G.I. Joe

I am reminded of something from General Sir John Hackett and others' 1978 novel The Third World War. Near the end (I think it was in a nonfictional postscript), the authors offer a parable about a turn of the century burgher accurately predicting the ups and downs and wild pendulum swings of the next seventy years of German history, ending on an up note with the West German economic powerhouse of the Sixties... Naturally, the townsfolk locked him up as a madman.

Oh and just to put the bow on this whole thing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64644845
We had a lotta laughs though - cue montage.

The foundation of reactionary politics in US is that many ordinary people live in relative luxury but imagine it is penury and that their kids won’t do as well as they did (Trump support was overwhelmingly from folks making above $50k/year). Their antipathy to immigrants is that they worry they might actually do this whole America thing better.
Ukraine’s reactionary politics is being crushed by this war. The oligarchs simply can’t compete in a society where corruption is a barrier to throwing out the hated Russian bear. And regular people are learning they can fight a war, use social contacts to supply an army, self fund tank destroyer units. It’s civic empowerment in the most accelerated way. You can see in things like that video from a few months ago where a police checkpoint was shaking down drivers. The local TD unit found out and came and arrested them all. 
One can see this sort of attitude in Vietnam. For all of that nation’s problems, people have a sense of identity and a confidence that is pretty amazing. It makes them much more powerful than their mere numbers suggest.
 

I am reminded of something from General Sir John Hackett and others' 1978 novel The Third World War. Near the end (I think it was in a nonfictional postscript), the authors offer a parable about a turn of the century burgher accurately predicting the ups and downs and wild pendulum swings of the next seventy years of German history, ending on an up note with the West German economic powerhouse of the Sixties... Naturally, the townsfolk locked him up as a madman.

Within the humor is an excellent point. Anyone who told you in 1979 that Asia was going to be the peaceful, prosperous engine of global growth in 2023 would have been laughed out of the room. While I remain a pessimist on Russia, there's plenty to see in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe that suggests a better future.

