kluge

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.
 

I always look forward to reading a post by The_Capt. If you ever decided to write a book I would buy it in an instant. In regards to the whole "warrior" discussion, despite nearly a decade of service on active duty in the US Army I was never comfortable calling myself a warrior. I was an intel nerd and despite my knowing full well that my job was to facilitate the death of other people and that tactical SIGINT is quite dangerous to me warriors were the maneuver guys going around kicking in doors and shooting people in the face or blowing stuff up with tanks. I think this stems from my formative experience as a soldier in basic training. I went through POG basic at Fort Jackson, SC with a company full of intel, logistics, and maintenance trainees. My three platoon drill sergeants were all infantry NCOs with combat tours in Iraq or Afghanistan and they derisively referred to us as "warrior" throughout my three months in basic. That stuck with me and anytime someone since then has called me "warrior" I've kind of snickered in my head. Perhaps that would be different if I had ever seen combat but the closest I got to any real danger was two tours holding the line in South Korea.

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. 
 

Pet peeve (and not at all aimed at you, or at Kevin, who you were quoting).
I really do not like the pervasive use of the terms "warriors" and "warfighters" that many, mostly in government or the military upper echelons, refer to service members. Statements like "We have to give our warfighters the tools to do their jobs" (which is another thing - sounds like we are talking about carpenters or plumbers).
It's like some macho thing to me. Maybe I'm an old fogie (I guess I am at this point!) Maybe it's just me and I'm the outlier, but it seems much too belligerent for a country that supposedly uses its military for self-protection, and the aid and support of other countries. 
I have no idea if this is common in other countries, but I find it very grating. 
Dave

Just imagine that pilot on his debrief: "Eh, well yeah, me and my multi-million dollar super high-tech jet got defeated by a few guys in rubberboats."

These are simple canvas sheets for camoflage. They remove the obvious shaddow line at the front and below the vehicle. Its standard practice for all german combat vehicles. Though the ones pictured are otherwise really low on camoflage.

What's the difference practically between sincere and false? None, in his position in the Russian military, he's effectively a PR speaker. If you want to change his mind, give Ukraine more missiles, tanks, APCs, artillery so he can choose to either die in Ukraine or retreat to Russia and continue spouting his views safely there.

He's made some really good choices and saw where things were headed while others had head in sand.  But genius?
He drunk or mental illness binge bought twitter, tried to renege (even trying to wreck twitter stock value thinking it would help his case) and was forced to do the buy.  He paid $44B for a company worth maybe $20B.  And now it's worth what?  he then decided cost structure to high and binge fired over half the company w no plan or thinking.  That aint genius.  
He publicly wanted to fight his competitor, Zuckerburg of facebook.  And wanted to compare dicks.  That's not genius.
He thinks QAnon stuff actually makes sense.  That makes him an idiot, not a genius.  
He alienated the customer base for tesla cars (affluent libs) and had to dramatically cut prices.  The good news for tesla is that they are great cars and get the big tax break in US, so a lot of libs (some I know) held their nose and bought anyway, but he did serious damage.  So, not a genius.  
He thinks colonizing mars makes sense.  Except that it's insane.  Maybe he promotes this because he'll make fortune on the contracts for the stupidest endeavor in human history.  

I used to think so. But I am more and more convinced that Musk isn't actually all that smart. Just rich enough to hire smart people. The man renamed Twitter (one of the more recognizable names in the world) to X (a single letter which is impossible to trademark and which is literally used as a placeholder).

This is genuinely one of my favorite paragraphs from any book. The amount of not just information but flavor and imagination put into just few sentences is just incredible. Gibson really is a master of language.

There is far too little attention paid to the interplay between Chinese actions and US aid to Ukraine. In this particular case, I suspect that the shoe that dropped was North Korean aid to Russia. Kim quite literally exists at the courtesy of China. He can't do his banking or feed his country without the acquiescence of Beijing. In the last week it has become clear that Xi has agreed to let him send arms to Russia. The US was holding back ATACMS in order to have a card to play to stop that sort of thing from happening. Now that China has decided to allow it, the US is letting them go.

As usual, William Gibson saw this coming a long time ago: 
"They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel."
     

Ukrainian General Staff in first time officially confirmed UKR forces are present on left bank of Dnipro and hold bidgehead
On Kherson direction our defensers continue to hold seized positions on left bank of Dnipro, conduct counter-battery fire, eliminate ammo dumps and sucessfully strike enemy rears

Russians moved to Kozachi Laheri some new unit - 28th motor-rifle (?) regiment. I couldn't find anything about it, presumably it can belong to X motor-rifle division of new-formed 18th CAA of Southern military district. 
This Russian regiment have been deploying month ago, but can't do anything with UKR bridhead west from village. 
Here they write: 28th regiment RF in Kozachi Laheri area was fu...g butt kicked. As they tried to assault our positions from their two companies only 26 orcs remained. This regiment was formed recently and have been conducting combat running-in. At this pace it will be soon necessary to form again. 
And Russian text below the photo:
Sodiers of 28th regiment have been seeking from commanders at least one EW system a month so far, but all to not avail. As a result - "Baba Yaga" [Russian name of UKR R18 night bomber octocopters] has flew and destroyed single KAMAZ, which supplied with food, water, ammunition and helped our artillerymen. 
 

