Hister

I wholly agree Steve. Longer lasting ideal situation can not be achieved since the way universe works is a constant change, fluctuation and perfect state is only a dream, if at all then it happens only for a very brief moment but is generally only something that we can strive for but not really reach. Striving for better can in the end actually make things better but not without tough obstacles on the way.  
 
 
True, true but I can never get past the notion it's being somewhat overused and abused. That's my totally uneducated and maybe also naive guess and gut feeling. And I think that is what Lethaface is hinting too in his posts.  
 
 
I know. I also know there is a degree of how misused such actions can get or were and also know that they are necessary. This was not an attack on USA or you personally. Whoever can, will. But there is a degree which we can debate on and I'm well aware USA is using it on a less lower scale then any other global or regional power contestants would. Still, this does not make it all good and is as such ripe for our debate.  
 
 
I fully agree. If I can extend it let me give this simple example.  The way many peoplein Eastern Europe see USA and it's capabilities is simply funny and idiotic. For example, CIA and FBI are seen as unmistakable and omnipotent. This view is stupid as hell and not at all in line with reality but then again as long people will bite it it will give USA a bigger leverage then it actually has so in a way that's positive for it.
 
 
A relative of mine was working for Saddam in Yugoslavian times (in the 80's) as a construction firm contractor. He was building bunkers and other military infrastructure. He got a similar impression of the local people there so I fully understand and agree with your notion about them. Such things just show you even more how some tings are better left to be not touched.  
 
 
Yes, I understood this about you before already and for that I personally hold you in high regard if that means anything to you. I also fully agree with the notion USA army actions are way more soft-handed then of most other armies out there. Still, it could get better and that is also why I'm having this discussion with you right now. 
 
 
Yeah, my views too. They were on par with Germans when it comes to committed atrocities, on many levels they even surpassed the Germans - they only got bailed out 'cos they won the war on the "right" side. I also have a rather veeeery unpleasant feeling when I see WW2 "partisan" memorial events here in Slovenia since things are oftentimes presented too one-sided, still. All in all it's crazy to put so much effort into celebrating things that were instead of channeling energy into a more healthy future. 

Sublime, USA was/is more under the spotlight 'cos it is #1 global player who proclaims itself to be one of the "good guys" while it's actions are sometimes somewhat "debatable". Russia is making up for it with it's Ukrainian debacle so USA is less under global attention now.

BLSTK,
 
Thank you for this from the bottom of my heart! Now I know what I've really put myself out there to convey was "heard," felt and understood by a fellow human being. I hear you and relate on that father and emotion stuff. My dad knew one real emotion--rage. Sure, he cared about his wife and kids, but he couldn't express it. Ironically, he was a very tactile person. Figure out that one. It took Mom's pancreatic cancer late in the game (40 years wed) to open him up emotionally, for it was then he had to man up and take her for a change, ride herd on the doctors, be attentive to her needs--until her death. What a concept! I find it shocking and sad there seems to be so little care for our fellows here, though I have seen condolences to one guy whose dad died recently. Also, I'm not the only one here dealing with a brain injury. All it takes is one good smack to do it. This is why schools are suddenly all over concussions, for it's now known that all it takes is one concussion to set up a player for outright death from the next head blow, even with a helmet on. Thank you, too, for your very kind final thought.
 
Regards,
 
John Kettler
 
P.S.

I really miss my brain. If you come across it, please have it come home!

@ John Kettler
 
Having a father who never gained access to his own emotions, I can appreciate your efforts to enlighten us about your personal challenges. I dare say it is something we, as males, rarely summon the courage to do. And writing about it in the Forum is both cathartic and empowering for you. Consider this a form of communal therapy. 
 
Those who are quick to criticize you would do well to channel that negative energy into something resembling empathy rather than scorn. Because a post describing one man's plight is really the story of the human condition. What has happened to you could happen to any one of us at any moment.
 
Remember this: John Kettler at 50% is still better than most of us at 100%.

I agree with every answer from the posters above
- but would like to stress one thing:
 
CM will give you far more gaming time that most other games: I bought CMBN at the release in 2011 and got the every module/pack after that. And I am still far from having played every scenario I have on my hard drive, probably only one third of them.
 
In terms of gaming hours per dollar, Combat Mission is the cheapest game I ever bought. Seriously.

But it's never been addressed or looked at in a serious light.  There's been much written on the damage the Allies did (from bombing to the sheer number of French civilians killed in the fighting to liberate France herself), and the like, but the Russian narrative remains this action movie mockery of what actually occurred.  The Soviet Army sat and watched Warsaw burn because it was the wrong sort of Poles that stood up.  Countless innocents found themselves outbound to the gulags for reasons only known to political officers and god.  These monstrous acts and all the others have been, and continue to be airbrushed out of the Russian narrative in favor of the "Great Patriotic War."  This in turn does a greater dishonor to history and the sacrifice of the men who served because it turns the nightmare of 1940-1945 into a simple tale of brave stalwart men saving the motherland at great cost! instead of the much more complicated, much more meaningful reality contained within.
 
