Gnaeus

Hilarious 
 
 

"Leaked" 🤣   Well, I am an expert with 38 years of submarine construction and testing, and as a subject matter expert I can say that that submarine is truly f-ed, FUBAR, SNAFU, scrap metal. 
Aren't you glad I'm here to provide you with my expert opinions?   😀
And kudos to Ukraine. Nice shot. 
Dave

Am not one to decipher whether to call one who served a warrior, a soldier, an intel or any other moniker.  But as one who never served I do have three words for those that did:
Respect.
Thank you.
 

These terms have caused pretty significant debate among western militaries, especially in Canada.  The issue is really one of identity and culture, which of course has come under significant scrutiny in the post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq era.  For some it is no doubt a bit of macho flexing, for others it is holding onto core identity for very important purposes.  Up front, I personally fall into that latter category - but also recognized people are going to have differing positions.  So to try and break it down more simply:
- The term "warrior" [aside: 'warfighter' is in reality an attempt at compromise on warrior and largely has no other point of reference], has been mal-adopted and appropriated into toxic sub-cultures within modern militaries.  Of this fact there is little argument.  The most recent scandal in the Australian SASR and many examples of a warped or toxic use of that term are well documented.  People adopt all sorts of crazy ideas as to what a warrior means and how they behave.  This has to do with the fact that a modern warrior concept has yet to truly evolve so people look at history which was an entirely different context (eg we don't scalp anymore).
- The actual term of "warrior" has deep roots within indigenous cultures around the world.  In many it was a class of citizen with a clearly defined purpose.  You can read a lot on this but the most common and prevalent definition was in line with "One Who Does War" on behalf of their people.  A person whose role within a society is the function of warfare.  In most cases it became part of a cast or class system.  In some cultures this was seen as a sacred duty-to-protect bordering on a pseudo public service.  The recent bashing of the term has drifted into colonial insensitivity in some cases as it really reads like "white folks screwed it up, so now all 'warriors' are bad" when in fact indigenous cultures have employed the concept for millennia and many, like North American natives, still hold it sacred.
- The term is important because it incorporates a key pole of the two-worlds problem.  Militaries are not armed humanitarian aid agencies, or slightly better armed police forces.  Some nations have tried to go that way but they tend to be geopolitical anomalies.  The role of any military is state sponsored and legitimized homicide.  Dress it up anyway one likes, call it "self-defence", "use of force" or whatever helps one sleep at night but the core role is "murder for effect.  The second a military culture, or the society that pays for them, forgets that reality very bad things happen. 
- Militaries that get watered down for various social or political sensitivities tend to do several very dangerous things: 1) They forget themselves. This can lead to significant collective shock when war actually happens and generations of military officers and NCOs have basically become bureaucrats.  When that culture runs head long into warfare it is never pretty.  I lived through such a time in the 90s and trust me it is really bad. 2) Societies go into armed conflict with eyes closed.  Sanitization of war and its consequences becomes very easy when one scrubs out what it actually means.  This can not only dangerously shape political calculus, it can create major flaws in military advice to policy.  The reality is no matter where you may be in the kill-chain, there is blood on your hands. That is a serious burden. Those that forget it can start to make very poorly informed decisions quickly.  3) You cannot order identity.  Troops in combat or preparing for combat are going to adopt an identity and culture that will provide them survival advantage and cope - find me a war where that did not happen.  Problem is that if leadership does not define that identity, troops will do it themselves and sub-cultures form.  Those sub-cultures can become dangerously toxic very quickly.  So bottom line is, ignoring warrior reality comes with significant risks.
- Many like the term "soldier" better.  Feels more civilized.  The term it self actually comes from solidus or coin and refers to mercenaries.  The major historical difference between a solider and warrior is that a soldier stops fighting when they don't get paid.  Warriors keep fighting because they don't need to get paid, they believe.  There is an element of righteousness (and I do not mean in the religious sense) in the role of a warrior. Righteousness being a higher ideal held sacred (all war is sacrifice..."to make holy") by the people who sent you to fight for them.  Soldiers by definition live on a more transactional contract with society.  These are deep and important distinctions that often get lost in the noise.
- To your point, "machoism".  The problem we have with "warrior" is that we never actually define it.  It gets tossed around because it sounds cool but as an identifier we do not unpack it and then teach it to people when they enter the service.  It is all over the place, the US Army uses it all the time:  https://www.army.mil/values/soldiers.html.  Likely the closest I have ever seen is the US Army's Warrior Ethos:
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
https://www.army.mil/values/warrior.html
Not bad, but not quite there either as it lacks definition of role as an extension of American society and elements of righteousness.  
So without a clear definition, the term gets hijacked into a macho "ra-ra" tag line.  The reality is far deeper in speaking to balancing our two worlds - war and peace: home and away.  As military we live within and are part of our own societies.  I have kids, bills and go to the same grocery store.  I watch the same shows and play the same game.  But that is only half of my existence.  The other side lives out in a place of conflict and warfare.  In many ways I did not get this until after my first war.  When I got home I realized that part of me would always be in those hills (and then years later, in the desert). 
As I see these young guys fighting and dying in Ukraine, I see them all fighting and dying in the tradition of the warrior.  They are the Ones Who Do War on behalf of their people.  To them it is more than a tag line and will be for the rest of their lives.
So we definitely need to develop a modern definition and concept here and build a concept that not only better fits modern society but resonates.  If we, as modern militaries do not, then we will get hijacked.  I have already been in discussions where terms like "aggression" are being scrubbed out of our ethos by academics and civilians.  If a modern military cannot define itself, someone is going to do it for us.  And they will very like not understand the two-worlds problem.  We are The Ones Who Do War and we need to get much better at explaining what that means in 2023. 
 

