Zoraptor

Yeah, all the large towns in East Qalamoun (funnily enough Al Jazeera called it west Qalamoun which is largely Lebanon) have reportedly surrendered/ reconciled already and when ISIS gets booted from Yarmouk that will be it for both rif Damascus and city Damascus. The Rastan/ Talbiseh pocket in Homs/ Hama is the obvious next target since with it gone you could drive on main roads from Damascus to Homs to Aleppo rather than on back roads with a huge detour. Bits of Idlib with Turkish backed rebels may be off limits, but areas like Jisr Al Shugour and those with HTS/ TIP presence will be fair game. What happens with the Kurdish areas depends on the US, if they withdraw they'll reconcile with the government to avoid Turkey as in the end Sheikh Maqsood, Tel Rifaat and rump bits of Afrin did. If they'd done so in early January they'd still have Afrin instead of having pro Turks settled in their houses. Long term... probably the Kurdish areas will be back with the Syrian Arab Republic renamed and Kurdish language education allowed andsimilar mostly cosmetic changes, they're far more natural allies than the radical islamists who spent as much time fighting kurds as the government or ISIS. And it turns out the research center destroyed in the strikes had been inspected multiple times by the OPCW, they'd used it for analysis and its last inspection was only November last year. There's also an interview with the girl shown gasping on the hospital video (so far as I'm aware the interviews with the medical staff saying it was smoke inhalation have never even been shown on the Beeb etc though this is obviously meant as refutation of that video) saying it was CW, but she's clearly reading a script since every time she pauses she looks either to her left or down then restarts. To be fair, the medical personnel also seem to be at least soft scripted, except when pointing themselves out in the video where they seem to be way more natural and believable. In the recent incident communication was fine, both Russia and the US agree. It was a previous incident where communication failed, and the circumstances were such that it led to accusations that the US was helping ISIS. (It was an hour long attack on besieged government held Deir Ez Zor city's most important defensive position which had been held by the government long term and which allowed ISIS to capture it, it killed or injured between 5 and 10% of the total defensive force of the city since they were completely unprepared for aerial attack and meant that DEZ airport was easily interdicted making supply flights even more difficult; the deconfliction line was only attended by a junior US officer during the incident not the Colonel who should have been there and the US also gave incorrect targeting information to the Russians beforehand. The strikes were also in a general area which was extremely rarely targeted by the US before or after) There wasn't any real chance of escalation in the latest incident since whatever Wagner was doing it was doing it independently from Russia in coordination with the local tribes who wanted Conoco Gas Plant, and revenge on the branch of their tribe which swore fealty to ISIS and had them besieged in DEZ for 3+ years. Deiz Ez Zor is far too far away for effective intervention even if Russia wanted to. If Russia wanted to target the US the base at At Tanf would be a better target anyway, it's way more isolated and has zero credible legal justification

There are a few Chinese soldiers in Syria mostly due to TIP's (Turkestan Islamic Party; pan Turkic, main Uighur terrorist group) presence. They're not advertising their presence and neither is the west, and aren't actively fighting only advising and providing intelligence. There are also a lot of reconstruction advisers already there.

Wow, and the luxury of a DX as well. Not sure I could justify the cost premium for going DX over SX, personally.

There's definitely a crater right in the middle of the second picture, it's a big rectangular patch of green in the before pic which makes it look like underground storage. Impossible to tell if that's correct or not, but there's definitely a crater there. I'm not sure that browbeaten is quite the right term. Yeah, it's pretty clear that his instincts are broadly towards isolationism, the battle is between those instincts and his desire not to look weak which is probably why we ended up with the wild swing in the tone of his tweets from promising WW3 to giving peace a chance over half an hour. His position is probably that he wants out still, but feels he has to respond when US power is questioned. I doubt he particularly cares about kids in Syria, he certainly doesn't care about kids in Yemen, he just cares that it looked like Assad was roostering a snook at him. If the CW attack was staged (if it was it would have been Saudi doing so, Turkey deported 500+ Saudis and they were the ones stopping the surrender agreement) then he was manipulated, if not it was just in his nature to put not looking weak as highest priority. There's some decent satellite imagery of the damage now, far better than the DoD/ Pentagon provided. In terms of craters it looks like 7 and 2 hits at the two Homs sites but that would be minimum number, impossible to say at the Barzah one- though with only 3 buildings being hit there now absolutely confirmed I'd expect 12t of explosives to have done more damage, and 25 missiles per building seems grossly excessive. Edit: took far too long to post that, link is the same as Gfted's

