chris talpas
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Posts posted by chris talpas
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6 hours ago, The_Capt said:
Interestingly I think the step the Russians missed was the same one that a lot of western mainstream analysts kinda glossed over at the start of this war, and is near and dear to just about everyone on this forum - the war game.
In military planning this is a major step/exercise (in fact we do it at least twice). In strategic planning it is normally done through a series of operational war games and results summed, but you can do a version of opposed strategies.
In the war gaming phase one takes a plan and smashes it up against an opponents counter-plan. What a lot of students miss is that it is not about winning, it is about completely acid washing your concepts. War games are not supposed to be fun, they are supposed to brutalize your planning before your opponent does it for real on the battlefield. Until you see every flaw and hole in your plan, you cannot fully understand the risks.
You can even do this for non-linear campaigning, but it is trickier. One has to re-think the war game for emergent phenomena, and here a bottom up micro-sampling based approach may work better. However even for top-down - and here I think a lot of western experts made this mistake - one can see macro-masking leading to significant poor assumptions. This just underlines how hard a discipline this is to carry out when you are really trying.
As far as I can tell Russia did not war game this out. When the boss has a habit of having people who disagree with him thrown out windows, it is pretty hard to get honest assessments of holes in his plan. This is a planning environment of lethal group think which is just a perfect recipe for progressive unreality.
But for a few dozen copies of CMBS and Putin not being a gamer, a war was lost.
Reminds me of the war gaming the Japanese did prior to Midway, throwing out inconvenient outcomes based on overconfidence.
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9 hours ago, Kinophile said:
Who's "we" in this particular reality? How do you enforce a Naval blockade in the Black Sea? How do you slip through the Montreux Convention? Whose ships do the stopping and boarding? Who thinks the Black Sea Fleet will agree for one hot second to allow NATO vessels to stop them, to fire shots across Russian bows? Do you really think a Russian frigate is not going to fire back? What about the BSF submarines, their naval ace-in-the-hole via a vis any potential adversary? How do you blockade them?
So who's ship's will do the sinking, and be sunk? The US? So, War then. Britain? War. EU? War. Turkey? ROFL.
And bye-bye any chance of this war ending in 2023.
Yer 'avin a laff, guv' nor!
Actually why would one do a blockade in the Black Sea when the Mediterranean would be a much more effective place to do it? You are in NATO home waters with access to far more assets than you could ever have in the Black Sea. At the same time Ivan suddenly has diminished options in terms of projecting power. Also all meaningful outbound cargo would need to enter the Med since there isn’t an absolute need to transport by ship, other than for efficiencies, to friendly Black Sea ports. All other ports lay within NATO/aligned territories. Not not that I’m suggesting we do this, but if One had to, I think the Med would offer the best chance of success in enforcing a blockade while also being less escalatory.
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3 hours ago, Kinophile said:
But... what if we like the strap?
giggity
Perhaps time to change your name to kinkyphile.
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10 hours ago, Fenris said:
Amusing clip. Next gen attack rodents have gotten loose from the biolabs.
The tail looks pretty short for a rat. Could this be a recon element of a Hamstertruppen unit?
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Why the reluctance on Zelensky’s part to admit it was an accident and move on?
No one is blaming Ukraine, but continuing to say it isn’t theirs is doing them no favours.
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15 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
Lea
I think history will reflect favourably on Biden. He has effectively lead the western response and the sharing of intelligence on Russian intentions prior to the Feb invasion blunted any surprise. The courage and determination of the Ukrainian people have been an inspiration. They have earned their place in the drivers seat of their self determination.
Zelensky, at least to this external observer, has been a great leader. He has been relentless in his pleas for support to the world. He is held in high regard amongst the public.
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As much as I rejoice in the battlefield success that Ukraine is having, I am dismayed at the success Russia has achieved in destroying Ukrainian power generation in the last 10 days or so. 40% I last saw. There are the obvious references to the cold in terms of impact, but modern life disappears without electricity. No running water, no refrigeration, no industry or commerce. Communication infrastructure is rendered useless as well.
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8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
On a serious note, I often think about how lucky I am that the country with the longest border with mine is Canada. I absolutely could not ask for better neighbors. Ukraine, on the other hand, has its longest border with Russia. They absolutely could not have a worse neighbor. I for one do not take my good fortune for granted.
Steve
As a Canadian, I feel the same way about the US.
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Fanciful speculation:
Putin seeing that things are looking less likely to end well for himself, quietly transfers a portion of his personal wealth to China. During his visit with Xi, he decides he enjoys China so much that he will stay there and step down pre-emptively thus vastly improving his life expectancy.
I would imagine other Russian operatives would be reluctant to mess with him in China. China benefits internationally from assisting in regime change that offers a pathway to de-escalation. -
4 minutes ago, JonS said:
But, see, this is the issue with the pro-proton mob: "everything is fine, it's totes safe (as long as you ignore this totally unsafe but likely operating condition)!" It all feels like a bait a switch. Probably because it is.
