TheVulture

What message politically does that send the US? If you won't supply Ukraine to defend your own national interests, we'll reward you by paying you billions of dollars and do it for you?
Defending Ukraine is in Europe's interests too of course, which is why they are spending money on it.  But for things like artillery shells it is better to invest the money in their own production capacity,  not throwing it at the US as a temporary solution and ignoring the long term one. 
Particularly true if the US is going to become an unreliable ally that is going to abandon allies because of internal ideological politics.

What message politically does that send the US? If you won't supply Ukraine to defend your own national interests, we'll reward you by paying you billions of dollars and do it for you?
Defending Ukraine is in Europe's interests too of course, which is why they are spending money on it.  But for things like artillery shells it is better to invest the money in their own production capacity,  not throwing it at the US as a temporary solution and ignoring the long term one. 
Particularly true if the US is going to become an unreliable ally that is going to abandon allies because of internal ideological politics.

What message politically does that send the US? If you won't supply Ukraine to defend your own national interests, we'll reward you by paying you billions of dollars and do it for you?
Defending Ukraine is in Europe's interests too of course, which is why they are spending money on it.  But for things like artillery shells it is better to invest the money in their own production capacity,  not throwing it at the US as a temporary solution and ignoring the long term one. 
Particularly true if the US is going to become an unreliable ally that is going to abandon allies because of internal ideological politics.

Good read.  Basically outlines Corrosive warfare and proposes it as the main strategy for this entire year.  I am pretty much in agreement.
Ukraine needs to develop and field capabilities that allow for rapid, precision attrition of the Russian military system along its entire length.  The pace of that attrition must outmatch the RAs ability to replace and reinforce.  It must be targeted at key nodes and connectors, not simply grinding cannon fodder at the front.  If they can do this well enough, for long enough, the RA operational system will lend itself to collapse, which will then allow for manoeuvre.
At least that is the theory.

It's the best solution that Ukrane has available to it, through no fault of their own.

It's the best solution that Ukrane has available to it, through no fault of their own.

It's the best solution that Ukrane has available to it, through no fault of their own.

Armenians, and many many many other groups (too many to list) whose historical lands got 'solved' by war, progressively or all at once, might differ with that assessment.

All complaints about pathing in the game will be refrred to this video forevermore.

the problem with artillery ammunition, and barrels, is that they have to withstand absurdly high stress. 
 
Above is a very technical article from decades ago proving that a slightly cheaper grade of steel was not going to work. Virtually nothing in the civilian economy operates at the same kind of stress levels. So there is exactly as much capacity out there as the government has been willing to pay for. The single biggest lesson of this war is that we weren't paying for even a fraction of enough. What makes this much worse is that production machinery, and the machines to make the production machinery are just as specialized, and the capacity for all of it has withered with three plus decades of very low demand. Resurrecting all of that is requires serious engineering AFTER we get of our rear ends in gear and write the checks, and contracts to pay for it. We have done an absolutely crap job of doing that in a coherent way, that admits this problem isn't going away next week. Rheinmetal and the various U.S. defense contractors need SIGNED CONTRACTS to even get started. Two years in many of those contracts STILL aren't signed. It is a an epic case study in refusing to admit there is a war on.
There is real engineering being done on dragging whole process from 1950s tech up to something modern, but please note the 2025 delivery date for the first new model shells.   Drones are pretty much the polar opposite in terms of the difficulty of manufacturing. Every single piece that goes into them is common civilian tech. The actual warheads are usually RPG rounds simply because there are warehouses full of them around. There is nothing particularly complicated about designing warhead for drone use that would be lighter, cheaper and more effective. Because drones do not undergo the enormous stresses that being fired even from a RPG, much less a 155mm artillery barrel impose. Any thin wall tubing would work just fine. Soda cans would probably work just fine. Someone just has to decide to order five million of the bleeping things and it ought to be possible to put together a factory in six months that can make a thousand of them an hour with out ever being touched by a human hand. Somebody just has to make a decision and write a contract. The Ukrainians seem to have been trying to get this underway, but nobody else is trying nearly hard enough. 
 
 
  In regard to the Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil infrastructure, it is has been known since 1945 that attacking oil infrastructure is most effective method of conducting a strategic bombing campaign. Refineries, and chemical factories, are the linchpin of the modern world. They are big, flammable, impossible to hide, and there are not that many of them. Ukraine should focus on them almost exclusively. The strike someone mentioned on a critical factory for Lancet production is the exception that proves the rule.  

