chrisl

Much of that $30B (and the many $Billions more committed) that will get recycled into the US economy was spent years ago (in the US) building stuff that we sent/are sending/will send.  Some of which was/is essentially retired and never going to be used again anyway - it's probably cheaper to ship it to Ukraine to get blown up and recycled there than to pay for disposal in the US. It's not like all the big defense companies just have parking lots and warehouses of materiel to send if we send truckloads of cash - we're sending it mostly from long since paid-for stock.  And then most of the rest of the military aid will get spent in the US, too, because where is the US going to buy high end US military equipment from other than the US MIC?  
The main actual cash outlays that go overseas are humanitarian aid and some fraction of the shipping cost.

Much of that $30B (and the many $Billions more committed) that will get recycled into the US economy was spent years ago (in the US) building stuff that we sent/are sending/will send.  Some of which was/is essentially retired and never going to be used again anyway - it's probably cheaper to ship it to Ukraine to get blown up and recycled there than to pay for disposal in the US. It's not like all the big defense companies just have parking lots and warehouses of materiel to send if we send truckloads of cash - we're sending it mostly from long since paid-for stock.  And then most of the rest of the military aid will get spent in the US, too, because where is the US going to buy high end US military equipment from other than the US MIC?  
The main actual cash outlays that go overseas are humanitarian aid and some fraction of the shipping cost.

Some folks here may be reading this fairly anodyne communique (translated from Russian/Chinese) a little too closely and seeing what they want/fear to see.
That said, I have been worried from the beginning that Chinese support will allow Russia's 1940s dumb army to hold the field far longer and kill far more Ukrainians than it otherwise would.

This is kind of unanswerable, and a bit chauvinistic.
Unanswerable in that no one involved is going to say. Like the Capt I have little doubt there is a lot of integration in certain areas. ISR and targeting is an obvious one: I doubt NATO are just piping raw intel into an HQ somewhere in Kyiv, or emailing random target packs to intel@mil.gov.ukr   I *assume* there is some back and forth dialog along the lines of "is anything going on south east of Bakhmut?" "Well, this is what we found, and this is what we think they're up to. We assess their critical vulnerabilities as this and that, located here and there. You could hit them with these things at this time." "Thanks. We'll get back to you."
Similarly, I don't think NATO are just leaving random 40' containers just on the Polish border, with a consignment note and instruction manuals taped to the doors. I assume the loggies are talking to each other in great detail about what is where, when things are arriving, and collaboratively managing the sustained flow of materiel. NATO - and the US especially - really are really good at logistics.
But i believe the strategy and strategic decisions are all with UKR.
Chauvanistic in that it kinda comes across as "silly Ukes. What you're doing is cute, but get out of the way now, and let us show you how it's really done."

It’s also accelerated onshoring of manufacturing technology that we spent the last 35 years offshoring.

It’s also accelerated onshoring of manufacturing technology that we spent the last 35 years offshoring.

Of course China hasn’t been neutral in this war, but its interests are also not aligned with Russia’s (in truth, Putin’s).  What China wants is status quo ante bellum - China would’ve preferred  Putin had never started the war, but now that it’s started, China wants to see the war ended as soon as possible, but not at the expense of Russia becoming destabilized or Putin being ousted.  For this reason, we’ve so far seen China acting as Russia’s life line, but not so much so that China would send military aid to Russia.  However, if the US unnecessarily stokes tension in Taiwan at this moment, China could perceive this as a strangle move by the US and could  be provoked into sending material war support to Russia.  The West has been dragging its feet with delivering heavy weapons and struggling with sending enough ammunition when Ukraine has been fighting a mostly self-reliant Russian army.  Is it wise to further provoke the world’s second largest economy into becoming Russia’s arms factory, not to mention the global economic fallout that would ensue?

Apologies for repeating myself, but Google translate is what makes this possible. It has had an enormous effect on this war.

This really is a “you guys” thing, so I am going to leave out any and all personal opinions one way or the other.  However what I do not get is that the US government is one of the most transparent governments in history.  
So if I am sitting on my back porch and someone in my sphere says “the government is spending all that money on Ukrainians and screwing Ohio-ians, damn [insert political party of your choice]”.  It literally takes an internet connection and about 10 mins to unpack this thing to a level that at least lays out some actual facts:
https://www.policymattersohio.org/research-policy/quality-ohio/revenue-budget/budget-policy/review-of-ohios-2022-23-budget
https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/assets/organizations/legislative-service-commission/files/historical-revenues-and-expenditures-table-1-grf-lpef-and-lgf-revenue-history.pdf
https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/publications/historical-revenues-and-expenditures
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-aid-by-state
So the punchline is that the US federal government spent about $40B on Ohio alone in 22-23 (12B in grants which are code for “we never except to see them back”) and Ohio is in the top ten states to receive federal funding annually.
Yes, it looks like FEMA is being particularly dense and bureaucratic - and they likely need some executive nudging, however, we are talking about apples and unicorns here in both scale and funding streams.
And finally, there is a lot of some pretty convincing arguments flying around that said dangerous cargo was supposed to be off that train but…politics: https://apnews.com/article/wv-state-wire-north-america-donald-trump-us-news-ap-top-news-2e91c7211b4947de8837ebeda53080b9mp-us-news-ap-top-news-transportation-1936e77a11924c909880f1ef014c7ca7
So what?  Well could the federal government be doing more cut through the red tape and support East Palestine Ohio - looks like it could.
Is the US government blowing all it money on Ukraine and therefore cannot support Ohio-eons?  No, that does not track.
Do US rail safety regulations look like they need a revisit - yes, probably a good idea.
Is there a direct link between East Palestine Ohio and US support to Ukraine - no.  In fact trying to find and indirect link is pretty hard.  The US federal budget was roughly $6.27T in 2022.  The $50B in aid to Ukraine comes to about .8% of that.
So for perspective if an average family income in the US is about 71k per year: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html
So in parallel terms this would be the same as that family spending about $560 dollars, or about $46 per month.
And last point, one of those corrupt former Soviet republics is Russia, a P5 UNSC member and nuclear power, and is directly threatening US global interest and influence, on a great power scale - you wanna stay on top?  You have to fight for it.

