America Has No Hypersonics Because IT Tools CANNOT Replace Math And Physics Knowledge, Skill, And Ability...,

 

cf2r.org  | We will start, if necessary, by reading this article [1] . He reports on Russian advances in this area and discusses the potential concerns of the Western world about its ability to follow them, with the United States in the lead. We are asking ourselves the question here not of a delay which would be due to later development, but what seems to us to be a real conceptual difficulty in making such machines work.

Since we are in the West, let us remember these words of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics: “the goal of the physicist is to make the equations speak” .

Let us note then that at the end of the Cold War, we find ourselves in a rather strange situation at first glance. The West pushed electronics and computing much further than the Soviet Union. It did not occur to anyone that the latter had held up without this and we were content to think, here, that its equipment was obsolete and ineffective. The Ukrainian conflict demonstrated the opposite!

However, those who worked on equipment opposing the collapse of the Berlin Wall know very well that the “enemy” of the time had implemented treasures of thought to precisely make the equations speak and understand what was really in-game without having to go through computer calculations. This was the case, for example, with so-called “ionic” space propulsion engines.

Meanwhile, at home, we relied more and more on software. They constituted a black box over which we had no control and we “swallowed” the results, whatever they were, as if they were the naked truth coming out of the well.

An example is often better than a long speech. In 2013, I had a machine of my design tested in a digital wind tunnel. Contract was signed with the School of Mines which included one of its best students from the Polytechnico Milan. The aim of the study was to determine the drag and lift coefficients of my aircraft. I had made an estimate by hand which took me 10 minutes. After 6 months of effort, the super calculator produced a drag coefficient which was equal to mine to within 10%. If we stop the story here, you might think I was 10% wrong. Nay! Indeed, in essence, my concept had to have a non-zero lift coefficient. But the one who emerged from the “hellish” program was zero. It was therefore a clear error which showed that we could not have any confidence in the result concerning the drag. I will spare you the analysis that followed as well as its conclusions.

Today, engineering schools, in full agreement with companies, want people who are efficient in handling various IT tools: Catia, etc. If in fact the latter, at the time they were designed, brought great progress for those who were used to thinking, they only “Taylorized” the real profession by degrading it enormously, leading to the incremental improvement which tomorrow will be the prerogative of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, from my point of view, replacing the Soviet physicists and engineers of the time with AI would absolutely not be possible.

So this is where we are and until our scientists are able to make the equations speak, it seems very unlikely that the West will be able to make hypersonic missiles worthy of the name. What do I mean by that? Not rockets that go to Mach 5, which is the limit between supersonic and hypersonic, but that reach Mach 9 like the Zircon at sea level or 27 like the Avangard at high altitude, while remaining maneuverable .

To reach such a level, it is imperative to return to studies focusing on paper and pencil. Write the equations, try to solve them by hand and understand, when you make approximations, what they correspond to physically and if they are legitimate.

Let's take one more example. There are so-called phase change fluid loops for cooling parts of, for example, satellites. If we do not carry out, with ad hoc approximations, an expansion limited to order 4 of the Navier-Stokes system, we cannot conceive of such loops. A computer will never be able to achieve this, although excellent engineers in the past have been able to do so.

When we see the low level in mathematics and physics today throughout the Western school structure, we say to ourselves that the light will come from elsewhere. And this is what we are seeing.

Israel Can't Sell Ukraine What Israel Doesn't Have An Effective Defense Against Drones

thecradle  |  A senior Israeli official revealed to the New York Times (NYT) on 12 October that Tel Aviv is providing Ukraine with “basic intelligence” on Iranian drones used by Russia on the battlefield.

The unnamed official also revealed that a private Israeli firm was giving Ukraine satellite imagery of Russian troop positions.

In September, western media reported that Kiev had asked Israel to share intelligence on “any support” Iran has been giving to Russia. “The Israelis gave us some intelligence, but we need much more,” a senior Ukrainian official who spoke with Axios was quoted as saying.

Hebrew media revealed earlier that an Israeli defense contractor is supplying anti-drone systems to the Ukrainian military by way of Poland, in order to circumvent Israel’s official stance of not selling advanced arms to Kiev.

The unofficial sales are likely a stopgap measure to make up for the refusal of Israeli officials to sell Ukraine their Iron Dome missile defense system, reportedly in a bid to maintain strategic relations with Russia in Syria.

The Israeli defense and foreign ministries on Wednesday declined to comment on long-standing requests from the government in Kiev and its western backers to acquire the Iron Dome system, including pleas made since this week’s Russian missile barrage.

