Trench Art

This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts

by STEVE WEINTZ In the spring of 1952, the U.S. government tested tactical nuclear weapons at the Nevada Proving Ground as part of Operation Tumbler-Snapper. It was the third nuke test series in 18 months at the Nevada site in an era of breakneck atomic development. At 4:00 in the morning on May 13, one of the Tumbler-Snapper bombs—code name “Fox”—was scheduled to go off. But the moment passed … and no atomic fireball curled into the sky. Shot Fox had misfired.

The city of Shostka, in northern Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast, is just 25 miles from the border with Russia. That places it within range of every heavy deep-strike munition in the Russian inventory. So it was foolish, if not criminal, when a Ukrainian national guard commander gathered their trainees out in the open, in broad daylight, at a shooting range in Shostka on Tuesday. A Russian drone spotted the trainees. A Russian Iskander ballistic missile streaked down. Six trainees died and 10 were injured.

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN Get ready to break out the crayons and colored pencils. Back in the 1980s, the Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt II was one of the Pentagon’s deadliest tank-killers. The twin-engine “Warthog” was a veritable flying tank itself, heavily armored and hauling Maverick missiles and a GAU-8/A 30-millimeter Gatling cannon. When it fires, it sounds like a buzzsaw. To help them hit their targets, Hog pilots had their own coloring book.

Losses are piling up on both sides as Russia’s Kursk counteroffensive grinds into its third bloody week. But they’re piling up faster on the Russian side of the 250-square-mile salient that a strong Ukrainian force carved out of Kursk Oblast in a surprise August assault. On Tuesday, Andrew Perpetua—an analyst who scours social media for evidence of lost equipment in Ukraine and Russia—logged a staggering 163 destroyed, damaged and abandoned vehicles. Ninety-one were Russian.

When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky celebrated the arrival of ex-European F-16s in Ukraine on Sunday, two of the single-seat, single-engine, supersonic fighters sat parked behind him—powerful reminders of the F-16s’ potential to revitalize Ukrainian air operations as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 29th month. But there’s every reason to believe those two F-16s were non-flying decoys.

In an abrupt about-face that signals renewed foreign support for Ukraine’s war effort, the Ukrainian army has re-designated its new 153rd Brigade as a mechanized unit rather than an infantry unit. The reason is obvious. With the resumption in U.S. aid to Ukraine following a six-month blockade by pro-Russia Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress, and with NATO and the European Union also boosting their support, the Ukrainian armed forces have more and better armored vehicles.

The massive, $1.25-billion aid package that Sweden pledged to Ukraine on Wednesday includes every single decommissioned Pansarbandvagn 302 armored personnel carrier the Swedish army still has in storage. Potentially more than 200 vehicles, according to the army. This is a very big deal. With the passage of a new national mobilization law as well as other reforms, Ukraine is drafting and recruiting fresh troops—tens of thousands of them—and forming new brigades to grow its 100-brigade ground forces.