G.I. Joe

For the US, as long as the country a citizen is fighting for isn't engaged in hostilities toward the US then it is legal. There are several notable examples:  Lincoln Battalion (Spanish civil war), Kosciuszko Squadron (Polish-Soviet war), The Flying Tigers (China-Burma pre-WWII), Eagle Squadron (during BoB). The US Government doesn't encourage or sanction it though.

One assumes this is a joke, but for clarity - it could not be more wrong.  The US' foibles loom larger on the world stage because they matter more; Canada's foibles get regional coverage, partly because of the much smaller economy and partly because Canada seems non-threatening to other parts of the world and so is discounted.  
But 'reason' is in short supply with our leaders and commentariat as much as elsewhere.  If the US seems more 'out there', in addition to the above, and to deliberate gridlock built into the US political system, there is the issue of gerrymandering, a pox on democracies everywhere.  Schwarzenegger's core legacy in California is, and will be seen as, attempts to dampen this.
Back to lurking.

Well, that's sufficiently depressing 🙄.  I suspect most non-US folks don't know that the most watched show on fox news is tucker carlson, who, from the start, talks like someone auditioning to get on Putin's PR payroll.  Maybe he already is, hard to say.  However, I am still holding to my belief that there's still good GOPers in the house who will fight tooth & nail to support UKR and will overcome the tankie faction.  
But on another topic, some artillery/logistics stuff here from former artillery guy who's summaries I like to link to.  Similar theme to what's been said here, often, that it's not the fighting crews that are the issue, it's the maintenence crews.  This ties in w the earlier posts about the proportion of artillery systems out for maintenence at any given time.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/28/2138792/-Ukraine-update-There-s-a-good-reason-Ukraine-hasn-t-gotten-the-most-modern-weapons
 
 

Oh that is very good.  Mirrors a lot of what we have seen throughout this war.  I think the major western powers, primarily the west have viewed this as the "poor mans warfare".  However, clearly advances in modern technology have done something fundamental here. This sounds a lot like the corrosive-dispersed defense we have seen from the UA throughout; however, they did not need an archipelago or wicked terrain to tie it together. Even the Finnish approach to air power is mirrored here and sounds a lot like "parity-through-denial" the UA also seems to be able to practice.
What is really interesting is that the UA has demonstrated twice that one can execute a form of corrosive offence.  It looks different from traditional manoeuvre offensives but it clearly works.  I think the entire thing lines up with high-speed precise attrition (= corrosion) where you are able to effective attrit key connectors and nodes in an opponents operational system faster then they can replace them.

General Winter just showed up...and there's a tryzub on his cap badge.

To summarize the winter fighting process:
 
 

Add continuous harassing indirect fire, some wounds that go untreated due to lack of medical support and the odd tac UAV pooping HE on your head.  

I have avoided predictions in this war but I will make one here - the RA is really screwed this winter.  Their logistics issues are going to turn into stuff like disease and cold injuries in the winter that their medical system will not be able to deal with. Troops are going to be faced with lighting fires or freezing to death so ISR is going to light them up.  Looking at the weather in Kherson for example - https://weatherspark.com/y/97401/Average-Weather-in-Kherson-Ukraine-Year-Round  And you have the worst possible conditions - cold enough to freeze you to death but also warm enough to get you wet - and then freeze you to death.
Winter warfare is hard - like “wishing you were dead” hard.  It is ridiculous without proper logistical support and regular troop rotations.  Fog eating snow might just turn into ice shattering the RA and the UA driving over their frozen corpses.  If the RA has a division of elite Siberian troops left in the pantry, now would be the time to use them.

Allegedly three Sea Kings already in Ukraine. UK says theese helicopters only SAR variant, but who knows %). It's unknown we will receive 10 helicopters or theese just reserve crews.
 
 

Today electicity was turned on from 4:00 to 9:00 and from 13:30 and still present now (20:30) Hot water and heating also turned on. Even more - before a last strike, even if we have electricity by shedule, the streets mostly weren't illuminated. Now I see all so too bright ) But let's see next week, time of Kh-101 %) 

