womble

LOL I think so... AK can't even raise steam at the moment, can it? A true "dockside queen".

All the actual carnage here was down to the TacAI choosing the right weapon for the situation The satchel charge probably took out more than half a squad, and I think a grenade did for the MG team.

For sure. Or maybe the UKR Hrim program already has that sorted. Or maybe the success of RUS CAS I remember being reported was an outlier. Needs to be more than a hope, though, or the poor tankers and infantry might end up regretting it.

I just plotted some Quicks and Fasts and Pauses-at-waypoints back and forth along around and through some bits of Bocage in a forest. I think the poor Amis were on Fast move orders, and by the time my opponent could give them any orders to save themselves, they were men down and panicing too much to respond.

Famous boxing guy? I thought that was Richard Osman from Pointless...?! Or maybe he was riffing off the boxing guy and I had clue zero.

It's not going to win the war, because it can't get inside the UKR AD umbrella to do any harm, except with standoff "Precision" (LOL) munitions. I can only remember one time the UKR have gotten an armoured strike together (somewhere in the north/Donetsk, maybe around the time Russia was floundering around failing to cross a river... I have no idea how to spend only a reasonable amount of time going back to find it), and it fell apart, largely, according to the preponderance of accounts, due to Russian TACAir. I know my recollection isn't perfect, but within its parameters, there's a 1:1 relationship between UKR armoured push and RUSAir stopping it. Air couldn't be a factor in stopping the Kharkhiv push, because that was basically a cloud of midges expanding, and way too diffuse for Russian CSIR and precision combined to be able to exercise any decisive effect. In Kherson, hasn't it been said that RUS CAS was a large factor in making the UKR advance as slow and painful as it turned out to be? There, it was also a situation that the Russians knew was going down eventually, given the supply problems and obvious UKR motivation to retake it, and the geometry of the geography probably also helped keep UKR activity at least partially under their established AD umbrella. It has seemed to me, from the accounts promulgated here, that most times UKR stray from under their established AD perimeter, they do suffer from RUS CAS. It's also seemed to me that the UKR command have learned their lesson, and severely restricted the depth of any counterattacks over the winter (whether through choice or necessity). This means we don't know whether they have solved the problem of leaving their own "safe zone". They have Gepard now, and hopefully a lot more Stinger, Starstreak and the rest, because they're not going to be contesting air superiority on the wing. On the defense, RUS don't have to attain air superiority to deploy their CAS platforms, since they have competent AD complexes to deter UKR interceptors. I guess it depends how deeply the two umbrellas overlap... They'll probably have enough information about where to strike, since it'll be their forces that are stood in front of the UKR advance; if the "C2" part can handle the volume and properly direct their assets... that's a big hurdle, for sure, but the Russians don't have to get it right many times to give the UKR attack a bloody nose and pause, and they have a lot of air frames to throw around; reluctance to lose them might start to erode once the UKR advance starts and nothing else is stopping it...

If you're permitting non-CW stories? The Tank Hunter who, having had his team mate killed while taking out a scout car, succeeded with a combination of MP40, grenades and a remaining satchel charge, in whacking most of a platoon of Amis and an MMG team (displacing, not set up for support) over the course of 2 minutes of playing jack-in-the-box through Bocage gaps. It was poetry in motion.

Some campaigns will have "different wins" and "different losses", depending on which missions you succeed at, I believe.

"Not much" ain't "nothin'"... though that may be true for the "not much" the RU navy can contribute The RU tacair has made a decisive nuisance of itself a couple-few times that I vaguely remember (a roughly equal number to the times UKR have tried to punch hard with armour), and was a major thorn in the side of the Kherson offensive, IIRC. Hopefully, there are now enough AD systems and munitions in theatre to keep the RU birds at an ineffective arm's length from any spearheads/bridgeheads, or enough ballistic missiles to do what airpower dominance ought to do and let UKR destroy the RU airframes on the ground. Or maybe it's all going to be drones and corrosion, but the vehicles that have been provided are surely supposed to be good for something... The air denial environment this war has thrown up is somewhat novel, I think, and its effects are going to vary wildly as the AD environment, locally and theatre-wide. ATACMS would make great strides in rocket artillery replacing airstrikes in cutting the RU strength on the tarmac. It seems strange that no one has managed to hammer out a protocol where such long-ranged things are only used on "non-contentious" targets (without unacceptable direct target approval by the US). The benefits to both sides (UKR and US) should be incentive to be able to work something out.

It's probably just scraping from here and other CM forums/communities/Steam and the BFC site. But if the tech involved in ChatGPT could be leveraged to improve the TacAI, or generate QBs, now that might be something...

True in a battle. Less so in a siege where you're relying on the enemy element's isolation to defeat them, rather than your own force of arms.

Since we're being a bit philosophical: if power corrupts, we should withhold power from as many people as possible, so that they aren't corrupted into evil ways... Please don't ignore the smiley...

Russia (as currently constituted) won't even accept that "least objectionable" scenario. They'll caterwaul and impede it in the UN, and stamp their little feet. They'll hold their breath til they go purple, and scream and scream and scream until they are sick. Because they can. Then they'll fund and support pernicious insurgency and criminal activity to make Crimea a sore in Ukraine's Black Sea belly, to go with the Donetsk/Luhansk brace of septic thorns in her side. And in a decade they'll try again, and there's pretty much nothing can be done about that which isn't self-defeating.

