They do have some interesting advances. E.g. loitering air defense missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/358_missile

Since F-35 does not use its radar while being stealthy, it would require an early warning from an AWACS about a loitering missile. But the missile is small. It gets pointed to an area and told (typical scenario) “there be helicopters somewhere there, go and see if you can find them”. It cruises in economy mode and watches with presumbaly side-scanning sensors. If it sees a hot topic, it turns and goes from loitering mode to darting mode.

P.S. Not sure if this was the weapon involved. It’s just the strangest thing Iran has.

I’m not entirely certain (because Telegram is disrupted and it’s harder to get information from Russia), but I think this bears some relation to RosKomNadzor f**ing with Telegram and mobile internet in general, recently also in the Moscow region (arguably because the sky is full of Ukrainian drones, but perhaps for additional reasons).

Two political principles applicable to Russia:

• don’t take people’s alcohol away from them, sober people will do rational things
• don’t take Telegram, people depend on it and will be angry, possibly forgetting how to lie

Let’s hope that changes on April 13 (Hungarian general elections).

Also, it causes natural selection.

If an opponent undergoes natural selection, the product is the most careful and wily persons being in charge. If you kill every dumbass, only those smart enough to survive will survive. Chances are, they will also strike back.

And meanwhile, there’s nobody to negotiate with.

Apparently, careless smoking is not a uniquely Eastern European thing. Or perhaps someone decided to frag their ship (just a little bit, not badly).

From the article:

The U.S. military’s Central Command said two sailors received treatment for “non-life-threatening injuries.” People on the ship reported that dozens of service members suffered smoke inhalation.

And in the category of non-life-threatening, but still not ideal, many sailors have not been able to do laundry since the fire.

The ship, along with its 4,500 sailors and fighter pilots, was in the Mediterranean on Oct. 24 when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered it to steam to the Caribbean to add weight to President Trump’s pressure campaign on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader before his seizure.

From the Caribbean, the carrier rushed to the Middle East for the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which is now in its third week.

Speaking to sailors on board aircraft carriers is difficult in the best of circumstances. During a war, the ships and military bases involved in operations go “dark,” limiting the ability of service members to communicate with the outside world. The officials and sailors interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Ford is now entering its 10th month of deployment. It will break the record for longest post-Vietnam War carrier deployment if it is still at sea in mid-April. That record, at 294 days, was set by the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in 2020.

Crew members on the Ford have been told that their deployment will probably be extended into May, which would put them at an entire year at sea, twice the length of a normal aircraft carrier deployment.

It is nice to know that it has gone exceptionally well for Ukraine in Kupyansk. Meanwhile:

https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine

Russian battlefield casualties and fatalities are significantly greater than Ukrainian casualties and fatalities—with a ratio of roughly 2.5:1 or 2:1.

That’s the opinon of the Center for Strategic Studies.

Serious trouble” is a 27:1 casualty ratio in Ukraine’s favor,

Your other points are true. This, sadly, is not. The situation is at best 4:1, in bad sectors, 3:1. It also varies - wounded Russian soldiers tend to die of their wounds far more often than wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

However, if it was 2.7:1, it was too pessimistic.

Edit: link for people who keep downvoting without a clue. CSIS thinks the ratio is more pessimistic. They mention numbers like 2.1 : 1 and 2.5 : 1.

I plead for journalists to actually inform themselves about the subject before they write… :o

Israel has other ways to defend against Iranian missiles during the war, including via fighter jets, but the interceptors are among the most effective defensive weapons against long-range fire. Its Iron Dome missile defense system is designed to repel more short-range fire.

They speak of Iron Dome (short range, for slow rockets from inside the atmosphere) and THAAD (high altitude, for fast missiles re-entering from space) interchangeably. And they even mention fighter aircraft, which cannot do jack in either case.

The currently relevant scenarios:

• Hezbollah shoots unguided rockets at Israel -> Iron Dome intercepts maybe 15% of them (if the trajectory looks dangerous enough), and this costs about 10 times as much as the whole rocket salvo.