I personally think it's mostly a combination of diplomatic and bureaucratic inertia. Never underestimate the delaying power of "getting all the Is dotted and all the Ts crossed".

Or some background threshold in which Russia was told if you do X we will do Y has been breached.
Could be plenty of reasons for the release that doesn't fit your statement...
 

To add bit of my expertise for once - I was part of robotics project that included drones moving around in buildings and in urban setting (I did some of the programming, not much of the robotics stuff).
This size is probably fine, especially tracked. But I would not expect to see much smaller drone ground vehicles than this. Definitely don't expect something the size of the tiny quadcopters or RC cars. Small wheels suck for moving around even in buildings and in towns, in war terrain with craters everywhere it would just not work. For small ones, flying is much better.

Word budut is future; they will be ours. Mistranslation.

When looking at U.S. (Western) implementation of lessons learned I feel that the real places to be watching are the Navy, Airforce, and maybe the Marines. The theoretical peer conflict would be against China and that fight would be heavily geared towards naval combat unless something happened vis-a-vis Vietnam or India. We've likely all seen the Marines attempting to shift away from small Army to something more geared towards modern warfare.

There really isn't a peer conflict that would lead with army forces that I can think of. If, for example, Russia suddenly had no nuclear weapons the war would be measured in months if not weeks and most of that time would be prepositoning forces.

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.

The one simple trick to understanding Musk is that he will do whatever he perceives to be in his self interest. Obviously, letting Ukraine use Starlink endeared him to the US government...upon whose contracts several of his companies depend. But he also has large Tesla manufacturing interests in China and that government was expressing strong concerns about Western aid to Ukraine at that time. Much of his wealth is tied to Tesla and it wouldn't take more than a Russian interlocutor mentioning Putin's conversations with Xi to put a deep chill into him. 
The situation now, as I understand it, is that the USG locked him in contractually to avoid this sort of thing reoccurring but I would imagine the scrutiny of who at Starlink knows what about Ukrainian operations and who they may then be talking to will be going into overdrive. Musk's wealth is a pretty big vessel but in the end, the USA is the world's biggest glacier. He avoids running against it or he sinks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-admits-thwarting-ukraine-attack-not-activating-starlink-satellites-2023-9
He didn't think Starlink would be used for military purposes? Man is either deluded or a liar. Or a deluded liar.

I think that’s backwards. You want anit-radiation loitering munitions that will go after anything emitting a signal in the sky. No power/cooling problems compared to an active antenna, and emits no signature of their own, and obviously way cheaper.

I honestly think that air superiority/supremacy is the Achilles tendon of the entire western way of warfare.  You take it away at any altitude and our whole system become vulnerable.  We need to start thinking about fighting in mutually denied environments.  A big hint was when we lost air superiority to ISIL (freakin ISIL!) below 2000 feet in around 2016.  We kind of wrote it off as an anomaly and more of an annoyance as opposed to a signal of trends and that was a major mistake.  We know our opponents are already working on fully autonomous, which makes EW against them damn hard.  We have a lot of guns but these are small birds, everywhere.  We had better start thinking about denied and parity environments, which is something we have not thought of in over 30 years.
That and simple lethality of ground systems.  Air superiority will do deep battle on formations and units.  But 2 guys in a treeline with a system that can hit and kill at 4+ kms at 80-90 percent is just nuts.  At this point I am less worried about gaps and more worried about blind spots in western military thinking.  That post highlights some of them at a ground level.  

You realize that a few pages back people here were calling for your deportation in the event of a liberation?  This is the mess.  You clearly are not a pro-Russian sympathizer but in the wrong circumstances unless you can prove Ukrainian citizenship and loyalty you could be on a boat out based on some of the rhetoric being thrown around here. The cause emerges out of situations just like this.
Anyway as I said before let’s honestly hope it does not come to this.  Hopefully people will be integrated smoothly and embrace peace.  It is when the honeymoon period ends that things may get weird.  For the record I am talking insurgency here, not partisan resistance during the war.  That I strongly suspect is off the table.  I am talking 6 months to a year after the war and something does not go right and Russia is still able to make trouble…because they will if they can.
And in all sincerity, take care of yourself.

Well accept for the part where is does not really matter what two old guys said on a wargaming forum. I damn well hope an insurgency does not occur and that Crimea can be retaken slamming the door shut on Russian meddling forever.  If Russia has totally collapse to do this, well we have a whole new set of problems to deal with.
We will be able to see pretty clearly if the right counters were put in place, having an entire government department built and ready to go for reintegration is a pretty good start.  Soft hands and incentivizing the liberated populations is another good route to go.  Like most professional military we hope and pray to be wrong before a crisis starts, in that is never starts.  But I simple cannot see a way out of this without a lot of risks and conditions for things to go sideways…we will have to see.