Holien

Good luck finding many journalists left alive in that area, the number of deaths have peaked and even in "safer" areas they have specifically been shot by IDF forces in the recent past. 
The BBC have been trying to show balance by reporting both sides of what is happening in Israel outside Gaza and have had IDF troops intimidation when interviewing Palestinian activists. 
Israeli citizens who have tried to raise their opposition have been falsely arrested and intimidated by the police. 
The courts independence are under attack by the government and before this horrific terrorist attack parts of the IDF were striking in protest against the extreme right wing government. 
The attack has allowed the extremists in the Israeli government to try and use it for their own ends. 
As has been said on other threads if you want to be the good guy you need to do the right things.

It seems to me that most people forget how humanly normal it is for the Ukrainians to be war-weary and somber, and to even question a positive outcome. But it is almost certainly TEMPORARY!
It is not only the longevity of the war, and the corresponding fear and stress that goes along with it, that creates this grim atmosphere. In my experience hope that doesn't get materialized tends to weigh heavier on most people's morale, than physical pain, fear, disappointment and other adversities.
And in this war the average hope before the summer offensive was very high, perhaps - in retrospect of course, unrealisticly high. The unexpected defeat of the Russian invasion, the sinking of the Moskva and the further humiliation of the Black Sea Fleet, the Wagner-uprising, the endless amount of video's and reports of exploding Russian vehicles and dead and dying Russian soldiers, and the large number of countries that gave material and/or financial support (Which in hindsight gave a false impression of the usefull amount of support. Ten countries donating 10 -20 tanks each sounds nice, but creates unrealistic hope.), all contributed to an understandable belief in succes.
In my opinion a sudden realisation that thing aren't nearly as rosy as expected, weighs people down. Mostly because rational thinking cannot cope very well with accepting the fact that our expectations were too high.
It just takes time. Whether the situation on the frontline stays as it is, or even when there are going to be more setbacks for the Ukrainians, this current "depression" will subside. The Ukrainian tenacity and unwielding fighting spirit just have a little understandable setback.
And to parafrase Schwarzenegger's famous quote: "They will be back".   

Perun from last month has some very relevant discussion of EW, and how it is keeping the ''Drone Apocalypse" at bay for the moment; last 1/3 of the hour, although the rest is also worthwhile as usual. 
 
 

