dan/california

Israeli public opinion is in a BAD PLACE.

If only there was a good simulation to help work some of this out.... It needs mentioning here that "snow" is an extraordinarily variable thing. It is quite possible that 95% of the time the mines work more or less normally, but that there is some combination of thaw, refreeze, and more snow or freezing rain that would disable most mines temporarily. A question I am pondering very hard is could such circumstances be created by carefully controlled flooding somewhere. Find just the right low lying spot, knock down an otherwise inconsequential dyke, and create the conditions for a few kilometer stretch to freeze solid enough. to support at least light vehicles. It would probably have to be timed at warmish moment before a hard freeze. I realize that is a very complicated basis for a plan, but the entire defensive scheme on both sides in Ukraine depends on the assault being slowed enough to let all the supporting fires come to the party. If a couple of brigades of light vehicles could suddenly just floor it right through a section of the defenses things might get very lively.

I generally agree with the points they do make. They great flaw is that they don't emphasize that many of these weaknesses depend greatly on the extent to which Russia loses in Ukraine, and is seen to lose.

I fully agree with this. In a related question does anybody have a video of a CV-90 doing the same kind of tree line shred? I am very curious about the performance of the bigger gun. The long term question is what is the smallest UGV that can carry a Bushmaster, and enough ammo to justify itself? Or will little flying bombs make even that unworkable.

They need to pull these guys out and put them in charge of the course for the whole army.

The two coolest things I found today.

The biggest short term effect is every corporation that isn't busting sanctions, and probably a lot of them that are, is going to demand cash in advance to ship much of anything to Russia. That matters when you are heading towards a cash crunch anyway.

If Nato really committed there would not be a single Russian vehicle moving on the land bridge. Give the Mobiks a month to freeze properly, and I think things would look very different.

This is one of the fundamental contradictions in modern warfare, all jammers, and most air defense systems have to emit detectable radiation to do their job. Jammers, almost by definition have to emit a LOT of it. This can be detected more or less instantly with proper equipment, and then it is just a question of how long the other sides targeting cycle is. You can do a lot of things tactically as far as turning things on and off in in various sequences, so hopefully you can't be found before you do something militarily useful, but basic concept is inescapable.

As someone put it eloquently a few pages ago, the problem isn't just having a lot of your own drones, it is suppressing the other guys. As long as the other guy has drones up attacking is just going to cost to much and be to slow. Ground the bad guys drones one way or another and everything else has some chance to work.

As someone put it eloquently a few pages ago, the problem isn't just having a lot of your own drones, it is suppressing the other guys. As long as the other guy has drones up attacking is just going to cost to much and be to slow. Ground the bad guys drones one or another and everything else has some chance to work.

Fantastic post. I still come back to drones, drones enable the artillery that makes the minefields impregnable. If you achieve drone superiority in a wide enough area you can use the rest of your force sort of, kind of, as it was intended ten or twenty years ago. In terms of the course of the war, the great failure was the pace of support in the summer of 2022. If the tanks and the ATACMS, and the cluster munition had been there to leverage the the initial victory at Kharkiv, either by attacking somewhere else, or enabling that attack to roll all the way the Luhansk City, their is at least a possibility that the Russians might have just folded. Giving them six to months months to sort out their problems, and then feeding things like cluster munitions, and ATACMS in piecemeal has been EXTREMELY expensive. Allow me to reiterate that the cluster munitions, and the ATACMS could be used by systems the Ukrainians already HAD, and they had been begging for both since May 2022. Maybe, just maybe, Jake Sullivan ought to develop a urgent need to spend more time with his family before the Russians win this war. It isn't like his Mideast strategy has exactly been a raging success either. The man need to go do something else.

I think this article is at least directionally correct. Ukraine can't get a big enough advantage in enough places at once to break the Russian system. We need to help them fix that.

The mobiks seem to understand they are completely expendable, and just be ok with it. Todays tape of two fully loaded AFVs driving past six OTHER dead Russian AFVs to get whacked within fifty yards of the same spot is exhibit A. And i fully expect there to be tape of a third batch dying in the same kill zone next week. I mean there is a Ukrainian mortar team that just leaves a tube zeroed on that spot, so they can drop death on it with thirty seconds notice. But the mobiks are so beat down from a hundred generations of abuse they would rather die that way, than shoot their officers and surrender. Ukraine may have to kill another half a million of them to get the point across. We need to be sure they have the tech, and the ammo, to do that with the lowest possible casualties.

you will be invisible to Ukrainian drones, we promise!

