acrashb

Well, I'm having the same experience with most of your posts, so let's leave it at that.

Yep, the same morons which demonstrated against Pershing II and NATO double-track policy. A lot of those have their roots in the 1968 movements.

Indeed. That thought isn't as far fetched as it may sound to some. The peace movement in Europe in the 1980s was highly infiltrated and partly financed by the Soviets and East Germans. Since the Greens have quite a lot of members with a communist background, we can safely assume some are still connected to their old masters.

The (not just German) Greens have hurt Europe immensly with their anti-nuclear nonsense. They have been such a great boon to both fossil fuel industry and various evil regimes like Russia and the Saudis that it is fair to wonder whether they are paid by any of those.
Honestly, I wonder which reality is more scary, whether the Greens being corrupt or them doing everything because they really think it helps.

I must say you sound wise for your years. 

Which probably is founded by Putin....

We will see if that opinion survives France having a warm and comfortable winter.

Interesting short clip, shows how qucikly tactics of small quadrocopters is developing. They send another one with pretty decent thermal camera; they seem to move very smoothly together, almost like wingmen.

Holly molly, this is "Franz Ferdinand historical moment" (sorry for link to VS24, but this kick is hillarious):
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1551582164428390400
 
PL01 It was just fancy prototype, sometimes engineers play with such toys to lure media.
A lot of decisions regarding new shopping have no sense from outsider perspective. There is a big scandal now called "Krabgate", as they started to buy Korean stuff "on yesterday" and will probbaly chopp production of our cool Krabs (who were only half-Korean). I am sure @Huba will explain you more details.
I think it is connected to 1) Sense of urgency and 2) amount of equipment that gone to Ukraine- not only heavy, but also personal (tons of rifles like Grots, sniper ones, hand granate launchers old and new, etc. ;reportedly even venerable, small Komars were actually very useful in the hands of defenders of Mariupol/Kiyv). A lot of it is probably underreported, just as T-91 deliveries were. It seems to be better strategy to send, train and build up than announcing everything as default. Less morale-building, but with pleasant surprises along the way. Still, of course, not enough for UAF to conduct some large offensive out of the blue.
I try to see this conflict from historian perspective. If I will keep in hand a book in 5-year time describing this conflict, I wonder what events will be there? Certainly there are heroic ones, like Mariupol defence or vlaiant stand of 1st Tank Brigade in Chernichow. But NATO deliveries will need a separate chapter on its own. Scale is really breathtaking, execution seems largely very good, even OpSec seems surprisingly effective considering we are open societies with free media flow.
About Russian abilities to hit something, it is worth to mention there were whole trains with 122/152 ammo standing several days on the railroads next to Lviv about 2 months ago. And nothing hit them somehow.

They're currently functioning exactly as designed - not a single NATO member is coming across the border to help in Ukraine.  They're sending lots of stuff, but Ukraine is on their own for troops.  The way Russia's other neighbors have stepped up, there's a non-zero chance there would be more belligerents signed onto defending Ukraine if Russia didn't have a nuclear arsenal. And Russia is being very, very careful to no drop any shrapnel on NATO members, despite all the posturing.

Even if we were to consider them the sole (or even primary) reason for the Japanese surrender, I don't think the atomic bombings can be considered a counterexample to the lesson that terror bombing does not work. The 20s and 30s theory of terror bombing was that bombing cities would break the populace's will to resist and drive them to rebel or flee. This is not what happened in Japan...one can argue that the atomic bombings pushed the political and military leadership to a decision point, but not that they broke the civil population's will in any way that forced the government's hand.
As far as the USSR's entry into the Pacific war is concerned, I think it's both-and, not either-or, and even then there are other factors which probably played a major role. Contrary to the "official narrative" having been that the atomic bombings led to the surrender, there has always been a school of thought that the naval blockade was the real reason for Japan's capitulation (one can guess the inter-service rivalry affiliation breakdown of that debate). I think it's probably safe to say that the collapse of Japanese war industries due to the combined effects of the blockade and bombing, the appearance of nuclear weapons in the equation, the Soviets entering the war, impending famine due to the blockade and U.S. diplomatic signalling that the Allies would let Japan keep the Emperor as a constitutional monarch all contributed to some degree...

And that is really the point. Even if 90% of one side don't go boom are intercepted or whatever and all the warheads of the other side explode on target, so one side can technically say they have won, they will still have lost millions. Congrats for your great victory. Nuclear war means that both sides lose, just maybe one side loses more badly than the other.

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.. 

