Combatintman

Let's not get out of hand with what I said about this equipment left over from Afghanistan stuff. Russia is buying stuff from local dealers that fits into shipping containers. It is individual kit - so webbing, PPE (body armour and helmets) and combat lifesaving stuff like tourniquets and quick clot.

Most of the good (US) kit is being worn or carried by Taliban Special Forces (Badr 313 etc) or went to Pakistan. It will be mostly Chinese knock-off kit that is going to Russia.

Since when did what become an acknowledged fact? To restate my point - the Afghan withdrawal pathway started in February 2020 and was supposed to have been put to bed well before it actually was put to bed. There is an argument to say that it was sooner than that as the previous US administration was widely reported to be on the cusp of a deal in 2019 but stepped away from the dialogue in September 2019 following the death of US personnel in a Kabul IED attack. From those start points the obvious question to ask in relation to the theory that the Afghan withdrawal is related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year is ... was a Russian invasion of Ukraine on the cards in 2019 or 2020? In my response to the reemergence of this canard ... President Biden announced the withdrawal decision on April 14, 2021 and being an insider on matters Afghan and somebody who regularly attended meetings at the European Delegation, HQ Resolute Support and the UK and US embassies, I can tell you for a fact that nobody in the international community in Kabul had any idea which way President Biden was going to go until the decision was announced. The supplementary question; therefore, is ... was a Russian invasion of Ukraine on the cards in April 2021? The article I posted in my last post indicates that this was not the case until September 2021 which was after the last US service member walked up the ramp of a C17 in Kabul. The main problem with politically motivated theories of this ilk (and this is one, because it has been doing the rounds for at least over a month now and the handling of the Afghan withdrawal is a subject of justified scrutiny in the US) is that very few people are prepared to run the facts down and, as I said in my August 18 post, the most obvious explanation is usually the right one Feel free to challenge any of the above (on another thread) but Afghanistan and intelligence analysis is my day job, so it is always handy to have some facts to hand before doing so. As to "actual proof that there was early intel" - that is a big ask - intelligence is generally classified and/or on a limited distribution. To bring this back on topic - guess which country beginning with 'R' and ending with 'ussian Federation' has been buying up container loads of medical equipment, body armour, helmets and other assorted military paraphernalia from local suppliers in Kabul this month?

Quoting myself ... So - your theory holds no water at all.

It is my advanced Microsoft Word skills that are the most valuable of that lot to me now

Nine months of my life on operations in the role, two years of my life in a PSYOPs unit and three months of my life on courses suggest otherwise ...

Sorry I should have replied to this earlier ... I've got a few in various stages of readiness on my hard drive that I'll work on. I'll guarantee at least one of those before Xmas and hopefully more.

Sure - I get it but I am still a believer in fact-based narratives. I suppose we were lucky because we had fairly unsophisticated target audiences who had access to limited mediums so it made our job easier to some extent. Nonetheless we struggled because we were unable to achieve the persistence and access required for certain target audiences due to the limited physical footprint. With this conflict, the resources would need to be huge to do info ops justice. Looking at just the PSYOPs side of it, all of the available mediums are being used and the volume of traffic is huge. This thread is a small subset of it - by the time you've written a post and hit submit, there are three posts on the thread that you haven't seen. The potential target audiences - or segments thereof are also potentially massive. In those conditions of course you could feed echo chambers with big fat fibs and probably get away with it. I always find it fascinating how a lot of slightly less than factual propaganda/PSYOPs messaging gets recycled today and how certain narratives or labels stick in people's minds, whether factual or not. The killing of the IRGC chap Soleimani being a classic example - I remember hearing it on al-Jazeera first and the word "assassination" was used. That gained a lot of traction in many news outlets or sources, some of which who ought to know better: Soleimani assassination | Today's latest from Al Jazeera 2 years after the U.S. killed Iran's Qasem Soleimani, tensions remain : NPR Qasem Soleimani - Wikipedia Afghanistan Reacts to Soleimani’s Death – The Diplomat Words are certainly important combined with the right target audience analysis you could certainly cause trouble in some of those echo chambers, but it comes back to picking those target audiences from a massive pool. I've certainly been following the discussions about the manoeuvring in the Kremlin, what's going on with the nats and all that and having an idle thought or two about how you could influence some of that. An academic exercise for me really because, despite the great insights from various posters here, I don't have sufficient understanding to really come up with something that would fly.

I concur ... My bolds from personal but not well-remunerated experience at the coal face of PSYOPS and the management level of PSYOPs and Information Ops: 1. All of our PSYOPs product had to go through the lawyer and to get it through we had to describe the First, Second and Third order effects and then needed command sign-off once the lawyer was happy. Not only describing those effects was hard work but persuading certain lawyers was a bit of a to-and-fro experience. That whole process was usually more difficult than designing and putting the product together in the first place. 2. I was the yeller rather than the yellee by the time I got into the Information Ops game. 3. Not necessarily lying - our doctrine did allow it, whereas other nations including the US did not. I can only think of maybe one occasion where we did in my nine months in Afghanistan in the role and that had to be signed off by a two star. The main reason for not fibbing is that the truth usually catches up with you and then you lose all credibility as a source of information. You can get it away with it in a fluid tactical situation but not in the insurgency game. but it usually ends up backfiring because inevitably the truth will surface eventually.

The other factor is that Ireland is a non-permanent member of the UNSC right now and its diplomats have put in some pretty solid performances which the call for Russia to be booted out of the UNSC is its most recent example.

My bold - not saying it has been happening every day but there have certainly been US bombers flying in that area and as to locking up air defence radars, that is considered a hostile act under various rules of engagement that I have seen. I certainly recall UK aircraft flying legitimately with flight plans and permission from the owner of the Flight Information Region getting locked up by air defence radars in a country I served in once and when we reported it the lawyers were all over it like a rash and it resulted in a demarche to the country that owned those radars. As a result, I am not sure fooling around with Russian AD radars by NATO assets is a good option.

The Saudis have used AMRAAM to knock Iranian UAVs down fired by the Houthis in Yemen across the Saudi border. In fact, such success with AMRAAM underpinned the argument for the US to continue selling AMRAAM to the Saudis. Not a cheap solution for sure.

Data suggests otherwise ... Democracy Data Explorer - Our World in Data

Planned suicide ... I mean he was an aviation scientist ...

The clue's in the title ...

He needs 10,000 sales to clear his beer debt to me ... come on folks, pre-order

@George MChad better do, he owes me a shedload of beer.

Which army-sized research team is going to do the TO&E research for that lot for every single year spanning the game time span? One of the dramas with the CMFI expansions was the additional TO&Es for a two-year time frame for a theatre and forces that is a lot better documented than the Cold War period.

If you save your Google Earth overlays as .kml files rather than .kmz files you can open them up in this Program: Military Map - Plan your Mission Once you're in it - click the layers button, then vector layers. If you then hit the + key it will then allow you to navigate to wherever you've saved your overlay. Select the .kml overlay file and add it. For topographical maps - go to the settings icon and click it. Then scroll down to map type and select OpenTopoMap.

That was not the form of words he used, I repeat "ANY work on the next module for Cold War." Just for context, there was no mention at all of a Cold War module in Steve's announcement in the original 2022 bones thread on January 14 this year, although he intimated that one might be on the cards in a subsequent post.

What part of "work has also started on a module for Cold War" equals "haven't been doing ANY work"?

"Contact front - traffic lights!" is the more likely Chechen course of action here.

PRE-ORDER | meaning, definition in Cambridge English Dictionary

Remedial reading for you my friend

Working title for @sburke's book ... War Special Military Operation and Peace.