Well interesting if one has an unhealthy tank lust.  This is what in the business we call a “heavily situated” estimate.  The author starts with the core conclusion that tanks are still viable on the modern battlefield and then goes about pulling anything and everything he can to try and prove it:
- reduction of combat power down to firepower, mobility and protection - which of course are also the core attributes of the tank.  When in fact modern military doctrine sees combat power in far broader terms.  Interestingly he does not apply his condensed framework (from circa 1993) to the main competitor to the tank, the modern UAS/ISR.  Unmanned systems have far higher mobility, at least equal firepower in disaggregated form, and higher protection through distributed mass.
- Oversubscription on tanks role in just about all operations other than war.  I know from first personal experience and follow on research that his deductions from both Bosnian ‘93 and Canadian Forces in Afghanistan that the employment of the tank was anything but “decisive”.  In fact their overall employments were problematic for many reasons on those sorts of operations.
- Assuming that the UAS/ISR game will be fought “how we fight it”.  EW offers the best possible defence right now; however, as we have discussed at length, full autonomy of these systems, even in the last 1000m largely negates EW counter-measures.  China is investing heavily in fully autonomous systems…this is where things are going.
- Biases analysis of ATGMs: “costly and heavy”….seriously…as compared to a tank?   He also fails to recognize the most dangerous part of modern ATGMs…range.  FFS he is making a Cold War argument that ATGMs need LOS “making operators vulnerable” - that argument 1) has not been proven in this war and 2) does not reflect where ATGM technology is going.  No mention of self-loitering munitions or NLOS systems, some with ranges nearing 100kms. [He cites a CBC interview as proof that tanks can still find and kill ATGMs - sure it can happen but as we have seen, not to the point as to reestablish conditions for offensive operations]
-Largely sidesteps the entire issue of logistics.  Reduces it down to recovery and maintenance.  The major problem with heavy logistics is that itself must be “heavy”.  Heavy formations consume obscene amounts of fuel and ammunition.  Spare parts and recovery are also issues but long LOCs of fuel and supply trucks are suicidal in this war.  Why…because the enemy can see them with operational ISR (no real mention of ISR realities either for that matter).  Once seen they can be interdicted and shot to pieces.  This is why “logistics” is a core combat function…none of the others work without it.
- I do like camo, decoy and deception discussion.  That has some solid ideas.
- UGV comparison is woefully tepid.  Appears to assume UGVs will simply be 1 for 1 tank replacements when they will likely take the cheap distributed path much like their air counterparts.  
Author really fails to see modern warfare as it is,  more for what he wants it to be.  The combination of UAS/ISR and PGM has been definitely “undeciding”.  It can translate into offensive warfare under the right conditions but it is largely about Denial.  These systems have denied heavy  of its major offensive attributes.  They have done so because they are able to see, fix and engage heavy systems well beyond the ranges that heavy can respond.  They do so through distributed mass.  Combined with Air Denial we have a condition where heavy is narrowly applicable to the modern battlefield.
He proposes a bunch of solutions pretty much as I expected - invest in the tank heavily to try and keep it viable.  What he fails to define is “what is the point of diminishing returns?”  When do we call it and go in another direction?  He makes glancing, and frankly disingenuous, attempts in a light/med analysis but never really asks the question: “Well what if heavy is dead?”  Hell I am not even sure traditional military mass is not dead, let alone heavy.
The unmanned/ISR/PGM complex are not enablers to traditional land battle, they have become deterministic.  The decisive force on the battlefield is  no longer heavy systems…it is the systems that undecided them.  I suspect our future lies in these spaces as “precision, distribution, unmanned” also become part of the combat power pantheon.  We will see counter-systems and “forward edge superiority” as concepts.  What happens to forces that can “take and hold ground” remains unclear.  Right now ATGM, UAS and PGM (artillery and self-loitering) along with dog-faced infantry appear to be the new combined arms.
But if I know the western military complex (and unfortunately I do), we will spend billions, maybe trillions trying to prove “it ain’t so”.  Finally, we need to pull our collective heads out of @sses and realize that this issue is so much larger than the freakin tank or heavy or even ground forces.  It applies across all domains.  We have billion dollar ships and air fleets that may be unable to control or create superiority.  I can see that from here.  They will be brought down by cheap and ubiquitous smart munitions of all types.  So while everyone is gawping and squawking about tanks, I am not even sure aircraft carriers will stand up in 20 years.  Cyber and nukes likely may be the only military forces that we can count on to keep doing what they were.  Start with a blank white board and go from there.
 

I've got a fairly easy three weeks ahead of me so I've decided to revise this one but it's not going to be a straight up remake. Rather, I'm going to split the campaign into two separate campaigns, one for the 9th Cameronians (9 missions) and a second, shorter one for the 2nd ASH (6 missions). I see no good reason to keep this as one long campaign as it's not for official release and splitting it up will make it much easier to manage script-wise. There will be some tweaks to how the player goes to the Veteran or Green branches but I want to get core units done before tackling the new scripts.
Although it was made prior to the 16 AI groups patch, I'm quite happy with the AI as it stands so don't expect any significant changes here. However, the most important change will be that the core units will not start at 80% strength but rather at full strength. While these units were at 80% strength historically, it's not a particularly good way to represent this in the game so I've decided that the fighting strength of these formations should be at 100% and the 'reserve' companies are seriously under-strength. That seems to be a better way to represent this. One side effect of this though is that I'm going to remove the PIAT team attached to every platoon and give 1 section its PIAT instead. This also serves to reduce the number of units the player has to manage and that's fine by me.
I made the new Cameronians core units file last night and have started importing units into the Cameronian missions. I don't expect this will take very long and so it's possible this will be finished later this week. After that, I'll do the same for the ASH missions. I don't want to make any changes that require significant play-testing either. The plan is to have this campaign 'working' again for possible future revisions. But I'm happy to 'fix' any issues you guys might have with it as long as they're quick.
If, and that's a big IF, there is the interest, I may decide to enhance one or both of these campaigns adding flamethrower units as well as further improving the AI, especially the big attacks at the end of each. Regardless of interest, the next step after this is to finish the Montebourg revision so if you have any comments or suggestions for  this one, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
 
Move it! Move it! Let's go!

