Lethaface

He sees Crimea as an island that can be isolated and the Russian position there made untenable over time. He is not betting on air/navy actions, landings and suchs

There'd have to be multiple rounds though, right? Karate in the first, a bare-chest off in the second, and finishing with sick burns in an improv comedy round.

So if Cuba invades Florida and claims it is Cuba now because many Cubans live there, will a referendum, among the mainly Cuban people remaining in Florida after the invasion, be 'legitimate' ?

The Russians obviously aren't completely useless - they did manage to muster several hundred thousand folks at jump off points, get them across the border, and largely keep them there despite global sanctions, heavy heavy losses, and a pretty sustained Ukrainian offensive against their theatre logistics. If they were hopeless - or had become hopeless - then the Russian forces would already be back across the 2014 borders and Sevastopol's resorts would be taking summer bookings for Kyiv's great and good.
What the Russians don't seem especially good at is offensive operations. Much like the Germans from 1941 through to 1943, their offensive aspirations seems to be on a pretty sharp downslope^. Whether that's because they just no longer have the manpower, logistic support, materiel, and strategic surprise, or because all the folks who knew how to do that have had smoking accidents, been defenestrated, or afforded a close but brief inspection of the sharp end of a HIMARS I don't really know. I suspect, though, that is a combination of reduced materiel ability coupled with reduced cognitive ability. Which is predominant is a matter of taste in the absence of real data.
 
^ Compare Op Barbarossa to Op Blue to Op Citadel, then compare Feb 2022 to the dry humping now (still) going on around Bakhmut.

"Predator", hero of famous video got light wound and filmed this. During he reloaded PKT, reworked for shooting with bipod, some sort of AGS burst exploded near him. He got four small framents. The video probaly for second part of March
 

Yep. It always answers with confidence - even when it's making stuff up. Which is really really bad IMHO.
Mind you we all know at least one friend in RL that does the same 🙂

😅 NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo
 

That's Ramadan finally and officially over so I can probably expect to get an uninterrupted night's sleep once again. When I'm a bit sleepy, i tend to spend more time working on maps and I've now updated all the maps for the campaign. I even reworked the 'Breakout' which I was kind of dreading doing as it was the most ASL-like of all the maps. I also got 'Overkill' finalised last night so that one's behind me. Now I'm on holiday for about 10 days and today I got started on serious AI planning. This is the plan going forward.
I'm going to focus on getting all the Special Forces missions up and working so that I can compile them and test them together. This shouldn't take long as the maps for all of them are now done and I've already imported all the core forces and placed the enemy forces. Today, I worked exclusively on 'Ambush' and it became very obvious early in serious testing that the river and the bridges were going to have to go. The AI really struggles on the attack even in the best of circumstances so add two bottlenecks across a river and have a mech infantry company try an assault across it and you're really flogging a dead horse. So the river was removed as well as the bridges and it plays much, much better. This is the type of mission that I'm likely to play over and over again while working on the campaign, short and small, fun but dangerous, so it'll get iterated upon as testing goes on.
Tomorrow, I'll get started on Strong Stand and the airfield missions and that will be all the Phase I SF missions done. However, the Phase II missions are almost entirely new because of the extensive map reworks as well as me rationalising the campaign so that there is some consistency to the friendly board edges. so will take a lot more time to test.
Here's the old Breakout map:

Here's the new one from the same angle.

And from the other end

Gone are the elevations, the mud, the foliage and about half a million flavour objects. I've added a river (the player has to move across it so there's no worries about the AI being able to navigate across it). Gone is the massive, boring workshed complex and it's been replaced with a real-world farm complex, only a few kilometers west of 'Hasrabit' as it happens. I was lucky to find a large, square farmhouse to replace the old one too so I'm happy with the result. 

