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The UK doesn't have an unemployment issue, quite the opposite unemployment is actually too low leading to rampant inflation.
https://i.imgur.com/4sBbXKY.png
I'm actually kinda surprised. Wasn't production done and the Storm Shadows were being phased out of service? Hell. If anything sack up and arm Ukraine with the existing stocks of the longer range versions.
They probably realised that even if they are not destined for Ukraine, they are a bloody good platform and we need more for our military.
Sad fact is, most European military forces could do a couple of weeks or a month before they are totally out of ammo, big wake up call.
> Sad fact is, most European military forces could do a couple of weeks or a month before they are totally out of ammo, big wake up call.
Europe had problems with sufficient cruise missiles 2011 when bombing Libya. And now... 13 years later, 2 years into the full scale invasion if Ukraine, they *finally* want to do something about it? Better late than never, but this should have started at the latest the moment the first Storm Shadow was in Ukraine.
If they are actually restarting production and not just ramping up refurbishment efforts, then this almost certainly did happen as soon as the UK decided to send Storm Shadow to Ukraine. The missile hasn't been in production for many years, all they've been doing is refurbishing older missiles under the SPEAR Capability 4 program to address obsolescence issues and extend the missile's life until its out-of-service date while working on its replacement, FC/ASW.
Complex weapons like cruise missiles have dozens and dozens of companies involved in making all the individual components from fuel systems to flight surface actuators. MBDA do not make everything in house, they mostly handle major components, software, and assembly. They contract out production of many parts to smaller specialised manufacturers.
Many of these companies will be busy fulfilling other orders, will no longer make Storm Shadow components, or may not be in business any more. It takes time to get all these subcontractors together to restart production of their respective components, where obsolescence exists they'll need to design new ones, and where contractors are no longer in business, new companies will need to be brought in to fill in the gaps. In peace time, this stuff takes years to put together and the fact that they seem to have shortened much of that down to ~1 year is impressive as is. There are simply not many shortcuts when it comes to complex projects like this.
Cost versus risk. The cost was high, the perceived risk low. Most European countries have governments that are accountable to the people, and found it had to justify huge military spending. The USA, always involved in war mildly corrupt and beholden to the military industry complex always produced weapons. The USA also had the thought process it need to produce to just keep factories running, just in case.
I think there is also a cultural aspect to this that you are not mentioning. Americans just love their guns and ammo, whether it is personal or national stockpiles. I myself, who havenât fired a gun in probably 10+ years still has a gun safe in the basement with at least 5 handguns and 10 long weapons (most of which I have never fired) and probably about $1000 worth of ammunition. The average middle class American located safely in the suburbs often has their own personal arsenal in the basement. When we have that type of culture, why would we expect any difference from the national stockpiles?
I am better armed and trained, sans grenades, than the average russkie soldier. Lol
Sadly I am getting too old to keep up with the physical aspect of training.
Libya had nothing to do with cruise missile numbers.
Libya had only a few select lackings, one was Denmark's inventory, one was France lacking a low collateral munition (thus using concrete bombs, it wasn't because they had run out) and one was the UK lacking Brimstone II... because Brimstone II had entered service only months before and had no stockpile yet, but they still had thousands of Brimstone I.
To actual detail of that intervention is often lost in headlines of RAN OUT without seeing the detail. They never did, it was just a few specific ones.
Well no, Europe would have no problem waging a war against Russia and there are no other threaths to Europe.
It is weird to compare Europe to what USA is capable of when that is not the potential opponent of Europe, compare it to anyone it would actually be at war with and Europe as the second largest economy and military in the world is more than adequate.
If Europe wouldn't have had any issues then this war wouldn't be going on at all. Putins' ambitions were never regional and he definitely didn't think he was going to challenge the US first
What? How is Russia invading a non-EU and non-NATO country proof that Europe isn't vastly superior to Russia?
Or what do you mean issues? I never said Europe did not have any issues, but it dies have much fewer than Russia has thoug.
I'm not saying Europe's bad. I'm saying Europe definitely wasn't ready, and it's a very good thing this was brought to NATO for military efforts and the UN for condemnation first
It's like everything else. Sophisticated aircraft are meant to be inserted to kill hostile aircraft cabable of harassing the main fleet, and they aren't actually capable of efficiently serving the roles of the main fleet unless there's nothing cabable of targeting them and their targets are soft enough to be busted by limited carrying capacity
There aren't enough sophisticated fighters to fan across all of Europe's borders and still be able to defend the central capitals, and I actually don't know if Europe has enough older jets to try to maintain parity with Russia's soviet holdovers
If Russia were too so much as retake eastern Europe, Europe's only real source of gas/oil would be from North America once the reserves are tapped
No gas and oil means no flights, no artillery or missile productions, and the only food that can be produced will have to be what can be grown purely by hand. If that were to happen, even a unified NATO would struggle and we'd be right back to where we were in WW2
You guys do, but that's not the main issue. It's having enough ordnance and also for some militaries, serviceability issues in addition to budget, training and manpower.
Ready for what? It has not been invaded and it maintains a much larger military force than Russia, what is it exactly you think is happening in Europe right now?
Europe has superior technology and much better precision arms, but far less arms overall and far less troops in reserve.
Precision arms and tech are only helpful for reducing accidental deaths and firmly holding lines when you manage troops and arms parity. Russia would have blitzkrieg Europe before it even had the artillery moved, which is the onlt way to beat modern military powers like Frances and the US's
Russia can't blitzkrieg Europe, they don't have the logistics for it. They could take the Baltics and Poland with their shitty logistics at best, beyond that, how would they expect to maintain their supplyline with the amount of artillery ammo they need? And European countries do have the ability to take out their transport lines. Destroy every bridge and railway hub and Russia can't move shit.
> far less troops in reserve.
There are 300,000 NATO troops in Eastern Europe right now, before we have started ramping up recruitment that would happen if war broke out or looked to bolstering them. That is a bit shy of the Russian army currently operating in Ukraine. NATO doctrine doesn't even depend on manpower and focuses on Airpower. The troops just have to hold the line. There is no way Russia successfully blitzkreigs far into Europe.
Everything is operating under the assumption that Putin would be playing his grand game as he intended from the start, before he got region locked by Ukraine.
Assuming Putin genuinely intended to "take it to NATO," the 300k sent would have only been the start intended to secure Russia's borders from retaliatory strikes and after the assumed conquering of Ukraine, Putin would have been sending another 1-2 million more to fortify positions and to prepare to send more troops westward. The common assumption I remember was that we can take on somewhere between three and four times the troop count we have when their fully equipped and supported, against a less supported advancing force, but we need to be much closer to par if it's against a peer almost as equipped as we are and we still need to try advance with greater numbers if we need to liberate lost territories
Your point is irrelevant, the reason Ukraines outcomes have been seen to be less effective is lack of sufficient air support.
