TheVulture

Bear in mind though that CM scenarios are designed to be competitive to a degree, while real life isn't under the same constraints. A scenario where one side has AFVs and the other had nothing that can hurt them is badly designed. In real life it just means that one side is screwed. And is therefore the kind of situation you want to create. Most real life tanks never fire at another tank. The vast majority of CM tanks come up against other tanks.

It's also been strongly critiqued here: https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe

Or the person who wrote it up made a mistake somewhere. According to the manufacturer (Lockheed Martin) https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/himars.html "There are more than 540 fielded [HIMARS] systems worldwide". Which means that there aren't much more than that (if there were 700, you don't say "more than 540" in your press release. I don't think that Poland is single handedly donating 95% of globally deployed HIMARS to Ukraine.

I'd have thought that either publicly available data or satellite orbital anomalies would give you much better precision than a balloon. And more importantly, much better precision than is needed for any practical military application -the effect of gravitational variation on projectiles is going to be dwarfed by the day to day variations in atmospheric drag due to changing weather conditions.

On that front, a snippet from CNN: A US official said there were similar incidents with suspected Chinese surveillance balloons over Hawaii and Guam in recent years. On Thursday, a senior defense official said, “Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years, including prior to this administration.”

One possibility is that it is purely to test what the US response is like. Much like all those US and Russian bomber flights along the edge of each others airspace, which were mostly to gather data on detection ranges, response times and scales. China is seeing what the US reaction is - how soon they saw the balloon, how aggressively they responded to it. I wonder if it might be intended to have echoes of the Japanese fire balloons in WW2. Another possibility: this is actually relatively routine, but the US is making a big noise about it now for various political reasons (the cynic in me wonders if there is some USAF funding decisions pending in the near future...)

Only tangentially related, but a leaked memo from USAF General Mike Minehan has predicted that war between the USA and China is likely by 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-force-general-predicts-war-china-2025-memo-rcna67967 Its relevance in the immediate future is what it implies about the US's willingness to commit weapon systems to Ukraine versus maintaining its own capabilities (which are largely unrelated - equipment that the US would use in a peer conflict with China is emphatically not the stuff they are sending to Ukraine now), with a side helping out ramping up ordinance production and testing out new doctrines with drones etc. Again, of dubious direct relevance since a war with China would be overwhelmingly naval and air power, not ground forces.

Some news from the last day or two re Russian trade courtesy of Geopolitical Futures

10 tanks, or whatever it was, is pretty pointless, and unlike with the Leo2, it's not like there are half a dozen countries that can also chip in a small number, making a battaltion's worth in total. But politically it does have a use - mostly in breaking the taboo on providing modern western MBTs to Ukraine. It is militarily small enough to not provoke a meaningful reaction as a 'trial balloon', and once everyone (including Russia) is used to the idea, slowly ramping up the number of Leos being discussed is less of an issue. No idea how much that was planned, versus the UK just being a bit half-assed with 'we can only spare this many' (rather than the more realistic: "this is the war they are designed to fight, so we can either win it now or fight it again later and closer to home").

The last Perun video was on exactly this. Dictators need to have multiple duplicate military groups in competition with each other to prevent any one group being in a position to overthrow the boss. And the leaders on these duplicate groups are chosen more for their loyalty than their ability. The groups then inevitably compete with each other for the same resources, trying to increase their own personal empires at the expense of the competition.

You can imagine a situation where a hillside has multiple detectors and dozens of missiles available - next gen javelin types with 10km range or more, and one person on the far side of the hill can basically spot and smoke any armour that moves within sight of the hill. Give or take tank active protection systems. And since you're simply not aiming for man-portability here, you can have larger payloads and ranges. But with passive detectors, and small launch systems that are just small lumps of metal until they activate, there's not much you can do to detect or take out that kind of system directly - and spotting a launch site when it activates just means you've found a location that is no longer useful to you. It goes against most western ideas of fighting mobile wars where everything moves fast, but what we've seen in Ukraine is that in peer conflicts, stalemates and static front lines might be not-rare feature of future war, so having some capability based around relatively static positions might be useful, rather than gearing almost everything for constant mobility.

Isn't it more that Soviet - and by extension Russian - air doctrine wasn't interested in trying to achieve and superiority in the sense that NATO thinks. The Russians focus on achieving temporary, local air superiority sufficient to be able to launch strikes in direct support of ground troops. NATO tries to achieve permanent, theatre wide and superiority to use and power to hit rear areas to destroy logistics, HQs, communications and interdict movement. Hence Russian and doctrine isn't too try and contest this with air power. Instead they focus on an array of ground based anti-air systems for defence, and punching local holes in enemy air cover for the duration of a single mission. Since replacing an entire and defence network and air force is a very major undertaking, Ukraine also still has the legacy Soviet system, much the same as the Russians. So neither side has an air force designed to maintain superiority over and behind enemy lines. And both sides (more so the Russians, at the start of the war at least) have plentiful artillery, and that artillery is doctrinally supposed to fulfill the role that is the province of Close Air Support in NATO doctrine. So I'd have thought it was to be expected that artillery would be playing much of the NATO CAS for in this conflict, because both sides have Soviet-legacy ground and and forces designed to fight that way. And while Ukraine is becoming more NATO-like in many ways, this is something that would require the complete retooling of most of the armed forces before it can be changed significantly.

