Seedorf81

That particular like was to the killing terrorists part of the post. As an Iraq vet I have a deep hatred of terrorists and terrorism. I've seen and experienced first hand the chaos and death they cause.

Also, If I lived within 500meters of this guy, or God forbid in the same building. I would relocate by any means necessary. I don't think he is a safe person to be round ,now, or ever again. The risk of anything from his cell phone exploding to a skyscraper falling on him seem rather high.

Something coming straight at you is the easiest shot to make. The question is it worth the immense hassle of issuing every third soldier a modified bird gun. For all that the extended chase cenes make compelling video, most people get taken out by something they effectively never saw. I keep coming back to the idea that it ought to be possible to build small UAVs just to take out other UAVs. It must be harder than I think it is or we would be seeing it already. A lot of RWS turrets with anti UAV capability popping up in dribs a and drabs, but as The_Capt never tires of reminding us, at even a couple of hundred thousand dollars each the number requires quickly exceeds the ENTIRE defense budget of most countries.

This late afternoon: Israel airstrike hits hospital area with loads of refugees. Slaughterhouse, also young kids, already 200-300 deaths, possible more trapped under rubble.
Whether Hamas was under this hospital or not, this number of deaths doesn't justify that.
O most recent update, deathtoll already 500 deaths.
And these deaths are by far not the last in this endless conflict. You can expect that Israel and "the West" are going to have to deal with suicide-bombers, lone wolf shootings, knife-attacks and the lot.
And the most terrible thing is that most of those Hamas-****ers are in more or less safe places..

I mean... it's the Egyptian army that controls the border crossing.

Baltic sea, such a rough place for undersea infrastructure... another telecom link damaged, this time between Estonia and Sweden.
https://www.dn.se/sverige/forsvarsministern-haller-presstraff-om-kritisk-infrastruktur-i-havet/
Must be earthquakes. Or Jaws.

Combat veterans from all ranks and all branches describe their experiences in/with combat, but they also explain what they believed worked, and what could be improved.
Amount of info is stunning, and some of the tips and advice could still be useful on the modern day battlefield.
 
Urban fighting, logistics, AT-warfare, combined arms, engineering, camouflage, maintenance, supplies, medical stuff, transport and much more.
It is a 388 page report, and you can (safely) download it from this WW2 US Bombers channel. Play in Youtube, than see description below this video how to obtain this report.
 
Whether you want this very interesting download or not, but you have even a slight bit of interest in WW2 bombers, check this channel out. You will be amazed, no doubt about it.

Us intelligence: Russia received it's first shipment of North-Korean weapons. (1000 containers)
Link is Dutch, but original US Twitterpost is in English.
https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/buitenland/artikel/5413059/rusland-oekraine-noord-korea-wapenleveranties-munitie

A bit of a confusing video. I'm sure it would help if I understood Hebrew.
 
 

This would be a glorious opportunity for American pick up truck manufacturers, who with the end of ZIRP are sitting on lots of inventory they can’t move. They could get probably get uncle Sam to comp them a bit too. Not as good as a Hilux/LC70, but better than nothing. Also American-size means lots of room for body armor and cupholders for energy drinks.

At least the X guy had the decency to admit he is a novice.  His analysis is a bit of a mess.  The objectives he lists are really all over the map (literally and figuratively).
I think it has been termed “The Death of Expertise”.  Social media, and now AI, has lowered the cost of information to the point that one no longer needs to demonstrate proof of work.  The problem is that information is not knowledge.  The ability to take information, or as we have gone on about - negative information (things that should be seen but are not), and synthesize it into knowledge based understanding is not something one can do with a Twitter account.  It takes years of study to create the critical analysis frameworks and foundational understanding that allows one to take new information and understand it in context.
We see this “college boy, eh?” type of thinking in vulnerable sectors of society.  Those that were not afforded the opportunity to gain expertise can now appeal that condition.  Further expertise can be wrong - that should probably be the first rule of experts.  In fact an expert will know they are wrong before anyone else.  Being an expert is not about being right all the time, it is about understanding what we know, what we don’t know and why.
So we have people who are facing enormous uncertainty and are compelled to try and solve that.  They form information spheres they trust and then use that to try and understand better…to be more certain.  It is what we have been doing here since Day 1 - world went nuts, we seek certainty in community.  Problem is when a community is built on biases or skewed perceptions.  We have walked that precipice on more than one occasion on this very forum.
In the end, it is not about “shut up and take what I say as gospel”, in fact any community that is doing that is probably toxic.  It is about clear and objective analysis of facts, due diligence in self-monitoring and correction and proof of work in making analysis and synthesis happen.  Everyone and anyone may contribute to this community, but it must contribute.  Signal not noise.  Not for me to judge noise, the meritocracy of the community (and moderators) do that for us.

