Agreed, I use Z.ai and the usage is fantastic the only temper that recommendation that it's often unreliable. Perhaps a few times per week it's unresponsive. Maybe more often it seems to become flakey.
It's very variable though recently I'm noticing it's more reliable but there was a patch where it was nearly unusable some days.
Agreed. They had a rough patch around the 4.7 to 5 upgrade. New architecture required hardware migration. The 5 to 5.1 upgrade was much smoother (same architecture new weights). As you say, little rough around edges, but still great value. Trick I learned is that it's max 2 parallel requests per user. You can put a billion tokens a month through it, but need to manage your parallelism.
> Apparently it is bureaucracy without purpose after all?
No it's not without purpose at all. The purpose is to know who could be drafted in a timely manner should the need arise. There's currently 2 major wars - sorry "special military operations" - happening, one of which in Europe.
A certain government involved in one of these simultaneously calls for allies to assist while at the same time openly questioning half a century of military alliances. So maybe this helps to understand why regulations like this make sense - even for people who never lived through a time when there was mandatory military service and take their own security for granted.
The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law, because it says that women cannot be forced to military service. It is an old document, and it is based on old role models. Modernizing the constitution would require 2/3 majority, and the government was already struggling with making a law at all.
> The constitution made it impossible to make a less sexist law
with the right level of public exposure citizens would surely have been able to put enough pressure on the government to make this happen. But instead zelensky kept repeating the talking points that we should not be concerned about the war because the risk had not changed since 2014. Near-zero effort was made to evacuate ukrainians living near the russian border or those who would be in the way of russian troops. The intelligence had been there for at least six months before the war began
> and the government was already struggling with making a law at all
Only if you ignore free will. Feels unlikely that women will suddenly abandon monogamy and forced procreation à la the draft is probably very unpopular especially given that women would be a majority. Not that they’re wrong to disagree, but there are more conditions here than the biology of procreation.
The modern answer would be immigration, and that’s gender-agnostic.
that argument is uninformed, check the birth rate in ukraine
also check who are these refugees abroad: mostly women and children. How many will return? No one knows. Also what’s the incentive for women to return knowing there are far less options to marry?
who will be working hard jobs where men are prevalent?
what about the current generation? Who will be rebuilding the country from ruins? I’ve never seen women working in construction in ukraine
also this is cynical, your position assumes it’s either men or women, not sharing the military service duty
go learn the history and then come here to comment on the matter
> that argument is uninformed, check the birth rate in ukraine
This has long been the argument for a male-only draft.
One woman can make 1-2 babies every 9 months on average. It is difficult and expensive to speed that up; you can implant quadruplets and induce labor at six months, but that introduces all sorts of other problems. Sperm is much easier to obtain.
> who will be working hard jobs where men are prevalent?
Women, if too many men die in the war.
> I’ve never seen women working in construction in ukraine
This was also the case for the US in the 1940s. Women entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. Plenty of predecent for this sort of shift.
> go learn the history and then come here to comment on the matter
As you can see from the above, this is perhaps advice you should follow first before yelling at others.
> This has long been the argument for a male-only draft. One woman can make 1-2 babies every 9 months on average.
It is difficult and expensive to speed that up; you can
implant quadruplets and induce labor at six months, but
that introduces all sorts of other problems. Sperm is
much easier to obtain.
this argument is detached from ukrainian realities. Can ≠ will. Also have you checked the birth rate? Do you expect it to grow in a post-war context?
> Women, if too many men die in the war
so who will then raise these 1-2 babies every 9 months on average? If women need to replace men in the workforce, first they need to go through education and training. Along with having children, it’s incredibly hard to accomplish
> Women entered the workforce in large numbers for
the first time. Plenty of precedent for this sort
of shift
in the same sentence you say ‘for the first time’ and then ‘Plenty of precedent’. You either have no idea what ‘plenty’ means or you contradict yourself
the states weren’t ruined like europe was. The large numbers you are talking about are only large compared to normal historical numbers and female population percentage
also you completely ignore the cultural context, ukraine is not the states. The story of your country, which seems the only one you know, isn‘t as relevant as, for example, the history of ussr. We didn’t have a boomer generation. There are way too many differences for me to continue, so surely you are uneducated on the ussr history
> yelling at others.
yelling? Not a single exclamation point but still yelling? You have a rich imagination for sure
> Also have you checked the birth rate? Do you expect it to grow in a post-war context?
