ISIS mainly just entered Sunni base areas who dispersed from the army units without confronting them and their entrance without any major resistance was probably organized by the surviving Baathist networks cooperating with ISIS after the Maliki’s turn towards Iran disenchanted the local Sunni tribal leaders organized (and more importantly, paid) by the US as part of the Sunni Awakening project which pacified the Sunni areas (expelling the jihadists to Syria) and gave the US a chance to start with their exit (IIRC, they were supposed to leave a number of troops to help the Iraqi army, but Maliki under Iranian influence basically kicked them out as the IRGC seems to prefer the Iraqi army to be weak and that they depend on their radical militias).

You do have a point that Syrian regime has proven more resilient than expected, but the regime has been losing ground dramatically recently and time and again their poorly trained armed forces proved unable to perform any meaningful offensive operations. That can’t be good for the already low morale, plus the manpower shortages and the increasing role of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their various militias in running the SAA doesn’t boost the locals (especially Sunni) remaining dedication to the regime either. Their anti-Jihadist card (by releasing the Jihadists from their jails to turn the course of the rebellion) worked well for them in the short term locally turning most of the minorities and Sunni moderates to their side, but the Western countries are still not biting much, while the Gulf countries boosted the Islamist rebels unlikely to make a deal with the regime. With the IRGC not achieving much, I feel the Russians will need to increase their commitment to some ground troops eventually or quit while they’re ahead.

Thanks for the posted article, Austin, it was a nice read.

I see absolutely no evidence of that. As regards being poorly trained, the US trained fighters in the Iraqi army are completely useless – a child armed with a Barbie doll could have put up a better resistance – and the US trained ‘moderate rebels’ have also been completely useless – of the original 500, 430 are dead and 70 are traitors. Only the terrorist units among the rebel seem to have been remotely effective sadly.

When you consider that this is no longer a Syrian Civil War given the number of foreign fighters, Assad is doing pretty well. What we’re actually seeing is crowd-sourced terrorism in Iraq and Syria, which has recently spilled over into Turkey.

Standing on its last legs, to be more precise, as this was directly the reason for Russians to intervene. That didn’t stop the Russians to exit Afghanistan before, nor e.g. the US to exit Vietnam, but packing up so soon might be end up as a fiasco for Putin.

Yeah, people on militaryphotos.net have been saying that since the chemical weapons debacle in August 2013, saying that was the reason for the use of chemical weapons. Two years and two months later, ISIS comes about along with the other rebels, thousands of foreign fighters travel to Syria via Turkey to join the fight, CIA trains moderate rebels (who are now all either dead or defected) and Assad is still there, despite being up against half the global supply of Allah-Akbar and the 40,000 thieves.

In the same time ISIS alone have managed to take over an area in Northern Iraq larger than the whole of Syria. So exactly who’s on their last legs again?

I suppose it also depends on the quality of the inertial guidance system no?

There’s that too, which was no doubt significantly better even by 2000 compared to the late-70s. The TERCOM and DSMAC technology will also have improved. DSMAC was certainly fledgling technology in 1986 and probably difficult with the processing power available.

http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-109.html

“but IMHO its really just shown a number of technology shortcomings. ”

There is a good reason we stopped seeing a lot of footage from US bombings when the transition from laser guided to GPS guided was made. GPS is frankly going to be less accurate almost all the time because of lack of terminal correction and I would bet the majority of US bombing is pretty much exactly as bad as this Russian bombing. If they were lobbing TV guided or laser guided it would be pin point too but nobody wants to waste the money. What the Pentagon releases is the “best of” clips.

The quoted accuracy of JDAMs is 13m CEP, meaning 50% land within 13m. Achieved accuracy is slightly better. But yes, a miss by 50ft is still possible under worst case. But nobody really knows the original target in this footage anyway. A GPS/GLONASS bomb goes to where it was told to go prior to release, what the pod is pointing at when it lands is irrelevant, there is no correction post release.

Modern CPUs are in no other way programmed than legacy ones.

Except they can do 64-bit arithmetic without requiring the programmer to write an algorithm for it. Some units also have built in FPGA.

Reliability comes through simplicity (amongst other things). The elongated development cycles and endless teething troubles experienced by modern, highly complex systems (such as the F-35) in comparison to their simpler forebears (e.g. F-16) demonstrates this clearly.

Ignoring the F-35 comment because it’s the best policy. But in this case, with cruise missiles, the complexity of the system and task it’s performing is the same. The only difference is that a missile during Desert Storm was doing that task with the likes of a very slow Intel 8080, with very little RAM/ROM, and probably 8-bit mnemonics (assembly language) as a result of that. A modern missile produced in 2012 is, at very least, using a 32-bit system, and has enough RAM/ROM to use either a high-level language or more advanced 32-bit assembly code and possibly some FPGA in there too.

To put it another way, take FCS. Imagine controlling an unstable design with an Intel 8080 and 1970s flight sensors, now imagine doing it with 32-bit/64-bit RISC processors. Which plane will crash more? Store 0.6 as an 8 bit number and add it too itself 1 million times during integration component of PIPA control. The answer is 600,000 right? Wrong! It’s 593,750. See the problem? For many of these applications in digital control you need 32-bit arithmetic or better and to do that with 8-bit hardware requires algorithms, just to do simple maths operations, programs to do basic mathematical operations.

Oh come on ,what does it mean they THINK ? Any solid evidence ?

I am not saying it`s impossible to have duds and stuff, all complex military equipment is prone to this, BUT unleass you have clear evidence one must raise the BS flag

It has all the hallmarks of BS:

1. Unnamed source – check.

2. No quoted remarks – check.

3. Unconfirmed by state department – check.

4. No evidence of actual missiles that crashed – check.

If you can make any bizarre claim you like and have the exact same level of evidence, which you easily could, then chances are it’s BS. E.g. Unnamed sources at the UN have said the USAF used VX gas on the hospital it bombed in Afghanistan. The UN presidential spokesman could not confirm the incident, neither has the Afghan government. No evidence of VX gas has been found. Apologies for the analogy but see how easy it is?

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSKCN0S20J920151008

The Russian Defence Ministry said it fired missiles from ships in the Caspian Sea for a second day and had hit weapons factories, arms dumps, command centers and training camps.

U.S. officials said they believed four Russian cruise missiles bound for Syria had crashed en route in Iran. Russia’s Defence Ministry insisted the missiles had reached their targets in Syria.

The White House declined to comment and State Department spokesman John Kirby said he could not confirm the missiles had crashed, while adding that the report pointed towards the need for procedures to prevent clashes with U.S. planes targeting Islamic State militants in Syria.