Usually these are empty when rolling into battle, they are used to get there in the first place. Tanks aren’t known for great fuel economy and the inside is already cramped, so for cross country travel it’s practical.

Wow that’s an enormous payload, is that an rpg warhead? Is the plastic wrapped block on top extra battery? How big is the carrying capacity of these drones?

Now I like dead vatniks in Ukraine just like the next guy, and I’m not sure this qualifies me to be the party pooper but the quirky tone when recounting war crimes does not sit well with me. Like when bush Jr misspoke and said “Iraq” instead of “Ukraine” and everyone laughed. Tens of thousands iraqis were killed on your orders (on false pretenses if that somehow makes it worse), yes you should be in prison, and no, you giving candy to Michelle Obama doesn’t kinda even it out.

Well yes and no. It’s a ballistic missile, so it doesn’t have a “low trajectory” but a ballistic flight path, which can be calculated from just 3 data points. It can indeed maneuver at all stages, but because it’s really fast (that part isn’t a lie), it’s only able to do very small deviations from it’s predetermined flight path (apart from also needing to hit the actual target, so it can’t just fly in a completely different direction). The deviations are so small that the patriot can just correct for them in many/most cases. So it’s not a lie it can maneuver, it’s just not as much as would be necessary to reliably avoid interception, even though patriots fly slower.

Слава Україні Brother

Yes, NATO tactics haven’t been proven against a peer enemy, but I would argue neither did the Soviet tactics, this war can hardly be seen as a show of force over a “peer enemy”. And NATO advisors saying “if there is a minefield, go around it” if they are continuous for many miles is naive to say the least. But my armchair general spidy sense tells me the static nature of the battlefield and allowing the creation of these minefields are both a consequence of Soviet tactics, not the other way around.

Let me preface this that I didn’t read the article due to the paywall. Now my answer: Not really. Soviet doctrine is really just a Zerg rush supported by artillery, it’s rather stupid in terms of tactics. Coordination between different arms is only minimal: “we bomb then you go, if you die we try to bomb from where they shot you.”

NATO doctrine is to out maneuver the enemy, which is really hard to learn as many branches of your army have to closely interact with each other to raise the pressure to a maximum. Timing is key, as is fast movement. Units have to trust each other to perfectly time each action. It has to be perfectly planned. Ukraine has to learn these on the go and also didn’t have the forces to keep up the pressure while preparing their counter offensive. This gave the Russians months to prepare their defenses. Ukraine doesn’t have air superiority to fuck up the observers and manning of these trenches & minefields, so they try to achieve the same with cluster munitions. In principle that could work, but it works best if well coordinated: a German general visiting Ukrainian front lines a few days ago complained about bad coordination, that Ukraine shoots a salvo of artillery, effectively warning where an attack is about to happen and then takes too long to execute the follow up attack. You want the enemy to be scared and keeping their heads down while you rush their trench. That doesn’t work if there are ten minutes between artillery strike and infantry attack. And the coordination to reduce this time is the hard part.

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Not sure I want to go this hard for people self-identifying as right wing nationalists.

“Never hesitate to state the obvious”, for socially awkward teenager-me this was a game changer how to participate in conversation. I still live by it and it’s really useful in meetings, as it also brings real value to the conversation, as whatever is obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to others. And even if everyone knew, it may still spark a discussion.