Posted on 05/29/2024 7:52:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
War drives innovation. Weapons systems that were cutting edge at the beginning of a great power war often are obsolete by the end because the enemy learns how to counter them. A little-appreciated challenge of the Ukraine war is that it is making many of the United States’ best weapons systems obsolete. As a result, the next president and Congress need to do a major push in defense weapons innovation.
For example, according to a confidential Ukrainian weapons assessment that was leaked to the Washington Post and summarized by Yahoo news:
The assessment said that Ukraine stopped using the Excalibur shells last year after the weapon ‘lost its potential’ and effectiveness fell to just 10 per cent.
The Himars system, hailed early in the war for its ability to destroy targets with a single shot, has now become ‘completely ineffective,’ according to one Ukrainian military source.
The problem is that the Excalibur artillery shells, developed by a U.S. Army research committee, and the Himars system, developed by Lockheed Martin, both depend upon satellite GPS which the Russians have figured out how to disrupt on the battlefield.
The war has also revealed technical problems with the Javelyn missile, developed by Raytheon, which has also been abandoned for battlefield use by the Ukrainians according to Blackwater founder Erik Prince in an interview with Tucker Carlson (03:06 mark):
The Javelyn missile which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot, with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in an ambush because their IR detector – if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot, it’s burning.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Who cares if the missile systems work or not?
The only question is, is the workforce producing these systems diverse enough?
Is there sufficient level of DEI facilitators, communicators or trainers per X employee?
And do they recycle enough of their garbage?
Don’t for get the pronouns!
The MIC speaks.
Just judging from the excerpt, it’s not that the weapons don’t work, it’s that they don’t work against a technologically sophisticated enemy like Russia. Wasn’t it the ‘Lightworker’ and ‘God of All Things’ Obama who mocked Romney for expressing the idea that Russia might be an enemy? And, of course, Brandon, the new FDR, mocked Trump for expressing that China might be an enemy.
So we’re good. Our weapons work just fine against third-world adversaries. /s
There is a much more dangerous scenario in play here.
The Russians may not be jamming GPS (this is a VERY hard thing to do, the signal is coming from above and the receive antenna is generally designed to be hemispheric — meaning excludes signals not from upwards).
The more dangerous scenario is they have figured out how to localize EMP and disrupt circuitry. If they have, the sooner people just surrender the better, because there will be no defeating that.
Most of the learning curve is not in the hardware itself, it is in the countermeasures. The new frontier is in the electronic battlefield.
What I was thinking
America’s defense Dept resembles our health-care and education systems
Nominally private, but is really an oligopoly controlled tightly by Federal Government with all its political and ideological burdens, massively bloated bureaucracies, the corruption of political insiders and cronies, resulting in out-of-control costs.
Once again, in war the real winners are arms developers.
Gazing towards the future...Here is your sword and shield.
The Russians may not be jamming GPS (this is a VERY hard thing to do, the signal is coming from above and the receive antenna is generally designed to be hemispheric — meaning excludes signals not from upwards).
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GPS can be jammed. The signal is baseband spread spectrum so power requirements are reduced and multiple signals can be sent using the same frequency. Jamming is simply putting out enough power to mask the low-power GPS signals. Russians have been doing it for over 20 years.
Spoofing (false signals) the GPS is a little tougher but also being done within the last ten years or so if memory serves. That drives the navigation off so the target is missed. I’m not going to chase it.
You might try looking up navigation errors using GPS reported by aircraft pilots in the middle east regions. That’s the spoofing problem.
Insanity.
OF course. That was the plan all along.
As for weapons sent to ukraine:
Did the big guy’s family get 10%?
Have the military industrial stocks risen ( and paid good dividends)?
Are the government war mongers profiting?
The weapons are working as they are supposed to.
The Russians are likely spoofing the open civilian GPS so as to overwhelm the signal and misdirect weapons that rely on it. An encoded military GPS signal is used in current US weapons but those have not been sent to Ukraine, which has been mostly getting older model weapons with civilian GPS for guidance.
bkmk
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