I've always heard it as the even more ridiculous "up with which I will not put". Possibly not true regarding Churchill having said it though : the anecdote seems to be an evolution of one that originally didn't involve Churchill at all: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/?amp=1

Russia knows that it had a demographic problem even before this was started killing off 20-30 year old men, so in true Russian fashion they've decided to approach a solution from the wrong end by allowing soldiers to freeze their sperm for free. So that when they get killed, their widows can still have their kids. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64107729

Obviously the police, army, state governments and all the social, governmental, economic and legal institutions in Germany will accept the change calmly and obediently. I can't begin to imagine how these nutbags thought this was going to work. It's the same as the sovereign citizen loonies (many countries seem to have some kind of equivalent) that seem to think there is some kind of magically pre-existing 'law' that governs how things work, rather than it all being something that is basically the implicit consensus of everyone in the country.

How much of the mobik experience is policy though? Russia does have capable forces: the units that have been defending in Kherson for months have done a competent job, and most of them managed to withdraw over the river in reasonably good order. Some sections of the RA are capable of coherent, integrated (more or less) action. Are the mobiks a counterexample of what is 'normal' in other sectors, or a deliberate policy of just getting enough bodies in place in critical areas quickly to buy enough time for the better units to reconstitute (at least a little) and relocate. Were they ever expected to do anything but die in place in short order. Just throw them out there as a speed bump, and don't bother telling the artillery or anyone else because it really doesn't matter.

BBC reporting that the Polish president is saying the explosion was most likely Ukrainian air defences: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-asia-63593855 Blast 'very likely' caused by Ukrainian air defence - Polish president More now from a press conference by Polish President Andrzej Duda. He says it's "very likely" that a missile explosion in a Polish village late last night was caused by Ukrainian air defences. Ukraine was attempting to defend against a barrage of Russian strikes. It has denied it was to blame for the blast in the Polish village.

The Russian Orthodox church turned into a fanatical apocalyptic death cult so gradually that we never noticed it happening...

I'm far from sure, but it certainly looks like very similar surroundings to videos of Ushakova Avenue in Kherson from several months ago. But maybe that's just a common style of buildings / fences/ sidewalks etc that you'd see in a lot of large Ukrainian towns and cities.

Another small bit of good news today: 45 Ukrainian soldiers returned home in a prisoner swap. I didn't see any information about what Russian prisoners were exchanged. https://twitter.com/AndriyYermak/status/1591045090663092226

I think most people, given the choice between street fighting in Kherson with the possibility of killing and capturing many Russians, versus liberating the city with fighting within the city, but letting the majority of Russians escape, would choose the option that avoided the city fighting. The cost in extra military casualties, civilian casualties and damage to the city isn't worth what you'd gain.

The problem with that is (as I'm sure you are aware) that you can't tie the scooting to the shooting. Half the time the guy won't get the spot quickly, will just be lining up the shot, and then the timer is up and he's off 2 seconds too early. Or spots and fires straight away and then hangs around for 15 seconds to await retaliation. But it is a very hard UI problem to trade off giving players control over the they need once in a while, versus making the who interface unworkable complex. If you have to say 30 parameters before you can issue a simple move command, then that's useless. If you don't have 30 parameters, then you are going to run in to a situation where you can't give an offer that does exactly what you want, and you get to curse as your pixeltruppen die to a problem you'd foreseen but didn't have the tools to prevent.

The press (and humans in general) love to take a series of events and turn it in to a narrative. It can't just be a series of events. It has to be a series of events with cause and effect connecting them. So if Putin has cancer then we have to invent a way to turn it in to either a cause or an effect of the war, of at least of some of his decisions during the war. History is particularly prone to doing this.

It does sound pretty reasonable - at face value. I suspect the cynicism comes from the fact that US practice for decades seems to have been to be willing to shovel pallet loads of money in to 'their' side without much concern for efficient use, and the people who want to cut off the money hose usually frame it in terms of wanting to be responsible with the tax money and to use of effectively. So it's not the meaning of what he said that gets a reaction. It's people thinking that what he says sounds like the standard 'code' for "let's stop doing this".

I'm going to hazard a guess that you meant "incarnations". Unless you've been a very naughty boy... But as to your main point, as has been said before, and obstacle is only and obstacle if it is covered by fire. If Ukraine has the opportunity to dismantle it at leisure, rather than in combat, then it doesn't make much difference whether it is styrofoam of the tip of a buried concrete iceberg: it's an inconvenience, not a barrier. And as you say, if it is covered by fire and artillery, combined with mines and other types of obstacles, then you're probably not moving it during combat regardless, so it's doing its job of cutting off lines of approach for defenders.