dan/california

All of this is true, but you are overlooking the great weakness of such a system. It is built entirely on people instead of institutions, and there is zero loyalty. At some point it will become apparent to enough upper level people that there would be a lot more to steal if if Putin had a VERY fatal heart attack, and they jaw jaw a try instead of war war. They seem to be rather bad at the war war part.

I love this bit! They have some pretty good stuff. Unfortunately the rest of the article was uniformly grim in the event of anything short of Russia's defeat in, and eviction from, Ukraine.

They have app, and outstanding customer service.

So since Patriot, Iris-T, and NASSAMS, are all living up to their billing with bells on, does crossing the Dnipro start to look doable? or at least doable enough to make the Russians put a lot more men and equipment on their side of the river?

So since Europe seems to finally understand that the way to make it stop is to win the bleeping war, can we go one more step and stand up the Flying Tigers part 2? F-16s flying CAS over Southern Ukraine by August would just the thing to finish off Russian morale once and for all.

Going for LLF's position as the forum's cheeriest member, are you?

This is by the way one of the scariest movies ever made.

Biden is using a rather brilliant accounting gimmick. If you write down the value of what has been sent, you can send more. What is a 27 year old artillery shell worth, anyway???

The selective pressure against free thinking liberalism in Russia has been extremely high 98% of the last thousand years. The degree it is out and genetic selection is probably unknowable, but either way that degree of pressure will get you less of it. Putin allowing hundreds of thousands to leave the country to avoid the draft has also had political positives as well as massive economic negatives. The people who would have most vigorously opposed the regime left instead. There is a strong parallel with the survival of the Cuban government. The people who would have REALLY fought took the out to Miami.

Although this thread/article would seem fix the hope problem, utterly, completely, and forever.

I mean the best time to start was a year ago. The next best time is right now. And it would be one more signal to the Russians that they have no hope at all.

If this is already up all over twitter there is probably no harm in posting it here.

I am almost sure it was initially found to be too loud, and too easy to see on thermals. But the tech on that sort thing improves continually. They will get to the tipping point fairly soon, if they haven't already.

That really is the tell, now isn't it. I also suspect a bunch of Russian weapons engineers are frantically trying the that new CIA telegram channel. Once the "leopards eating peoples faces party" starts in on people you actually know, buying a ticket to Argentina or San Diego with a hard drive full sensitive information suddenly looks very attractive.

Best typo ever!

Yes!

Russia will quit when it realizes the pain dial it thought stopped at ten, goes to thirty something. Ukraine and its NATO friends need to make it clear that that dial is on a one way ratchet until the last Russian soldier takes his $&&$& *&$&#^$ home. And if they EVER want the economic pain to stop, they have to hand back EVERY person they have kidnapped into Russia.

First and foremost in terms of grinding Russia's face into its own failure is wrapping up Sweden's entry into NATO. The second is to facilitate Romania annexing Moldova, and cleaning up that whole ugly little nest of Russian misbehavior. Then we make it clear that if the Ukrainians have to launch a fall offensive they will do it with couple of hundred Abrams, and all the kit that goes with them. The way to make the other side quit is to convince them that NOT quitting is going to be much, much worse than quitting. It is time to make sure that Russia gets that message. And yes as a general planet improvement project there needs to be a bounty on every single member of Wagner, world wide open season, no limit. As far as SDI goes, it was wildly ambitious at the time, parts of what was proposed would be rather ambitious now, but I am pretty sure the tech development chain it started just won this war. Steve is correct of course that a there needs to be a lot more work done on systems where the cost per shot is not quite so excruciating. But that is a lot easer to do when you have something that WORKS to start the program with. Edit: And we should start very publicly spinning up the second coming of the Flying Tigers, make it clear that fall offensive will have REAL air support. And make sure every mobik knows it, they are just targets that smell even worse when they are dead.

Can we grant a profanity exception when a forum member is subject to live fire? Edit: are the trying to saturate a Patriot battery?

Will get better is a little strong, probably is about as optimistic as it is possible to be about a problem like that. And even if he lives he might never operate at even 25% of his previous effectiveness, for a year, or ever. This has to be one of the best three posts on the whole thread! All you have to do is look at the initial Russian war plan. The entire concept was to take Kyiv before the Ukrainians could get organized. This was THEORETICALLY possible starting a hundred miles from Kyiv. Putin had spent most of the previous decade looking at what it would take to do it starting from northeast of Kharkiv, and not even his optimistic excuse for math worked. Steve disagrees... I started saying that the best part of a year ago.

They are still doing most of this with improvised ammunition. I can see large improvements when purpose built munitions get deployed in quantity. In particular a round that dispersed dime to quarter sized hunks of thermite seems like it would be rather useful. Something more or less guaranteed to set a at least couple of square meters on fire long enough to light off anything flammable.

A leak like the Texieara one is really a test for the competing intelligence agencies. What misinformation can be fed into the global info system at what point in the process, and then spun for advantage? We don't know how much of the original stuff was fed to Texiera after he was identified , but before it became public? We don't know how much of the extra chunk the WaPo got an exclusive on was real? And as in any poker game so much of it is selling the bluff well. There will be some excellent books in a few years.