Rokossovski

I'm late to the party due to a business trip, but to comment on the Prague protests.
The political parties organizing it were 1) SPD ("common man" far right party, claiming to be direct democracy party - basically nazis) 2) Tricolor ("intellectual" far right party, basically nazis in suits) and 3) Communists (actual Stalinists who renamed themselves after the revolution, sadly never got banned). None of these parties had any success in last elections, by the way, and all are basically known to be getting Kremlin money.
They were protesting for 1) leaving the EU 2) leaving the NATO 3) leaving the WHO (... wtf) 4) "not diluting Czech nation with Ukrainian refugees" 5) removing sanctions and buying Russian gas 6) some other nonsense like people being give 3 MWh of electricity every year or something.
So yeah - nazis, antivaxxers, commies, traitors and idiots.
Some of us have already made arrangements to run a counter-protest in case they do this again - it is true that we got bit blindsided by there being so many of these scum.

unregulated free markets would quickly evolve to trusts and monopolies.  Free market requires competition, which companies all hate, of course, and would smash if they had the market power and capital to do so. 
Free market capitalism, like democracy, is the best system humans have.  But it's not a magic rainbow pony and requires some amount of regulation.  Too much and you stifle innovation.  Too little and the free market has no competition and consumers get fleeced w/o recourse.  People love to think they are 100% free market proponent -- until they need health care at age 65, where there is no free market solution simply because old people are so expensive to insure that no one could afford it except the very rich.  Then they wants that awful socialism.  None of this stuff is black & white, it's all a balance that is constantly being adjusted.
The big picture is that gov'ts intervene when for whatever reason the market gets wrecked in a way that hurts the people too much -- like now, w Putler.  The market will adjust to Putler's extortion racket but it can't do it instantly.  Meanwhile the gov't can't have thousands of old & children freezing to death because they can't afford heat.  So might be subsidy, might be price control, or any of a number of tricks, all of which would hopefully be temporary until a functioning market can return.
For this Ukraine discussion, what matters is that gov'ts do what they can to soften the economic damage so that support for Ukraine continues and we don't get pro-Putin demagogues elected due to angry populace. 
Having said all that, I must now leave for religious obligations.  The Ohio State Buckeyes Football Team, most beloved in The Creator's eyes, is on the telly!

On top of what everyone else has mentioned (e.g., safeguarding trainers, two-way information flow, relationship building, etc.), there are also facilities.
Training, for example, unit cohesion is both theory and practice, and practice is better done with good facilities than an open field.  CQB is a lot better with 360-degree shoot houses (not that CQB is decisive in this conflict) vs. a 180-degree outdoor range, urban fight a lot better with a fake city vs. whatever the UA has for training.
And this type of embedment creates long-lasting ties, personal, military, and societal.  When this is all over, UA will be much better positioned to integrate with Western forces / NATO, which is the obvious end game.

Worth every penny.

 

i think the word you're looking for is 'posterity' but otherwise i agree with you 100%, blazing.
 
cheers,
rob
 

More so compared to that orange f'n blathering, BS spitting pumpkin that wants to get back in again. Surely my friends down south of me are not that dumb again? Good God I hope they aren't.🥺
Sorry, back to what really matters in the thread, Ukraine.

Mea culpa.

If you actually think that American allies would commit the way they have to supporting Ukraine to the degree they have without the assurance that the US President is fully committed and able then boy do I have some Crimean time shares to sell you. 
Your first graf repeats the same error you made earlier. Nobody is claiming that they had complete certainty of the invasion because nobody could until one person, Putin, made the final decision and set the Russian armed forces in motion. If you read the Washington Post tic tock on the run up to the invasion, it’s very clear that the Biden administration thought it highly likely and jawboned/planned/armed accordingly. That’s not “suspected something was going to happen”. That’s intelligence gathering, analysis and action. Thus, it wasn’t a case of “fool me once, shame on me”. It was a case of “you fooled me once, now I’m going to fool myself”.

Rather than ‘nonsense’, perhaps a more useful way to prove the point would be to note that what the Biden administration is doing very strongly projects very specific policies that are very particular to Biden over his political history…and often very much not what the ‘permanent establishment’ often prefers. Afghanistan is one very salient example but there are others. That simply doesn’t happen in a caretaker administration.

