Dear Readers:
Continuing my review of this piece by Russian war correspondent Dmitry Steshin. Who has spent a lot of time at the front, embedded with Russian units, so he is in a good position to write about these matters.
Where we left off: The American HIMARS turned out to be a tough nut to crack; and almost a game-changer when they first appeared in Ukrainian hands. HIMARS is, of course, an acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. When Russians pronounce this American acronym, it sounds something like “KHEE-mirs” which is similar to the Russian word khimer (“chimera”) from the Greek, of course. This is why Steshin plays with the word and subtitles this section “Crooked Chimeras”. It was urgently necessary for the Russian military to find a solution for this beastly problem; and they did.
Steshin: The first time we were able to defeat a HIMARS was at the start of the battle for Artyomovsk (Bakhmut). GPS navigators on automobiles had stopped working in this region, they could no longer “see” the satellites. I encountered this problem personally, getting lost on the front-line roads near Soledar. My GPS navigator arrow just stopped moving on the screen. Instead I saw a message: “Seeking satellite…” And this went on for dozens of kilometers.
Turned out it was our side that suppressed the satellite feed. But that was only one part of the overall solution. Our crafty “MacGyvers” [yalensis: in the original, it’s a Russian analogue of the American MacGyver, a guy named Ivan Kulibin (1735-1818) who was a mechanical genius and inventor] had figured out how to fool the HIMARS by replacing their actual network of coordinates with a fake one.
I had a chance to see this with my own eyes. A certain object in Donetsk Oblast was shot 5 times with HIMARS, and each time the rockets just fell on some road intersections. The HIMARS, each time, “thinking” they had hit the real target. They had quite a large hole in the asphalt, though.
Unfortunately, the enemy came up with a second series of HIMARS, these are inertial types, and we still haven’t figured out how to defeat them. But I have no doubt our guys will figure it out eventually.
The Wandering Excalibur
Along with the HIMARS, the guided artillery rocket Excalibur also lost its vaunted precision.
It too is equipped with a GPS guidance system and was considered the most advanced of all the American rockets. In the initial phases of the Special Military Operation, its accuracy, according to the Washington Post, was around 55%. But by the fall of 2023, Russian counter-battery had managed to decrease that number to 6%.
A single Excalibur shell costs $100 thousand. And one single precision strike costs around $1.9 million. This is why the Excalibur is no longer used in Ukraine.
Next: The humiliation of the Leopards…
[to be continued]
Awful Avalanche 
“A single Excalibur shell costs $100 million.”
$100 thousand, according to press reports.
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I was thinking it must be a typo…a couple orders of magnitude too much. How else could a “single precision strike” (1.9million) cost 2% of a single shell ($100 million)…
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Excalibur shells are not $100 million a piece. Its over $100,000 a piece.
The Russian equivalent Krasnopol is claimed by one website as being around $35,000. I would not be surprised if it is actually much cheaper. After all, the Excalibur price is as high as it is because it’s a money making business that produces it while the Russian one is mass produced in government owned factories and with much lower labour costs.
Btw, Excalibur supplied to Ukraine is GPS guided, which makes it vulnerable to jamming while Krasnopol shell being used is laser guided via Orlan drones or similar. It may also have GLONASS (GPS equiv) option.
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Sorry, Mr. Domingo, et al, I made a dumb mistake. The Russian:
При этом один снаряд Excalibur стоит $100 тысяч. И одно точное попадание стало обходиться в $1,9 миллиона.
You are right, one shell costs $100 thousand dollars.
I will go back into the post and correct this typo. Thank you for your diligence and eagle eyes!
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There, I went in and fixed that error! Additional apologies, Mr. Domingo, that your comment got lost in spam for whatever reason. I see that you got desperate and posted it 3 times! Well, it had to wait until I got home from work and fished it out of the spam. I don’t know why that happens sometimes, a WordPress quirk. But I am sorry it happened, even though it wasn’t my fault.
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You are apologising too much! All I can say, good thing that WP tries to block spammers. It is not your fault that WP blocked my comment.
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Well, most of the time, spammers ARE spammers, and you can tell at a glance. But I don’t know why their brilliant AI suddenly decides a regular contributor is a spammer, it’s not like you were selling dog food…
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what does “inertial types” of himars mean? thanks… does it mean they don’t rely on satellite?