Well, The U.S. army entered the war in wool pants, wool shirt and a cotton Field Jacket O.D. (nicknamed "M41 Jacket" by collectors), which was lined in wool. A sweater in wool was also used and the greatcoat was made in wool indeed. The Mackinaw was also made in cotton but had good wool linning, and most models a nice wool collar. Thae tanker jacket also had a good wool linning and wool cufs and collar. The Tanker Jacket and the Mackinaw was loved by the troops. 
The new M43 uniform was certainly made in cotton, but it was the first layer system. The M43 pants were designed to be worn OVER the wool pants, the field shirt in wool was never replaced by a cotton one, and the M43 jacket was designed to be worn over an IKE jacket (which was made in wool, by the way) or even the M41 jacket (which was lined in wool), as can be seem on some wartime pics. A liner/jacket was designed to be worn under the M43 jacket and over the wool sweater which was worn over the wool shirt. That M43 liner was lined in alpaca or similar. 
After the war, as a rule, the smarter British Battledress look was copied by many  west armies, for dress uniforms mostly, while the U.S. layer system was widely copied and used for field uniforms.  
In short, the American system was quite good, modern and well-thought. OTOH it seems there were big problems to deliver the uniforms in time (ammo, new troops, weapons etc. had priority), and, IIRC, there was a  huge shortage of protecting footwear, which caused many unnecessary loses.

Pure conjecture, but I would have to agree that a mismatch on data capture or definitions seems like the most plausible explanation. Two things that stand out to me are: a) WWII U.S. forces were generally considered better equipped than just about anyone else (some exceptions of course), particularly with regard to personal equipment, and b) I'm guessing U.S. troops in that era would probably have had a noticeably higher percentage of personnel from rural areas and/or climates colder than the UK (though if the British figures include personnel from elsewhere in the Empire/Commonwealth, the difference might be less pronounced), both of which would seem to suggest the disparity would be in the opposite direction. More to the point, as you say, the two armies' training and equipment were similar enough that such a stark discrepancy seems... highly anomalous.

Maybe the successor to "liberal site - enter at your own risk" needs to be "sarcastic post - read at your own risk..."

Maybe the successor to "liberal site - enter at your own risk" needs to be "sarcastic post - read at your own risk..."

Maybe the successor to "liberal site - enter at your own risk" needs to be "sarcastic post - read at your own risk..."

So, US GI uniforms in WWII were, AIUI, primarily manufactured from cotton. Really nice and snappy uniforms, but ... cotton is known as the thief-of-heat for a reason. British Battle Dress was manufactured from wool. Wool when it's wet is super uncomfortable but retains heat. Cotton does not.
Anecdata: McDonald, in Company Commander describes being fed with hamburgers. In the Ardennes. In January. And that was a treat as fresh cooked meals were irregular. British infantry units received stews and casseroles routinely. Unappetizing stews, perhaps, but more nourishing and warming than an occasional cold hamburger.
The British learnt a LOT during WWI about maintaining mind and body in the field in terrible conditions. I'm not sure the US really had the same opportunity to learn from first hand experience, given that US ground forces didn't really enter battle in significant numbers under their own command - and logistics - chain until spring/summer 1918.
Also, in NWE at least, the US and UK occupied very different terrain. During the particularly severe winter of 44/45 the British occupied a broadly coastal area, from Liege up to the English Channel, while the US occupied higher alpine-ish terrain in the Ardennes and Alsace-Lorraine. So, on the one hard the British were occupying lower terrain with average temperatures moderated by proximity to the ocean, but their AO was notoriously damp. The US meanwhile was occupying higher, drier terrain, but dealing with significant snow and the raw cold that came with it.
Plus, of course, the US ground forces in NWE were somewhere between 2-3 times the size of the Commonwealth forces, much more if you just count UK formations.^ That alone would account for a marked divergence in raw numbers.^^
I think you are undoubtedly correct that there is a data capture and classification mismatch - how could there not be when dealing with very different national medical systems? - but nevertheless I can credit that there was a marked difference in cold weather outcomes and NBI-rates between the US and the UK.
 
^ although I suspect that the medical data will be from the Commonwealth forces overall. Although 21AG included Canadian, Polish, Czech, etc, forces, and was highly heterogeneous from that perspective, from the perspective of equipment, organisation, and logistic (incl medical) support they were extremely homogeneous.
^^ Comparative force sizes in Italy were much more balanced - again as long as the Commonwealth forces are counted in toto, and not just UK formations.

So, that was a fascinating paper in its way. I had no idea that experiencing cold injury symptoms in the past could heighten your sensitivity to them and pre-dispose you to being rendered ineffective in the future.
Also interesting, although not necessarily that relevant to fighting in Ukraine was the historical table entry for cold casualties in during WW2.
Western Europe: British 500; Americans 91,000
Italian campaign, winter 1943–1944: British 102 cold injurycasualties (ratio 1:45);Americans 4,560 (ratio 1:4)
I can understand differences in national approach but these are two armies with quite a lot in common yet an order of magnitude difference in Italy and two orders of magnitude in NW Europe? Surely there has to be some sort of data capture or definition mismatch here.
 

