Livdoc44

Sorry for the length but this is well worth reading: 
 
Less Than Meets the Eye - Parsing Tucker's Putin Interview
JOHN GANZ
I was probably one of the relatively few people that sat through the entire two hour Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin. To call it an “interview” is not quite right: Carlson essentially allowed Putin to discourse at length and only occasionally tried to prod him in the direction of his own preferred talking points about the war in Ukraine. Any appearance of tension or journalistic effort only occurred because Carlson seemed to have the expectation that Putin would cooperate with his own line and appeared frustrated (“annoyed,” he said in his prefatory remarks) when it immediately turned out Putin seemed to have his own ideas . Essentially, the interview consisted of a melange of multiple, sometimes contradictory, lines of propaganda about the war. But to say that it was “propaganda” also might gave a misleading impression: it suggests that there is a “real” underlying motivation for the war, while the justifications are merely self-serving deceptions for public consumption. But what it actually might reveal is superficiality and incoherence of the case for war itself. Instead, there were a number overlapping and shifting messages to different constituencies. is not a single overarching ideology at play, but rather a succession of “ideologemes,” little snippets of ideology: themes from Russian nationalism, Western far right cultural pessimism, anti-colonialism, and Soviet nostalgia all crop up—even little remnants of Putin’s Marxist-Leninist training appear, like when he talked about the “excessive production capacities” of the West. Putin doubled down on the theme of “denazification”—evidently somewhat to the irritation of the America Firster Carlson —while at the same time offering a revisionist picture of the start of World War II, sympathetic to Hitler’s territorial aims and essentially blaming the war on Polish intransigence, saying “they pushed Hitler to start World War II by attacking them.” This speaks to the awkward position of Russia claiming simultaneously claiming to embody the continuation of the Great Patriotic War’s anti-fascist crusade while being the darling of a far right at home and abroad, which views it as the last remaining hope of “white civilization.” 

This synthetic, “postmodern” quality does not reflect devilishly clever strategy, rather its incoherence directly reflects the fragility and fragmentation of Russia’s entire post-Soviet political project. The Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ischenko writes of “a crisis of hegemony” in the post-Soviet world and that both Putin’s authoritarian, “Bonapartist” rule and its consequent war arise from the same “incapacity of the ruling class to develop sustained political, moral, and intellectual leadership.” His regime is ad hoc: a cobbled together arrangement of veterans of the security services and the rent-seeking oligarchs who accepted Putin’s settlement. Prighozhin’s mutiny made this provisional and brittle nature of “the state” clear. Rather than reflecting position of strength the strongman antics of Putin reveal fundamental political weaknesses and failures. As Ischenko put it in an interview with The New Left Review:

"Putin, like other post-Soviet Caesarist leaders, has ruled through a combination of repression, balance and passive consent legitimated by a narrative of restoring stability after the post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s. But he has not offered any attractive developmental project. Russia’s invasion should be analyzed precisely in this context: lacking sufficient soft power of attraction, the Russian ruling clique has ultimately decided to rely on the hard power of violence, starting from coercive diplomacy in the beginning of 2021, then abandoning diplomacy for military coercion in 2022."
The political fragility and insecurity of the ruling class, its cliquishness and insularity, its inability to shape a single coherent narrative of national development, its preoccupation with finding tactical expedients to avoid the chaos of the 1990s and the humiliations of the collapse are all wedded to the cult of “special services,” from the former KGB officer Putin on down. As early as the 2000s, Dimitri Furman noticed this aspect of the regime, writing in his Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia’s Post-Soviet Political System, that a growing number of “activities, essential to the maintenance of the system, were in essence ‘secret special operations.’ Rather than rare exceptions, they were fast becoming crucial and lasting dimensions of all political activity.” With that in mind, it’s worth noting Putin’s insistence on calling the war in Ukraine, not a war at all, but a “special military operation” and its simultaneous development of contradictory propaganda campaigns directed at different audiences rather than a single, articulable vision of Russia’s role in the world. Putin can’t escape looking at everything as an “op.” (Not for nothing, this confusion of war, propaganda, and secret police subterfuge along with the subordination of politics to the needs and views of the national security apparatus is something usually associated with totalitarian states.)

