danfrodo

this f-ing dumbass does realize that he'll run out of rockets, and soon, while the Israelis most certainly won't??? What imbecility.

Hey all, I just started a new thread on the Israel war that hit us today. Hoping to keep this thread more on UKR war.

I was out for a while today, I come back to see hundreds of Israelis dead, plus hostages. And what will this accomplish for the Palestinians? More suffering. Nice binge but the hangover is gonna be deadly. Starting this thread to get the discussion out of the UKR war thread.

I needed some feel good something today, and this is it. Abrams arriving in UKR, hopefully first batch of many. This article goes into some history of the tank but also makes some good points about how it could be more useful than some other armored vehicles in the coming dark, muddy months. Abrams has really low ground pressure despite its size. And it has excellent night vision plus some bunker-busting ammo. So could be used at night to target RU strongpoints while RU has less visibility, typically. Chobham armor should give nice survivability. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/7/2197886/-Ukraine-Update-The-Abrams-was-designed-for-winter-combat-in-Zaporizhzhia?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_1&pm_medium=web It's no wonder weapon, but what armored vehicle would you rather be in as a tanker? And what would you rather have as armored support?

good lord, the conflation begins. Where completely separate things are falsely tied together for some benefit to the person saying it. Like 9-11 and saddam hussein. But on a more UKR centric point, related to the tactics post above. It seems RU digs in and fights for every meter of tree line and can generate plenty of ~untrained mobiks to man the dugouts. UKR is RU attriting men, material, and vehicles at a high rate but just the slow grind of digging rats out of holes is soooooo slow. A whole summer campaign season and they've moved ~15-20km at best. The pace has picked up a little but really this whole thing is still looking like RU made a pretty good bet on their defenses. I am not calling it defeat or failure, but it does say this is gonna take a long time. And over time anything can happen. bad things or good things.

Since no one else is listening to Steve about Israel.... I am pro-Israel. And I am pro-Palestinian. Meaning they both deserve to live & have a state & have rights. In my crazy mind Palestinians and Jews are actually all....people. The attack: I hope the crazies had fun. All that will come of this is Israel killing over 10x the number of people it lost, taking land, and becoming more entrenched in hatred. Like the bus bombings of 20+ years ago, which utterly destroyed the Israeli peace movement. While great fun for some imbecilic radicals who think they actually achieved something, it will do nothing but bring death, misery and more poverty to the people these idiots claim to represent. And Netanyahu loooooooves this. He gets to be big daddy protector now, and he'll pound the hell out of whatever he thinks he needs/wants to in response to this.

latest summary from this guy here. Mostly about tree line war, which we all hate. Sharing it here because he posits that losing leaves helps UKR, as the attacker and w more precision, more than hurts. I've been wondering how losing leaf cover will affect each side. I've also wondering about night actions. With long nights, will URK use it's superior soldier night imaging & communication (w thermal image drones) to conduct more night ops against RU defensive positions? Night operations are inherently dangerous and require good training. Maybe this is part of UKR winter plans, I don't know. Since we're mostly smaller scale infantry operations anyway, maybe it will be something UKR starts attempting. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/6/2197824/-Ukraine-Update-It-s-a-war-of-the-tree-lines?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_2&pm_medium=web

"Russians report one BMP-2M lightly damaged in fierce fighting"

deleted, on second thought don't want to add to the politics stuff

Here's some tankie fun, hopefully distract from US House nonsense w some UKR related nonsense. It always amazes me how filppin' stupid people can be and how zealous in their stupidity. It's great and good to be anti-war, but not when it also makes you pro-slavery and pro-genocide. This naive idiots think that we can just talk to the monsters and they will behave? The world talked and talked and talked to Putin, and then he invades UKR. Then having basically lost any good reason for continuing the war, he continues the war. All the while trying to sabotage global food, global energy, and our democracies. It's utterly amazing to me. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/5/2197568/-Ukraine-Update-Top-tankies-attack-Bernie-Sanders-claim-he-is-a-warmonger?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_9&pm_medium=web

I am sure there's still lots of GOPers that want gov't to work and would be willing to negotiate and find common ground. Sadly, working w dems (the great satan) will be used against any GOPer in a primary. They would be castigated as a RINO and a weakling and a collaborationist by some extremist usurper candidate. Our compromise form of gov't has been destroyed by the radical right. Except that the radical right is now the GOP base. Note that during last Bush admin, many dems crossed party lines many times on votes. But doing this under Obama for GOPers became almost non-existent, despite obama bending over backwards to try to make bipartisan deals. When he couldn't find anyone to work with, he just did executive orders to try to get things done.

superfluous

That is really interesting. May not sound like much but what if RU logistics put a bunch of effort over many months into making sure there was abundance of good winter clothing. And what if they stored a very big percentage of that clothing at a single supply hub in rostov-on-don because that would make things easy from a logistics standpoint. And then all the supply was burned up. I am hoping that's what occurred here. That could make a real mess as RU soldiers at front line might spend weeks or months of bad weather without proper kit. I am sure hoping this is what happened here. I real morale and combat effectiveness disaster IF that's what happened. RU probably thought it was a low value target that would never get hit.