Warning, further antecdata. It also depends on how active you have to be. One of the less pleasant things that can happen at a ski resort is when the grips on a high speed speed quad ice up over night. You literally have to stand at either the terminal entrance, or the closest tower and beat the ice off with a soft tipped hammer. it can easily be three hours of hard dangerous work on a worst case morning. Even wearing the best Black Diamond mountaineering gloves money can buy, you literally had to wring the water out of them and find a heater to lay them on and your spare pair. Alternatively your hands would just freeze to the snowmobile grips. You can't wear a lighter glove that will make you sweat less, because of the spray of ice and slush off of the grip will freeze you even faster. You just have to have dry gloves available.
And yes it is water that matters,not dry snow. It is a hundred times easier to stay warm at a Colorado Resort, than one In the Sierras. Colorado is colder and much higher elevation. But slushy snow, and icing conditions outweigh all of that.

Eventually. But some basic competence will take you a long way. There are numerous examples from WWII of troops with no or limited rotation and very limited shelter beyond what they dug sticking it out for extended periods. There are the blokes around Bastogne, for example, or up in the Vosges, or the Italian mountains.
Ive seen it go the other way too (anecdote alert!), although granted on an exercise. Now, I'm a city boy, you understand, born and bred. I've seen farms, of course, as we speed by on the highway, but I've never lived or worked on one, and only really got into tramping quite late in life. However on one particularly long exercise mumble years ago we were wandering around in the hills as one of the FO parties in a battalion advance. The battalion halted for the night astride a road and anchored on a couple of hills. For whatever reason, we were given an old 2,000# crater in a saddle between a couple of hillocks to hootchie up for the night in. 2000# makes a pretty big dent at the best of times, and the dirt up on the volcanic plateau is really easy digging, so this crater was massive - probably 80-odd metres across, and 10m deep. I looked at our home for the night, looked at the sky, and promptly started digging a shelf up near the lip of the crater, ending up with the top of the hootchie level with the ground around the crater. That night it persisted down. Hard. All night. I was snug as a bug in a rug though, and my space was big enough that in the morning I had enough room to pack up and prep breakfast without going out into the still falling rain. I also had enough room to take in a couple of strays. That was lucky, because a couple of the guys had - despite some pretty direct advice - had opted to occupy a couple of old slitties. And, to be fair, they were set up for the night long before I'd finished digging my shelf. And really, the only problem was that the slitties they inherited were right at the bottom of the crater. I have never seen a more miserable or bedraggled pair of puppies as those two the next morning, literally wringing water out of their sleeping bags. The next night was just as bad, although there was a brief respite around dusk which gave me long enough to dig a space in the area we'd been given, complete with drainage channels to divert water around my hole. After another snug night, warm and dry, I got to watch even more drowned rats emerge from their poorly conceived holes. There was a lot of experiential learning going on that exercise.
Anyway, the point here is that staying warm and dry isn't voodoo magic. The longer you're out, the harder it gets. The wetter it is (wet water, not snow) the harder it is, and of course being shot at really really limits your options, but it isn't impossible. Even for city boys.

The only answer that IMO makes sense is that we don't and can't know - we're talking about times so far away that there are hardly any sources to establish anything about the "culture" of these pre-people. A reasonable assumption would be to say that all the possible approaches and behaviors were tried and tested at some point. It would also be unreasonable to assume that what constitutes a behavioral norm was homogeneous across various groups - on the contrary, the more "primitive" people are, the more fragmented their culture is, as a rule of thumb. Even animals show behavioral differences depending on the group they live in, even though they might might be biologically identical.
Murder as an act, motivated by personal gain or whatever surely predates its intellectual conceptualization and an ability to describe it with language -  by millennia, perhaps by millions of years. So do some forms of war. As for killing being an organized, group undertaking directed inwards, why say a group wouldn't kill and eat the weakest, or otherwise chosen member in times of dire need, and have this behavior normalized (and we didn't even mentioned religion/ spiritualism...)?  Just an example, and of course oat the end of the spectrum the crabs in the bucket behaviour would lead to a group's swift disappearance - pure evolutionism. 
I'd say that philosophical deliberations about the intricate human nature are quite hard to fit in the narrative built on the basis of archaeological/ anthropological sources, especially if one would like to invoke classics who obviously couldn't be applied directly. At least I feel absolutely out of my depth here.

