Reputation from BlackMoria - Page 6 - Battlefront.com Community

BlackMoria got a reaction from Raptor341 in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get? January 6, 2023

Armor grognards....gahhh. "Is it a tank or not a tank?" You can call it 'Peaches' for all I care. It is a light armored vehicle with a big horking gun on it that can kill russians. Give it to the Ukrainians who have shown a talent for killing russians and let them kill more russians with it. I don't give a damn whether it is considered a tank or not. Sheesh...

BlackMoria got a reaction from LuckyDog in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get? January 6, 2023

Sheesh... Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum with a Barrett. You two clowns do you....

BlackMoria reacted to The_Capt in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get? January 5, 2023

Absolutely. All war is sacrifice. I use that term deliberately and it does not mean to simply be willing to "give something up". Sacrifice actually means "to make holy" or "sacred". This is a point Clausewitz completely missed. War is extremely personal as we literally sacrifice people for something bigger. The real question is just how much we believe in that "bigger" thing. This is more than "cost", it is the fundamental changes that happen at both macro and micro cultural levels as a result of any war.
Ukraine is sacrificing - making holy costs - in defence of their ability to be free to chose their own future. Russia is sacrificing - making unholy costs - in defence of some false vision/narrative being sold to them by a kleptocrate and his cronies to stay in power. Sacrifice negotiates with Certainty, now whose certainty is more righteous?
No society can withstand endless sacrifice without breaking. However, when I see Ukrainian boys holding wooden rifles better than a lot of western soldiers, I can only see a society that has a pretty deep cultural zeitgeist right now - killing Russians. The Ukraine that went into this war, will not be the one that comes out. Russia and Putin have likely created a regional power pole in all this that will change the face of Eastern Europe, just to add to the bafflingly bad strategic outcomes they constructed in all this.
However, after all that we are back to "when does it end?" Well I think that is directly tied to the point when the Sacrifice gets close enough to the Certainty. Kherson was painful. There will be other operations that are just as painful. Hell we may see a Ukrainian defeat before this is all over. But to my mind, the average Russian's ability to "change the channel" is waning everyday - e.g. a lot of the middle-class Russian's left. And the Russian Sacrifice-to-Certainty equation is very different then Ukraine's - time is not on Russia's side.
This war will end when Ukraine and the West have won enough, and Russia has lost enough. A lot of people post that "this war will end when Putin decides", or "it will end when Ukraine decides" - this is incorrect. A war is a living breathing entity, it carries its own weight and influence. History is filled with wars that should have stopped but didn't. Or ones where the job was not finished but stopped anyway. Wars have stopped on executive decision. They have stopped on broader public decision. They have also stopped because of weather events and eclipses.
In the end this war will end when it makes sense to end it. The "making sense" part is the hardest thing to determine as it is filled with relative rationality, emotion, power, culture, relationships and human failings/strengths.