How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Fernando]

1 hour ago, JonS said:

Ok ... this is not a comment that can be taken seriously.

I was speaking of the mental framework. In 1918, both sides found ways to breach a heavily defended entrenched enemy front and advance. That was not the case in 1915-1917 (Caporetto excepted). 

Edited February 11 by Fernando

[Fernando]

10 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Well first off let’s keep it above the belt. Calling a Canadian “basically an American” is akin to calling a Spaniard “basically Italian”.  

So your working theory is that tactics rule the battlefield and operational and strategic considerations are essentially window dressing?  US Civil War - so Lee and the South kept on fighting with great verve…but was essentially doomed strategically.  1918 - Germany had all the tactics…but still collapsed strategically.  I am not seeing your point.   It is not about “ignoring” tactics and morale at all; it is not allowing them to hijack the rest of the thing.

I think that you need to maybe read up on how the levels of warfare interact and create an interlinked machine.  Tactics are important but without operations to string them into coherent decisions while setting conditions for success, one gets nowhere - see our own performances in Iraq or Afghanistan as examples.  Strategy is the art of “hard options”.  How to sustain yours while compressing an opponents.  It goes deeply into the institutional spaces.  Lee and the Germans had better tactics (hell Lee was better operationally), however in both cases both sides were in a losing strategic position.  Both sides ran out of gas (attritional) at strategic and political levels…this decided the wars, not tactics or bracing moral.  Germany did have 1940…then it had 1945.  They were completely unable to translate success into sustainable strategic victory.

Well that is good because “all out attack” and manoeuvre is not going to happen on a battlefield which appears dominated by denial and defence.  In fact this is what is wrong with the western school of military thought - which while you besmirch the US, you are buying into their way of war, nearly completely.  If one can only think in terms of offensive and manoeuvre, with defence and attrition as “inconvenient interludes” you are in fact restricted in options.  You live in a box of your own making.  “We can’t attack…so the war must be over…hey why didn’t the Russians get the memo”

In addition, while poo-pooing attrition, the back end of your little thought piece here basically says “Russia has won by attrition”.  Grinding one trench at a time, by the perspective you are demonstrating, means Russia has “won” by adopting the exact opposite approach central to your philosophy.

Again…”except for the Russians”.  A strategy of attrition has worked brilliantly for them coming at it from this angle. Russia has “surrendered to a strategy of attrition” and Ukraine is now stuck…that is basically what you are saying.

Look, you are really muddled up here.  Clearly well read but it feels like you don’t have a good grasp on how to put all the pieces together.  We have gone from “tactics…you don’t understand the tactics”, to “boo attrition, it will never work - offensives and manoeuvre only”, to “ Ukraine is stuck and it does not look good.  And if they do not have complete victory they lose”.  Meanwhile ignoring the fact that by that thinking, Russia has won through adopting an attrition strategy when viewed through these lenses - regardless of how bad their tactics and operational art in fact are.

So let’s try this:

Ukraine can win a war of attrition, and likely do it better than Russia.  They can do it via smart, connected denial - same way they blunted, stopped and rolled back the RA in the first year.  They can, and are, projecting friction and attrition onto the RA (whose losses are simply brutal).  I call this Corrosive Warfare.  It is not simple old school Attrition Warfare, which is grinding the front end until  one side runs out.  Corrosive Warfare is targeted, precise and rapid attrition directed at key nodes, connectors and capabilities.  We have already seen the UA do this on EW, C4ISR, artillery and logistics.  If one can corrode an opponent in what essentially constitutes a manoeuvre via firepower then theoretically one can set the pre-conditions for an opponents operational system to collapse. Further you might be able to strain their strategic system to breaking as well.  What we really want to see is political collapse but in that one I am not sure.

Now that is the plan.  All tactics, operations and strategies should be directed at that.  Once they can do that, then the forces that are supposed to cover all those minefield will not matter because they will be unsupported and disconnected.  No magic bullet tactics or capabilities are going to solve this.  It will take a concerted and long term focused effort (and western support needs to align).  Smart defence and denial is definitely central to this but so are firepower offensives.

