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Russia Builds Microwave Weapon To Take Down Enemy Drones (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Russian government is backing a military research project to develop a powerful microwave-based weapon designed to take out unmanned enemy drones from up to half a mile away. The country's United Instrument Manufacturing Corporation (UIMC) created the microwave gun specifically to disrupt the electronics of enemy missiles. Using the ultra-high frequency waves the weapon can completely disable aircraft communications, resulting in loss of control. The destructive rays, which belong to a group of warfare technologies known as directed-energy weapons (DEW), will be emitted from surface-to-air Buk missile systems. Military analyst Alexander Perendzhiyev noted that the new weapon would be particularly effective against systems carrying microelectronic equipment. He also suggested that the impact of the radio-electronic waves could even be deadly to humans -- and referred to potential use against terrorists.
Part of the reason they are a power despite having a GDP smaller thant the United Kingdom is also part of the reason their GDP is smaller than the United Kingdom in the first place:
They spend a disproportionate amount on military, $98 billion annually. (more than any other European nation)
This combined with the fact that a lot of their neighbours are military light-weights, they have more nuclear weapons than anyone else, and they have an aggressive dictator (posing as elected) who has already invaded two sovereign neighbours and annexed their territory does indeed make them a threat to world peace.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I was about to respond to GP, but you beat me to it! That's my point - taqfir wars, or 'mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the most Islamic of us all' contests in that region is none off our business (get lost, John Doone), and we have nothing to gain by getting involved.
If we were honest about Muslims and recognized them as the savages that they are, we'd have a State Department advisory to all Americans advising them not to travel to Muslim countries in the first place so that they don't get into trouble. Then you wouldn't have issues like US prisoners in Iran, nor would you have had the beheadings of various US journalists and aid workers in Syria. But we lied to them telling them that things there are hunky dory, Muslims are wonderful people just like the rest of us, and there was no problem w/ people going there. Then they start getting beheaded and you have an outcry in the US wanting to get rid of ISIS.
TL:DR fact about Syria: different Muslim groups are at war to decide who will control the country. Who wins won't make a qualitative difference: Syria will still be a country that doesn't tolerate different faiths living in harmony - just like Iraq has become. Just stay out of there, and don't take their people into Europe. If Syrians have to flee, let them flee either into safe zones within Syria, if any, or into neighboring Arab or Muslim countries, like Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Iran or Saudi Arabia. There is no reason why either the EU or the US has to take them in.
I dunno. The Russian have a different approach to these things than we do. If Russian engineering firms were baseball teams, they'd be small ball players and our guys would be sluggers. We tend to swing to swing for the fences and they concentrate on getting base hits.
If the Russians think they're on to something they tend to keep tinkering with it, making it incrementally better. The question isn't whether something is necessarily the most impressive thing in the world now, but whether it is practical and useful now.
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