Russia Is Jamming GPS Satellite Signals In Ukraine, US Space Force Says (space.com) 136
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report. Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force. "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). "Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities.
Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet. In late February shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, SpaceX's Starlink satellites were activated over the country to help restore internet services destroyed by the Russians. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions.
Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet. In late February shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, SpaceX's Starlink satellites were activated over the country to help restore internet services destroyed by the Russians. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions.
Mandatory Spaceballs Reference (Score:5, Funny)
Raspberry?
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Nice opening, but I was disappointed none of the comments addressed the real problems here. The Russians are the ones who need the GPS to find where their own arses are. The Ukrainians aren't likely to get lost at home. Talk about extremes of home field advantage...
(Based on searching for "find" and "lost", which seem to be the key words. Only a few appearances, but none were geographical.)
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Thanks for that info, but it should have been mentioned before I raised the topic.
What? It's in the original linked story? Surely you can't be expecting...
Russia is showing their hand (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll betcha ten bucks this war resolves with independent states in the Donbass, economically and politically entwined with Russia, just as Putin claimed.
Want to take the 'Putin loses' side?
You might want to listen to Gonzalo Lira's interview of Scott Ritter before deciding. There's a strategic reason he was banned from Twitter.
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I'll betcha ten bucks this war resolves with independent states in the Donbass, economically and politically entwined with Russia, just as Putin claimed.
Being economically entwined with Russia is going to suck going forward. No matter how this war ends, Putin is no longer a man the west can do business with ever again.
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I'll betcha ten bucks this war resolves with independent states in the Donbass, economically and politically entwined with Russia, just as Putin claimed.
Want to take the 'Putin loses' side?
You might want to listen to Gonzalo Lira's interview of Scott Ritter before deciding. There's a strategic reason he was banned from Twitter.
I think there's a pretty good chance that Ukraine retakes the "separatist" regions. There was never much of a separatist movement among the populace, and probably even less after being through several years of being Russian protectorates.
Crimea probably stays with Russia. I think the most likely outcome is a peace agreement where Ukraine ends up retaking the Donbass and agrees to recognize Russia's sovereignty over Crimea. That way no one has an active territorial dispute and Russia can start getting out fr
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there's one single reason NATO isn't directly confronting USSR, erm, I mean Russia: Nukes.
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Completly aggree, if not for nukes the bordering countries would have already impose no fly zone and likely threatened the black see ships. Engaging in ground operation would not be likely, imho.
It appears that the (only?) way to safetly nutrilise the Nuke black mailing is to develop high accuracy counter system. Some kine of Patriot-like but way better. That would nutralize the delivery system practically rendering the nukes usless (well they could still turn them into dirty bombs I suppose).
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Which must make some NATO countries pretty nervous.
Since the US (let alone the whole of NATO) was unwilling to stand up for ethical and moral reasons w/a show of military force to dissuade a dictator bully from invading a neighboring democracy for no legitimate reason just because that bully had "Nukes", many NATO countries must be wondering right now "Will the US and NATO stand up just because of contractual commitments?".
I, personally, sadly suspect it's unlikely that NATO would necessarily stand up just
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Well, that and NATO doesn't actually want to conquer Russia. There is no reason to do so.
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:4, Interesting)
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Everyone also believed that Putin would not attempt a complete takeover of Ukraine. In a war with NATO he just might see wholesale Nuclear destruction as the great-equalizer in the face of his army's abysmal state.
Thing is, it seems apparent that a huge portion of the money Putin thought was being spent on military upkeep has been going into someone else's pockets.
I'm willing to bet their strategic rockets aren't in any better shape, and that 80-90% of them wouldn't even make it out of Russian airspace, if they even make it out of the ground.
That said, I think NATO should just offer to give a bounty of 10% of all seized Russian assets for Putin's head, and call it a day.
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I doubt it, using a nuke would likely push off the fence many of the countries currently sitting on it. I doubt Israel and India would keep their neutral status if Russia did that for instance.
Russia's economy is in a bad enough spot as is, they just can't afford to piss off the fence sitters.
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That remarkable manoeuvre warfare that caused the Russkies to retreat after being unable to use their tanks effectively?