So outcomes..what really matters.  If Ukraine goes this way they can, at worst, freeze this thing.  A Korean Peninsula outcome is definitely a possibility, and frankly it is not a bad one…with provisos: Ukraine will need intense reconstruction, and will need to be pulled into a binding security alliance of some sort.  Now if Russia hits a tipping point we could also see another RA collapse (kinda what I am hoping for).  The bar is very low on defensive requirements right now, so I am honestly not sure if it will work.  But it has a far better chance than throwing more western ways of warfare at this problem.  If the RA collapse due to corrosion that would open the door to operational manoeuvre and offensives.  We might actually see that damned land bridge cut, at which point Russia is dangerously close to pre Feb ‘22 lines - we get that far and we can have the next argument.

And then there are versions in between.  There is a really worst case.  Ukraine loses the will to fight and begins to fracture politically.  Or the West does the same.  At that point Russia has a decent chance of pulling whatever this thing is, off.  And if they do they will have won this war through a grinding attrition strategy that frankly is humbling.  The level of losses they have been willing to spend on this are from another era.  This is why we cannot let them win.  It signals to every challenger that we will blink in the face of a real fight that last longer than a f#cking long weekend (that is where all this cult of offensive has gotten us).

Since we keep throwing cool sayings around, here is another English one “understand when you are in a hammer fight, and then make damn sure you don’t come in second.”  

 

 

1. The tactical level always has an effect on the operational and strategic level. The EPR (The People's Army of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War) had some of the best generals in the Spanish army of the time. Their plans at an operational and strategic level were generally excellent and withouth a fault. The EPR received more and better material, some of it was very modern for the time and better than de German and Italian one.. What was missing from the EPR? The tactics to make those plans and new material work.

A house is built from the foundation. If your army does not work at the tactical level, you can have all the operational and strategic plans you want, which generally those plans at the operational and strategic level will not work as intended.

By the way, the Germans in 1918 had the tactics but not the means. Not everything is tactics. You also need the means to put tactics into practice.

2. The Ukrainians managed to carry out a Blitzkrieg-style operation in the Kharkov area, attacking at the Russian weakest point and exploiting the success operationally with an advance in that area that forced the Russians to abandon the part of the front closest to Kharkov and retreat to the Svatove line. There, I don't think there was much denial.

But if you then let the front stagnate for months, let the enemy reinforce itself with 300,000 men, plant millions of mines (no one has calculated how many mines Russia has left from the stock it had before the war and how many it can manufacture per month ) it is not strange that things change. The Ukrainians evidently made a superlative effort in 2022 that is to be admired, and they could not make a greater effort because we, their allies, have done nothing but procrastinate shipments of ammunition and material. That said, it seems to me that attacking the strongest points of the Russian lines and persisting in the offensive once it was clear that it had failed, as if we were in a 21st century Somme or Verdun, as did by Zaluzhnyi, is not the best idea. And staying hidden in the trenches playing to see who is the last one to survive a drone attack, praying that Putin's dictatorship magically falls apart, as you seems to advocate, doesn't seem like a good idea to me either.

3. I have not said that Russia has won by attrition. I have said that if we adopt an attrition-only strategy, Russia has a better chance of winning in the long run.

4. I'm sorry but I don't believe in corrosive warfare as the inevitable way to fight the war in Ukraine. Every war implies, of course, a wear and tear of one's own army, and of the enemy's army too. But reducing everything to a war of attrition shows an inability to leave the mental framework that fosters it and an extreme simplification of war: if I kill more than you, until you run out of soldiers, ammunition, resources and will, then I win. Therefore I need more bombs, more missiles and more grenades, until there is nothing left of the adversary. Which by the way, the enemy will do the same. Eye by eye, we will all go blind. It may be the only way to act in a nuclear war, but I don't think is the only option in a conventional one.

You say "If Ukraine goes this way they can, at worst, freeze this thing. A Korean Peninsula outcome is definitely a possibility, and frankly it is not a bad one." Everything indicates that this is the possibility. However, I would not like it if I were Ukrainian. What is clear is that if the Ukrainians dedicate themselves exclusively to fighting a war of attrition, the Korea Peninsula result is what they will get ...if they are lucky.

Rommel said that you must be bold, but you can never be reckless. It's exactly what I think. If you give up everything and sink into a war of attrition in Ukraine, you will not be reckless indeed, but what is also certain is that you will not be bold either.

Edited February 11 by Fernando

[JonS]

22 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Rommel said that you can be bold, but you can never be reckless.

Is this Erwin "dash to the wire" Rommel you're talking about, or Erwin "strand myself with my back to an unbreached minefield" Rommel, or is it Erwin "Medenine" Rommel.

