JonS
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Posts
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Days Won
15
Posts posted by JonS
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2 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:
We've seen this in Ukraine. Defensive primacy doesn't mean ...
I know. Stuff is complex, yo. And yet over the last couple of years we have had any number of simplistic hand-wavey "answers" to the issues Ukraine is facing.
$500,000 ghillie suits!
Leopards!
Gavins loaded with 40mm grenade launchers!
AI!
F16s!
DPICM!
Robots!
HIMARS!
Future tech that doesn't exist!
Etc.
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1 hour ago, dan/california said:
It all comes back to the same set of cost curves. When computing power is dirt cheap defense costs a LOT less than offense, and the problem is only going to get worse. The platforms that let the U.S. air force do this today are already costing fifty million dollars and up. Can their possibly enough of the next generation of exquisite platforms to defeat a large opponent that isn't utterly incompetent?
This is incoherent.
Strategically, is the US military (and The West generally) an offensive force, or a defensive one?
If it's defensive (as in, maintain-the-status-quo defensive), then there's nothing to fret about. Defensive primacy? Bring it on, baby!
If you're worried about /restoring/ the status quo, then your argument kind of fails at the first hurdle, since it presupposes that any actor can somehow magically overcome this defensive primacy.
So, which is it; defensive primacy, or Serbia could overrun Europe tomorrow if they wanted to?
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Is "no more than a few hours" an acceptable delay to engage a target of opportunity?
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1 hour ago, hcrof said:
So I agree a gun battery is likely to have faster effects on target, but a tank platoon needs to have line of sight on your target and has a max range of 3km or so. The grey zone in Ukraine is 20km wide so it is very unlikely that they will be in the right place at the right time.
In a static situation, which is essentially what we are seeing now, then sure. But if you're going forward then - assuming that "combined arms" is still a thing - then the tanks are going to be a lot closer.
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51 minutes ago, The_Capt said:
As to unmanned, the major shortfall in western thinking is “signal”. Fully autonomous systems are already today’s technology.
The thing I wonder about fully autonomous (well, ok; one of the things I wonder about with fully autonomous) is how much it's going to slow down the OODA loop. If I have a bunch of fully autonomous drones tooling around at the FEBA, they're likely working on yesterday's or last week's targeting data. When a new target pops up today, NOW, it's going to take a lot longer to get a fully autonomous drone squadron up and at 'em than calling up a gun battery or a friendly tank platoon to sort the problem out.
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2 hours ago, dan/california said:
The artillery delivered mines are several more nails tank is dead coffin.
Then the tank has been dead since the late 1970s - RAAM is very old tech.
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21 hours ago, Vet 0369 said:
I understand it was a simple case of”d#$k gets hard, brain gets soft!”
Robin Williams had a great gag about men having both a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to run one of them at a time.
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1 hour ago, Probus said:
War, unfortunately, is big business and Trump, if nothing else, is a businessman. Now that NATO is starting to pull their own weight, as you say, he'll take credit for that too.
The first premise is true.
The second is ... well, he's not a *good* businessman, and he really only seems at all interested in grifts where he, personally, can get get free money without contributing any stake. He doesn't appear to have any interest in making America as a whole, and especially any bits of it that refuse to fawn over him, great again.
The third premise is just swallowing a lie, whole.
He'll definitely take credit for everything that isn't obviously a screwup. That much is for sure.
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8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
The important point is that they have confirmed 50,000, not that there is 50,000 total. Just like vehicle counts, you can only visually verify something if it is spotted and noted. Russia is a vast country with many nooks and crannies to check into. Even if 100% of the deaths were reported in an obvious way, many would be missed. I'm sure that sort of clarity doesn't exist.
First, you'll have some people who died and for whatever reason their death isn't clearly associated with being in Ukraine. Kinda like in the US we have a huge percentage of our obituaries that report "died unexpectedly" instead of "blew his brains out".
Second, the huge number of prisoners will have a disproportionate % of non-reporting because nobody cares enough to acknowledge their death.
Third, Russia was documented to have been picking up vagrants off of the street and sticking them into uniform at the very early stages of the war. Who knows how many, but whatever that number is it's not likely to be reported.
Fourth, estimating dead Donbas Ukrainians has got to be beyond difficult to do, yet we know very large numbers have been killed. With such a very large pool of dead, the number missed could be quite large.
Fifth, we also know that Russia has "recruited" migrant workers and the poor from other countries in very large numbers. These were fed into the z-storm units that suffered massive casualties, which means the dead in this group is disproportionately higher than other groups. The researchers are not combing every local paper in a few dozen non-Russian countries, so these would likely be totally missed. And even if they were looking for them, they were disproportionately poor and less likely to have easily found and detailed death notices.
In aggregate, the number that they missed could easily be 2-3 times what they have confirmed.
Steve
Yeah, counting is hard.
Actually, legitimately, hard.
