People have been posting this news with outrage, but the sensible response should be loud cheering and the sound of popping champagne corks.
One can oppose Israel and its policies without descending into unbridled anti-Semitism and flagrantly gross insubordination. This jackass will be lucky to make it to retirement without a general court martial, and we yet live in hope that his CG convenes such. This happily relieved colonel's excretions were exactly such, and correctly recognized as that by his senior commanders, as well as being wholly incompatible with service at the highest and most sensitive levels of this (or any) administration's defense establishment. Huzzah.
Outside the restrictions of the UCMJ, well known and studiously ignored by Colonel Jackass, one may hold and express such rabid Jew hatred freely, but they should understand that to most people, the halo of froth around one's mouth is generally off-puting.
We wish former colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest our best wishes in his future (and happily) non-military endeavors, and our final hope is that his separation from military service comes from his last duty assignment, somewhere involved with the mess and maintenance operations of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, until his inevitable separation from military service, unless the Pentagon finds both a spine and the command determination to bust him to private and saddle him with a farewell BCD or Dishonorable Discharge after a few months in the Military Correctional Facility in Leavenworth, KS, which he so richly deserves, thus zeroing out his future retirement and medical benefits.
Shitheads gonna shithead, but the military is no place to subsidize such shitheadery.
We hope he wears the boot prints on his ass a long, long time after his pending, inevitable, and richly-deserved separation from service.
Discuss in comments the odds that Hegseth already knows that answer.
And after that, the over/under odds he'll do anything to fix that longstanding boil on the military's ass, under the theory that victory in battle is their primary mission.
Step One: Anyone who can't perform their service branch's PRT/PFT to the current male standard is given the same number of weeks as they have years TIS to either meet the male standard, or be separated for the good of the service.
There's no Step Two necessary. Combat doesn't grade based on gender.
[Pro tip: I wouldn't be holding my breath for that small amount of obvious common sense, even from Hegseth. #Notevergonnahappen]
{Nota bene: We said "tits" rather than "a pussy", because if we started picking on people in the military packing that gear, it wouldn't just be the women we'd be talking about, and a quite large number of them would be in the O-7 and above ranks. #Fireallthegeneralsandadmiralsforopeners.}
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.
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.
Mosey over to Borepatch's blog, and read ASM's epiphany on a classic scene in Full Metal Jacket.
My take?
You (ASM) know no recruit ever saw a doughnut on P.I. Kubrick didn't.
You're still overthinking it. (And BTW, Pyle confessed to stealing the jelly doughnut in the scene without further prompting. Trying to pin this on Hartman's imaginary dastardly subterfuge is plainly bad movie-watching comprehension.)
The doughnut scene was just lazy screenwriting, and bad shorthand to make a point, nothing more nor less. That's the discovery. Hollywood only does that 24/7/365. (Lou Gossett did it even worse, when he won an Oscar for them making it look like he single-handedly ran a Navy OCS platoon in An Officer And A Gentleman. As If.)
Pyle's failure is that he's Pyle. I knew many Pyles. I had them in my recruit platoon. Some of them hid it better than others. Some didn't even try.
We had "Sniper", caught sighting in his M-16 on 1st MAF's helo as it landed on the parade deck.
The "Filter Kings", caught smoking a half-smoked cigarette butt they'd found. (The scene where Profile is running around the entire formation coming back from the range in Heartbreak Ridge? Oh yeah, that happened many times in real life. Just ask the Filter Kings.)
And two outright Thieves who should've been shit-canned from the Marine Corps on the spot in boot camp, and were later court-martialed and shit-canned from the FMF, for stealing ordnance in MOS School right after. Leavenworth Correctional is tough to explain on a resume.
The Corps oft-times fucks up by trying to salvage the unsalvageable, when it should just do them a mercy and kick them out as "unsuitable for military service" for life, the first time it becomes bog obvious.
Not everyone left MCRD in dress blues. Some leave it in Levis. Even two days before graduation. Deservedly.
The D.I.s were simply the illusion of perfection, because they only had to put the show on for their shift. It is the most elaborate staged performance in a military full of them. The Blue Angels have nothing on Marine boot camp for creating an illusion. Doesn't matter for recruits, because they're expected to make illusion reality, Or else.
The problem comes when over-eager recruiters are desperate for audience participation, and screen in kids they should've screened out, and knew they should've screened out.
The one I want to see, that would tear the mask off, would be to do a documentary on BUDS Class 234 Instructors Behind The Scenes. Or ditto for Ranger School or SFAS Cadre.
Then the penny would drop.
The military would crap itself to stop that reality show getting out.
(That's a lot of why The Guardianfailed at the box office, despite being an excellent flick: Costner's senior chief was shown to be just as damaged in his personal life as the trainee he was trying to reach, and it was a little bit too on-point for audiences to like. It broke the boot camp movie mold.)
I saw one of the sister platoons' D.I.s in the base PX about a year after boot. After a momentary flashback, the truth dawned. He was just another motor T sergeant, buying T-shirts and socks.
Besides myself, and two tours with the guys whose birthday I talked about yesterday:
Neice who pulled a tour as an Army medic during the GWOT.
Younger brother who served as a Cold War tanker in the Fulda gap, and punched one Baader-Meinhoff terrorist's ticket on guard duty one night.
Older brother who served in Da Nang, and a string of outposts in the farthest reaches of I Corps in Vietnam in '66-'67.
Cousin who led a rifle company of Marines in Vietnam, same time frame, and eventually put in decades in both Marine and USAF reserves.
Uncle who was killing communists with the Army on the DMZ in 1951, and brought back some Nork- or Chinese-carried Japanese Arisaka as a war trophy.