Edited February 11 by JonS

[JonS]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

I was speaking of the mental framework. In 1918, both sides found ways to breach a heavily defended entrenched enemy front and advance. That was not the case in 1915-1917 (Caporetto excepted). 

Fine. It's still not a comment that can be taken seriously.

[Fernando]

24 minutes ago, JonS said:

Fine. It's still not a comment that can be taken seriously.

Fine. It's not a comment that can be taken seriously.

[Fernando]

43 minutes ago, JonS said:

Is this Erwin "dash to the wire" Rommel you're talking about, or Erwin "strand myself with my back to an unbreached minefield" Rommel, or is it Erwin "Medenine" Rommel.

Bold means you may take risks, but if your move fails, then you are still alive and you can still react.

Reckless means that if you gamble fails, then you are toast.

Rommel was usually bold. Hitler was reckless.

Edited February 11 by Fernando

[Holien]

12 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Bold means you may take risks, but if your move fails, then you are still alive and you can still react.

You rarely have all the information to hand as a leader to know if you are being bold or reckless.

That's what Historians determine 

[JonS]

26 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Bold means you may take risks, but if your move fails, then you are still alive and you can still react.

Reckless means that if you gamble fails, then you are toast.

Rommel was usually bold. Hitler was reckless.

This sounds an awful lot like the popular working definition of maneauverism; if it works it's maneauvry (and bold), while if it doesn't it's attritiony (and reckless).

I don't think that's a useful definition.

[Hapless]

To chip in on the WW1 front-

The interplay of tactics on both sides is important. The only reason the Germans could suceed with infiltration tactics in 1918 was because the Allies were reorganising to dispersed defence in depth. Infiltration attacks in 1915-17 would have found no gaps to exploit... hence the Allies doubled down on the scripted set piece.

And that's to some definition of 'suceed'. There were plenty of German infiltration type attacks in the Spring Offensive that were massacred to no effect.

But anyway, back to the war in Ukraine... I'm sure we'll see the same dynamic.

[Fernando]

36 minutes ago, Holien said:

You rarely have all the information to hand as a leader to know if you are being bold or reckless.

That's what Historians determine 

1. If you don't have enough information, so you move basically in the dark, your move is not bold, but  reckless.

 

Edited February 11 by Fernando

[Fernando]

15 minutes ago, Hapless said:

To chip in on the WW1 front-

The interplay of tactics on both sides is important. The only reason the Germans could suceed with infiltration tactics in 1918 was because the Allies were reorganising to dispersed defence in depth. Infiltration attacks in 1915-17 would have found no gaps to exploit... hence the Allies doubled down on the scripted set piece.

And that's to some definition of 'suceed'. There were plenty of German infiltration type attacks in the Spring Offensive that were massacred to no effect.

But anyway, back to the war in Ukraine... I'm sure we'll see the same dynamic.

What was first, the egg or the hen?

[Fernando]

27 minutes ago, JonS said:

This sounds an awful lot like the popular working definition of maneauverism; if it works it's maneauvry (and bold), while if it doesn't it's attritiony (and reckless).

I don't think that's a useful definition.

What makes a move bold or reckless is not the results. A reckless move may be succesful while a bold move may be a failure indeed, though it is also true that mos reckless moves fail. 

Edited February 11 by Fernando

[Holien]

13 minutes ago, Fernando said:

1. If you don't have enough information, so you move basically in the dark, your move is not bold, but  reckless.

 

Hmmm you think that battlefield commanders have a fully illuminated battlefield? 

Even with today's battles with modern ISR it is hard to bring all that information accurately together in a way that is easily understandable.

It certainly was not possible before now, so by your statement every commander was reckless?

[The_Capt]

7 hours ago, JonS said:

Weren't you just talking about setting conceptual boundaries, otherwise every conversation has to include everything? Wait - maybe that was Steve.

Anywho, I fear we may be missing the point of Operational Research. It's purpose is not to explain the causes and courses of a war, or a campaign, or even a battle. It's to provide metrics and rules of thumb to answer operational questions - like "if I attack a city, all else being equal, how many cas should I expect?"

I don't have Rowland's book (although it's on my Amazon wishlist now), but his reputation does precede him so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. And, given that you managed to completely butcher the interpretation of a simple diagram/graph/chart/thing, in this particular case I am also inclined to disregard your attempted criticism of his work.

