I don't doubt that Ukraine cyber hacked in Russian digital terrain elevation maps that the Russians compiled for themselves. Up to date digital terrain elevation maps are a good thing to have.
Plus NASA also had a huge archive of digital terrain elevation data.
But the art of planning munition trajectories to use them is a separate and uniquely military skills set.
Ukraine has had four years of combat experience doing the task of planning munition trajectories.
2/
Which is why I called them out as replicating SMAC's capabilities.
Combat experience is 10 times the best simulations.
The Flamingo flies lower and much faster than most of the other deep strike assets the Ukrainians use, but it is also larger.
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This puts a premium on clever flightpath routing to get the best possible terrain masking to evade the IADS during penetration.
The Ukrainians have been honing these skills since they started using deep penetrating OWA drones.
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How much of what they are doing involves automated software tools and terrain elevation databases like SMAC uses, and how much is done by humans, has yet to be disclosed.
We know from the @DrnBmbr map Ukraine is doing it.
5/5
@DrnBmbr @threadreaderapp unroll please
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Very, Very, few people understand the implications of this Israeli hack combined with its deep penetration of Iran's Regime means for the US-Israeli campaign to exterminate the Mullah's Regime Security Forces.
Let's talk about Gorgon's Stare & Post GWOT smart bombs🧵 1/
Gorgon's Stare and its peer systems like ARGUS, Vigilant Stare, Constant Hawk and Agile Condor are Wide Area Aerial Surveillance (WAAS) systems, the all-seeing eye in the sky.
They are increasingly sophisticated mergers of multi-spectral cameras, computer data bases and more recently A.I.
2/
WAAS has had a rocky and politically charged history (See 2011 text below) but the data fusion technology has gotten to the point that more and more cameras can be networked together over larger areas with the data saved for later analysis.
War with Iran has kicked off and both the Trump Adm. and Israel have gone for Iranian Regime change with oil export, leadership decapitation, air defense & Iranian missile site strikes.
"The U.S. strikes are focused on Iran’s missile program and missile launchers. The Israeli strikes are focused on eliminating senior Iranian officials and on the missile program"
Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Al-Salem Base in Kuwait, Al-Dhafra Air Base in the Emirates, and the US Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain were all reportedly hit by IRGC Ballistic missiles.
"Preliminary reports suggest the UAV was likely launched from an Iranian naval vessel — a move that would significantly extend its operational range and time over target."
This means the world has changed so radically that any US Army officer higher than Captain is negative value added on a drone battlefield because their professional military education is as obsolete 1930's US Horse cavalrymen Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures were in 1944.
The problem for an independent EU nuclear deterrence force is sheer numbers, the EU lack of them.
What the Putinists have proven is that Western deterrence assumptions about "acceptable losses" were naive mirrored thinking, attributing Western values to Russia.
The assumption of credible "deterrent effect" has to be shifted into the loss band of annihilation of threat forces - anything less than that, as the Ukraine war proves, is an acceptable loss for the Putinists.
We are at over a million Russian casualties to date.
That means a 200 kiloton nuke in either St. Petersburg or Moscow, or dozens of tactical nukes into airfields & missile fields across Western Russia as an EU nuclear response to a Russian first strike are acceptable at a minimum.