G.I. Joe

Hi All,
Sorry for yet another thread sidetrack but to update re @Haiduk's laptop etc:
It's arrived here in Canada at long last. I'll post photos when my phone recharges.
The funds raised came to about $1700 so we've gotten a Laptop for Haiduk's wife and major pc part upgrades for his own PC. Those I will be buying today/tomorrow.
I'll be sending everything to Przemsyl in Poland, with a reliable family member who lives there, on this Monday coming, Aug 22nd.
They'll hand off to someone Haiduk sends to pick up during that week.
If the UKR Law is relaxed a bit then maybe he can pick it up in person, we'll see.
 
POSTSCRIPT
This process has been badly delayed on my end, due to a heavy couple of months for me, personally and work-wise. Especially the personal side. It's been...difficult...to focus outside the household for a while. But things have finally stabilised, the laptop is here beside me and the pc parts are a short walk away to buy, once Haiduk confirms his choices. Everything is moving forward again.
 

It's all true, but there's no way they would miss the unique learning opportunities:
 

Mine is. Especially when it comes to joint military exercises with an aggressive country that just invaded another country and is bombing, killing, raping and torturing it's civilians.

Like do what about it? I don't have carrier battle group I could park in Black Sea. Nor do I have magical ninja assassins I could sent after Putin or space marines I could deploy from orbit to lay siege to Kremlin.
The US knew, and they did a lot about it. Eastern Europe had other trouble - they were at that time thinking whether NATO will hold or whether the Western Nations will Munich them off to Putin once Ukraine is done. The behavior of France and Germany in the pre- and beginning stages of the war did not inspire confidence in NATO and while it is unthinkable for Biden's US to betray its allies, Trump's / someone like Trump's US is a much less safe bet.
If the Russian plan of saying "do not help Ukraine or we'll nuke you" and West saying "oh well I guess we won't help then, we don't want to risk nuclear war after all" worked, it would very obviously turned into "do not help Baltics or we'll nuke you" and "do not help everything east of Germany or we'll nuke you".
Not sure where you're from, but the beginning stages of war looked very bleak in places that were invaded and occupied by Russia relatively recently (they left here in 1992), probably in comparison to places a continent away or parts of Europe where people never had to live with that horror.
This might be my social bubble, but even around here - where Russia would have to go through at least Ukraine and Slovakia and likely Poland to get here - people somewhat calmly accepted we are next and the West likely won't help and started making preparations. The "active reserves" system of our Army basically collapsed because of too many volunteers. I myself tried to apply for a job in our intelligence because that's where I thought I'd be most useful as a person good at working with large amounts of data (but I gave up when they asked for perfect eyesight and drug-free past).
Eventually it turned out that NATO holds, Ukraine is heroically and effectively defending, Russia sucks at war because they learned nothing since WW2 but new ways of corruption, barbarity and evil, and so on. The world is somewhat normal around here. But that was not always the case.
EDIT: this was possibly too emotional reply, sorry about that, I'll stop posting until I sober up.

Ok, I sweared myself will not post any mems in this serious board, but this is simply too good to miss. Info-war is already lost by Kremlin, battered remnants of muscovite forces fled behind Ural mountains.😎

Reminds me of this quote by Ronald Reagan. “Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way”
 

It's me.  I've been holding off saying anything just because then I'll get all sorts of pressure from everyone with an opinion on how it should be done.  Hold on a minute, phone ringing off the hook..... 
Hi Joe.  What?  Just send the f'n rockets already will ya? 
Sorry I'm back anyway where was I?
Seriously, there isn't a single person.  There are entire communities, military, intel, state. etc  Where I give Biden credit is
1. He's listening to his experts
2.He's following through and doing his portion of the job
3.He isn't grandstanding for points.  Just slow and steady and doing what smarter people are telling him we need to do.
The issues pointed out earlier about mistrust of intel is based on situations where our politicians wanted to do something and didn't want to listen to anything counter.  That's where you get into trouble trying to justify what you've already decided to do.
 

The US didn’t have “proof” because that’s not the way it works. It had strong intelligence from many sources within the Russian military and government pointing in that direction while the shambolic nature of the preparation gave naysayers something to point to if they were so inclined. I get it…the Iraq War was just one of the times where the US pushed something that turned out to be wrong and it is reasonable for other nations to be skeptical. This was not one of those times. The troop deployments were there to see. The statements by the Russian government on where their thinking was vis a vis a continued Ukrainian state were clear. France and Germany simply didn’t want to believe it because they didn’t like what they were hearing. That’s ok too! But the Biden team got it right and deserve every bit of credit for how they prepped the diplomatic ground and provided (and continue to provide) materiel support.

