G.I. Joe

To put it into perspective, today is a remembrance day of Volhynia Massacre, which stains PL - UA relations to this day and is routinely used by RU propaganda to sow hatred. This year, for the first time UA ambassador laid flowers at the monument of the victims, which is a very important gesture. And Duda's visit in Kyiv today is no accident of course. I didn't follow it closely, but in my opinion it fell a bit short - I'd love to hear "we forgive, and ask for forgiveness", from both sides ( Poles paid Ukrainians back in kind during "Akcja Wisła"). Anyway, it is important that we're trying to leave it behind, it might take some more time though.

I in all seriousness intend to take a day off, catch a plane to Kyiv and see the victory parade with my own eyes. My wife is not amused...

The day the Russians will have lost this war, I will go to my cellar, take two bottles of red wine, drink them both and cry from happiness. 

I just bought John B. Lundstrom's The First South Pacific Campaign on Kindle and the epigraph struck me as rather fitting for Ukraine's situation right now:
"The 'defensive-offensive' may be paraphrased as 'hold what you've got and hit them when you can,' the hitting to be done, not only by seizing opportunities, but making them."
- Admiral Ernest King to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, February 8, 1942.

I just bought John B. Lundstrom's The First South Pacific Campaign on Kindle and the epigraph struck me as rather fitting for Ukraine's situation right now:
"The 'defensive-offensive' may be paraphrased as 'hold what you've got and hit them when you can,' the hitting to be done, not only by seizing opportunities, but making them."
- Admiral Ernest King to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, February 8, 1942.

WTF is there anything we don't have someone on this forum with detailed knowledge of?  Having driven my Dodge Ram van in enough parking garages worrying about hitting the sprinkler lines I can attest to the height problem.

This is the power of open source and crowd-sourcing.  I do think it needs filtering and vetting (thank you @BFCElvis, long may you reign) but the ability to pull in expertise from so many different corners to make sense of extremely complex problems is the future.  
How we avoid echo chambers and self-reinforcing bias is also tricky but for those that think we are vulnerable here try spending some time in a 5EYES ASIC - we have to hire red teams just to let some air in.
If anyone is hunting for material for a graduate thesis on the future of collective thinking there is about 1000 pages just sitting here.

I own a parking garage company and here’s the thing with parking garages: they are built to a pretty defined standard globally and in Europe in particular, they are built on the lower end of that standard in terms of dimensions. So….they are *terrible* places to store things. They are not warehouses. First, they have low roof space. You can’t stack up a ton of ammo when the height limit is 9 feet (which is a generous estimate for older built garages) and trucks simply won’t fit inside most of them. Second, they are typically broken up by pillars/buttresses/etc to carry the weight of vehicles. It’s very hard to efficiently stack in them. Third, few have an actual loading dock attached so ingress/egress of supplies have to go via the normal vehicle entrance and then be lifted from the ground to the level of the truck bed. Fourth, it’s quite easy in an older garage to over stress them with weight. Artillery shells in bulk would be a nightmare…especially in some slapdash Soviet era Trabbie hutch. 
Finally, a single big shell at the egress point shuts them down entirely. They are specifically built to stop vehicle traffic from anywhere else. So…it would be just like the Russians to do it but it would be quite stupid to use parking garages.
 

Hopefully, but even a 'light' tank takes horrific amounts of energy to move.  Fossil fuels are amazing for providing energy density.  Unfortunately there's some side effects.....   It's like asbestos or DDT -- truly miracle materials for their intended purposes.  Not so miraculous on the unintended consequences.

Battery powered vehicles are going to/ are already infiltrating the battlefield from the bottom up, but if the batteries get good enough to run even a ten ton armored fighting vehicle, never mind a 70 ton Abrams we have already won this war and several others. Because if you can run an MBT on batteries the internal combustion engine is obsolete, and China is the only opponent of "The West" that doesn't go broke instantly as oil sales crater. Even more money needs to be thrown at this problem, but we are a couple of fundamental breakthroughs away, probably. An epic advance in superconductors, , super capacitors or both comes to mind..

It is not all wrong, it is missing some context.  Russians are slowly taking the Donbas, however, they are doing it too slowly to break through and threaten deeper centres of gravity.  As such Donbas is neither operationally nor military strategically decisive (in any sense beside possible negative decision impact in the Wests resolve).
Sanctions can be skirted but 1) doing so exposes Russia to exploitation as the weaker trading partner and 2) no where near enough to stop the damage (I believe Perun did a pretty good analysis of this on YouTube).
US President - we have covered here before, US president is impactful but he/she does not rule the planet.  It is highly doubtful that Trump himself or someone like him would withdraw all support at this point, the Lend Lease is an act that has already been passed.  And then Europe with roughly $18T GDP may have to step up harder but we are not talking wholesale US withdrawal.  Same with NATO, too much to lose in influence and arms sales at this point.  The next US president will dance to the same war drums, but may have a slightly different beat.  But this is a wildcard, so ok put that one in the “unknown” column.
Ukraine in NATO, at this point I don’t think it really matters. The UA is better armed and trained with western weapons than some NATO founding states (Canada, anyone?).  Further we are pumping so much ISR support into Ukraine, they may as well be freakin 5EYES.
I think Putin and his cronies are definitely in for the long haul.  And I think that a healthy slice of Russia may also be “all in” but how long and how firm is that support as the casualties stack up?  Russia has not mobilized for a reason, in fact they have basically tied themselves in knots to sustain forces and avoid mobilization…why?  Likely because a large slice of Russia is not “all in”.  Russia is running out of time but we won’t know when, or if, until we see Russia no longer able to conduct offensive operations.
We can and have gone on at length at the issues with the RA and whether or not they are going to have a systemic collapse, again.  Steve definitely has some informed strong opinion that they will.  I think they are very brittle right now and have devolved in the type of operational warfare being conducted as a result of qualitative erosion.  This is a symptom of a war machine in trouble and still unable to establish anything near operational superiority.  We spoke on how HIMARs are the last puzzle piece of a system that is currently delivering significant effects without any Russian counter-part.  The trend of UA deep strike is definitely going upward, which may force the RA to devolve further.
But hey, keep asking questions and validate, validate and validate all sources…even this one. 
 

