Field Oggy

That theory has a lot of issues.  First off, there have been questions as to its overall validity and application in WW2 itself.  Did it take into account the PTO or non/low-US theatres such as Burma?  Was the phenomenon isolated or more generalized?

Then there is context.  In WW2 you had masses of US “citizen soldiers”.  These were people who had been living normal lives who got suddenly pulled into this war en masse.  Was the phenomenon of “not shooting” endemic to them alone?  While forces that had been in the war longer or more intimately involved in their own countries did not see this happen.  For example, I sincerely doubt members of the French Resistance or partisans in Eastern Europe were avoiding lethal force at a high rate.
Did US forces in combat see their “murder aversion” change over time? Warfare throughout history demonstrates that it gets pretty normal to kill, pretty fast.  
How does this phenomenon stack up against other wars in history?  Am I to believe that Roman legions were only “stabbing to kill” 20% of the time? How about the Mongols?
Then the modern era.  We suddenly went from high percentages of not shooting to kill to murderous lust from WW2 to Vietnam?  I know in modern wars that we did not see mass aversion to lethal force - quite the opposite, we had to rein it in.  So what changed?  Was it sugar, tv and video games?  Or was the initial study flawed?
From my own experience.  19-20 year old kids amped up an adrenaline -  scared and angry at the same time, will go from “0 to Murder” in seconds and sleep soundly that night.  It usually only takes one person to start shooting first and then the rest jump in.  The challenge is to get them to stop shooting, or get them shooting at the right thing.  That is why we spend so much time training them.  I have never seen a widespread phenomenon of an aversion to apply lethal force, from any side, of the wars I have been involved in.
Finally given our biological make up, this theory also does not compute.  All primates (with only one or two exceptions) are murderous brutal little monsters.  Our closest evolutionary relatives are some of the most vicious creatures in nature.  The idea that mankind was somehow blessed with a higher morale standard is laughable given our history.  We impose a lot of programming and frameworks just to get us to not kill each other in a peacetime setting, let alone open warfare.
I am not sold on the whole idea to be honest.

You really need to allow yourself growth and accept nuance in your world view. It's not always US bad - other side good.
You're right, US is much better.

Let’s hope it has its mother’s turret. 

eeer what?  The response was your assumption that somehow "good clean Christian" implies anything at all these days.
Full List of Texas Pastors Charged With Abusing Children This Year (newsweek.com)  have fun
all I am saying is their church going activities should not be a + sign on the check list no more than whether they are a member of the local softball team.
oh yeah well I'll have you know... umm wait, what were we talking about?

Here we agree. I think Putin's ability to somehow manipulate people is totally exaggerated. It's one thing to ampflify opinions and emotions that were there already (i.e. mobilize people with at least an affinity in that direction). That he can or could do. And some certainly just fell for disinformation. But - as far as I can tell from the outside - the idea to leave EU was popular way before Putin got involved.

As usual the anti-Brexit crowd are unable to debate without slinging insults. Brexiteers were stupid, or old, or manipulated, or didn't know what they were voting for and should be asked to vote again once they clever people have explained it to them. This is not debate so I'm off.

I doubt a 60+ resident of a Northeast coastal town whose economy was devastated by EU fishing quotas cares a damn what Putin thinks, if they even use social media. The idea that Russia caused Brexit is pretty ridiculous.

Wow, just read this. As a Brit who voted for Brexit, I think maybe Steve should stick to military matters as this is pretty insulting and frankly bat **** crazy. My reason for voting Brexit, for the record, is that I believe in democracy and the EU is profoundly undemocratic. We got rid of a king in the 1600s because he was overruling our parliament. The EU over the passed decades has imposed thousands of laws on the UK we had to accept by treaty obligation. It was always about democracy and sovereignty for me and many others, not stupidity, irrationality, or Russian manipulation.

Oh you mean football Jacob 😉?
Reminds me of British sports presenter Des Lynam, who attempted on a live broadcast to say 'Cup Soccer' but came out with 'C**k Sucker' instead - hilarious if you're bit childish like me.

War. Nature's way of teaching Americans geography.
 
 
 
 
^Also includes war games.

So this is a bad idea but not in the way it is being presented.  AT mines do not come with the fuses in them.  Last thing anyone wants it to lose an entire mine dump because of a faulty fuse.  So those are inert lumps of explosives in steel casings.  It is a bad idea not because of a risk of explosion but denting the casing and damaging the explosives inside.  This could lead to a partial detonation or it being messed up and not taking out the vehicle like you want it to.  Or you could damage the fuze wells and wind up not being able to arm the thing.  

