Chow Cow: Diversity By The Forkful

h/t Divemedic

I didn't know Cash Sales sold OCPs in 5XL.

And While They're Up...

It's far past time our worthless, shiftless congressweasels called Gen. Anthony Cotton (the irony of a black man named "cotton" we leave for another time), the head of STRATCOM, the folks who run our nuclear weapons forces, onto the carpet to answer about whether the White House "nuclear football" contains 

a) codes and communications gear for nuclear response, or 

b) crayons and coloring books to distract Emperor Poopypants when he gets cranky and needs a nap.

If the answer is a), Gen. Cotton should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty and gross negligence, in letting a functional retard with the wits of a potato within a million miles of nuclear weapons launch authority.

If the answer is b), Gen. Cotton should be court-martialed for sedition and high treason, in holding a soft coup.

Because there's no way anyone at his level can be showing leadership, intelligence, competence, and loyalty, all at the same time. His oath was to the Constitution, not the Potato In Chief. He needs to be court-martialed and fired in any event, and he should have brought forth his concerns, either to the chain of command, or direct to Congress, long since before now. We can't have anyone so toadying, waffling, and slovenly in charge of our nuclear forces, for even a minute. Period. Bust him to permanent colonel, and retire the sonofabitch, as a regrettable mistake. He's the archetypical example of why the Air Farce is an honorable alternative to actual military service. Curtis LeMay would have had him shot.

In either instance, the testimony in his defense should be evidence that it's 40 months past time when the Cabinet convened to strip Biden of his office and responsibilities, and send him back to the Delaware Home For Stumbling Bumbling Retards, to spend his declining months in peace and quiet, while he shits himself privately, after his family can gain no more perks from his former pretended glory.

The world is wondering every minute what kind of a potato is in charge of the entire US government, and the other nuclear powers, all eight of them, deserve to know that we haven't left our nuclear arsenal within the grasp of a diaper-shitting toddler with anger issues.

The congressweasels, all 435 of them up for re-election, need to stop tap-dancing and fucking around on such a critical point, and get down to brass tacks on this question, once and for all.

And then begin the drumbeat calling for Biden's removal, for cause.

This is too important an issue to be looking at politics. Armageddon is at stake.

Oh. My. Dear. God.

 

I...

I mean...

This can't be...

It's a parody...

Wait?! It's real?!?!?

What the...?

Words almost fail to do this justice.

This guy should've just been killed, on the spot, FFS. As a mercy killing. For the good of the service.

Incredibly, this happened at least a year ago. A decade or two hence, it would have been an entire episode of 60 Minutes, and the Secretary of Defense would have been impeached for cause. And probably would have had to flee the country to somewhere without an extradition treaty to avoid the federal trial afterwards.

After watching this ungodly piece of total walking shit fuck up harder than a platoon full of retards just in his non-judicial Mast, while underway submerged on USS Wyoming (SSBN-742) I have a scant few questions:

1) How in blistering fuck is this asshole on any nuclear missile submarine? EVAR?!?

2) How in blistering fuck did this walking piece of shit every get on any submarine that wasn't a landlocked tour, or a ride at a Disneyland amusement park?

3) Why the fuck is this being handled at an Article 15 Captain's Mast, instead of a Special Court Martial?

4) Why isn't Seaman Recruit Fuckbag not doing 5-10 years under confinement at hard labor at the Military Correctional Facility in Fort Leavenworth, KS, spending 16 hours a day beating the shit out of boulders with a sledgehammer until his bones screamed in agony, every single day, prior to receiving a Bad Conduct Discharge??

5) Why isn't everyone in this shitbag's chain of command, from SecDef down to his Leading Petty Officer, not getting the shit grilled out of them by 20 Senators and Congressweasels live on national television for endangering the national security of the United States of America, specifically with regard to willfully and negligently disregarding the safety and integrity of our strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems, for ever letting such an unredeemed piece of walking human shit within 50 miles of a nuclear missile submarine, and facing charges up to and including treason?

6) Why isn't Seaman Recruit Fuckbag's face and body not lumped up like a row of anti-tank dragon's teeth from the results of nightly "blanket parties" administered by his entire watch, in shifts, using bars of soap in a sock administered from head to toe, prior to his flagrantly insubordinate appearance at this Mast, just to instill in him the bare minimum of respect and military courtesy for his chain of command??

7) How in blistering fuck did anyone pass this shitbomb through recruit training, let alone sign him up for the Navy in the first place?

While this CO has the patience of a saint, tolerating such flagrant and willful disobedience and disrespect, and letting this shitbag off with a few days confinement on bread and water, is like the CO wiping his ass on his own uniform and the ship's national ensign (that would be the U.S. flag for lubbers) at the same time.

The most reasonable and expeditious punishment for this 80-IQ piece of walking shit should have been to have the Master At Arms take him to the Trash Disposal Unit, physically stuff him inside it, jumping on it as necessary to get it closed, compact his body using the machinery provided, eject it overboard at depth, and record his subsequent status as Unauthorized Absence - Presumed Desertion At Sea.

