Zoraptor

Weird that so many of the hottest takes have come from the British MoD. It's like they've employed an article writer from The Sun. Mine Clearing Line Charges (specialised launcher that, uh, fires explosives attached to a line to set mines off), specialised tanks (eg Leopard 2R) with rollers or reinforced dozer attached. Ukraine lost half their Finnish 2Rs in the first two days though, and they can't cope with mines stacked two or more on top of each other. As Malcador mentioned, the MCLCs are highly vulnerable too in contested areas though I cannot recall seeing any actually destroyed. Then again, may not be much left if they did get hit since a single line charge is 750kg of high explosive.

One of the big problems is they don't actually need months to prepare mines. The Russians are using MLRS to mine areas on the fly. That was something the Ukrainians did extensively around Vugledar too. Don't think they can double stack the mines that way (that takes out mine clearance vehicles) but they will handily take out standard armour which is driving in areas they think has been swept. Which is the reason you get a lot of combat footage of Ukrainian vehicles seemingly just sitting around in columns waiting to be destroyed- lead vehicle has hit a mine and the rest can't drive around it without hitting others.

A lot of those complaints are inevitable though when things are contested- and they aren't necessarily out and out mistakes. Fair enough complaining about artillery not being ready when it's you having to cope with making an assault with no support; but there are circumstances where that is going to happen and it happening is not a mistake. An artillery piece isn't going to do anyone any good if it's blown up and there will be situations where limbering up those m777s or driving a Krab off is going to save it from counter battery fire or a lancet, and where doing so is 100% the correct call even if it leaves an attack in the lurch. It's not NATO's fault that that happens since it's inevitable, but... if the offensive had worked we'd definitely have had wall to wall praise for NATO tactics, so it's only fair that they cop criticism when it doesn't. Plus, of course, you didn't tend to get nuanced takes when it was Russia doing the same thing at Vugledar. Most of the complaints also ignore that there are two sides fighting, it's perfectly possible that the Russians are fighting well and not allowing Ukraine to perform. At this point the offensive is definitely faltered. Might always restart, but you'd think their best chance has gone now that they've committed almost all their best/ western trained brigades- and haven't even reached the main defensive line yet.

Giving their kit to new formations was at western insistence, the idea being that they would not have learnt any 'bad habits' and of course that meant that the troops were completely green when it came to combat realities and hadn't learnt any good habits either. I don't think it's been unequivocally stated but the inference is certainly that Ukraine wanted to send people with combat experience on the basis that they'd learn and ultimately perform better but NATO wanted them running on their doctrine from ground up. The social media complaints are mostly about the sort of things that always happen in military campaigns. The main exceptions firstly being complaints about announcing the 'counter'offensive and its marketing campaign. Which was certainly moronic and looked so at the time, and had zero military justification since reddit upvotes and breathless news reporting don't count there. The other is anything corruption related. But a bit of disorganisation and occasional supply issues etc are par for the course, and the complaints about tactics are things that always happen to greater or lesser extents, especially as the scale of things decreases. And fundamentally if you have a big convoy run into mines and get shot up miles behind the front lines the grunts are always going to blame their immediate commanders, not the ones who told them that was how to conduct manoevre warfare and the Russians would panic and run in their classroom in Wiltshire. A thought experiment about what they could have done better on the larger scale doesn't come up with much obvious they could have. Or at least, not much they could have that doesn't rely on handwaving. Maybe they shouldn't have tried at all, in retrospect, but you do have to take some political aspects into account.

Don't think Ukraine can be blamed (much) for the military failures, but they can be blamed for setting expectations far too high. And yeah, announcing the offensive was stupid both for doing it at all and for setting ludicrous expectations on a completely ridiculous timetable (Crimea by spring!.. in their hearts). In that at least Western Official was a lot more circumspect, in general, they just tended to be drowned out by by expectation inflation from people competing for clicks, Unnamed Western Official and Retired NATO Officer writing column. It also sets the stage for recriminations when things don't go to plan or schedule and recriminations can get out of hand. Militarily... well NATO hasn't fought a 'proper' war ever and you have to go back to Korea 70 years ago to find an equivalent fight. No doubt their tactics look great in a simulator and when wargamed, but those always work on the basis of assumptions and the assumption is never that your army has to fight a way you don't want them to. So you get a self reinforcing impression of your own competence. Sitting back and asking why they aren't fighting as the simulations suggest they should is paternalistic bollocks at best and has often been accompanied by extremely obvious inconsistencies. It would be interesting to see how they'd perform when their lead vehicle hits a mine, everyone has to stop, and a helicopter picks your convoy off from 10km away (or artillery from even further). Just drive around the minefield (lol), deploy infantry screens (unsupported, because your armour is stuck trying to get through the mines), don't move in convoys (but keep launching those 1000 man attacks!), keep moving (but stay on the cleared lanes!); very easy to say not so easy to actually do. The one thing they might be blamed for is going for obvious PR targets over military importance, and that's mainly wasting energy and resources attacking Bakhmut not because it's important strategically but because losing it was embarrassing. OTOH, whining about 'only' getting 60 odd billion dollars worth of military aid from your allies (and about as much again non military) is not a great look either.

