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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/bill-clinton-nato-expansion-ukraine/629499/ Interesting article by Bill Clinton about his time working with Putin. While I don't 100% agree with him I respect the weight of his office. Dude had some tough decisions to make and it seems like he attempted them in good faith.

My kids school has a sign in the parking lot that reads something to the effect of "Staff is armed and will use lethal force to defend students." I'm not saying that stuff isn't at my kids' school. But maybe not.

https://www.axios.com/boris-johnson-ukraine-zelensky-2283122f-3d5a-487a-91df-95eb62d81f5b.html I'm going to guess that some very top-shelf and seldom used UK capes were dusted off in order to arrange this meeting. Ballzy, Boris, ballzy indeed.

Happy for Max.

Woke stupidity should hurt (or at least be expensive): https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/04/09/the-cost-of-woke-appeals-court-rules-oberlin-must-pay-gibsons-bakery-32-million-n461248

Good article, thanks for posting.

You know who else offers $35k bonuses…the guard.

This is why the Florida bill is necessary…and I don’t see how this stuff is a winning message for the left this fall. Until we get rid of public (ie government schools that indoctrinate kids) funded by forcing people to give up their wealth to fund such schools, then banning this kind of indoctrination of very young children is the next best thing. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-jersey-second-graders-learn-gender-identity-alarming-parents

https://sofrep.com/news/4-airmen-awarded-the-distinguished-flying-cross-for-rescue-and-evacuation-153-us-citizens-and-afghans-from-kabul/

Ok man. You do you. It's clear you got some weird narrative in your head that can't be shaken. Here's what Axios says. https://www.axios.com/putin-war-crimes-charges-punishment-0a6275ca-daa5-4fa2-9296-2b9e1348661e.html I guess statements from a former ICC prosecutor are also Russian propaganda? You're laughable man.

Which is what I said in my original post. There is a big difference though between being tried internally and being tried internationally, and none of our folks have been tried internationally. The US position on this has been that we maintain good order and discipline within our ranks so we dont have a requirement for an international body to hold us accountable. Russia will make the same appeal. All of this is kind of pointless to discuss anyway because I dont think the ICC actually has jurisdiction in the Ukraine conflict because neither party are full signatories. Best-22 is one of those people that believes everyone who disagrees with him must be the victim of some disinformation campaign and not realize that maybe they just have more facts than they do. Fine. Whatever. But its just the reality of the circumstances. All I'm trying to explain to him is that in conflict, there is a game that states play. And Russia knows the game and they know how to play it and they are playing it quite well because they are doing a pretty decent job of insulating themselves from any widespread prosecution against the state. Its like Covert Operations and the concept of plausible deniability. It doesnt matter if the whole world thinks its bullshit. If its plausible, its good enough to evade most international consequences. All states do is look for something that is just strong enough that other states with significant ties to them can internally justify to their populace why they are not making retribution.

You are missing the point. But lets assume for a minute you didn't join the military assuming it was going to be rainbow farts from gilded unicorn assholes. In EVERY single instance of outrage you expressed above, I can pinpoint a near EXACT equivalent that happened in the US GWOT. Mishandling prisoners of war. Abu Ghraib, 2003. Striking hospitals marked as shelters? Doctors Without Borders, Kunduz, 2015. Raining artillery down on residential neighborhoods? al-Aghawat al Jadidah, Mosul, 2017. Raping and pillaging Ukranian villages? Mahmudiyah Iraq, 2006. I could name half a dozen for each of these actually but those were the best specific examples that most mirror the circumstances you point to above and as I said in my original post, its going to be really hard to pin some of these because Russia doesn't have access to advanced aerial sensors or PGMs that we do (and they are not required to). Futhermore, Zelansky muddied those waters further by giving every civilian in Ukraine a rifle and telling them to go out and kill Russians. I don't fault him for that, this is a war of survival for them, but recognize that makes it really hard to throw charges at Russia, charges, not accusations, and make them stick. More important to the overall point though, you lack the nuance of how LOAC is applied, where it hails from and the international audience it caters to. You brought up the Hague. Did you know that the United States of America (the country you said you still believed in) is actively sanctioning the ICC and has placed entry bans on ICC investigators tasked to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ever ask yourself why that is? Ever ask yourself how the news stories about the incidents I outlined above were portrayed in the rest of the world? Ever open up a Pakistani newspaper article on drone strikes? This is just silly. You guys just want to chock everything up to Putin apologetics and in reality i'm just telling you how shit is going to play out as I see it which is that Putin has sufficient fog and noise in Ukraine to effectively conceal a case against the state for war crimes based on Zelansky's decision to arm a civilian populace which massively distorted any cases against distinction and the lack of advanced targeting technologies, mainly sensors and PGMs, which allows Russia greater leniency and presuming proportionality. Just War Theory makes it pretty clear that combatants are innocent of Jus-ad-Bellum and therefore no matter how idiotic or stupid Putin's reason for entering Ukraine is, nothing justifies the extrajudicial killings or Russian POWs that are presumed innocent unless tried and found guilty of war crimes. If someone understands something better than you don't just dismiss it as propaganda, ask them to explain it. I can write pages on here about LOAC, Just War Theory and the Geneva conventions. If you were a shooter at some point, and you did some shit that bothered you, you probably talked to a Chaplain and a JAG a few times about this stuff, and they probably gave you some things to read, and you probably read a shit ton about it because you wanted to sleep at night. But hey man, what do I know. One last thing, Russia is not winning the information space right now. Ukraine is. And if you don't believe Ukraine is targeting American and Western European citizens in that information campaign, you are completely naive. And they are not doing it because they want to "be our friends" or "help us lead the free world." They are doing it because they are acting in their own country's interests, as ALL states do. There are "reasons" we are hearing very little about how the snake isle defenders suddenly ended up in Russian custody, what is happening in the inner ranks of the foreign legion, and how Russian prisoners are being treated in Ukraine. If we go balls to the wall break all hell lose against Russia so be it. But lets make sure we are doing it because its in our interests and not because its in Ukraine's interests.

