Billy Ringo

From the cheap seats regarding Putin:
If anything, the opposite: he's least able to make decisions when they're hard 1/ https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/89826
Coupled with Stanovaya's observation that his belief in being "right" will eventually lead to his ultimate goals without having to intercede or take certain actions, would make one believe that he would have a difficult time pulling the trigger on going nuclear.
THAT would seem to be the ultimate hard decision.  And based on her evaluation, that's not one Putin would be likely to make. 
Hope she's right on that one.
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On this Memorial Day, a solemn thank you and reverence for those who gave all to preserve the liberties we have in the United States.
 
 

Putin seems to be trying to see how far he can roll it back towards some approximation of real Stalinism. He has gotten a further down the curve than I thought he could with having a "heart attack".
 
Going to attempt a bike racing analogy here, please forgive me. Real pros can do ~350 watts all day long. But they have a limit, and every watt they exceed the limit by reduces the amount of time they can hold a given power level by exponentially. So your all day power is 350 watts, but one hour at four hundred watts would completely cook them, 500 watts they are five minutes and done. A thousand watts  for one minute is considered very strong, and nobody expects you to do much afterwards.  When you try to ride all day at a power level you can't hold bad things happen, even when the margin you are exceeding your limit by is quite small. The higher defense spending caused by competition with the West put the Soviet union over its all day limit.

This is true. Almost everything that Reagan is credited with the so-called Reagan military buildup, was started in the Carter administration, a lot of it under the direction of Bill Perry who was then UnderSecDef for R&D. He realized the US needed quality over quantity, and Carter realized the military needed a drastic rebuilding after being wrung out by Vietnam. As a young officer then I appreciated the 2 huge pay raises that Carter gave us. In 6 months I got something like a 13% and then an 8% pay raise, plus I went over 2, and got promoted to 1LT. Man, I was rich suddenly after having lived on $600/mo for 2 years!
Reagan had the good sense to continue all those programs and buy them.
As a sidelight, if you want some good reading, William Perry's book "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink" details a good bit of this and also his later time as SecDef and even later, and current, efforts at nuclear disarmament/arms reduction. It's interesting reading and if you can find any videos of interviews with him, he's great in person. Soft spoken, brilliant, and by all accounts a really nice guy. He and former Sen. Sam Nunn on a panel discussion together is a treat (seen in person). Two men who do not need a single note card to hold forth at length and detail about anything to do with defense, nuclear weapons, deterrence, and arms control treaties and actions. 
Quick search and there are several interviews here:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=william+perry+secretary+of+defense
Dave

I wanted to stay out of this, but here we go.
On the first part:
Numerous studies (no, I can't produce them, but someone better than me with google / waybackmachine may find the first one I am aware of done by the Pew Research Center) show proportional and related systems to have materially more waste and corruption.  The "why" seems to be that fringe parties - which proliferate in proportional systems - swing the balance of power and leverage this.  Also, in proportional one need not have "big tent" parties, so fringe and lunatic fringe and single-issue parties end up with representation.  And no, the 11% of people who believe Elvis is still alive don't deserve independent representation.
Also, first-past-the-post systems have greater longevity of the polity (fewer revolutions) and less overall political violence.  
For more: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/why-first-past-the-post-isnt-to-be-abandoned-lightly
If the US extirpates gerrymandering (which encourages extreme candidates) and somehow manages to reduce the grotesque amount of money in elections without impairing freedom of expression, it will have better results.
 
On the second, it will never happen.  People have a natural tendency to band together to protect their shared interests (e.g., trade unions), and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Most likely I'll go back to lurking and enjoying the interesting discussions popping up as the Ukrainian counter-offensive warms up.