The_Capt, if you want to talk we want to listen. As I have said before we REALLY appreciate getting to audit staff college without  the push-ups, or the paper work.

So this is what you got?  I teach “young warriors” and have led dozens in combat while you likely sat at home and yelled at the tv - you are no vet I can tell that from your first post.
Let’s stop the BS and call this what it really is - political platforming.  Your position is not all that difficult to read, pretty transparent.  Basically everything the current US presidential administration is doing is “wrong”.  “Right” is whatever “our guy would do as opposite”.  So President Biden is pursuing a deliberate incremental strategy to compress Russia, so your position is “more firepower” and “hard staring”.  Or you jump on the “this war is stupid, we must negotiate”.  Basically anything President Biden is doing is “wrong” and anything they are not doing is “right”.  That has been the sum total of your contributions to this entire discussing since you showed up (oh, and some bizarre social commentary on women and social justice for good measure).  That is it.  One long “very stable strategic genius” diatribe anchored on a single viewpoint.  If President Biden declared the US was going to “end this thing in 4 weeks” you would be here yelling that “this was the dumbest thing ever” and probably quote my points as why.
You know it is ok.  You are just another in a very long line of segments of the population that surrender their own agency in the face of uncertainty.  We invented the Church which has lasted over 2000 years on exactly that principle.  Agency and independent thought is to embrace uncertainty and most people really don’t want to do this, it is scary.
Problem is you wandered onto the wrong forum.  This place has been home to a lot of independent thought since before this war started. We have pursued the facts as we can find them and then conduct collective analysis and synthesis to try and establish a clear picture of what is happening.  No one here has surrendered independent thought to a political position.  We all have opinions, I for one think President Biden’s administration has done very well in managing this crisis.  Not perfect but considering we are well off the strategic map here, they have done as well as reasonably possible.  
I am not an American, I do not participate in your political process so I do not share your baggage.  I cannot fix you or even try to change your mind, you clearly have it all figured out.  But you are not going to find friends here. Your missionary work on this forum is a waste of time.  
But it is ok.  With this last, I promote you to Hot Thread “crazy guy”.  It is a honorary position that has been vacant since John Kettler left us (rest in peace John).  You can go on and on but we all know it is for entertainment purposes only.  I am even going to un-ignore you because I am going to be first to rub your unruly mop of hair and just smile at your incorrigible rapscallion ways.  Your are a stump thumping looney kevinkin, but you are our looney.  Try not to get banned because then we will have to find another.
 

Fully endorse this. The claim the Biden administration somehow blinked is, let's be entirely clear, idiotic. It played every card it could play within the political/military/strategic restraints that it could in order to avert the invasion. That the Russians decided to go va banc is on them, not on everyone who tried to stop it. 

My assumption is that the global pandemic had delayed Putin's original war plan by about a year. Putin had plotted his war-of-plunder in Ukraine under the assumption that *someone else* would be in the US presidency at the time, would have pulled the US out of NATO by then and would have publicly backed him in his war. We were in fact just a few locked doors and a few alert Capitol security guards away from that happening, judging by the growing list of January 6 sedition convictions. A common meme at the start of the war was that Putin had invaded Ukraine on a whim because Biden had publicly said 'unkind things' about him (I recall one Youtube video actually used accompanying CM game footage). You can't have it both ways. You can't blame Biden because he too forcefully warned of the coming war and also because he didn't oppose it enough.

