Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Ryan McBeth" channel.

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  11. He's totally right! That's why Patton lost WWII. Lacking air superiority, the Germans overcame the Allies during the Battle of the Bulge, slaughtering all of the allies and shortly after, nuked New York city. Oh wait, despite no air superiority, tanks did cover the day with infantry cover. Survivability onion, I'm reminded of an M1 Abrams that was killed by a newer model RPG that made one big sensation in Iraq. One shot, right between the idlers, penetrated the hull, entered the crew compartment, the jet grazing the loader, killing the tank by the jet hitting the "brain box". They junked the tank, not due to critical damage, the CPU box could've been replaced, but to dismantle the hull to analyze the failure and damage done by the new model warhead. A good movie illustrating tanks penetrated and remaining in use was the film T-34. When asking anyone about combat and warfare in general, pretty much the absolute last person in the universe that I'd ask is Elon Musk. He's got zero military training, zero military experience, but somehow is an expert in warfare? He's invented nothing whatsoever, codeveloped one website, "earned" his fortune by inheriting an emerald mine, bought everything else and hired experts in those fields to develop things, but did precisely what Liberace did - be mediocre in everything, save being a showman. Might as well also ask for treatment advice for my Crohn's disease, which is also something he's got no training or experience with - or maybe DIY brain surgery. I can kill a tank in a number of ways, such as a mobility kill - damage the drive enough that the tank can't move. Now, it's a bunker that's well, not as strong as a bunker. I can firepower kill a tank - damage optics, gun, loading system or ammunition storage enough to prevent utilization of the weapon(s), it's a huge metal box now, can use it to ferry supplies on top and inside, the weapons are useless. I can k kill, a wee bit harder on anything not Russian, as Russia insists on putting the blammo inside of the hull with the crews - any major hit that puts thunder, fire and brimstone inside with the blammo and blam! The hatches turn into flaming jets, might lift the turret off, the crew is decently cremated instantly, the tank is now junk. Anything less and one can kill the entire crew and scoop out the cremains and shreds, minor repairs and the tank is back in business.
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  24. Lightning isn't much of an EMP, which is a regional phenomena. Geomagnetic storms are also regular occurrences from solar outbursts, thankfully nothing like the Carrington event, but still plenty spunky and causes some hair loss in the load protection and management centers. Radiation, yeah, a few days and everything's fine for a fair bit of time outside. Give it two weeks, you're pretty close to background radiation levels again. New Orleans, kind of a poor example, when Houston would be more damaging to fuel infrastructure, as was illustrated a few years back after a hurricane hit there. AWS, Google and Microsoft cloud management centers, although a cyber attack would be just as effective and a lot cheaper. Another misconception is one bomb per target. For large targets, both CEP comes into play, as does the nature of a target. An air field needs multiple devices, with a military air field likely needing up to a half dozen devices to entirely destroy. Degradation vs destruction are also facets to consider. MAD becoming a component, what we'd get is what we'd send. Upside is, deployable warheads are quite limited compared to the height of the Cold War. Still, it's moderately likely my area would get some licks, as we've Chambersburg not far away and the area is dotted with DLA and NSA (Naval Support Activities, not the Puzzle Palace) depots, if things went toward countervalue. Slightly more likely, which remains extremely unlikely, a strike on a NATO member with a tactical device, which would earn a reprisal strike of a like nature. An analogy for that is, two prize fighters in a heavyweight boxing match, both having anvils in their gloves. Nobody's going to want to swing first, as they know a swing is going to then be coming their way. Circling back to EMP, due to the geology of the area I'm living in, whenever we get any halfhearted geomagnetic storm, my computers crash due to power spikes riding past my filters. For what I've got, not worth getting a saturable reactor to try to block those odd spikes. A data center, yeah, worth the expense of protecting, even a main office, a home office, yeah, not worth spending more than all of the computers are worth to protect them.
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  27. The "This is my first day at" one was a joke, saw it when it was fresh. People dutifully followed on with other ways to impress the boss... Mine being, "Don't forget to pour around the gasoline on the way out the door". True though on never push updates out on Fridays. You push them out as mandatory immediate at COB on a holiday weekend Friday, then pour the can of gasoline out on the way out the door. One thing that really didn't sit well was, those companies that had test groups and deployment staging configured in Falcon's updater found to their horror that Crowdstrike had overrode the client organization settings and pushed the update as mandatory and immediate. That went from one lead balloon to a Blitz barrage balloon squadron full of leaden balloons. I've used their software, got our organization out of a jam with a very longstanding APT attack that was ongoing for long enough that we joked that the APT was eligible for a retirement pension due to the amount of time spent within our network. Went from loggers with delays of 19 - 26 hours to instantaneous alerts and accessible logs, literally capturing one attack in realtime, buffering it in its entirety and leveraging packet captures, submitted their latest PE software to the FBI and DHS for submission to the vendors, halting a major attack on our network and apparently, a half dozen other organizations. Attack being via RDP and novel(ish) an ancient method being revived - buffering into notepad the binary, something I'd not saw since the Windows 3.11 days. I know about that one in detail, as I ran that one down and wrote the report on it. Downside, all it needed was a repadding and recompile and they'd be at it again, but that was long enough to get the behavioral software to recognize it and jam it up in IPS. A bit later, we found the entry point - a long forgotten, unpatched DMZ test machine on a multinational network. Once it went offline, the attack was over. All, a side effect of having a network that happened, rather than one that was planned. If I'm at BSOD, yeah, lemme click on that one. Gimme a minute to grab the disconnected keyboard and start typing in commands. JLOTS, reminded me of the Mulberry harbours at Omaha. And precisely like with the Omaha one, a storm came in and knocked the snot out of it, forcing it to be abandoned. Maybe next week, we'll try the charge of the Light Brigade... Circling back though, I'd not include the A-10 being eliminated in favor of fast movers with lighter capacity overall. For CAS, it'd be inferior due to lower loitering time, less rounds for the cannon and generally just ill suited in that role. It'd be like trying to revive the museum ship battleships to assume the role of a cruiser. They could sort of do it, just not very well in that role. Sure, you can try the new guy, but I'll stick with Frank Moses. ;) And don't tell me "it's old", the BUFF is even older, both run on coal, so what, they still work and work well in their roles.