This is some high grade apologia to defend Russian imperialism. One, "Ukraine slipping away from Russia", aside from denoting Ukraine as Russian owned, entitled to, "slipped" is a funny way of saying for punishment for seeking closer relations with the EU, Ukraine gets invaded and it's citizens killed and economy damaged in 2014, (not to mention the current invasion) it's "slipping away", Russia has done far more to give Ukraine reasons to run for EU and NATO membership by acting as violently (genocidal) as it has to Ukraine seeking NATO membership that does nothing to threaten Russia proper, and EU membership that is democratic, and peaceful and only threatens Russia via making the Russian people ask why they live like this when the EU lives like that.
"National interests" "next to it's borders" "Russian dominated areas" horse****. Russia before the invasion, demanded as part of ensuring it's "protection from NATO" that was driving supposedly it's reasons to invade Ukraine, that NATO withdraw forces back to 1997
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude_to_the_2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#NATO–Russia_security_talks
Meaning the withdrawal of NATO defense from Poland, the Baltics, the Balkans, the map below shows it, so your saying Russia has the right to consider Belarus to be part of its borders? Ukraine? I guess Russia owns Serbia and Bosnia too considering they wanted the withdrawal of NATO from all neighboring states. "National interests" "next to it's borders" "Russian dominated areas" bull****. Let's not even get into the bull**** that is Russia thinking NATO is going to invade Russia. There is no national interests being secured via the withdrawal of NATO from Poland, much less Czechoslovakia, Romania, etc, etc.
I understand the need to be critical, but realize that Russian demands for preventing the invasion of Ukraine were maximal as hell, and sure as hell not emblematic of a Russia seeking security, but emblematic of Russia seeking imperial domination it once had.

 

"This country was forced to fight a war nobody wanted" is about as persuasive as Hitler's claims that the German people had to fight to avoid "racial annihilation". This was a war of choice by ambitious old men running a kleptocracy who don't want to be known as broken old men who used to run a kleptocracy. 

yes

The US really has to respond to a nuclear attack.
Post-Soviet Ukraine was born with the world's third largest nuclear arsenal.  They didn't have control over the launch/arming systems, but could have in a year or so.  Instead they voluntarily gave up the entire arsenal in return for assurances of security.  Failure to support Ukraine as much as possible (even now with conventional weapons) would basically toss out 50 years of work on non-proliferation. Not only would no state willingly disarm, but it will ensure a bunch of small (and less stable) states develop nuclear programs or work to buy nuclear weapons from other countries.  Letting even a tactical nuke go unanswered would make all that happen even faster, putting everyone on Earth at much higher risk overnight.  The current situation is already putting non-proliferation at risk - if Ukraine had kept and taken firing control of the nuclear weapons they inherited, none of this would be happening now.

Thanks for the correction.  Having said that, Bing was off and I did not scroll down in the second link far enough to notice that the GDP headline number inexplicably excluded the United States.  If we take the 18.4 T and add it to the US' 21.4 T we get 39.8 T USD in NATO vs. 1.6 T USD in Russia's GDP, for a 25-fold ratio.  Happily,  this correction strengthens my assertion that Russia's lack of action on obvious needs is / was driven not by a peaceful political culture but by economic reality as further degraded by corruption.  If the average NATO country spends 2% of GDP on armed forces (it doesn't) then Russia would have had to spend ~50% of GDP on armed forces to keep up, and that's plainly a) not what they do and b) completely unsustainable without a massive lend-lease program headed their way. 
 

Here's the problem with tactical nukes:
Say you nuke Kharkiv...and the Ukrainians still say "**** you, sovoks" and keep fighting.
You've just become the first nation to use nukes since WWII in a war of aggression. Your not-entirely-unfriendly trade partners India and China have been "no first use" states for half a century. There's every likelihood they will abandon you politically and end trading with you. The EU/US now have no compunction about a complete trade embargo if not an actual blockade and will ramp up conventional aid through the already high roof. 
For all of this you get a city you can't use and some local tactical gains. There's no calculation that makes it worthwhile if you don't believe the terror alone will get everyone to stop fighting you.

I think you've been reading too much of that other media. 

1) should have, but could not.  NATO countries combined GDP ~18.4 Trillion, Russia GDP pre-war ~1.6 Trillion (and much of that consumed by corruption).
2) "if accurate"?  Of course it's accurate.  Readily  verifiable.
3) Bull**** (I mean this in the academic sense - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bull**** ).  Review the last twenty years of Putin's and other prominent Russian power-brokers statements.  It was a question of when, not if. 
But don't take my word for it: https://www.understandingwar.org/report/how-we-got-here-russia-kremlins-worldview
The "state of their army" and the "sat thing" was not a matter of choice or conflict avoidance, it was necessity driven by economics and social (corruption) factors.
At the outset of the war one could be excused for a shallow understanding driven by dominant (and shallow) media.  Now?  Not so much.