That, backed up with deep strike and ISR might just cause the Russian system to buckle under it own weight again.  Fog eating snow until we get systemic failure. Then a modest amount of highly mobile mech/armour might bring the whole rotten house down.  Massed mech/armour before that condition is met could just leave it as vulnerable as the Russian systems were on the offence.
Or at least that is the working theory.  We are talking about a battlefield where a principle of war, “surprise” does not seem to exist, at least for the Russians.  And as we have noted from early on, Mass is also behaving weirdly.  However, it is really hard to determine if both sides are fighting this way because it is all they can do with what they have.  Or is it all they can do because that is how things are now.
It is likely in between those statements but how much is key.  Right now no one knows the answer, the UA and RA are trying to figure it out (Russia is failing badly) and they are closest to the problem.  Its why I really do not listen to pundits, experts and analyst that try and say what the answer is, or is not.  I know enough to know that we are kinda off the map here and it is going to be a bit before things become clear.  The analysts to listen to right now are the ones asking the best questions, in my opinion.
I am not worried about Ukraine because they appear to have the learning advantage here.  They have access to all the western expertise and data.  They have some brilliant leadership, and they have shown they can adapt as fast as we can send them stuff.  
News for Russia not so good.  They were unable to really adapt or learn from Phase 1.  Many pointed to Phase 2 as some sort of Russian brilliant re-think when it was in fact a devolution back to an even older form of warfare.  One that did not produce results anywhere near fast or as far as they would need to.  So here we are entering Phase 3, Russia is in worse shape and Ukraine is starting to dance circles around them.

Just started to check. So far, my first impression is too quet - they are trying to process it and calm down repeating this is war, the war means loses, we need to get used to that.
Propagandists started to sugarcoat the losses:
Losses are few, and they were not flying anyway. The cause is not clear and anyway it is not important. Important is calm down and not to be nervous now when UKR are hitting our airfield in deep rear.

Hilarious trolling from Ukrainian MoD:
 

So, I've been reading Ian Toll's Pacific Trilogy, and in "Twilight of the Gods", he writes this:
By contrast, according to Wylie, a cumulative operational strategy does not involve territorial offensives and pitched battles, but a "less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other, until at some unknown point, the mass of calculated actions may be large enough to be critical". It weaponizes the logic of "death by a thousand cuts." In the Pacific, cumulative strategies chipped away at the economic and political foundations of Japan's imperial empire. It struck me that the Russians appear to have adopted what Toll calls a "sequentialist" strategy: "we will march to Kiev 100 yards of dirt at a time", while the Ukranians appear to have adopted a cumulativist strategy: "we will degrade the Russian ability to make war until it collapses".
I think that analysis broadly harmonizes with The_Capt's description of warfare as decision space shaping. A sequentialist attack changes the decision space (the US capture of Saipan, for example, or the Japanese capture of Borneo), but cumulativist strategies (building a metric crapton of escort carriers; destroying the Japanese merchant marine) lead to breakthroughs and shorten the overall war by undeciding things and forcing bad decisions on the part of the adversary.
In many ways it feels like the Russians are duplicating Japan's WWII playbook while the Ukrainians are duplicating that of the Allies.

Super villian and certified genius Putin getting  whupped by a comedian and his friends.  Better than fiction.

shrug.  I could care less what sort of humor the Russians take it in.  They are in the find out phase of this war.  If they want the war to end all they have to do is withdraw back to pre 2014 borders.  It's pretty simple.

As if this is first video from airfield. Destroyed Su-24
 

RU reaction is as follows:
Kremlin ordered RU propaganda to work on two versions The first version is official for the general public - it was just an accident, no losses. The second version is unofficial for RU Nats specifically - it was sabotage group. The Kursk guys with mortar are now running around Crimea with a lot of explosives.  So currently there is infighting between RU Nats and RU propagandists Overall RU Nats are in stupor now, trying to process it. Hardcore ones are in complete denial - it changes nothing. War is war. There are losses. And now for something completely different

Thank you. Just doing what I can. Would like to do more but I do not have the required contacts.

Shrike is a lot more primitive than HARM, but HARM is still relatively independent of the carrier's sensors when operating in the PB mode compared to something like the Sidewinder or the AMRAAM.

I think that what you described here can be quite accurately expressed with one word: a siege. Whole right bank of Kherson is now a fortified region, semi encircled by UA forces who are slowly starving out and reducing it instead of storming the walls I think mamy rules of classical pike and shot era siege warfare will be applicable here - but it is a thought for tomorrow, time to sleep

If F-16s are already in country and not one photo has leaked it would be the greatest opsec victory in the history of man.

HARM is inertially guided with terminal radar-seeking. It doesn't need a lock to be fired.

http://www.ausairpower.net/API-AGM-88-HARM.html
Based on the wreckage, it is also the AGM-88D, which has GPS guidance supplementing the inertial guidance. This allows it to accurately hit radar emitters even after they have been turned off.

 
 

Nothing of the sort was ever done, at least officially. No way to know about behind the scenes though, that is a fair point.
It certainly isn't. The sudden wave of attacks against RU SAMs is quite telling - I don't think they would bother with HARMs and all that just to fly a Bayraktar closer to the front, or fly an odd Su-24 sortie, they might be preparing for something here. OTOH, there was info about Azerbaijan donating some Su-25 compatible LGBs a few days ago (but only 36 units total).
To add to the excitement, UA General Staff tweeted this yesterday:
 

The only answer that makes sense is that somebody researched that as a contingency at some point. But even if they started from scratch, these aircraft would be most available, and known inside out by US technicians - best starting point.

Without wanting to derail too much...you have good taste in aircraft, and I'll gladly accept kinda cool.
In the L-19's case I might have to, seeing as its modern-day counterpart is more likely than not an $800 COTS quadcopter from Best Buy... 😁

Beautiful video.  Damn, I love tanks.  Always have, always will.  Even russian-designed tanks (as long as they fly UKR flag).  I think tanks are not obsolete, because God loves tanks.  If he did not love them, he would not have made them so beautiful. 
Lots of people like airplanes, but they worship a false god. Tanks are God's chosen war machines.