“Israel has great experience with air defense and Iron Dome, and we need exactly the same system in our city,” Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in an interview 11 October. “We have been talking with them a long time about it. Those discussions have not been successful,” he added.

The reluctance by Tel Aviv to aid its US-sponsored analogue has not changed much since the war erupted in February, drawing the ire of Ukrainian officials.

“Everybody knows that your missile defense systems are the best,” President Volodomyr Zelensky said while pleading with the Israeli parliament in the spring.

“I don’t know what happened to Israel,” he said in an interview with French TV5 channel on 23 September. “I am in shock, because I don’t understand why they couldn’t give us air defenses.”

DefenseNews |  Israel said its Iron Dome defense system has been a great success, with a 90% interception rate against incoming rocket fire. But officials say the system is expensive to deploy. Bennett has said someone in Gaza can fire a rocket toward Israel for a few hundred dollars, but it costs tens of thousands of dollars for the Iron Dome to intercept it.

The Defense Ministry released a short video showing what it said were the new system’s successful interceptions of rockets, mortars and an unmanned aerial vehicle. The video, which was highly edited and set to music, appeared to show a laser beam coming out of a ground station, hitting the targets and smashing them into small pieces.

Bennett said in February that Israel would begin using the system within a year.

Israel has already developed or deployed a series of systems meant to intercept everything from long-range missiles to rockets launched from just a few kilometers (miles) away. It has also outfitted its tanks with a missile-defense system.

Talks on restoring Iran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers have stalled. Israel opposes the deal, saying it does not do enough to curb Iran’s nuclear program or its military activities across the region, and Israeli officials have said they will unilaterally do what’s necessary to protect the country.

At $100K/Shot Iron Dome Cheaper Than Patriot - But Not Effective Against Drones

wikipedia |  Although Iron Dome has proven its effectiveness against rocket attacks, Defense Ministry officials are concerned it will not be able to handle more massive arsenals possessed by Hezbollah in Lebanon should a conflict arise. Although in Operation Protective Edge it had a 90 percent hit rate against only rockets determined to be headed for populated areas, 735 intercepts were made at a cost of $70,000–100,000 per interceptor; with an estimated 100,000 rockets possessed by Hezbollah, Iron Dome systems could be fiscally and physically overwhelmed by dozens of incoming salvos. In 2014 Directed-energy weapons were being investigated as a complement to Iron Dome, with lower system cost and lower cost per shot. Solid-state lasers worldwide have power levels ranging from 10–40 kW; to destroy a rocket safely from 15–20 km (9.3–12.4 mi) away, several low-power beams could coordinate and converge on one spot to burn through its outer shell and destroy it. Because laser beams become distorted and ineffective in foggy or heavy cloud conditions, any laser weapon would need to be complemented by Iron Dome.^[67]

In 1996, the Israelis developed the Nautilus prototype and later deployed it in Kiryat Shmona, Israel's northernmost city along the Lebanese border. It used a collection of components from other systems and succeeded in keeping a beam on the same point for two continuous seconds using an early prototype of the Green Pine radar. Nautilus succeeded in its goal to prove the concept was feasible, but it was never deployed operationally, as the government believed that sending in ground troops to stop rocket fire at source was more cost-effective.^[67]

At the 2014 Singapore Air Show, Rafael unveiled its Iron Beam laser air-defense system. Iron Beam is a directed-energy weapon made to complement the Iron Dome system by using a high-energy laser to destroy rockets, mortar bombs, and other airborne threats.^[68] Development of the system began some time after the joint United States and Israel Nautilus laser development program ended.^[3]

In December 2014, former Israeli Air Force chief and head of Boeing Israel David Ivry showed interest in the American Laser Weapon System (LaWS). Earlier that month, the U.S. Navy had revealed that the LaWS had been mounted on the USS Ponce and locked onto and destroyed designated targets with near-instantaneous lethality, with each laser shot costing less than $1.^[67]

In February 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that a ground-based laser system would begin deployment within a year, first as a trial and then operationally. The system will first be deployed to the south of the country to areas most under threat from rockets fired from the Gaza Strip; the ultimate goal is for Israel to be surrounded by a "laser wall" to protect from rockets, missiles, and UAVs.^[69] While lasers are cheaper to fire per shot, they can be impacted by weather, have a slow rate of fire, and have less range. Therefore they will be used in conjunction with Iron Dome in situations where they can reduce overall interception costs.^[70] A procurement contract for the Iron Beam system was signed the next month, however the schedule for fielding was revealed to be delayed for several years.^[71]

Has Interception Of Straight Line Ballistic Missiles Been Demonstrated In Combat? (REDUX)

Originally posted 4/28/22. 

moonofalabama |   The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:

"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing and pose significant risks to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.

