So says Kanal13, citing Ukrainian official sources:
There were mutterings of Ukrainian attacks on Sevastopol earlier today, but this is the first mention I’ve seen of naval drones being used. It will be interesting to find out how they got past the elaborate defensive netting system, if the attack is inside Sevastopol harbor itself.
Developing…
There are some local bond elections on the ballot along with constitutional amendments. Here are my recommendations:
Williamson County
Travis County
Round Rock ISD
No one in Round Rock ISD should receive a raise as long as the current social justice agenda is in place. I recommend voting AGAINST Round Rock ISD Proposition A.
Another Constitutional Election Ballot (crappy formatting there, Ballotpedia is upon us, and early voting starts today.
Here’s Texas Scorecard’s roundup, with input from Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, True Texas Project, and the Huffines Liberty Foundation and links to Texas Legislative Council Analysis of the amendments. The Texan also has a roundup.
Here’s my quick and dirty list of propositions and recommendations.
Williamson County early voting locations can be found here. Travis County early voting locations can be found here.
Some under-reported news from last week: Russia withdrew from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and literally hours later the U.S. conducted a nuclear test.
The U.S. conducted a high-explosive experiment at a nuclear test site in Nevada hours after Russia revoked a ban on atomic-weapons testing, which Moscow said would put it on par with the United States.
Wednesday’s test used chemicals and radioisotopes to “validate new predictive explosion models” that can help detect atomic blasts in other countries, Bloomberg reported, citing the Department of Energy.
So, a nuclear test, but not a nuclear/fission device. It seems like this was a test using conventional high explosive mixed with radioactive isotopes, For Science.
“These experiments advance our efforts to develop new technology in support of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals,” Corey Hinderstein, Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a statement. “They will help reduce global nuclear threats by improving the detection of underground nuclear explosive tests.”
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty is a bit of an outlier, because it was signed, but not ratified, by the United States, and never went into force because China, Egypt, Iran and Israel also signed but never ratified it, and other “Annex 2” countries India, North Korea and Pakistan never signed it. Despite that, the United States and Russia had been adhering to its terms until Putin decided to do his “Look at me, I’m a big scary nuclear power, fear my wrath!” thing to distract people from his continued failure in Ukraine.
Like Russia’s withdrawal from START, there’s not much to worry about here. The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. Russia, already broke before it launched its illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine, has probably spent decades under-funding the nuclear program it inherited from the Soviet Union, and the endemic corruption and the brain drain of nuclear scientists to richer western countries probably hasn’t helped either.
The U.S is still a signatory to a number of other nuclear weapons treaties. But it’s pretty interesting that the Department of Energy had this one cued up and ready to go immediately after the Russkies nixed the treaty…
Casual observers of the Israel-Hamas War (which is to say, probably not anyone reading this blog) may wonder what all the fuss is about, given that various Jihadist groups have been attacking Israel their entire lifetimes. In a rare, mostly readable New York Times piece, Thomas Friedman explains why this time is different.
With the Middle East on the cusp of a full-blown ground war, I was thinking on Friday morning about how Israel’s last two major wars have two very important things in common: They were both started by nonstate actors backed by Iran — Hezbollah from Lebanon in 2006 and Hamas from Gaza now — after Israel had withdrawn from their territories.
And they both began with bold border-crossing assaults — Hezbollah killing three and kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 and Hamas brutally killing more than 1,300 and abducting some 150 Israeli civilians, including older people, babies and toddlers, in addition to soldiers.
That similarity is not a coincidence. Both assaults were designed to challenge emerging trends in the Arab world of accepting Israel’s existence in the region.
And most critically, the result of these surprise, deadly attacks across relatively stable borders was that they drove Israel crazy.
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
So the Israeli Air Force relentlessly pounded the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership in the southern suburbs of Beirut throughout the 34 days of the war, as well as key bridges into and out of the city and Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah’s leaders and their families and neighbors paid a very personal price.
The Israeli response was so ferocious that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a now famous interview on Aug. 27, 2006, with Lebanon’s New TV station, shortly after the war ended: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture [of two Israeli soldiers] would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”
Indeed, since 2006, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively stable and quiet, with few casualties on both sides. And while Israel did take a hit in terms of its global image because of the carnage it inflicted in Beirut, it was not nearly as isolated in the world or the Middle East over the short term or long run as Hezbollah had hoped.
Hamas must have missed that lesson when it decided to disrupt the status quo around Gaza with an all-out attack on Israel last weekend. This is in spite of the fact that over the past few years, Israel and Hamas developed a form of coexistence around Gaza that allowed thousands of Gazans to enter Israel daily for work, filled Hamas coffers with cash aid from Qatar and gave Gazans the ability to do business with Israel, with Gazan goods being exported through Israeli seaports and airports.
