When it comes to realistic depictions of war in video games, The Onion’s satirical commercial was closer to the truth than anything actual video game developers have released.
In a story that should have most certainly been Duffel Blog but is actually real-life, a Russian weather forecaster proclaimed the skies over Syria were perfect “flying weather” for Russian jets bombing rebel positions, The Guardian reported.
“Experts say the timing for [the airstrikes] was chosen very well in terms of weather,” Ekaterina Grigorova said in her report for Rossiya 24 on Sunday, according to The Washington Post.
The Russian military has carried out more than 100 sorties in Syria since its aerial campaign began last week. Moscow has claimed it has been bombing militants affiliated with ISIS, but so far strikes have overwhelmingly targeted anti-Assad and Kurdish forces instead.
“In these meteorological conditions, planes can dive below the clouds and conduct effective strikes on ground targets, and only climb higher if there’s active anti-aircraft fire,” Grigorova said in front of a graphic depicting a Sukhoi Su-24 strike aircraft dropping bombs on an enemy tank from the “optimal height for targeting and bombing” of three to five kilometers off the ground, according to the translation from The Guardian.
A video uploaded to YouTube earlier this week purportedly shows what happens when a Russian RPG-7 (rocket-propelled grenade) is fired at 45 sheets of bulletproof glass, measuring about 16 inches thick.
An RPG is a portable, shoulder-fired, anti-tank weapon system that fires rockets equipped with an explosive warhead.
Here’s a side shot of an RPG:
Photo: YouTube/CrashZone
Here’s the target: 45 layers of bulletproof glass:
Photo: YouTube/CrashZone
Here we go:
Photo: YouTube/CrashZone
Here’s the RPG on its way toward the bulletproof glass:
The lessons in Sun Tzu’s book “The Art of War” still ring true, despite it being written in 513 B.C. Case in point comes from the tactics used during the Vietnam War. As the following video points out, you have American Gen. William Westmoreland, who sees the battlefield like a chessboard. Then you have Gen. Võ Nguyên Giáp — who sees it like Sun Tzu would — as a go board. In go, you acquire territory with the fewest resources instead of eliminating the enemy troops like in Chess.
“It’s a classic case of a general fighting the last war,” says Richard A. Gabriel, a professor at the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, in the video. “The lessons he learned there [Gen. Westmoreland during World War II] only apply partially to Vietnam. There were no fixed objectives to be taken, there were no fixed units to be destroyed.”
This video shows how Sun Tzu’s lessons were applied during the Vietnam War:
Nazi Germany produced some of the nastiest people the world has ever seen.
The atrocities they committed remain hard to believe. Mega thugs like Gerhard Sommer allegedly helped massacre 560 civilians, Alfred Stark executed 117 Italian prisoners of war, and Oskar Groening was charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.”
Movies have portrayed some Nazi bad guys, as well, and here are 10 of the most memorable:
The maximum punishment for desertion during a time of war is death. But it’s highly unlikely Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who allegedly left his Afghanistan post in 2009, or any troop today would receive that sentence. The last service member executed for desertion was Pvt. Eddie Slovik in 1945 (by a twelve-man firing squad).
There were over 20,000 American military deserters between 2006 and 2015. Of those, about 2,000 have been prosecuted.
This short TestTube News video explains the severity of desertion and its place in military history.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II (Photo: The Royal Hashemite Court, Facebook)
Jordan’s King Abdullah II, a former commander of his country’s special forces, vowed to bombard the Islamic State until his military runs “out of fuel and bullets” after the release of a grisly video showing a captured Jordanian airman being burned alive in a cage.
“He said there is going to be retribution like ISIS hasn’t seen,” said Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr., a Marine Corps veteran of two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, who was in the meeting with the king. “He mentioned ‘Unforgiven’ and he mentioned Clint Eastwood, and he actually quoted a part of the movie.”
Hunter would not say which part of “Unforgiven” the King quoted, but noted it was where Eastwood’s character describes how he is going to deliver his retribution. There is a scene in the picture in which Eastwood’s character, William Munny, says, “Any man I see out there, I’m gonna kill him. Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill his wife and all his friends and burn his damn house down.”
Beyond airstrikes, Jordan could further contribute to the fight against ISIS through the use of its extremely effective special forces units.
Jordan’s special forces team, grouped under Jordan’s Joint Special Operations Command, is 14,000 strong and is one of the most effective fighting and intelligence forces in the region. Jordanian special forces frequently train alongside US forces.
This video of a soldier letting his squadmate shoot him with an AK-47 is about as nuts as it gets.
“This is about the dumbest thing you can do,” the video description says. “But I filmed this one day when my friends were bored in Syria. War gets boring sometimes.”
The YouTube channel – which has other videos featuring Western volunteer troops in Syria – belongs to Robert Alleva, who is a volunteer fighter himself, according to the video description.
Watch:
This body armor test could have gone wrong in so many ways, especially considering that the weapon was on automatic mode. The video below shows what happens when things don’t go as expected. The Russian separatist takes one in the gut while testing his body armor with a pistol.