Father who was ground crew in the USAAC in WWII. During which time he met mom, which is how I came to be here.
Grandfather, who left the backwoods as a boy, and sailed around the world on a light cruiser in Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet a decade before WWI. I have his Shellback certificate from crossing the equator festivities at the Galapagos Islands in 1908.
Those are just the ones I know about firsthand, but per the genealogically inclined relatives, the line apparently stretches back to at least the late unpleasantness of the 1860s, to both sides.
Surviving US military veterans all. Just one family's contribution to the maintenance of the republic, and like all the rest who did their part, the reason for the US holiday today.
Those of you who never served, and never will, owe them a small debt of gratitude for the country you enjoy today. If you get the chance, pay a little of it back to the ones you meet, as the opportunity arises.
We noted that any 27 blogs yesterday (find them yourself, we won't point fingers) reported breathlessly (and witlessly, which we'll deal with anon) that "Pentagon admits US troops in Ukraine!!!! OMG!!! World War Eleventy!!!!!"...
Point Of Order, Brigade Of Dipsh*ts:
The US has had military attachés in foreign countries for over 120 years. The US embassy in Kyiv was opened in 1992, within days of Ukraine's declared independence from the former Soviet Union. The defense attachés there undoubtedly include multiple officers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as they do in over 100 US embassies worldwide, including any country of military, economic, or strategic importance.
Yes, we have "troops in Ukraine." So what the Internet Field Marshals are posting as if it's earth-shattering news is something that's been true for only something like thirty years.
And frankly, if the US military (and every other nation) doesn't have their minions watching every single thing of military significance in that conflict, and sending back daily and weekly telephone-book thick reports on literally everything - from the performance of Western and Russian weapons systems, to the wool content of their troops' socks and winter underwear, then everyone in our and any 57 other militaries above the rank of colonel is a retarded fuckwit guilty of gross professional negligence.
To the contrary, I'd be shocked to find out we haven't already sent entire intact Russian tanks and Mig cockpits wrapped in HD black plastic and duct-taped all around with "US Diplomatic Pouch", the contents protected by treaty and international law, shipped by rail to ports in Poland and Germany, to be forwarded to our foremost actual military experts here.
That's what your tax dollars are supposed to pay for.
We had military people watching German troops in person in Spain in 1936, and Japan in China in 1937, and have done the same thing back to at least 1901 if not far earlier.
If the Pentagon admits we have military advisors or actual military units present for duty in Ukraine other than that, then all these Captain Obvious military ignoramusii will be onto something. Not before.
If anyone is surprised to learn the above, and this comes as great surprise to their sparse data bank of military knowledge, they aren't tall enough to be posting on the interent, and there's an award rocker for that:
Old salts: If this causes your last meal to make a sudden comeback, remember to puke to the leeward side. If you don't remember why, don't worry; it'll come back to you.
Video presented because it's even-handedly "Just the facts, ma'am."
Takeaways
1) Russia has a lot of artillery shells.
2) They're dumb shells, overwhelmingly from pre-1990 days.
3) Nobody has any wild idea how many.
4) Nobody has any wild idea how many.
5) Shooting a lot of shells is nice. So...how'd that strategy work out for Germany or the Allies on the Western Front from 1914-1917?
Hint:
6) Shooting a lot of artillery shells is a huuuuuge logistical strain on anyone. Even more so on an army so skilled at wartime logistics that they lost entire mechanized regiments early on because their vehicles simply ran out of gas, and were subsequently abandoned intact.
7) Even Russian ammunition reserves are not infinite, and the glacial pace of their advance despite prodigious ammunition consumption puts a time limit on even their current slow gains. At some point, they have no choice but to cut back, from a host of inescapable factors. Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
7a) Whether their logistical ability to maintain their current artillery expenditures outlasts the Ukrainian forces' ability to resist is precisely the point at issue. We won't bother to point out the multiple fanboy analyses that declared the war was over a month and more ago. Those quotes and posts aren't aging well, and even worse with every passing day. Things can go any which way yet, but it isn't over until it's over, and the Fat Lady hasn't even gotten to the opera house yet.
8) Wear and tear, fuel, and simple time and distance makes trains, trucks, tires, spare parts, and simply feeding drivers as important, if not more than, how much ammunition they can fire, and for how long. If you ain't got it, you can't shoot it.
9) As we tried to tell the fanboys in an earlier post, wear and tear on artillery tubes leads to unavoidable accuracy problems as well, and physics always wins. The Russians can ignore accuracy, and probably will, but they can't ignore the consequences of ignoring accuracy. And they then expend even more shells to even less effect, the longer they continue to do so. C'est la guerre.
10) Russia has always loved artillery, because the math is basic, and once you pull the string, your military worries are over. Unlike with aircraft, tanks, APCs, missiles, trucks, or even conscripts, who still have to be fed, watered, and supplied. Plain Jane artillery works in all weather, 24/7/365, as long as you don't give a damn about accuracy.
"Minute of city? Da, is good enough, comrade."
Russia has demonstrated their total inability to dominate the air, conduct effective combined arms operations, or master maneuver warfare, but they have conclusively shown the unsurprising aptitude for rubble-izing any troops or real estate not able to get out of the way of a rain of HE shells. Gravity is a great help to them in ensuring that their expended artillery rounds do eventually fall to earth...somewhere. But that weight of ordnance has not translated into any amazing breakthroughs, rather instead to ensuring nothing but an endless meatgrinder, and destroying the very territory and population they claimed to covet with such lovingkindness.
Thus my conclusion at this point is part of a familiar quote to many readers:
"...what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, or the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count."
