They're made by Boeing so....

But anyway, this sucks

Better to fix it in that theater before we need it in another

In Joe Bidens American, not even our bombs work.

Are they at least minute of refinery accurate?

The Ukraine should make their own fuckin’ glide bombs then.

Bunch of slavic ingrates.

I mean they already have a suitable launch platform.

It will never be your skin nor your kid's on the line, but you will never hesitate in the slightest to drop that card.

As somebody that is active duty and has a kid that is active duty combat arms....the amount of sheer stupidity I see regarding our comprehensive Ukraine plan is only topped by the social media-fed lifetime civilians who will say just about anything simply to justify their agenda.

We are indeed learning lessons here, and none of them are positive for us considering they all demand we need to make significant course corrections that aren't happening.

It’s so hard to tell when people are being sarcastic vs. being retarded trolls.  

Patriot/Himars/Storm Shadow have all been highly effective and successful against Russian equipment.    It’s not in dispute.

If you’re trying to push the angle that they’ve failed, it’s only going to succeed in destroying your own credibility.

There are second and third order effects and considerations being completely whitewashed.

From bribing federal acquisition officials and government inspectors, to defective planes falling from the sky, I don’t think it is the media telling us Boeing is fucked up, it is Boeing

I have no idea,  I'm just speculating based on the limited data in the post.

The warhead and guidance part of this device, the Small Diameter Bomb, is a significant component of our air-delivered weapons capability. Regardless of whether it's being lofted to altitude on a rocket or an aircraft, if the weapon itself isn't working right it needs to get fixed.

It's not that they "fucked up" it's that the Russian weapons are better than we think they are.

Many people here are stuck in 1991 when the US was the unquestioned economic and military superpower, while China was a low-cost labor camp, the Soviet Union was imploding, and Iran was a bunch of dirt-poor religious fanatics.

A lot has changed in the past 30+ years, and most of the assumptions people entertain about the relative economic and military power of the US and its allies vis-a-vis our enemies are badly outdated.  The inability of western weapon systems to turn the tide of the war are just an example of this.

SDBs have been shit for years.

I dropped the first GBU-39 in combat over in Afghanistan and it sucked then, too.

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sucked because the guidance sucked, or because of the limited area of effect from having such a small warhead?

I don't want to get too specific here, but let's just say that the bomb's calculated flight path is optimized for a certain type of attack, target, and launch profile...and that doesn't always equal it being a useful weapon for other types of attacks, targets, and launch profiles.

For example, it was entirely useless for CAS.

I've been told that the flightpath and time calculation has been changed in newer versions of the '39, but some of the built-in limitations remain.

It doesn't matter if they "work"

The IMPORTANT part is that they got funded and everybody who was supposed to make money through that funding got paid.

Everybody.

In other words they work well enough but they found a convenient excuse to stop using them and offload them on the black market. 10% paid.

Testing of our current weapons system effectiveness against a near peer adversary is the entire point of our involvement with Ukraine.  This is a proving ground with really intense moulage.

dupe

Can I get me some of those glsdb?

No refunds!

...oh wait...

CIA probably helped them "re-home" them in Africa or South America

Sounds like they need to be tweaked.  Ukraine is a great testing ground for out new technology.  

You might want to ask the Black Sea fleet hq about those storm shadow missiles

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Bonus content: s400 battery hit by atacms.

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How many patriot batteries has Russia “taken out”, @aaron56 ?

Disruptive weapons technology is only disruptive for so long, than the enemy learns to adapt to it.

As someone who used to spend the government's money on military stuff....the government doesn't get what it wants, the government gets what it asks for in writing.

I'm certain whatever the results program in question has produced, they are within scope of performance parameters in the solicitation the government posted.

How is it that you guys are so gullible?

I thought we were only sending them surplus items from the GWOT? Not our latest and greatest?

You are getting the lies mixed up dummy.

Jamming is ferrocious at all sides.

As evidenced by the Ukrainian videos of bits and pieces that they collect and film, Russians were constantly upgrading and improving the GLONASS receivers on their high precision weapons. So a constant fight is going on.

In these conditions, any American weapons that were not upgraded to account for the latest jamming can easily fail prey to it. It's nothing scandalous, it's just life in a real war.

I'm trying to keep up!

American technology never fails.  This is Russian propaganda

Actually from what I hear the Russians EW makes every US GPS munition guidance fail.  

General James Gavin said that before he parachuted into Sicily in WW2 he believed American equipment was the best in the world... his first hours on the ground in combat confirmed that was not true at all.  His M1 Carbine immediately failed after the jump.  Next he watched the M1 Bazooka fail to do anything but damage the track on enemy armor.  The Airborne captured a truck full of Panzerfausts and used them for the rest of the war.

You would think Washington would have taken note and made changes, but the Bazooka was still being used in subsequent wars like Korea: Wikipedia

We need to learn from this.

Does it seem to you that this ^ condition applies to every "expedition" we get into that lasts longer than a month or so?


One would think with all the "war colleges" etc. that these lessons would have been learned LONG ago never to be repeated.

You're right.  And those 2 things have had a huge effect on the frontline.  Lets see,

Ocheretyne has fallen
Novobakhmutivka has fallen
Soloviove has fallen
Berdychi has fallen,  reportedly some in the Ukrainian battalion in the west half negotiated a surrender rather than die fighting.
Semenivka has fallen

The Russians have entered Novokalynove and Keramik.  The large defenses in between there and Ocheretyne are surrounded on 3 sides.   They will leave one road out so the Ukrainians don't fight to the death, The Art of War.

