There was zero threat to that American submarine, they fired on an unarmed ship that the US Navy had just held ceremonial activities with literally days prior. Absolutely disgusting behaviour but we can't expect anything less from the Americans unfortunately.
Modern subs don't run on the surface routinely like WWII subs did. Practically all they could do would be float some life boats up, but they were probably >10 nm away, so it wouldn't have been in position to deliver them promptly.
They tried restraint and proportionality for decades and where did that get them? 47 years of non-stop aggression, espionage, sanctions and the mass deaths of Iranian civilians.
UAE wants that because their leaders are highly Israel aligned. Saudi Arabia is a lot more pragmatic, they take their role as the "leader" of the Islamic world pretty seriously.
I think this was the nail in the coffin. Not only has the US exsanguinated their military capability at the behest of Israel, everyone with half a brain watched closely as they took AD out of the gulf states and moved them into Israel. Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are not morons, they will see the writing on the wall and they will move to make diplomatic peace with their neighbours (China) now that the US has keeled over with self-inflicted wounds.
It doesn't really matter what happens internally in the US now, everyone realizes that every four years the world will roll the dice.
Palantir is part of the IDF's kill chain. In Gaza that means supporting the automated targeting systems that choose targets with little to no human oversight, and then the automated tracking systems that follow targets until they are at home with their families so that the entire family can be killed at once.
>Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
>“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
ICBM means the missile is able to be launched into other continent (more than 5K kilometers in range), not about its effective warhead. Iranian missiles are fast and efficient, but their effective range is essentially being able to target Israel and the Gulf States, which means they are not ICBMs. Also, the one country in the Middle East who does have ICBM missiles and can target Europe is Israel, not Iran.
The Iranians just hit an F35 with a proverbial box of scraps they put together in a cave. The Chinese military must have experienced collective euphoria when they saw that.
To be clear, that F35 was being incredibly careless, flying low in broad daylight. All the stealth features of an aircraft are useless if you can look at it with your own eyes. In any conflict with China, F35s would not be flown that way.
APKWS interceptor is about 35K USD and works much better than drone-based interceptors. The problem is to scale the production, training and deployment. Another problem is detection. One needs wast multilayered system that US military missed to build as big stationary radars are very hard to defend.
Air-launched interceptors like this have the problem on relying on a super-expensive manned carrier (fighter or helicopter).
The intercept cost is now not only the cost of the interceptor, but also the cost of the flying hours of the launching platform, and the risk of losing the launching platform.
If you equip even some of your Shaheds with AA missiles (cheap manpads with autonomous IR target acquisition and guidance), like is already happening in Ukraine, the feasibility of APKWS becomes problematic. The technology is developing fast these days.
APKWS launching from air is a stop-gap measure in any case. The detection range for Shahed-type drones is tenths of kilometers, not hundreds, like with fighter jets or big missiles. One cannot have that many fighter jets in the air all the time even without the threat of manpads.
But ground-based platforms work just fine and cheap enough to scale up the deployment to cover the big area.
The big advantage of APKWS over interceptor drones is the rocket engine, they are much faster and can catch Shaheds within much bigger radius or within much smaller timeframe than interceptor drones.
First, if I understand correctly, APKWS is laser guided (one of the reasons it is relatively cheap is cheap simple guidance), it needs the carrier to designate the target.
Second, it is rather short range, and that range is helped significantly by the speed and altitude of the launching platform. Launching from the ground upwards would significantly reduce its range, which is anyway just a few km.
Due to the short range, you will need a densely distributed significant numbers of them, and still be in danger of saturation attack (the attacker can saturate one route, you have to be ready for all possible routes). Having a carrier platform allows the missiles to be quickly brought where they are needed, so overall you need much less of them (still too much, as having enough carriers in air imposes limits as well).
You can have longer-range ground missiles, but then the costs rise. Also, I am not sure how feasible/robust is to laser designate air targets from the ground. I suspect it does not work over longer distances, i.e. you need a more sophisticated and costly guidance system/sensor suite on the missile.
The beauty of an anti-drone drone is that you have a much more robust human-assisted guidance, for cheap (camera and communication link). With advances to AI, even that human and communication link are becoming obsolete...
With rocket propelled missile you have much faster closing speed, and quite limited energy budget - essentially you have to make a correct decision fast and precisely, otherwise the missile is wasted. With a drone, everything is slower and easier to correct.
The latest APKWS is IR guided and works in fire and forget mode that works nicely from the ground. And then drone interceptor struggles with Russians Shaheds with jet engines.