Yes, birth rates tend to go up when wars end.
> in the same sentence you say ‘for the first time’ and then ‘Plenty of precedent’. You either have no idea what ‘plenty’ means or you contradict yourself
This is baffling.
Women entering the workforce in the 1940s due to the war is the precedent. It happened throughout the developed world. We are now eighty years past that demonstration.
> The story of your country, which seems the only one you know, isn‘t as relevant as, for example, the history of ussr. We didn’t have a boomer generation.
There was indeed a birth rate spike in the 1940s in Russia.
I don't think we'll see anything close to reliable reporting any time soon.
The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.
By the time Trump started pushing that they were close to a nuke again, those that claimed he was wrong 6 months ago and the nuclear program was intact. Had started claiming it was in fact destroyed.
Gosh that sentence is hard enough to write, but the story is so contolvuted I don't think I can improve it.
That Iran had a nuclear program was not in dispute. It was regulated under international supervision based on the terms of Obama's agreement with Iran, which Trump promptly tore up because he has the mental capacity of a fourth-grader.
That Iran was on the verge of building bombs was far from clear. Khameini had previously issued a fatwa against doing so, on the grounds that it would be haram, or un-Islamic. All signs suggest that the IRGC was operating in full compliance with that fatwa.
I'm sure the remnants of his administration regret that now.
But the JCPOA had some big issues with it. It was time bound- that is it only delayed Iran's program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal ) and Iran got sanctions relief in return that allowed it to fund its proxies and pursue other activities not constrained by the agreement (such as its ballistic missile program, drones etc.).
Iran also restricted IAEA access to military sites while the agreement was in effect.
That's a fascinating insight into what friends of Bibi can do with photoshopped text on long range photos.
Doesn't include any 256 channel multi spectral radiometric data from ground level crystal packs though ... I guess they didn't show much of interest in the gamma spectrum.
We have two competing theories. One is that Israel is making everything up. The other is that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. At least the second one seems to have some evidence backing it up like secret underground facilities with centrifuges, enriched material, and yes, that warehouse in Tehran. The theory that Israel is making everything up doesn't seem that well supported.
A confidential report, seen by the BBC, did not say exactly where the site was. But inspectors are believed to have taken samples from a location in Tehran's Turquzabad district.
That is the area where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alleged Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse". "
"VIENNA (Reuters) - Samples taken by the U.N. nuclear watchdog at what Israel's prime minister called a "secret atomic warehouse" in Tehran showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain, two diplomats who follow the agency's inspections work closely say."
...
"Those traces were, however, of uranium, the diplomats said - the same element Iran is enriching and one of only two fissile elements with which one can make the core of a nuclear bomb. One diplomat said the uranium was not highly enriched, meaning it was not purified to a level anywhere close to that needed for weapons.
"There are lots of possible explanations," that diplomat said. But since Iran has not yet given any to the IAEA it is hard to verify the particles' origin, and it is also not clear whether the traces are remnants of material or activities that predate the landmark 2015 deal or more recent, diplomats say."
Iran has been pursuing nuclear deterrence by enriching for decades, the entire time I've been in and out of the country. That's a given.
Bibi and his tales that Iran is just a week away from an actual working bomb has been going on almost as long. Bibi - the guy with a secret / not secret collection of bombs.
The question of whether or not Iran was playing along sufficiently with inspectors when there was an inspection deal in place is what we are talking about here.
IMHO they weren't getting away with much, at that time Israel was making up claims that they were and media blasting.
That is all times past, of course.
It's also clear that once Trump tore up the deal they went (sensibly in light of everything it seems) back to unchecked enrichment, and now that they've been attacked during negotiations there's zero trust and it would seem certain that there is a real risk that reinvigorated hard core fanatics will set a bomb off in either Israel and / or the US.
Isn’t this just weapons of mass destruction again circa Iraq 25 years ago? We had evidence back then also, it turned out to be fabricated. Are you sure Netanyahu didn't just need a big distraction to prevent from being impeached and sent to jail? And Trump didn't need a huge distraction from the whole Epstein thing? Because this war come out of nowhere and was way too convenient for them.