In so far as anything approaching a worldview emerges from the interview, it is Putin’s preoccupation with the central role “special services” purportedly play in world affairs, particularly his apparent belief that the United States is not governed by its political leadership but by its national security bureaucracy, which accords with Carlson’s view of a “deep state.” This is less of ideology than Putin’s own déformation professionnelle, one that’s so deeply rooted that he felt the need to bring up Carlson’s onetime attempt to join the CIA. (He even seemed to coyly suggest that Tucker might actually work for the CIA, which I’m sure Carlson found flattering.) 

From the very beginning, Carlson’s generously offered Putin the chance to present the war in defensive terms, asking,

"On February 22nd, 2022, you addressed your country in a nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started, and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States, through NATO, might initiate a “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears, that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?"

Instead of taking that route, Putin immediately launched into a nearly half hour disquisition on Russian history, the point of which was to stress the original unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. Carlson averred in his opening remarks that he was “shocked” by this, but Putin has been harping on this theme since before the war. In July 2021, he published his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which states “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” Of course, “sovereignty in partnership” is not really sovereignty at all. Despite Putin’s open and lengthy statement of what the Old Bolsheviks would’ve called “Great Russian chauvinism,” Carlson came away from the interview stating, “Russia is not an expansionist power. You’d have to be an idiot to think that.” From both Putin’s rhetoric and his behavior, you’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise. Carlson is just employing the propagandist’s trick of employing abuse and invective when the facts clearly oppose their case. But, as Michael Tracey’s recent Substack post makes clear, Putin’s open statements of Russian grand imperial ambitions are troubling for Westerners otherwise predisposed to be sympathetic and who have spent a great deal of time rationalizing Russia’s actions or presenting them in a defensive light. 

In the minds of the Russian ruling class, there’s really no contradiction between defensive and offensive conceptions of the war: they both involve securing of their system, and in moments of more grandiose transport, their civilization, against Western encroachment. The other overriding theme of Putin’s discourse, connected to the fixation on “special services,” is the characterization of the Maidan as a “coup d’etat.” The fear is that the example of success of Ukraine’s political revolution might spread to Russia itself. This concern on the part of the Russian elite is not new: it has its origins in the collective trauma of the Soviet collapse. More proximately, it dates back to the “Color Revolutions” of the 2000s that toppled Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine, Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan, and Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia. As Furman writes, 

"These men had headed systems highly comparable to Russia’s, if substantially weaker, and their ousters aroused an irrational panic of the kind seen in tsarist circles after the French revolutions, or in Soviet circles in the run-up to the Prague Spring. To acknowledge the naturalness, the predictability of these regimes’ collapsing would mean acknowledging the inevitability of the collapse of Russia’s regime, too – an impossibility. Those in power in Russia thus concluded instead that these revolutions were all the work of Western security services (very much as Soviet leaders had blamed similar forces for unrest in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland)."

Since that time, Russia’s foreign policy in its “near abroad” has since been fundamentally counter-revolutionary. As Ischenko notes the tempo of revolt had been picking up in the run up to the invasion:

"Such uprisings have been accelerating on Russia’s periphery in recent years, including not just the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014 but also the revolutions in Armenia, the third revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the failed 2020 uprising in Belarus, and, most recently, the uprising in Kazakhstan. In the two last cases, Russian support proved crucial to ensure the local regime’s survival. Within Russia itself, the “For Fair Elections” rallies held in 2011 and 2012, as well as later mobilizations inspired by Alexei Navalny, were not insignificant. On the eve of the invasion, labor unrest was on the rise, while polls showed declining trust in Putin and a growing number of people who wanted him to retire. Dangerously, opposition to Putin was higher the younger the respondents were."
Again, the war is a piece of domestic policy as much as it is foreign policy: an attempt to consolidate a regime that feels itself to be vulnerable. The acquiescence of the population and the resilience of the Russian economy in the face of sanctions may prove that it was a successful expedient, at least temporarily. It would be dangerous indeed if Russia’s regime concluded that such “operations” redounded mostly to its benefit. 
 
