Makes you wonder. There must be a massive archive of satellite on satellite images somewhere and teams of people figuring out engineering capabilities/secrets from them.
There's already a commercially publicized satellite that went out into geostationary orbit, matched orbit with an end of life telecom satellite, rammed a probe up its rear end to latch onto it and took control over its station keeping. Google satellite mission extension vehicle.
I'd be shocked if this isn't a capability the DoD has developed to a very high level.
Spending 5% of their budget to cut Russia's military in half is an amazing value. And without putting any US lives into the conflict. Sending over weapons is a no-brainer.
What exactly is Russian going to do in retaliation? They've already failed to invade an ex-Soviet neighbor. At this point if I were Russian I'd be concerned Finland might just annex the whole country and nothing could be done to stop them.
While it does exist as an option, I'm not entirely convinced any significant number of the weapons they retain function. Their military seems to be in shambles. They have so many nuclear weapons that certainly at least a handful are usable, but how would they know what weapons function?
Russia already has been a hostile nation for more than a decade and will try to do as much damage as it can without incurring additional retaliation anyway. Nothing changes here.
Besides after more than a year of war this is an interesting but purely counterfactual analysis without much relevance for today.
> Russia already has been a hostile nation for more than a decade and will try to do as much damage as it can without incurring additional retaliation anyway. Nothing changes here.
Not quite, since there are taboos that even the Kremlin has been afraid to break so far. Such as poisoning diplomats, deploying weapons to space, messing with subsea cables, etc...
But theoretically they have less to lose than the U.S. because they have less diplomats, have less space assets, and so on. So one day the decision makers may be tempted to get one back.
Pretty sad that Ukrainian and Russian human lives probably didn’t enter any of that equation as having any value.
It’s likely extremely negative value when properly integrated into future potential outcome. For example the “badwill” it will generate from relatives and decedents of all the dead.
I doubt fueling war is ever a good strategy in the long run.
Compared to peace and prosperity, sure. Compared to Russia winning and subjugating more of the Ukrainian nation and population, much less so.
Who cares what the motivation of some bigwigs in Washington is, as long as they are helping Ukraine defending their country. It is Russia that invaded and annexed territories of its neighbor and who can end this war any time by going home.
It's also incredible advertising for western arms manufacturers, especially after several decades of them basically being the bad guys in the public's eyes.
