bear in mind this will only work on extremely sunny days … and lets face it sunshine will not go 30cm deep into soil - and mines will not have sufficiently energy stored to radiate warmth back through 30cm of soil.
there was a best-case scenario, where mines were laid out on the open ground (highish grass) … so that did work for a nice IR-photo-op … but just put a couple of them mines underground and it will blow sappers up - just enough to not make this not practicable
if you have november-fog-soup-weather for days on end, where its overcast and 0° … then everything will have 0°C and hence no thermal signature to speak of.
So I’m not sure what the discussion is about. When the sun comes out it heats up the ground regardless of how much fog is present. Objects of different densities and thermal characteristics are visible because they exchange thermal heat at different rates.
I think that, if I found myself in need of mine-clearing, I’d use every detection technique I had at my disposal, because missing any means that someone will have a very bad day. Doubtless IR finds some of them, but probably not all, and probably not all the same ones that other techniques would. Bring on the IR, and the ground-penetrating radar, and the ground-penetrating sonar, and the trained bees, and the magnetometers, and whatever else you’ve got.
No, that’s not a joke. One of their advantages is they’re only about three pounds so too light to set of the landmines. Of course, the Ukrainian climate might not be congenial for them for part of the year.
| Russia Overcomes Sanctions to Expand Missile Production
Moscow’s missile production now exceeds prewar levels, officials say, leaving Ukraine especially vulnerable this coming winter.[/quote]
Ukraine does not have enough air defense systems to cover the entire country, and must pick the sites it defends. An increased barrage of missiles could overwhelm the country’s air defenses, Ukrainian officials said.
[Russian] military production has not only recovered but surged.
Before the war, one senior Western defense official said, Russia could make 100 tanks a year; now they are producing 200.
Western officials also believe Russia is on track to manufacture two million artillery shells a year — double the amount Western intelligence services had initially estimated Russia could manufacture before the war.
American and Western officials say there is some good news. Russian production is still not keeping pace with how fast the military is burning through ammunition. For example, even though Russia is on pace to produce two million rounds of ammunition a year, it fired about 10 million rounds of artillery last year.
Information on Russian manufacturing capabilities must, by necessity, come from Russian sources – I’m sure Putin is doing everything he can to make as many weapons as he can, but I’m very skeptical that Russian sources would be accurate on their true manufacturing capabilities.
Not necessarily. Via satellite we can watch factories and see how much stuff goes in and out how often. Etc. It’s not merely taking Munitions Factory #123 Director Yakov Smirnoff’s word in a press release that he can produce 1.5 million shells per year.
Perun did a video last week on Russian production.
TLDW: Actual Russian production has increased and still is increasing. But there is also a lot of equipment being “produced” by pulling old Soviet stocks out of storage and reactivating it.
Why has the intel on Russia’s capabilities been so poor? Pre-war, the image seemed to be that Russia was a war machine and would have been able to steamroll through Ukraine. That wasn’t the case. The intel community seemed surprised Russia’s military performed so poorly and got bogged down. Early in the war the intel community was saying that Russia would quickly run out of stock and the sanctions would limit their ability to keep producing. That wasn’t the case, either. There’s always going to be some uncertainty with this sort of intel, but from what we’ve seen with this war, it seems like the intel has been about as accurate as day 10 of the 10-day weather forecast.