> German police were investigating an incident at a Hamburg shipyard where several dozen kilograms of metal shavings were dumped into a corvette-class vessel's engine system.
Italics mine, and holy crap that's a lot of metal shavings.. like multiple 55gal trash cans' worth.
You're mentioning the densities for solid bulk materials. I'd expect shavings to be quite loose and trap a lot of air. Depending on the exact type and shape of the shavings, I can imagine a huge volume increase compared to the bulk material.
You also have to imagine the size of the engine the shavings were deposited into. Assuming it's the new German corvette class (K130 Braunschweig), they are powered by two MTU 20V 1163 TB93 engines. Each one has about 240liters of displacement. This means each engine has about 4 55gal bags worth of cylinder volume, plus turbochargers, fuel pumps, etc. It's unlikely that ~1/5th-1/10th of the entire volume of the engine was consumed by shavings, mostly because 1/50th is probably enough to ensure major permanent damage.
Interestingly enough, the engine is produced by a company owned by the Rolls-Royce holding company, so in a meaningful way the British are helping the Germans produce warships. In the first half of the 20th century the British would have been prime suspects of the sabotage.
Higher probability of success. With 1 shaving it could make it to an oil filter without lodging anywhere critical (like in a main bearing oil gallery or something). With a huge number of them the likelihood of clogging oil galleries and overwhelming the filtration system is very high. Also, the secondary point of the sabotage is to be detected. Even if the engine doesn't grenade itself through the hull of the ship, when they discover widespread contamination in the lubricating oil they'll have to remove and completely disassemble every single part of the engine and lubrication system. Effectively a total rebuild. So "no permanent damage" is really a very rose colored way to frame it. The cost is roughly the same.
EDIT: a super devious way to do it would be with very small magnetized filings. It would be incredibly difficult to rid the engine of those, even completely disassembled.
This was a huge security screw up, you have to draw your security barrier and they left this huge asset on the wrong side of it. If only the followed Gauss's Law.
It's a security screwup that a ship was scheduled to be in service, but now that date might be delayed. The entire point of the boat is security. They didn't secure the thing that provides even more security.
It would have been a much bigger security screwup if it was actively in service.
> a super devious way to do it would be with very small magnetized filings. It would be incredibly difficult to rid the engine of those, even completely disassembled.
I personally like to use thin spaces or apostrophes as a thousands separator, precisely to avoid the language confusion. I also try to avoid three decimals going for 2 or 4 instead, but you can't always do that, because it changes the content.
> Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …
As someone from another language that does that: agreed. It gets even weirder with 124: one hundred four and twenty. Middle-endianness is silly.
For the thousands separator, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (based in France) recommends the use of a space, and as a result this is used in France.
Commas and dots being swapped is fairly common on continental Europe: I think it's the case at least in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Probably other countries as well.
Since we're talking about numbers, in France we used to count by blocks of 20, and the usage somewhat persists to this day: so, for instance, 72 is read "sixty twelve" (60+12), 81 is read "four twenty one" (4x20+1), and 96 is read "four twenty sixteen" (4x20+16). Mind bending for the poor French learners...
> Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …
That's a weird remark to make. Lots of languages do that. And if you want to talk weird numbers, try Japanese with their 10k grouping (e.g. 100k is 10 10k, juu man, 1M is 100 100k, hyaku man, etc).
this usage of the decimal separator is not a German thing only [1]
and globally not very consistent.
One third of the world seems to use ".", the other third "," and the others decides with own rules or have own symbols. (Space, "'" and "·" and "_" in many variants).
Also, the alleged incident happened at a shipyard - finding dumpsterloads of metal shavings there is like finding sand in the desert. It's plausibly an opportunistic attack by a spy who was already in the facility rather than a planned operation.
It really depends on how corse the shavings are, if you do any work to compress the metal shavings, and the density of the alloy. However I think you're right, because 53lb of steel is only about 0.1ft^3.
I assure you it isn't. I've lifted them many times. I'd say 75-100lbs is normal, depending on the distribution of metals (obviously steel is heavier than aluminum for example).
IME they're really not all that dense. When chips come off a lathe or mill cutter they are curled and have small serrations in them where the sharp edge cracked as it was curling. So they don't pack well. Each chip takes up a large amount of 3D space and they interlock really easily--they don't slide past each other.
Sabotaging engines of a military ship doesn't fit with my expectations of military security. You cannot even sabotage most civilian office printers without getting past a security badge and passing through multiple security cameras.