So to that, the parade is an affirmation of this whitewashed and glamorized history, and it remains a nationalistic celebration of same.  

To steal a Leonard Cohen line, it's better than being blinded by the beauty of our weapons.
 
 
On the other hand in all but Somalia (which is really a question of "what government?" and above table Pakistan (basically they've opted to on the government-military side condone the strikes, while still doing public outrage) US drone operations are sanctioned by the legal governments of said states.  
 
I'm....not going to be insulting but the "bringing in front of a judge" aspect is about as reasonable as "simply waltzing in and arresting Hitler."  A raid isn't just a few guys hop on a helicopter, swoop in with search warrants in hand on a moment's notice.  The sort of raids I described earlier were largely possible because of how the urban operation restricted terrorist movements (the various checkpoints meant the terrorists had to live fairly close to their operational areas, heavy security simply meant that it was blatantly obvious where they lived etc etc).  In dealing with many of these targets:
 
1. Local government is complicit/too weak to effectively deal with the target
2. The window to do something about this guy is very narrow
3. The target is in a place much too risky to send in conventional forces without significant loss (or basically asking the question of if it's worth the risk to lose the lives of several soldiers, a few million dollars of hardware so we can go through the legal procedure to show that this guy who we have a small mountain of evidence showing what a bad, bad man he is is in fact a bad bad man that we want to put in jail).
 
Even beyond that looking at historical counter-insurgencies or counter terrorism operations, bringing someone to trial has rarely been the historical case outside of domestic situations, or cases in which the targeted individual either survived the raid somehow, or was apprehended in a way that prevented them from being able to fight back.  The difference now is drones have the endurance and sensor fidelity to loiter over possible target locations, and the sensor fidelity to do the sort of "kill" it used to take big burly men with lots of guns to do.
 
 
The French, Israelis, the UK and countless other countries have all practiced the same exact tactic of international assassinations against various threats.  We're not talking about something "new" we've just hit that point where targeting and shooter technology has combined to allow for the sort of operations that used to exist purely in fevered dreams.  
 
However in terms of "what I have done" uh, yeah sort of missing the point to a large degree.  As:
 
1. The targets are folks who belong to organizations that have historically targeted the west because allah said its righteous.
2. Folks who support an unstable Afghanistan were stoning remains the legitimate means of judicial punishment
3. Folks who believe jihad is the one true path and if they explode enough people allah will smile on their dreams
 
That's sort of making it a bit glib, but these folks are opposed to us not for yesterday's acts, but for a long lasting historical grievances and perceived slights (US TROOPS NEAR MECCA HARRAM!!!!!).  If it was not the US, then it'd be the oh wait they did the UK.  Well if it wasn't the US and the UK it'd be Franc...oh crap.  Okay they did them too.  Well if it wasn't the US, the UK, France, it'd be the Spani...well damnit.  Even in the event of total US departure from the middle east, they'd still be blowing up Americans because of our cultural assault on Islam, or because we did not pay the ransom to not blow us up because allah commands it.  It's not as simple as it seems.
 
It's also not something we can kill our way out of, but the blowing up folks who are dead set on killing Americans is sort of symptoms management for the disease.  We've however mistaken it for the cure which is really more than a small problem.  
 
 
Again, Steve addressed this pretty well.  You can hold the US accountable for:
 
1. The post invasion chaos.  There really wasn't a good plan for that.
2. Disbanding the Iraqi Army.  That created a lot of the low-level trigger puller type insurgents for the Sunni population.
 
The dead Iraqis bloating in the Tigris, the exploding Mosques, the "mentally handicapped children as bomb transportation" tactic, and the VBIEDs in markets is something the Iraqis can take the lion's share of blame for.  It's my fault if I fire you for no good reason.  Your fault if your anger causes you to rape and murder a few people.
 
 
And it's very arrogant to assume we break everything too though.  In a lot of ways it's handy to blame things on "The West" but the troubles of the middle east reach all the way back well past colonialism.  We give ourselves a lot of credit for the power to do both good and bad, and frankly, too much credit for either.  
 
That's really the powerless moment you feel in Iraq.  No matter what you say, what you do, how many times you point out that Shia are people too, there's Sunnis that believe they're pretty much satan worshippers and allah will only smile when all of them are dead.  The looting anything worth money regardless of community benefit is something no amount of "west" could fix, nor the corruption.  No amount of attempt to foster small business with loads or grants would help as long as it was simply seen as a way to scam the Americans (which made it darkly funny in a way, the small grants we gave were totally enough to set up a good shop, or make your current shop much bigger, but nooooo, we're going to buy expensive stuff that's going to get stolen by our jealous neighbor, and then cry to the Americans for more money).
 
