Germany says its warships were sabotaged(businessinsider.com) |
Germany says its warships were sabotaged(businessinsider.com) |
Italics mine, and holy crap that's a lot of metal shavings.. like multiple 55gal trash cans' worth.
several dozen is not several hundred
1 dozen = 12
55 us liquid gallons = 208,198 litres
the densities of metals are higher than that of
water ca 1 kg/l aluminum ca 2.7 kg/l steels and iron 7.5-8.5 kg/l brass 8.5-9 kg/l gold almost 20kg/l
several dozen kg is half a 55gal worth, maybe one...
EDIT for shavings:
https://www.mollet.de/info/schuettdichte-und-schuettgewicht....
iron and steel chips / shavings still are about 2 kg/l
aluminum is 200g / l
so one 55gal trash bin of aluminum shards is still about 40 something kg, four dozen.
thus for aluminum and aluminum only I stand corrected, it may be multiple trash bins.
I don’t think so. A 55gal Tran can full of metal shavings is probably several hundred lbs. 2 dozen kilograms is only about 53lbs.
To people that share this low opinion of the German military, is it worse in Germany than the other major European armies (France, UK)?
Also it sounds like it was pre-commissioning, so it hadn't been delivered to the Navy yet.
Stupid/tangential question, would a primarily hindi speaker from the north know the origin of this particular idiom? or is it more of a southern thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-d6ymgA_c (Westinghouse Leasing Reduction Gears to Navy Ships: Fact or Fiction?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGLoBbTeTAs (The Keys to the World's Fastest Battleship: Unlocking the Reduction Gears)
The comments are full of former U.S. Navy sailors remembering how they had to have an armed guard and strip down before entering while the reductions gears were opened and being inspected.
> The Emden is one of the five new K130 corvettes that Germany ordered for delivery in 2025 to fulfill its NATO requirements.
Ugh. Could that be five damaged units? Finds metal shavings in new engine. Touts it as sabotage without explaining further. Spends the rest of the article on fear mongering. If this was an internal investigation, that would have been great. Doing a press conference about it? Sounds more like "before we investigate where it came from, should we take the opportunity to do some propaganda?"
(With all the recent subsea cable issues, yeah, something is going on in these waters, but this is not a good press release.)
You sound very disingenuous. If you one day find a dump of metal shavings in a freshly assembled and validated engine, and the only possible and conceivable way those could be found in there is if someone goes way out of their way to purposely dump them in there, how would you have describe that?
I forgot it was several kilograms of shavings. So not just a poorly assembled engine.
So there was no damage. How convenient indeed that there happened to be an inspection.
You don't just say yolo flip the switch and ignite the engines for a multi million dollar vessel, it's a multiple step process that contains lots of safety checks and precautions, which one of them would be visual inspection for debris.
Do you think Russia realizes this? If it's obvious to you, it would be obvious to them.
I also think the significance here is in the context of Russian aggression in Europe beyond Ukraine.
Yes, and it also frames the ramp up of Russian aggression triggered by the ongoing demolition of the US. It's the deep sea cable-cutting attacks in the Baltic, today's drone attack on Chernobyl's dome, etc. We're bound to see a ramp-up in these actions in the near future, and the only peaceful exit for this scenario is helping Ukraine win by supplying it with everything they need to win. Any other scenario will involve more wars and more war fronts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/security/someone-cut-a-ke...
i just don't understand the point of revealing a weakness by exploiting it unnecessarily like this
So publishing this kind of thing might mobilize the society and convince them the risks are real.
From my understanding Russias security services and adjacent Oligarchs are not monolithic and they love to do stuff like that. The intention is to bring it as a present to the Zar and curry favor while keeping the windows away.
Blowing up nordstream was an act of war but couldn't be pinned to anyone. When Russia invaded Ukraine they were prettending it was "green man" from outer space.
Meanwhile country A has an interest in country B, so country C instills a coup or train and fund islamic group.
The worst part is that this is only the tip of an iceberg, shards of reality that surface to mass media. The real damage is done by influencing masses.
Personally, I would not like to go to war for a Business Insider article. But no one asks what the German population wants.
All they do is talk, which is why the Ukrainians got fed up with them and for better or worse Zelenskyy is now talking up Trump...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/text-of-spe...
May cooler heads prevail.
Supply chain attacks are a thorn at your side, sabotage on military bases is a direct security threat to the country.
Having said that, the Germans have for decades not funded their military. Politicians have for decades degraded the profession of war and those who pursue it and now those chickens are coming home to roost.
Frankly they deserve this, and they are extremely lucky their opponent is so butthurt they're doing this sabotage during peacetime so the Germans at least have the option to fix themselves.
Also, blaming germans for "degrading profession of war" shows quite some gaps in history knowledge.
That would be like saying blowing up an airport runaway isn't serious because you can obviously tell the runaway is faulty - so no harm done!
https://www.mollet.de/info/schuettdichte-und-schuettgewicht....
iron and steel chips still are about 2 kg/l
aluminum is 200g / l
so one 55gal trash bin is still about 40 something kg, four dozen.
so for aluminum and aluminum only it may be multiple trash bins
$20 billion is nothing. Europe already froze $300 billion in Russian assets. No one believes this theory outside Ukraine.
$20 billion is more than enough to pay for few hundreds of such operations or bribe a few millions of investigators or paid articles in reputable journals.
Interestingly enough, the engine is produced by a company owned by the Rolls-Royce holding company, so in a meaningful way the British are helping the Germans produce warships. In the first half of the 20th century the British would have been prime suspects of the sabotage.
