastructure, a dramatic surge of cheap and deadly fentanyl and a far more potent and addictive form of psychosis-inducing meth, and a crippling housing shortage led to the formation of more than 700 tent cities in residential neighborhoods and business districts across the city.
But while it’s too soon to declare that Portland’s troubles have passed, the worst may now be over. Despite ongoing woes, Portland looks and feels much better than it did in dystopian 2020. The riots stopped, and the crime wave seems to have peaked, with shootings down by nearly 40 percent and homicides down more than 50 percent in the early months of 2023. A sober mood shift has taken over the city. Voters passed a ballot measure to restructure city government, while the three newest elected officials on the city council are steering Portland in a different direction. The city, county, and state are taking steps to reverse the decline.
Portland is suffering a serious livability crisis. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in early 2022 told the Portland Business Alliance that the quality of life is worsening. Portland is hardly the most dangerous city in America: the homicide rate in St. Louis is more than four times higher, with 65 murders per 100,000 people, compared with Portland’s 15 in 2022. Portland’s rate peaked at more than double the national average, but of all the cities with higher crime rates than Portland, only Chicago gets as many national headlines. That’s probably because Portland’s increase in crime was the worst in the country. No other city’s homicide rate rose so spectacularly. And unlike St. Louis, Baltimore, and other notorious hot spots, Portland was recently a destination city that touted its high quality of life as a reason to move there.
Of late, though, rather than attracting new residents, Portland has actually lost population, either to the suburbs or out of state. “I’ve never seen money move out of here,” commercial real-estate salesman Stu Peterson told Willamette Week. “Nobody ever wanted to leave Oregon. It’s a beautiful place. Most evacuees are high-wage earners who are fed up with the crime, taxes, and homelessness, in that order. There’s an ugly spiral.” Real-estate agent Justin Harnish described a client who left downtown Portland for the suburb of Lake Oswego after she saw a woman stab another woman in the face with scissors.
Accompanying the crime wave is a drastic staff shortage at the Portland Police Bureau. Portland now has fewer than 800 sworn officers, a smaller number than it had decades ago, when the city was barely half the size it is now. And with the surge in violent crime, the police have little time to deal with anything that isn’t life-threatening. Prioritizing shootings and other emergencies, they’re forced to neglect break-ins, stolen cars, vandalism, and just about everything else. The traffic police unit has been defunded, reduced to a single full-time traffic cop—not for ideological reasons but because the city has no one to staff that division.
Part of the blame rests with the months of demoralizing anti-cop violence in 2020, but Portland would probably be short of police officers anyway. Every city agency, from fire and rescue to the transportation bureau and the public defender’s office, faces staff shortages now. And while a shrunken police force didn’t cause Portland’s crime wave on its own, a police department that can barely react to anything but emergency calls aggravates the problem. Criminals behave as though they can get away with essentially anything and commit far more crimes than they would if they were investigated, arrested, and prosecuted swiftly. The Woodstock neighborhood, where Joe Biden won 88 percent of the vote, is considering hiring its own private security force.
Snip.
I spent more time talking to my neighbors that year than I ever had before or have since. A lot of us suddenly became friendlier outside our houses, and we weren’t talking about sports and the weather. Residents and business owners alike worried about where things were headed and expressed dismay at the city’s inability to defend itself. I didn’t talk with a single person who thought that everything was okay, that city hall was on top of it, or that the anarchists were not a menace. And nobody could understand why the homeless camps at the elementary school down the street or at the park hadn’t been cleared. No, I didn’t conduct my own scientific public opinion survey, but it was obvious that regular people were nearing the end of their rope and that the status quo was bound to be upended.
In 2021, that’s exactly what happened. A tsunami of outrage inundated the mayor, the city council, and the police bureau. Phones rang nonstop. Furious citizens shouted at meetings. Newspaper editors published scathing letters, and journalists at mainstream outlets covered distressed neighborhoods and interviewed disgruntled citizens while largely ignoring the activist set that booed every conceivable solution and told civilians that the problems were in their heads. Lawsuits against the city proliferated. Polls showed city council members languishing on political death row, with approval ratings in the teens.
Though most residents still wanted accountability for bad cops and citizen oversight of the police bureau, the complaints were primarily about crime, about how the police hardly ever show up anymore, and about disorder dragging neighborhoods down. Even some of the fashionable middle-class neighborhoods endearingly satirized in the Portlandia comedy series were enduring weekly gunfire.