The situations certainly aren't equivalent, but they don't have to be in order for KSA to be annoyed. The more equivalent situation would be Cyprus getting invaded by Turkey. That comparison is even less flattering though, since the US had an arms embargo on Cyprus until very recently. Needless to say, no embargo on Turkey. (bit OT but... officially the west supports Saudi as trying to restore Yemen's legit government after an aggressive Iran backed coup/ civil war threatened regional instability in a region that is critical to western interests. Generally speaking that has also been enough to get aid for other countries. Saudi has signed a treaty with Israel, which got Egypt and Jordan a lot of aid- it got Saudi the right to buy more stuff at inflated prices, but still not even the good stuff. Then they look at the $49bn in aid Ukraine has got... that's Saudi's entire military budget for 2022* just given away *per IISS, estimates very significantly)

Not a great article, that. Sort of assumes that Poland knew about the intrusion and chose not to do anything. While you can legally shoot down intruders, you can't do so retroactively. There have been tons of intrusions too probably a dozen per year on both sides and very few have ever resulted in shooting. The two most famous cold war incidents don't even come close to fitting their scenario either- Gary Powers' was a singular result of a quite deliberate, repeated and systemic pattern of intrusions dealt with at the time, KAL007 went through Soviet airspace twice for dozens of kms and despite them thinking it was a spy aircraft it still got warning shots fired at it before missiles. And there's a massive difference between dumping flares on an unmanned drone which has been illegally toodling around a country's airspace for hours and shooting down something manned. Indeed, a far better example there would have been the drone over the Black Sea that Russian plane collided with and even then, still not a great example. Far better examples of more active support not resulting in war would have been Soviet pilots flying in Korea (or the Chinese intervention there, though MacArthur at least wanted to nuke China for that) and Vietnam. But those were a lot more deniable before the internet- hard to deny that Joseph K Bloggs, Captain USAF, was just on holiday with his F-16 when shot down when you've got facebook and the like. Think there's a certain amount of that already happening. Ukraine has been pretty vocal against some of their friends for what was pretty mild criticism (eg Poland recently, Britain and Germany earlier) and have been claiming that they aren't being supplied what they want and need* to win. Plus there's a decent amount of semi public hectoring about what has been going wrong with the counteroffensive and why, and I don't imagine they're all that keen on people negotiating on their behalf either, no matter how informally. *certain amount of irony there considering that they're getting stuff for free that most have to pay for. Indeed, hard to fault Saudi/ UAE for being annoyed when they're charged $10 million a pop to protect their cities from missiles with old interceptors while Ukraine gets the new ones, for free.

They at least had leadership that liked France, up until recently. The general populace has never been that keen on 'I give leader beads euros, leader gives me land unlimited access to your economy, control of your currency and our companies the ability to export all your commodities at whatever price they want' but the leaders love it.

I'd give Biden some leeway on that. I don't think the US could practically supply Ukraine with enough aircraft to allow NATO doctrine without supplying pilots- and a lot of them- to fly them as well. Then you'd also need Apaches or similar... The stuff that might make a difference is a lot of short(ish) range Air Defence in the 15-20km range to deny Russia its air support by outranging the KA-52s. But western countries simply don't make much of that, because they always expect air superiority to take care of enemy helicopters. You could see the result of that lack by things like S-300 systems getting hit by lancets. A system with ~70km range should not really be getting hit by something with 50km range launched from behind the front lines, and haven't before or since; but they tried bringing them in close at the start, lost a few, then withdrew them as being unsustainable losses.

It's probably more Bethesda Magic: It Just Works!.. ..When you're a behemoth like Bethesda already, with all the fancy bells and whistles, practically unlimited resources and an enormous inbuilt fan base. Not so easy if you're a plucky new company relying on kickstarter, and the same ideas that work for Bethesda don't necessarily work for a 12 person company trying to take down EA with a Sims killer. The big mistakes are that western doctrine relies on air superiority, at minimum, and that's the crucial part of their 'combined arms' doctrine (significantly, left out of the description above, though). Ukraine doesn't have that, not even close, and on offence their short range systems are significantly outranged by Ka-52s. NATO has by design never fought a war where they expected to have anything less than air supremacy. That reliance pervades everything. And yeah, the insistence on having raw recruits supplied so they would not have learnt bad habits meant they also hadn't learnt any good ones. No matter how good the training and simulations are people fall apart when it's real. Happens to experienced soldiers too, but a lot less. Funny (well, 'funny') all the things you see when the offensive isn't going well though. NATO would just abandon troops and not try and rescue them (yeah, right), NATO would just drive around mine fields (lol), NATO would roll out a few thousand man attacks instead of lots of 50 man ones (they wouldn't, if the 1000 man attacks were getting smashed*), Ukraine's western trained brigades were actually 2k men each not 4k (plain cope), Ukraine isn't actually using NATO tactics. The last is at least true but they did try to at the start, they just didn't work on the ground so they went back to what does: Stoss, from WW1. *to whit, the Big Bradley Burn Up from the first few days and there were at least two smaller examples. They've still been losing a lot of vehicles, but nowhere near that many all at once since reverting tactics. Also another example of mixed messaging: on one hand say the scale of the attacks are too small and independent, on the other say that that is how you taught them: to give small unit commanders initiative. Very much a "no, not like that, just do it again successfully" type situation.