I went to see Return of the Jedi when it came out.  Was all ready to go, dropped some acid and settled in.  Then when the fight started on Endor my buddy leaned over and whispered "sir, sir we are being attacked by muppets".  I had to leave the theater as I couldn't stop laughing.  That was the end of Star Wars for me.

I think the one thing that a lot of Americans do not understand is that fundamentally being at the top of the heap of a global order means that in order to stay on top you are going to have to "sort out everyone else's messes" or it just comes back to bite you later.  That is because as a global super power everyone else's messes are in fact your messes.  Sucks but it is reality.
A lot of it has to do with economics that frankly I do not understand.  The reality as I understand it is that the US does not really sell anything substantial anymore (at least not compared to what it buys) other than the idea of the USA.  That idea makes the USD the world currency reserve and it underpins a lot of foreign investment into the US - from buying your debt to investing in selling things to you.  The underpinning idea is that the US = safe.  And that safety extends well beyond your own borders. 
I am pretty sure citizens of the Rome had the exact same sentiment - "why do we care what happens in Britannia?  Why are their problems suddenly ours?"  Well the answer is, look in the mirror - you should see an Empire staring back at you and this is what being an Empire means, always has.  The major issue with the US as I can see it, is that the vast majority of its citizenry do not understand this at all.  As you have pointed out repeatedly, a lot of Americans do not even understand their own democracy and government systems, let alone how it links directly to far flung locales.
There have been proponents of the "let it burn and contain" strategy within the US, but I think the risks become to high in a globalized world.  If the US simply stands back and lets things unfold, they can quickly spiral out of control.  Some places like Rwanda just make everyone feel bad, others like the Balkans can see a regional war explode into a larger one and that will definitely hit your bottom line.  We just saw how incredibly fragile and interconnected the world is during COVID, I think the idea of playing hand-off is a particularly bad one given that experience.  Finally, the current strategic reality basically states that if you do not get involved and fix their messes, someone else will.  It is a competitive race right now so any and all options to stand back and let nature take its course are pretty much dried up.  In fact within defence circles is how we can clean up messes while someone else is trying to mess with us.

And the last time he talked about pulling Starlink out was during the last big Ukrainian offensive. Musk's sympathies are pretty clear.

