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Think it's a little between sburke and Apocal's perspective. The Russians wanted a lot more out of the Ukraine than simply not-in-NATO. That's where this whole conflict kicked off, closer ties to Russia via the not-really good at representing Ukrainians government. The results of the follow-on repression by the Russian friendly government, and the "insurgents" totally undermined ANY likely future cooperation between the Ukraine and it'll likely be decades before you see anything resembling a Russian-friendly* political stance in the larger Ukraine (which is a contrast to the previous sort of trying to exist in both the east and the west stance). On the other hand Russia had clearly gunned for what it assumes it can get through limited conventional warfare and walk away with. It has succeeded in some ways, taking the Crimea, and having successfully sustained the rebels, but what they've clearly sought in terms of more solid land connections to the Crimea, or more leverage against Kiev has not panned out. In effect the Russians had to succeed a lot faster and use the time in which the Ukrainian forces were very poorly equipped, lead and trained. Russia has reached the extent of what they can do short of putting large scale ground forces into theater, and that much is doubtful at the moment. The provocations that were relied upon to justify sending in "peacekeepers" frankly have not borne fruit, and the situation on the ground is now known enough that fait accompli "trust us the Ukrainians were eating Russian babies!" inspired invasion just is not going to wash. Which brings us to now, where more investment is unlikely, but progress is doubtful without said investment. Re: Soft Power The odd thing about Soft Power is you really need to be a carrot sort of person to make it work. US loans, aid, guarantees and Chinese business investment both are great examples of those carrots. The problem is the Russian economic soft power is very tightly tied to oil....which isn't worth so much and comes with less strings from elsewhere. In terms of non-financial means, Russia hasn't really been a good partner to anyone so outside of folks with literally no one else to turn to (like a certain Syrian guy) it's not going to win friends. Which therein makes hard power a more reasonable choice to "solve" Russia's problems. Which THEN makes soft power even less viable (even the US suffered greatly in terms of soft power resulting from the War on Terror, and that's something that had SOME appeal overseas, as opposed to the Russian route which really only resonates with the anti-US/EU circles as a middle finger to the west of sorts). *This also assumes Russian policy that's conciliatory or at the least, less of how Russia has treated its neighbors since the Czars.

There's a sort of logical fallacy assuming that because there's two sides to a debate (or more!) that those viewpoints have equal weight. The Russian argument for the various republics it carved off of Georgia, and is trying to carve off of the Ukraine doesn't hold water. There might even be legitimate Russian concerns....but they do not excuse or warrant the conflict Russia started (again, there's no practical denial there, Russia started the current crisis, and it sustains it). Which is inherently why I find some claims of being unbiased to be dishonest. You either think there's enough of a justification for Russian behavior, or you don't at this point. There's no middle ground of "Russia deserves SOME of what it's trying to carve off, but not all!"

Re: Nidan I will rip off your head, ram my ovapositor down your throat and lay my eggs in your chest. Which is to say that's not an unreasonable request. That said, between IanL and Steve that sort of wraps this one up. It's like arguing with the 9-11 Conspiracy folks, they're going to argue you to death about Iran-Contra and that you can't not-not prove nanothermite beams were installed by black helicopters, while ignoring the larger picture. I can comfortably say the world would be a better place with Russia out of the Ukraine, and the current spike in tensions only has Russia to blame upon.