Damn good 23rd post. The frozen conflict scenario has been discussed here: think Korea.  The idea that there is simply no way to break the lines and regain offensive primacy has been brought up many times.  The picture you paint is quite accurate.
However, all war is negotiation.  In order to stop this war, both sides need to be ready to stop.  It is plausible that with enough backroom pressure Ukraine could be convinced to stop this thing pretty much where it is.  The problem, not surprisingly, is Russia.  The Putin regime is riding on this dumpster fire.  Hell, his life and those of his cronies are likely riding on this thing.  Convincing Putin to stop and draw new lines is the problem.  Technically we cannot even incentivize this as the man and most of his admin are labeled as war criminals.  We cannot renormalize while he (and they) remain in power.
Subversive wheeling and dealing has and likely is occurring in the backfield.  However, as we saw with Saddam, one thing paranoid autocrats are exceptionally good at is shoring up the store.  They have intel everywhere and make people disappear who even have a whiff of disloyalty - recall the flying oligarchs of the last two years.  
So what will it take to bring Russia to the table at this point?  A freakin military coup.  The RA would need to collapse to the point it turns on Putin.  That may force him from office and we are looking at “can we bargain with the next SOB?  “Is the next SOB clean enough?”  Of course if the RA collapses, Ukraine will want to push to take more ground.  Recall that this time last year Ukraine had retaken both Kharkiv and Kherson - those were major operational victories.  The hope was that they could repeat the same method this summer.  But apparently even on the high tech battlefield, mines still work.  In fact with UAS minefields work even better.
So here we are.  Ukraine will likely be pushed into defence until someone can figure out a Plan B.  RA will keep smashing itself onto that because Putin needs to show that he is “winning” to stay alive.  Even offering the war criminal peace talks would be nothing but a sham at this point.  Hell it would lend legitimacy to their actions.  As a min, Russia would demand international recognition that they own what they took, including Crimea and Donbas.
I guess the main reason we have not gone deeply into a peace process is because frankly an RA military collapse is more viable than trying establish one.

What does this actually mean?
The UK, its Dominions, and France entered a war against Germany in September 1939 to - amongst other things - guarantee the independence of Poland. Six years later that war ended. Had Poland's independence been secured? Can the UK be said to have 'won' in those terms? What about France, or even Poland?
If they didn't win, does that mean Germany did?

Just don't bother.  This crowd have exactly two gimmicks and they build everything on top of that:
When not in power - Do the opposite, no matter what.  Had Biden said "nope" and held back at the Polish border, they would be howling for blood because he failed to defend the global order.  It doesn't matter context or facts (just make up your own) whatever the issue take the diametrically opposite side of "them".  Build an entire framework - even if it makes no sense - around that.
When in power - Blame everyone, anyone for not getting a damn thing done.  It is "the system", the swamp, the democratic process.  No matter what never be accountable for your own decisions or inaction, blame, blame, blame.  And if you manage to be like a broken clock and get something right - make like it was a shining defining moment in the history of humanity.
This is not even new.  Despots and autocrats have used this same scheme forever.  Fascism did it.  Communism did it.  And now various far-right political groups are doing it - this is not a solely US based phenomenon.
This strategy is particularly focused on two main groups:
- The mob.  They do not really have any idea of how things actually work nor do they want to.  They want easy solutions and binary lenses.  First clue on whoever this guy is was "simple math".  I recall during the previous US presidential administration when aluminum tariffs were being imposed on Canadian trade on "national security grounds".  CBC went down south and interviewed an aluminum can factory owner, and then guy on the shop floor.  Owner was very concerned that he was going to have to lay people off because all tariffs is pass cost increases onto him, the manufacturer.  They then cut to the guy working the floor, "Damn straight!  We gotta show those Canadians they cannot take advantaged of the USA."  That is what we are dealing with.
- The elites.  There is a small minority of people with a lot of power who know exactly what they are doing.  They understand the risks and damage but do not care as the gains far outweigh them.  They are supporting all this to grab more power (never enough). 
If anyone is thinking "I recognize this", well you probably do - it is exactly how Russia is working right now.  It is how other autocrats are working.  China has a similar system.  The major failing of democracy is that it expects the voter - the one with decision power - to actually care enough to stay informed enough to make sound decisions.  The reality is very different.  Autocracy is beautiful in its simplicity: "Don't worry about all that uncertainty.  I will give you certainty and take care of it.  Just give me all the power."
The rest is just noise and soundbites from talking heads who string together datapoints to "prove their point".   Or transparent tactics that a 7 year old would recognize - pretend to have empathy and point out the "humanity".  I could see this from the start and likely why my reaction was visceral.  Any one who can come on this board and arrogantly claim with authority that "WW1 was simple" clearly has no idea what they are talking about and is rolling in on an agenda.
If the past is any indication, Steve will put up with it for awhile and boot the guy.  Or he will slink back into the shadows before coming to that point and we can do this all over again in 6 months. 