The technology behind these rifles takes a shooter’s experience, skill, and environment factors out of the equation. Simply tag your target and squeeze the trigger. It’s that simple. The same tracking and fire-control capabilities found in advanced fighter jets are incorporated into these rifles, according to TrackingPoint.
“Being proficient at Call of Duty or Battlefield takes more practice and skill than firing a weapon in the real world does now,” reported Timothy for Engadget. “This is the future we live in.”
The rifle also has a password-protected firing mechanism, which doesn’t fire until you’ve aligned the rifle with your target. It also features the ability to video stream, which allows you to share the view from the scope to any device connected to the Internet.
This three-minute video demonstrates how the rifle works:
Whatever the future holds, Ukraine is as ready as it’s ever going to be. If the Russians invade the central European country, Ukraine is much better equipped and trained to give them as good a fight as possible. If they are able to join NATO, then a Russian invasion is much more unlikely.
30 countries are currently members of NATO. Will Ukraine be the 31st?
As Russia steps up its military presence on its border with Ukraine, adding around 30,000 troops as of April 2021, Ukraine is getting ready for them. Both sides of the border held military drills in the middle of the month, on their respective sides of the border.
Ukraine sees the Russian troop presence as a direct threat to Ukraine’s national borders and internal security. Russia says its military buildup is a direct response to possible American intervention in the region, as two U.S. Navy ships entered the Black Sea in the week before Russia’s military exercises.
In the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution that brought current President Volodymyr Zelensky to power, the Russian military entered the Crimean Peninsula, captured strategic sites in the area, and installed a pro-Russian government there. It then initiated a referendum among its populace that allegedly voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation.
Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal addresses Soldiers of the JMTG-U as TF Illini transfers authority to TF Raven.
Two days after the vote, Russia annexed the peninsula. But that didn’t stop the fighting in the region. In the aftermath of the revolution in Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists rose up in the Donbass region of the country and have been fighting Ukrainian government forces ever since.
The two areas that comprise the Donbass region, Donetsk and Luhansk, have declared their independence and are being supported financially and militarily by Vladimir Putin’s government in Moscow.
But that conflict started years ago. When Russian forces entered Crimea, the Ukranian military was largely inexperienced and untrained. After seven years of low-intensity conflict, the military leadership in Kiev believes it fields a battle-hardened army of veterans.
Russia maintains a large military force, with one million troops on active duty and two million in reserve compared to Ukraine’s army of 255,000 in active service and 900,000 in reserve. The bulk of the Russian military’s combat experience is from the recent actions in Syria, and large portions of the Russian army do not deploy outside the country.
Still, observers are concerned that the 30,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s doorstep is the largest buildup of Russian forces since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Ukraine, for its part, has not only been fighting a war for years on end, giving its troops valuable real-world combat experience, it has also strived toward NATO membership. The gains it made in recent years have dwarfed the gains made under its former pro-Russian leaders.
Members of TF Raven, 81st SCBT, Washington National Guard watch the Ukrainian Brigade command lead their forces in a simulated exercise as part of training with the JMTG-U
In the first 18 months of Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency, the country has met 96 of NATO standards compared to the 196 made by his predecessor over five years. Zelensky’s government has also increased military spending by 1.4% since 2019, now spending 3.4% of its GDP.
NATO membership for Ukraine is still a long way off by most expert opinions. Zelensky has called for four-way talks with Russia, Germany, and France to ease tensions with Moscow and end the military buildup along his eastern border.
During the Cold War, the Soviets made a new type of vehicle called a ground effect vehicle (GEV). These vehicles earned their own classification because they aren’t quite airplanes or hovercrafts but something in between.
Ground effect is the aerodynamic interaction between the wings and the surface of the Earth, which reduce the drag and lead to greater cruise efficiency, according to AVweb. Pilots simply describe it as “floating.”
Although the Soviets didn’t discover the ground effect phenomenon, they did take full advantage of it by making these behemoth low-flying vehicles.
The Nazis had plans to blow up the Hoover Dam during World War II, in an effort to cripple aircraft manufacturing in Los Angeles.
Born out of the Great Depression and completed in 1935, the dam was the largest ever built and stood as a symbol of America’s ability to overcome adversity. It fueled Southern California’s incredible growth – its large cities, its industrial base, its massive agricultural industry, and the nation’s biggest defense plants, according to the National Archives.
This video from American Heroes Channel gives an idea of what happened:
Fortunately, the government was tipped off to the plot and upped security in the area. But it kept fears of the plot secret for more than 60 years, until a historian unearthed documents while doing research at the National Archives, according to Mental Floss.
Weapons that have uncontrollable effects or cause unjustifiable suffering are banned from being used in war. These weapons are so insidious that more than 115 nations have signed The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention.
Despite the CCW and various other treaties that prohibit these weapons, some countries continue to use them. This video shows the types of weapons that are illegal under the CCW and why.