Except the transponder information was provided by not at all yankee imperialists? Either the Russian Air Force is too stupid to read transponders that random Swedish aviation enthusiasts can figure out, or they're having integrity issues. Re: Whitehot in general Looks like you've already acquired some holes and we've identified a distinct lack of comprehension on your part. The US generally doesn't do overflights any more. The sort of SR-71/U-2 stuff went away once we moved recon orbital, which is WAY lower risk with much lower operational cost. We've still got some U-2s in service but in generally they've been employed for more....like you need photos of object X no later than 1430 for the raid vs waiting for the next orbital pass at 1700 daily. Most of what we do with manned platforms is the signals intelligence stuff, but that's done entirely from international waters or over someone who approves of US recon's airspace. There's drones, but they really need a complacent (like Pakistan) or cooperative (like most of the middle east) air space. And Iran is quite aggressive with chasing US assets out in the gulf so it stands to reason that your scenario is pretty stupid and doesn't happen. Explicitly he states Danish ships, located in Danish ports would become targets for Russian nuclear missiles. Also amusingly "dismantle" is a funny word for "launch an overwhelming nuclear strike killing millions and likely heralding nuclear retaliation and ending the world as we know it." Because alone of all the nuclear powers Russia seriously believes it can employ nuclear weapons for limited objectives like killing tens of thousands of Danes in exchange for the warship parked in the harbor. Because it's not like those are real people like in Donbass. .......Russia should employ you as the frontal armor on tanks. Just sayn'. Russian nuclear capable bombers have no legitimate reason to fly near Portugal, or even the English channel for that means. Russia is doing the nation-state version of rolling by a house real slow with a piece hanging out the door, because it believes Eastern Europe is it's "turf" and how dare Eastern Europe, or the rest of the world have an opinion on this! Re: Iraq. God. Yes because that's on topic, an open war chasing phantom WMDs is totally the same as a secret war with phantom soldiers that isn't happening but hey Ukraine surrender to my mercenaries plz so I can has Crimea? It's the classic Russo-debate non sequitur. Well, I'm not going to talk about where you have me dead to rights, so let's visit something I have a prepared propaganda line for!

Why would Russia be dishonest about anything? It's not like they've ever concealed facts for their own benefit? I imagine if that callsign or transponder code was not in service, Russia could easily show the US as lying sneakmen of green wearing nature.

I am merely concerned his hometown is unaware of his whereabouts, any insults you might have seen are simply on vacation with their transponders turned off. Also my town is well aware of my location thank you! I filled out the proper forms several weeks ago when I moved. While totally off topic, did you ever find real numbers concerning the "5,000" Serbian civilian deaths during the NATO air campaign you claimed? I was genuinely surprised not to have heard your follow up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/two-days-of-russian-aircraft-intercepts/1422/ Please explain to me how Portugal, England etc are just right around the corner from Russia? Apparently it was on, according to the very thing you posted. Literacy? I'm curious to what the Russian interest in maritime patrols carried out over Western Europe were. The B-1 can also do a variety of other missions, I imagine if they were zipping up and down off Russia we'd be getting marginally more nuclear threats to Denmark than usual. Again, picture if it was B-52s buzzing along, and the US DoD had just mentioned pointing more nuclear weapons at Russia because the US has secretly not invaded but actually invaded parts of Mexico to make the new US state of Baja. It's a needlessly stupid penis waving moment that's on par with Russian foreign policy choices on a whole at this moment. Said the person comparing P-3s to nuclear bombers, and who thinks Russia has a right to fly nuclear capable bombers through crowded airspace unannounced. Who also doesn't apparently read his own articles posted. Who thinks the UK is next door to Russia. Does your village know where you are?

Would you care to idenfify the nuclear payloads carried by recon planes, or the P-3? The P-3 is especially hilarious considering they're largely flying in that area so they can be aware of Russian submarine activity as they pass into Norwegian waters. This is a stark contrast to nuclear bombers some hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from Russian airspace flying through some of the busiest commercial airspace with transponders off. You can take issue with US/NATO recon assets bopping a little closer to Russia than you'd like, but that's different from Russian threats, and indeed plans to employ nuclear weapons against the west, and then waving said weapons systems around. It's perfectly reasonable that you could see my car as it darted across six lanes of traffic so it is in no way reckless. So please stop complaining about my driving.

Sort of puts that whole Putin classifying the deaths of Russian servicemen on "special operations" thing into perspective. I hope the separatists choke on Marinka. It's not like negotiated peace short of some dismembered version of the Ukraine ruled by Russian owned folks is going to lead to something lasting. Which is totally within Russian belief to find reasonable because Nazis world war two great patriotic war HATO-Nazi EU MOTHERLAND etc etc.

I am shocked, positively shocked at this. Novorussian troops of Donbass have been so good about avoiding shameless Ukrainian provocation conducted by Ukrainian-Polish-US Navy SEAL NAZI militia forces. It's a shame so much of the Russian military is on vacation or else perhaps they'd be there to help the attacking defense of Donbass!

It'd depend on the resolve of the rest of the nuclear powers...but there's no distinction between "tactical" and "strategic" nuclear weapons in terms of deterrance. Official US policy is a weapon of mass destruction is a weapon of mass destruction and will be retaliated against in kind. So perhaps it wouldn't be full on Dr Strangelove, but matching the Russians nuke for nuke seems likely.