Yes, he does states that he thought reaching ceasefire was possible at that very moment (=before Bucha, 2:45) but he is not sure from a posteriori point of view if it had even worked ("Cause statemenship is very complex" and "there were many factors", 4:51, a part you missed). Murdered civilians were a potent fact in both Western and internal UA politics- there was no coming back to talks after it became obvious what Ivans did, especially from Ukrainian perspective.
Additionally, Arakhamia on other interview too stated that they were simply not trusting Putin enough to sign agreements with him about neutrality. The fact that talks were in place, Putin was willing to make some concessions when wounded after his army became stuck spectacularly or that Boris Johnson came to Kyiv to promote not signing deals with Vova does not change basic premise- if Ukraine would dismantle bulk of its own military forces and finlandize, it was only a question of time before it become swallowed again by muscovia. They would have Russian tanks over their necks anyway, sooner or later. And Ukrainians understood it from the start; Bucha was just a confirmation.
You may not get inner workings of Kremlin politics since you focus on America, but Putin couldn't allow in long term to have image of a loser in this war- and that would be effect if potentiall ceasefire of the kind we discuss here would take place, while Russian columns took such looses in the north, both on Eastern and Western side of Dnieper. Perception of his war as military failure could be deadly for his imperial mojo, and even making small concessions to Ukraine would put him in very difficult position internally.
Agree, sanctions should be much stonger and West do lack coherent strategy for this war after 2023- but is is a topic touched upon many times in this thread. Also book by Z. Parafianowicz gives some details of behind-the-courtain talks between US and CEE countries- initial US plan for this war was supporting insurgency, not conventional conflict on such massive scale. White House did reevaluate its stance to support heavy weapons to Ukraine quite dramatically, so they did changed their strategy when learned Ukrainians can in fact defend. Doesn't sound idiotic nor lazy on western behalf, at least at that time.

I think Ukraine has much more in common with the Palestinians though.
Resisting illegal invasion and occupation by a much stronger aggressor, civilians getting indiscriminately bombed and shot, being called Nazis, even animals...
Actually neither Ukraine nor Palestine even really exists, according to Russia/Israel. Ukrainians are just Russians who forgot they are Russians, while Paleistinians are just Arabs who for some reason suddenly began to think they were Palestinians. In both Ukraine/Palestine, this has been called a clear case of genocide by well informed observers.
The difference mainly seems to be that one side is allied with "us", and the other side with "them".

C’mon, we did the terrorism thing for the last 20 years.  In fact what the IDF is doing is likely to make things worse, not better.  Hamas knew damned well the reaction it was going to get.  It went medieval to get exactly that.  It did it for a reason.  I am mulling over what to call this “winning by losing” strategy but it is working.  Does anyone think Hamas cares about the Palestinian civilians.  In fact for them the more human suffering the better.
AQ tried the same thing in 01.  ISIL again in ‘14(ish).  Punitive expeditions do not work in the modern era.  No one has demonstrated that shooting their way out of an insurgency is even possible.  Hamas needed a deliberate campaign of isolation and precise killing before 7 Oct.  They needed one after.  Breaking the international system is a Hamas goal because they feel abandoned by it.  Iran wants the system to fail so they can get their nukes and move up the regional pecking order.  So how in gods name is Israel helping them do it make any sense?

