kimbosbread

And supposedly the most critical part of that oil refinery! And the saphire glass plant in Shebekino! Sadly I don’t have a handy list of russian military industrial complex sites, but it seems like a lot of places have burned down or been destroyed over the last year and a half.

As we got yeeted into the full retard timeline in 2014ish by our favorite particle accelerator, I propose something more appropriate for this timeline: Punishment by forcing them to gain 150lbs each via sumo hotpot, and then jello wrestling, for several years.

Girkin has been extremely astute. Agent murz too. Murz hasn’t written much lately unfortunately. Pity they are on the wrong side; they should get clemency for writing an accurate history of what’s going on on their side.

I’m extremely happy with many things his admin is done, and consider him the best president since Bush #1, but let’s be real, it’s full weekend at Bernie’s.

The dam being blown is certainly a risk- ferries seem like they’d more flexible taking that scenario into account. If you ferried across a dozen or two humvees and amx10s (100L and 500L fuel capacity respectively) and a fuel truck or two (7000L capacity) you’d have some signficiant raiding potential if they don’t get bogged down on the first defenses they find. That kind of force seems very ferryable in short order.

I like it for all the reasons you said and because it’s the express route to Crimea. I’ll absolutely wager as six pack of extremely hipster beer that they’ll cross the river in force. UA were to build several pontoon bridges + ferry, does Russia have any weapons they could use to target it with a high degree of success? It doesn’t seem like their missiles are very precise, Lancet has too small a warhead, and increased SAM coverage makes an aerial attack much riskier.

To quote our former president, think bigly-er. Take out essentials for happy living: Tires, tampons, vodka, potato decoration stores or whatever Russians like. Imagine if middle class Muscovite women ran out of tampons.

A low-intensity conflict that will last a long time, cause tremendous problems on NATO’s flank and have a large surface area for China to exploit. The better, more organized future is to help Ukraine win the war this year and next, so we can get on with the South China Sea.

Disagree. From a moral perspective it’s very powerful- witness the absolute butthurt from the Russians right now. Nice side effect, as someone pointed out a few days ago- drones over Moscow and Belgorod People’s Republic give the West a window into what happens if they stop supporting Ukraine in a direct war to remove Russia from Ukraine proper.

Frequency hopping only does so much unfortunately; that’s the rationale for going for narrow-beam aimed signals. It’s a movement towards sub warfare on land, effectively. Either that or have decoys all over. On the unmanned vehicle side, this argues for autonomous systems.

What are the go-to texts on grey zone warfare? I’ve read about all the books on logistics, guerilla and otherwise I can find!

Yeah, that’s a good point. Ottoman Monetary Theory is now not just theoretically stupid! There’s another silver lining- if anybody wants to shore up demographics with young well-educated yuppie turks (yurks?) that demographic is ripe for pillaging! For example, if Ukraine was amenable…

Yeah I’m gonna go 99/1, and I’m a sadist and would the US to default just for entertainment purposes and tell my friends I told you so. Look who organizes and funds the campaigns of various politicians. Sadly, it’s not gonna happen. EDIT: Claim52 whatever horrible disgusting hipster beershake is available. Their key lime pie beer was awesome; the thai lemongrass jelly donut was the virulent gonnorhea of beers.

Dedollarization is a farce. RMB, oh yeah unstable and tied to the real estate bubble to end all bubbles, plus onshore and offshore. If Switzerland started getting uppity and we went all Grande Suisse, sure, I could see the CHF being an option. KSA provides most of China’s oil, and KSA is distinctly unpopular in Washington in recent years, but it doesn’t change much. Who is the world’s biggest energy producer? We’ve set a ceiling on oil prices, and that puts a limit on how uppity OPEC can get. China produces lots of stuff that we use- that is their big hook for sure. I’ll be the last to dispute that. But that is rapidly changing. India I’m extremely unconvinced, and every Indian I work with also (even the BJP fans among them). They’ve had an epic water crisis brewing for 20 odd years, and haven’t gotten their act together like Mexico and Egypt did in the 70s (IIRC), are gonna be hurt badly by climate change, and have unstable neighbors. Not to mention the US siphons many of their best people, and their families (one of our superpowers). Taiwan has a trump card- China has built itself a giant single point of failure that given time will collapse on it’s own due to world-class-awful concrete and rebar issues, not to mention design problems (Greater China Coprosperity Dam). Take that out, and it’s real ugly. Wuhan, Shanghai, a bunch of nuke plants, army bases, agriculture… it’d be 50% of their GDP, no Great Satan involvement needed. Not to mention China is horribly exposed to a blockade of the straights… their war minus option is blockade, but their bet is we miss their production, and they forget who the most warlike country of all time is. Blockade would be the ideal scenario for the US- we wouldn’t have to expose any surface ships at all within “real” missle range. Obviously China owns the canal, but that can be reversed nicely. They probably want food from Brazil more than we care about the canal being blocked. China has zero useful friends. The US has Japan and UK as #1 friends. Two other extremely warlike countries with capable militaries. And the US’ other friends are reasonably capable too. The hubub around rot in the US is pleasant distraction from automation and erosion of the middle class. If the poors weren’t so distracted, they might get angry at stuff like PS (https://reserveps.com), or billionares’ blood boys or even more absurd things. That would be bad. The optimist thinks the glass is half full, the pessimist the glass half empty, and the engineer half as big as it needs to be. What happens when we don’t need a third of existing white collar jobs in a decade? Ultimately, I think the US is the healthiest of a bunch of very sick men. Maybe once we get past the demographic crunch in 30 years the front runners will start fresh and anew, but I think it’s going to be a series of hard punches to roll with: Climate change, population migrations, water shortages and of course war. Not to mention my personal nightmare- garage crispr terrorists. In the 90s we were all rainbox six eco terrorists, but there’s a realistic possibility in the next 20 years of a bioengineered plaugue that will make every other bad scernario look less bad. Hopefully the people so inclined have better things to do!

