sburke

Russian Empire Born 2 November 1721 Died 13 April 2022 Cause. Embarrassment This is just crazy. Man I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the kremlin to see Putin's reaction. Zelensky should arrange for a stamp to be sent. "would you like a little salt in your wound?"

@Haidukwe need to get some of those stamps.

So who is the commander of the Black Dea fleet? I suspect he just got a phone call to report to the Kremlin.

no reason to be concerned whatever that means. Again, there is another thread with updates from Elvis.

Please take this to a different thread to discuss, it is just disruptive here and there is a discussion with more info elsewhere. Just a week ago Elvis posted an update.

Actually, he's a pretty unimaginative commander. His background was discussed a few pages back I think. As to combat experience applicable to the current fight, nah Syria wasn't even close. While it is a move in the right direction for the Russians to finally recognize their C2 issues, this guy is unlikely to make much of a dent. however he definitely fits the mold for what Putin wants.

as my father used to say. "Steven, you aren't as dumb as you look. But then nobody could be that dumb."

I hear you can get those at the same Walmart that the separatists bought Grads and Tanks at.

LOL Our next data center move was to Clifton NJ which is way up above sea level.... didn't fix the transatlantic cable problem though. It did have better food choices though!

nice bracelets. Gucci?

to give a pretty good example, something like 70% of the global internet traffic is routed by TATA. There are oodles and oodles (that is a technical term ) of Internet providers, but actual physical infrastructure is expensive to come by. You can't just go lay an undersea cable if you handle 150 internet users. Even running fiber in country is an issue. Long haul connections have to follow some existing right of way, usually either power lines or rail lines. Note below, one of those areas they are referring to is Staten Island. It is a hub point for transatlantic cables. During that storm I was pretty much up all night on the phone with out network team monitoring the situation in two data centers we had. One in lower Manhattan and the other in Weehawken NJ to make sure the fuel deliveries for the generators were there and the water levels were not threatening the centers. The global internet is powered by vast undersea cables. But they're vulnerable. | CNN In 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into the US East Coast, causing an estimated $71 billion in damage and knocking out several key exchanges where undersea cables linked North America and Europe. “It was a major disruption,” Frank Rey, director of global network strategy for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure and Operations division, said in a statement. “The entire network between North America and Europe was isolated for a number of hours. For us, the storm brought to light a potential challenge in the consolidation of transatlantic cables that all landed in New York and New Jersey.”

We called it "splinternet" One of the projects I got sucked into before I retired was defining at various degrees the impact on our telecom network if we had to divorce ourselves from Chinese (Russian, Saudi, Ethiopian) network access. As a private firm you have some options, but when you get to countrywide it can get really difficult. Case in point was when Ethiopia was hitting their high school exams they literally shut down their external internet to prevent cheating for two weeks. Ethiopia: Internet shutdown to “prevent high school exam leaks” – The Ethiopian Satellite Television and Radio (ESAT) (ethsat.com) The problem becomes how does business and gov't function in that space? Even Peskov has used a vpn to get around Russian censorship Putin spokesman says he uses a VPN in Russia, where the news and social media are heavily censored (yahoo.com) So Russia hasn't gone full on blocking yet. Part of the project I mentioned included a what if for a full shutdown.

In Russia's case I think that is part and parcel of a flawed perception of how quickly they could overrun Ukraine... and why the FSB is in the middle of a purge. (yeah that is really going to help your war effort). I also expect that early on at least since last spring (likely much earlier) Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies have been extremely active in looking for vulnerabilities hence that FBI announcement taking down the GRU botnet network FBI operation aims to take down massive Russian GRU botnet | TechCrunch In a general scenario though short of connecting via satellite, information networks have some major physical bottleneck points. Typical hubs still largely follow the telecom infrastructure for some obvious legacy reasons (physical space, power, cooling, fiber optic terminations). There has been some diversification particularly in highly connected countries, but centralized hubs for internetworking are still a major component. While from a mapping perspective it appears like there is widespread interconnectivity, the basics to make it functional are more hierarchical. In addition, there are the actual data centers that host all the information collection/storage etc. There are certainly critical points that could at least disrupt whether some storekeeper in Irpin could upload pictures via their mobile.