 
If I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, doesn't mean I can't call you a murderer for shooting down Nancy Sinatra.  Further I'd like to think my experience on the ground sets a nice contrast.  I have yet to shoot anyone.  I did however open several schools, briefly restore power to a neighborhood before the generator was looted, provide key tracking of displaced persons, and while I was at it release some prisoners back to their families.  As much as the American way of war can bring devastation, we're very conscious of doing "good" even if it's the kind of "good" I mentioned that can turn out "terrible" once it's actually implemented.
 
Contrast this to the Russian army which can give locusts a run for it's money, if locusts could rape and install puppet governments.  That's actually rather another reason I strongly dislike the Russian military, it's like having another company that does what you do, only sans morality, decency, and gloats about how it gets away with a lack of either.  Which almost loops back onto the topic, it's why I hate the Russian "victory" day parades.  They're in effect celebrating the nightmare they brought through Eastern Europe, the Stalinist oppression of thousands of innocent people, and the systematic rape and looting of anything with a correctly sized set of holes, or that could fit on a train back to Moscow.  It's like if the US Army had a "Wounded Knee Victory Parade" or the Brits held a festival to celebrate the first use of the maxim gun on indigenous people.  Then pair it with being a celebration of a return to Russian militarism and it just honestly gets sort of sick in that regard.  

Lethaface, I agree with what you've got to say on the matter, it's just this part that I would also like to see happen but it's a bit naive to think we as humans can act that way. Still, a lot can be improved - not saying it's impossible, just very very hard to achieve. Maybe if whole world gets an outside enemy we will turn our aggression towards the attacking aliens.  
 
 
Exactly. I as a teacher can't give a negative score to my pupil in advance although I know 99,99% for sure he/she won't be able to score positively.
 
I already had similar debate about Iraq with panzersaurkrautwerfer in some other thread a while ago. This thread went way offtopic anyway already so I'm not feeling particularly guilty for popping in.
 
I think it's hard for anyone who was more or less directly or indirectly involved with Iraq or with other activities his state did/does to be totally impartial and subjective on the matter. I hold panzer in very hard regard when it comes to his views on the matter since his are a lot more down to earth then to many other people I know. BUT your counter arguments Lethaface come spot on. It's hard for someone who is claiming to operate from a higher moral ground then the other to remain seated in that position for long. In most cases, not that it's not possible. 
 
Cudos to both of you gentlemen, really. 

Lethaface, I agree with what you've got to say on the matter, it's just this part that I would also like to see happen but it's a bit naive to think we as humans can act that way. Still, a lot can be improved - not saying it's impossible, just very very hard to achieve. Maybe if whole world gets an outside enemy we will turn our aggression towards the attacking aliens.  
 
 
Exactly. I as a teacher can't give a negative score to my pupil in advance although I know 99,99% for sure he/she won't be able to score positively.
 
I already had similar debate about Iraq with panzersaurkrautwerfer in some other thread a while ago. This thread went way offtopic anyway already so I'm not feeling particularly guilty for popping in.
 
I think it's hard for anyone who was more or less directly or indirectly involved with Iraq or with other activities his state did/does to be totally impartial and subjective on the matter. I hold panzer in very hard regard when it comes to his views on the matter since his are a lot more down to earth then to many other people I know. BUT your counter arguments Lethaface come spot on. It's hard for someone who is claiming to operate from a higher moral ground then the other to remain seated in that position for long. In most cases, not that it's not possible. 
 
Cudos to both of you gentlemen, really. 

Comrade Badasski is one serious bad ass player! 

Exactly my experience. Although somehow I feel it's worse when something intended well ends up nasty, versus just plain being nasty. Might have well just been nasty, would have saved a lot of people with good intentions a whole lot of work

Well said.
   
Agreed that it was coming regardless. However, usually a judge or jury won't let you get away with murder simply because that person would have died anyway sooner or later. ;-)
 
It is indeed arrogant of the West to assume they know what's best for everyone, apart even from having the power to let everyone have that what we think is best. While I respect people feeling moral obligation to help countries were our 'grandfathers' made a mess colonizing (for which I personally feel 0% responsibility as I wasn't there), I think the help isn't helping making things any better. Best leave everyone to fend for themselves, favoring cooperation as equals going for mutual-benefit deals over 'let us help those poor people over there'.

Well apart from Afghanistan and Iraq, JSOC is presumably assassinating people in countries they aren't at war with, without having brought them in front of a judge. While I agree the latter can be a little impractical and there are circumstances in which it is irresponsible to let certain individuals roam the world unhindered. But instead of debating acceptable collateral damage, I'd like to zoom out a bit.
 