In the fall of 2022, 82 percent of Portland respondents in an Oregonian poll said that they wanted more cops. If some Portlanders felt overpoliced a few years ago, hardly anyone felt that way after the chaos, with a mere 15 percent saying that they wanted fewer officers in 2021.
Before the city council elections got going in 2022, voters fired repeated warning shots in public opinion surveys. An overwhelming 85 percent of respondents said that they found the city council ineffective, with a clear majority describing it as “very ineffective.” For a while, it looked as though Portland was gearing up to fire every single official in a landslide election.
Two city council members, Dan Ryan and Jo Ann Hardesty, ran for reelection last year. Ryan managed to defy expectations and win despite the temper in the city, though it’s easy to understand why: he set aside his ideological views and changed with the times. Though he first ran during a special election in early 2020 on a campaign promising to cut police funding, he soon reversed himself. Anarchists vandalized his home seven times because he refused to cut the police budget.
Hardesty didn’t fare as well. Pushing bills to defund the police and opposing the cleanup of homeless camps, she put herself wildly out of step with her constituents. Mingus Mapps, a moderate on the council who had easily dispatched the left-wing populist Chloe Eudaly two years earlier, endorsed Hardesty’s challenger, Rene Gonzales, and bluntly said: “It is time to put ideology aside and elect people who will fight for Portland. I need colleagues who use debate, reason, and logic to solve our many crises.” Gonzales said, “Our once beautiful city is struggling in ways that were unfathomable a short time ago. . . . City hall’s ineffective, ideologically driven policies are ruining the city we used to proudly call home.” Gonzales won, and Portland replaced the city council’s last progressive firebrand with a centrist. It was the kind of event that marks the end of an era.
Sounds a lot like Austin, except for the sobering-up part. (Also, it’s good to read Michael Totten again. He seemed to disappear from view for several years. Probably because he was writing for The Bulwark…)
He got caught snooping and forgot how to dog 😂
⭕️ Follow @Funniest_Family for more interesting content everyday!pic.twitter.com/Givy1JY1IJ
— Funniest Family Moments (@Funniest_Family) May 14, 2023
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ pet thread.)
I try to keep up with the latest drone developments out of the Russo-Ukrainian War, so this funky remote-control mine-laying device caught my eye:
Ukrainian ground drone carrying TM-62 anti-tank mines being tested at military proving ground
📹https://t.co/KXT1hTplIO pic.twitter.com/No23BdTJNM
— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) April 29, 2023
It looks like someone took a lawnmower chassis and replaced the mower blade and engine with a mine-laying servo.
#Ukraine: Judging by the video, the main idea is that this UGV "RATEL" is used as a mobile warhead that carries two TM-62 AT mines and whose goal is to be activated under a vehicle or tank. In the video, UGV was successfully tested on an old van. #UkraineRussiaWar️ #Russia pic.twitter.com/JRqtabl4nj
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Warfare (@WeaponsWarfare) April 29, 2023
RATEL is evidently the name of the device, and not connected to the South African Ratel IFV (though it wouldn’t shock me to see those show up in Ukrainian inventories, despite being fairly long in the tooth).
I first saw this mentioned in a Reporting from Ukraine video:
Not a whole lot of information there, either, but he did say “Recent combat footage shows that Ukrainians finally started using mine-laying drones in large numbers. Even though such drones cannot be driven far behind the front lines, they are very effective at mining the roads that go along the front line, especially those that connect Russian positions between the tree lines.”
There’s very little information available on this device online, but speculation on previous prototypes suggested they were trying to lay mines under enemy vehicles, which makes no sense. The Reporting from Ukraine description of them as an area denial weapon makes much more sense.
We think of mines as buried items, but laying them atop roads can take out unwary or distracted drivers, or cause them the to stop to clear the mines (a risky proposition, since they could be designed to explode at any removal attempt, and which subjects stopped targets to possible hostile fire), or to divert around into areas that may have buried mines (and we’ve seen plenty of video from Ukraine of Russian vehicles hitting mines buried to the side while trying to avoid some obstacle).
The Mine-Laying Lawnmower of Death (MLLoD) looks a bit more purpose-built than The Flying Yeet of Death or their wheeled RC bombs.
A whole lot of low-cost, low-tech drone innovation is coming out of this war…
Here’s something informational for Sunday, Nicholas Moran explaining exactly how a modern 120mm (AKA 120×570mm NATO, the type used by the M1A2 Abrams and the German Leopard 2) APFSDS round works.
Here’s another video that provides a visualized simulation of how APFSDS rounds work.