DavidFields

ROTFLMAO an entire country with balls of steel.  Makes Putin's bare chested horseback ride downright effeminate.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  He can try out for the role of Lady Godiva in a netflix series.

Because we can't like yout post, thank you Steve for this great summary

We have talked a lot about tactical lessons being learned in this war, but there are also strategic lessons to be learned and this is a very important one. 
NO, I AM NOT AN ISOLATIONIST. Just wanted to get that out there so that this isn't looked at as a political post.
Western powers need to be as self sufficient as possible in their critical infrastructure and manufacturing. Energy independence is very important. I know a lot of countries just can't get there but they should try to get as close as possible and definitely not rely on rogue regimes. Big lessons out there for the learning and especially for the US who has the ability to do those things. Sadly I doubt that most countries will truly learn and take this to heart. It will probably always be cheaper to source oil/gas from other countries but that doesn't mean that is the best or safest route. 
If the US can't even manufacture a tablet, how is it going to produce or maintain all it's fancy whiz-bang gear if Taiwan was suddenly not able to export microchips? If Taiwan is ever incorporated into China, Xi would have a huge economic lever to use against the world. 
Ah heck, I'm just probably paranoid. I'm sure everything will be just fine........
 

You must be new to the show. It has been always about politics. Who likes whom in Europe. That is the point of it. The music is just to pass the time.

who cares, if it pisses off Russia, score another one for the good guys!

This issue here is that, if slice-and-hold works again, Russia will keep doing it.  Might as well give up now and give them everything - which isn't acceptable.  The big question if Putin does what ISW is suggesting: will the nuclear threat again be a bluff, or this time be real?

You are. And I can comment on a couple things you bring up. 
First of all, the role of light infantry in the defense comparing Ukraine to {anything else}. During the Cold War, in the 82d Airborne we trained on something called the AAAD (Airborne Anti-Armor Defense). In practice, and from what I've seen of Ukraine, what wee did is a more concentrated version. We would have been in the line somewhere, with the mission to stop/seriously degrade the oncoming Soviet armor columns. To do this, we were loaded to the gills with TOWs and LAWs in strongpoints with interlocking fields creating crossfire kill zones. In Ukraine it seems to be much more decentralized, with hit and run tactics, rather than strongpoints. Just like mechanized company teams, we had alternate and fallback firing positions. This is a likely task of light infantry thrown into the line of battle.
HOWEVER, saying that, it isn't the best role for light infantry, and we didn't really expect to happen except in desperation, to plug a gaping hole. Which of course, gave us a fair estimate of our potential lifespan at the time (seriously, none of us expected to live to 30).
Your last point about offense - light infantry is most suited to "mobile" offensive operations, and we've seen some of those, mostly unsuccessful, by the Russians. An airmobile operation to seize an airfield, or over a river to assist in a bridging operation making an instant expanded bridgehead are classic light infantry ops. For non-airborne or non-airmobile ops, ("legs" in paratrooper terminology 🙂 ), offense from a light infantry unit is fairly limited. A typical mobile op could be to airlift a unit into an airfield, seize it, and then hold on for dear life for a day, or two, or three, until the armor/mech units can either be 1) airlifted in to reinforce/relieve, or 2) force their way to join up, or 3) some combination of the two. As you can imagine, these are high risk/high reward operations, with a large potential for hanging that light infantry unit out in the breeze.
There are some differences in Russian and US airborne/airmobile units in that Russia can airdrop light IFVs right along with the infantry. That would be quite a nice advantage if you can do it right. When you do something like that, OUR doctrine would be drop infantry first, secure and expand the drop zone and THEN you drop vehicles, including artillery (mortars come in first with the infantry). Don't I don't know how the Russians do it, (or considering how things have been going, how they are SUPPOSED to do it, which can be two different things.)
I don't know enough about Ukraine's airborne and airmobile units to compare, so perhaps @Haiduk could jump in and comment. This may have been well covered but in reading 700+ pages (and I have), it may have escaped my overworked brain cells.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions. We're all trying to figure out what's happening 🙂
Dave

First off, anyone who says they "hate all politicians they are all the same", is being intellectually dishonest or willfully ignorant.  If you can't tell the difference between fascist politicians that are working to overthrow our democracy and the democratic ones trying to save it, then.... I don't know what to say other than what I just said.  
Second, on Rand Paul.  What Steve said.  Again, intellectual dishonesty or willful ignorance.  Your pick.  We know exactly why Rand does what he does.  
He's a disgrace and an embarrassment.  
I'm done.  I just had to say it.