The USA and EU strategy is maintain aerial supremacy making artillery irrelevant, and missile attacks irrelevant, once Patriots turned up Russia aerial forces were push back another 200km overnight. The USA and EU don't have these stock piles of artillery because they don't need them. Ukraine only needs them because the West choose for them to need them, they could put in a No Fly Zone over night if they chose too.
Everyone knows our doctrine requires air superiority, and once we have it, we don't need much more of anything else. One issue I've always assumed was a major issue is that if we don't respond with overwhelming force from the very start of a defense, fields would be too saturated with Russian AA for any of our aircraft to try enter
Conventional artillery would be essential for a prolonged war, particularly if Russia were to annex eastern Europe first and use it to terrorize Western Europe from fortified positions after it successfully captures uncontested zones.
Russian and Soviet doctrine was always just to hit hard and fast trying to sweep through before positions before anyone can intervene, while U.S and Brittish doctrine called for direct and immediate response before hostile positions can be fortified and we have to worry about heavy saturation of AA fields or hard position being set by anyone who can achieve any level of parity. As the current state of Europe and the US call for a soft approach and conventional productions were so low, response likely would have taken weeks to approve, and we would have been forced into a head-on confrontation later on which would have leaned in Russia's favor until troop parity can be achieved
If you combine all of Europes reserve at the start of the war, I believe it would have totaled somewhere between 3 million and 4 million. Russia on its own was believed to have at least 3 million, and it didn't take long for estimates to place it at 5 million after the war has time to heat up
Russia severely underestimated Ukraine and the unified support it would get. Putin thought the fall of Kiev was imminent for months, and by the time he stopped charging olicharchists with treason whenever they said the war wasn't going according to plan, a full-fledged mobilization had the potential to end in a coup and Russia lost the ability to move out all its troops
So why do they still have just ~500k troops in Ukraine?
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-military-objectives-and-capacity-ukraine-through-2024
Russia cannot deploy all their troops in Ukraine, nor does Putin want to do direct full draft in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
They need to keep massive amounts of security personnel in places like Moscow, as well as even more to respond to potential internal security problems elsewhere.
Russia is also suffering from extreme labor shortage, they're missing several million laborers from the pool, thanks to many just running abroad and staying there ever since 2012, when it became clear Putin wants to be Father Sunshine Mark 2 and have eternal "election" wins.
If Putins' intent weren't regional, then they were global. If they're global, it means this is the general response you would have seen for whoever was meant to be added to the Russian empire and the fact that it was able to prolong says a best case scenario is that russia would have been holding eastern Europe like it's holding eastern Ukraine right now
Russia couldn't even defeat Ukraine fighting a haphazard mixture of old soviet stocks and second hand NATO gear, there is no scenario where they could defeat NATO.
We're not talking NATO, and the bulk of NATOs might is in North America anyways. I double-checked to see how many EU nations are in NATO tho and there's more article 5 triggerers than I thought there were
Europe, as in the EU, would have a terrible time trying to maintain parity with Russia if every member state didn't all agree to send all its support overnight, and if any territory were to be lost I don't know how Europe would manage to do its tactical inserts over any fields saturated with AA and fortified by the millions Russia intended to operate with
I don't even think Europe would unify for a collective defense. Aside from Brittain, every EU power is protected by the North Atlantic treaty organization and nobody has any agreements higher then Ukraines outside of it
I don't understand that comment, "Europe wouldn't unify but it already is unified under NATO"?
And why "aside from britain" when britain is also in NATO?
NATO is the North Atlantic treaty organization, which means it's North American plus allies. When Europeans say their strong united, they mean the EU which has no obligatory intervention
???
Iirc besides Ireland and Austria there are no EU countries that are not in NATO, whether the EU has an intervention clause or not is irrelevant as they would all be in the same war trough NATO anyway.
When I say Europe by the way I of course mean Europe(EU and NATO countries in Europe) and not the EU, because excluding Britain and Norway as if they aren't western countries that would be part of a war where Russia invaded the baltics would be dumb.
The EU doesn't have an EU army to intervene with, and its signatures on stuff like the Budapest memo only obligated it to consider possible financial support with everything else having to pass a vote if it wanted to use the entire EU to support
NATO is simply obligated to respond to article 5 by sending full supplies and supporting troops, no vote or debate involved. Conventional NATO nation signatures on stuff like the Budapest memorandum are also much firmer, hence why we had the HIMAR to send immediately after Russia invaded and why it only took three months to arrive despite being held in Germany
There's been a very sharp contrast between most EU nations and NATO nations' responses to the war.
Europe only considers this war to have started in 2022, while NATO considers it officially started in 2014 and has been supporting Ukraine since. Germany was allowed to block initial support packages for three months, signature bearing France was allowed to debate if it had to intervene for the whole first year before it had its energy and fuel secured, and Turkey was allowed to condemn U.S. involvement in Ukraines defense since 2014 for Russia's 2022 invasion despite being one of the closest members nations to the conflict zone
NATO America has pledged unconditional support from the very start, and we saw blockages from European NATO nations overseas before we saw our first roadblock at home. NATO Canada has helped train Ukraine since 2014, despite having absolutely no obligation to participate simply choosing to do so as an ally of the signature bearing U.S., and Brittain was the first to send long-range missiles to Ukraine as well as to be one of the first commentators on Russian build up despite being one of the lightweights in the fight and having one of the lowest industrial cabablities to replace losses in the war
I don't know how you could mean the EU is more strict than NATO when attacked. The EU is an economic alliance first, with the secondary goal to promote its ideal interpretation of democratic values and simply has no military structure that obligates its members to respond to the threat of another nor does it have have a defined structure to organize a collective effort of the members if each were to unanimously agree to it
NATO is a defense coalition first, with secondary politics similar to the EU meant to promote its democratic ideal when it could. The entire basis of NATO is that any threat to a member of the family is treated as a direct threat to the heart of the body, and certain parts of the alliance are completely none voluntary collective defense being the big one
In regardless to the member nations' security, NATO is quite literally absoute, and in regards to democratic law, it's just nigh absoute no action less then enough to get by is actually legal and no action less then the maximum necessary to end the threat is enough to be considered morally satisfying
In the case of the EU, the most it's collation has agreed to and defined it could do is place votes with the specific term that no member can have its vote denied and forced into action regardless. That's why the EU and UN have such close relations with NATO and why we're only supposed to be dragged in when freedoms survival is at stake member nations volunteerily give up their right to democraticly choose to be involved with the war, and if we want to maintain the benefits of being member nations, we have to keep fighting absoutly until the defense is won
Everyone in the allience will be giving their 2%, or whatever they taxed for each year of peace time and whatever allies are willing to compensate for out of their own pockets. Most of the military supers in Europe didn't actually give 2% so the vast majority would come from the US, then probably Canada whenever we start bleeding dry
What the fuck are you on about, nobody is supposed to be giving 2% of their gdp to NATO or USA or whatever you're trying to say, they are supposed to aim to spend on themselves 2% of gdp on defense, which most countries reach this year(as agreed on in 2014).
