dan/california

Biden made at least some initial moves towards giving Ukraine the frozen Russian funds at the Federal Reserve. I still think it is more likely the Dems will eat enough crap on border policy to actually pass something, but if there is going to be a plan B, it is the frozen Russian money.

I just wrote and called both Senators and my Congressman about getting Ukraine funding done. Every single reader of this board who is a U.S. Citizen should do the same.

The Gulf States are not our friend, they are our dealer. They are just nice enough that we don't actually get clean and tell them to go to bleep. Given that you can still buy a pickup truck that gets ten or twelve miles per gallon, they seem to have us pretty hooked. Throwing Putin a party just demonstrates this...

I disagree on the politics of giving the Republicans some of what they want on the border. Very few Democratic voters regard the border as THE issue, a lot of Republicans do. It is a little like the NRA/guns issue, a minority that will actually change their vote over an issue can beat a majority that doesn't consider it that important. Giving the Republicans the less crazy chunk of what they want would let the Democrats diffuse the border issue to some degree, and run on the issues that are actually good for them, Dobbs not least among them. The border is a complete mess now, it can be a completely mess in a different way for a few years without completely destroying the world order as it has stood since 1945. Abandoning Ukraine would be mistake that that wrecks the next century. Edit: Now I have to figure out how to rephrase this for a letter to my Congressman and Senators.

Not good, I really think Biden needs to give the Republicans three quarters of what they want on this. Not because I agree with any if it, but because the border being a mess a different way for a few years is not an existential issue. Ukraine IS an existential issue. If the Republicans do get what they want on the border the entire business lobby will abandon them as soon as the labor shortage really bites, and then maybe we can have a real conversation.

Added a comment from lower down that I suspect is relevant.Many of these people are being lied too from the moment they leave their villages, until they wind up under artillery fire. As someone mentioned above I would expect people from a fair bit of the third world to start showing up.

Doing a better job of not freezing will be a non-trivial factor this winter.

Capt. if you want to talk we want to listen! The scariest similarity between Russia and China is that they have both devolved to what is effectively one man rule. The war in Ukraine happened because Putin wanted it too, full stop. There was no critical forcing element in the Russian system at large, indeed all available reports indicate that almost everyone IN RUSSIA thought it was a bad idea. That was the single biggest contradictory element in the pre-war intelligence. Unfortunately, to extent I can determine from a couch in Seattle with no access to classified information , the situation in Chine is unpleasantly similar. Xi has become a more or less absolute autocrat, and if he decides to invade Taiwan there is no one in the Chinese system to tell him he can't. To put it mildly that increases unpredictability of the situation immensely. It must be pointed out that this is considerably different form the Soviet leadership after Stalin, The Central Committee had more or less absolute power, but it WAS a committee. This was also true of Chine for essentially all of the period between Mao, and Xi, and Mao just did not have the capacity to do all that much outside of China's borders. The essentially one man rule in both countries is a bad thing that just makes the whole world vastly less stable.

Xi seems determined to see how much mistreatment the Chinese economy can stand.

Even with overhead observation this Russian assault group gets their heads handed to them.

It just can't be that hard to set up a real assembly line for these things where they aren't put together by packing tape and chewing gum. It is just one more thing in this war where nobody has been able to admit to themselves that this thing isn't ending tomorrow, and we actually have to build some manufacturing capacity.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1730995200917393585.html

Great quote!

The single biggest thing that makes it a drone is that it flys home if you don't find a target worth spending it on. It all comes down to deterrence, and failures thereof. The invasion of Ukraine was failure of deterrence, Putin thought he could conquer the place for a price he was willing to pay. By continuing to prove him very painfully wrong we increase the level of deterrence throughout our alliance system/sphere of influence. There is no question in my mind that Xi would launch an invasion of Taiwan if he thought he could do it on the three day SMO model. We have to convince him he CAN'T do that, preferably while having some energy and attention left for the rest of the planet. The overarching problem I truly CANNOT see a solution to is negotiating some sort of meaningful curbs on global warming at the same time. If you have any credible ideas on fixing that one in the midst of a new cold war, you have my vote for any job on the planet.

They are rounding up EVERYBODY not under the protection of the Moscow/St Petersburg upper classes.

it is obviously on the expensive side, and sort of straddling the line between being a drone, and a missile. But think about the capability is represents. All you have to know is that a helicopter took a shot from XYZ general area, and you send up one or two of these to hunt it down. It would also be very valuable for high end counter-battery targets like Uragan MLRS. It could get to the approximate area fast enough to find it trying to leave, doubly so if it could be launched while radar was still refining the launch location.

The military industrial complex has joined the chat, finally. Ukraine will take them all. Edit: and helicopters are done...

We have done a crap job at what should have been the obvious targeted ones ,though. A real effort to actively sabotage Russian military production by feeding them them bad parts, components, cyber attacks directly on the machine tools, and..., and.... just doesn't seem to have been done at all really.

Not a cheery read, I would argue the greatest flaw in the strategic vision though, was in the Whitehouse at about the three month point of the war. They just vastly overestimated their ability to fine tune how this thing was going to end. Now they are vey close to allowing the bad guys to make a late game comeback.

So Ukraine needs SOMETHING to break, or at least degrade, the Russian C4ISR system to unstick this thing. There need to to be smart people in quantity, with money in even greater supply, throwing rocks, laser beams, and autonomous drones at this problem until they figure it out. And when they do figure it out, it needs to be built and shipped in a truly crash program.

With the aforementioned Russian improvement there just seems to be a multi-kilometer band on both sides of the line where vehicle movement is suicidal. My assumption, and it is an assumption, is that this band is defined by the sensor reach of medium altitude drones flying circuits far enough onto their own side to be mostly safe from SAM systems. Absent a better way to knock these drones down, or a truly massive superiority in the weight if effective fires, I just don't see how either side is doing much of anything in way of advancing.

Three brigade sets of late model Buk-M3 delivered, and and least four more on order, if this has any bearing on reality. Irritatingly it doesn't specify how many units a brigade gets. Original article is in Russian BTW. Actual production rate is not given.

Note the level of control in the drones flight path...

I am no way saying that the U.S. hasn't made a truly impressive laundry list of mistakes in the last thirty years, but I think we have to look at the way we approached those mistakes. The U.S. has mostly attempted to increase order and the rule of law. With very few exceptions when we set out to undermine a hostile regime we have been extremely public about it. Sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program is the only real exception. There were other covert actions, but at the very least they mostly in pursuit of very public goals like the the pursuit of ISIS and Bin Laden. We now have to adapt ourselves to a world that again has real great power competition, and multiple players with a proven willingness to change borders by force. We have to relearn to do things in a truly covert manner, and keep them covert even if successful. We simply can't afford not relearn how to help unpleasant regimes and people to experience what i like to call "bad industrial accidents", and they need too look convincingly accidental.