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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Day 293: Another Quick Update & Patriots!

War for Ukraine Day 293: Another Quick Update & Patriots!

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What? You can’t get more Patriot than Sam the Eagle! And that’s the big news, originally reported by Voice of America News:

CNN hass additional details that the Biden administration is finalizing plans to send Patriot batteries to Ukraine:

The Biden administration is finalizing plans to send the Patriot missile defense system to Ukraine that could be announced as soon as this week, according to two US officials and a senior administration official.

The Pentagon’s plan still needs to be approved by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin before it is sent to President Joe Biden for his signature. The three officials told CNN that approval is expected.

Ukraine has been calling for the US to send the advanced long-range air defense system that is highly effective at intercepting ballistic and cruise missiles as it comes under a barrage of Russian missile and drone attacks that have destroyed key infrastructure across the country. It would be the most effective long-range defensive weapons system sent to the country and officials say it will help secure airspace for NATO nations in eastern Europe.

It is not clear how many missile launchers will be sent but a typical Patriot battery includes a radar set that detects and tracks targets, computers, power generating equipment, an engagement control station and up to eight launchers, each holding four ready to fire missiles.

Once the plans are finalized, the Patriots are expected to ship quickly in the coming days and Ukrainians will be trained to use them at a US Army base in Grafenwoehr, Germany, officials said.

Ukraine has been asking for the system for months but the logistical challenges of delivering it and operating it are immense. Despite those obstacles, “the reality of what is going on the ground” led the administration to make the decision, the senior administration official told CNN, noting the continuing intense Russian missile barrages.

I’ll have more analysis from Rob Lee after we cover President Zelenskyy’s address. Video of that below, English transcript after the jump:

Good health to you, fellow Ukrainians!

Today was a very fruitful day for Ukraine. In different aspects.

We have very good news from France – two conferences in support of Ukraine were held there today. Their first result is €1 billion in aid to our resilience, primarily energy.

Every day we gain new strength for Ukraine to get through this winter, and I thank everyone who works for this and who helps our state.

Today, we also have decisions from other countries, besides France, – the Czech Republic, Spain, Switzerland – to provide additional support packages. The Italian Senate passed a decision on armed support. Norway is preparing a new program to support our state and people…

I took part in both conferences in Paris today. The first concerned to a greater extent our interstate relations. The second forum was focused on French business.

Ukrainian government officials presented French entrepreneurs with opportunities to invest in Ukraine already now, when the war is still going on, and after our victory. We also discussed what we can do additionally to strengthen our state at the European level.

Today in France, the First Lady of Ukraine presents humanitarian projects to our partners. What can be done as quickly as possible to support our people in the field of healthcare, education and humanitarian aid, in particular through Olena’s Foundation. And I am grateful to all the French for their support of Ukraine – not only political, not only defense and sanctions, which is vitally important. But also for the fact that we equally perceive the need to protect the value of human life, human dignity and the humanitarian opportunities that the modern world gives to everyone.

I spoke with President of the European Council Charles Michel. I thanked for the decision regarding 18 billion euros for Ukraine next year and for increasing the European Peace Facility by 2 billion euros. These funds can greatly help us maintain social stability. I am also preparing to participate in the meeting of the European Council on December 15.

I have just addressed the parliament and people of New Zealand, a country that has fundamentally supported us since the first weeks of full-scale Russian aggression. I’ve told about our peace formula, about the special summit that we are convening to implement our formula. And I called on New Zealand to take the lead in supporting at the international level one of the clauses of the peace formula – the one related to environmental security and demining.

New Zealand is one of those countries that understands that the destruction of the natural environment is equal to the destruction of life, and that can help the diplomatic mobilization of its region in order to implement the Ukrainian peace formula.

And one more thing.

Today I signed the Law adopted by the Verkhovna Rada on the liquidation of the District Administrative Court of Kyiv. This story is over. And the story of reforms continues – continues even during such a war.

Thank you to everyone who works for Ukraine!

Thank you to everyone who is fighting for our independence, who is currently at the front, who is currently struggling! We support you, we strongly believe in you.

Glory to all our warriors! 

Glory to our indomitable people! 

Glory to Ukraine!

Here is Marine veterans and current Foreign Policy Research Institute Senior Fellow Rob Lee’s analysis of the big news:

LTG (ret) Hertling also has some analysis for us:

And that is really the key question: has there been any prior training on the Patriot system by any of the Ukrainian Soldiers that NATO allies have been training or are they going to just be getting a crash course at Graf? The CNN reporting seems to indicate the latter, but I expect we’ll soon learn for sure one way or the other.

