NamEndedAllen
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Posts posted by NamEndedAllen
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5 hours ago, danfrodo said:
If you think that's funny, you would've found Rush Limbaugh hilarious
Well, he DID say he was really just an entertainer. Or was that his comrade AlexJones? Of course, TOKYO ROSE and AXIS SALLY(s) also performed “entertainment”. In the service of the actual Nazis and their allies in Japan. Some things never change. But meanwhile, a certain forum member’s fervent plea, “Are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet” has finally been answered.
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3 hours ago, FancyCat said:
Just about time for this. With all the sturm and drang down southish. I’ve been hoping to see this, perhaps crashing into and past Svatove, Kreminna line. Or?
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6 hours ago, cesmonkey said:
cesmonkey quoted this from the invaders’ side, he did NOT say it himself!
“The evening on the Zaporizhia Front began with massive artillery preparation by the Nazis”.
It’s funny seeing the Nazis call other people “Nazis”.
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"Dear residents of the Ukrainian Crimea! The Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps will soon make a raid of volunteers on the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which is temporarily occupied by the Putin regime,” the message stated, according to the Crimea Partisans Telegram channel, which is dedicated to the liberation of the peninsula. “We, volunteers of free Russia, consider it our duty to help the Crimeans clear the peninsula of the war criminal Putin Please remain calm and assist us as much as possible."
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-partisans-threaten-crimean-incursion-next -
8 hours ago, dan/california said:
Oddly enough the attack is happening in one of the least fortified areas.
(shhh: “hit ‘em where they ain’t…hit ‘em where they ain’t…hit ‘em where they ain’t”…and THEN…!)
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1 hour ago, danfrodo said:
And what the holy hell is going on w the raids into Russia? Seems these are causing a lot more trouble than I would've imagined.
Just a wild thought. Remember that idea long ago about the “shortcut” sweep up across the Russkie border and then back down again into Ukraine? While in general these raids would seem intended in part to draw some Russian combat units to the area, they might instead draw other border units in the region, thinning that rehion even further. Because Russians of course wouldn’t want to fall for Ukraine “obvious” feints, and draw off front line units as the offensive draws near. Clearly there are problems with the notion: Ukraine regular units, armed with USA weapons aren’t supposed to cross Russia’s Magic Border. And certainly would be crossing a (political) line! But I keep hearing a voice saying, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”
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NATO-trained units will serve as tip of spear in Ukraine’s counteroffensive
-(Wash Post) By Isabelle Khurshudyan and Kamila Hrabchuk June 4, 2023 at 9:50 a.m. PTWhen Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive finally begins, the fight will be led by brigades armed not only with Western weapons but also Western know-how, gleaned from months of training aimed at transforming Ukraine’s military into a modern force skilled in NATO’s most advanced warfare tactics. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/04/ukraine-nato-training-counteroffensive-47th-brigade/
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1 hour ago, George MC said:
I’ve used the whiteboard function in Windows - by importing a screenshot of the map (you can import multiple copies see later) then annotating that as I go, including using post-it’s etc. you can also use this to track different phases of the e battle by using a fresh copy. Saves everything getting to cluttered.
You can also export the mission briefing via the editor and copy/paste relevant info from this into your whiteboard.
For smaller scenarios I’ve also used the IPad and imported image and annotate using Apple Pencil but find for larger scenarios the screen size constrains things. Though this is more accessible.
Cheery!
George
Thanks, George. I will look into Whiteboard. And thank you for your superb CM work. Partly your fault I have to solve this!
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47 minutes ago, Vet 0369 said:
No team has ever come back after a 0-3 deficit to win the series
Not looking real good as the second quarter winds down. The truism of “Live by the 3, Die by the 3” being emphatically demonstrated. So far.
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Remember this? 2014. It’s been nine long years. And oceans of blood, sweat and tears:
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War fueling the advance of drone technologies
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1 hour ago, The_Capt said:
Never said THE sole cause, not once. Most objective research and analysis see it as a major contributing factor in a 50 year program that encompassed a lot of efforts, economic not the least of them.