Wow that took a hard left turn from your emoticon heresy.
Personally I think humans stand poised between the Hobbesian and Rousseau -ian (?) we are able to swing to either pole based on a set of really complicated factors.  However when threats become stark and existential, and we are given license I think we have a default setting that is pretty savage.
The famously quoted statistic from WW2 is not without pushback : https://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-fired-weapons-vietnam-war/. And from experience the problem in a firefight is to get the troops to slow down and exercise fire discipline rather than all opening up at once - I saw little aversion to violence but that is just me.  
Regardless pre-civilization research is showing that we were in fact quite violent (see Lawrence Keeley’s work) with something like 60+ percent of all adult males experiencing human violence and/or death based on wound evidence.  And this jives with other primate behaviours which can be extremely violent - Azar Gat has some interesting analysis of this as monkeys go to war too.
So that is the bad news - killing in fear appears very much baked into us as a species.  The good news is that we have worked very hard at social frameworks to try and control and limit that reflex.  The reason is not really all that altruistic as one cannot stick 20000 chimpanzees into a hockey stadium but you can with humans…because social frameworks.
To your point, it is very much a slope.  In my experience it becomes normal pretty fast even coming from a peace loving society.  We employ military discipline and culture to keep it from getting out of control and taking the effectiveness of a cohesive fighting unit with it.  As to how this applies to the common Russian soldier is really unknown - I have no doubt there are strong opinions (some have been repeatedly expressed here ) but I am not sure how accepting Russian society is of brutality in war and then how that translates to the brutality of its soldiers.  My sense is that it is definitely a factor - the average Russian soldier is likely on a less steep slope than say a US one.  But how much have we seen is a lack of discipline and training, and how much is baked in?
My experience is that there is a dark animal in all of us - what may differ is what it takes for that animal to see daylight.  Some is societal macro and micro, and some is just individual wiring I suspect.  In time we may evolve out that darkness, or maybe we can better control it - cool science fiction idea there…but I think it has been done.  

Maybe the successor to "liberal site - enter at your own risk" needs to be "sarcastic post - read at your own risk..."

Maybe the successor to "liberal site - enter at your own risk" needs to be "sarcastic post - read at your own risk..."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3750324/
This is an article about cold related injuries on the British side in the Falklands campaign. I worked in the ski business for over decade, and my standing joke is that I froze to death for a living, so I have paid a fair bit of attention to this issue for a long time. To complement the the above study on the British side in the Falklands, I also went to truly fascinating talk once by the U.S. Amies senior cold weather researcher. Quite a lot of his EXTREMELY unpleasant slideshow was from soldiers on the Argentinian side. They did not have the SOP, leadership, and gear to prevent rampant trench foot among other unpleasantness. I am assuming that both the Ukrainian winter environment, and the mobiks situation is at least as bad. Now if I was on the Ukrainian General Staff I would spend a fair bit of resources and energy checking that assumption, but in the absence of the ability to understand Russian radio intercepts without translation software, and deploy recon teams, I think it a pretty good assumption. It obviously needs to be checked against more data as it becomes available.
 
I looked for some actual data on the Argentinian side, and I couldn't find any with a few minutes googling.

As an trained, though not practicing archaeologist, it is my (non-)professional opinion that the most important of the early pra-human's inventions was a pointy stick with which he could kill larger animals and defend himself, also from other humans. There would be no leaving the African savanna without this skill (and perhaps ability to make fire). From it follows that we were natural born killers way before we became what constitutes a homo sapiens. If one feels philosophical,  an interesting question is if learning NOT to kill each other allowed us to create civilization, or if it was the ability to coerce an kill others that made bigger social structures possible...
Edit:
On a related note, 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best movie ever made  
 
 

This is interesting relative to what I was thinking about on dog walk in the woods today.  Heavy fog, temperature around 37F (3C).  Living & sleeping out in the cold, damp, even at this relatively 'mild' temperature would be quite draining over time.  But along w the post above it did clarify something I was wondering about:  will the mud-caused break in major operations create stronger or weaker RU defense lines? 
On the plus side, RU has time to bring in & train mobiks, get supplies, dig in, fortify, pre-target artillery, etc.
On the negative side mobiks are often older, out of shape, and very angry about being kidnapped by Putin's army.  We know that RU commanders typically have very little concern for the welfare of the men in the trenches.  We know that RU troops are often seen without adequate food, clothing and shelter.  And many have old (really old!) weapons.  Seems like there will be many sections of the line filled w troops with rock bottom morale and physical endurance.  Fertile ground for fleeing, surrendering or even mutiny under pressure from UKR troops.
So by the time the ground freezes, some sectors will have gotten stronger but some will be brittle and weak.  This is my hope for the next offensive.   Lots of weak sectors to exploit, leaving the strong portions of the line isolated and useless while UKR drives around them.