No it wasn’t and I don’t think you need to.  It is a stupid narrative proposed either by opportunists or fools.  The time for “staring” was between 2014 and 2022 and we failed on that at every turn across the entire political spectrum.  The reasons were pretty simple - you can’t just stare, you have to be ready to back it up, and no one in the US or entire western world was going to do that for Ukraine.  The costs were simply too high on too many levels. This entire post-crisis “tough guy” narrative is a pretty oblivious ploy to try and pin the blame for this war on one side or another.  We all watched Russia doing dirty in the region and basically did nothing…in some cases we made it worse.
”But air power!”  Ok dingus, how much do you think positioning that amount of AirPower in the region would have cost?  Air power is not a magic wand, it is a massive military capability one has to surge, stage and keep at readiness levels, costing billions to do so over the timescales the “staring” would have occurred.  The bill for massive overmatch of the Russian air forces would have been (and frankly still is) very high.  Let alone if we really had to do it, and completely ignore escalation risks. Same people would be quacking about “ridiculous government spending in Ukraine” that is would have taken to actually set up “staring” - unless it was their guy in charge, which is a whole other problem.
 One is not an expert “strategist” because you can regurgitate some spin-lines dreamt up by a political ad agency. You are fool being played because it is so much easier to let someone else do all that hard thinking and make this whole complicated world so simple.  And before anyone weighs on on left or right…both sides do it so let’s just not get into that.  Best thing you can do for yourself is get a library card, read a lot of history and a wide range of political sciences/military affairs.  Do the hard work for yourself.  

Alright, I’ll bite (just this once) in case clearing it up once and for all might stop it being posted 3-4 times a day…
What does this even mean?  Amongst all the thoughts you post (which are honestly sometimes pretty hard to untangle) this one seems to come up more often than anything else.  It’s an analogy, right?  ‘staring down Putin’?  What is it actually an analogy for?
The article in your own post points out that “The United States thus sought to leverage intelligence in a manner to convince allies of the imminent threat and, to a lesser degree, dissuade Moscow from acting, while signaling that it had deep insights into the Kremlin’s plans.”
So the US basically told Russia they knew about their plans, told all their allies, told Ukraine and mobilised the alliance we see today to implement unprecedented sanctions against Russia and unprecedented financial and military support for Russia’s intended enemy.  I’m honestly not sure what other reasonable measures could have been taken at the time.
What else do you mean by “stare Putin down”?
Oh and, fair warning: if your response mentions B-52s or a no-fly zone I will be forced to conclude that you’re either trolling or basing your suggestions on video game experience, at which point I’ll apologise to the rest of the board for bringing it up and duck out.

There is one massive flaw in this logic..well maybe two.  First is that SEAD and DEAD will work in modern context.  Western SEAD is designed specifically to take out IADS, big complex systems built in layers.  What we are seeing in Ukraine are highly distributed systems with more weight being carried by what we considered “point AD”.  Problem with “point” is that it becomes “area” if you have enough of them and can link them together.  We already see MANPADs capable of reaching up to 20000 plus feet, what happens when someone sticks a bunch of those on a UAS?
Let me be very clear…western “superiority” as we we know it may be dead as of this war.  The things we are seeing are on a very long trend going back to The Gulf War so this is not some flash in the pan phenomena, it is a building pressure wave.
Second flaw…guns will keep doing all the killing.  Guns are highly effective but they are big and have a very large logistical footprint.  The trend appears to be more and more loitering munitions and very long range systems be they rockets and/or unmanned.  Cheap, low footprint is the trend.
Finally the primary driver for corrosive warfare and Denial primacy does not appear to be weapon systems or capacity, it is C4ISR.  Our western forces have enormous logistical footprints that can be seen from space.  An opponent that can find them first and then hit them via any number of methods is going to be able stop us cold.  
So what?  The entry cost to fight a peer opponent has gone up dramatically.  Stand-off and denial technology has gone into overdrive because (surprise, surprise) adversaries want to blunt western advantage.  I am not convinced we have solved for any of this.  I know we are working on it but old faiths die the hardest.
UAS have nothing on UGV and that shoe will likely drop very soon.  Western powers need to solve for Unmanned, C4ISR and Precision Defence very quickly.  We won’t be learning Mandarin, we will be looking very long high intensity wars that our societies are incredibly poorly prepared for.

