dan/california

If i could throw in one more specific thing. CM needs a vastly better simulation of mines, mine clearing, and relatede combat engineering. Can the cost of that be justified in absence of a nice military contract, I have no idea, but the third phase of this war has been mines and what to do about them, while each sides artillery did every thing it could to make the minefields even less pleasant. Yes that is an oversimplification, but it is a pretty good one.

The whole report is a top down look at Russia's and China's long term military plans and goals. However I thought Steve might want to clip the quote above, and go beat a selection of Colonels and Congresspeople with it. They did discuss the risk that the PLA is basing some of it simulations on overly optimistic assumptions. they attribute at least part of this to minuscule amount of fighting the PLA has done since 1953. The whole thing is a 32 page PDF, you probaly can't get through it in one cup of coffee.

Think so.

Much good news in todays ISW, not least a dead VDV regimental commander on the Don-Zap front. Ukraine appears to be advancing on a broad front around Bakmuht. The S-400 in Crimea of course. What is it with Russian officers named Popov. Their are at least two of them mentioned in today's readout and the relived commander of the 58th CAA isn't one of them. Is this a prominent extended family in the Russian military? Or is that surname just much more common than I realized?

I doubt they are going to do anything more ambitious than pushing more troops across the Dnipro in one of the places they already have. Although given that Russian fighter plane and Ukrainian rubber boat seems to be an even fight, I suspect we haven't seen the last SOF op around Crimea.

Musk seems to have finally gotten on the agenda of someone that matters. At a minimum that will cost him a great deal of money and hassle.

They seem to have a well thought out plan to really degrade Russian air defenses in Crimea. i suspect that they are trying to systematically work their way towards the Kerch bridge until they can strike it not just occasionally, but in a continuing way that really does reduce the flow of supplies to near zero. Of course it also works if they can force the Russians to divert a huge percentage of their assets to trying to protect the bridge. Very much like the Pantsirs parked all around Moscow, every asset placed there is not doing something important somewhere else.

ten thousand apologies,

Indeed, Ukraine seems to be using Russian SAM sites as chew toys. The next big show will be a bunch of those tower mounted Pantsir systems going boom spectacularly. They are completely fixed targets, they will get got, for the propaganda value if nothing else.

Perhaps not, but if they pulled the security clearances and launch authorizations wholesale they would be closed in a week. I assure if that if you or I call up the Russian Ambassador and ask him how we can make Putin feel better, negative consequences will ensue. There is absolutely no reason Musk should be any different.

The Korean war steel strike is by far the clearest test of the governments powers in this area. Not saying Biden could get a away with outright seizure, but he has enough leverage to get Musk's attention if he really wants to, and Musk dragging twitter into the right wing fever swamps, and getting directly and publicly praised by Putin mean he is going to get most of the downsides whether he acts or not. Again I think a "voluntary" sale is by far the best option.

I disagree on that one. Among other things 99% of the people there that matter can do math, and understand that the Mars thing is a centuries long project at best. My guess is that most of them would be delighted to work for a someone that is less erratic.

Ukraine has a solution for that problem, in fact they have a through end to end test in mind. Also exhibit A on why manned helicopters are done, or should be.

Their really is an argument to simply buy him out of SpaceX. If he won't talk sense on the price, just figure out a legal way to jam it through. The are some fairly draconian last resort laws on the books for circumstances like these. Obviously there is some political cost to this, but as the man just goes on high diving in an empty pool there just won't be any choice. He built one the most militarily significant technologies of the this century, and he is being EXTREMELY irresponsible with it. Russia doesn't have a meaningful escalation strategy that doesn't pull NATO in. What is has is an exhaustion strategy, if it has a strategy at all. They are simply saying we can stand this awful mess longer than you can. We have to prove them wrong.

Not sure if this is real, I suspect the Czar will not be happy with him if it is. It is a video BTW.

Claims to be video of tonights strike in Sebastopol. If true either the Ukrainians put two hits on the same bullseye, or there was something on that dry dock to generate a large secondary explosion. Could the Russians have put that sub in dry dock without removing its missiles?

Drones have changed everything.

The VDV doesn't much like being on the receiving end. Hopefully the ones getting an introduction to JDAMS and 155 DPICM on the southern front right now comprise the end of Russia's competent reserves.

Congradulations, your coffee klatch has been judged worthy of a PGM.

I was somewhat thrown by this very recent picture. These guys are paratroopers, and artillerymen, but the huge sign they standing in front of says field artillery. The post is also a case study in the marketing issue, as selling cadets on joining the artillery is literally what they are doing. I suspect artillery's primacy in the current war has been more effective, regardless of how well turned out these guys are.

One thing I would throw into the the discussion of "soldier" vs "warrior" is that a lot of it simply the evolution of a marketing strategy by organizations that have to recruit volunteers. As a related example look at the evolution of U.S. Army head gear over the last ~fifty years. The whole Green Beret hype train has slowly crept though entire army as various colored berets have become standard parts of various branches uniforms. This is even as the the same army has spent a very large amount of money on effective and expensive helmets to actually fight in. The Marines got their brand marketing strategy right over a hundred years ago. It still works, and if it isn't broken... An unpleasant parallel is that Wagner has to recruit volunteers, too. It is just that their recruiting pitch and contract is more like the one Hernando Cortez had with his conquistadores than anything recognizably modern.

And this tradition of absolute brutality, and it goes back a LOT further than Stalin is why the Russians need to be beaten utterly and in locked in a box to the extent humanly possible.

First things first The_Capt, you are simply an excellent writer, that is a completely separate thing from subject matter expertise. To be sure you have a vast quantity of that as well, but so do a lot of people who can't EXPLAIN any of it. Anyway, if you write a book on 18th century Chinese porcelain styles, I will buy it, simply because you can WRITE.

Certainly these would be incredibly useful, but I have sneaking suspicion they are getting the DPICM version because they won't bring down the Kerch Bridge.