Not to mention alone of all countries on Earth, Russia is actively drilling to use manned bombers to deliver nuclear weapons on targets that would kill literally tens of thousands at best, and furthermore in recent wargames included launching nuclear strikes on Warsaw as an acceptable outcome for ensuring Russian interests were kept. There's no justifying that, compliance with aviation agreements (Which there is not) be damned.

Well hell, if we've just gone full 80's The second was a staple of the ancient music videos my german teacher would show. It was like he'd recorded 24 hours of German MTV with about 6 of it being "recent" (late 90's), and the rest being straight out of 80's

1. One of my ROTC instructors had started life as an ADA crewman on the M163 in Panama before going SOF. He said it was an amazing counter-sniper platform, you might not get the sniper, but NO ONE is hanging out for long after a vulcan burst. 2. There was a wide variety of DIVADs type vehicles that got kicked around. I seem to remember there being a Sheridan hull mated with the GAU-8 and a radar for local air defense. Could be wrong though.

I've never understood the almost lust for the Nazis and their adult words I cannot use here. They lost. Handily. Got dug out of their holes and turned into good Nazis. Good guys won life went on. That said if we're picking out better songs in German:

Eh. You'd see them for a few tenths of a second, even for helicopter attacks, your average map is still too short to have the chopper over your edge of the map and be firing at targets on the map. I'd kinda like a silhouette moving quickly paired with a bit less rudimentary off-board area, but that's as far as it needs to go realistically. Re: Shoot it When bullets start flying, the first thing to die is good fire commands. I like skid monkeys. We always called infantrymen "crunchies" in the armor end of things.

Re: TRPs I think TRPs are different from deployment zones. You sort of artificially know about where the enemy is going to come from with more precision than you should, firing off a heavy long barrage into that deployment zone as the game starts is terrible sportsmanship. Having a TRP though on terrain you want to deny the enemy, or on a likely route out of that deployment zone is 100% fair game (and a great way to use a TRP and a Raven!) Re: APS Samey. Think the're too common across the board at this point, and it makes it a bit less fun to have TOWs/AT-14s etc pretty much be a wash.

In terms of armor, I don't see anything hard. It's just a matter of making it thick enough and the rest is pretty simple.

I could have been one of those, but they didn't bite for some reason. I operated out of a MAXPRO for a while as a new LT, and then as a troop XO had to keep a fleet of RG-31s and MAXPROs from falling apart. They're not great vehicles. However if you read my later proposals on BCT adjustments...basically I feel having two "light" BCTs is the wrong way to go about it. If the Stryker is just a taxi for light infantry, great. Then why do we have two distinct flavors of light infantry that are incapable of unaugmented operations outside of COIN? Which is sort of missing the point. The rapidly flexing around the battlespace is cool and all, but as you pointed out, it's not a spearhead force. So we have a rapidly deployable and mobile force that must wait for something that takes months to deploy before it can do anything. Which gets us full circle back to the 101st and 82nd relying on Saddam's good graces to let us get armor in theater, which is what the Stryker was supposed to help with. What good is faster if it cannot do the job when it gets there? If you want to get super-specific, it's actually an old idea back when 2 ID in Korea was really 2 ID vs Div troops+1 BCT. The most practical way would just be to co-locate the leg dudes with the aviation brigade and have them be air assault troops. The simplest way to climb a hill being getting dropped off at the top and all. We still had to give up our mech infantry dudes for missions like that fairly often for training. Just makes sense to have the pool of light infantry to accomplish that task without having the uncomfortable question of where the Bradleys live when the company is on helicopters. The XM8 was a light tank that nearly made it to service in the mid-90's before being scrapped in favor of the MGS (to the degree it actually made it into the tank platoon FM and doctrine was written for it). Which is odd/funny as the end users of the M8 are not folks who received the MGS (except for 2 CR after it was Stryker-fied). It's a good start point as it's about Bradley to Bradley+level armored depending on the modular armor fitted. Also it was highly air transportable. Which is exactly why there should either be SBCTs, or leg IBCTs, but not both. It's wasted capabilities to have two things that do the same job with slight differences. Either should bring something more meaningful to the table, or there's just no point. So in that regard having purely "light" air mobile and then motorized makes sense, but not leg and motorized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M8_Armored_Gun_System There you go. I think a bolt-on expanded range Javelin might be a neat option too, especially if it still lofted from the launcher, as that'd let you fire off a missile from the defilade. In regards to 2 CR, if we meant business it'd be an ACR. It's doing the ACR mission already, might as well give it the firepower to do it. It doesn't work as well as you'd think. I had a friend who was an SBCT guy. Their Battalion was held up to the point of simply endexing by a platoon of either National Guard or Marine Reserve M1A1s at Yakima*. On the defense you have a point, but a Stryker unit cannot advance in the face of armor, especially halfway decently positioned armor. *MGSes simply died without getting a change to engage, ATGM variant couldn't get into position and fire without at the least being firepower killed during TOW flight time. Infantry infiltration with Javelins...between troop fatigue from infiltration type movement with ATGM and body armor in tow, and just getting spotted and wacked, just did not pan out well. The battalion never got past the tanks and it was never really addressed beyond claims by Battalion leadership that the MGS platoon leaders were to blame somehow. Which is exactly why I'm not anti-infantry, I'm just against this light infantry mafia thing that the last ten years has empowered. There's a time and place for light infantry. It's a valuable tool. But it's a lot less valuable if the enemy is halfway decently armed. Right now we have a capabilities gap in that we have Strykers, which cannot do full spectrum unaugmented, or ABCTs which are either ultra expensive to deploy fast (1-2 tanks at a time stratair!) or take a few weeks to get in theater. The ACR concept in the regards of it being something mean enough to hold its own for sometime, while having the all arms organization to leverage supporting assets is a great starting point. Finding a better AFV than a Stryker to fill it out is the next logical step.

