those 3 frigates being built in St. Pete for India are still on schedule right?

In America they have the GAO to provide a serious review of products and make sure they work as advetised, my question is this: which Russian body does the same job as the GAO?

ROSPROM but you will never see any of their classified reports, just the fluff pieces they put on their websites to help manufacturers sell their stuff.

The gist of the video is things were bad in the 90’s, comrade Putin made them better. They talk with an officer from the Leopard Akula II. An officer who used to not see a paycheck in months now gets a regular 10,000 rubles a month ($350, but this video is old it is now more like 500). In the past officers would avoid going home to avoid having to look their wives in the face, but now they can afford to take the family on vacation (BS). The fleet still faces many problems. Funding for repairs is sporadic. The boats get money from their respective city or region. It talks about Tatarstan funding one boat, but this funding is not enough. The officer talks about how only the best ships were preserved from the Soviet era, he has tried to keep the best people in place. He says it isnt fair to say nothing is being done, but clearly not enough is being done.

They talk about the loss of the Kursk, how its painful for these people to talk about and how they would rather not. One of the women talks about how all the naval families wept when the news about the Kursk came in. No talk of blaming the government.

Things are still bad, it talks about how they have no hot water in their apartments in the summer (this is a common problem everywhere in Russia, even in Moscow entire chunks of the city go without hot water in summer thanks to crazy soviet civil engineering). At the end of the video it talks about how they will all continue to do their duty and not complain.

It does mention that this is the best base in the Northern fleet and things are actually worse elsewhere, here only 20 families are waiting for housing instead of the usual 100.

Since this time I must say Putin has put in place a mortgage program for housing in the military, it has not been very successful, but the more entrepreneurial types have taken advantage of it. The state has also multiplied the housing budget for the military by many multiples, but things are still very bad on the housing front. The recent crisis will not make things better.

Again, where is this fantasy $5 million helo with anywhere near the integrated sensor, proyection, network and attack capabilities of the WAH-64?

I do believe they call it the Mi-28N 😉

Also the new VK whatever the hell the designation is engine for the Mil should allow operation in mountains at pretty much the same altitudes as the Western birds with no problem. The engine is 15 years late thanks to no funding, but it is finally being produced.

I do believe the new three letter acronym will be OAK as that is the big new Russian aerospace holding company.

I’m kinda hoping the PAK-FA will become the OAK-2. The Il-2 is my favorite commie plane of all time so I just have a thing for that number.

the Gorshkov is not a “known commodity” and the parts are not “off the shelf.” Everything from the radar to the engines will be entirely new and in that respect it is a completely new development effort exactly like the F-35.

Every Tunguska I saw pictures of had some missiles on it, even if only 2. I’d love to see a picture of Tunguskas in Georgia with no missile tubes.

Most Russian columns advanced with Tunguska or Strela’s among them. There are lots of pics of manpads being deployed in Georgia. They probably believed they killed most or all of the Georgian Su-25’s on the ground and thus felt confident advancing with limited battalion level AD.

Additionally, in theory any way S-300’s on the Russian side of the border should have been covering a nice chunk of S.Ossetia anyway (any plane that flew much higher than a Su-25 would have been lunch for S-300’s).There was talk of this on some Russian forums on the first day of the war (most notably on the pilot.strizhi forum).

In Abkhazia is where there was the biggest lack of AD, but there was virtually no fighting there.

The Russians suffered 60-70 KIA and even if we double this number to 150 to account for the typical Russian tendency to understate their losses that is still damn good for a force where body armor and helmet wearing discipline is basically zero. Of course, that says more about the awful fighting ability of the Georgian soldier than it does about the state of the Russian army.

The “coolest” thing out this war were the stories of T-62’s penetrating T-72AV’s at point blank range. Who the hell expected the T-62 to actually kill a tank in 2008?

The thing I dont understand is why there was apparently very little use of the Mi-24 in this conflict.