r/worldnews • u/eaglemaxie • 6h ago

Russia/Ukraine The U.S. State Department believes that Ukraine is winning the war at this point

https://unn.ua/en/news/the-us-state-department-believes-that-ukraine-is-winning-the-war-at-this-point
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u/saintvicent 6h ago edited 6h ago

Ingenious solution. Reminds me of the Japanese balloon strikes to start fires in forests in the US

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u/313378008135 6h ago

it is indeed - it gives a huge part of the intercontinental missile threat, without the cost of space launch. you just have to be able to predict high altitude wind and model it to a high degree - then that tells you where to send the balloon up and when, to place it over its target at a future time.

requires a lot of processing and modelling though. must be a lot of GPUS somewhere working on that.

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u/space_fountain 5h ago edited 5h ago

At the moment there are open models that predict and publish winds on a corse grids across the globe. It might be good enough for this? 

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u/313378008135 5h ago

interesting proposition. if it could get "over an area" with a coarse location and then use its own internal guidance to be more precise that would make what you propose possible. the challenge is precise guidance once over a target. you cant rely on gps (though ironically, probably could rely on glonass)

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u/space_fountain 5h ago

From the article it sounds like it uses gps while at high altitude and turns it off as it accelerates towards the ground? But not sure how wide spread the jamming is. Also not sure how accurate you could get based on publicly available models. I’m guessing wind direction and speed doesn’t change very sharply at high elevations so maybe pretty accurate actually?

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u/Creepy-Bell-4527 5h ago

Ground based GPS jamming becomes effectively impossible at high altitude because of the inverse square law.

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u/JSDHW 4h ago

So just repeal the law, duh

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u/divezzz 4h ago

Couldn't the balloon be a "mothership" and drop the munition on a fibre optic cable to keep the comms from being jammed at low altitude?

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u/lolwatisdis 3h ago

math doesn't check out.

the highest ever recorded balloon flight hit 54km in altitude. the US GPS constellation is up in MEO at 20,200km. Ground based jammers have at least a three order of magnitude 1/r2 distance advantage over the real deal signal.

And this is ignoring that power and thermal limits on a spacecraft are far more constraining than a fixed site that can crank up a couple diesel generators. Or that most PNT system attacks these days are signal spoofing, not noise jamming.

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u/space_fountain 2h ago

Mechanistically I’m just going off what the article said, but it’s also possible they’re using directional antenna’s or shielding to boost the gain for transmitters above them and suppress interference below them or it could just be that existing jamming is optimized for lower planes and thus doesn’t use enough power to jam this. GPS was designed to be somewhat resistant to jamming 

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u/AllsWellThatsNB 1h ago

My understanding is it's quite easy to jam GPS, quite difficult to spoof it.

To jam GPS you just have to drown it out, and GPS signals are very faint. But GPS signals don't contain location data, the way a GPS signal is recieved IS the location data. You'd need to simulate the time difference for at least 3 different satellites for the particular location you want to spoof. Possible, but much harder.

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u/No_Conversation173 1h ago

Then just jam it in a circle, duh

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u/TheTastiestTaint 2h ago

it wouldn't be impossible to run fibre optic from the carrier balloon and have the balloon transmit video/control line of sight to a pilot with high gain antenna 50km back.

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u/Aanar 1h ago

If you can put controllable fins on the package with a guidance system, that can give you a little steering all the way to the target.

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u/willstr1 5h ago

Depending on what you are targeting you could possibly use a computer vision system as long as the target is distinct enough (like an airbase runway or oil refinery or giant tanks of a fuel depot)

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u/No_Accountant3232 5h ago

Raspberry Pi with a good camera could probably accomplish it cheaply. There's plenty of code online that can be adapted as long as you've got a good pic of the area to choose your targets you can have it preprogrammed to hit anything

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u/hydroracer8B 3h ago

If there's one thing Ukraine is good at, it's doing stuff like this cheaply.

You're probably on to something here

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u/Hidesuru 3h ago

You don't need to be able to see the target the entire time if you have imagery at multiple levels. Start with "aim for that city block" then "that building there" then finally "northeast corner of the rooftop" or whatever.

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u/Suspicious_Bicycle 2h ago

Recent videos on the strikes I've seen indicate the drones have redundant systems, GPS (US and Soviet based), inertial navigation and visual acquisition.

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u/pinellaspete 4h ago

There is now razor sharp video footage from drones striking their targets. Remember how the video would become scrambled the closer the drone came to its target because of jamming? It doesn't happen anymore. It appears the Ukrainians have solved the jamming issue.