They're sufficiently unstable that for most military applications the precursors are not only stored separately but they're mixed literally on the fly in the warhead- or you can mix them in a bucket, doesn't matter if they're going to be used immediately. Some such as VX can be stabilised, and kept as mixed chemical. All are destroyed by heat and burning, so at least theoretically a saturation strike would not pose much of a leak risk. The list of targets and number of missiles used have been released by the Pentagon: 76 at the Barzeh Research Facility (Location, most pictures of damage are from roughly the roundabout at center and it's the 3 buildings to its NW that have been destroyed, see also) 22 at one chemical site in Shinshar, Homs (location of Shinshar; the imagery shown is so terrible you can barely say they're the same places and there are a load of military facilities around they could be in) 7 at another site in Shinshar, Homs (as above) The Russian, Syrian Government and Rebel claims are... rather different and all include attacks on multiple airfields, though most are on a rough flight path from Jordan to north Damascus (Mezzeh, Dumair, Marj Ruhayyil, Kalkhalah) or near Shanshir (Qusayr) so may well not have been actual targets but just shooting at passing missiles they assumed were targeted at them. Russians say 71 were brought down, SOHR says 65, Pentagon says 0. 76 fired at the Research Facility certainly seems completely ridiculous for the amount of damage so far shown- ISI (note: their north arrow is pointing... south) show only three buildings as destroyed and all the others shown apparently intact, 76 JASSMs and tomahawks would have cost more than the cost of the buildings.

The target at Barzeh literally has random civilians and soldiers walking around it and inside it, none wearing so much as a facemask. That's the only one with any pictures yet, and it's taken a fair ding it's fair to say. It is also least likely, if the US descriptions were true, to have much actual chemicals since it was a research facility. There's a big discrepancy between targeting reports still, the Russians, government and rebels all claim a whole bunch of places rather than 3 were targeted. The Russians and, rather oddly, the rabidly anti government SOHR both say that more than half of the missiles were intercepted, Pentagon claims are that none were. While 71 or 65 interceptions seems unlikely the case for at least one storm shadow being intercepted is near incontrovertible (french manufacturing info on wreckage, rocket fuselage looks more like a crash than explosion), and at least one other interception or failure is very likely (random missile debris is shown, but crater is far too large for an interceptor to have caused). Donald Trump tweeted a 'Mission Accomplished' message. I really do wonder sometimes if he does it all deliberately and is the biggest troll in the known universe.

They didn't leave, some ships put to sea and that's it. There's literally no concrete information yet, but it looks like in the order of 120 cruise missiles- not tomahawks, this time...- launched from B1s rather than ships and not going anywhere near the Russian base, probably launched over Jordan and coming east to west. Also tacit warning was definitely given to Russia, via the deconfliction line. Overall it looks low energy rather than yuge, and not likely to lead to anything much further. Not surprised it was launched today either, Friday the 13th wasn't going to be a go, but if the medical personnel from Douma Hospital* saying it was smoke inhalation rather than CW gains traction Trump's 'think of the children' appeal goes away. Their story is also exactly what the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported, so there's corroboration from a strongly anti government source. *the medical personnel can be seen in the most often repeated footage with the gasping children and point themselves out in it in the video. It's marginally NSFW and has age restriction applied so no embedding.

The US and allies have decided to attack Syria, so a separate thread seems sensible. Details are sketchy at the moment, so it's unclear if there was any tacit deal made with Russia or anything else. At least two waves of missiles over Damascus, and some reports of explosions near Homs is pretty much the sum total of what is known so far.

Probably time for a separate thread then so people can get back to talking about Trump flip flopping on TPP and shouting at Comey in peace.