As I said, we do largely agree. The disconnect may be the implication of how fundamental military spending was. If you weren’t meaning to assert this, my and possibly other pushbacks’ misunderstanding.
1 hour ago, The_Capt said:are suggesting that western military spending and the of the Soviet Union were entirely decoupled.
No one here suggested that, apart perhaps from my opinion in response to your thought experiment - that even with a “normal” degree of arms spending, the internal and often bizarre and/or cruel ideological rather than fact and market based economic and “governance” (autocratic , dictatorial) the USSR was a house of cards. Always one or two crises away from disintegration.
BTW, I don’t think anyone is relying on a single Atlantic article for the discussion. It was a good one that’s run its course, raising some good points. Complex, huge society of disparate societies, filled with contradictions and bad decisions. No one single cause of longterm failure necessary. On that, I believe we all agree.
Thanks again. -
1 minute ago, The_Capt said:
Fair point, like I said it was one major pressure but also not the only major pressure. I do wonder if the USSR could not have reinvented itself much in the same way communist China did? It was a flawed system however clearly when allowed to evolve somewhat can, and does work in a sense. Of course the heart of the thing is current hemorrhaging all over Ukraine so the odds of enlightened evolution look to be slim in hindsight.
I do think the other military contribution to the USSRs defeat was containment. Like Nazi Germany the USSR only theoretically “worked” if it was able to continually expand, pulling in more and more resources to feed the corrupt bloated monster. Expansion was key to its survival and that was blunted and compressed a lot by western military affairs in concert with other elements of power.
Looking forward, after this war, we are going to have a very sore Russia with less to lose - assuming it survives the landing. China continues to rise while running out of soft/smart/sharp power runway to fuel its expansion, while it also deals with internal frictions and sore spots. There will likely be an acceleration of the Outsiders club in pulling away from the West and pulling in more members. This will not be a repeat of the Cold War but instead be something far more insidious and vicious I suspect. Hard choices are in front of us, this war in Ukraine was the first real one and I am heartened to see we appear to have passed the test, at least so far.
Good conversation, and thanks for sticking with the back and forth. I agree with much of your points. We end up at the same collapse “peak”, perhaps by different but not really contradictory routes. Your point about the entire mindset caused by the military competition with the West and how that contributed to distort everything else in one way or another makes a lot of sense.
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4 hours ago, The_Capt said:
. I would need to see a lot more than a couple articles
An unbiased search of the literature about the USSR economic collapse is not displaying your assertion that military spending, arms race was THE fundamental cause of its collapse. Most every reference shows what everyone here has been saying. A host of severe problems, failures, events, and inherent weaknesses were together fatal. There is a tremendous historical literature and research on this. But the subject is getting too far off topic, so I’ll stop with just some non Atlantic (?) references.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-reasons-for-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union.html
https://www.rbth.com/history/330630-how-soviet-economy-work
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-did-the-soviet-union-collapsehttps://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/021716/why-ussr-collapsed-economically.asp
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9 hours ago, The_Capt said:
I think this position likely decouples too far. This suggests that if the US had dramatically decreased spending the USSR would have stayed “flat” and collapsed anyway. I do not think this is true. Western and Soviet defence spending were linked, however were a component in a larger competition. If one decouples US defence spending from the argument then it is too easy to insert revisionist agendas on current defence spending - eg “well it had nothing to do with the outcome of the Cold War, why are we doing it again with China?”
The Soviet system was brittle and flawed from the get go. By forcing it onto an unsustainable trajectory by creating a decades long arms race the West did successfully create pressures that led to an eventual collapse of the system. It took a lot of pressures of which military was a central component. If the West had tapped out and relieved the pressure the Soviet system could have also reduced spending and perhaps survived much longer. The effect of Western defence spending was much larger and longer than any single decade of the Cold War.
That’s an interesting thought experiment or alternate history proposal. Would less arms spending by the Soviets have saved them? Put another way, was the Soviet Union a stable, healthy, going concern apart from its swollen defense budget? In a word, no.
