Yes, this is why having a prompt satellite launch capability to replace attrition losses is now a strategic imperative. We need to be able to put up new ones in a matter of hours, not months.
I'd like to see your version of maritime law that doesn't allow freely roaming over important cables. Your country's enemies would gladly drop cables totally encircling you and say "uh uh uh, important cables!" if you tried to leave your perimeter
I realize US politics may suggest otherwise but I can't imagine the military is just gonna stand by and entertain such a farce..
Satellites can serve multiple purposes including communications, navigation, overhead imagery, signals intelligence, weather, etc. They are also vulnerable, but it's possible to launch replacements faster than repairing damaged cables.
That of course assumes that Putin stops at Ukraine. The point is that this isn't our war.
While the EU may not be at war with Russia, Russia is already at war with the EU.
The purpose of this is to unite enough of the domestic population to suppress dissent and keep the current regime in power.
The reality is that it is actually at war with only one small neighbor, which is going so badly that they have had to import troops from North Korea. Embarrassing.
If they actually engaged in war with the EU, more specifically a member of NATO, they would lose quickly. So they stay well back from that line.
We might be able to stop it before it becomes a hot war, but the ambition is there, the indicators are there, the opportunity is there. Assume it's a war. (Unless you're German. I guess our national sport is now making excuses for Russia)
It makes it pretty real when 7 year old me is wondering if this one has any nukes on board, and if this will be the day that they drop.
Russia is not to be trusted, imho. They do not honor their international commitments in good faith, and they will expand their territorial claims if they are allowed to do so. Europe, like a frog in a pot, is in peril and they need to take steps to make sure that Russian war fighting capabilities are destroyed through exhaustion in Ukraine.
This of course is tragic for Ukraine, because it means that she will be utterly razed in the process. But if Russia prevails or backs down with strength, it will happen again. And again.
Russias ability to project force in a strategic way must be destroyed. They are not trustworthy stewards of coercive force.
Having fighters scramble from Eilison was not unusual at all, and when hunting out in that area with my father we saw a few of those. It was pretty distinct from the training and combat training they did, so it wasn’t that hard to distinguish the intentionality and risk tolerance that was reserved for that kind of urgency.
Anecdotally, I’m pretty darn sure that I saw a bear flying overhead just a few miles east-southeast of Fairbanks. I watched it be turned by 3 F4 phantoms. I was with my father and a few of his friends, as well as my brother that would have been 13 at the time. Everyone there remembers the event, and it was talked about for days in Fairbanks, we even had a subsequent training the next week in my elementary school on survival in the event of a nuclear attack lol.
Perhaps it was some kind of clandestine fuckery, perhaps it was an authorized flight, or perhaps it would have been to embarrassing / inflammatory to make it an event of record? I’m sure the answers are quietly sitting somewhere in a musty filing box.
I for one am in favor of giving Wagenknecht a list of must haves for a ceasefire and peace treaty, which obviously will contain giving back all territory to Ukraine, costly reparation for many years to come, and denazification in Russia. With that list we send her to Russia to negotiate. She is only allowed to return, when the points on that list are achieved. She will be the negotiator, the change she will be the change she wants to see. (If it is not obvious to someone, this is rather a joke, since she cannot be trusted to have meaningful negotiations with her idol.)
After the dust settles on the Ukraine war, if Putin still has the capacity to wage war, he will not likely stop with Ukraine. It is by now obvious that a limited incursion into Poland, for example, will not spark a global thermonuclear war.
Ukrainian suffering is both the litmus test and the vaccination against nuclear escalation that Putin needs to contemplate further expansion.
Political alignments aside, if I were based in Europe I would be very, very concerned.
and try to plot a path between them without crossing an undersea cable:
Who is now threatening nuclear war?
Imagine the US engaging in an invasion of Mexico as equally stupid and unprovoked as Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Then not only would Mexico have a perfect right to seek whatever help it needed to resist the aggression directed at it, we would -- unless we were damned fools -- fully expect Mexico to seek and obtain that help.
You will even see Kessler cited as some sort of barrier to leaving, which is nonsense.
Imagine there's a 1x1m spot where on average once per week, entirely at random and without warning a giant boulder falls from the sky and if you're there you will be crushed under the boulder. Clearly living on that spot is a terrible idea, you'd die. But merely running through it is basically fine, there's a tiny chance the boulder hits you by coincidentally arriving as you do, but we live with risks that big all the time. If you're an American commuter for example that's the sort of risk you shrug off.
Likewise, Kessler isn't a barrier to leaving, humans won't be leaving because there's nowhere to go. The only habitable planet is this one, and we're already here.
The most likely explanation for the unexplained disassembly is that Boeing made it. Second, most likely, is a collision with a hunk of something invisible.
Edit: I guess I was assuming geostationary. There's a whole sphere of geosynchronous orbits to play with.
Edit2: I was right the first time, GEO (geosynchronous equatoral orbit) / GSO (geosynchronous orbit), apparently. Now my head hurts.
"cramped" the way that like, Alaska is cramped on account of how everybody has to live on the surface, not evenly distributed through the volume of the planet?
Like yeah, it's "just a circle" but did you check the radius of that circle?
Remember if there's debris, the debris isn't stuck in the circle, but, any time it's not in the circle it's harmless. This has the effect of significantly defusing the problem, so in total it's too low risk to be worth considering.
Also, your focus on cost was not the point. The point was numbers necessary. You need $lots of bullets, but you don't need any where near the same number of jets/tanks. You don't need $lots of satellites. You need a much smaller number closer to the number of jets/tanks. At least based on Starlink constellation numbers.
Yes, I know the undersea cables are privately owned too.
But that's an awfully gray area after the last few months