Well, the nickname actually comes from the original BG series.
I remember the two names both being used at the time.
Modern chaff is made of ultra-thin bits of mylar chopped up to resemble the aftermath of a man’s haircut. It would do exactly zero to a power station. Any chaff that happened to connect anything live would be vaporized by just a couple amps of power and the utility wouldn’t even notice the microscopic fluctuation in power flow. Besides that, any single piece of modern chaff is far too small physically to bridge the large air gaps between conductors running at different voltages or phases in any substation
You may as well throw a handful of sawdust at a speeding locomotive and expect that mighty impact to stop it dead on the tracks.
Bringing it back around to the primary topic, I wonder what the Ukrainian pilots will call it?
while there, why not explode a “RealBomb ™” at a substation and call it a day?
I assume that BLU-14Bs are a lot cheaper, and sometimes you don’t want to wreck stuff, you just want to mess it up just enough to knock it out of commission.
Save the limited number* of big booms for targets you sincerely want dead.
*Granted, it’s a large number, but still finite.
For a place you intend to soon occupy or liberate, not just destroy vandal-style (read “Putin-style”), doing mild damage that puts things out of commission for a few hours or days is better than destroying it completely when it’ll be your people putting it back together and dealing with the consequences until it is.
e.g. During the opening of Desert Storm the various US attacks on Baghdad’s electrical system were intended to shut everything down for a few hours so the rest of the attack could occur in darkness and with maximum confusion and outages affecting the defenders. Yes, lots of important military nodes have backup generators. but not all, and not all are going to work when called upon.
The US fully expected that real soon they’d be administrating Baghdad and any infrastructure damage there would be their problem. Which proved to be the case.
Two points I’ve surmised from listening/reading various expert takes. I might have oversimplified so may not be accurate.
One of the objectives of this invasion was aimed solely at Washington. To show America the world wouldn’t end if Ukraine invaded Russia, and to get Washington to remove any restrictions it has on Ukraine/use of weapons, etc. So far, the Russian response has been laughable, and certainly no nukes, nothing dramatic. If true, Washington was probably not in on the planning of the invasion. I’ve heard the Brits were (per a Guardian article), and they do have a track record of planning independently (whereas Germany would be more reluctant to help plan this without US approval).
Also, one “clean” way of hurting Russian morale is POWs. Especially if they are conscripts. Certainly helps with negotiations.
The other aspect is that it’s far easier to invade a place like Kursk than Crimea. Hence, getting Russia to swap Kursk back in return for Crimea would be a lot easier than actually invading Crimea itself.
ISTM the Ukrainians are quite capable of planning an invasion without deeply involved help.
What is useful to them that only big powers like US or UK can provide is persistent overhead recon deep into enemy territory. To be able to say with confidence e.g. “The region for a few hundred kilometers deep around Laputa has a rather heavy presence of Russian military and internal security troops, whereas the region around Kursk has almost none.”
That would inform Ukraine where along the border might be the most profitable place to strike. How and when with what can be left up to them.
Though not as “clean”, I’ve recently thought that snatching Russian civilians in the newly occupied areas, and bringing them back to heavily damaged parts of Ukraine for a “tour” (while being treated fairly and well) for a few weeks, and then returned to Russia, might be a useful tool.
I don’t know why you would condemn innocent Russian civilians to being executed by the Russian FSB or Russian military government in the conflict area for knowing too much colluding with the enemy.
That’s a good point that never occurred to me but should have.
Would be a good time for a PR campaign of “Stalin kept Kursk, Putin lost it.”
Putin has lost Kursk twice. The first time at the very beginning of his reign, and he screwed that up big time (a mistake from which he later admittedly learned a lot). And now a second time, where he has forgotten the lessons learned 24 years ago.
I see poetic justice at play here, but that may be my impartiality.
Or lack thereof.
The BBC’s Russia correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, bought this up in an article today
Kursk.
It is one of the first words I wrote and spoke as a BBC correspondent.
The Kursk sinking having been a major naval tragedy on Putin’s watch adds another delicious layer of Schadenfreude to the whole thing.
The word Kursk is definitely his personal Kryptonite.
Well, not until 12 years later.
Thank you.
Whoops. Bad terminology on my part. It was 22 days from the opening air raid when the USA invaded Iraq w intent to regime-change until the US was administering their erstwhile capital city.
As you rightly say, that wasn’t Desert Storm. That was Iraqi Freedom.
Time for someone to edit that near the end of the movie clip from “The Hunt for Red October” where the Soviet ambassador ask for help again
“Vladimir, you’ve lost another Kursk?”