Posted on 04/14/2022 1:45:20 PM PDT by LeoWindhorse
It also has much to do with construction and damage control systems. Lots has changed in the last 40 to 50 years. This ship was almost 50 years old and the safety features are usually in place early in the construction. Hypersonic is new must have.
Small surface combatants may potentially be less vulnerable than larger vessels - picture the swarms of small/fast attack craft countries like Iran are reportedly fielding. In such cases a $1.5 million antiship missile may not be considered an appropriate means to eliminate a target costing a fraction of that amount (and may not be available in sufficient numbers to counter large numbers of small attack craft, in any case).
In addition, a lot of folks assume nuclear/biological/chemical weapons will continue to remain mostly unused - which I hope is true (I like civilization ;>). Unfortunately, that is not guaranteed, and if NBC weapons are used, personnel inside armored vehicles may have more protection than infantry; unshielded electronics (some ATGMs, MANPADS, drones, etc.???) may cease to function due to EMP; and satellites are likely to be destroyed, crippling many communications, navigation, and guidance systems. Silicon chips can be a vulnerability, rather than an advantage. There are any number of countries that could, under certain circumstances, potentially just 'change the rules of the game', so to speak...
” was being towed to port when “stormy seas” caused it to sink”
The missiles that hit it had nothing to do with it sinking. /s
“...or the crew somehow managed to cause a catastrophic explosion with letting a fire get out of control onboard.”
Sailors will be sailors.... The Bonny Dick got burned to a crisp while tied to a pier in San Diego not too long ago.
All honesty, the missile strike is plausible. Look at the design of the ship. They have those 16 massive external launch tubes (8 on each side) for the anti-ship missiles. Each of those missiles are liquid fuel, and have a 2,200 pound warhead.
A Ukrainian missile hitting those launchers could have caused a sympathetic detonation of the fuel and/or the warheads.
LOL funny!
If Iran were armed with sophisticated stealthy drones and deployed them in conjunction with the Chinese made shore to ship missiles that line its shores and suicidal swift boats, do you think that these American task forces that have made the Persian Gulf an American lake over the pat forty years could operate with impunity? If you were Comrade Xi you would probably lose a lot of sleep thinking about what happened to the Russians and anguishing just what capabilities Taiwan has before he sends and invasion flotilla across 90 miles of open ocean. Things are changing fast and the technology always seems to get better.
The US Navy has an inordinate faith in its defensive systems. Sincerely hope my analysis is wrong and those sailors and Marines are safe on their ships.
Ukraine War: Combat Footage of Tank Battle of last hours of fighting near the port in Mariupol
Apr 14, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXQRt_V9dE
You left my dead mom off the list. She also would have been happy.
Of course, like everyone else on your stupid list it’s meaningless
Try this name on for size:
DONALD J TRUMP
Very funny. 😊
And they have solid fuel boosters to get the from a dead stop to supersonic speed, where the liquid fueled ram jets kicks in. While it seems possible that the liquid fuel may be stored on the ship, and missiles fueled before launch, the solid fuel boosters are built in.
The invasion of Ukraine was passed off as just a training exercise (even to the conscripts sent in for the first wave) so that Russia could position the troops with “plausible deniability”. But Russia doesn’t need to do that to fire a nuke.
Putin can launch them from units inside Russia. So this moving nukes into the Baltic is pure posturing - UNLESS everyone in the entire command chain all the way from Putin himself down to the launch technicians turning the keys is in a collective state of total apoplexy. So what happens next is entirely in the hands of Putin, his inner circle, his command structure, the Moscow elite, and the chain of command.
If Putin orders a nuclear launch it won’t be because of anything anyone’s done to Russian troops, civilians or obsolete military assets; it’ll be because Putin is a deranged, irrational, paranoid, drug-addled, roid raging space cadet who’s desperate for immortality. If he was a rational actor, he’d have spent some of the $900 billion he’s looted from Russia since the early 1990s to make Russia great again without needing to start a war. But he’s been stuck in a COVID bunker for two years reading about how wonderful Imperial Russia and Peter The Great used to be, while undergoing cancer monitoring - best guess is, he’s off his head on meds, he now thinks everybody’s out to get him including his cooks and best friends, he even socially distances over the dinner table, and he’s frightening the horses. You could see the terror on the faces of the troops stood behind him at that Gagarin event this week.