"Everyone" knew the Great Putini wouldn't invade Ukraine, until he did. There's no telling what that insecure little tyke will do if he finds out he cannot even have Eastern Ukraine. If he winds up with nothing, then he must worry about being deposed for sheer stupidity. Launching a nuke or some chemical weapons would tidy up his political life nicely.
Put yourself in Biden's shoes. If he m
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Everyone knows Russia would not be using nuclear weapons. NATO and those in the Defense Department know they are not ready. They have a military force who have been making sandcastles in the Middle East for twenty years and are woefully unprepared for the manoeuvre warfare that Russia has been using in Ukraine and western analysts are amusingly clueless about. NATO needs rebuilt and there is no money for it.
1) So are you actually in Russia and this is what the narrative has been?
2) The "USSR" talk isn't people being confused, it's a reference to Putin's repeated claims that the fall of the USSR was a historic disaster and his current attempts to conquer Ukraine and essentially an attempt to rebuild the USSR.
3) Do you agree that Russia retreated from the region around Kyiv?
4) No one thinks Putin is going to use Nukes in a war with Ukraine if for no other reason than he can't be sure the order will be obeyed.
5)
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:5, Funny)
Do you agree that Russia retreated from the region around Kyiv?
This is obviously fake news, for the following reasons:
First, Ukraine doesn't exist.
Second, Russia never attacked Ukraine so the Russian army couldn't be in Kiev.
Third, there was no retreat. The great Russian army is still in Kiev.
Fourth, the retreat was all according to plan. The Russian army just moved back to barracks after it completed the peaceful exercises it was running in the Kiev area.
Did I miss anything?
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Yes, you missed one:
"Is potato."
In the flat voice with the pseudo-Russian accent.
(And you were well modded as Funny.)
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1) So are you actually in Russia and this is what the narrative has been?
Still getting your bad news from CNN? The war isn't going the way you've been told therefore it must be Russian propaganda.
I get my news from many sources.
But again, you dodged the question. Are you in Russia? I honestly wouldn't hazard a guess, your English is great so you could be American (among English speaking countries that would be my guess) but I really don't know.
2) The "USSR" talk isn't people being confused, it's a reference to Putin's repeated claims that the fall of the USSR was a historic disaster and his current attempts to conquer Ukraine and essentially an attempt to rebuild the USSR.
No one has ever talked about rebuilding the USSR. This is something invented in the minds of delusional western analysts. Ukraine has come about directly because of a western backed coup in 2014 and the Ukrainian military is NATO trained and equipped, despite
Re: Russia is showing their hand (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everyone knows Russia would not be using nuclear weapons. NATO and those in the Defense Department know they are not ready.
Even if they are not ready and 99% of their launches fail, they only need ONE nuke from ONE submarine hitting NYC or any other major city to make catastrophic damages. A risk NATO is not willing to take.
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Is Putin crazy and unable to think clearly? He has to know that the fear of nuclear war is the only thing holding back NATO from militarily entering Ukraine. If that one hesitation is removed (via a nuclear launch), then not only would NATO feel obligated to enter Ukraine, there is the very real possibility that NATO might feel the need to enter Russia for regime change.
In a way, a Russian nuclear attack could have similar consequences to Pearl Harbor.
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Is Putin crazy and unable to think clearly?
Possibly, there's a lot of chatter that he's somewhat delusional due to Parkinson's or simply being a long-term dictator.
He has to know that the fear of nuclear war is the only thing holding back NATO from militarily entering Ukraine. If that one hesitation is removed (via a nuclear launch), then not only would NATO feel obligated to enter Ukraine, there is the very real possibility that NATO might feel the need to enter Russia for regime change.
In a way, a Russian nuclear attack could have similar consequences to Pearl Harbor.
The worry right now is tactical nukes in Ukraine, which are very unlikely but possible.
1) The problem for Putin is a complete defeat, being driven out of Ukraine (possibly including Crimea) is disastrous enough to potentially result in a coup, which means the end of his legacy and possibly his own death.
2) When faced with #1 Putin might decide to roll the dice on a very high stakes gamble
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:4, Interesting)
....and Russia is not the USSR, something which western analysts also can't get out of their heads. Russian 'experts' my ass.
Except Putin obviously wants to reclaim USSR territory. I can't tell if you're a pedant, dense, or a troll.
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Except he's never claimed that. Putin explained quite clearly Russia's position and this has been the same fucking position that Russia has had for the past 30 fucking years. No NATO expansion eastward.
