G.I. Joe

Yep an unintended consequence of the war, people getting to see how other countries behave and operate by staying there. My whole world view was changed after a year as an exchange student in America with folk from all over the world. That one year was the most influential on my education than any amount of time spent in a classroom.


 
I hope they have learnt good lessons and that Ukraine benefits.

And in the past few days for the first time since Feb 24 there are more people returning than leaving.
Guess home is home and it's better to build Europe here, now that more people seen it and have an idea what personal ideas they want to bring here from abroad.

Russia is experiencing geo-political bankruptcy, and all its bills are coming due at once. I think there is no way the Russian army last until August. Even in an information system as closed as Russia's it has to be getting around that the only thing you are leaving Ukraine with is a missing limb or two. once that sinks in it is a simple choice between mass desertion, and mass surrender.

For me the friction, incompetence, and brutal behavior of the Russians has been one of the great surprises in this war.    
Apparently the best, most capable, most experienced and to be feared Soviet / Russian unit are those belonging to the 60th Motorized Rifle Division (MRD).  Composed of the 125th Guards Tank Regiment and the 32nd Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment (MRR).  These are the units that compose the OPFOR at the National Training Center (NTC) at Ft. Irwin California. 
Looking back I now suspect the real Soviets / Russians were never close to being as good as the OPFOR. 
       
 
Thanks for your input and service.   Pretty cool to have an NTC Observer/Controller/Trainer on the forum.  
Which has been a real eye opener.  I had thought the Russia army was a modern, professional force that would attempt to follow basic human values and respect (as much as possible) civilians and private property.  I was stupid wrong.  
+1.  Back in the late 1980s I worked in the Division TOC as a member of the 82nd Airborne.  The footprint of the TOC and all the other HQ units was large and noisy with field generators running 24/7.   
An 11B friend of mine told a story of his platoon training in the woods of Ft. Bragg.   They came across the Division HQ, also setup in the woods training.  He was amazed by all the equipment, activity and com wire running into the area.  He jokingly said they thought they stumbled onto a small city out in the woods.  

I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate here, as a user of proprietary DOD hardware and software, there is absolutely something to be said for the simplicity and usability of using COTS systems. A lot of soldiers I’ve talked to would agree. It certainly seems to work for Ukrainians.

The urgency of getting a DOD wide license for CM professional edition is hard to overstate....

UKR Su-25
 

First time that I have heard of this South Korean sailor but I'm glad he's alive.
Also nice to see the CZ 805 BREN making its way into the right hands.

To be fair, that's not really the role of generalist media. Their job is to deliver the first draft of history in broad strokes. Specialist media, like RUSI or Janes, is for the details and analysis. Think of it this way - generalist media is like wikipedia, while specialist media is like a good book. Wikipedia is a great place to start and if you just want a quick overview it's probably all you need. But it you really want to understand WTF happened you're going to have to put in some work yourself.
If you confuse the role of each, you're always going to be disappointed.

Is that really true, or did the Soviet military always have - in retrospect - a kind of Potemkin vibe about it?
Granted, they were very effective from early-'43 through to mid/late-'45, but 'very effective' is not exactly a synonym of 'very good.' Did the Soviets conduct any major operations after WWII? They had a couple of inconsequential and uninspiring skirmishes against the Chinese, and did about as well as anyone in Afghanistan, but other that that ...? Loads of "advisors" in Korea and Vietnam, probably advisors on both sides in Iran/Iraq, plus some AD systems here and there, but really, I can't think of anything they did that was on the scale of what the West (loosely defined) was doing in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.
Also, 'advisors'? Telling other people how they should be using their soldiers and equipment is very different to employing your own. And you know what they say about teachers - those who can, do. Those who cant, ...

