dan/california

And I probably shouldn't have said it. We could argue about my future of drones post instead? And as always when the things get a bit heated on here.... Steve, we would cheerfully argue about the next game if you would give us even the tiniest little bone.

Russian morality is a contradiction in terms, based on observed behaviour. What Ukraine has to do is convince those mobiks that they are more likely to die getting on that train/bus to Ukraine than they are if they do whatever they have to do to AVOID getting on that bus. And, with a nod to The_Capt, as much as I hate to admit it the less threatened those mobiks think their own homes and families are the easier that will be to do.

And their we have the German position in a nutshell. Unless I read it wrong it says "of course we won't REALLY fight for Poland". And that is why everyone else is mad at them.

I think the ideal trick is for them to run out of conscripts willing to obey orders. Which to oversimplify massively is what happened in 1917. The enlisted men simply said no more, and the whole deal changed. This really could Happen in Ukraine. Ever more of the Russian forces there are mobiks with little or no training. This makes the Russian force as whole far more brittle. Can Ukraine crack it like an egg?

Speaking of failure points in the end game, what are the odds Russia attacks Kazakhstan or some other central Asian country just to try and prove it can beat someone/anyone? Maybe even as it is still in the final stages of losing in Ukraine?

Do you think that Mobiks dying from the cold is actually worse for Putin than Ukrainian direct action? It just seems to make the entire Russian state apparatus look REALLY bad for them to be taking massive winter weather casualties. Beating the Germans because they made they same dimwitted mistakes is pretty much the foundation of their entire national mythos.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-complains-ukraine-military-aggressive-behavior-sergey-vershinin-turkey-1766296 A bit of comic relief, courtesy of the Russian MFA.

The big, expensive kinetic counter drone systems out there are just not going to cut it for anything but critical fixed infrastructure. Some whiz-kids will hopefully figure out a solution, because I'm not sure the big defense contractors are looking at small, affordable systems hard enough. Wet all know this is next big area of military technology development. I just want to throw some the known unknowns out for further discussion, in the absence news from the front that materially changes the conversation. 1. Can AWACS survive in a modern peer to peer fight, at a useful distance from the FEBA. If they can, at what range, and with what resolution can they see Shaheed 136 class drones? Can they get enough of a return to vector a missile into an envelope that lets a relatively cheap seeker head finish the job? How much would that missile cost. Is it worthwhile to have a C-130 class cargo plane configured just to carry dozens of these hopefully cheaper anti drone missiles? And on a related note, with a better tech base than Russia/Iran how much better can you make a Shaheed class drone without bleeping up the cost per piece that is one of its primary advantages. 2. Is it cheaper to make suicidal anti drone drones than than it is to make missile? Can these suicide anti drone drones cover a meaningful amount of frontage? Do they need to be suicidal? I am assuming they would not be a lot faster than the incoming drones they were trying to kill so how to distribute them to get the coverage you need for them to be the primary defense is a little complicated. They probably would not be able to move quarter of the way across Ukraine fast enough to counter a large swarm sent after a specific target. Is the data link to tie them into the air defense network so expensive you might well build more capability into the rest of it? How much these costs really matters because you are going to buy a LOT of them. 3. Lasers, their is an enormous amount of talk, system development, and even the beginnings of procurement and deployment, but I have seen ZERO public specs on how well they actually work. How fast can they engage a target, at what range, and how many targets can they engage before heat or some other technical limitation force them to take a pause. Do they have enough range it would be worth putting them on an aerial platform? If the engagement range was tens of miles, and they can engage a target every ten seconds, one plane could cover most of a city. If it is 5000 meters the airborne version is probably not worth the cost of the platform except maybe to defend the aforementioned AWACS. I am sure I missed things, but the could be billions, or even tens of billions of dollars thrown at this problem in the next five or ten years. It would be good to throw the money at something that actually works.

Russia has used as many thermobarics as they could figure out how to deliver. The Tos-1A being the obvious example. In terms of the Truly inexplicable things the Ukrainians want that we aren't giving them is DPICM, for both 155 an GMLRS. The Russians are raining it everywhere, along with every kind of machine and artillery deployed mines they have in inventory. If the Ukrainians think it is worth an incremental increase in an already incomprehensible clean up job to get the Russians out faster, well it is their country...

Let me rephrase, you are the real professional in this conversation, and I really do mean that and respect your opinion immensely. What should we be sending them that we aren't to wrap this up as quickly as possible, and with the lowest total butcher's bill on the Ukrainian side? I could care less about the Russians, although your point that that "let's chase the six thousand loose nukes is a lousy game" is well taken. Edit: I might as well get my moneys worth from my regular letter to my elected representatives.

i saw an interesting theory somewhere that a lot of the fires, especially at places with no perceptible military/industrial utility were insurance fraud. That enormous building that was originally the Moscow IKEA being exhibit A. Anyone who bet on the Russian consumer economy is completely bleeped. Some of them are rolling the dice on their insurance companies actually making a pay out. It isn't a bet I would want to make in Russia, but when you are bankrupt anyway...

