BletchleyGeek
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Posts posted by BletchleyGeek
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3 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:
I'm asking all of you to keep your eyes open for any and all reports of how these tiny drones do in combat situations. There's bound to be discussion of them soon now that Ukraine has them in their hands (er, litterally:
Steve
The last update from this guy's buddy in Ukraine had some commentary
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11 hours ago, Huba said:
It's even funnier that this post suggests - it looks like we have too much gas at the moment, time to turn up the heating
Didn't want this post by @Hubato be washed away... that's so interesting! In any case, if all this "Cold Winter" story ends up being just burning bullcrap smoke vented by the Russian propaganda machine (and its knowing or unknowing accomplices) I think that the resulting massive push for solar (up to a year waiting list in Spain for subsidized home solar installations) and basic things such as improving home insulation will be a net positive contribution to the welfare of the World.
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On other important news too
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2 hours ago, JonS said:
I've just finished reading The Ledger by Kilcullen and Mills, covering the denouement in Afghanistan last year.^
It was written in a rush - a rush of time, and a rush of anger - and it shows. However, one of the more coherent points they make is that, clearly, Afghanis can fight. And fight. And fight. What the ANA couldn't do, however, was fight effectively within the construct of the pseudo-western military that had been forcibly grafted onto them, and which then had vital enablers - which the ANA couldn't generate or sustain for themselves - withheld right at the time they were desperately needed.
^ good grief. Only last year. Time really is non-linear at the moment.
Kilcullen was doing the rounds on the Australian national radio 5pm news on a Friday, back in early September, when there was that moment immediately following the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in Kherson. When Russian bullcrap was very loudly claiming that thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were being obliterated in mindless fashion, like extras in a schlocky contemporary Russian movie on WW2 or All is quiet in the Western Front.
Kilcullen's take was that, as "das experten" consensus at that moment was, AFU had failed. His was one of many voices coming forward reasoning that the West had got this war wrong and that we were ruining our economies and causing undue suffering amongst Ukrainian people by supporting them, but without wanting to involve troops, planes and ships into it. That we should be offering an off ramp to Putin, and let Russia take whatever they fancy. That the Ukrainians were a corrupt, anarchic, lazy lot that probably were selling the secret of Steel to the Russians. And so on.
That same night first news came through about AFU breaking through the Russian lines, reaching the river Oskil in about 20 hours, in what by all reckoning was a stunning reversal. The rest is history.
The next Monday 5pm news opened up with 10 minutes of coverage of the Ukrainian victory, and das experten were quite confused.
I hope they had a chance to review any "advice for the future" before going to press... It's a different war, in a different land, with different motivations. This conflict cannot be further from the Afghan war. Yet I agree with the following: it is possible that the same mistakes are done.
To wit, that instead of offering terms when our side is winning (as should have been the case in 2007-2008 perhaps) we decide to double down and effectively wish for the annihilation of the adversary without willing to put forward the means to wage a war of annihilation. And vice versa, that instead of keeping a firm steering on policy, an off ramp is offered to the losing side when they were getting some respite, in a premature fashion, causing chaos, mayhem and despair.
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1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:
That's it, I have the answer: sinister Ukronazi NATO capitalist puppetmasters haz better fish, and make bribe perfidious military dolphins!
Так долго и спасибо за все рыбы!
I was reading the bit about the dolphins, poor bastards. I doubt the RA treats any better their dolphins than their replacements...
Jokes aside, like with the attack on the Saki airfield, I think there is a very unconventional Ukrainian "special operations" bureau, formed by very talented individuals. Whether they are rocket scientists, roboticists, elite commandos or just simply, wizards, I have no idea
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52 minutes ago, Offshoot said:
This the the first frame that isn't normal. The flash starts at the bottom of the frame.
In another video, you can see something moving under the bridge
These both come from this thread that was linked to before (https://twitter.com/INTobservers/status/1578633947109810176). You can see the moving boat in the first video.
Yep, there is something disturbing the water under the bridge. Could well be an underwater drone at "periscope" depth to keep a satellite link with the base station. But I haven't heard of anything with this explosive power - that was one heck of a explosion and there was something else in whatever was the payload that killed the train as well.