 
 

RU are currently incapable of maneuver warfare. Due to the apparent serious vulnerabilities of their tanks and planes, and serious shortcomings of their artillery and AA their current doctrine is late-World War I infantry-based attacks (+ UMPKs and helicopter ATGMs). They are considering rectifying it eventually, but it would need a large rearmament program, something they cannot afford at the moment (they have money left for around 1 year of fighting).

I would strongly recommend Paxton's "Anatomy of Fascism" or John Ganz's online writings about anti-Dreyfusard and/or Boulangiste France. The model of fascism represented by Mussolini or Hitler is not quite what's happening to the GOP, subject as it is to the cultural and political mores specific to the United States. On the one hand, that's a good thing because the essentially immigrant/moderate/revolutionary/democratic foundation of the state makes blood and soil dictatorship a much harder prospect. But on the other, the United States also contains within it strains of racism and violent action that, should they ignite fully, can be positively Balkan. 
Luckily, there's one simple and decisive thing Americans can do. Vote. Vote for the current administration even if it isn't your cup of tea. Because if nothing else, it will remain within the normal bounds of politics. And (to remain on topic)...because it is far more likely to see the war in Ukraine to a positive conclusion. 

What you would get is a constitutional crisis. Trump would attempt to do various things. There would be lawsuits and in most cases the SC would judge against him. He would say "Ok...try to enforce your judgement" and go ahead anyway. Then, states would resist in various ways, the folks carrying out his orders would be sued personally as well, he would pardon them, etc, etc. And he would, as he did but more than he did last time, send what parts of the national security state who agreed against his perceived foes. Large parts of Border and Customs, DHS, etc would gladly go along. Last time around, Lafayette Park saw the Texas prison system's SWAT team threatening protesters and passersby. I know...because I was one of the latter who had that experience.
So, you wouldn't likely have a dictatorship like Putin's...you would have paralysis, disfunction, violent protest and different parts of the American state pulling in different directions. No so bad, right? Except that that disfunction would include essentially the US writing off Taiwan, NATO, etc and a far more violent response by a second Trump administration. 

I think this is a big misread of what is happening and going to happen. 
Trump was limited in his first term by a several things: 
1. He did not actually expect to win the race and so didn't come into office with a coherent program. 
2. He didn't have any idea of how things worked and still saw value in working somewhat within the system.
3. He believed that he actually had alliances within the conservative movement...starting with the Federalist Society...who would safeguard his hold on office. 
Trump today is no longer that politician. He knows that he doesn't have allies in the conservative movement but also that they don't control the party any more. He does. He knows that the Pentagon won't willingly help him achieve power and he is embittered towards the generals he would be dealing with in a second term. He also is explicitly saying...along with potential VP candidates like Vance and Stefanik...that he will ignore Supreme Court decisions he doesn't agree with. Finally, at Heritage/Claremont/etc a coherent and nakedly fascist program is being articulated which includes pulling out of NATO, mass seizure and deportation on day 1 and worse. 
Trump's supporters in DC are making no bones about it. This is the big one. This is the emergency. Nobody should imagine that it will resemble the first term. 

Rare episode of UKR fighter jet uses AA missile, likely to shoot down the drone
 

Acoording to updated information UKR Su-25, lost on 7th of Feb was shot down on 17th minutes of flight by R-37 long-range AA missle, likely from Su-35. This missile has 200 km of range and speed 6M . Other carriers of this missile are Su-27 and MiG-31BM  
For the lost pilot Vladislav Rykov ("Magic"), this was 385th combat flight.