On the training post: a lot of what is in that story rings true.  The issue, which we have pointed out here before, is that western troops have no frame of reference for this war.  The more I hear descriptions of company operations in this war, the more they sound like a SOF action as far as C4ISR goes.  A GF Comd does pretty much what they are describing as a Company Comds role in this war - pulls back and manages the engagement from a pan C4ISR node.  Conventional military experience does not do this.  Tactical commanders get more feeds but pretty much fill the same roles as they did 30-40 years ago.  The Battalion TOC has changed a lot but the mass use of UAS for ISR is still not at the forefront.
The offensive focus also rings true.  I got into an argument a long while back on modern war and the offensive doctrine of most western militaries.  A lot of doctrine was built during the Cold War and then adapted to the insurgency wars we fought over the last 30 years.  The few times we went conventional, the opponent was so overmatched that we kind of confirmed a false positive - offensive primacy.  This war is showing the holes in that theory.  This is a war of Denial - drones and artillery.  That takes a fundamentally different training approach.
We all “yay’ed” when western troops began training support, and we still add a lot of value in some skill areas.  However, we may very well be teaching  bad lessons.  For example, that well documented and broadcasted failed minefield breach back in Jun. To my eyes it was a textbook western mechanized breach.  It looks like it got stopped by enemy UAS, a couple helicopters, a few ATGM teams and some pretty tepid artillery.  Our minefield breaching doctrine has not been refreshed since the Cold War and it ran headlong into 2023 reality.  Our impulse is to declare “well the UA is doing it wrong,”. Of course this assumes we actually know how to do it right in the first place.
I can only hope the AAR process is firmly in place and is capturing these observations.  However, in most cases the AAR guys are cut from the same corporate cloth as the training delivery guys so there are going to be biases to overcome.  We likely need to adapt the training significantly.  SOF may need to take over infantry tactics training because the reality is closer to their environment than our conventional experience.  However, SOF are pretty low density.  Conventional can focus on equipment (eg “night driving”), it still does this better than anyone else.
I have brought up the point on this war being as much about competitive learning as much as about actual warfare before.  The UA learns very fast, Russians slower…but they do learn.  The question is, “how fast are western militaries learning?”  They are part of this war too, they make up a significant portion of the Ukrainian force generation stream.  As such they should be in a direct feedback loop from the front line. We need to be learning at a better pace than the Russians - “EOD is taboo” (likely because we have framed them as exclusively a COIN thing).  This will mean breaking out of our own boxes, which is a damned hard thing to do at the best of times.  In reality we should be getting then UA to train us on how to train them.

The oldest and newest question in foreign policy: how does one deal with a late Ottoman nuclear power?

Ah my robot of the "deep state" (insert sarcastic and friendly smirking looking emoji here), I am a strong believer that "speed matters".  A long slow fading of Russia is very different than a sudden snap.  Human collectives can endure a lot so long as they are eased into it.  A sudden shock can create very different effects.  I think for right now the option where Russia enters into a sort of state-palliative care is a given and we are embracing the oldest strategy known to mankind: hope.

For sure, Carolus.  I've read military history my whole life from a detached perspective.  Ukraine war I really feel, I am totally not detached.  It makes me sick -- emotionally, spiritually, every way.  Each UKR death is like helplessly watching some serial mass murderer continually killing people and being helpless to stop him -- and that's exactly what is happening.
On the devil's advocate stuff in some earlier posts today:  Some guy, friend of my daughter (ex friend more accurately), stayed w us for a few weeks recently while he was in town doing clinicals for his phy therapy degree program.  I was watching Davydov video and he said "well, there's two sides to this conflict", some dumb view he probably got from listening to Joe Rogan or some other garbage podcast.  I said "yes, the serial mass murder-er side and the serial mass murder-ee side".  This is the most black & white major war since WW2.  No war is black & white completely but this is as close as it comes.
Would anyone say "oh, well, the serial mass murder probably had some good reasons for killing those 12 women, we should think about his needs?"  F no!

One possible explanation is that is the only "safe" way citizens can get out their frustrations with the war. Yelling at one solider who is now a civilian is a lot safer than joining a protest march.
 
Yeah, thankfully more people seem to have learned that the political decisions about going to and conducting the war are not being made by the people who fight them. I'm glad we have done better at that recently.