Sometimes their memory of previous spots persists way past usefulness, into the realms of distracting.

It really does make things up, don't it? Or was there a secret cabal of Kettlerites somewhere? Speaks to some of the limitations of ChatGPT et alia: just because lots of people quoted him doesn't mean he had a following. Context matters, and can be difficult to nail down.

Thanks Haiduk.

What's that? About a kilometer? How long is the explosive cable? Am I missing something, cos it doesn't look very long? That trailing cable is going to play hob with the accuracy of the thing at that range. I can see the usefulness of being able to clear a bit of minefield without actually having to sit at the edge of it, but not so much if you can't be 100% sure where the breach is going to end up...

It's the same check being applied, I would hazard, as is used to determine whether mounted pTruppen with movement orders pending will dismount and begin their own footslogging. I think a vehicle has to be at the end of its movement path, not "just Paused", for troops to dismount. They can mount up onto paused transport, sure, but not get down.

Interesting points, but I think you might've missed the context, namely "dropping the Kerch Bridge rail without destroying the road deck". All the "other rail interdiction" targets can be nailed whether the bridge is in range or not, if you want to just degrade rail comms. A large chunk of the terminal effects of "dropping the Kerch bridge" are symbolic as much as anything, and if they have to repair that rail link again, under fire from UKR rocket artillery... Assuming that symbolic is any use at all, that is. Mostly, though, Crimea's problem in a siege is water, and I don't imagine they can tanker in enough water (along with all the other feedstock of the war machine and fodder for the civilian population), even if the Kerch rail link remains up. Once the UKR have sealed off the peninsula's land approaches, that's the beginning of the end for the Crimea garrison.

Are there any systems that can reliably break the rather sturdier rail link without "house-of-cards"-ing the eminently tippable road bridge deck sections? In the last instance, there was the assistance of a burning oil tanker train, too... I guess you could stop one of those with loitering munitions to the cab/locomotive set, and then set it alight however you like...

Doesn't he have the Kerch Bridge in the wrong slot in that OOB? Is it worth leaving up as a rat-escape-route, vs dropping it to deny rail and road supply?

I thought the same, when it became clear that UKR were going to hold "indefinitely" and soak whatever the cost was. The bleeding of RUS troops strength doesn't seem to be "enough" to keep reinforcing the salient, but if they could suck enough Russian tubes into range of NATO long-barrelled 155s, and GMLRS and thin out the artillery park, that'd be a great strategic result. I don't think we can necessarily decide that this hasn't happened, though, to at least some extent. We only have fragmentary accounts of the artillery duel, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that these will tend towards the "OMG, we're getting pounded and our arty is doing nothing," end of the spectrum, since the times when CB is effective might be assumed to be down to the Russians just not throwing the same weight of iron into the target area, and won't be so memorable. We probably won't know the effectiveness of any rope-a-dope approaches the UKR have tried until a while after the shooting stops, and even then it's going to be a patchy picture.

Oh, apart from the South China Sea, where they're definitely throwing their military weight around in an attempt to claim the entire basin for themselves, contrary to agreements they're party to. The only reason you could think it's not a "military conquest" is because no one with the wherewithal to effectively do so has yet felt it's worth actually shooting at them for it.

I think POTUS is right on this one, to a great extent. The F-16 needs good airfields, and those are targets. It'd be a bit rubbish if half a squadron got Kalibred or Kindjahled. But, what if the Fighting Falcons were based (most of the time) on NATO soil? Served and piloted by Ukrainian AF personnel. What if they just did "touch and go" or "fast refuel" at bases inside UKR and only operated within UKR airspace, attacking targets within UKR official borders? Would that be "too escalatory"? For sure the Russians would scream blue murder, but the international community (well, the US) are being extremely careful to deny UKR missiles that can reach out and touch the Russians where it hurts within Russia itself, so why not provide safe haven for UKR airframes? I suspect the lawyers would have whole litters of kittens over something like this, so POTUS is effectively correct: the F-16 can't be practically used so shouldn't be sent.

Aye, it's not the clearance level that's at fault in this big leak case, it's the compartmentalisation of information at this level (possibly across the board, but possibly at the facility where Teixera worked) that's failed. None of those people "in aerospace" with TS/SCI clearance should have access to the high level summary stuff that got leaked, unless it was to do with the job they were actually working on. They need their clearance, just to get in the door of their workspace. As has repeatedly been said, a network tech shouldn't have blanket access to all documents of their clearance level or lower. They just shouldn't, and I'm pretty sure that, in general, they don't (because the Internet would be nothing but leaked documents if that were the case), and there's a specific failure of compartmentalisation in Teixera's case. Over-compartmentalisation of information has been a contributing factor to intelligence failures in the past and does need to be avoided, but the broad-brush synthesis stuff should be controlled in some detail, and available only to the analysts that produce it and the supervisory "high level" folks who are meant to be coordinating responses across agencies. Age should of course be a factor in assessing security clearance levels. The whole exercise is about risk mitigation, and anyone involved in risk management should be aware that youngsters are at higher risk of poor judgement. But it's only one factor.