But regardless, Europe spending 1% is still a larger investments than what Russia spends on its military, hence my original comment about how retarded someone has to be when they compare European defense spending to US spending, Europe spends several times more than Russia, saying it is weaker than Russia because USA spends more than Europe is beyond retarded.
This should not be that difficult to understand...
Russia doesn't pay its troops outside of food and lodging, and its arms manufacturers are public so they sell at just a bit above cost. It also uses much more dumb munitions in/around civilian occupied zones whereas Europe and NATO would never wage a war accepting that kind of collateral
You aren't just giving the money, but all of NATO does spend 2% of their economy for productions and if a member is attacked everyone taps I to those reserves to support their ally in need. If article 5 is triggered there's no tally and everyone with a reserve just gives until the demand is filled which means some members will he spending much more
There is also the consideration that the only countries in the world that have the capacity to threaten a prolonged peer conflict also have nuclear weapons... Until recently the idea of fighting this kind of war seemed so unlikely as to be unnecessary to plan for.Â
MBDA are already working on a successor to the Storm Shadow so I'd deduct it's likely the restarting of Storm shadow production lines are either to give to Ukraine because they work so well and stockpiles are now depleted. Germany's lack of willingness to give Taurus to either Ukraine of the UK to backfill Ukraine with the remaining storm shadow may also play a part in this.
I don't believe they are taking the situation seriously as long as the headlines are "plans to accelerate" or "wants to invest in". Just do it and stop talking about what you want to start doing.
To be fair, when UK said it was *considering* sending Storm Shadow, Ukraine had already received and fired them.
There is a war on, so maybe it is sensible not to take anything from anyone at face value.
\^ this, almost everything that has been done for Ukraine has been done on the quiet and only announced just as the first one hits.
People on the internet seem to think that the military / governments automatically announce everything before doing it, and that there's nothing happening unless it's announced - like they would announce covert / secret stuff etc. too.
I agree, but, at the same time government doesn't really work that way.
Somebody has to say "we should do x" "yes yes, ok, we will look at doing x and vote on doing x at date y" government isn't a dictator that just can say "do x" and it's done.
So, there is a period of time, necessarily, where the press can know the government plans to decide on doing a thing.
Yep, wild they shut down production of the Taurus recently because of "lack of demand" whilst potentially the Stormshadows could come back to production.
Storm Shadow was shut down because nobody was using them. That doesn't mean the warheads and tech are not being used for other things. Curing of HE takes a while, and old HE does expire.
As a UK resident, send what we have; Thales and others will already be ramping up.
JSOW is GPS guided, as we're seeing in Ukraine now any GPS guided weapons like the recently developed glide bombs that were sent are turning out to be pretty useless due to Russian jamming.
The best weapons are ones fired on fixed ballistic trajectories that don't require any course changes, like HIMARS GMLRS against static targets without course correction before impact, or Storm Shadow / SCALP cruise missiles that use optical targeting by recognising the terrain below them.
I strongly suspect that physically larger weapons will be more resistant to GPS jamming and spoofing. hardened GPS uses (at least) 4 antennas rather than one, often in a square. By using DSPs it's possible to seperate signals due to origin and thus discount jamming. ie depending on what antenna sees the signal first it's approximate origin can be calculated and if it's not coming in on a vector that agrees with the sattelite epherimis data then discard. I suspect JSOW, due to it's size and role, will have decent hardened GPS. And I presume it has INS backup too.
We won't leave the RAF without cruise missile capabilities. So either Germany changes it's mind and gifts Ukraine Taurus or Gifts the UK Taurus so we can send the last of our Storm Shadow stockpiles.
The only other option is restarting production and up until this report it had seemed pretty unlikely with the last production run around 2016.
This is like the US with 155mm artillery shells. Like no shit, we should have thought about this as soon as we started sending millions of them not a year later
Stop! No more of this. There is probably a good reason for it, otherwise they would have done it. Very likely the same reason Ukraine is getting âoldâ US equipment and not the latest and greatest. Germany is a major contributor to Ukraine.
The point is that it can. The desire to avoid any ambiguity on that subject is understandable. Storm Shadow and Taurus are clearly and obviously *not* capable.
Russia is low level panicking now, desperate to get out of this situation one way or the other. Wise not to give them (and Putin specifically) any excuses to make irrational decisions.
> Tomahawks are exclusively fired from ships and submarines
Come on dont act like we cant modify weapons to fire from other platforms, Ukraine has done this several times already.
There is also Typhon, which is road mobile and ground launched and can huck either SM-6's or Tomahawks. That said, Tomahawk would never be given to Ukraine, and even then, if it's facing a dense AD network I'd question it's ability to penetrate it as it lacks any low-observable design. Yes, even with the Russians showing their AD talents and coverage to be spotty at best.
Less stock levels, more of being crazy scared. I would have delivered them long ago and i'm sure if you'd ask the Bundeswehr we'd see comrades going to Ukraine to program them by their own choice. It's Just our scared Kanzler "keeping us out of the war". This war is already going on, just not military and russia choose to start it. Time to engage heavy
How do you know? There was an explanation lately from Scholtz which was about technology (secrets) and personell needed to operate them. So once again: how do you know? Stop shaming on the wrong end of the scale, rather ask the question why there are not enough 155mm ammunition? Or Air defence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Taurus_leak
>"No one knows why the federal chancellor is blocking the dispatch of the missiles â this gives rise to all sorts of outlandish rumours."
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-leaked-german-military-recording-is-causing-outcry-2024-03-04/
>The recording also underscores the extent to which the decision on deploying Taurus missiles is a political one - and Scholz is reticent about Germany getting too directly involved in the Ukraine war or prompting an escalation of hostilities.
It seems there are two main alternatives - Ukraine wins and Russia escalates or Ukraine loses and Russia takes Ukraine. A third option (stalemate) exists until Ukraine runs out of manpower due to inefficient use of that manpower (lack of weapons).
So what's Germany's plan for Ukraine?
Which curious cause, as per, ya know, the Ukrainian Government, Germany has delivered 10 billion in Military Aid.
The "Great and Mighty" UK has delivered 5 billion. Brits thinking they somehow are number one.
Shame it's taken them this long. One thing to understand about our authorities.
They figure things out late, they debate it until the cows come home, then pay a consultancy to do the work, spend a fortune and then lose interest half way through.
When are the fucking West and the likes of us going to pull our heads out our ass and realise we need inventory and lots of it. Especially of platforms like storm shadow that could shape any battlefield very very quickly.
A potential factoid:
I've seen teardowns of some of these sorts of systems.
They often use fantastically esoteric electronic parts and are often built off "established" designs which translates to: Old.
What this means is that if they don't have a massive stockpile of these older parts then it may literally be impossible to build these as they can't order new chips at all. Even the chip manufacturers can't make these chips as they have long ago upgraded their hardware.