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Inertial Guidance* refers to the use of gyros and accelerometers to determine speed and direction from it’s origin which creates an analogue of what was called “dead-reckoning”. It does not require external inputs making it almost impervious to jamming, however, while the math behind it is perfect, in practice cumulative error creeps in. As discussed earlier here the Iranians have combined Inertial Guidance with form recognition to correct the small errors that have creeped into the guidance computer, their system can not be jammed although it can be visually spoofed. Ironically, the original cruise missiles used a crude version of this technology.
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FYI the illustration above is meant to demonstrate the principle, today ring laser gyroscopes are used. Needless to say, for the end user, GPS sensors are much less complex and much cheaper to employ. It’s my understanding that commercial aircraft flying around Ukrainia’s conflict exclusion zone suffer a complete loss of their GPS guidance and have to rely on their back-up inertial guidance…just like days of yore.
This giant leap backward is brought to you by the anglicized/English schoolboy mentality that predominates in DC & London. This sociopathic behavior has been forcibly grafted onto all the western capitols…it intertwines dogmatic strains of neocolonial & neo-economics-(fascism) into a single rigid ideology using various forms of 3LA-manufactured terrorism to maintain it’s strict adherence.
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Thank you for these brilliant explanations and illustrations, S!
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yes! ditto yalensis comment – thanks s… very informative technically…
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I agree with a touch of amazement. Mr. Brennan’s explanation was not only detailed but impressively clear. If he chose to write copy in the technical field, he could command high figures in payment. Just sayin’.
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It also helps to explain that whole “dead-reckoning” thing from the maritime world. If I remember my American Literature correctly, towards the end of his quest, Captain Ahab had lost most of his ship’s instruments in the storm and had to fall back on “dead-reckoning” for navigation. I didn’t really understand it, I thought it meant the sailors just had to look up at the stars. But apparently there was another set of instruments involved!?
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Thanks to all for the kind words…
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…another of my OT comments…
File Under; US Sanctions work…at creating high value jobs in Russia !
Russian Companies To Produce Spare Parts For Western-Made Jets
https://aviationweek.com/mro/aircraft-propulsion/russian-companies-produce-spare-parts-western-made-jets
If DC/London’s “leadership” keeps this up…the Russian Renaissance will become the world’s “beacon on the hill” to those who seek to make a living by adding value to objects through the God-given power that’s possessed in human mind, body and spirit. I don’t think DC’s decision-makers are capable of understanding that last sentence because “adding value” is something outside of their life experience. DC’s “leadership” dismissively views people* who make things as interchangeable “widgets”…to be bought and sold on demand, I beg to differ.
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“adding value to objects through the God-given power that’s possessed in human mind, body and spirit….”
Why, I do declare, Mr. Brennan, such thoughts are outright Marxism, have y’all not heard of the Commie fallacy about “the labor theory of value”? Continue to spout such heresy, I swear this will give me the vapors…
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Completely off-topic, but my copy of ‘How The Steel Was Tempered,’ in English translation, arrived today. (Your post about Pavel the Ukrainian soldier, now fighting for the Russians, who had read it as a boy, prompted me to order a copy.)
I’m 90 pages in. Good stuff. The first three chapters cover Pavel’s boyhood – he’s kind of a Bolshevik version of Tom Sawyer – and his labors to keep the family fed, against the background of revolution, then German occupation. Here’s an excerpt from Ch 4, which starts with the town occupied by Petlyura forces:
‘A fierce and merciless class struggle gripped the Ukraine. More and more people took to arms and each clash brought forth new fighters …
‘An avalanche of Petlyura bands of all shades and hues overran the gubernia, led by little chieftains and big, all manner of Golubs, Archangels, Angels and Gordiuses and a host of other bandits …
‘As for the workers, they regarded the yellow-and-blue flags of the Petlyura thugs with suppressed hatred. They were powerless in the face of this wave of Ukrainian bourgeois chauvinism, and their spirits rose only when passing Red units … wedged their way into the town. … [T]hen the unit would move on again and the engulfing gloom return.’
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“a Bolshevik version of Tom Sawyer”
Excellent.
American history also has some genuine Russian characters worth knowing about, noodling Ivan Turchaninov and his wife Nadezhda Lvov will reveal the now torn, threads that intertwined our two nations as they sought to reform themselves. His wife’s loyalty to Ivan is something all men should seek.
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John, nothing is off-topic here, especially not Russian literature!