 
 

I don't know the details, but I very strongly suspect that 'a small town in Ohio' *could* get aid if certain *cough*qanon*cough* senators and congressmen pulled their heads out of their asses.
It's not a financial binary - Ukraine or Ohio. It's a political binary - Biden doing good makes me look bad.

Actually I don't disagree, but the problem isn't that we are giving money to Ukraine, it is that we don't support our own folks.  We could do both.  Why we don't take care of our own people is a domestic issue and really has nothing to do with Ukraine.  Frustrating?  Yes
As someone who's COBRA benefits are about to run out and I am now researching the medical care marketplace I have a strong opinion about how we take care of our own and who has effed that up, but that is for an offline discussion.

Good.  We can stop the very unnatural and unhealthy tank-lust trend that has polluted our thinking. Disgusting really.

For the non-Mil here (such as myself), these observations from a relative in the British Army:
The fella fighting was going through a mag every couple of seconds. They all need to be reloaded. The grens are shipped in two parts,  fuse and body and they have to be married almost immediately beforehand. The RPG warhead has to be fused, and married to the motor. The frightened bloke did well to keep at it. He came out to fire at one point, but fighting bloke told [him] to get back in.
There is enough work in that intensity to take half a section* out just maintaining the fire. In a platoon the Reserve is constantly rebombing the mags and sending them forward. That pit was held because of the sheer amount of suppressing fire that bloke laid down, and it was only possible with the support from the frightened guy.
[The Shooter] has been in that position for weeks, but I’m surprised he didn’t have a firing ledge cut into to get better visibility.
You’d wonder at the BMP crew. They just ate a RPG, and second one, and didn’t return fire into the position. Might have been too close to depress their cannon.
Yeah, milchat is laughing at ‘most engagements are at up to 300m’ yeah chew on 30m.... 
So the comments I've seen (not here) mocking the second guy are just sheer, stupid amateur ignorance. In a fight everyone plays a part and not everyone is a hero every time. Artillery explosion overpressure waves and constant combat (and the threat of combat) do awful things to the human brain.  The bravest man can be steadily reduced to a nervous cat with enough concussive impacts.
The "scared"  guy could just as easily be the hero next time.  Or not,  but who knows - unless you're in the fox hole and you're him or his shooter buddy. No one else knows. Any commentary beyond that is just talking uninformed ****e. 
 
*In the BA a Platoon is made of Sections. In the US they're called squads or teams (I believe? ). 

That’s where the autonomy needs to advance- you lose radio control in tunnels and caves like that so the UAV needs to be able to take over targeting on its own.

Oh and just to put the bow on this whole thing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64644845
We had a lotta laughs though - cue montage.

War economy?  Why do we need a war economy to defeat Putin in UKR?  A fraction of the US military spending is being supplied, this is mostly money that was already being spent.  The only war economy I've seen is the energy issues in europe and the higher gas prices in US (back down now).   US spending ~$800B just this year on military.  One year.  And we've only sent ~$50B to UKR over year one.  So in two years, with ~$1500B military spending, just in US, we might send $100B of support -- and that can be done within exising spending by slowing down schedules for some of the projects in already in the budget that aren't needed for UKR.  That doesn't require any sacrifice on the US economy whatsoever, except for when Putin messes w energy markets.  

Within the humor is an excellent point. Anyone who told you in 1979 that Asia was going to be the peaceful, prosperous engine of global growth in 2023 would have been laughed out of the room. While I remain a pessimist on Russia, there's plenty to see in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe that suggests a better future.