Russian artillery is hitting minute-of-city-block.
Ukrainian artillery is hitting minute of tank or APC.
Time will tell which is the better tactic.
That isn't telling you (as I never have) that Zelenskyy will be dictating terms from within sight of the walls of the Kremlin, nor even that Ukraine will "win".
What it does tell you is that Russia is not marching from victory to victory, but rather feeding its own face into a woodchipper just as hard as they're pushing on the Ukrainians. Afghanistan showed they aren't fast learners in that respect, but at some point, a lot of problems go away the minute some bright young actual field marshal decides to liberate Putin's brains kinetically onto the wall behind where he sits, and sooner or later, it's likely that the lightbulb will switch on, and someone thereabouts may decide the lemon is worth the squeeze.
And Putin's megalomaniacal quest to re-form the Soviet Empire isn't going over well anywhere from Oslo to Ankara, and Europe is digging in, not softening its stance.
Every minute this continues, the whole world suffers for it. The minute is stops, worldwide problems and tensions ratchet down about five levels. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with how corrupt Ukrainian leadership is, nor the fecklessness and cynicism of the dog-wagging jackasses who actively pushed and pulled this conflict into happening on both sides of the Atlantic.
The minute Russia, with or without Putin at the helm, realizes it has more to gain from ending the conflict than continuing it, the faster the ten crises the war accelerated go from glowing cherry-red and about to blow, back to a nice tepid not-nearly-so-serious problem.
But if you really frothingly want WW III to kick off tomorrow, by all means keep rootin' for Putin.
I'd rather turn that burner way down, and concentrate on the epic housecleaning hereabouts that's coming like a freight train, without having to deal with it in MOPP Level IV gear, knowwhatImean? That shit is uncomfortable as f**k.
Word to your mother: Video Guy nails it out of the park.
Back in the day, I owned (on behalf of the Bn CO) not one, but two howitzers.
A 155mm M198 (the far heavier Army p.o.s hand-me-down, and exact predecessor of the much lighter and handier M777), and a literally ancient 105mm M101A1. Minted in 1940. (The Marines never throw anything away. They still have Civil War bayonets and Spanish-American War mess kits in pallet boxes at MCLB Barstow, to a metaphysical certainty, because "This stuff might come in handy some day!" I Sh*t Thee Not, my first issued helmet - in the Fleet -was a WWII steel pot with VN-era camo leaf pattern cover, my flak vest was a Korean War-era turtle-plate hand-me-down, and I carried an M-16A1. In 1984. Yes, really.)
Which light howitzer two - yes two - guys could pick up, and run down the road with like a Chinaman's rickshaw, place wherever it was needed, and send such packets of pure hatred as beehive AP rounds, which its bigger brothers could not do.
More to the point, it could be picked up by anything in the air wing helo inventory, including a decent UH-1, as long as it wasn't at 120°F. and 8,000 ft. altitude, etc.
It was also less manpower intensive, needing just 5-6 guys, instead of 10-11, and could be pulled around by anything down to and including the venerable M151 Jeep.
It could also shoot shorter ranges, unlike the M198, which was literally useless on the Grenada Adventure by the 22nd MAU, so they left them on the ships, and turned Hotel Battery 3/10 into Provisional Rifle Company Hotel for that invasion.
"Domine, Domine!: You are now grunts again. Get out of your racks and grab your packs." - H 3/10 1st sergeant.
And my personal bucket list fave, I got to use mine to play Special Percussion for a July 3rd concert including full orchestra, in a performance of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and then use it the next day for the 21-gun salute to the nation at noon the following day.
So I liked my little toy a lot more than the bigger one.
But I digress.
What that has to do with howitzer barrel life is this:
Up on Ye Solid Steel Breechblock of said nifty little howitzer, between the brass leveling points for the gunner's quadrant, were the manufacturing marks, serial number, and the dates my particular toy, the one I signed for ownership and responsibility of, had been rebarrelled.
In the case of mine, it was, IIRC, November of 1943, January of 1951, and October of 1969.
Which means my predecessors had shot the barrel of it out first on Guadalcanal, then again at the Frozen Chosin, and yet again during Tet '68 in Vietnam, before it was pulled out of storage and re-issued to me in the early 1980s, now and still sporting barrel #4.
Because as Good Marines, they had dutifully sent it back for depot maintenance and rebarrelling at their earliest convenience. (And yes, I would have killed to see the logbooks and unit diaries of the military actions to which that old warhorse had been invited. Alas, I never did. But clearly, it didn't get shot out in practice at 29 Palms.)
Point being, howitzer barrels have a service life, like anything else in the military.
So is the video guy correct? Beyond all doubt.
Does that matter for Russia?
Probably not so much. (Somebody re-read those last two lines - slowly, he's not very bright -to The Canuskistani Never-Served Except As A Busboy World's Foremost Expert, who always misses that stuff, because he can't read, and he'll probably just make something up. Again.) They're already only shooting minute of city anyways, so it's academic if they even give a flying f**k, but it may become problematic for a few privates if they ever need something like real accuracy in a danger-close mission near their own troops. But if this means Vlad's monkeys won't hit what they're aiming at, but might own-goal grease a few more Ivans from sloppiness, I say, let 'em go at it.
Maybe, with any luck, they'll skip the barrel stress-test inspections too, and do some destructive testing, to include a few Russian gun bunnies who'll suddenly become pink mist when a breech blows out during a fire mission.
It would matter to the Ukes, and make the sting of their fire missions all the harsher, as they keep achieving one-hit kills on APCs and tanks with GPS- and laser-guided munitions, while Vlad's guys will have trouble hitting the right city block, even after expending an entire day's basic load.
