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.
Injection molding gets you a lot of one thing cheaply. Think lots of fiber optic guided FPV drones, which are immune to radio jamming.
3D/AM allows a lot of modifications to meet the changing requirements of war. Think rapidly evolving Ukrainian interceptor drone designs.
2/
The issue for Ukraine versus Russia is Ukraine has to more widely disperse its industrial base because Russia has a bigger cruise and 500 km(+) ballistic missile production base.
Ukraine's need to disperse production and evolve drones means 3D/AM is a better industrial fit.
3/3
The Coyote I was a propeller interceptor like the Ukrainian FPV's, but it wasn't "enough" for the higher end drone threat like the TB-2 Bayraktar.
2/
So the US military abandoned kinetic solutions the lower end drone threat.
And it has to pretend that high power microwave weapons and jamming will be the answer to fiber optic guided FPV's at weed height and grenade dropping drones behind tree lines.
The arrival of the Ukrainian Gogol-M, a 20-foot span fixed-wing aerial drone mothership, with over a 200km radius of action while carrying a payload of two 30km ranged attack drones under its wings, underlines the impact of low level airspace as a drone "avenue of approach."
2/
The Gogol-M flys low and slow, below ground based radar coverage like a helicopter.
It opens up headquarters, ground & air logistics in the operational depths to artificial intelligence aided FPV drone attacks.
This is the main example of one of the most unprofessional delusions held by the US Navalist wing of the F-35 Big/Expensive/Few platform and missile cult.
Russian fiber optic FPV's have a range of 50km - over the horizon!
Drones simply don't have ground line of sight issues like soldiers do.
Drones can see in more of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans.
And the US Army refuses to buy enough small drones (1 m +) to train their troops to survive on the drone dominated battlefield.🤢🤮
2/3
"Just send a drone" is the proper tactic for almost everything a 21st century infantryman does from patrolling, raiding enemy positions, sniping and setting up forward observation posts.
3/3
The odds are heavily in favor of the IDF having parked Hermes drones with "Gorgon Stare" technology over Tehran to hunt Iranian senior government officials.