If I as a state have to resort to outside of the law, large scale, (international) assassination operations to maintain national security, I'd be asking myself what I have done to make the situation so FUBAR that I'm even considering debating collateral. It's not 'normal' for a democratic state to have hitlists with several thousand people on it. While there is more to debate I think that alone is enough for me to rephrase your example of the thief and the murderer: I think it's more like the murderer confronting someone, who is both a thief and a murderer, about his thievery. 
Let me be very clear again that I'm not defending Russia at all, just a little picky on who's calling them out ;-)

Comrade Badasski is one serious bad ass player! 

well, hello there !
 

 
This is going to hurt !
 

 
Bad day at the office...
 

 
Furious Fight !
 

 
Comrade Badasski !

@Sublime:
Not is not more off-topic than the discussion about Iraq and Afgahnistan we are currently having.
 
@John:
In general i think you are taking this way to seriously, John. Just ignore them, i mean litterlly ignore them by using the "ignore" function of the forum. You wont see their posts anymore if you ignore them.
 
I do agree with you though on LukeFFs behaviour beeing inappropriate though, not because he is occasionally makeing fun of you, but because his profile says he is an official CM Beta Tester, which gives his statements and opinions influence on the general reputation of Battlefront.com. If i were Steve, i would tell LukeFF that publicly making fun of one of their customers is a big no-no because it may hurt the companys reputation.
 
At the end of the day, if the behaviour of the people you named really bothers you as much as you say, i recommend you collect their posts and as soon as you have sufficient evidence of their "bullying" write a ticket at helpdesk or send a PM to one of the Admins.

Dunno.  Would we have batted an eye at killing some of the various Allied nationals that did work on behalf of the Axis?  There's plenty of German-American or Japanese-American folks who either found themselves stuck, or willingly answered the motherland's call, and were cut down without significant hesitation.  Where it gets fuzzy is the question of how legitimate some of these targets are at all in the  modern spectrum of non-conventional warfare.  Most of the very dead American targets unambiguous aided and abetted, or were in the active employ of organizations engaged in military conflict with the US government.  It's a far cry from making craters out of folks who simply disagree with US policy in the abstract.
 
The real debate should be a matter of targeting in terms of collateral damage (value of target vs damage inflicted to the populace) or national sovereignty in the cases of nations that at least above table, give no special permission for drones to operate in their air space (of course, finding a government in some of these places would be difficult).
 
But in terms of the intended targets?  They're folks who'd declared an intent to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can with fairly little discrimination.  That's pretty much hostile intent enough for me to sleep easily when that individual is made into meatpaste (but have some moral reservations when he's meatpasted with the family next door, if the intended target is just some low level dude).
 
 
The western system works for the west because it evolved and grew as western ideals and the like evolved.  It's a system designed for our way of thinking and our way of life.  Thusly it's good for Yankee imperialists, sneering British colonialists, and the French (no prefix required, name is sufficient to imply what I was getting at), but a poor fit for sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and somesuch.  They need a culturally well adapted system of government, and through colonialism, they lost some of that growth, and our continued attempts to make them more like us, we're doing them a disservice.  
 
In terms of the chaos of Iraq, I've said it before but it was coming regardless of who started it.  Centuries of Sunni-Shia conflict, and decades of Sunni minority rule were going to boil over someday (see Syria for a reversal of roles in terms of Shia minority rule over a Sunni majority, with a very similar history of oppression and mass killings).  If it was not the US invasion, it'd have been the fighting between Saddam's sons in 2024 after the old man kicked the bucket, the Arab Spring, or any number of crises.  It's arrogance to assume that the west is powerful enough to change the 3rd World for the good because it's the west, just as much as it is to assign blame for all the problems of the present to western whatever.  
 
I simply advocate we keep our meddling limited to our own interests in a low threat sense (if we do not like your way of doing things, we do not have to do business, vs invasions), the military involvement to breaches of the peace/international law (invading neighbors, or for reals actual genocide sort of beaches of the peace)  and a broad support of human rights (we don't care HOW you rule, just as long as you don't fill your jails or ditches with your opponents).
 
 
I'm there too.  It just happens the russian government is well supported on the internet/military forums which tends to cast me in a more hostile light.  I wouldn't care what it did though so long as it did it within its own borders, and laid off on the nuclear bullying of poor Denmark though.  That doesn't mean I wouldn't make fun of Putin on ponies, just I'd recognize it's someone else's country, and if they dig that well, then it's sort of hilarious but whatever man.  

Good post (no sarcasm, ).
 
Regarding the Iraqi locals, look at how that country/region/'nationstate' has been managed the last 500 years or so and it does make sense to me that the general population really lives literally day by day. Obviously not all do, as I can tell from first person from some Iraqi people I know.
 
