Don's Weekly, 16 September 2024: Part 3
by Donald Hill
(…continued from Part 2…)
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Early in the war, Russia seized all the off-shore oil rigs and turned them into remote sensing posts. Ukrainian special forces raided some of them in the past to destroy or capture the electronic equipment. The last week, Ukraine raided the Krym-2 and released its version of events, which included shooting down a Russian jet with MANPADS. They didn’t mention any casualties. Russia said they destroyed 8 of the 14 raiding boats.
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Russia
The Omsktransmash factory had a fire on its grounds. The factory produces TOS-1 and other vehicles. It appears that transformers outside the factory were the source of the fire. A metallurgical plant in the Sverdlovsk region burned after a gas explosion.
A pair of 13- and 14-year-old boys burned down a cell phone tower 2200 km east of Moscow. They were paid $300 by someone on Telegram. They were then offered $55,000 if they burned an Mi-8 helicopter. Using gasoline and cigarettes, they destroyed the helicopter but were severely burned in the process and subsequently arrested.
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Ukraine
Russia is deliberately targeting substations that provide power to the cooling operations at Ukraine’s three operating nuclear facilities. Without the cooling operations, the overheated reactors could melt down.
A year ago, Budanov said that Russia will start to have serious problems with their economy starting in the summer of 2025. Last June, he said that the attacks on Russian oil refineries won’t decisively change the war but negatively impact the economy. He recently repeated that the Russian economy will start to have problems in the summer of 2025, saying it won’t cause a collapse, “but it will make them think what the next steps are…Russia is fighting purely at its own expense and they are losing serious money”. He also said that North Korean artillery ammo and the increased production of guided bombs and Iskander missiles are a huge problem on the front lines, and that Russian internal planning shows they will have a recruitment crunch in the middle of next year…which would be the summer of 2025.
Despite defense production “doubling” under Alexander Kamyshin’s tenure as Minister of Defense Industry, he resigned and is now an advisor. He said production will “triple” by the end of the year, without providing any figures. He also said that Ukraine started production of its own 155 mm shells without providing current or target production numbers.
Canada has provided 1400 Senator armored vehicles to Ukraine and will start building them in Ukraine at some future date.
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Diplomacy
As result of another mediation by the UAE, 103 Russian soldiers captured in Kursk returned home after being exchanged for 103 Ukrainian POWs, seen here crossing into Ukraine from Belarus. Notably, the Russians insisted on recovering their recruits captured the last month in Kursk: not their troops held captive in Ukraine for 1-2 years already. Of the Ukrainians, 23 were Azov fighters from Mariupol. Two days earlier, 49 prisoners were exchanged. For some families it’s a reunion,
After a Russian drone landed in Latvia, the Lithuanian defense minister said the NATO air policing unit stationed in his country has to shorten their decision-making process to engage and shoot the drones down more quickly. Russian missiles and drones have landed in Poland. Nine drones landed in Romania over the last two years. The last two were monitored by F-16s. The only country that shot down Russian drones over its land was Belarus.
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Equipment
Six months ago, a US AI developer met a group of Ukrainians that traveled to San Francisco for a hackathon. They wanted to see if there were new ideas they could bring back to support the war effort. So in 24 hours, the American and two of his partners built a drone that could navigate without GPS and would only cost $500. Issues need to be worked out, such as when the AI is looking for an intact building on a map that was destroyed on the ground, but all of the issues can eventually be solved.
More Russian reconnaissance drones are intercepted.
Guided missiles have motion sensors to detect where they are relative to the earth. There is a level of error, though, that increases with the distance it travels. Communication with GPS satellites resets the correct location of the missile. If the signal from the GPS satellites is jammed then the missile cannot be updated with its correct location and the missile travels and impacts somewhere within that margin of error. Quantum sensing would offer a navigation system precise enough to eliminate the need for GPS corrections but such systems had been as big as a small room. At Sandia labs in the US, they are producing a rugged, miniaturized version and reducing the cost, as well, with microchips that use beams of light instead of electricity. Instead of the necessary four lasers, they are only using one laser that can produce four different frequencies of light. That results in echoes but they reduced the intensity of the echoes by a factor of 100,000. These developments move them closer to a mass produced quantum compass that would allow a guided munition to precisely hit the target without GPS assistance.
EW effectiveness varies wildly by sector for both sides, but in one unnamed sector, of the 160 drones the Russians launched in one day, 135 of them were impacted by Ukrainian EW.
About 220 Fath 360 missiles were sent by Iran to Russia over the Caspian Sea. The missiles have a range of 120 km and a warhead of 150 kg.
(…to be continued…)
War pushes military technology at much higher rates than peacetime research. And often in previously unexpected directions. Particularly when the conflict goes on for some time.
Drones have been around for decades, but in lower intensity conflicts were primarily reconnaissance or 'targeted assassination tools. Israel (not sure what other nations were working on at that time) did up the ante with the drones supplied to Azerbaijan for its defeat of Armenia in Nagorno-Krabakh, but that was over quickly and there was no real time (or likely the resources) for Armenia to develop counter measures.
Iran and other nations obviously did get into the game, but the rate of development and usage has vastly accelerated.
As an aside, I remember a story in a collection of military SF from at least thirty years ago that stated that the era of infantry on the battlefield was over due to anti-personnel drones. These would home in on human targets using body heat and other signatures and explode killing the targeted soldier. IFF transponders were implanted in the respective armies troops to prevent 'blue on blue' incidents. Of course, as noted by Tom's posts on aerial warfare an IFF transponder can then become another means of locating a target.
Now we see individual soldiers being being targeted with drone delivered grenades, with a push to develop the Ai to make those drones independent...
Thank you. That GPS news is very interesting indeed.