As some of you will already be aware, I've decided to fast track revising my ancient 'Hasrabit' campaign and I've been busy with it since last weekend. I tried out the very first mission, Ambush, and didn't like it and my initial reaction was to abandon the original opening map and create an all-new Ambush map. I started work on it on Wednesday and I finished it earlier this afternoon. It's really big and very detailed but, well, I suspect you can already see why this map isn't going to work in this campaign...

It just doesn't look like any of the other maps in the campaign. It actually looks like the maps I made for the NATO campaigns. So I'm going to use this in Retribution which will come a bit later. I'm not teasing you by showing that in a thread purporting to be about Hasrabit, it's just that it's the end result of 3 days of work and I'm very happy with the end result. I'd LIKE to use it but the other maps would all look utterly incongruous beside it and I certainly don't want to redo them all.
Hasrabit is an old campaign and so I'm not going to change very much with it because otherwise, what you'd get wouldn't be 'Hasrabit' - it would be a whole new campaign using similar forces. So it's going to be an update instead. I'm going to improve the old maps for sure and make them look more Syrian, adding water and bridges for example and redesign the compounds and villages so that they look much more realistic. And bye bye to the vast glowing fields of wheat, the lush, green grass and the dense forests that made the maps look more like NW Europe. I'll expand a few of them, particularly the ones with armour clashes but otherwise, they will all stay pretty much the same. I'm also going to stick with the totally made-up background story as again, this is Hasrabit and there's no such place or governorate and so I'm just going to let it be. 
I've also decided to keep the original Ambush mission but take out the artillery strike on your starting positions and also remove all the trees and the mud which was everywhere and replace them with orchards. That huge yard will also get removed and redone with something that looks more Syrian. I suspect that the river will also have to go but we'll see how I feel once real play-testing starts because the bridges are a pretty bad bottleneck which the AI can't handle very well..
Which brings me to what will definitely change - the AI. I was rather surprised to find that the AI attacks in almost every mission and that's going to be fun to do. The old AI plans are atrocious though as are the set-up and positioning of the AI's units. The player set-ups look really terrible too with very narrow set-up are areas with units all crammed together so all that will change. I now have 16 groups to work with and can give them far more orders with some special ones which were not in the game the last time I played. And, of course, some triggers.
So, that's the plan as it stands. I've made up the new core units file and I've already started improving the existing maps. So, I'm going to import the new units and get down to some serious play in against the old AI plans and OBs before I rip them out so that I know the original intention behind the mission and try to stay faithful to it. I'll probably add shots of the 'finished' maps here as I go. I suspect that by the time I've finished this revision, I'll have relearned all the skills I formerly had and will be able to do a better job of the new campaign I plan to follow it with.

I expect it refers to the demise of Gough Whitlam. The list is efforts to destabilise/overthrow foreign govts, which might - but doesn't necessarily - involve a war.
See: Iraq 2003 vs. Chile 1970 and 1973

Another pet peeve: human waves attacks.
I don't even know how you would describe what Russians and Wagner in particular are doing when they send these squad or platoon sized elements forward with barely any support at all but for me that's not really what a human wave attack is. Soviets in front of Moscow sending companies or whole battalions of conscripts yelling hurrah at German positions (instant cmbb nostalgia) en masse or Iraq-Iran war okay.

You know it is a bit funny but I am not quite sure the translation is accurate in these vids. What is usually translated by "orc" is another word entirely. I think what they usually say is "pidori" which means "f*ggot" as far as I know. And both sides use this expletive. So maybe that's just me but I find the orc thing a bit cringe. Nothing personal, I just thought it was worth pointing out.
edit : Ah sorry I see Haiduk commented on that before.

Ukraine 2014. Very serious list.

AIr Forces report
Destroyed:
- UFO over Kyiv ) 

Situation in Bakhmut. 
Russians activated today on northern flank, attacking on Bohdanivka village and near Khromove. Multiple infantry assault groups attacks with heavy artillery support, enemy has minimal advance along one of tree-plants. 