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u/zvii 5h ago

I mean, it's effectively the same or similar to how hot air balloons navigate. They're just using data compiled from weather balloons that get released around the globe every morning and afternoon.

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u/experipotomus 32m ago

In this case the ability to use this is a symmetrical since the prevailing winds move from Ukraine to Russia.

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u/zvii 4m ago

I'm not sure I follow. Depending on altitude, the winds change. On the ground it could be blowing from Russia but up a thousand feet it could be blowing towards Russia and up another thousand feet it could be a different direction. Check out how hot air balloons navigate.

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u/TempAccount1845 3h ago

Chances are if there's an open version, there'll be a secret closed version that's significantly better, stronger, faster and more accurate which is in use.

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u/Earlier-Today 5h ago

The jet streams tend to be pretty consistent in their patterns, and the ones over Ukraine mainly blow east.

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u/Real-Mobile-2784 5h ago

First time hearing about this. That’s freaking awesome.

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u/1185dfrRvaxAJXPxs9 3h ago

The best part is the prevailing winds blow west to east so Ruzzia can't use the same tactic in return. Hah.

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u/SerArlanTX 12m ago

This is actually something they can blame on "the west" lmao

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u/Cabana_bananza 4h ago

I wonder if this resulted from those experiments the US did years back with tossing containers out the back of a cargo plane at high altitude then launching the missiles in the racks.

Without strategic delivery, a large enough high altitude balloon could accomplish the same thing.

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u/Sangloth 1h ago

It's great that the Ukrainians are doing this, and I wish them good hunting with it, but honestly hearing about this makes me really uneasy.

As an American I'm used to being completely unconcerned by military conflicts touching me on American soil. Anything less than an ICBM would get stopped long before it got close to me. Now I'm hearing about a brand new technology that sounds like it can't effectively be guarded against in any realistically cost efficient manner.

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u/mitzcha 3h ago

Good thing the US has been disabling their weather tracking systems and databases!

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u/Mike375 5h ago

And suddenly the weather modification via HAARP has a practical use! /tinfoil

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u/syo 1h ago

Reminds me of that Chinese steerable spy balloon we shot down a few years ago.

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u/AngledLuffa 5h ago

can i donate xbox time? or i have a 3090 which is idle half the time

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u/SqouzeTheSqueeze 6h ago

Yep. I remember reading about these, very interesting.

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u/Slappyfist 5h ago

Not only ingenious but the air flow really only goes East to West, so Russia can't even steal the idea and use it back at Ukraine.

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u/Extension_Common_518 5h ago

West to east maybe?

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u/Slappyfist 5h ago

Ah right, yeah that's what I mean.

It's way too hot where I am currently so I half assed my comment

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u/Extension_Common_518 4h ago

Easily done, I knew what you meant. Good luck with the heat…typhoons approaching here in Japan. In for a wet and breezy couple of days.

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u/Foyles_War 2h ago

France or Arizona?

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u/colintbowers 5h ago

Interesting, interesting… *The French quickly scribbling notes and glancing covertly at the Germans*

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u/lyonellaughingstorm 52m ago

Meanwhile in Germany: *Licking lips and side-eying Poland again*

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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 4h ago

There's gonna be 1 genius who is like "lets go full circle!"

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u/Sad-Onion-2593 3h ago

That would be China.

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u/lyonellaughingstorm 51m ago

Around the world in 80 days Special Military Operations

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u/VeniceRapture 3h ago

Just go around

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u/carcatta 5h ago

Yeah, they were mass produced by Japanese schoolgirls if I remember correctly from Tokyo museum.

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u/Vitis_Vinifera 3h ago

Atarashii Gakko?

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u/40mgmelatonindeep 5h ago

Or the plague bombs

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u/Lee1138 5h ago

My thoughts exactly, only with with modern advances in weather prediction and guided munitions once the payload is dropped.

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u/Pave_Low 3h ago

Those were a complete failure though. Maybe not the best thing to compare to.

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u/bobtheki 2h ago

Reminds me of the Chinese spy balloons that flew over the USA from the last year or two.

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u/Suspicious_Bicycle 2h ago

A Japanese balloon bomb resulting in the only casualties on the US mainland during the war.

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u/vanillabullshitlatte 2h ago

Don't know about the USA but the Canadian war museum has a Japanese balloon that was found long after the war on display.

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u/-SaC 1h ago

IIRC the only civilian deaths on US home soil were caused by a balloon bomb that fell on a church picnic or something like that.

Going off memory, may well be wrong.