I was corrected in an earlier thread (and rightly so) when I suggested that. Apparently the US doesn’t make or deploy those cluster warheads anymore, and hasn’t for quite a while. There was an unacceptably high dud rate combined with questionable effectiveness.
They got replaced with the M30A1 warhead, which is basically somewhere between the WWI-style Shrapnel shells and a modern HE/fragmentation warhead, in that it has something like 180,000 tiny tungsten balls surrounded by 200 lbs of HE and goes off what looks like 5-10 feet above the ground.
Beyond that, I’m sure there are casing fragments that get blown outward, and those could account for the puffs of dust that are further out. But it could be a regular old HE/frag warhead too… it does look a lot like it hit the ground when it detonated.
Worth mentioning that Russian warrant officers are very different from western NCO’s. For the most part they’re basically specialized arms guys and have little command responsibilities. The Russian army is a very top-down organization which is almost certainly why there has been such a seemingly high Russian general casualty rate by western standards. Russian generals tend to lead from the front more than western commanders do. Warrant officers meanwhile are not highly regarded or leaned on by their superiors because the best conscripts are recruited into officer schools.
So losing experienced contract NCOs IS a real problem for Russia. The contract troops kinda know what they are doing, unlike most of the under-trained conscripts. But much less so from an organizational, leadership and command & control sense, because Russian doctrine doesn’t lean on them much for that.
It’s the Daily Beast, supposedly drawing from Ukranian Intelligence, so who knows if accurate. They are asserting that Russia has secondary lines of troops whose job is to simply shoot those trying to escape the front lines.
The story is built from a purported intercepted phone call between a Russian soldier and his wife. In the call he describes being dropped off behind the frontlines while fromer inmates are taking towards the frontline. His job is to shoot any trying to run away. Supposedly, there is a third line behind him to catch those who run from the second line.
$275 Million in Additional Presidential Drawdown Security Assistance for Ukraine
Oct. 28, 2022 |
Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announces the authorization of a Presidential Drawdown of security assistance valued at up to $275 million to meet Ukraine’s critical security and defense needs. This authorization is the Biden Administration’s twenty-fourth drawdown of equipment from DoD inventories for Ukraine since August 2021.
Capabilities in this package include:
Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS); billions of ball bearings or unitary warhead not specified.
500 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds; most certainly Excalibur.
2,000 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) Systems;
More than 1,300 anti-armor systems; AT4 or possibly some Javelin.
125 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs);
Small arms and more than 2,750,000 rounds of small arms ammunition;
Note that US DoD is looking to buy Soviet/Russian pattern AK-74 rifles, these are chambered for 5.45x39mm rounds unlike US 5.56x45mm or older AK-47 in 7.62x39mm.
I’ve seen reports that the Admiral Makarov was damaged and another that says a minesweeper was damaged. No confirmation from reliable sources as of yet.
Interesting. So little info, not even known if it’s a delivery system or a kamikaze boat.
While the video may be edited somewhat, the Russian attempts to attack it are extremely ineffective. It could be made of something like fiberglass that doesn’t return a good radar signal. It seems like the Russians could actually see it towards the end and the amount of fire at it is pitiful. They should have been able to put hundreds of rounds at it if needed.
I’ll have to go back and see if the fire is coming from the helo or the boat. If from the boat, no wonder the helo cleared out so quick. It was almost on top of it at the beginning. Great video!
