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Czechia?
The system is hopelessly corrupt.
What's not said is he asked for $20 million which were to fund a major political party (ODS). I highly doubt he wasn't working for them.
To be fair, I don't think you can name a single nation that has a military procurement system free of bribery. It's basically impossible to even operate at those scales without it. Even in total war people still seem to skim off the top.
The question is whether the corruption actively stymies proper ressource allocation or not. Czechia seems to at least be able to operate a somewhat competitive arms industry, so it's not exactly comparable to the people that are buying entirely fictitious fortifications.
It's criminal waste of money.
Example 1
https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/domaci-cena-dronu-z-izraele-nebude-15-ale-27-miliardy-korun-40407332
Heron 1 drone. Utterly, totally useless against the supposed enemy - Russians, who'd shoot it out of the sky without blinking an eye. 100 million$ cost, per 3. That's an utterly absurd price for an unmanned plane with a speed of 200 kph. If it were completely stealthy and low IR observable, maybe it'd be worth considering. It's not.
People ought to be shot for this.
EDIT:
Oh, it got changed to loitering munitions which will be useful for a short while.
https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/sebevrazedny-dron-vyckavaci-munice-armada-acr-nakup-vojaci.A240321_080714_domaci_ivos
At an absurdly inflated cost though.
that's 350k€ per one battery driven loitering munition! (the Hungarian deal, but I'll expect Czechs won't have a much better one).
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Exactly this. Yes, the Czechs probably have money traded under the table even now, and employees in the French DGA treats Thales as their eventual employer, but in the end what matters is the force getting something they need.
Some charity can be extended to procurement agencies who have to react when vendors shit the bed, but bad procurement practices treat a procurement exercise as a shitshow to begin with. German procurement leaves their ground and air capabilities a decade behind their intented readiness posture because of insane litigiousness, Italians keep using shitty refurbished Arietes or Mangustas, Spaniards have no money at all, and did well developing assets jointly but shit the bed entirely with their domestic submarine program.
In the end what matters for military procurement is whether the stuff they have is fit for purpose, and if not why is it so. Much of military procurement failures like the OP example of the Arrow are a combination of vendors bullshitting the client about the expected capabilities of their equipment, and parallel evolutions in technology leapfrogging an in-development project, rendering the initial project entirely useless. Some capabilities are due to client interference, like the issue with the M16 powder in Vietnam causing fouling after the initial vendor failed to deliver on the scaled up contracts.
And of course sometimes clients and vendors both grab the idiot ball together and decide to hail mary, usually to failure but sometimes to success. The US littoral combat ship is a case of that idiot ball exploding in their hands, while the F35 needed time to cook, and cook it did.
And of course you have simple insane corruption for contracts in governments with no real threat forcing a reckoning. Headline assets like submarines or jets or ships or tanks or even the guns make the news, but I've seen an invoice where a shipment of chicken was 5x the supermarket rate. Thats where the real money is for corruption, and given the quality of the meal I would argue it fits my definition of 'failure to deliver'. A military is ultimately a transportation service for bad things to go into someone else, but my transformation into a walking biohazard is definitely not part of their food procurement specifications.
No, they aren't. If you've only got 10% of the air defense missile you need because your procurement is buying $1 million dollar gold plated bullshit with seeker heads that integrate radar, IR and god knows what else, and China and Russia are simply using command guided shit hooked to a powerful radar that cost 5% per unit, you're going to lose.
Because they won't have any problems with replenishment and you're out after a few battles.
This is what happened with the Houthis - they were firing milion dollar missiles at $2000 drones.
Replenishment dollar value is a metric accessible and understandable to the public. It is also fundamentally wrong.
