The soldiers brought two High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with them.

I was reading about how the Marines were interested in HIMARS for that WRT China. Any conflict with China would likely be in large part maritime, but HIMARS is big enough that it can launch munitions with enough range that it can take out ships, act in an area-denial role.

kagis

Here’s someone mentioning that.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2020/11/black-sea-drill-again-validates-himars-as-an-anti-ship-weapon-system/

Black Sea Drill Again Validates HIMARS as an Anti-Ship Weapon System

This isn’t the first time that the U.S. Army and the U.S Air Force used this tactic as the HIMARS RO-RO concept dates back years with the idea of landing C-130s into the field, having the HiMARS drive off, park at a distance, set up, fire, and then drive and reload back into the cargo planes for immediate take-off without the need to reload or refuel.  The U.S. Marines operate in similar fashion with their HiMARS and U.S. Marine Corps KC-130Js.

The U.S. Marines do not have any tracked MLRSs in inventory) and the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps’ (U.S.M.C.) HIMARS are seen as one of the pivotal key launchers for the current and future United States’ strategy and tactics for an Anti-Ship land-based weapon system that can counter peer nations’ shipping and breach Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) in the Pacific.

With future land-based Anti-Ship Precision Guided Weapons in development and available now, such as the Naval Strike Missile, the U.S. Army’s tracked MLRS, 6×6 HIMARS, and 8×8 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT), and the U.S. Marines’ 8×8 Logistic Vehicle System Replacement (LVSR) and HIMARS, when modified and outfitted as Anti-Shipping rocket or missile launchers, are poised to become the “Go to” system for LBASM and LRPFs to prevent enemy ships and amphibious assaults on allied-protected islands and shores

I recently commented on NCD with a twelve-year-old, humorous-given-present-context review I found of that radio on eham, when apparently counterfeit IC-V82 radios were a serious problem:

https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=5046

Watch out for fake v82’s! Only buy from authorized retailers or someone who did.

Words of wisdom there, eham.net.

https://jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820808

The walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah terrorist group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others could not have made the exploding devices, the Japanese company said on Thursday.

“There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things,” Yoshiki Enomoto, a director at ICOM, told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan, on Thursday.

ICOM has said it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.

“If it turns out to be counterfeit, then we’ll have to investigate how someone created a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there,” Enomoto said.

Or even a dead one.

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

And while in war, there are prohibitions on targeting non-combatants, they don’t require that there be no collateral damage. Israel’s pretty clearly targeting Hezbollah here, not random Lebanese.

I do wonder if Hezbollah can maybe agree to stay out of part of Lebanon. I don’t think that that’d need to compromise either Israel’s or Hezbollah’s war plans, so maybe it’d be possible to come to some sort of agreement like that; you’d need buy-in from both parties. Then that area could be used as a safe area for Lebanese non-combatants.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-crackdown-on-mobile-phones-in-schools

Mobile phones are set to be prohibited in schools across England as part of the government’s plan to minimise disruption and improve behaviour in classrooms.

New mobile phones in schools guidance issued today (19 February 2024) backs headteachers in prohibiting the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, including at break times.

Many schools around the country are already prohibiting mobile phone use with great results. This guidance will ensure there is a consistent approach across all schools.

I suppose if enough countries do that sort of thing, pagers might start doing a comeback.

EDIT: Though looking at the wording, I’m not actually sure if this is a “we’re banning cell phones” or a “we’re talking about policies that make it look like we’re banning cell phones to keep the anti-cell-phone crowd happy”.

There are a large number of people in Hezbollah. Israel is fighting them.

You’re talking about using a Hellfire R-9X.

In order to launch those concurrently against, I dunno, sounds like there are maybe hundreds or thousands of targets, you’re going to need to have hundreds or thousands of drones. You’re gonna need something like a TB-2 at least to be lobbing them, not a tiny little drone. You’re talking about a lot of medium-size UAVs. That’s where your scale limitation is gonna come from.