Look into the suicide numbers. You'll find they're up for soldiers...but they're not up for guys who've deployed. It matches a wider increase in suicides for the 16-22 population. Which is sort of why the suicide prevention focus in the army went away from "YOU SURVIVE IRAQ AND NOW LIVE THROUGH THIS FOR AMERICA!" or "warrior/think spartan*" focused resilience because it turned out, the combat vets weren't the risk group. It's the 18-20 year group offing themselves because of 18-20 something age group problems. *Seriously. By month five or six, you've got a coping mechanism. You don't need to be told you're ultramaxstrongwarrior. My whole plan for surviving Iraq was: 1. Video games. Once you're done for the day, change into your PTs, sit down for an hour or two and play xbox. 2. Care packages. I'd order stuff like games and books, and then keep track of how much longer I had until they showed up, as it's easier to count down the 9-14 days it took from ordering something on Amazon to get to me, than count down the remaining 240 days of deployment. 3. I had a remote controlled Abrams and Sherman tank that shot airsoft pellets. I'd take those out behind my living area, lay out some styrofoam cups, then drive the tank around drilling those cups. For some folks it was porn, working out, whatever, but finding something to do that wasn't Iraq focused was pretty key. Either way off topic, but it made sitting in the powerpoint briefing on being max emotional strong through warrior centric focus battle meditation or whatever crap the army was trying to genuinely help us in a hamfisted way with bothersome.