Interesting sounding tech/software, which if I understand correctly could be installed on existing crows and link them together forming a distributed network for defense against drones.

After the defeat of ISIS not every ISIS-fighter or ISIS-leader was dead or caught, of course.
Now I wonder if Hamas gave a bunch of them shelter, learned their tactics, and planned to use them as murderous cannonfodder all along.

It will be (is, already) an unimaginable horror for the families of the missing/kidnapped persons, but the rest of the Israeli's might have the opinion that after a 1000 people being butchered, there can be no more talking with those who executed and organized the attack. Even if it means the death of all the hostages.
Hamas may have created a united and resolute Israel that we haven't seen in decades. I suspect we're gonna find out what an almost fully mobilized Israeli army can achieve when they're in full-revenge mode.
But, alas, things will only escalate from here on. The division between "Israel and The West" and the Arab/Muslim world will only get worse.
Just the huge difference between reactions and emotions on western news (CNN/BBC) and non-western news (Al Jazeera) is shocking. In the West there is horror, disbelief, and condemning of the brutal attack. And mostly empathy for Israel.
But the Arab/muslimworld has a very different outlook. There is a tendency to almost disregard the Hamas-atrocities, because lots of people are absolutely convinced that Israel deserved that. They mention "the West"'s hypocrisy on the Palestinian issue and the horrible way the Israeli's treated the Palestinians for 75 years.
There is an insurmountable difference in beliefs. Whether the Israeli's "destroy" Hamas or not, whether they occupy Gaza or not, whether they give up the illegal settlements and free all Palestinian prisoners or not, it won't bring peace.
It's not a happy conclusion, but it seems to me that it is a neverending horrorstory.
 
 
 

This is what I wrote yesterday (in the wrong placed Israel-thread), but still think it is valid.
 
Hamas just now announced that they will publicly execute one hostage for every next (air?land? both?) attack on Gaza.
I fear that the Israeli army high command and the majority of the cabinet already realize/fear/accept that the hostages will die anyway. (They won't say that out loud, obviously.)
Hamas poked the bear, even gave it a real bloody nose and they probably can hurt the bear even more, but it still is a bear.
Israeli gloves are off, and I fear it's going to be much more bloody murder on both sides.

You do realize you just violated the principle of my initial post?  “Oh hey look everyone, THH149 did ‘national intel selection’!”

Hamas decided to lose the propaganda war preemptively. They will regret that.

Forum software was fighting me about getting any writing in the post above, sorry
Hamas seems convinced achieving the nearly impossible bar of being worse than the Russian army will accomplish. something. I suspect most of the population of Gaza is going to get to ponder that what tHamas achieved was getting them dumped in the Egyptian desert with a leaky tent. 

It's all pretty vague, as you would expect.
_____
These key Iranian officials did not know the attack was coming, according to the intelligence. The United States, Israel and key regional allies have not found evidence that Iran directly helped plan the attack, according to the U.S. officials and another official in the Middle East.
While they would not identify the Iranian officials who expressed surprise at the attack, the U.S. officials said they were people who typically would be aware of operations involving the Quds Force, Iran's paramilitary arm that supports and works with proxy forces.
U.S. officials said the intelligence investigation was continuing and could turn up evidence that Iran or other states were directly involved in the Hamas operation. Senior officials said they were keeping an open mind, reviewing old intelligence reports and looking for new information.

I guess you are referring to the original 1948 war, which is when most of the Palestinian refugee's in Gaza were created.  I won't argue with you that some (but not all) were "driven out", although the exact reasons that some Arabs left and others stayed is not clear (20% of 1949 Israel was Arab).     However,  refugees as a result of war is not unusual.  Think about the aftermath of WW2.  All the German's who lived in East Prussia, the Sudatenland, and parts of Russia were "driven out".  For some reason, we don't call the ancestors of  these people as refugees.  I will also point out, that the there were large numbers (900,000) of Jewish Refugees from Arab countries that were "encouraged" to emmigrate to Isreal, in much the same way that Jews "encouraged" Arabs to leave.
 