Very well put.
One thing to add: one reason why Germany and Japan were treated so well by the allies was that they were needed vs Russia and/or China. Without that, I guess the willingness to forgive would have been a bit less.
The willingness of Ukraine to forgive Russia or Russians will pay out in good PR in the West, which translates to money or things like EU membership.
Ukraine has managed to stay the 'good guy' in a horrible war. When the war ends, it needs to stay that for its own future.
That will be a very hard thing to do - not to pay back what the bastards have done to you. But the West is not in this war, we are only observing. And the West will judge Ukraine by its own standards, which are not adjusted by having been into that war.
Winning the war is only halfway to peace.

The morale issue is key, and a continuing puzzle.  Were the russians a western army they would have collapsed last year.  They are badly led, badly equipped, and fighting for an immoral and unethical cause.  It cannot even be argued that they are fighting to defend the motherland since the motherland has not been attacked in the slightest until recent weeks.  They are now outgunned.  They are not welcomed in the occupied territories as liberators, rather despised.  They are often asked to endorse or perform atrocities that must turn the stomach of any human.
What keeps them going?  Day after day they continue to attack and take many casualties.  The medical care is minimal, it seems.  And for what?  They lose ground slowly but surely and every day that passes the corrupt nature of their cause becomes more evident.  Surely one of these days they will turn on their superiors, or surrender.
The power of culture and group think has never been more revoltingly on display.  This war needs to be won on a psychological level.  Morale is key.  The russians need to change their minds about this war. 
 

I’m not sure how much congressional support will even exist once the primaries start since the rank and file Republicans may not want to offend the front runners and their enthusiastic supporters (I’m trying to be diplomatic),
Ronald Reagan and John McCain must be spinning in their graves -God rest their souls
I would have never imagined the Republican Party being the pro Russian dictatorship party.  
Sorry for rant

I didn't fight for the abstract concept of nationhood. But I DID choose to join the military (US Army) as a career. Because I love my friends and family, and being a soldier was my best way to serve THEM. When it actually came to war, I fought for the folks on my left and right. Nationhood sounds good as a thing to fight for, but there are very few people who actually do that.

As for fighting for my country: That is precisely the point. I couldn't care less about my country. My country is just a bunch of lines on a map. It was totally random that I was born within the confines of these lines and not others. Three centuries ago my country didn't even exist. It was a number of smaller areas on a map with some dudes constantly wanting to redraw those lines because they didn't have a playstation or something similar and were bored. Except for the random nobleman who "owned" that patch of land, nobody cared about those lines on the map and much less would have wanted to fight for them. Enter Napoleon and suddenly people here were told that they were Germans and that this conglomerate of lines on a map is something glorious worth fighting and dying for, instead of... well, living in a country that was actually more civilized but with less noblemen still having their heads attached to their necks.
In the following years, people were told that, since they were born inside these lines on a map, they had to hate people for being born inside the neighbouring lines on the map. After the inevitable war, the then "Germans" could finally become Germans, united under a (suddenly beloved) nobleman who called himself emperor. The emperor was of Prussian origin and thus the Germans were told that a militaristic society is the best. With great "Hurray!" millions went to the next war... because... was it even about lines on a map? Or just because going to war is so awesome? Millions of dead later - who absolutely enjoyed the experience of dying for their country (if nothing else), Germans had a brief experiment with nasty leftist ideas like, actually voting for stuff and such.
That ended quickly, when Germans were told that being randomly born to the right parents, they were better than people who were randomly born to different people. And also that the lines on that map absolutely need to be redrawn because people with the right parents need more space and those people being born to parents to the east in areas surrounded by lines called "Poland", "Russia" or "Ukraine" wouldn't need that space, anyway. Oh, and Germans were of course told that being born within the right set of lines, the absolute best is of course to fight and die for that set of lines.
After the inevitable war with even more dead, some people wondered whether those "leftist" ideas weren't all that bad, after all. Voting, inviolability of human dignity, etc. But alas, the lines on the map called Germany had been split into two sets of lines. Both sides were told that it was absolutely preferable to kill their relatives on the other side to allowing them to redraw the lines. If that didn't help it was absolutely necessary to just convert both Germanies, and if necessary the whole world, into a nuclear wasteland.
See, we are kind of fed up with this nonsense of "dying for our country". In between we found out that human rights, like e.g. not getting randomly imprisoned and shot without trial, kind of made sense and that our neighbours weren't as bad as we were told. Even the French. Especially the French. As others have pointed out, had the question been if we are willing to fight for freedom, democracy, etc. the answer would probably have been different.
And finally, let me be honest with you: I support my government in sending billions in money and materiel to help you defend your lives, your right to decide for yourselves, your freedom and, yes, your human rights and the possibility to enjoy your lives. Not the random lines on the map called Ukraine.
 

