dan/california

The podcast is always pretty good. Today has a very interesting, although too short, interview with some people at the U.S. air force academy. The piece that hit the hardest was the Air Force gentlemen saying the U.S. restrictions on DOD personnel in Ukraine are greatly limiting our ability to learn as much from this war as we should. Edit: The bestbit is at the beginning of the last third.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/lula-putin-g20-brazil-arrest Lula was trying to make nice with Putin, and said he could attend the next G20 in Brazil in person. I suspect he got a very quiet phone call about his odds of getting any help with his next economic crisis if he didn't row it back. He seems to have decided getting his calls answered in D.C. was a higher priority.

The author makes an excellent case that far too little attention is paid the nasty little details, even in many upper level military staff colleges. Said details and realities have been scrubbed almost comepletely from the educations of diplomats and politicians. It explains a great deal about why this forum has been at the very least less wrong than a lot of other folks. The game forces you to think about at least some of those details. The fact this entire company attack is going nowhere until that one well sighted machine gun gets dealt with comes immediately to mind.

A lot of Russia's "influence" right now is due to giving away stolen Ukrainian grain, and selling their own oil and grain at cut rate prices, at least relative to the world market price. They are probably almost out of pre war Ukrainian grain, and there surely isn't going to be much more produced in the parts of Ukraine that Russia occupies given the extent to which they are active war zones. There were some interesting posts a few pages ago about issues with the diesel supply severely affecting this years Russian harvest, so quite possibly Putin will soon be down to cheap oil, and perhaps less of that, to buy friends with. It isn't like Putin has any military hardware available to shower on miscellaneous third world dictators. We will see how many friends Russia has when they have less to buy them with.

I will believe it makes a little sense when I a pile of ammo for that very obsolete main gun that doesn't look at least as hazardous to the people firing it as the people it is aimed at. Maybe the T55 thing is being driven by the fact that the North Koreans have kept making that caliber and are willing to let a bunch of it get on a train heading east. Keep in mind the T55 uses a rifled gun, not the 100mm smoothbore the Russians also produced in large quantities. The Wikipedia article above has wealth of information about the gun and it ammunition. Sadly it does not have the one bit I really wanted, which is who stopped making it, and when. Or is someone, somewhere STILL making it. It is my strong assumption that any Russian capacity to do so vaporized in the nineties and would have to be rebuilt from scratch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_59_tank The Chinese and North Koreans kept the The t55, and its Chinese knockoff version in frontline service far longer than the Soviets did, They probably do have a pile of ammo that is merely out of date as opposed to outright hazardous, and my suspicion that this is all driven by ammo availability grows stronger with everything the internet will tell me. Edit: Anybody got an old copy of some Jane's book from 2005, or similar that might have that info?

The_Capt, if you want to talk we want to listen. As I have said before we REALLY appreciate getting to audit staff college without the push-ups, or the paper work.

Invading Iraq was a far worse case of magical thinking than anything anyone outside of China has done about COVID.. Outside of Taiwan, Australia , and New Zealand no country was even minimally competent, but in the end the bleeping thing is so contagious it didn't matter very much. Different countries tried very different strategies with only modestly divergent results. Trust me I have had it three times despite getting every shot they would give me and trying probably too hard to follow all the other stay safe advice. The virus is simply so contagious it is uncontainable without turning off civilization. China's response is a whole different story, they blew it utterly at both the beginning, and the end. I can rant about for hours, but with one or two exceptions you folks haven't been that bad.

This is the only sentence in the entire post I disagree with. Virtually no one except Putin had anything to gain, a great many people had a very great deal to lose. One the clearer things in current understanding of how this mess happed is that Putin's intention to actually commit this insanity was held to perhaps less than twenty people. Indeed a great many people who needed to know is was happening for real didn't and therefore didn't do the fairly obvious things they would have done if they had known. There was great post many, many months ago about the FSB sending happy talk about the prospects for invading Ukraine up the chain. Not because they believed it, but because it made Putin happy, and they never even conceived that he would actually DO IT.