Wild *** guess: UKR must have a skunkworks outfit that you would very much not want to lock up even in a garden shed (like you wouldn't lock up the A team in a shed either) and can customize existing hardware to come up with "one trick ponies" for very specific missions.
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10 hours ago, poesel said:
think that was rather a reference to H.P. Lovecraft and this guy: https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Yog-Sothoth
Yup, the 'gg' is also accepted spelling I think. It would be bad juju to piss off Yog-Sothot/Yog-Soggoth. You even found a picture with the weird green ray (since I am not Lovecraft I can't come up with a baroque juxtaposition of adjectives to describe it properly).
Didn't know about that book @danfrodo, sounds interesting!
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33 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
I haven't played CMBS in a while, (can't, feels too morbid), I was reviewing the TOE.....wondering about a future CM Ukraine...
Look I understand that the level of HIMARS might be too above CM's scope....if it'll tip the scales...maybe a little DLC is in order?
Gah, micro-dlc is evil but I want some rockets...
Let's imagine for a second that video games were a thing in 1935, all other things remained equal in the world, technologically and politically. What would a CM-like game covering a hypothetic World War II look like:
- Tanks would have multiple turrets and guns
- Infantry platoons would be like those of the Italian Army
- Cavalry would be a thing
- It would have an amazing model for fortifications
- Uniforms would come in bright colors
- Etc.
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So there seems to be quite a few arguments and facts that suggest that, in all likelihood, those green "death rays" were some kind of BS. Or the RU Nats conducting some rite to call Yog Soggot from the Dark Beyond the Stars.
Meanwhile, commercial satellites provide plenty of intel for the OSINT community:
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3 hours ago, Beleg85 said:
Jesus, this stuff that keeps coming out from liberated lands is like from horror. But it is unfortunatelly very probable. There is a dog-tag of UA soldier in the video that seems fishy, but most of golden teeths were probably taken from older civilians, as golden dents were (and sometimes still are) popular in post-soviet countries. Russians could try to hide their trophies before leaving; they could also be common criminals- I wouldn't be surprised if organized crime would flourish in occupied territories.
Those images were indeed an example of the saying "an image is worth a thousand words" ... when the bandits are part of the armed forces then we are well into the Dirlewänger territory.
Also, thanks to @Haiduk for the comment about the green rays coming out of Russian cities. They looked really weird.
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That part also caught my eye, it is a very strong historical parallelism.
It was also interesting that there was no write up today about the situation along the theatre.
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14 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:
Others speak up, please, but the only way you make this kind of defence work, even temporarily, is with firebases (efficient medium artillery) backstopped by air strikes. And even then, you lose eventually if you don't have your own infantry platoons out there aggressively contesting the infiltration.
Otherwise, it just gets chopped systematically into pieces and the next fallback river line is at Misky. Same bloody thing.
What you describe above sounds like what has been going on north of Lyman for the last week. Just unsure that the Russian forces have the infantry numbers and skills for that to work.
And definitely that river line you mention is what makes sense, would need more careful terrain analysis (like going down to the scale of a good tactical map).
Makes me wonder if the UKR command isn't thinking of a lunging towards Kremnina from the south of Torske as the Russian reinforcements (allegedly) try to jump into Zarichne - Torske to keep a route out of the Lyman pocket open.
5:30AM in Kiev, let's see what news come as the sun rises over Ukraine...
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@LongLeftFlank was wondering whether the Lyman Pocket was going to play out like Falaise or Korsun... Looks like it is going to be a mixture of both. From @The_MonkeyKing map the last kilometre or so into Zarichne is down hill and observed probably from Ukrainian positions on higher ground either side... Yuck.
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7 minutes ago, FancyCat said:
What is BARS-13? Why is it called the Russian Legion in a army of a majority Russian? Has anyone actually been able to figure out if there is a defense line in Svatove? I know we know Ukraine was supposedly pushing units to Zaporizhia Oblast but it's strange how the same leaking of info isn't occurring in Lugansk oblast.
Those are all great questions: I am also wondering if there is any substance to the rumours about fresh Russian mobilized personnel being already fed into the Battle of Lyman in the style of "let's try to overrun the other guys without suppressing their defensive fires".