One of the questions we probably won't get answered for at least a year or three is how many hundreds of Nato analysts, and how many gigawatts of server farm were expended every day to turn the several zillion incoming ISR streams being generated into a coherent picture of the battlefield that is handed to the Ukrainian General Staff as a bow-tied present every morning, and again after afternoon tea. The Russians have essentially never generated even a tank company sized surprise action that I am aware of, much less anything on a scale that might matter. Anyone who actually wants to win the next war is going to have to figure out how to deal with that.

It´s a very different game with taxes, in different countries! We have very high taxes, but pay 10 dollars a day on hospital. Even if you do brain cancer surgery! In a low tax country like the US, you make the choise by your self. 

This is not quite right.  ~1/2 US people don't end up paying federal income taxes.  This gets promulgated into the myth that half of america is free loading.  These are children, stay at home parents, disabled, etc plus the majority which is low income folks.  But low income folks DO pay social security and medicare taxes.  Since Social Security, and Medicare make up ~1/3 of the budget and around half of mandatory spending, they are chipping in.  And they are paying all sorts of state & local taxes.  I don't want to distract just wanted to clarify a bit.
But if anyone thinks being low income worker is free loading, they should try it for a while. 

Having heard on the BBC (who just this morning got around to the famous bridging fiasco as breaking news) about how Russia is threatening to encircle Sievierodonetsk, I decided to summarise how the Russian 'threatening to encircle' reports have changed over the war so far:

NVM
(deleted to avoid descending into partisan politics)

99% of that supposed opposition is media enhanced political rhetoric. A huge majority of Americans support Ukraine. American politicians from both parties recognize that.

Expansion of NATO in Europe also means that Europe will become less dependent on the US. The US already had a dissident president, and his supporters still support putin. I prefer the US to remain fully democratic, but I don't take them for granted. To call Kim of North Korea and putin great guys give me the shivers. Two nut regimes with enough bombs to wage a terror campaign on the world is unacceptable. One nut regime (Russia) is bad enough. The Democratic Party won't be here forever. The social democratic systems in Europe are called left liberals in the US. The Republican Party needs to regain trust. 

Is fast and quick really that important? You know what they say about the triple constraint of projects ...

Pick any two you want, and watch the third suffer.
(except in combat case the corners would be something like time, casualties, and resources)
 
Anyhoo, what I had in my mind is basically a smaller scale implementation of your proposal for the UA offensive against the hypothetical RA defence of the Donbas. Ie, the one where UA isolates and reduces each company position before moving on. Except in the case of NATO vs UA it'd be finding, isolating, and reducing each platoon or section position, before moving on. It's not going to win many Rommel-esque style points, but it'd get the job done at tolerable cost in casualties, I think. In other words, I'm choosing to sacrifice Time in the above triangle in favour of Casualties and Resources.
And, of course, logistically in the hypothetical NATO vs UKR war it'd be UKR in the strat log position that RUS is currently in (no friends, no suppliers), rather than being the beneficiary of an endless magical conveyer belt of free splodey goodness.