Well yeah- but, the assertion is that 59 tomahawks struck, so I don't have to prove that 59 didn't since I'm not making the assertion, I can freely dismiss any hits not shown. I'm not unreasonable and I wouldn't bother arguing, if the evidence released merely disproved the Russian version. But they didn't even do that, and that begs the question why. As for Russians providing proof, they don't have to, and have good reason not to- secrecy of any countermeasures plus Trump being insecure about his grands mains turning out to be rather more petits. If someone told him the Russians had crashed his beautiful new SMART missiles and were crowing about it he'd probably order an outright war. They still provided some evidence though, via video tour and photogallery which clearly showed multiple undamaged shelters, aircraft and buildings, as well as damage, at a time it was still being claimed that the base had been destroyed. You'd need to come up with a good reason for the shelters especially not being targeted, or why some were and others weren't. Just because you believe tomahawks are infallible doesn't make them so and doesn't reverse the burden of proof onto anyone else but the US. is already defeasible both theoretically and practically. If you have mobile sources like planes it's pretty trivial to brute force, and if spoofing is involved it won't do anything. is a 'magic' defence, there's nowhere near enough known about it to prove or refute effectiveness, and it still relies on antenna(e) and the GPS signal. I also note: So, if it isn't effective against all jamming environments you can pretty much guarantee it would be Russian (or Chinese) military systems it isn't effective against, and the countermeasures are only on newer missiles as well. Hmm. Hope an old batch of tomahawks weren't used. In any case, per your aphorism, the onus is on the asserter to prove that 59 tomahawks arrived, me providing a reason as to why they didn't is wholly optional on my part.

Yeah, Putin wins because Russia now is still so much better than Russia was in the 90s with the overt western influence that it's scarcely believable, and people blame Yeltsin and the west for the bankruptcy and weakness; and, most of all, taking advantage of Russia's weakness to humiliate. Probably needs a reminder that Yeltsin the utter disaster only got a 2nd term at all because of massive direct- not devastating Pepe memes class, billions of dollars class- US intervention in the election. Funny thing about that, back when reddit (yeah guys, I know) was doing public aggregation reports one place really stood out amongst the Torontos New Yorks, Londons etc: Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Report then got deleted, of course. Shooting missiles is not an act of war, though it could be a pretext for one. But then sneezing on an ambassador could be a pretext for war. No, if anything moving its ships make a confrontation more likely. Getting your fleet caught in port is a massive no no in a war; see Pearl Harbour, Mers el Kebir/ Algiers etc, Port Arthur, Alexandria (Aboukir), Taranto, since you present a single target able to be targeted by a single coordinated strike, cannot manoeuver and are a sitting duck. Tartous is a decent distance from Hmeimem (about 40km), and you'd far prefer to use pantsirs on CMs which have a shorter range. If you're using S400s to shoot tomahawks they aren't fully ready to shoot planes which is their primary job. As for the ship utility, depends on the ship and role. They can work very well as pickets and the like to augment radar, and of course if you've got ship launched tomahawks they also potentially give a quicker and heavier response than a plane would. Pyotr Veliky (not present in Syria) has 20 SAM systems fitted including 12 S300s so it would be significant for air defence as well, but a frigate or especially a cargo ship not so much. Reminds me, I found the video the stills of the 'chemical weapon gas cylinder' came from and it's not exactly more convincing. Video's perfectly SFW, unlike many of the others About the only thing it shows 'positively' is that there's enough concrete debris shown and the greening is unlikely to be algae, but the latter is because the hole in the ceiling is shown to be ~5m away from where the cylinder came to rest, undamaged, on the undamaged bed, and would require a truly weird trajectory of about 30 degrees from horizontal, after being dropped by a chopper and going through concrete. I'd be pretty confident in saying that at least was outright staged, so much so that I cannot see any way it can be defended as accurate. For some reason we don't get that video shown on news reports though, just 'trust us, we got the good oil' from Macron etc.

