dan/california

This is an excellent translation, gives as much feel for the war as anything I have read. It also really points out both how important good junior officers are, and how hard it is to keep them alive. The only non military/defense industry target worth hitting is the Moscow electric grid, I don't think casualties, blackouts, or anything else does much of anything except play to Putins propaganda if it happens anywhere else in Russia. Now if they could put the lights out in Moscow, even for a few days, in the middle of winter? I think that would have a at the very least a meaningful propaganda value for Ukraine. It might even move some plans along by someone, somewhere for Putins own window mishap This would be the most excellent exception to what I just wrote above.

Which may true on the facts , but that interpretation is also going to kill the nuclear non-proliferation regime deader than dead. Every regime outside of the most solid parts of the U.S. alliance system, and maybe quite a few of them inside it, will conclude that the only guarantee of not being on the menu is their own deliverable nukes. So not pushing Russia completely out of Ukraine is going to greatly increase the risk of. a nuclear exchange down the road. except it will be between Vietnam and China, at least at first, just to site one case of long term disagreeableness that isn't currently on the boil. Never mind the five places where things ARE passing 97 Deg C as we speak. My opinion, worth what you paid. I can totally see Poland and the Baltics combining on a crash program among a great many others. Edit: I don't think the Poles would go for it unless a certain Orange someone got elected, but if he does...

So we agree Russia has extraordinarily little on its escalation ladder that does not include WMD, and their new Chinese owners seem rather down on using those. So why not give Ukraine the hundreds of of older ATACMS, and other long range strike options to simply kill everything in the land bridge and northern Crimea with more military significance than a Bukhanka van full of drugged out mobiks?

There was a lot of discussion last year about essentially pushing NATO's air defense Umbrella forward into western Ukraine. I still think that makes a ton of sense. Putin is trying to convince the Russian people we are quitting, that is the time to double down.

just to make it easier for everybody to find

Would it be less confusing if I changed my user name? I'm thinking it would not actually help.

I'm the cartoon chickenhawk, he is the dogs.

https://www.threads.net/@noelreports/post/C1ZqjkptWUW From the Daily Kos article Danfrodo highlighted above, a textbook drone double tap.

Because a streak of mass surrenders is still the best and easiest way for Ukraine to win this war. Every Russian soldier every day needs to think that "I can die of frostbite slowly, unless a drone gets me first, or I can be warm , dry, fed, and comfortable in a Ukrainian POW camp". It really is that simple, and I am the guy that fully agrees that that the lights need to go out in Moscow, among other things. I am not making a moral argument, pure military utility. They need to put out MORE videos of POWs eating well.

At what point does Putin run into this problem in a major way?

We aren't going to know what is really happening in Congress until they have been back for a week or so. The number of people crossing the Southern border just keeps going up, so the Biden Administration has incentive to just give the Republicans what they want there. The border can be completely dysfunctional in a different way for while. Write/call your Congressperson.

I can see the slightst trace of what hit it. Maybe it was tank main gun round?

Pushing five times as hard just gets you five times the casualties.

Lukashenko is harder to kill than a cockroach, and this seems like just about the worst possible moment for Putin to do something that might cause Belarus to get lively all of a sudden. He does NOT have a division or two to spare to put out a fire in Minsk.

Edit: Some interesting bits here.

Merry Christmas all. To the Ukrainians in the trenches, and to the families who can't think about anything else, I wish you victory, peace, and that next year it will all be a bad memory. Churchill had a little speech about how much the many owed the few, It applies to Ukrainian soldiers as much or more than anybody in history.

I think you are underestimating three factors that are contributing the Russians commercial aircraft maintenance issues. The first is the extraordinarily tight grip that Airbus and Boeing keep on the parts and maintenance business/process. They do this both because they get the blame when a plane has a problem, and because it makes them a great deal of money. This is facilitated by the highly regulated nature of the business among other things. The second issue is that Russia did not launch a full scale program ten years ago to ready to get around the first problem. There are a lot of things they COULD have have done with several years of lead time, but the plan to actually invade was very held to an extraordinarily small group, and even that nasty little cabal in the Kremlin did not have a clue that they were looking at a multi year major war, with massive sanctions and so on. Nobody even tried to prepare for this in advance. The third problem, that massively exacerbates the second one, is that the same limited pool of people and resources that might be able to do something about the problem are also being ordered to make an absolute maximum 24/7 effort to increase the production of everything from small arms ammo to Su-34s and Iskanders. I don't think the Russian airlines are at the front of that line. I am not even sure they are IN that line. When you add up the three factors, and the general Russian disregard for anything resembling safety, my advice is take the train.

The man is as hard to get rid of as a bad roach infestation, and less pleasant to have around.

No, but it makes all the other problems much worse. The details of the math matter here. If you have ten brigades and you utterly wreck two or three of them to get the other seven loose in yours opponents rear area, and they do enough damage that the enemy has to retreat tens or hundreds of miles, with mass surrenders and such. Then you have just achieved a major military success, albeit an expensive one. I have essentially just described the battle of El Alamein, which despite very high losses is considered a huge success for the British by almost everyone. If you launch an attack with ten brigades and seven of of them get shredded, and the other three have to retreat, well you have just lost rather badly. I have just described the battle of Kursk, and NOBODY thinks the Germans won that one. They were both set piece attacks against prepared positions. One of them worked and one of them didn't, because the details matter, and the current beyond enormous minefields in Ukraine are very most definitely one of those details. Edit: The basis of the current disagreement between the Ukrainian and U.S. militaries is that the U.S. thinks Ukraine could have achieved an El Alamein style victory if they had stacked everything into one maximum effort push instead of spreading out there efforts in hopes of finding a seam in the Russian defenses. The Ukrainians are absolutely convinced that if they had done that they would simply have would have had the same kind of disaster the Germans experienced at Kursk, and the Russians have recently demonstrated at Vuhledar and Adviika. Trying five times as hard in spot where the defense is truly solid, relative to what you can bring to bear, just gets five times as many people killed. So what we are talking about, with varying degrees of sanity, is how to move the math in Ukraine favor, just enough.

can't figure out what to say...

I love it, the 144th VDV regmt, quality rating Steak Tartare. This might need to be a thing in the new game.

This s the kind of thing that willnor just help Ukraine on the battlefield, but really weigh on the Kremlin's thinking I fully agree with Haiduk that Russia is trying to cash in ~eighty years of investment in the Western "peace" camp to get something out of this war through subversion that it couldn't win on the battlefield. I also agree with Steve that this particular article has relatively reasonable assessment of Putins intention, but some of the other recent stuff in the NYT has been full the sky is falling panic. I firmly believe that the NYT itself has representatives of both the the appeasement camp, and the Ukraine has to win camp. They really have been all over the map. The thing I keep coming back to about Putin's Strategy for ending this war is that their no reason for assuming it is any more coherent the initial Feb 22 plan for fighting it. To all current appearances Putin is firmly in charge and he could decide to retreat, or launch a second larger mobilization over breakfast. The only reasonable certainty is that any agreement with him isn't worth the paper it is printed on. The Patrushevs are certainly trying to line things up for after Putin, but they seem to think the best way to do that is to appear completely loyal until Putin's ticker pops a spring. The only thing Ukraine can rely on is whatever guarantees it gets from the U.S. and the E.U.. Even those can't be considered entirely solid until and unless the U.S. election comes out the right way.

While I can eventually see this leading to a truly terrifying recon UGV, I suspect the distributed neural net and soft actuators to make it work would be way to expensive for something that was supposed to make a one way trip, one time. As the basis of an SOF teams favorite new toy, though...