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24 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:
Other examples are the former Warsaw Pact countries, the Baltics, the Balkans, and Georgia. Of all of these only the DDR was "occupied" in the sense that it didn't pursue it's own independent path. The rest of these countries had minimal experience with democratic principles because of Russian and/or Soviet domination. Not all are shining beacons of democratic principles, or have times of stumbling, but they are all headed in the right direction.
I am less familiar with other parts of the world, but Vietnam has made some very interesting changes over the years. South Korea is better than it has been, Taiwan as well. Mongolia is doing quite well from what I can tell.
There's a huge variety of good/bad stuff in the mix of countries I just mentioned, but the point is all of these nations had pretty dismal track records of Human Rights and, in the case of the Baltics, genocide (let's not forget Serbia wasn't the only one guilty of atrocities). Nobody occupied them to set them on a better path.
That's honestly a rather strange analysis Steve.
All the - I'd say - "solid success" stories are to no small part a result of their integration into the Common Market and etc. provided by the European Union. I think that this thread has gone in quite a few orbits around how wrong/right was the Ostpolitik that the EU implemented to integrate, in some sense, the Russian Federation. Something that if anything, after recent events, seems to me way, way far removed from what will be possible in the near future.
Vietnam as you say is an interesting case study where making amends on past misguided, ideologically-driven political-military interventions and the existence of a common enemy/rival (China, which let's remember, invaded Vietnam too, in an example of "big fish eats eat small fish" international relations) has certainly resulted in a non-alignment and economical partnership that has greatly benefited Vietnam. Still, I would say that nobody would say that Vietnam is a democratic country, and questioning the Party line in any way - even if you happen to be a double citizen from a Western country - gets you thrown into a dank dungeon in Hanoi.
South Korea wasn't occupied, but I think it is fair to say that it is sovereignty was kind of "closely monitored" for decades, until the corrupt military dictatorship there collapsed in the late 1980s. So not really a beacon of freedom and liberty because of good relations with the West, but rather in spite of. Hence the rather - at times - dubitative approach of South Korea to jump ship with the USA and Japan (with whom South Korea still has some beef to cut).
Can't say much about Mongolia, to be honest.
And regarding Serbia... not only was bombed by NATO (and the aerial campaign of 1999 is matter of great debate how effective was at actually destroying the Serbian army capabilities) but the West changed de facto the recognised international borders and still has, what I can't help describing as a garrison on Kosovo. The process of integration with European Union requires nation states to trade off sovereignty for prosperity (and I would argue future liberty and freedom too, thinking that also Spain and Greece had military dictatorships in place which were great friends of the USA, at least after 1956 in the Spanish case).
Another interesting case study is Iraq (or Afghanisthan)... probably as providing a counterexample to the kind of political-diplomatic engineering that I was referring to in my post.
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47 minutes ago, NamEndedAllen said:
I point this out because most of us have no illusions that Ukraine or anyone else is going to invade Russia, defeat it, and then carry out the sorts of post WWII plans that rebuilt Germany and Japan. That makes it difficult to use as comparisons the two world wars that ended in total defeat and unconditional surrenders. Speculation here mostly revolves around long distance constructive engagement with hypothetical new ruler or rulers to either:
a) “manage” Russia and/or several splinter states from afar, or
b) reform and guide Russian culture to a better place with healthy relationships to world society
Are their reasonable, realistic historical analogies to this sort of outcome?
Thanks for saying out loud the bit part, Allen.
The last few days in this thread have made me quite uncomfortable as folks were fantasizing about breaking up the Russian Federation as if if they were playing Paradox Interactive's Europa Universalis, where you invade a country like France and partition it into bits like the Duchy of Brittany and the Principality of Burgundy to ensure that it doesn't come back to eat you... or giving a nation the treatment of vampires in the traditions of the Southern Balkans, where vampires are gone only when you pretty much cut them up into teeny tiny bits and set them of fire. All this talk of obliterating this and that without even pausing 1 second to consider the enormity of what is being proposed and the means necessary to carry it out may be okay for a couple posts, but after days of writing in circles, honestly it is a bit tiring.
Hobbesian man-eats-man anarchy isn't a good state of affairs in international relationships (I think).
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1 hour ago, Panserjeger said:
There have been two incidents recently where norwegian seabed cables have been cut. One was a fibre optic cable to Svalbard, and the other a combined research/defense cable in the North Sea (probably used is to detect subs). Investigations have found that both cases were probably sabotage, but it is of course almost impossible to get proof of who was behind it. However, a norwegian media outlet investigated the incidents, and found that at the time of both incidents the same russian fishing vessels made repeated passes in the area of the cables.