Must have been Steve as I don’t recall ever bringing “conceptual boundaries” into it.  However, if we were to go there I still think the concept of “vital ground” would carry.  In land warfare this concept shapes the battle space.  When an urban area becomes vital ground it would not be too bad of an idea consider the surround areas supporting it - but hey, you do you.

As to Rowland, ok so let me get this right.  Because I missed the little round “dots” on a scanned page on a pretty fast moving forum, you are going to dismiss the legitimate questions raised on the subject of urban warfare?  I was not even directly criticizing your new hero, I was challenging some of the conclusions being drawn.  First, it is easy to find counter examples in urban warfare, which were obviously either left out of Rowland’s chart or he interpreted them differently.  Second, this book came out in 2006 and does not match follow on modern military thought on urban warfare (and in some places, experience).  But saying all that, I noted that there was also corroboration on some of Rowland’s points.  That informed a deeper conversation which I found useful contribution to the broader discussion.

But hey, if you want to play “Rock, Paper, Gotcha” Reddit games instead…knock yourself out.

[The_Capt]

8 hours ago, JonS said:

Do you think? I'm not sure - I mean, it's not like he, personally, stands to benefit from arms sales to Europe, so I expect he doesn't give a flying feck where the weapons come from ... other than making his daddy happy by getting folks to Buy Russia(tm).

I am not sure who we are talking about here,  I was referring to the Trump speech where we appears to be green lighting further Russian aggression on NATO partners “who don’t pay” (not sure who his “daddy” is in all this).  It plays well in the sticks but US arms sales are not small:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/29/arms-sales-united-states-nato-russia-ukraine-war-the-arsenal-of-democracy-is-back-in-business/

My point being the entire shtick is more political theatre than a declaration that a potential future US president planning to abandon article 5.

Edited February 11 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

4 hours ago, Artkin said:

So I was a little wrong there. It seems all of 6th army was eventually destroyed.

In terms of forces involved - yeah all of the Soviet troops fighting in the city were conscripts - 62nd and 64th armies were reserve armies deployed that year. They did have fighting experience during Blau but it wasn't good experience - both armies were pretty much already decimated by the time they retreated to the city.

This is a complex question because many units were shifted around over months, and it can't be answered without going in depth. It's the reason why I'm committing to a Kursk campaign first instead of a Blau campaign.

The assault on the city began on September 13th 1942.

 

---------------------Troops trapped in pocket------------------------

6th army was composed of many late wave divisions:

1st wave - 44th ID (August 1939)

2nd wave - 71st ID, 76th ID, 79th ID (August 1939)

8th wave - 295th ID (February 1940)

12th wave - 113th ID (August 1940)

13th wave - 305th ID (November - December 1940)

18th wave - 384th ID, 389th ID (December 1941)

19th wave - 376th ID (March - April 1942)

100th Jager (July 1942 .. Eight days after Blau commenced)

3rd Motorized (October 1940)

60th Motorized (August 1940)

14th Panzer (August 1940 from the 4th ID)

16th Panzer (November 1940 from 16th ID)

24th Panzer (28th November 1941 from the 1st Cavalry Division .. The only cav div in the heer)

 

4th Panzer Army:

29th Motorized - Before 1940

20th Rumanian

---------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Tracking the strengths of units:

Soviet:

I'm not going to draw conclusions from all the data but if you look you can see decently sized Soviet divisions disappearing in a week. Many divisions were rebuilt on the spot. For the third picture you have Authorized/Actual strengths. It's hard to calculate totals when you're dealing with this.

 

I can't find any definite numbers on the Germans from September 13th because the staffwork was not the best afaik. This is important because we don't know what strength the Germans actually had when they entered the city. I do have 6th army's primary source documents in pdf form but I'm not sure where to look to find their "Iststärke" (Actual strength) numbers.

I have numbers for the later months but they are not very useful without an initial strength value.

For 24th October:

And mid November:

Sorry about the off topic post. I know this also doesn't conclude much. A serious in depth look is required on this topic.

Now this is good stuff.  It appears the Soviets went with the tried and true “I will send conscripts, you send veterans, and we will keep grinding at unfavourable ratios.  In the end you will run out of veterans before I run out of conscripts.”  This tosses troop quantities back into the mix and “which troops” are being lost.

[poesel]

Sorry to derail the thread with stories from Ukraine...