And that gentle treatment, only because Keelhauling and Flogging Round The Fleet have sadly gone out of vogue.

Everyone who touched him all the way back to the recruiter who signed him into the Navy should be reduced one grade permanently, and receive a permanent punitive letter of counselling for their official service record.

I know senior NCOs in the Marine Corps who would have killed such a piece of human excrement on the spot in the first two minutes of this clown show, purely out of autonomous reaction, pled guilty, and gotten a Navy Commendation Medal from the Commandant of the Marine Corps for that response.

In the Fleet Marine Force, a guy like this would have received E-tool counselling in the field, and never come back after a field exercise. No loss, net gain.

Hint: This is an E(ntrenching)-Tool

If during wartime in a combat zone, one of the grenades on his belt would have had the safety pin removed. Oopsie. Too bad. So sad.

Sorry, squids: you're now a national joke, and an international laughingstock. They should issue all of you rainbow wigs, red ball noses, and clown shoes in basic training until further notice.

This is what all those rusty Navy ships look like on the inside.

And why I can't even talk about the current state of the military anymore. If this hadn't plopped onto my YouTube page today, I could have died happier someday. Pretty much like the US Navy already has.

Dumb F&@king Squids

It should be understood from the outset that I have no actual animus or disdain for the airedale aviators of the brownshoe navy, the bubbleheads of the silent service, the bosuns of the surface fleet, the throat-slitting amphibians of Navspecwar, nor for the lowly messmen of the gator freighters, nor even the clerks and jerks at shoreside bases, dedicated professionals and brothers in arms one and all.

But when a commissioned officer of the US Navy steps on his dick so publicly that everyone from SecNav and the CNO downwards has to concoct excuses and scramble for cover, it's pretty clear that all semblance of any sort of professional military organization has gone down the shitter and been flushed out to sea.

(For those blissfully unaware, the scope on that weapon is installed backwards, and the lens cap is still in place, leading one to question whether Goldbraid Numbnuts there could have managed to hit the ocean's surface even with gravity helping him out. The Navy Recruiting dorks, who used to go by the helpful description of "press gangs", had to pull the pic from a national recruiting ad campaign, and it's now safe to say that the pic of the screw-up will be far more widely seen - and laughed at - than the entire actual recruiting campaign ever would have been. Especially in Marine, Army, Air Farce, and Coastie barracks and wardrooms. Blood on the quarterdeck, swab jockeys.)

Congratulations, Captain Squidly, you've done more to embarrass the United States Navy in one picture frame than did two aircraft carrier fires during the Vietnam War. And against monumental odds, finally made the US Air Farce seem competent and professional by comparison.

Hence the title of this post, repeating a phrase uttered by hundreds of thousands of Marines, millions of times (usually, about once a week), every time they cast a narrow-eyed and disbelieving glance upon the antics of the sister service and its minions, around the world, probably since five minutes after the first detachments of Marines shipped out aboard Continental Navy ships in 1775.

Biden's Morons

Hilary After-Action

USS ELEANOR ROOSEVELT puts to sea to avoid getting wet and
melting, ahead of a rapidly weakening tropical hiccup
so mild that no damage was recorded anywhere in San Diego Bay.

And that about covers that.

I can guaran-fucking-tee that 2000 Marine recruits at MCRD watching the TR flee this cloudburst were even less impressed yesterday, probably doing PT and close order drill out in the rain.

As noted in Comments:

I get the underlying rationale.

But it's only sound if you accept that they couldn't tell the difference between Chicken Little's inflated doomporn, and actual actionable weather intelligence.

It's like launching nuclear missiles because someone's radar detected a squadron of pelicans incoming.

They still look like idiots, obviously they don't have any better intel than Joe Schmuck, and they fell for the vastly inflated hype, rather than actual accurate weather reports.

If they did this as a readiness exercise, they're just stupid. If they did it because they couldn't tell the difference, they're stupid morons.

They look like not just pussies, but incompetent and gullible pussies.

There's no way to salvage this for them, and they wasted metric fucktons of fuel and money for no good reason, while sharing with near-peer adversaries their total inability to tell a real threat from a fake one.

You can bet Russia and China were taking notes.

Pentagon Can't Figure Out Why Recruitment Is Cratering

Quite the poser, that question is.
And it puts a whole new scary spin on "Drill Sergeant".

Public School Chimp Out: White Feather Awarded

h/t Gateway Pundit

Apparently the battery was in response to 6'6" 270-pound 17-year-old Dindu having his  Nintendo game taken away by a teacher's aide during class. Rex Kramer's timeless comment  comes to mind:

Our concern over the incident, troubling but hardly noteworthy in the grand scheme of zoology that passes as public schooling this century, is the immediate incident response. Or rather, the lack thereof. We hereby award -50 points to the alleged Marine Corps SNCO who strolled up to the assault in progress with zero sense of urgency, then tenderly ministered to the emotionally distraught Dindu, including allowing him to renew his assault after the first go-around, rather than applying a briskly executed arm bar, choking the living fuck out of the future lifetime felon and ward of the FL state penitentiary system, and then kicking him in the balls both hard and enough times that he'd never have any possibility of reproducing offspring. The latter would have been within Marine Corps policy. Sauntering over and daintily and tepidly shooing the criminal away are decidedly not.