Those things are fine if you’re trying to kill one person. But Israel’s fighting a number of people, even if it can identify them. They aren’t gonna have thousands of drones above Lebanon.

And if they’re hitting buildings and such, then you’re gonna be collapsing buildings and stuff like that.

Secondly, I assume that the Lebanese government is not going to give Israel free reign to do drone strikes on Hezbollah on Lebanese territory, will shoot at those drones, so to use those, you’d need to destroy any air defense that Lebanon has. My guess is that Israel’s looking to just fight Hezbollah as much as possible.

There’s still gonna be some collateral damage with those, that can’t be employed at scale as readily – you’d have to concurrently target huge numbers of people from airborne platforms, and these are pretty small charges. Given that Hezbollah isn’t fighting in the open – understandably – this is probably about as good as it realistically gets in terms of collateral damage.

Israel could maybe use DIME charges to have a smaller difference between lethal radius and damaging radius, but that’s got its own unpleasant aspects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_inert_metal_explosive

Dense inert metal explosive (DIME) is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material (such as phlegmatized HMX or RDX) and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten. It is intended to limit the effective distance of the explosion, to avoid collateral damage in warfare.

Upon detonation of the explosive, the casing disintegrates into extremely small particles, as opposed to larger pieces of shrapnel which results from the fragmentation of a metal shell casing. The HMTA powder acts like micro-shrapnel which is very lethal at close range (about 4 m or 13 ft), but loses momentum very quickly due to air resistance, coming to a halt within approximately 40 times the diameter of the charge. This increases the probability of killing people within a few meters of the explosion while reducing the probability of causing death and injuries or damage farther away. Survivors close to the lethal zone may still have their limbs amputated by the HMTA microshrapnel, which can slice through soft tissue and bone.

If Israel isn’t using those already, I guess we could send 'em some, if we have some sitting around. Realistically, though, I doubt that collateral damage is gonna be possible to reduce a whole lot, given the fact that Hezbollah’s hiding in a civilian population.

It did both the original link and archive.org

Internet Archive - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Internet Archive:

MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America

I think that the MBFC database should probably have some special case for the Internet Archive. Either parse the archived domain out of Wayback Machine links and use the MBFC assessment for the domain or just don’t have a rating.

Any aggregate rating of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is going to basically be useless, because it shows archives of sites spanning the spectrum on politics and factuality.

Well, they did remove it when they found out. But…

Look. I’m looking at a Thinkpad. Lenovo owns that line now. I dunno if they can push firmware updates to old, pre-Lenovo models, but they can to current versions. Those things are pretty common in a business setting. AFAIK, the US has never raised any issues with Lenovo and security a la Huawei. But if there was an honest-to-God, knock-down, drag-out war, I assume that Beijing is gonna see whether it can leverage anything like that. And I’ve got, what…a microphone? A camera? Network access? Maybe interesting credentials or other things in memory or on my drive? I mean, there are probably things that you could do with that.

Then think of all the personal phones that military people have. Microphone. Camera. Network access and radio. Big fat firmware layer.

My guess is that if you did a really serious audit of even pretty secure environments, you’d find a lot of stuff floating around that’s potentially exploitable, just due to firmware updates. If you exclude firmware updates, then you’re vulnerable to holes that haven’t been patched.

Okay, maybe, for some countries, you can use all domestic manufacturers. I don’t think that South Korea could do that. Maybe the US or China could. But even there, I bet that there are supply chain attacks. I was reading a while back about some guy selling counterfeit Cisco hardware. He set up a bunch of bogus vendors on Amazon. His stuff got into even distribution channels with authorized Cisco partners, made it into US military networks.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/counterfeit-cisco-gear-ended-up-in-us-military-bases-used-in-combat-operations/

Counterfeit Cisco gear ended up in US military bases, used in combat operations

That guy was just trying to make a buck, though I dunno if I’d have trusted his products. But you gotta figure that if that could have happened, there’s room for intelligence agencies to make moves in that space. And that’s the US, which I bet is probably the country most-able to avoid that. Imagine if you’re a much smaller country, need to pull product from somewhere abroad.