Not that much news for the folks here, but still interesting:

 

[Kraft]

36 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

than a declaration that a potential future US president it going to abandon article 5.

Worry not because he has verbatum said just that before, removing unecessary doubts.

Specifically mentioning the small NATO Eastern border countries, he would not help.

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

A house is built from the foundation. If your army does not work at the tactical level, you can have all the operational and strategic plans you want, which generally those plans at the operational and strategic level will not work as intended.

By the way, the Germans in 1918 had the tactics but not the means. Not everything is tactics. You also need the means to put tactics into practice.

Ok, with you so far.  But it still appears a little binary.  So Russia has bad tactics, bad operational art, and bad strategy but is in this war via simple mass so there are clearly offsets.  However, I do agree that tactics, operational and strategic levels need to support each other in order for this thing to work well.  Of course your last line also highlights that one can have outstanding tactics but if you have poor strategy you can lose just as badly as the other way around.

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

2. The Ukrainians managed to carry out a Blitzkrieg-style operation in the Kharkov area, attacking at the Russian weakest point and exploiting the success operationally with an advance in that area that forced the Russians to abandon the part of the front closest to Kharkov and retreat to the Svatove line. There, I don't think there was much denial.

 

Actually that is not how Kharkiv went down.  The entire offensive rested on air power denial.  If the UA had not denied the RuAF air superiority that entire offensive would have ended in disaster.  Further, the offensive phase at Kharkiv was the culmination of months of deep strikes on an over extended RA position in the southeast while the RA burned itself out at Severodonetsk.  You seem to be seeing “blitzkrieg” because you want to see it and are missing all of the real work it took to make that area a Russian “weak spot” in the first place - good ol fashion attrition.  The breakout battle in fall of ‘22 was the end move of a long attritional effort to establish conditions for operational collapse.

We know exactly what a “blitzkrieg” attempt without establishing those conditions looks like - the UA summer ‘23 offensive.

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

That said, it seems to me that attacking the strongest points of the Russian lines and persisting in the offensive once it was clear that it had failed, as if we were in a 21st century Somme or Verdun, as did by Zaluzhnyi, is not the best idea. And staying hidden in the trenches playing to see who is the last one to survive a drone attack, praying that Putin's dictatorship magically falls apart, as you seems to advocate, doesn't seem like a good idea to me either.

Ok, but one does not simply “attack the weakest part of the line”.  One “makes a part of the line weak”.  The UA has incredible ISR right now and can see that entire line and it is all mined and defended.  There is no “weak part” they blindly missed.  The RA has ISR too (even though lower quality) and can see major UA muscle movements allowing for shifting to meet the UA wherever they go.  Again your perception needs to go deeper as you are really only seeing the surface.

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

3. I have not said that Russia has won by attrition. I have said that if we adopt an attrition-only strategy, Russia has a better chance of winning in the long run.

4. I'm sorry but I don't believe in corrosive warfare as the inevitable way to fight the war in Ukraine. Every war implies, of course, a wear and tear of one's own army, and of the enemy's army too. But reducing everything to a war of attrition shows an inability to leave the mental framework that fosters it and an extreme simplification of war: if I kill more than you, until you run out of soldiers, ammunition, resources and will, then I win.

Ok, time for another English saying “fight the war you are in,  it the one you hoped for.”  This is where we are at.  There are no clever manoeuvre options here.  No elegant or clever/convenient quick solutions.  This is now an attritional fight until something breaks. We cannot simply throw up our hands and go “well all is lost because we can’t to offensive manoeuvre anymore”…that is where a lack of imagination hits.  War has been reduced to its foundations - killing more of them than they can handle.  Now we can do it smartly, with precision to create advantages but you seem to be proposing that obvious manoeuvre options are on the table but the UA “doesn’t get it”.  Clearly that is not true.

More simply: ok, so what?  What you, I or anyone “believe” is irrelevant.  What matters is the war Ukraine is in and how to win it.

2 hours ago, Fernando said:

You say "If Ukraine goes this way they can, at worst, freeze this thing. A Korean Peninsula outcome is definitely a possibility, and frankly it is not a bad one." Everything indicates that this is the possibility. However, I would not like it if I were Ukrainian. What is clear is that if the Ukrainians dedicate themselves exclusively to fighting a war of attrition, the Korea Peninsula result is what they will get ...if they are lucky.

