I think it’s less than 50/50 that Russia’s nuclear missiles would even make it out of their own silos, let alone hit a target. They can’t even maintain their jeeps. But still, not a gamble that I would take.
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I understand the impulse; well-intentioned people naturally want to stand up to the bully in an unambiguous way that doesn’t depend on complex sanctions and military aide to the Ukraine. What they fail to confront is that dragging Ukraine into World War Three would not be doing them any favors.
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Or a coup (which admittedly would likely involve his confederates assassinating him, but that’s a world apart from a foreign power doing so). His power depends largely on keeping his fellow oligarchs obscenely rich. One legitimate lever is hoping his sense of self-preservation will prevail.
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It has 1,174 rounds and theyre kept on a continuous drum, so the expended shells stay in the drum. To reload you keep pushing in new rounds which pushes out the expended rounds. One you see new rounds come out, you stop loading.
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No fly zones don’t help against artillery-- which so far have been the primary cause of destruction in e.g. Kharkiv and Kiev.
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The US does have experience utterly destroying convoys:
But it’s not worth risking armageddon.
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This is my take as well. Direct conflict is always an option. War is always an option. Sadly, nukes are always an option. There’s a whole host here of other options available before we get there though.
Let’s try a few of those and see how Putin holds up. So far, the Russian army has proven to be far weaker than most people thought. They look kind of sad and poorly prepared. I know we’ve only seen a fraction of their force, but I don’t know how long the Russians can handle a sustained conflict. It gets even more difficult when the economic sanctions begin to weaken his ability to pay for a sustained war and his Kleptocrat buddies see their prospects dwindling while the Russian public gets intolerant of an unpopular war.
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Well, since we are showing off… (ETA - I got a shell from a co-worker who used to service A-10s in the Airforce)
I also have a patch from the A-10 Squadron at Whitman AFB in MO. I met a woman who was an A-10 pilot in Target and she gave me her patch off of her flight suit.
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Neat!
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Have you or anyone read anything on Ukrainian artillery? Artillery is what causes the most death in wars. I haven’t really seen any mention of Ukraine using it, but I assume they have some. Are they hiding it to do a counter strike at some point?
mentioned in this video
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A remarkable thing is that Tom Lehrer is still alive, so he lived long enough to see his satire of Mutually Assured Destruction go from imminent to unlikely and back to a little more imminent.
Oh, and he seems like a genuinely cool nonagenarian…
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From what I’m reading they have plenty. Including ballistic and cruise missiles. Also plenty of AA batteries and rocket systems, the Russians apparently screwed the pooch on knocking this stuff out. And the big push before the invasion was getting them ammo for all this stuff.
Those drones they like so so much are also used for artillery spotting and have a whole guidance system for precision arms on board.
We’re not hearing about it because they’re not asking for more. They’re critically short on small arms and aircraft.
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Even if we assumed that was true they have like 6,000 nuclear warheads. If even a tiny fraction of those were launched in a war we’d all be in deep shit.
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I think he spent most of his life teaching theater to college kids? He doesn’t need the royalties, I’m sure he has a pension
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the worst it’s been since most of us were born
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Thanks for sharing the info. I was just curious because I haven’t hear something like “xyz was destroyed in a Ukrainian artillery strike.” Of course we aren’t privy to all actions, but it is good to know it isn’t just infantry with Javelins, NLAWS and small arms.
That convoy would would be sitting ducks for artillery dialed in on the highway, if you had enough to hit a large portion of it at the same time.
A single missile would be a catastrophic loss of life.
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I can’t be sure cause detailed reporting doesn’t seem to be a huge thing here.
But apparently some of the convoys we’ve seen destroyed were destroyed by artillery in concert with the drones. Apparently the way these things are used for anything bigger a handful of strikes, is they take out key stuff then back off to be used for artillery targeting. Or one drone targets, the other moves lower to bomb and they trade off.
Ukraine seems to want to put it out there that it’s all on the drones, and a single Bayraktar can take out out a whole column of armor. So they’re just not mentioning anything else involved in those strikes.
If you could get artillery close enough, or the convoy was in range of artillery in Kyev. Neither of which might be the case.
There’s also a bit of confusion I think with the term “artillery” cause “what about artillery” seems to be something a lot of people are asking.
Apparently modern militaries don’t really do a ton of the big, mostly fixed, long range cannons we tend to think of as “artillery”. And to the extent that we do, it’s on ships firing from the coasts.
Artillery in the modern sense includes missile and rocket systems, and traditional big guns tend to be mobile field pieces and armored self propelled artillery.
So we are hearing reports of artillery strikes, it’s just a lot of people don’t realize it cause it says “cruise missile”.
We’re not talking about, at least the way the Ukrainians are doing it, a broad rolling bombardment by gun. Or even much in the way of “dialing in” ahead of time. A spotter with laser range finding equipment gives a pin point strike area in the moment, which is what those drones seem to mostly be built for.
Plus that convoy doesn’t seem to be doing much besides running out of gas. It’s not like it’s attacking things along the way.
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Or even one of their nuclear artillery shells.
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