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  31. Now, now. That wasn't an invasion, that was Russian troops going on vacation and their commanders generously allowing them to take their vehicles and equipment home with them on vacation. Remember that nonsense being press released from the Kremlin? Yeah, I agree about the Crimea part, started there as a test, we failed and well, one failed President that also ignored a pandemic encouraged escalation by Putin. You missed one other use of nuclear weapons, typically neutron bombs - area denial. Then, one channelizes adversary movement into a desired direction and area. Also, we've not used Cheyenne Mountain Complex for a C3 center for ages, the C3 center is now a standard office building and the old bunker is just communications switching for the most part. I've also ungently reminded some Russian stooges that only one nation in the world has ever used nuclear weapons in war. And that that country tested cobalt-60 releasing warheads first. And that countervalue strikes would be preferred to wasteful counterforce strikes, as Russia would run out of population centers down to village level before we'd run out of warheads, leaving the population depleted below survival levels. They attempted then to shift goalposts, counting large cities in the US only, upon which I reminded them again of village level raising the number from 1300 to 19000+ vs our number of cities exceeding the numbers of cities, towns and villages in Russia. They did the smart thing and went for a nice hot cup of STFU. I grew up in the Cold War, I trained and operated in the Cold War, much of my career specifically targeted at Soviet, essentially Russian forces. Diplomacy isn't saying nice doggy until you find a rock, it's saying nice doggy until you can pull out the gun and fire. And blathering veiled threats of nukes, ancient news and flat out boring, Putin ran off at the mouth at his supermissile we're not hearing about since it blew up its scientists and irradiated its water based launchpad, but he had during his brag sessions threatened to salt the warheads for port attacks, which would really foul US ports and coastlines - plus our largest population centers. I countered then with, the only reply is a full level countervalue response and between his missile blowing fissiles all over the place and such responses, he STFU. And as I've happily informed all readers that I live at ground zero anyway, I really don't give a fuck kind of set the tone, as I was born a week after Tsar Bomba. I'll definitely outlive Putana. Oh, one did suggest I'd discover Novichok, I reminded them that we have long had samples and a standardized detector, so the most likely outcome from such a thing would be a redelivery in a Russian styled gift package to a very inconvenient location, at a sensitive time, resulting in Russia having a really bad day from an inconvenient and usually troublesome part-ally. Because, we trained to fight dirty and think much farther ahead than they're used to dealing with. They really hate reply in kind with high explosive babushkas. Just to remind them that I remembered the bombs in children's toys in Afghanistan that they used.
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  42. I'm reminded of the Fukushima meltdowns. CNN had Bill Nye on to discuss when they were injecting boric acid into the reactors to prevent criticality. Bill, being a good engineer and generalist totally flubbed things, confusing cesium-137, a fission product for boron, a neutron poison. Now, on day one, that'd be a no biggie, not enough time to line up any consultants that knew a control rod from a fuel rod. After that, not exceptionally excusable, as people who worked on nuclear reactors were lined up around the block to talk about what was going on and were studiously ignored. Instead, they had "whistleblowers" that were crackpots or well, a mechanical engineer who once worked for Boeing on hydraulics discussing the physics of a nuclear reactor. With the efficacy of asking a barber about constitutional law technicalities. Better off asking wait staff, oh wait, I'm sure they would, rather than ask an attorney. Being right has a low return on investment to the MBA crowd, being first is what counts and well, we see what MBA attitudes did for Boeing's profit margin with the 737 MAX debacles. And the booze bottles in the under construction Air Force One candidate... Pity, as MBA types are invaluable within their fields of expertise, but lousy outside of their lanes, as are every other specialist around. You don't ask a network architect to fix your car, you don't ask your barber for legal advice and you certainly don't ask your attorney to remove your gallbladder, you go to the appropriate expert in those fields. Or do your own research and remove your own brain tumor. Sure that'll work out well. Although, one's next career would be as a second lieutenant/ensign. ;) I'll just get my coat...
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