Daan

Aside from the brief duration of the current flare-up, Israel of course profited from the attention going to the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the season when even the most rabid activists are languishing somewhere on a beach. Footage from a rocket that went astray:

T-90M with roof screen, great marketing:ttps://i.imgur.com/ST7U6aG.jpg[/img]

Given the losses, it is taking more old tanks out of storage:

Alleged Russian T-80 going up in a spectacular explosion after being hit:

Current example: http://www.twitter.com/ELINTNews/status/1556000653801320448

Why trolling? In videos from previous escalations you could see rockets being launched from the Gaza strip and then falling from the sky without ever having left said strip, frequently following wild trajectories. Part of the Gaza rockets are primitive designs of poor quality and reliability, produced in clandestine workshops.

The IDF conducted a bombing of an IJ commander in Gaza today:

Interesting data. What appears to reduce the practical accuracy, as seen in the video, is that the rocket salvos are not launched from a fixed-wing aircraft diving steadily down onto the target, but from a helicopter whilst performing a pop-up maneuver and the missile pods taking a brief moment to empty themselves fully. Especially the later rockets in the sequence seems have a tendency to course along a somewhat deviant angle.

Unfair criticism. In the video's I have seen of AH-64s, AH-1 and Tigers in Iraq and Afghanistan the rocket runs were made from closer distances and thus under less elevation resulting in much more concentrated fires. Similar videos came from Russian helicopters operating in Syria. The threat environment was of course different there. In the current Russian invasion of Ukraine the rockets are sometimes launched in nearly 40 degrees of elevation creating a very large degree of dispersion. One wonders what the targets were in these attacks. In another video you see the rocket volley impacting all over a town with no living sole or vehicle in sight, seemingly completely ineffective.

Thermal imagery from the Russian helicopter rocket artillery and the dispersion resulting from this launch method:

Azerbaijan is opportunistically using Russia's preoccupation elsewhere to very gradually subdue and capture the rest of NK, which had been left in rather weird and probably untenable configuration after the ceasefire with a poorly connected central Armenian enclave. One wonders whether the concurrent Iranian moves are all show, or not.

The Chinese sample amounts to just 24 Su-35s, which given the size of the PLAAF and PLANAF, seems a little more than a batch for trial and evaluation to find out where Russian Flanker technology currently stands and what could be applied / reverse engineered to enhance China's domestic ongoing Flanker production. The fact that additional batches have not been acquired is telling.

An aspect of this modern war that I find interesting is the really marginal role of combat helicopters overall, as well as transport helicopters when it comes to operations near or across the front lines in the face of a ubiquitous MANPAD threat (and ATGM threat for slow moving ones). In the opening stages of the conflict and the first two months thereafter we saw a string of videos of shot downs of various Russian and Ukrainian helicopters as well as cockpit footage. This imagery has mostly dried up. Combat helicopters have been relegated to a form of expensive 'ersatz rocket artillery,' lobbing unguided rockets from increasingly steeper angles and larger distances, to maintain a safe stand-off range, and wildly throwing flares during the required pop-up maneuvers, as seen in the video below. While US AH-64s and UH-60s in Iraq had already adapted NOE flying to decrease the window in which they could be engaged, combat and transport helicopters in this conflict now literally cruise below 10 meters of AGL to avoid being shot down. Large scale troop insertions of heliborne troops near, let alone across, the front lines have not been seen after the Russian disaster at Hostomel airport. After the 1st Gulf War many countries invested in combat helicopters following the successes of the AH-64 and AH-1 against Saddam's forces. Others, including my own country, also invested in the creation of brigades of heliborne troops. While such forces are perfectly adequate to operate in extended areas during the then fashionable peacekeeping and peace-enforcing operations where the opposition was mostly armed with small arms and MANPADs were relatively scarce, the current applicability of these expensive assets seems really limited versus a well-armed opponent. The investment in and maintenance of such forces seems questionable. What is the point of a manned future reconnaissance helicopter, as in the American 'Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft' program, especially if its kept back from the front lines out of fear it may be lost? How many UAVs and UCAVs of various types could you buy for single helicopter and crew? Should these programs be abandoned? Of course you could combine a manned helicopter, such as the AH-64E, with drones, but what is the point of the manned helicopter itself? You may just well hang a hellfire missile of a UCAV.

PFM-1 demining tactics:

Do these UN commissions have a capability to really influence the security situation in this region? If not, why post these links? While these institutions had an important propaganda role in the 1990s and early 2000s, with the current Israeli-Arab rapprochement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict leaving the center stage, they have been relegated to being mere job creation schemes for various pompous mediocrities aspiring to a career in the international arena. The current composition of the UNHRC is, as usually, laughable and sucks all moral authority out of its lofty proclamations.