Top 10 Failed Wonderweapons of the Ukrainian War⬇️
My criteria are simple - these are weapons (defined loosely) that were heavily hyped by Western pundits that actually failed in service.
So, for example, the Leopard 2 isn't on here because it's actually a perfectly functional tank that has performed in line with other tanks.
10. The Ukrainian Foreign Legion
After the war kicked off, Western outlets began encouraging adventurous foreigners to travel to Ukraine to fight. These new recruits were housed in barracks at the Yavorov Training Ground.
One Russian missile strike largely ended the project.
9. Switchblade
This "drone in a can" was supposed to allow Ukrainian troops to deliver lethal, precise strikes at standoff range.
While drones have transformed the Ukrainian battlefield, Switchblade itself was complicated and ineffective. I've seen five used in two years.
8. NASAMS
This surface-to-air AMRAAM adaptation fell prey to the problem that all SAM adaptations of air-to-air missiles do - missiles designed for high-speed aerial launch don't have the legs to perform from a dead stop.
Far from "closing the sky," this system has been MIA.
7. Excalibur shells
This GPS-guided precision 155mm artillery shell performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Russian jamming has apparently rendered it ineffective on the far harsher Ukrainian battlefield.
6. The Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb
This LEGO-esque combination of a 227mm MLRS booster and a GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb was supposed to allow the AFU to stretch their HIMARS systems out to 150km.
The slow-moving glide bombs were shot down easily by Russian air defenses.
5. Bayraktar TB-2
Ukraine bought these Turkish drones en masse after their good showing in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.
As it turns out, Russian air defenses are a little stiffer than Armenian ones. They were shot down in droves and quickly withdrawn from combat.
4. Challenger 2
The UK donated a company of its premiere war machines to the Ukrainian cause, with shills hyping them to the moon as indestructible.
The Russians were unimpressed and blew one up. The British government reacted by demanding the rest be withdrawn from combat.
3. Javelin
When the war started this IR-guided fire-and-forget antitank missile was hyped as a magic wand that could delete Russian tanks at the push of a button.
Battlefield conditions and Russian countermeasures degraded its performance and it has rarely been observed in use.
2. The "Arsenal of Democracy"
The Western powers vowed to keep Ukraine supplied with everything needed to win the war. They have failed to do so.
Once derided as a "gas station with nukes," Russia produces substantially more war materiel than the entire Western Alliance.
1. Sanctions
The most comprehensive sanctions regime in history, intended to collapse the Russian economy and force Putin to surrender, comprehensively backfired.
Russia is now wealthier than ever despite fourteen rounds of sanctions, while European economies wither by the day.
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Apparently four missiles were shot down at sea, with one hit far enough into its final dive that falling submunitions still killed several civilians.
As this occurred on a Sunday afternoon and the nearest military target is three miles away, this was likely a terror attack.⬇️
First of all, I'd like to note the speed with which Ukrainian propagandists, while still celebrating the deaths of Russian vacationers, have come around to a remarkably pro-Russian position while commenting on this event: (1) that Russian air defenses shoot down pretty much everything fired at Crimea; (2) that the Russian Ministry of Defense generally puts out accurate information to the public; and (3) that civilian casualties from downed enemy missiles and malfunctioning interceptors are the responsibility of the defender rather than the attacker. I'm sure they won't immediately do another 180-degree turn as soon as they are presented with a less convenient fact pattern.
Secondly, the range at which this attack was delivered (>160km from any point of UKR-held territory) indicates that the Ukrainians have received a number of M39A1 extended-range ATACMS missiles with cluster warheads. There were only a small number of these manufactured around the turn of the century and apparently most were subsequently converted to unitary models, suggesting that the US is already scraping the munitions barrel to keep Ukraine supplied with missiles (and explaining our reluctance to hand any over previously). ATACMS activity has certainly fallen off dramatically in the last two weeks.
Thirdly, as I pointed out upthread, the nearest obvious military target is an airfield located three miles north of this particular beach. There's also an area of farmland about a mile and a half to the east that may serve as a SAM positioning area. Ballistic missiles that get clipped late in their flight don't fall three miles away from their intended targets, and if the Ukrainians had been interested in a military target they would have done what they always do and attacked in the middle of the night. They struck instead on the afternoon of Orthodox Pentecost Sunday, when the streets and beaches would be crowded with civilians. As such - and in light of a pattern of Ukrainian attacks targeting civilians in Russia gathered for holidays - it is likely this attack was intended to terrorize civilian residents and vacationers in a wealthy Sevasopol suburb and the work of Russian air defenses prevented an enormous number of deaths and injuries.
Addendum: Just to provide some visual context on exactly how far this beach is from the airfield in question - it's farther from it than from the harbor!
Addendum 2: It's not clear from the way I wrote it, but there were five missiles in total - four shot down at sea plus one over the beach in question.
D+10 update for the Russian Spring 2024 offensive. I mentioned last time (D+8) they'd begun to turn the pressure back on in the Donbass after easing off to let the Ukrainians pull troops to Kharkov.
They've marked up gains in 14 locations across the front in the last 48 hours⬇️
1 / Starting from the north, Volchansk, Russian troops have secured the north of town and pushed troops across the Volcha River to begin evicting the AFU from the south side.
2 / No map for Liptsi because the location of the contact line in the area is astonishingly murky for this fishbowl of a war, but the fighting is visible from Kharkov.
By popular demand, I'm writing a listicle - my top ten US military acquisition disasters of the 21st century.
It's a little distressing that I have so much material to work with.⬇️
This list is largely informed by two factors - taxpayer money wasted and capabilities not delivered. So despite my catchy F-32 frontispiece above, the F-35 didn't actually make the list because despite being very expensive the program delivered working hardware.
Number 10: the VH-71 Kestrel
You think it'd be easy to design a VIP version of an AW101, but the DoD managed to make an off the shelf design cost $400M each.
Cancelled in 2009 after sinking $4.4B; sane program management got the replacement VH-92 in at a third of the unit cost.
The Russians have lost around a thousand tanks in Ukraine during the war thus far.
Oh, you want an explanation? Okay. Thread. ⬇️
There has been a problem in estimating Russian vehicle losses since the first hours of the war - Ukrainian propagandists have flooded the internet with dodgy pictures of destroyed Soviet-era vehicles, claimed as Russian. I got started debunking them.
It occurred to me recently, though, that there's a way to "back out" Russian vehicle losses from far better-confirmed data for Russian personnel losses. According to Mediazona's ongoing count there have been 724 Russian tankers killed in the war to date.
Palestinian forces - belonging to Hamas and other armed groups in the Gaza enclave - stormed the perimeter defenses yesterday morning local time, catching the IDF entirely off-guard. The front line has yet to stabilize.
Israeli troops have begun to converge on the area and counterattack, so I do not expect the zone of Palestinian control to expand significantly, and absent external intervention they will likely be driven back into Gaza proper soon. However, that isn't the whole story.
The Palestinians took advantage of their initial breakthrough to flush commandos deep into the Israeli interior, where they have been wreaking havoc for the past two days.
Video of a "road of death" in southern Israel, my understanding is the aftermath of a Gazan attack.
"Dozens" of Ukrainian soldiers surrendering north of Klescheevka, apparently around 48.552153, 37.960711. Probably the remnants of a whole company.
Very much calls into question their recent claims of success in the area and the motivation of their troops.
Location on the map. This is quite close to the location of an earlier, unsuccessful Russian attack so it seems the Russians regrouped and gave it another shot.