And even then, assume the best run, perfectly maintained plant, with excellently trained and adequate staff, that isn't hit by earthquake, tsunami, cyclone or war throughout it's operating life of maybe 100 years. Cool. /NOW/ what? What do we do with the site and waste for next few thousand years?
Not to derail the thread …
if we want to decarbonize the energy grid, which global warming is driving us in that direction, then taking existing nuclear offline is not going to help us get there.
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7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
Yup, or specifically my pet theory that this is messaging by the GRU to the RU Nats to tread lightly.
The_Capt... I am absolutely convinced that this was not an FSB inspired false flag
The other reason I favor this being a GRU op is that it fits better with the agency motivations. The FSB is responsible for keeping the Russian state together, the GRU is there to serve the interests of the military. They are NOT the same thing. So the GRU is not a team player, so it is totally in keeping with them to do something for their own perceived self interests while at the same time harming Russia as a whole.
Steve
On the GRU front, I too was thinking they could have their hand in it. Who has more incentive to end this sooner than the army which is being systematically ground down?
Quis bono? Who benefits
i agree the military and its dirty tricks dept are likely culprits
I agree this is a message to the nationalists from the army to tone down those drumbeats for escalation?
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11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
For you fans of early viral videos, I bring you this...
Steve, you really need to give us a way to give you likes.
Thanks for bringing a smile to my face. Thanks as well for all the commentary and analysis. This has been a go to thread for intelligent discourse on the course of this war from a military and larger perspective.
This thread should be preserved for posterity.
I could see it being a primary source for future scholars detailing how the conflict was analyzed along with predictors of outcomes within the open source community. It would interesting to compare this group with the professional analysts.
I don’t know if all of this (including links twitter, News sites, etc) can be backed up?
The eventually thousands of pages that is this thread, could provide a unique window into the insights that were developed over the course of the conflict.I think it can also provide a contextual record of how successfully Ukraine has managed the information war. They have been masterful on so many levels: diplomatic, social media, news media, to name some. Example: Releasing the Snake Island commemorative stamp featuring the finger to the Moskva. Later that day sinking that ship.
While the sinking was probably almost too good to be true, I am glad good fortune was with Ukraine that day. -
4 hours ago, Calamine Waffles said:
Actually I think it would be hilarious if the US gave them a ton of MALD-Js and use the A-10 purely as a MALD platform to troll the Russians.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/a-10-warthogs-tusks-are-being-sharpened-for-a-high-end-fightActually that and the HARM armed Migs is starting to look a good SEAD tag team especially if the A10 is armed with JASSM standoff missiles as well
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Some good analysis of the state of the central Asian republics in light of the Ukraine war
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1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:
As we've discussed before, Russia for sure has the Kherson bridge rigged to detonate. If Russia withdraws for ANY reason that bridge is going to get blown. Therefore, why not just destroy it now at a time when Russia is getting enormous benefit from it?
Steve
With it already rigged for demolition, would that make it easier to destroy by setting off sympathetic detonations?
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5 hours ago, Huba said:
Putin went all in already. I thought he will keep the gas flowing till the winter, and threaten to cut it when it's most needed. My take is that he needs this EU pressure on Ukraine sooner than later and want the Germans to feel the pain ASAP. It's going to get interesting...
Hopefully those turbines Canada was returning can be recalled.
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2 hours ago, poesel said:
About AI replacing programmers: here's a tweet that explains everything
Not to take this thread on too far a tangent, but here is a short video giving the current state of the art in machine coding. Also an interesting channel on AI development in general
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25 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
All good from where I sit.
This video should give you a good idea about how bit of an explosion it was:
Thanks for checking Steve and sharing the video. Much appreciated. Will see tomorrow if the problem is with my iPad when I retry with PC.
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Anyone else having problems with loading page 1019? Other pages load fine but this one either hangs loading or gives a getpage error.
A shame since judging by the following pages that is where the big kaboom is initially reported
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3 minutes ago, dan/california said:
At some point you have to wonder if your Duma seat includes a weekly allotment of the special Columbian marching powder along with the case of vodka. I mean complete poly substance intoxication is the least bad reason for what some of these people are spouting
And this would be in water that will just kill you in ~15 minutes.
And just a wee bit deeper than that river too.
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4 hours ago, MikeyD said:
Russia doesn't have 'another army' waiting around so it'll probably be a little difficult to take back Alaska.
Could be interesting to see how well the Russians execute an opposed amphibious operation
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Center for Strategic & International Studies follow up session on assessing Russia’s performance.
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Impressive looking photo which was shared by LLF on the previous page:
Not sure how wise it is to bunch all of this valuable equipment up? Looks like a juicy target for Russian aviation or missile strike.
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Silencing or at least severely attriting Russian artillery is key. Other armoured vehicles can be dealt with via atgms. Hope the additional longer ranged western weapon systems can make the difference.
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
On that topic:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-russia-canada-trainers-training-unifier-1.6755532