• Iran shoots an IRBM at Israel -> the IRBM splits up in space into cluster munitions -> Israel can intercept the MIRV bus (cluster munition housing), but it’s empty at the time of getting intercepted. Not much point. And doing it would cost at least 10 times as much as the incoming missile did.

A missile defense system, in this case, cannot do jack either. For this type of attack, defense would have a point if one was expecting to get nuked, becuause a nuclear-armed reentry vehicle cannot be made arbitrarily small, and the cost of leaving it un-intercepted would be extremely tragic.

In case of these projectiles, which are conventional and unguided in their final stage, one has to simply absorb the hits. This is the cost of war. And try to find the other guy’s launchers, and try to prevent them from producing more.

And I’m not shedding any tears for Israel in this case. It definitely sucks to be bombed with cluster munitions, but they started this round of fighting, killed most people who they might have negotiated with, and aren’t even new to using forbidden kinds of weapons (e.g. cluster munitions made of white phosphorus).

Wreckage is the ultimate test.

If there is doubt about a particular strike, comb the wreckage. The flying product looks the same, but motors and electrical parts are different, the way of laminating fiberglass, the sort of fiberglass, etc.

Sonar-equipped and fiber-controlled submersible drones / robots can. Ordinary sea drones are just small boats with cameras for finding a target, typically made of aluminum or fiberglass. They typically don’t have sonar, ride on the surface, and their magnetic signature needs massive amplification to trigger a mine.

Signature amplification might be doable, though.

If by “signal” they mean the numbers station which appeared at 7910 kHz and moved to 7842 kHz, then Iran is attempting to jam it.

Normally, one would not expect a country to jam its own means of communications, unless they are playing 5D chess or something.

The Iranian Numbers Station Story Just Took An Odd Turn

…and they should both stop.

Nobody should target desalination plants.

It’s even worse than targeting heating and power in the middle of harsh winter.

As for Persian Gulf countries, they are dangerously dependent on desalination for fresh water.

About 42 percent of the UAE’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, while that figure is 90 percent in Kuwait, 86 percent in Oman, and 70 percent in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia also produces more desalinated water than any other country.

Iran is the least dependent with about 30% of fresh water coming from desalination. I would not be surprised if Bahrain would be 100% dependent.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/8/how-targeting-of-desalination-plants-could-disrupt-water-supply-in-the-gulf

Fortunately they remember. Having now observed the process for a few days:

• apparently, several politicians of Iraqi Kurdistan are not enthusiastic at all about the US war
• the president of Iraq, who is Kurdish, is not enthusiastic
• the first lady is publicly un-enthusiastic, writing that they are not guns for hire
• Iran is bombing Iraqi Kurdistan regardless, so they’re learning how to deal with frequent drone attacks

Not money, but continued deliveries of antiballistic missiles. Trump’s war is wasting them away at an unbelievable pace, but Ukraine needs them to function and survive.

and now wants to capitalize on it.

Ukraine is forced to trade its anti-drone expertise at this time. Explanation below.

Around Iran, during 3 days, the US, Israel and Arab countries have shot off the same amount of Patriot missiles as Ukraine has consumed in 4 years. They are doing something wrong, overconsuming missiles at a crazy pace.

This is unrelated to drones, but the balance of ballistic attack and defense is tilted heavily in favour of attack. If you are over 50% sane, you only defend if you absolutely must. Most of time, you calculate the trajectory, sound the alarm in relevant areas, everyone takes cover - and you absorb the hits. Because defending would bankrupt you. For example, an Iranian “Zolfaghar” ballistic missile costs around 150 K euros, while a Patriot PAC-3 interceptor might cost 4 M euros, and typical defensive tactics involve shooting 2 per target. (It is very fortunate that the Russian Iskander is a precision weapon with midcourse corrections and not comparably cheap.)

