Livdoc44

To restate the points I made earlier in this thread:
Bolton and others have said directly that Trump had planned to pull out of NATO in a second term and there is no evidence that he now intends the contrary. Trump has also quite publicly rejected the Pentagon’s top generals who restrained him from this direction in the first term and there is no constituency in Trump world that has a stake in European stability. Quite the opposite, in fact, as they can anticipate making enormous amounts of money off of the Russian oligarchy should the US swing into acquiescence to a Russian dominated Eastern Europe. Don’t kid yourself. If he wins, NATO is very likely to die.
It is also a canard that Putin was holding back on Ukraine before Trump left office. The reality is that Putin’s regime was involved in a full court press to pressure Ukraine into subservience with the willing assistance of political appointees in the White House. Russia hasn’t gone to war because Putin didn’t think he needed to and clearly the Russian government expected Trump to win a second term. War was decided when it became clear that Biden had won and the immediate focus of American power was going to be on containing Moscow. Putin’s clique imagined that the US was still too shaken politically from the previous four years and too involved in Afghanistan to reorient rapidly while the Ukrainian military wouldn’t be able to put up significant resistance. Virtually wrong on all counts. 

The US Congress added an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requiring consent from 2/3rds of the Senators or an Act of Congress in order to leave NATO ( Congress passes bill to prevent the president from leaving NATO without approval (msn.com) 
A President could sort of leave by not co-operating, I suppose.  

Possibly because he bashed the threads into mush? Just a thought 🤣
They do seem to be trying to fuze rounds but it obviously is not going well, to say the least. 
The one with the view down inside appears to be empty, completely empty. You should just see an open area just big enough for the base of the fuze. Looks like you can see all the way to the base. That one will only hurt if it actually hits you, like a 1700s cannonball.
That guy in the cartoon is at least trying to not destroy everything. See how the screwdriver is at the side - trying to get it to turn, not smash everything. 
[edit] Looking at the cartoon again, he's doing it wrong. The screwdriver should be on the other side. "Righty tighty, lefty loosey"
Dave

This really speaks to a political leader who simply does not understand how the modern world works. Of the US wants roughly the same economic footing it had pre-WW2, back when its population was about 125M, then decoupling globalization makes perfect sense.  How many jobs in the US will have to go back to manufacturing and resources?  Entire generations of Americans will have to go back to the coal mines and steel mills.  Costs for everything will go through the roof, unless of course Vance’s plan is all JP Morgan and plans to pay future US workers next to nothing to do all the work that has been outsourced.  And then there is the uncomfortable realities of the money markets and foreign investment.
The US does not get to be large, powerful and rich without the global order that it built, fought for and now needs to keep fighting for.  It baffles me that the average voter in the US does not really understand this let alone a senator.

Hmmm we in the UK have personal experience of this and it has cost us dearly. A very expensive mistake...
I hope for the world's sake America takes note that tearing up years of work and cooperation doesn't magically solve anything and creates problems no one was told would happen...

It is potentially worse than that.  This sort of dysfunction does nothing but feed anti-democracy sentiment.  Democracies die due to abandonment, history demonstrates this quite well.  If the system is seen as "unworkable" democracies often choose suicide.  This is the threat to the US and global stability.  Trump and Greene are symptoms of something far deeper and dangerous....apathy that leads to despair.

From what I’m hearing, deal is done but passage is not. There could and are likely to be some bumps ahead. What has changed is that it has finally gotten through to everyone but the loons that disaster is being courted and not just for Ukraine. Keep those fingers crossed. 

I mean ... I think that's a joke? But with MT "Empty" Greene (proud veteran of the Bowling Green Massacre) it's really really hard to be sure. That is bat**** enough to have actually leaked out of her ears.
 
Edit: oh FFS. Those really were among the proposals she submitted 🥸

Drone wars - UKR FPV intercepts Russian recon drone similar to DJI Matrice-30
 

New update from General Oleksandr Syrskyi:
https://t.me/osirskiy/650
 
 

And just to give a sense of how early we are in this iteration of warfare, my great-great-grandfather witnessed the early use of proto machine guns at the Battle of Gaines Mill more than 150 years ago. Imagine where drones will be in 30. 

