🤔 Off-the-Rack or Second-Hand?

The Cope Choir Meets the Facts

If only I had a dollar for every time people have made the argument that: "The US/NATO haven't sent any of their good stuff to Ukraine."

Fact is, all of the following items, sent in significant quantities, are "front-line operational units" in NATO armies:

- M-777 howitzers, and various NATO self-propelled guns in large numbers

- HIMARS MLRS

- Counter-battery radars

- Leopard 2A6, Challenger 2 MBTs

- NASAMS, IRIS-T, Patriot, etc. air-defense systems

- Storm Shadow / SCALP cruise missiles

And that is only a partial list.

On the other side of the line, and by direct comparison:

- Russian artillery, towed and mobile, has been consistently excellent and utterly overpowering. The God of War is not dead.

- Russian unguided MLRS has been devastating on area targets, and the appearance in numbers of Tornado-S guided MLRS has stretched the line of rear-area precision strikes back 50km+. It appears they are now deliberately using them to hunt HIMARS launchers, with dramatic effect (see video attached below).

- NATO counter-battery radars have to stay on the move, and they don't live long

- The German Leopard 2A6 was touted as the best main battle tank in the NATO inventory. It might as well have been made of plywood. None of the NATO tanks sent to Ukraine made any meaningful impression on the battlefield, aside from the glow of their burning.

- None of the NATO air-defense systems sent to Ukraine have been nearly as effective as the Soviet-legacy S-300 and Buk systems with which Ukraine started the war. By all indications, there are few of the NATO systems left. If only 5 Patriot systems were sent, I believe all 5 are now destroyed.

- My back of the napkin estimate is that ~250 Storm Shadow / SCALP missiles were delivered.

We now know their operation and targeting is a 100% NATO affair, with "boots on the ground" NATO specialists.

Of the ~250 launched, maybe 50 have hit what they were aimed at. I would say it's more like 25. They have been consistently shot down or jammed. The aggregate interception ratio has been somewhere between 75% - 90%.

And, other than their longer range, there is no reason whatsoever to believe sea-launched Tomahawks or air-launched cruise missiles of any NATO type would achieve a higher success rate.

All Russian-model strike missiles are at least equivalent — and most are substantially superior — to anything in the NATO arsenal. This should not be a controversial question. The facts of the matter are now demonstrable.

And that, folks, is the score as it now stands.

The entire NATO military bloc has now significantly attrited its already inadequate stockpiles of all manner of equipment and munitions — and to negligible effect in relation to its objectives.

Of course, standing apart from everything else, there is the most meaningful NATO contribution to Ukraine's successes in this war: their intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms.

By any reasonable logic of conflict, the Russians would be well within their natural rights to strike back at the US/NATO ISR assets that have played such an essential role in several damaging attacks against them.

Their patient restraint is likely wearing thin ...

https://twitter.com/EmpireinWinter/status/1765149685264929179?t=toP0gBSdOdBSDQdHfEvBAA&s=19

📜 Patiently Waiting to Strike



"By any reasonable logic of conflict, the Russians would be well within their natural rights to strike back at the US/NATO ISR assets that have played such an essential role in several damaging attacks against them."

I have written many times over the past two years about what is arguably the single most important component of US/NATO military involvement in the Ukraine War: its Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets that have been omnipresent on the battlefield from the very beginning.

I have frequently expressed my expectation that the Russians would eventually feel compelled to "do something about it".

Up until now the most they have done is down an MQ-9 surveillance drone over the Black Sea, by the novel method of buzzing it with an Su-27, dowsing it with jet fuel, and possibly even giving it a wingtip nudge.

But the serious platforms — the RQ-4 unmanned drones and the various crewed jets packed with electronic gadgetry — have been permitted to operate more or less unhindered.

Or at least we can say none have been shot down yet.

We are not privy to the knowledge of how successful the Russians have been so far in developing effective countermeasures to NATO ISR.

Of course, these aircraft are flying either in "international airspace" or (primarily) in the airspace of Romania and Poland.

That said, THIS IS WAR. And little diplomatic niceties like “protected airspace” lose their meaning in war. If you don’t believe me, review the history of what the United States, Britain, and Israel (among others) have done over the course of the past several decades.

There is no court in this world that can adjudicate, let alone enforce its judgments upon nations at war. Only the victors get to designate and hang the guilty when the cannons fall silent.

By any reasonable logic of conflict, the Russians would be well within their natural rights to strike back at the US/NATO ISR assets that have played such an essential role in several damaging attacks against them — in most cases directly providing requisite intelligence, surveillance, targeting data, and even real-time guidance to NATO-provided (and often NATO-operated) weapons intended to kill Russians.

So why hasn’t Russia forcibly eliminated this paramount element of the military force arrayed against it?

The primary answer is undoubtedly that they have made a firm strategic decision to carefully manage the escalation of this conflict from the relatively confined borders of a proxy war in eastern Ukraine to a regional or global conflagration that could conceivably put in play the risk of a major nuclear exchange.

That, of course, is inarguably a very prudent strategic judgment.

On the other hand, this war — against almost all expectation around the world — has revealed the acute weaknesses inherent in what was previously imagined to be “full-spectrum” American military dominance.

Simultaneous to this exposure of the myth of American military supremacy, it has conversely been revealed that the Russians are considerably more than “a gas station with nukes”. Anyone who does not by now recognize the degree to which Russian military, economic, and industrial power has grown over the course of this war is either embarrassingly ignorant or blinded by mindless prejudice.

Consequent to these developments, the Russians have been waxing increasingly bold in both their rhetoric and their publicly proclaimed objectives.

Foremost among those increasingly explicit objectives is that Russia regards itself, Belarus, and much of the Ukraine as one people and one nation, and they fully intend to return to what they consider the status quo ante.

In my estimation, this objective is one that has now become “non-negotiable” for the Russians. According to whatever timetable they have established, they will eventually move to militarily subdue and politically subsume everything east of the Dnieper River, as well as the Black Sea coastal regions all the way to the Danube, including Transnistria.

They will very likely also move to secure a “demilitarized zone” that reaches much further west than the Dnieper, and demand “neutrality in perpetuity” for whatever Ukrainian rump-state remains.

And when the realization of this objective draws nearer and nearer to being a fait accompli, we can be almost certain that the empire and its obeisant European vassals will do something stupid, and bring to pass some level of direct warfare between them and the Russians.

If and when that happens, then we will see the Russians finally move decisively against the US/NATO ISR assets in the region. And they will do so with at least two full years of battlefield experience, careful observations of its weaknesses, and competent adaptation and innovation cultivated by that analysis.

Originally published February 7, 2024:

https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/patiently-waiting-to-strike