Which is why that 10:1 disparity in who's shooting what matters less in reality than it does to certain keyboard commandos.
Oberst Reisner of the OB just uploaded another briefing, this time in English.
Not much up-to-the-minute info, but two takeaway factoids worthy of note:
1) Original briefings by US DoD people stated we would be sending a whole 18 M777 howitzers to Ukraine. That's three batteries, which is one bare battalion. Which ain't a helluva lot in a 100,000-man 600-mi. long frontline. Color me unimpressed at the time.
Obst. Reisner's briefing reveals that, from all NATO sources, Ukraine has actually received 114 M777 howitzers.
For reference, that's 19 complete artillery batteries, and more artillery tubes than you would find in a USMC division. That's comparatively yuuuuge. It is, however, not enough to support anything like the entire front line.
2) Also notably absent from Reisner's latest briefing:
Any wild headless-chicken nonsense about the Ukrainians in headlong retreat, collapsing, or in any serious difficulty. Unlike, say, multiple online Putin junk-garglers who have declared Ukraine lost, and the war already over. Pretty much like that 90-day long victory in Mariupol (where after three months of waiting hopelessly for Russia to actually win, the Ukrainian military command ordered the regiment+ of troops still fighting there to go ahead and surrender).
So, you can believe the non-NATO disinterested third-party expert analysis of a certified military genius with full access to real-time military intelligence about that, or you can go with the uninformed bloviations from the least thoughtful gasbags on the internet.
That's a pretty easy call for me to make; you're on your own.
It's foolishly suggestedthat the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shifted the paradigm of war, demonstrating Russia's grasp of the new paradigm, and hopelessly outclassing NATO.
The trouble with that argument is it ignores facts from both history, and current events.
Battleships didn't become obsolete because of events at Taranto, nor Pearl Harbor, nor even because of the sinkings of two British battleships off the Malaysian coast. In point of fact, ignored wholly by Piggott, battleships continued to be deployed, successfully, for the rest of WWII (he might have noted the final Japanese surrender instrument was signed on the deck of USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, had he the historical acumen to summon that factoid), and Korea, and Vietnam, and GW1, before the final retirement of ships then over 50 years old. Half a century of action after supposed obsolescence is quite a long time.
And they weren't retired because of obsolescence, but rather because they were simply aged ships, requiring more in staffing and maintenance than they delivered in capability, and their main-gun ammunition was becoming notably wonky. Naval gunfire is fantastic, and nigh irreplaceable, but running oil-fired bunkers on a 2000+-man ship whose capabilities can be parceled out more economically among other platforms was the end game for the battleships. It was that simple. (OTOH, the defense plan if one was rammed by a speedboat IED, or hit by an Exocet or Silkworm in the multiple belts of foot-thick side armor, was to come about 180°, lower a seaman over the side with a brush and a bucket of gray enamel, and paint over the scorch mark in the hull that would result from such an attack.)
Carriers didn't become obsolete after Midway, either.
Bad carrier tactics, yes.
Carriers, no.
Particularly against people with no defense against them. (Which is most of 185 nations out of 195 total.)
Piggott nonsensically waves the Russian hypersonic scramjet missiles as the death blow for anything in their path. They can cover 180 miles (their operational range) in a couple of minutes.
Okay, spiffy. Russia has new toys, based on technology around since the 1950s, some 70 years ago. So, had he more perspicacity, the obvious follow-up questions would be:
What are you going to do about targets 190 miles away?
How accurate are those missiles?
How easy are they to jam, spoof, or shoot down?
How are you targeting objects BVR?
How many have you got to shoot?
Where are they?
Those are questions a plebe at West Point or Annapolis would have thought of; Piggott, not so much. What he grasps about warfare in general, or in specifics, could be written longhand with a Sharpie on butcher paper and fit inside a thimble, with room to spare.
And the most obvious question is, if these missiles are so revolutionary, why is Russia in an endless meat-grinder conflict, rather than sitting atop the pyramid of victory in mere minutes, as they expected, and Piggott's suggestion predicts?
The obvious answer is, because all those questions show the utter dearth of ability of those "revolutionary" missiles to effect anything that looks like victory.
Might they have some utility? Perhaps. It remains to be seen.
Are they a "paradigm shift" in warfare? No. They are a fart in a windstorm in the grand scheme.
Grunt Law: When you declare victory, be sure to inform the enemy.
Offense/Defense Corollary: There ain't a horse that can't be rode, and there ain't a rider that can't be throwed.
IOW, fast missiles are anything but world-beating game-changers.
It would take pages to fisk the multiplicity of military errors, from strategy, to tactics, to logistics, that underpin this pile of gelatinous shit plopped out at the link, but suffice it to say that war has not transformed in 6000 years of recorded human history, and neither have the conditions for obtaining victory. (The plural of 27 fallacious conclusions is not "wisdom". When you ask the wrong questions, and draw the wrong conclusions, you get the equivalent of gibberish from a baboon. For but one example, the machinegun didn't make infantry obsolete. It made head-on infantry charges obsolete. Wee difference, but Piggott doesn't know what he doesn't know - or else ignores it because facts mess up the flow of effluvia in his narrative.)
Hypersonic missiles haven't changed that calculus, and the failure of the Russians to sweep all opposition off the chessboard merely underlines the idiocy of the suggestion that they have.
If ICBMs with nuclear weapons didn't make armies and navies obsolete, there's little likelihood that a few missiles will do so now. The suggestion is risibly ludicrous, and only a rank amateur and total military loon would suggest otherwise. The first prerequisite of being the smartest guy in the room, is that one be smart.
Epic Fail.
