Maquisard manqué

guys keep it up and we are going to have to discuss if Dragoons carry a purse like mine.  That is critical info to know.

I don't think it's so simple. They've been brought up in a jar (you might even call it a psychotic one) - what better do they know? I can totally see why you're short on compassion for them, but they are no more than a product of their environment.
You know, there was some talk of Orcs earlier in the thread. It struck in my mind that Tolkien regreted writing them so one-dimensionaly evil.
But as i said, i can't actually put myself in your shoes right now. Clean hummanist hands are easier to maintain from distance.

I don't think it's so simple. They've been brought up in a jar (you might even call it a psychotic one) - what better do they know? I can totally see why you're short on compassion for them, but they are no more than a product of their environment.
You know, there was some talk of Orcs earlier in the thread. It struck in my mind that Tolkien regreted writing them so one-dimensionaly evil.
But as i said, i can't actually put myself in your shoes right now. Clean hummanist hands are easier to maintain from distance.

I think there's a lot of observer bias in general. Maybe it's factored in by those with intelligence experience but I feel like I'm only seeing the super-salient bits that make up the possible "edge" of the real shape of what's going on, rather than the centre or actual contents of the shape. I am not used to consuming propaganda (or at least a different flavour of it) so what is coming out of Ukraine feels uncertain. Fog of War you might say.
My thoughts are with all Ukrainians. I hate that their world is being shredded. I simply cannot comprehend what this trauma is like.
I do also have compassion for the Russian conscripts, if i'm honest. They're only kids. Pawns thrown into the grinder.
 

I don't think it's so simple. They've been brought up in a jar (you might even call it a psychotic one) - what better do they know? I can totally see why you're short on compassion for them, but they are no more than a product of their environment.
You know, there was some talk of Orcs earlier in the thread. It struck in my mind that Tolkien regreted writing them so one-dimensionaly evil.
But as i said, i can't actually put myself in your shoes right now. Clean hummanist hands are easier to maintain from distance.

The cost to rebuild what the Russians destroyed is going to be immense. I doubt Russia will agree to it, but taking some of the assets frozen to rebuild what they destroyed would be in order.

I didn't know The Guardian is now ran by our DoD.
How about checking actual official source?
https://www.mil.gov.ua/news/2022/03/10/vtrati-rosijskih-okupantiv-stanovlyat-ponad-12-000-osib-znishheno-majzhe-2400-odinicz-vorozhogo-ozbroennya-i-vijskovoi-tehniki-–-generalnij-shtab-zs-ukraini/
Втрата translates to loss, not 'death'
Our DoD doesn't calculate dead or wounded because that's impossible. But press is uneducated in milspeak.
So again, check actual sources
 

So I kinda fall back on my assessment:
Russian forces don't control sh#t right now, but they are terrorizing everywhere and none of that is good from a long term occupation standpoint.

As much as I sympathize with UKR I agree with @Maquisard manqué  It isn''t so simple.  Using my home country as an example, we all have access to the same info.  However you still end up with a spectrum of views that is all over the place and in many cases extremely all over the place.  Then you add the bubbles we create for ourselves in social media and it accelerates.  That is without a government driven narrative that has control of most of the media sources.  Saying people have access and should know better.. well that hasn't worked so well in our response to the pandemic much less human enemies.
I see those pics of the attack on that hospital in Mariupol and part of me wants to see Ukraine doing mass trials of Russian prisoners for war crimes right now.  That however is an emotional response that would be counter to Ukraine's war effort and counter productive.

So first, that is horrible and constitutes a warcrime reckoning. 
Second, it is the single worst way to try and manage local security when occupying another nation.  For every home invaded and people hurt  or killed, you make dedicated resistance go deeper and meaner.  Russian patrols start go go missing and sentries found dead.
Third, it is patchwork at best.  So I suspect that locals in these "red zones" still have the means to communicate.  Question is, do they have the ways.  Not sure if that Starlink thing every amounted to anything but unless the Russians have finally gripped the communications networks in controlled areas they are literally shooting themselves in the face.
Fourth, this control is porous, there is simply not enough Russian manpower to control this amount of area.  So farmers have cellhones, they definitely have reason to use them, the only question left is can they.  Regardless your original point that finding Russian command centers is very likely a level up from the local support networks...enter western ISR support here as well.