At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’ between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but, notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.

But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?

We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian ‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now. Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal, now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.

The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed. More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7 km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere. [Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also higher.]

But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.

This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times, sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.

Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima! But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of the North Korean rockets!

The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It is a very hard thing to do.

But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows just how difficult missile interception really is:

At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.

‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency vehicles streamed onto the runway.

Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.

The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!

Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five times at the incoming missile.

‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss? That's shocking,’ she said. ‘That's shocking because this system is supposed to work.’

Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?

This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:

On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th Quartermaster Detachment.

A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.

Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!

 

 

Shooting Down 60 Year Old SCUD Missiles Is Difficult And The Government Lies About It (REDUX)

Originally posted 4/28/22 

NYTimes |  The official story was clear: Saudi forces shot down a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group last month at Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. It was a victory for the Saudis and for the United States, which supplied the Patriot missile defense system.

“Our system knocked the missile out of the air,” President Trump said the next day from Air Force One en route to Japan, one of the 14 countries that use the system. “That’s how good we are. Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.”

But an analysis of photos and videos of the strike posted to social media suggests that story may be wrong.

Instead, evidence analyzed by a research team of missile experts appears to show the missile’s warhead flew unimpeded over Saudi defenses and nearly hit its target, Riyadh’s airport. The warhead detonated so close to the domestic terminal that customers jumped out of their seats.

Saudi officials did not respond to a request for comment. Some U.S. officials cast doubt on whether the Saudis hit any part of the incoming missile, saying there was no evidence that it had. Instead, they said, the incoming missile body and warhead may have come apart because of its sheer speed and force.

The findings show that the Iranian-backed Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of their years-long war. And they underscore longstanding doubts about missile defense technology, a centerpiece of American and allied national defense strategies, particularly against Iran and North Korea.

“Governments lie about the effectiveness of these systems. Or they’re misinformed,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst who led the research team, which shared its findings with The New York Times. “And that should worry the hell out of us.”

 

 

What Up With Starlink?

Newsweek  |  Starlink communications device outages are straining the Ukrainian military as it mounts a counteroffensive to take back territory occupied by the Russians, according to Ukrainian officials.

Starlink, a satellite internet system operated by SpaceX, deployed technology to Ukraine after Russia invaded the country in late February. The company's billionaire CEO Elon Musk recently estimated that the company has spent $80 million in remote internet terminals for the Eastern European country.

However, the Financial Times reported on Friday that a senior government official in Ukraine said Starlink outages have created a "catastrophic" loss of communication on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine. One anonymous official told the newspaper that such outages occurred as forces were making advances into Russian-occupied areas. Soldiers also told the newspaper that the communications systems stopped working mid-battle, and that some Starlink technology hasn't worked in areas recently taken back from the Russians.

In an interview with Newsweek on Friday, V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, said that Russia "basically took out all of Ukraine's military communications" at the beginning of the war, and it's only when Starlink technology was introduced that "those comms went back to fairly reliable form."

Stephen Quackenbush, an associate professor of political science and the director of the Strategic Studies Program the University of Missouri, told Newsweek on Saturday that the outages "appear to be related to advances into territory previously occupied by Russia."

"That suggests that SpaceX is able to target access with a great deal of precision. It also appears to me to be an issue that they are working on improving, with greater coordination between the Ukrainian military and SpaceX," he wrote in an email.

He added that the outages don't change "the fact that momentum in the war is on Ukraine's side."

"While Russia has continued attacks in the Donetsk Oblast with limited success, Ukrainian advances in the northern (Kharkiv/Luhansk) and southern (Kherson) fronts over the past month have been beyond anything that Russia has been able to achieve since the spring," Quackenbush said.

Meanwhile, Subrahmanian said he doesn't believe the outages will pose a major problem for the Ukrainians in the long-run, saying that the Ukrainian military "has multiple ways of getting information to their troops" and has had continued support from the West.

 

Russian Combat Lasers End "Full Spectrum Dominance" Till Further Notice...,

stalkerzone |  On May 18, Deputy Prime Minister of the government and curator of the Russian defence industry, Yury Borisov, said that the “Peresvet” combat laser system has already been serially supplied to the Russian troops. According to the Deputy Prime Minister, the laser can disable satellites in orbits up to 1,500 kilometres high. Such technologies were previously considered impossible. A significant number of experiments in this area were conducted by two superpowers of the world.

Several similar programs have been active in the US for some time. One of the most promising was considered to be the development work on the topic of the YAL-1 “flying laser” based on the Boeing 747 aircraft. As a result, $12 billion was spent on a high-energy weapons program to intercept ballistic missile warheads, but the work was completed to no avail.