Okay. For the last time: There never was an attempt to conceal the nature of the deaths of US servicemen and women. Top to bottom, right to left, that they died in combat as part of operations covered by OIF/OEF, or other events (suicide in theater, fell of a truck and broke their back, fatal snake bite, whatever) in theater. Never at any point did the US also claim a total lack of US forces in either theater (while details as to where the various SOF teams were in Afghanistan after hostilities kicked off were sparse, there was no denial that US forces were on the ground doing things). The not filming the return of US dead is something that was supposed to be respectful in regards it's basically part of the funeral procession. And even then nothing stopped the media from getting permission from the families of those KIA to film events occurring after the return flight, nor was there a denial that the return flight was happening. The information provided by X number of coffins returning was the same information provided when the news announced X number of folks killed in Iraq. There's no difference between those numbers. Re: kettlarian stuff A lot of those articles show a great deal of bias to put it mildly. I won't go too far into the Iraqi body count thing except for to say tracking ANY numbers of Iraqis doing anything alive, dead, or indifferent was problematic to say the least. You'd have people come in to claim all 20 members of their families were killed by a US airstrike (despite there not having been a plane dropping bombs in the AO in years), or you'd go into the local park that was too dangerous for anyone for the last year, and find the corner that had become the general purpose body dump for all Iraqi parties, sunni, shia, indifferent. The whole "large scale killings" of Iraqi civilians by the US though...we generate a lot of paperwork. And there's a lot of cross-unit situational awareness. So to that end, unless there were special stealth teams of US forces going around killing civilians more or less at random...uh yeah wasn't happening that often. You'd get a lot of Iraqi blame directed at US units for whatever death just happened, but even a cursory reading of some of the stories put some pretty strong doubts (my favorite was a US black HMMWV shooting people with a suppressed machine gun and then stealing the bodies to sell the internal organs to the jews). In terms of casualty as in injury counting, stuff that's generally just a hazard of being in uniform doesn't get rolled up into the losses normally. While it's hard to argue someone falling off a truck and breaking their arm in Iraq wouldn't have happened if they weren't in Iraq....it's pretty easy to rightly claim soldiers fall of trucks regardless of what part of the planet they're on. Same deal with the hearing loss. I've suffered service related hearing loss. It's also because after 8 years of weapons ranges, vehicle noises, having the volume in my headset cranked up so I can hear what's going over the background noise that my hearing has suffered. Did my time in Iraq make it better? Likely not. Do I consider myself Iraqi/Afghanistan injured like the article claims? Roflno. And that's the case for a lot of that article. And that's hardly sweeping much of anything under the rug. Which isn't to say I trust the government, I'm just saying it's much too incompetent most of the time to pull off the sort of deceptions folks think it does as a matter of course.

Which is a dignity denied to the Russian war dead from Ukraine. You're missing the point. Showing photos of the dead at a solem occasion is questionable, and does nothing to remove the reality of how/where they died. Putin just reserved the right to deny any information at all about the death of Russian servicemen, which you are apparently okay with because CNN used to not be allowed to film an event designed to be a respectful, quiet ceremony. So tell me instead of trying to run down this rabbit hole of non-comprehension. Is it okay to lie about the fates of soldiers or being at war at all?

I once used nuclear weapons to open an MRE. True story.

You're funny. Perhaps you should open a comedy club? Have you actually seen the sort of crap people pay to see? There will always be an audience that wants to see crispy critters, or what organs look like falling out of someone. I see no reason to make it easy to feed the orgrish crowd, nor is it relevant to the debate. Regardless of pictures of the dead, your original point is just as wrong, there's no similarity between not showing the dead, and denying that they happened.

Which is odd, as the official US military post-battle assessment is pretty unambiguous. Yo're not going to have HVAP type entry damage on a tank that was knocked out by napalm, nor are there more T-34s burned out from Napalm lurking where they were not discovered. The available on-hand T-34/85s of 1950 were all accounted for minus two by the post battle survey, and extensively poked and prodded. Only 27 showed definite damage from air weapons, the 60ish were certainly destroyed, but from causes difficult to determine (some large portion of them being napalm) and that's all you can really credit to aviation. There's simply no other tanks to claim in 1950. If the "score" of napalm kills is real...well then that accounts for all the unconfirmed kills in two instances. Again we're dealing with a limited pool of tanks to be destroyed, and have a pretty definitive account of what killed most of them. It's worth noting however, the NKPA forces were only actually stopped once they ran into the follow on US Army and Marine elements at Pusan. By all accounts the actual effectiveness of the USAF/USN/USMC air campaign against the NKPA spearhead was quite low. This is totally on-par with the performance of similar platforms against German armor in Europe....really simply put fixed wing CAS had a while to go before it was especially good against the actual combat forces in terms of dead targets (although it was quite handy in suppressing enemy movements, and killing logistical assets). And there was still enough NKPA armor and forces to attempt several breakthroughs throughout the August-September fighting. Most of the armor kills in that timeframe is going to be NKPA "runners" which accounts for certainly more than 40 on the perimeter. The October-November kills are certainly from the pursuit....but again there's documented tank vs tank fights, and certainly more than a mere 40 tanks plugging around. I'm more inclined to trust the technical assessment here. It's hard to argue if the NKPA really had "40" runners or any validity to the air claims when you've got actual tank wrecks, and knowledge on how many tanks total were available for the fighting.