If he'd hurled himself at that miscreant, he'd have gotten uncountable offers to replace any damaged parts of his uniform, at minimum. Instead, people should send him endless boxes of tampons. Maybe courtesy of the school's ROTC detachment?

Way to go, Staff Sergeant Chickenshit Bitchface Pussypants. 

The sailor in the Village People was more butch than you. Now we know who's recruiting at the gay bars these days, and why recruiters nationwide in all the military services can't make their quotas.

If we were Commandant for so much as thirty seconds, convening your court martial under Article 134 for dishonoring the entire Marine Corps would be our first official act this morning. Finishing out your enlistment as a private and scrubbing bilges non-stop in the interim between that day and your separation ought to about cover a fitting punishment, until the day you're marched off your terminal duty station the same way they kicked Chuck Connors out off of his cavalry post for cowardice in the opening of Branded. Ideally, with a firm kick in the ass just before the gate slams behind you. Generally, when people see someone so thoroughly shit on a Marine uniform, they expect them to be from Hollywood, not MCRD.

If you're not going to act like a Marine at all times, including during recruiting or NJROTC duty, at least have the courtesy to wear your best lingerie to school, not Dress Blue Charlies. In a just world, you'd be shunned until separated, and put on permanent guard mount on the most remote post available, for your own protection. How you ever fooled promotion boards is a mystery for the ages, and we still have a healthy suspicion that you'll be discovered to be a civilian imposter guilty of stolen valor, rather than an actual member of any U.S. military service. We expect better conduct from the Merchant Marine, for pity's sake.

Consider your white feather officially awarded, and well-deserved.

And we can only hope ours is neither the first nor last notice, civilian or official, you receive for your half-assed weakling performance in this incident.

And if the Marine Corps is too pussified to outright bust you down to E-1 and separate you from service, they could at least save face by issuing you a skirt. That way, you'd only be an embarrassment to female Marines. Who would kick your ass as well.

UPDATE:

People claiming to know the defendant say he's mentally handicapped, and "this wasn't his fault".

Okay, fair enough.

He's not legally responsible for his violent outbursts, because mental incapacity.

We'll grant all that unreservedly, arguendo.

That just means that any and every legal, medical, and/or educational professional(s), who put a mentally incompetent person the size of an NFL tackle into mainstream high school, which is neither intended, nor staffed and trained, to handle sudden violent behavior from any such person, as this incident illustrates with stark clarity, are the ones legally and morally culpable for setting up such a jackassical occurrence in the first place. 

The answer is simple: put Baby Huey in a mental facility for those subject to violent behavior, revoke the professional certifications of everyone who set up this recockulous situation in the first place, and charge them for both criminal negligence and civil liability, to the fullest extent of the law.

Baby Huey may not be, in any binding legal sense, responsible for the incident.

But the asshole professionals, with licenses and letters after their names, who created this ticking time bomb, ARE ENTIRELY RESPONSIBLE.

And they should pay for it with their careers, their fortunes, and their personal liberty.

There is no legal doctrine that allows someone to plant a human time bomb, and then escape culpability when exactly that bomb - entirely predictably - blows up, like this incident illustrates.

And SSgt. Chickenshit Bitchface Pussypants is still a total piece of shit for not intervening more forcefully under the circumstances. The mores of the civilian world have Jack and Shit to do with what's in play here. He shit on the uniform he wore, all of his fellow Marines, and the entire organization, with his bitch-ass non-response. Zero tolerance for such pussies. Even if he knew all the facts coming out, he's still a gutless coward, for all the reasons previously stated. When a 270 pound thug, of whatever mental competency, is beating on an unconscious woman barely more than a third his size, this isn't a job for a social worker. It's the time and place to step in and resolve the situation with alacrity and overwhelming force. And when it counted, and someone was helpless, and he had the chance to step up and be a Marine, he pussed completely out.

He should be told to pack his shit, and stand by to be ejected from the Corps. Whatever actually happens, for the rest of his sorry existence, he's an ex-Marine. And that's a shame nothing can scrub out.

Putincide Vs. Partisans

 

No pension for you, podpolkovnik. War is all hell.

It seems that the man responsible for the current Russian recruiting debacle in one district, to provide cannon fodder for their ongoing disaster in Ukraine, was found dead near a fence at his home. Some reports say he hanged himself, but no one has yet explained how he also cut himself down afterwards and got to where he was found, and no points for guessing how many times he also shot himself in the back of the head and stabbed himself before settling on hanging as the best method of suicide.