Ah yes, the wonderful western aid that, hmm, had Chad 2nd from bottom, Niger 3rd from bottom (2022, don't think the 6th is from this year since it's ongoing, so position is actually dropping), CAR 4th from bottom, Mali 6th from bottom, Burkina Faso 8th and Guinea 10th on the Human Development Index. Not sure the west has been showing all that much care, eh. (Technically of course CAR and Chad aren't ECOWAS members but they were french colonies. Indeed, Chad is still french aligned, for all the benefits it's got them. About the only actual one of which was Toyotas for the Toyota War)

Interesting game of chicken in west Africa, with Mali and Burkina Faso pledging to support Niger if they were invaded. Guess it mostly depends on how much France values their cheap uranium. Doubt ECOWAS itself can do anything, more than a quarter of its members are suspended at this point and Nigeria, by far its largest member, can't even deal with Boko Haram properly. Can't see them having any stomach to go beyond political posturing. At least life can't get much worse for the average Nigerien, they could only drop five places on the HDI. Guess that shows how much all that uranium benefits the average person.

There's a load of things they could do- from stuff they really ought to have done militarily on day one (target bridges over the Dniepr) to symbolic (target the Motherland Monument or Rada) to packing thermite into longer range missiles or drones. It's not possible anyway, but the sticking point isn't just being at war (which Ukraine considers herself to be, and she's the important one since she'd be claiming Article 5) it's active territorial disputes*. So for example Turkey may 'claim' a whole swathe of Syria and Iraq informally via Misak-i-Milli, but can't call on NATO for help for their invasion as they didn't claim it formally on accession. Similarly, can't call on NATO to help them in Cyprus even if they wanted to. If Ukraine wanted to join NATO she'd have to cede anything occupied, assuming the war itself wasn't active. Though, of course, NATO is free to amend or ignore its own rules any time, for any reason. *and to be even more specific, active territorial disputes in the Treaty Region, hence no NATO article 5 when Argentina invaded the Falklands nor did their claims on Las Malvinas stop Britain joining in the first place.

I did finish WItcher S3 this afternoon. Pretty much exactly the same thoughts as for the first half after the second: it's not really that it's bad, it's just a really frustrating watch. It's not badly scripted- ie the dialogue itself is fine both in writing and delivery- the acting very seldom dips below good and is usually better than good, and the story is fine. Scenery, SFX etc, maybe some niggles but no real complaints. It's the way the story unfolds that is the problem. And it's a very major problem. The pacing is simply awful and they don't appear to have learnt anything over the three seasons despite all the criticism it got for it in S1 (albeit, the time jumps added confusion there too). You think back and pretty much everything of significance happened in one episode, and the rest... maybe a couple of things of significance but a whole lot that should have been condensed. 100% if it was a choice between Cavill and the showrunners the showrunners should have gone. They probably should go even if Cavill was staying.

I haven't quite finished Witcher S3, had to stop half way through the last episode. On Friday, and it's now Tuesday so I'm not exactly running to the tv to watch. That desert episode was stultifying. I know it's more or less book canon, but then so is 84 pages of Paris Sewer History in Les Misérables and no one has adapted that. And that was 1/3 of the new episodes. Previous episode was a lot better though not quite what I imagined, but you could see why they split the season considering how much cgi it required.

Haha, no. Biochemistry in training, but ended up mostly doing unrelated stuff like modelling (of the computer rather than Zoolander variety). I did have to do a decent amount of proper fact checking/ research though.

