No one is claiming the U.S. is run better than Finland, no really we do NOT make that claim. It is just that this rambling wreck of a system has produced the worlds most powerful military, and I simply don't care what budget shenanigans the President has to pull finish beating the Russians in Ukraine. Doubly so when Putin is actively manipulating and funding the worst people in our system.
Oh I don't know. He has been good enough on his feet to arrange the destruction of the Russian military with only 4% of the US military budget, thoroughly pantsed the GOP on the debt limit fight and Americans 25 to 54 are working at their highest rate since 2001.
If that's not fit, I'll take more unfitness please.
People trip. I'm less than half Biden's age and I rolled my ankle pretty good just this last weekend when I somehow managed to stumble while walking across completely flat, hard pavement. Gerald Ford pretty famously took a header down the stairs of Air Force One and he was in his early 60s at the time.
Also of interest is the perfectly located site for the video recording and the timing in the middle of the night of the drones’ approach and their cinematic detonation just above (not on) the building. Should be easy to extrapolate the location of the phone or camera. It’s across the river from the complex
And yet, EVERY SINGLE BILL in Congress, from the moment written, is available to every US Citizen (for that matter, anyone in the world unless some country blocks it), on Congress.gov, free to read, download, print, full text and summary, status, votes in committee and floor.
The fact that the general public has no idea is at least in part due to the general public making no effort at being informed. When presented with extreme claims of doom due to the potential passing of this or that bill by either party, or any news or social media post, the general public should go read the bill for themselves and find out.
I don't know the details, but I very strongly suspect that 'a small town in Ohio' *could* get aid if certain *cough*qanon*cough* senators and congressmen pulled their heads out of their asses.
It's not a financial binary - Ukraine or Ohio. It's a political binary - Biden doing good makes me look bad.
What westerners, most of whom are very conscious people (hence why you don't live in totalitarian states, no matter how much smoothie-sipping leftists like to whine about it), fail to understand about people living in totalitarian states they themselves built - is their thought process and why they say things they say.
(also the sole fact that these interviews happen is just another proof Russia isn't a place where you get insta-executed for asking questions or answering them - and not because there's some kind of "freedom of expression").
You see - when a person in a totalitarian state says "I'm apolitical" - it literally translates to "I'm more than happy with and fully endorse current politics - thus they don't bother me, hence I have nothing more to add". And that's why when asked further, more precise questions - they suddenly become very "political" and you learn about Murica Bad, West Evil, Zpecial operation Good.
And when somebody they elected* and/or highly support - cocks up royally - they reply with "we have no say in it". What it literally means "we thought that guy will do what we want right, but he effed up, so it's his responsibility, not ours, we hoped he will finish Ukraine in 3 days, why should we pay for his mistakes?".
*Because, again, living in the West it's hard to understand how totalitarian states work. Totalitarian state isn't when some single guy decides how things should be and everyone follows blindly (even if it may seem so to a people who is used to democracy and personal freedoms from outside) - totalitarian state is when people in their vast, absolute majority, almost unanimously give a single person so much power and support - that it seems like a single person is running the show.
What really happens is that dictator, for having the privilege of getting every luxury he desires, has to follow the wishes of his people to a letter - otherwise he will seem weak and get dethroned. It's why putin hasn't mobilized yet - if there was the "movie dictatorship with poor people who are afraid of one guy" - what would he be worried about?
Democratic leaders require 51% support to stay in power. Dictators require 95%.
Wow, I love everything about what SBurke posted here. FU Putin, fer shur. I am tired of the pants-wetting folks not standing up against an unbelievably evil regime and blaming everyone except Putin for this nonstop atrocity.
How often is there actually something this simple to figure out the right thing to do?
Since we don't actually know whether there's already been training on the new weapons for UKR personnel I suppose we don't really know when the new weapons will be wiping out RU artillery. That's something I'd pay to see -- RU arty getting blasted and not able to counter it. Won't be fun trying to hold that 600+km line w/o arty advantage.
So...DOOOOOOOOOOM?
Well all war is negotiation and sacrifice, so the question will come down to both sides coming to terms with those two factors. My pushback to the "inevitable partitioned Ukraine" is that Russia talks a good game but Ukraine has lived it. Russia is only just starting to feel the pain and like any good nut-sack shot, that pain takes some time to build.