"There is rising fury over mobilisation officials forcibly recruiting men with little or no training in apparent violation of the rules. Armed conscript-snatching teams of enlistment officers backed by police have been operating in Russian cities, grabbing men on underground trains, on the street, and in offices."

Either way, whether through popular insurgency, or official displeasure, it's pleasing to know that at least one more lieutenant colonel of the Russian Army will be in a warm place for all eternity. And it's yet another data point letting you know just how well the war is going for Russia, and the actual nature of both popular and official support for it.

As noted in comments, the Potemkin Army is suffering from Potemkin readiness and Potemkin recruiting, which explains much about their Potemkin success. Some folks are going to need to stock up on condiments for all the crow and shit sandwiches they'll be eating if this continues apace. Boo frickin' hoo.

Ozymandias* Redux

via Tam

It Was All A Sham

Source QOTD:

The 4th Guards Tank Division and 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division-and by extension the whole 1st Guards Tank Army-probably are unfit for further fighting. They could reconstitute, but with what and whom? The Kremlin's urgent recruitment drive is faltering. And having written off more than a thousand tanks in Ukraine, the Russians might need years to bring depleted units back up to full strength. 

The Ukrainian army by contrast has more tanks now than it did before the current counteroffensives, as it has captured more Russian tanks than it has lost of its own. 

Oops. Cat. Out of bag.

RTWT

Ponder that when you see Russia press-ganging geriatrics and cripples for the front lines, trying to renovate 60-year-old tanks for military service, and rattling its rusted nuclear saber.

It's because they haven't got anything else to spare to throw at this war.

And the Number One supplier of military equipment to Ukraine, for weeks and weeks now, and by orders of magnitude, isn't NATO; It's Putin's raggedy drunken Russian Army.

Tam QOTD:

What do you want to bet that a large percentage of the billions Moscow allocated to modernize its armed forces following their underwhelming performances everywhere from Chechnya to South Ossetia wound up bobbing gently at anchor in Monaco and Barcelona?

No bet.

Pisser for Vlad-o-philes.

*{link for Common Core grads}

Vlad Wisdom

 

I leave town for a couple of days far from anything higher-tech than a wristwatch, and the Putinophile Usual Suspects wet themselves with glee when he rockets multiple cities far from the front lines. Exactly like he's been doing to Ukrainians since February. >yawn<

1) Cities don't move very fast, so this wasn't a particularly impressive technical feat.

2) People who you've been shelling for seven months aren't liable to lose heart when you do it yet again.

3) Interested third parties aren't inclined to take you more seriously when you bomb cities instead of armies.

4) Both of them have, in fact, tripled down on their resolve, and their aid guarantees, and the phrase "war crimes" moves from whispers to bullhorns.

5) When your armies, plural, are getting their asses handed to them on a platter for over a month straight, you might want to think about shelling those military formations that vex you. If you could find them and target them correctly. Everybody also notices when you can't do that: their army, your own army, and the armies of friendly and unfriendly nations now know you can't hit Jack or Shit, unless Jack's a third-grader on the swings in the playground.

6) When all you have is a tack hammer, even your problems that really are nails give you trouble.

7) Vlad has now announced it's open season in return on actual Russians in actual Russia. That rarely ends well. Ask Zombie Herman Goering.

All Vlad has accomplished is to look like a bigger and more murderous @$$hole, with a weaker and less-competent military than before. The only things helping him now are that his supply lines are 100 miles closer to Russian territory than they were in August, and he's got 60,000 less troops to supply than he started out with in February.

And with time, as things develop, he may not have to worry about supplying his forces in Crimea any more at all. As the king said in The Princess Bride, "Won't that be nice?"

Well-played. It's like Christmas in October.

I Was Wrong

But before the World's Foremost Experts, who've gotten this wrong  every day since February 26th, start wetting themselves with delight, some background:

You see, I assumed that the military tribe of incompetents surrounding Putin would call up their 300K reservists, equip them, give them some minimal refresher training, and use shattered leftovers from early in the war as cohort units, around which to rebuild serious fighting forces.

That takes weeks to months for us, and Russians aren't anywhere near that competent, so I figured a reasonable expectation was that either they'd have to issue and train for a winter offensive (good luck with that in Russia or Ukraine on the steppes), or far more likely, they'd take the time to do it right, and have another go at things next spring.

Because that's what military leaders competent in logistics, tactics, and strategy would do.

Only total farking military idiots and morons would send them straight into combat immediately, right?

Nope. I was wrong there. Nothing could be further from the truth. That's not what's happening at all.

They loaded the busses and trains with old farts, and simply shipped them Stalingrad-style, straight to the front lines, to be fed face-first right into the meat-grinder, and they're already turning up in Uke POW hauls. In short, Russian generals are falling for their own patriotic propaganda from their Great Patriotic War.

Three days after the mobilization, their fresh conscripts were already being captured. Some of them are simply driving over to the Uke side, and surrendering, to get it over with. And bringing fully functional BMPs with them.

Unarmed, unfed, unsheltered, un-equipped, and generally surly and pissed at being treated as exactly the cannon fodder they are.