Oh no argument there from me.  Should the Israeli justice system, who are charged with upholding the LOAC within the jurisdictions of the state of Israel?  Definitely.  Will they? Doubt it.  Or will they translate the LOAC in a biased/skewed manner.  I suspect they will.
Of course the Russian legal system is going to do the exact same thing.  In my books when you are in the same boat with Putin, things are not good.
We keep coming back to a central issue: international laws of armed conflict are getting in the way.  Well that is kinda the point.  They were designed to try and constrain and restrain military power.  They did so for very good reasons.  One cannot point to one nation violating this and make noise, while defending another.
What most people do not realize, sitting at home on the old computer, is just how much our current lifestyles rely on the stability of the global system.  Our wealth, health and freedoms rely on a system that creates and reinforces stability.  The US is not the most powerful nation on earth because some sky-god says so.  The US is the most powerful because of geographical/geopolitical privilege, which provides stability.  It then translated that into a global system that again creates stability.  The LOAC is part of that system.  Right up there with global trade regs, criminality, and diplomacy.
One cannot have a temporary suspension of the rules so that anarchy of states can get a day pass.  These things get broken, sometimes irreversibly.  For example, Iraq 2003 caused enormous damage to the international system.  One could argue that both Russia and China went “nope” when that operation occurred.  Iraq wasn’t even its prosecuted it was its overall justification.  There is a direct line from Iraq 03 to Ukraine 22.  There will be a line to Taiwan in ??, if it happens.
The other myth is that the US can handle it no matter what.  The US is very powerful but it is also very internally fragile.  It also is not nuclear weapon proof.  So the US needs that system likely more than other outer orbit nations.  Example. I once had someone ask “what if the US refused to pay its debt?  Who is going to make them pay?”  Well a global economic collapse would.  US debt is a commodity and making it worthless would buckle the entire system.  Your cellphone would cost more than your car and kiss any pension plan goodbye.  Foreign manufacturing and commodities would collapse.  “Well fine, I will just buy American”.  You may want to review just how much of “American” actually comes from America.  It may be assembled there but the raw resources are pulled in from all over the world…mostly China in reality.

So what?  Stakes here are much higher than Israel or Hamas.  The international system is starting to give and this mess is just one more crack.  Now if you choose to applaud while it does, hey go for it.  But you may want to review just what that system actually does for you and yours before you do. 

Ok now you have my full attention.  So to answer your first question - no, it was a terrible idea but here we are.  We did not “push” Russia into anything - unless you subscribe to the John Kettler school of international policy.  They did fall into it.
I think what I find most offensive about your position now that is becoming clear is that somehow this entire war is Ukraines fault because they pissed off Russia.  So small powers should basically all fall in line to neighbouring greater powers and the freedoms and will of their peoples do not count?  This is where oversimplification get us.
We stationed western troops, including Canadians in the Baltics.  But we should back off because we wouldn’t want to make Russia angry.  Beyond your definitive tone you also appear to get pretty high on your own opinion.  Chinas status as a superpower is debatable:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/02/china-superpower-us-new-cold-war-rivalry-geopolitics/
 
https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-emergence-superpower
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2023/08/25/why-chinas-bid-to-become-a-superpower-is-doomed-to-failure/?sh=651d400d1d0e
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3936751-china-a-great-power-but-not-a-superpower/
So glad another expert could come and tell us how it really is.
 
 

It was not international conventions or humanitarian concerns that kept the US from sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, because neither Ukraine nor the US have signed those conventions.
The point here is that it was not the reluctance to "fight like orcs" but the fear of escalation that kept those munitions away from Ukraine. As Russia decided to escalate, those weapons were eventually released.
But even now, I don't think it's Western sensibilities that is hurting the Ukrainian ability to fight effectively. Escalation fear is still what keeps supplies back.
Even tiny Denmark has given or pledged to give more than 77 tanks. How many did the United States pledge?
76 MBTs, according to Wikipedia. Seventy-six. While you have around 6000 Abrams, thousands of them just sitting in storage...