WW1 - you are confusing outputs with outcomes.  Of course there was movement in WW1 but none of it was decisive.  There was plenty of defence in WW2 but none of it was decisive either.  All war is a combination of each, however, which form of warfare that is decisive in creating outcomes shifts overtime.  I do not debate that offensives happened in WW1, I debate the idea that any of them created decisive outcomes.  WW1 was an attritional and positional war in the majority. Not decided by manoeuvre - even if it was happening in a bunch of sideshows.  To try and force that war into an offensive primacy lens is to attempt to bend the facts to fit a perception/dogma, not the other way around which is how it is suppose to be done.
Gettysburg.  Lee broke his military in that battle and never recovered.  His entire campaign buckled and collapsed after that fight.  He decisively lost a Union defensive battle.  What is so hard about this?  It happens all the time in war.  The consequences of Gettysburg were significant.  European sentiment toward the Confederacy went cold, Southern force generation started to fail and Lee’s gilding was tarnished.  That battle set the conditions for a Southern defeat - this is not really debated (except here).  But because it was a defensive victory and does not fit this strange offensive-cult mindset we are going to dismiss it?
Victory.  I have provided numerous historical examples but somehow the idea that most military “victories” are negotiated endstates that neither side can declare total continues to elude.  Turn your binary equation around, “If Ukraine can only achieve 80% of its political and strategic objectives…this is a defeat?”  
Here is another English saying for you “take the f#cking win you can get”.  If Ukraine pursues a blind “total victory or death” strategy here they could easily wind up with the latter.  They could break themselves on those southern minefield belts while western support grows cold.  They could kill hundreds of thousands of their own people until domestic support grows cold.  That could easily set conditions for that 80-20 ratio to flip violently.
Grown ups do not think this way.  They realize the stakes are much higher.  All war is a violent negotiation.  Victory is not some simplistic binary calculation.  It is linked broader political objectives, some which do not become clear until after the war is over.  This war will very likely end much like the majority of wars have, with a mixed outcome where both sides will declare victory for themselves and defeat on their opponent.  Then the wrangling will continue to try and use that as a foundation for what comes next.
I think what you, and other purists, find offensive is the idea that war is not a decisive political tool.  Well I hate to be the one to break it to you but the evidence of this is pretty overwhelming.  Wars rarely are the “last argument of kings” without becoming the first argument for what happens next.  All victories and defeats are messy human affairs.  Anyone seeking clear and definitive results due to warfare is chasing fantasy.  In fact this is the central flaw in all Clausewitzian thinking - war is not rational, nor is it decisive. Or at least very rarely so. So rarely that when looking through a long lens, all wars are in fact largely indecisive.  Nazi Germany was totally defeated, yet Germany is the major power in the EU.  We won the Cold War and are living with this. The North won the Civil War but the seeds of discontent never really went away.  
This war is not going to end in total Russian military defeat. Ukraine is not going to march on Moscow or remove Russia as a threat on its eastern border.  So we had better start figuring out how to live with whatever the outcome of this thing is and stop treating it like the skewed historical fictions we have created.
 