Captured Russian equipment is now a sizable percentage of the reason for the renewed and re-invigorated Ukrainian push forward: Russia is supplying them nearly as much gear and ammunition in some areas as they're getting from the West. How annoying.

The Russian conscripts being force-fed into this would be rioting and mutinying, but they don't even have the ammo to pull that off.

So where I'd previously expected the Ukrainian Army to take a breather any day now, if not weeks ago, to consolidate their gains, and then see where to go next, I expect they may be able to completely push the remaining Russian forces back strategically. They're encircling a full corps (two-plus divisions) now, and if they cut off the southern front, everything from Odessa to Mariupol is in play, including shutting the Crimea off from Russia proper by land again.

Things on the fronts might return to something like normalcy eventually, but that would depend on Russian military leadership competence (another thing they're under-supplied with), so the only limiting factor may become how long the Ukrainians can keep kicking Russian forces in the balls, and how long they want to keep doing it, before they stop to fully consolidate their gains, with an army on the ground now about 4 times the size of the Russians, and at least twice the size it was when this conflict started.

And the whinging that this offensive was all NATO troops has dissipated like fog on a sunny day. The Ukes are doing this themselves, and it's obvious from space.

Russia's big mobilization so far is looking like the mouse that farted.

Bummer, Putinophiles.

The primary concern, and still-open question, is whether Putin has the ability and the will to order a nuclear strike, and the insanity to try it, or if that really is the point at which he gets retired, and he knows it, and is thus forced to eat the entire shit sandwich he ordered, until all of it is gone.

Interesting times continue.

Not The War News Some Were Hoping For

 

It's looking grim for Team Annexation:

Russia no longer has full control of any of the four provinces of Ukraine it says it annexed last week after Ukrainian troops advanced dozens of kilometres in Kherson province in the south of the country and made additional gains in the east.

On Monday, the Russian military acknowledged that Kyiv’s forces had broken through in the Kherson region. It said the Ukrainian army and its “superior tank units” had managed to “penetrate the depths of our defence” around the villages of Zoltaya Balka and Alexsandrovka. 

The [Russian] Ministry of Defence spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said Russian troops had occupied what he called a “pre-prepared defensive line”. They continued to “inflict massive fire damage” on Ukrainian forces, he claimed. 

His comments are an admission that Ukraine’s southern counter-offensive is dramatically gaining pace, two months after it began. Ukrainian brigades appear to have achieved their biggest breakthrough in the region since the war started, bursting through the frontline and advancing rapidly along the Dnieper River. 

The Ukrainian military’s southern command said forces in the south destroyed 31 Russian tanks and one multiple rocket launcher, without providing details of where the fighting occurred. 

Russian sources acknowledged that the Ukrainian tank offensive had moved along the river’s west bank, recapturing a number of villages along the way, and threatening the supply lines for thousands of marooned Russian troops.In a sign of turbulence inside Russia’s army command, the head of the western military district was reportedly sacked on Monday in the wake of the recent defeats. 

The news outlet RBC said Col-Gen Alexander Zhuravlyov had been fired. His district is one of five that make up Russia’s armed forces. The move follows criticism over the weekend by Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, of Valery Gerasimov, Putin’s chief of the general staff, over the loss of Lyman. 

“This is obviously related to the war blunders, which are becoming harder to hide. The Kremlin is looking for scapegoats,” said a former Russian defence ministry official who has worked with Zhuravlyov. “The pressure on the commander of the Russian armed forces, Valery Gerasimov, will only increase,” the former defence ministry official added.

But wait, there's MORE!:

Russia's forces occupying Ukraine’s southern Black Sea region of Kherson have suffered serious territorial losses to Kyiv’s troops over recent days, maps published by Moscow's defence ministry showed.

The ministry’s daily video briefing made no mention of any pullbacks on Tuesday, but the maps included showed that Russian forces were no longer in control of the village of Dudchany on the west bank of the river Dnieper, where Ukraine’s forces have been pushing to reclaim territory captured at the start of Moscow’s offensive.

In the northeastern Kharkiv region, defence ministry maps showed that Russian forces have left positions on the west bank of the Oskil River. They appeared to have retreated some 20km (12.4 miles) to the east, as far as the border of Luhansk province, in the aftermath this month of a counteroffensive by Kyiv’s army.

That's all Russian sources admitting that the Russian Army is getting its ass kicked all the way back to actual Russia, Internet Field Marshalls. Hint to the hardcore Putards: this was the military breakthrough news you've been breathlessly waiting for since February. Except it's going in the wrong direction. Bummer, huh?

Ukraine has regained more territory in one month than Russia could capture in five. This doesn't bode well for the competence or success of any future Russian operations short of Canned Sunshine deployment.

Maybe the Russians are going to wait until the Ukes have totally recaptured all Ukrainian territory before they spring their Sooper Sekrit Counter-Offensive.

Probably by zooming in from behind on flying unicorns, right?