That's the scary thing. Not even the experts know. Perhaps not even Putin himself. But that shouldn't prevent us from going all the way. 

Capt, where can I learn more about this? Could you point me to something? I'm a corporate IT strategy dude and I'm sure it would make me way better at my job  

So this post got me thinking and raises a really good set of points.  Right now we have been handing out a lot of fish on this thread.  We pull in the data, filter it, assess and then pull out analysis, which leads to some level of prediction.  What we (I) have not done is provide enough fishing rods.  Of course you guys are swimming around the internet and being exposed to all sorts of narratives, some good and some bad.  It may be helpful to arm you with some ways to do your own analysis so that while you are out there you can come at it better.
Everyone has got their own system, western military teachings all tend to cover the same ground (e.g. PMESII, OPP, whatever that thing Bil does, which must work because he keeps beating me).  Eastern approaches are different and take into account different criteria, I am not an expert on these so I will let someone else weigh in on them.  I will give you my personal system and the one I teach, see if it helps and if it does not keep looking around.
My system is pretty simply to be honest and focuses on two main areas: what is seen, what is not seen, but should be.  That first one is much easier, the second requires a lot more depth but we can walk to that.
What is Seen
I think I posted this before and @sburke lost his mind a bit.  Let me try a less-powerpointy version (seriously guys it is the message, not the medium).