Amateur historian chiming in, so take it for what it's worth: yes with a but.
I'd suggest that there are two kinds of war, the second of which is relatively uncommon. I'd distinguish them based on what the victor gets at the end of the war.
The first kind of war is a war-for-things. The aggressor wants to take some things (which can be abstract things) from the defender. The victor gets to keep the things. For example, when the United States fought Mexico in the 1840s, that was a war for things. The victor kept Texas and California. Or the Roman conquest of Gaul: Caesar plundered everything that was not nailed down, and functionally annexed modern France to Roman rule. These are pretty common, and World War II was, from one side, a war for things: Germany wanted Lebensraum, Japan wanted the rich resources of the indo-pacific region (particularly oil). Note that I'm defining wars-for-things in terms of the spoils, not the rhetoric that surrounds the spoils. I'd note that modern war is so mind bogglingly destructive that rational actors have concluded that protracted war-for-things is a suckers game. There are no things you can get that are worth the destruction on the things you want!
The second kind, which is relatively rare, is a war-for-rules. The aggressor wants to impose (or maintain) a particular rule set on a collection of polities. The ancient examples of this would be Roman expansion in Italy (which ended with the defeated state bound into a treaty structure rather than obliterated) and the inter-Polis wars in Greece (which were by and large prestige competitions). The victor incorporates the defeated party into a particular rule-set. The objective is not to take things away from the defeated party.
We've also seen asymmetric combinations of the two. For example, Gulf War I. Iraq was fighting a war-for-things against Kuwait, but the Coalition was fighting a war-for-rules against Iraq (we did not annex Iraq at the end of the war, we said, "no annexing neighbors, bad Iraq").
So the war in Ukraine is a combination of these two. Russia is fighting a war-for-things against Ukraine. They are attempting to take the whole of Ukraine's territory, and stealing grain and people. Simultaneously, Russia is fighting a war-for-rules against the Status-quo Coalition. The rule change they're attempting to effect is a return to the "annexing-neighbors-is-ok" rule set that preceded WW2. Ukraine is fighting an existential war-for-things against Russia, and wins if they exist as an independent state at the end of the fighting. The Status-quo Coalition is fighting an existential war against Russia as well: the absolute lynchpin of the status quo is that annexing neighbors is not OK. If that rule falters, it will blow up the international order and allow a renegotiation of lots of the status quo by actors not enamored of the status quo (the Baltics, Taiwan, Africa, the Middle East, &c.). Victory of the Status-quo Coalition is deterrent: showing everyone that attempting to violate the international rule set is *just not worth it*.

Usually I ignore most of articles in WP/ NT about Ukraine, because many of them had been written by authors, who worked in Russia or had any relations with Russia and this is not journalistic, but sort of influence on public opinion and to sow scepticism. 
But this is article, despite had been written by "anonimous sources among UKR battalion and company commanders" (if I see "anononimous source", this is 50/50 BS) in whole reflects probably more significant problem, than artillery sjells shortage - the crictical lack of pesonnel in "line units" - those who hold positions and should go forward. Problems with mobilisation and failed information policy of the state in this sector led to army receive too few replenishment. And many of infantry, who come from Ukrainian tarining centers have very weak training. (My addition - existing 151st training center, established by volunteers and saved in endless wars with old soviet dumbs top brass from GS anD MoD gives very food training, but can't reterain more that 2-3 batatlions for one cycle)
In conditions, when units have 30-40 % of personnel, which have no normal rest, we can't think about any offensives, And if this not be solved in short perspective, this with addition of probable US aid termination can lead to very bad consequences
   https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/08/ukraine-soldiers-shortage-infantry-russia/

Exactly one year after the first announcement, the project is now finished. In order to avoid
misunderstandings on the part of the company Battlefront.com, I chose the name CampaignPack 😎.
The pack (as described in former threads) consists of 5 campaigns in which the player is thrown
into the events of the summer of 1944 in the sector of the German Army Group Center.
In total you will play minium 52 single missions, maximum 55 single missions (depending on one
branch). To avoid technical problems, I didn't add any mods to the campaigns. But I can, for example,
highly recommend the excellent work of @JM Stuff, especially his extraordinary mod collection of vehicles
and wrecks 👍
I recently visited the forum regularly to stay in touch with people who wanted to register. However, I have
asked the people at Battlefront.com several times to delete my profile.  This request has not yet been
granted to me, so as a quasi "undead" I will always stop by - but I will no longer take part in any discussions
or answer any questions in the forum. To get in touch with me, please write to me at:
E-Mail: f-s-zbg@web.de.😎
Of course, I can still send the campaign pack to anyone interested.
 
So all I can say is:
It was a great pleasure for me to finish this project and share it with many people.
I hope you have as much fun playing as I did creating it 🙏
 
Best regards
Mr.X 

One more caveat: 
A big difference in American politics now from even 7 years ago is that there is a lot of actual intimidation going on on the Republican side. GOP pols get swatted (i.e. have bogus hostage/shooting calls made to police with their address), their kids get targeted online, they deal with waves of threatening emails, calls and texts if they publicly break with Trump. Nikki Haley was swatted in December at her home and just applied for Secret Service protection because of the unrelenting and violent comms she gets. When 20 GOP Senators who would have killed for this border bill in 2015 run cowering from it, it's not because they suddenly had a change of heart. They were scared off it for both political and personal reasons. 
One of America's parties has entered a very dark phase and it's not going to get better unless they lose and keep losing.