I read the doc and RUSI actually hits some pretty salient points.  The mainstream thinking is that unmanned systems as we are talking about here are an addition to conventional warfare.  An emerging capability to be added to our extant capability portfolios and expenditures. Unmanned systems are an undeniably part of the future warfare military algorithms and focus should be on how to combine them best within our current approaches to create advantages.
I think this does not go far enough.  I believe that unmanned autonomous systems will emerge as the core pillar of a future military operational system.  We will then build the remaining systems, some legacy others also new, around these new unmanned capabilities.  We will fund and equip the unmanned forces first, along with C4ISR and PGM strike.  We will then need to figure out from the money left what to resources with respect to heavier conventional manned systems.  This takes the entire approach to force development and generation and flips it. More plainly, tanks will survive if they can demonstrate that they can shape, support and/or exploit the main unmanned battle…not the other way around as RUSI and others suggest.
This era we are in reminds me of the introduction of machine guns. Militaries of the day immediately brigaded them like cannons and relegated them to a support-to-infantry role.  The reality is that within a few short years the role of infantry was to protect the machine guns while they exerted firepower effect, and then the infantry would exploit that effect by taking and holding ground…so they could move up the machine guns.

We're all arguing this on a board that's dedicated to a wargame that has implemented at least some level of autonomy at the small unit level for 20 years.  And made it work in reasonable compute times for battalion sized swarms on computers that were nothing special.  The only thing it doesn't have is the physical sensor inputs, and those are pretty straightforward.  And it was all implemented by Charles and maybe a helper (I haven't kept up).  Charles himself might even count as an autonomous biocomputer, since he's really just a brain in a jar.

When EU parliament is doing better than the House of Representatives, I hope Speaker Johnson looked at the eclipse without protection. What a ridiculous mind boggling genuinely bad look for the Republican Party, Congress and the U.S. At this point, a pure Ukraine bill should be able to pass. The fact it cannot, despite a majority of republicans, democrats, a bipartisan majority in Congress, alongside a majority of the American people, due to one man, the speaker, and I suppose, one presidential candidate, how can any ally of the U.S have faith in us? I mean, let’s be blunt, support for Ukraine is bipartisan and popular and not a fringe position. The fact that despite this, we are unable to pass the bill will not reassure any American allies, nor our enemies, nor neutrals to trust us.

But here and good news. After despearted interview of UKR Foreign Affairs minister about "Patriots", something moved in Eurpore
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68788110
Well the uckers were eventually going to get through...
I hope our friends in Ukraine are OK and at least summer is on the way...
Wind Turbines and Solar with extra Grid connections to Europe are I hope on the cards for you.

This sort of narrative reminds me of WW1 generals who also thought the airplane was a fad.  First off Russian glide bombs need to carry so much HE because they are inefficient and imprecise.  A whole lot of HE is not necessarily a good thing.  For example, if I have 10 enemy in a build I can use a large 500lb HE munition to drop the building.  The energy it takes to get that heavy munition to that building is significant, costly and has a high ISR signature.  If I have 10 micro-drones with a .45 cal round that will not miss, that simply fly into the building and kill all 10 enemy, I am using far less energy and cost to deliver the same effect.  I am using precision and processing as an offset.
So the Russian AF lobbing large glide bombs is not a sign that “big booms are back baby!”  It is a sign that 1) Russian ISR is still fairly low res, 2) Russia does not have a lot of higher tech precise munitions and 3) we should really be worrying about air denial for Ukraine because if that fails then a whole lot of this is largely academic.
As to “someday soon C-UAS will make this all go away and we can go back to Grandpa’s war” - there is a lot of hand waving on “someday C-UAS”.  Yes, counters will be developed but they will likely reshape the battle space in doing so.  For example, let’s say we invent a nifty micro-smart missile or laser that can blast those pesky UAS out of the sky, even when they are in swarms.  “Huzzah!  Now that is over with, let’s roll out the tanks and do this Persian Gulf style…USA.USA!”
Well except for the part where we have operationalized a technology that can find and hit a flying target the size of a bird with a very small munition at crazy scales.  What do we suppose the impact of that technology is going to have on conventional ground units?  That level of ISR alone means nothing can move without being picked up for kms.  Individual infantry are screwed, vehicles may as well be battleships.  The changes such technology would bring would be f#cking profound.
So there is no going back after this with or without UAS.  Unmanned, plus ISR, plus processing power, plus miniaturization, plus cheap production are all conspiring against our entire current theories of warfare. They have been for decades while we tried to ignore them.  So we can do “hope and denial” or we can can see the shift for what it is and adapt.
 