Recce by death, with mass fires follow up, is straight out of the WW2 playbook.  If that is the Russian design, sure it should work as long as the Russians can keep feeding that bloody "Find" and keep up momentum.
If the Russians are in fact much better than we have been led to believe, more in line with what we saw in 2014...then why are they not crushing the UA?  
I get all the numbers comparison hazards, but there is no getting around the fact that the RA had (note past tense) the clear advantage in mass.  They also had their choice of where to put that mass at the beginning of this.  So by all traditional conventional metrics, this thing should be over by now...and that did not happen.  Quite the opposite. 
Maybe the opening phase was just a wild winger, and the UA got lucky; however, we have seen the same thing in the Donbas Offensive phase; Russian mass is not working...and it is supposed to if all the textbooks still have any value.
My honest guess is that the Russian suck, but not as badly as we think - at least not initially during the opening offensive.  And something the UA was doing basically negated that mass.  I suspect it was a combo of ISR superiority - a lot of western strat stuff at play - UAVs everywhere, hybrid self-synchronizing tactics, all link back to integrated fires.  My working hypothesis is that Ukrainian defence has, and continues to be able to create friction along the entire Russian operational system.  This friction, along with Russia's own, has made all that mass nearly useless as it is dislocated and disrupted constantly.  To the point that up north it may have fallen under its own weight.

So I also think that this will be Russia's play, likely trying to hold on until either the West loses interest, Ukraine burns out and/or they can see an opportunity to go back on the offensive.  By going to the defensive Russia and freezing the conflict, Russia may be able to reduce Ukrainian options while sustaining theirs, and possibly see openings for new ones.  All war is negotiation, a frozen conflict puts Russia in a better bargaining position as they can drag this out, shift the domestic narrative to one of "defending against attacks on Russia from the evil West".
Big problem needs to solved first - how do they freeze the conflict?  Can they?
We have been watching for over two months and I am still scratching my head at what is going on here.  But for arguments sake let's play this out and discuss what a Russian Defence would look like:
Strategic - I am going to assume they are going to dig in along the lines they have in order to create bubbles where they can have referendums, create "republics" and get people to spend rubbles.  They will likely keep stuffing those lines with as much cannon fodder as they can find and hope that sheer mass in trenches can attrit Ukrainian and Western willpower.  In sum, they will lose a lot of people but so long as Ukraine loses as a similar rate, the strategic equation may tip in their direction.  Good plan, but let's see what it is resting on. 
Operational - 70+ days into this thing and the Russians have still not solved for setting operational conditions, and likely will not be able to in the future.  The air space remains at rough parity, or in reality porosity, ISR and information remain out of Russian reach in any meaningful manner and logistics still remain a problem - even in the defence. The Russian's ability to Shield their forces remains in serious question as Ukraine is accelerating its deep strike capability either through indirect fires, missiles and/or NLOS self-loitering munitions.  So a Russian operational defence is likely going to, 1) be visible from space, 2) static because manoeuvre is going to be very hard and the Russians have already demonstrated that they are not to good at this, and 3) have its entire operational system in reach of Ukrainian ISR and weapons with no real counter. 
And then there is the frontages.  I am not sure what Russia has left in the hopper as they slowly bleed out on this last offensive.  However, conservatively we are talking an approx 850km frontage from Kherson to Kharkiv, so Western Front WW1 length.  To even try to make that airtight, particularly without solid C4ISR is going to take in the order of more than 1 million troops (that is about 1100 troops per km of frontage - depth and rotations).  The Russians do not have that right now, not even close.  They would need to generate those men and even "here is your uniform and a rifle" takes weeks, months if you want anything that resembles an able fighting force.   Without that force the ridiculous frontage is going to be extremely porous, likely for months.  Now let's go down a level and see where the real problems lie.
Tactical- Given the Operational conditions, we know the Russians will not be able to do a complete linear defence in depth, so, knowing the Russians they will go with strong points.  Due to political considerations, the Russians will not be able to adopt the Ukrainian style of warfare and trade space for manoeuvre - and they probably could not pull it off if they had the green light to try.  The Russians will shoot for mutually supporting/firebase concepts much like they did in Afghanistan and something that resembles a mobile reserve system to plug gaps.  You can see the tactical problems stack up already.  Nothing in this was has signaled that high concentrations of troops, even dug in, is a good idea.  The Ukrainians, being fed Western ISR, will be able to see exactly where those strongpoints and reserves are, and importantly, where they are not. 
So what those "strong points" actually become are deathtraps as the Ukrainians, infiltrate - the porous frontage, likely with irregulars and SOF, isolate - by hitting the mobile reserve and logistics in depth, and destroy - Russian tactical strong points in detail with a combination of freakishly accurate artillery fire and PGMs, with an mech follow up/clean up.  [BTW, this is very much how the Iraqi security forces re-took Mosul]  The UA will employ drones everywhere and one strongpoint at a time erode entire fronts until they crack.  Here I am very interested in the time race: can Russians push troops forward and dig them in at the same or better pace than the UA can blow them up?  My guess is "no" but we will see.
An obvious solution for the Russians to this is a robust and effective screen in front of those defensive positions to prevent infiltration...sure, but recon screens have been something the Russians appear to have lost all knowledge of and the majority of the trained troops they had for this job are all making sunflowers right now...and for an 850km frontage they are going to need a lot of them.
So back to my original question - how can the Russians freeze this conflict?  Particularly when the tactical and operational conditions do not point to an easy answer?  Next question, what happens if the Russians cannot freeze this conflict?