Also extraordinarily helpful and eloquent 'facts on the ground':
1.  Black Horse HQ redeploys to IVO Izium, with cantonments and training grounds sharing defence responsibility with fully 'Westernised' UA mech forces deployed in the central Karkhiv-Izium-east Luhansk oblast 'bulge' of Ukraine.  Think CENTAG -- UA [Bundeswehr] fully integrated with US commands. Fulda Gap. Whatever 'heavy' means, it is deployed at full scale right heah! Go ahead, make our day....
2. Polish-Czech heavy armoured division IVO Dnipro and Poltava (which btw is also a forward TAC base and EW command centre). Attach heavily subsidised Romanian pioneer brigade (come on, you DID get your frontier restored to the Dnistr postwar in 2025, by popular referendum. Do your bit!)
....Here, my pathetic little US satrapy 🇨🇦 can even contract some cranky old EOD sea lawyers to manage private contractors (I could accurately name the nations providing the actual sappers, but it would be distinctly nonwoke) clearing about ten bazillion mines/UXO in Donbas... that is actually the most dangerous postwar work, no joke.
3.  101 AB RCT in Kyiv backstops UA forces on the frontier from Chernaiv to Kyiv. TBH, the UA has nothing really to learn about  combat from the 101st, but it's always nice to professionalise and integrate the 'tail'.
4. Ideally, Anglo-US HQ advisory and training elements -- perhaps Étrangère as well? --  are based around Gomel, in a newly democratic but utterly Anything Goes Belarus. 
Minsk becomes the weirdest, edgiest and most violent city in Europe, the sole entrepot of the post-Soviet Mafiyas.  Tombstone 1889, or Shanghai 1924....
Я твой Гекльберри.
...Notice that 'NATO' plays no formal role in any of this for 10+ years.
****
So now we wander off the map of military into Emerging Markets possibility space.
1. By about 2032, Ukraine, Europe's GMP compliant manufacturing hub, has already reached middle income status on a national average per capita GDP basis.
2. Fantastic yakitori, chaat and vegan Texmex, plus gourmet coffee, is standard fare in youthful hi-tech edge cities exploding in quaint Old Town / university areas of all Ukraine's major cities.
3. Ukrainian biopharma / biotech eats China's (and India's) lunch with amazing speed, moving to the world's R&D leading edge (daily nonstop flights Odessa-Tel Aviv). 
4. With avid lobbying from the private sector (fine, just say George Soros if you're into that kind of thing, but it's pretty ecumenical in reality), Ukraine achieves EU membership by 2028, well before NATO becomes feasible.
5.  @kraze , realising that Living Well Is the Best Revenge, claims 'reparations' from ambiguously legal Muscovite massage therapists, one lap dance at a time.
In addition to his tireless custom but stingy tipping, he also gains some notoriety in the trade by insisting the 'visiting artists' recite verses from Pushkin and Bulgakov on the karaoke machine whilst Performing, with the bass reverb cranked up to Eleven....
Ни мамы, ни папы, ни газировки с виски. Нет русской возлюбленной!
6.  Coincidentally, rumour spreads that certain videos are embedded as easter eggs in CMBS2 scenarios. Shall we say, ahem, 'Enemy Condition' finally becomes meaningful in achieving Total Victory.  Whose grass mod are you using, winkwinknudgenudge?
7.  CM product sales soar faster than a  Stalinist pig iron quota, particularly for the Professional Edition. Steve retires to Stalin's former palace at Yalta (several degrees warmer than Vermont) and makes bank as a docent, with the grudging assent of his wife, while obdurately refusing to fix the PzKwIII turret rotation bug, or sumfink.
6. Meanwhile, across the bristling 2023 frontier, maquiladoras flourish, first in Crimea and Kuban, then in Belgorod and Voronezh... and, wait for it, Chechnya (where Kadyrov  has finally achieved martyrdom after enjoying too much lamb with apricots at the halal buffet).
Bored, totally unfunded Russian generals are only too happy to put their mobiks/zeks/ fanatical brainwashed Third Rome Zoomers to profitable (for the generals) work in sweatshops, picking and packing pills and chips, since 'hohols' can no longer can be found to do those jobs across the (densely fortified and mined but increasingly porous) frontier.
....So yeah, about that combat Readiness for that Next War, against peoples who are presently funding your commanders' beach houses in Cyprus.
8.  Sadly, the shattered and depopulated Donbas will take at least 12 years and billions in reconstruction aid and subsidies to start showing signs of economic life again. 'Clean energy' on the steppes is probably the thin edge of the wedge.
(copains, please don't take this too literally, it's presented more as a counterpoint to the last 20 pages or so.  But such trajectories did /are happening in Asia, in spite of dysfunctional rulers and seemingly shattered infra and social contracts. Take a look at today's Cambodia, which quite literally devoured about a third of itself nearly half a century ago!)

I think their point is THIS is normal.  The only way to change the behavior is to make sure they know they lost, and the days of imperial grandeur are over for good.

I'm not sure that rickety old barnstorming fighter jets are a thing.  Those things take a ton of maintenance to be able to get off the ground and stay there long enough to do something useful.  Sending waves of old jets piloted by barely trained mobiks seems like a great way to make big pile of recycleable titanium and aluminum at the end of the runway.

I was *just* describing the way the Japanese air forces were used starting in '44 to a friend in reference to this. In both cases, the apocalyptic language and the completely internal logic of national honor dominates. 

At a guess I would say it's because of:
* less own-side corruption, which means less wate and therefore less duplication required
* greater own side professionalism (which results in less exposure and therefore risk required to achieve objectives)
* lower overall log requirements (therefore fewer targets) because less artillery
And the really really big one
* not having the entire Western ISR infrastructure watching you night and day

Thank you, this was definitely headed off a cliff.
But really chiming to wonder about point made by TheCapt & you above.  For a long time we were hearing about RU tubes wearing out and the declining arty superiority that RU could expect plus burn rate of shells well above replacement rate.  We've seen that over time -- the RU artillery strikes last June were much greater than anything we see now, and over greater frontage. 
So  let's assume a couple things for argument: RU is in a shrinking arty situation (both guns & shells); arty is the only thing that keeps RU troops in the fight against UKR, whether on offense or defense.  This makes current RU offensive even more desperate than it already seems as they are burning up the things they actually can't replace and most need.  They can make more mobiks overnight (literally).  And if the rumored massive air strike happens in a week or so, then they'll probably lose a bunch of their air force which also can't be replaced.  Which all makes me wonder if Putin really is throwing all the dice?  Hello, Germany 1918?  Hello Germany Wacht am Rhein (the attacks right now) & Nordwind (the rumored attacks toward Kupyansk)?  