Yes, the book is very good, and nothing has changed at all in the Ukraine, since those days…
I have read the book several times, and it inspired me in my youth, although I would tend to roll my eyes when it gets to the part where Pavel goes all Stalin-y and they start going after Trotskyite wreckers, and all that nonsense. Up until then, it’s all good though…. Well, I won’t give you any more spoilers, but it does get dark with the hero’s health problems and stuff.
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One thing that fascinates me is how anti-‘woke’ the author makes the early communists appear. Sexual mores in particular seem quite conservative. I was vaguely aware of this already – as a boy in the ’60s and ’70s, I remember reading that Soviet authorities regarded western ‘youth culture’ in general and rock ‘n’ roll in particular as ‘degenerate.’ (They may have been onto something. In fact, pondering my boyhood, I think degeneracy was a huge part of the appeal.)
It’s weird, because the different varieties of ‘critical theory’ – on ‘gender’, race etc – that we collectively call ‘woke’ are often formally referred to, at least by American conservatives, as ‘cultural Marxism.’ Since I grew up in the late 20th century, I understood Marxism primarily as economic theory. It was never hard to understand its appeal to dirt-poor Latino peasants slaving away on banana plantations; the Marines always lurking just offshore, itching to wage one of their Small Wars on your sweaty brown ass if you dared strike or unionize. So I struggle to understand what on Earth ‘gender theory’ and ‘drag-queen story hour’ have to do with Marxism.
Conservatives like NS Lyons (see reason #11) and J Michael Waller trace a fairly convincing lineage from Dzerzhinsky’s alleged early sponsorship of the Institute for Social Research (aka the Frankfurt School), through Herbert Marcuse (who worked for OSS during WW2), the 1960s New Left, and then postmodern thinkers like Foucault, to modern wokeness.
For what it’s worth, Waller (an old Reaganite ‘movement conservative’ whose work I take with a grain of salt) explains it this way (pg 64): He claims that the Soviets targeted Weimar Germany and dispatched communist intellectuals to found the ISR because Germany was so decadent at the time. He says some Marx writings that predate Das Kapital form the basis for critical theory: “The Frankfurt School’s newly arrived intellectuals would exhume the early Marx ravings of 1843, with their critical theories to destroy culture … As an added twist, the Frankfurt School alloyed cultural Marxism with the fast-growing “science” of psychology, itself infused with a neo-Freudian theory of sexual assault on traditional values. Breaking all sexual taboos, especially with alcohol and drugs in a permissive society, would add to the fun and pleasure … [The] revival of the much-forgotten cultural revolutionary side of Marx, merged with neo-Freudianism, would come to America and take root.’
I’m very interested in your take on all this.
In closing … I think I can forgive Ostrovsky for a bit of Stalinism. He was blind and bedridden by then, and purges were underway.
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John, I continue to maintain that “gender theory and drag-queen story hour” have zero to do with Marxism! I find it hysterical that the Trump MAGA-morons call wokies Marxists. I also maintain that there is no such thing as “cultural Marxism”. Marxism is an economic theory, like you said.
Well, to be sure, I reckon you have “kinky” people on every side of the class barricades. In the French Revolution, for example, Robespierre was very puritanical in his attitudes towards sex; whereas his friend and colleague Saint-Just was exactly the opposite.
I mean, the Bolsheviks were modernistic intellectuals for their time, and they stemmed from a Russian intellectual tradition (Chernyshevky, for example) which supported women’s lib. I think that’s their only claim to “woke” is that the Bolsheviks and other forward-thinking socialists of that era believed in women’s liberation and organized working women as a revolutionary force. Engels even wrote the first bible of sorts for women’s lib, “Family, Private Property and the State”. So, the Bolsheviks fought for equality of women workers, etc., and also maybe believed in free love (Chernyshevsky had endorsed a kind of wife-swapping program for in-house use.)
When it came to homosexuality, maybe that was a bridge too far, but even here the Bolsheviks were ahead of their time: after the Revolution they repealed sodomy laws. During the Stalin counter-culture-revolution those laws were reinstated.
As for trannies, well, that was unthinkable up until the 1960’s.
If any of this adds up to Marxist woke, well, I dunno… But it was still all based on the everyday needs of the working class, not on the selfish needs of the bourgeoisie, and that’s what really counts.
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Thanks yalensis, that’s kind of what I thought. At best, then, our right-wingers have latched onto something Marx wrote as a young skull-full-of-mush, and exploited it as a pretext for labeling those ideas ‘Marxist’ (a sort of knee-jerk slur in right-wing circles).