The war is far from over. Things may shift again. But it hasn't been a very good week for those Rootin' For Putin.

How sad they must be.

Russian Transmissions: Two Forward Gears, and Twelve In Reverse

 

Meanwhile, back in the actual war, Ukraine continues to beat the Russian Army like a rented mule, pushing them out of town after town in a month-long counter-offensive that hasn't stopped yet, and attempting to completely encircle some 20,000 Russian troops and cut them off from any hope of Russian resupply or help. Bummer.

But it's okay though, because the World's Foremost Experts assure us that the Ukes are going to collapse any day now, certainly long before they take Moscow, definitely before they get to the Urals, and Putin has all those elderly recycled conscripts coming online. In a few weeks. Or months. If they can catch the hundreds of thousands of military-age males (which is now 60 in Russia) lately seen bum-rushing the borders to neighboring countries, like Mexicans at the Rio Grande, to avoid Putin's latest military levee.

Any day now, the Russian military powerhouse is set to spring their Sooper Sekrit Trap on the Ukes as they recapture more of Ukraine. Any day.

No one is sure how Russia will manage to equip their replacements, but most sources report there will be plenty of Ak-47s and -74s lying on the ground waiting to be scooped up.

Good times.

Glorious Reinforcements Ship Out

Codename: Spetzsnooze

We knew the Russian Army once stopped the Germans at Stalingrad. We just didn't expect Marshall Putin to draft veterans of that war now.

Forward movement? They'll be lucky to accomplish a bowel movement. 

And offensive operations will have to halt every day for the 2PM nap time. But now everyone will know what the Zs on their vehicles stand for: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

And their medics will need to add nitroglycerin and Flomax to their aid kits.

What will be the most important logistical item to supply to this army? Depends.

MOAR Winning

 

Go, Vlad! Bleed yourself white.  Adopt the conscription policies of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards mine clearing forces. Put the old guys and the kids in those rusty T-62s you've been pulling out of the scrap heaps. That'll show Ukraine who means business.

100 Days, And A Mouthful Of Ashes

 

And loving metrics in a hazy conflict, the media and Putin fanboys are all agog with the news that Russian control now encompasses 20% of Ukraine territory. (They forget that most of that 20% was Crimea and the Soviet puppet "breakaways" in the east they already held before the war began on 2/24 this year, but we'll spot them the difference anyways, just to be sporting.)

So, at that rate, this war will last another 400 days beyond the first 100.

That's also overlooking Russian losses and retreats, but acknowledging the obvious facts there upsets the fanboys to the point of flinging feces from their monkey cages, so we'll spot them that too.

Meanwhile, Russian losses amount to about 10,000 troops/month, by reliable accounts. To take the territory they were certain was already ON their side. More each month than we lost in Iraq and A-stan combined, in 20 years of trying. Three times more men than we lost in all of Vietnam in a decade. And out of missiles, running out of artillery shells, and burning through hard military assets Vlad couldn't replace in another ten years of trying, with a Navy and Air Force largely MIA for weeks, in a land war against an opponent with pretty much neither one. 

So in 12 more months, Russia will perhaps achieve a Pyrrhic (Mariupolic) "victory" over the whole of Ukraine, at a cost of nearly the entire initial invasion force, 150,000 men out of an initial estimate of 180,000, against an army it outnumbered on paper 10:1, but which it only attacked initially at 0.8:1, with a Russian Potemkin army composed of incompetent and unwilling conscripts led by drunken officers and fueled by gun-decked capability and maintenance reports, running now on mothballed tech left over from the 1960s, because it's all they have left to throw at the problem.

Yeah, that's going to do so much better against a Ukrainian ad hoc army that gets better equipment and more experience by the day, over the next 400 days, i'n'it?

Go, Vlad. Bleed yourself dry, only to achieve the capture of scorched earth, at a cost of a quarter of your entire national army, including probably 50-75% of all available actual combat forces, most of your war-making equipment, and beginning the next ten years of a partisan guerrilla insurgency in Ukraine that will make the last Russian foray to A-stan, or the British rule in Northen Ireland, seem like church picnics in comparison, while Russia is forced to genocide most of the surviving populace within Ukraine, and the 7M expats live on, with a seething hatred of Vlad and all things Russian that will outlive his own great-grandchildren.

While uniting NATO like it hasn't been in 50 years, increasing it in size and scope, and putting the entirety of it right back on Russia's borders from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean, exactly as Vlad didn't want.

Sanctions work both ways, but Russia spends the next century or two as the Iran of Europe. They couldn't feed themselves once from 1900-2022, but now that they're burning Ukraine to the ground, they're looking at not being able to feed themselves next year, or the five years after that, until the famines have done their job, and their entire population decreases appreciably. Along with that in the West, and the rest of the world. Famine hits the Turd World even harder, because when food gets scarce, the poorest are the ones who do without, not the well-off.

But watching millions starve and threatening global thermonuclear war is a small price to pay for being a worldwide pariah state, right?

