G.I. Joe

My definition of a fully successful spring/summer offensive would be Ukrainian units controlling the rest of Kherson, the entrance to the Crimean peninsula and then eastwards to the point at which the Kerch Bridge is in range of UA fires. It would be sufficiently successful to ensure continued aid if the first two conditions were met because if Ukraine manages it, then Russia has definitively lost no matter what happens thereafter. Moscow would be facing a slew of unhappy strategic choices with few options to change the menu.

This. The big difference between the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation is that the latter is a far more centralized state than its predecessor. Yes, the USSR was an autocracy but power was highly distributed within the system and a lot of decision making was made by the constituent republics on that level. A one party state but a layered bureaucracy and decision making process. In the Russian Federation, there is no party as such but the state itself is far more highly centralized in terms of decision and direction. If it breaks, there will be no bureaucratic or political inertia to hold it together or slow any violent jockeying for power. That's a highly combustible situation.

Looks to me like a fan or turbine came apart, or, it could have been a natural even such as a large bird strike. This is the time of year when geese, ducks, and others begin migrating to nesting sites in the Arctic. We’ll probably never know.

Just posting to round out the shots of the Bradleys from yesterday
 

Wonder if this is true.  I would really like to see one working under combat conditions
 

Heard this one before too. The biggest problem is that Russia did not fall apart back in 90, the USSR did.  This was more like the EU falling apart than a homogenous nation.  The USSR had a lot of central control but it did not remove the internal governance of the nations states within it.  Russia falling apart has no such safety net.  The provincial and regional governments can go some way, but a lot more points of failure in that construct.  Enough to make me nervous.

1. What countries recognize Crimea to be within the international borders of Ukraine?
2. What countries recognize Crimea to be within the borders of Russia?
 
BIG HINTS. Also from Wikipedia:
1.  Nineteen.  Guess which ones, and how many are democracies vs dictatorships
2. One hundred and twelve. Guess how many of the most democratically governed nations in the world are included.

Who are "people of Crimea"? It's a nationality? Maybe Crimean language exists? 
Crimea? Really? Not Russia? 

Now the problem with people constantly bringing writings of folks like Jefferson, Adams, Paine etc. is that they are only valid within American context. As much as I am fascinated by your Founding Fathers and their debates, please understand that around the globe they are not considered particulary relevant or inspiring political thinkers, nor is Declaration of Independence; at least not to the extent they are for Americans. Simply as that- American model of democracy, citizenship and political well-being is limited to US. Don't get me wrong, it's cool its there, USA is land of liberty, shield of freedom etc, but very few political entities (even most democratic ones) outside States were ever directly modelled by this system. Comparing it to political mentallity in Russia is material for a dark comedy in itself.
If you really need to support your claims, at least quote Monteskieu, Locke, Rousseau or Hegel- they did impacted political framework around the world in much more profound way. But of course none of them have anything to do with situation in Crimea either; it was simple, plain thugish land-grab by former imperial power modo mongolico.
Now extending your point, why not even Confederate States of America are  a thing anymore? They seem to enjoy rather popular acceptance. Except for slaves, of course.

In 2014 real number of referendum participants were not more 30-35 %. Many of populaion in Crimea, like on Donbas were indifferent Ukraine or Russia. Many thought Russia would give them Moscow level of salary with Ukrainian level of prices. Naive.  New "masters of Crimea" for nine years completely killed medicine, barbarically destroyed unique Crimean nature in many places, gave many coastal territories under elite real estate building, closing access to the sea for locals. So many Crimeans maybe not enough like Ukraine, but obviously silently hate Russia and many of them in local chats recalled with nostalgia for Ukrianian times, when foreign cruise liners came to Yalta, many rich tourists visited Crimea etc. So, when UKR troops will come to Crimea, most of Crimeans will do nothing due to their conformism. Russians, who settled in Crimea after 2014 will flee in panic. Who will not do this will be deported. Of course, there will be some "idea fighters", who will try to make guerilla, but this will not be "total resistance"   
PS. Just NEVER judge by ethnicity in Ukrainian question. This is almost doesn't work here. 

Very extreme low altitude flight %)
 

I'm waiting for Bilingual Maple-Flavoured Political Yabbida Day, myself...

I think it is a whole lot like waiting for an op.  Sitting around and trying to fill the time as you sit on your ruck.  Weapons are spotless, you can see the map when you sleep and redraw it from memory.  Radios and gear have been checked twice.  Some guys play cards.  We played a game where we tried to figure out the order of who we would eat in the troop after a plane crash - Alive has just come out a few months before.  
So here we all are.  Waiting for the UA to cross the start line.  We have talked thru the scenarios.  Keep checking social media etc.  The kooks come round every now and again but even they don’t seem as into it.  We have kinda done German/Euro Bashing Day to death.  US Bashing Day isn’t even that fun - I mean we have to go back to freakin Guatemala in ‘54.
So, ya, it tracks that we drift OT.  So who do we eat first?