In the USSR, they went the other way. Few people know, but it was the mock-up of the “Skif-DM” combat laser complex, or “Index 17F19DM”, better known as “Polyus”, that was the first “passenger” of the superheavy “Energiya” rocket back in 1987. As with modern anti-satellite weapons, its principle was based on the defeat of the optical elements of enemy satellites – visors and lenses. The second, cheaper and simpler project in this direction is the A-60 chemical laser based on the Il-76 transport aircraft.

“Peresvet” laser and secret “Zadira”

Work on the “Peresvet” combat laser complex was first announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The exact composition of the equipment inside the complex is not disclosed, however, it is known that “Peresvet” is a high-energy laser in a mobile version: a generator and a combat readiness maintenance system, a radiator and a surveillance system are located in several sections. According to some reports, the complex is effective against all surveillance means, including RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude unmanned vehicles, as well as most spacecraft of the American IMINT species reconnaissance system. According to some reports, commercial structures are also periodically connected to it. The most famous example is MAXAR, which provides high-resolution intelligence to the US military. The other two participants in this program are slightly less well known, but Planet Labs and SkyBox have the most high-tech devices.

Back in 2014, with the help of a complex optical circuit, ultra-sensitive matrices and software processing, Skybox was able to achieve outstanding performance. From a height of 600 km, their devices can film the surface of the planet with a detail of about 1 meter, while it’s not only about photos, but also about video. The project turned out to be so impressive that the entire company was bought out by the IT giant Google, and the satellites formed the basis of the Terra Bella surveillance system. Another company, Planet Labs, received the first “spy grant” back in 2016, and since then it has been commercial structures that have been spying on the most important objects of a likely enemy, including in Russia.

The capabilities of the “Peresvet” laser are designed just for such means of reconnaissance. The principle of operation of the weapon is not disclosed, however, it is known that the previous complexes, designed in the USSR and Russia, could operate in several modes. The two most important ones are the “local impact” mode on a specific vehicle flying over a restricted zone, as well as the “continuous defeat” mode, when over a certain zone (a square of several hundred kilometres) a so-called laser curtain is being put up.

here is no detailed data on the combat deployment of the “Peresvet” complexes during the special military operation in Ukraine, however, in early March, Wired reported that American satellites were “experiencing difficulties” in working when flying over the border areas of Russia and Ukraine. According to Wired, the intelligence department of the US Department of Defence could not get any pictures of the desired area at all before the start of hostilities, and the advanced units of Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine were noticed from space only a few hours after the start of “Operation Z”. Neither civilian analysts nor representatives of the Pentagon specify why this happened.

And on February 28, 4 days after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, Google satellites “fell off”. The company even had to issue a statement informing users about the “temporary shutdown” of updates for images in areas of concentration and movement of Russian troops. In total, according to Professor Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas, at least 50 different synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) satellites were deployed over Ukraine after the start of its military operation by the Russian Army.

It is curious that the combat protection of such objects as the “Peresvet” laser is carried out not only by electronic warfare troops and air defence units, but also by fully-fledged “Zadira” combat lasers. This complex was developed at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center (Russian Federal Nuclear Center — All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics) in Sarov. The power of the weapon is not disclosed, however, according to some reports, a few seconds of radiation is enough to “cut” a small reconnaissance drone into two parts.

Starlink to Ukraine

According to some reports, the American and Ukrainian military had several simultaneous serious problems.

Firstly, a significant part of the equipment of the US surveillance satellites “failed” in the first few days of the special operation in Ukraine. The reasons why this happened are not disclosed in the United States, just as in Russia they do not make statements on the combat use of “Peresvet” lasers capable of burning out the powerful optics of satellites in orbits up to 1,500 kilometres high.

Secondly, the transmission of data from Maxar Technologies’ WorldView-2 satellites to Ukrainian spacecraft was difficult, since the latter, as it turned out, were not designed for such a volume of information. Data overload has led to the fact that a significant part of telecommunications satellites simply failed. It is not possible to restore their functionality at the moment, so the spacecraft are just hanging out in orbit like garbage.

It is for this reason that Elon Musk was urgently brought into the arena. Starlink communications satellites, previously tested at military exercises of the US Army and the Strategic Command, turned out to be the most convenient channel for data transmission. If it were not for the data transmission network that SpaceX deployed in orbit, the UAF would have lost all intelligence — both its own and those transmitted to them by American intelligence.

 

Russia Has Successfully Neutralized Ukraine's NATO Supplied Drones With Something

RT |  Russia has developed its own anti-drone laser capability and is already using it in Ukraine, Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov claimed in an interview on Wednesday. It has a range of 5km and was nicknamed Zadira, or ‘troublemaker’ in Russian, he said. He didn’t disclose any other details about the new device. 