Or with a Russian spin on events:
General Tatarenko bravely personally intercepted an incoming missile and prevented it hitting the airfield. He is said to be lightly injured. 

Or with a Russian spin on events:
General Tatarenko bravely personally intercepted an incoming missile and prevented it hitting the airfield. He is said to be lightly injured. 

Most things people consider AI right now, from self driving cars to chatGPT is almost as hard to understand as giving someone a brain scan to ask why they like the colour pink. The code is simpler than you would think, but the "thought process" is almost totally opaque. A major area of AI research right now is trying to get it to explain why it did stuff in a way we understand 

Or with a Russian spin on events:
General Tatarenko bravely personally intercepted an incoming missile and prevented it hitting the airfield. He is said to be lightly injured. 

Or with a Russian spin on events:
General Tatarenko bravely personally intercepted an incoming missile and prevented it hitting the airfield. He is said to be lightly injured. 

Tanks behaving like they often get used in CM games? As an uninformed tangent, I always got the impression that most players used tanks in CM (thinking WW2 games here) in a historically unrealistic way, where instead of tanks being the spearhead, in CM games they were more often kept hidden until the infantry had identified targets and enemy AT assets had been located.
In CM, this is the combination of:
(a) scenario balance means that if you've got a platoon of tanks, the other side very likely has the capability to kill a platoon of tanks (as opposed to reality, where an assaulting tank company might just roll through the enemy positions because they didn't have anything that posed a threat to heavy armour - but that would make a boring CM scenario)
(b) Borg spotting, perfect terrain knowledge and the players' ability to co-ordinate their entire force to a wholly unrealistic degree meaning that they can afford to keep tanks at the back because they will be able to scoot forward through defilade to a keyhole firing position to take out a threat in literally 1 minute, while in reality that's more like 15+ minutes with far more chances to screw up, go the wrong way, shoot at the wrong building etc.
So is it possible that the incredible C4ISR available, replicates in effect much of point (b): enemy positions are known pretty well in advance, real time drone observations funneling information back to units on the ground, and so on, mean that something closer to (although still far short of) CM player levels of planning, co-ordination and responsiveness is achievable, meaning small armour packets can be held back and used on demand with more effect than a full platoon could two decades ago - never mind the increasing number of things that can quickly kill an exposed and hard to conceal tank.
And on a higher level, the higher situational awareness, and prevalence of longer ranged things that can kill vehicles in particular mean that it is hard to create a situation where you can mass e.g. a tank force against a position that has no meaningful defence against it. They will see it coming, and tank-killers can hit from a much larger range, so wherever you attack there is going to be meaningful anti-tank capability, meaning you're always in more of a "balanced CM scenario" kind of situation in practice.

From one point of view, a basic mine is an autonomous drone with extremely low mobility,  a crappy sensor package (touch only), and the targeting decision logic is "kill anything you see" with no human veto in the loop.
Mines don't scare people as much as drones though because they don't come find you while you are sitting around in your trench. We have the illusion of agency,  where since it is our actions that trigger the mine, we can believe that we have a degree of control by making better choices. 
(A bit like why people distrust automation  in cars. Even if it was objectively safer overall, we don't like being in a dangerous situation where we have no input. We'd rather have some influence ourselves even when the data show that it's more dangerous for us overall).

UA proclaims that they sank Russian corvette "Ivanovets" with kamikaze USV.
 

From one point of view, a basic mine is an autonomous drone with extremely low mobility,  a crappy sensor package (touch only), and the targeting decision logic is "kill anything you see" with no human veto in the loop.
Mines don't scare people as much as drones though because they don't come find you while you are sitting around in your trench. We have the illusion of agency,  where since it is our actions that trigger the mine, we can believe that we have a degree of control by making better choices. 
(A bit like why people distrust automation  in cars. Even if it was objectively safer overall, we don't like being in a dangerous situation where we have no input. We'd rather have some influence ourselves even when the data show that it's more dangerous for us overall).

From one point of view, a basic mine is an autonomous drone with extremely low mobility,  a crappy sensor package (touch only), and the targeting decision logic is "kill anything you see" with no human veto in the loop.
Mines don't scare people as much as drones though because they don't come find you while you are sitting around in your trench. We have the illusion of agency,  where since it is our actions that trigger the mine, we can believe that we have a degree of control by making better choices. 
(A bit like why people distrust automation  in cars. Even if it was objectively safer overall, we don't like being in a dangerous situation where we have no input. We'd rather have some influence ourselves even when the data show that it's more dangerous for us overall).