As a strict Constitutionalist, and not one of the offensive far-right or just one of the morons who were force-fed hatred by their even more moronic parents, I feel I must say that the First Amendment of the first 10 Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, known as The Bill of Rights, guarantees every citizen of the U.S the Right to Peacefully Assemble, the Freedom of Speech, and The Freedom of Association, among other things, even with those whom the “majority” feel are reprehensible. The only time an American Citizen can lose a right, since a right cannot be taken away, is if that right is used by the individual to harm another in some way, such as yelling “Fire” in a theater in order to cause a panic. As long as exercising one’s rights isn’t done directly to cause harm or violate an existing law, that person’s “right” cannot be taken away.
Even though we might find their speech and symbology disgusting, they have the right to express it.

Regarding Prigozhin's recent outbursts, here is an interview with a Russian journalist who has written about the power struggle between the different clans surrounding Putin. He contends that the clan wars have started and that Putin is weakening and indecisive - https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-clans-war-russia-interview-succession-ukraine-war/32425962.html
The original article this interview is based on (also linked in the interview) - https://istories.media/en/opinions/2023/01/09/in-russia-a-clan-war-for-putins-throne-has-begun-who-will-win/

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.

It is uncertainty, which is toxic to humans.  We mostly do one of two things with uncertainty, we push out and explore to remove it, or we pretend it does not exist.  
We were never apex predators in nature, middle of the food chain in reality.  However we had a big enough brain to be aware of where we sat in the food chain which created fear.  We then leveraged that to survive and evolve.  The fuel for a lot of our fear is uncertainty, the unknowns because in nature those unknowns could easily kill us for food.
So we will work very hard to remove uncertainty, it is a primary impulse.  To over simplify and dumb thins down, particularly when faced with highly complex unknowns is a very old human strategy.  One of the first things we did was to try and use substances to cope - alcohol, narcotics etc.  Than when we constructed faith and religion.  And now we have whatever the hell this era has produced with echo chambers and ideologies that embrace obtuse and willful ignorance as dogma.  Better to embrace safe lies and face unknowable truths.  And to be fair there is also a caloric strategy at play here as well. Brain chews up a lot of calories so in one embraces dogma one can stop burning calories on worrying about unknowns.
Certainty and uncertainty are also central to warfare.  I describe all warfare as a violent collision of human certainties.  It creates enormous uncertainty as social structures are fractured.  Uncertainty is a weapon in itself and can be projected onto an opponent.  We have been wrestling with uncertainty since 23 Feb 22.  We have all created mental frameworks that aid us in reasserting certainty - I know I definitely have.  This is not a bad thing so long as those frameworks remain on speaking terms with reality and the facts on the ground.  If the space between my mental certainty framework and reality becomes too wide, I am in an unreality space and that is when decisions get really shaky.
Now for any 8th graders out there.  We are afraid of the dark because we can imagine all the bad within it.  So we can either build flashlights or cover our heads and pretend it is daytime until the sun does come up.

No. Never. If we invite Russians in mass here, we will get new 5th column soon and "mini-Russia" inside Ukraine. There are can be exceptions for those, who really have been supporting us and resisting Putin's regime since 2014, but not "10 millions"
There is proverb "scratch Russian liberal and you will see usual imperialist" and "Russian liberal finish himself on Ukrainian question". I see behavior of those Russians, who escaped to Georgia, Kazakhstan or Armenia from economical crisis and mobilization. Russians - no matter they are "vatniks" or "liberals" believe "where we are, there is Russia".  Their behavior toward locals mostly swaggering and arrogant. They resent, why no signs in Russian on the streets, why service mostly in local languiages, they already begin to demand Russian-speaking teachers and Russian classes in schools where their kids go. Those, who will give a shelter to alot of Russians will receive soon own Eastern Estonia, own Germany with organized agressive post-Soviet pro-Russian community, own Brighton Beach. Russians consider they are "hub of universe" and they can do anything in any country, they don't respect local style of life, local culture, they rare will teach local language, they just believe that anybody around them must know Russian. 
I see what write many of so-called "liberals" in Russia now about Ukriane and war and can say - only a wide ditch with crocodiles and Great Wall with turbolaser guns have to be between us, but not inviting of millions to live in Ukraine.

