Centurian52

You need some sort of ranked choice or proportional voting system. Otherwise you will always trend towards two dominant political parties after enough election cycles. The problem is that you need access to modern political science in order to know that, which they didn't. It doesn't seem like you can ever get rid of political parties entirely (at least we haven't figured out how to do it yet). But other countries manage to have a larger spectrum of political parties that better represent the views of their populations. There will still tend to be two parties that are larger than all the others, but they don't squeeze out the others completely.

The downside of being the first modern democracy is that you don't get to learn from the example of other modern democracies. We've made a lot of improvements in the last 250 years. But the underlying structure is still based off of 18th century political science. Credit to the founders, it was the best political science available in the 18th century. But it is astounding how far political science has come since then. Think of it like the difference between an old tank that has been heavily upgraded, and a tank that's a new design from the ground up. The US government is basically an M60A3 TTS (lots of impressive improvements bolted onto a fundamentally old hull). While something like the modern German government (designed from scratch in the aftermath of WW2 based on the best mid-20th century political science) is basically an M1 Abrams.

Edit: Seems I jumped the gun in thinking I was close enough. I just saw Steve's post 18 hours ago closing off further discussion on the A-10. --------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for pointing this out. I'm finally less than 24 hours away from catching up on this thread (or was when I started typing), and I hope that's good enough because I really do want to say a few things about the A-10. Frankly, I just don't understand why people still think it's a good aircraft. What mission do people imagine it performing that an F-16 couldn't do better? Maybe it was a good aircraft in the 70s. But not today. Sure, it's far from useless. It has hard points, so it can carry missiles. And I'm sure someone will be able to find a use for any airframe that can still carry missiles. But that doesn't set it apart from any other aircraft. Most of the meme culture around it seems to focus on the cannon, which really has me scratching my head. The cannon is basically useless. No one is getting close enough in any aircraft to make gun runs on a modern battlefield. Even if there are opportunities to use the cannon, the 20mm cannon on the F-16 can take out any target that the A-10's cannon can (neither are likely to take out a tank, both with shred IFVs (if they can somehow get close enough)). People applaud its survivability. Why? Does anyone really believe that having a tough airframe will protect it against missiles? Being able to take a few hits from a cannon might have helped back when AA guns were the main threat. But against modern missiles? Even if it does manage to survive a hit from a missile (which may be about as likely as an M60 bouncing an APFSDS round, for all the CMCW players out there), wouldn't it be better to have an aircraft that can avoid getting hit in the first place? Don't over-focus on how few A-10s were shot down in the last few decades of operations. Few aircraft of any kind were shot down in the last few decades. Sure, only 5 or 6 A-10s were shot down in the 1991 Gulf War (disagreement between sources on whether it was 5 or 6). But remember that the Coalition only lost 52 fixed wing aircraft in that whole war. The A-10 accounts for 10% of those losses. More A-10s were lost than any other kind of Coalition aircraft (the source which listed 6 A-10s shot down also listed 5 Harriers (making it the 2nd most shot down), with the A-6E Intruder and F-16 tied at 3 each). And it should be emphasized that flying low and slow is a bad thing. It was designed to fly low and slow because modern sensors didn't exist at the time it was designed. The Mk1 eyeball was the only way to spot ground targets, and that works best if it isn't too far from the ground and has plenty of time to look. But we have modern sensors and ground radar now. You can fly high and fast and still spot, identify, and accurately engage ground targets. Flying low and slow does nothing but make you vulnerable to everything.

A recursive acronym. like GNU (GNU's Not Unix).

All that, plus the F-16 is obsolescent in the US Air Force. I see no reason why we can't send Ukraine F-16s just as fast as we are replacing them with F-35s. According to a quick google search we may be slated to produce 156 F-35s this year. Which means we could potentially send 156 F-16s this year without our force readiness dropping by one iota. Presumably we could send a similar number next year.

double post

For all intents and purposes they're basically their own branch. But it's always fun to remind them of this fact.

I haven't noticed an uptick in artillery systems on Oryx. But then again there may just be a delay as they verify photos, or it may be that I don't scroll down to the artillery section often enough to see the pattern. Also, artillery is probably less likely to get photographed anyway. It seems plausible that they would conduct more counter-battery operations as they prepare for the offensive, but I'm not aware of anything that can confirm it.

good point

No, but also I'm only just getting to what happened in Belgorod. I tend to fall behind on the weekends. I usually catch up on Monday, but it's been a busy week.

This would be a brilliant diversionary effort!

My understanding is that the Chechen wars and Georgia were humiliations for the Russian army. They managed to win because they were invading very tiny countries (and they actually lost the 1st Chechen war outright). But they took far heavier casualties than they should have and the Russian army was revealed to be deeply dysfunctional. Of course then they put on a good PR campaign and made a show of "reforming" their army. By 2022 the Russian army was supposed to have been completely transformed. Far superior to how it was in 2008. The surprise wasn't so much that the Russian army was bad, but that it was still bad. It had apparently made no real improvement since 2008. Either that or everyone just forgot how bad the Russian army was in 2008 (2014 must have been a hell of a drug).

