Moon Of Alabama has some interesting takes on what's going on in Ukraine.

 via MoA

Meanwhile the Ukrainian side of the conflict experiences a communication failure that is likely way more consequential.

Adam Kinzinger🇺🇦🇺🇸✌️@AdamKinzinger - 16:26 UTC · Oct 7, 2022

Evidently the Starlink system is down over the front lines of Ukraine. @elonmusk should make a statement about this, or, this should be investigated. This is a national security issue.

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Tore @potifar66 - 21:55 UTC · Oct 7, 2022

Some of the outages led to a “catastrophic” loss of communication in recent weeks, said one senior Ukrainian government official with direct knowledge of the issue.

ft.com: Ukrainian forces report Starlink outages during push against Russia
Some of Elon Musk’s SpaceX devices stopped working when Ukrainian soldiers liberated territory, Kyiv officials say

The Russian army is leading globally in its abilities to wage electronic warfare. It can disable ground based radio traffic on any frequency. It has now found ways to also disable ground to satellite connections as used by the Starlink constellation.

At the beginning of the war the Ukrainian military was supplied with thousands of Starlink ground terminals that can connect to the swarms of small Starlink satellites, which were financed by the Pentagon, but managed by Elon Musk's companies. They allowed for communication between Ukrainian ground units as well as for general command and control of larger operations. Without Starlink the Ukrainian command will depend on cable based field telephone, runners and couriers. All of which are extremely vulnerable in an artillery rich environment.

Wow.

I've been MUCH MUCH MUCH more simplistic in my thinking about comms in this war.

The thing that has bothered me the most is all the vids we've been seeing from the front.

What happened to "if you have a phone they can locate and kill ya" that has been drummed into everyone's heads?

But to knock out starlink?

Elon hasn't said a thing about that.  Neither has the Ukrainians. Command & Control is taking a big hit if that goes down and that alone will slow the Ukrainian advance.

But it gets even more interesting.  I've long suspected that allied forces were on the ground advising the Ukrainians.  Check this out from MoA!

 

I have no way to verify those claims but a recent Intercept report stated that there are significant U.S. forces on the ground in Ukraine:

One U.S. official insisted that the CIA only conducted a partial withdrawal of its assets when the war began, and that the agency “never completely left.”

Yet clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war, when U.S. intelligence officials were fearful that Russia would steamroll over the Ukrainian army. There is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine than there were at the time of the Russian invasion in February, several current and former intelligence officials told The Intercept.

Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding, current and former officials said. The finding indicates that the president has quietly notified certain congressional leaders about the administration’s decision to conduct a broad program of clandestine operations inside the country.

These will not be the only U.S. casualties in Ukraine. When more such reports come out the issue is likely to explode in Biden's face.

Just wow.

Read it all here....oh and thanks to my reader for re-introducing me to this guys blog!