Somebody wants to talk about actual new tech in this war, we can do that. But this article wasn't it.
Addendum: For the incorrigibly stupid who need this spelled out with wooden blocks, we lost our first aircraft carrier in 1942. Carriers were vulnerable 80 years ago: This is not news. We started WW II with a total of 7 carriers. We were so distraught and paradigm-shifted by the wholly unsurprising news that they could be sunk, that by war's end, we had 99 aircraft carriers afloat by VE day. And if anyone were to start lobbing missiles at any one of the 11 carriers we currently possess and had the misfortune to sink one, the life expectancy of their fleet, and capitol city, would be measured in minutes. Which is reason #27 why hypersonic AS missiles are largely irrelevant to any serious discussion of anything military-related beyond "What's a great way for a country to initiate national suicide by radiation poisoning?".
After all of the preceding, if anyone is still willing to carry water for Piggott's jackassical thesis, kindly turn up the brightness on your keyboard.
And I suppose they recruit pilots from the deserts of BFE who used to bullseye womp rats in their T-16s, right?
CW posted this (he was kidding) as the "artists conception of the SR-81".
But srsly:
Look, we retired the SR-71s in 1999.
Some anonymous soopergenius opined that "satellites replaced the SR-71" and "high flyers aren't coming back".
Bitch, please.
Catch up on anything-but-current-events, from 30 years ago in fact:
(REALITY) The mysterious rumble and bounce has occurred five times since last June, always about 7 a.m. on Thursdays. These were no earthquakes, but a passing aircraft, Caltech seismologists say.
"All I can say is that it's something that's traveling through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound in a generally northeasterly direction," said Jim Mori, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey at Caltech.
Analysts from Jane's Defense Weekly, the widely respected London-based military periodical, say that the Thursday morning phenomenon could be a top secret new spy plane, dubbed the Aurora, that can fly up to six times the speed of sound, or about 4000 MPH.
The Air Force denies that any such plane exists.
Jim Mori, Ph.D., anything but dumb, is a SME on earthquakes and seismology. And California is paved with GPS-precise-to-millimeters seismographs wall-to-wall, which made collecting the data easy and meticulously precise. So when a string of "earthquakes" hit SoCal in 1991-1992, always before 7am, always on a Thursday, he plotted the rumbles on the SoCal seismograph network, and did some napkin math.
The minute-by-minute timelines formed an arrow-straight chevron moving at about 70 miles a minute south to north from the Pacific Ocean towards Area 51, and Tonopah AFB beyond that, and based on speed-over-ground, they were moving at 4000+ MPH. Mach 6.
Pre-7am, because this was a project in progress, and on Thursday, unlike Fridays, traffic was lighter, so less people up and about. Project engineers and such tend to be M-F guys. And earthquakes don't punch time clocks.
Ergo, something moving in the air, not in the ground, at Mach 6, and coming in for a landing at one of the two most secured and remote AFBs we have.
Since then, other evidence has piled up:
Black delta-wing unidentified aircraft, frequently seen in high-altitude formation with USAF birds like KC-17s and F-15s, etc., over the USA and Europe. Frequently with contrails suggestive of a pulse-jet, and making an unfamiliar and distinctive sound.
I remind all and sundry that it was years between the SR-71s first operational flights for recon after the U-2s vulnerability was exposed to the world in 1960, and the time the USAF actually admitted to owning and flying the -71.
To date, AFAIK, they've still never copped to the existence of the Aurora, let alone revealed nomenclature, official photos, performance specs, or anything like, in 30 years.
But you think they gave up a world-beating recon and intel asset like the SR-71 (it was still setting speed records the day they retired it), in exchange for nothing? Or satellites? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Sure they did. NOT.
Now, see if you can figure out why China and Russia have spent the last 30 years busting their scientific asses to develop hypersonic missile tech, at a huge cost in effort and treasure.
Hint: It ain't to shoot down recon satellites, kids.
(Sidenote: If the Air Farce had someone really bright somewhere, their most top secret:codeword-level unit would be a couple of science fantasists, and a small crew of welders and carpenters, and their sole job 24/7/365 would be to create whimsical plywood and sheet metal fake aircraft, especially designs that failed spectacularly, and plant them at a few testing airbases, and leave them out for satellite recon and GoogleEarth to find. I'd also have them take a couple of cutting edge planes and paint false black silhouettes on the undersides, and change the shape using light blue over wingtips and such, maybe a couple of smoke generators on underwing mounts to fake additional engines, just to give amateur airplaneologists something misleading to photograph. For that matter, they'd create fake ICBM silos scattered on military bombing ranges, and leave a few SSBNs fake hulls moored at several Navy docksides too, with full guards and foot traffic. Just saying.)
On a tip from a reader - Morons will be morons: The Great Canadian Dronemaster Windbag gets it wrong again. Space starts at the Kármán Line, where the atmosphere ceases to exist, which is 100km (330,000') up, some 230,000' feet higher than reconnaissance aircraft reportedly fly, i.e. nearly 2½ times higher than anything with wings goes since the X-15 stopped going there. This boundary was established in the 1960s, and recon planes don't fly there, because by definition, no one flies where there's no atmosphere within which aircraft (which cleverly has "air" in the description) control surfaces would work. People who fly to space get astronaut wings. People who fly recon flights have ordinary pilots' wings. And they carry their balls in their helmet bags, because they need something that big to hold them. Stick with being massively ignorant about drones, Gasbag. Being ignorant about everything you touch only takes you from sad to utterly pathetic. But thanks for playing, and enjoy the extra looks.
Angus has undertaken to give historical background to the Ukrainian artillery tactics we described last week.