In spite of Russia's propaganda and continuous subversion attack on Germany's political leadership, currently we're seeing polls showing around 70% supporting Germany's military aid to Ukraine. It might not be a uphill battle to have Germany's population invested in investing in their defense.
https://www.ipsos.com/de-de/jeder-zweite-deutsche-gegen-weit...
50% of Ukrainians want negotiations:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-ne...
The majority of comments in German newspapers is against continuing the war.
Why do you blindly assert it is biased?
> Here is another (50% against):
That should be framed into context, specifically how for the last year Russia has been pumping industrial levels of propaganda onto the world in general and Germany in particular.
https://www.dw.com/en/russian-disinformation-is-growing-in-g...
All these sudden calls for disarmament and pushing Ukraine to capitulate don't happen organically when the same belligerent part also starts to target you specifically. They take place when you're enduring a constant blast from a firehouse of falsehoods over genetically engineered gay Nazi soldiers from Ukraine taking your jobs and increasing the price of eggs.
I for one was handed over a very peculiar anti-NATO protest leaflet, which said nothing more than "Bow to God, not to the media. Say no to NATO."
This is how far and how desperate the anti-europe propaganda is willing to go to erode public trust on such specific topics.
So no wonder public sentiment on their own self defense is being eroded over time. This is by design, and a part of the whole war.
I think retrospectively however, the important thing to understand is how that example is cynically leveraged in the present environment of misinformation. And how it emerged in the first place, as part of an administration attempting to steamroll over existing institutional guard rails intended to keep us in touch with reality.
Quote:
> Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts held in Arlington, Va., in 2006.
> According to Shaw, ex-Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, went to Iraq in December 2002 and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
> Anticipating the invasion, his job was to supervise the removal of such weapons and erase as much evidence of Russian involvement as possible.
> The Russian-assisted "cleanup" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achalov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."
They did. They supported Ukraine and turned Russia's 3-day invasion into a 3-year-and-counting quagmire where:
- Russia suffered a humiliating defeat and pushed out of Kiev,
- barely made any progress beyond the initial blitzkrieg,
- got it's black sea fleet sunk and destroyed,
- saw parts of it's territory invaded and captured by Ukraine,
- is helplessly seeing it's oil industry being decimated,
- is begging the likes of Iran and North Korea for help, including boots on the ground.
As much as it pains Russia to admit, this is exactly what Russia's defeat scenario looks like: a long drawn out conflict that forces Russia to self destruct without a single boot on the ground from NATO.
At the time Biden left office, Ukraine was losing territory. There's no saying Russia would have or will lose, unfortunately. A stronger response from the US and Europe was/is needed...
Not really. Each time a quagmire like this takes place, Russia collapses. The last time was Afghanistan.
Yes, the Biden admin was slow to let Ukraine use the weapons we gave them in an effective manner. He was afraid that Putin might go nuclear (at least initially, I think they were realizing that Putin's threats were more bark than bite in the last year or so). He was also wary of the rhetoric coming from the Trump campaign during the last year about how Biden wanted to get the US into a boots-on-the-ground war in Ukraine - in that sense he was trying to thread a needle. But Biden was very supportive of NATO, whereas Trump wants out of NATO. And Ukraine has managed to draw out a war that Russia was "supposed" to win in a couple of months to a stalemate after 3 years while also managing to capture a bit of Russian territory.
Trump's threats have caused most of Europe to rapidly ramp up defence spending, meanwhile Biden's "support" accomplished basically nothing, practically speaking. Nice words without action are useless.
The "moved to Syria" argument is essentially the Loch Ness Monster of the WMD debate, which is to say it's constantly discussed but never conclusively proven. And given the catastrophic consequences of the war, clinging to this narrative feels less like a genuine search for truth and more like a desperate attempt to avoid accountability.
I was also confused but could be German usage where comma and dots are swapped. The German 208,198 is the same as the English 208.198
Conversely the English 1,000,000 is 1.000.000 in German! Very confusing.
Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …
Well, yes. But it's mostly the Anglosphere being weird again: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.s...
I personally like to use thin spaces or apostrophes as a thousands separator, precisely to avoid the language confusion. I also try to avoid three decimals going for 2 or 4 instead, but you can't always do that, because it changes the content.
> Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …
As someone from another language that does that: agreed. It gets even weirder with 124: one hundred four and twenty. Middle-endianness is silly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
If you look at the image, Antarctica has “data unavailable” - seems we still don’t know what the penguins use! /s
Since we're talking about numbers, in France we used to count by blocks of 20, and the usage somewhat persists to this day: so, for instance, 72 is read "sixty twelve" (60+12), 81 is read "four twenty one" (4x20+1), and 96 is read "four twenty sixteen" (4x20+16). Mind bending for the poor French learners...
That's a weird remark to make. Lots of languages do that. And if you want to talk weird numbers, try Japanese with their 10k grouping (e.g. 100k is 10 10k, juu man, 1M is 100 100k, hyaku man, etc).
One third of the world seems to use ".", the other third "," and the others decides with own rules or have own symbols. (Space, "'" and "·" and "_" in many variants).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
EDIT: a super devious way to do it would be with very small magnetized filings. It would be incredibly difficult to rid the engine of those, even completely disassembled.
This was a huge security screw up, you have to draw your security barrier and they left this huge asset on the wrong side of it. If only the followed Gauss's Law.
Just heat it.
It would have been a much bigger security screwup if it was actively in service.