It is also nice to see responses like this:

As I’ve written here before in regards to migrants that try to reach the US to seek asylum and refuge, the American flag is supposed to symbolize hope, freedom, and safety for those folks, as well as for those unfortunately in the situation that Ukrainians find themselves. So it is nice to see it being viewed that way.

Here is former NAVDEVGRU Squadron Leader Chuck Pfarrer’s most recent assessment of the situation in Bakhmut:

Here’s a British MOD video analysis of the Ukrainian advances so far:

Rob Lee also brings us news of a new indictment involving Russian attempts to smuggle ammunition and sensitive technologies out of the US and into Russia:

One of our commenters, and since I can remember if they use a nym or not they can ID themselves in comment if they like, sent me this post earlier today from Mastodon:

First off: thanks! I’ve now seen other confirmation:

This was preceded by what the usual suspects would call a shadowban:

Now we have to wait until someone does some actual reporting and explains whether this is a deliberate action taken by the Starlink Snowflake or something else is going on. I know which way I’m leaning given the Starlink Snowflake’s statements and actions regarding Ukraine over the two months or so, including Ian Bremmer’s reporting that the Starlink Snowflake had spoken with Putin:

That’s enough for tonight.

Your daily Patron!

And something a bit more upbeat:

And a new video from Patron’s official TikTok:

@patron__dsns

Оцініть мій стиль від 1 до 100😂 #песпатрон

♬ original sound – boiwhatdahelllboi1

The caption machine translates as:

Rate my style from 1 to 100😂 #PatrontheDog

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    randal sexton

    Just read somewhere that putin’s Air Force one is on its way to Venezuela.  No indication he is in it.  My guess is that it has 10% of the washing machines looted from Ukraine.  Of course the ten percent is just my guess as to what putins cut is.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    I know Elon can’t be charged with treason against the US, because the US is technically not a belligerent in this war. What would he have to do for Ukraine to consider him as significantly abetting the Russian side, and what could they do about that?

  6. 6.

    Lyrebird

    @cain: I hope you’re wrong.  Not because I have any good reason to think so, just because Starlink would be that much harder to replace than Twitter.

  7. 7.

    Alison Rose

    A GOOD BOY, INDEED!!! I’m kind of surprised Patron is still doing the demining work, but maybe they just couldn’t keep him away from his favorite thing: digging digging digging.

    I hope we can get the Patriot system to them as quickly as is feasible, and I hope there is much more where that came from.

    I was glad to hear Zelenskyy’s positive comments about France, since Macron has at times been……..uh, frustrating, let’s say. This was also nice to see:

    Україна не одна.
    L’Ukraine n’est pas seule.
    Ukraine is not alone.
    With the help of friends, it will overcome all challenges and only become stronger.
    — Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) December 13, 2022

    Also too, of course, fuck Muskrat. If he wants to do putin’s bidding so badly, he can just fly his ass to moscow and crawl around after him like the pathetic junkyard dog he is.

    Thank you as always, Adam.

  8. 8.

    MagdaInBlack

    I did not think it was possible to despise musk more than I already did, but turns out it is.

  9. 9.

    Anoniminous

    Job training for a PATRIOT launching station enhanced operator requires 10 weeks of Basic Combat Training and 13 weeks of Advanced Individual Training with on-the-job instruction That’s the easy part. It takes 53 weeks to learn how to maintain the system. So if they can’t find mercenaries already trained on the Patriot Missile System they will be deployed to Ukraine sometime in January of 2024.

  11. 11.

    Carlo Graziani

    If the Patriot decision is being finalized now, it must have been stirring around the guts of the Pentagon for a month at least, maybe two, possibly even since the beginning of the missile offensive.  It’s not actually implausible that during that time a few Ukrainian officers should have been deniably given at least some preliminary training on Patriot systems, to speed up the final train-up when a decision that was thought likely came through.

  18. 18.

    Repatriated

    @Carlo Graziani: Ukrainian Patriot mechanic calls up NATO tech support on a Zoom call to sort out issue…never mind. It’s not really that funny.

    I have a vague recollection that something very much like that happened with another NATO weapons system early in the war. The UA operator called a US army reservist he knew from joint training a while prior.

    Don’t recall the details though.