Hamas’s stated reasons for this war are that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been provoking the Palestinians by the morning strolls that Israel’s minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was taking around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and by the steps that he was taking to make imprisonment of Palestinians harsher. While these moves by Israel were widely seen as provocations, they are hardly issues that justify Hamas putting all its chips on the table the way it did last Saturday.
The bigger reason it acted now, which Hamas won’t admit, is that it saw how Israel was being more accepted by the Arab world and soon possibly by the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia. Iran was being cornered by President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and Palestinians feared being left behind.
Very little about “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” has anything to do with Biden, and a whole lot to do with Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner pioneering diplomacy first with Saudi Arabia (remember the “glowing orb”?) and later with the Abraham Accords. “Biden’s Middle East diplomacy” seems to largely consist of a retread of Obama’s “throw large sums of money at Iran and hope they play nice” (and possibly kick some back in the form of graft) wishful thinking.
And by “Palestinians feared being left behind” read “Hamas and Iran becoming even more irrelevant and isolated than they already are.”
So Hamas essentially said, “OK, Jews, we will go where we have never gone before. We will launch an all-out attack from Gaza that won’t stop with soldiers but will murder your grandparents and slaughter your babies. We know it’s crazy, but we are willing to risk it to force you to outcrazy us, with the hope that the fires will burn up all Arab-Israeli normalization in the process.”
Hamas has always been that crazy, always willing to blow up a pizza parlor or a disco. The only reason they didn’t behead Jewish babies before was insufficient opportunity thanks to Israeli security. Remember that Hamas believes all Jews to be apes and pigs and that their continued existence living on the face of the earth is a literal affront to God. Saudi-Israeli rapprochement may very well have been paymaster Iran’s trigger to greenlight the operation, but it wasn’t Hamas’ primary motivation for killing Jews any more than fish need a reason to swim.
Hamas kills Jews because Hamas exists to kill Jews.
Yes, if you think Israel is now crazy, it is because Hamas punched it in the face, humiliated it and then poked out one eye. So now Israel believes it must restore its deterrence by proving that it can outcrazy Hamas’s latest craziness.
Israel will apply Hama Rules — a term I coined years ago to describe the strategy deployed in 1982 by Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, when Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.
Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”
Welcome to the Middle East. This is not like a border dispute between Norway and Sweden or a heated debate in Harvard Yard. Lord, how I wish that it were, but it’s not.
Friedman is only intermittently interesting. Much of the time he’s merely doling out Trans-Atlantic globalist elite conventional wisdom (global trade, China, climate change), and a guy who’s occasionally three months ahead of the curve who’s plodding pronouncements are treated like Delphic declarations. (Ace of Spades offered up an epic parody that’s still worth your attention.)
Eventually the piece devolves into the inevitable “Netanyahu: Bad!” catechisms that run on the internationalist left’s wetware anytime that can spare cycles from their ever-present Social Justice, Trump Derangement Syndrome and Global Warming Alarmism subroutines. But it was a halfway decent piece up to then.
Now the reviled Netanyahu is leading a unity government in a declared war against Hamas, unlike the Second Lebanon War or Operation Cast Lead.
This time will be different, because Hamas will not be permitted to exist for there to be a next time.
No job yet, but my dogs and I are all doing fine. Israel’s land incursion into Gaza is still pending, more Democratic Party graft, another House Speaker aspirant drops out, and media flame outs at Disney and Apple. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
On Monday, former FTX engineering chief Nishad Singh testified that FTX had used stolen customer money from Alameda Research to make political donations, even after learning it owed $13 billion to customers. In short, Sam Bankman-Fried was using customer funds to make political donations to Democrats, according to Singh’s testimony.
One of those Democrats was failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who in November of last year reported returning a $1 million donation from SBF just four days before the November election because he was ‘uncomfortable receiving such a large, unsolicited donation.’
In truth, the adderall-addicted SBF (or one of his employees) fat-fingered what was supposed to be a $100,000 donation, and instead ended up being $1 million.
In January, the Washington Free Beacon reported that O’Rourke kept the $100,000.
Of course he did.
House lawmakers are warning that the Biden administration’s $27 billion green energy “slush fund” at the Environmental Protection Agency could be used to finance Democratic political allies and Chinese solar companies, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will be responsible for distributing $27 billion to nonprofit groups and the green energy technology sector by next September.
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said the short deadline for doling out the money will make it difficult for the agency to conduct proper vetting of grantees. They also noted that some EPA officials previously worked for nonprofit groups that stand to benefit from the funding and questioned how the EPA will prevent money from going to Chinese companies that dominate the solar industry.
“Hardworking Americans are facing record high energy costs as a result of the administration’s massive tax-and-spend agenda, which has driven inflation across the board,” House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.) told the Free Beacon. “Energy and Commerce Republicans won’t stand by and let President Biden use this $27 billion slush fund to line the pocket of his political friends or use it on technology that is produced in China.”