Russia will be completely broken and will likely break into several different countries, unless they retreat right now and go full North Korea. North Korea is Putin’s best case, and I suspect Russia’s elites know that. Without rail infrastructure for movement of goods and military, and a broken military, I don’t think they could win a conflict against a resurgent Chechnya for example, especially not with some random donations of weaponry from the outside. China has no friends, and is a huge net importer of food and fuel. Their demographic cliff is here; the US advantage in space + air will only grow. If Xi doesn’t invade Taiwan within the decade, he’ll have no chance whatsoever. If he does, he’ll face a ruinous war. If he doesn’t, well, there are serious structural problems. India isn’t in the worst spot, apart from running out water and having Pakistan and Bangladesh imploding next to them. However, what do the West or China need India for? It’s not a critical producer of anything besides generic medication. It’s not a huge market for luxury goods that France would collapse without. And they hate China. So who is this outsiders club anyway? What is their motive for banding together? Meanwhile, the US, being so bored with the world and lack of competition engages in wokeness and facism and inventing new awesome **** like chatgpt and giant space rockets to pass the time until someone gives a reason to actually care. Maybe we’ll go build a space elevator? EDIT: To add Europe, the continent wide retirement home that has good R&D but doesn’t produce new industries. ASML, wait, that’s just licensed tech from the US that they were the lowest bidder on. Eastern Europe I’d be more bullish on but the birth rates are horrific.

I would argue that the conflict could be frozen and it would just drag out Russia’s econmic collapse as their rail neytwork and thus ability to hold on to republics fails. The number of reported partisan actions against signaling boxes is pretty high (https://old.reddit.com/r/FreedomofRussia/comments/13qgg3y/may_has_seen_a_real_spike_in_partisan_attacks/), plus one can imagine the bearing shortage has wiped out a decent amount of their rolling stock. Without rail how will the hold onto the east? Obviously the plane situation isn’t great either- no spare parts, no maintenance on the jetliners. And it’s not like Comac is doing great right now and can just be a drop in replacement. The gas/oil situation isn’t as bad, but they need to cap wells or burn off the excess. And all the equipment is getting worn down without replacements.

So should the west be giving ol Priggy a platform to speak on then? Or is Putin’s leash tight enough that he wouldn’t give an interview to say FT (or whatever reputable newspaper Russians read)?

Are there any numbers on how many surrenders there are per day? I cant imagine if Russia had a similar number of soldiers surrendering every day to killed that this would help the moral side of their effort. How much surrendering can an army suffer before it collapses in the field, historically speaking?

Yeah from a PR perspective this should be a major focus for the military. Give all the “heroic” units new patches, maybe keep the wolf, but a wheat field in the back, or women or children, or puppies. Americans love puppies. Super easy, but requires a bit of a different mindset to do during wartime, and harder to understand for people dying to push to Russians out.

Relief in place is going to be a disaster without secure flanks and communications. How does that even work for artillery and ammo dumps, which I assume Wagner won’t just hand over to MoD? And then you’ll have trucks and various other hardware all over the place moving in and out of position. #2 sounds more likely unless Ukraine cant muster up the resource for this.

Ukraine has a massive high tech sector and was one of the world’s leading software countries- certainly one of the main players in Europe. Coming out of this war they will likely become a key player in small UAV + UGV development. Demographics is a bigger worry.

You missed (d) easy to integrate with other capabilities. Specifically, integration with drones for targeting, and coordination with other UGVs to form for example a mini artillery battery on the fly, and flexible fire programming, that is drop a line of 40mm on the trench, but hit the IFV with a few extra rounds for suresies, without needing direct input from the soldier. EDIT: Or opportunistic programming, such as the drone detects an mg an atgm team and this is presented as a “one-click” fire to the commander.

Is there any reason crew served weapons cannot evolve to be UGV capable of carrying their ammo load and receiving targets from nearby soldiers and drones? It doesn’t seem that hard to make something like a squatter ATV with a AGL and a few cans of ammo, especially if it is driven by remote control by a nearby soldier.

Well, depends on the orbit. The advantage of having tons of smaller, lower cheaper satellites is you can toss them in a bunch of very different orbits, and the US realistically might be able to have more satellites than China has antisatellite missiles (which by their nature have to be very high performance). Also, these small cheap satellites alter their apogee frequently; enough to make targeting less “fun”. If you figure they won’t last that long, you can even do inclination changes every orbit (which is more expensive in terms of fuel). A large part of your constellation could realistically alter their orbit each orbit; tough on the transceiver on the ground but that’s a solved problem. Starlink (and I assume Starshield) are really low, so a lot of debris will burn up fast- worst case a couple years for most of the debris.

Several issues: How expensive is it to take down a satellite? How bad is a the debris cloud for friendly and enemy satellites? How expensive is it to replace the satellite? How fast can it be replaced? How expensive is it to launch? How fast can we launch? SpaceX and friends are rapidly solving (3, 4) to the point it will be cheaper to throw up some new birds than a $10+M antisatellite missile. (2) is a huge problem, however.