I suspect the answer, in this case, is more likely to be “There just isn’t a lot of market for watching a four hour long documentary in a movie theatre.”

Like, I love Hbomberguy and Folding Ideas, y’know? I am the actual target audience for four hour long documentaries. But if you told me that I could go watch HBomb’s latest in a theatre instead of at home, I’d think you were fucking insane.

Is it impossible there was foul play? No, of course not. But I think this is a pretty good application for Occam’s razor.

Let’s see what happens when it hits streaming. That’s where the real market will be.

Oh, I never specifically claimed this was a Hegseth problem. Notice I said “American” arrogance. This problem has been going on much, much longer than the current electoral cycle.

In all fairness to Raytheon, Patriot is incredibly good at what it does. The problem isn’t the platform, the problem is that what it does is shoot down $80m combat aircraft. When that’s your target, $1-5M a shot is cheap. And Patriot is deadly accurate. Ukraine has used it to basically neutralize the Russian airforce.

The fault here is with US Military command, who point blank refused to take drones seriously while everyone else was working overtime to adapt to them. Ukraine actually offered to partner with the US on training and technology specifically to intercept shahed drones and the US turned them down.

Now, we can only speculate as to why that is, and it’s certainly possible that arms industry lobbyists wanted to avoid Ukrainian defence companies gaining any share of the US market. But that would only be speculation. I suspect it has far more to do with American arrogance; “What can little Ukraine teach us about war?”

In the interest of being factual I have to point out that it’s not quite that bad. You’re quoting the export price, but the US Military gets them for closer to $1M per because they funded the development of the system and have ongoing contracts for delivery.

Still not great when you’re spending a million a shot to intercept $20,000 dollar drones.

The bigger issue though is production capacity. Raytheon can’t just magically quadruple their output overnight. Patriot is an extremely complex device that requires skilled personnel and complex tooling to manufacture, as well as a LOT of safety procedures (it is a missile after all), in addition to the rare earth requirements you noted. Even if the US offers to start buying them at export price Raytheon can’t just make that production capacity appear out of nowhere. And in order for them to scale up capacity they’re going to want guarantees of ongoing purchases so that they don’t just do a bunch of capex to meet a short term need.

Range, line of sight, and infrastructure.

Radios have limited range. For reliable communication, that is limited to, functionally speaking, line of sight. While you’re probably aware that it’s possible to transmit radio signals beyond visual range by bouncing them off of the ionosphere, this kind of long range communication requires substantial infrastructure; eg, a tall radio antenna placed in a high up location. This doesn’t work for piloting drones because a) the drone does not have the benefit of substantial communications equipment on it’s part, and b) the tall or high antenna is obviously a very exposed and vulnerable target. It’s also extremely unreliable. While bouncing signals off the ionosphere is possible, it’s deeply imperfect, heavily weather dependent, and the interference involved could easily impair the operation of a drone.

What Ukraine needs is the ability to:

• operate a drone very, very far beyond line of sight. Several thousand kilometres in some cases.
• do so reliably and without interruption of service
• do so with equipment that does not require an exposed position to operate from. Starlink dishes or similar can be pointed almost straight up, so you can operate them from, say, a small clearing in a woodland, among a cluster of buildings, or down in a trench or foxhole. They also don’t need very much power, you can run one off of a portable generator.

And they need to do all of that with as little latency as possible. LEO satellites are the only option that ticks all of those boxes.

I will note that radio is used for the operation of FPV drones, the small drones piloted using a first person view (FPV) camera that you’ve probably taking out Russian tanks and troops. This is one of the key limitations of these drones; they cannot operate beyond visual range. That means if you’re separated from your target by a hill or tree line, you will likely lose control on the final approach. These weapons have been as effective as they are in Ukraine because the terrain is extremely flat and these kinds of obstructions are rare.

But what we’re talking about here is specifically long range strike drones (intended to hit targets deep in Russian territory) and interceptor drones intended to knock out Russian long range strike drones being sent into Ukraine. In order to effect an intercept on an enemy long range strike drone you need to hit it as far out as possible. If you wait until you have line of sight, it’s already too late. Hence why, in both these cases, satellite communication is required.

Latency. Lower orbits give much less latency, and latency is a huge problem with satellite internet. This is especially bad if you’re trying to do anything realtime like, say, navigate a drone.

That’s why Ukraine got so fucked by Musk throttling Starlink on them recently. They use it to pilot both their long range drone weapons and their drone interceptor systems that protect people from Russian drones.

It makes me very happy to know that this is being developed for our military. They shouldn’t be at the mercy of American owned communications services out in the field.

Incredible game

Three of the dead were no-hook privates. Literally just starting their careers.

The scary part is that this was just a grass fire. Those happen all the time in training areas. You’re firing tracers, explosives, etc. It’s very, very easy to start a fire. They happen at least once a week during routine training like this. You call it in, range control takes care of it. They had no reason to expect this would be any different.

Then the wind changed and suddenly the fire was moving towards them at 100km/h.

Fucking cowards

Except no one is putting wells down in the middle of a 600km^2 army training area.

Like, that’s something I really need to stress here. CFB Wainwright is absolutely massive. None of this was taking place anywhere near established oil and gas infrastructure.

Remember, in CAF parlance, “live fire” includes artillery, missiles, and 2000lb bombs. Sandbags aren’t gonna do much against those.

Edit to add: Which isn’t really the point, because you don’t put live fire within kilometers of anything like that on purpose. This was either a major fuck up or - more likely - something that wasn’t known about, like a naturally occurring gas pocket that was ignited by an explosive round.

I’m going to “suggest” that the latter is far, far more likely to have been the case in this particular instance.

Edit 2: We have the full story now. No gas, no infrastructure. It was literally just a grass fire. These happen all the time on training grounds. Live munitions start fires very easily, especially tracer rounds. The difference was the 100km/h wind gusts which whipped up the fire and caused it to move extremely quickly, much faster than normal safety protocols anticipate.

BBC also reporting on it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr86z0w4lxdxo

According to Global’s coverage, this was a live fire exercise gone wrong;

The explosion was caused by a live-fire training exercise hitting a gas line or gas well on the base around 4 p.m. MT, multiple Canadian Armed Forces sources told Global News.

You’re not wrong exactly, but I think you’re perhaps assuming an unnecessarily absolutist approach. If there are legacy systems that need windows, keep windows for those legacy systems. What you’re describing are exceptions, not the norm. The vast, vast majority of public service computers could just as easily be running Linux.

As for who the Federal government sues, that’s why you go with an enterprise release like Red Had or Ubuntu. You find a company that you’re happy to work with, you pay them maybe 25% of what you’re paying MS right now, and in return you get a full support plan with clearly defined SLAs.

This isn’t so much “Nothing’s impossible” as it is “It’s really not that hard.” These are solved problems. Plenty of governments have already switched over to open source.

I’m going to be completely real with you, I’m really not sure how many developers have the Gentoo user base that high on their list of priorities.

Deadass murdered her own kid. Stone cold.