That said, for the purposes of what we're talking about most of the time, the number of foreign mercs or contractors killed doesn't really matter. Whether it's 1,000 or 10,000 Nepalese killed in Ukraine, either number isn't going to lead to Putin's regime collapsing. And when Nepal gets tired of sending its young men to die there, theres still Nigeria, and Sudan, and Liberia, and Myanmar, and ...
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53 minutes ago, Offshoot said:
The group tracking them have estimated the actual number is around twice as much
Wouldn't "twice more than" equal 150,000 total?
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3 hours ago, FancyCat said:
Thread from Dara Massicot
Twitter really is trash now, isn't it. Not the content (although a lot of that is too I suppose), but the platform itself.
I can't work out how to see the thread past that first post, but I gather that two separate events are being referred to here;
1) UKR strike on RUS training facility, with ~100 cas indicated (suggesting UKR long range strike capability)
2) RUS strike on UKR HIMARS launcher(s), with 1 or 2 UKR launchers being hit (suggesting improved RUS ISR, and greatly improved RUS sensor-strike integration)
Is that correct? The way the tweet is written is highly confusing.
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23 hours ago, poesel said:
Georgia now looks like Ukraine 2013...
Saw this on the Guardian when I woke up this morning ... I genuinely thought the reporting was about the US state, not the nation in the Caucasus. All the elements of the story - corruption, protests, right-wing wet-ons for Putin, fvckery with laws and legislation - fit either place, and for whatever reason the Caucasus didn't pop top of mind.
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16 minutes ago, poesel said:
I guess a problem for reporting losses by respectable media outlets is that you can't really verify the numbers.
There's possibly also the hangover of bodycount reporting from the Vietnam War which, among its many problematic features, showed that casualty reporting wasn't an especially useful metric.
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29 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
feels like videos are dried up a bit of those.
Probably because the targets have dried up too.
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42 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
Based on an actual desire of a population of Americans that “some” members of NATO weren’t fulfilling their commitments. That was actually true
The 'desire' (or belief) in the more clownish part of the electorate may have been true, but the "lack of commitment" in Europe was not.
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7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Far better to sink a couple of ships
Is there any /military/ point in sinking more ships?
It looks good, and plays great, but this war isn't going to be won on the Black Sea, and the Russian fleet has already been neutralised. Maintain the threat for sure, but there doesn't seem much point expending any further resources there.
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11 minutes ago, Ultradave said:
Yes. It is. Interestingly though, not necessarily for crowd control by law enforcement. In war, yes, it's banned.
Yeah, the Geneva conventions (or, more relevant in this case, the Geneva protocol and tangentially the Hague conventions and the 1980 convention) are all about inter-state conflict.
What happens intra-state, between you and your local law enforcement body, is entirely a matter for you and your respective legislature to figure out. 'Geneva' doesn't care a whit.
(Multiple edits: bloody sbellçzech)
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24 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
The Democratic Party are just as partisan as the Republican Party,
The dose makes the poison.
Looking from the outside, there is absolutely zero equivalence between the two parties. None at all.
There are ... odd individuals in both, but at the party level only one is utterly dysfunctional.
Theres also this inconvenient reality:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes
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Yeah, obviously I dunno either. Knackered wiring loom, maybe? Heat-damaged chassis member?
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17 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Either way, I'm surprised that they would have to move the entire trailer unit back to the US for repairs. This looks like the sort of thing that could be done inside of Ukraine. If not, then someone in the Pentagon should be rethinking modularity requirements for future weapons systems. The time and logistics to move this whole thing instead of a component and some engineers is a head scratcher to me.
US design for maintainability is generally pretty excellent. It makes for expensive procurement and high maintenance budgets (ie, swap the entire Abrams power pack rather than fix the fault lòcally) but it does that in order to increase availability rates at the pointy end.
Given that general approach, I'd be surprised if the Patriot was an exception. Given *that* I'd assume there is more internal damage that both can't be seen in a photo and can't be fixed in Ukraine.
Or, alternately, the priority to date has been on pushing end-user equipment into Ukraine, and not on the support systems that keep them operational and in users hands. Edit: So what would be a simple field repair for a US unit has to go back to the States when its operated by Ukraine.
But weighing against that second conclusion is the existence of USAREUR; if it was conceivably fixable forward at Grafenwohr or Kaiserlauten (or by any of the European operators of Patriot) then they would. That it wasn't suggests significant but non-obvious damage.
I think.
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2 hours ago, Carolus said:
It was found in experiments that vertical solar panels offer basically the same energy output as an angled panel.
Presumably this is only true at fairly high latitudes - north of 45°N or south of 45°S?
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I mean ... I think that's a joke? But with MT "Empty" Greene (proud veteran of the Bowling Green Massacre) it's really really hard to be sure. That is bat**** enough to have actually leaked out of her ears.
Edit: oh FFS. Those really were among the proposals she submitted
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Murphy's Laws of Combat
#12: there's always more targets than there is ammunition, so try to look unimportant.