Since it's a bit more important than the waffle in the other post, plus the quote system is being a particular pig today and won't trim or even delete anything without borking formatting... They really need to pick nerve agent or chlorine. Sarin is unstable and despite being called nerve gas it's a liquid at STP, and you spend a lot of effort purifying and stabilising it when weaponising- combine it with chlorine liquid which it is miscible in and which is very reactive and generates nucleophiles readily and you'll get no sarin pretty quickly (or maybe no chlorine, depends on relative amounts and purity). There's simply no plus to combining the two and a lot of negatives. Chlorine can be used as an accentuator with some CW, eg phosgene, but phospgene is both literally made from chlorine, and literally is dichloroformaldehyde. There's only footage of one alleged container so the contents would have mixed. The troubles with that container are multiple though. (1) it's gone through 20cm (?) of at least somewhat reinforced concrete since you can see the rebar and is basically undamaged. Going through the concrete in itself isn't necessarily a problem since it would be Traveling and several hundred kg heavy as well but with (3) it's an insurmountable one. Going through a concrete roof undamaged and (2) being stopped by an- undamaged- bed is extraordinarily unlikely given comparative stress thresholds and (3) you can see multiple examples of other alleged gas cylinder improvised bombs and they all show obvious, sometimes massive damage to the cylinder. Note also one of them covered in concrete debris, there (4) isn't anywhere near enough concrete debris for the hole made to be recent. And (5) contrary to common belief, chlorine does not leave a green residue despite itself being green, it bleaches. That can be confirmed by the many industrial accidents involving chlorine. The green staining looks far more like algae from a wet mattress due to having a hole in the roof for some time- the picture with the hole in the roof also shows there's wall mould in places, another symptom. Difficult to be sure of that given the resolution and lack of any wide angle picture though. (Having done organic chemistry it's a bit baffling how terrible a lot of the evidence is. The French say that hexamine is diagnostic for syrian sarin, but hexamine is regularly used in rocket fuel, explosives and other solid fuels so it's all over the place in warzones) Edit: Russian ships leaving port doesn't mean much, the Tartous base is tiny. When the Kuznetsov and Pyotr Veliky were there they were anchored a fair way out to sea as there was nowhere near enough space. You don't want to be caught in port during an attack, but it doesn't mean that an attack is at all imminent. If it's today it would likely be in the next few hours though.

It was definitely local reasons- the son of the local tribe chief was killed and another injured, no one in the actual Syrian army was involved. The Conoco gas plant is also held by a competing branch of the same family. The issue got muddled a lot when 'Girkin/ Strelkov' (VK account claiming to be him) said that 3x more russians were killed than the US DOD claimed were killed total in the incident and the press ran with that as gospel despite there being no evidence, let alone proof; but the best estimate is 8-12 Wagner deaths in a camp rather than as part of an active attack. Asymmetric attacks would be used if the governments wanted a fight, not direct ones. There's already at least two groups doing so. As well as Boo's list, the guy was literally in prison in Russia, so they could easily have bumped him off at any time then and no one would have batted an eyelid. In this case it being highly pure actually introduces problems as well, since purity also increases lethality. It also cannot have been 'pure' if applied as a paste since, obviously, it's mixed with the paste, but I'd admit that as being a technical objection to the term used more than a direct objection to the conclusion made. That's a dreadful article but it does illustrate one interesting tactic. The Russians don't have to pick one of it being either a real attack perpetrated by the rebels or it not being an attack at all. That's like saying that a defence lawyer arguing that a murder victim is still alive, the evidence that was produced suggests he was stabbed rather than shot and the accused person has an alibi only reinforces the prosecution case- they can't even keep their story straight, the guy's alive but was stabbed and the accused guy wasn't there anyway? Clearly that reinforces his guilt since the prosecutor only has one story! Except per below the prosecutor has multiple stories as well. The White Helmets are also an interesting one. They definitely moved some of the bodies in the recent attack to make it look more dramatic as there's absolute proof sufficient that even extreme rebel supporters like Julian Roepcke agree, and they definitely outright staged their Mannequin Challenge bomb victim recovery video and there's good evidence for others as well, and they definitely participated in beheading and mass execution videos since you can literally see them there, and they definitely have some members who are also HTS (crypto Al Qaeda) and other extremist group members, and that is definitely used as a way to get around funding issues since you're paying the white helmet not the extremist even if they're one and the same person. But, they also genuinely do respond to attacks and the like, and genuinely do do good work. So they're neither pure manufactured propaganda merchants nor angelic saints.

