dan/california

I actually mostly agree with that statement, and not just because of Abrams. It took nine months to get serious about contracting increased production of a lot of things, and there is absolutely no excuse for it.

I bash my Congressman about the Abrams, have been for ten months now...

Maybe Abrams later, and more 155 now is better anyway, but to say the messaging on this has been abysmal is the understatement of the century. Or maybe it is a brilliant info op, and there will be three battalions of late model NATO something leading the big offensive.

So what it comes down is the entirety of Europe is completely feckless, and Ukraine is getting Abrams, eventually. Never mind the people that will die because heads should have been removed from A$$s eleven months ago.

The trigger is Taiwan. China, the Imperial Germany here, is unhappy with the settlement of the last round. For Germany it was most of the World outside the Americas being wrapped up as British and French colonies before Germany got in the game. The analogy with the Chinese waking up from a ~40 year self inflicted nightmare after WW2 and being unhappy with the way the pie was cut is actually pretty good. I know Taiwan got detached in 1948 not 1945, and, and..., but the basic theory works. Not least because once the REAL ballon went up, nobody thought about Serbia again for 50 years, maybe it was 75 years actually. This is why the war staying in Ukraine is actually better for Ukraine, as backwards as that seems. Edit: The Russian military performance in Ukraine has certainly shown a strong resemblance to Austro-Hungarian Empires in WW1, they are at least one war behind the times, and it shows.

Best analogy I have seen. Bleeping unpleasant knife edge to be on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/world/europe/russian-attack-aid-worker-video.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20230214&instance_id=85376&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=56536788&segment_id=125324&te=1&user_id=0664831fc7d6a10c183bbe706f36ff4a Missile team working an LOS keyhole?

All true, but the first and hardest one is to get peoples attention at all, about anything. The infinity of rabbit holes to crawl down is making a movement for or against anything harder. And this is itself open to manipulation by the big players.

In areas where the underlying physics are well understood there are already some amazing things being done with genetic algorithms If you can ask the question the right way, an that is a medium large if, a sufficient amount of server time can solve it better than any human engineer s ever going too. Expecting a LOT of this is being applied to EW as we speak. If Chat GPT or similar can layer on top, things are going to get interesting. Like this...

If her/your last name refers to a body of water it would explain a very great deal. That will be cryptic, or very obvious. Ignore it if its cryptic.

Simply glorious, and the music is even bearable for a change. The West took a thirty year vacation, and proved that there is such a thing as too much booze, among other things. We are going to have to PAY ATTENTION going forward.

A long article, and nearly too awful to read. The Russian army, and the Russian STATE are a blight upon the world. They should be treated as such.

If it is going to take another half a million, or a million, Russian casualties for the Russians to get the point, we might as well give the Ukrainians the means to get there as quickly as reasonably possible. Yes The_Capt, I know we shouldn't give them nukes...

I think the tanks that as dangerous to their own crews as they are anything on the enemy side have actually been a bigger problem. The only adds the flying turrets are going in is for the NLAW.

What we need to do is start making virtually every kind of munition there is like there is war on, and just maybe someone will tell Xi this little gamble he is thinking about isn't so little after all. Nothing demonstrates resolve like producing three million rounds of 155 a year, and procuring more of the new precision strike missiles every month than were in last years budget for the whole year. And it yes that is going to take pouring a lot of concrete and ordering a lot of machine tools. It sounds expensive until you look at fighting over Taiwan will cost. The free lunch left with Putin's sanity.

An unpleasant combination of drinking their own propaganda cool-aid, and thinking even the smoking crater where TSMC used to be would somehow grant them an overwhelming advantage in the next round. Putin thought he would take Ukraine in a week and get to tell the U.S. to pack our bags and not let the door hit us in the A%% on the way out of Europe. Apparently Xi nurtures a delusion that Taiwan will work out better for him, somehow. The self licking ice cream cone the dictators live in is just bad for their though processes.

Tolkien understood almost everything, and wove it into a masterpiece. How many times have we gone back to his work at various points in this war?

I can totally see an NYT reporter getting unhappy when he was told he couldn't go somewhere.

AFU might have decided that holding it is costing more than it is worth, finally.

I think Putin has managed to make this type of person realize that in Ukraine exactly these kind of people were on Putins execution list. It has concentrated their minds wonderfully.

Ukrainian leaderships combination of Russian and Nato military exposure made them uniquely suited to fight this war. I suspect the Russian air force is under huge political pressure to TRY something. They have pretty much failed epically so far in this war. It is this kind of cognitive vacuum that gets resolved in a shooting war. Which we are having,unfortunately. Never underestimate the ability of the clueless tourist types to do epically STUPID things. The missionaries who got kidnapped in Haiti a while back being exhibit A.

I think this guy is making an insightful point. Wagner's level of full Nazi nutjob might have had the unintentional effect of getting it across to the average Russian mobik candidate that he REALLY doesn't want to go die in Ukraine.

A hundred or so ATACMS fired preemptively would do wonders.

Speaking of maps, the NASA forest fire satellite was the closet thing to ground truth for most of last summer. Does it just inherently not reveal as much useful information when the ground is cold wet, and not going to burn? Or have I just lost track of that feed?

This article doesn't even rise to the level tankie drivel on twitter. It also give some tiny hint of an idea what level of ISR Ukrainian Staff officers are working with. They probably get 10X or better resolution from U.S. Satellites every few hours. With overlays from the entire electromagnetic spectrum.