Being so bleeped in Ukraine that he couldn't even credibly threaten Sweden and Finland while they ground through the membership process, and Erdogan's B.S. does go down as a world historic strategic fail. Edit: Just for fun i checked the distance from Murmansk, to the Finnish border. It is well within ATACMS range, never mind the new replacement missile that is more or less twice the range.

Milley wasn't really speaking about Ukraine, and MikeyD and several others have pointed out various reasons why deterrence in Ukraine was doomed to fail. I actually find MikeyD's reasoning about the Putin's timeline and assumptions to be quite convincing. Throw in a bad case of sunk cost fallacy on Putin's part and here we are. The cost of that deterrence failure though, is tens of thousand of lives, just on the side we are supporting, and at least a couple of hundred billion dollars by the time the final tab comes due. Disruptions to the worlds food supply that aren't over and may be getting worse, and all the rest of it. Taiwan would be at least an order of magnitude worse, in every conceivable category. It might take the world economy decades to recover. Whatever we need to spend to be absolutely sure the Chinese get the message that they can't take Taiwan and shouldn't try, it is a tiny fraction of what it will cost if they DON"T get the message.

They certainly haven't outlawed them for the mistresses of top tier oligarchs. https://www.instagram.com/p/CwNY1NatyZ1/ I suspect the abominations we see on anyone below the level of vice minister, or the economic equivalent are effectively some sort of sumptuary law that demonstrates their seriousness of purpose. Or something like that. The Instagrams of Moscow socialites are a weird distorted mirror into state of the Russian economy.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-moscows-shadows/id1510124746?i=1000627356533 Gallioti does a fairly deep dive into a selection of second tier players in Russia, and what the ongoing maneuvers say about the war.

Of course this might be part of the Ukrainian plan, or at least their backup plan. Really bad weather might suppress the advantages of drone dependent defensive scheme more than they suppress the ability to attack, it probably doesn't do a single good thing for Russian fixed and Rotary wing aviation either. So wait until a butt cold, windy day and launch a, hopefully, more or less surprise attack at a weak sector of the front. Their certainly seem to be some weak sectors out there if the recent Ukrainian advances towards Donetsk airport are any indication.

Just a bit of light politicking, Russian style.

Well, the Central Asian melt down is suddenly kicking off with a bang.

What he said, Ukrainians have reached the point where they can stand and fire in whole batteries.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ukraine-the-latest/id1612424182?i=1000627283842 Interview with David Petraeus. A couple of weeks old, but a deep and sober assessment of the situation. He says the Ukrainians are not done yet.

There is apparently some level of military Darwinism occurring, and some of the brighter orcs have lived long enough to impart lessons learned. Hopefully ATACMS will show up quickly and erase some the new model back and buried command posts that seem to be appearing.

Is one of those a ~six week old old UGV towing a ~60 year old single barrel 23 mm auto-cannon? That is the most Ukrainian thing ever. And yeah, these are the future of land warfare.

Always just slow enough the Russians can adapt. Their is still an attempt on going to thread the diplomatic needle. Given the consequences of Russia just collapsing that might be justified, however their is ever more evidence that all that is left of the needle is slag on he!!'s shop floor. That makes threading it kind of hard.

The Pentagon may finally be getting it.

I wonder if this because they are worried about partisan/ SOF drone attacks in Belarus, or the desperately need every aircraft in the south.

There are some use cases for helicopters, in that they can be fifty miles up or down the front in minutes. I find this unconvincing thought most of the time. The Russians have to use them because they designed that missile for the sensor suite on that helicopter, and the helicopter around the missile. The newest top tier ATGMs if you can even call them that, like the latest generation Spike missile have a standoff range of tens of kilometers, and are are pretty much launch platform agnostic. The best way to deploy them on defense is park them on a disposable launcher in an outhouse, and the second best way is a super stealthy UGV, any midsize four wheel drive pick up equivalent works too. All of these options are dirt cheap, have a vastly lower logistics overhead, and therefore free up huge amounts of money to buy more of the missiles. The choice between 500 missiles in inventory, m with ten helicopters to launch them from, and five or ten THOUSAND missiles to deploy on cheap attritable, and preferably unmanned platforms should not be hard.