A Canadian Cat

I like to split teams and have one firing on the enemy position while other team moves up. If the distance covered is a bit long then besides getting MGs and Mortars involved I also have the first team firing while the other is moving and then switch it up. Have them move a couple of Action Squares while the other is firing and when the moving team gets to its destination they start firing. Use pauses of 15, 20 or 30s depending on the actual distance and how important it is that someone is firing at all times (see above about available support weapons). After a while you being to get an idea of how long to make the moves and how long to pause the teams.

Not only that but sinking and damaging Russian ships in the Black Sea should make operating the grain shipments safer. If the Russians have less navy to enforce a blockade then that's a Good Thing(tm). The Ukrainians will need to do some more damage to Russian air fields too to make things safer. Soon we could be looking at a situation where the Russians cannot maintain a blockade anymore and that would be an even better thing.

LOL you know it I still think that Putin's disconnection from the reality of the situation makes his decisions delusional by definition. You are also correct that he is not insane from a clinical standpoint so I also get your point that if he got information that better reflects really he'd make better decisions. I just don't see how that is possible. Based on the system he created.

I do love the idea of Ianstan and being an all powerful dictator. I think a lot of what you and @The_Capt are writing is in violent agreement with just a slightly different point of view. It actually makes him wilfully uninformed. Right but your own story line of Ianstan highlights how someone sitting down and telling me the truth would just not be possible, because I made sure of that. Putin has done the same. He designed his regime so that he remains will fully ignorant. I think this is important. Putin isn't just a victim of becoming isolated he designed his regime that way. He chose to operate that way. Putin is supposed to be a bright guy, I have no doubt he is. But in his younger years he must have watched dictator after dictator fall because they did exactly what he did. Heck leaders in democratic countries get disconnected and do dumb stuff too (just not as dramatic - mostly because they get tossed before they get that far). He must have / should have know that is a side effect of taking power and running a dictatorship. And yet he made the exact same mistakes himself... Yes, that is delusional I agree. You just moved the case up stream a little. That is all we disagree about.

The definition of delusional: I make no comment about diagnosing anyone's mental state but everything else about this discussion seems to point to delusional thinking. My bold because that's the key point. OK that seems to make sense but its not in context. The issue is not that the plan was sound based on the assumptions the issue is those assumptions were not just wrong they were wilfully wrong. As @The_Capt points out every step of the Russian planning process was based on easily verifiable lies / over-estimations of Russian capabilities / under-estimations of Ukrainian capabilities. If someone or a group take actions to misrepresent reality and ignore evidence presented to them they are behaving in a delusional way. That is why I would call Putin's plan delusional. The issues is not "if assumptions for Plan A were right it would have worked" its that those assumptions were clearly wrong and they all should have know that; combined with no Plan B and no concepts of what to do to mitigate the situation if an assumption turned out to be wrong (a delusional thinker is often not able to consider being wrong as possible).

You can send some of the complainers my way too if you like; I'm happy to chat with someone who's political bubble was burst with information from outside of it. We should be striving to read other points of view not hiding from them.

Yep, 100% save those images for the next time someone says "but my tank guns keeps getting hit and disabled, its a tank that shouldn't happen". We can answer with just that picture

That is what makes me lean towards their cyber is not as good as they claim / project. I'm no expert hacker but I do know it takes some organization and patience to be ready to disrupt another country's power distribution or net work infrastructure. You have to probe their systems and verify that you have zero day vulnerabilities mapped out for each. For some you can insert something and wait but for most you cannot do that because it will likely be detected. Then you have to pay attention to when systems get updated because it might close your zero day attack plan and if that happens you have to develop another one. A cyber attack plan is not like a ransom where attack. For a cyber attack you have to be able to disrupt systems A, B and C all at the same time at H Hour. Otherwise it's just not useful. The standard ransomware attack we read about is the success (from the criminal's point of view) story that is the one out of 1000 random and semi random phishing attacks the bad guys did last month. In other words they did not set out to disrupt gas supply or hospital systems those were just the places where some dummy clicked on a link and let some trojon horse into their system. Having the capabilities to create havoc on some system you might get lucky to access is *not* the same as a directed cyber attack against an enemy.

Oh yeah. Remember those long armoured and supply columns that were just sitting on the roads sometimes for days? Can you imagine the RA losses if UA had HIMARS back then? Talk about a missed opportunity.

There is a third option too: Russian cyber capabilities are also overblown and not nearly as good as they claimed.

My impression is that populations that are ready to have a better place to live and want to achieve better governance can be assisted to get to their goals faster. Populations that are still focused on grievances of generations past or think their current corrupt and authorization ways are actually better cannot really be remoulded by an outside force into a better run government.

Yes, good points. I we should also remember that their force quality is not even. Clearly they have units that are better and those that are worse. My impression looking back with hindsight is that the success the RA had in 2014 would not have been universal if scaled up. In other words they had success when their best equipped and trained solders fought but if they had to fight with a 200 000 strong force most of it would not have fought that well.

Indeed spot on. However the new way of trying to nation build and create infrastructure had a problem: it turned out we were funding the Taliban's insurgency with some of the cash that was supposed to be building stuff. As a tax payer I'm not find of that outcome either.

Yes. The Iranian government is happy to do **** that checks all the boxes whenever they can.

I don't think you are wrong to point out that cargo cult was a bit too much but the corruption that was exposed is astounding. Troops without proper food, old helmets, no / fake body armour, way less top of the line tanks and IFVs than officially available not to mention pulling vehicles and small arms in terrible condition out of storage. I would instead call the Russian army a parade square army instead of cargo cult. They always had on hand enough cool new tech to look good at the May day celebrations and on the staged "exercises" for the cameras but they were not doing all the things that they should have been doing to be truly ready. Yep. They were exposed as a parade square army because they met some competent and prepared resistance. They have had these problems for a long long time but they got away with their previous adventures because the opposition tripped them up but not enough to break their Phase 1 type actions so they were able to just gloss over the issues and keep doing photo shoots.

How about separating the motivation into "Motivation to attack" and "Motivation to defend". Then you could have a low motivation on attack and a high motivation on defence to represent this observation.

LOL that would be refreshing - I'd be to attracted to that

Very true. However it is delaying the end of the war - and that's not good for UA and might be good for RA or might be good for Putin. It still probably is not enough for Putin to win.

Sorry who is that? Am I supposed know?

LOL I love the line "we really think we're nearly there now". As a software developer I have heard that so many time and I've said it so many times. Yeah, most of the time you are not correct but ever now and then you are right. Trick is no one knows which until the software ships

Still a bug and thanks for the reaching out.

LOL no apology needed. There lots of types of cats. My brother's family cat is a lot like a dog - comes to meet you at the door and expects belly rubs. My avatar is all about cats and their love affair with boxes and acting like royalty. There are cats that do indeed seem to be plotting ways to kill you at all times. Putin is like the latter type of cat.

I fail to see how finding truck parts on a damaged bridge section where trucks were traveling when the explosion happened, favours the explosion being caused by a truck bomb over a missile strike.

Keeping in mind I'm not more of an explosive expert than you are but I don't think that warped edge is from an impact. If it were I would expect more damage to that railing. I think. That whole section seems to have been twisted a bit - not visible in this picture but others. I think the explosion and shifting caused that section of road bed to be twisted. I think that's what caused that edge to be deflected. To me it looks like what happens when a metal part with a shaped edge gets bent and then you try to straighten it and the edge is just never the same shape any more.

Sorry about that. Yes, please PM me about your problems I would like to hear about them.