dan/california

And Zelensky can never be let into the same room with any member of the Russian Government.

The real lesson here is Biden was right, Putin has to go.

Yes, wasn't using good terminology. Obviously every military unit has a chain of command, and an executive officer who is of course designated to take over from the commanding officer if something unfortunate happens. The unfortunate thing happens the next most senior officer in the unit more or less automatically becomes the XO, rinse and repeat. It is still VERY disruptive for units to experience a change of command due to combat. even more if it not just some sort of precision strike on the command group but part of unit wide losses in combat. Also the (acting) commander's radio operator and senior NCO are also removed you have the entire process of getting the unit up to speed on what radio/ comms platform is now issuing valid orders. There is no evidence the Russians are good at anything with radios. For a captain to be doing a colonels job, one of two things has happened. Either the unit got hit so hard the CO and XO bought it in the same strike, or the CO and XO have been taken out sequentially as the unit has continued to fight/manuever. For the third officer in line to wind up in command BAD things have been happening. If that third officer in line is tasked with anything other than withdrawing from active combat to reorganize and reset VERY BAD things are happening. For the third officer in line to get KIA while commanding a unit means either the unit couldn't be withdrawn successfully, or higher command need to keep it in the fight even after things gone comepletely off the rails. The three most obvious guesses as to the condition of that unit after the death of the third commanding officer in the chain of command are bad, worse, and never mind.

Stuff like this...

I know that cruise missiles are not great for firing into the front lines of a city battle. But if the entire logistical train feeding the Russians in Mariupol just started blowing up they would notice very quickly. My less crazy suggestion is that NATO line up whatever ground launch cruise missiles are available, set the trucks up on the Ukrainian polish border. get them 100% ready to launch, have a Ukrainian crew drive them a hundred yards over the border, set the ground stabilizers if any and press the the go button. Then drive it back across the border to be reloaded and and any other necessary steps by the the trained crew. Repeat the process until the Russians quit and go home. Even fifty or a hundred missiles would thoroughly wreck whatever logistics the Russians still have. These fine distinctions about how we will and won't kill Russians are getting silly. I realize the Ukrainians are winning on the current plan, but the cost to the civilian population is just beyond excruciating. Everyone is worried about making Putin too desperate, but he is going to get desperate anyway on the current trend. There will just be how ever many more thousands or tens of thousands of dead Ukrainian civilians when he gets to the point of realizing he has flat out lost. I think there is one bleep of argument for moving up the timeline.

The defense of Mariupol matches any heroic defense in history, as well as any collection of war crimes. NATO needs to start giving Zelensky cruise missiles if they won't just put their planes in the air and end this. The &%$#^ *%%%$% &&$$% besieging Mariupol need to meet a higher grade of retribution. I will spare everyone the my full rant on the subject.

The back up command group is the one that gets assembled in a very great hurry when the original one gets mortared/152ed/MLRSed into little tiny pieces. It is usually not as good as the first one, by the time you are putting things back together for the third time the unit is probably combat ineffective anyway. Although the Russians seem to have committed at least some units to the fight in that condition, if the rank of the acting commander listed on HIS obituary is any indication. To put it another way the top of the units chain of command keeps shorter, very painfully. Maybe the Russians should just go home before their country disintegrates behind them.

There are really only three explanations, Putin is senile, he believed the FSB really did have a coup set up and ready, or both a and b.

The only thing getting rolled back is the Russian army, which seems to have some sort deranged death wish about revisiting the epic failures, and complete collapses of 1917

The thing about Taiwan that doesn't get enough press is that they actually have a very strong and reciprocated affinity for the Japanese. It is literally the only place in Asia they treated decently from 1895 to 1945. There was a plan to incorporate them fully into the home Islands. This gives the Japanese more motivation to help defend Taiwan than is commonly assumed. Then the Nationalist Chinese treated them very badly for a few years until they had to reverse course move in rather hurriedly. There is still a fairly distinct division between Nationalists refugees from the mainland, and native Taiwanese. But real democracy has rebalanced a lot of things because there are a LOT of native Taiwanese. The biggest factor in Taiwanese politics in the last ten years is that the Chinese wasted decades of trying to appear benevolent when they absolutely crushed freedoms in Hong Kong. Now nobody on Taiwan except a few bought a paid for shills believes anything China says. They know letting the Chinese in means Gulag in the tropics. What they haven't done is reorganize their military to reflect the last twenty years of lessons learned. We will know they are serious when they start hiring Ukrainian advisors.

Literally the only place it worked, according to any information I can find. I suspect the people involved are trying desperately to be ANYWHERE else when the Ukrainians take Kherson back, which seems to be in progress, actually. So part of the U.S. government believed the Ukrainians at least enough to hedge against the blob opinion in a meaningful way.