One thing I do miss in your analysis and posts is slamming of the west. Yes democracy is the best of the bad and I'll take US leadership of the world over any Russia, China or even divide et incompetente EU. We West are supposed to have become 'civilized' after killing each other in several guiness world record wars and are relatively free. Still we are at times violently and lawlessky intermingling in affairs on behalf or our own interest; means to an end. That democracies tend to more bureaucratic and 'evil' over time makes me not very inclined to push our 'superior ways' down the throats of other (be it oppressed) people around the world. I wasn't sad Saddam went but thinking of being involved and at least partly responsible for the slaughter and wholesale plunder that has happened and is happening there, I can't judge that as mere 'thievery'
 
Ending with Russia: power hungry ex-military oligarch mafia been running the state for a few decades, no need to say more.
 
Feels good to have our own, semi off op topic men being men, parade here

If we're going by the reputation I've acquired, all Russians are worse than Hitler, and even an ounce of Russian blood should condemn you to being eaten by a starved and enraged Micheal Moore.  
 
If I'm done being sarcastic:
 
It's really two different flavors of annoyed.  Here's the quick rundown:
 
 
1. Collectively the west is stupid for believing in "nation building."  I hold nations/nation-states are things that must grow organically.  When we go in and try to impose what works for the west on a society, it almost always will fail simply because it's a foreign influence.  When we go into a country and try to restore order the parties we usually work with are not the proverbial founding fathers we think we're working with, it's the folks who see us as a means to an end.  Sometimes that's an okay end, we've really found someone who wants to make crapistan a better place, and we've got the money to do that, but a lot of time it's marginal powers who see us as a way to bypass the major players, or folks just looking to scam as many millions as they can in reconstruction projects.
 
If Iraq 2003 really was a problem, I'd have simply done an Army level raid.  We announce we're going in, we're going to break everything worth breaking, destroy sites we view as a threat, blow up the crossed sabers monument in Baghdad to show we can do whatever we want, and we're going to leave and let Saddam deal with the mess.  And we're leaving crates of AKs and RPG-7s in select locations as parting gifts.  We firmly establish why we're going in, why we'll come back to burn the village down again, and then leave the country alone.
 
This open ended commitment to make a country work better because somehow by being 'merica just does not work.  The post World War Two occupations succeeded not because of us, but because we were able to enable the folks who were willing to comply with our standards (no more Hitler, no more big military, no more goosestepping!) with resources, but effectively the Germans and the Japanese rebuilt their countries because they wanted to rebuild them, and recognized they if they did not play nicely they'd get bombed all over again.
 
It's not the most polite way to go about it, but looking at the "progress" the billions of dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan it bears questioning if we're just better off focusing on stopping folks from doing things they shouldn't do, and letting nations build themselves (and offering voluntary incentives, if you're willing to turn over Saddam's head on a platter, we'll  chip in a few billion to refurb that oil refinery you really need working again).
 
My frustration with Iraqis came from the fact they kept indulging in very self destructive choices for short term gain.  In the wider view it makes sense as given Iraq from the 1980's on, anything long term rarely panned out, but grabbing the money and running was highly successful in the short term.   But in terms of rebuilding, it meant you'd at risk and expense install a generator to provide power for the local community, and then six hours later it's been stripped down to pieces and is being sent up to Turkey to be sold as scrap as the pennies on the hundreds of dollars of investment in the generator is worth more to someone than having reliable electricity.  And then the local community basically just sitting and watching it happen because maybe they can steal the wires the guy didn't take and sell those!
 
George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" is strongly illustrative of the feelings of being in Iraq, in terms of having all the power to murder the heck out of everything, but being ultimately unable to change the behavior of the locals, or address the underlying problems in their community.
 
And onto shooting Russians:
 
2. Prior to the Ukrainian mess, I did not especially have positive impressions of Russia, but I held them on par with the French in many ways.  Fiercely proud, very capable of doing things I found silly, and easily offended when I made fun of said silly things.  On the other hand while I found things like their treatment of homosexuals offensive, or their belligerent posturing to be bothersome, it was still done well within their own space, and it did not strongly intersect with the rest of the world at large.  I even referred to them as "ultra-Ukraine" on a few occasions as a way of explaining how the US viewed Russia on a whole, something marginally related to our foreign policy, with fairly minimal trade or cultural links.  Basically something to be occasionally mocked for hating gay people, while at the same time, their president acted in a way that'd be considered flamboyant in some parts of San Francisco, but not much else.
 
The crossing into the Ukraine was a line for me, because its very much your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins. Russia can do whatever it wants to itself, but by god invading the Ukraine because it decides it isn't especially in favor of a government that increasingly is not representative of the national will (which then shoots down a bunch of folks in the street) is well beyond what is within the "right" of Russia to do.  Then toss in the unambiguous lies and denials, and the whole polite men pile of feces, and it's enough to turn "lol Russia" to "please go find a spike to sit and spin on" levels of distaste.  And it's a shameful pattern of behavior reaching back through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yalta, Poland, Latvia, Finland, etc, etc, etc.  If Russia was content to play by civilized rules, and use economic/diplomatic channels to express its distaste, that's fine.  That's its right to not do business with folks it disagrees with.  That's its right to not engage with a new government.  And even if the Ukraine had been oppressing Russians, going before the UN and making the case for it would be a logical next step.
 