 I agree that Gaza is a hell whole and no one wants it.   As for Israel's Arab neighbors, you seem to think that they actually care about Palestinians.  They don't.  Jordan still has 680,000 Palestinian's within its borders that are not Jordanian citizens, even though many of them have been living there for three generations.    This idea that Israel alone is responsible for the state of Gaza is one-sided.  Gazan's have been screwed by Israel, Arab neighbors, and their own government (Hamas).  
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/us/politics/iran-israel-gaza-hamas-us-intelligence.html
Early Intelligence Shows Hamas Attack Surprised Iranian Leaders, U.S. Says
That is interesting. That kind of goes against "Iran is behind it all" people seem to be taking for granted.

If the Russians had any sense they wouldn't be attacking, at all. But common sense is evidently not the primary guiding factor in their decision making process, so I think it is pretty much a given that the same senseless meat assaults would have gone on earlier and at higher intensity than what we are seeing now. There is a major and fairly obvious downside to basing your strategic planning on the assumption of your enemy's stupidity, since at any point the might get the memo and just cease it. At least by attacking UKR can force attrition upon the Russians on their own terms, but much less efficiently.
Disruption of defensive preparation would have had merit, I think, if the offensive had managed to achieve notable gains. But as it stands now the main line basically holds and there are just to little bumps in a vast defensive network, which the Russians will probably easily be able to "buff out" over the fall/winter again. They did attrit the Russian forces holding this line, but not as efficiently as staying on the defensive would have achieved, is what I am arguing. Killing Russians is easier while they are on suicidal assaults than when you have to root them out from minefields and trenches.
What personally worries me and what maybe explains why I perhaps obsess a bit about the, let's say efficiency of attrition, so much, are the long term prospects of continued supply of arms. Even if the Western countries maintain their political will to supply UKR, most of the stuff that is required is extremely finite and has abysmal yearly production rates. Denmark can only send their entire fleet of motorized artillery so often (once, to be precise), Leopard 2 tanks are produced at a rate of I think a couple of dozen each year and Western countries seem more focused on back-filling their own arsenals for the near future. The only thing to be optimistic about seems to be the production of 155mm shells, which does appear to be slowly ramping up, but I have yet to see evidence for increased production of all the other stuff. Last time I checked, I think Oryx listed 1/3 of all M777s ever delivered as destroyed or damaged, mostly by Lancets, and I don't think I've seen announcements of further pieces since last summer, to give another example.
To summarize, UKR mostly lacks the capabilities to produce their own armaments and the current rate of attrition appears to be too high to sustain given what the West is physically able to replace without digging deeper into its own arsenals, against which there appears to be a very strong political aversion. Therefore, the attritional battle UKR intends to fight would have to be as optimized/efficient as possible to work out.

I think, this is a fairly safe assumption, otherwise these early failed breach/breakthrough attempts would not have been made. It was also probably the right choice to make these attempts, given the extremely high upside potential in case the RU forces had in fact been as brittle as everyone seemed to expect, which probably was quite a reasonable assumption given their showing during the previous winter and, in fact, the entire war up to that point for that matter.
I am just doubtful about the sense of proceeding with the slow grinding "Kherson style" approach.
I mean, I get that you are mostly not referring to personnel losses here, but the entire support structure, which is obviously many times smaller than what the Soviet Union had in WW2. But in terms of manpower losses, the Russian casualty figures for the entire war are roughly equivalent to a good (as in "not too bloddy") month during 1941/1942.

Out of likes as usual (first world problem :D), but here is one.
Yemen anyone? Sudan also going on, etc. This war has large ramifications for most of us. Indirect results like inflation, energy pricing, etc; 
Anyway I'm not that bleak about support dwindling yet; so far it's more of a media / politics thing afaik. Of course from Ukraine perspective the support can never come (quickly) enough. 

Without a Speaker no business gets done. The Speaker Pro Tem's (the interim Speaker) one and only responsibility is to preside over the election of a new Speaker, after which they can get down to business. There's been some talk on voting to give him more responsibility in order to pass aid bills, but I can't really see that happening. Opening a can of worms unless it's very restrictively written.
The large aid package is unrelated to the Speaker election or lack of a Speaker. The one time large aid package is a proposal to avoid dickering about aid every 2 months with smaller appropriations bills, and just get enough aid to last until the election (next November). Biden can't do it himself. Both houses have to pass it, which they may do. There is still good support in both parties for aid to Ukraine, although recent news has showed lessening support among Republicans. But their majority is only 5 seats, so it would only take 6 Republicans and all the Democrats to pass a bill, or some similar combination. The big however to this might be getting it to the floor in the House to vote on, depending on who the next Speaker is. 
Hope that helps. My gut feeling is that sanity will prevail. Someone recently quoted the Churchill saying about Americans being counted on to do the right thing, once all the other possibilities are exhausted. Very perceptive, he was.

Dave