I have zero access to nonpublic information, but I REALLY question the extent to which the strategic rocket forces have escaped the corruption that is consuming the rest of Russia. That is one of the three most important intelligence evaluations out there. The others of course are the actual state Putin's opposition within the Russian regime, and Xi's real intentions about Taiwan.

No inside knowledge whatsoever, but I sincerely hope he next time we see them they are in NATO tanks and IFVs!

If, big if, sanctions are succeeding one of the effects should be to significantly increase the cost of just continuing their current rates of production. I mean it is pretty clear that most sanctions can be evaded, but it costs more. Just to pick apart the canonical example, if Russia really is buying washing machines just to rip them apart for their control systems, they are paying a rather large mark up on the price of ordering those chips legally from Samsung. Now if Siemens and the other machine tool manufacturers would get off their rear ends and send the Russians a very special "software update" that made every third part come out just wrong enough, the cost of running say a BMP production line would get positively painful. Western intelligence agencies need to start a systematic sabotage campaign too, feed bad chips into the Russian Sanction busting operations and so on.

You are, as always, correct. But I think you are perhaps less correct than usual. If somewhere north of 75,000 KIA isn't enough of a casus belli to to attack the supply bases in Poland ,it leads me to a really strong conclusion that the Russian leadership understands they don't want to attack Poland. So let's get back to red lines. first of all the only red line left within the border of Ukraine is the actual invasion of Crimea. Even after the Kerch bridge attack Russia just sat there and tried to make Ukrainian civilians more miserable, and that might have been their preexisting plan anyway. So for starters, why don't we give the Ukrainians the missiles to put a kilometer of said bridge in the water, and utterly wreck the the one strand of the Russian logistics system that still functions across the land bridge? Let me restate, U.S./NATO has decided the current slow motion meat grinder that is slowly but systematically mincing both Ukraine and Russia into dog food is the lowest risk option on the table. I disagree, among other things nuclear nonproliferation is already dead, or on life support. Why would Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, or for that matter Kazakhstan ever take our security guarantees seriously, after Ukraine gave up a thousand plus nukes and then had this happen? Does a world with 25 or thirty nuclear powers have better or a worse chance of making it to 2100 without a major nuclear exchange? And yes, we all have to acknowledge that the actual decision makers have a LOT of information we don't, but we have been ignoring that for 1800 pages and counting.

It is a shame they only hit those air bases with one or two drones each. Twenty or thirty would have put a hole in the Russian Strategic bomber force that they would never be a able to replace. Still wondering if the U.S. asked them to go small.

I think Kinophile answered his own question. Putin is trying to create his own version the IRGC. The primary job of the IRGC is to defend the regime against its own army, and its own people. It has a strong sideline in overseas dirty work. Wagner has long had one of those jobs, and Putin urgently needs it to take up the other two. Because he has utterly bleeped the actual military in this war, and now he wants to stick them with the blame, too. It is entirely possible that what is left of the Russian Army's officer corps might not like that very much.

It is not at all clear to me that Putin is getting unfiltered information. Maybe it has gotten better recently, maybe not. Not much to lose by giving Bout a message to relay if he is in the same room for any length of time.

Sign contracts! Pour concrete! Order the bleeping machines .And yes the Russian army is not getting back to even its inadequate 2/24 self for a decade!

Another thought that just occured. If the U.S. wanted to get a message more or less directly to Putin I can't think of anyone more likely than Bout to deliver it.

"Russian officials have been pushing for a Bout return for over a decade, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Aleksandr Lukashevich alleging his extradition was illegal and that the U.S. had been holding him in “unjustifiably cruel conditions.” From a Forbes article They have always been incandescently unhappy the we grabbed him. It just turned out that Griner was the right leverage at the right time to get him back. With relations already in the toilet there was no reason NOT grab the next clueless celebrity that was grabbable and see if they could turn up the pressure up to get it done. Even a year ago that might have caused them more problems than it solved. And when they initially grabbed her they still counting a short victorious war. Getting Bout back was supposed to be a candle on the celebratory cake, not the booby prize in an endless, grinding fiasco. The bit about "unjustifiably cruel conditions" is beyond satire coming from the Russians...

This highway needs some high explosive attention...

Glad your back!

Arguably not a single word ANYBODY in the Russian government utters is worth listening too. They couldn't tell the truth if they tried at this point. That extends to signing a treaty with them as well.

Those fools that got kidnapped in Haiti are example A. A completely unnecessary crisis, in the middle of what already a shambles. Utterly aggravating.