The administration of US President Joe Biden refuses to transfer long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, despite requests from Kyiv and pressure from US lawmakers.
I’m guessing the US arsenal of ATACMS missiles is rather limited and they have their own reasons for not making it smaller, which they can’t go into detail about. Frustrating, but understandable.
The best theory I have seen is the Biden administration is trying to ‘manage’ the conflict. A belief they can dictate levels of aid to determine a geo politically satisfactory outcome.
Concerns around unmanaged escalation made sense but the UK has been pretty focussed on methodically moving up the escalation ladder to demonstrate Russia won’t resort to nuclear strikes (Brimstone, Challenger 2 tanks, setting up the F16 coalition, Storm Shadow, etc…).
The USA expects China to be the next conflict zone, that is a naval/air situation where ATACM’s can’t be used. Suffering a shortage of ATACM’s in the near term isn’t really an issue especially if you’ve already put in place contracts to address the gap.
FYI (source: ChatGPT 4)
ATACMS stands for Army Tactical Missile System. It is a surface-to-surface missile system designed and manufactured by Lockheed Martin for the United States Army. This system is designed to be extremely mobile and can be fired from the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) family of launchers, including the M270, M270A1, and the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
The ATACMS is a short-range ballistic missile with a range of about 165 km for early versions, and more than 300 km for later models. It carries a large payload, up to 500 lb, which can include unitary warheads or submunitions depending on the specific model of the missile. The missile is designed for precision strikes against a variety of target types, including enemy artillery, air defenses, and concentrations of troops or armored vehicles.
As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, the ATACMS was set to be replaced by the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), a next-generation surface-to-surface weapon system being developed for the U.S. Army.
Really weird how much ChatGPT knows. I wonder how much comes from Lockheed’s public promotional material, and how much comes from sources that should not exist.
ChatGPT doesn’t know anything. It just reproduced existing stuff and if the core points of a topic are hit is purely coincidental, just like there’s no guarantee that the reproduced information is correct. It just needs to be found out there…
Case in point: No, ATACMS can’t be fired by M270s… Only the very first production line was compatible and those don’t exist anymore as they were modernized and upgraded with newer guidance systems. Which requires M270A1 and later. You could probably find that information even on wikipedia and yet ChatGPT missed it.
Sure. I think everything in that post and more can be found on Wikipedia, but does ChatGPT retain any information on a server after scraping data from sites or does it always just look it up upon being given a prompt?
I would think for the learning process they’d have to retain some data about prompts it has been given. I know there’s been issues with ChatGPT finding classified info about certain topics. If those sources are located and removed does that then deprive ChatGPT of the information?
It’s a tragedy that these have not yet been sent. There should already be a production line set up to deliver hundreds per month.
They might not.
There’s been a couple cases where the US military has classified something so heavily that they needed to re-spend millions in R&D in order to learn how to make the material again.
That’s a complicated one. Military tech tends to all be 10+ years old at time of deployment and the ones stockpiled are probably late 90s designs that went into production in the early 2000s. Most of the parts for the control and guidance systems are likely no longer produced at all and haven’t been for a decade+ (think the kinds of computer chips you’d find in a SNES, maaaaybe an N64) so it’s not that they don’t have the blueprint somewhere, they would have to re design large parts of it to work in a modern supply chain. Yes, they could do emulation/simulation shenanigans to get some stuff to be compatible on modem COTS hardware but they’d still need to re qualify everything because nobody wants a 500lb ballistic warhead going stupid and killing someone in the wrong country.
I have inside knowledge on this because I support[ed] production for a part of this system. I can’t divulge too much information obviously, but we can still manufacture ATACMS. The real issue is a lot of the components and manufacturing processes are terribly out-of-date so it’s questionable whether it’s worth it when the replacement is on the horizon.
