Lawman

Go look at a map of the Baltics and compare it to Ukraine. Also factor in that time thing you’ve left out of any discussion. How many towns and cities can the Russians fumble into ownership of on their worst day while we get V corps ready to go in a fight to take them back. The Russians are not our peers on the ground but that means nothing because our ground forces aren’t in a position to make the argument on day 1 of any conflict. You (and others) seem to be trying to make the conversation about how Russia is somehow this toothless made up boogieman and that’s simply not what any of the rest of us criticizing them are saying. Albeit I was mistaken, your intent wasn’t necessarily that. The Russian Army is the same threat to us as it is to Portugal from the standpoint of actual arms and effects, but we are part of NATO and only as good as our strength to honor our commitments. And one of the ways we (and arguably more importantly the rest of the alliance) don’t have to answer that commitment is to get to keep them at proxy arms length in Ukraine. As to combat effectiveness, An army of peasants and numbskulls with rifles are still fully capable of taking over a swaths of territory, Africa and the Middle East are proof of that. They can be dipshits, but they still have tanks. Dipshits organized into Battalion Tactical Groups which they can manage and equipped with tanks can accomplish a lot when they are left to pick where they seek battle. Right now so long as they don’t take Ukraine and want to stay involved in Ukraine they don’t have that option to seek battle elsewhere. The Russians may not be able to form their ranks into what we would call a reinforced armor division and punch a 300 km whole in the Ukrainian lines, that doesn’t mean they can’t orchestrate the seizure of territory in the Baltics or Poland and upend 70 years of NATO because it is collectively decided that such an event isnt our problem. Not to mention the message it sends to the other hemispheres geopolitical foe. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Countries don’t fight ground wars, formations do. Ukraine has parity above most of NATO in that manner, but they don’t possess the number of formations needed to achieve some decisive breakout. The old “quantity has a quality all its own” mantra. 92nd can’t win a war on its own, and ground maneuver culminates over distance meaning it won’t matter how good or bad they are because they will be spent either way. Russia also achieves near-to-peer parity with a whole lot of NATO in that manner, because while they may be a half dozen regiments full of ass clowns in regards to quality, the formation of the other side of the border is a series of Company’s of Lithuanian professional with about 6 kilometers of strategic depth to give before they are fighting in their capital. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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

Having just done work with some of our Euro partners, they are absolutely still a threat because while they can’t stand offsides against a US division, they don’t have to. We can’t protect all the frontage. We only have so many units and we simply can’t be everywhere at once. Most of the border spaces have no real strategic terrain so it doesn’t favor the defender except for the occasional water crossing. The only real terrain to split them affects their ability to threaten Czech, but Poland is a parking lot. Our Euro partners are neither unified in what they think is the proper course of action (for instance the Poles will die for every inch of Warsaw because they already had it leveled in memory vs Lithuania which understands Vilnius is gonna be moonscaped if they try to defend it). They (NATO) can’t field large formations of any size, save for a few brigades which aren’t the same size as our idea of a Brigade. For the next decade France is the 2nd most powerful land force in NATO on the wrong end of the Continent to be useful, and with most of our forces still being rotational at best it’s not that we are massively ahead or positioned. You take that one rotational division out of theatre and suddenly the French have more combat capacity than we do by a good bit. 2ACR and 173rd are incomplete units, they are designed to function as a V Corps enabler, not the main body of the Corps. You need 2-3 mech/Armor division for that purpose and without the rotations we don’t even have one. It would take weeks-months to get sufficient ground forces in theatre to recapture and retake whatever ground the Russians were to stumble across and seize. You’ll need to port multiple divisions out of railheads and ports and ship them across an ocean to an ISB. Unless we (NATO)are both equipped and prepared (militarily and politically) to annihilate those ground formations with fires and aviation they would be able to come swinging out of their borders and simply occupy what is largely unprotected. I don’t think for a second somebody like Germany is going to accept the trade of destroying mech formations on the road to Warsaw or Talin for having to absorb Iskander/Kalibr strikes (or worse) in its territory. So we don’t kill them as they swarm out…. Now you’ve gotta be willing to dislodge them once sufficient ground forces (mostly entirely ours) are set, which means shaping their deep (ie bombing into Russia/Kgrad/Belarus proper). Now we’re gonna put a ground force we know they can’t stand against marching in the general direction of their capital. Tell me that’s a less dangerous scenario than allowing them to attrition themselves into oblivion in Ukraine let alone one that doesn’t involve US casualties. The Russians are not a US peer, they are a NATO peer, because frankly non of our NATO partner ground forces can keep pace with our ground maneuver so they can’t be part of any Corps/Army frontage in any offensive action. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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