In that era of 10 Pence War comics you also has German generals writing themselves glowing reviews in their memoirs and history books. If anything, peeling the paint off the mythical German über army and exposing its deep flaws is only gaining traction relatively recently.

Minister of Defense Reznikov introduced AMX-10RC for service in Marine units.
 

Even if we could develop APS umbrellas, they are going to be making a lot of noise in protecting our mass, which is hot and highly visible. We manage to create a great ATGM wall - which is a tall freakin ask when one considers sub-munitions, stand-off and decoys.  But let’s say for a second we could do it.  Well it will feel great for about 5 mins before the long range fires come lobbing in.  A combination of unmanned loitering, artillery and high trajectory missiles…we don’t have an answer for that.  And this is before we start talking UGVs, freakin EFPs with legs and a brain.
So in a fight against a comparably UA empowered force we are talking adversaries ISR outside the theatre so “no touchy” or we run escalation.  So we create a force protection dome to protect our combined arms mass. Surprise is dead at that point.  And we would need to load up the FP to the point it starts to get uneconomical to try and protect those same formations.  Logistics and technical support, sustainment etc all stack up really fast to try and build a mobile Iron Dome.  There will come a point that trying to defend our current formations stops making sense.  We are not there yet but I can definitely see it from here.
As to AirPower and “the might of NATO”, c’mon we are at risk of sucking and blowing at the same time here.  On one hand we are 20 minutes from running out of munitions and equipment to support this war, but in a comparable next-war, we now would have bottomless weight?  We would not be stumped at Bakhmut for months…because we likely would have run out of ammo in the first 6 months before we ever got to Bakhmut.
As to AirPower, good lord, Russia had the 3rd largest Air Force in the world and got stumped hard: https://www.wdmma.org/russian-air-force.php
At the higher ends of readiness (always a contentious one for Russia) they have as many fixed wing aircraft as the Gulf War:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign
Orxy has Russia with only 79 aircraft lost, so a pretty small fraction of their fleet.  Yet we are not seeing a lot of Russian air action beyond lobbing well back from front lines.  The reason for this, cited by many, is denial.  Air forces are like navies, extremely expensive and insanely long build times.  No one is going to throw them into a denied space because the costs just get too high.  Does anyone think that if entry costs escalate in a NATO war to the level we see in Ukraine that “national caveat” light are not going to light up like an Xmas tree?
 

Feeding off of that, if you are an American and want to "feel good" about American support for Ukraine, watch this video:
 

Neither of those two factors match up with reality.  
Ukraine is employing a distributed and dispersed C4ISR system linked into western ISR which is outside the theatre.  This means that MANPADs and IADs get cued well out on incoming Russian strike packages early and accurately.  They have enough time to reposition and wait.  We do not have SEAD for passive MANPADs, we have some c-measures but they have not frankly been tested in these environments.  The EW planes cannot blind space-based assets, and OS built on civie IT networks.  And once someone puts a Starstreak on a UAS that MANPAD could hit up past 30k feet.  I am not convinced we could get full air superiority, let alone supremacy, below 20k and might even lose it to denial (A2AD) above that.  Then we are high altitude bombing which comes with so much legal risk as to make CAS nearly impossible.  Troops on the ground would do better with indirect fires and tac UAS to be honest.
ATGMs - “APS will save us”.  Well not from top-down (yet), nor submunitions or decoys.  And last I checked we were not putting those systems on every logistics truck, which is a problem as our tanks need gas too.  I have seen a lot of tank lusters working overtime to show how the tank can be protected and completely ignoring the fact that the tank is just the end of a capability system that reaches back to production lines.
As to western bias, sure.  Almost unavoidable.  But in CMs favour, the battlefield results of Russian armour are not far off how badly they get mauled in CMBS.  In fact the shortfalls in CM are that it was probably too generous with respect to indirect fires and lethality.