Except for that tiny little problem of Ukraine never being at any imminent risk of joining NATO. Now NATO will most certainly expand welcoming new members as it continues to arm itself in response to illegal unprovoked Russian aggression.
Great job, "no NATO expansion" mission accomplished.
-The United States backed the 2014 coup in Ukraine removing the democratically President and plunging the country into an 8 year civil war
It wasn't the US who protested and eventually forced change in government it was Ukrainians who were sick and tired of Russian meddling that did that.
Then Russia invaded eastern Ukraine with equipment, troops and did everything they could to destabilize the region. MH17 was shot down by the Russian military in Ukraine, hundreds of Russian military have been killed in Ukraine prosecuting a war fueled and funded by Russia.
-The United States withdrew from the INF Treatry
-The United States withdrew from the ABM Treatry
-The United States withdrew from the Open skies Treatry
Russia repeatedly violated INF and refused flights over a number of areas of interest during Trumps tenure. Why would you suppose anyone would oblige themselves to remain in treaties which serve no purpose?
-The United States places missile defense systems in Poland
You seem to be slightly confused when it comes to causation. Defense systems were shipped to Poland after Russian waged an illegal war of aggression. A war of aggression against a sovereign state which has not attacked you and is of no threat to you.
Apparently when this happens neighboring states get somewhat rattled and seek weapons to defend themselves... Who knew? Strange how that works.
So no, this was not a land grab by Russia. Russia did what the United States does all the time: invade for humanitarian reasons or for defense reasons, to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here.
Fight who exactly? Your brothers and sisters in Ukraine? Four and a half million of which are now externally displaced. Another 6 million internally displaced. I guess murdering children, leveling cities and committing war crimes is what passes for humanitarian reasons these days.
You can fuck off now
You are only embarrassing yourself.
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Even without nuclear weapons, in Ukraine or at home, Russia will take a lot of defeating.
Ukrainians can win for years, and Russia will just lose and lose and lose and keep fighting. And, as the situations in the Luhansk and Donetsk area showed, confronted with a prolonged conflict, Ukraine has choose some kind of ceasefire (in fact, 29 of them according to Wikipedia).
So no, Russia won't win against NATO even on its home turf - but it can lose long enough to make the war unsustainable (as US learned in Vietn
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Ukrainians can win for years, and Russia will just lose and lose and lose and keep fighting.
In a tabletop wargame scenario, sure. And Putin might even think of the war that way. But a real war, fought by human soldiers, supplied by a real-world economy, and paid for in both a literal and figurative sense by a nation, cannot be fought by the losing side indefinitely. Not in modern times at least.
As Russia continues to fight without victory, it will become weaker and weaker as it runs out of everything it needs. It can try to shift men from internal security (a huge manpower drain for an auth
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If NATO was unwilling to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine (or even parts of Ukraine), they won't start to bomb in Russian territory.
There might be stated and unstated reasons, but if the no-fly zone was impossible even in face of the recent Russian missile attacks (Kramatorsk) and declarations (we will truly start to bomb Ukraine), armed war against Russia is even more impossible
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I don't think NATO will strike in Russian territory either; in fact a no-fly zone would likely require strikes on Russian soil so one is tantamount to the other. But even in a tabletop wargame scenario Russia can't use its raw numbers to win.
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It has managed to do just that in Crimea, Transnistria, Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia I think), and some other places.
But in the end, the prospect of a Russian loss could be even more terrifying to behold than the prospect of a Russian win...
Will the Russian Federation remain intact? Will Russia itself survive, Will it become a handful of North Koreas? Will it become another hulk with desires to be a Slav Empire?
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We're weren't talking about a swift Russian victory over a disorganized and helpless Ukraine. We're talking about Russia losing and losing and losing until Ukraine simply throws in the towel. That's certainly part of Russia's thinking given its scorched Earth tactics. The problem is Russia's ability to sustain the war is going to decay even faster than Ukraine's.
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Before Crimea invasion, I think Russia would have been able to win that kind of confrontation.
While Russia is the same, Ukraine is a totally different country now. The world is also different (or at least Germany is).
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:4, Interesting)
Which kind of confronation, a swift and decisive military action or a drawn-out war of attrition?
