Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. (I Corinthians 3:13)
Dear Readers:
Today I have this piece by Russian military correspondent Dmitry Steshin. The piece itself is almost as long as its title, and is stuffed with many facts, so I shall probably have to work my way through in segments. The subtitle tells you Steshin’s main theme:
The Russian Army And The Military-Industrial Complex Have Passed This Trial By Fire And By Western Weapons
Steshin: Nobody expected, at the start of the Special Military Operation, that it would befall our army to test almost all of NATO’s most advanced weapons systems – from American rockets to German tanks. And nobody could imagine, in their wildest dreams, what kind of surprises we ourselves were able to deliver to our enemy!
Verily we have not been tested in this manner since the time of the Great Patriotic War.
The Sacred Javelins
The appearance of anti-tank Javelins evoked among Ukrainians a veritable psychosis. One could even call it an ecstasy. Ukrainians were delighted, especially, by the notion of employing an American super-weapon, which marketologists turned into a slogan: “Shoot once, and forget.”
How convenient! So this is what Western technology is all about! Newborn Ukrainian babies were named Javelin, even though the more intelligent people warned at the time: How will this little boy feel 10 years later carrying a name like Javelin?
Well, it didn’t take 10 years for the psychosis to quickly die down. Already by 2023 people had stopped praying to Javelins, and this foreign word fell out of use. Even though, in the course of 2022 Ukraine had received 8,500 of these complexes. Our soldiers found stacks of them (often bullet-ridden) in recaptured villages and forest belts. Nowadays you won’t see any Javelin at the front. This was a theme that got old very quickly.
Why so, you may ask? Neither Ukrainians nor Americans like to speak of this topic. For starters, “10 Javelins for every Russian tank,” as Biden had promised, proved to be too expensive. Each complex costs $1,400,000, for which price you get only 6 rockets. Secondly, the Ukrainian army burned through 500 Javelin rockets per day, with very little to show for it, in terms of targets hit.
The main thing is, in its trial by fire, the Javelin did not perform well under real-life conditions. Its self-guidance system (an infrared heat-seeking head) is cooled with liquid nitrogen, which takes from 40 seconds to one and a half minutes to cool down; longer in the heat. Javelins don’t like to operate in urban conditions (dangling wires, open window frames, protruding fittings), and tend to malfunction. And there are many other problems as well, including an instruction manual which is written in English and runs to 258 pages.
The Crooked Chimeras
The American artillery rocket complex HIMARS appeared on the Ukrainian front in the summer of 2022. This was a rather unpleasant surprise for our side. In its structure, the HIMARS does not differ all that much from our own Grad, Smerch, or Uragan. It’s just that, on the issue of precision, the HIMARS is in a class by itself. I saw with my own eyes, on the Ugledar front, how two HIMARS rockets struck an underground shelter in the basement of a two-storey building. The second rocket entered exactly right through the opening in the concrete made by the first rocket! And this despite the fact that it was fired from 20 kilometers away! These chimeras were having a field day in our rear, destroying our weapons caches, supplies, whole parks filled with technology. We countered by covering everything in camo, or by dispersing our supplies, we silenced our radios and telephones. This helped a bit. But we needed a more permanent solution to this problem. And we found one…
[to be continued]
Awful Avalanche 
Good piece – can wait for part 2
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thanks!
LikeLike
thanks yalensis… like michael – i can’t wait for the next dispatch!
LikeLike
Thanks!
LikeLike
Remember when Trump got impeached over Javelins? Impeachment #1. Congrifts said “send ’em!” and Trump didn’t (not because he objected to the war-mongering, but because he wanted his own grift about exposing Bidead’s scamming before he’d let them loose. So many layers of sleaze…) Not that it’s the business of Steshin to go into all the backgound. He can’t include everything.
At the time, I thought that Javelins to Ukraine was a good thing. They were a nice democratic European country and they were on America’s side, right? How dare a president defy the will of Congress?!? I did not sense the war-mongering behind Congrifts’ decision. And I was someone who was paying attention to the nooz, being the junkie that I am.
My my, how I have learned and how my opinion has changed! I only knew part of the story. That’s why I’m always whingeing about the failure of the propagandamedia to tell the WHOLE truth, and how the people (including Dimmocrap supporters, whose ideological side I ought to be on) are fools for only exposing half of reality. And the entirety of reality is way more fascinating than the half-truths we get, even though one has to pay a bit of attention to figure out what’s happening. To paraphrase that “math” quote from the talking Barbie doll in the 1990s, “reality is hard!”
LikeLike
Alternative title:
Game (Non)Changers Part 1
LikeLike
or maybe “Exciting game-changers… not” – haha!
LikeLike
The javelin appears in one mission of the fourth Call of Duty game (2007). You use it to destroy a few Russian vehicles (some form of BMP from memory). In this scenario the player uses the thing while standing upright, in a field with the enemy at a distance of 100 metres at most. It works because the enemy are either blind or thought it would be ungentlemanly to shoot at you.
This turns out to have been a surprisingly accurate depiction of its capabilities.
LikeLike
Not a gamer myself and never touched any computer games (other than classics like tetris), but curious to know: I wonder will the people who write these “Call of Booty” type propaganda games write a new stock of scenarios based on the war? Or will they avoid this war like the plague because the Russians will have won it?
LikeLike
They will flock to it like flies to a shitheap once the war is over. They’ll be going by the Ukrainian version of events so they will have plenty of material for triumphal tales and the ultimate defeat will be glossed over or else blamed on the betrayal of Ukraine by traitorous western politicians (if Trump is president then).
If you want to get an idea of how stupid it could get, consider that one of the more recent CoD games centred around a fictional middle eastern country where brave female rebels fight against both Russian occupiers and the ‘Al Qatala’ terrorist group. Also the Russians here committed something virtually identical to the ‘Highway of Death massacre’.
As the cherry on top, expect to see a version of the Crocus massacre where you play as one of the gunmen, who are naturally Russian government agents out to frame the Ukraine. Something very much like this was done in the 2009 release and if there’s one thing game developers love more than bad history it’s rehashing previous titles and charging full price for it.
LikeLike
Ugh! I wish somebody clever would just plant a deadly virus in those horrible games…
LikeLike
Its usage characteristics have been well-known since its introduction. That is, it’s quite difficult to employ and you have to do it just right for the seeker head to acquire the target.
If it did acquire the target, and didn’t misfire, it tended to work pretty well against the targets it was intended for: Soviet tanks. At least, Soviet tanks with second-rate armor and no reactive blocks (e.g. Iraq).
So, anyway, it’s not hard to model in a simulation. As you say, fortunately your opponents are sporting. Probably because the engagement distance is dramatically closer than you’d want if actually shooting at tanks.
LikeLike