There is no military security in Germany. Military hires low wage guys over “security” companies to guard their barracks and military objects. That’s shocking reality. There are no soldiers with dogs and armed G36 around. Swarms of hostile drones fly over military objects and make pictures of every detail inside. Sad reality. Sometimes I feel that the whole country is sabotaged.
This is the most pessimistic account of the German military I've read, and admittedly I've read several propaganda and mainstream media pieces about the German military.
To people that share this low opinion of the German military, is it worse in Germany than the other major European armies (France, UK)?
Drone overflights are not the problem he thinks it is. A western military is categorically prohibited from shooting at civilians and their things. And the people who say "just shoot them" don't understand what theyre asking for.
Having said that, the Germans have for decades not funded their military. Politicians have for decades degraded the profession of war and those who pursue it and now those chickens are coming home to roost.
Frankly they deserve this, and they are extremely lucky their opponent is so butthurt they're doing this sabotage during peacetime so the Germans at least have the option to fix themselves.
There's a difference. Yes supply chin attacks are bad. It's worse when deployed equipment is destroyed, because it can generate holes in defense for more special ops. Sabotaging deployed equipment also reduces the ability for the military to respond to active threats.
Supply chain attacks are a thorn at your side, sabotage on military bases is a direct security threat to the country.
Sabotaging engines of any ship feels like failure in generic security. Bringing stuff in is a thing, but bringing stuff out should as much be a thing and a risk. Like regular theft of say copper or other materials.
Tangential, Emden is the name of a warship that shelled Chennai (formerly Madras) in India, so Tamil and Malayalam languages today use the name for dominating and big.
Stupid/tangential question, would a primarily hindi speaker from the north know the origin of this particular idiom? or is it more of a southern thing?
The article suggests that this is an escalation relative to the last few years. I don't think the article is suggesting that no such thing as sabotage had ever happened previously.
I also think the significance here is in the context of Russian aggression in Europe beyond Ukraine.
> I also think the significance here is in the context of Russian aggression in Europe beyond Ukraine.
Yes, and it also frames the ramp up of Russian aggression triggered by the ongoing demolition of the US. It's the deep sea cable-cutting attacks in the Baltic, today's drone attack on Chernobyl's dome, etc. We're bound to see a ramp-up in these actions in the near future, and the only peaceful exit for this scenario is helping Ukraine win by supplying it with everything they need to win. Any other scenario will involve more wars and more war fronts.
Well, with the USA now distancing itself from NATO, and aligning itself with Russia more closely than at any historical moment after WWII — even sabre rattling about expansionist conquests of its own and abandoning preservation of the international order — Germany finds itself bereft of a powerful ally and with a greatly degraded deterrent against Russian aggression. It is the right moment for Russia to advance.
It's not like sabotaging German ships will cause Germany to increase military spending or fix the Bundeswehr's comically bad procurement process so there is little risk for Russia in these actions.
Well, they blew up an ammunition dump in the Czech Republic 10 years ago, they are sabotaging electric and fiber cables, including to a highly sensitive Norwegian air base:
Not meant as a reply to the commenter above but to anyone else on hn, how come there's such incredible, richly detailed comments on, say, the history of S.U.S.E. (personal stories of people who grew up with it, people who used to work directly on it etc), but with international politics it steeply goes downhill?
I feel like the same minds being brought to bear on the latter subject could be similarly interesting.
Hybrid warfare, along with gray zone, has been escalating sharply in recent years. It is a major topic of discussion in international national security circles. There is a general sense that the absence of material consequences for engaging in this activity has encouraged it.
A great and underappreciated point. I think at the time the important thing to understand was the inaccuracy of the story itself, on its face value and how it steamrolled over objections from the national security state at least at it had existed before the Bush admin.
I think retrospectively however, the important thing to understand is how that example is cynically leveraged in the present environment of misinformation. And how it emerged in the first place, as part of an administration attempting to steamroll over existing institutional guard rails intended to keep us in touch with reality.
I looked this up recently (because I remembered a news report from after the war which casually mentioned "and some stockpiled chemical weapons were found and destroyed", but nobody seemed to pick up on that). They had leftover chemical WMDs that were in the process of being destroyed, since before the war, but were actually still in stockpiles because destroying chemical weapons is hard and they didn't wanna.
Former Iraq general Georges Sada said in his book "Saddam's Secrets." that chemical WMD transferred to Syria few months prior to invasion.