Well full points for the attempt but in the end an Investigation will be required.  Was it a specific unit or formation where the civilian deaths mostly occurred?  When were most civilians killed, air strikes or ground action?  Who was in command?  How was release authority handled?  What was the target info provided to shooters.  What was the collateral damage estimate?  How did that estimate compare to real losses.  How was collateral damage calculated?  How was military necessity calculated?  What were the ROEs?  Who was running the targeteering (matching munitions to targets)?  What were the civilians told and how?  Did they ever target an area they said they would not/how tight were the control lines?  How heavy were the strikes and on what cross section of targets? 
If the IDF is as clean as new driven snow they would open the books and clear the air.  They would likely run a parallel investigation of their own and we could all argue in the end.  My money is that there will never be an investigation.  Unless we see something truly horrific.  The damage is largely done because the IDF look like they are playing cover up while blasting block by block.  This may be unfair because the court of public opinion is not supposed to rule…but here we are.
My blunt assessment is that Israel is losing this thing.  They are playing directly into the hands of Hamas and their backers.  Iran is laughing its @ss off as any deals between Saudi Arabia and Israel are very likely dead.  Israel is heading towards outcast status and isolation.  The US as champion of a rules-based order is taking a royal beating. Russia and China will be dining out on this for years.  And meanwhile we are getting soft on Ukraine.  And the human tragedy in Gaza is just getting warmed up.
Final note:  how on earth does Egypt get let off the hook in all this?  Why have they not been called out for keeping 2 million Palestinians trapped in a shrinking box in Gaza?  

Civilian deaths per building is not really a reliable metric.  Were they all in a few of those buildings. Were they evenly distributed across all of them.  What we have are a series of shoots that resulted in a large number of civilian deaths.  A full review and investigation would have to be done to determine if those deaths were simply background collateral damage or criminality occurred.  
By the metrics of deaths per building then Hiroshima wasn’t “that bad either”.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_chp9.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
At the high end, Hiroshima “only” resulted in about 2 deaths per building.  So what is all the fuss over?  By your initial estimate, you calculated up to 1.6 deaths per building in Gaza.  So if we play the statistics game: Gaza is only 0.4 civilian deaths per building less than Hiroshima (OMG !!!!!).   This is frankly silly.
As to “let them back in through some sort of filter system”…let them back into what?  The area is uninhabited.  Water, electricity and transport are all blow to hell.  Medical and government services will be non-existent until major reconstruction is done.  “Welcome home good Palestinians!  That crater is all yours!”  Those “good Palestinians” are likely to spark up new insurgencies and terror groups in minutes because the IDF just blew up their homes and left them ruins without power and water.
Finally, we have no idea how many dead civilians are left under those buildings.  One cannot drop a high rise and expect good morgue services.  Without a longer more extensive investigation all we can say is that an investigation is needed.
What we can see is highly suspicious levels of destruction (eg If a Hamas fighter would have been in every single building the IDF would have wiped out Hamas twice over by now).  Either Hamas is much larger than estimate gave, like twice the size.  Or the IDF has one helluva crappy targeting enterprise and keeps missing while knocking buildings down.  Either way, the most obvious potential violation of LOAC remains the indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure with intent that Palestinians never can come back.  That matches the evidence we can see and a plausible Israeli motive.  There is easily enough suspicion that destruction at those rates should be placed under scrutiny and the international community has every right to say “hey wait a minute”.  
 