The Express is as tabloid as The Fail or The Scum and possibly even more hysterical. Houthis said they'd fire a missile a day at Riyadh, that's what they're doing. Somewhere between midnight and 0200 GMT would be the likely time for a strike, so that's when the journo car park being full would be a worry. If anything that's relatively good news. A lack of British participation would be due to Trump wanting to do something really stupid, or May letting parliament vote and losing which she won't do, since she might lose. The story comes from the Russian Ministry of Defence, RT is just quoting it. If RT quotes the Russian Government or RFE/RL/VOA quotes the US one their status as propaganda arms reinforces it being the government's position. If they do it as an opinion piece or similar using disposable sources- alphabet soup think tanks, typically- then it's deniable and low value. That's true for both propaganda arms. Or, you know, Occam's Razor works too. Per a post from Sean O'Connor* on the matter a year ago: And you're still not going to use an S400 to shoot down tomahawks except under very specific circumstances, none of which were in evidence. If indeed an aerial platform was used to overcome the horizon problem, then surely the Russian MoD would also release the radar track data it had on them so they knew where to place those aircraft. Why would they though. It's operationally sensitive; and Trump is a sensitive snowflake who'd probably insist on throwing more tomahawks out there if made to look weak. This way both sides made their point and could make their claims without escalating; the US could claim to have struck a blow and obliterated the base, Russia can say it did minimal damage and was back in service the next day. You're still treating GPS like it's a terrestrial system where you can just __ to counter jamming when you can't, because the basic physics that gives GPS its advantages are the same basic physics that gives it its disadvantages. Countermeasures are designed for level playing fields not 1000000000000000 fold power differences. If you have something the size of a truck vs something the size of a truck having an 'EM battle' over frequencies some dozens of km apart from either you have a range of anti jamming options available; if you have one a few km away and the other 20,000km away it's nowhere near a fair fight. I'm going to let you think for a moment on just how well that goes with this: They go fine. Difference being; in one case you wouldn't expect evidence, in the other you would. You can't reasonably prove they crashed into water, but can prove that they hit where they said, if they showed the pictures. Which they did for some, but nowhere near enough to disprove the Russian scenario.

roll_safe.jpg always applies. Though I'd prefer stalin.jpg for this, especially since the relevant quote* is misattributed. You do have to assume that isn't what was actually meant though, and the idea was to get a better result than now. *..no man no problem"; Rybakov

If they allow either of them to ever communicate with anyone again, and I'm not exactly holding my breath after the mess Yulia made when talking to her cousin for a minute. By intervening openly and forcefully. Obviously it would be a political suicide for some but it could have been done when the war was just beginning. Yeah, that wouldn't have worked at all. You might have got rid of Assad, but he's at most the symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. If you look at the situation as was in East Ghouta that shows why intervention simply could not have worked. Surrounded by the government for 5 years and the rebels there... spent as much time fighting each other as the government. They also had a decent sized crypto Al Qaeda presence (HTS) allied to a supposed 'moderate' faction to fight another 'moderate' faction that literally called for the genocide of 2 million Syrians, took 4000 hostages* and literally paraded them as human shields in cages. There's an active war between rebels in Idlib, and even the Turkish rebels in Afrin have been fighting each other despite the Turkish Army being there. The same things that were in play in Iraq and the same things at play in Libya would have all been at play in Syria to make things worse than either, and given how bad Iraq was... You have the sectarian divide and the ethnic divides of Iraq, plus the competing local factions (Saudi/ Qatar/ Turkey) of LIbya; plus Israel looking to take even more land and the watermelon seller in Ankara dreaming he's Mehmed II Osmanli. The west has shown neither any clues about 'nation building' post intervention nor any ability to learn from mistakes so much so that you have to suspect it's a deliberate strategy to asterisk things up. There was never any prospect of the mythical moderate democratic opposition being real, even just a brief examination of the laughable goons put up as alternative governments by democratic luminaries like Erdogollum and Incompetence bin Salman give the lie to that, and make the merely massively flawed Ahmed Chalabi look like enlightenment personified. Assad's a crap leader by any objective measure and his best trait, by far, has been his unexpected persistence. Despite that he's still immeasurably better than any of the realistic alternatives, especially now when the only result from him losing would be another wave of refugees as all his supporters flee. Or look positive, maybe they'll all be moderately beheaded and the Euro taxpayer saves some cash. *footage of whom's release was used on US TV to show how relieved people were to escape... the depraved government siege. Technically true, I guess, but darkly funny if you knew what the footage actually was since nowhere near 4000 of those prisoners were alive at end.

Tunisia was the first and most successful arab spring revolution, and the only one which stuck. They also have a secular (well, secularish) elected government now.

Good thing we have Donald Trump to uh... compensate for his tiny hands?* Trouble being of course that Trump is precisely dumb and narcissist enough to really make a mess, then keep digging. Apparently his talk with Teresa May spooked her so much Britain is now trying desperately to delay things. *Fatal error, please reboot universe?