Well-played, Vlad. Well-played indeed. Keep banging your head against that wall.

Mariupolic Victory

 

Why Is That?

 h/t My Daily Kona

The Russian Army of 1980 called. From the convalescent hospital.
On life support.

As in, "Why do we keep getting it right, and the Putin-fanboys keep doing an endless faceplant?"

How The Soviet Army Fights: RTWT  

Go read Mr. Garibaldi's accurate 30-second thumbnail on how the Soviet Army trained to fight.

That was exactly the Soviet model doctrine. We knew it backwards and forwards. Hell, I read the whole collection from the S-2's open shelves while I was on battalion guard duty. It's not that complicated, and was written at a high school grade level, like most military manuals.

And that was great, when Ivan had 50,000 tanks to our 10,000, and his senior generals had no-shit fought German panzers at Kursk, and crushed them.

That was in the 1980s. When Russia was the Soviet Union.

But what too many fanboys forget, is that was then.

Here's a not-so-subtle clue:

This is 1980s heartthrob Kelly McGillis, co-star with Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise from movies like Witness and Top Gun, in a t-shirt and shades:

Hot stuff in 1986.

This is her in t-shirt and shades now:

There ain't enough lipstick to put on that to make anybody want it. It's box wine and cats forever. Time is cruel to women. They shine brightly when young, but biology's payback for that is that they age like milk, not wine.

Now imagine that as the entire Russian Army, after divorcing from Daddy Warbucks in 1990, living not in a Black Sea dacha on champagne and caviar budgets, but on vodka and cabbage soup and dwindling government handouts for forty years. And haven't won a war in 70+ years.

That's the force you were so certain was going to stomp Ukraine in 2022.

Ukraine, conversely, dumped Russia in 1990. At the same time Russians were siphoning alcohol from missiles to drink, Ukraine started beefing up its forces with Western technology. They accelerated this when Putin invaded once to steal back the Crimea (because he wanted it), and again when he invaded Donbas with soldiers in civvies. Both those illegal invasions took place under Putin, and both before 2022. So when the war drums were pounded again (mostly by D.C., and by Putin, not by Kyiv) they started getting their hands on mil-tech with a vengeance, and they'd spent years preparing for Russian grabbiness when it came calling the third time.

And once all of Europe, and most of the rest of the world, saw Russian military adventurism as a direct threat, the floodgates really opened, to a country neither as tiny as Chechenya, nor as backwards as Georgia, and the results in Ukraine have been anything but spectacular for Russia, but phenomenal for an army nominally outnumbered 10:1 by Russia.

Take another look at Kelly McGillis now, and see why.

Things get old. Rust never sleeps. People joining the army literally for the potato soup and a bed aren't as motivated as people fighting for their own homes, farms, and country.

The Russian troops rapidly don't want to be there, and sure as hell don't want to die there.

The Ukrainian troops are on the exact opposite end of that spectrum.

The Russians have no NCO cadre, and no junior leadership. When their senior leadership is incompetent, or takes a bullet in the head, they lose their collective shit, and they get slaughtered. They've been taking it in the head for going on three months, and they aren't getting better, they're getting worse, with less equipment, zero morale, and fewer leaders who have a clue, rather than a bullet in the head. And Vlad's not helping by shooting the old ones when they fail him either.

This was both predictable, and predicted, to anyone not taken in by knee-jerk anti-Biden responses, and people pimping an army that ceased to exist 40 years ago as being a world-beater. It's more of a wife-beater: fine for putting down tiny republics with disarmed citizens, but hopelessly outclassed by 40 years of military technology advances from the West, in the hands of a motivated people with a hard-on for payback for Stalin's Holodomor. Anyone who couldn't see that coming a mile off is simply too short to be talking geopolitics and military affairs with grown-ups.

Was this war cobbled up by Poopypants' minions in D.C., as a distraction from 57 massive failures, from election fraud to rampant inflation and looming economic collapse?

ABSOLUTELY IT WAS. We've never made any secret of that, nor failed to call it out.

But Russia remains in only one sense anything more than a Turd World failed state: they still have nuclear-tipped ICBMs in substantial numbers. Because they're drunken paranoid fucks with a pathological inferiority complex, have been since the 1400s, and getting invaded by Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler over the centuries hasn't helped their mindset or disposition. Even though their artillery can only hit minute-of-Mariupol, for a 10MT hydrogen warhead on an American city, that's close enough.

And that's the only reason why nipping their military escapades in the bud is important. They can stew all they want; they can beat their chests all they want; they can even beat up their subjugated client-state constituents all they like, as they've done for centuries. But once they step outside their own territorial boundaries because they think they CAN, they're a bully in need of getting their dicks kicked up to their throats.

History teaches this lesson with excruciating clarity, over and over again.

Which is why we will cheer Ukraine and jeer Putin's warmaking until we are hoarse, and why anyone with a lick of sense should do so as well.