Some good perspective on the hard, grinding war of tree lines & trenches. Plus at the bottom the post by Sen JD Vance that set me off yesterday -- bizzarro world fantasy that the pro-UKR folks are all just bleeding UKR for some kind of revenge. It's so utterly insane it's like it was generated by some really bad chatbot. But the tactical part was quite good https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/1/2196681/-Ukraine-Update-A-kew-weapon-is-making-its-way-to-Ukraine-and-it-s-better-than-ATACMS

This makes sense to me, Kinosbread, well said. The only question I have is why the radical right is making UKR aid such a big deal. I think it's because they are paid (campaign contributions) to do it by lobbies that are, somewhere well below the radar, funded by Putin. I get why the radical left would be like this, they are nuts. But they are also not in power, they have no one in power, they are where they belong -- on the fringe. We know that Putin has been poisoning democracies for many years, and this is just another instance I think.

damn you. Damn you, Mitch McConnell. You keep doing things for Ukraine that force me to say "thank you Senator McConnell" to a person I completely loath. But I mean it. THANK YOU SEN MCCONNELL.

Let's not get caught up in words like 'conservative' for what is happening. These people not anything like what conservative GOP was in the past. There are radical, insane people who have managed to take the US house hostage. These loonies are a minority of the country and a minority of the GOP and a minority of the house -- but they are a minority that managed to hold the GOP leadership hostage and now the country hostage on occasion. The rightwing media did such a good job brainwashing the f-kwits over the last few decades that now the lunatics are running the asylum. Just look at what these imbeciles believe. They live in a psychotic, anti-science, anti-reality fantasy land. But my point is that those that want to abandon UKR represent a minority of both US parties. They will not get to continue minority-tyranny for long. I bet most GOPers, while publicly praising Trump, are secretly wishing he'd die soon so some sanity can return. Then they can get back to serious work of making rich people richer, which is the actual mission of the GOP. These radicals in the house are having a grand old time trying to set fire to the republic, but it's very unlikely they will last. They will all most likely be in the dustbin of history after the 2024 elections. Most of them won't survive their primaries. They are nearly all from safely-GOP districts so their seats will probably remain GOP. And the non-crazy GOP politicians will be happy to see them (and Trump) gone -- they just can't say that in public. Because of the MAGA base. The dumbest f-wits america has ever seen. I am confused when I see, today, so many people peeing their pants over UKR aid, as if it's ending. This is just a speedbump on the road. The majority is with UKR, both with the public and the politicians.

back to the war. There's an interesting video here of an RU observation post precision hit by UKR. Also says RU building new rail lines in the south as backup in case they lose the ones running thru tokmak. I hope UKR gets within HIMARS or GMLRS range of that line. Folks keep pointing to the defenses around Tokmak. but don't need to take it, just need to cut the supply lines. Then everything has to come over the kerch bridge or by boat. And yet we hear from 'serious people' that UKR can never take back the landbridge. But how will RU hold it w seriously disrupted supply lines over the long, cold winter? https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/27/2195843/-Ukraine-Update-Russia-is-literally-retrenching-around-Tokmak

for reals, that was kevinkin?? I was thinking maybe I overreacted but now thinking maybe not. I think a lot of forum members would read that little article and be really tweaked. It was a disgusting example of concern-trolling. And he offered no plan for actual victory. Saying he wanted victory, then advocated cutting off UKR. It was like some drunken kevinkin post..... hey.... I wonder if he moonlights as a writer on that website...

David, I am confused about what you were trying to say here. I went to look at the article, but he doesn't actually say anything useful other than lamenting that helping UKR hurts the military capability of the US. WTF am I spending money if not for this war, right now. Then he has this howling pile of speculated bulls-t: Frankly stated, there is no likely viable path to a military victory for Ukraine. To continue supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes” is no strategy at all. It is merely continuing, month after month, to send gear, ammunition, and other combat support to Kyiv. Doing so may prevent an outright military defeat for Ukraine, but no matter how much support the U.S. and NATO provide, Kyiv’s troops will almost certainly never drive Russia from its territory. What such support will do, however, is keep the war going, at the cost of sometimes many hundreds of Ukrainian troops daily. Why is this true? Who says Kyiv can't defeat RU forces to the point of getting back the landbridge. And maybe Luhansk? he says this like he knows that to be true. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but right now RU looks to be getting weaker while UKR is getting stronger. Also, he says meaningless ****e like "need to win" -- WTF does he think everyone is trying to do? And he assumes we all want endless war just because we've been in long wars in the past. It's ridiculous. So we stop sending ammo & gear? WTF does this clown think will happen then? That Putin will sue for eternal peace?

That's an interesting opinion on what's going on. Except that we're spending nearly 800 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR on our military. OMG we're going broke because we used ~5% of our already spent money to actually try to do something, militarily, that will help the world be a better place. What cumulative effect on our country?? This is just utter horses-t. If we had just stood by & let Putin win in UKR would he then decide to not try to poison all the world's democracies? Would he not use fossil fuels to extort europe every time he wanted to? This is tankie nonsense. We have mountains of gear gathering dust and that's a huge portion of what we've sent. And just because I am on a rant on this: How about we turn this around by saying "those that want to freeze the conflict haven't given any thought to the cumulative effect on the world of pulling Putin's *** out of the fire". Gawd this makes my blood boil.

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totally off topic, will stop here. I try to be hull down, just barely showing above terrain. and some sagger or T64 still picks them off. But sounds like it's a 'me' problem not an equipment problem since you are having success.

I meant modern tactical games. Drones aint no fun. Heck yes CMCW is fun! Except 1979 is tough as americans. I love M60s but they struggle against the soviet tanks. And those awful M113-TOW things -- Damn them, they never spot first and never hit anything. I'm in a battle 1979 battle right now and not doing well -- against the AI. That's embarrassing.

soooooo..... you are saying tactical war games can still be fun?