Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
Speculation going around the USS Carney has no missiles. They allegedly fired off their entire anti-air payload when the Houthis attacked them. People are speculating that these platforms basically have a massive vulnerability to swaming tactics or just running out of ammunition.
Most ships have this issue because VLS systems take up a lot of space and need to be fitted with both anti ship and anti air missiles so you can't dedicate all the cells to just one type. Because of how shit missile interceptors and ciws are in practice, you end up expending multiple missiles to stop a handful of AShMs. Iron dome has the same problem, if Hamas has a bm-21 grad they could completely saturate an iron dome battery.
This means that an offensive and proactive naval doctrine involving large numbers of very fast and maneuverable long range missiles is preferred, to take out enemy launch platforms before they can retaliate. The USN relies on its planes to do this, but Russia and China for example invested heavily in long range hypersonics.
In a full blown conventional war I expect opposing navies to blow their load within minutes of getting in range of each other.
maybe the mecha will be the best option for dodging those swarms. i mean, you don't have to waste interceptors or tons of CAWS rounds. just nimble graceful aerial acrobatics in your fusion powered gundam
Just like the Ukrainian war went from "highly mobile tacticool warfare" to trench warfare in months, a modern naval war will go from "super cool missile strikes" to good old battle line formations and gun battles like in WW1 as well.
There are always more missiles and they're way cheaper than ships. A modern naval war will mean a lot of new coral reefs in the first few minutes and then nobody will bother with ships again
People think that but there's actually an underground/water tube that connects each carrier to an arms manufacturer wherever it goes. It just can't double back or cross a place where it's already been or else you lose