LongLeftFlank

1. Before we blame all this on isolationist Deplorable Know Nothings, take a deep whiff of this.... https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/12/russia-sitrep-of-sorts.html This is the Old (nonwoke) Left Berniecrat blog, although they've chucked him too now. The founders keep quoting the same 8 highly erratic people (Ritter, MacGregor, Helmer, MofA, Mercouris, etc.) in rotation, while ruthlessly sanitising anyone who dares challenge Kremlin-origin alternative facts. Such as: - the UA is now losing a battalion a day in Bakhmut, and while lavishly equipped out of NATO's now rapidly depleting stocks they are incompetently/cowardly commanded and poorly fed, while medevac is at 1941 levels. Local logistics is a corrupt shambles; their rail net is shut down. The UA can't keep tank battalions operating, still less warplane squadrons. Their sole effective strike arm, HIMARS/arty is all Western-crewed and you know, those perfidious BoJo commandos..... - Azov, Kraken, et al., are mafiya-run SS skinhead militias who won't fight (unless trapped a la Mariupol). They force middle aged UA conscripts to stay in the line, when they aren't busy enforcing blanket 'OPSEC' on civilians, cleansing out Russian speakers or reselling foreign provided kit in Africa for big $$$. - Whole regions of Ukraine are depopulating now, as their freezing-in-the-dark people decamp to become (unwelcome) refugees across the energy strapped EU. Their economy (already a patchwork of mafiya fiefdoms) is now ceasing to function, for war or any other purpose. EU cities are filled with Ukrainian child prostitutes. Oh, and huge numbers have fled, or been driven out to mother Russia. (4th grade schoolyard logic: Well uhh... YOU are a poopyhead times 2!!!!!) There's a Russian guy who comments, and even he prods now and then at the Putin rahrah echo chamber and quickly realises he is walking on eggshells. No outside views are tolerated: that is all a Vast MSMDNC Conspiracy. 2. Once you're done there, go do a Ukraine search on pretty much any 'Left' journal or publication outside the Anglosphere (or nations bordering Russia who actually KNOW what they're dealing with). ...They make Tucker look 'fair and balanced'.

Oh FFS, here we go I never thought I'd miss Kettler.

Ho ho ho, Xmas memes for everybody!!!!

Pat Lang, stalwart conservative and no fan of JRB 46 (albeit no fan of DJT 45 either), has been onside from the start. https://turcopolier.com/the-story-of-carol-of-the-bells-a-christmas-classic-born-in-ukraine-ttg/

Well here again, instead of spluttering in outrage, I just keep nosing through Their sources periodically. Just to see whether there's anything They are seeing that We have somehow missed. They! They! (and then post some memes) ...But nope, so far it all seems to trace back to the same claque of raving lunatics (Helmer), Hate America/The Empire Firsters (Moon of AL, Greenwald) and stubborn permacontrarians (MacGregor), all cross-citing one another or 'citing' sources (e.g. Indian bloggers) that ultimately trace back to Russian pronouncements. **** But where's our Collapse @The_Capt sir? You promised Collapse? You Promised!

Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not

Interesting thoughts, but I suspect your threshold is a good bit too high given modern communications (which makes comparisons to Czarist or Stalinist times of limited value imho). I'll accept that 350k is not the tipping point though. ...What about the community consisting of Russian armed forces careerists and siloviki? Threshold for pain is higher, sure, but what, maybe 25 million in uniformed services families (parents included)? Consider the case of the Russian Afghan war, which was wound down in part (though not entirely, and after some 8 years) owing to an upwelling of protests by bereaved families (50k = 15 KIA + 35 WIA). So clearly, some kind of tipping point was reached albeit not insurrectionary. Note that nobody here is claiming body count ends the war all on its own. Nor will sanctions nor anything else, even a large battlefield defeat, on its own. EDIT: Looks like you covered these points above. That said, still an important topic.

