WARLINK

OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence, is a product of the internet 
era that I find quite interesting. The idea is assembling the 
wealth of public information available on the internet to document 
military and related information. There's a lot of information out 
there which was previously only all accessible to those with the 
resources of national intelligence agencies, and now it just takes 
one guy with a computer.

To be honest my examples of good OSINT sources are pretty limited, 
just two websites. I'd like to find more but many in this space 
seem to sell articles to media organisations rather than document 
all their findings clearly and concisely on one free website, which 
to be fair probably offers little direct financial reward for their 
efforts. There are probably some busy making YouTube videos to 
appeal to the masses too, but I don't like that medium for this 
sort of topic.

"Russian strategic nuclear forces" is relatively infrequently 
updated with short posts, but there are some interesting longer 
articles in their blog's archive about aspects of Russian, and also 
US, nuclear weaponry, strategy, and politics:

https://russianforces.org/

But the best one, with ample time-wasting potential via the related 
links at the bottom of each article page, is Covert Shores:

http://www.hisutton.com/

Primarily about sea-going military and smuggling vessles, 
particular underwarer, the author (who also draws excellent 
cut-away diagrams) has become quite focused on unmanned craft, for 
both sea and sky. This space has advanced massively during the war 
in Ukraine as their army seems capable of producing an infinite 
variety of very different 'drone' war machines. In turn Russia, and 
actually all the world's military powers (even us Aussies), are 
responding with their own derivative projects for what often amount 
to robot bombs.

Remote guided missiles are nothing new, rather incredibly they were 
in development by the Americans all the way back at the end of 
WWII, complete with video transmitted by a missile back to its 
controller in the aircraft it launched from. The limitation really 
has been that transmission aspect - how to control these weapons 
from a properly safe distance away. The US military's drone 
programme of course cracked it a long time ago with satellites 
relaying transmissions from their drones over Afghanistan (or any 
country where you don't want to be), back in fact to places like 
their base in the middle of the Australian outback at Pine Gap.

Starlink and its mostly-vaporware competitors have been promising 
this sort of global satellite data capability to any guy with the 
cash, and it's not surprising that the US military has been said to 
be one of Starlink's big financial backers. Now though, it's 
interesting to see Starlink dishes appearing on both Ukranian and 
Russian naval drones in these articles:

http://www.hisutton.com/Ukraine-USV-Jetski.html
http://www.hisutton.com/Russia-USVs-ARMY-2024.html

Whether the Russians are actually using Starlink, or if they're 
hoping to use an equivalent LEO satellite internet service run from 
a more friendly country like China, one can only guess. Since the 
Chinese are ramping up their StarLink copy project, Qianfan, the 
Starlink dish(y) on the Russian naval drone is probably some degree 
of stand-in for a future Chinese equivalent.

https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-megaconstellation

So what this shows is that warfare is entering a new era where 
advanced satellite communication is no longer dominated by the 
superpowers. Interestingly, wheras GPS and its Russian equivalent 
Glonass are military projects that revolutionised civilian life, 
LEO internet constellation satellites are outwardly civilian 
projects that seem set to revolutionise global military strategy.

 - The Free Thinker