Also extraordinarily helpful and eloquent 'facts on the ground':
1.  Black Horse HQ redeploys to IVO Izium, with cantonments and training grounds sharing defence responsibility with fully 'Westernised' UA mech forces deployed in the central Karkhiv-Izium-east Luhansk oblast 'bulge' of Ukraine.  Think CENTAG -- UA [Bundeswehr] fully integrated with US commands. Fulda Gap. Whatever 'heavy' means, it is deployed at full scale right heah! Go ahead, make our day....
2. Polish-Czech heavy armoured division IVO Dnipro and Poltava (which btw is also a forward TAC base and EW command centre). Attach heavily subsidised Romanian pioneer brigade (come on, you DID get your frontier restored to the Dnistr postwar in 2025, by popular referendum. Do your bit!)
....Here, my pathetic little US satrapy 🇨🇦 can even contract some cranky old EOD sea lawyers to manage private contractors (I could accurately name the nations providing the actual sappers, but it would be distinctly nonwoke) clearing about ten bazillion mines/UXO in Donbas... that is actually the most dangerous postwar work, no joke.
3.  101 AB RCT in Kyiv backstops UA forces on the frontier from Chernaiv to Kyiv. TBH, the UA has nothing really to learn about  combat from the 101st, but it's always nice to professionalise and integrate the 'tail'.
4. Ideally, Anglo-US HQ advisory and training elements -- perhaps Étrangère as well? --  are based around Gomel, in a newly democratic but utterly Anything Goes Belarus. 
Minsk becomes the weirdest, edgiest and most violent city in Europe, the sole entrepot of the post-Soviet Mafiyas.  Tombstone 1889, or Shanghai 1924....
Я твой Гекльберри.
...Notice that 'NATO' plays no formal role in any of this for 10+ years.
****
So now we wander off the map of military into Emerging Markets possibility space.
1. By about 2032, Ukraine, Europe's GMP compliant manufacturing hub, has already reached middle income status on a national average per capita GDP basis.
2. Fantastic yakitori, chaat and vegan Texmex, plus gourmet coffee, is standard fare in youthful hi-tech edge cities exploding in quaint Old Town / university areas of all Ukraine's major cities.
3. Ukrainian biopharma / biotech eats China's (and India's) lunch with amazing speed, moving to the world's R&D leading edge (daily nonstop flights Odessa-Tel Aviv). 
4. With avid lobbying from the private sector (fine, just say George Soros if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty ecumenical in reality), Ukraine achieves EU membership by 2028, well before NATO becomes feasible.
5.  @kraze , realising that Living Well Is the Best Revenge, claims 'reparations' from ambiguously legal Muscovite massage therapists, one lap dance at a time.
In addition to his tireless custom but stingy tipping, he also gains some notoriety in the trade by insisting the 'visiting artists' recite verses from Pushkin and Bulgakov on the karaoke machine whilst Performing, with the bass reverb cranked up to Eleven....
Ни мамы, ни папы, ни газировки с виски. Нет русской возлюбленной!
6.  Coincidentally, rumour spreads that certain videos are embedded as easter eggs in CMBS2 scenarios. Shall we say, ahem, 'Enemy Condition' finally becomes meaningful in achieving Total Victory.  Whose grass mod are you using, winkwinknudgenudge?
7.  CM product sales soar faster than a  Stalinist pig iron quota, particularly for the Professional Edition. Steve retires to Stalin's former palace at Yalta (several degrees warmer than Vermont) and makes bank as a docent, with the grudging assent of his wife, while obdurately refusing to fix the PzKwIII turret rotation bug, or sumfink.
6. Meanwhile, across the bristling 2023 frontier, maquiladoras flourish, first in Crimea and Kuban, then in Belgorod and Voronezh... and, wait for it, Chechnya (where Kadyrov  has finally achieved martyrdom after enjoying too much lamb with apricots at the halal buffet).
Bored, totally unfunded Russian generals are only too happy to put their mobiks/zeks/ fanatical brainwashed Third Rome Zoomers to profitable (for the generals) work in sweatshops, picking and packing pills and chips, since 'hohols' can no longer can be found to do those jobs across the (densely fortified and mined but increasingly porous) frontier.
....So yeah, about that combat Readiness for that Next War, against peoples who are presently funding your commanders' beach houses in Cyprus.
8.  Sadly, the shattered and depopulated Donbas will take at least 12 years and billions in reconstruction aid and subsidies to start showing signs of economic life again. 'Clean energy' on the steppes is probably the thin edge of the wedge.
(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

I think their point is THIS is normal.  The only way to change the behavior is to make sure they know they lost, and the days of imperial grandeur are over for good.

hey look on the bright side, halting global warming with a nuclear winter!  It is only a small step past the idea of nuking a hurricane.  😎

I'm not sure that rickety old barnstorming fighter jets are a thing.  Those things take a ton of maintenance to be able to get off the ground and stay there long enough to do something useful.  Sending waves of old jets piloted by barely trained mobiks seems like a great way to make big pile of recycleable titanium and aluminum at the end of the runway.

Invented by Germans in response to word count limits in academic abstracts... Just remove all the spaces and call it one word. England took the opposite extreme and paid by the word and gave us Charles Dickens.

Don't leave out Bulgakov.
Or that they provided inspiration for the Klingon vs Federation theme in ST:TOS.

I'm not sure that rickety old barnstorming fighter jets are a thing.  Those things take a ton of maintenance to be able to get off the ground and stay there long enough to do something useful.  Sending waves of old jets piloted by barely trained mobiks seems like a great way to make big pile of recycleable titanium and aluminum at the end of the runway.

I was going to make a similar comment.  DB is just acting like a bank and doing the things that big banks do.