F-35 Crash Final Conclusions “With your shield or on it” went to some people’s heads. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They are celebrating a “win” that has them 10k square miles short of taking the Donbas much less anything worth while. Positional warfare at its finest. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I always enjoyed having a Jag review our tapes post strike to make sure we used the right phrases pre strike. Gotta justify killing bad guys with words that can be reviewed by some dipshit that just got back from the KAF Chilis who has some innate insight on the PID process. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A lot of that was the 12-13 that they were technically aligned with us. Their 2020 “deployment” wasn’t really anything to say other than it was Covid and we were all doing weird stuff. Go sit in a place so they can say they have Apaches there. We’ve been doing that in CENTCOM for half a decade now. Not really tip of the spear for that. I went through flight school with a half a dozen guys out of that unit well before the wars had been turned down from boil. I think all of them combined have less combat time than any of the active guys in the same class. They just have some seriously old farts in that unit that refuse to go find another job. That said it’s sad to see some 30 year CW5 with all of 3 combat stripes on his sleeve. As I’ve said to a lot of peers in the Air Force Active/Reserve/Guard, the Army has a very different relationship with those entities especially now that we’ve gone back to the Divisional model. An aviation brigade exists to back its specific division because depending on type they fight very differently. Army Guard aviation is supposed to be a harvest point for bodies and aircraft to us to feed the machine, but when we actually try to do that it’s screaming about their organic make up.If they ever deployed a guard division we might give a crap, until then put some aviation dude on mobilization like we do all the other branches (engineering, med, etc). Until then they can shut up and stop pretending, I don’t ever and will never need an organic battalion of guard guys at the cost of having an active unit undermanned. But hey, when it’s time for the big fight the Guard staying home means we can’t be tracked by our link16… because 10th mountain won’t have any. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That unit was so on its ass in maintenance to spool up for a deployment we gave them an entire active duty battalions aircraft out of Forscom so they could go. While on said deployment they had not 1 but 2 inadvertent fuel starvation flameouts (idiots doing idiot stuff) a long with a host of bungling across RC North. This is the unit that tries to sell its self as something special for doing all the quick reaction testing when really that’s a 2 aircraft every couple years requirement to fly canned test scenarios. They don’t deploy often enough and when they do it’s largely a series of small disasters. We should have changed them over to Hawks and kept Idaho or Penn. Yet somehow because of the strength of the guard through its senators that unit is getting brand new EV6 aircraft before active duty units that are deploying with D’s. That last part isn’t unique to them either, for some reason we’re going to let an active Army divisions have their supporting aviation brigades use a lot of old airframes while we upgrade the guard with virtually no deployments on its calendar (the CENTCOM E-Cab always uses an active duty Apache Battalion) to the newest E’s rather than give them the old stuff they are already qualified in. There are anemic D models still flying at Carson and Bliss while these guys pretend to do high altitude gunnery in easier conditions. And one of them that could have been had just burned it in giving an F-35 guy a tour of how the other half lives. Way to go Utah… but again no surprises. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’m sure Kharkiv wasn’t their objective either. He’s still trying to figure that one out (along with most of the Russian Army leadership). Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