You only have to read his recent meandering historical essay, his approved national newspaper’s wonderful editorial explaining exactly the genocide that needs to be delivered in Ukraine, and the writings of Kirill and Zhirinovsky, to really understand why this war came about. They’re all mad old kleptomaniacs, fantasising about the glorious time before World War One where a self-appointed dynastic klepto elite aristocracy lived it up while the Russian peasantry and “khokhol” (Ukrainian untermensch) toiled for scraps.
That Putin narrative about de-nazification is a red herring - Putin himself has admitted, the word means exactly the same to him as does “de-westernisation” and “de-europeanisation”. Putin sent tens of thousands of Russian neo-nazis into eastern Ukraine over the last nine years and Telegram is utterly full of channels of Russian neo-nazi soldiers and families saying Russia has to do to the “khokhol” what Hitler did to the Jews. If any country in the world needs de-nazification as a matter of utmost priority, it is Putin’s Russia.
That Putin narrative about doing it to protect native Russians in Ukraine is also a red herring. Over the preceding 8 years, even if ALL the dead civilians were Russians in Ukraine opposing Kyiv rule AND they were only killed by pro-Ukrainian forces with zero casualties at Russian/LPR/DPR hands (which is stretching credibility), Azov were killing 35 Russians every month - a figure so high that Russia’s invasion has killed 675 civilians in the same region in 49 days (with the body count likely to be much higher, but unquantifiable until the fighting stops and the mass graves are opened). Therefore the LOW estimate is 14 per DAY, or ~420/month. So in the same civilian areas, with the exact same Azov forces in combat, the rate of deaths of Russians in DPR/LPR easily rose by over 1200%. (Source: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2022/04/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-12-april-2022). The only variable? Russian troops went in.
That Putin narrative about Zelenskyy being a corrupt money-chasing puppet is a hilariously contrived third red herring - because we all know Putin loves a good money-chasing sycophant as a puppet leader. You only need to look at the current fawning from Lukashenko. If Zelenskyy was as corruptible and as green as Putin keeps saying he is, or had been as easily removed from the running as Yushchenko was, this invasion would never have been needed.
NATO expansion is the fourth red herring - and it’s a demonstration of foot-shooting stupidity from a Putin off his meds. Putin was told repeatedly that Ukraine wasn’t going to be let into NATO for YEARS, if ever - but for obvious reasons NATO was never going to say “never gonna happen” to Ukraine. It was an established fact that Zelenskyy was about as likely to get a seat at the NATO table as Finland and Sweden... Oh, wait. Turns out that Russia invading its neighbors is a very good way to turn “it’ll never happen” into “we’re fast tracking your application.”
So, unless you buy into one or more of those four red herrings, you should be able to see what any dispassionate observer and student of history can. This is only going to go nuclear if even the military, who now know Putin badly needs a Section 8, are bloody-minded enough to trigger Mutually Assured Destruction for no reason other than Mad Vlad Is Mad, and are past caring where the nukes go.
1. When Russian official orders could’ve triggered a nuclear launch during the Cold War, have Russian officers holding the launch keys didn’t follow through. The chain of command was unbroken, and it STILL didn’t happen.
2. In the last week alone Putin’s sanctioned over 100 senior commanders, he’s terrified that there’s a plot against him, and anyone still in the chain of command must know Putin is in the same headspace that Hitler was in the last days of the bunker, mentally.
3. Russian navy chain of command will want absolute proof at every step that any nuclear-related fire orders are legitimate, especially given they’re being told that their best ship in the Black Sea was DEFINITELY NOT sunk by Ukraine despite it being hit. Why? Because ordering a nuclear strike as an apparent reprisal for either an accident on a Russian ship that didn’t get sunk by enemy action OR as a reprisal for Finland flipping Vlad the bird, isn’t going to pass the Stanislav Petrov sanity check if it lands on someone’s desk.
4. Based on the utter mismanagement of Russian military kit, and corruption, and embezzlement of funds for maintaing the kit, who knows where a nuke would actually go even if they could launch it. So anyone close to the actual launch targeting and triggering is going to be very reluctant to actually do it without quadruple-checking where that missile’s actually going to go.
“...Sailors will be sailors.... The Bonny Dick got burned to a crisp while tied to a pier in San Diego not too long ago.”
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