The only questions is which parts of the federal government aren’t being used as a slush fund for Democratic Party cronies. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Unfortunately, I can’t stop visiting the world, since it’s where I keep all my stuff…
Pakita, a dog in Argentina, spent nearly three years in an animal shelter after being mistaken for a stray. The shelter owners eventually found her true owner and arranged a reunion. Initially hesitant, Pakita's excitement grew as she recognized her owner's scent.
Credit: Jukin pic.twitter.com/qdgXBiWogE— Family Moments (@Family_viralvid) October 17, 2023
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Below is the tip jar, if you’re so inclined. Thanks to everyone who donated to the Non-Homeless Blogger Fund. I’m bad at thanking people individually the way I should, but let me know if you want public recognition in this space or not.
Have Chicago residents finally had enough of rankling lower on the totem pole than the illegal aliens that seem a top priority of the Democratic Party?
“You want to take the little scraps of resources that we have and put us at the bottom of the bar? That’s not fair!”
Of course those are the people who are screwing them. And of course they’re going to vote for them again. Their entire focus seems to be “Other people are getting goodies from the government, and I want those goodies!” Not: “How can I make safer communities for private enterprise to invest in and provide jobs?”
Those people will never stop voting for Democrats. And Democrats know it. So they have no incentive to dispense crumbs from their graft machine when there are new victimhood identity politics groups to pander to.
A fair amount of tank news has built up in the hopper over the last month or so (some, but not all, related to the Russo-Ukraine War), so let’s do a roundup.
The U.S. Army has announced that it’s not doing an M1A2SEPv4, and instead will produced the M1E3.
The U.S. Army is scrapping its current upgrade plans for the Abrams main battle tank and pursuing a more significant modernization effort to increase its mobility and survivability on the battlefield, the service announced in a statement Wednesday.
The Army will end its M1A2 System Enhancement Package version 4 program, and instead develop the M1E3 Abrams focused on challenges the tank is likely to face on the battlefield of 2040 and beyond, the service said. The service was supposed to receive the M1A2 SEPv4 version this past spring.
The SEPv4 will not go into production as planned, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo told Defense News in a Sept. 6 interview at the Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia. “We’re essentially going to invest those resources into the [research and] development on this new upgraded Abrams,” he said. “[I]t’s really threat-based, it’s everything that we’re seeing right now, even recently in Ukraine in terms of a native active protection system, lighter weight, more survivability, and of course reduced logistical burdens as well for the Army.”
The Abrams tank “can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight, and we need to reduce its logistical footprint,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, said in the statement. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protections for soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”
Ukraine’s military will have the chance to put the M1 Abrams to the test when it receives the tanks later this month. The country is fighting off a Russian invasion that began nearly two years ago.
The M1E3 Abrams will “include the best features” of the M1A2 SEPv4 and will be compliant with modular open-systems architecture standards, according to the statement, which will allow for faster and more efficient technology upgrades. “This will enable the Army and its commercial partners to design a more survivable, lighter tank that will be more effective on the battlefield at initial fielding and more easy to upgrade in the future.”
“We appreciate that future battlefields pose new challenges to the tank as we study recent and ongoing conflicts,” said Brig. Gen. Geoffrey Norman, director of the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team. “We must optimize the Abrams’ mobility and survivability to allow the tank to continue to close with and destroy the enemy as the apex predator on future battlefields.”
Norman, who took over the team last fall, spent seven months prior to his current job in Poland with the 1st Infantry Division. He told Defense News last year that the division worked with Poles, Lithuanians and other European partners on the eastern flank to observe happenings in Ukraine.
Weight is a major inhibitor of mobility, Norman said last fall. “We are consistently looking at ways to drive down the main battle tank’s weight to increase our operational mobility and ensure we can present multiple dilemmas to the adversary by being unpredictable in where we can go and how we can get there.”
General Dynamic Land Systems, which manufactures the Abrams tank, brought what it called AbramsX to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in October 2022. AbramsX is a technology demonstrator with reduced weight and the same range as the current tank with 50% less fuel consumption, the American firm told Defense News ahead of the show.
The AbramsX has a hybrid power pack that enables a silent watch capability and “some silent mobility,” which means it can run certain systems on the vehicle without running loud engines.
The tank also has an embedded artificial intelligence capability that enables “lethality, survivability, mobility and manned/unmanned teaming,” GDLS said.
The Army did not detail what the new version might include, but GDLS is using AbramsX to define what is possible in terms of weight reduction, improved survivability and a more efficient logistics tail.
The Army awarded GDLS a contract in August 2017 to develop the SEPv4 version of the tank with a plan then to make a production decision in fiscal 2023, followed by fielding to the first brigade in fiscal 2025.
The keystone technology of the SEPv4 version consisted of a third-generation forward-looking infrared camera and a full-sight upgrade including improved target discrimination.