I don't think Ukraine is a different country, it's just better prepared. First, it's known this was coming for years and knew the operation was afoot months in advance thanks to US intelligence. Second the kernel of truth in Putin's complaints about NATO is that the US and NATO has been training and equipping Ukrainians for years. The Ukrainians didn't figure out how to do combined arms operations all by themselves, American NCOs taught them. Ukrainian pilots didn't figure out how to defeat Russian pilots all by themselves, US Air National Guard pilots taught them.
The US has been deeply involved in preparing the Ukrainians for this. You may remember that came up in an impeachment trial.
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I think it's both.
Imagine you're part of the Ukrainian army in 2013, what do you do? Train and once in a blue moon send a token force into some larger conflict?
Post-2014 now you've not only got an active conflict in the east but you know that Russia might launch a full scale invasion.
Having a job with a real purpose matters a lot.
Same with the country itself, pre-2014 it was somewhat torn between Russia and the EU. After 2014 it's pretty clear that Ukrainian means European and everybody needs to get on boar
Re: Russia is showing their hand (Score:3)
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Will the Russian Federation remain intact? Will Russia itself survive
Yes, of course it will, based on interviews I've had across from east to west. (I don't know about Chechnya).
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Just to piss around a bit, suppose the former alleged president becomes president again. Then the Great Putini must only keep it up for another 2 years. . .if he isn't depose in the meantime.
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Russia has already started to run out of ammunition. They hit the culmination point [youtube.com]. They were forced to remove their forces around Kiev to resupply in other parts of the country. Resupplies are not good [twitter.com], and they are running out of fresh troops as well.
Heavy artillery has been supplied to the Ukrainians, and there has been video of them using it. They've been able to push back hard on the Russians in the north, all the way towards Borova. Izyum now has its supply lines under attack.
Mariupol somehow still s
Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Even without nuclear weapons, in Ukraine or at home, Russia will take a lot of defeating. Ukrainians can win for years, and Russia will just lose and lose and lose and keep fighting. And, as the situations in the Luhansk and Donetsk area showed, confronted with a prolonged conflict, Ukraine has choose some kind of ceasefire (in fact, 29 of them according to Wikipedia). So no, Russia won't win against NATO even on its home turf - but it can lose long enough to make the war unsustainable (as US learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan).
Russian tank factories are shutting down due to lack of critical foreign made components. They can't even repair the ratty old T-72B3 and B3M tanks with baseline upgrades that make up the vast majority of their tank fleet never mind upgrade or build more sophisticated stuff like the T-80/90/14. Any equipment losses Russia suffers are likely permanent unless they start getting major shipments of Chinese equipment on credit, which I seriously doubt. The Chinese aren't particularly fond of the west but they'd be dumber than a post if they got sucked into Putin's unfolding clusterfuck in Ukraine. The usual answer to that is "well Russia will just source components from China" and they probably will eventually but switching your tank/artillery/IFV, PGM and aircraft production over to use Chinese components is not something you do in a weekend cram session and Chinese manufacturers will be hesitant to supply parts to Russia for fear of losing access to Western markets which, let's face it, are orders of magnitude more lucrative than Russia. I postulated before this began that all the Ukrainians really have to do is bog the Russians down and now that NATO has enabled them to saturate the battle space with guided munitions that will only become easier as NATO ups the game and supplies even more sophisticated guided munitions. NATO should also untwist its panties and send the Ukrainians every Su-27, Su-25, Mig-29 and other Russian made jets NATO can get its paws on and start training Ukrainian pilots on F-16s.
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You don't win a war by defending in your home - and the Ukrainians don't really have the capacity to go in offensive.
Putin's plan seemed to be something like:
"We'll take Kyiv and Donbas, then gracefully retreat from Kyiv but keep Luhansk and Donetsk, and everybody will be happy".
Now it seems to incline towards "As a gesture of good will we have retreated from Kyiv, but we'll take Donetsk, Luhansk, Odessa and link to our forces in Transnistria (between Moldavian Republic and Ukraine). And we might retreat fr
Re: Russia is showing their hand (Score:2)
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Exactly, a healthy Ukraine as a trading partner is a better asset than a smashed Ukraine as a seething angry territory. I have no clue what rational reason there was to start this campaign.
The reason seems to have been for Putin to go down in history as the latter day Peter the Great who rebuilt the Tsarist/Soviet imperium, but as you said, that isn't a rational motive.