 

A bit of Russian fun:
Some regions in Russia are experiencing a shortage of chicken eggs.
When the ruble's value fell, chicken meat prices started to rise because bird feed prices rose, until the government issued a law that forced stores to lower prices again under threat of jail. But that meant stores stopped buying from farms. To counter that, poultry farms started butchering chickens like... like Russian generals butcher conscripts, in order to make meat cheaper and encourage stores to buy. 
But they butchered so much they went into the egg-laying chicken population, leading to a shortage. Stores started to introduce egg regulation, so every customer can only buy a certain amount. They also stopped putting eggs in packs of twelve or ten, but started selling each egg individually. People stand in lines to get a single egg. But even with the high value of eggs, it does not help the farms. 
Russia is importing eggs from Turkey because it is cheaper to import and sell than to produce at home. 
In Belgogrod oblast the governor has apparently seized egg supplies and is giving them away to citizens who sign up for a lottery to improve morale.

UKR troops lost almost all gains of previous two months west from Robotyne. 
Situation here and in Donetsk oblast is very bad. UKR troops exhausted almost without rotations for several months of intensive combat. Many companies turned into platoons. In that time, when Russian moved here fresh troops or have opportunity to replenish battered units directly on the place or during short-term rotations in close rear. 
I suppose brigade general Tarnavskiy, who is commander of Operative-Strategic Troops Groupment "Tavria", which operated from Donbas to Zaporizhzhia oblast can have very hard talk with Stavka soon...

Well then I think we can agree that fighting to keep some rules and laws that transcend the demons of our worst nature is a good idea.  I do not think it impossible.  Hard, yes.  But not impossible.  If it is impossible then mankind is basically doomed.  The gloves will come off and that will be that.  We tend to forget that.
In all the sabre rattling about China, we forget that they have 6-8 nuclear boomers we cannot track on a good day capable of basically wiping out most of NA.  So if war really has no rules then it is a matter of time until someone goes all the way.  In fact they might get dragged there by uncontrolled escalation.
I dunno, I am getting on but I do not think just because a thing is difficult that we should drop it and just slide backwards.  Civilization is damned hard.  Survival in a chaos based universe is hard.  But I am not ready to accept the IDF breaking the LOAC anymore than I am ready to let the Russian military get away with it. Too many people died trying to make a better world and I think we owe it to them and those that follow to try to keep it up.

There's your problem.  Of course the IDF needs to prove that there were 11,000 to 22,000 Hamas fighters in each of those buildings who constituted such an immediate threat that it was worth dropping an entire building to kill...what?  Maybe 0.8 to 1.6 of them?  BBC lists the damage as much more widespread:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67565872
Al Jezeera notes that 50% of residential housing has been destroyed:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/israeli-bombardments-damage-more-than-half-of-gazas-housing-units
As to numbers of civilian dead...ok, so what is a "warcrimes level of destruction" then?  2? 12 per building?  The law says that even one civilian killed indiscriminately constitutes murder.  What arbitrary number means warcrime, if it is not "one"? 
I actually do not think anyone can say definitively that Israel is killing civilians indiscriminately and weird deaths per building really does not work as a metric.  Incidents where hundreds were killed in basements have occurred and need to be investigated.  The IDF is one bad shoot away from a horror story.  The potential wacrime we  can see is the level of destruction occurring outside military necessity.  It is a war crime to ethnically cleanse an area by making it uninhabitable.  Now if Israel were to put a few billion into a UN controlled reconstruction fund there could be an argument made.  But my money is that Israel has zero interest in Gaza reconstruction and will likely actively oppose it. 
Hamas needs to be destroyed, no argument.  They committed egregious warcrimes, no argument.  The IDF leveling entire neighborhoods on the flimsy excuse "there are some fighters in there" as a cover for a ghetto clearing...argument.  
 

Amen.  This speaks to the larger issue.  No point "winning" if we have to become the bad guys to do it.  We fight to defend something more than security.  We fight for an idea.  How we fight impacts the integrity of that idea.  Right now the idea of Israel is taking tremendous damage.  This is what we have been supporting for decades?  They are looking worse than Russia right now with respect to indiscriminate strikes...and that was one helluva low bar to get under.  
If the idea is corrupted by "some people are more equal than others", we are dead in the water.  