"By the early 2000s, two key clandestine facilities were nearing completion: a uranium enrichment center at Natanz (in central Iran), built to house thousands of centrifuges, and a heavy water production plant alongside a 40 MW heavy-water reactor (IR-40) near Arak. These facilities, which had been kept secret from the IAEA, were intended for ostensibly civilian purposes but had clear weapons potential. Enrichment at Natanz could yield high-enriched uranium for bombs, while the Arak reactor (once operational) could produce plutonium in its spent fuel, and the heavy water plant would supply the reactor's coolant.[41] In August 2002, an exiled Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), exposed the existence of Natanz and Arak.[41] Satellite imagery soon confirmed construction at these sites. The revelation that Iran had built major nuclear facilities in secret, without required disclosure to the IAEA, ignited an international crisis and raised questions about the program's true aim.[41]"
People who are pro the Iranian regime claim that there was a religious order against building nuclear weapons. But at the same time there is no other explanation as to why Iran would enrich Uranium to 60% as that has virtually no other use. It also seems they were working on other components related to weaponiztion (though admittedly we have less confirmation/visibility into that). Ofcourse the precise timing of when they would chose to build those weapons and their intent is not that easy to guess but it's also not unreasonable to assume they would do so when they felt it would be to their advantage.
But everyone agrees that they have enriched >400kg of Uranium to a level that has no other purpose than nuclear weapons and that the remaining steps of enrichment are measured in days/weeks.
So something doesn't add up in what your references are saying. What is your explanation of the discrepancy?
Oh shucks! military intelligence and 19 different intelligence gathering agencies are such nincompoops that they completely missed what an expert HN commenter of sparkling genius pointed out.
I don't have the expertise to know what use its for, but I suspect the agencies assesment was informed bybthe knowledge of 60% enriched uranium.
It's used for subs btw and maybe they felt they needed a nuclear one to secure Hormuz.
I get it. So according to you Iran is building nuclear subs. JFYI it takes 4-5Kg of material for a nuclear sub reactor. So according to you they're building 100 nuclear submarines.
Got it genius. But hey, by the trust you put in Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard we already knew you were a genius. Didn't need the additional observation about Iran building 100 nuclear submarines to secure Hormuz.
I have no F'ing clue what Iran wants to do. But I know that the intelligence agencies are well equipped and experienced to guess that, especially more than 'that guy on the internet '.
Why in the world would Iran be expected to remain in compliance with the JCPOA after 2018, when Trump tore it up?
As I recall, they did remain in compliance for another year after that, given that it was originally supposed to be a multilateral agreement. But IMHO they should have put everything they had into refinement and weapons production as soon as Trump unilaterally ripped up the agreement. Instead they held back, and they are now seeing the result of that mistake.
None of this would be happening if Iran had actually done what Israel assured us they were doing.
You're asking why wouldn't they pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them? Why should they? Don't you think as a country they should have some other priorities? Like ensuring Tehran has water? So because Trump tore up the agreement (and the US was sanctioning them anyways for their ballistic missile program and other reasons) that's somehow justification? Trump tore up the agreement because it would enable them to get there anyways and Iran refused to sign an agreement that would prevent them from getting there.
The JCPOA would have expired in 2025 anyways assuming that they even meant to observe it in the first place.
Your last statement isn't as solid as you think it is. Iran hasn't gotten to a point where they have nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles not because they didn't want to but because they were unable to get to that or were concerned that getting closer would invite the same attack we're seeing today.
Maybe Israel and the US wouldn't be attacking a country where stepping on US and Israeli flags, chants of death to America and death to Israel, calling Israel little Satan and the US big Satan. Building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and trying to get to a nuclear bomb? (and I mean the list goes on and on).
They need nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles so they can murder with impunity without risk of retribution. A regime that conducts public executions in stadiums, or mows down 10's of thousand of their own citizens who dare to protest, or give people plastic keys to heaven to walk into minefields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_key_to_paradise or beat up woman on the streets to death for not wearing a hijab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini (and this list also goes on and on) can't be allowed to act with impunity.
Maybe had the US not upended their parliamentary democracy with a coup to grab their oil, they would have continued to maintain their earlier friendly relations with Israel.