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The usual reason. Russia is attractive only when everything around it is a wasteland.
Before the fall of the Communism, newspapers were printed on awful paper. So were - for example - science journals. Books were only a half step above that.
Yet, in Romania there was in print a magazine called "Soviet Union". It was full color, and basically at the highest quality the German Democratic Republic could print. Fashion-magazine quality in pictures, glossy paper, and high quality content.
Yet, however attractive it
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"Territory is meaningful but has a limited impact in a modern economy."
With their ports unavailable, the cost to export grains increased tenfold.
Donetsk and Lugansk held a disproportionate part of Ukrainian industry (and I think power generation).
It's not the land by itself, it's the access to naval transport for bulk commodities, it's the industry and electricity. Ukraine would be much diminished without Donbas and sea access. You might know that Russian and Ukrainian trains use different rail gauge and ca
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But it seems like a very good moment to rebuild Ukraine's road/rail/air infrastructure under EU metrics than Russia's. With or without a port, Ukraine will be ground-zero for a rebuilding effort that shines as bright as possible in contrast to Russia's fading light. Putin should only hope to expire before witnessing that embarrassment. We're back to the days of movie plots casually invoking defections from a soviet nightmare, aka "Moscow On The
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As history has shown, once the Russians have claimed a territory is pretty hard to root them out.
That assumes that the Russians can train competent armoured vehicle, artillery, missile, aircraft crews etc in no time flat during a major shooting war when they have displayed a near complete inability to do so in decades of peacetime. They can't unless they get huge lend-lease style from China and I don't see that happening as long as the Chinese act rationally as they have done so far and don't get sucked into this clusterfuck. Russia's access to key war fighting weaponry that can hold a candle to what N
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You don't win a war by defending in your home - and the Ukrainians don't really have the capacity to go in offensive.
Putin's plan seemed to be something like:
"We'll take Kyiv and Donbas, then gracefully retreat from Kyiv but keep Luhansk and Donetsk, and everybody will be happy".
His original plan was to take Kyiv in a weekend, annex a bunch of the east, and install a puppet (Medvedchuk or Yanukovych) to rule over the rest Belarus style.
He figured he could get away with moderate Crimea+ sanctions because, frankly, that's what happened when he did the same to Crimea.
He only withdrew from the north because he was forced to.
Now it seems to incline towards "As a gesture of good will we have retreated from Kyiv, but we'll take Donetsk, Luhansk, Odessa and link to our forces in Transnistria (between Moldavian Republic and Ukraine). And we might retreat from Odessa and make everybody happy".
His new plan seems to be taking a land bridge from Crimea then basically offering a peace deal with the new border. Given all the trouble they've had with Mariupol
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Given all the trouble they've had with Mariupol I doubt they're planning to take Odessa.
They've tried. They got dealt a hard defeat at Mykolaiv and have had trouble holding on to Khereson since.
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"His new plan seems to be taking a land bridge from Crimea then basically offering a peace deal with the new border. Given all the trouble they've had with Mariupol I doubt they're planning to take Odessa."
Well, nobody says where the cruiser MOCKBA was when it suffered a couple of accidental detonations... but it might have been closer to Odessa than to Crimea.
As for the defense of Odessa, maybe some people consider that the defenders of the next city under attack will prefer to surrender than to die heroic
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Russia is losing about 10% of its armor per month.
Given that Russia has about 65% of its forces in Ukraine, and has already lost 18% of its armor, at this rate Ukraine could win the war by August/September of this year, iff they can keep resupply out of the country. Given that this feat is being accomplished with only a few drones and perhaps a few dozen aircraft, it would be fairly easy for Russia to lose this war if NATO becomes serious about supplying the Ukrainians with fighter aircraft and weapons.
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You don't win a war by defending in your home
As history has shown, once the Russians have claimed a territory is pretty hard to root them out.
All I remember from history is Afghan goat herders doing just that to the Russians and later the Americans.
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Go home Vasily. Russia has shown itself to be incompetent, inept, and supremely overrated as a fighting force. Their tactics are straight out of World War II, they have almost no modern equipment and what they have has been shown to be only moderately effective, and to top things off, they can't even get food and fuel to t
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Assad is Alawite, not Sunni. Most of the opposition is Sunni. The Shi'ites in Iran and the Alawites have been fuck buddies for a long time ever since it was clear Assad was keeping the majority of the pop., which is Sunni, from coming to power.