Ukraine has a dependency they cannot alleviate. About 75% of Ukraininan antiballistic defense relies on Patriot imports from the US to knock down Iskander, Kinzhal and similar items on certain trajectories (not all trajectories). European production of Aster and South Korean production of KM-SAM is unlikely to have enough volume. Buying from South Korea is doubtful if the US is pulling out Patriot and THAAD deployments for sending to the Middle East (South Korea has North Korea to worry about).

If Ukraine does not apply every political lever to ensure continued supply of Patriot missiles, a time will come when Putin will be given a menu every morning - to decide which Ukrainian power plants must stop working next evening.

This is not something that Ukraine can afford. So they will leverage their antidrone knowledge to get a continued supply of missiles, at least until their own missiles start reaching Russian missile factories. Currently they rarely catch Russian launch vehicles. They have made a good attempt at attacking a factory producing Russian “Iskander” missiles, but only 1 building was hit. They will be fired at, and need a sufficient number of interceptors to stay functioning.

So, they will smile and offer an exchange on some mutually bearable terms. Then they return home and curse - properly. Foremost they will be cursing the utter stupidity of the orange toddler who picked an avoidable battle at the wrong time (or allowed a certain war criminal to drag him into it).

Since the claim originates from an Iranian news agency and there are currently no photos of wreckage, I would wait for additional confirmation, but the publisher of the news is Yemeni (they are allied with Iran) so they would likely not wait.

This is certainly possible, everything that flies can be shot down and F-15 is not the hardest of them, as some guy in Kuwait accidentally proved when dots on his radar got too confusing.

I recommend to find some assistance. Even one other person can help immensely at certain points.

I have built a 2-storey shed on a metal frame alone, and it involved highly inconvenient and more than moderately dangerous stages. I would not do it again.

I managed only because I relied heavily on industrial aluminum profiles for machine building (engineer’s Lego beams).

Opinion: I think this news is true. I will not tell anyone if this is good or bad news, as it could be both.

Most likely, the CIA has been repeating to Trump and Pentagon like a broken grammophone: “you cannot win by aerial bombardment alone”. It seems that now the CIA got authorization to make promises to Kurds, and have delivered weapons. Kurds however, most likely:

• remember being double-crossed in January (Turkey alerted Iran of their expedition)
• remember being double-crossed in December (US allowed HTS, now called “Syrian government” to surprise them)
• remember being double-crossed many times before

They are likely reluctant. According to the sources, they have asked for air support. The source cannot tell if support has been granted. US and Israeli strikes have certainly been above-average intense in Western Iran. An effective ground front might be the amount of pressure it would take to overwhelm Iran. Or maybe not.

Judging by the most recent speech by Reza Pahlavi, where he addresses all ethnic minorities and regional tribes and promises extensive safeguards to their identity and culture if a new Iran should form, I would estimate that a rift exists between Pahlavi’s faction (they want an intact but democratic Iran) and the Kurdish factions (50 million Kurds are waiting for an opportunity to set up Kurdistan, 10 million of them live in Iran - this could be a condensation nucleus that starts the formation of a country). Reza Pahlavi obviously cannot promise them that, so he’s willing to promise everything else.

As a note: Kurds will not declare statehood quickly at all - they know they must keep a low profile. They know Turkey will attack them if they declare statehood, Iraq will likely attack them, Syria has recently attacked them for mere ambitions of autonomy. They won’t declare anything, but may try to carve out a highly autonomous province and see what happens in practise.

However, they will fear being betrayed again for the umpteenth time, which may reduce their eagerness to stick their heads into fire.

And it won’t help the US break open the Hormuz strait, because there are no Kurds living there. They live in the western mountains. If Trump wants Hormuz, US soldiers will have to set their own feet on ground.

Given what I have read, I agree with Al Jazeera’s evaluation. Either highly outdated info and no effort to update it (colorful murals on exterior walls, regular traffic by parents --> chances of updating the designation of the object)…

…or just people who give zero damns, or even worse, some form of AI generating target lists which people blindly rubberstamp, Israeli style.