Funny - my question was exclusively related to the period post-WWII
I'm happy to concede that the Soviets won the ground war against the Germans in the '40s (while the UK won the naval war, and US won the air war .... very broad brush), and was really wondering whether the Western freak out from the '60's right up till the wall crumbled in 89/90 was justified. WarPac force structure was big (like, really big) which does tend to mask a lot of sins. And a defence policy based on "we think they'll probably just trip over their own shoelaces" would never fly. But I do get the impression that there was a bit of anaphylactic shock going on in the political and military spheres.
On the other other hand, as has been noted several times, given slightly different priors we'd currently be sitting around discussing how Putin is still an evil genius after overrunning Ukraine in 3 days, so ... 🤷‍♂️

Old Chinese dude:
VII.2. Having collected an army and concentrated his forces, he must blend and harmonize the different elements thereof before pitching his camp.
VII.3. After that, comes tactical maneuvering, than which there is nothing more difficult. The difficulty of tactical maneuvering consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain.
VII.4. Thus, to take a long and circuitous route, after enticing the enemy out of the way, and though starting after him, to contrive to reach the goal before him, shows knowledge of the artifice of deviation.
VII.5. Maneuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous....
VII.13. We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country--its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.
VII.14. We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides....
Zero out of six.

...And that's worth a like for the baseball reference alone.  Western Oregon...at the risk of veering way OT, any chance you're a fellow Seattle Mariners fan? I know that by around the time you hit Corvallis heading down the I-5 it shifts to more San Francisco Giants fans (doesn't bother me...my dad's from the Bay Area and they're my favourite NL team). Up here, it's over 60% Toronto Blue Jays fans because of the "Canada's Team" cachet and their media presence, but Mariners fans are over 20% and the rest is divided among the other teams, especially the big-name and/or West Coast ones...
Getting more on topic, agreed on the last sentiment. I'd much rather run a baseball or hockey team than be a prime minister or president. I sometimes wonder if one of the problems with political power is that it tends to attract the kind of people who want it and put off some of the people most suited to hold it... (I know there are politicians with genuine good intentions, but I think there might be something to that).

And when you LOSE the battles...... I am really starting to expect the Russians to just collapse and shatter any day now, An army just can't take this level of pointless failure for forever, or even all that long.

Well, this Oesterreichs Bundesheer Col. explains fairly well what the Russians have been trying to do in Donbas (basically what the Germans tried at Kursk).

(Video has English subs)
 
The problem for the Russians is that the Ukrainians have had 8 years to prepare the defences in the JFO, as opposed to the 1-2 months the Soviets had at Kursk.

I'm familiar with him, and actually sat next to his former book agent on a plane a week or so before this past xmas (by dumb luck).  We didn't talk about Zubrin, but I think we did talk about space.
Russia is probably 40-ish years behind in space ISR assets, much like they're behind in things like microelectronics and NVG.  Most of it has the same root in the Soviet Union failing to try to copy Silicon Valley from the 70's on (and probably earlier).  The USSR and later Russia were/are fine at building big things made of lots of metal that spit out fire - tanks, missiles, rockets.   But without microelectronics they can't keep up with the kind of data volume that you can collect and integrate if you have relatively cheap high performance sensors and cheap, fast computers.  They've been able to buy some of those things to an extent, like the Thales targeting systems, and presumably microcontrollers for various things, but they can't do the kind of mass production that makes fancy chips appallingly cheap.
I came across an article (linky here) a while ago about when the big divergence between US and USSR capability happened in space. It's by one of the space journalists who figured out the capabilities of the first KH-11 in 1977 (launched in 1976) and sat on it for a year until a spy sold the details to the Soviets.  KH-11 can do about 10 cm (4 inch) resolution on  the ground, and there are 5 of the latest few versions in space right now.  And the NRO is giving away telescopes that size to other agencies, because they presumably have better. One of the things that the Aviation Week journalists held off  on publishing even longer was the existence of a second satellite network whose sole purpose was to be able to relay images in realtime from the KH-11.  So the US had realtime 10 cm resolution on the ground in 1977.  Russia was still returning film capsules in 2016.
And "New Space" has changed things drastically - commercial companies can give you multiple daily revisits of any location on earth at resolutions between 20 cm and 3 m.  Basically, kids in a garage in the US can make and launch cube sats cheap enough to do 3 m resolution more or less hourly.  If you have several billion dollars you could do half meter resolution that often, and there's probably a commercial market for it.  The stuff you need to do that is export controlled, and just about all the high res imaging companies are US based for that reason. The USG is the largest customer for those data.
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is becoming comparably cheap and there are multiple companies doing that, too. And it can see through clouds.  And those companies also tend to be US based for similar reasons to the optical imagers.
There were some twitter posts early on about likely degradation of GPS over Ukraine, figured out from looking at the errors reported on ADS-B data.  There was speculation that it was Russia doing it, but it seems more likely that it was the US/NATO.  Ukrainians know where they are and have maps, but the Russians appear to have lousy mapping and were using some commercial GPS units, so even being able to mess them up by putting them a couple roads over from where they were supposed to be could help UA.
And that doesn't even get into the SIGINT and ELINT stuff.  But three things are happening to ISR from space right now - the cost of launch is going down fast, the cost of making stuff to launch is going down fast, and the size of the electronics you need to make that stuff work is going down fast.  So the west has tons of space ISR going on, both commercial and government.  And Russia, well, doesn't.  They have two optical satellites that are getting old and probably don't have anywhere near comparable performance to western stuff.  They probably have some SIGINT and ELINT satellites, but the lack of a microelectronics base makes it likely that those are very limited in capability.
All of which leads to the Russian anti-satellite test in November.  There was speculation at the time that it was intended to produce a ton of debris to blind the west so that they could do exactly what they did.  They did succeed in making a mess, but didn't take out any significant satellites.  And even if they took out a few, there are so many that they wouldn't be likely get them all, and the three letter agencies tend to keep some sitting around on the ground for launch-on-demand, so they could launch above the debris if they needed to.
edit: here's where Russia is with ELINT/SIGINT satellites and SAR, which is basicaly nowhere:
 