Burning US flags and calling for death to blacks has been a KKK thing. We did not bomb them collectively, or break their infra, when they got their guns because their expressions were considered free speech. Individual transgressions of law were pursued (once in a while).
I do a mild bit of environmental geophysical radiometrics, that took me to Iran decades ago - it's not a new thing, they've been edging having nuclear deterrance for a good while.
Trump ripped up the monitoring agreement - that was unquestionably stupid.
He attacked Iran during talks to get that back on track .. that was unbelievably stupid (see: current world state).
Had he agreed to have in country monitoring again and had the USofA simply waited it was probable the old hard line core would have withered in time.
That's certainly not on the table now, the fanatics are dug in and feel fully justified. On both sides.
True but without radar they have a relatively difficult task of being out there setup and waiting for a fast moving jet to pass within range.
Compare that to Ukraine defending it's skies with NATO (well mostly French IIRC) AWACS feeding early data which is what made MANPADS in Ukraine so effective against Russian attacks.
Yeah my guess was they were coming in along predictable routes at this point and that's what got them? I saw that the search and rescue mission was in an area close to water. I believe many Stinger hits in Ukraine can be attributed to predictability.
Shortwave radio is more challenging than you might imagine.
Near to the transmitter it's received by ground wave, further it's scattered off the ionosphere. In-between it's undetectable due to the skip zone. This might also explain why Amelia Earhart went missing [1]
Coverage is obtained from multipath and reflections. Leading to variable strength and timing. Not as bad as DXing on HF with low power but much harder than you might imagine.
Fine for someone to transcribe some numbers but useless for people trying to identify sources.
So locally you get an apparent direction to the source which is clearly not the source.
Add to that the complex local terrain and a well placed number stations can be very difficult to locate with precision.
Edit: unrelated but interesting there are some mysteries in HF transmission including long delayed echoes where a signal takes far longer than reasonable to travel out and back over several seconds [0] which given its travelling light milliseconds is a conundrum.
I would guess that the combined EU/NATO counterintelligence forces could find the station if they wanted to, especially for the rough location in the article.
EDIT: apparently the source is on a U.S. military base in Germany (other posts on this topic). Looks like its "ours" then.
My father regailed tales of his college years where it was a game to have a HAM radio operator start broadcasting and to have teams try to find where they were hiding, first.
More challenging? Not really. It does require multiple boots on the ground to do it.
Yes, more challenging. Ham radio fox hunting is usually VHF/UHF. Waaay easier to direction-find, since the signal isn't bouncing off the ionosphere, and also the much shorter wavelength means that you can get highly directional antennas that are small enough to be held, and don't need to be 50 feet in the air to work well.
Besides the problem caused by reflections and by the fact that unless you are very close to the transmitter you do not receive a direct wave but one reflected from the ionosphere, there is an additional difficulty.
Antennas with high directivity, which are needed for accurate triangulation, must be very big in the shortwave range (wavelength from 100 meter to 10 meter). Moreover, if they are too big it would be difficult to move them, to be able to measure an angle.
So traditional triangulation is inaccurate in this frequency range.
With modern technologies, using highly accurate synchronized clocks, one could distribute shortwave antennas over a large area, to create a synthetic aperture array, enabling a precise triangulation. However this would be expensive. An amateur would certainly not have such a thing. I doubt that even a state would bother to build such a thing, because it would not be worthwhile.
While precise triangulation of a shortwave transmitter from far away is very difficult, such a transmitter would not be hard to find during a local search wherever it is placed, because there not only the direction, but also the intensity gradient of the signal would allow finding it.
Two receivers of the same signal may not be from the same proximate source. One could from the original antenna the other from a reflection. Both could be reflected but by different reflectors. Even if the proximate source was the same for both the receivers, triangulation might yield the location of a virtual image of the original source.
BTW I am just going by geometry and may be way off because radiowaves behave quite differently compared to visible light.
One might need effectively the inverse of beamforming to nail it.
I get the feeling you haven't read the article. The carrier is not in drone range precisely for that reason.
The reason so many tankers have been lost and that E3 sentry is that the carriers are having to stay out of the preferred range and rely on refueling for the bombing campaign.
If the CSG could move to the Iranian coast they wouldn't have to maintain a constant chain of refueling tankers which have become so vulnerable.
