The Steppenwulf

Ukraine Goes After Russia's Fuel Tanks in Record Hunt (msn.com)
 
Ukraine's bid to degrade vital Russian supply lines in the occupied south and east of the country is being reflected in the rising number of fuel transport vehicles being reported destroyed in Kyiv's daily battlefield tallies.
Through January, the Ukrainian defense ministry claimed 937 fuel cars and cisterns had been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, the highest monthly tally since the beginning of Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Similar losses in December—931—were the second-highest monthly total of the war, per Kyiv's tallies. The rising attrition rate may be a reflection of Russia's costly offensive activities, which have seen the Kremlin's troops pushing forward in hotspots including Avdiivka in eastern Donetsk Oblast, and on the northeastern front near Kupiansk in Kharkiv Oblast.
 

I suspect we are looking at hybrid system.  Human control up to a release point and then a pre-authorized kill box will full autonomy once in a denied space.  Target discrimination will be a major argument - hell we have problems with humans doing it right now.  It may have to stay at the vehicle/anti-material level - we can program in restricted targeting to military vehicles but individual people is really hard to do.  Is the person carrying a gun?  Are they acting threateningly.  Are they being shady?  Under ROEs a human can engage on all of these, but I doubt we will trust a machine with all this for some time.

This is bull****. Either you support the western rules based order, or you do not. You cannot start to pick and choose which rules to observe when you think they've become a bit inconvenient.

Apparently this baby is finally leaving the delivery room. Should ease the pressure on GLMRS stocks.

If you are watching the back and forth between Zelensky and Zaluzhny today, I would warn against the way in which most commentary is treating if as if it's a football game...as they do much of what has happened in the war so far. Shashank Joshi at the Economist is going to drop an article soon that looks more deeply at the reasons and the forces motivating the move. I would recommend it in advance. 

Would it be different if Russian paramilitaries had in reality run riot through an airport lounge killing hundreds of citizens and security guards? An event of such unimaginable violence that it would be on the scale of Oct 7th attacks, or 9/11. 

Regardless it needs to be considered that this is not only the reputational risk of a single company at stake, Slitherine and Steam share the risk of potential reputational damage and this in turn can affect future agreements re collaboration. In fact reps from those companies may have even expressed their own views on promoting and selling the planned module. A number of factors could have influenced the decision to pull it, these included.

P.S. This thread should have been titled "How cold is CMBS gonna' get?" 😀

My take regarding Ukraine and corruption.
While I think most people here know I firmly support Ukraine and its just war against Russian aggression. I know that corruption is still an issue in Ukraine.
I think it was one of the posters living in Ukraine who explained it best to me on this forum. Basically corruption was used as one of the tools by Putin to keep Ukraine in Russia's sphere of influence. Ukraine's oligarchs knew that if Ukraine was serious about joining the European Union it would need to clean up its act regarding corruption, and that could mean possible jail-time for some of those oligarchs. Who were happy that Ukraine be tied to Russia and the status quo preserved.
Corruption or not I still hope Ukraine is granted NATO membership soon after this war is over so this nightmare that the Ukrainian people are going through does not repeat itself.
As far as the EU goes I hope Ukraine will take it's efforts to battle corruption as seriously as they are battling the Russian military on the battlefield right now. I'm optimistic about Ukraine's chances because if other former communist countries in Europe were able to improve in this regard, I don't see why Ukraine cannot also improve.
 
 

Apart from the general logistical principles raised by The_Capt I’m pretty sure DPICM would actually have been particularly difficult to provide at that point in the war, since many of the nations who were making up the supply chain to the Ukrainian border had signed a treaty specifically obliging them not to facilitate the use of DPICM, even by transporting them elsewhere.  We’ll all recall that it took a while to find a diplomatically acceptable way around that and I’m pretty sure they/we only bothered because of the lack of alternatives as conventional ammo types ran low.

Do you really think a lack of DPICM is why the Kharkiv - or any - offensive stalled out?
That's taking kit-fethism to the next level.

Huh? How is that different than what we have seen from e.g. Girkin's blog?
Certain Russian nationalists have been criticizing the way the war is fought since March 22 and with colorful, explicit language.

WarTranslated seems to be a Ukrainian propaganda blog.
Anyone got a link to the original post by that Russian propagandist? Because if even their propagandists have such a negative view on the war, then Russia has surely lost by now.
Which is of course what a Ukrainian propagandist would want us to believe.

Exclusive-Russia struggles to sell Pacific oil, 14 tankers stuck - sources, data (msn.com)
 

We should be clear about what's happening here...and note I am politically an opponent of and no fan personally of Mitch McConnell: 
 McConnell has been trying very hard to get a deal through that addresses the border 'crisis' and funds Ukraine. Trump has become the nominee in all but name and Trump is threatening Senators who make any deals with Biden that might hurt his chances in November. So, McConnell has realized his own caucus is weak at the knees and a linked deal might not get through. 
His solution is the delink the deals so that Senators can bow to Trump on the border but maybe get Ukraine money through...and he's done it in a way that makes it clear that the fault for all of it lies with Trump. In short, he's maneuvering to keep aid alive while making sure Trump pays a political price for his obstruction. 

Good riddance. If/when he gets sent to the hell that is Avdiivka I hope we get a nice FPV of his fascist little face just before the drone snots him. They can identify him later by finding his ratty beard in a tree. 
Fanatics like him were a critical enabler of the initial rebellion and directly responsible for the following decade of murder, rape, pillaging, invasion, torture, pointless stupid war oh and blowing up a Dutch civilian airplane. 
I wish nothing but the absolute worst for that human weasel. 