Czechs are most chill-out and non-problematic people in whole region. They rarely get pissed off; so, if Russians managed to bring even them into fury they should understand how f.....ed things has became.😎
But seriously, it happened I had an occassion to spend several days at the Polish border towns during first week of the war and can totally confirm the same mood. Rationally we knew NATO is here, but common people were bat**** scared nonetheless. They made extra supplies, checked bus timetables (in case), some had bags prepared with necessities. Nobody knew what Putin was capable of, where he will stop and Russian army was admitedly intimidating if only by its mechanized force. Ofc this is only fraction what Balts have experienced; my friend in Latvia even booked tickets for his family to leave country and was constantly packed, just in case something blew up next to the border. And he wasn't the only one.
Fortunatelly, fear very fast came into rage. Solidarity, slef-organization and cooperation among people of different nationalities of the first days was really something astonishing to observe close-up; probably only "Solidarity" movement from 80's and Fall of Berlin Wall came close to it.
Yup, definitelly. One learns to respect NATO uniforms much more when they are only bulwark against brutallity of this eastern Mordor 120 mln people happen to have as their neighbours. It is hard to overestimate how just presence of several NATO soldiers could be calming for locals - in my town it was a company of 20+years old paratroopers from US 82nd Airborne who seem to settled FOB at local McDonald. But boy, how local people were happy of their presence is difficult to describe...

I have wondered if Putin's original plan, circa 2019/2020 or so, was to continue to take smaller bites of Ukraine but realized that the west might only give him one more shot so he decided to make it count and go for the whole enchilada. 

I also have to say that one of the few times I agreed with our former president was when he called for our European partners to live up to their commitment to NATO, it is unfortunate that it took Putin's invasion to make some realize that defense spending is still important.  I do however disagree with Trump's threat to leave NATO like a spoiled child taking his ball and going home.

The main thing about Ukraine is their logistics are very decentralised, which makes it exceptionally difficult for the Russians to target their supplies with the notoriously poor Russian ISR capabilities, as shown in Syria.

you left out one item - The nature of the Russian logistic system facilitates pilfering.  To seriously change it would mean challenging the hierarchy of corruption.  Anyone who messes with that is likely gonna meet an untimely end.

Amnesty reminds me of Wikileaks somewhat. They went from being an organization of conscience (one to could argue) to being hijacked and manipulated by people with an agenda. In the end Wikileaks was pretty much a Russian troll farm.

Hey thought i'd jump on this point, its because the human mind is very good at ignoring stuff that isnt important to it, an ai will constantly have the streams of data and as you say become overloaded.
This all comes into the pattern recognition capability of the human mind and its capabality to on the fly 'zone out' things experience tells it is unimportant.
Just my two cents, been lurking for quite a while and thought theres something I think I have insight into. Appreciate all the analysis and info you guys are collating.

For starters, I shouldn't be allowed near the PC drunk, but anyway... IMO looking for fundamental metric both in economics and warfare is a folly. Money in a modern understanding of it is just very convenient when applied to modern economic systems, but in no way it is a fundamental unit in economics as a discipline - I'd say an abstract concept of "value" is much more central, money is just a one (very limited at that!) way to measure it.
My point is that when we talk about warfare (with the caveat that my understanding of it is centered mostly on historical aspect of it, as opposed to it being an applied discipline), looking for a way to quantify and measure it shouldn't really be central to our endeavour - this line of reasoning is really very limited, and while useful to understanding of specific aspects (logistics...),  one should be aware that you can't explain the phenomenon with numbers alone.
Edit: I'd say that to be able to better describe warfare, on the high level at least, studying methodologies of humanities/ social sciences might perhaps  be more useful than trying to apply the theories of sciences.

I hate to be the "well, actually..." guy, but personally I see here a mixup of the two separate orders - economics and warfare really belong to the humanities / social "sciences"(ducking for cover here), not science. Quantifying and measuring parts of these with the cognitive tools of sciences is of course useful, even central to these disciplines, but trying to make  general observations only this way leads to nowhere IMO. We are stuck with inductive reasoning here I'm afraid, building an educated narrative and having it peer reviewed is the most we can hope for.

Two things. First, they believe not so much in Mobilization as in legal cover Mobilization gives to execute whoever they consider a saboteur of the victory. For example, now they cannot legally threaten refuseniks back to front line. Mobilization gives them legal cover i think even with shooting them. The same can be said about RU industry - they cannot now threaten anybody in the industry. Mobilization gives them legal cover to order plants to work 24/7 and pay them nothing. 
Second, there is a belief in innate wonder power of RU people when war becomes Peoples war and the whole country mobilizes. For example, in 1812 RU could not hope to defeat French army in open battle. But RU mobilized and the war became a Peoples war and RU managed to turn the tide of the war. The same can be said about WW2 - Germans were extremely strong but RU mobilized, the war became a people's war and RU won. That's what believe says. 

Wow, this is fascinating.  GrigB, YOU ARE DA MAN!