Its on the to-do list.  Right after "combined arms" and "logistics", and slightly in front of "do not try the same water crossing more than three times [baby steps]"

I was just coming to post this.  At some point...the Russian navy will figure out it's a bad idea to sail anywhere within missile range right guys?  Right?

Not to bring up the subject of Biolabs again but there is a good article in march rolling stone about the effort to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile. It is a good example of the work the threat organization does and the complexity in eliminating these weapons.   They had a copy in the waiting room while I was getting my second booster. 😀

I live too far from the center of city. I suppose, there were some attempts to sneak on guarded territory of Govt. quarter, because even in our distant district I heard several clashes with short, but intensive sounds of rifles firing, so there really were many diversion groups around. But I have too little faith to the words of Arestovich about dozen attempts and "epic battles" near Bankova street with Russian diversion groups. 
My advice to you and all - never believe the words of Arestovich. Even he say something true it should be divided in many times. The mission of Arestovich is not bring true picture of war, but to calm population with heroic victorious tales. He is just a part of PsyOps for inner customer. 

so stealing washing machines is actually a plan to get around sanctions... devious.

Sorry for off-topic, but I have to post it:
So it's a map of railways in present day Poland. Based on that, find the late XIX century border between German/Austrian and Russian Empires:

Fascinating maps of how old history holds over even into the present day.
The English possessions in 100 years war vs. modern French electoral returns is incredible.
https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/1524040715352817665?t=qtSf6xKyMMmESqNxNjC-AQ&s=19
 

Both, and all points in between (I would really like to see future modules push CMCW's timeframe options back into the late Sixties or even the mid Fifties, though pushing it forward to 1989 or even 1991 is of slightly greater interest to me). That being said, if I had to pick just one, World War II hands down.
I've always had a strong interest in the history of the Second World War, for many reasons. I think a big part of the appeal is the pace of technological change and how jarring the combinations of things that seem ahead of their time and things that hark back to an earlier era can be: the Wehrmacht had ballistic missiles and night vision by the end of the war but always relied heavily on horse-drawn transport. For another case in point, three milestones in the air war that happened over the span of just under two months:
August 4, 1944: First shoot-down of a cruise missile (Fiesler Fi.103 / V-1) by a jet fighter (Gloster Meteor Mk.I).
September 2, 1944: Last enemy aircraft (Junkers Ju.52/3m) shot down by a biplane fighter (one of the rebel Avia B-534s in the Slovak National Uprising).
September 27, 1944: First drone strike by U.S. Navy Interstate TDR-1s against Japanese shipping in the Pacific.
(I'm counting the latter as the first drone strike in the sense that the drones dropped bombs and then returned to their carrier, radio control aircraft had already been used as flying bombs before that, and the TDR was also capable of being employed in that manner...indeed, one TDR operator wrote a memoir titled American Kamikaze).