I can help: I was around 12 in the 80s when my father was serving near Frankfurt, so I have expertise in the French army. Also remember the Canadians because we did our food shopping in their stores. I propose myself as artistic director with my in-depth knowledge as shown by this drawing drawn from my childhood memories:

Folks, we have a whole lot of plans for CMCW...we plotted out an entire franchise.  However, how much of it that will ever see daylight is a continual negotiation with reality.  We are only going to be able to go so far on CMx2, and then we will just have to see what CMx3 looks like.
Bil H, Cpt Miller and I are committed to this ride for as long as it lasts, but much will depend on sales and BFC bandwidth - small company, big dreams.  So one step at a time.  The fact we got green lit for a Module so quickly is a good sign, and we exceeded expectations as far as base game went - we were expecting CMA and got a lot closer to CMBS response, it put our baby squarely within the "inside club" of the modern era titles, hell we were a Charles S. Roberts nominee!  (Even told my mom...she totally did not get it.)
So beyond BAOR...we will see in the fullness of time.  And maybe Bil and I have got other ideas...maybe.

Well that is a loaded question to be honest.  Bil H will no doubt chime in but a few factors came into play as I recall:
- Resources.  We can take a really good shot at BAOR and not cripple ourselves in development for years - along with the other BFC titles.  The core team is pretty small and we were looking for a quick, but solid, follow up to the main game.  Germany would have been a lot more work, as would  any other NATO nations, and the French were just a non-starter.  Those modules will take much longer, particularly in vehicle modelling and artwork.  BAOR had a lot of new vehicle models but much more manageable in the timelines for a first DLC.
- Locale.  The Northern Plain was actually where the most likely Soviet Main effort was going to fall.  Hate to admit it but Fulda was a bit of a sideshow in the overall Soviet plan.  It made sense game wise simply because the largest market for the game is the US, and we had a lot of details on this fight - US research is a dream as they put everything out there, Canadians are a nightmare.  That said we really wanted to do the northern plains from the start and historically that is BAOR or the Germans.
- Expertise.  We had experts on both UK and Canadian orbats right out the gate, which made research a lot easier.  I joined in 1988 and had a lot of my old battlebox stuff to pull from and some old timers I still know from up the day.  On the UK side we had similar expertise.
- Timeframe.  Late 70s, early 80s is really the “tipping point” of the Cold War.  It was when the doctrine and equipment of both sides was pretty balanced, each offsetting the others strengths and weaknesses.  Before this you get the nuclear armies, which were just nuts. And after you get the  western advantage leaning into overmatch and then we start to look a lot like CMSF or BS.
- Straight up cool factor.  So how would the UK done against the Soviets?  Canadians are fun because they mix European and US kit.  You wanna know how a squadron of Leo’s would have done…well let’s find out.  Not saying the other nations are not interesting but when you add everything up it just made more sense to do BAOR next and they would be fun to play.
As to “how will they play”…totally honest…no freakin idea.  We also had no idea on the main game.  It wasn’t until I played those first few scenarios while we were early in did we see that we were onto something.  BFC doesn’t balance for gameplay or market. They literally plug in the data from research and then throw it at each other in game. The balance is almost entirely emergent.  When we do up scenarios and campaigns there is always a level of balancing that goes on but this is macro stuff like force size and enablers.  For CMCW we were amazed at how little balancing we had to do. I designed the campaigns and scenarios based on doctrine on both sides and basically how they would have gone into a fight with each other.  The fact that these led to tightly balanced fights that require deep understanding of what each side can do was all pretty much emergent design.