Tanks behaving like they often get used in CM games? As an uninformed tangent, I always got the impression that most players used tanks in CM (thinking WW2 games here) in a historically unrealistic way, where instead of tanks being the spearhead, in CM games they were more often kept hidden until the infantry had identified targets and enemy AT assets had been located.
In CM, this is the combination of:
(a) scenario balance means that if you've got a platoon of tanks, the other side very likely has the capability to kill a platoon of tanks (as opposed to reality, where an assaulting tank company might just roll through the enemy positions because they didn't have anything that posed a threat to heavy armour - but that would make a boring CM scenario)
(b) Borg spotting, perfect terrain knowledge and the players' ability to co-ordinate their entire force to a wholly unrealistic degree meaning that they can afford to keep tanks at the back because they will be able to scoot forward through defilade to a keyhole firing position to take out a threat in literally 1 minute, while in reality that's more like 15+ minutes with far more chances to screw up, go the wrong way, shoot at the wrong building etc.
So is it possible that the incredible C4ISR available, replicates in effect much of point (b): enemy positions are known pretty well in advance, real time drone observations funneling information back to units on the ground, and so on, mean that something closer to (although still far short of) CM player levels of planning, co-ordination and responsiveness is achievable, meaning small armour packets can be held back and used on demand with more effect than a full platoon could two decades ago - never mind the increasing number of things that can quickly kill an exposed and hard to conceal tank.
And on a higher level, the higher situational awareness, and prevalence of longer ranged things that can kill vehicles in particular mean that it is hard to create a situation where you can mass e.g. a tank force against a position that has no meaningful defence against it. They will see it coming, and tank-killers can hit from a much larger range, so wherever you attack there is going to be meaningful anti-tank capability, meaning you're always in more of a "balanced CM scenario" kind of situation in practice.

From one point of view, a basic mine is an autonomous drone with extremely low mobility,  a crappy sensor package (touch only), and the targeting decision logic is "kill anything you see" with no human veto in the loop.
Mines don't scare people as much as drones though because they don't come find you while you are sitting around in your trench. We have the illusion of agency,  where since it is our actions that trigger the mine, we can believe that we have a degree of control by making better choices. 
(A bit like why people distrust automation  in cars. Even if it was objectively safer overall, we don't like being in a dangerous situation where we have no input. We'd rather have some influence ourselves even when the data show that it's more dangerous for us overall).

Using "their" in a sentence like that has been around for decades, possibly over a century.  Its not some new development. And not exactly on topic either.

Tanks behaving like they often get used in CM games? As an uninformed tangent, I always got the impression that most players used tanks in CM (thinking WW2 games here) in a historically unrealistic way, where instead of tanks being the spearhead, in CM games they were more often kept hidden until the infantry had identified targets and enemy AT assets had been located.
In CM, this is the combination of:
(a) scenario balance means that if you've got a platoon of tanks, the other side very likely has the capability to kill a platoon of tanks (as opposed to reality, where an assaulting tank company might just roll through the enemy positions because they didn't have anything that posed a threat to heavy armour - but that would make a boring CM scenario)
(b) Borg spotting, perfect terrain knowledge and the players' ability to co-ordinate their entire force to a wholly unrealistic degree meaning that they can afford to keep tanks at the back because they will be able to scoot forward through defilade to a keyhole firing position to take out a threat in literally 1 minute, while in reality that's more like 15+ minutes with far more chances to screw up, go the wrong way, shoot at the wrong building etc.
So is it possible that the incredible C4ISR available, replicates in effect much of point (b): enemy positions are known pretty well in advance, real time drone observations funneling information back to units on the ground, and so on, mean that something closer to (although still far short of) CM player levels of planning, co-ordination and responsiveness is achievable, meaning small armour packets can be held back and used on demand with more effect than a full platoon could two decades ago - never mind the increasing number of things that can quickly kill an exposed and hard to conceal tank.
And on a higher level, the higher situational awareness, and prevalence of longer ranged things that can kill vehicles in particular mean that it is hard to create a situation where you can mass e.g. a tank force against a position that has no meaningful defence against it. They will see it coming, and tank-killers can hit from a much larger range, so wherever you attack there is going to be meaningful anti-tank capability, meaning you're always in more of a "balanced CM scenario" kind of situation in practice.

The worry is that once western defence companies get involved, and NATO procurement tendencies, you're going to see the $1000 drone made in a shed in Ukraine with an RPG warhead strapped on be replaced with a custom-built state of the art $20,000 drone that does the same job maybe 5% better.