But nope!  It's time for polite men, invasions, and then trying to provoke a war with the Ukraine.  
 
All of which gets to the point where needless to say, I have a very low opinion of the Russian government, its supporters, and its policies.
 
re: Kettler
 
Look, yeah pointing out that some of his stuff is nuts is a bit of stating the barn is red.  But what does it accomplish?  We all know he's a bit off his rocker, but occasionally he posts something interesting, or at least on topic.  You don't have to read or respond to him, I don't read everything he writes obviously, but generally he's politely a bit nuts.  If you don't like what he writes, ignore it, if you're like me and at least skim it, respond to the stuff that's more or less on topic if you'd like, but you're no worse the wear for him chugging along and Kettlering it up.  Posting that he's a bit nutter doesn't make him less nutter, and we've all agreed tanks in space and the USN-Alien-Vampire war is loony.  Do we need to talk about it more than that.? 
 
Addendum:

 
 
I think everyone at age 19 is a little dumb.  It's one reason now than I'm older I'm glad the younger population does not vote (or throws the vote effectively away).  Looking back on college I can see a lot of head against wall level stupid beliefs in both my peers of the day, and myself from all ends of the political spectrum.  

Pretty much.  I can accept you wrote an article about tanks on mar/moon/whatever or believe the USN got in a fight with aliens.  That's something I think is loco but that's your bag.  Most of your posts on here are a bit out there but they're at least somewhat grounded in what's discussed on the board.  I can accept the out there though because I'm either not forced to read it, or it might be topical and worth talking about.
 
Either way though reacting to folks bringing in the more Art Bell parts of your beliefs is not going to help anything because it'll just encourage them to do it more.  So please do calm down and stick to the more interesting stuff discussed here.  It'll be best for all parties. 
 
Re: 105 MM
 
Again it was not optimal, but the lack of efficiency at long range is often cited by Soviet Power Supreme fanboys as an example of how NATO would have sat weeping powerless before STRONG MEN OF SOVIET MIGHT RODE ASTRIDE COMRADE TANK while ignoring historically, on the offensive especially given similar sensor capability the defender still tended to inflict heavier losses regardless of armor/weapon imbalance (see the fairly strong performance of Allied armor in the west against German armor when on the defense for a pretty good historical example).  Longer engagement ranges would be preferred as that best leverages the sensor gap between west and east, and gives the western unit more time to shift battle positions to receive the next wave.  But I still feel it is incorrect to simply state the 105 MM was useless against Russian armor without a very big * and some footnotes to clarify it wasn't good where we wanted it to be good, but would still murder comrade tankist at closer ranges.
 
The 105 was not perfect, or even really good at all post 1972 or so, but it was suboptimal vs totally useless.  
 
Re: "Just War"
 
Afghanistan is pretty cut and dry, UN approved high fives all around, following some pretty unambiguous casus belli.  Here's where Stagler consumes so many hats from his high horse after my textual resounding body blows of great strength he becomes known as "The defeated pig dog horse rider hat eater"
 
I do not support the fact we went to war in Iraqi in the first place.  I did support it when it kicked off because I was an idiot 19 year old and I believed the case that got pitched to the UN.  I was already in ROTC when it kicked off, but darn it didn't I believe there was a world that needed bombing sometime.
 
I think many of the posters on here were equally dumb, jingoistic and willing to believe war fixed things when they were that age, or they're dishonest enough about it now to pretend they wouldn't have lept on the warwagon willingly themselves had roles been reversed.  
 
As I continued in my college education it became apparent that a lot of the reasons to go to war were wrong (for a variety of reasons outside this discussion).  At that point I believed we had a need to do whatever we could do to restore Iraq to some level of normalcy, and counter the people who were sawing heads off because allah told them it was a swell thing to do to murder his creations for an imperfect understanding of him.  So I came to believe going to war was wrong, but finishing it was right.
 
Having gone to Iraq twice, and leaving just a few steps above Kurtz in my feelings towards the locals, my opinions are somewhat interestingly colored.  At the same time it's noteworthy that the Iraq war 2004-2010 was fought at great expense to give the Iraqis the government they voted for, the infrastructure they needed, and the security they wanted.  And on departing in 2010 broadly speaking that had occurred, although the fact the Shia leadership decided Iran knew best in running a country rather dismantled it in short order.
 