Definitely fuzzy pictures but I am getting more confident by the day on some things:
- Russian forces have stalled operationally.  Will they get it back? Dunno
- Operational pre-conditions were not met in air, info or logistics.  Russians are likely trying for some of these but have little to show for it so far. 
- By all metrics and analysis the Russians have lost a significant amount of men and material.  Further the nature of those losses point to system failures in the Russian C2 and logistical system.
- The Ukrainians have exploited all three of those points above and continue to a level that is starting to lead to some questioning some of our fundamental theories of how war is supposed to work.  Early days but we will see.
A lot of these observations are not based, at least on my end, on what I am seeing through the heavily filtered lenses, it is what I am not seeing.  Or still seeing that should not be there.  These negatives tell as much as the positives on social media.

This is not door-to-door control. This is door-to-door robbing. This happened in occupied Hostomel, Bucha, Irpin', Borodianka, Ivankiv. Russians burst in the appartments and houses, rob the phones, but mostly a food. They terrorized citizens, beat the men and sometime shot them - to the death or just make wounds. There were several rapes. Citizens, evacuated from these towns in last days via "green corridors" tell horrible things. 

Well I am a trained military strategist and all I can say is we are at the tip of what could be a very deep iceberg - that, and most trained military strategist have no real idea what is happening in this war either. 
Your home team/social media observations are valid and another sign the Russians did not set pre-conditions.  I did a post awhile back on the vertical dimension of this war for the Ukrainians which very much captures a lot of this.  The question for all militaries is "how do we do this in the away game?" and "how do we protect it in the home game?"...or simply "how do we establish information superiority?"  [aside: think how weird this would get in a civil war].
So this is the concept of self-synchronization - distributed groups able to synchronize and organize organically outside of a C2 framework.  I think we are seeing a lot of this right now and the question is really how to box it up and employ it anywhere while denying the same to an opponent?
For an invading force, this gets into field networks based on a lot of different communications systems designed to weather denial.  You cannot depend on local support, so you turn that off and then have a networked system that allows your own forces to self-synchronize in motion.  In the home game, we have no doctrine to describe what is happening here - basically crowd sourcing ISR, but it is happening.
This speaks back to my original point that I am not sure the Ukrainians need a lot of concentrated mass outside of the urban environments a this point, it may be counter-productive. Unless they can really manage the time and place as a crushing blow to the Russians at an operational level.
I think at a strategic and operational level the Ukrainians are getting a lot of outside ISR support, it is one of the few things the west can do inside the Ukraine right now.  But how that picture is meeting the publicly generated one is also going to be very interesting as I am sure there needs to be a level of deconfliction occurring as the UA does not control the public system and mis/dis information will no doubt be fed into it as well.
As to the famous OODA loop, I am not sure to be honest.  I am not sure the speed of that loop matters as much as the quality of it.  I can see the Russians making bad decisions faster while the UA is making better ones slower.   

This can work during column passes or until Russians completely keep the ground and rarely works in enemy's rear on occupied territories. In Kyiv oblast occupied villages you CAN'T go out from your house if Russians stay there. You have a risk to be shot out immediately. In occupied villages Russians often take away the phones from a locals. Not only for security reasons, but just because they want to rob. But even if you was a lucky and kept your phone, you should be real partisan to walk in unknown place to search Russian troops. If some in the forest Russian command center of SAM battery are deployed, you can't walk there and make a shot for FB. Command centers are guarded. You even can't transmit your picture if you will lucky to sneak and make a shot, because often GSM netwok is jammed. 
So, uncovering of command centers is a work of our SIGINT, recons and SOFs. Civilians via FB make great work too, but to say all recon work is making farmers with the phones is deeply mistakingly. 

Let me start by saying I am not a trained military strategist.  I am an armchair warrior/historian who's experience is all from gaming.  In other words, I know ****e.
That being said I think there is more here than what you have noted regarding a change in warfare.  I think much of what you have noted for the Ukrainians only works for the home team.  One example is Ukrainian use of facebook to involve their whole population in the ISR game.  I believe there was at least one example the UKR posted of a strike accomplished via info gained from one such facebook post. The proliferation of mobile communication devices with geo location to the entire population and the ability to harness that is something I think the UKR is learning to use that is new on the battlefield.  In a sense it is that big data/machine learning buzz word applied to the battlefield.
There has been some conjecture on these pages about how the UKR is managing to hit so much of Russia's command structure.  I think there is some observer bias built in there.  We have seen some examples but nothing that tells me the UKR is doing something that uniformly effective or that heavily relies on Western Intel.  Not that I don't think they are getting that, but it is just as believable to me that some UKR teenager took a pic of some Russians on their phone and loaded them up to that facebook page and UKR intel spotted it and said - huh so that's where those guys were 30 minutes ago.  They then pass that back to some group tasked with targeting orders and either field it to a drone, a Spec OPs unit or a local commander that has some teams in the field.  Add to that Russian comms suck and they are frequently communicating in the open.
Going back to that Vietnam analogy. You still have that scenario of an invading army facing a hostile population.  Now however that hostile population has the means to communicate in near real time to a central military organization that has the means to convert that info to effective battlefield decisions with military hardware that dovetails in capability.  The old OODA loop has been magnified with additional intel sources and weapons.
For an invader some of that still works, but minus a thousand eyes and ears.

