This is a race between ABM capabilities and funding. NK is rather helpful here as thanks to all the hysteria on TV no US politician can even dream of cutting the funding of this program.

Let’s not forget that we know this from a leak from one of the spy agency who intercepted Russians comms talking about it. I’m no fan of trump administration but just think about this chain Andy the probability of this info being accurate . By accurate I don’t mean better for Knushner - just accurate . Also assume…

Very sad situation indeed. Another great result of the geopolitical adventures by Americans, Chinese and Russians.

I think there are 3 possible explanations

NATO : what is exactly is its mission, what is US backing??? Even more importantly what exactly is its capability? Even more importantly how expensive is it? And probably most importantly is how much of that capability was utilised since the 90s? You see I believe that military is the extension of politics (and I…

Funnily enough I was doing same calculations and for most of it got similar results. The one thing I disagree on is (guess!) wind effect. Clearly 35secs flight vs 1sec flight would imply that same average error (say 10% and say one direction so cumulative) would affect the accuracy 35times more for the former. But at…

First time I heard about “external ballistics” but it makes sense. My point was however that you cannot simply draw a parallel between bullet trajectory (ie its complications beyond newtonian mechanics ) and that of a bomb and call it basic ballistics. Its not trivial by any means i.e. differences in flight…

I know nothing about bombs - but reading 50% of the comments here made me feel right at home :) 2 simple points

I agree that this was coming, and Russia should have made a lot more effort into drawing up an deconflicting agreement with Turkey around precisely that area. Instead they played cowboys with Turks over and over . But even if Turkish radar is correct, shooting an aircraft that spent 18secs over your territory and…

Let’s look at the big picture: Michael in my view did a great job of explaining how this thing is a complete non-event. Furthermore the leaks came from Russian state run media, which is highly censored and more importantly is extremely unlikely to broadcast anything classified in the first place(as many people said :…