Kosovo's objection has more to do with who's friends with who.  The behavior of the Serbian military pretty much 1993-1999 is on the road to terrible, and we're ready to remember the agony of sad that the Serbs went through during the bombing, but not the well filled ditches the Serbs left from Croatia, through Bosnia, and beyond.  All the Serbs had to do is stop shooting civilians, and there wouldn't have been much of a leg to stand on.
 
As the case is the region is a lot more stable today, and there's a marked downtick in violence.  And Kosovo isn't a US territory so there you go.  
 
This runs a pretty good contrast where Russia's current military acts have been to carve off choice parts of its neighbors, or trying to kill its way out of an insurgency in Chechnya.  Granted Chechnya is nominally Russian and honestly while I can object to the methods, whatever get your hands all bloody life goes on elsewhere but where I object is when we start finding Russian troops where they do not belong, and there's a long history of that in the last hundred years resulting in significant swaths of Eastern Europe getting a one way ticket to rapey-steal anything worth stealing-install the resident pet stalinist as leader town.  
 
While there's a history of western military adventurism, in the last few decades its been the White Man's Burden madness, or the silliness with pretending somehow putting Americans/Brits/French people on the ground will return the region to stability (with some imperfect success).  Russians show up, it's generally to take anything that isn't nailed down, and failing that, take what the things are nailed to.
 
 
 It's pretty standard Russologic.  Your country did a bad thing/something we did not like, which means our thing of equal or often more dubious morality is okay!  Rather than addressing the topic at hand it's pretty classic misdirection because bluntly if we're going to talk about Russian/Soviet actions, it's going to be a pretty lopsided fight in favor of anyone who doesn't find red especially fabulous.  Effectively he wants the discussion to migrate to a medium in which he can talk a lot about Iraq, or the like, while avoiding talking about the fact the Russians are currently facilitating an entirely illegal war in the hopes of carving off parts of a country they already more or less stole land from, or the fact that when the west shows up, hungry people come looking for food and comfort, but when Russia shows up, they send their daughters, and more attractive livestock as far away as they can.

lol Hister yea my third go around and maybe on this one I hopefully did something right.....hope you enjoy

According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Study, where that statistic supposedly comes from, in Russia 111 persons control 19% of the overall wealth in 2014 (p. 53). No comparable figure for the USA.
 
https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=60931FDE-A2D2-F568-B041B58C5EA591A4
 
However, both Russia and the USA are ranked as having "very high inequality" (p.30). In Russia the top 10% own 84.8% of the wealth. In the USA, the top 10% own 74.6% of the wealth. The "very high inequality" ranking put the USA and Russia in the same category as Egypt, India, South Africa, Thailand, etc.(p.33)
 
OTOH, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Finland are all rated as having only "medium inequality" since the top 10% own between 50-60% of the overall wealth.
 
Not sure it is anything for Americans to be bragging about .

The basic German defense doctrine was the one they developed during WW I to avoid being defeated by local concentration and artillery suppression, and it remains the basic system the Germans used in the east.  That tactical system has been called the denuded front, in comparison with practice near the start of WW I of lining continuous front line trenches with solid lines of riflemen.  Instead it was based around a few fortified machinegun positions, concealed, and cross fired to cover each other rather than their own front, in an interlocking fashion.  The idea being to make it hard to take out just a piece of the scheme.  Most forces were kept out of the front line to let enemy artillery "hit air".  Wide areas were covered by barrage fire and obstacles (in WW I generally just wire, in WW II plenty of mines as well).  Barrages and obstacles have the feature that they multiple in their effectiveness the more then enemy sends; his local odds does not help him, it hinders him or raises his losses instead.  The MG and outpost network is meant to defeat penetration by smaller enemy numbers, while barrages crucify their masses if they overload those.
 
Then the main body of the defending infantry defends from considerably farther back, and executes local counterattacks into portions of the defensive system reached by the attackers.  The idea is to spend as much prep barrage time as possible deep in underground shelters, and only come up and forward to mix it up with enemy infantry after they are mixed in with your own positions and hard for the enemy to distinguish and coordinate fires on them etc.  This also was meant to exploit the confusion that even successful attackers were generally in, after crossing the outpost and barrage zone described above.
 
That is an effective enough system, but it isn't foolproof.  The thinner front and separated strongpoint positions it uses are vulnerable to stealthy penetration, night infiltration e.g., rather than frontal attack on a large scale.  The local counterattack part of the doctrine can be taken to extremes and get rather expensive for the defenders, resulting in mere brawling inside the defender's works, and just exchange off with the more numerous attackers.  What it really relies on is the enemy being defeated by the artillery fire scheme and ranged MG fire over most of the frontage, so that the counterattack and brawl stuff only happens in a few exceptional spots, where the defenders have a safer route to the front, better information about where the enemy is, what routes are left clear of obstacles, and the like.
 