Smoke 'em if ya got 'em 2. Discussion of the magic number, 100k KIA 3. Pep talk from Bakhmut, but looks like the situation there is still tenuous. Arestovich claims 60,000 RU casualties in the past 3 months in this area (direction).

https://warontherocks.com/2022/12/is-china-planning-to-attack-taiwan-a-careful-consideration-of-available-evidence-says-no/ Opinion piece: There is a conspicuous lack of evidence that the government has decided to pursue a military solution.... Chinese leaders routinely direct the military to prepare for Taiwan contingencies. Neither has Beijing made any effort to rally public sentiment in favor of war against the island.... a course of action that would very likely shock the public, lead to severe economic disruption, and expose many people to serious harm or death. National unification may be a popular idea among Chinese citizens, but war isn’t. The wargames favored at U.S. think tanks typically explore the devastating first few days of conflict but rarely consider what might happen afterwards. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2022/08/12/in-think-tanks-taiwan-war-game-us-beats-china-at-high-cost/ Some variants had Japan involved from the start. The Philippines allowed U.S. basing in some iterations, but not others. Game moderators permitted U.S. strikes on mainland China in some, but not others. In a version earlier in the week, the United States lost 700 aircraft over the three-week battle. War games once dominated discussions but fell to a low point during the counterinsurgency decades of the early 2000s. A heavy element in the Marine planning for a war with China is its Marine Littoral Regiment, a still-forming unit that is experimenting with new weapons systems, formations and employment strategies.... In every scenario, once the conflict stars there’s a “forest of Chinese ships” around Taiwan. In other games the Chinese military sunk an entire Amphibious Ready Group twice.... every single time no Marine made it to the beaches of Taiwan The Marines’ key weapon, the Naval Strike Missile, simply can’t shoot far enough with its 100 nautical mile range.... If I’m not on Taiwan, that weapon is basically useless. While the China team had early successes, they lost far too much and took too many strikes on their ports and supply chain to continue the fight. By the end of the game, the China team had more than 30 battalions on Taiwan, quite a feat in under three weeks of battle. But the U.S. was able to cut off the Chinese resupply entirely, leaving thousands of simulated Chinese soldiers foraging for food, low on ammunition and trying to outmaneuver U.S. forces in a cat-and-mouse fight. Once the U.S. gets its forces flowing into theater, the result is almost unchangeable — the U.S. wins, but at a heavy cost.... the Chinese Navy ceased to exist in any functional capacity after a few weeks of U.S. strikes.

I too spent salad days as a penniless grad student in DC, in '93 - 95; one of the only truly bike friendly cities in the US (in Canada, most cities are). U street and 'Madams Organ' were the hopping places back then, although I also caught some great live bands (e.g. Social D) at the 930. Overall, a fantastic city to be young and geeky-but-pretty in. I lived, loved and lost richly!

So did St. Nicholas Although, kids still there???... wtf?!!!! 2. HeliosRunner's sitrep thread. As usual, I like his topo maps, although his front line markings should not be taken too literally.

...killed during an air-raid on Tobruk; a NAAFI tea urn fell on his head. So where might we find imagery of devastated districts of Donetsk City, leveled by 8 years of merciless Banderite terrorist shelling? Pretty easy to find on the Ukraine side of the line.... Both sides filling up hospitals....

Oh, I know there's a Chinese company happy to send Chinese technicians to provide those essential services, and all the equipment... for cash. And hey, why not cut out the middleman, they'll happily modernise and operate all the O&G infra and mines for Mother Russia as well, and provide all the civil infra gratis. Here, just let the nice warm friendly dragon slither its coils around you while your own society dissolves, stupid drunken bear.

Anime take on the drone p^rn....

1. So about that upcoming winter offensive. 2. Mobiks gonna be mighty uncomfortable after sunset. And the Ukies may be able to smell them from a distance. 3. For the CMBS2 terrain files. Urban ground tiles gonna need a lot more ambient litter: paper, plastic, wood scrap.

I assume someone will geolocate this street eventually and establish which side of the lines it was filmed on... But at the moment, I'm inclined to believe it's real, since GirkinGirkin doesn't tend to knowingly circulate Russian prop.