  19. 19.

    Geminid

    @Anoniminous: I think Ukraine has a lot of potential Patriot missile operators who won’t need the 10 weeks of basic training. So that would advance the schedule. And they have experienced operators of Russian type SAM-3 batteries. These could be quick learners. Similarly, experienced Ukrainian missile maintenance specialists should have transitive skills that would give them a head start learning maintence for this weapon system.

    All that is to say that it might not take as long for Ukraine to deploy Patriot missiles on the battlefield as you project.

  20. 20.

    counterfactual

    I’m not worried about Starlink going down in Ukraine. In the hoopla over the success of Artemis I, a “NASA official” said they had a personal conversation with Space-X second in command Gwynne Shotwell assuring that Musk’s person chaos is not affecting the delivery of the lunar Human Landing System. I’m guessing that the official was NASA head Bill Nelson. I know Shotwell has her issues, ignoring her boss’s racism and affairs, but she is very good dealing with the customers at NASA and DoD. She’s made it clear she’s in charge at Space-X while Musk is distracted.

  21. 21.

    Anoniminous

    More to the point would be to send a couple of hundred General Atomic MQ-9 Reapers – or equivalent Class – to kill Russian artillery. And a dozen or so GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators to take out the approaches to the Kerch Strait bridge and maybe roust up the specs for the Grand Slam Bomb and see what damage they can do when allied with a JDAM package.

  22. 22.

    Bill Arnold

    More details:
    Musk “cut off” Ukrainians from Twitter – an important function is unavailable (Denis Ponomarenko, DECEMBER 13, 2022)
    Probably related to, or maybe disguised by, this:
    How Elon botched his war on bots (Casey Newton, Zoë Schiffer, Dec 13, 2022)
    It affected other countries, too. (IIRC, Russia blocks twitter. But unblocked-by-twitter Russian phone numbers could be used to set up an account (and used for 2FA) in Russia using some sort of unlocked proxy.)

  23. 23.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Anoniminous: ​
      They aren’t going to be training raw recruits on the Patriot. I would bet that they could up to speed on the system in 6-8 weeks.

    @Adam at Top: No way Graf is big enough for any Patriot training that involves a live fire exercise. And if you are going do live fire, there is no real need to go to Graf. Yeah, it was a nitpick, but Graf is one thing I do know.

  25. 25.

    Tim C,

    Random, barely tangential question:

    Ever get the sense Sam the Eagle would have been a Republican right up until the second Bush Presidency?      Like, seriously,  he was a classic conservative,  but not a movement “Conservative.”

  27. 27.

    sdhays

    @Bill Arnold: Oh, please. “Botched” his “war on bots”. He loves bots. He only cared about them briefly when he was flailing around for a way to get out of his stupid deal.

    All of Twitter’s supposed uptake in “engagement” is probably bot driven.

  28. 28.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Anoniminous: Again, that is starting from zero.  We are probably talking about guys who do this with another system learning how to do this one.  Maybe not the 6-8 weeks it would take the operators, but there is no way it would take over a year to switch.  I know of battalions that switched wholesale from M110A2 howitzers to M270 MLRS over the course of three months.  That was during peacetime; things move faster during a war.

  29. 29.

    Bill Arnold

    @sdhays:

    Oh, please. “Botched” his “war on bots”. He loves bots.

    I think he’s stupider than you do, perhaps. :-)
    He’s gullible and easily manipulated, for sure.

  33. 33.

    oldster

    I’m glad Ukr is getting Patriots. They will need to use them sparingly, on high-value targets. Not, eg, Shahed drones that can be brought down with shells from a Gephard. You don’t want your defense to cost more than what they are firing at you, and Patriots cost hundreds of thousands a pop.

    But Ukr has proven that they know how to do this, with the Himars systems. Those are also expensive units, but Ukraine has made everyone of them pay rich dividends.

  34. 34.

    David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch

    Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be holding his annual year-end marathon news conference this month amid the war in Ukraine. Observers have attributed the rare break in the long-held tradition to the Kremlin’s uneasiness about a string of battlefield setbacks.

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed Monday that Putin wouldn’t hold the annual news conference for the first time in 10 years.

    Cancel culture

  36. 36.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Adam L Silverman: All that being said, Graf’s ability have both knee deep mud and choking levels of light gray dust at the same time in violation of all the laws of physics is a trainer’s dream.

  42. 42.