A ship was only an example. You really don't really comprehend just how weak the GPS signal is. (1) the GPS signal is so weak you can potentially block it from- literally- 100s of kms away (2) you can block it with submarines. You probably wouldn't since it would largely defeat their purpose, but you could. (3) you can jam with planes. You can jam with drones, it's so weak. Going to plot a course around planes that can fly considerably faster than the missiles you're launching? Especially if you've given an hour's notice... (4) I'd take the rferl article more seriously if it wasn't literally the propaganda arm of the US government and (5) while s400 is capable of being used against cm it's ludicrous overkill and you'd use pantsir or similar against tomahawks, so that article is mostly strawmanning. (6) radar on US warships is so good they only ram gigantic cargo ships a few times a year and only occasionally mistake Airbuses for F14s. Yep, sarky, but you can't claim system infallibility. That isn't even close to being an accurate analogy. A good analogy would be if your expert coroner says someone was shot 5 times but only shows 2 bullet wounds. Asking for the other 3 and why they weren't shown is not just fine, it should be expected. Similar sources have confirmed this only for RQ-11 Ravens and not for anything in the class of the MQ-1. Not totally unsurprising, or even unexpected for such a small RPV when there's room for a rudimentary datalink and sensors and little else such as specifically hardened anti-jamming measures (and the cost is such that there is an assumption that it _will_ be neutralised by a peer or near-peer adversary, or at least disrupted, in one way or another) that's also flying fairly high and within LOS of any jamming measures. Your arguments also fail to reconcile with what's perhaps the biggest hole in the Russian MoD story: If the missiles were jammed, where are the dozens of airframes littered across the Syrian/Lebanese countryside? Plenty of photo evidence exists of cruise missiles laying in a field due to mechanical faults mid-flight from past campaigns. Given that if nothing else the Russian bombing campaign serves as a country-sized advertisement for the latest and greatest of Russian military hardware, surely parading a big piece of the airframe on RT would be a great propaganda coup. Firstly, as I've said multiple times, the whole point would have been jamming them over the sea since terrain recognition doesn't work over water; only inertial and GPS guidance. Guidance jamming of terrain recog is practically impossible over most landforms, but not over featureless water. There'd also be no evidence of crashes in water since, well, they'd sink. Secondly, yeah, the role of recon drones as opposed to combat drones makes them intrinsically more likely to be jammed, indeed you'd probably deliberately fly them into jamming fields to test weaknesses etc. But if the reapers and predators haven't been exposed to the same extent because they're doodling around the Deir Ez Zor desert dozens of km further away to avoid being shot down and provoking an incident then yeah, you can't tell anything about the jamming potential. I haven't seen any upcoming strike scenarios which involve combat drones, only manned planes and missiles. Given the potential for being fired at in anger by the s400s they'd definitely use drones if they could reliably do so.

The funny thing about LoT is that if you posted spoilers about it people would presume you'd been eating the wrong (or right, facpov) sort of mushroom. For a TV series the animation of the final fight was pretty impressive.

Because they can. But imagine it's mostly because movie producers pay royalties for use. While game producers opt for limited licences, I imagine it's cheaper. Yep, those licenses are cheaper, and there is also the issue of format shifting not being specified in licenses- if a license specifies CD or VHS then you may have to renegotiate if you're going download or DVD. Games aren't treated uniquely badly in that respect. Many TV shows run into problems with music licensing expiry as well. Shows which used a heap of high profile music especially were effected, like Tour of Duty whose first DVD release (iirc) even required a new rights free title song due to them no longer having 'Paint it Black' licensed and had most of its contemporary soundtrack replaced with generic muzak.

Descent games have been back since December, iirc November. They were only removed because Herve forgot to pass on royalties- he's very busy, so completely understandable- and there was no intrinsic legal issue with the rights apart from that. There are plenty of examples of licensing issues getting games outright removed, racing games using real vehicles are probably the most effected proportionally by removals due to rights loss.

