kluge

As we sit and wait for the Ukrainians to kick off their offensive, I am reminded of how Miyomoto Musashi handled a couple duels... he would arrive very late, letting his opponent stew and really mess with their heads.  Could this be what is happening here? I don't think you can discount it, the Russians have to be pissing themselves with anticipation right now.
Bil

Ohhhh for the days of Tank Ist Tot debates. 
*peers into the immediate future*
Think I'll give the next two pages a miss...

Genetic versus cultural. Lets remember PTSD. Extrinsic trauma (not caused by your own biology) produces actual physical changes to the brain. Its not genetics, its 'social', but the result is the brain being rewired to change your responses. One can only imagine how a culture of poverty, violence and endemic alcoholism has warped the mind of the average Russian. There was a recent K-pop song named 'Amygdala' about how an accumulation of traumatic incidents basically ruined the artist.

Been trying to catch up on this thread, but been too busy writing George Soros to have the space lasers repointed at Russia.  With all the water in CA I think they won't be able to create so many forest fires this year.  Hoping MTG will help introduce a bill for congress to include this in the next round of military support for Ukraine.

Culture is learned.
Biology only plays as much of a part as: that's how we are all made - we grow up one place in one culture we turn out a certain way. If we grew up in another culture we would be different. Yes, I know individual nature plays a factor in how an individual turns out but for a society level analysis that's not really relevant.

I think that's where the geneticists would disagree. The gene pool won't hardly have a ripple in it, given the timescales involved. All that conditioning leaves marks on psyches, not DNA, not in centuries.
The difference, if you like, between Russia and the "Liberal West" is that in Russia, the crazies are the only societal element left that's allowed to speak, whereas in the West, both parties still get to voice their opinions, and the difference between "then" and "now" is that the Internet gives the crazies' voice a volume, connectedness and cohesion [chortle] it could never hope to achieve when media had actual sane people watching over it.
And because in Russia, "the only way is crazy", even people who would otherwise dismiss the nonsense have to get on board, to get ahead, and any human has the capacity to rationalise their self-interest as moral, in order to live with themselves, while only some have the fortitude to refuse to deceive/delude themselves.

It's much more complex than that, obviously, since there are different classes of crazy, from the sociopath-manipulator, to the violence-obsessed bully (none of which are entirely genetically determined; it's all "predispositions", and the system taps into those), and they all play their role in the dysfunctional "family" that Vova wants to be Patriarch of.
If the cause for the "Russian mentality" were genetic, you'd have to characterise German mid-20th-Century Nazism as similarly genetic, because the societal acquiescence to the rise of National Socialism has broad parallels in post-Soviet Russian Nationalism. I don't think anyone here believes that the German genetic makeup predisposes them to Nazism, indeed the empirical evidence would indicate very much otherwise. So why assume the Russian mentality is any more based in DNA than Hitler's was?
I'm sure there are analogies between the action of human biological inheritance, and the development of theories of Society (pace Ser Dawkins), but we should not confuse one with the other in its expression in populations.

Damn. This sort of thing is a real concern in the DoD. We all want to trust our colleagues. No one wants to think that someone you've worked with for a long time actually intends to do something nefarious, and certainly no one likes getting their friends in trouble. But we don't do annual insider threat training just for show. Whether you're uniformed (me 5 years ago), GS, or a contractor (me right now) you need to make sure the rules are being followed!

If the biological tic exists in a multitude of societies, it's not really a tic at all. It's just the human condition filtered through a particular culture.

Our town overvalues everything but never fesses up. 

Ukraine has a massive high tech sector and was one of the world’s leading software countries- certainly one of the main players in Europe. Coming out of this war they will likely become a key player in small UAV + UGV development. Demographics is a bigger worry.

Thanks

Apparently the street in the original photo comparison  has been identified as Vokzal'na Street in Bucha.
Are These Before-and-After Pics of the Same Location in Bucha, Ukraine? (Snopes)
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but that building at the end of the street does look alike in both images. I think I can even make out the yellow light post.
The reason the photos caught my attention to begin with was because Illia Ponomarenko retweeted them and he lives in Bucha, I would figure he would know the geography of that town.
 
 

I'm not sure the Russian General Population is any more stupid/less self-aware than any other mass of Humanity in any other location  on the planet . Generalizations are not very useful  or particularly clever .

No source quoted but Jon tends to know his stuff

Footage from a three man team doing a short recce mission.  They don't run into the enemy but there's obviously a lot of fighting going on.
 

Despite that, though, in a lot of ways commie blocks are pretty great. Weirdly.
 