You do realize that the laws of armed conflict were written because all of the unconstrained warfare of the 19th and early 20th century?  They started with The Hague conventions in 1899 - and in fact the Lieber Code in the 1860 kicked things off.  The main purpose is to try and remember that there is a world states need to live in after the war.
But ok, let’s buy into your framework for a second.  So the Russian massacres in Ukraine in places like Bucha, deportation of children, along with the civilian terror missile strikes they have been waging…where do we sit in those?  Because in your framework we will be unable to prosecute or hold to account because Russia is only trying “to win as fast as possible”?
As to chemical or even nuclear weapons.  Well Hamas would now live under the same framework.  First off, we could not even prosecute for all the horrors they committed.  Second there would be zero legal restraint in Russia or Iran supplying Hamas with chemical or even nuclear weapons.  In fact under the framework you describe Hamas could legally employ them to “hit harder”.
The problem with “only one rule of war” thinking is that people forget that it applies universally.  What they more often mean is “the opponent has to follow the rules but we don’t”. Or they really mean “well let’s ditch these ‘rules’ but keep those ones”.
Lastly, the Rule of Might led directly to both WW1 & 2, the fact that the US had to “nuke Japan” is a bad thing you realize?  Both those wars were not “good news” and sparked a lot of our attempts to reign in warfare.  Legal restraint is designed to curtail the escalations we saw in both World Wars because they were bad for humanity.  
We do live with a thin veneer of civilization, that much is true.  But why would we abandoned the laws that hold that veneer together.  I mean, how does that make things better?
 

Hmmm I wonder if mistakes were made after that where folk used the incident for their own political ends which then had / continue to have impacts today.
Pity we don't learn from our past. 
BTW I predict further forced migration to Europe, the Russian playbook being used by others...
Maybe some folk do learn?
Anyway thanks @The_Capt for trying to explain that there is another way of doing things which would be legal and still deal with the scum of Hamas.

That is why that sort of logic is factored out of international law.  People in a democracy who support poor government decisions end up paying for it in the end.  However, there are no provisions in international law to punish them directly with violence.  In fact that would be extremely corrosive to the promotion of democracy worldwide - why support a system whereby I can be killed for what my elected government does?  At least if we have a dictator, I have some excuse and perhaps they won’t bomb me.  
I have no doubt Hamas did/does have Palestinian support.  The problem now is that they are likely to get more support, not less.  Hamas may even be destroyed but there will be another organization that looks just like it coming after.  It will be dining out on this entire war for generations.  Israel is going to remain regionally isolated.  And at this rate may very well be globally isolated - a NK of the Middle East.  If the winds shift in the US, Israel could looking at a Syria in envy in a few years at the current trajectory.
To be brutally cynical, I think the pace and intensity of the IDF actions are less about Israeli national security at this point and more about Netanyahu and his administration trying to save their own @sses.  The security failure of 7 Oct was so egregious that there are people in positions of power that could be facing charges of criminal negligence.  Politically Netanyahu is so badly burned that his legacy is basically over.  But so long as they can show “progress” in Gaza there is a chance they can keep the whole goose from being cooked.  While I support the destruction of Hamas, Israeli security integrity and the use of military power under the definitions of international law to make those first two happen; I do not support violations of the LOAC in order to try and save an Israeli PM his job after he threw up all over himself.

First off, nowhere in international law does voting for a violent extremist organization or even supporting them negate the law of armed conflict.  The fact that Hamas is a terror organization immediately brings into question the validity of both their election processes and any polling of support.
It is not for you, or I, to judge the IDF actions.  That will be the job of the international criminal justice system to decide.  All I can do as a professional military officer is look at the situation and comment that an investigation will likely be needed.  There is suspicion here, not assigned guilt.  As to “pontificating” well we in the west have been blessed with a level of objectivity that Israel does not currently have.  So it is really our job to say “hey wait a minute”.  The UN tried that and the champion of the Rules Based International order just vetoed it…so we may have a larger problem.
As to brutality.  Well indiscriminate and illegal strikes that result in innocent Palestinian lives being lost are not solving, nor are they justice for, what Hamas did on 7 Oct.  In fact they are likely to make things much worse.  Even more perverse, Israel’s reaction to 7 Oct is likely playing into exactly what Hamas wanted out of that attack in the first place.