The entire edifice was rotten. Examples include “Collectivization” of agriculture, destroying their ability to even *feed* themselves. The oil price collapse, a tremendous shock to an artificially propped up financial house of cards. Chernobyl. Afghanistan. Glasnost. Lithuanian independence. East Berliners knocking down the Wall. Even with a somewhat less extreme defense budget, with failures across the board, unrelated to just budget levels. The utter corruption at every level sapped nearly every Soviet enterprise. You might look to any other primitive command economies riven by corrupt dictatorships for comparisons. Perhaps the most that could be said is that your scenario would have delayed but not prevented the breakup of the Soviet Union. Often left unsaid is the artificial nature of the USSR itself, the inherent difficulty of keeping the lid on the great number of wildly varying “republics” and peoples tied together however unwillingly.
To be clear, no one is disputing that defense spending took a toll on the Soviet economy. Ultimately, the judgement of history nowadays is that the Soviet Union’s collapse was due to a number of causes not limited to arms race spending. Or more simply, they made too many losing economic and social bets. -
3 hours ago, The_Capt said:
To which I would add “…any Russian government based information”
Which is why the post Cold War investigations revealed the Soviet *actual* spending was…essentially flat, as now understood. The house of cards was collapsing without any additional pushes by USA spending. It was rotten for a very long time. And it looks to be about ready to do a rerun!
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2 hours ago, kevinkin said:
But the US increased defense spending compared to the Soviets, so differential was real even if SDI was pie in the sky at the time. I don't think many believe defense spending vs. the USSR was the sole reason for the evil empire's collapse. That's just political positioning. The command economy was 90+ of the reason. However, the case has been forwarded the increase in spending may have pushed the USSR over the edge faster than the command economy could alone.
Good point about the differential. Still, it is commonplace to hear and read people saying that the USA spent the Soviets into collapse. We need to keep focused on the fact that *increased* Soviet spending did *not* happen, and a non-existent increase to “keep up” was therefore not the cause of the collapse. As Steve enumerated and you said, the collapse was in motion for a long time. The die was cast by insistence on ideological, command economy. Failure to acknowledge the market’s priority over ideology meant that unlike South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan’s market based economies that also suffered extreme degrees of defense spending, the Soviets could not withstand the various slings and arrows of real world economics. Reality caught up with them.
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52 minutes ago, Vanir Ausf B said:
That, plus the collapse of oil prices.
Excellent point. And interesting to see that ~10 year rise between ‘75 and ‘85. Otherwise more or less flat until around 2003-4.
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4 minutes ago, MikeyD said:
One assumes the Soviets had intelligence assets in place that were assuring them that Star Wars was all smoke-and-mirrors and one failed test after another.
True, although presumably some technological skill was earned for all the wasted billions. FAR scarier was the actual response: The Dead Hand Doomsday Machine! https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/22/missile-defense-didnt-win-the-cold-war/
After the Cold War sturm and drang quited down, SDI facts began to publicly emerge, “Russian (and American) scientists knew early on that SDI, which sought to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles with lasers, was a pipe dream. Far more consequentially, the Soviets knew that they could easily defeat Reagan’s “Star Wars” fantasy by launching hundreds of decoys and saturating the skies with more nuclear warheads than the system could handle.” -
6 hours ago, The_Capt said:
the US effectively won the conflict without direct military collision by forcing their opponent to spend more economy could sustain
It’s an interesting point with more than a grain of truth to it. This explanation is repeated often, but without critical context. Soviet defense spending *was* excessive. But actual Soviet Cold War spending and policy was flat. US policy did not itself strongly affect it. Note also that Taiwan, South Korea and Israel also suffered significant defense burdens, like the Soviet Union. But they grew their economies. The more fundamental cause? Ideology. And how it distorted and undermined the economy:
“The Soviet Union's defense spending did not rise or fall in response to American military expenditures. Revised estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency indicate that Soviet expenditures on defense remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. Neither the military buildup under Jimmy Carter and Reagan nor SDI had any real impact on gross spending levels in the USSR. At most SDI shifted the marginal allocation of defense rubles as some funds were allotted for developing countermeasures to ballistic defense”. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/foreign/reagrus.htm A far more persuasive reason for the Soviet economic decline is the rigid "command economy" imposed by Stalin in the early 1930s. It did not reward individual or collective effort; it absolved Soviet producers from the discipline of the market; and it gave power to officials who could not be held accountable by consumers. Consequently much of the investment that went into the civilian sector of the economy was wasted. The command economy pre-dated the Cold War and was not a response to American military spending. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, but it was not defeated by American defense spending.”