More interested in how he got away. He was under house arrest until Feb 28th. you'd have thought he would have been under close observation or actually locked up. Were they letting him loose to see who he would contact?

so pull this guy from our list? Lucky bastard

couple items/questions 1. US strategy would have been to first establish Air Supremacy. That has been noted early on as not necessarily being Russian doctrine. How much do you think that could alter this equation? The Russians seem to have pretty much walked in blind and still seem to mostly be stumbling around in the dark. Even target selection info is ridiculously poor. 2 There seems to have been no attempt to shut down Ukrainian communications networks even before Musk tossed in starlink. (Which honestly I am not even sure how much impact that is having as even here in it's commercial application there have been a lot of complaints). As you have noted information has been a game changer. That shouldn't be all that surprising in that we live in the information age of big data and machine learning (did I get all the main buzz words in there?). Russia however seems to have completely conceded the information war. Ukraine's advantages aren't just in drones - hell they have a web page for your average Ukrainian to dump info onto. This is orders of magnitude better than any Afghan or Iraqis insurgent had. How might this conflict have been affected if Russia had in the opening phase of the war targeted Ukraine's information network. (and managed to have a usable secure comms network for their own troops) 3 Boots on the ground? This is kind of the big one that seems to be gotten wrong most of the time. The political/strategic reasons for actually putting ground forces in is typically flawed from the start. We (the US) have made this error several times now. Unrealistic plans for what we hope to achieve (Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan), an unrealistic appraisal of the social political forces in a country (Vietnam) are just a few examples. Information proliferation is only going to get worse as is disinformation. How do we get better at deciding NOT putting boots on the ground is the smarter option? Russia's decision to invade Ukraine has clearly been ridiculously flawed, but what it does show is what an unwelcome invading force will face. NATO being a defense-oriented alliance normally should be on the favorable side of that information advantage. but invoking article 5 for Afghanistan kind of threw that advantage out the window.

I went with sunflowers of peace. I figured our gov't was throwing enough military aid. This group builds medical kits etc to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population. Sunflower of Peace - Help the people of Ukraine

we have both.

nope, he's new. Any details?

Maybe this guy doesn't realize the implications of Article 5. Russian Legislator Calls Ukraine 'Total War,' Demands Attack On NATO Convoys (msn.com) "I am certain that in the very near future," Morozov said, "we will see special operations, both from our air forces and from our special units, in order to destroy weapons shipments from NATO countries." "The West wants this war to continue for as long as possible," Morozov added. "They presume that this war will exhaust our military and economic resources." He also acknowledged, without saying so directly, that the Russia has failed to achieve its military goals. "The war has changed, and we can only win this war by using means other than those we have been employing up to this point," Morosov said. Recent history provides some indication of Moscow's possible next steps. Before the start of the current conflict, Russia had been credibly accused of employing covert operations on the territory of NATO countries in order to disrupt weapons shipments to Ukraine. On October 16, 2014, a Czech arms depot in the town of Vrbětice exploded, killing two workers. According to an investigation by the Czech magazine Respekt, the weapons belonged to Bulgarian arms dealer Emilyan Gebrev, who was planning to send the shipments to Ukraine. At the time, Ukraine was fighting a defensive war against Russian-backed separatists in the country's eastern Donbas region. In April 2021, the Czech Republic expelled 18 Russian diplomats after evidence emerged that the explosion had been caused by agents of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence division. The agents in question, Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga, had arrived in Prague on October 13, 2014, and departed on the day of the explosion. Records show that, during their trip, they used false documents in order to request access to the arms depot where the explosion subsequently occurred. In February 2020, Bulgarian prosecutors accused three Russian GRU agents of attempting to assassinate the arms dealer Gebrev. The attack was carried out in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in the spring of 2015. Although Morozov called the current conflict "a total war with the collective West," Russia is not known to have taken any similar action on the territory of any NATO country in recent weeks.

CM - Australia vs France and Great Britain - it's Chuckdykes fault!

That's a whole other subject. Should a formation like the UN have anyone with veto power? Is the US willing to abide by that? I would bet not.

err bad analogy. We don't even have a specific enemy for that one. Kind of like the War on Drugs. Kremlin doesn't have to surrender. Just leave. Regardless of the military campaign, Russia as going to be in isolation for some time to come.

Hey I'm American and the force I want is the Canadians! First Clash! Don't be so sour.

LOL finally someone who's read the real book. LOTR is just a small aside barely 6 pages or so. Morgoth is the real deal.