dan/california

An instagram video from United 24. It does an excellent job of making the point that the people in Western capitals complaining THEY are tired need to bleeping get a grip. Apologies for posting the instagram link, I couldn't find it anywhere else, and I tried fairly hard. If someone has a link on another platform please post it.

This book contains four excellent case studies of some of the biggest turnovers in military technology from the last ~150 years. I thought it was excellent, and i learned a lot from it.

Also possible, i haven't frame by framed it. But the pattern of the tracers and the apparent misses in a linear pattern looks a great deal like a couple things we have seen recently that we at least think we know are Bradley 25mm firing at very long range. I freely concede that the video is low quality, and my impression may completely wrong. Speaking of Bradley's firing at very long range, I have a question for the people on the forum who have actually operated one. Does the U.S. commonly employ the 25mm at very long range in semi indirect fire? Or is this something the Ukrainians are inventing as we watch?

The interesting thing about this tape is that is was hit by some sort or direct fire auto-cannon. Probably firing at longe range. I am thinking someone was not careful about sight lines to the far bank of the river. That or the Ukrainians have a lot more forces over the river than we thought, and in places the Russians did not expect them to be. Interesting either way.

Totally possible this is a mistake in what I suspect was a multi language translation. If it is true though I strongly suspect it is the Ukrainians trying very hard not to have a friendly fire problem when the lines are moving back and forth by the hour. They want to be very sure their own drones know not to shell them.

The goal of a better method to lay MICLIC type charges is to get the cost down, and therefore the availability of the equipment up, to the point that many more lanes could be created. So instead attempting two or three lanes, and those only at the place you are actually attacking, you could do six lanes in multiple places, and keep the other side guessing that much longer.

Both U.S. and Israeli politics are going the rest of the way off the rails because of leaders whose primary motivation is staying out of jail. Netanyahu is bitter ending his time in office because he is more or less immune to prosecution as long as he hangs on. It would be a mess anyway, but this is the final straw making things so much worse.

Above is the detailed plan done by the Estonian MOD about how to sort out supplying, and training Ukraine coherently. It is entirely within the capability of NATO and friends to do this. Below is an excellent podcast to the effect that we aren't doing that, not even close. I recommend going thru both of them , and then contacting your elected representatives, and then contacting them again, and again, and again.

WW1 on the Eastern front never culminated into true trench warfare because neither side had enough bodies to build and man the equivalent of the continuous trench system in the West. As a result the fighting played out more like the Germans had thought it would pre war, and the Germans were better at it than the Russians. So the Germans were able to conduct several major battles of maneuver that just wrecked large parts of the Russian Army. The Russians did much the same to the Austro-Hungarians. The overall balance though swung decisively to the Germans, due not least to the Czars complete incompetence. The morale of the Russian army just broke. This of course fed back into the series of political convulsions in Russia that culminated in the the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin came out on top in that not least by promising the army peace at any price. It took the Germans to long, and cost them them to much, but the war in the East did not come out all that differently from German pre-war planning. It is just that this success was not enough to keep the German war economy afloat as the weight of the U.S. coming in, and the grinding pressure of the blockade ground down Germany's ability to continue the war. As Dan-Frodo mentioned the peace treaty the Germans made the Russians sign made the the treaty of Versailles look mild and well adjusted.

The times really is on a maximum pessimism campaign. And Russia really is in the process of becoming a Chinese colony.

Something like this might be worth half a look, particularly given that a lot of southern Ukraine has relatively soft soil. If you could shove a MICLIC charge underneath the minefield without being noticed you might be able to open several parallel breaches with the element of surprise. The manufactures are quoting boring rates of one to two meters per minute. it would possible to do a full five hundred meters in one or two episodes of bad weather, then trigger the charges when things were more optimal for operations. Yes you would get the the bleep shelled/droned out of you if the Russians noticed. But the tech more or less exists. It seems like it would at least be worth a few training range experiments. I think you could buy about a hundred of these for the cost of one Abrams based breaching vehicle. If nothing else you could irritate the Russians by setting up fake attempts, and counter batterying whatever they used to shoot at them.