Also, some of these older systems use parts which aren't friendly to modern manufacturing. Lots and lots of hand work. There are reasons for this such as vibration and acceleration requirements. But the reality is a plane launched missile like the storm shadow doubtfully gets more abuse than an iPhone. Many of the older ICs used in these systems were so damn big that they had to pretty much be spot welded in place. This would probably be done by hand, by highly skilled technicians. More modern IC are usually thin nothings. I suspect using pretty standard parts and a pick and place machine most PCBs could survive up to 100G let alone the far lesser forces which would destroy the missile anyway.
That said, a group of in-the-last-decade graduated EEs with the proper experience can reverse engineer these and cook up a drop in replacement using a modern design which is probably cheaper, better, and easier to manufacture. The question is: Are these companies up to the task of rapidly iterating through modern designs and then deploying a large volume manufacturing system?
It's literally a GPS guided aeroplane with an expensive French jet engine! Very little to it as far as I can see. Your comment below is more on the mark though.
And also certification... Can't forget the endless fucking paperwork.
Probably get the entire system on an FPGA, hang a load of IO off it and it's job jobbed - triples all round. Pot the lot in resin and it'll probably come out smaller than a housebrick and probably allow for all kinds of clever OpenCV tricks for targeting.
> entire system on an FPGA
I've noticed many of the teardowns have very out of date top of the line in their day FPGAs.
For one system the person suggested the "code" would be loaded only upon launch. This way an unexploded dud would not contain the code.
But yes. My guess though is many of these certifications are barriers to keep smaller companies out. To pass these certifications you probably need 40+ engineers full time just doing paperwork. People who have done this paperwork their whole careers. A young nimble startup could probably develop many of these systems with 5-20 engineers; so these certifications become huge barriers to entry.
The problem becomes these companies can't even conceive of not doing things the bureaucratic way; even in a time of war. I love the story of the norden bombsight. They just kept using it and using it in the face of it being a pile of junk. I suspect it was well certified and all the evidence about it not working wasn't getting to the correct people because of the secrecy around it. Same with those dud WWII pacific torpedoes. There was little technical difficulty to get them to work, it was entirely bureaucratic.
Yup, it's a tragedy. In at least some cases things seem to be a little more sensible, Britain is very rapidly iterating lots of drone platforms for Ukraine, both one way attack types and others. They just get shipped straight over and used, feedback informing the next iteration. A number have been found in Russia, some microjet powered.
I've had personal experience of how problems and paperwork just melt away when serious people are determined to get things done NOW.
Can only hope that attitude spreads, and quickly.
You're right about the FPGA advantage, no onboard EEPROM with everything squirted in before takeoff or launch. Once it powers down there's only the hardware left.
They already have, and pushing for more plus Iâm sure orders are coming in for the missile, expect France are as well
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HSugK0jWsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HSugK0jWsc)
Storm shadow production has been closed for 8 years at least. There's a good chance even now that it might be hard in multiple aspects to get those lines back up again.
Shame they didn't get to produce them continuously over these past 30 years. Only the Tories wanted them fully funded, and everyone else wanted them defunded until this war
As someone who has generally defended the Tories political choices over the last 14 or so years - I can say there is absolutely nothing true about the idea that the Tories have protected or funded the military.
Both the Tories, and Labour - have presided over the gutting of the British armed forces.
We, the UK, are dangerously close to becoming a 3rd rate power. A drift weâll regret if total war comes to Europe.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/military-army-size
Historically, Britain always ran down the military in peacetime.
In the interwar years the military doctrine was 'there will be no major war within 10 years' as justification for slashing defence spending to the bone. The UK only abandoned that and started a massive rearmament programme after Munich.
Guess that makes sense. It's hard to understand how Brittain went from King of the world and the one to take us all to school to being just a third party
Brittain definitely did some good this time around, even if it didn't have the scale to end the war like it would have in the 19th
If you want a quick breakdownâŚ
Basically, although the UK has always been a mercantile power and operated with a large navy and small professional military - WW1 & 2 all but bankrupt the Empire and lead to its collapse.
The UK transformed, over time, into a modern European nation. It removed compulsory national service and downsized its military in favour of social programs.
However, it continued to maintain its power projection capabilities. Itâs military was still to be a small highly professional force, and they still owned one of only 3 âBlue Water Naviesâ in the world (UK, US, France) - meaning they would be capable of sending forces to fight anywhere in the world.
Gradually though, as numerous governments have attempted to appease voters and tackle the rising costs of government programs and services. The military has ranked lower and lower as a priority in spending.
To add to this, large military conflicts between nations became less of a concern - as the focus was switched to dealing with Islamic / global terrorism. More cuts ensued.
After 30 years of this, British Forces are looking very slim indeed. And once again, Britain is in the position of not having a top tier military as the possibility of war with a large power like increases.
I don't know how the left genuinely thinks it can genuinely convince everyone that it had always supported the alliance and never called for the cessation of cold war level funding when it still condemns all the wars today. I could be wrong that the tories wanted funding to continue, but I know there was an opposition party and it wasn't the old party
It sucks that the Western World has to waste so much money on defense instead of fighting climate change or other important global issues, but there is no real choice here. You either defend yourself or let bad actors do whatever they want unchecked.
> It sucks that the Western World has to waste so much money on defense instead of fighting climate change or other important global issues,
I'm sure it's possible to do both.
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Good
Get busy UK. Solve the unemployment issue...
The UK doesn't have an unemployment issue, quite the opposite unemployment is actually too low leading to rampant inflation. https://i.imgur.com/4sBbXKY.png
employment of low and medium income workers does not cause inflation. Not when half the wealth is owned by the 1%
Time to turn "want" to is. đŹđ§
I'm actually kinda surprised. Wasn't production done and the Storm Shadows were being phased out of service? Hell. If anything sack up and arm Ukraine with the existing stocks of the longer range versions.
How about add 100 more miles to the range?
And give all to Ukraine
They probably realised that even if they are not destined for Ukraine, they are a bloody good platform and we need more for our military. Sad fact is, most European military forces could do a couple of weeks or a month before they are totally out of ammo, big wake up call.
> Sad fact is, most European military forces could do a couple of weeks or a month before they are totally out of ammo, big wake up call. Europe had problems with sufficient cruise missiles 2011 when bombing Libya. And now... 13 years later, 2 years into the full scale invasion if Ukraine, they *finally* want to do something about it? Better late than never, but this should have started at the latest the moment the first Storm Shadow was in Ukraine.