Ok so this is a representation of what is essentially the western operational system.  It starts on the left with what is basically "Command" and works its way to a desired Outcome.  Everyone is focused on the "Boom"...of course you are...it is exploding!  The reality, however, is that the Target is really only in the middle of this whole thing.  It is an indicator - one of many - but it is not the only indicator.  I think everyone here gets that but they often do not know what else to look for (although some clearly do).
So the big red system on the left is often referred to as the "kill chain" (thanks for nothing Brose).  It is really the center of what we call a "targeting enterprise" and frankly we in the west are very good at this.  This is "cause" space that translates human will, through capability, into energy (and here it can get quite complex), through mediums (also crazy complex) and onto a target and foresaid "boom" (yay!).   Be it an ammo dump, shopping mall, tank or goose (I hate geese) the process is pretty much the same, and volumes have been written as to how to do this faster/better than an opponent.
The point of the big red circle is that when we see a "boom" it is important to analyze the entire Cause chain all the way back to determine 1) if that was the actual intended target or was it simply happenstance, 2) how well the chain is doing in competitive terms and 3) what is this all signaling about Will?  All of this also has to take into account context and the situation on the ground.
Cool. We now have a bead on Cause.  Effect is much harder and more important.  The big blue area is where the pay dirt really sits.  A lot of big booms are impressive, but trust me if they do not translate into that big blue space you are going nowhere loudly - and I speak from experience here.  
So the first question is "what effect is this actually happening?"  Here an effect is a "consequence of action", so for example the effect of all those HIMARS booms - who are at the end of their own kill chain - was (allegedly) to have the Russian logistics system tie it self in knots to get away from them.  Great, outstanding...but was it decisive?
Second is Decision.  I have written about the three types of decisions available in warfare (at least) - positive, negative and null.  Let's leave off the last two and just focus on the first one.  A positive decision is a "death of alternate futures".  There was a future where Russia pounded Kyviv into submission for two months in Mar-Apr 22.  The Ukrainian government tapped out because western support was being cut off from the west and Russia occupied half of Ukraine and the capital, set up a puppet government and then enjoyed an insurgency-from-hell that would last 20 years.  That future died in March when the Russians were held off and pushed back from Kyviv: it was positively Decisive.  The Russians may actually have a future where they are back at Kyviv but it won't be in Mar-Apr of 22, the reality will be very different.  The HIMARS are having an effect, that much is clear.  What is not clear is how decisive the sum of those effects are as yet.  If the Russians lose the ability for operational offensive for a significant duration (e.g. this "pause" never ends) then we can say it has been decisive, because there are dead futures on the floor.
Last are Outcomes.  "What is the difference between a Decision and an Outcome Capt?"  My personal definitions is that an Outcome is a death of options, normally strategic options.  The sum of decisions in western doctrine is supposed to lead to "Objectives" which are the "Deal Done" points in western military planning.  Frankly these have let us down in the past, so I go with Options.  If Options die, they kill off entire fields of futures....a future-cide if you will.  Here something like the entire collapse of the northern Russian front was an Outcome to my mind because the Russian strategic options space collapsed.  Same thing happened after the first week of this war as the strategic options spaces that led to a quick war also died - it is why we got all excited about it back then.  The most significant Outcome is the end of the war of course, but that Outcome is the sum of a bunch of other ones, that all loop back to Will.
So whenever something blows up, look both left and right on that spectrum, and ask a lot of questions.  How is the Cause chain doing comparatively? What is happening with Will? What is the problem with Russian Capability translating into Energy and Targets?  Really keep a close eye on the Blue circle, the indicators of the important stuff are there:  what is the actual effect?  Is this decisive?  what was the Outcome?
Ok, so that was the easy part.
What is not Seen, but should be.
While books have been written on the first part above, the second is the land of experience.  Here a deep understanding of history comes in very useful as it provides a lot of context.  This space (which I do not have a snazzy picture for) is essentially "what should be happening but is not..."  It is very tricky and takes a lot of experience to "see the blank spaces", it is where the effects should be happening but are not based on whatever time and space we are in within a given scenario.
For example, let's take the Russian cruise missiles (and this is not a beat up of @panzermartin, he is asking some good questions).  We know the Russians have a lot of missiles (https://missilethreat.csis.org/country_tax/russia/) and they had launched roughly 1000 of them in about a month at the beginning of the war.
And another report that they were at 2125 total "68 days into the war" (https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-ill-fated-invasion-ukraine-lessons-modern-warfare#:~:text=Russia launched more than 1%2C100,68 days of the war.).  Now if we take "What we see" as the only indication, well this is a clearly functioning Cause chain.  Will, Capability all landing on targets.  A little shaky on the dud rate and "missing" military targets by many reports, and the Medium of UA AD has been pretty effective (then we get into competitive system effects which is a whole other thing - there are red and blue circles in collision); however, that is a lot of "boom".  The Effects we saw were a lot of damage, some of it military and the UA definitely had to react to defend itself by moving AD and C2 around.  I am not sure they have been Decisive, but we will get to that.
So that is what we saw, and on the surface 2125 incoming missiles all over the Ukraine is not small and frankly looks scary...but I only see what is missing:
A Ukrainian strategic center of gravity is the inflow of support from the western world.  We are pushing a lot of money and boom-boom over the border from Poland.  High on Russia's list of high value targets has to be to cut off that incoming support anyway possible.  They have done strikes in Lviv on training bases, so they clearly have the capability to hit.  But what are we not seeing?  I am not seeing rail infrastructure being crippled in Western Ukraine.  I am not seeing road infrastructure being destroyed faster than Ukraine can repair.  I am not seeing 30 Ukrainian ammo depots in western Ukraine being hit to cut off the supply of 155mm shells - it is what I am not seeing that is the biggest indicator something is going very wrong on the Russian side.  The Russians have the capability - range is no excuse as they could park missiles in Belarus, so why are they not using all them there 2125 missiles on what really matters?  First answer is that they are "dumb" but that is too easy.  Split Will, missiles spread across disjointed commands all lobbing on their own priorities much more likely.  Lack of ISR to consistently hit things when they need to be hit like UA ammo dumps and logistics nodes, which tend to move around...also very likely.
This is the same thing very early on in the war - why was I still seeing Ukrainian social media feeds 72 hours into this war?  All them tanks getting lit up, old ladies with balls of steel etc.  Rule #1 of country invasion: make it go dark.  Russian failed in this, it was missing and should not have been.
Wargamers have an advantage here as they play these problem sets all the time.  We have seen it a lot on this thread.  A wargamer can ask..."why did they not do this?  I would have."  
And this has nothing to do with an echo chamber either, but we do need to be careful.  For example, we have not seen UA operational offence yet, and nothing that looks like all traditional arms manoeuvre.  This one has me particularly puzzled and we are getting more data in on why this may be happening.
I will sum up by saying that in order to really filter the "reality" from opinion and BS, take all this and apply it to what we can actually see and not see.  We can build assumptions but they have to remain on speaking terms with the facts.  Once an assumption becomes a fact [edit for @Combatintman. “without sufficient validation”]  we are in trouble.  Enough facts put through the lenses of the two frameworks I give here become a trend, and it is those trends that told us that Russia was losing the first part of the war while most of the mainstream were figuring out how to deal with a Russian victory.
Good luck and surf safe.