Another common refrain among conservatives is that Reagan simply “outspent” the Soviets. But Soviet defense spending remained flat throughout the 1980s. More significantly, Gorbachev was unalterably opposed to increasing military spending; he fought a relentless campaign by the Soviet military-industrial complex to spend exorbitant sums in response to Reagan’s buildup...
Despite costing taxpayers billions of dollars, SDI had no significant effect on Soviet strategic decisionmaking. Gorbachev rejected every single proposal to build a Soviet response to Reagan’s “Star Wars” program. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/478941-lets-stop-revising-history-reagan-didnt-win-the-cold-war/
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The hits keep coming:
Russia’s Defense Ministry (MoD) on Wednesday released a video it claims shows the Russia’s Defense Ministry (MoD) on Wednesday released a video it claims shows the destruction of a Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessel (USV) attempting to attack the Project 18280 Yuriy Ivanov class intelligence ship Ivan Khurs in the Black Sea about 90 miles northeast of Turkey's Bosphorus Strait.
The video, published by the MoD’s official Zvezdanews outlet, shows the last seconds of what it says was a Ukrainian USV approaching the Ivan Khurs. Several tracer rounds, apparently from deck-mounted 14.5mm machine guns, are observed narrowly missing the USV before it turns and is struck on the bow, exploding in a tremendous fireball. destruction of a Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessel (USV) attempting to attack the Project 18280 Yuriy Ivanov class intelligence ship Ivan Khurs in the Black Sea about 90 miles northeast of Turkey's Bosphorus Strait.
The video, published by the MoD’s official Zvezdanews outlet, shows the last seconds of what it says was a Ukrainian USV approaching the Ivan Khurs. Several tracer rounds, apparently from deck-mounted 14.5mm machine guns, are observed narrowly missing the USV before it turns and is struck on the bow, exploding in a tremendous fireball.
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44 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:
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.
Sadly, in many places. For years now. Here are a very few of the afaik endless list:
https://www.newsweek.com/nazi-flag-school-wake-county-north-carolina-1563635https://www.columbian.com/news/2023/apr/19/la-center-residents-concerned-over-home-with-swastikas/
https://www.newsweek.com/swastika-flag-seen-display-california-state-building-1468330https://www.businessinsider.com/nazi-flags-displayed-outside-tpusa-summit-where-trump-star-speaker-2022-7?op=1
https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/05/10/florida-holocaust-museum-slams-swastika-flag-display-outside-disney-world/https://abc11.com/swastika-nazi-flag-wake-county-tree/9877322/
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/swastika-displayed-in-front-of-elementary-school/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/oklahoma-woman-shot-back-while-trying-steal-man-s-nazi-n1232573
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2 hours ago, sburke said:
He also called Poland a "hostile" state for Russia, as it is now allegedly "engulfed in russophobic hysteria".
Unlike Ukraine, which is engulfed in Russian ultraviolent genocidal terrorism.
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4 hours ago, Centurian52 said:
Nazi symbolism is extremely taboo in the west.
Except unhappily now, in the USA. Growing proud displays and embrace of all things Nazi, Hitler by the white supremacy crowd across the country. Swastika flags flown even in some smaller cities (recently here in mine, during a “vandalism” knockout of our electrical utility service.)
Examples recent - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/box-truck-crashes-into-security-barriers-near-white-house-2023-05-23/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/07/texas-mall-shooting-few-details-known
How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?
in Combat Mission Black Sea
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You OK? Not a collateral damage casualty? Please do not expire prematurely!