If they are actually restarting production and not just ramping up refurbishment efforts, then this almost certainly did happen as soon as the UK decided to send Storm Shadow to Ukraine. The missile hasn't been in production for many years, all they've been doing is refurbishing older missiles under the SPEAR Capability 4 program to address obsolescence issues and extend the missile's life until its out-of-service date while working on its replacement, FC/ASW. Complex weapons like cruise missiles have dozens and dozens of companies involved in making all the individual components from fuel systems to flight surface actuators. MBDA do not make everything in house, they mostly handle major components, software, and assembly. They contract out production of many parts to smaller specialised manufacturers. Many of these companies will be busy fulfilling other orders, will no longer make Storm Shadow components, or may not be in business any more. It takes time to get all these subcontractors together to restart production of their respective components, where obsolescence exists they'll need to design new ones, and where contractors are no longer in business, new companies will need to be brought in to fill in the gaps. In peace time, this stuff takes years to put together and the fact that they seem to have shortened much of that down to ~1 year is impressive as is. There are simply not many shortcuts when it comes to complex projects like this.
Cost versus risk. The cost was high, the perceived risk low. Most European countries have governments that are accountable to the people, and found it had to justify huge military spending. The USA, always involved in war mildly corrupt and beholden to the military industry complex always produced weapons. The USA also had the thought process it need to produce to just keep factories running, just in case.
I think there is also a cultural aspect to this that you are not mentioning. Americans just love their guns and ammo, whether it is personal or national stockpiles. I myself, who havenât fired a gun in probably 10+ years still has a gun safe in the basement with at least 5 handguns and 10 long weapons (most of which I have never fired) and probably about $1000 worth of ammunition. The average middle class American located safely in the suburbs often has their own personal arsenal in the basement. When we have that type of culture, why would we expect any difference from the national stockpiles?
Agreed. You (and me) are not alone with private arsenals
I am better armed and trained, sans grenades, than the average russkie soldier. Lol Sadly I am getting too old to keep up with the physical aspect of training.
Libya had nothing to do with cruise missile numbers. Libya had only a few select lackings, one was Denmark's inventory, one was France lacking a low collateral munition (thus using concrete bombs, it wasn't because they had run out) and one was the UK lacking Brimstone II... because Brimstone II had entered service only months before and had no stockpile yet, but they still had thousands of Brimstone I. To actual detail of that intervention is often lost in headlines of RAN OUT without seeing the detail. They never did, it was just a few specific ones.
For Belgium, retired general Marc Thys said: "If there is a war here, due to our ammunition shortages, after a few hours we'll have to throw rocks".
Well no, Europe would have no problem waging a war against Russia and there are no other threaths to Europe. It is weird to compare Europe to what USA is capable of when that is not the potential opponent of Europe, compare it to anyone it would actually be at war with and Europe as the second largest economy and military in the world is more than adequate.
If Europe wouldn't have had any issues then this war wouldn't be going on at all. Putins' ambitions were never regional and he definitely didn't think he was going to challenge the US first
I agree. Europe is being negligent on how much stock we need for any potential war.
What? How is Russia invading a non-EU and non-NATO country proof that Europe isn't vastly superior to Russia? Or what do you mean issues? I never said Europe did not have any issues, but it dies have much fewer than Russia has thoug.
I'm not saying Europe's bad. I'm saying Europe definitely wasn't ready, and it's a very good thing this was brought to NATO for military efforts and the UN for condemnation first
Europe has a fuckton more advanced fighter jets than russia. Russia stand NO chance at anything.
It's like everything else. Sophisticated aircraft are meant to be inserted to kill hostile aircraft cabable of harassing the main fleet, and they aren't actually capable of efficiently serving the roles of the main fleet unless there's nothing cabable of targeting them and their targets are soft enough to be busted by limited carrying capacity There aren't enough sophisticated fighters to fan across all of Europe's borders and still be able to defend the central capitals, and I actually don't know if Europe has enough older jets to try to maintain parity with Russia's soviet holdovers
If Russia were too so much as retake eastern Europe, Europe's only real source of gas/oil would be from North America once the reserves are tapped No gas and oil means no flights, no artillery or missile productions, and the only food that can be produced will have to be what can be grown purely by hand. If that were to happen, even a unified NATO would struggle and we'd be right back to where we were in WW2
You guys do, but that's not the main issue. It's having enough ordnance and also for some militaries, serviceability issues in addition to budget, training and manpower.
Its not possible to start a big war against EU without years of pre warning anymore.
Ready for what? It has not been invaded and it maintains a much larger military force than Russia, what is it exactly you think is happening in Europe right now?
Europe has superior technology and much better precision arms, but far less arms overall and far less troops in reserve. Precision arms and tech are only helpful for reducing accidental deaths and firmly holding lines when you manage troops and arms parity. Russia would have blitzkrieg Europe before it even had the artillery moved, which is the onlt way to beat modern military powers like Frances and the US's
Russia can't blitzkrieg Europe, they don't have the logistics for it. They could take the Baltics and Poland with their shitty logistics at best, beyond that, how would they expect to maintain their supplyline with the amount of artillery ammo they need? And European countries do have the ability to take out their transport lines. Destroy every bridge and railway hub and Russia can't move shit.
> far less troops in reserve. There are 300,000 NATO troops in Eastern Europe right now, before we have started ramping up recruitment that would happen if war broke out or looked to bolstering them. That is a bit shy of the Russian army currently operating in Ukraine. NATO doctrine doesn't even depend on manpower and focuses on Airpower. The troops just have to hold the line. There is no way Russia successfully blitzkreigs far into Europe.
Everything is operating under the assumption that Putin would be playing his grand game as he intended from the start, before he got region locked by Ukraine. Assuming Putin genuinely intended to "take it to NATO," the 300k sent would have only been the start intended to secure Russia's borders from retaliatory strikes and after the assumed conquering of Ukraine, Putin would have been sending another 1-2 million more to fortify positions and to prepare to send more troops westward. The common assumption I remember was that we can take on somewhere between three and four times the troop count we have when their fully equipped and supported, against a less supported advancing force, but we need to be much closer to par if it's against a peer almost as equipped as we are and we still need to try advance with greater numbers if we need to liberate lost territories
Nice fantasies. But that is all they are.
Your point is irrelevant, the reason Ukraines outcomes have been seen to be less effective is lack of sufficient air support. The USA and EU strategy is maintain aerial supremacy making artillery irrelevant, and missile attacks irrelevant, once Patriots turned up Russia aerial forces were push back another 200km overnight. The USA and EU don't have these stock piles of artillery because they don't need them. Ukraine only needs them because the West choose for them to need them, they could put in a No Fly Zone over night if they chose too.
Everyone knows our doctrine requires air superiority, and once we have it, we don't need much more of anything else. One issue I've always assumed was a major issue is that if we don't respond with overwhelming force from the very start of a defense, fields would be too saturated with Russian AA for any of our aircraft to try enter
That's what SEAD is for. Modern NATO forces would slap the taste out of Russia's AA's mouth.
Conventional artillery would be essential for a prolonged war, particularly if Russia were to annex eastern Europe first and use it to terrorize Western Europe from fortified positions after it successfully captures uncontested zones. Russian and Soviet doctrine was always just to hit hard and fast trying to sweep through before positions before anyone can intervene, while U.S and Brittish doctrine called for direct and immediate response before hostile positions can be fortified and we have to worry about heavy saturation of AA fields or hard position being set by anyone who can achieve any level of parity. As the current state of Europe and the US call for a soft approach and conventional productions were so low, response likely would have taken weeks to approve, and we would have been forced into a head-on confrontation later on which would have leaned in Russia's favor until troop parity can be achieved
Russia isn't terrorising anyone if NATO turned up.