On the other hand the latest development with drone interceptors is rocket booster to quickly bring in within Shahed. So I guess there would be a convergence between APKWS and interceptor drones.
IR guided fire and forget is fine, but undoubtedly quite a bit costlier than the basic laser-guided one. If you want to use it against jet engined Shaheds while launching from the ground, you definitely need larger rocket motor, i.e. costlier interceptors. But that might be fine, the jet engined Shaheds are not as cheap as the basic ones anyway.
Actually, I am surprised they still use the Shahed platform for the jet engined drones. A Reaper-like platform with high aspect ratio wings would be much more aerodynamically efficient, allowing longer range/loiter time/larger payload. It is definitely more expensive airframe, but that jet engine might be the main cost factor anyway.
Re: IR seeker against plain Shaheds: does the basic weedwhacker Shahed have enough IR signature? (More precisely: does it have it if you did some basic precautions - cover the engine, some mixing of the ambient air with the exhaust.) The power level of that engine (= the whole source of IR energy) is quite low...
Shahed shape is dictated by the need to sustain very high G and aerodynamic forces during the launch from a truck which in turn allows for a very fast deployment. Anything more aerodynamic will imply stronger, more expensive frame and less payload.
Shahed has sufficiently bright IR that even a basic seeker works. To keep the cost low no efforts were applied to minimize the signature.
It is fascinating how well designed Shahed was for its intended purpose of being the cheapest mass-produced platform that would saturate any advanced air defenses while hard to track launch site. However, with appearance of cheap mass-produced counter-measures it may no longer be optimal.
To deny the US the use of any nearby airfields (Okinawa, several others in Japan an Philippines). This will limit US airpower to carriers, which are few and sinkable.
Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on) - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers.
Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be peppered very early in the conflict.
There won't be a direct conflict with China, at least not in the last 10 years, because the US first needs to complete de-coupling his economy from China more, re-industralize in-shore or at least near-shore, and dramatically build up its military and logistic capabilities to fight an expeditionary campaign on China shores.
China also is not stupid, and no matter how much they posture, they won't invade Taiwan.
No one is invading China. Coupled or de-coupled is a completely irrelevant consideration. People think MAGA are crazy, but no one is suicidal. A war with China would be over in a matter of hours. And anyone who did not manage to get to Africa or extreme South America before the outbreak of hostilities would have a great chance of dying. The only question is will death be quick in a blast, or slow as you try to walk out of the US.
To be clear, Trump announced that the US had destroyed Iran's air defenses, missiles and missile launch capabilities. Trump also said that the US enjoyed air supremacy over Iran and were flying when and where they wished.
Maybe one of these days we'll see a B-52 take off with JDAMs and not JASSMs but probably not, kind of scary to try and drop gravity bombs on a country that your stealth fighters can't fly over.
The "pen-testing" discoveries go both ways. In Iran, Chinese HQ-9B surface-to-air missile systems and YLC-8B anti-stealth radars failed to intercept any aircraft. In Venezuela, Chinese JY-27A early warning radars failed to detect approximately 150 incoming U.S. aircraft. In Pakistan, Chinese HQ-9B and HQ-16 systems failed to intercept Indian strikes.
Not really. US, a competent operator of US made platforms losing hardware to Iranian box of scraps is different than third party operators vs overmatch environment, i.e. Pakistani had pathetic amount of IADs vs India, and by all accounts VZ didn't even integrate theirs.
IADs not integrated by marginal operators =/= stealth radar didn't work aka, physics of stealth detection is basic, and parsimonious likelihood is US gave up strategic intangibles for VZ and IR side shows. Even if IADs wasn't integrated it would still be worthwhile for PRC to send out stealth radars knowing they'd get glassed because it's rounding error investment to get near F35s without luneburg. At the end of the day, these radars are networked/uplink to beidou3 for a reason, their primary function for PRC is to serve as cheap telemetry gathering nodes that gather strategic US ephemera like stealth profiles, ew, order of battle and beamed it back to CETC.
The last time China bombed a foreign country was 1979, 47 years ago. Has the US gone even 47 days in the last 80 years without bombing another country?
Ya, this is in fact quantifiably better. Insofar as number of deaths = level of badness.
Neither is a picnic but I'll take a small proxy conflict over massive direct air campaign and definitely boots-on-the-ground Freedom campaigns any day.
https://www.beachesofnormandy.com/didyouknow/Did_you_know_wh...
There was zero threat to that American submarine, they fired on an unarmed ship that the US Navy had just held ceremonial activities with literally days prior. Absolutely disgusting behaviour but we can't expect anything less from the Americans unfortunately.
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