I am sure his artillery history per se is excruciatingly correct, and beyond dispute, and you are unhesitatingly recommended to read the exposition given.
The problem, however, is that his explanation of how this current thing is not new, basically did a face plant.
Multiple guns in multiple batteries fire all their tubes at different times (based on flight time) such that all the rounds land on that single target nearly simultaneously, or at least, close enough as makes no difference. Infantry mortars and even air-to-ground munitions can be added, just for grins. Any way you do it, at any size, it's Hell, in a very small space.
TIME ON TARGET: Each battery of 6-8 guns fires their rounds the indicated number of seconds prior to the planned TOT. Think "Whump...Whump......Whump.....Whump...Whump....." Then all 30-40 of those shells impact within 1-2 seconds. "FOOM!FOOM!FOOM!FOOM!FOOMFOOMFOOM!!!" The only thing more awe-inspiring would be God's own thunder from a lightning strike (or 40 of them in a second or two, at one spot), but the devastation is near identical for anything at that address.
Having participated in everything up to a regimental TOT, where every tube in the 10th or 11th Marines (90+ tubes, from 16 batteries with 6-8 towed and SP pieces each, at the time) dropped their shells from 105s, 155s, and 203s all on one specific given point within 1-2 seconds of each other, I will allow that they are properly glorious for everyone involved, other than anyone inhabiting said target. Which is rather the point.
They do that because artillery per each is inherently inaccurate, and thus an area weapon, fired like a shotgun. A TOT is like firing all the rounds in a single shotgun at once, at whatever poor SOBs are in that impact area.
That is NOT what Herr Oberst Reisner was describing in the linked video.
The Ukrainians spread those 6-8 gun batteries down to 1 or 2 tube sub-units, all linked on StarLink, and all using the GIS ARTA targeting program, (neither of which anyone had before) and each one picks an identified target, and shoots at it as soon as they're ready. Then they look at the update, and see what hasn't been waxed, and shoot at that, until there's nothing left to shoot at. Each sub-unit shoots when it wants, and then the guys (as we covered in an earlier ITC video) scamper in the rare case of counter-battery return fire, while other sub-units pick up the fight from a different position until there are no more Russians to shoot up, either from their destruction in smoking heaps, or their hasty retreat. Usually a couple of minutes either way.
Counter-battery fire is somewhere between pointless to impossible, both because Vlad's artillery counter-battery assets work as well as the rest of his Potemkin military to date, and because hitting 10, 20, 50 or more different single-tube targets would take hours, and require more artillery than there is in the entire Russian Army, and metric fucktons of ammo to splatter-fire an entire grid square just to take out one single tube, and 3-6 guys, plus a couple of dozen unfired rounds. If Vlad wants to try and use 500 rounds to kill one gun, even the Ukes (hell, even Ewok log and rock catapults) can play that game all week long, and twice on Sundays, from here to the next millenium, and come out ahead.
That looks like this:
Ukrainian artillery bushwhack ca. 2022 AKA: How To Erase An Enemy Regimental Task Force, In 5 Minutes Or Less
The Ukes DGAF when rounds land on the multiple targets, nor are they synchronizing any attacks (which is the entire point of doing a TOT), nor are they having all tubes/weapons impact the same rough patch of real estate. Their only concern is that all visible targets get serviced as rapidly as possible. The whole point is to get first- or second-round direct hits.(Word To Your Mother: Until very recently, artillery doesn't GET first-round direct hits. Period.) They're inviting, via that GIS ARTA app, every single weapon system that can be brought to bear to hit anything and everything within their own range fan, which targets are also dispersed, and which is something nobody did with arty before now, including us, because now arty can drop a shell with accuracy rivalling that of tank cannon in direct fire, so that instead of shooting up a vehicle from a couple thousand yards, they're dropping heavy arty on a target from a dozen or more grid squares away. (Our preference to date is to do that with LGBs from aircraft.)
It is exactly the company of long range snipers I described in the OP, rather than the historical artillery idea of a mob of musketeers doing a group mugging, which ain't nobody been able to do before now, and you can't "invent" that if you can't do it. This is why Edison gets credit for inventing the light bulb, and the Wright Brothers with inventing the airplane, because their versions worked, and which is why we don't give the credit to some nameless fantasizers who thought "Wouldn't it be great to light the room with electricity instead of fire?" or "Wouldn't it be cool to fly a heavier-than-air craft wherever you wanted?"
The Ukes are thus not doing anything like a TOT. So thanks for playing, but we know whereof we speak, from firsthand experience, and we know the difference between this, and a TOT. The two are worlds apart.
They didn't invent all the components, but they synthesized those other things together into a coherent whole like no one has ever done with artillery, and when they do it well, they're erasing Russian units up to regimental level (1000-2000 guys, and all their equipment larger than a Toyota) in a few minutes.
We don't even do this now. (Nor, AFAIK, does anyone else. YET.) We drop a round, adjust, drop another round, adjust, and so on, and then fire for effect (i.e. drop a shit-ton of rounds on the last spot) once we're on the bullseye. If we had this level of artillery accuracy (which two words, to this point in history, were generally understood to be an oxymoron on the level of jumbo shrimp, government help, or military intelligence) in Iraq/A-stan, we would have deployed all our available arty assets in firebases, along with Predator drones to spot, and simply erased the Taliban and Iraqi insurgencies one shell at a time, with virtually zero risk, unless they tried to mob attack a FSB, and walked into interlocking fields of fire from miniguns.
Traditionally, artillery is a shotgun, fired by a blind man, and coached by someone nearby; the Uke concept of operation is using it as a sniper rifle, and it's kicking the shit out of Vlad's minions, over and over again. The observable secondary explosions after arty impacts on video after video are the proof of the pudding. Welcome to the Big League, rookies.