Heavy clashes along Rose Alley [north of the city  - Russians can't cut the road west ftom Khromove, so they now try to cut this road inside the city from its northern part]. Russians Along Levanevskkoho str. and Hliba Slobodina str. Wagners and VDV advance, UKR forces conducted maneuver defense. Heavy situation west from railroad station area - Russians advance along Kolpakovoy str. and to north-east along Pushkina str. On the southern flank is relatively quiet - UKR arty shells Russians behind the forest. 
2 hours aho
We have retaken two streets, by reasons of safety I will not tell what exactly for now.
 

It doesn't happen, since leaving NATO was from the start Trump's...well trump card in negotiations with members who did not wanted to share burden. It wasn't real from the get go. US leaving NATO is as realistic as Men in High Castle or similar storylines. It may one day modify its structures and purposes, though.
People "stepped in" during Yugoslavian wars, Rwanda, ISIS and myriad other conflicts. Didn't end that well. Also, I am not immune to all inequalities and absurds of US-held order. Any serious alternative is simply much scarier than it. And even if it wouldn't be, sole transition period would probably shake our global civilization to its core. Should I remind that for many of those now peacefull states obtaining nukes would be best insurance in chaotic world? Not even mentiioning non-state actors, always thriving in chaos.
Btw. I remind you folks, we are here at this topic preciselly because people stepped in, in 2014, in last true revolution in Europe. And they did for  their country being part of western-ruled order, not against it. Or at the very least, they did it to not be part of this darwinistic world various autocraties are trying to procure and advertise to us. This is real cause of this war and ripples its sending across global order- not machinations of Monsanto, Lockheed Martin, Biden son or Bildberg Club.

I'm far, faaar from that. I'm quite modest. But sometimes this board has the exact opposite world view. A fairytelish one if we remind ourselves how many times we make LOTR comparisons here drawing a distinct line between the enlighted of this world (West ) vs the orcs, russians, chinese whatever. 
It's a mentality heading for a total clash of the two worlds, maybe I'm naive enough thinking we can prevent it. 
 

This fight took place on 9th of April. Probably this is fight for the road near Khromove, "Honor" company of 1st mech.battalion "Da Vicnci" of 67th mech.brigade. 
Dead soldier "Norman" at first minutes of video is Oleh Kornay

Also in the same day "Honor" lost other soldier "Tyomych" - Artem Berezniuk

With our technology at hand, return of Westphalian international order means we are going straight into Fallout series scenario. World is too connected for it.
I did not say US popculture is qualitivelly better (usually opposite of it, actually) but that nobody is enforcing it. Unless one forgets what practice of enforcing (pushing by force, against the will) is. We are not that much offtopic either, as Putin's henchmen put a lot of effort to remind us what this word really means in classical sense. And its not pretty. Unlike American soft power, which is real and alive mythos, Russian (or Chinese) is token one, only aplicable by force/coercion, not even natural diffusion of cultural codes from center to peripheries like happened in the past with those empires.
That's one of main reasons of this sick bloodshed we are witnessing, isn't it? Putin really believed sentiment for old Soviet cartoons plus some yelling idiot in buffallo skin at Capitol means he can have his imagined empire back in people's hearts.