PROPORTIONALITY is key here. While civilian casualties are an unfortunate reality of war, it is still not ok to commit murder. Have a look at the multitude of evidence of Russians executing civilians with their hands tied behind their backs & tell me they’re not guilty of war crimes. How about deliberately targeting hospitals and clearly marked shelters? How about raining down artillery on residential areas with no military targets in sight? Not exactly proportional now is it? Have the Ukrainians been operating 100% in accordance with LOAC? Probably not. But it’s their neighborhoods, their cities, their farms that have been invaded here. They can’t possibly be guilty on the same scale as the Russians because they aren’t ransacking Russian neighborhoods, raping their women and killing their children. Putin and his enablers are absolutely responsible for all of this reprehensible activity & frankly a hanging at The Hague is far to easy on them. Once again I’ll remind you that there is no gray area here. Only one side is guilty of a violent invasion & subsequent atrocities. There is NOTHING that justifies that. Not an expanding NATO, not an actor turned president who Putin doesn’t like, not Ukraine defending its own claims to Donbas. NOTHING JUSTIFIES RUSSIA’S ACTIONS. NOTHING. Fuck Putin and all of the Russians (and anyone else) supporting him by covering their eyes and ears to everything but the absolute garbage the Russian state is spreading. One final note here: It’s sickening and offensive to those of us who have served and still believe in our country that we have American military members making a moral equivalency between our own targeting processes which, while less than perfect, are NOTHING like what the Russians have done in Ukraine. It literally turns my stomach.

It's wild seeing this play out with a new and evolving type of threat that we are still attempting to deal with. I remember that time downrange when we would deploy SF troops around the aircraft for Counter UAS ops during EROs. Of course, one time they ended up shooting at our own UAS.

To those who toil in anonymity especially the NCOs. What you do matters.

Would not have predicted this prior to Feb 24. "Ukraine has won the Battle of Kyiv". Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 3 | Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org) Got to give a shout out to any California and Florida (and any others) Guardsman who participated in the SPP and other events through the years and up until the invasion. CHEERS!

2023 Race coming to Vegas Strip Here we go.

When I was there seemed like AMC was a lot more proactive about pushing people through than ACC or AFSOC who were just sending the minimum to get their IRC boxes checked. AMC on the other hand was sending any and everyone they could. A bit of a narrow data set but that was my one experience.

Was kind of eluding to this earlier. We all want to see war crimes as this black and white thing but it's not and the fact is, states will attempt to blur the borders and boundaries of it as best as possible to serve their interests, including the US. The only definitive assurance is that your state will suffer less scrutiny if it comes out the victor. Its sort of why I don't put much stock into all of these cries about Russian war crimes because I can clearly see that what they're doing isn't really that far removed from our own state targeting processes, but they are doing it without the advantages of advanced sensory ISR or PGMs. I'm not saying there were war crimes committed by Russia, there certainly were; but most of the stuff I've seen right now is going to fall on an individual level and not on a state level. Now what is worth observing is if Russia internally disciplines those cases which is what we normally expect of our own military in this case (and why we won't sign in or participate in the ICC). Again, not sure how many people on here are shooters or involved in targeting, but it is and always had been completely legal to kill civilians in war. Witnessed multiple times where we assessed a military target had the requisite necessity and proportionality to justify striking without regards to nearby civilian collateral.

Russian misinformation seeks to: 1. Sow division between existing divides (political, racial, etc) 2. Introduce enough "noise" that you give up trying to find the objective ground truth, or start to feel that "both sides are the same anyways" (through false equivalency, historical revisionism, multiple conflicting reports or versions of the same event, and so on) It rarely is overtly pro Russian, and often aligns with some of our previously held beliefs in some way. This makes it hard to spot and easy to spread.. Some users on this site exclusively post things that align with one or both of the above. It doesn't mean they are part of the Russian propaganda machine, but they have likely fallen victim to it. I agree with everything you posted, calling out BS like this helps clear up some of the noise.

So essentially your point is "America is bad too and who's to say what the truth is because it's all so murky" , "Ukraine does propaganda too!" Your whole post is a real life example of method 2: It's like I predicted the future. I'm sure you're an expert on the LOAC and just war theory, but that doesn't mean we can chalk up all of Russias crimes to a simple targeting error because they don't have enough PGMs... do you think we're all stupid? The more details that come out the harder time you're going to have selling the "russias just acting in its own self interest like all rational states" line. I'm looking forward to seeing you flail around with that.

No I'm just saying you're following the misinformation playbook exactly..With nearly every post you make on this forum regarding Russia (including this one). Specifically: you continue to double down on flimsy logic with this ridiculous theme pretending that since "America is bad too" then we can't fault Russia. Your insistence at this stage of the war that Putin is some brilliant geopolitical Chessmaster is laughable. Very rarely do I see accurate predictions regarding this war from the "both sides are the same" camp.