The sooner Putin either quits, or dies, the better for humanity. Then we can go back to letting Ukraine make its own way in the world, and go back to largely ignoring Russia as the vodka-soaked incompetent irrelevancy it has been and will be again, left to its own devices. Until they stop hugging dictators, keeping their heads down, and just following orders, as they've done since the czars, they will continue to be a failed state. Nothing has changed just because Emperor Poopypants and his minions needed a proxy war with them as a political tampon, to staunch the flow of blood from their pussified regime.

If you're butthurt by that, you've been on the wrong side of this since the outset. Sorry there's no nice way to say that. So just stop already.

WYS ≠ WYG: How you Know The King Is Dead

h/t Common Cents blog

 

A few pointers on this clip from ITV:

1) This is a militia artillery unit. So what? My posted estimate at BCE's place was that it would take a very short time, far less than expected, to train raw recruits to operate field artillery competently. My estimate was a few days for the artillery itself, and a couple of weeks to shake out the fire direction head shed. I was earnestly assured by a commenter at BCE's blog it would take far longer, months and months, to do so. Yet here we have a battery at two months, tops, doing as well as any experienced military unit would do. TL;DR: I win again. Days, not months and months.

2) By leveraging the use of drones for fire direction, something that was in its infancy in my day,

a) they don't need to push Forward Observers out into harm's way

b) they can operate and target well beyond their own FLOT (Forward Line Of Troops)

c) their fire direction corrections can be made seamlessly, in real time, without relay, taking artillery from being indirect fire, to being very nearly direct fire. Their own FDC is calling their own corrections, and they can do BDA simultaneously.

d) anything in their range fan that their drone(s) can see, they can bring under fire, almost immediately. Their only limitation is the NV/thermal capabilities of their drones; the artillery can fire 24/7/365.

Nota bene: 

3) Russian counter-battery fire is virtually NIL. For the novices out there: This is YUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGE.

It obviously happens, else they wouldn't all run to their bunkers right after a fire mission. 

But so rarely as to be inconsequential.

Blue Force Cold War doctrine was to expect OPFOR to start erasing the grid you were in within 2 minutes of firing. That's not happening here. Nor anything remotely close.

How do we know that?

a) They aren't hooking the field pieces up to prime mover trucks at light speed after "rounds complete", and then hauling ass a mile or more away within 90 seconds of last round downrange. Conclusion: they aren't doing it because counter-battery almost never happens.

b) They're running to bunker shelters. I'll say that again: They're running to bunker shelters. Which aren't chewed all to hell by the constant accurate incoming Russian counter-battery fire. Conclusion: because it doesn't happen.

c) They have those bunkers at all, because they're disciplined enough to build them, and more importantly, because they had the leisure time to bother, because they've been firing from the same positions for so long, it was worth the time and effort to bother. Conclusion: Because there's been no counter-battery fire whatsoever, and they haven't had to displace anywhere in a big ass hurry, not even once, in days and DAYS and DAYS.

Inescapable Conclusion:

Once-vaunted Russian grid-square erasing counter-battery Armageddon beloved of 1980s tech fiction is so f**king rare in Ukraine as to be virtually non-existent. You're more likely to find Bigfoot in a Ukraine forest poition than an exploding Russian artillery shell.

The former Russian King Of Battle is impotent.

QED

If it were otherwise, those militia guns would have been smoking heaps of scrap, and those shelters blown asunder to kindling, with a fresh paint job of cannon-cocker blood-and-guts paté splattered hither and yon. Russian artillery is manifestly completely dickless, unless they're shelling non-movable cities and civilian targets, and hitting to minute of Mariupol on schools, factories, and apartment complexes only because those things can't run very fast.

Russian counter-battery capability has been degraded to non-existence, for all practical purposes. If it were otherwise, the ITV video would have been a snippet stating "ITV news team missing somewhere near  front-line positions in eastern Ukraine."

So, minus any help from what was once the foremost cudgel of the entire Russian military order of battle, to the point that amateurs are pwning Vlad's minions 24/7/365, see if you can guess why the Russian troops in Ukraine can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, and have been relegated to shelling the living hell out of soft, non-movable civilian targets for two months.

FTR, I assumed the Ukes would need time to get their FOs up to speed, and instead they made them completely superfluous. 

I also took the common assumption that the Russians were barely competent at counter-battery fire at face value, but obviously, from first-hand evidence, they're about as good at counter-battery fires now as they are at running cruisers in the Black Sea, or attacking a short distance on mutiple axes of advance, while keeping their front lines well-supplied with fuel, food, and bullets: i.e. which is obviously not at all, based purely on the evidence of anyone's lying eyes.

I can pick that much info up from a less than 7 minute video; ITV didn't figure it out after being there live to film it. And all the gainsaying and Putin-cheering can't change those realities on the ground.

Those "Go Putin!" and "The Plan Is Working!" comments from those whose only uniform time was as a parking valet aren't aging well in light of ground realities on the front lines of a war. But you can't use facts and common sense to argue people out of positions they didn't use facts and common sense to get to in the first place.