I completely disagree. All it takes is one ignorant article in a tabloid or wherever and BFC could be in a world of hurt. Selling DLC with a Russian campaign that lets the consumer play the Invasion of Ukraine might even be construed as supporting a war of aggression in some countries (like Germany), which could lead to serious legal troubles, a ban on sales, or anything else that a small company wouldn't want to take a chance with.

abominations?  A community of gamers that are focused on war history and in this particular Black Sea thread - modern combat with Russia discussing an ongoing war by Russia that is challenging much of what we thought about modern combat is an abomination?  Forgive me if I look confused.

I would argue that there are a lot more lessons than that - this war is the first major peer-on-peer war of the 21st century and everyone in professional circles is watching it closely as to what it might mean to our assumptions.  We have gone at length to discuss and analyze possible impacts of this war based on what we are seeing on the ground.  We have pulled in expertise from many corners and view points, some directly in-theatre.
Beyond that, this thread attempts to cut through the massive amounts of mis/dis information and make facts based assessments as they relate to the war, again very often pulling from open source information, which we try and filter through.  As to ghoulish, well I think we try and avoid the worst of it, but a lot of the video streams of combat tell more than simply stuff blowing up and are a necessary evil at times.
In the end if this is not your cup of tea - and I get the fatigue that can come from this thread -  there is an entire forum to go have other discussions; I spin by CMCW to keep up with stuff.  As to "conversation about CM", well a lot here will inform the next CMs, and for many a wargame is not the focus right now as the world has once again become a pretty scary place.

I think they need to go read the RPG-7 manual. The PG-7's warhead has a 4.5 s self destruct timer. It will self destruct before it lands if you fire it at that angle.

Great, now get those guys clear. the place just a target!

Hey guys, this is HISTORY under our eyes ! 🇺🇦
 
 

Practically an EM-50.

Fair points, but I think it comes back to @poesel's point about economics not being a zero-sum game. The Marshall Plan was not purely altruistic, either. It was very much in the United States' interests both strategically and economically to help Western Europe (and Japan, though not part of the Marshall Plan per se, but the parallels are obvious) to rebuild as prosperous liberal democracies. So in a sense the Marshall Plan can be seen as both a tremendous humanitarian effort and a very sensible long term investment...

Fair points, but I think it comes back to @poesel's point about economics not being a zero-sum game. The Marshall Plan was not purely altruistic, either. It was very much in the United States' interests both strategically and economically to help Western Europe (and Japan, though not part of the Marshall Plan per se, but the parallels are obvious) to rebuild as prosperous liberal democracies. So in a sense the Marshall Plan can be seen as both a tremendous humanitarian effort and a very sensible long term investment...

Without wishing to derail the thread with discussion of old Polish TV shows again, I can't help noticing three tankers and a dog in front of the Polish-flagged T-72. Something tells me the homage is deliberate...

Without wishing to derail the thread with discussion of old Polish TV shows again, I can't help noticing three tankers and a dog in front of the Polish-flagged T-72. Something tells me the homage is deliberate...

No, why should it? The ‘industrial heartland’  of Europe goes from London through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria into northern Italy. That’s the big continuous line. 
There will be new areas in the CEE. Either those who have historically been there like Czech Republic, Krakow and Donbas or new ones.
Economics is not a zero sum game. The richer your neighbours / trading partners are, the richer you get yourself. I can very selfishly say, that I’m very happy about this development.
No region is resistant to climate change. Every region will change, some for better, some for worse.
Replace ‘well developed’ with ‘developing’. Eastern Europe has a long way to go to get to western standards. This is a very broad statement. Some regions in the east are better developed than some in the west. But generally this is true.
Yes. The importance of education cannot be overstated. Access to good, free education is the best long term investment a nation can make. Unfortunately, the long term part makes it so unpopular with politicians.
The plumber sentiment is a British thing. So yes, ‘old EU’ indeed.
These sentiments go away as soon as these population groups get the necessary education (skills & language) to work in higher paid jobs.
I hope this comment is meant in a long historical context…
The only place I know where this worked out is Switzerland. 
If you need militias to keep your government in check, you are doing something wrong. And that is all I’m going to say about this.
Yes, indeed.

Without wishing to derail the thread with discussion of old Polish TV shows again, I can't help noticing three tankers and a dog in front of the Polish-flagged T-72. Something tells me the homage is deliberate...

Without wishing to derail the thread with discussion of old Polish TV shows again, I can't help noticing three tankers and a dog in front of the Polish-flagged T-72. Something tells me the homage is deliberate...