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Unknown, but zero active duty American casualties and Russia will be unable to fight a peer/near-peer for a generation.

Offensive power on the ground maneuver is predicated on the same advantage/disadvantage ratios that have existed since the time of Alexander. Technology can soften those numbers but they never get away from the requirement of say an attacker to employ a 3:1 or better 5:1 advantage to take the ground effectively. What technology does do well is allow you to extend influence over the ground (say as far as indirect fire or drones can range). The Russian Army is not capable of fighting that way because to effectively maneuver an advantage force you don’t really need a body count to body count, you need an element of size vs an element of size, so when we say 3:1 advantage what that means really is a battalion attacks a company, and better yet 5:1 a Brigade attacks a company. Since the Russians are pretty much inept above the size of a battalion task group, Ukraine can field Company+ size elements with reinforcing enablers like fires and drones, and achieve parity with the attacker which is never something that pans out well for the attacker. And that is why the Russians adopt positional warfare, it’s not by choice, it’s by their own inept ability to wield what is largely still an army of convicts and peasants with too few competent officers and no NCO corps to effectively train and use them. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I am more impressed by the ECIPS. Break break...As previously reported N Korea sent 8,000 troops to Russia to train then on to the front. The Ukrainians just killed the first batch in a couple of drone strikes. A staggering report just came out of the Institute for The Study of War - They estimate that Russian has lost an average of 30,000 troops (killed or wounded), every month in 2024. In October alone they lost 57,000 troops. What a meat grinder.

Ukraine has done in 2 years more collective training and maturing of its officer cadre than the rest of NATO combined (including a good chunk of our commands). I mean what did you reference in Kursk… that was a Ukrainian Brigade+ operating under a single unified commanders intent and attacking what were a series of Company and smaller elements acting in a fragmented scheme of defense. That is text book application of offensive ground maneuver. The Ukrainian military from a staff and orders capability right now is head and shoulders above any of our standing NATO partners who may have the kit but lack any of the collective experience employing it. The one place that gets funny is employing enabling capes that they simply don’t have or we won’t give them because we save it for ourselves cough*offensive cyber*cough. The secret to our success over peers on the ground isn’t going to be measured in simple tangible comparisons like tank armor or Rmax of specific artillery systems. It’s going to be in the fact we can execute the MDMP at echelon faster than whoever is sitting in the opponent seat. We didn’t figure out something new, we just got back to the understanding that the Corps is the unit of action in LSCO and the Division is the staff that has to execute that action. We aren’t even that good at it, but everybody else is just really terrible if they’ve even begun considering to think that way. And that’s great and all…. But we only have so much Division frontage and Europe is hella big. We can’t simply sprinkle the US elements piecemeal across Europe, and Europe cant defend all the spaces in between if we mass. That’s the same problem the Ukrainians have, how do you take the stuff you’ve learned the hard way and transfer that experience to the 60k plus troops and elements you’ve got in the pipeline without diluting it too much to keep its effect. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It's been a long time since I was a UPT IP, but I always had a simple hypothetical for the tanker guys I flew with that were debating the assignment. You can adapt this to whatever your current airframe is. If it was a Wednesday, middle of the day, and I came to your desk and told you that I had a pattern only sortie about to step, and you had no beans left, no requirements, nothing in your desk job that required you to skip the flight; basically, if you did it you would be doing it for nothing other than to hop in the plane and fly a little. It hasn't been a while since you've flown, and you haven't been flying your ass off. Just... Do you *want* to fly? If the answer to that is "hell yeah," then you're probably going to enjoy UPT. If you're the guy who would rather use the time to catch up on some low priority tasks, or maybe hit the commissary so you don't have to after work, or whatever other simple life and career tasks we all have, then it's probably not for you. Bottom line, if you just fucking love flying airplanes, it's hard to get a job as good as upt. If flying planes is just how you pay the bills, then moving your family to the least exciting cities in America is probably not going to be particularly fulfilling.

These guys still have a small squadron of high, fast flyers! https://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/2024/10/23/starfighters-space-testing-jet-wing-rocket-launches-at-nasa-kennedy-space-center-cape-canaveral/75454852007/

We need a high fast flyer, let's resurrect with the Brits... the Super Lighting https://hushkit.net/2013/02/01/the-ultimate-what-if-bae-super-lightning/ Adaptive cycle engines and lots of gas, mated with conformal recessed AIM-260s, our HVAA killer or long range sniper.

The standard one (they call it the classic); he was almost 9. First squirrel he shot he had to rest the gun on my shoulder because he wasn’t strong enough to off hand it at the time. He could shoot it fine as long as there was something to rest the barrel on (or bench shooting). He got bigger/stronger and could off hand it a year later (he’s also not a big kid to begin with).

My sons first gun was a Henry 22 - I still grab it sometimes when I go for a walk and want a nice squirrel killer. Every kid should learn on one!

A gun I have always wanted and never purchased (going to fix that soon), is the Henry Golden Boy 22 MAG. A buddy had one and it was a blast to shoot. Something about the 22 Mag....hot little round.

Marine Corps Blames Pilot Error for Crash of Malfunctioning F-35 in South Carolina Forest Kind of a fucked up situation with a non-aviator Commandant reaching in to roll this dude long after the fact. A quick summary of events, some of you may know more: 1. Crap Weather 2. Dude went missed approach 3. While on going missed his HMD glitches three times going blank - the report indicates no attitude information (assuming in the HMD), but does not say nothing about primary displays 4. The report says he lost his transponder AND radios 5. "With no visible reference to the horizon or ground, and unsure of which flight instruments he could trust, he perceived that the aircraft was still not responding to his commands to convert -- and therefore was out-of-controlled flight," 6. If you read the report (which is heavily redacted), they place the blame on the pilot "The investigation concluded that the mishap was a result of "pilot error" in that Del Pizzo incorrectly diagnosed the out-of-control flight emergency and "ejected from a flyable aircraft -- albeit under extremely challenging cognitive and flight conditions." 7. The report recommends NO punitive action against the pilot. 8. Leadership reviews the report, puts him back on status and sends him to a follow on command. 9. 100 days into new Command the Commandant does a second review of the report and decides to mort this guy in what can best be described as a perception kill. 2,000' in bad weather with a malfunctioning jet and your brain stem can't determine what is up and what is down...hard to blame a dude for punching because he is Spacial D.

There are vidios all over the net of people being bused into her events. The latest ones are the mass exodus, while K was speaking, when people relized Beyonce wasn't going to do a show. They looked like a herd of goats that found a hole in the fence.