Don't oversell AP landmines here. Having been in minefields and witnessed some of the carnage you describe personally - and a lot of years as a combat engineer, I think I can play the "expert" card here.
AP landmines were always designed to harass and attrit - both physically and psychologically.  The only ones that were approaching lethality level to be decisive are area systems like claymore or bounding mines (especially when in daisy chain...nasty).  So their utility in warfare is not zero but it is also 1) upside down and 2) backwards:
Upside down - like most engineer obstacles you are trading work for time.  A LOT of work up front to buy a few seconds minutes later.  Making those minutes second count is what all arms defence is all about.  AP mine as part of that overall system is a very junior player in the modern age.  The vast majority of AP mines simply are never detonated.  They do support force multiplication but pale in comparison to AT systems.  Main reason is that mechanized made modern warfare - we will see how long that lasts - so kill the vehicle and a modern army is back to WW1.  AP mines were there to make clearance of those AT mines difficult and to kill engineers.  In some conditions they were still used for final defence, but in order to really have an effect you have to employ a very high density.  Go read on the Falklands War accounts of the final attacks on the Two Sisters.  The Brits hit minefields on the assault, took hits and just kept on going.  So as the modern era progressed the amount of effort to put out enough density in AP became entirely secondary to the AT problem.  Back in training, before the Ottawa Convention, we would plan for a lone single strip in a massive AT minefield that was frankly an enormous pain in the a@@ and did basically nothing.  We did employ them for nuisance minefields but these were last on the priority list of engineer works.  AT, AT and AT was always the priority. 
So the value of AP outside of very narrow circumstances really began to drop to the point that when the landmine ban came up, we kind looked at it and went "meh".  We still retain the command detonated point defence systems, like Claymores, so the ability really mess people up is still there.  And boobytraps/anti-handling devices exist in a grey area so if we need to deny critical systems in a withdrawal scenario we still could.  The old AP mines - "toe poopers" - really kind became old-school extra work that we really did not miss.
Backwards - The other problem with the old dumb AP mines was the fact that they killed/injured more people after the war than they did in the war itself.  This drove the costs of these systems way outside the battlefield gains.  Cambodia was really the eye opener, and then the Balkans, Afghanistan etc.  We saw that the post-war impact was like GDP-level harming - the cost of removing these weapons, especially if they records are lost or never made, was orders of magnitude of the weapon system itself.  So from a military strategic perspective these were literally cutting off the nose to spite the face.  They were never going to be decisive on the battlefield, and the post-war costs were enormous as we were seeing large swaths of agriculture, tourism and development areas were totally denied for at least a century unless a nation in post-war recovery could spend millions on clearances that would take years. 
So frankly, AP mines do not make warfare economic sense.  They may feel good but Ukraine sticking its neck out on this one is not worth it.  They will kill a few more Russians, but not enough to balance the blowback or post-war impacts.  The RA has demonstrated a stunning ability to feed people into this thing, so they are simply going to ignore any AP minefields, accept the casualties and move on.
DPICM is fundamentally a very different problem.  The issue here is the "peace community" really functions by fund raising and to do that they need "wins".  The AP Convention was a big win, so they were searching for a high profile follow up - enter Lebanon 2006.  Israel in a bafflingly bad military operation - it basically killed the credibility of their famous design approach - decided to start lobbing old stockpiles DPICM at hybrid forces who were fighting from within communities...what could possibli go wrong?  Well the whole thing blew up in their, and our, faces...literally.  Old stockpiled DPICMs had embarrassing dud rates - although, reality check; those dud rates do not even come close to the numbers of AP mines employed in older conflicts.  More modern DPICM systems are seeing lower dud rates than the HE being tossed around the battlefield today...but if it looks like a landmine and can generate crowd funding like a landmine...
 So the Anti-Cluster munition thing was born.  We in military circles knew that it would really go nowhere because DPICM has far more battlefield utility and in many circumstances it could be decisive.  So they bolted together a convention but there are holes one can drive a truck through and all the major players simply refused to sign off - although the US made some hand over heart promises.  So what?  Well DPICM essentially takes HE and distribute it widely and more efficiently.  When shaped charge rounds are employed the lethality goes up as well - plenty of studies out there, and we read a lot of them for CMCW.  So unlike AP which is a nuisance to an attacking combined arms unit, DPICM can kill it.  For Ukraine, and the US, the employment of DPICM is entirely legal, even if it makes some people queasy.  Neither nation signed the thing in Oslo and can legally employ the weapon systems in accordance with the Geneva CCW.  Modern DPICM have extremely low dud rates as they are built to be self-neutralizing - we are talking 95% and above, far higher than standard HE.  Now as PGM enters the battlefield en masse, my bet is that DPICM will also go the way of AP mines.  If we need to kill 10 attacking vehicles, we fire 10 PGM systems.  DPICM cost/benefit will very likely shift- along with a lot of systems - after this war and into the future.  So the entire thing may become moot, but we are not there yet.
So DPICM will have political costs, but I think they are mitigatable and are outweighed by critical battlefield utility.  AP mines, no; DPICM, yes. 
 
 

I don't think the main reason for the treaty is about the effect against combatants. The issue is that the main victims of anti personnel mines are non-combatants, years after the wars in which they were placed were over.  

To be fair, listening to some of you Americans one can get the same impression. 😉

A manned high altitude SIGINT platform, moving at about 120 khp visible by amateurs with telescopes?  Considering the economic footprint China has, combined with cyber capability, I can think of about a hundred better ways to collect SIGINT data than whatever this is.  The biggest problem with the entire idea is the fact that we are all talking about it.   It is extremely high profile, on many levels, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a strategic ISR collection platform.
If this is a Chinese SIGINT platform, it is pretty much one of the worst way to go about it.
Hey if anyone wants to start covering their roofs with aluminum foil, go for it.  But just know the Chinese already had a lot of capability without going to all the trouble of a freakin balloon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongxin_Jishu_Shiyan
https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-ramping-its-electronic-warfare-and-communications-capabilities-near-south-china-sea
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4453/1
And this does not even start to unpack their cyber capabilities.
https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/china
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare_by_China
Or their HUMINT capabilities:
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2019-11/Chapter 2%2C Section 3 - China's Intelligence Services and Espionage Threats to the United States.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_activity_abroad
But ya sure, "let's send a giant balloon that every bored yokel from Alaska to the Eastern seaboard can see and track across social media."

It needs the REME following close behind to keep it going.

Something for the moderators, this is just straight Hitler speech.

That's not politically incorrect, it's pure unadulterated anti-Semitism. 

At least your Sherman didn't teleport into the Vineyard and become immobilised.  Which is what happened to me on the three occasions I have witnessed this bug.

What - no teleporting? You haven't seen the real bridge bugs yet

Also (but this is just pure wishful thinking, tough I think with some merit) if we're talking about 2024, I like @dan/california idea of Trophy/ whatever hard-kill APS might be available. Might be worth it if only to gather the practical experience. 
Edit: And a meme to end the day with:

Two weeks, be sure!
(old IL-2 players will get this)