panzermartin

You didn't answer my question, though. The fact that the Australians want nuclear submarines can have a lot of good (and some bad) reasons but is in itself no evidence of Chinese expansionism. I also didn't say that the Chinese government doesn't act aggressive. They are aggressively establishling presence, militarily and otherwise, in a number of regions. But so do a number of other countries, the USA being a prime example. But where do you see the Chinese actually expanding their territory? Hong Kong used to be Chinese and was given back by the UK, so that doesn't qualify. Taiwan is, well, complicated, in the sense that most countries for whatever reason don't have official diplomatic relations with them and so accept that Taiwan is still somehow Chinese. You don't have to agree with that but that's why Taiwan is also not a good example for expansionism. So, honest question because maybe I'm just missing it, where do you think China is going to expand its territory?

Wait, didn't t you know that China has over 750 military bases all across the globe and is enforcing chinese language, chinese currency, chinese culture and chinese weapons everywhere?
But it's too difficult to write in chinese so we all continue in english here. 

there are always people that care about others/the world and the ones that care about themselves. It frightens me that a generation of the ones that care about themselves works in finance, it scares me to hell when they start to work in tech and silicon valley. I get horrified and actually start to loose hope when these start to work at farms.

Russian T-90M in Bakhmut city center. It fires toward cottadge area, laying south from railway station. The tank stands in about 750 m from railroad
 
 

100 % old Soviet stocks. We hadn't own SA-missiles production. There were some projects like a missile, based on R-27 AA, but it wasn't realized to serial production. So, we can only to extend resourse of existimg SA misiles.  

Damn... This war is just wrong, seeing your son, brother, friend, husband, father shot in HD. I think after WW1 this the most horrible war for the infantry man. It's just unfair to be infantry nowadays. It always has been, but now it's another level. 

I really hope you are right. You are probably are...
But we can go on a larger conventional war on multiple fronts for years before turning nuclear(if ever) . And that will ensure that all the gains we in the West have achieved through decades of social struggles, our freedoms, our standard of living, will go down the drain sacrificed for the "greater cause". That will make the elites very happy. Just look what is happening in Europe right now with major strikes, and people being slowly deprived of post war privileges...
This war is very strange, the way we are willingly sucked into it in an age we had forgotten how to hold a gun in Europe. Maybe it's all about Putin's megalomania maybe not. 
 

Hey I'm not in the nut camp, thanks. Not yet. But I know elites on both camps are ruthless. Capitalism and war go hand in hand. If all else fails its time for a big war to reshape the markets. Deconstruct to reconstruct. I don't exclude chinese, russian elites or anyone else.   

I haven't done it for a long time but before CM the best combat simulators were flight simulators and it has been a long time since I have played in one but if I wanted to fly as close as possible to something else in the air the was going much slower than me you would sort of do what the Russian pilot did. They wanted to dump fuel on it so you have to pass close and above it.
You have to see it so you would start at a lower elevation and climb towards it with your aim point being just above it by the distance you wanted to miss. Being slightly off axis also gives yourself more space to miss it.
The fastest way to move yourself in the air jumpy fast wise is to rip back in the stick which means you probably want to be well above your stall speed which may exacerbate the speed difference. You only have two hands so one hand is one the stick and the other dumping fuel at some point so its not on the throttle. 

I am finding this gentleman's tactical analysis to be a must read
in the comments he foresee that these adaptations won't be very successful (?) in light of the top-down approach that dominates the Russian Army.
I think this links up nicely the ongoing conversation about the duality of mission and direct command with a case study that is quite fresh. In this case, DC is needed to allocate the resources (manpower, supporting arms) that make up these units. Obviously, MC kicks in when these formations are set in motion (much like a robot but made by people and "dumb" vehicles and weapons) and they need to handle whatever contingencies follow from engaging the enemy (e.g. interesting to see the allocation of a demining vehicle).
This is an example of adaptation rather than devolution. It's not clear though that they can  implement it well due to materiel and personnel issues. But clearly there is someone, somewhere with both brains and time to come up with ideas...
 
 

So China is crossing the line with arms supply. Pretty fubar situation. Don't want to sound pessimistic but, the endgame seems to be WW3. It always starts "small" and then things escalate out of control. I haven't seen a single step back since Feb24 from any side. Only steps forward to total war. 
Are wars just inevitable dark tunnels of human destiny, when there is a bottleneck, economic or social and old and new must clash to give a violent birth to a new world?
Or are the elites pulling the strings to a choreographed destruction and redistribution of power and wealth. 
Grateful to have experienced the peaceful and prosperous and years of post WW2. Very insecure about the future:( 

So China is crossing the line with arms supply. Pretty fubar situation. Don't want to sound pessimistic but, the endgame seems to be WW3. It always starts "small" and then things escalate out of control. I haven't seen a single step back since Feb24 from any side. Only steps forward to total war. 
Are wars just inevitable dark tunnels of human destiny, when there is a bottleneck, economic or social and old and new must clash to give a violent birth to a new world?
Or are the elites pulling the strings to a choreographed destruction and redistribution of power and wealth. 
Grateful to have experienced the peaceful and prosperous and years of post WW2. Very insecure about the future:( 

Well, it tells us that the rest of the world doesn't buy our pretty Sunday speeches, and rightly so. Our precious western values apply mostly to ourselves and definitely only extend to other regions of the world as far as they don't interfere with our interests. Which usually means we don't give a f*** about autocrats as long they are "our" autocrats and we don't care about human rights when cheap resources and workforce are better accessible without them.
That's why it means nothing to quite a few countries that we are democracies and China and Russia are not. For them it matters how they are treated and as a matter of fact, so far we have a worse track record.
What we should learn from that is that we shouldn't take it for granted that we are seen as the good guys and everyone gathers under our banner. If this is to become a clash of systems then we better make sure to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world through deeds not words.