Here is a dirty little inside baseball secret - professional soldiers are supposed to die, it is what we get paid for; civilians, not so much. Every society knows this and accepts it. We can lose people who choose this lifestyle who, like mercs, take the Queen's Coin and do the dirty work. We have Remembrance Days and "Thank you for your service"-free coffee but in order for a society to be truly tested in war, it must be willing to feed it people who had nothing to do with warfare before it started. The harsh calculus of regular everyday people dying in numbers is a threshold that we in the West have not crossed in a very long time (e.g. WW2 for Canada and Vietnam for the US). Nor has Russia by this point, but it is approaching it quickly.
However, you know who is already living in that stark land?...Ukrainians. They have been "all in" since 24 Feb, to the point that there are no longer "regular Ukrainian civilians", the whole nation is in on this. I see pictures of 12 year old holding a wooden AK properly and that says it all; war, has become the way of life for Ukraine. Out of everyone talking and positioning, only Ukraine (and possibly the folks in the DPR/LPR...many involuntarily by the looks of things) has crossed that threshold. Putin is very nervous of it, and it shows. The US was terrified of it in Iraq, that is why they imposed all sorts of crazy things to try and keep the professional troops they had.
So before I pass judgement on the current situation with finality, I would want to see how Russia reacts when the civilian population starts bleeding heavily. They are hurting but it has been a slow burn, and frankly I think Russia is culturally masochistic...to a point. However, despite a bunch of retired Russian warhawks barking from the cheap seats, Russia has not been tested in this trial in a very long time either. Ukraine is the single largest hot-war they have been involved in since WW2. History looks great in the movies and we can all get our pulses up watch Saving Private Sasha; however, watching the guy next to you get blown in half by long range arty when you were working at a now-closed Starbucks a month ago, is an entirely different experience.
So no, I do not think Russia and Ukraine or on the same wavelength when it comes to negotiation and sacrifice...at least not yet.
As to communication:
We have been over the challenge of the Russian Defence, which they need in order to "freeze" this conflict. Right now they are keeping Ukraine busy by this very slow grinding offence, but it has been costly as hell. At some point if they want to "freeze" they are going to need to dig in and let the UA crash upon the shores of the great Russian Steel Wall.
Problem is what it will take to build that wall. Did some research and frankly we do not have modern troop density calcs for this sort of thing - we have lots on peacekeeping/making and COIN but basically sweet FA on modern conventional conflict. So we are going to have to make some assumptions here and keep checking them. In warfare the concept of "troop density" is a bit controversial. It is a hold over of the Jomini-esque "war is math" approach. It holds water but it is not deterministic as we already know a lot of soft non-linear factors play into this. With this in mind, all caveats etc lets break this down a bit:
- We are talking about 800kms of frontage from the Russian western position around Kharkiv to its position ion the East near Kherson. That is a long active front...very long. In WW1 the Western Front was about 400 miles, or about 640 kms in comparison.
- Troop density requirements have decreased over time. It is well documented that weapons ranges, ISR and battlefield mobility have increased the combat influence each soldier has on the battlefield over time. Problem here is that reality cuts both ways. In both offence and defence effectiveness and range have increased, so it is competitive.
- Troop density in WW1 - a frozen conflict - was in and around "5000 troops for mile" or roughly 3125 per km: (https://books.google.ca/books?id=nhhlHGWCnzYC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=troop+density+western+front&source=bl&ots=WWfd6Y7VIl&sig=ACfU3U1M05Ef9GIbmBAREwu-_obJPnXEpw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_rO_4jf33AhXvjIkEHRJEDUoQ6AF6BAg7EAM#v=onepage&q=troop density western front&f=false). This jives with the roughly 2 million troops each side had to sustain in the trenches, in depth, replacements and rotation, in order to sustain that deadlock. This does not count logistics and support overhead -which is likely why each side had on the order of 12-15 million troops in total.
- Based on WW1 metrics, Russia would need approximately 2.5 million men in those trenches to achieve the same deadlock...and then have the architecture behind them to sustain it, which at a very generous 1:1 (which means a very slow burn war) means roughly 5 million men to dig in and hold that front a la WW1. But as I noted we are not in WWI - although if the Russians tried to force generate these numbers they would probably start looking like they were from that era equipment-wise.