>The carrier is not in drone range precisely for that reason.
umm, you have no idea what you are talking about.
the Iranian Shahed drones typically have an operational travel distance of approximately 1,200 to 2,000 kilometers (roughly 750 to 1,250 miles).
and
>USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) CSG: As of March 30, 2026, this strike group is operating in the Arabian Sea supporting Operation Epic Fury. Satellite imagery from mid-February and March 2026 placed the Lincoln roughly 700 kilometers (approx. 430 miles) off the coast of Iran and Oman.
All right, they have the range. Let's say a carrier is 700 km away and the drone has a range of 1200 km. Great.
Now, does it have the kill chain to supply it with an accurate targeting fix and update it during the flight? Or, does it have a radar good enough to find the Lincoln on its own? If it doesn't, then it's a really big ocean. But sure, they've got the range.
I think the point being made is that before Iranian drone doctrine (they were the originators of the long range drones, the FPV drones and sea drone which have dominated the Ukraine way too).
A US CSG could simply sit in the Hormuz strait shoot down any incoming missiles and keep it open.
Right now the US has 3 CSG in the middle east and nearly 50000 troops. After weeks of intensive bombing the strait remains closed and any associated asset in the region is at risk the loss of the E3 to drones is particularly shocking.
> A US CSG could simply sit in the Hormuz strait shoot down any incoming missiles and keep it open.
They can't even do that in their own bases. Most of US defenses have been severely overestimated due to propaganda. They hadn't been tested and when they were they've shown themselves lacking.
Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload.
Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve.
Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer.
Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.
Do you mean stuff like FP-5 Flamingo? These are really cruise missiles. Why would you call it a suicide drone? Because it has wings? Tomahawks have wings. Because the design is based on a target drone, so what the capabilities are very much inline with munitions we call cruise missiles.
The drone/guided missile divide is really about dividing a continuum which on one end has foam wings and raspberry pie equivalents wrapped in tin foil and on the other million dollar tomahawks. The distinction is the price tag and the capabilities really.
Flamingo is pretty close to a cruise missile in many ways. You correctly observe that this is a continuum but most but not all drones have props whereas all missiles are either rocket based or jet engine based and missiles tend to be a lot faster and do not allow for a change of plan after launch.
So no. But the Lyutyi (sp?), the FP-1 and the Nynja all qualify as drones (and there are many, many more, it's a veritable zoo) if you make that distinction, as do all of the sea-borne gear.
The ones that are decimating the russian oil industry are a bit more impressive than that. The foam wing ones are mostly Shaheds, the Ukrainian ones tend to be made of various plastics and/or fibreglass or composites for the more specialized stuff.
Imo foam wings and low cost components is very impressive. Low cost easy production is an actual tangible benefit. If it destroys the target and is easy cheap to make, it is a better arm.
Yeah not so much for it's radars, or for the f35 parked on the flight deck, which may be you know loaded with thousands of gallons of fuel and hundreds of pounds of missiles and bombs.
Sure, it won't sink it, but operations may be disrupted, for hours to days.
Rocket engines are typically used for short range missiles like AGM-65, or ballistic missiles. All cruise missiles use jet engines to achieve long ranges.
Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.
And one of them can't scratch the paint on a modern naval vessel. Anti-ship warheads alone weigh more than an entire Shahed-136 drone.
As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink.
Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
You might need to consider lateral options. What if someone flew 1,000 drones at the windows on the bridge? How many BBs can hit that fancy radar before it is out of service?
Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
It's the radars really for destroyers. The bridge is not actually where the ship is run during combat.
There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships.
Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire.
The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
That's great if you're in a shallow anchorage (average depth: 45 feet). Less so if you sink in the Arabian sea and you're under fire during the refloating process.
I also suspect modern ships are a little more sensitive to complete immersion.
> In May 2019, the Minister of Defense was presented with a report from Defense Material which concluded that a possible repair would cost 12–14 billion and take more than five years. The cost of purchasing a new corresponding vessel was estimated at NOK 11–13 billion, with a completion time of just over five years.
Your scenario imagines a naive and completely fictional concept of how modern naval systems actually work. That you can’t conceive of why what you are suggesting is effectively impossible means you truly don’t understand the domain.