 

Turtle-tank %)

What ticks me off is that he is going to go off and sulk now, muttering about how we are all “high on copium” and “smother alternative views.”  I resent the echo chamber accusation immensely.  Many people have put in a lot of time and effort to keep up with this war.  We are definitely pro-Ukraine but we also try to avoid the blinders as best we can. If they do not want to get beat up, come in with stronger arguments…and maybe some actual facts.
Is Russia still in this thing?  Definitely.  I am not sure exactly how but it is undeniable that they are still holding and even capable of tactical advances.  However as many from this individual’s camp are prone to do, there is a double standard against Ukraine in just about all things. I am willing to bet Russia winds up taking about as much as Ukraine re-took last summer.  To them this is a clear sign “Russia can never be beaten!”  Meanwhile when Ukraine did it last summer, “see they will never push Russia out!”  It really doesn’t matter what happens the conclusions are always the same.
Ukraine is holding on just as well, if not better than Russia.  The UA is undergoing reforms.  The West is slowly getting its act together - this NATO collective mechanism for support is a good idea, if it doesn’t get weighed down in bureaucratic sludge.  Russia is not “getting better” by any stretch.  Advances come at horrendous costs.  Losses continue to stack.  They do appear to have some concerning glimmers of C4ISR daylight but they never really coalesce.  Ukraine continues to demonstrate significant strategic strike acumen.
As to the finish line…who knows?  Could Russia operationally collapse…sure, they have twice before.  Can the full on strategic collapse…definitely.  They did in 1917 and 1991, they can do it again.  Hell Priggy’s wild ride had real potential.  Will they?  Again, we do not know.  The second anyone from either side of this goes “this is how this war will end”, I for one, stop listening.  All we can do is hold on and hold fast.

Apologies if this has already been posted. Having a hard time keeping up and just skimming. 
 
Three drone hits on the unit 6 containment dome. No real damage ( containments are VERY strong), but this is still not great. The reactors are all shut down at least, but decay heat and spent fuel still exist and must be mitigated. 
 
Really you could do more damage hitting infrastructure OUTSIDE the containment, like incoming power lines, diesel generators, secondary water supply equipment from the river/lake. Containment? “‘‘Tis but a scratch”
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-drone-a28710a691f3259b5dd6586787838b60
Dave

This is such a weird take to me as to be somewhat incomprehensible. Like, we seem to be operating in different factual universes. Italians bogged down in Albania? How is that an apt comparison?
What particular weapons systems are we depleting the reserves of? We've been culpably stingy with our second and third tier weapon systems. Your points contradicts one another. If China is learning to fight a western military that doesn't use any of its airforce, any of its modern deep strike capability, any of its naval capability, any of its modernized mech force... learn on, I guess?
On the contrary, everyone is learning that the shape of the battlefield has changed, and changed in ways that seriously favor the defender. The PLAN has to be looking at the videos of the SeaBaby double taps and thinking hard about what their losses crossing the Taiwan strait would look like.
Everybody is looking at the rise of low-energy precision fires and wondering how totally that's broken mechanized mass.
Everybody is looking at the totally illuminated battlefield and wondering how complete their ground-to-space ISR system is.

Helpful
 

But isn’t a “domestic” enemy someone whose position is forbidden?  There weren’t a lot of protections granted communists in the US back during the Cold War.  For example, if one was a firm communist they were not going to be employed within the defence department.  Roll forward to modern era, devoted fundamentalist Muslims did not fare much better.  This “freedom” concept really appears to be selective when viewed through a historic lens.  Sure, a US citizen can be free to express whatever they wish, but to do so without consequences from both private and public sectors has clearly been demonstrated as false.  Once a society allows for negative consequences as a result of free speech or association, it is no longer “free”.  This inconsistency appears migratory and frankly unfairly applied historically.  Try being a black civil rights movement in the 1930s in the South.  Not a whole lot of freedom of speech and association in that period for that demographic. LGBTQ in the 50s?
So what, as it relates to this war and situation?  Within the US, and other modern democracies, I do not think this is a case of “autocratic control” but you are very correct in calling it out as a slippery slope.  I think it is a case of “when does speech and association become a threat to national security?”  When is it honest political discourse in an open and fair democracy, and when does it become too dangerous to tolerate?  Obviously sharing information on how to build and deploy a WMD should not be covered in “freedom of speech”.  Nor should sharing of classified information.  But when does political discourse cross that line?
The US currently has elected officials who are pretty actively supporting a foreign powers agenda.  To the point that they are blocking military aid to an ally in the middle of an existential war.  At what point does this stop being “open and free political discourse” and become “paid foreign lies by a domestic enemy?”
I honestly do not know.  I have watched my country wrestle with this.  I think our “hate speech” laws are in fact dangerous.  But clearly there is a point, even within free democracies where we cannot tolerate free expression.  For this war, where that line is drawn could very well impact its outcome and what the region looks like.