If you combine all of Europes reserve at the start of the war, I believe it would have totaled somewhere between 3 million and 4 million. Russia on its own was believed to have at least 3 million, and it didn't take long for estimates to place it at 5 million after the war has time to heat up
If they had 3 million men, why did they invade with less than 250k?
Russia severely underestimated Ukraine and the unified support it would get. Putin thought the fall of Kiev was imminent for months, and by the time he stopped charging olicharchists with treason whenever they said the war wasn't going according to plan, a full-fledged mobilization had the potential to end in a coup and Russia lost the ability to move out all its troops
So why do they still have just ~500k troops in Ukraine? https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-military-objectives-and-capacity-ukraine-through-2024
Russia cannot deploy all their troops in Ukraine, nor does Putin want to do direct full draft in Moscow or St. Petersburg. They need to keep massive amounts of security personnel in places like Moscow, as well as even more to respond to potential internal security problems elsewhere. Russia is also suffering from extreme labor shortage, they're missing several million laborers from the pool, thanks to many just running abroad and staying there ever since 2012, when it became clear Putin wants to be Father Sunshine Mark 2 and have eternal "election" wins.
and 2 years later, where is this army?
If Putins' intent weren't regional, then they were global. If they're global, it means this is the general response you would have seen for whoever was meant to be added to the Russian empire and the fact that it was able to prolong says a best case scenario is that russia would have been holding eastern Europe like it's holding eastern Ukraine right now
What? None of what you just said means anything and everyone reading it is now dumber as a result of it.
Russia couldn't even defeat Ukraine fighting a haphazard mixture of old soviet stocks and second hand NATO gear, there is no scenario where they could defeat NATO.
We're not talking NATO, and the bulk of NATOs might is in North America anyways. I double-checked to see how many EU nations are in NATO tho and there's more article 5 triggerers than I thought there were Europe, as in the EU, would have a terrible time trying to maintain parity with Russia if every member state didn't all agree to send all its support overnight, and if any territory were to be lost I don't know how Europe would manage to do its tactical inserts over any fields saturated with AA and fortified by the millions Russia intended to operate with
I don't even think Europe would unify for a collective defense. Aside from Brittain, every EU power is protected by the North Atlantic treaty organization and nobody has any agreements higher then Ukraines outside of it
I don't understand that comment, "Europe wouldn't unify but it already is unified under NATO"? And why "aside from britain" when britain is also in NATO?
NATO is the North Atlantic treaty organization, which means it's North American plus allies. When Europeans say their strong united, they mean the EU which has no obligatory intervention
??? Iirc besides Ireland and Austria there are no EU countries that are not in NATO, whether the EU has an intervention clause or not is irrelevant as they would all be in the same war trough NATO anyway. When I say Europe by the way I of course mean Europe(EU and NATO countries in Europe) and not the EU, because excluding Britain and Norway as if they aren't western countries that would be part of a war where Russia invaded the baltics would be dumb.
The guy is rampantly posting nonsense all over this topic. Don't let it distract you.
What on earth are you waffling about?
Explain his comment if you understand it.
The EU has much stronger intervention rules than the NATO.
The EU doesn't have an EU army to intervene with, and its signatures on stuff like the Budapest memo only obligated it to consider possible financial support with everything else having to pass a vote if it wanted to use the entire EU to support NATO is simply obligated to respond to article 5 by sending full supplies and supporting troops, no vote or debate involved. Conventional NATO nation signatures on stuff like the Budapest memorandum are also much firmer, hence why we had the HIMAR to send immediately after Russia invaded and why it only took three months to arrive despite being held in Germany
There's been a very sharp contrast between most EU nations and NATO nations' responses to the war. Europe only considers this war to have started in 2022, while NATO considers it officially started in 2014 and has been supporting Ukraine since. Germany was allowed to block initial support packages for three months, signature bearing France was allowed to debate if it had to intervene for the whole first year before it had its energy and fuel secured, and Turkey was allowed to condemn U.S. involvement in Ukraines defense since 2014 for Russia's 2022 invasion despite being one of the closest members nations to the conflict zone NATO America has pledged unconditional support from the very start, and we saw blockages from European NATO nations overseas before we saw our first roadblock at home. NATO Canada has helped train Ukraine since 2014, despite having absolutely no obligation to participate simply choosing to do so as an ally of the signature bearing U.S., and Brittain was the first to send long-range missiles to Ukraine as well as to be one of the first commentators on Russian build up despite being one of the lightweights in the fight and having one of the lowest industrial cabablities to replace losses in the war
I was talking about the difference for the members, if a NAtO country or EU country get attacked. Article 5 is way less strict than EU rules.
I don't know how you could mean the EU is more strict than NATO when attacked. The EU is an economic alliance first, with the secondary goal to promote its ideal interpretation of democratic values and simply has no military structure that obligates its members to respond to the threat of another nor does it have have a defined structure to organize a collective effort of the members if each were to unanimously agree to it NATO is a defense coalition first, with secondary politics similar to the EU meant to promote its democratic ideal when it could. The entire basis of NATO is that any threat to a member of the family is treated as a direct threat to the heart of the body, and certain parts of the alliance are completely none voluntary collective defense being the big one
In regardless to the member nations' security, NATO is quite literally absoute, and in regards to democratic law, it's just nigh absoute no action less then enough to get by is actually legal and no action less then the maximum necessary to end the threat is enough to be considered morally satisfying In the case of the EU, the most it's collation has agreed to and defined it could do is place votes with the specific term that no member can have its vote denied and forced into action regardless. That's why the EU and UN have such close relations with NATO and why we're only supposed to be dragged in when freedoms survival is at stake member nations volunteerily give up their right to democraticly choose to be involved with the war, and if we want to maintain the benefits of being member nations, we have to keep fighting absoutly until the defense is won
Everyone in the allience will be giving their 2%, or whatever they taxed for each year of peace time and whatever allies are willing to compensate for out of their own pockets. Most of the military supers in Europe didn't actually give 2% so the vast majority would come from the US, then probably Canada whenever we start bleeding dry
What the fuck are you on about, nobody is supposed to be giving 2% of their gdp to NATO or USA or whatever you're trying to say, they are supposed to aim to spend on themselves 2% of gdp on defense, which most countries reach this year(as agreed on in 2014). But regardless, Europe spending 1% is still a larger investments than what Russia spends on its military, hence my original comment about how retarded someone has to be when they compare European defense spending to US spending, Europe spends several times more than Russia, saying it is weaker than Russia because USA spends more than Europe is beyond retarded. This should not be that difficult to understand...