Here is a link to the article, sadly only in norwegian: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/xl/russiske-tralere-krysset-kabler-i-vesteralen-og-svalbard-for-brudd-1.16007084
In Norway we are pretty much certain that the russians were behind it, but without concrete proof the government did not confront the russians directly. I work with IT security, so this has been a big thing recently as the most important communications cables out of Norway are sea cables.
So for me there is no doubt that Russia has the capability to do sabotage on the seabed, using civilian ships or submarines.
Smells like hybrid warfare to me, and the NS sabotage most definitely an instance of the tactic known as deception.
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2 hours ago, Grigb said:
Small update - in latest Rybar English speaking post (cannot post link right now) he says at Ridkodub UKR advancing toward Borove-Svatove highway reached operational space means UKR broke through RU defenses completely and now have freedom of maneuver.
Nighttime in Australia and looks like tomorrow I will be waking up to very big news. It is shaping up as a pretty solid encirclement for the Russian forces in Lyman.
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2 hours ago, FancyCat said:
thanks for the correction.
well, well.
This little piggy went to the market...
The Italians had great success with this stuff, arguably the biggest success of the Reggia Marina in World War II
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44 minutes ago, keas66 said:
Things seems to have quietened down for sure - but is the consensus that the Campaigning season is now over ?
They have and probably the cause are operational concerns (logistic problems like integration of new equipment and replacements, flank security, defining goals, etc). Which is to say real world military operations do not quite work like operations in Gary Grigsby's War in the East.
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1 minute ago, Huba said:
What I can see is RU covering the whole line of contact more densely, making aggressive patrolling and infiltration more difficult for UA. But apart from that? Achieving breakthroughs with mech won't be much harder probably, and might result in vastly increased losses for RU. As for using mass of conscripts in offensive operations, the very thought is too horrifying to contemplate...
That's my thinking too: those 300,000 (1,000 times 300 btw) probably are meant to provide as you say with a "buffer" and go to the defensive operationally and into the offensive strategically.
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1 hour ago, Huba said:
Ukraine still has some months of numerical superiority ( actually the announced 300K still doesn't give RU numerical parity, am I right?).
Numerical parity and parity in conbat power are not necessarily the same. I think this number of 300,000 is just too well rounded to fit a narrative rather than any reality. Why not 3,000,000? How is even conceivable that the Russian Army will absorb those 300,000 recruits? Either we need to get ready to witness some really messy Russian counteroffensives, or this is just rhethoric to rely on terrorising Ukraine with what actually Russia has plenty more that Ukraine, long range strategic weapons.
I think that Putin is playing what in poker is called "angle shooting".
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2 hours ago, billbindc said:
No idea. But something happened because that looked ridiculous today. And Simonyan clearly expected it to happen and she's briefed on what to expect.
Exactly, hence why I was wondering about things happening today (like rumours of the US releasing "old" M1 models from storage).
26 minutes ago, FancyCat said:The Russian delegation to the UN is landing now in NYC, maybe just like the speech where he declared war and missiles began falling on Ukraine while the UN security council was meeting, they are timing it to ensure that once again they show their disdain for the UN.
yet again in case nobody got the message back in February about how much they care.
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1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:
Odd thing that the president of Russia only remembers in the last moment that Russia is big and spans many time zones. Really odd.
Putin's last big speech - announcing the invasion of Ukraine - was timed to overlap with the address of the Russian ambassador to the UN security council. So they can be aware of time zones when it suits them.
I am wondering what will the speech be about, and if it is being - as I write this - tweaked to catch up with military and diplomatic developments.
Second Front
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
I agree very much with the assessment. I must say that for a one man show it is pretty impressive... yet many of the design decisions are a bit ehm, particular. Steam workshop scenarios can be played at will, and with the editor I am pretty sure many "classics" will be available to play sooner than later. The scenarios feel like, on the basis of a couple attempts, time and resource management puzzles in the disguise of a WW2 tactical wargame.
There is no off map arty or CAS, neither on map indirect fire either.
In terms of gameplay I think is much like The Troop, all things considered, but with more content yet much less immersive qualities.