Cold Warriors.
  Well it looks like Steve has already dropped the mic over on the annual update thread, so let myself, Bil H and Cpt Miller (along with a small team of unwashed heathens - two of whom are actually from the UK), be the second to announce the first CMCW Module - CMCW - British Army On the Rhine (BAOR).

We are still in development so I will only outline the broad strokes of what we are working on, and insert the caveat that we reserve the right to add/subtract - 
 - Time frame of the game is going deeper backwards into the Cold War.  We are setting the clock back to 1976, so CMCW will now encompass 1976-1982 (including some minor tweaks to the existing US orbats).  As has been noted we are less interested in the later Cold War years largely because they really do start to resemble the later CM titles and we are shooting to keep CMCW distinct in its own right.
- UK BOAR - right now we have a pretty comprehensive build planned for the UK units as they transitioned from their 1974 structures - to where they landed in 1980.  As per the picture above players should be able to become deeply engaged within the historical BAOR sector of the ETO.
- And because I just have to represent the home team, we are also doing the Canadians.  That little black box is the planned 4 CMBG AO - you will note this was right at the tail end when the brigade was still part of the BAOR, although for those that really want to play First Clash and park them down in Lahr you are fee to do so because the basic unit structures remained the same.
- We do have plans for the Soviet side, but are going to hold off on details until we zero them fully in...more to follow. 
- I will let you all speculate and discuss what new vehicles and weapon systems we are talking about but there is a not insignificant list of new ones we are planning - more as we start to get some cool screen shots.  
As noted by Steve, we are well on our way and are planning for a release this year - content and full scope remains TBA.
Thank you all very much for your support, the response to CMCW has been well beyond what we were expecting and that is entirely thanks to you guys.

Updated loses spreadsheet for Avdiivka (second tweet).  Quite eye watering numbers if these are truly accurate. Like Oryx, the spreadsheet links to the evidence of each claim.
 

Example that a tank is not always easy target for drone dropped HEDP and thermobaric grenades. ERA and weakness of charge makes own work, if this is not sniper drop in open hatch or lucky hit in engine area. 
Here compilation of several drone attempts to finish of abandoned Russian tank. HEDP and two thermobaric grenades in the puddle of fuel can't set the tank on fire. Only last dropped thermobaric grenade penetrated inside the turred and caused fire. Several grenades were defeated by ERA - it's good seen how blocks dissapeared afer activation. But in one case ERA didn't activate 
 

Although I've known about the Combat Mission license for a long time (I bought Shock Force in 2007), I acquired all the WW2 Combat Missions on Steam over the holiday season (and Final Blitzkrieg last week ). Better late than never...
For the moment I have a lot to do with four games, the campaigns, the scenarios, the content created by the community but I will buy the other modules to come without hesitation.
Good job at Battlefront, keep it up!

Please forgive me in advance for my extreme lack of knowledge on what to me seems to be and inordinate amount of time crank out these CM games. Steve mentioned 10 years ago that it took to complete CMBN, Yeah, that's right. I retired 13 years ago, and I was playing it before then. The business model involved in the development and all the computer work required and all the research that goes into these titles to me seems somewhat staggering. I was in Law Enforcement for almost thirty years, and I spent a lot of time investigating traffic accidents and other criminal activity. While I am in no way making a comparison to my prior work than what the Battlefront folks are doing is to say this. The dedication and hard work that is put into these "games" that we all love so much, certainly for me and I'm sure for everyone else out there in "Battlefront" land is greatly appreciated. Whatever Steve and his coworkers decide to work on is fine with me. I own every title put out. I will conclude my remarks with this. I am 63 years old, and I hope to the Lord above I am around to see and "play" the next full installment of whatever it might be.

Wasn't there another Asimov story about the world being managed by AI, everything had been going great but then things started going wrong in a big way, famine etc. The main character investigates and discovers it's corrupt humans feeding incorrect data to the AI that's the problem. Might have been one of the Robot short stories, this human computer can't remember.

UA proclaims that they sank Russian corvette "Ivanovets" with kamikaze USV.
 

