1,300 miles in twelve minutes

#1

The world and military technologies transformed greatly. Here is the incredible thing, in the Ukraine, even the side with air superiority - which is Russia - doesn’t dare to fly their planes over the battlefield. Air defenses now are so good, shoulder mounted manpads, different types of air defenses, all these things are so good that nobody can fly a plane. That’s why there is so much drone activity, because a small drone can avoid the missile defenses, but that is going to change too, because as soon the laser anti aircraft tech is small enough to be mounted on a truck, the drones aren’t going to be valuable either. The skies are already partially off limits and that’s why NATO has been crippled. NATO and the US has always depended on air supremacy.

We see the transition from aircraft’s to drones. The drone can’t be easily shutdown by the air defenses, and surface to air missiles. Once you got lasers that can fire 120 times in a second, you can’t mass produce enough drones to get pass them. In addition of seeing the passing the sea baton from the US to China, we are also witnessing the end of air power. Air power has been dominant and has been key to US use of sea power, because is in the aircraft carrier. The gunboat diplomacy of the last 60 years, has been aircraft diplomacy. But that is coming to an end, I think they set a new record last year, a Russian missile, shot a Ukrainian jet 400 kilometers away, that is 248 miles. So if you can shoot airplanes from 400 kilometers away, I mean there is really not much point on flying airplanes anymore.

Aircraft carriers are obsolete in pure peer warfare. I thought they were not obsolete and can be use to dominate second, and third tier countries. But now, this story of Hypersonic missiles in the Middle East changes a lot of things.

Screenshot 2024-09-15 at 20-57-50 Douglas Macgregor on X Houthis fired a hypersonic missile into the Centre of Tel Aviv yesterday - evading Saudi and Israeli AD (obviously). The missile covered 1 300 Miles in less than 12 min. These are ...
Screenshot 2024-09-15 at 20-57-50 Douglas Macgregor on X Houthis fired a hypersonic missile into the Centre of Tel Aviv yesterday - evading Saudi and Israeli AD (obviously). The missile covered 1 300 Miles in less than 12 min. These are ...1196×1370 96.1 KB

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#2

I like Colonel Macgregor, a stand up guy. He should be in office in a meaningful place. Share his view of retrenchment of the empire. But he says, that a lot of the military operations need to move to the Caribbean, where they should had been all along. Not liking it that much because that means, a lot of militarization where I live. We have other goals and objectives we want to accomplish. A Venetian tech tree we want to climb. Don’t know if we can accommodate the two together. It has to be a win win situation. Let’s do win win deals like the Chinese.

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#3

I agree with your insightful observations. A small caveat…conventional aircraft can be detected and targeted easily. Stealth ones not so much (Ukraine doesn’t have those). And Manpads have altitude limits. The best modern fighter aircraft have excellent multi-frequency long range sensing/imaging capability, typically fly well above the range of any manpad, and can target and launch weapons at quite long distances. They’re expensive for a reason, they provide the ability to operate in the kind of ground to air environment you describe.

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