- Actual Russian troop numbers as of today are hard to find; however, with the 200k they brought with them and assuming they have kept that force level (big assumption), Russia currently has a troop density of 250 men per km of frontage. This is less than ten percent than the WW1 number. But as we noted modern forces can cover more ground, which makes this a weak analogy. The question is, "versus a very well armed attacker, how much troop density does Russia need to "freeze" this front?" My bet is a lot more than 200k troops, but how much more?
So let's tackle this from another direction. Things in this war are challenging a lot of our rules of thumb; however, we can go with the 1:3 ratio of defender to attacker, at least locally. So Russia likely needs to put at least a Company per km frontage. This forces the UA to concentrate a BG on the attack, with all the support bells and whistles in order to make an effective shot at it. This makes sense from a force-space-time perspective for both attacker and defender but I am not sure about firepower in the least [Note: it might be a lot less if things like UAVs and precision artillery are involved. This is one of the unknowns]. Terrain may also give them a break, particularly on the Dnipro, however, they also have urban areas so I am betting things even out.
So a Russian Company of say 150 men per km. They will need at least on more company behind them to create effective depth and prevent breakthrough of that UA BG, while also accounting for attrition, so now 300 men per km. And then they will need to rotate troops in and out of those positions. We are not designed to live in the open, under harassing artillery/Switchblade fire indefinitely. So we are now looking at another company for rotation and sustainment. Throw in an armored reserve to plug holes and supporting fires/assets and we are getting dangerously close to a BTG, per km. This would bring the Russians up to about 1500 (a fat BTG) men per km, about half of WW1 troop density. Or 1.2 million men. And that is just the fight stuff and basic tactical logistics. As we know from this war, the Russians like to travel light on logistics and formation-level support, so we can probably add another third of that number, say 400k to build the backbone to keep those 1.2 million men in the field = about 1.6 million men...and they have to sustain that for years, under increasingly crushing sanctions.
I have to be honest, if I was an average Russian and I saw these types of numbers I would be asking myself "how badly do we need Putin".
Finally, checking the old CIA factbook (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/russia/#people-and-society) Russia has roughly 37 million fighting aged men aged 15-54 (I am going to assume good old Putin male chauvinism holds and they do not a start tapping women). You can throw out a third right off the top for all sorts of medical conditions etc that make them simply unfit for service. So roughly 24 million men to draw from, in entirety. To freeze this Ukrainian war, to the point that you can force Ukraine to "tap out" you need to commit at least 5 percent of all eligible fighting aged males...up front. And you count on needing an extra 1.2 million just to sustain it over time. Now I can hear the demographic nerds out there pointing out that over time more men come of age...well the news for Russia in that regard is not good either:
Russia is in a bit of a demographic hole right now and it is going to take what look like 3-5 years to dig its way out. Worse the big bulges in the 35-44 range are going to age out in the same timeframe.
And finally, finally, this does not take into account the the standing military bill for the rest of the country - Russia can make all the noise it wants with Finland and Sweden, everyone is going to be fully engaged on this Ukrainian thing for a few years so you may as well shut down everything else.
So What? After all that it comes back to: how much does the average Russian want a bunch of new broken Republics vs how much does Ukraine want its country back?
If I were a betting man, I would put my money on the country that has already demonstrated the commitment. If this war goes long, we will likely need to shift from send guns and bullets (fish), to funding the creation of a Ukrainian domestic arms industry (fishing rods) and then figuring out what to do when Russia totally collapses under the weight of this thing.
this picture is not "full context for foreigners". That is a an extreme outlier of a picture. It's like "jews for Hitler". That is so misleading as to be a complete lie. The 1 out of 10,000 exception is shown and we are meant to conclude the utterly, ridiculous "see, even the black folks loooooove the confederacy!"
ASL Veteran, you should ashamed of trying to pass this off as informative.
That is not what the oaths they had preciously taken to the United States Constitution said. The Civil war was about one thing, and one thing only. The top one % in the Confederacy got and stayed filthy rich because you don't have to pay your workers when you can torture them instead. That is what chattel slavery was. The top tier managed to bring the rest of the south with them by the use of the 1900s equivalent of a certain TV network that rhymes with box. It took a ~million dead and another 100 years of miscellaneous unpleasantness to almost clean up the mess.
two mines with jet engines strapped to them
You can also say Moskva successfully demilitarized Ukrainian naval defenses by lowering the amount of our antiship missiles by two.