well somebody is wrong then, @FancyCat

I don't know whether that is a hard and fast rule. I do agree to the extent that such a strategy requires a great deal of time (and a very lethal army to carry it out), and that where it does work it's likely a multiple causation thing. 1. In postwar analysis, the Vietnamese noted that the American war had all but run the Southern provinces out of capable draft age males for the VC intake by the time the US left in 1972. In addition to taking kids and oldsters, they were sending large numbers of Northerners south. Cultural conflicts were driving southerners -- including VC cadre -- back toward the SVN government, which in spite of its own manifold defects and corruption still required a series of large conventional attacks from the North to topple in 1974-1975. Demographic data comparing northern and southern provinces supports this conclusion. So, did casualties (and strategic hamleting/population denial) defeat the VC insurgency? We will never really know, but it seriously impaired them.* 2. The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988 mainly owing to Iranian casualties, worsened by their reckless and costly human wave attacks with young volunteers early in the war. Iran's rulers wanted to continue, but simply could not do so. 3. Less well documented, the often intense insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala wound down when pro-rebel areas ran short of men willing to fight far from their villages. The governments basically paid the remainder to stay home as militiamen. 4. In Iraq, while Allied forces didn't interdict the host populations as such, AQIZ and other insurgent forces ran out of willing recruits to replace those lost in 2003-2005. By 2008 the US was ambushing groups of inexperienced young volunteers crossing the deserts from the borders, as local tribesmen were no longer interested in fighting. In this case, the Allies focused on isolating and shrinking the pool of fervent jihadis. 5. There's some case to be made that Japan was getting pretty close to empty on its national first line manpower pool, had the Bomb never been invented and OLYMPIC had to be executed. The Kwantung army was its last million man formation and when Zhukov took it out, they were really in a kids and codgers situation.... teenage girls with bamboo stakes, etc. Again, I'm *not* responding with a hard and fast 'Oh yes you can kill your way to victory' either. But it can absolutely be a major factor. * This is tempting me to pull one of my favourite hex-and-counter wargames VIETNAM 1965-1975 off the shelf (or onto VASSAL, really). If I only had time for such things, sigh.....

Ukraine Volunteer is 76 years old, and quite an outlier. The UA special forces took him in because of Russian fluency and a basket of skills (EOD particularly) they can't get easily. And he keeps up with the younger guys. Sounds like he also had a Ukie SoF mate while contract soldiering in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 2000s who spoke for him. ....Ref my prior posts on this, or just read the 50 odd posts in the blog which will convince you this is not a fake. The guy is amazing.

We have missed you, brother! Hope all is well! ...for those of us who have read Solzhenitsyn, zek grinder has an extra layer of awful to it. Could some mercurial Western squillionaire or other perhaps offer a 5 figure USD bounty plus an air ticket to a warm country for each severed head of a Wagner starik brought in by a defector?

https://turcopolier.com/partisans-ttg/ These partisans and the Ukrainian SF teams operating in Russian occupied Ukraine are an important part of Ukraines strategy, far more important than in many previous wars. It’s part of the “total defense” strategy now being implemented in many Eastern European countries. ....Murdering wounded Russian soldiers in their hospital beds in Simferopol (Crimea) is just not on though (assuming it happened of course). 2. Fair enough.... 3. Perhaps UA can do without the long range missiles for now. Their enemies seem to be doing quite a good job on themselves.... So much for that fabled 'Siberian Army' They expect that they will be given unusable body armour, so they are now looking at buying their own. "The price tag for them starts at 140,000 rubles ($2225). There's not enough pay here [to buy it]." 4. OT, but umm..... Collapse begins at home! 5. Wünderwaffen? 6. A fleeting peek behind the strange OPSEC curtain on social mobilisation in small town Ukraine. Dubno, east of Lviv: population 37,000. I dunno, maybe Ukrainians or Europeans see these kinds of images on the telly every night (I haven't watched TV news in over 25 years myself). But it would be good for Western media to testify (not propaganda, just show it!) just how 'all-in' ordinary Ukrainians are in this effort, and have been. Even in Western Ukraine, far from the sound of the guns (though not necessarily the rockets).

You may be being a little harsh on FC, I for one have gotten a lot out of his contributions here. ...But for reference, if you click on your profile at the top of the screen, one of the dropdown items is Ignored Users.

That's what I have been thinking, down at the CM Tiny battles end of the combat spectrum. Forget the Big Push that bogs down and gets blasted by arty or air: it's five thousand ambushes or envelopments, all along the front, on average yielding a RU:UK casevac ratio of, say, 3:1. The Russians have been hugely short of combat infantry throughout this war; that was by design (career soldiers were mainly specialists, to be augmented by mobik grunts). To me, that's the essence of why the BTG failed, hard. They've clearly learned since April that screening and patrolling around your positions and vehicles is NOT optional. But their VDV and spetsnaz have been worn away, and it looks like Wagner is going that way now. Where are the cadres to train the new guys in fieldcraft and get them to survive the first bumps? No infantry, no army.