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PROPORTIONALITY is key here. While civilian casualties are an unfortunate reality of war, it is still not ok to commit murder. Have a look at the multitude of evidence of Russians executing civilians with their hands tied behind their backs & tell me they’re not guilty of war crimes. How about deliberately targeting hospitals and clearly marked shelters? How about raining down artillery on residential areas with no military targets in sight? Not exactly proportional now is it? Have the Ukrainians been operating 100% in accordance with LOAC? Probably not. But it’s their neighborhoods, their cities, their farms that have been invaded here. They can’t possibly be guilty on the same scale as the Russians because they aren’t ransacking Russian neighborhoods, raping their women and killing their children. Putin and his enablers are absolutely responsible for all of this reprehensible activity & frankly a hanging at The Hague is far to easy on them. Once again I’ll remind you that there is no gray area here. Only one side is guilty of a violent invasion & subsequent atrocities. There is NOTHING that justifies that. Not an expanding NATO, not an actor turned president who Putin doesn’t like, not Ukraine defending its own claims to Donbas. NOTHING JUSTIFIES RUSSIA’S ACTIONS. NOTHING. Fuck Putin and all of the Russians (and anyone else) supporting him by covering their eyes and ears to everything but the absolute garbage the Russian state is spreading. One final note here: It’s sickening and offensive to those of us who have served and still believe in our country that we have American military members making a moral equivalency between our own targeting processes which, while less than perfect, are NOTHING like what the Russians have done in Ukraine. It literally turns my stomach.

All those intel chiefs who definitively stated the laptop was propaganda should be banned from government service ever again. They are permanently discredited.

LOAC says you aren’t supposed to murder wounded prisoners. I notice some of the Russian victims are zip tied. There have been a lot of those videos— you can find Ukrainians killing tied up Russians with knives fairly easily. It’s terrible. War is terrible, and in this case neither side is innocent of wrong doing. That said, this was a war by Russian choice and for Ukrainian survival. If Russia invaded Florida and I was running around with a piecemeal group of volunteers while every other nation sat around watching atrocities inflicted on my family…. Well I have some bad news for the LOAC office.

And the garrison wings are going to staff these A-staffs with what bodies?

Quoted again for posterity.

Trump had his AG launch appoint a special counsel to investigate the fake “Trump Russian Collusion”. For some reason I doubt Biden will do the same for his financial involvement with his son’s corrupt financial dealings.

At this point, the optimist in me is hoping this egregious abortion of the last 2 years (and especially the last year) has pissed so many people off that the far left has shot themselves in the foot 10 times over, and we'll see them and all of their bullshit shoved aside into the dark corner of the basement where they belong.

For real? Like no shit? *If* this is the case, there needs to be a massive come to Jesus with regard to how our media apparatus functions. That's already true, but this should make it obvious for everyone, regardless of which side of the isle you're on.

The stews must have been really hot

So the so called news agencies that banded together to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden Laptop story have now admitted it is a real story and not "Russian Propaganda." This week it was reported the investigation has heated up and Hunter is likely to be indicted soon. As of this morning it was reported the panel (I am assuming grand jury), asked "who is the big guy." Will be interesting to see what comes of this and how the die hard liberals on here will react.

KA-52 Shot down with ATGM. The Russians have a lost a LOT of equipment in five weeks.

Surprising that the Russian military hasn’t been able to counter Ukrainian’s asymmetric advantage in UAS this far into the war.

Magpul Zhukov attached (many thanks oh benevolent government for deciding to allow me to exercise my constitutional rights). Works great, feels great...definitely recommend for any scorpion owners out there.

I view "Hunter getting indicted soon" the same way I viewed "Trump getting indicted soon". I'll believe it when someone actually files charges.

But seriously, yeah, same thought. Heres the ACC produced infomercial that was used to explain it to us.

Nice, at least in that article they specifically say “traditional” and not mention sep or simple iras… so I’m thinking I’ll be in the clear. Also wonder if I should just go ahead and start contributing to the Roth again this year and do the same thing next year.

We should all stop calling it a bonus. It’s a contract extention.

You're doing all the right things then. My only advice would be to spend more time researching heavy missions before writing them off. Flying Herks or C-17s is a lot cooler than not flying for the military at all, plus you'll get a lot more flight time. If you're willing to go active duty there's already a very high chance you won't fly fighters, so it would be beneficial to look at some of the heavy guard units with interesting missions (e.g. HC-130 or MC-130) and weigh the certainty of flying those birds against the uncertainty of getting stuck with something even less appealing to you if you don't do well in UPT.

Ka-52 vs Anti-tank missile.

Well we still have groups and NAFs, I don’t ever see it going away, less grooming billets for 0-6s and GOs

Bumping/Resurrecting this thread since the topic came up in the Eval Downgrade thread and a lot of people haven't heard of it before.

