dan/california

This might be the screw up that gets them to tighten up and slow down...

Twitter is managing to be even more irritating, but this near miss video from some Russian Pilots is amusing.

Good podcast.

It is actually worse than that. The goal of the Republicans opposing the aid is to cause a disaster in Ukraine, and then turn around and use that disaster against Biden in the next election. Taking power from the opposing faction in our own country has become far more important than the countries position in the word, or managing the system that has made us the most prosperous place in history by orders of magnitude.

Your right about this, after the fact no amount retributive violence can completely fix it. That says a very great deal about what we ought to be doing to be sure it doesn't happen in the first place.

Hopefully Putin will be unhappy enough to send him some very special tea.

Of course approximately nobody in 1914 really understood that technology had reached a defensive primacy equilibrium that would hold until ~1935. That turned out to be an expensive misunderstanding. And yes I realize that the initial German push into France at the beginning of the whole thing very nearly worked. One of histories bigger what ifs.

Funny you should mention that.... HELSINKI, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Finland will on Monday Dec. 18 sign a defence cooperation agreement with the United States, the Finnish government said on Thursday, to grant the U.S. military broad access across the Nordic country to the vicinity of its long border with Russia. Russia's Nordic neighbour Finland became the NATO military alliance's newest member earlier this year in response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. "The fact that there will be no need to agree on everything separately, makes organising peace time operations easier, but above all it can be vital in a crisis," Finland's Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen told reporters. Not nukes, yet, but certainly a very sharp stick in the general direction of Putin's eye.

What had to happen to day, happened. That is plenty good enough.

Then we should be seen to be trying, rather hard. If nothing else they need enough support that holding the current lines against the Russians becomes almost routine, as opposed to a grinding slog.

Lets just say it feeds back to my own opinion of how much support Ukraine OUGHT to be getting.

I agree with everything in your post, but you are only looking at part of what maintains the international system. If the Oct 7th attack is seen to have been a long term success for Hamas, every unhappy group on the planet is going to take note. What will the reaction be when some bunch of homicidal idiots/fanatics with a "cause" goes Oct 7th on cruise ship somewhere? The only good outcome here was for the Israelis not to get caught asleep at the switch. I am just trying to point out that there is more than one kind of very negative lesson to be drawn here. And yes all the choices are bad, it doesn't mean some of them are not worse.

Why would flooding the tunnels be a war crime? They are more or less purely military infrastructure.

An awful lot of them are going to decide to go nuclear. If we let Ukraine go under that will include places like South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. At least two of those three could probably do it in six months from a standing start. That is on the very optimistic assumption is they haven't ALREADY started. Australia too, come to think of it. And, and, and.........

I think infantry, terrain, and fortifications still very much matter. It is quite possible none of them will be quite the SAME going forward, but I don't think they are going away. They all seem to matter rather a lot around Avdivka. See below. Most of this response is rhetorical, but i am absolutely convinced that if Ukraine could put the power out in Moscow for a month this winter it make a large difference in this war. NATO has also done a ton of hemming and hawing on a vast number of issues that Ukraine has every right to angry about, since they have cost Ukrainian lives. The endless delay in releasing the cluster munitions we have released, and a number of types of them that we still haven't being example A. The endless back and forth about ATACMs, and then only giving them ten, and, and, and.... We vastly overestimated our ability to to land this thing on the exact glide path we (wrongly) seem to prefer, and it seems to be in danger of imploding because of it. When Ukraine was still standing in May 2022 we should have committed to WINNING this thing, not "improving our negotiating position.

It is not at all clear to me that Tanks/IFVs/mech anything is a thing going forward. it is absolutely clear to me that if they are they will have the ability to use drones to direct fire from their main armaments. And I don't mean by voice, I mean seamlessly passing targeting data.

The video os TOS going boom was posted a while ago, but this is an interview with the commander of the team that did it.

It says something that this is a target worthy of spending a PGM on

This is the important bit, if your fog wins, the only limitation on how fast you wipe the other side off the field is ammo availability. The West/NATO have to get this right, or someone is going to deal out a defeat we will have a VERY hard time dealing with in a few years.

Even if the parts of tech industry are trying to prevent it, the basic technology here is essentially perfect for drone guidance. It can only be a matter of months before both Ukraine and Russia hack whoever and whatever they have to hack to be able to field almost completely autonomous drones. The only question is whether the Pentagon is smart enough to make sure the Ukrainians get there first.

I would file this as somewhat significant if it is true, and related to the war as opposed to some sort of domestic dispute. If some piece of the Ukrainian intelligence apparatus can Identify a guy like this as nearly irreplaceable, understand his daily routine well enough, to get a shooter to the right bus stop, and then get away? That is a significant capability.

The one beside Donestk City? There are like five of them... Well, the Ukrainians have been screaming for even longer range assets from the beginning of the war essentially, When we don''t give them, they have to take risks like this. And if the Russians weren't capable of hitting the broad side of the barn occasionally Ukraine would be on the sea of Azov shooting GMLRS -ER at the Kerch Bridge. As Zaluzny made very clear the Russian CSISR/fires complex is good enough to prevent Ukraine from attacking at scale, and it is going to take more, or better, something to break that capability.

Not been a good week.

Yes, welcome aboard, but I thought I was the reasonable one......

I can't put it any better, the whole article is worth a read.