Thread by @TrentTelenko

Russia is not going to like Ukraine playing by Russia's rules on civilian power grids.

Russia's power grid is wide open to Ukrainian Alibaba drone/DYI cruise missile strikes.

Now Ukraine has every incentive to go there.🧵
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https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1569018331641876480

And Russia's very centralized, corruption ridden, and economically sanctioned power grid is far less robust than most people realize.

See @Aviation_Intel here for what I am referring too regards the drone.

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https://twitter.com/Aviation_Intel/status/1560915127439790080

The damage such drone can do is all out of proportion to their size.

Spools of carbon fiber thread are small, light and highly effective at stopping the electric power grid.

They have been available since the early 1990's

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apnews.com/article/c3c07b…

The idea for these 1990's weapons came from Britain's little know strategic balloon bombing campaign in WW2

See:

Operation Outward
Britain's World War II offensive balloons
By Raoul E. Drapeau
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magazine.ieee-pes.org/september-octo…

Operation Outward happened because of a storm ripping up the moorings of UK barrage balloons.

Text from the article link:

"Errant Balloons
On the night of 17 September 1940, during the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe was incessantly attacking England by air, a raging...
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...storm with gale-force winds ripped many of the barrage balloons away from their moorings. The balloons were carried by the winds over the North Sea toward mainland Europe, dragging their severed cables behind them.

Within hours, reports of electrical outages in Denmark,
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...Sweden, and Finland began to come in. The balloons' heavy tethering cables had struck high-voltage overhead electric transmission and distribution lines, and the resulting short circuits caused power outages affecting electrified railroads and even whole cities.
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...One balloon strike resulted in the toppling of the broadcast tower of the Swedish international radio service."

The British launched waves of these balloons in the winters of 1941-1943 whenever their bombers could not fly.
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The arrival of H2S 10cm radar in widespread service on RAF bombers saw the use of balloon bombing end.

Alibaba Drones are a lot more controllable in delivering wires to short circuit the power grid than balloons.
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Another higher tech possibility for Ukraine with the Alibaba drone is using them to deliver non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse as Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generator (FCG) technology is readily available & easily exploitable in a size the drone can carry.
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The American Non-Nuclear EMP (NNEMP) Report from the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security made clear the US power grid is utterly & completely vulnerable to FCG technology.

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emptaskforce.us/wp-content/upl…

Text from the taskforce report:

"NNEMP weapons can be built relatively inexpensively using commercially available parts and design information available on the internet.

EMP simulators that can be carried and operated by one man, and used as an NNEMP weapon, are available

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...commercially.

Even random attacks using NNEMP weapons against less than 100 EHV transformer control substations located in all three U.S. grid systems—Eastern, Western, and Texas—would probably suffice to inflict a protracted nationwide blackout."

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There was a major, if low profile, budget fight about this report in 2018 as it caused Pres. Trump to modify US National Security Strategy to address the US power grid as critical infrastructure.

The strategy required the DoD to upgrade inadequate Cold War nuclear EMP
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...standards on all its new procurements - including the F-35 - and the US power industry to harden itself against NNEMP & against a Carrington Event.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carringto…

This October 2018 THE HILL piece is relatively accurate regards the players & motives in that fight.

Ignoring EMP threat is a death sentence for Americans
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thehill.com/opinion/cybers…

Ukraine's impending retaliation against the Russian power grid may be another of those 2nd & 3rd order effects of the Russo-Ukrainian War which will haunt us all in the coming decades.

17/17 End