Tanks behaving like they often get used in CM games? As an uninformed tangent, I always got the impression that most players used tanks in CM (thinking WW2 games here) in a historically unrealistic way, where instead of tanks being the spearhead, in CM games they were more often kept hidden until the infantry had identified targets and enemy AT assets had been located.
In CM, this is the combination of:
(a) scenario balance means that if you've got a platoon of tanks, the other side very likely has the capability to kill a platoon of tanks (as opposed to reality, where an assaulting tank company might just roll through the enemy positions because they didn't have anything that posed a threat to heavy armour - but that would make a boring CM scenario)
(b) Borg spotting, perfect terrain knowledge and the players' ability to co-ordinate their entire force to a wholly unrealistic degree meaning that they can afford to keep tanks at the back because they will be able to scoot forward through defilade to a keyhole firing position to take out a threat in literally 1 minute, while in reality that's more like 15+ minutes with far more chances to screw up, go the wrong way, shoot at the wrong building etc.
So is it possible that the incredible C4ISR available, replicates in effect much of point (b): enemy positions are known pretty well in advance, real time drone observations funneling information back to units on the ground, and so on, mean that something closer to (although still far short of) CM player levels of planning, co-ordination and responsiveness is achievable, meaning small armour packets can be held back and used on demand with more effect than a full platoon could two decades ago - never mind the increasing number of things that can quickly kill an exposed and hard to conceal tank.
And on a higher level, the higher situational awareness, and prevalence of longer ranged things that can kill vehicles in particular mean that it is hard to create a situation where you can mass e.g. a tank force against a position that has no meaningful defence against it. They will see it coming, and tank-killers can hit from a much larger range, so wherever you attack there is going to be meaningful anti-tank capability, meaning you're always in more of a "balanced CM scenario" kind of situation in practice.

That's a great point. It took, for example, 40-odd years to unpack and deconstruct "blitzkreig" from a mythically wondrous imagined doctrine to its actual reality as a marketting elevator pitch. And, frankly, 40 years after that epiphany there are still plenty of folks who continue to prefer the marketting take.
One concern I have about analysis of this war is availability bias: drone feeds are new and exciting and ubiquitous, but are they representative? I wonder if we give drone's effectiveness too much weight due simply the the large supply of feed videos.

Good lord this sentiment is so 2024.  We are not even entirely sure if we are looking at defensive primacy, let alone if it will be enduring.  We have suspicions, but we really do not fully understand the full impact of what is, or is not, happening.  I think it may be a little too early to start "challenging our challenges."
The defensive primacy shift of the 19th and early 20th century took roughly 50-60 years to fully emerge.  And then it lasted roughly 30 years before technology broke it.  The current possible shift has taken maybe 20 years to sink in and no on knows how long it will actually stick - if it is indeed a thing.  I personally do not think manouevre is dead, I think its selling points have definitely have taken a hit.  But the principles of manoeuvre are very old - "hit em where they ain't, faster than they can recover" likely has roots in pre-civilization warfare.  What we, in the western military complex appear to have forgotten is that detail (or "task") command and good old fashion attrition ("me smash, you") is not dead, in fact it never was. 
Once this war is over, two things are going to happen. 1) modern militaries are going to scramble like mad to jump on all sorts of bandwagons based on how this thing has gone down.  And 2) they will immediately stuff these new phenomenon into the existing box.  We will see Battalion TFs wearing unmanned hats as next-gen collides with legacy inertia - we can see this already.  Some may over subscribe and read the tea leaves wrong - get ready for some crazy ideas in all this.
I suspect it will take at least a decade to fully unpack what has been happening in this war.  Right now most of the evidence is happening on social media - of one digs around for scholarly analysis, we are not there yet.  What we have are some pretty skeletal frameworks that roughly fit what we are seeing, but I am still not entirely sure why.
As I also tell my students - the trick to this war is understanding what is fundamental and enduring, and what is a unique manifestation that will only occur in Ukraine.