Quote:
> Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts held in Arlington, Va., in 2006.
> According to Shaw, ex-Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, went to Iraq in December 2002 and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
> Anticipating the invasion, his job was to supervise the removal of such weapons and erase as much evidence of Russian involvement as possible.
> The Russian-assisted "cleanup" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achalov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."
Shaw’s claims were never corroborated by primary intelligence agencies, and Primakov’s involvement remains speculative. And perhaps more tellingly, the U.S. intelligence apparatus couldn't verify these claimes despite having every incentive to do so. If such an elaborate Russian operation occurred, why did it leave behind no satellite imagery, no intercepted communications, no credible human intelligence? Nothing.
The "moved to Syria" argument is essentially the Loch Ness Monster of the WMD debate, which is to say it's constantly discussed but never conclusively proven. And given the catastrophic consequences of the war, clinging to this narrative feels less like a genuine search for truth and more like a desperate attempt to avoid accountability.
but to what point? to see if they could? but if you could, why give up your "0-day"? now they know there are saboteurs beyond just suspecting or worrying about it. what did they achieve? causing the Germans to spend some money or repairs? if this was a shooting war, then okay, this is as good as a bomb as the ship is not able to join the fight. but there's not a shooting war, so what did this actually achieve?
i just don't understand the point of revealing a weakness by exploiting it unnecessarily like this
Germany probably needs to rearm aggressively, given what Russia is doing, but doesn't have the society buy in to spend money on armed forced (or rather, doesn't have the buy in to spend less on other things).
So publishing this kind of thing might mobilize the society and convince them the risks are real.
> Germany probably needs to rearm aggressively, given what Russia is doing, but doesn't have the society buy in to spend money on armed forced (or rather, doesn't have the buy in to spend less on other things).
In spite of Russia's propaganda and continuous subversion attack on Germany's political leadership, currently we're seeing polls showing around 70% supporting Germany's military aid to Ukraine. It might not be a uphill battle to have Germany's population invested in investing in their defense.
> One biased ZDF poll from the German state television.
Why do you blindly assert it is biased?
> Here is another (50% against):
That should be framed into context, specifically how for the last year Russia has been pumping industrial levels of propaganda onto the world in general and Germany in particular.
All these sudden calls for disarmament and pushing Ukraine to capitulate don't happen organically when the same belligerent part also starts to target you specifically. They take place when you're enduring a constant blast from a firehouse of falsehoods over genetically engineered gay Nazi soldiers from Ukraine taking your jobs and increasing the price of eggs.
I for one was handed over a very peculiar anti-NATO protest leaflet, which said nothing more than "Bow to God, not to the media. Say no to NATO."
This is how far and how desperate the anti-europe propaganda is willing to go to erode public trust on such specific topics.
So no wonder public sentiment on their own self defense is being eroded over time. This is by design, and a part of the whole war.
I don't understand either. But I have a hypothesis, that they do it to dilute the definition of the war. Like if 15 years ago they did something like that, it was probably seen as a declaration of a war. But not now, not it is just headlines in newspapers. The more they do it, the more they will be able to get away with. Like invading Poland, while saying "there is no invasion and it is someone else invading not us", and European politicians will eat any such shit just to avoid declaring a war. They do it right now, but they must be trained to eat bigger shit to swallow an invasion to EU or NATO country.
Because some guy on telegram answered their recruitment drive and this was the only use they had for him?
From my understanding Russias security services and adjacent Oligarchs are not monolithic and they love to do stuff like that. The intention is to bring it as a present to the Zar and curry favor while keeping the windows away.
The comments are full of former U.S. Navy sailors remembering how they had to have an armed guard and strip down before entering while the reductions gears were opened and being inspected.
will doesn't matter here. Only game theory. Either die by a gunshot by your commanding officer or by the enemy bullet. The second death option happens little latter if at all.
I would rather watch cute puppy tiktoks than go fight a war and waste my life for elites who use millions like pawns. I was making a point that will of common man is not considered by elites, an established structure is used to make them fight and then words like brave, determined, strategic are thrown over and used over their dead bodies.
But even then, there is Article 1 (Human Dignity) and Article 16a (Right to Asylum) in the german constitution, with Article 1 being immutable by the Eternity Clause.
It's funny to see how HN is immediately turning into reddit when anything goes political, with people downvoting and flagging replies they disagree with.