Gold plated seeker heads filled with Raytheon pension entitlements aren't slugging one to one against Chinese slaved missiles, they're part of a warfare system operating according to the presumed threat environment based on battlefield realities. Taliban and Vietnam crow about beating back the USA, with the cheap cost of thousands of their fighters and population for the tradeoff where they melt away immediately in any setpiece engagement. Yes the dollar value per Afghan is minimal, and they expend bullets in exchange for a 1m GBU, but a colonel calling in a package doesn't think about some schoolnin Virginia that doesn't get built because of the money he spends, he fulfills the mission and keeps his guys alive. Afghans thinking their own lives are worth less than a thousand US dollars is their calculus and consequence.
China and Russia crow about their cheap shit, but even without factoring in PPP calculations their headline assets are still expensive. A S400 is a billion fucking dollars, and we've seen multiple S400s get destroyed by less than 50m worth of ordinance each. Russias cheap and 'effective' aircraft have to do long distance lobbing because they are too afraid to operate in a battlespace with uncertain air superiority. Cheap doesn't mean cost effective, it means cheap.
Cheap houthi skimmers are striking civilian ships, not warships. Warships are launching SSM interceptors to strike threats 20 to 40NM away, not 1-5NM. At closer ranges EW nukes all command guidance, and systems rely on terminal guidance for final strike, which is where your fancy gold plated shit becomes necessary and why Russia keeps jerking off about hypersonic manueverability weapons. EW against command guided weapons has been in effect since the 70s, and the west lost the first round with their shitty doctrine of launcher guided missiles... exactly as OP of this thread castigates.
Cost effective mass generation is warfare for the early 20th century. Modern militaries are making a risky calculation that deepstacking intelligence and precision striking allows for decisive victory at individual engagements. That is their decision to make and their requirements to communicate. We as observers are free to call them stupid money wasters who just need some cheap integrated shit, but unless you are willing to violate OPSEC then all we can do is shove our scenarios into warthunder for gaijin to prove doctrinal superiority.
Thinking any plane is safe today in an environment where $3000 thermal cameras are routinely used to blow up $5000 boomer-vintage frontline supply trucks is truly astonishing. What do you think would happen in a war ? You can't hide plane acoustics, even if you had a perfectly invisible plane Chinese are liable to have an acoustic network too. Coupled to their own air traffic control, it's going to know exactly where jet engines are operating, which means it can launch IR seeker missiles and those will find that plane given they have 2.5x speed. You're reduced to thoughts such as 'maybe NSA can take down Chinese military networks' despite those being run by Chinese, on Chinese domestic hardware, with no physical access whatsoever.
So no, you're not going to have battlespace superiority because of stealth aircraft, unless the US secretly borrowed cryo-arithmetic engines from god knows whom alone, ones capable of hiding a few megawatts of heat in the sky, cool the entire plane to sky temperature.
You're back to lobbing missiles and hoping GPS isn't jammed too hard.
Which can be something as simple as a thermal camera, which costs $5k today according to people sticking them on drones in the Donbass. Not $300k. Yet RIM-116 costs a million $.
The cheap command guided missiles used in for example, the Pantsir have a range of 15 km, mostly limited by missile size. Same with Crotale.. Your country's navy is dead set on engaging the Chinese mainland, which means a large quantity of middling class missiles can destroy the entire strategy by forcing a retreat. If Houthis managed that against the US navy, what would the result be with China ? Odds are the war devolves to a cringe standoff with both sides blockading trade and US hoping Chinese give in first. Seeing as they're the ones obsessed with building large stockpiles, not that likely.
Having gold-plated nonsense that might win a theoretical purely naval engagement if Chinese decided to treat warfare as a sport is quite the idea.
So why then is everyone using it ? You're surely aware multiple European countries are using evolved versions of the 1960s Crotale ? Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, disrupting a laser beam or a highly focused very powerful radar is ..actually pretty hard ?
EW against command guided missiles worked in the past when the signals weren't really powerful and focused. Today you're pretty much talking out of your ass because there's no way you can outjam a highly directional radar. To say nothing about laser-beam riding missiles.