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Why yes Vladimir, we understand that you would like people to believe your assertions because in reality, the Russian army can't back them up. There is proof all over eastern Ukraine that the only way the Russian army has a chance is if they continue to kill woman, children and the elderly in hopes to break the will of the Ukrainian people. The Russian Army should pray to God that the NATO forces don't get involved because if they can't handle the Ukrainian people, image how much damage a properly trained f
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Their military is rotten from the top down to the bottom. Decades of corruption and yes men have robbed it blind. Their equipment is falling apart from years of neglect and troops are ill prepared and deserting when they see how good people in Ukraine are living. Russia is trying to bring in paid conscripts now which is working just as poorly.
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I read an interview with a former NATO supreme commander who was instructing Ukrainians on how to conduct operations. He said that when the U.S. military completes some operation, large or small, they did a debrief on what went wrong and even the commanders would sometimes apologize to lower command for screwups (I doubt this happens in every case). The Ukrainians replied that would never work in Ukraine because they were trained using the Soviet method of lying to each other. I gather it doesn't look good
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Re:Russia is showing their hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Russia is showing their hand (Score:3)
These are just my observations from afar.
1) Russia's military budget dwarfs Ukraine however a large percentage of that budget is on nuclear weapons and navy deployed in oceans worldwide. Ukraine is mostly landlocked and I count 3 Russian ships that have participated. Ukraine's budget and focus the last 8 years has been preparing for this exact scenario.
2) The majority of the Russian military in this invasion are not special forces. They are regular troops. For regular troops, very few of them have any comb
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"propaganda .. incompetent buffoons"
- Place a military convoy on a 30 km long line, car behind car and towards Kiev and paint the letter Z (in WHITE!) .. which stands for "viable target (c) by brain dead military leaders" on the tanks.
(ambient conditions: cold & wet -> do you know what tankers do when it is cold? -> turning up the heater .. if your motor is the heater .. guess what will run!
(40-60 tons of steel can be extremely cold when its cool outside)
And guess what: running heaters and motors
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NATO isn't a protection racket like the former alleged president and you apparently believe. Joe might be sleepy (I doubt this) but at least he isn't incredibly stupid like the former alleged president who would have welcomed the Russkies to rape Ukraine to their hearts content since they didn't acquiesce to being a pawn in former alleged president's political machinations.
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Yes, well except for China winning over some points by tying in the Russia and weakening India in the process.
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Gotta admit it, Biden or whoever thought this up pulled a masterstroke.
It wasn't planned. The plan was that Russia would defeat Ukraine in three days, and the US would fund an insurgency inside Ukraine.
Everyone expected the Red Army to perform better.
Seems like jammers should be easy to take out. (Score:3, Interesting)
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But that would be a direct NATO attack against Russia. This NATO will not do (yet) as it is afraid of an escalation of the war.
Jamming Russia's GLONASS might be an idea, however I do not know if it is also used by the Ukrainians and so be counter productive.
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> But that would be a direct NATO attack against
> Russia. This NATO will not do (yet) as it is afraid of
> an escalation of the war.
And Russia attacking the (GPS) satellite infrastructure of a NATO member (the US) is *not* an attack? If not, what precisely does constitute an "attack" against us? Is is only an "attack" if they kill people, but they're allowed to take out all the infrastructure they like so long as they don't actually kill someone?
I'm not ready to beat the drum of war just yet. But
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Quite revealing that Putin is willing to hand NATO operational data about Russian GPS-jamming in a war against much smaller and less-equipped forces. It suggests his forces don't have tactical control of the territories they occupy despite overwhelming advantages of firepower and numbers.
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Despite his rhetoric, Putin is not actually afraid of NATO.
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For someone so wrapped up in his own fantasies of history, he seems unaware that no matter what happens in the next few months or years, he is training Ukraine to dominate Russia within a generation. It's not a small country, in population or geography; not a soft one, either; and they've proven to the world
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Jamming Russia's GLONASS might be an idea, however I do not know if it is also used by the Ukrainians and so be counter productive.
Any good GPS receiver I've seen of late gets info from all available networks, including GLONASS. So, if US-based GPS is being jammed but GLONASS isn't, the Ukrainian equipment keeps ticking along happily. Especially so, I'd imagine, since they're using Russian tech anyway, which might primarily depend on GLONASS in the first place.