To continue your late-World War II German analogies, that could be their Bodenplatte...

To continue your late-World War II German analogies, that could be their Bodenplatte...

We have been having a lot of laughs here today but I did not want to let this one slip by.  Been watching these summaries go by for about a week now and is it just me or are the Russians losing an increasing number of back-end equipment overall?  Guns, C2, trucks (especially fuel trucks) and even some engineering equipment.  That is 7 guns yesterday alone.  People keep focusing on the front end but the enablers in the RA are taking a beating by the looks of it.

To do it right you have to do the whole thing - the movies were a hatchet job on the much bigger story in my opinion.  One cannot do a full treatment of the strategies at play in this Universe unless one takes into account the micro-social structures of its elites, cultural contexts etc, and that is the much bigger picture of the Expanded Universe, not Haydenson and Portman sharing absolutely zero chemistry for half a trilogy.
Thrawn is really pivotal to the entire discussion.  He embodies the failure of the Empire, and then the "back up plan" of the First Order - a genius for failure to learn.  His main schtick was to completely know his enemies, and then continually fails to link that to actual victory; think he might be a book on his own to be honest.  For a bit I actually wondered if he was not House of Carding the whole thing.  And of course you have the whole divided loyalties angle - which actually makes for a very good case that strategy must have context, it is a frame within frames.
I think Andor, Rouge One and Mandalorian are where they whole franchise needs to go (and arguably actually has its roots), a much more serious treatment of the human condition (and "aliens" of course).  Lucas was selling campy action with just a hint of serious undertones, but at its center the universe has more Dune than Buck Rogers in its DNA.

I think you have just described Canadian strategic planning for the last 30 years...

Btw,  if we're use WW1 as a reference frame (and I don't disagree with this)  the Russo Ukrainian War is more like the 1st or 2nd Balkan Wars.
No alliance lock-ins, no actionable security commitments. The major current alliance is defensive and requires voting, so that's a welcome brake on automatic collective suicide. 
It's the time after this war that will make states lock themselves into alliances for perceived security, one's that are more definitively aggressive in consequences if activated. 
Tbh,  this timeframe now is more a wierd blend of pre-WW1 (the imperialistic mindset in Russia, China is alive and kicking)  and pre-WW2 (western fear of war's damage gives hostiles the wrong idea). 
This makes sense in that our current time did not just pop into existence,  the modern political structure is a twisted outgrowth of the 20th century's rivalries,  ideologies,  pressures and security conflicts. 
Of course, these had their own roots in the 19th century,  and so ad infinitum... 

Who thinks this?  Capitalism works, overall.  It just needs some boundaries and people need some safety net.  We can (and should) argue about where the right balance is, but what do people think will replace capitalism?  State run economies are baaaaaad at running..... a state economy 🤪.   The free market, which sometimes actually exists, works -- meaning it only exists when there's the much req'd proper competition, lest things devolve rather quickly into trusts & monopolies. 
 

Right?!  Afghanistan was actually pretty smart.  There was not way to fix that place without breaking it first.  It’s national anthem should be “Don’t try and fix me, I like me broken.”  The US got out before it joined the graveyard of empires club.
As to US power, I think there is a combination of Shaudenfreude/wishful thinking by some, and fear by others.  The metrics of national power do not add up to a major decline.  Economically by far largest economy (debate rages on how brittle and the impending “end-of-capitalism”), which pretty much fund all the others.  Largest and most modern military in the history of the species.  Information power is immense.  Cultural power is also incredibly potent.  Diplomatic, likely the lightest touch of any empire in history - I have seen the US take bad deals just to keep people onside.
The only thing that really concerns are the deep political divisions.  We should sidestep those here as they could derail this thread really fast but on the outside we do despair at the apparent death of compromise.  I think the war in Ukraine has actually gone a long way to heal some of those deep rifts, or at least I hope so.  The US seems to operate best when it has competition - you guys do love a good hard game.  30 years at the top unchallenged may have been unhealthy for you.  And of course both Russian and China appear dim enough to overtly provoke, which is the exact opposite strategy I would employ to erode the US.

