dan/california

The people who are running this war for Ukraine will get very tired of lecturing at every staff college in the western world. They won't get a day off for years.

Hacked?

My view is 100% the other way on Xi attacking Taiwan. This has been a brutal demonstration of what can happen to your plan for a "short, victorious war". And Taiwan is ten or a hundred times harder. A ~hundred miles of unfriendly ocean, and infinitely better defensive terrain when you get there. Helicopter born assaults have been demonstrated to just not be a thing anymore. Ponder transports going down with a thousand troops each on them, the bodies washing up on the Chinese coast. If you do win all you get is an expensive, and violently unhappy ruin. Xi is great many very bad things, but stupid isn't one of them. Xi also hasn't been at the center of the self licking ice cream cone of what he wants to hear for long enough to lose his marbles, yet.

This, this, this, the Russians simply don't seem to have functional infantry on any large scale. Drive the tank column down the road until the first one, or the first five, blow up is not only not a winning plan, it doesn't even deserve the word plan. They are getting wrecked in semi open country this way. If they try this around Kyiv the city will be barricaded in burning Russian wrecks.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/10/mariupol-bombing-ukraine-before-and-after-satellite-images-map-russian-attack-residential-maternity-childrens-hospital If you want to angry/depressed about how wrecked Mariupol is, the Guardian has you covered.

https://militaryland.net/ukraine/invasion-day-14-summary/ Best maps I have found. Or to put it another way, the only ones I can read.

https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast/the-bulwark-podcast/ Excellent hour long interview with retired General Mark Hertling. I wouldn't say his position is wildly different from this threads, but he lays it out chapter and verse, not dumbed down, not sugar coated. For the record he thinks the Ukrainians can hold. He says response the unconventional weapons is under discussion at the highest level, but wouldn't give more. Worth the hour.

I call it the flywheel of barbarity for a reason...

Driving along with the lights on in the immediate aftermath of a firefight would imply that it was isolated outpost that got 100% wiped.

Seems to me Biden should make it clear in advance to Putin that if he does that NATO planes will give killing every Russian soldier in Ukraine their level best shot. Personally I would even argue for bombing the retreating ones if the Russians use gas or intentionally wreck a nuclear plant. Let Putin explain 80 or a hundred thousand casualties. Added as an edit, And sink every Russian warship in the black sea.

Any word on what they hit his headquarters with?

Brave men, but then Ukraine is not short of those!

I think selling the Ukrainians cruise missiles for a dollar a piece as they cross into Ukrainian airspace has a certain appeal. Maybe sell them 10 or 25 every time the Russians do something this unspeakably awful.

Having to have that chopper over the convoy in the first place is an enormous resource drain.

The Russians just don't seem to have even a fraction of the infantry they need. A function army would have a platoon guard this until a recovery could get out there. As is the Russians don't have a platoon they trust to actually stay there, and it isn't clear they have the recovery vehicle either. So a farmer will set it on fire with a pint of gas and a cigarette.

I have brought this up before to mixed reviews, but whatI call the flywheel of barbarity is spinning faster and faster. This is also an enormous point of vulnerability, you have a ruling class of a different ethnicity, and different first language, that is viscously disliked by the majority of the population. This works as long as the majority is scared enough. It gets VERY dicey when the mailed fist that backs up that ruling class starts looking weak. Weak as in the riot police battalion is however many thousand miles away getting its #$% shot off, and nobody knows if it is coming home or when. Pretty much a textbook example, actually.

Trent has been the single best analyst of this war so far, but this post is not very good. Russia has forty BTGs left in the entire country. I don't think Putin can afford to commit his very last soldier to Ukraine with economy in free fall. There are no shortage of unhappy ethnic groups in Russia. If they noticed the nearest tank was a thousand miles away and not coming back anytime soon there would be consequences.

Got to disagree on this one, at least a little. What is getting old is watching Putin wreck Ukraine with maximum intentional killing of civilians. Putin will wave his magic nuclear stick as long as it works, and he won't stop in Ukraine, or anywhere else, unless we make him.

Can we get the daily likes, plusses, whatever they are called increased? by a lot?

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/ Some it you have seen if you have been looking, some it was new to me, and if they say it is graphic, they are NOT joking.

And it isn't just that the Ukrainians are wrecking the Russians' supply lines. The Russians haven't broken the Kyiv's supply lines, every day large quantities of supplies are flowing in and all manner of preparations are being made. More civilians get out so noncombatant mouths won't be eating those supplies. A day's pause isn't in the Russians favor, a week's pause isn't in the Russians favor. And it could REALLY rain at any moment, and off road movement becomes the rest of the way impossible. If the have the the ability to do it the Russians should be attacking now, with everything that still runs.

This is yet another weight on the Russians morale.

We will know Putin is absolutely, irrevocably bleeped when we see high school kids, and the army being sent out to countryside to try and get some of the crop in by hand.

How can the airport run out fuel when there are almost no planes flying? Is the refinery/distributor holding back because they are afraid they won't get paid? Because getting paid in rubles amounts to NOT getting paid? Ran out of critical little part immediately? So many questions, but i can't imagine any of the questions, or any of the possible answers are improving Putin's day.

If Ukraine comes thru this with a country, and an economy to speak off, Zelensky is going to more or less completely in charge for a WHILE, literal father of the nation ect.. If he is half a good a peace time president as he has been a wartime president he use the opportunity to at reduce it, a LOT.