This is how CM BS 2 clip will/should look like I guess. Soviet tanks mixed with Western APCs, white wash terrain with blackened blast marks and shellholes and later modules with Leopards and Abraams (and Armata). Apologies for thinking about wargaming these moments but it is just too obvious thought seeing all the action from drones, the RPG ambushes etc, that all this time CM was the closest (digital) thing to the reality of warfare. 
 

This is how CM BS 2 clip will/should look like I guess. Soviet tanks mixed with Western APCs, white wash terrain with blackened blast marks and shellholes and later modules with Leopards and Abraams (and Armata). Apologies for thinking about wargaming these moments but it is just too obvious thought seeing all the action from drones, the RPG ambushes etc, that all this time CM was the closest (digital) thing to the reality of warfare. 
 

Sharing a whole continent with only two other countries while having a population more than twice as large as the other two combined does tend to make life simpler. Although the other two might feel different about the situation.
The last two times we tried to make the political situation on the European continent simpler, the USA were instrumental in preventing that. Please make up your mind about what you want. 😉

This only proves the racist inside Churchill. Maybe he was drunk again though. 

Well, there goes pretty much every book in 18th and 19th century literature in every tradition folks...

The truth is it took a little Chinese "communism" too to make these affordable (?) to the masses. Capitalism and consumerism has also polluted environment, food, cultures, health systems, politics, polluted arts and sports and its by no means a panacea for the future of humans.  We can do better and I would trade a more human center system than fancy ten camera iPhones. 
And ultimately I think capitalism is causing the downfall of West and it's ideals rooted in the Athenian democracy and classical era. 
Remember West and US particularly created its big and possibly deadly rival in the form of China with the uncontrolled outsourcing and tech export because "capital has no country". 

Yes AI will have to bring changes to the system. I hope the elite understands they can't put everyone out of work while they hold the keys to automation and the big share of goods. This will either lead to most people going extinct or to another revolution like in 1789. Hopefully the second. 

Yeah - so as much as I support  Ukraine's fight against the Russian invaders - I don't personally see a need to target all Russian Arts/Science/People as  Villains incarnate . You'll just have to accept that  a lot of people are not going to see the need to swallow this particular thread of Ukrainian thinking  . Its a little too extreme -  I'd advise you to dial it back a bit .

Of course capitalism "works" but it doesn't work in a way that is useful for society. A good economical system converts greed into productivity. This never actually worked reliably but since WW2 capitalism managed to sell the narrative that it does. Work hard and you will get rich or at least have enough money for a good life. We were fed the stories of people with good ideas who worked hard and became millionaires. We weren't told about survivor bias and that those people ultimate were just those who got lucky. At least up to a decade or two ago it was good enough that a large middle class was created, mostly in the western democracies.
But in the end capitalism is not about hard work, it is, as the name implies, about capital. Which ultimately means making money by having money. And that only works with interests. You lend someone money and expect to get back more than you gave him. Since that is what our whole economy is about we need perpetual growth (because otherwise you can't pay interests). And it is not about hard work. You very rarely get rich by working hard. But if you have money, you very reliably get more money. That is the opposite of converting greed to productivity.
Now, about the middle class: We currently ser a decline of the middle class in many western countries. That's because it was kind of an accident that got corrected by globalization. The middle class are well educated people whom companies needed to produce their ever more complicated products and who thus made the money to actually buy them. Nowadays we have cheap but well educated people in far off countries and still some middle class here to buy stuff but which often largely exists because countries subsidize companies to stay in the country, often making debts in the process. But since one person's debts are another person's capital that model, for now, works even better.
But once AI and automation make the vast majority of jobs vanish (and that will happen!) plus climate change showing us that perpetual growth on a finite planet can't work this whole system is in serious trouble.

It's not so much that Europe has outsourced security to the US (and somehow fooled them into paying way more for defence than we do). It's that Europe imploded culturally, politically, and economically because of WW2, and the US then took over global leadership.
When Trump says it's "not fair" that EU countries pay less for military, that's based on the idea that we are somehow in an equal partnership. We are not. The USA is running the show, and EU is generally fine with that because the USA is way better than any alternative. And because we really don't want to be too assertive in global politics, telling people in other countries what to do... we've been there.
Also, while the US pays way more for NATO (in fact investing in its own superpower status), European countries spend way more of their GDP on international development and humanitarian aid. So it's not so much that we don't pay our part of the bill - we just pay different parts of it.

Then I'd have to say you suck at strategic assessment.
I don't know if George Kennan is considered a 'neo-tankie', but his commentary a quarter century ago has proven downright clairvoyant:
 
perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.