I think what happened is that a lot of people...often in the US too...talked themselves into overestimating US decline and the Trump administration really set the hook on that idea. The Afghan withdrawal also with its chaotic endgame taught exactly the opposite lesson that it should have. Meanwhile, the fundaments of US power remained quite resilient and perhaps most pertinently, there's no remotely as attractive hegemon anywhere on the horizon. Sometimes just being preferable is powerful. 

Not sure if I've talked about the larger picture but as I see it, China expected Russia to roll over Ukraine and calculated that Taiwan would have been something like a fait accompli thereafter...particularly as there's going to be pretty big window of opportunity in 5 years or so when China will enjoy a bit of a force mismatch as the US coalition belatedly catches up. Instead, Russia muffed it and the West turned out to be much less of a paper tiger than expected. 
So China is in a strange place. As Hal Brands and William Imboden have posited, China is at a peak moment. It will get relatively stronger for a half a decade and then begin a slowish relative decline as demographics, economics and military preparation of potential opponents gets better. And it's been stumbling badly in its quest for hegemony (i.e. AU subs, Japan arming, Philippine bases, etc). 
Xi's response was to try and dial things back with the US for now and seek to wedge as a counter balance for European countries against overweening American political power and economic pressures. Just as that was getting into full swing, the PLA's 3rd Department dropped a huge turd in the bowl. I'm not so sure that's a symptom.  It looks to me more like there is an internal reaction from the Chinese military to burn any attempt of rapprochement before it gets traction. We'll see.

No they shredded his logistics system, C4ISR and cause him to implode at an operational level at least twice.
The density you would have to lay AP mines to get the effect you want would likely get more people killed than you would in fact inflict on the enemy.  They did an experiment back when I was at CFSME and laid a standard NATO AP strip in a training minefield.  They then had two entire courses run back and forth a half a dozen times over the minefield man abreast.  It created 2 casualties.  So the density you would have to lay these at would 1) stress the logistical system, 2) expose troops while putting them in place even given RA ISR and 3) not likely work like you want as the first 2-3 guys would get hit and then the rest would just charge over their bodies.
Mines are not some magic sticky carpet we can stick out there like mouse traps.  Just think about a company sized position, so 500m across because this is dense fighting.  So that is 500 sq meters in a single line, so if you want high density you are probably talking 4 mines per square meter, that is one mine in a 1/4 meter box.  That is 2000 AP mines to deny a strip 1 m deep.  Want to make that strip 10ms and we are talking 20000 mines.  100ms, so the stopping power your are looking for, 200000 AP mines....for 500m.  Oh, and then in a month or two you have to counter-attack over the same minefield...whoops.
It would be far better to use area command detonated systems which are already outside the Ottawa Convention. 
Political cost - I have noticed a trend here to "poo-poo" inconvenient political realities on both sides of this war.  Russian supporters or fearers wave away Putin's real political pressures and hazards that limit his actions (e.g. mobilization).  Doing it on behalf of the UA is not any better.  The UA might get away with it, but lets take Canada for a second...peace loving maple syrup slurping socialists that we are.  So we are in a minority government situation right now with the far left NDP actually holding the Liberals in power.  So consider for a moment what they are going to do with the sudden wide employment of AP mines by the UA as we send Ukraine billions of dollars in military aid in a post-pandemic economic crunch....I will let you mull it over.
The moral here, is that within politics risk is not simple nor straight forward - it is also highly connected.  So while you may wish to dismiss the issue, I am pretty sure the Ukrainians have not.  They have not given notice to withdraw from the convention, nor have we seen any evidence of violations...and they are fighting for their lives.
So 1) they will not do what you want, and 2) the risks are very real and frankly not worth it given point #1.  You want to make Russians die in numbers, how about just keep doing what they are doing because it seems to be working.