    Jay

    Epic fail on Russian TV: channel interviewed a man who returned from Ukrainian capture, to talk about "horrors of Ukrainian captivity". The man goes on to tell they were treated well, fed 3 times a day, rights read out in full, the Geneva Convention properly followed. pic.twitter.com/EgMOxMxhY4— Dmitri (@wartranslated) December 13, 2022

  46. 46.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Bill Arnold:  going by that article it sounds like Phony Stack doesn’t understand how the internet works and is assuming  bot is any two or more accounts with the same IP address and is banning whole countries.

    And then there is this

    On Friday, Musk sent an email to Twitter employees threatening to sue people who leak confidential information to the press, Platformer was the first to report. “If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when joining Twitter, you accept liability to the full extent of the law and Twitter will immediately seek damages,” he wrote. Employees had until 5 PM PT on Saturday to sign a pledge indicating they understood.

    Some Twitter employees failed to respond because they were not checking their email over the weekend. On Sunday, they found their access to Twitter’s systems had been cut off.

    Then a second email went out: this time, employees were asked to email the people team reaffirming their commitment to stick to their NDAs by December 15, 2022.

    The man is a complete idiot.

  48. 48.

    way2blue

    @randal sexton:

    I recently read a rumor that the Russian ‘ruling class’ was looking for safe refuge to flee to when Ukraine wins the war.  Venezuela was on the short list.

  49. 49.

    way2blue

    @cain:

    I’ve been worried about Musk reneging on Starlink In Ukraine ever since he began acting out.  Or trying to shake down the U.S. & Ukraine for more $$ to subsidize his Twitter debacle.  Since Musk doesn’t actually run Starlink—I’m hoping the U.S. can insist that its techs keep it running.

  50. 50.

    Randal Sexton

    @oldster: Hmm, wouldn’t it be ok to make your defense cost less that what will get destroyed if it is not available ? I think that is a more appropriate metric.

  51. 51.

    dr. luba

    Patron: “Patronchyk,” they said, “We bought you such a stylish winter coat….”

    And for something entirely different, Ukrainian humor. During Zelenskyy’s recent interview with David Letterman, the president decided to tell a joke about how Odesans discussed the war.

    Two Odesans met. And one said to the other:
    – Well, how is the situation there, what do they say?
    – They say war.
    – What kind of war?
    – Russia is at war with NATO!
    – Seriously?!
    – Yes, yes, war, Russia is at war with NATO.
    – And what, how is it there?
    – Well, how is it… 70 thousand Russian soldiers killed, all the
    missiles are almost spent, a lot of equipment has broken, blown up. This is the situation.
    – What about NATO?
    – What about NATO? NATO hasn’t arrived yet!

  52. 52.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    So now that Russia ran threw most of its missile inventory allegedly Russia’s latest cunning plan (in the Black Adder sense) is to take An-2 Biplanes, which are normally used for crop dusting and recreational sky diving,  fill them with explosives, fly them at Ukraine and then pilots bails out as an improvised suicide drone.

    https://youtu.be/z7I3Illsuqg

  53. 53.

    Lyrebird

    @Grumpy Old Railroader: Yes I did too.  And the bio of the journalist you linked to is pretty interesting as well!

     

    ETA: I guess the government officials in Kyiv figured, hey, if the Bakhmut sanitation workers are still out there dealing with the trash, we had better keep up!   j/k but seriously impressed

  55. 55.

    Another Scott

    @Carlo Graziani: There supposedly are people at the Pentagon who are thinking about all kinds of scenarios all the time (there were war plans for how the US might fight Canada and the UK and the rest of the British Empire before WWII).  So, I think you’re right that plans were available that could be dusted off quickly.

    I also wonder if the stories a few weeks ago about Poland and Germany moving Patriot batteries around was more than indirectly related to this. A trial balloon, or misdirection for VVP. Who knows.

    I wish that we had been less reticent about sending these antiaircraft systems earlier, but things rarely happen quickly in real life.

    Slava Ukraini!!

    Thanks Adam.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  56. 56.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Repatriated: Your recollection is exact.  It was a Javelin expert, who got contacted via Reddit and Zoom, and was helping Ukrainian soldiers literally in the field, facing RU tanks and AFVs, and saving their lives with advice  and instructions in realtime.  I remember reading about it.