There’s precedent in multiple other democratic states for things like this. For example, the Bund organization/party was outlawed in the US after the start of WWII. There’s multiple open source examples of the Russians kidnapping Ukrainian officials and and installing puppets; the 1st party in the above article is openly sympathetic and colluding with Russia, I’m not sure about the others. There’s only one large autocracy in Europe currently invading its neighbor, slaughtering thousands of civilians with heavy artillery, forcibly deporting thousands of others, and denying the entire thing. If the Ukrainian government has to ban political parties supportive/sympathetic of these actions to ensure they remain free of Russia it may not be in line with some idea of a democratic utopia, but perfectly understandable in a fight for survival.

You are missing the point. But lets assume for a minute you didn't join the military assuming it was going to be rainbow farts from gilded unicorn assholes. In EVERY single instance of outrage you expressed above, I can pinpoint a near EXACT equivalent that happened in the US GWOT. Mishandling prisoners of war. Abu Ghraib, 2003. Striking hospitals marked as shelters? Doctors Without Borders, Kunduz, 2015. Raining artillery down on residential neighborhoods? al-Aghawat al Jadidah, Mosul, 2017. Raping and pillaging Ukranian villages? Mahmudiyah Iraq, 2006. I could name half a dozen for each of these actually but those were the best specific examples that most mirror the circumstances you point to above and as I said in my original post, its going to be really hard to pin some of these because Russia doesn't have access to advanced aerial sensors or PGMs that we do (and they are not required to). Futhermore, Zelansky muddied those waters further by giving every civilian in Ukraine a rifle and telling them to go out and kill Russians. I don't fault him for that, this is a war of survival for them, but recognize that makes it really hard to throw charges at Russia, charges, not accusations, and make them stick. More important to the overall point though, you lack the nuance of how LOAC is applied, where it hails from and the international audience it caters to. You brought up the Hague. Did you know that the United States of America (the country you said you still believed in) is actively sanctioning the ICC and has placed entry bans on ICC investigators tasked to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ever ask yourself why that is? Ever ask yourself how the news stories about the incidents I outlined above were portrayed in the rest of the world? Ever open up a Pakistani newspaper article on drone strikes? This is just silly. You guys just want to chock everything up to Putin apologetics and in reality i'm just telling you how shit is going to play out as I see it which is that Putin has sufficient fog and noise in Ukraine to effectively conceal a case against the state for war crimes based on Zelansky's decision to arm a civilian populace which massively distorted any cases against distinction and the lack of advanced targeting technologies, mainly sensors and PGMs, which allows Russia greater leniency and presuming proportionality. Just War Theory makes it pretty clear that combatants are innocent of Jus-ad-Bellum and therefore no matter how idiotic or stupid Putin's reason for entering Ukraine is, nothing justifies the extrajudicial killings or Russian POWs that are presumed innocent unless tried and found guilty of war crimes. If someone understands something better than you don't just dismiss it as propaganda, ask them to explain it. I can write pages on here about LOAC, Just War Theory and the Geneva conventions. If you were a shooter at some point, and you did some shit that bothered you, you probably talked to a Chaplain and a JAG a few times about this stuff, and they probably gave you some things to read, and you probably read a shit ton about it because you wanted to sleep at night. But hey man, what do I know. One last thing, Russia is not winning the information space right now. Ukraine is. And if you don't believe Ukraine is targeting American and Western European citizens in that information campaign, you are completely naive. And they are not doing it because they want to "be our friends" or "help us lead the free world." They are doing it because they are acting in their own country's interests, as ALL states do. There are "reasons" we are hearing very little about how the snake isle defenders suddenly ended up in Russian custody, what is happening in the inner ranks of the foreign legion, and how Russian prisoners are being treated in Ukraine. If we go balls to the wall break all hell lose against Russia so be it. But lets make sure we are doing it because its in our interests and not because its in Ukraine's interests.

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/04/05/double-helicopter-crash-at-fort-stewart-was-not-an-accident/?fbclid=IwAR3K1uWX12yPqm4UMwAxLj5U0m2OuZkTOgOyJdLTrkyafRrYeIH1Y3kRtc4

This doesn’t really sound like much of a “democracy” to me. https://www.nationalreview.com/news/zelensky-suspends-opposition-parties-in-ukraine-with-russia-ties/

Was kind of eluding to this earlier. We all want to see war crimes as this black and white thing but it's not and the fact is, states will attempt to blur the borders and boundaries of it as best as possible to serve their interests, including the US. The only definitive assurance is that your state will suffer less scrutiny if it comes out the victor. Its sort of why I don't put much stock into all of these cries about Russian war crimes because I can clearly see that what they're doing isn't really that far removed from our own state targeting processes, but they are doing it without the advantages of advanced sensory ISR or PGMs. I'm not saying there were war crimes committed by Russia, there certainly were; but most of the stuff I've seen right now is going to fall on an individual level and not on a state level. Now what is worth observing is if Russia internally disciplines those cases which is what we normally expect of our own military in this case (and why we won't sign in or participate in the ICC). Again, not sure how many people on here are shooters or involved in targeting, but it is and always had been completely legal to kill civilians in war. Witnessed multiple times where we assessed a military target had the requisite necessity and proportionality to justify striking without regards to nearby civilian collateral.