It's not even a lie, sort of. Before the other day UKR had a bunch of Patriot missiles. Today they have 30 fewer directly as a result of RUS airstrike. QED.
Win!

Just want to reiterate the end of the article everyone's referring to for clarity, since a few forumgoers are writing as if these three were arrested after yesterday's strikes...
edited to add bold.

The difference between these two images fills me with hope for the future of Ukraine after this war.

As everyone is looking forward to UGVs I am not so convinced. They have one unsolved problem and that is mobility.
You have all seen the rubble, the mud, the pure chaos that makes any movement complicated. What size of platform do you guys have in mind? 
The weasel was mentioned. That is not a small vehicle. 3-4 tons. 1.9m wide about 4m long. Yes that is big enough to drive over a trench or through mud and rubble. Anything smaller will get bogged down in a real combat zone real fast. What could be implemented easily is a remote control option to drive around the next corner to do some shooting without risking the operators life. For a vehicle of this size how do you move the operators around? With another vehicle? On foot? How the UVGs runs over your own guys because the operator was not looking at the screen for a few seconds? 
Small ones for an MG I have not seen any design that is truly mobile and doesn't get stuck at the next obstacle. I mean there has been research on this topic for a century on remote controlled vehicles. But sofar we are not much closer to a reliable solution than the Germans with their Goliath. 
Another thing not to underestimate is maintenance and repairs. Especially in a war zone. The jammed gun will not fix itself. The stone stuck in the track will not remove itself. The dirt at your sensors will stay there until they get removed. No we don't have robots for those tasks. 
Controlling a vehicle remotely is solved. Having it mobile and keeping it in operating condition is not solved. 
Also those systems are sitting ducks for kamikaze drones. 
Land and air are two completely different domains with very different engineering challenges. 

So essentially, they operate on about the same level as my cat.  It knows when my wife goes in the kitchen it sometimes gets a treat.  So every time she heads to the kitchen the cat perks up, even if she was in the kitchen just 5 minutes ago and already gave her the treat.  Keep in mind she only gives the cat a treat once a day and usually in the evening.  Doesn't matter to the cat.  Could be 11am, she's headed to the kitchen ergo maybe a treat!  To give my cat some credit, she just turned 20.

The only reason I can think of not to do this is the concealability of the platform. A tripod mounted weapon is easier to hide "in a bush" than an ATV-class chassis with a tripod-mounted weapon strapped to it. You could make the weapon demountable, but that's additional engineering and potential complexity, if the weapon is automated, on its carrier platform.
But, if the tripod-mounted weapon can operate from full defilade, its concealability matters much less. If all that has to happen is that some "sneaky eyes" get forward and find the target, and feed the coordinates to the weapon system which automatically orients itself and lays its weapon, then the weapon itself doesn't need to be concealable at all; you just need to find a large enough lump to stick it behind. AGL can fit that bill, with the right mount and FCC; I'm sure other systems can be worked that way too.

That's exactly what Russia tried in Nov 2021.  They took out a fairly large satellite in a quite messy way.  It was before I was paying close attention to Russian space assets, and it confused a lot of people at the time because it would also threaten Russian satellites. But after Feb 24 when I started looking into Russian space based ISR, they really had nothing substantial to lose and had the potential to create blind spots in US/NATO ISR by "accidentally" taking out western sats.

Well, depends on the orbit. The advantage of having tons of smaller, lower cheaper satellites is you can toss them in a bunch of very different orbits, and the US realistically might be able to have more satellites than China has antisatellite missiles (which by their nature have to be very high performance). Also, these small cheap satellites alter their apogee frequently; enough to make targeting less “fun”. If you figure they won’t last that long, you can even do inclination changes every orbit (which is more expensive in terms of fuel). A large part of your constellation could realistically alter their orbit each orbit; tough on the transceiver on the ground but that’s a solved problem.
Starlink (and I assume Starshield) are really low, so a lot of debris will burn up fast- worst case a couple years for most of the debris.

I should have qualified my statement a bit more. The debris from one satellite getting shot down is bad. But it isn't so bad that it would deter anyone from shooting down one satellite in a major war. I suppose it's easy to get the impression that I was saying that it wasn't bad at all in my earlier comment, since you need to read it with the right voice inflection in order to get the right meaning (stress on the "too" in "isn't too bad").
Regardless of the fallout of shooting down one satellite, I think we agree that you can't scale up to shooting down dozens of enemy satellites without knocking out your own satellite network in the process, along with the satellite networks of every neutral party in the world (none of whom are going to be very happy with you). It probably just isn't practical to contest low Earth orbit.