dan/california

And Greek settlements/towns around the Black Sea go all the way back to several hundred years BC. Indeed blockading Athens from Black Sea grain figured in several wars during antiquity. Athens could not feed itself from its local territory and was dependent on that grain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontic_Olbia#/media/File:Mykolaiv_province_physical_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cynossema

I think this is the general plan. A couple of governments just need to get over their fear of winning and get out of the way.

Put down all beverages first. It is that funny.

I have been advocating for a real fire control system for a vehicle mounted Mark 19 for at least a decade. There is no reason the guy with tablet couldn't have direct control, he puts the cursor on a a target and presses a button and the computer does the rest of the work. And even a Humvee can carry a LOT of 40 mm if that is its only job.

The game is the only way to develop those tactics. It might take multiple modules, but the game is the way to test carious ideas at least well enough to see if they are worth pursuing. I am just hoping we get a publicly available version. I am a bit worried that various western militaries have gotten a clue, and decided it so useful the other side shouldn't be able to buy it.

The U.S. lame duck Congressional session needs to put its big boy pants on get Ukraine support for the next two years done. They need to pass a hundred billion in U.S. support 2/3 military and 1/3 economic. They need to pass whatever law treasury needs to seize the 280 billion of Russian money at the Federal Reserve. That is enough money to take all the financial pressure of the Ukrainian Government for three plus years. Make the RUSSIANS pay for the bleeping war.

Filing this one under EXTRA harsh... Edit: Of course their real enemy is the blocking troops between them and the Russian border, and the Czar who stuck them in that hole in there first place. There is only one way to encourage them to figure that out.

They need to pass $75 billion in the lame duck session, If they were smart they would roll it in with a huge increase in the debt limit. It would eliminate the worst of the craziness for the next two years.

https://substack.com/profile/101117237-cristian-dorobantu Interesting writer. He is some some functionary in either the Romanian MOD, or a parliamentary adviser on defense issues.

The part about ""fifteen months of porridge" sounded rather unfortunate.

Ukrainians at one end, Russians at the other. Quite a bit of hot, speedy metal in between. They blew the road bridge and one small section of control locks, but not enough to cause something catastrophic. Who knows if they have a bigger charge ready to go.

Looks like a good time!

Not sure of how credible this is, but even if you divided it by two or three it would be a staggering number.

Warning, further antecdata. It also depends on how active you have to be. One of the less pleasant things that can happen at a ski resort is when the grips on a high speed speed quad ice up over night. You literally have to stand at either the terminal entrance, or the closest tower and beat the ice off with a soft tipped hammer. it can easily be three hours of hard dangerous work on a worst case morning. Even wearing the best Black Diamond mountaineering gloves money can buy, you literally had to wring the water out of them and find a heater to lay them on and your spare pair. Alternatively your hands would just freeze to the snowmobile grips. You can't wear a lighter glove that will make you sweat less, because of the spray of ice and slush off of the grip will freeze you even faster. You just have to have dry gloves available. And yes it is water that matters,not dry snow. It is a hundred times easier to stay warm at a Colorado Resort, than one In the Sierras. Colorado is colder and much higher elevation. But slushy snow, and icing conditions outweigh all of that.

Yes but at home they do it by getting out of the wet hole in the freezing ground, building a fire, and or going inside somewhere warm, at least intermittently. You can withstand things for twelve hours that will render you dysfunctional in 36. All of these fixes will get you killed in the mile or three closest to the front line. You just HAVE to have some combination of shelter and rotation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3750324/ This is an article about cold related injuries on the British side in the Falklands campaign. I worked in the ski business for over decade, and my standing joke is that I froze to death for a living, so I have paid a fair bit of attention to this issue for a long time. To complement the the above study on the British side in the Falklands, I also went to truly fascinating talk once by the U.S. Amies senior cold weather researcher. Quite a lot of his EXTREMELY unpleasant slideshow was from soldiers on the Argentinian side. They did not have the SOP, leadership, and gear to prevent rampant trench foot among other unpleasantness. I am assuming that both the Ukrainian winter environment, and the mobiks situation is at least as bad. Now if I was on the Ukrainian General Staff I would spend a fair bit of resources and energy checking that assumption, but in the absence of the ability to understand Russian radio intercepts without translation software, and deploy recon teams, I think it a pretty good assumption. It obviously needs to be checked against more data as it becomes available. I looked for some actual data on the Argentinian side, and I couldn't find any with a few minutes googling.

Dear lord indeed,, an ancient horror seems to be rising from the depths. Couldn't resist.....

https://www.leonardodrs.com/what-we-do/products-and-services/m-shorad/ Army is taking delivery of these. They need to ship to Ukraine direct from the factory.

And it isn't December yet. The Russians will have tens of thousands of weather/environmental casualties by mid January.

A couple of emojis would have fixed the whole thing...

Pretty sure he was joking, the joke just didn't quite work. Thanksgiving day in the U.S., it can be a little overwhelming.

I have no doubt this is the way it usually works. But this is not the usual situation. First of all, a freezing trench with a foot of water in the bottom and 155 raining down is not a survivable situation, be it however so awful a conscript tour in peacetime usually is . Secondly the mobiks are being recruited and formed into units from individual cities/districts, and this might increase their internal cohesion. Third the mobik units seem to have no formal structure to speak of other than one or two uncaring/incompetent officers. These factors might not suffice to overcome the long history and practice you reference, but they certainly push the other way. Also, if I was the AFU i would try hit these Chechen blocking troops PGMs. With and extra rocket or two for any bleep holes in red sneakers.

How long before he comes back with his squad and puts a whole mag into Mr red shoe?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/some-russian-commanders-knew-sexual-violence-or-encouraged-it-says-lawyer-2022-11-23/ I don't think we have ever wrapped our heads around how completely different the Russian military is from ANYTHING in the West. It really is run more like the Golden Horde than any recognizably modern institution. Actually, at the peak of its power I suspect the Golden Horde was better run. The Russian military is late stage Golden Horde, right before gunpowder resulted in its defeat by Moscow. The looting, the rape, and the unending war crimes are not failures. They are the very intentional, or at the very least inevitable, result of the way the whole thing is put together. that very much includes the way it brutalizes its own personnel. Their is a vast scope for more real research on this. In purely operational terms it seems to result in an army that only has a fraction of the capability its order of battle implies to a western analyst. At the same time, since it never really had any unit cohesion, it can stagger on after losses that would shatter a NATO unit. Again it is just so different we can't wrap our heads around it.