Rommel said that you must be bold, but you can never be reckless. It's exactly what I think. If you give up everything and sink into a war of attrition in Ukraine, you will not be reckless indeed, but what is also certain is that you will not be bold either

Again, tell that to the South Koreans.  The other options are much worse.  

As to Rommel (he ended up losing on a losing side - due largely in part to unsustainable attrition by the way).  Why can’t Ukraine pursue “bold attrition”?  Why does attrition have to be dumb or simple - this is what western manoeuvre warfare dogma has gotten us and highlights my major point.  You clearly have bought into a school of thought where anything but bold offensive manoeuvre is essentially the road to failure.  This is not historically supported and is simply not true.  Further it creates barriers to “bold imagination” as opposed to encourage it.

This is where your entire thesis breaks down.  Bold manoeuvre = decisive victory (the only one that matters), therefore anything else = defeat.  How does that position nurture new ideas in the face of a war that does not allow for “bold manoeuvre”?  It becomes a doctrinal prison that frighteningly mirrors what WW1 leadership did in a very similar position.

In the end I guess we will have to see.  I suspect the UA will need a very heavy attrition campaign to get the RA to the point where operational collapse is again an option.  Then we might see a breakout battle again.  But there are few clever end-run options left here, and most of which Ukraine is not set up for (eg amphibious op to the south).  One thing this war has taught me in spades is that this entire thing is far more ambidextrous than what was fed to me for my entire career.  And we need to start understanding what that left handed piece means, quickly.

[Kraft]

5 hours ago, Zeleban said:

 

Offensive? Through what means? Ukraine now receives only about 10% of the aid it received last year. And that help turned out to be insufficient for the offensive. Everyone is well aware of this, especially the generals. Currently, the front line is held only by FPV. And as we see near Avdeevka, as soon as the weather does not allow the effective use of FPV, the Russians manage to break through the front.

I'd add that through the last months, losses have been higher than replacements. With little to no pledged armaments

An offensive cannot happen this year or it will end in an even greater disaster that could upset the balance swiftly.

Edited February 11 by Kraft

[The_Capt]

12 minutes ago, Kraft said:

Worry not because he has verbatum said just that before, removing unecessary doubts.

Specifically mentioning the small NATO Eastern border countries, he would not help.

Didn’t the US pass a law where a president cannot unilaterally pull out of NATO or somesuch?  Oh ya, here it is:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/congress-trump-proofs-nato-1.7059768#:~:text=It says no president shall,spelled out in the bill.

 

[Kraft]

6 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Didn’t the US pass a law where a president cannot unilaterally pull out of NATO or somesuch?  Oh ya, here it is:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/congress-trump-proofs-nato-1.7059768#:~:text=It says no president shall,spelled out in the bill.

 

I am legitimately curious how Donald Trump could be forced to send troops against his will, as he does not uphold the law per se. Especially if he has majority republican support

Edited February 11 by Kraft

[The_Capt]

4 minutes ago, Kraft said:

I am legitimately curious how Donald Trump could be forced to send troops against his will, as he does not uphold the law per se. Especially if he has majority republican support

Well first off, they are already there:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_136388.htm

So he would have to pull them out - which looks a lot like running away and one thing Poppa T does not like is looking weak and scared.  And as soon as the shooting starts and the US takes casualties the whole discussion becomes moot - PAX Americana and all that.

[Kraft]

13 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Well first off, they are already there:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_136388.htm

So he would have to pull them out - which looks a lot like running away and one thing Poppa T does not like is looking weak and scared.  And as soon as the shooting starts and the US takes casualties the whole discussion becomes moot - PAX Americana and all that.

But he did that in Afghanistan and his base loved him for it. I am sure putin would encourage redeployment early enough to avoid awkward situations. 

Putin would likely stay local and limited in scope, not try to reach Berlin, so it would be fairly easy for the commander in chief to avoid having troops in that area, long enough for facts to be made.

Edited February 11 by Kraft

[Maciej Zwolinski]

8 hours ago, cesmonkey said:

bI found that part of his speech. You can listen at the time stamp below. The context was if NATO members weren't paying their fair share, would the U.S. come to their defense? To that, he answered no. If you don't pay, you don't get any protection from the U.S., and he would then encourage Russia to attack those NATO countries is Russian wanted to.

To state the obvious, this may be the way he could have negotiated commercial contracts in his company. This is not how a mutual defence alliance works