WARLINK
OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence, is a product of the internet
era that I find quite interesting. The idea is assembling the
wealth of public information available on the internet to document
military and related information. There's a lot of information out
there which was previously only all accessible to those with the
resources of national intelligence agencies, and now it just takes
one guy with a computer.
To be honest my examples of good OSINT sources are pretty limited,
just two websites. I'd like to find more but many in this space
seem to sell articles to media organisations rather than document
all their findings clearly and concisely on one free website, which
to be fair probably offers little direct financial reward for their
efforts. There are probably some busy making YouTube videos to
appeal to the masses too, but I don't like that medium for this
sort of topic.
"Russian strategic nuclear forces" is relatively infrequently
updated with short posts, but there are some interesting longer
articles in their blog's archive about aspects of Russian, and also
US, nuclear weaponry, strategy, and politics:
https://russianforces.org/
But the best one, with ample time-wasting potential via the related
links at the bottom of each article page, is Covert Shores:
http://www.hisutton.com/
Primarily about sea-going military and smuggling vessles,
particular underwarer, the author (who also draws excellent
cut-away diagrams) has become quite focused on unmanned craft, for
both sea and sky. This space has advanced massively during the war
in Ukraine as their army seems capable of producing an infinite
variety of very different 'drone' war machines. In turn Russia, and
actually all the world's military powers (even us Aussies), are
responding with their own derivative projects for what often amount
to robot bombs.
Remote guided missiles are nothing new, rather incredibly they were
in development by the Americans all the way back at the end of
WWII, complete with video transmitted by a missile back to its
controller in the aircraft it launched from. The limitation really
has been that transmission aspect - how to control these weapons
from a properly safe distance away. The US military's drone
programme of course cracked it a long time ago with satellites
relaying transmissions from their drones over Afghanistan (or any
country where you don't want to be), back in fact to places like
their base in the middle of the Australian outback at Pine Gap.
Starlink and its mostly-vaporware competitors have been promising
this sort of global satellite data capability to any guy with the
cash, and it's not surprising that the US military has been said to
be one of Starlink's big financial backers. Now though, it's
interesting to see Starlink dishes appearing on both Ukranian and
Russian naval drones in these articles:
http://www.hisutton.com/Ukraine-USV-Jetski.html
http://www.hisutton.com/Russia-USVs-ARMY-2024.html
Whether the Russians are actually using Starlink, or if they're
hoping to use an equivalent LEO satellite internet service run from
a more friendly country like China, one can only guess. Since the
Chinese are ramping up their StarLink copy project, Qianfan, the
Starlink dish(y) on the Russian naval drone is probably some degree
of stand-in for a future Chinese equivalent.
https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-megaconstellation
So what this shows is that warfare is entering a new era where
advanced satellite communication is no longer dominated by the
superpowers. Interestingly, wheras GPS and its Russian equivalent
Glonass are military projects that revolutionised civilian life,
LEO internet constellation satellites are outwardly civilian
projects that seem set to revolutionise global military strategy.
- The Free Thinker