I’d guess that we’re talking about a lot of pagers.

Honestly, I’m not saying that I’m sure that that’s what it is – I listed both sabotaging equipment before distribution and this. Just that it’s possible to make them explode, and you have the quote from the Lebanese internal security people saying that they were “hacked”, which would indicate that it’d be the battery, because nothing else in a pager can do that. They might be wrong, of course – it just happened and they cannot have had a lot of time to examine them.

I don’t care all that much about sabotaged equipment – my electronics aren’t likely gonna have bombs built into them.

I’m a lot more concerned about the possibility of weaponizing the BMS on devices with lithium batteries. Like, there are a whole lot of those out there, and a whole lot of parties who might want to attack other parties via that route. It’s not an attack vector that I’ve thought much about, but it’s a big enough one that I’m not entirely sanguine about having devices with God knows what security on their BMS floating around.

Plus, the fire factor is honestly pretty bad on its own. Like, the explosion isn’t huge. Whatever the cause, in both the video I linked and the pager explosion video, we aren’t talking about a hand grenade or anything. Would really have to have the device on you for it to likely be a serious problem. But if you have some IoT device somewhere sitting around flammable material unattended, especially if lots of devices go off at the same time so that the fire department cannot respond to any one…shrugs That’s kind of a concerning thought.

You mean an 18650? An 18650 is a small cell, in the neighborhood of the size of an AA battery, that is used in all kinds of electronics, including small consumer electronics. They can be used as a basic building unit for larger battery packs – if you take apart a lithium powerstation, you can probably disassemble it and find 18650s. It may be that some EVs build packs from 18650s, and I’m sure that ebikes will, but they aren’t specific to EVs.

I don’t believe small lithium batteries can explode like that.

If it’s an 18650, which is a pretty common small lithium cell, it looks like it can. Here’s one exploding after being shorted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDaPP-dI9dE

That being said:

• The cells cannot themselves have current regulation sufficient to avoid a fire or explosion. My vague understanding from past reading is that typically, if you buy an 18650, it’ll have internal regulation, but not all do – it adds to the cost and reduces capacity. But you’d only want an unregulated 18650 if you were putting it in a device that you would trust to regulate the thing. I believe I was reading about it in the past in the context of high-end flashlights that took removable 18650s, was telling people not to try and use unregulated 18650s, as then you’re trusting the flashlight’s firmware to properly limit the discharge rate.

• The battery would have to be the first point to go if the external BMS circuitry just let the thing discharge as quickly as possible. Like, if you had small-enough connections or something, I’d imagine that they’d melt first, act like a fuse.

• From the video I read above, lithium batteries from reputable manufacturers tend to have blowout holes to prevent exactly this – if the electrolyte starts to boil, then they’ll start venting vapor. They may catch fire from the heat, but it should prevent the pressure buildup from reaching the point where the battery explodes. They say that counterfeit cells may not have vents that work correctly.

So I can believe that there are devices out there at risk. But I would guess that most devices probably aren’t. That is, you could maybe make devices catch fire, and that could be bad if done at mass scale at the same time, but probably most wouldn’t explode.

Even on that above 18650 that exploded, you could see vapor coming out prior to the explosion. According to that video I linked above about exploding lithium batteries, it sounds like the issue is more that on some counterfeits, the pressure release system doesn’t work properly rather than that it doesn’t exist at all – I didn’t quote the text, but they went more into depth on it after the bit I quoted. But I suppose that if there were no presssure release at all, that it could probably get more pressure buildup before exploding.

So, not my area of expertise, so take this with a grain of salt, I doubt that Russian surface vessels are going to do much in a war with the US, or to last very long. Dispersing them from their port would potentially be a good idea, to help make them harder to hit at one go, but I don’t think that it buys Russia much to move surface vessels near American coastlines.