What we need is time. They have about 10 years of demographic runway left. They know, we know and they know we know.
We need both credible deterrence and the capability to fight a short war and a long war. China is betting they can win a long war. All the missiles get used, and the ships get sunk? They can build more, fast. Us, not so much. China's assumption is that they can win if they can get troops to Taiwan and hold for two weeks.
My worries:
Does the US have a big enough submarine force? We have 53 fast attack boats; lets say emergency we have half those are in the area. Do they carry enough weapons to sink a ****load of Chinese ships? Los Angeles and Virginia class carry 26 torpedoes (and up 12 missiles for some boats). Seawolf class carry double that. That's 1300+ weapons. Chinese navy is 300+ armed vessels and growing fast; plus they have lots of merchant ships. We can sink of bunch of ships, but they'll have more. How do we resupply our subs in a timely manner? Given Chinese antiship missiles, can we get surface vessels anywhere close to Taiwan? Are large surface ships on a blockade near Singapore viable? Would we be better off playing pirates on RHIBs in those sorts of waters and moving the surface ships back to the Indian Ocean/Australia/Indonesia? What do we do about drone ships/subs/mines? We need to be building these, fast, but I bet China can do it faster, and better. If we need to boots on the ground in Taiwan, can we get marines 400 miles from Okinawa in a contested environment? What do we do about transiting the Panama canal, which China effectively owns nowadays? On the other hand:
If all the satellites get taken out day 1, we have a credible shot at getting a replacement constellation back up, fast. China does not have a counter to this besides building more anti-satellite missiles. The longer they wait, the more ridiculous our space overmatch becomes. China imports food + fuel. How much can they stockpile? That dam is a big target and single point of failure. They'd lose Wuhan, Shanghai, and bunch of power plants, tons of military bases etc. Are they willing to risk it? Also, I used to work with a bunch of mainlanders who are all very pro-China. Around 2021 they had kind of given up on Pooh-bear and were much more bearish, no pun intended.

Well, the fact is that Nazi Germany lost the war. This time the army couldn't very well do a second edition of the Dolchstoẞ Legend, blaming it all on the Jews and the social democrats. So instead they spun the story that the Wehrmacht was superior in all aspects but numbers and would have won if Hitler hadn't been so incompetent or had just let them do their job and if the Red Army hadn't just buried them with the bodies of their soldiers. Oh and hadn't the Western Allies landed in Normandy, of course. All of that isn't entirely wrong but none of it is right, either. The Wehrmacht was initially superior, mostly in doctrine and personnel. But it became clear very quickly that neither logistics nor equipment were sufficient for the task. The Red Army was abysmal initially, but both equipment and competence improved over time. That doesn't mean they weren't absolutely ruthless throwing away the lives of their soldiers but later on the Wehrmacht wasn't just overrun by stupid human wave attacks. They were defeated on an operational and logistical level, too. And, I guess we'll never know if the Red Army would have defeated Germany without D-Day.
But I am preaching to the historian, so maybe, layman that I am, I should stop here.

Ironically the most expansionist feature of China was kickstarted from western companies/goverments , mostly US, that transfered all their hardware there to cut the costs and make some more free cash. That started to turn them into the behemoth we are all depended upon and in case of a war this will kickback mercilessly against all of us. Their military expansionism is an infant in comparison. When was the last time China army went to war? Started a war even? I can't remember.    

You didn't answer my question, though. The fact that the Australians want nuclear submarines can have a lot of good (and some bad) reasons but is in itself no evidence of Chinese expansionism. I also didn't say that the Chinese government doesn't act aggressive. They are aggressively establishling presence, militarily and otherwise, in a number of regions. But so do a number of other countries, the USA being a prime example. But where do you see the Chinese actually expanding their territory? Hong Kong used to be Chinese and was given back by the UK, so that doesn't qualify. Taiwan is, well, complicated, in the sense that most countries for whatever reason don't have official diplomatic relations with them and so accept that Taiwan is still somehow Chinese. You don't have to agree with that but that's why Taiwan is also not a good example for expansionism. So, honest question because maybe I'm just missing it, where do you think China is going to expand its territory?

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-yoon-opens-door-possible-military-aid-ukraine-2023-04-19/
This seems like an interesting development. Would be amazing for Ukraine if south korea provides military help.
Welcome everyone long time lurker.
 
On another note the following extension might be of interest to some @steve
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Looks like 59th mot.inf brigade had some advanse in Avdiivka area (likely on Pervomayske - Pisky direction) - "Madyar" on Russian BMP-3, destroyed by arty strike, being targeted by their drones