The current untrained mob of convicts has added enough resistance to prevent any major successes this whole offensive. They may die like flies but even the convicts stay in their trench and fight enough to make advancing terribly costly.
The only major success that can be had follows a collapse of the Russian line. With more mobiks, more lines can be filled. Means no collapse, which means endless grinding through trenchlines like its ww1 with a couple hundred meters here and there per day.
If the Russian public doesnt oust their beloved Tsar, then the manpower advantage swings wildly in the wrong direction - and I have little faith in Russian resistance, the zombies will complain but do as told.
Then the only way to win this is to draw enough Russian blood over years long slaughter that the state collapses before Ukraine does. Putin bets the West will force a negotiation before he gets a bullet in his head.
Assuming Trump winning thats not far fetched. The French and German publics will not carry this war alone for years, the Brits and baltics cant alone. 

It is because of who we were…middle of the food chain.  Prey animals are driven by fear because it is necessary programming to survive.  We were right in the middle until we figured out how to 1) leverage energy, 2) communicate, and 3) lie to each other and ourselves.  Our big juicy brains allowed us to do this at an evolutionary escape velocity rate.
Good/bad, altruistic/selfish have no real scientific meaning - an eagle swooping in to kill another animal is not being anything morally, it is simply surviving.  We built social frameworks that allowed us to create social metrics such as good and evil…which are basically metrics of relative behaviours.  We are in fact both and will leverage them based on context.  In frames of certainty and safety we will act altruistically and “good”.  Pump in enough uncertainty and fear and we will start to eat each other in a surprisingly short period of time - see Hurricane Katrina.
People want to believe we are good because their sky-god or whatever made us that way but in reality “being good or evil” is an artificial set of conditions.  The role of government is to sustain frameworks of order and certainty so we stay within a “good” frame.
War is a collision of two or more social frameworks that creates a completely new environment along with a new set of social metrics.  “Being good” is killing other people.  Being good is committing suicide to save others so they can kill other people.  Being evil is to not kill other people and run away, or kill the wrong people.  War is also a state of massive uncertainty so we often see devolution happen very quickly.  Of course that is what military machines are all about - sustaining violence through order in a massive environment of fear and uncertainty.
 

Not going to throw stones, however, this is what happens when one adopts an extreme definition of “winning”.  It has been a problem going way back to last summer.  To even suggest a half measure of victory for Ukraine was to admit defeat…which is simply not true.  
For some, yes even on this board, victory for Ukraine is 1) regaining every inch of the pre-2014 borders, 2) a completely defeated and dismantled Russian state and 3) regional security for Ukraine from now until the end of time.  I can clearly recall this narrative being promoted here and used as justification as to why we need to give the UA every weapon under creation yesterday.
Well 1) how realistic are these criteria given realities of modern warfare?  2) items #2 and #3 on that list are in strategic tension with each other? And 3) so if Ukraine (or the West for that matter) fail to achieve these goals, does that equal Ukrainian defeat?
Grown ups do not talk in terms of absolutes.  They talk in terms of negotiation.  How can Ukraine negotiate the best outcome it can out of this war?  As to victory, Ukraine is already there because the actual core objective of remaining an independent state has been met.  The rest is negotiation; violent and bloody negotiations.
Everyone wants Ukraine to succeed as much as possible but “what winning looks like” is a moving target.  If the UA cannot break the strategic corridor and set conditions for retaking the Crimea then this conflict will likely freeze.  Ok, so what?  How does Ukraine still achieve its strategic objectives if this happens?  

- In response to the current back and forth on the forum here -
With regards to certain enemy capabilities which we spend oh so much time discussing, I do not worry about it, though I respect it. It can be managed.  Personally, I (and many of my colleagues) are readier than ever to finally get into the fight and help win this. Everyday I wake up waiting for them to do something stupid and finally give NATO a clear, unambiguous, reason to intervene directly in this war. That’s the solider in me - - it hard to see all of our (combined) power not being used when everyday Ukrainians have to bear the burden alone (at least physically). That doesn’t sit right with me, never did. 
 
All of this to say I get it, it’s hard to watch this from the sidelines, whatever the reasons for that up to now. Still I read, learn about, and appreciate the challenges of leading the combined West through this crisis, with all of the diverse perspectives that it comes with. 
 
I trust the Alliance, and I trust the Ukrainian General Staff. I have my own opinions on what I would risk, which is more than current, but that isn't up to me. In the end, we are all on the same side here, let’s remember how important that is, even when it gets testy.