They did that add a year ago. Truly maximum cringe...

There have two REAL emergency landings, and what appears to be spiraling mechanical delays in the last few months. Russia bought quite a few newish planes over the last twenty years, and they are just really hard to keep going without manufacturer support.

We won't be able to say we weren't warned. The entire West needs to go to wartime level munitions production NOW. That would be between five and twenty five times more than we are producing now.

Russia is burning its seed corn to stay warm in five different ways. Indeed they seem to be shoveling it on the fire faster in the effort to intimidate everyone into giving up. If we don't give up the Russians are going to be spectacularly bleeped. Someone mentioned in the last hundred pages that Russian airline have had four or five extremely close calls, like airplanes landing in wheat fields that will probably never leave close calls. That string and a great many others are going to run out. Tightening up high tech/machine tool exports seems to have finally become a priority, it is criminal that it hasn't happened sooner. The other thing that STILL needs doing is an actual travel ban. Sending all the oligarchs kids home from Oxford and Columbia, too. The travel ban is the perfect sanction, because poor Russians aren't traveling anyway, and the rich ones will really care.

To the good guys only, by preference It isn't what this forum is about, but the millstone around Trump and the Republicans is abortion. And the reddest states are are being intentionally crazy about enforcing their bans because it plays the the part of the base that votes in primaries. The good news for the the rest of us is that the red state primary base is not NEARLY big enough to win a national election. Abortion bans lost in Kansas and Ohio for bleeps sake. Once you hit the outer edge of the belt there needs to be significant light mounted forces ready to floor it and spread the chaos far enough that the Russian system can't compensate.

I am starting to hear creaking noises again....

A feel good video, you need one of those now and again.

The perfect way to assault the the Russian defensive line is for the U.S. Air Force to join this war, establish complete air supremacy, and then literarily obliterate a section of Russian line tens of kilometers wide. Oh, and every single Russian supply vehicle in the entire land bridge, and every actual bridge that goes over something more than ankle deep. Anything less than that is going to be an extremely high risk maneuver for the units involved. We are at least pontificating that this plan has a more plausible chance of working than anything else anyone has thought of. Notice I said plausible, not guaranteed. Conveniently the new game would be almost perfectly suited to work this plan a little bit, if it looks anything like I think it does. I have no non-public information whatsoever. If Charles doesn't want to code the jet packs you could just put the deployment zone for the air assault troops on the hostile side of the mine fields, and make some assumptions about casualties during the fly in. And yes I realize the risk of the U.S. Air Force plan is WW3.

It would also work just as well for ship to shore as it would for getting over a minefield.

Alright Steve we have just outlined the new game, Combat Mission New Model Air Assault, get busy.

The compactness of the jetpack could be useful in some missions. If the demos is any indication you could probably land it right on a balcony, or a narrow bit of deck on a ship. But those seem more like a special ops anti terrorists operation than a brigade level new model airborne assault.

I mean its nuts, but the proven solutions have been proven not to work. The other huge advantage would be to attack all the layers of the trench system at the same time, so all the positions that usually support each other are to busy with their own problems. The step i haven't seen tried but seems very doable would be to have heavy lift UAVs lay the MICLIC charges. So instead of having an insanely expensive specialized armored vehicle deploying a thousand feet of charge with questionable accuracy, have UAVs do it in fifty meter increments, or whatever they can carry. Edit: the other trick would be if the jet packs could fly themselves back. So that the instant on soldier hits the ground, the pack leaves to get the next one without bleeping around. Edit: One more to add, the packs can obviously something in the range of a hundred kilos, a remotely controlled one could set a bunker busting charge down more or less within a foot of where you wanted it. One more way to leverage the tech a ruin the bad guys whole day.

Dmitri for the win, Again.

Twitter being a pain, great stufff from Dmitri though. A russian soldier filmed the the pre assault hype fest. He didn't make it but his phone did, so this includes tape from both sides. Dmitri say a a longer video is coming.