  57. 57.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Another Scott: I’m not enough of a student of history to know, but I do wonder if in the runup to WWII, we were doing the same sort of fidgeting/are-we-in-or-out with weapons deliveries to the UK.  Not that that justifies our reluctance today: just that, well, I remember Churchill’s aphorism about “The Yanks” who do the right thing, only after having exhausted all the alternatives.  He wasn’t wrong.

  58. 58.

    Another Scott

    @way2blue: <a href=”https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/courts/story/2022-12-04/three-months-after-fat-leonard-escaped-feds-remain-mum-on-details”>Fat Leonard escaped and fled to Venezuela.</a>  He was arrested by Interpol and the US has an extradition treaty with them, though apparently hasn’t yet filed the paperwork (for whatever reason).

    <a href=”https://www.npr.org/2022/11/26/1139284014/biden-venezuela-oil-sanctions”>Biden has eased oil sanctions on Venezuela as they’ve started talking to opposition political leaders</a>.

    Venezuela would not seem to be an automatically safe place for non-USians any more.

    We’ll see!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  59. 59.

    Another Scott

    HTML fail after some FYWP lockup…

    I fixy!

    @way2blue: Fat Leonard escaped and fled to Venezuela.  He was arrested by Interpol and the US has an extradition treaty with them, though apparently hasn’t yet filed the paperwork (for whatever reason).

    Biden has eased oil sanctions on Venezuela as they’ve started talking to opposition political leaders.

    Venezuela would not seem to be an automatically safe place for non-USians any more.

    We’ll see!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  60. 60.

    Carlo Graziani

    Here’s an opinion piece from the Moscow Times reflecting on the significance of the episode of the Dozhd TV channel losing its broadcasting license in Latvia for the condition of Russian exiles, and the resistance to Putinism. I think it deserves to be read with sympathy and understanding.

  61. 61.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Carlo Graziani: I read it.  And I tried hard to understand this guy Rogov’s position.  Fuck that and fuck him.  We can see every day so-called “Russian liberals” in the West, with their bleating about “tourist visas” and such.  We don’t need him to tell us all about it.

    If and when America goes Fascist, and if I emigrate, I won’t be sitting there telling my hosts that somehow America is great and all, Americans are great, etc.  I’ll be exhorting them to fucking *oppose* America with all their might, b/c America has become a toxic danger to all humanity.

    Hell, right before the 2020 election, that’s what I told my European friends, just in case things went South: if the shit hits the fan, then remember that I asked you to opposed my country with everything you got, with everything you got.

    And something more: by this guy Rogov’s *own description*, what this TV Rain host did was well-known to us: it’s called “bothsidesing”.  He was trying to appeal to *Russian moral black holes* by displaying sympathy for Russian soldiers in the field, murdering innocent Ukrainians.

    Fuck him and fuck Rogov.

    Slava Ukraini!

    ETA: And something more: it’s always these Russians from Moscow/St Pete, with their “oh, you can’t oppose all Russians” bleating.  I’ve read Window on Eurasia (Paul Goble’s blog) for enough year to know that Russia is a *blight* on its subject nations, and that if the Tatars, Karelians, Yakutsk and other oppressed minorities in Russia are to have *any* chance of a decent life, any chance of actually benefiting from their toil and their natural resources, it will come when the Russian Federation is dismembered, taken apart with a cleaver.  It’s an empire, and that, again, is something that almost all “liberal Russians in the West” refuse to admit.

  63. 63.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Carlo Graziani: Yeah, no. Unable to muster sympathy or understanding at this time. Perhaps the view the writer decries as “widely held” is, in fact, widely held for good reasons, and the “good russians” are, in fact, statistically insignificant.

  64. 64.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Gin & Tonic: If “good Russians” in the West were significant in number they’d have been out there facing down the Putinist scum with their rallies.  Instead, they left it to poor Ukrainian refugees to do that work.

    And this bullshit about “oh, we’re afraid of Putin” is suuuuch bullshit: if they’re that afraid of Putin, they should be pushing even harder for Germany and other Western nations to stick it to Putin.  They should be in the offices of every Western official, helping every NGO that pursues that cause.  And they’re *not*, are they.

  65. 65.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Gin & Tonic: I was especially irked by two passages:

    In a bid not to be seen as anti-Russian, Dozhd used the kind of language that could only have been appropriate for a domestic Russian television channel rather than one based, as Dozhd is now, in Latvia.

    [….]