It would for sure be a blow to Russia to repatriate all those people. But the implications of forcing people to go to war.. Germany would not do that under the current government, and they should not.
Also, assuming 250k people will be teleported straight into armed forces, this will does almost nothing to the high level course of war. Sure, it will help with morals a lot, it will allow to relieve many people fighting non-stop for years now, it will possibly help slow or even stop ruzzian advance. But on the high level it won't matter because those 250k new people won't have any significant hardware to fight with. No new rockets, no new launchers, no new planes, no new radars, no new bombs, no new tanks, no new IFVs, no new AA, no new trucks even. Ruzzia has a significant edge in the amount of working military hardware and keeps a lot of stuff in reserve. To break them, in order to move at least to the 2014 borders a lot more additional military hardware would be a mandatory requirement, regardless of the human headcount.
What makes you say it's a troll baiting with conspiracy? To me it seems like a valuable talking point from game theory perspective even if it's not what children would like to hear.
How do you fight a war if every one of your citizens tries to seek refugee status in other countries?
Except that's not how it works in reality now nor ever when war happens. Ukrainian men ARE absolutely being forced to the front lines against their will because no normal man is crazy enough to go to certain death or trauma if they can avoid it.
Just look up videos on social media of Ukrainian recruiters patrolling the streets and beating men uncircuitous and dragging them in vans to take them to training centers simply because they don't want to go and fight.
My EU country who borders Ukraine is constantly having to rescue men who risk their lives crossing the border illegally in order to escape the draft.
Yeah, nobody should be forced to go to war in some rosy utopia, but how do you defend yourself in a war when nobody wants to fight?
I wonder if Germany still keeps or even installs new Russian-made (hardware and software) navigation equipment - "Transas Marine" - on its Navy ships like they did 15 years ago (what a different times it were, as Russian opposition says - "vegetarian times" :)
The problem with these guys is that we domesticated them too much. We had to blow up their pipeline just to get them to know who the threat against them was. You have to take the horse to the water, you have to make him drink, but can he still run? Who knows.
"Is a hibryid atrack, nobody can know for sure, who did this, lets not stoop to hate crimes and point fingers on our favorite dealer." Chancellor Jonesing
Blowing up nordstream was an act of war but couldn't be pinned to anyone.
When Russia invaded Ukraine they were prettending it was "green man" from outer space.
Meanwhile country A has an interest in country B, so country C instills a coup or train and fund islamic group.
The worst part is that this is only the tip of an iceberg, shards of reality that surface to mass media. The real damage is done by influencing masses.
Gasprom fined for $20 billion due to stopping gas flow. IMHO, it's a huge reason to blow the pipe. Pipe is much cheaper to build or repair. Moreover, one of Nord Stream 2 tubes is intact, so RF still can supply gas to EU if Germany will allow NS 2 to work.
Zaluzny cannot do that: he is head of Armed Forces of Ukraine, while this is clearly a special operation, think FSB, GRU, GUR, CIA instead of an army. AFU destroys Russian oil and gas infrastructure with drones.
$20 billion is more than enough to pay for few hundreds of such operations or bribe a few millions of investigators or paid articles in reputable journals.
> The Europeans and Biden administration had nearly 3 years to do something (...)
They did. They supported Ukraine and turned Russia's 3-day invasion into a 3-year-and-counting quagmire where:
- Russia suffered a humiliating defeat and pushed out of Kiev,
- barely made any progress beyond the initial blitzkrieg,
- got it's black sea fleet sunk and destroyed,
- saw parts of it's territory invaded and captured by Ukraine,
- is helplessly seeing it's oil industry being decimated,
- is begging the likes of Iran and North Korea for help, including boots on the ground.
As much as it pains Russia to admit, this is exactly what Russia's defeat scenario looks like: a long drawn out conflict that forces Russia to self destruct without a single boot on the ground from NATO.
Russia has been here before, many times. They're remarkably resilient and good at sacrificing their own population to achieve their goals.
At the time Biden left office, Ukraine was losing territory. There's no saying Russia would have or will lose, unfortunately. A stronger response from the US and Europe was/is needed...
Zelenskyy is talking to Trump because he doesn't have any other choice now. Trump is most likely to let Putin keep what he's captured while also requiring Ukraine to "stay neutral" (and pledge to never join NATO)... and requiring Ukraine send the US rare earth minerals.