So I really do not have a dog in this whole EU fight but what I am seeing on both sides of the discussion are classic symptoms of information operations.  Russia has not simply been “troll farming”, evidence points to a re-emergence of subversive warfare doctrines re-tooled for the 21st century.  This is basically a lot of effort aimed at finding and exploiting the fractures and divisions in a society, leveraging that to either create negative decision (undeciding things, like EU membership), null decision (paralysis by rendering something undecidable) or positive decision (reflexive control type stuff where decisions are made that are in the interest of the sponsor, not the targeted state).
The things to watch out for just unfolded in these last two pages.  Polarized information spheres - Cpl S is clearly in one where the narrative is the EU is ruling the UK like a monarch to the detriment of the “working man”.  While others are being given evidence the EU was beneficial etc.  in reality there is enough truth in both to sustain the spheres and keep them accelerating away from each other - we saw the exact same thing with NAFTA here in NA.  The actual truth is almost immaterial, and is usually pretty mundane - something which some have glanced off of.
And then there is the agency reflex - “well I was not influenced”. Well you probably were, how much and how far it influenced your decisions is variable and likely linked to how much you cared (although there is plenty of evidence of apathy reinforcement).  The reality is that if you were involved in a decisive issue you likely have been influenced to a degree.
Now how successful Russia has been is a major problem.  If they have not been the reflex will be to ignore and continue, which is good for the sponsor of the campaign.  Or if it is over subscribed it hijacks heathy discourse and makes a boogeyman where none exists, also good for the sponsor.
We have seen the results right here - sides yell at each other pretty much abandoning any and all facts.  Someone leaves in a huff, which is pretty much what subversive sponsors want because meaningful discourse and compromise do nothing for their effort.  Agency reflex/active denial and actual facts getting lost in the noise.
Finally, the other place to watch for these sorts of things is on issues that are not only highly divisive but hang in a fine balance.  Subversion rarely works in creating massive landslides, they are not designed to and the costs are too high.  On tight races where a few thousand votes can swing things (or conversely in an autocratic society, a few key decision making nodes) this is where subversive warfare really kicks in.
Now as to how well Russia influenced Brexit?  Who really knows.  We do know they were involved and put some effort as it is in their interests to split up the EU.  How successfully they pulled that off would take a lot of effort to figure out.  But in reality the fact that people are still divided and yelling past each other is a pretty good sign they are still getting something out of the whole affair.

Announcing that on April 1st is definitely a kind of meta-humor, given that it is not a joke in any way. Some clarification/ details:
- vehicles will come from PL army stock, and the new-builds will backfill the stripped units in due time
- there was no info about the versions being sent, but the PL milnet seems to agree that it will be the IFV versions mostly. These sport a two-man OTO Melara turret with 30mm Bushmaster. It has thermals, but not a full hunter-killer setup usually  found in more contemporary IFVs. These vehicles were initially purchased as urgent need during GWOT period and were liked so much that finally we got almost a 1000, including 300 IFVs. Unfortunately the initial deal with OTO was, let's say, suboptimal, and the army  beancounters would surely be happy to get rid of them. Rosomaks are still being purchased, but armed with indigenous unmanned ZSSW30 turret.
- given the announced number, it will probably mean equipment for 2 or 3 UA battalions with some support vehicles. I'd love to see a Rak company to be sent with them, to combat prove the whole concept of turreted  120 mm mortar and the PL implementation of it:
 

pol.mp4    
 

Hahaha...great 1st April all...🤣
 
 

Quick reminder:
"Bureaucracy" produced these:

And

And

 
Meanwhile, lack of bureaucracy produced these

And these

Up till early 2020 I was part of the project that was removing the FOW from our army. Despite it procuring exactly zero weapons systems, it was - is - eye-wateringly expensive, and involved - involves - completely rethinking how the army works operationally. We had to consider the full range of procurement activity (what the Pentagon refers to as DOTMLPF) and that takes time.
Among other things, we had to consider how much of the army to de-FOW at any given time. "Obviously" you want to do it all, like yesterday, but that would mean taking the army offline for about two years while it was re-equipped and retrained with it's new capabilities. Politically that is obviously unacceptable - you can't just not have an army for a couple of years on the promise that it'll be better, I swear, when it comes back. Plus, of course, the capital cost of doing it all at once is intolerable, and probably worse than all of that you would be baking in future obsolescence - all that shiny new kit, a whole army's worth - is going to time out in a few years, meaning you're up for a whole army's worth of capital purchase again plus the requirement to take the whole army offline again. So we were enabling capability bricks at a time, and a lot of thought and effort and trialing went in to figuring out what that actually meant - you want whatever you deploy to be able to talk to itself, which means taking a slice across the army - some guns, some grunts, some loggies, some sappers, some armoured, etc. Which is great from a deployable capability perspective, but wildly inefficient because you're doing a bit of this, and a bit of that, and some of those. And you don't get long term efficiencies either, because the tech is moving so fast that the next time you do a chunk of the each the tech has moved on so you don't want to just buy more of what was great last year because now it's obsolescent. Which means a whole new cycle of testing and selection and integration and training. All of which means that the whole programme is going to take years longer than if you were able to just take the Army offline for a couple of years. And, in fact, the programme will never be completed because the relevant technologies will keep moving forward while the in-service kit will keep becoming obsolescent and obsolete, so we're now on an unwinnable treadmill of going around and around the army upgrading this and that and the other to keep this overall capability relevant and competitive until the heat-death of the universe.
But despite all that, despite all the rework and despite never quite being able to deliver the dream, one of the most frustrating and wasteful components of the whole programme was the extraordinary amount of time and effort we spent proving that we weren't wasting either time or effort. And that was necessary primarily because of all the people out there who think that "the bureaucracy" is the problem.

Concur. 

Also, recent events have shown that the PRC gov't is a lot more susceptible and sensitive to public outcry than Putin's Russia. Chinese civil society has a lot mor energy than Russian civil society does...even if it's too nationalistic and anti-American for our taste. The leadership in Beijing can't just ignore it...their overt messaging notwithstanding.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-chinas-new-no2-hastened-end-xis-zero-covid-policy-2023-03-03/