The revelation came as Borisov was discussing the advanced weapons being developed in Russia. He compared the new tool to Peresvet, a laser system first unveiled by President Vladimir Putin in 2018, the exact purpose of which was not explained at the time.

The official confirmed that the Peresvet was designed to disable optic sensors, including on spy satellites orbiting the earth as high as 1,500 km.

“While Peresvet blinds, the new generation of laser weapons causes physical damage to the target, burning it through,” he said.

When asked about the timeline for the Russian military to receive such systems, Borisov said they were already being supplied. When asked further whether the anti-drone laser was deployed in Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, the minister acknowledged that the “first samples were used” there.

According to military experts, lasers have several drawbacks as weapons, including massive power requirements and the deterioration of the beam caused by dust and water vapor in the air cause, among others.

However, they have a major advantage in terms of cost-per-shot compared to traditional anti-aircraft missiles. The advancement in drone technology, which has made the deployment of air assets more financially accessible, has compelled military planners worldwide to look for various ways to counter this threat without depleting their war chests.

 

I Was Not Aware That The Russian People Chose The Names Of The Russian Wunderwaffen

themoscowtimes |  Russia has unveiled the names for a new generation of nuclear-powered missiles touted by President Vladimir Putin as invincible after more than seven million people took part in a quirky public vote organized by the Russian military.

The names chosen include "Peresvet," after a medieval warrior monk, for a laser and "Burevestnik," after a seabird, for a cruise missile.

The arms systems, which Putin revealed in a bellicose state-of-the-nation speech this month, include a nuclear-powered cruise missile, an underwater nuclear-powered drone, and a laser weapon.

Putin has often used militaristic rhetoric to mobilize support and buttress his narrative that Russia is under siege from the West, and some critics complain that public discourse increasingly resembles that of a country at war.

The culmination of the "name that weapon" vote comes amid fears in both Russia and the West about a new arms race, something Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump have said they don't want, and after Putin won a landslide re-election victory.

Russia's Ministry of Defense asked the public to name the weapons systems in an online vote, something it has never done before, and unveiled the results late on Thursday on state TV.

After the results were announced, Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov explained on state TV, to ripples of applause, what the new weapons were capable of.

Warrior monk, Greek god and seabird

The Defense Ministry said Russians had voted to name the new military laser "Peresvet" after a medieval warrior monk, Alexander Peresvet, who took part in a 14th century battle against the Mongols. Peresvet is revered by some clerics in the Russian Orthodox Church, whose influence has grown under Putin.

 

Zelensky Mocks Russia's Wunderwaffen, Yet, American Drones Aren't Turning The Tide Of Battle

WaPo  | A senior Russian official told state media on Wednesday that a state-of-the-art laser weapons system has been deployed for active use in Ukraine, a claim that U.S. defense authorities and military experts say has not been substantiated and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has mocked.

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In an interview with the state-controlled Channel One, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov said the country’s latest laser weapon, dubbed “Zadira,” is now used by military units fighting in Ukraine. The equipment is capable of incinerating targets up to three miles away within five seconds, he added, and is more advanced than the Peresvet, another laser system unveiled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018.

“If Peresvet blinds an object, the new generation of laser weapons physically destroys the target. It is burned up,” Borisov said in the interview.

A senior Pentagon official told reporters during a news briefing on Wednesday that the United States has not seen any evidence to corroborate Borisov’s claim.

In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky mocked the notion of Zadira’s use and compared it to “wunderwaffe,” or wonder weapons. The term was coined during World War II by Nazi war propagandists who boasted the lethality of modern military equipment such as cruise missiles, even though historians now say these weapons were far less effective than advertised.

“All this clearly indicates the complete failure of the invasion,” Zelensky said Wednesday evening. “But again, this also shows that they are afraid to admit that catastrophic mistakes have been made at the highest state and military levels in Russia.”

Putin claims Russia is developing nuclear arms capable of avoiding missile defenses

Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army major general, who has been studying the Russian invasion, told The Washington Post that weapons like Zadira could take down reconnaissance drones or Ukrainian artillery. It could also be used to blind Ukrainian soldiers, a tactic that is banned under international convention, he added.

Ryan cautioned against taking Russia’s words at face value in the absence of evidence to support Moscow’s assertions. Since the start of the war, Russia has repeatedly tried to “awe the Ukrainians and the West with their supposed superiority,” Ryan said. “It hasn’t been working until now. It’s probably unlikely to work with an experimental laser system that’s yet to be proven to work.”