dan/california

What it WOULD do is make it politically possible for Ukraine to let go of Crimea and/or the Donbas, maybe. Zelensky might be able to sell that, if the all the treaties were signed by same people, on the same day, at the same table. NATO & EU membership effective immediately, the next Russian platoon to stick a tank tread into Ukraine gets greeted by a U.S. Air Force F15E. What is peace worth to Scholz?

Have you written your Congressperson/MP about SpaceX yet?

Gentlemen there is more than enough to talk about today without overworking someones less than perfect historical analogy. I say this as someone who has made my full fair share of very bad ones. But Starlink, Jets to Ukraine, Russian offensive, and, and.....

If Rheinmetal is even discussing this with Ukraine it can only be interpreted as massive bleep you to Scholz for deeply damaging their business by making them/Germany look like an unreliable supplier.

Out of likes, excellent post.

Very well put, allow me to repeat myself. The inboxes of Congress/Parliaments need to melt with complaints about this.

Musk needs to feel massive pressure on this TODAY. If you have a Tesla on order cancel, and tell, them why. If you know anybody with a Tesla on order, ask them to cancel it, and tell Tesla why. Call your Congressperson/Member of Parliament and tell them that every government contract Tesla has needs to be reviewed. Musk should be in front of Congressional committee this coming Monday. Edit: Email to my Congressman Done before my coffee is.

It isn't all that surprising. Putin is a micromanaging control freak, and some member(s) of Five eyes seem to own Russian communication completely. Of course Putin now has committed any number of other crimes that would get whatever maximum sentence the Hague can give. And for good measure he has given long speeches about those crimes on video. So charging him formally with MH-17 is in the nice but not required category. They also may want to use the lever of formal charges against Putin personally in the final negotiations to end this war.

Ukraine is trying to clean up its corruption issues. I think Russia is using the cover of "sanctions avoidance" to make its problems worse. ISW just mentions sanction avoidance, but what they actually described is a license to steal. Are various people in the Russian government making one last attempt to steal the state treasury in its entirety before they flee to whatever shady excuse for a country that will have them? They could also be trying round up the resources to contest the post Putin contest for power. Of course any of the losers that survived would be back to the any shady country that would take them plan, but with less money.

A long interview with the guy at the Pentagon who is more or less in charge of laser weapon development. A lot of positive energy, pun intended. What he didn't give is a single meaningful performance spec, in terms of how quickly, and at what range, they can kill various classes of missiles and UAVs. He says they are at the point of producing operational systems though, actually fielding things and counting on them to work in the next year or two.

Edit: I forgot the top bit. I have been advocating for the vast utility of 40mm to 60mm indirect fire since CMSF came out. Infantry just vaporize under 60mm mortar fire as modeled in the Marine Module. If you get an AAVB into a good protected spot its almost inexhaustible supply of 40mm grenades just lays waste to any light troops on the map. All of the fires development for the entirety of that time has been directed towards either very long range systems. or very high velocity direct fire systems like the ever larger auto cannon on AFVs. This has resulted in some really nice weapon systems. BUT, we have missed an entire subset of capability, and one that drones would make that much more useful. The AFU cutting the land bridge just to one side of Mariupol, and GLSBD raining down on the Kerch Bridge until it melts. That is the blow Putin cannot propagandize his way around. They should have been there months and months ago. They should sure as bleep be there by Monday. I mean there are entire corporations whose sole purpose in life is to provide these services to the Gulf countries. Ukraine might be more dangerous, but in a lot of other ways seems like a vastly better place to work. And west of the Dnipro, it isn't THAT dangerous.

That is THE question of this war. Why don't they look around declare it a disaster/I mean total victory, and go the bleep home?

This little master class in scenario design needs to be in the game manual, in full. Outstanding information as always. Two observations related to the current war. The Russians, with few exceptions seem put a unit forward, and leave there until it is just shattered. This must greatly limit the accumulation corporate knowledge The_Capt is referring to. The Ukrainians on the other hand seem very aware that units needs to rotated before combat exhaustion set in, even if their casualties have only been moderate. The minus side of the Ukrainian approach is that I can site at least two significant instances where a less experienced unit that was just put in to relive another unit had a very bad day that led to a lot of OTHER units having a very bad day. So as the The_Capt says, no approach is perfect. Higher level staff should remain conscious of the down sides of whatever approach the are using. FWIW I think the Russians are making a big mistake pushing there few remaining pre war elite formations to total failure, instead of pulling virtually all of them back to use as trainers and cadre for new units.

At this point in the war I think that is an entirely defensible statement.

BTGs seem to be out of fashion at the Russian MOD, but they lost the equivalent of TWO of them today.

This mostly proves that Wagner is a wholly owned subsidiary of the GRU. Although in the current state of extremis that does not prevent it from going rogue in any number of ways. There is a safe somewhere that justifies the pardons Prigohzin is handing out, too. But suspect various bits of the Russian state would rather shoot you than let you read it. I wonder if those pardons will suddenly come into question a few months after what winds up passing for an armistice?

Two separate thoughts. Won't these private companies compete with the MOD for what passes for able bodied men in Russia, and therefore make the problems worse? Or is this a place to stash the children of the rich and/or privileged where they can claim to be legally unavailable for service at say, the Bakmuht front?

I think this might be a case of what they asked for, and what they are getting in the next decade. Poland is notionally trying to order an army that could march on Moscow.

No, a mobik motor rifle regiment led by a retired VDV guy. Probably an easier target. I would argue much more valuable one as well since he was probably one of less than five people in the whole regiment who knew what he was doing, and quite possibly he wasn't the only one they got. The degradation of performance for the whole unit is probably much higher.

What is the old line, the way to be a brigadier in 1918 was to have been a lieutenant in 1914, and somehow still alive...

It really is important, every Lt Col or higher is a flat minimum of 15 years experience. The mobik army is going to be led be some combination of the maimed, the incompetent, the drunk, and people who were good at running a sewer plant.

Western tanks are a LOT better against other tanks and ATGMS, they are no better against mines and artillery. Mines and artillery seem to do most of the killing in this war. So a LOT of the effectiveness of the western tanks is going to come down to planning and leadership by the Ukrainians to maximize strengths, and minimize weaknesses. In particular they might want to do things like actually breach minefields with soviet legacy equipment while the western stuff does overwatch, and then the first stage of exploitation. Then the deep exploitation can hopefully be pushed by lighter units. We saw a lot of how badly the Russians can hurt when they really have to just run away in Kharkiv, and sadly only a little of it Kherson. I really want want to see burning Russian everything strewn from Mariupol to the gates of Crimea as the Russians flee for their lives. Fingers crossed we are even half that lucky.

You should write summaries for a living.

The KGB training course Putin went thru clearly didn't include anything so crass as getting even a jeep, much less an AFV, unstuck from an effectively infinite mud bog. This omission is killing the Russian Empire, because no amount of will, or application of the whip, will get tank across a field if it is muddy enough.

Hurray, Haiduk has checked in!