I am not pro-nuclear power.  But do we have a f--ing choice?  We are baking the planet and need something to get us from fossil fuels to something better.  But something better might take some time. 
I am aware that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by evil scientists and commie politicians.  But what I don't understand is how they convinced all the world's thermometers to start lying also.  
And so we find ourselves being held hostage by a petro-fascist who is disrupting the entire world economy, especially the EU.  Because we didn't take the evil, scheming, lying scientists seriously. 
Edited note:  my current weather:  Monday 97F, today 97F, then 96,96,94,92.  In a place where historicially almost no one even had air conditioning.  And last year we hit ~113F in the famous heat dome incident.  yeah, nothing to see here folks, all just a hoax, dang lying thermometers. 

I don't wish to sidetrack the discussion either, and I will say I respect your credentials (and you, based on your posts in general) so your stance does carry a fair bit of weight with me. However, I do feel it's worth pointing out that a fairly recent Pew survey showed that 79% of physicists (compared to 65% of scientists in general and 45% of American adults) support building more nuclear power plants.
And I will leave it at that, apologies for the slightly tangential post...

I get the "terror strikes" component to put pressure on the Ukrainian government - problem is, when has "terror" or "shock and awe" ever really worked as strategy?
Human beings are a funny bunch, we exist in imaginary social constructs - nations, provinces, duchies, towns, neighborhoods etc.  We invented these structures to sustain order when our populations expanded well beyond what we were originally designed for - but here is something I have suspected for a long time: we are still wired for our real social structures.  Those few dozen people we are directly linked to by blood or dependency.  
These are little social bubbles - hell in the pandemic we could map them - that comprise the real ocean of humanity.  We actually care about them.  These are the people we go to war for, we also go to work well after we want to for them.  We get dragged to church on Sunday by them and we dress like them, talk them and eat like them.  We buy the same stuff, dress the same way and consume the same information, thru the similar lenses.  We are still really tribal after all this time.
Now the energy in those bubbles is incredibly powerful - like running into a burning building, powerful.  However, it is also incredibly local.  We hunker down in our particular tree and tend to keep our heads down, even when the tree next to us gets chopped down.  It takes a lot to get us all going in the same direction.  We invent all sorts of mechanisms to create and generate power from these little bubbles - the Chinese did a massive and brutal social engineering exercise in the 60's to try and re-build those bubbles in such a way as to give the state all the power...it did not work because people. 
So what? Shock and awe, terror strikes and what not, have an effect but it is 1) very hard to line up in the direction you may want it to go, in fact it might create massive counter pressure (see The Blitz 1940) and 2) getting that effect to translate broadly across and entire macro-social system can be very hard, even impossible under some circumstances. 
Humans are highly unpredictable - I think we talked about 3rd order chaotic systems - and as such lobbing really expensive and limited missiles at them to get them to do anything in concert as a primary strategy...well it is not optimal.  Sociologist have no idea how "Springs, revolutions or movements" really happen.  We can see them easily in hindsight but predicting them ahead of time is nearly impossible right now.  So what magically triggers things like The Crusades or Hippies is really difficult - a sum of pressures and human turbulence that is highly unpredictable, and people have spent empires trying to crack that Riddle of Flesh.  
If Russian power brokers sat down and figured "we will simply hit them with missiles and they will all give up" then they are 1) complete amateurs, and 2) dangerous amateurs who do not really understand the dynamics of application of military power against human-based social structures - s'ok, they are not alone in this. 
My point is that they should have been looking at military impact if they wanted to win a war, and it is likely too late to "get smart" now if they could.   Directly impacting micro-social Will is a game for subversive warfare, not missiles and Russia clearly mis-read what war it was in, and now has to come to terms with how to lose it.

If the Russians start tossing around nukes...even just tactical ones.  There will be a response.  Now it likely will be tit for tat.  But there will be a response.  I'm sorry you don't think much of Americans and I get why because yeah we have fought a couple of dumb wars recently.  But, the one thing we dislike is a bully and if you let the Russians get away with one nuke, before you know it, there will be two...and so on...
So as I said before...yes.  Bank on it.

the NATO expansion as excuse for Russian serial mass murder & conquest is hilarious.  Free, sovereign nations joined NATO because they were terrified of Russia.  Russia then proves all those nations wrong by performing serial mass murder and a war of conquest on Ukraine, solely because it was the most valuable free, sovereign nation that hadn't joined NATO. 
Really, a fantasy writer couldn't dream up this stuff any better.. 

I think it would definitely have been a factor. In particular, the "how not to" aspects of the lessons of Vietnam were keenly felt among the U.S. officer and NCO corps. I recall General Schwarzkopf's autobiography It Doesn't Take a Hero had a lot of good first person insight into what that era was like for U.S. Army officers (also a good firsthand account of Operation Urgent Fury), but it has been ages since I read it. Over on the Air Force side of things, I highly recommend C. R. Anderegg's book Sierra Hotel: Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam. Being in federal copyright, Sierra Hotel is legally available for free online if you don't mind an ebook in PDF format.

Edit: Still a slow grind, but the pace seems to be picking up a bit with Himars and other new equipment.