I want to know what they said/did to convince the guys in this tape that things would end any differently from how it ended for the multiple platoons of dead AFVs they were driving right past? I fully expect in a week or so we will get more tape of more suicidal mobiks dying in the middle of what will then be a full company of wrecked AFVs. The Russian systems only strength is its ability to convince large quantities of people to commit suicide. That is the lock we have to pick. Edit: There some strong parallels with Imperial Japan at some level. It isn't wish talk, it is a rational strategic response to the stated intentions of our primary adversary. Taiwan is the linchpin of the the economic miracle in East Asia. The CCCP understands this, that is why they are frothing at the mouth to control it. For 70 plus years we have been able to deter them remotely, that time is passing very, very quickly. In addition to being a truly unmistakeable signal of U.S. commitment, the Marines could be used to drag the entire Taiwanese military up to speed. If we have to get that division there after the war starts, under a hail of Chinese anti shipping missiles starting AT LEAST five hundred miles from the Chinese coast it will be beyond expensive in terms of casualties. China is actually getting ready for this fight, if we don't we will be very, very sorry.

The single biggest reason this war is popular in large parts of Russia is that it has diverted a significant portion of the oil income that used to go straight to the Moscow/St Petersburg governing complex. Now rural villages that haven't seen a ruble in thirty years are suddenly getting truly large amounts of cash from military pay and death benefits. Second tier cities that were originally built as part of the Soviet military industrial complex, and have been dying on the vine for decades, are suddenly flush with factory orders to the extent they can't keep up. Retirees and teenagers are being recruited/drafted into the work force. The thing that will break this "beneficial" cycle is runaway inflation. The West has to buckle down and hold the line on sanctions. As well as keeping Ukraines army in the field.

In my experience your day goes to heck when someone yells that that it isn't working. Zero times have I been happy about what happened next.

This is excellent, but whatever needs to be done to add a zero to that production number needs to be done, soonest.

The blockade scenario at least gives the U.S., and its allies, time to spool up. Of course we needed to start spooling up a year ago. there are some munitions we need ten times more of, and some we need a hundred times more of. That still doesn't seem to be breaking through the way it needs to be. Never the less the worst case scenario is the Chinese taking the island the way Putin thought he was going to take Kyiv. That is the one we need to take off the table first. I mean i also advocate putting an entire division of Marines on Taiwan. It would take the ambiguity bit right out of the equation.

Yes the IDF needs to go much slower. At the same time Israel needs some confidence that if they slow this thing down by 75% they aren't going to be told times up at some random point. And yes you are 100% correct, Israeli public opinion borderline savage at the moment. No clue what to do about while Netanyahu is pushing from the top. https://www.politico.eu/article/israeli-tv-sketch-show-brandishes-satire-as-weapon-in-hamas-war/ Concern about Palestinians is uhm limited...

And for some reason this one posted correctly? Anyway, you should read Dmitri every day.

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1735943332243644437 Twitter being difficult. Russian soldier demonstrates the perils of poor training, and possibly vodka.

The way to make the invasion of Taiwan simply impossible is the anti shipping version of this thing. https://www.anduril.com/roadrunner A cheap 100 km anti-ship missile/drone that launches from its own independent box. The U.S and Taiwan have the ability to do this, we just need to pull our heads out of our behinds and do it at scale, as quickly as possible. By scale I mean tens of thousands of them, they will cost a LOT less if we commit to the necessary numbers up front. Then we can worry about the navy's job, which is how to deal with a blockade scenario.

Pretty sure a forum regular works for that exact company, hopefully he will be along before the weekend is over. Except that after four years of the savage stalemate Germany broke. They did not get to keep Northeastern France, the Low Countries, or a great deal else. All of the choices are bad, it doesn't mean some of them are not a lot worse. See below. At least some people in the Navy are starting to figure that out. He basically proposes a mostly PGM based fleet with the cheapest possible ships carrying the missiles, because they WILL take losses.