What part of the US? I know for a fact that anyone who went around waving a swastika where I live would be shunned. Maybe people can get away with it in private circles. But definitely not in public.

CM becomes a whole lot less frustrating when you remember that the graphics you are seeing aren't quite the same thing as what your pixeltruppen are seeing. Also, now that I'm playing a lot more WEGO, I like to turn the icons off so that I can see things "as they are" (after viewing the turn a couple times with the icons on). And even with the CM graphics being simplified compared with real life, it is still a lot harder to see things when I don't have a brightly colored symbol to draw my attention to it.

Wow. 25 killed, 40 wounded, and 4 taken prisoner adds up to 69 Russian casualties. With only 4 Ukrainian casualties that's a 17.25:1 loss ratio. Even if the enemy casualties are overestimated that's still a very impressive result.

That makes so much sense out of something that I had always noticed but never thought about.

We aren't. I strongly disapprove of Nazi and Confederate symbols being used in the US military and government as well.

This is worth emphasizing. Nazi symbolism is extremely taboo in the west. I've been happy to see that, so far, my anxieties about waning western support have been for nothing. But these kind of symbols are exactly the sort of thing that could turn those anxieties into a reality.

Sort of. I don't exactly mean the colloquial sense of the word, which I prefer to call a fight or a shouting match in order to distinguish what I mean by argument. I was raised by a logician, so I use the word argument in the sense that philosophers use the word. In philosopher jargon there are two different senses which are both expressed by the word argument. The first meaning is an element of language that is constructed with multiple premises plus a conclusion. The second, which is the sense I was using, is a discussion between two or more people who disagree about something. You use arguments in the first sense to support your position in an argument in the second sense. It is important to emphasize that an argument in the second sense is not the same thing as a fight. There is no reason for it to be heated or disrespectful (in fact if it starts getting heated, it's time to take a break). The parties in the argument should never (and I mean never) insult each other. It differs from a debate in that there are no judges and there are no winners. In fact your goal shouldn't even really be to win. You should be completely unafraid to concede a point if your opponent has made a good case for it. And you should not defend your position to the death if mounting evidence is making your position unreasonable. The goal in an argument is, ultimately, to learn. I was raised to believe that arguments are good things. They are how we expose ourselves to different perspectives. They help us grow. You should never be afraid to have an argument with someone. But again, an argument, as I understand the word, is not the same thing as a fight. Fights are not constructive. In contrast to arguments, which help us break out of our echo chambers, fights are likely to keep us in our echo chambers. Fights should always be avoided.

I never said anything about blood sport. I mean they are a literal sport. Debates have teams, judges, points, and unambiguous winners and losers.

That is not how real life works. Debates are sporting events. In the real world we have arguments (not to be confused with fights/shouting matches). Arguments do not have teams. They do not have judges. They do not have points. And they do not have clear winners or losers.

Well that's definitely not true. Just taking this thread as a case in point, the best posts here are the longest ones.

I figure they could do any loitering munition (FPV drones included) just like they do regular drones, only each one fires one "ATGM" (for game mechanics purposes) and then "lands".

I think I see Bakhmut as the culmination of a series of attritional battles which each sapped a chunk of the Russian strength. The first being Mariupol, the second being Severodonetsk, and Bakhmut being the last. A closer parallel than Stalingrad might be the Battle of the Somme (although honestly I'm going back and forth on which battle is closer, there are no perfect parallels in history, but the Somme fits the narrative I'm trying to paint at the moment so I'm rolling with it). For the kind of military impact it had of course, not for how it's remembered in the historiography (everyone seems to think the Somme was a disaster for the British, conveniently forgetting that the battle consisted of more than just the first day of the battle). Stalingrad will definitely be closer from a historiography perspective. The Somme didn't gain much for the British in terms of ground, but from an attritional standpoint the battle was a major Entente victory. The German high command felt that they could not afford a second Somme. But Mariupol, Severodonetsk, and Bakhmut basically hit the Russians with three Sommes in a row. None of them gained the Ukrainians any ground (in fact they all cost them ground). But each was a grinding attritional slog that the Russians could ill afford. They each contributed to the exhaustion of Russian forces. And with Bakhmut they are completely tapped out. Although honestly I thought that Russian offensive potential had been exhausted by Severodonetsk. I wasn't counting on them moving the goalposts for just how little combat power can still count as "offensive potential".

Sorry I missed it (downside of trying to catch up on these posts after falling a few days behind). But I suppose opsec is more important that my desire to understand the war. I hope it will be back up after the war.