The reason designed-for-purpose anti-ship missiles/drones are so expensive is they are literally designed to be somewhat effective at executing exactly the scenario you are laying out, while not being naive about the defenses that military ships actually have. Anybody that understands the capability space knows that your scenario wouldn’t survive contact with real defenses.
You are making an argument from fiction. Do you take the “hackers breaking cryptography” trope from Hollywood at face value?
Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle.
The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
Of course, you can use boatloads of cheap drones to kill the radars and CIWS, destroy the planes on deck and other juicy targets.
Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships.
If they're small - like quadcopter size - then how did you get them in range of a ship more then 10 miles off shore?
If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed[1] - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
For comparison one of Russia's largest drone attacks on Ukraine, and thus in the world, happened recently and included about 1000 Shaheds over a distributed area.
You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
You might get lucky I guess but I absolutely wouldn't bet on it.
They're also using their USVs as drone motherships.
> If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
The Taliban moved pickup-sized loads around just fine.
> You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
Here's one failing to shoot a single Shahed in Baghdad down.
It takes a surprisingly small warhead to destroy a 100 million dollar radar array. A mission kill requires much less damage than actually sinking a ship. Take out an Arleigh Burkes radars and it's a 2 billion dollar container ship.
It's more like, through the combined use of drones, sea-drones, and anti-ship missiles, backed by the productive might and surveillance capability of NATO, against a weak Russian navy. Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
> Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war.
Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer.
If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those)
To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat.
the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)
You can if you live in the US! It isn’t particularly expensive either, high explosives are industrial chemistry. A few dollars per kilo. Maybe a little bit more if you want something fancy.
Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable.
TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about.
This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
Amateurs who try to build their own explosives usually either fail to explode or explode killing the builder.
An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.
There's a selection process at work where smart people who know what they're doing don't try to assemble bombs in their garage for fun. If there's a legitimate reason like your country is fighting an existential war the kinds of people who can do things start doing things.
But it's just rare having a person smart enough to be able to do it be stupid enough to try. (and the people who do are nutjob terrorists like Timothy McVeigh)
FWIW, McVeigh got a lot of the technical details right, including many non-obvious ones. That was a sophisticated attempt by someone that actually knew what they were doing. It goes a long way toward explaining why that particular bombing was so effective.
That said, plenty of extremely smart people assemble bombs in their garage for fun. It is almost a rite of passage, at least in the US. The fact that historically you could just buy the common stuff incentivized smart people to attempt more technically difficult things for bragging rights. Most people have no concept for how available legal high explosives are in the US, even after 9/11 made it a bit more difficult.
Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences
This is delusional. Iran has thousands of ASM on the coastline. They need 1 to make it through to take out a tanker. Even the best anti missile systems we have aren’t 99.99% reliable. It was always a losing proposition. Iran has always been able to close the strait.
What I don’t get is why we need to take Kharg island. Can’t we just blockade ships selling Iranian oil?
I think the collective take might be too focused on the kinetic picture to see the underlying issue(s).
1) we want Iranian oil flowing and being bought elsewhere for the economy and to avoid hard decisions in Beijing, and as we’ve recently heard ad nausea money is fungible so… if one hasn’t thought to invade, dominate and occupy mountainous terrain filled with holy people, then ‘open’ means money to The Baddies.
2) it’ll only take a few wrecks to create navigation hazards, tankers are huge and that strait is shallow and narrow. The cleanup crews are slower, they also need massive ships.
3) let’s take a 0.01% reliability of missile attacks… drones, rpgs, suicide attacks, artillery, kamikaze plane attacks, mines, and trebuchets are also out there. So, again, unless we’re invading… fuhgeddabout 100%
And, fatally:
4) it’s not the missiles, it’s the threat, and who is insuring the massive money-boats. If your insurance company thought your car would, 0.01% of the time, be blown up resulting in a total wreck and complete loss of cargo and future revenue, your policy would not be what it is. You insure your oil boat for trips, and if not you don’t move it.
Trump doesn’t decide this, BigBoat Insurance brokers decide this, with their wallets and vibes. 0.01% x An Oil Tanker (slow, giant, vulnerable, + oil leak cleanup and ecosystem damage, loss of life) x totally foreseeable circumstances = a ‘closed’ straight on demand. Unless, again, the plan is invado-conquering.
I admit once it didn't work I didn't reach out to support but the entire experience was shit sandwich after shit sandwich.
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