billbindc

The folks he quotes are pretty good and yes, there's quite a bit of talk below the table. But in the end, it all comes down to reading the mind of one man for one fact: does Kim want to commit suicide or not? There's no strategic, military or economic logic to starting to toss nukes while talking about it might be just the sort of thing an attention desperate tinpot Stalin-let might do. It's got to be galling that Ukraine/Russia is soaking up everyone's bandwidth, that Kim's supply of aid to Russia barely elicited a shrug and that even in NE Asia the real money is being spent on a the potential PRC/Taiwan conflict. In short, I'll believe it when I see it, I will and won't be surprised and I don't think anyone else has much more insight than I do.

Among big things that matter:

Bottom line: Sanctions, attrition, demographic issues, labor short falls and the rest all are working as expected to damage Russian power. The only difference is the expectation in timeline. It's happening slower than we expected...just as the collapse in Russian offensive power happened much faster than we expected. We thought we had (Russian) Afghanistan II, then it turned for a while into Braveheart and now it's WWI circa 1916. This too shall pass.

I'm more interested in what damage is actually being done to the T-90. Optics? Gun? Ammo explosion? What else?

The 1905 Revolution went hot with the Bloody Sunday shootings of demonstrators at the Winter Palace. The 1917 Revolution began in earnest when soldiers revolted at the violent suppression of demonstrators also. Watch the demonstrations.

Don't sleep on the labor shortage part of this. The kind of guy in Russian society who mucks out plumbing and fixes steam pipes can easily think he will make more money in the army or because he has no krisha, he gets mobilized anyway. And at best for him, the defense industry pays better and is growing.

Just looking at live flight radar it looks like Russian commercial air which used to run up the line of the Volga is now flying well east of it until it they get north of Saratov. Could be coincidence but it's a striking difference right now from the norm.

I would strongly suggest for a good overview: "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between the East and the West" by Calder Walton

So far, I’m only at the point of thinking I want the Sov’s to come to me first and then counter.

So...if I may impose one more time...I'm looking at Stem the Tide as the American player and I haven't the foggiest idea how to think about it. Site lines are short, contact ranges look like they will be point blank and I don't have much in the way of infantry. I would be curious not for a how-to...but a this-is-how-you-should-thing-about-it approach to the problem. Thanks again!

Fair to say that at least in recon troops and fires they Sovs were far more professional than the Russian army of 2021?

That visualization is quite good but I routinely hear even the paltry invasion sites shown above overstate things and that for a variety of reasons there are only 14 reasonably useful landing points. In rougher weather, that number drops to zero and there are an average of 3 to 4 typhoons between June and October. That combination of readily definable logistics chokepoints and the friction of a long sealink make a conventional invasion quite daunting. Add in the PLA's lack of real operational experience and the risks of a purely military approach explode. If Taiwan falls, it's almost certainly going to be a political event not a military one.

This! I'm four scenarios in in three days and I'm seeing precisely what you've been describing for the last two years. I was fairly sloppy in Brauersdorf and I lost *two* TOW launchers. One of them had 7 kills. If every third split squad had a Javelin, the Russians wouldn't have made it past the pre-registered arty. It's also revelatory to my understanding of where things stood in Europe in the very early 80's. I had thought the danger zone lasted into 85 or so. Clearly not. What are your thoughts on now the Sov's might have fought differently?

Excuse me...I meant the "scientific Soviet approach to using mass in conflict with the capitalist West".

Just finished Brauersdorf after doing a little research and realizing I was up against 20+ armored vehicles. Won a major victory as the US, killed all but one Sov armored vehicle and was just about to go on the offensive to take that one out and sweep the dregs of Sov infantry off the field when it called the game on me. The ways in which Dragons, LAWs and TOW change the field was quite a revelation.

Not a fan of the Sov zerg rush vibe anyway so it will be a while.

Germany is an outlier in this regard and has been since the beginning of the conflict. The US has been dealing with an internal political crisis that is slowing aid but large majorities our Congress are in favor of it. Britain, Italy, the Baltics, Scandinavia have shown very little hesitation all things being equal. The German perspective on this distorts the larger picture but even then, Germany has been a fairly generous provider of aid and Scholtz' position is changing for the better: https://www.politico.eu/article/olaf-scholz-raises-pressure-eu-countries-beef-up-military-aid-ukraine-budget-germany/

Excellent. Thank you.

That the British government couldn't keep a fairly simple strike on the Houthi's secret for another 6 hours is a fair indication of how badly governments in general are at hiding important information. If there was a real cabal interested in dragging out the war in Ukraine we'd have known about it sometime in late March of '22.

Gentlemen, just picked up CMCW and I am, to put it gently, entirely at sea on how to conduct my pixel truppen. Where can I get a good, pithy rundown on the dark arts of tactical warfare in the era of When Ivan Meets GI Joe.

"Putin might have convinced the West that time is on his side, but the urgency suggests that he is not convinced of this himself. Given adequate support for Ukraine by the West, the balance of advantage is likely to turn against Russia in 2025." https://icds.ee/en/the-moment-of-truth/

The clearest indication that Russia isn't thinking that differently is that if using tactical nukes were a viable option then why haven't they used them already? This war almost led to a coup, it's grinding down the Russian economy, using nukes wouldn't be a problem within Russian domestic politics, etc. Yet it hasn't happened...because it isn't worth it even in terms of Putin's silovik mindset.

Exactly, the costs are far off the benefit.

This too. The likeliest outcome from such an effort would be territorial gains initially and then absolutely decisive Western intervention and involuntary economic juche.

The why of using nuclear weapons is a lot less important than the if. The US, China, India, Brazil, EU, etc have all made it very clear that using nukes in any context is a game changer. And using them *offensively* is actually far more destabilizing than if they were used in an attempt to stave off some final defeat. The rule of thumb when analyzing any contemplated move is to ask "Ok, what happens next?" and in this case Russia would be opening up a future in which 'just tactical' nukes would be considered to be an acceptable gambit in warfare against opponents who might easily take tactical use as justification for going full bore strategic and up the escalation ladder we go.