You'd at least think the anti Russia lot would be all over the idea of permanently weakening Russia and removing her leverage even if they don't really care about Africa. Guess it's all a bit too hard though- and for the realpolitik of it, would also remove the west's leverage over Africa... (Otherwise, and admittedly somewhat OT for here it would also save the average consumer a lot of money and be more healthy. There really aren't any negatives, to the average person, of a reduction in meat consumption apart from how tasty meat is. It's also about the biggest contribution the average westerner could make to climate change action (besides not having children, obviously and understandably a non starter for many people); which ought to be fairly important given that much of the northern hemisphere seems to have been on fire the last week. But as always, far more important to say that you're doing something about a problem than to actually do something about it which takes some effort and might result in tractors toodling around Paris or whatever. Very #StopKony2012 energy, overall)

Actually Bruce you directly quoted a heavily editorialised version from the WP. Which was pretty much literally written about one paragraph in a ~12 minute speech, the vast majority of which was extremely flattering to Russia- and in which there was also one paragraph criticising Ukraine for not even wanting to negotiate. For some reason the WP didn't report that, though... There is a transcript of Assoumani's speech available, though I'd prefer one from the AU since that's an official AU account of what was said (and is not up yet). Or you can watch one of the multiple videos of course, if you can speak French or turn on an autotranslator. I suspect that's a bit too much work though.

Starting island is maybe 4 hours. Probably a bit less for most. Only significant 'complaint' I have so far is performance, the game doesn't look good enough to be quite as slow as it is even on an old card. Niggles are there being no buying/ selling, or at least so far as I have got. Plus the voice acting is far too good for a Jagged Alliance game. Where is the iconic "she. is. evil. . a. driven. bitch" type stuff where it sounds like they grabbed someone off the street and held them at gunpoint to deliver their lines?

Sigh. The WFP is, of course, free to buy Russian grain to replace the Ukrainian grain it bought- and it did buy it, though you'd be excused for thinking they didn't and it was given away by the language used in some reports. ie Good Guy Russia, wfp has more money to buy grain since they now only have to supply ~20% of the amount to Africa they used to. Which, and this left me flabbergasted amazed and bewildered, wasn't actually 725kt. In a Very Surprising turn of events western media included amounts sent to non African countries (Afghanistan, Yemen) and one country that already has a replacement deal with Russia (Ethiopia) in their figures. Indeed, supposedly the 4 biggest receivers of WFP food aid were: Ethiopia, Turkey (!, presumably earthquake related), Afghanistan and Yemen (via wsj, but it's paywalled) and the only African country there is Ethiopia. Somalia is also western aligned, at least in theory. And, of course, the AU head's comments can very easily be read as criticism of the west for trying to stifle Russia's food exports. And yes, I know there's a lovely EU page saying they aren't doing that, it just leaves out every bit where they are. Which the Africans are very much aware of. And and once again again, if Europe and the US really wants to help Africa and stick it to Russian agricultural exports they could skip a few collective burgers. Then there would be plenty of cheap food and a lot less leverage. That takes some self control though, eh.

Dunno, buying a 1st gen amd platform worked out pretty well, for me. The 4 core Intel alternative... didn't age well at all. It does, of course, absolutely suck when you get a lemon though. If it is a BIOS issue they're hard to diagnose beyond the very basic hard reset/ try and update via usb utility (if available) as they can have pretty much any set of symptoms. Also, get a dual BIOS MB, though that is literally no help at this point.

Depends, if all you're going to do is take pointless- and inaccurate- swipes then it'd probably be better for all concerned, yes? That just wastes everyone's time. The other option would be preferable but either way, not a matter I'm going to lose sleep over.

Nowhere near enough information is known to draw concrete conclusions on anything about the negotiations, except that they're happening, kind of. Putin being the problem is... well, when isn't he the problem to unnamed security source talking about Ukraine? The interpretation of the US side leaking suggests they're the ones most keen on progress and least happy about the status quo. Even that isn't really concrete though, at minimum it requires the leak(s) to be authorised.

Don't think so. He specifically mentioned China and price inflation (ta Malcador for saving me scrolling back an entire page) despite the context being the pearl clutching about how Africa would starve. I do seem to recall someone publicly saying they'd blocked that poster though... But yeah, if Europe* ate fewer burgers Africa wouldn't starve; that's simple energy maths. 90% of the energy in food is 'lost' feeding animals. Don't eat meat reared on corn and the like and you can feed 10x as many people, and for less money. Far easier to just blame Russia than do something that would actually solve the problem though; that's the problem with a lot of Euros really, no self control, can't stick to their stated commitments and always going for the zinger to make themselves feel good even when it's a load of bollocks. *everyone really, unless you're rearing animals on grass/ land that can't be used for cropping. But westerners do eat far more meat proportionately than, say, the Chinese.

I'd suspect most of the grain supplied to China is going to animal feed rather than direct human consumption. There are a lot of pigs in China that need feeding and not all in the politburo, he says for -50 social credit. Pretty much have to be the case for Spain, their share of the Black Sea shipments works out to a fairly staggering 120kg per person. Which would mean that every Spaniard would be eating half a loaf of bread (or tortillas, to avoid being wheatist) per day, every day, solely of Ukrainian grain.