perestroika

Daily, in the worst case. They have almost no oil and only 10% of their needs are covered by solar (skipping everything non-essential will reduce needs, but only so much). They are adding solar capacity fast, but have little money, so there's a limit.

They do have some interesting advances. E.g. loitering air defense missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/358_missile

Since F-35 does not use its radar while being stealthy, it would require an early warning from an AWACS about a loitering missile. But the missile is small. It gets pointed to an area and told (typical scenario) "there be helicopters somewhere there, go and see if you can find them". It cruises in economy mode and watches with presumbaly side-scanning sensors. If it sees a hot topic, it turns and goes from loitering mode to darting mode.

P.S. Not sure if this was the weapon involved. It's just the strangest thing Iran has.

I'm not entirely certain (because Telegram is disrupted and it's harder to get information from Russia), but I think this bears some relation to RosKomNadzor f**ing with Telegram and mobile internet in general, recently also in the Moscow region (arguably because the sky is full of Ukrainian drones, but perhaps for additional reasons).

Two political principles applicable to Russia:

• don't take people's alcohol away from them, sober people will do rational things
• don't take Telegram, people depend on it and will be angry, possibly forgetting how to lie

Let's hope that changes on April 13 (Hungarian general elections).

Also, it causes natural selection.

If an opponent undergoes natural selection, the product is the most careful and wily persons being in charge. If you kill every dumbass, only those smart enough to survive will survive. Chances are, they will also strike back.

And meanwhile, there's nobody to negotiate with.

Apparently, careless smoking is not a uniquely Eastern European thing. Or perhaps someone decided to frag their ship (just a little bit, not badly).

From the article:

The U.S. military’s Central Command said two sailors received treatment for “non-life-threatening injuries.” People on the ship reported that dozens of service members suffered smoke inhalation.

And in the category of non-life-threatening, but still not ideal, many sailors have not been able to do laundry since the fire.

The ship, along with its 4,500 sailors and fighter pilots, was in the Mediterranean on Oct. 24 when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered it to steam to the Caribbean to add weight to President Trump’s pressure campaign on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader before his seizure.

From the Caribbean, the carrier rushed to the Middle East for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which is now in its third week.

Speaking to sailors on board aircraft carriers is difficult in the best of circumstances. During a war, the ships and military bases involved in operations go “dark,” limiting the ability of service members to communicate with the outside world. The officials and sailors interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Ford is now entering its 10th month of deployment. It will break the record for longest post-Vietnam War carrier deployment if it is still at sea in mid-April. That record, at 294 days, was set by the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in 2020.

Crew members on the Ford have been told that their deployment will probably be extended into May, which would put them at an entire year at sea, twice the length of a normal aircraft carrier deployment.

It is nice to know that it has gone exceptionally well for Ukraine in Kupyansk. Meanwhile:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine

Russian battlefield casualties and fatalities are significantly greater than Ukrainian casualties and fatalities—with a ratio of roughly 2.5:1 or 2:1.

That's the opinon of the Center for Strategic Studies.

Serious trouble” is a 27:1 casualty ratio in Ukraine’s favor,

Your other points are true. This, sadly, is not. The situation is at best 4:1, in bad sectors, 3:1. It also varies - wounded Russian soldiers tend to die of their wounds far more often than wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

However, if it was 2.7:1, it was too pessimistic.

Edit: link for people who keep downvoting without a clue. CSIS thinks the ratio is more pessimistic. They mention numbers like 2.1 : 1 and 2.5 : 1.

I plead for journalists to actually inform themselves about the subject before they write.... :o

Israel has other ways to defend against Iranian missiles during the war, including via fighter jets, but the interceptors are among the most effective defensive weapons against long-range fire. Its Iron Dome missile defense system is designed to repel more short-range fire.

They speak of Iron Dome (short range, for slow rockets from inside the atmosphere) and THAAD (high altitude, for fast missiles re-entering from space) interchangeably. And they even mention fighter aircraft, which cannot do jack in either case.

The currently relevant scenarios:

• Hezbollah shoots unguided rockets at Israel -> Iron Dome intercepts maybe 15% of them (if the trajectory looks dangerous enough), and this costs about 10 times as much as the whole rocket salvo.

• Iran shoots an IRBM at Israel -> the IRBM splits up in space into cluster munitions -> Israel can intercept the MIRV bus (cluster munition housing), but it's empty at the time of getting intercepted. Not much point. And doing it would cost at least 10 times as much as the incoming missile did.

A missile defense system, in this case, cannot do jack either. For this type of attack, defense would have a point if one was expecting to get nuked, becuause a nuclear-armed reentry vehicle cannot be made arbitrarily small, and the cost of leaving it un-intercepted would be extremely tragic.

In case of these projectiles, which are conventional and unguided in their final stage, one has to simply absorb the hits. This is the cost of war. And try to find the other guy's launchers, and try to prevent them from producing more.

And I'm not shedding any tears for Israel in this case. It definitely sucks to be bombed with cluster munitions, but they started this round of fighting, killed most people who they might have negotiated with, and aren't even new to using forbidden kinds of weapons (e.g. cluster munitions made of white phosphorus).

Wreckage is the ultimate test.

If there is doubt about a particular strike, comb the wreckage. The flying product looks the same, but motors and electrical parts are different, the way of laminating fiberglass, the sort of fiberglass, etc.

Sonar-equipped and fiber-controlled submersible drones / robots can. Ordinary sea drones are just small boats with cameras for finding a target, typically made of aluminum or fiberglass. They typically don't have sonar, ride on the surface, and their magnetic signature needs massive amplification to trigger a mine.

Signature amplification might be doable, though.

If by "signal" they mean the numbers station which appeared at 7910 kHz and moved to 7842 kHz, then Iran is attempting to jam it.

Normally, one would not expect a country to jam its own means of communications, unless they are playing 5D chess or something.

The Iranian Numbers Station Story Just Took An Odd Turn