Anybody who still thinks this current employment is a TOT, or has been done before as-is, is free to specify who made it work like this, and explain why it isn't therefore the universal artillery tactical rule, instead of the exception, being some mythical number of decades old, for all artillery since whatever mythical invention date so specified, and how come it's become so devastating to the Russians, who should have known better, being formerly thought of as the world Subject Matter Experts on artillery usage in combat up until 1945, or even 1985.
This is like explaining that Moses and the Israelites really only escaped through a marsh a few inches deep, and then having to explain how that water level drowned all of Pharoah's pursuing army and charioteers.
Sorry, but that's how it works. It's theoretically possible that I got it all wrong, along with the Austrian Army's head of R and D, and that despite his PhD, and everything he used to illustrate the point, he's historically ignorant about his entire profession.
But that's not where I'd put my chips if the wheel was spinning.
Russia is bringing T-62 tanks out of mothballs to replace the loss of T-72s and T-80s, which indicates that
1) The Russians aren't "winning" for any value of that word other than either "Pyrhhic" or "Mariupolic", and
2) They're now being forced to rely on vehicles that the Israelis were bitch-slapping around the Middle East 50 years ago, because modern AT missiles ate their lunch. Which things were what made those T-62s obsolete in the first place.
They're more advanced than lawn tractors, but if you couldn't win with top-tier gear, you aren't going to get it done against the same Javelins and NLAWS that kicked your ass earlier by using machinery that was obsolete almost before Vlad was born.
This is annoying for the Ukrainian forces, but mainly only if they run out of Western-supplied AT missiles before Russia runs out of mothballed crap from the 1970s to throw at them.
If Russia gets down to pulling T-34s from WWII out of museum displays, dollars to donuts they'll be using them for advancing on the Kremlin, not the Donbas.
But if Russian troops keep attacking, and can sop up enough AT missiles faster than they can be replaced, they might start to outlast the Uke resistance, and start to get some traction. It's unlikely given their past performance, but the law of averages says they can't stay incompetent forever.
Their attack is going to become a scorched-earth offense, which is going to tear the hell out of all the formerly Russia-friendly areas they hold now, which is where the war is being fought to a slogging standstill.
Remember please that Russia has no stomach for this endless slog; only Putin does. Putin's gamble is that he can maintain his tenuous grip on power long enough to eke out something like a win (which bus left the depot on about February 26th of this year). His victory conditions are not Ukraine's, and they only have to continue to exist. If/when Putin gets whacked or dies, the Ukes have an excellent shot at evicting what's left of the Russian incompetent and unmotivated hordes out of Crimea and the eastern districts forever, and based on current performance, the blood feud is going to make de-Russification of the entire Ukraine a territorial imperative they'll pursue with gusto.
And then join NATO, just for spite, making Putin's failure absolute.
And for those that need this explained in explicit detail:
This means Ukraine's continued existence is now at the whim of the West, not Putin.
Putin hasn't been able to overcome them in three months of trying.
The West, OTOH, could make Ukraine's candle wink out with the snap of a finger.
Now you know the answer to "Who run Bartertown?"
And you also now know why Gondor didn't want to ask Rohan for help against Mordor.
The fear of "strings attached".
In the real world, "help" always comes with strings. Of steel.
TANSTAAFL
UPDATE II: Color me shocked!, Angus is butthurt that his sup-par mis-explanation of what the Ukrainians are doing got taken to task in painstaking detail. I laid out the substance a successful counter-argument would need to provide, above. With the whole internet to drop a link to, if any such existed. But no. Instead, we get a pigeon playing chess: knock the pieces over, shit on the board, and pretend you won. Well-played.
The Ukrainians aren't doing a TOT, nor anything like it.
They aren't using tactics from 75-100 years ago that nobody could ever make work.
They're doing something in combat that hasn't been seen before, because they can, and making it work, like no one else has done, for the first time in military history. Having a metaphorical sword at one's throat makes people do things like that.
(And no, Angus, I let the nonsense slide, but we didn't widely disperse individual tubes; not in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or any other place you could name. We don't do it now, either {Yet.}. And yet we have computers and GPS that would supposedly "make it easy". So why not? Because it would take 6-8 times as long just to lay the battery, and then you'd have to register each individual gun, just to know WTF you're hitting. But you don't know that, because you never had to lay a battery, or register a gun, and don't know what you don't know. And a TOT was and is multiple batteries, which were already dispersed, firing at a single target. Not single dispersed tubes from the same battery. It wasn't done to avoid counter-battery fire, it was done to provide a devastating effect on a single target, before people could dive for cover, so that instead of the first round, they got 30-50, or more, all at once, which is exactly NOT what the Ukrainians are doing in any way, shape, or form.
They also aren't doing "shoot-and-scoot", which we did practice {it was SOP in the 1980s}. They're doing "shoot and take shelter in place while waiting to see if Ivan can even do counter-battery fire". Which lesson has been overwhelmingly, "No, he can't do that, and he can't even find his own ass with both hands and a map."} Not knowing any of this is why you should have stayed in your lane, or at least watched the Austrian Army video and learned a thing or two. You didn't set a clever trap; you simply don't know what you're taking about, but worse than that, you don't know what you don't know.)
And rather than shrug off the mistake, some people aren't happy until they aren't happy. Okay. Whatever floats your boat, chief, but you're still wrong, and now just being deliberately ignorant when corrected. This is what happens when apes read philosophy: they don't understand it. Best wishes with that plan going forward.
(Shout out: I forget who tipped me off about this source,
but many thanks. Pure gold.)