The implications of Patriots being able to handle a complex, dense attack of pretty much everything Russia has contains strategic implications that go far beyond the war in Ukraine. Chinese calculations about Taiwan were just revised negatively yet again. 

Remember when everyone was all a twitter about Russian escalation dominance?  Interestingly, and something I never considered, denial is a form of escalation.  In hindsight it is obvious, denial compresses an opponent options spaces - very effectively as it turns out.  It also neutralizes an opponents ability to escalate.
Russia earned this one with all of its terror missile attacks, however in the end the West held the escalation high ground…and still does.  A whole lot of this war has been us relearning that we are indeed powerful, very powerful as it turns out.  We kept seeing the nightmares in Russia but I think we are slowly realizing that we are the nightmares.  (Nod to Chuck Norris I believe).

An attack of this scope and size should leave an impression of strength and power.  Why does it stink of desperation and weakness?

There's a new RUSI article about the Storm Shadow. It is rather short, the most important excerpt below:
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/putting-russias-army-shadow-storm
 

My mantra has long been that the only way to understand the strategy of the various players in this saga is to accept that their goal is less about winning in Ukraine than it is about winning in Moscow. 

So not to pile on and beat up.  I get the position, video after video of Russian saps getting blown up may seem excessive and masturbatory, and for some it is. However, every video gives off information. Some is just noise, or repetitive.  While others are gold and constitute key indicators which when confirmed by other observations can point to trends.  Trends lead to broader deductions and assessments - this is not a single “keyhole” it is thousands of them.  In most keyholes the milk maid is bathing, but then you start to notice the copy of Karl Marx next to the tub.
ISW and other OS intelligence analysts are doing exactly what professional military are doing.  Looking at all the “war porn” and pulling out trends and indicators that tell a larger story.  Oryx is not counting blow up vehicles because people get their jollies seeing blown up Russian tanks.  They are doing it because individual losses sum up to larger attrition trend which chart the course of a conflict.
This is micro-analysis and has pretty much set this group apart - or did, other groups have caught up.  Example: back in the early days of the war the majority of open source assessment (and frankly military as well) were expecting this war to take a predictable course.  A rapid overwhelming Russian invasion, shock and collapse of the UA, and a drawn out insurgency against a puppet Ukrainian political regime.  It was places like this forum where micro-observation first challenged a lot of macro assumptions.  We saw war porn, but it added up to something going very wrong for the RA.  In fact it pointed to something even more fundamental shifting in warfare itself.
This was not a one-shot deal.  Micro-analysis backed up be expertise has kept us well ahead of the pack in all phases of this war.  Phase II did not become a protracted set of urban sieges - the RA logistical losses and Ukrainian resistance demonstrated that.  Phase III did not see an RA “cauldron” despite their use of WW1 levels of massed fires.  Phase IV the UA counter offensive did shock us at its scope but one could see that this was indeed a collapse of the RA operationally on two fronts (one slow, one fast).  Phase V - Op Russian Leg Humping: was going nowhere - one need only follow the famous “battle of the T” to see why.  And we will use it for Phase VI to try and understand how the UA offensive is unfolding.
So while some may only see Russian sods getting blown up.   I see: poor basic field craft in poorly constructed trench lines which suggest basic training shortfalls.  No effective C-UAS counter measures on the RA side.    The evolution of drone warfare throughout.  The big fact that Russia has still not been able to create information denial (let alone control) in the battle space. HVT losses within the Russian operational system - C2 nodes, A2AD platforms, engineering and logistics.  Failures in RA C4ISR…the list goes on.  I do not see this through a single war porn keyhole, I see them through thousands of them.
Are these view’s skewed?  Definitely.  But the fact that we do not see thousand of videos of Russian UAS blowing off UA heads is telling in itself (does anyone think the Russian info sphere would show any restraint in this?).  Open source is “open”.  In the end it is about filtering noise and trying to hear signal - and again, this is exactly what ISW or any other public analysis platform is doing, along with professional military.  We are just doing it in house - this is how the sausage is made.  What bakes my noodle is that in my lifetime a large virtual collective is able to conduct this sort of work, and demonstrate accurate assessments (more than just a lucky once or twice) is game changing.  
In twenty years we will all be old, senile or dead. However an another group of young(ish) folks will do this for another war but they will likely have AI support (we have already seen it here in its infancy).  They will have access to even more raw information but will have a better ability to use it - they may very well be directly involved in the prosecution of the war and not just sitting in chairs on the sideline.  We are at the beginning of an age of Open Source Warfare - all those keyholes are “pixels” in reality.

