Bearstronaut

When I was in Korea in 2019 my battalion's (an intelligence unit) retention NCO was a former infantry Staff Sergeant. In the US Army retention is an actual MOS that you can reclass to at a certain point in your career and is a pretty cushy gig as far as I know. Anyways, I was talking to him one day and I asked how he preferred doing retention in an intel unit over being an infantryman. He told me that he much preferred not going to the field all the time or the random busy work of a garrison maneuver unit but that he really missed shooting at people. I, who the closest I have been to combat was 3 weeks at a ROKA base on the DMZ, expressed surprise and a little concern at that statement. He said "dude, it's hard to explain but getting in a firefight and shooting at people is fun as s**t." Of course, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is an entirely different beast than a full-on LSCO fight against Russia.

It's a real Catch-22 because while you are absolutely correct the "possibilities" of AI and autonomous war machines scares the crap out of me.

Post this to the Ukraine war thread.

The Black Sea Fleet Commander is dead. Long live the Commander of the Black Sea Fleet.

Not really. I was a signals intelligence NCO with little access to higher level force structure. Friendly side was a standard Stryker infantry company and the OPFOR as far as I could tell was a normal Donovian (Russian) armor heavy BTG.

After the attack an infantryman came up to my MAT-V and asked "Hey s'arnt, you guys got any spare Javs?" I laughed and told him "nah dude, they don't give Javelins to intel nerds."

When I was active duty back in 2021 my brigade did a rotation at NTC. The SIGINT team I was in charge of was attached to a Stryker infantry company defending the mouth of a pass. We were attacked by an OPFOR armor battalion and we just straight up murdered them. They took like 70% casualties and the rest slinked away under a heavy smoke screen. I often wonder how that AAR went.

As much as it pains me to give my HUMINT brethren any credit it’s also pretty likely that there are more than a few residents of Sevastopol that know/hear things and hate the Russian occupier.

Aww man, I go away to drill for the weekend and I missed the BattleTech discursion? Steve, when can we get Combat Mission: BattleTech? Back to the main topic, yet another ChrisO thread on how crappy life is in the Russian Armed Forces. I honestly don't know how they keep fighting.

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.

Too much ketamine.

It was never going to be different. Hanyang (now known as Seoul) was the capital of the Joseon kingdom since the 14th Century and was the capital of the earlier Baekje kingdom during the Korean Three Kingdoms period. It is far too important in their history to not be the capital no matter what cold, military logic would say. Also, as an aside Busan is a phenomenal city. It's probably my favorite place I've ever been and if any of you get the chance to go there you absolutely should.

Wet weather moves mines. Probably less so in Ukraine than in places with significant elevation changes (Korea). There is a place I used to go hiking in Korea where the trails got swept a couple of times a year by ROKA engineers because it was near an old minefield and they wanted to make sure hikers didn’t get blown up by mines moved there by the monsoons. The picture is me about ten years ago on that trail.

It's absolutely wild to me that Russians can feel that way with a war that has killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of their men and led to (now) near nightly drone raids into their cities. I spent most of the last decade on active duty in the US Army and I felt that the general American public felt that our wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan didn't concern them. In a sense they were correct. Our casualties were relatively light and the war was fought entirely by volunteers. I remember being in high school during the worst days of the Iraq War in 2006 and talking to a girl who didn't even know we were at war. However, I really don't think that would be the case if we were in the type of war Russia finds itself in. Says a lot about Russian society and culture to be perfectly honest.

I think most people will probably answer Close Combat. That's what it was for me, although Combat Mission is superior in just about every way. The only thing that Close Combat does better is the operational level game, which is non-existent in Combat Mission.

At least when I went through basic we still got instruction on some of the heavier weapons. When I was still on active duty a few years ago the newer soldiers in my squad had never even touched a M249 or M240B, let alone fired one.

I went through Army basic in 2010 and didn't do any bayonet training. We were a bunch of POGs though so I have no idea if the combat arms guys still get bayonet training.

I actually preferred hiking in the winter.

I spent a lot of my free time in South Korea hiking the mountains near Seoul. Those were relatively small and were still a pretty exhausting climb wearing civvies and a camelbak. Assaulting an entrenched position while wearing full battle-rattle in the hot, humid Korean summer sounds worse than miserable. The mountains in the north are even more rugged.

Sure, but so is every other city in the world.

FWIW I spent four years of the last decade stationed in South Korea and I felt safer in Seoul than in any American city. Kim Jong Un isn't stupid. He is fully aware that Korean War 2.0 will result in the destruction of his regime. The ROK armed forces are technically and tactically proficient, far more so than the KPA. USFK is just a bonus. Now, that may change in 15-20 years due to the increase in isolationist sentiment in the US and the absolutely catastrophic demographic collapse South Korea is going through.

Ukraine won the war when the Russians retreated from the Kyiv axis in April 2022. Not even the most deranged vatniks think that Russia taking Kyiv and imposing regime change is possible anymore. No matter what happens (excepting nuclear war) Ukraine will remain an independent state even if it isn't able to recover the annexed territories.

True, but Russia also denied sending troops into Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 and that their troops shot down a civilian airliner despite everyone knowing that they were full of it.

I fail to see an upside for Wagner in ****ing around in Poland. They would do a little bit of damage and then get utterly annihilated by Polish and US QRF while the Russian government says "they are terrorists that we have no control over" and washes their hands of the situation.

When I was in high school my little sister and her friend poured baking soda into a glass vinegar bottle in our backyard and screwed the top back on. It exploded and my sister took a big piece of shrapnel in her leg. Her friend was miraculously unharmed considering that they were standing only a few meters away. I had to drive my sister to the ER to get the shrapnel removed and her wound stitched up. She still has a gnarly scar on her thigh from the incident.