Maybe the Bolsheviks were aware of Marx’ earlier work. Maybe that’s why, throughout the Soviet period, they went out of their way to call it ‘Marx-Leninism.’
Years ago I read Orlando Figes’ 800-pg tome on the Revolution. (Yeah, I know, he’s a Brit. But I expected him to be fairer than Pipes.) He mentioned, in passing, the practice of ‘free love’ among some urban Bolshevik activists. But I don’t recall it being central to their ideology. And I didn’t realize it dated back as far as Chernyshevsky. That’s slightly paradoxical: I haven’t read ‘What Is To Be Done,’ but wasn’t Rakhmetov super ascetic? Wiki tells me he slept on nails and ate only raw steak. I gather free love wasn’t his priority. Sigh … off to Amazon I go. The half-read books are starting to pile up …
I’m sure American feminists, in the 1920s and ’30s, looked to the Soviet example. (Of course they really needed look no further than Wyoming – today still maybe America’s most politically conservative state – whose men voted to give women the vote and let them run for office in 1869.) But by the 1970s the Bolsheviks’ fight for women’s liberation, equal rights and pay – and even free love – seemed to have very little to do with western feminism, which had by then hurled itself into the sewer of nihilism and critical theory. For example, in the ’70s Susan Brownmiller wrote a book, ‘Men, Women and Rape,’ which argued, in essence, that all sex is rape – a line of argument pretty much the obverse of that for free love.
Gender theory is just postmodern feminism’s retarded offspring. Though slow, the young creature has reached that rebellious age, and they/them have turned on Mom. It’s hard to imagine anything more anti-feminist than a bunch of men in drag ‘mansplaining’ what being a woman is all about. It’s also a 100% bourgeois phenomenon. In the ‘hood, the ranch, the barrio, nobody’s buying it.
Sorry for the long rant. I get a little carried away: My mom fell in with the ’70s feminists, and it wrecked our family.
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they went out of their way to call *their official ideology* ‘Marx-Leninism.’
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John, both Marx and his friend Engel were idealists in their youth, they dreamed of building a utopian social order in which individuals would be completely free to express themselves. First the proletarian revolution had to happen. Then, eventually, once the bourgeois parasites were gone, the withering away of the state and the flourishing of mankind, able to seek the heights of science and art, and express his inner nature in whatever fashion. You can call this youthful nonsense, but it was part of the socialist subculture, and motivated a lot of people to fight for this positive future.
The Bolshevik leaders were Marxist intellectuals who had read every single word that Marx and Engels wrote. So, I am sure they believed in this too. Or at least knew about it. After Lenin’s death they added the hyphen -Leninism not as a rejection of Marx, but rather to distinguish themselves from other brands of Marxists/socialists who had denounced the Bolshevik Revolution. I don’t personally see “Marxism-Leninism” as a bad word but, unfortunately, ever since the 1960’s, if you see any political party calling itself Marxist-Leninist, then they are bound to be hardcore Maoists. Or maybe just hardcore Stalinists.
I am sorry to hear about your mom and how she fell for the bourgeois feminism gig, thus destroying your family. I agree that bourgeois feminism is quite toxic, and a deviation from the earlier, healthy feminism of the socialist movement, which focused on the material needs of women and families.
You are right about the character of Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky’s book. Chernyshevsky portrayed his ideal of a dedicated professional revolutionary as an ascetic and spartan. Who literally slept on nails and ate raw steak for breakfast. However, the other main characters are allowed to leave more comfortable lives and be productive for the Revolution without necessarily depriving themselves of the luxuries of life, including sexual bonding. The two main couples (two men and two women) end up living together, in a wife-swapping arrangement, and everybody was happy. It is said that Lenin and his wife Krupskaya enjoyed just such an arrangement in their own personal lives, each was allowed to have other lovers. A very civilized arrangement. As for Stalin, well, he was just a conventional Caucasian brute who took mistresses because he could, and he made his own wife miserable, just like he made the whole country miserable. It was only after he died that people could feel happy again!
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Yalensis, thanks very much. This is just gold. I learned so much here!
For what it’s worth, I think many of your readers would benefit from a series of posts going into more detail about the various strains and factions of communism, including those you mentioned above; their disputes and agendas. In the Anglosphere, I don’t think we really know much about communism; we get fed a sort of warped caricature. I know you have bigger, mre urgent fish to fry though!
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