Close Cut

Eventually, Russia is going to run out of stuff. They are able to produce war materiel at about 1/10 the rate it’s getting spent on the battlefield. However, Russia has a fucking lot of stockpiled stuff.

What Russia is attempting now is to hold out until Trump gets into office and Ukraine’s support is slashed. Then they might win. But they are already cutting it close, using thirty-year-old rocket engines and tanks donated by movie studios and the like.

What We Do

This is not the direct setup for the Taiwan invasion. That’ll occur in 2026-2027 while Trump is at his weakest. This is a test to see how the US and Europe respond to provocations. This is a common Chinese tactic that produces extremely valuable real-world data on likelihood of aggressive retaliation, determination of actual effects of communications being severed, and movement of forces in the area in which the sabotage was conducted and in other areas as well.

This is a dry run for a future, much larger operation and not the operation itself.

Bad Boom

If Russia nuclear strikes Ukraine, would the West really follow up with nuclear counter strikes?

No, that’s not what would occur. NATO and the US would utterly destroy Russia’s military capabilities using conventional means, though. And perhaps even occupy Moscow temporarily.

However, what China would do is another matter. That I don’t have a lot of insight on but I can guarantee it would not be nothing. Most likely it would occupy significant parts of eastern Russia and Siberia, I’d guess. But that I’m less clear on.

Conditional Collapse

Ian Welsh and those types have constantly claimed ridiculous stuff about the war in Ukraine like, “Russia could win in a week if it really tried!”

No. Just no. That’s not how wars work. Especially not that kind of war. That’s a fundamentally ignorant take on the nature of war in general and what is occurring in the region. Russia possibly could have won quickly if they’d not completely misunderstood what sort of conflict they were getting into.

However, no country — not even as one as callous about human life as Russia — tolerates 1,000-2,000 KIA a day for months and years if they could just defeat the enemy if “they really tried.”

Ian Welsh just hates the West and the United States in particular and loves Putin. Everything else he writes and believes springs from that poisoned well. And he understands warfare about as well as a turtle understands astrophysics.

Ka-blam

Holy fuck. The targeting and fire control systems on those newer Leopards is pretty great. I still would not want to be in any tank on that battlefield. Or on that battlefield at all. (There is some gore at the end and people definitely die in that video FYI.)

Not Gonna Look

It is completely unclear to me that so many in the EU do not understand that if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, they then will be fighting Russia in their own country soon enough?

Perhaps (most likely) it’s just that they don’t want to understand.

How Do

It is a 100% false “fact” that in Vietnam (or anywhere else that has been said about) that 90% of soldiers didn’t fire their weapons to kill. Or as sometimes is heard, at all.

I’ve seen this claim trotted out about WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and other conflicts. But it’s made up. It’s just deceit and delusion. I believe where this faux fact comes from is that it takes a lot of ammo downrange to kill any one hostile. Suppressive fire is most of the fire used in every modern war. By design, by the way. In the Afghanistan war, for instance, there were 250,000 rounds fired for every insurgent killed.

This absurd nonsense gets trotted out about various wars depending on what sort of ideological axe is being ground and it’s just lunacy, for a few reasons but the main one is this: when the enemy is on top of you and you’re in small arms range, you’re often fighting for your life. Even the most pacifist and wilting soldier is going to be tossing whatever they have downrange at any target they can plausibly identify.

How do people believe such goofy crap?