So: for the jamming to be effective, it would need to stomp on all the different constellations' spectra. Maybe it is. In which case it's also taking out their own troops' sy
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The US military does invest a lot of thought in operating in GPS-denied environments and has other types of guidance for
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While SA can't be turned back on again, the DoD can selectively turn off the L1 channel in various parts of the world (L1 is what's used for civilian GPS). Modern military GPSs can operate with just L2 (previous generations needed both L1 and L2 to function). There are also now additional channels so it's getting tougher to jam.
That said, Galileo, at the very least, operates in the same frequency band as GPS, so jamming one jams the other (They've coordinated their PRNs). GLONAS operates on an FTDMA basis (
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What makes you think they don't already have GLONASS jammers in their possession now?
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Galileo (EU system) and GPS share frequencies, so jamming one jams the other. GLONAS operates on different frequencies, but again is relatively close.
All you need to do to break the system is to put out a reasonably powerful transmission in the same frequency band, and you'll overwhelm the front end of the receiver.
By the same token, though, if you put, say, a building between you and the jammer, the building will block most of the jamming signal.
Re:Seems like jammers should be easy to take out. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Russians used them before, during a NATO naval exercise not that long ago. They employed both jamming and spoofing (system still works but shows an incorrect position). It was a good exercise, in the sense that allies learned a lot about Russian jamming capability.
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A low-end drone doesn't have the range of speed to actually make it to any moderately defended site. A cruise missile would do the job in most cases. But you'd probably start WW3 with Russia if the US started throwing missiles over their border.
It would be easier to convince Russians to sabotage their own GPS jammers using sympathy propaganda than to directly attack them.
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By their very nature, they are spewing forth radio waves... it seems like it would be pretty simple to send a cruise missile to home in on the source of this and take it out.
Producing a single, fixed frequency at an unvarying level might be simple enough for a missile to home in on, but a scrambler won't do that. It would take some triangulation, from multiple stations, which might be defeated by keeping the scrambler moving. It certainly does paint it as a target, but the question is whether it's worth it. For the most part, the Ukranians are operating in familiar territory so they don't need to navigate by GPS that muchand don't need GPS as much, and I don't think they're us
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Back in '72, I was in the Navy working on a homing missile system. If the enemy tried jamming its homing signals it would just home on the jammer. I see no reason why today's ordinance can't do the same thing, and better.
Quite possibly. However I think you might need to consider the possibility that countermeasures against homing missiles have improved in the intervening 5 decades. Off the top of my head, you could keep the jammers moving (drone, or just have someone drive it around in a truck, You could have multiple jammers that are actually a set of geographically separated units that coordinate their operation and rapidly alternate between each other in a pattern that seems outwardly random, confusing any attempt to hom
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The missile in question was the Sparrow III, still in use but getting close to its End of Service. Mostly an air to air weapon, and probably less expensive than many of the more modern ordinance. However, I stand by my statement that if we could do that back then, we can still do it, and better, now.
In other news.. (Score:2)
They're using bullets and missiles too! Shit! do we have dumb-down everything now just so we can get it to a 2 min. news bite?
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I'm not surprised (Score:2)
The only surprise is that they didn't pull this shit much earlier.
Ukranian farmers begin spring planting without GPS (Score:2)
Might seem minor compared to other things going on, but of all Ukrainians, farmers rely on GNSS more than most for everyday work. Now that spring planting has started, bombs and blood notwithstanding, Ukrainian farmers are in their fields planting what they can, likely without the aid of GPS. Some of the more recent systems employ both GPS and Glonass. But I'm really not sure the commercial systems are designed to reject one or the other if they don't agree. And I'm sure RTK calculations will certainly
Beyond satellite positioning systems (Score:2)
Can inertial positioning be used in complement or even alternative to satellite positioning systems? How precise can it be?
Is there any other alternatives to satellites (i.e. some sort of astrolabe, very sensitive compass)?
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https://timeandnavigation.si.e... [si.edu]
Good enough to be of military use.
Really? (Score:2)
Then it's no surprise that their own soldiers dig foxholes in radioactive country.
Why can't we use land based RF? (Score:2)
Low frequencies pass through matter, right? Why are we using radio and TV broadcasts instead of positioning with a system that doesn't need to see the sky?