You are taking propaganda at face value. 'Muh one-two atacms hits S400'. In reality it was probably quite different, seeing as ATACMS is a very bad missile with no evasion and no one will tell you what happened because it's likely secret and in any case involves some complex mission profile, probably EW or god knows what else. Even just to get GMLRS to hit a protected target required launching a MLRS salvo to saturate air defense.
Needless to say, US systems have entirely the same problem and are much more scarce.. One more example from Kiev..
Afghans won because US was totally and utterly clueless as to what they were doing there.
Yeah, and it's bullshit because as we have just recently seen, something as simple as a saturation attack by gently maneuvering ballistic missiles overwhelmed Israeli defenses and hit their air bases. And this was Iran, a relatively small, low IQ country with a shoestring economy, vs Israel, which has all the shiny US toys taxpayer money can buy.
What do you think would happen in the case of a war with China ? That was cca 200 missiles, something just the People's Liberation Army's Navy Air Force could launch daily.. Forget the actual Chinese air force which has about 3x that launch ability, forget the coastal defence missile batteries, forget the intercontinental range anti-ship ballistic missiles, just the land based naval air assets could send 200 mach 4 anti-ship missiles. The stated US tactic to deal with such is destroy the launch aircraft before that happens, which requires having air superiority at 500 km away from the carrier group.
Seeing how 'Prosperity Guardian' has fared, and how many drones US has lost over Yemen, it's clear you are talking total and utter nonsense. Were US in the possession of a sufficient number of stealth drones, they'd have not kept losing those defenceless drones over Yemen.
In reality your 'deepstacked' system of intel and PGMs cannot deal with a bunch of inbred half starved goat-herders launching harassment strikes on shipping using a small amount of thoroughly obsolete Iranian weaponry.
You'd think the strongest navy in the history of the planet would be able to convoy ships through and protect them from strikes, but apparently not, so shipping is down to 50% of last year.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KlTvsthaBqU
By your own presented logic, video evidence is sufficient proof. If this is fake, then why is yours not fake? What makes YOUR belief in veracity superior to this sources? You cannot present proof for one argument and then argue that proof for the converse using the same logic as your argument is invalid. that 'Ukraine fakes video evidence because superior S400 cannot possibly be destroyed by inferior ATACMS' is extremely weak.
As arguments go, this is weak. Theoretically someone out there has a perfect argument that is so perfect that its mere existence obliterates all other arguments. Thus, the existence of this theoretical means all the other arguments are invalid, even if said theoretical is not actually presented.
This is effectively a religious argument, but for the anti-MIC. God, discounted.
You are free to believe in the superiority of a 3000 buck thermal camera being a superior option that obviates all other equipment. I can give you, for example,
this textdump https://www.ida.org/-/media/feature/publications/a/at/a-tutorial-on-e-lectro--opticalinfrared-eoir-theory-and-systems/ida-document-d-4642.ashx
that comments on exponential decay fidelity of thermal cameras.
But thats not the point is it? Proofs of Gods miracles failing to manifest are not proof of Gods nonexistence, it is merely proof of Gods secret capabilities that are beyond the ken of us mere mortals. The more proof provided that this Gods teachings fail, the more Gods disciples present new arguments out of nowhere to prove that God actually has more tools, so more fool the heretic. Stand proud, for God remains unblemished.
I can tell you that acoustic sensors are the worst failures of detection systems ever because of ambient noise pollution, and you'll come up some something else. I can tell you that beam riders have notorious falloff for BVR aplications because and atmospheric EM diffraction overwhelms OTH signal boosting systems. I can tell you that 'finding a target' out at open sea is in fact REALLY FUCKING DIFFICULT and shore based missile spam is basically being Cao Cao in Zhuge Liangs arrow boat trick at Red Cliff. I can tell you that the failures of the USA in Afghanistan or Prosperity Guardian are definitional in nature because the force was so overwhelming in nature that the normal tasking of 'defeat the enemy' is automatic, with the mission moving to the far more gnarly 'destroy' part, and observers fail to consider that 'defeat' being automatic is not in fact easy.