So a private company that stakes its reputation on its analysis (and would likely provide further proof to potential clients that are not convinced by their publicly available content) gets picked apart, yet one can take on faith a claim made almost purely for domestic consumption to placate the most misinformed hardliners and is corroborated by zero evidence? The evidence they provided was for a number of strikes consistent with the Russian version. You're using classic appeal to authority fallacy. I've seen 'experts' claim that T72BM tanks are the only ones fitted with kontakt-5 ERA and kontakt-5 means the tank has to be Russian. Literally none of that is true; and being said by an expert, in a think tank with an authoritative name ('Institute for International Strategic Studies' in that case), doesn't make it true. Pretending as if FHSS and ECCM doesn't exist; a Hollywood actress figured it out in the 1940s for the purpose of defeating jamming efforts against radio-guided torpedoes after all. The placement of GPS jammers on cell-phone towers is also critically useful against cruise missiles that have some form of GPS guidance due to the elevation giving it maximum line of sight against a low-flying target. Thus if a missile were to pass through a "communications denied environment" the INS guidance kicks in until it passes through, the GPS guidance kicks back on, and it continues as normal. GPS jammers won't do crap against cruise missiles over land, but not every military GPS utility uses terrain recognition. And there's a massive scale difference between jamming torpedo guidance which is terrestrial and on a single figure km distance scale and GPS- which is 20,000km away, and with the energy limitations of a satellite. At 0.1 femtowatt signal strength you can drown out entire bands, which brute forces switching defences. To put it in perspective the signal output of a single cellphone, not even cellphone tower, is around 1 watt and thus a full 16 orders of magnitude larger than a GPS signal. That attenuates quickly as well, of course, but still, 16 orders of magnitude higher for something you literally carry in your pocket. Edit: Is the US military itself a sufficient source?

Trouble is that facts and what is or isn't fake news tends to vary by opinion. Consider: 1) 'Obama is a lizardman alien who has returned to Venus' is obviously fake news, but it also isn't going to be believed by people blessed with the gift of a functioning brain, so no point removing or fact checking it 2) 'Hillary Clinton had Seth Rich murdered', no evidence of it apart from some odd circumstances so strongly unproven, but an opinion that can be defended as being possible. Fake news, sure, 'fake opinion', no; fact check false if stated as fact, but unproven if presented as a theory. 3) 'Trump = serial groper", objectively unproven and opinion rather than true or false, but, have a pro Trump fact check and it's false, fake news; have an anti Trump fact checker and it's true, real news. 4) 'We know where Iraq's WMD are they're at [places]..', definitely said, also absolutely a lie. Fake news? No, Rumsfeld said it; fact check would be false, now, but then it was generally regarded as being absolutely true due to the authority of the source. Conversely, the reverse opinion from Comical Ali was obviously false, then. The same thing now from Muhammed Sahif al Sahaf though would be fact checked as true. It's the latter examples which are why regulation is a potential major problem as you're providing even more motivation to move from proper facts to opinion which the authorities- whether it's facebook or the government- agree with as facts, and labeling of dissenting of opinions that predisposes people not to even consider them. That isn't free speech, indeed some might say it's the reverse. The current situation is far from ideal but is probably the best we can get with human nature, it can get far far worse.

I've heard of barrel bombs being dropped (probably pushed out from inside) from helicopters though. I suppose it depends on how big of a barrel bomb we're talking about here. Actual barrel bombs have to be dropped by helis (or a transport plane with a loading ramp, but that's even less accurate), standard fighters/ bombers literally cannot drop them, in the vast majority of recent cases 'barrel bomb' is used as a dog whistle and it's a conventional bomb- I've even seen parachute retarded bombs referred to as 'barrel bombs'. While use of barrel bombs made sense a few years ago and they were used extensively then there's a reason why you didn't have fleets of bombers dropping barrel bombs in WW2 or over Vietnam or whatever instead of conventional bombs- barrel bombs are militarily worse in every single respect than conventional bombs. Experts who make claims not in evidence deserve to have their claims debunked and ignored. If they'd shown what they claimed there would be no argument, but they didn't. Otherwise, you get birth of credulity and death of skepticism. And Saddam's WMDs being over London in 45 minutes etc. Perhaps with that thing in your car, but whether or not they can jam a hardened signal is up for debate. It really isn't, jamming relies solely on the physical properties of EM radiation, and if the US military has a way to alter that then they can do anything. Spoofing is debatable in terms of its technical aspects and whether it would work, jamming isn't; if you have a stronger signal that overwhelms a weaker one. Cell phone towers are actually an ideal terrestrial placement for jammers since you already have the transmitter infrastructure in place, but it's really easy to make mobile ones- say, on a ship- because you don't need much power to jam weak signals. Even a cell phone signal is far stronger than GPS. As for the rest, I'd bet everything I own against a bent 5c piece that the Russians knew where the 2 US destroyers which fired the CMs were, and everyone knows they were warned in advance. One Russian ship in a place able to jam one set, one set too far away. Easy.