NLAW's inertial guidance is accurate versus moving targets to 400 meters and stationary at twice that. It uses a 15 cm Bill style slant down tandem HEAT warhead and will beat the front slope of any Russian tank.
You can't jam it. 2/
Only active defenses can stop and NLAW. And a tank hunter team can simultaneously fire several at the same tank to saturate an active defense.
And also see Phil Karber here regards providing USMC surplus Humvee TOW missile launchers and US Army surplus Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine: 5/ defence-ua.com/army_and_war/v…
The Trump and Biden Administrations have sent 120 Javelin Missile launchers and several thousand (that number is not public where I've looked) Javelin missiles since 2017.
...reserves. That works out to three Javelin launchers and maybe 30 (speculative guess) missiles in the BTG.
This is why Phillip Karber was calling out the need for more.
While the Javelin in small numbers has won engagements like The Battle of Debecka, IRAQ, 2003 7/
There is simply no comparison between the Russian Army of 2021 and the Iraqi Army facing the Kurdish Peshmerga Army during invasion of Iraq in 2003. 8/ weaponsandwarfare.com/2016/06/12/the…
The best a Ukrainian BTG can hope for with three Javelin launchers and 30 missiles versus a Russian regimental scale attack is 18 tank & AFV kills with a 100% loss of all three launchers & crew while being over run. 10/
Two thousand NLAW change this calculations by a lot.
Forty Ukrainian BTG now have another 50 NLAW on top of the three Javelin launchers & each NLAW missile is in a disposable launcher
An attacking Russian regiment can face a peak of 53 simultaneous sure kill if hit ATGMs. 11/
What the US Army Ft. Irwin National Training Center has shown time after time is that massed & simultaneous ATGM salvos from multiple ranges break large scale tank attacks.
The RAF airlift of 2,000 NLAW to Ukraine has given the Ukrainian Army that capability.
12/
The addition of NLAW to Javelins & existing older Ukrainian anti-tank weapons means the three Javelin launchers per BTG will survive several engagements.
BLUF: The Russian Army trying to take Eastern Ukraine now will lose 500 more tanks than before the RAF NLAW airlift.
/End
Correction: The Ukrainian Army has 26, not 16 reserve BTG.
There are now _SIX_ RAF NLAW supply flights to Ukraine.
The US Navy, as an institution, had a really horrid record of "friendly fire" in WW2, to include shooting down a FM-2 Wildcat fighter coming of the catapult of the CVE USS Tulagi in Kerama Retto on 6 Apr 1945.
Another FM-2 Wildcat, damaged in the same Kerama Retto engagement resulting in the USS Tulagi's FM-2 getting shot down, was in turn blown out of the sky by panicked USN gunners over Kadena airfield causing massive damage to fighter fuel logistics & strafing Army troops ashore. 3/
Congress being held accountable for stealth legislation & pork barrel spending _BEFORE THE VOTE IS CAST_ is my most unexpected and welcomed result of Artificial Intelligence large language models (LLM) in 2024.
It would take eight speed reading lawyers with eidetic memories 16 to 24 man hours to parse a 1000 page piece of legislation.
Specialty lawyers charging hundred of dollars an hour working for K-Street lobbyists.
2/
Now any competent person can feed huge pieces of legislation to Grok, or other LLM, for nearly no cost and generate a similar work product in minutes to post to social media.
K-Street lobbyists in DC, & Congressmen/Senators sucking up their cash, just had their world burn.
3/3
I've been involved with three US Army FMTV reset programs.
So this newest report from Ukraine's Defense Express on the the repairability problems with Russian AFV's out of their reserves is so much fun to share with you all.
Defense Express pulled an article from the No. 10 issue of the Russian magazine "Material and Technical Support" on how horrid the vehicles coming out of reserve are plus problems with battle damaged reserve vehicles.
"The central takeaway from this publication is that the actual repairability of Russian tanks is 3-5 times lower than what is claimed in official manuals. This discrepancy has extended repair times for equipment by at least 15-20%."
3/
The infographic figure below is a typical commercial production line curve.
Ukraine's stated production and use of the Peklo (Hell) cruise missile marks it as being on the 'start of production to market entry' ramp up part of the curve below.
2/
Over two dozen Peklo were shown in this public unveiling by Ukraine, which is over 1/4 of the stated production to date.
How many were pre-production prototypes or low rate initial pilot production models isn't knowable. 3/
"According to Andriy Klymenko , head of the Institute for Black Sea Strategic Studies , both vessels are very old and have a "river" class, which implies certain limitations.
2/
He published and commented on the relevant map, which indicates the approximate location of the tanker disaster.
"It is about 8 miles from the seaport of Taman (a transshipment port south of the Kerch Strait).
3/
This will require a Russian military railway service train to be deployed to this spot for possible future Ukrainian Switchblade 600 follow up strikes.