Assuming there are folks out there still interested in information, rather than posturing, empty gainsaying, and reflexively giving Putin his daily tongue-bath:
Why Vlad Is getting his Ass Kicked, Day 82
Oberst (Col.) Reisner of the Austrian Army giving a thoroughly professional and easily understandable briefing on why Ukraine keeps kicking the shit out of inferior Russian forces with artillery tactics hitherto largely unknown, and capabilities that are even better than us at our best to date, especially so for a fourth-rate military cobbled together under constant attack and three months of invasion by a nominally far stronger power.
(Click on YouTube to turn on CC, then go to settings, and select English captions, and Bob's your uncle, you've got the briefing in real time. You can even turn off the sound.)
In short:
1. Ukraine developed a simple program (GIS ARTA) which anyone, even people who are essentially untrained national guardsmen conscripts, can use to upload target info to the network in seconds, to within a couple of meters of accuracy. This wiped out any requirement for highly trained FOs, and shortened required competency at that task from months to minutes. That's world-beating.
2. Elon Musk's 1760-satellite multi-redundant and unjammable Starlink system communicates that data to every weapon system user on the network, in real time.
3. Ukraine deploys its artillery, not in traditional "Come counter-battery the shit out of me" compact battery formations, but rather in highly dispersed packets over wide areas, making counter-battery massing of fires immensely more difficult. Used to be, an artillery gun or rocket battery fit inside an acre or two, and Ivan's counter-battery would wipe out that whole grid square within 3 minutes. Now, the Ukes have dispersed their weapons over entire square miles and miles, and anything over everywhere can get the target, and open fire, and the fires are massed on the impact area, without the tubes or systems being massed from the launch point. This isn't evolutionary, it's revolutionary. It's the difference between taking a Napoleonic company of riflemen blasting away with smoothbore muskets, and transitioning your force to 200 guys with Barrett .50BMG sniper weapons, and scattering them from hell to breakfast, and having them pick off people from a mile away. Good luck returning that kind of incoming fire. (It was last tried by the US 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. Spoiler Alert: This did not go well for them.)
(UPDATE: Sorry, Angus, but natzsofast: this is not a Time-On-Target (TOT), which item is pretty glorious, and in which we participated multiple times; that is a wholly different thing from what is being discussed here by Herr Oberst. See follow-on post.)
4. The Ukrainians are using laser-targeted and GPS guided projectiles, and getting first-round hits with artillery. Russia is getting, in their laps, what happened to Saddam's army for the first time in 1990, where you had LGBs going into truck windows, and through ventilation shafts at HQ, and precisely targeting anything you can see. And Ukrainian drones are seeing everything.
5. Turning this level of targeting on Russian HQ, and any massed forces. In the video, Col. Reisner notes 13 Soviet generals, and 30 colonels are now good Russians, courtesy of the Ukrainians shellacking the hell out of any Russian HQ they find. (FTR, IIRC, the US hasn't lost 13 generals in battle in the last century.)
The Ukrainians also wiped out the best part of two entire Russian assault battalions in that famous disaster of a bridging operation in Donetsk. When your forces are knocking the enemy's attacks out in job lots of 1000 men at a time, it's become less a battle, and more a harvest of baby Harp seals.
Ukraine is now visiting on Russian troops the sort of artillery bitch-slapping smackdown Russia was formerly famous for, only by using targeted sledgehammer blows, instead of dropping a bus on the target. And it's kicking Ivan's ass all the way back to the Russian border, chewing up the best he's got, and spitting out nothing but scrap metal and bloody bits of corpses. No wonder the Russian troops don't want to play any more. This is like playing Army, and you draw Iraqi Republican Guards, against the other guy's choice of US 1st Armored Division. The Washington Generals have a better chance against the Harlem Globetrotters.
But hey, why worry? This isn't really the Austrian military college's analysis, this is all "Globohomo propaganda", those 13 dead Russian generals and 30 colonels are all secretly massing for the Big Russian Counterattack, any day now, and everything is going according to Vlad's brilliant 97-dimensional master plan. (That's what you get when you listen to people who put the "anal" in "analysis", because that's where their heads are.)
For those of you still believing your lying eyes, instead of the World's Foremost Internet Experts, this is why the number of people still talking about Pee Wee Putin's Big Adventure are getting quieter and quieter, and turning into the Chicago Cubs Fans of Russian Cheerleading and Current Affairs.
From Lenin to Putin, when your head guy is named Vladimir, it's not going to go well.
And FWIW, mad props to the Austrian Army, which is putting out weekly Master's level commanding general briefings for free, on the internet, just because they can. And I don't know how large or ferocious the Austrian Army is, but if this guy is representative of their competence level, you do not want to f**k with them.
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.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
Comments are fully moderated, due to idiots and trolls. Grown up discussion here will appear just as soon as I have the time to push it through. ANONYMOUS UNSIGNED COMMENTS WILL BE AUTO-DELETED WITHOUT MERCY, and the url added to the spam filter, or mercilessly mocked at the bloghost's sole discretion. If you're too chickensh*t to come up with an alias for online purposes, you're not tall enough for this blog. Pick a name, and stick with it, and you're good. Get cute, and you're wasting your time and my electrons, and your masterpiece will never see the light of day. No warning shots will be fired. If you can't maintain decorum and polite behavior, I won't toy with you, I'll squash you. If one of your comments disappears, YOU f**ked up. If all of them do, it's time for you to go. Disagree with the points made, on the merits, and you're good. Go after me personally, or other commenters, and your comment will never see daylight here. My tolerance for skirting the line is at absolute zero, and will remain there. Don't f**k up.