“I do think that we have enough support within Congress to sustain this for a good deal longer,” McConnell said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “All the leadership in the House and Senate in my party is very much in favor of defeating the Russians.”  
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3995898-us-announces-1-2b-ukraine-aid-package-ahead-of-counteroffensive/?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d

More coverage of this emerging procurement:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/laser-rocket-firing-humvees-spotted-in-service-with-ukraine
Again, seems suited to help attacking units forward. Maybe with the tactical impact the HIMARS now displays operationally. 
Armored Humvees with four-shot laser-guided rocket pods offer Ukraine a quick moving precision attack capability against a wide variety of targets. 
AE Systems, says that these munitions have a maximum range when launched from the ground of around 3.7 miles (6 kilometers). It's also a low-cost weapon, with each complete APKWS II round costing approximately $27,500.
Chase and lase; shoot and scoot. Float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.  

The power structure:
1. Kadyrov is a warlord with a defined territory he controls as a palatinate of the Russian Federation. He has intense local ties, a populace and geography that is quite difficult if not now impossible for the Russian army to subdue and an army that is loyal, personally, to him. His power is interleaved with Putin's but negotiated and inalienable by the Kremlin. 
2. Prigozhin is a functionary without any defined territorial control and thus no independent logistics, manpower sources or arms. He is, in essence, the appointed head of a quasi-state enterprise without a stronghold in any institution, region or ethnic group. He can be subdued by the simple expedient of cutting him off, trumping up a tax charge against him and tossing him back into the Russian penal system. His power derives from favor only, is alienable and only negotiated with difficulty.
What you are witnessing is the interplay between (in order of importance) the large institutional powers (FSB, MoD), the regional warlord (Kadyrov), the disposable functionary (Prigozhin) and the system created by Putin in which all must vie for his favor in whatever way they can. The  FSB/MoD are in daily contact and have the greatest access to Putin. They don't need to shout to be heard. Kadyrov mostly boasts but more importantly he withholds his forces in order to gain concessions and preserve his own strength for the aftermath. Prigozhin is much more marginal and so he must go public and make dramatic gestures for Putin to hear him. That's what you saw last week. 
The larger point of course is that Russia is run as a semi-mafia state primarily concerned with safeguarding Putin's power. Putin is the arbiter of the factions who must appeal to him in order to protect themselves and receive decisions and resources while their competition keeps them from uniting against him. And that creates inherent weaknesses...like divided command, conflicts between military needs and domestic power struggles, etc. 

Or, what if Prigozhin is nothing more than a mouthpiece for Putin?  Placing blame on the Russian military elite for defeat and lack of success.   Since the start of the "special operation" Putin has dropped little negative comments about his military, he's fired and reshuffled generals on what seems like a weekly basis.
Putin may simply be slowly building his off-ramp to get out of this mess by shifting blame on the Russian generals--hoping he can stay in power.  (And the fact that Girkin is still alive makes me believe he's another Putin and/or KSB mouthpiece.)

As if Prigozhin himself has no responsibility for this??????  He's the one shoving them into the meat grinder.  He's the one grabbing inmates and throwing them into the fight w no training.