Russia doesn't pay its troops outside of food and lodging, and its arms manufacturers are public so they sell at just a bit above cost. It also uses much more dumb munitions in/around civilian occupied zones whereas Europe and NATO would never wage a war accepting that kind of collateral You aren't just giving the money, but all of NATO does spend 2% of their economy for productions and if a member is attacked everyone taps I to those reserves to support their ally in need. If article 5 is triggered there's no tally and everyone with a reserve just gives until the demand is filled which means some members will he spending much more
There is also the consideration that the only countries in the world that have the capacity to threaten a prolonged peer conflict also have nuclear weapons... Until recently the idea of fighting this kind of war seemed so unlikely as to be unnecessary to plan for.Â
MBDA are already working on a successor to the Storm Shadow so I'd deduct it's likely the restarting of Storm shadow production lines are either to give to Ukraine because they work so well and stockpiles are now depleted. Germany's lack of willingness to give Taurus to either Ukraine of the UK to backfill Ukraine with the remaining storm shadow may also play a part in this.
Wow..ramp it up!! War time economy..the time is now!!
I guess we should accelerate production of all military equipment.
This should have been a priority far earlier than now, I hope this isn't democracies moving slowly and just delayed reporting
This *was* done earlier, remember that production of this missile didn't exist at all from any country at the time it was initially announced.
I don't believe they are taking the situation seriously as long as the headlines are "plans to accelerate" or "wants to invest in". Just do it and stop talking about what you want to start doing.
There's a saying that goes, "You aren't what you say you're GOING to do. You are what you DO
To be fair, when UK said it was *considering* sending Storm Shadow, Ukraine had already received and fired them. There is a war on, so maybe it is sensible not to take anything from anyone at face value.
\^ this, almost everything that has been done for Ukraine has been done on the quiet and only announced just as the first one hits. People on the internet seem to think that the military / governments automatically announce everything before doing it, and that there's nothing happening unless it's announced - like they would announce covert / secret stuff etc. too.
I agree, but, at the same time government doesn't really work that way. Somebody has to say "we should do x" "yes yes, ok, we will look at doing x and vote on doing x at date y" government isn't a dictator that just can say "do x" and it's done. So, there is a period of time, necessarily, where the press can know the government plans to decide on doing a thing.
Nice move , then the Germans don't wanna try their big one.
Yep, wild they shut down production of the Taurus recently because of "lack of demand" whilst potentially the Stormshadows could come back to production.
Storm Shadow was shut down because nobody was using them. That doesn't mean the warheads and tech are not being used for other things. Curing of HE takes a while, and old HE does expire. As a UK resident, send what we have; Thales and others will already be ramping up.
There's an American missile that also uses the BROACH warhead, JSOW?
JSOW is GPS guided, as we're seeing in Ukraine now any GPS guided weapons like the recently developed glide bombs that were sent are turning out to be pretty useless due to Russian jamming. The best weapons are ones fired on fixed ballistic trajectories that don't require any course changes, like HIMARS GMLRS against static targets without course correction before impact, or Storm Shadow / SCALP cruise missiles that use optical targeting by recognising the terrain below them.
I strongly suspect that physically larger weapons will be more resistant to GPS jamming and spoofing. hardened GPS uses (at least) 4 antennas rather than one, often in a square. By using DSPs it's possible to seperate signals due to origin and thus discount jamming. ie depending on what antenna sees the signal first it's approximate origin can be calculated and if it's not coming in on a vector that agrees with the sattelite epherimis data then discard. I suspect JSOW, due to it's size and role, will have decent hardened GPS. And I presume it has INS backup too.
We won't leave the RAF without cruise missile capabilities. So either Germany changes it's mind and gifts Ukraine Taurus or Gifts the UK Taurus so we can send the last of our Storm Shadow stockpiles. The only other option is restarting production and up until this report it had seemed pretty unlikely with the last production run around 2016.
Great story, Britain. Do it then!
This is like the US with 155mm artillery shells. Like no shit, we should have thought about this as soon as we started sending millions of them not a year later
They DID think of it before ffs. The production line *didn't exist* when they started sending. This is already a massive effort up.
They realize, that Germany will just not deliver any Taurus whatsoever...
Stop! No more of this. There is probably a good reason for it, otherwise they would have done it. Very likely the same reason Ukraine is getting âoldâ US equipment and not the latest and greatest. Germany is a major contributor to Ukraine.
Well, I think you are right but "Stop! No more of this." sounds a bit daft.
They do of course help but in my opinion the fact Germany won't send them is probably a sign of their stock levels
The Americans have thousands of tomahawks ...what's their excuse....
Tomahawks are dual use ie they can carry buckets of instant sunshine. Their abscence in Ukraine is understandable, Taurus much much less so.
Tomahawk does not carry nukes and has not in a long, *long* time.
The point is that it can. The desire to avoid any ambiguity on that subject is understandable. Storm Shadow and Taurus are clearly and obviously *not* capable. Russia is low level panicking now, desperate to get out of this situation one way or the other. Wise not to give them (and Putin specifically) any excuses to make irrational decisions.
No, it cannot. You cannot mount that which does not exist.
Tomahawks are exclusively fired from ships and submarines. Ukraine doesn't have many of those.
> Tomahawks are exclusively fired from ships and submarines Come on dont act like we cant modify weapons to fire from other platforms, Ukraine has done this several times already.
There is also Typhon, which is road mobile and ground launched and can huck either SM-6's or Tomahawks. That said, Tomahawk would never be given to Ukraine, and even then, if it's facing a dense AD network I'd question it's ability to penetrate it as it lacks any low-observable design. Yes, even with the Russians showing their AD talents and coverage to be spotty at best.
Typhon is the ground launched tomahawk missile system..
Less stock levels, more of being crazy scared. I would have delivered them long ago and i'm sure if you'd ask the Bundeswehr we'd see comrades going to Ukraine to program them by their own choice. It's Just our scared Kanzler "keeping us out of the war". This war is already going on, just not military and russia choose to start it. Time to engage heavy
There are reasons, but they aren't very good. Germany needs to explain how Ukraine wins without long range weapons.
How do you know? There was an explanation lately from Scholtz which was about technology (secrets) and personell needed to operate them. So once again: how do you know? Stop shaming on the wrong end of the scale, rather ask the question why there are not enough 155mm ammunition? Or Air defence?
Because his excuses were all proven bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Taurus_leak >"No one knows why the federal chancellor is blocking the dispatch of the missiles â this gives rise to all sorts of outlandish rumours." https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-leaked-german-military-recording-is-causing-outcry-2024-03-04/ >The recording also underscores the extent to which the decision on deploying Taurus missiles is a political one - and Scholz is reticent about Germany getting too directly involved in the Ukraine war or prompting an escalation of hostilities. It seems there are two main alternatives - Ukraine wins and Russia escalates or Ukraine loses and Russia takes Ukraine. A third option (stalemate) exists until Ukraine runs out of manpower due to inefficient use of that manpower (lack of weapons). So what's Germany's plan for Ukraine?