Another unit on its second or third commander. The Russian officer corps is literally immolating itself in this rolling atrocity that they started. Russia will be a generation rebuilding from this if Putin pulls the plug in the next five minutes. In another week there just won't be an army left to rebuild, and Russia just dissolves into thirty separatist conflicts. An optimistic take, but not a crazy one.

I think the thing about the FSB believing they already owned the Ukrainian Government explains a LOT, maybe everything, about this war. First and foremost since the FSB believed it, Western intelligence agencies that seem too practically OWN Russian communications believed it. This was a BIG part of the prewar Western Government /media blob opinion that Ukraine would fall in a day. It appears to have been one of the more successful double agent operations in history. It is comparable to the British owning more or less every single German spy on the island from 1940 on, and being able to present a coherent but wrong picture to the Germans at will. Here is the crazy part, I think the success of this double blind led to the war. Putin thought success was guaranteed. Someone somewhere disregarded what I assume were repeated communications from the Ukrainians that the KGB was full of s$%%^#. The west believed Putin was right. NATO was afraid to commit to Ukraines defense because they thought the Ukrainian government would dissolve underneath them. The entire war has essentially been about forcing both Moscow and NATO to change their assumptions about the coherence of the Ukrainian government. For the record I fell for the blob opinion the the Ukrainians would dissolve, at least I did a month ago, I changed my opinion completely after week one though. Feel free to tell my have this completely wrong, but it explains a LOT.

We should start a pool on which regions have the first break out of hostilities. You can't pick Azerbaijan because 1) it isn't Russian 2) They have already opened the party.

After losing that ship without any visible response from the air defense systems they may have the gain on their radars turned up so high it unsafe to be a goose, or a particularly aggressive cloud. Given the competence the Russians have displayed everywhere else I can see them just ripping out an entire layer of filtering on their radar returns. Not because it will work , but because someone can sit in an unpleasant meeting and say they did something. That someone is hoping the next disaster to befall Putin's misbegotten rolling atrocity doesn't involve air defense, and that they can resume the bureaucratic equivalent a hopefully invisible defensive crouch. Sadly I don't have the plans for an S400 so I can't opine if that would involve literally hot wiring circuit boards, or just futzing with the software.

My point is that it is less expensive to upset China by arming Taiwan to the teeth, than it is to deal with a complete rupture in the world economy AFTER China attacks Taiwan. There are at least some reports that Xi wanted to follow up Putin's glorious parade in Kyiv with one in Taipei. Putin sticking his #$%^%# in a meat grinder should already have been instructive, but making it ABSOLUTELY clear that taking a swing at Taiwan does nothing but create well fed sharks would be a very good thing. 10,000 Javelins 10,000 Stingers, and a truly ridiculous quantity of heavier air defense, and anti ship missiles would make a nice firm statement. On a vaguely related note the board needs to start a pool on when Japan goes nuclear, note I didn't say if...

If you made me king for a day I would put a Marine division on Taiwan, permanently.

We need to get a straight answer From the Taiwanese about how badly they don't to be conquered. If they are are convincing in their desire not become a large island gulag, we need to start pumping hardware in their like there is already a war on, the second Ukraine cools off. It will be SEVERAL orders of magnitude cheaper to convince the Chinese they shouldn't even think about trying, than it would be to rebuild the world economy after the fact.

It seems to have sunk in for Azerbaijan. I suspect they won't be the last.

So if a captain is commanding a motor rifle battalion the MRB in question has already lost its original command group, and it's back up command group. So the one that just got waxed was the last guy standing who who can read and write command group. Any guesses on the combat effectiveness of that MRB? Assuming there is anything left besides sunflower fertilizer?

Another winner of a thread from Trent

If one side has 152/155 with ammo and drone feeds, and the other side doesn't it isn't even a real fight anymore. The side with a working kill chain will just obliterate the other guys assets in order of priority and/or detection. So the entirety of the fight that matters is to put yourself in that position.

Have the Russians used the separatist conscripts as sacrificial roadblocks while the better units ran?

A real peer to peer fight would involve literal clouds of drones, loitering, munitions and sensor platforms shredding each other until one side runs out of assets to fight with. The side that loses this fight might as well surrender. Because if the opposition has ISR and you don't they will just start with longest range systems, and then work down the list of your ranged assets with a snowballing advantage in fires. Losing the ISR battle means losing the war now, period.

The Russian army is on fire in a Ukrainian swamp, all the other people they have been beating down for more or less forever are quite aware of this. Azerbaijan won't be the last one that decides it is a great time for some payback.