None of that matters. God, the manifestation of 'cheap stuff better than expensive stuff', is pristine eternally. Belief is all you need. Belief in the superiority of cheap stuff and vranyo. And Belief that your paeans to your God will make him manifest, while ignoring that Gods church is busy sucking down all the heretic dick it can find because its own teachings rotted the house from the inside.
I didn' say it's fake, I said the evidence for S400 failing to intercept non-evading ballistic missile is nonexistent. It was destroyed but by something more complex. ATACMS is not a missile capable of evasion, it doesn't maneuver and so on. Russia has routinely shot down similar missiles, such as Tochka, during the war.
It doesn't obviate it, it means decent thermal sensors are now available for a very cheap price. I'm not sure how good they're for aerospace applications but the first viable anti-air missiles used a single IR detector and direction was determined by spinning a mask in front of it. That worked pretty well for a while.
Not a 320x240 array. which is what those FPVs use.
Why do you think Chinese put up radar satellites ? Why do you think they have very high altitude rocket recon drones? Do you really think you can hide 200m long 20m high ships from radar ? No, finding giant floating ships at sea is not a 'fucking difficult problem' you just require cope to sustain belief in a way of warfare that stopped being relevant in a superpower context cca 1970. Now it's civilian tech, see this startup here.
No, I'm saying you are an idiot because 'defeat of enemy' is not automatic when 'enemy' is any structure in Yemen big enough to conceal a viable anti-ship missile, which in this case is small enough so that several can be put into a big truck.
US doesn't have the recon assets to find the 'enemy' in Yemen and never had. It'd require either a solid human intelligence network or vast amounts of small drones operated by entire brigades of techs, neither of which is something US is interested in because it's just not a very good way of getting retirement money or generational wealth, unlike gold-plated weapon systems you know and love..
..are you ok ?
You are free to call me or anyone else an idiot all you want. In fact, you are free to call anyone who develops gold plated stealth systems idiots, like the Russians or the Chinese.
Stupid idiots who cannot see your manifest genius in googling advertised capabilities of thermal cameras and high resolution satellites provided by small scrappy cheap startups. They can see a 20km by 20km space with 30cm fidelity on a geosynchronous position. The size of the pacific ocean within Chinas EEZ is after all only a mere 4 million square kilometers. You only need 40000 satellites in geosynchronous positions and no cloud cover for real time coverage. Oh and a reliance on having an enemy that does not have long range munition delivery platforms that go even further out than 200km from the EEZ. And obviously radar works perfectly aimed at the ocean, which famously is not made up of radar reflective matter. Hint: read up on what radar signals reflect off of before you spout off your next gish gallop of justifications.
You are the smart one, and everyone is an idiot for not making the smart move of spamming scrappy solutions that vranyo clearly delivers as superior to gold plated western tech. The Russian and Chinese MIC keep crowing about their SU57, SU75 and J35 only because they PRETEND to be interested in these capabilities. You are free to call everyone idiots for pursuing this gold plated technology and your own cheap scrappy solutions like the Iranians and Houthis are doing is way better as military tactics and strategies go. Potshotting an enemy to claim victory while hiding among civilians is excellent for propaganda, and the propaganda war is all that matters. Thousands of dead palestinians, yemeni and lebanese are inconsequential when you get to flood telegram with stretched out clips of your munitions hitting one target on repeat.
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They’ll happily launch million dollar ESSMs, RAMs, and Nulkas at closer ranges, see the USS Mason. The US Navy is pretty far behind the Air Force in operational EW, I suspect it will be a long while before any captain entrusts EW with incoming threats over lobbing $10M in physical ordnance.
I think there is an ex navy commander on this forum who commented something similar. I know my own experience basically had 'spaz out mechanically' as A2 doctrine. Its the opposite of hoarding potions for the final boss, just use everything asap.
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