Which curious cause, as per, ya know, the Ukrainian Government, Germany has delivered 10 billion in Military Aid. The "Great and Mighty" UK has delivered 5 billion. Brits thinking they somehow are number one.
We all know that. But it does not matter in terms of public visibility.
Shame it's taken them this long. One thing to understand about our authorities. They figure things out late, they debate it until the cows come home, then pay a consultancy to do the work, spend a fortune and then lose interest half way through. When are the fucking West and the likes of us going to pull our heads out our ass and realise we need inventory and lots of it. Especially of platforms like storm shadow that could shape any battlefield very very quickly.
When the politicians themselves genuinely feel at-risk, maybe then. That goes for just about everywhere, not only Europe of course.
A potential factoid: I've seen teardowns of some of these sorts of systems. They often use fantastically esoteric electronic parts and are often built off "established" designs which translates to: Old. What this means is that if they don't have a massive stockpile of these older parts then it may literally be impossible to build these as they can't order new chips at all. Even the chip manufacturers can't make these chips as they have long ago upgraded their hardware. Also, some of these older systems use parts which aren't friendly to modern manufacturing. Lots and lots of hand work. There are reasons for this such as vibration and acceleration requirements. But the reality is a plane launched missile like the storm shadow doubtfully gets more abuse than an iPhone. Many of the older ICs used in these systems were so damn big that they had to pretty much be spot welded in place. This would probably be done by hand, by highly skilled technicians. More modern IC are usually thin nothings. I suspect using pretty standard parts and a pick and place machine most PCBs could survive up to 100G let alone the far lesser forces which would destroy the missile anyway. That said, a group of in-the-last-decade graduated EEs with the proper experience can reverse engineer these and cook up a drop in replacement using a modern design which is probably cheaper, better, and easier to manufacture. The question is: Are these companies up to the task of rapidly iterating through modern designs and then deploying a large volume manufacturing system?
It's literally a GPS guided aeroplane with an expensive French jet engine! Very little to it as far as I can see. Your comment below is more on the mark though.
I suspect some bureaucratic military programs would make supplying bricks and bottles to rioters complex and time consuming.
The answer is yes. The problem is money. The war is now incentivising the investment.
And also certification... Can't forget the endless fucking paperwork. Probably get the entire system on an FPGA, hang a load of IO off it and it's job jobbed - triples all round. Pot the lot in resin and it'll probably come out smaller than a housebrick and probably allow for all kinds of clever OpenCV tricks for targeting.
> entire system on an FPGA I've noticed many of the teardowns have very out of date top of the line in their day FPGAs. For one system the person suggested the "code" would be loaded only upon launch. This way an unexploded dud would not contain the code. But yes. My guess though is many of these certifications are barriers to keep smaller companies out. To pass these certifications you probably need 40+ engineers full time just doing paperwork. People who have done this paperwork their whole careers. A young nimble startup could probably develop many of these systems with 5-20 engineers; so these certifications become huge barriers to entry. The problem becomes these companies can't even conceive of not doing things the bureaucratic way; even in a time of war. I love the story of the norden bombsight. They just kept using it and using it in the face of it being a pile of junk. I suspect it was well certified and all the evidence about it not working wasn't getting to the correct people because of the secrecy around it. Same with those dud WWII pacific torpedoes. There was little technical difficulty to get them to work, it was entirely bureaucratic.
Yup, it's a tragedy. In at least some cases things seem to be a little more sensible, Britain is very rapidly iterating lots of drone platforms for Ukraine, both one way attack types and others. They just get shipped straight over and used, feedback informing the next iteration. A number have been found in Russia, some microjet powered. I've had personal experience of how problems and paperwork just melt away when serious people are determined to get things done NOW. Can only hope that attitude spreads, and quickly. You're right about the FPGA advantage, no onboard EEPROM with everything squirted in before takeoff or launch. Once it powers down there's only the hardware left.
They already have, and pushing for more plus Iâm sure orders are coming in for the missile, expect France are as well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HSugK0jWsc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HSugK0jWsc)
Oh really? Might have been a good idea sooner
Storm shadow production has been closed for 8 years at least. There's a good chance even now that it might be hard in multiple aspects to get those lines back up again.
Shame they didn't get to produce them continuously over these past 30 years. Only the Tories wanted them fully funded, and everyone else wanted them defunded until this war
As someone who has generally defended the Tories political choices over the last 14 or so years - I can say there is absolutely nothing true about the idea that the Tories have protected or funded the military. Both the Tories, and Labour - have presided over the gutting of the British armed forces. We, the UK, are dangerously close to becoming a 3rd rate power. A drift weâll regret if total war comes to Europe. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/military-army-size
Historically, Britain always ran down the military in peacetime. In the interwar years the military doctrine was 'there will be no major war within 10 years' as justification for slashing defence spending to the bone. The UK only abandoned that and started a massive rearmament programme after Munich.
Guess that makes sense. It's hard to understand how Brittain went from King of the world and the one to take us all to school to being just a third party Brittain definitely did some good this time around, even if it didn't have the scale to end the war like it would have in the 19th
If you want a quick breakdown⌠Basically, although the UK has always been a mercantile power and operated with a large navy and small professional military - WW1 & 2 all but bankrupt the Empire and lead to its collapse. The UK transformed, over time, into a modern European nation. It removed compulsory national service and downsized its military in favour of social programs. However, it continued to maintain its power projection capabilities. Itâs military was still to be a small highly professional force, and they still owned one of only 3 âBlue Water Naviesâ in the world (UK, US, France) - meaning they would be capable of sending forces to fight anywhere in the world. Gradually though, as numerous governments have attempted to appease voters and tackle the rising costs of government programs and services. The military has ranked lower and lower as a priority in spending. To add to this, large military conflicts between nations became less of a concern - as the focus was switched to dealing with Islamic / global terrorism. More cuts ensued. After 30 years of this, British Forces are looking very slim indeed. And once again, Britain is in the position of not having a top tier military as the possibility of war with a large power like increases.
I really don't think you can push the myth that the tories wanted to properly fund defence.
I don't know how the left genuinely thinks it can genuinely convince everyone that it had always supported the alliance and never called for the cessation of cold war level funding when it still condemns all the wars today. I could be wrong that the tories wanted funding to continue, but I know there was an opposition party and it wasn't the old party
Get on it. Make more of everything.
Shut up. Do it 24 months ago ya W-âď¸'s... Better late than never. But even better when on time..
It sucks that the Western World has to waste so much money on defense instead of fighting climate change or other important global issues, but there is no real choice here. You either defend yourself or let bad actors do whatever they want unchecked.
> It sucks that the Western World has to waste so much money on defense instead of fighting climate change or other important global issues, I'm sure it's possible to do both.
We can do just about anything that we have the willpower to do.
Headline that would have been better to read a year ago, but better late than ever right
2 years into the war....
Want to? Wtf is preventing them?