FSUs Offensive Line has holes like Riley Reid. It doesn’t matter what talent is on the rest of that team if you’re going to give up whole drives to just bad protection of the quarterback. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

At this point nobody except the Iranians need to worry about the restriction of that straight. Saudi can pipe the oil out the other way. The only reason they don’t is the price per barrel is still low enough to justify shipping it via boat from the old oil ports. Things get hot, Iran effectively isolates its self. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Help me! This internet is all sorts of suspect over here. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

So like every after action review I’ve ever taken part in… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I would say probably a sudden breeze of wind Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Well in fairness, Boeing didn’t build the one for Apollo either North American did. Guess those geniuses in Seattle should haven taken better notes over the decade they owned them before selling them off. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

We’ve got a team of young troopers whose sole job is acting as a red force with home made drones and going around showing people the vulnerabilities. They built this stuff in a basement with YouTube training, a 600 dollar 3D printer, and about 5k of budget. Now they’re flying around FPVs with droppers on them to drop little 3D printed chalk bombs. If you haven’t had the opportunity go out near one of these seagull sized little bastards when they are flying. You can’t see them beyond about 300 feet unless they are against naked sky, and at the speed they move you notice it just in time to look up at what would be death. It’s a pretty amazing and terrifying experience. The stuff DGI makes is even scarier. 2 minutes of playing with it and I was flying around 2-3 km away from where I was across corn fields at 5 feet doing 50-60mph with almost no effort and full HD video. The drone i was using is 600 bucks off the shelf. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Yeah while I totally agree with the sentiment of skepticism at the lunar mission flight plan for Artemis…. This does make the cycling rate for launches to meet the refuel question way more within reach if they can replicate this success. Truly amazing… imagine having all the modules on ground pre assembled and building something like the ISS in weeks/months instead of years/decades. Truly insane leap in what could be. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There is a counterpoint to be made for not turning the military into an access tunnel towards greater social standing and upward mobility in power… and she makes it very detailed in that previous podcast. The effectiveness of the military we wield is based largely off the degree to which the people within it choose to call it a profession and act as such. While we would most definitely bolster a lot of our manpower issues by turning on the tap of compulsory service, some of us remember the “I just joined for the college money” attitudes that existed when GWOT started demanding return to active duty or extensions of enlistments. I very much see a military filled with personnel that are there to just meet their social contract being more hollow entity than the one we currently have. You’d need a “Pearl Harbor moment” to actually galvanize that population in uniform when the call goes out into carrying on. And honestly with a unifying moment like that against an existential threat you’ll get the personnel you needed. While I agree we need more veterans in the politics above us, connected politicians masquerading as veterans is not the solution. The harder question is what are we doing right now to prepare and how does that compare to the efforts of Bill Knudsen for the years preceding Pearl Harbor where we started looking to retool our industry for war. I’d say that is the harder technical problem to solve vs the draft. How many JASSMs and GMLRs can we manufacture a week… ok now how do we go about increasing that by a factor of 5, and I’m only gonna have 3 months to do it before it’s not gonna matter anymore. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I think there is a calculus to that where she’s playing for 2028. Whether Trump wins or loses this election anybody linked directly to his campaign or an administration will carry that into a campaign probably for a lot of negatives. If Kamala does win this out, and runs for reelection as would be expected, Haley becomes the perfect counter for the Republican Party to rally behind. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

In response to the current economic environment… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Saw a documentary about something like that once… The attack even got the hostage released, so two goals achieved. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I’m noticing a lot of politically aligned people throwing around the word terrorism and trying to make something of it. Funny I don’t see that same thing with any other nation capitalizing on their opponents crap OpSec. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

They (Israelis) have no doubt in their mind this war is inevitable. I’m sending this around to everybody I work with like “this is why you can’t have your god damned phone at the warfighter.” Classification be damned, mission command via F’ing signal is going to end us before we even start a war. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk