18 Comments
Jul 30·edited Jul 30

Ukrainian SSO are in Mali with the Tuareg...or maybe those are just albino Tuareg....

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1817920448253854046

Besides the commander Anton "Lotos" Elizarov, the admin of the Grey Zone Wagner telegram channel was also KIA in the same ambush.

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We know Ukraine is in Sudan. I haven't seen any reports on Ukrainians being in Mali. The Russians are an enemy in common.

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We'll know they really mean business when Ukraine officially recognizes Azawad.

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I will be quite impressed If Boeing manages to build cheap and high performance drones, their history with defense projects isn't exactly impressive (to put that mildly). They seem to be much better at lobbying than building and delivering

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Boeing actually has a long history of safety and reliability. That started to change when they acquired McDononell-Douglas. Profit became the driving force and engineering became a by-product. An opinion piece discusses it: https://www.newsweek.com/merger-that-brought-boeing-low-opinion-1867937

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Didn't McDonnell and Douglas also have a long and successful history?

It seems weird that the merger of seasoned, reliable companies somehow causes them to start turning out crap.

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They did, but then they merged and a McDonnell son/executive made a lot of bad decisions in the '70s that lost their market share in airline sales and eventually led to a merger with their former competitor, Boeing.

https://www.airlineratings.com/news/mcdonnell-douglas-missed-big-twin-disappeared/

The merger between McDonnel and Douglas led to a decline because of ignorance at the highest levels. The merger between McDonnel-Douglas and Boeing led to a decline because of greed. On the Boeing production line workers were being told to increase stock values. In the past it was always pride in quality.

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Thanks, interesting article. So McDonnell essentially killed off a very promising and virtually complete plan by Douglas, because they didn't believe in it and had no idea about the airliner market anyway.

As for the aftermath of the second merger, I kind of understand it. Warren Buffett is a minority with his stance that investment in quality will reap its rewards on the long term, that's boring old man stuff we have no attention span for. An overnight spike in stock value due to some obscure trick is way cooler. I especially like the adage on social media that "you're one decision away from a happier future". No passionate effort, just one decision. Boeing folks may have grown to like it, too.

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Oh, I am watching Boeing saga since the 737MAX fiasco, and the Starliner mess, and the other programs like the KC-46. Since the break up of the Soviet Union, the mergers between the defense companies made Boeing "too big to fail".

Harry Stonecipher said it himself:

“When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.”

The"reverse merger " with MDD where the Boeing executives left the company and let the MDD executives run the show should be a lesson in how to run a great engineering company to the ground

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Jokes aside, there are a lot of details here: https://youtu.be/Q8oCilY4szc

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Oh yes, I have seen this video.

One particularly illogical claim by Boeing was that they built most of the Apollo program hardware, so they had space experience. They conveniently "forgot" to mention that it was other companies which were merged with Boeing decades ago, and the engineers and managers who did implement the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs were dead or retired many years ago.

So, I watched with amazement Boeing lobbying hard to become a sole source contractor for the Commercial Crew Program of NASA instead of sharing the contract with SpaceX, by claiming that they were the experienced company, and SpaceX the neophytes. In truth, it was the reverse, because SpaceX was operating their Cargo Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 rockets for years, while Boeing had zero institutional knowledge after decades of not building rockets ( *cough* SLS) or capsules. They cannot operate outside the cost-plus paradigm anymore, and they depend on lobbying instead of engineering prowess

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"n 2022, two Poles were killed by falling debris from a missile shot down by Ukraine." - terrible lie, this was a Ukrainian missile. How many other things are lies? Greetings from Poland

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You are correct, I apologize. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/polish-experts-confirm-missile-that-hit-grain-facility-was-ukrainian-media-2023-09-26/

It's not a lie unless I knew it was wrong. Believe what you will but I always try to get it right.

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A cheap drone from Boeing would be designed to drop $10,000 hammers on the enemy.

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Cost-plus FTW!

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Once again thanks Don for these report I look forward to them trying to stay informed

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Boing and Ukraine build drones together… well if Boing simply copies Ukrainian drones and avoid the overhead….

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Ukraine needs a bunch of modern Bolton-Paul Defiants to shoot down these cheaper drones

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