The Russians have entered Kyslivka and have a foothold.  

Krasnohorivka the Russians have reached the center of the city,   in the northeast outside of the city they have taken many of the defenses, they're in the process of encircling the heavy fortifications on the east side of the city.  It will most likely fall soon.  

So what effects have those strikes had on the frontline?  ZERO. ZILCH, NADA, NOTHING.   Yes they get big headlines and give people boners.  But at the end of the day they don't effect shit on the frontline and that is all that matters.

In before you or anyone else says "this is all part of a big Nato/Ukrainian super duper secret plan to fool the Russians".   Ukraine is doomed.  Period and always have been.  I feel sorry for all the people yet to die.  

The prox fuze uses a mini radar to tell it when to detonate the munition.  I'm guessing a very muddy environment messes with the fuze so that it doesn't trigger.  And the backup physical fuze isn't getting a large enough deceleration shock to trigger that fuze.  So you have a dud.  That about it, @R0N?

Also, if GPS isn't working, and time of flight is >10 minutes (subsonic flight if it's gliding >10:1, I'm also guessing.  Lots of guesses.).  That's a lot of time for significant drift to enter into the calculations.  With only a 250 lb warhead, and the bursting charge is probably a lot smaller, lots of drift mean enough miss to maybe not break the thing you launched the bomb at.  

Compare with the JDAM missing by 30' (or meters, per Ron) vs 3' we chatted about yesterday. Target's still dead.

Are we even sure they are being operated correctly?

You are, of course, planning on also saturating him in the requisite hardbass audio environment for ensuring 100% uptime while maintaining proper heel-ground contact during tactical lowering movement.

Well don't tell us those, obviously.  

But if Congress made you King of DoD, what "corrections" that you stated in your earlier post aren't being made, would you insist must be done?  Increasing PAC-3 production and anything else that can swat Chinese IRBM terminal homers, sounds like a great start.

I'm going to enlist when it breaks out. I'm 70.

The analysis is always driven by hubris, resulting in a lack of accounting for the impacts of hybrid conflict across several generations of warfare. We focus on the factors we are already strong at, and virtually ignore the ones we aren't.

We lost a ton of people in Iraq due to maneuver commanders not understanding that they can't punch their way through an asymmetric insurgency and IED fight.  This was right after the IC guaranteed that there would be no insurgency.  I would argue we properly planned in Afghanistan to a degree, as they never had a standing conventional maneuver army to begin with. We waned when allowing coalition partners and the state department to influence military decision making.

Ukraine is a triage problem, which you can't properly do if you never accounted for yourself and your allies to start running out of shit almost immediately.  China, Russia, and Iran played the west like a fiddle and used our hubris against us knowing we planned on Ukraine smashing this situation with decisive maneuver fueled by our better equipment.  They capitalized on every asymmetric area we are weak at in the tactical environment right from the start... EW, IW, Cyber, UAS, IED's, all of it.  They also pre-planned our current logistics and manufacturing dilemma and started working that well before anyone on our end.

Meanwhile we are treating this is a warfighter exercise to influence planning and resourcing 3-10 years from now while still focusing very poorly on those asymmetric concepts that we are losing at.  Ukraine is desperately clinging to one of the few things it still owns in this conflict, the narrative internally and in the west.  Even that is slipping away very quickly as they are doing such an obviously horrible job concealing their overt censorship and manipulation of the facts and media.




We always had a plan to close these loops, bringing back SHORAD, increasing strategic ADA, growing our EW capabilities...to name a few. The problem is that these plans take years to decades to implement, and even longer when they keep getting pushed right due to forcing the DOD to take a lot of the burden of Ukraine support out of hide.  Outside of our own purview we have some serious problems with our allies that exponentially grew that burden on us in ways we never thought would happen.

The best option I can suggest at this point is kind of where we are headed. Cut Europe off and force them to deal with Ukraine organically. Force them to grow their military capacity across the board.  We may never fully solve our manufacturing struggles but we can damn sure cut the leeches off.

None of this is a surprise to anyone mildly switched on to a strategic military view who was watching this from the start. A lot of us called all of these outcomes we now see from day one, and these are the exact same mitigations we suggested would need to happen.

We get our weapons tested and Putin doesn't try to attack Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia* which are full NATO countries and would start WWIII.  

I would assume we are sending the oldest blocks of weapons first. I would also think the DOD is gathering info on the Russian systems with the S400 being at the top of the list.

*He has talked about doing this so...

The bomb knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't ...

Radar proximity fuzes will function 1,5-3 times higher than planned for if the ground is wet or snowy,  The lower the angle of fall the higher it will function.

Sure they have bro...

That is why the LONGEST BRIDGE IN EUROPE is STILL standing and being used every single day and there is not jack or shit that Ukraine can do about it!







Seriously dude... The LONGEST FREAKING BRIDGE in Europe connecting Russia to Crimea and Ukraine STILL has not been able to even damage it for more than a few weeks here and there before it is back up and running again???  Shit Shadow cruise missiles for the WIN here for sure!



That is also why when the Russians find out that the Ukrainians are housing foreign troops (or any troops for that matter) in a hotel well behind the front lines and they decide to 'remove' those accommodations from the map entirely due to those reasons - They have absolutely NO PROBLEMS in doing so...






Before Ukraine started using it for military purposes:


After:






Thank goodness that Ukraine had the finest Western AA defense systems supplied by pretty much ALL of NATO around to help 'protect' all of that!