“I think the investment in subsystem technologies in the v4 will actually carry over into the upgraded ECP [Engineering Change Proposal] program for Abrams,” Camarillo said. “However, the plan is to have robust competition at the subsystem level for a lot of what the new ECP will call for, so we’re going to look for best-of-breed tech in a lot of different areas,” such as active protection systems and lighter weight materials.
For instance, the Army has kitted out the tank with Trophy active protection systems as an interim solution to increase survivability. The Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems develops the Trophy. But since the system is not integrated into the design of the vehicle, it adds significant weight, sacrificing mobility.
The Army plans to produce the M1A2 SEPv3 at a reduced rate until it can transition the M1E3 into production.
Which looks to be 2030.
Nicholas Moran looks at what this might or might not mean in practical terms, with an emphasis on what it doesn’t say:
Chris Copson of The Tank Museum offers up an assessment of the use of tanks in Ukraine’s summer offensive (posted September 29).
Finally, we have a report that Russia is resuming the long-halted production of T-80s.
The Uralvagonzavod factory in Omsk, in Siberia, hasn’t manufactured a new T-80 hull since 1991. And work on the T-80’s GTD-1250 turbine, at the Kaluga plant, likewise has idled in the decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse.
No, for nearly 30 years the Russian army has replenished its T-80 fleet with old, refurbished hulls and engines. Those hulls and engines obviously are beginning to run out as Russian tank losses in Ukraine exceed 2,000. For context, there were only around 3,000 active tanks in the entire Russian armed forces when Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022.
Uralvagonzavod produces just a few dozen new T-72B3s and T-90Ms every month: far too few to make good monthly tank losses averaging a hundred or more. That’s why, in the summer of 2022, the Kremlin began pulling out of storage hundreds of 1960s-vintage T-62s and ‘50s-vintage T-54s and T-55s.
But the T-62s and T-54/55s, as well as only slightly less ancient war-reserve T-72 Urals and T-80Bs, are a stopgap. Some get fresh optics and add-on armor; many don’t. To sustain the war effort into year three, year four or year five, the Russian armed forces need new tanks. Lots of them.
Thus it was unsurprising when, two weeks ago, Alexander Potapov, CEO of Uralvagonzavod, announced his firm would resume producing 46-ton, three-person T-80s “from scratch.”
It’s a huge undertaking. While the Omsk factory still has the main T-80 tooling lying around somewhere, it must also reactive hundreds of suppliers in order to produce the tens of thousands of components it takes to assemble a T-80. That includes the gas-turbine engine.
During the T-80’s initial production run between 1975 and 2001, Kaluga built thousands of 1,000-horsepower GTD-1000 and 1,250-horsepower GTD-1250s for the type. A thousand or more horses is a lot of power for a 46-ton tank: a Ukrainian-made T-64BV weighs 42 tons but has a comparatively anemic 850-horsepower diesel engine.
The T-80’s excess power explains its high speed—44 miles per hour—and commensurately high fuel consumption, which limits its range to no more than 300 miles. Why then would Kaluga bother with a new 1,500-horsepower turbine?
As long as certain Russian forces—airborne and marine regiments, for example—value speed over fuel-efficiency, it makes sense they’d want even more power for their new-build T-80s. A 1,500-horsepower engine also would give a next-generation T-80 lots of growth potential. Uralvagonzavod could pile on tons of additional armor without weighing down the tank.
A few quick thoughts:
Ukraine just managed to destroy nine helicopters in a single attack. Though initial sources suggested special forces were responsible, it now appears that the newly supplied ATACMS missile was used.
Ukrainian overnight strikes on Russian military airfields in occupied Luhansk and Berdiansk destroyed nine helicopters, an air defense system, and an ammunition warehouse, the Special Operations Forces reported on Oct. 17.
The attacks also hit the airfields’ runways and “special equipment” stored at the premises, the Ukrainian military said, without elaborating on the nature of this equipment.
Dozens of Russian personnel were killed and wounded as a result of the operation, according to the report. “Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.”
The Special Operations Forces is a branch of Ukraine’s Armed Forces that conducts reconnaissance missions and covert operations behind enemy lines.
Here’s a video of the aftermath:
A bit more from Kanal, where it states ATACMS was responsible
Suchomimus has a more detailed video:
And here’s the update on that one, when he confirms the use of ATACMS:
There are lots of Mi-8s around, but Russian doesn’t have that many Ka-52 or Ka-29s (reportedly only 15 of the later) to lose them to enemy action like this.
One reason Russian was formerly considered the second most powerful military in the world was their vast store of Soviet-era MilTech. Vlad’s Big Adventure has pissed vast portions of that stockpile away, and the chip-heavy electronics necessary to run things like military aviation isn’t something Russia has the infrastructure to effectively replenish them anytime soon.