It might be advantageous to move Russian ballistic-missile submarines close to US shores if Russia wanted to do a first strike, albeit not a game-changer. SLBMs can, in theory, be used to do depressed-trajectory shots, where instead of flying above the atmosphere, they push through the dense atmosphere and can achieve pretty short flight times on near-to-coast targets.

https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs03gronlund.pdf

SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have short flight times, comparable to escape times of bombers and launch times of ICBMs, thus raising the possibility of short time-of-flight (STOF) nuclear attacks

We find that current US and CIS SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have the capability to attack bomber bases at ranges of up to about 2,000 kilometers, and possibly at ranges up to 3,000 kilometers

But the real problem for Russia isn’t a disarming strike on American ICBM silos and air bases, but rather countering the American SLBMs at sea. To do a first strike on the US, Russia would need to either (a) have some sort of way of taking out US ballistic missile subs prior to them launching a counterstrike, which probably means needing to be able to locate them, or (b) be willing to absorb their response. And it’s a pretty good bet that Russia isn’t willing to do (b) in anything other than in pretty extreme scenarios.

Setting aside the military issues, legally, Russia putting ships there is a non-issue; Russia can sail warships around in the American EEZ (up to 200 nmi offshore) all they want, just not the territorial sea (12 nmi offshore).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters

More-reputable source, as I haven’t heard of “i24news.tv” before – this looks real.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/middleeast/lebanon-hezbollah-pagers-explosions-intl/index.html

I’m kind of guessing, from the strength of the explosion in the video – it really was a small explosion, not bursting into flames – that somehow rigged pagers were inserted into Hezbollah’s equipment prior to distribution to operatives.

But if this was, instead, some kind of remote software compromise of battery management system firmware for lithium batteries, now I have one more thing to worry about in my life, with all the devices with lithium batteries I have.

looks warily at laptop on my chest

EDIT: Strengthening my concerns, in the CNN article I linked to in my other comment, the devices were termed “hacked” by Lebanese internal security forces. Now, okay, that’s a report immediately after the event, and I don’t know how much time they have had to actually do analysis. Or if they’re right. But:

NNA reported that “hacked” pager devices exploded in the towns of Ali Al-Nahri and Riyaq in Lebanon’s central Beqaa valley, resulting in a significant number of injuries. The locations are Hezbollah strongholds.

…it sure doesn’t assuage my concerns at all. Even if you couldn’t make a BMS discharge lithium batteries hard enough to explode, you definitely can make them do so hard enough to make a pretty unpleasant fire. You do that with numerous laptop-sized devices all over a country, that’d potentially be a pretty unpleasant event.

sighs

Maybe it’s possible to mandate that lithium-ion devices conforming to some sort of safety certification standard, like UL or something, have non-updatable-firmware hardware putting a physical limit on discharge rate. I don’t think that that’d add too much cost or too many restrictions to devices.

EDIT2: From this YouTube video, it sounds like as long as you’re not using sketchy battery cells in the device you’re building, that battery manufacturers already take this into consideration via a blowout hole:

Even in the event of a short circuit, genuine lithium-ion batteries have several protective measures to prevent them from catching on fire. Take a look at this lithium-ion that was just shorted out. In the unlikely case that a battery short-circuits, the terminals heat up and the electrolyte fluid begins to boil. The vent holes in the top of the terminal allow the battery to depressurize the electrolyte steam, thereby reducing the battery capacity and making a pressure explosion much less likely. In the end, you’re more-likely to see a small fire shoot out of a battery than a large explosion. While they still can cause damage, it’s a much better option than having a battery explode, which results in a shrapnel cloud. But in counterfeit batteries, this vent hole safety valve is often ineffective.

All that being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have some devices with sketchy cells…but my guess is that at least in my collection, when it comes to large-battery-capacity, Internet-connected devices capable of firmware updates, stuff like laptops, they’re probably – hopefully – using legit battery cells.

The defendant named Donald Trump as a potential target

They’re gonna wind up with multiple assassins running into each other on the rooftops around Trump at this rate.

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