After the Cold War was won, the UK had decades of downsizing their armed forces (A brief look at the British Defence Budget in the 1990s). According to that article the number of personnel in 1990 was 306,000. So by 2000 (according to the chart shown in the video), they had lost (cut) 200,000 or close to two-thirds and woke hadn't even been invented yet. That aside, he slaps "woke" on some memes but doesn't provide any real evidence for it's effect on recruitment, just some quotes from some nobs in the Torygraph and some broad assumptions.
But here are some numbers:
-as at October 2018, people from ethnic minorities (not including White minorities) made up 2.5% of officers in the UK regular armed forces, compared with 2.4% in April 2012
-for ranks below officer, 8.8% of all armed forces personnel were from ethnic minorities, compared with 7.9% in April 2012 ( https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/armed-forces-workforce/latest/ )
-that number has gone up to 10.1% as of April 2023 (compared to an estimated 16.1% of the total UK population). ( https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7930/ )
The disparity between the proportions for officers and non-officers shows me that the British armed forces really need to up their wokeness game.
And yeah, people should stop using the word woke if they don't know what it actually means.
 

To follow up.  I also do not think most people realize just how weird this moment in history has become from a military power standpoint.  The Cold War came off the back of WW2 and was actually an exercise in downsizing to fit the requirements of the intense strategic competition between the two global power poles.  Defence and Security architectures were largely scaled down from their WW2 architectures to fit the Cold War environment.  The competition then became sustaining competitive advantage in that context, along with negotiations with an evolving social calculus that occurred rather slowly (eg civil and gender equity).
We then won the Cold War and re-scaled again.  We first created military power to intervene in sustaining the global order. And then after 9/11 built the architectures aimed narrowly at a problematic niche.  Social evolution continued but began to accelerate as the Information Age emerged and began to deepen.
And then in just a few short years - let’s take 2010 for arguments sake and say 14 years - we saw the re-emergence of a Cold War-looking strategic competition, a hyper acceleration of the Information to whatever the hell this thing is now and, the largest pandemic in over a century.  This has driven social change pressures to crazy levels - like “let’s storm capital hill/defund cops/cancel-mob rule” levels.
And suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we are seriously talking about military requirements we have not seen in over 35 years. NATO has just run the largest exercise since the Cold War and we likely had to build things we forgot entirely how to do.  HQs and staffs, force generation, and military capability have all changed dramatically but we are still looking at a massive upscaling requirement to align with strategic realities.  Don’t even get me started on intelligence and security architectures, which have been entirely focused on hunting terrorists and now are being asked to consider under the threshold strategic disruption against other states - those are enterprises that take decades to get right.
We may look “ok” but we are not “ok”.  We have a very significant expansion in front of us in order to 1) create deterrence,  2) contain expansion of influence, and 3) create new strategic options…on top of an already stressed out social situation - f#cking “woke” is the least of our problems.  Rebuilding entire defence and security strategic power structures to be able to do what we found challenging over 30 years ago while the fabric of warfare appears to be rippling under our feet; while our domestic populations appear really intent on losing their f#cking minds in about 30 different directions at once…is our new Tuesday.
At this point senior military staff don’t care if someone is gender-fluid, multi-racial and bestiality adjacent - if they can fill a chair better than the forest of traffic cones that we currently have…welcome aboard!
(did that video get all that?)

Well, I think he is less biased than the title implies, he says himself (9 minutes in video) that the recruitmenttroubles cannot be explained by woke-issues alone.
He mentions:
 - changing motives from the new generations,
- the effects from social media and internet,
- income,
- the fact that young people want fun, succes and more pleasant things than being in the Army,
- the fact that people aren't driven to join the army through poverty anymore,
- the "lessening "of patriotism, of being proud of your country,
- the difference between rural and urban numbers,
- the difference in recruitment numbers between England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
-  that Poland ("Not so woke") and Japan have the same recruitment problems, 
and more.
So he concludes himself that wokeism isn't the main problem. He says that he current recruitment is a problem, and a serious one.
Like I said, I agree on that point and I see that it is happening in the Netherlands, too. Young people just don't wanna join the Army as young people did decades ago. (I can't blame 'm, btw.)
 
 
 
 
 

This. 
I've spent time with someone who was responsible for recruitment for an entire service and 'wokeness' wasn't even on the radar. His take was the problem was remuneration, demographics and also a military culture that wasn't well oriented towards recruiting towards the needs of a more digital warfare. 

26,000 dead and counting, dozens of hospitals and safe zones bombed, but go off about one fake. 

Our former POWs told today Russians really sometime used tarnsport aviation for captives moving. BUT. For group in 50 captives were 20 MP servicemen and 3 of escorting persons from Army. So, Russian claims about 3 guardmen for 63 captives is BS.
This video posted above, shows large holes in the plane remains - so this was SAM work, not MANPAD. 
Also other video shows only two corpses on the field, no any signs of ground litterd by multiple bodies 
UKR General Staff claimed this was UKR AD work
 

Just out of curiosity does anyone know how far clear of the war zone all/most most airlines are steering? Ukraine may have been avoiding shooting at anything resembling a transport plane out of an abundance of caution. And then they got solid intel on a target to good to pass on...

I think 70km the other side of Belgorod means this is either some very ballsy SF with MANPADS or- more likely- the kind of SAM raid we've already seen a few times.
Roll a Patriot further forward than normal, light up a juicy target, bug out. Just an exercise in extending threat into areas the Russians think are safe.
Last week it was a Mainstay, this week it was Il-76.

Das ist gut.

I was just thinking the reason would be that the Russian's aren't dumb enough to fly transport planes close enough to Ukraine. But now that I think about it, that can't possibly be the explanation 😀