The above is a great example of why this board kills.

S’ok, Afghanistan was my second war, tough time etc.  Still is a bit of a trigger.  Honestly I do not think we could ever have enough resources to win that war without full occupation and then they would have ate at us for a century if we tried that.  Afghanistan needs to fix Afghanistan and there are layers of issues there that made it a doomed mission for us from the get go, which frankly makes all those kids dying there such a waste.
Anyway, don’t mind me.  From experience the math is easy at one level, and very hard the deeper you go.  The trick is figuring out which of the maths matter and when.  Sometimes one has to go with the gut and instinct, other times you need facts and stats because they can tell more than what you are seeing.  Messy miserable business all of this, but in the end someone has to do it.

Our landing on this bare piece of rocky land has no sense.
This is typical "smoke curtain", when you defeated. As if, "well, we withdrew, but the enemy lost many times more, than we are". Or "it was a plan". Also add Russian propaganda feature to turn all upside down. If they launched a missile in railway station, they say "this was Ukrainans", so here the same case "Ukrianians filmed desroying of own helicopter and pass it off as our". As well as "Ukrainans lost landing boat "Stanislav", but indeed it turned out next Russian Raptor (our Kentavr-class landing boats distantly similar to Raptors, but its can not be confused)  
 

Pretty sure it's rubbish. There were several Ukrainian drone / aircraft attacks on the Russians on snake island,  the videos of which were in this thread.  But a Ukrainian attempt to actually land forces to recapture the island, aside from making absolutely no sense given Russian air and naval superiority (there's no way they expect to hold the island) - there's no evidence that such an attack was attempted. Nothing from the Ukrainian side about it.  No video or anything else from the Russians. And competely implausible claims of numbers from the Russian side. 
Unless Russia manage to come up with some actual evidence, I'd ignore it as "total b$*%@ocks"

They do want to stamp out Ukrainian culture, anti-Russian activists and the political class. 

this picture is not "full context for foreigners".   That is a an extreme outlier of a picture.  It's like "jews for Hitler".  That is so misleading as to be a complete lie.  The 1 out of 10,000 exception is shown and we are meant to conclude the utterly, ridiculous "see, even the black folks loooooove the confederacy!"
ASL Veteran, you should ashamed of trying to pass this off as informative.

I don't think we can exclude Putin saying:
1. Ukraine does not exist.  That land is now considered by Russia to be part of Russia.
2. The Baltic States are in the Russian sphere of influence.  It is unfortunate that they are currently in NATO, but they will be forced out of it.
3. The same for various countries in Eastern Europe, which he might name specifically.
4. If Finland applies for NATO membership, Russia will consider it an act of war.
 
We, Russia, can do this because we are a nuclear power, and therefore no one can definitively stop us, even if it takes years of fighting.
Isn't this what you want, the Russian people?  You want to belong to something great.  
(He might throw in some "Nazi" language--but that is marketing, and ultimately not necessary for his assertion of Russia's supposed place.  He might put a long, fiery, but ultimately dreary, historical preamble to the above.  And some religion.  He feels both intensely, and feels --so-- slighted.  But, again, ultimately such verbiage is not necessary.  It is a sheer Power/Will exercise. )
At least, from what I had read, the above was sort of what he was telling everyone prior to Feb 24. Didn't he say something like "Now will you listen to me!", shortly after the invasion?
 
David