The main line of resistance, once hit, generally tried to solve the fire discipline dilemma by firing quite late, when the attackers were close enough to really destroy them, not just drive them to ground.  Harassing mortar fire and a few "wait a minute" MGs were all that fired at longer ranges, to delay the enemy and prevent them being able to maneuver easily, mass in front of the defenders safely, and the like.
 
At a higher level, the division's artillery regiment commander, divisional commander, or regional "Arkos" tried to manage the larger battle by choosing where to intervene in the outcoming attack with the weight of divisional fires.  They didn't distributed those evenly, or according to need.  Instead they would have a plan of their own, to stop the Russians cold in sector B, and just make do in sectors A and C.  They divide the attack that way.  Then shift fires to one of the break ins, and counterattack the other one with the divisional reserve.  The basic idea is just to break up the larger scale coordination of the offensive by imposing failure where the defenders choose, by massing of fires.  They can't do this everywhere, but it can be combined with choices of what to give up, who pulls back, what the next good position is, and the like, as a coordinated scheme.  The function is "permission" - you only get forward where I let you get forward, not where you want it.  If the enemy tries to get forward in the place the defenders "veto" in this way, they just mass their infantry under the heaviest artillery and multiple their own losses.
 
I should add, though, that those doctrinal perfect approaches sometimes could not be used in the conditions prevalent in parts of Russia.  In the north, large blocks of forest and marsh are so favorable for infiltration tactics that separate strongpoints with only obstacles in between just invite penetration every night and loss of the position.  The Germans often had to abandon their doctrine in those areas, in favor of a continuous linear trench line.  And then, they often didn't have sufficient forces to give that line any real depth, but instead had to defend on line, manning that whole front as best they could.  In the more fluid fighting in the south, on the other hand, the Germans could and did use strongpoint schemes.  The Russians got significantly better at night infiltration as a means to get into or through those, as the war went on.
 
Against Russian armor the German infantry formations also had a harder time of it.  In exceptional cases they could prepare gun lines with enough heavy ATGs well enough protected and sited to give an armor attack a bloody nose, but normally they were not rich or prepared enough for that.  Keep in mind that the Russians were quite good at tank infantry cooperation in their mech arm - by midwar that is, early they hadn't been - but lagged in the development of tank artillery cooperation.  Which is what tanks need to deal with gun based defenses efficiently.  The German infantry formations themselves tried to just strip tanks of their infantry escorts and let the tanks continue.  The Russians would sometimes make that mistake, and send the tanks deeper on their own.  That put them in the middle of a deep German defense that would know more about where they were and what they were doing than vice versa.  But that is really an "own goal" thing - if the Russian tanks just stayed with their riders and shot the crap out of the German infantry defenses, the Russian doctrine worked fine.
 
On a deeper level, the Germans relied on their own armor to stop Russian armor.  Brawling frontally with reserves, often enough, sometimes aided by superior AFVs.  Sometimes by counterattacks that sought to cut off the leading Russian spearheads, and prevent their resupply (with fuel above all).  That worked less and less well as the war went on, however, because the Russians got better at keeping multiple threats growing on the map, gauging defender strength correctly and waiting for all arms to consolidate gains, and the like.  There was also just less of the fire brigade German armor later in the war, and it had less of an edge in tactical know-how.
 
There are also some weaknesses of the Russian doctrine that the Germans tried to exploit.  It can be quite predictable.  You can let them succeed at things to draw them in, in a pretty predictable way.  The Russian mech way of attacking was at its best against infantry defenses, or vs armor against heavily outnumbered defenders.  If they pushed too hard at a strong block of armor, they could get a brigade killed in a matter of hours.  If you have such an asset, you can try to string the two together - let them hit a weak spot precisely where you want them to come on hard into your planned kill sack.  They aren't doing a lot of battlefield recon to spot such things, they are mostly relying on speed to create surprise.  If you let them think they just made a brilliant and formula perfect break in, they are apt to drive hard trying to push it home, and not to suspect that its is a trap.  But a lot of things get easier if you have a Tiger or Panther battalion lying around, don't they?

Open letter and personal statement
 
I would like to express a few words on a recent situation that came out in the gaming community: pay for mods. I have no intention to, I never had intention to and I will never ask for money for my mods. I strongly belive that my modding is something done for myself and my tastes (first of all) and for the benefit of the community (or at least those who might be interested in trying/using such mods). I belive that a lot of credit should be given to BFC (in this particular case) for making not only a great game but also a good mod support (instruments for unpacking/packing, file priority upload for the game mods, dedicated modding folder, easy to work with file formats).
I am for FREE modding, I respect those modders who ask, or are open to, donations and such, but I do not support any kind of paywall for mods, which are, in my opinion, a form of player-generated, free content for a game. 
 
I kindly ask not to start a Whole discussion about this matter here, but in case use another forum section. At the same time I had the desire to express these few lines here because I felt as part of the matter in question.

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