CM need to consider adjusting scales within the editor...
Motivation: Poor thru to Ukrainian
Leadership: -2 thru to Zelensky

I also thought it was a fair question, and a good answer.

FWIW, I think it was a reasonable question, and it was reasonably answered.  No need to lock IMHO.

yes, there have been "visible minority" pixeltruppen since SF1 days.
Here is a CW screenshot I took some times back.

It may be hard to spot but the Russians in the titles include a number of central Asian textures, though the common head model isn't really amenable to those  textures. Recently I did some tests, trying to create female faces for the standard model. It came out better than expected. If for CMBS module I get the order 'Include female soldiers in the Croatian army' I'll be able to do it.

I can see why you'd think that. Fair enough.
I knew it'd be rash to ask and am now kicking myself for not researching it thoroughly. Again, I am glad to be wrong!

Hello, this is probably not the best way to start off in a forum/community and at the risk of upsetting the more grog minded, I wondered if a sci-fi or future war type setting had ever been considered for CM games?
I can answer the question myself in that the CM USP is about simulation/realism, anathema to fictional settings. Lots of the player base (like me!) are presumably drawn to the vicarious fantasy of historical armchair generaldom.
On the other hand, I've been playing a mod of Hearts of Iron 4 set in the Fallout universe (Old World Blues) and I've been having a blast with the combination of setting, mechanics and a mix of familiar and unfamiliar technologies. It got me thinking how a CM game would play in the Fallout universe, power armour platoons mixed with robots, regular infantry, irregulars and AFVs. Also, the notion of walkers etc like AT-ATs (for want of a better example) or others (and setting aside how silly they might be e.g. does this thing have a hull down mode?).
Anyway, I'm sure its more likely the realm of a mod given possible licensing restrictions and I totally see it as a different direction for the CM brand, so most unlikely. Nonetheless, I'd be interested in the challenge of a more fictional setting with wilder units. Any thoughts?

Hello, this is probably not the best way to start off in a forum/community and at the risk of upsetting the more grog minded, I wondered if a sci-fi or future war type setting had ever been considered for CM games?
I can answer the question myself in that the CM USP is about simulation/realism, anathema to fictional settings. Lots of the player base (like me!) are presumably drawn to the vicarious fantasy of historical armchair generaldom.
On the other hand, I've been playing a mod of Hearts of Iron 4 set in the Fallout universe (Old World Blues) and I've been having a blast with the combination of setting, mechanics and a mix of familiar and unfamiliar technologies. It got me thinking how a CM game would play in the Fallout universe, power armour platoons mixed with robots, regular infantry, irregulars and AFVs. Also, the notion of walkers etc like AT-ATs (for want of a better example) or others (and setting aside how silly they might be e.g. does this thing have a hull down mode?).
Anyway, I'm sure its more likely the realm of a mod given possible licensing restrictions and I totally see it as a different direction for the CM brand, so most unlikely. Nonetheless, I'd be interested in the challenge of a more fictional setting with wilder units. Any thoughts?

Hello, this is probably not the best way to start off in a forum/community and at the risk of upsetting the more grog minded, I wondered if a sci-fi or future war type setting had ever been considered for CM games?
I can answer the question myself in that the CM USP is about simulation/realism, anathema to fictional settings. Lots of the player base (like me!) are presumably drawn to the vicarious fantasy of historical armchair generaldom.
On the other hand, I've been playing a mod of Hearts of Iron 4 set in the Fallout universe (Old World Blues) and I've been having a blast with the combination of setting, mechanics and a mix of familiar and unfamiliar technologies. It got me thinking how a CM game would play in the Fallout universe, power armour platoons mixed with robots, regular infantry, irregulars and AFVs. Also, the notion of walkers etc like AT-ATs (for want of a better example) or others (and setting aside how silly they might be e.g. does this thing have a hull down mode?).
Anyway, I'm sure its more likely the realm of a mod given possible licensing restrictions and I totally see it as a different direction for the CM brand, so most unlikely. Nonetheless, I'd be interested in the challenge of a more fictional setting with wilder units. Any thoughts?