    While this mistake in no way justified the firing of Korestelev immediately afterward, which I categorically condemn

    I mean, W.T.A.F.  Domestic Russian media are all propaganda, and if these fucknuggets don’t believe that, they should go back to Russia and try to publish their shit.  EVERY ONE of these Russians should have at FRONT OF MIND that they’re GUESTS, and their home country is a FUCKING MENACE to their hosts.  I mean, if I were exiled from the US b/c it went Fascist, that’s what I’d start my day thinking about.

    Fucking Russkiy Mir.  Fucking Russkiy Mir

    ETA: Ugh, I’m too angry to think straight.  NO exile Russian media should be thinking in terms of “we have to behave like Russian domestic media (for reasons)”.  B/c that’s the same as saying “we need to kowtow to Putin a bit”.  And that’s the end.  The.  End.

    As the famous Dropkick Murphy’s song demands: “TV Rain, WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?”

  66. 66.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Chetan Murthy: I have Ukrainian friends in Munich – born and raised in Munich, of post WWII immigrants – who all, every one, have recent stories of being out in public, speaking Ukrainian, and being verbally attacked by russians.

  67. 67.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Chetan Murthy: And the Dozhd people in Latvia went to their administrative hearing with the Latvian broadcast regulator bringing no one conversant in Latvian, apparently assuming everyone would speak russian. He must have run out of space to mention that.

  68. 68.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Gin & Tonic: Yes, that too.  I’ve read a ton of stories in the Western press, too.  But what really stands out to me, isn’t those stories, but rather the *absence* of any stories of mass demonstrations by Russian expats in Western countries.  *That* absence, just like the absence of cellphone videos of aliens and Sasquatch, speaks volumes.

  72. 72.

    livewyre

    @Ksmiami: This shouldn’t need saying, but what Russia is doing to Ukraine is categorically the wrong thing to do, no matter who does it. There’s no “they don’t count as human” exception to genocide, because that’s the rationale it starts with. We cannot ever tolerate it. Ever.

  74. 74.

    ColoradoGuy

    I’ve heard Ukrainians refer to Russia as “Muscovy”, which isn’t meant as a slur, but a direct reference to the centuries-long imperial greed of Moscow.

  75. 75.

    oldster

    @Randal Sexton:

    I agree with you, one case at a time: if their cheap drone can destroy your $10 million power station, then it is worth $3 million to take out the drone.

    The trouble comes when you iterate the case: they can make more cheap drones than you can afford $3 million missiles. After you have run out of your last spendy missile, they’ll destroy your power station after all.

    That’s why in the long run, you have to make sure that you are using cheap bullets to shoot down their cheap bullets. And save your expensive defenses, either for the most irreplaceable targets, or for their most expensive bullets, or for whatever your cheap bullets cannot knock down.

    But again. I think the Ukrainians have shown that they are good at this. They will layer the Patriots with the SA-300s with the Gephards with the manpads and use them together to get a sustainable network.

    Honestly, after seeing video of a Gephard taking out a Shehad with a short burst of cheap 30 mil shells, I would like them to get a lot more Gephards. That’s the right response to ruzzia’s flooding in the Iranian drones.

  76. 76.

    Geminid

    @oldster: I believe that the Gephard anti-aircraft system is out of production and there may not be many more that could be supplied to Ukraine. There maybe other systems using similar fire control technology that can fill the need.

    One of several possibilities is a system developed by Israel that might be deployed in this war. A Kyiv Post article dated October 27 and titled “Israel Reportedly Provides Ukraine With Smart Shooter Anti-Drone System,” cites reporting in the Israeli publication Debka:

    .    According to the publication, Israel has supplied the Smart Shooter drone destruction system to Ukraine. These fire control systems are equipped with “smart sight” that detects the location and type of drone and makes it possible to destroy it with small arms. They work on the principle of “One shot, one hit” and are controlled by artificial intelligence.

    ….According to Debka, the system is installed on light aircraft and drones to destroy Iranian drones. Ukrainian Command has not officially commented and the information currently needs to be verified.

    The Dutch military has contracted to purchase (I believe) 200 Smart Shooter systems from the Israeli manufacturer and the US Marine Corps is testing them with an eye towards procuring them.

    Other reports of their provision to Ukraine suggest that they were shipped to entities  in Poland with the knowledge that they would be passed on to Ukraine, and that the Israeli government gave its approval. I think the systems are made to be adapted to various rifles furnished by the purchaser, and could be said to conform to Israel’s declared policy af not supplying weaponry to Ukraine.

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