Yes, the Biden admin was slow to let Ukraine use the weapons we gave them in an effective manner. He was afraid that Putin might go nuclear (at least initially, I think they were realizing that Putin's threats were more bark than bite in the last year or so). He was also wary of the rhetoric coming from the Trump campaign during the last year about how Biden wanted to get the US into a boots-on-the-ground war in Ukraine - in that sense he was trying to thread a needle. But Biden was very supportive of NATO, whereas Trump wants out of NATO. And Ukraine has managed to draw out a war that Russia was "supposed" to win in a couple of months to a stalemate after 3 years while also managing to capture a bit of Russian territory.
> But Biden was very supportive of NATO, whereas Trump wants out of NATO.
Trump's threats have caused most of Europe to rapidly ramp up defence spending, meanwhile Biden's "support" accomplished basically nothing, practically speaking. Nice words without action are useless.
Like the 20th Century two world wars, the US will be late for WW3 and it'll take a much bigger act than sabotaging one German ship. But if history plays out like it usually does (which it is) it's coming.
On which side would the US join the fight? Its movement towards Russia and away from NATO is accelerating dramatically, and it’s not clear where the trend will stop. Culturally, the US is increasingly at odds with scolds of liberal Europe and in tune with domineering Muscovite Russia.
If the US sided with Russia against Europe a big chunk of the US population would oppose that. (But even staying neutral and not supporting a NATO nation should one be attacked by Russia would be a bad outcome.)
This present timeline was predicted back in 2011. European politicians have been cutting their defense spending for some time and their military capabilities have been deteriorating.
A failed sabotage attempt is not grounds for initiating arm conflict involving the the biggest military alliance on the planet against a beaten and cornered state on the brink of financial ruin, that just happens to have the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. That would lead to disaster for all.
> Vice Adm. Jan Christian Kaack, the inspector of the German navy, said at a press conference on Tuesday that the damage involved "more than one unit."
> The Emden is one of the five new K130 corvettes that Germany ordered for delivery in 2025 to fulfill its NATO requirements.
Ugh. Could that be five damaged units? Finds metal shavings in new engine. Touts it as sabotage without explaining further. Spends the rest of the article on fear mongering. If this was an internal investigation, that would have been great. Doing a press conference about it? Sounds more like "before we investigate where it came from, should we take the opportunity to do some propaganda?"
(With all the recent subsea cable issues, yeah, something is going on in these waters, but this is not a good press release.)
> Finds metal shavings in new engine. Touts it as sabotage without explaining further.
You sound very disingenuous. If you one day find a dump of metal shavings in a freshly assembled and validated engine, and the only possible and conceivable way those could be found in there is if someone goes way out of their way to purposely dump them in there, how would you have describe that?
It seems like for the past few decades Americas adversaries have been very smart long-game focused leaders (Xi, Putin, bin Laden). Americas leaders… have not been. Focused on playing internal political games… poorly at best. Plain stupid (and or senile) at worst. This is not to say I support them at all, but they have been strong adversaries who are getting exactly what they wanted.
Would anyone say that either of the last two presidents would be the best candidates to manage the local Walmart?
I wouldn't call Putin smart - Russia overall is a fairly failed state. They could've been in a much better position. Perhaps maybe smart in terms of satisfying his own ego.
He’s getting what he wants and successfully destabilizing the US, and now has an invite to the White House. Does anyone think this isn’t going to end with Russia gaining Ukrainian territory and getting the sanctions dropped? How is Europe going to behave when they can’t be sure America is going to protect them?
Yes, Russian Empire failed 100+ years ago, but Russian Federation is strong enough to send hundreds of thousands to death to achieve their goals. It far from a «failed state».
There are multiple ways to help Ukrainian to defend from Ivan's: donations (e.g. savelife.in.ua ), fighting with Russian fake news, direct help to heavily wounded and orphans, counter-sabotage and counter-intelligence to protect your own country from Russian influence, responsible voting, etc.
If US can't sell the war to its people. Just have news report saying there are trillions of mineral reserves in the wartorn country. Happened with Afghanistan, and now with Ukraine. People are so dumb.
You do realize that inspection of such a vessel is done on a daily basis or higher frequency, right?
You don't just say yolo flip the switch and ignite the engines for a multi million dollar vessel, it's a multiple step process that contains lots of safety checks and precautions, which one of them would be visual inspection for debris.
Italics mine, and holy crap that's a lot of metal shavings.. like multiple 55gal trash cans' worth.