Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine (www.defense.gov)

submitted 1 year ago by Ftten@kbin.social to c/ukraine@sopuli.xyz

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The Defense Department announced additional security assistance to meet Ukraine's critical security and defense needs.

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[-] Ftten@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Interesting to note Atacms not in this aid package
If anyone knows the difference between storm Shadow and Atacms I'd like to know, I'm not versed in specifics of ammunition

[-] takeda@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

ATACMS is just long range munitions (300km) that can also be launched from HIMARS.

Storm Shadow comes from Britain and can travel 550km and needs to be launched from airplane.

Ukraine wants those long range weapons so they can fire them from safe distances (outside of fire range) and also be able to fire at supply targets deep in occupied territory to starve Russian soldiers of ammunition.

West was resisting providing long range weapons to Ukrainy in fears that Ukraine would fire them to Russia, causing escalation. The storm shadow as I understand was first long range weapon where UK said "screw it" to that.

Frankly at this point I think that fear is unwarranted and only makes the war last longer.

[-] 404CameranotFound@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Very similar to storm shadow, but storm shadow has better target acquisition, target painting, and lay of the land capabilities which give it an edge over atacms

Atacms is more like a dummy powerful HIMARS system.

[-] SpaceCadet2000@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In a technical sense, they're not similar at all.

ATACMS is a ground launched ballistic missile, so it follows a straight-forward parabolic trajectory: it climbs very high, goes very fast and then comes down on top of programmed GPS coordinates. Storm Shadow is a stealthy air launched cruise missile, it flies low at subsonic speeds and can manoeuver following a pre-progammed path (for example, to go around known air defense locations) and had advanced optics to locate the target.

Technologically Storm Shadow is way more advanced and it has a higher payload too. It also costs 4 times as much per missile, there are less of them and they can't carry a cluster bomb warhead because in Europe we decided not to make those weapons anymore.

Both would be very useful for Ukraine.