Lawman

You’re confusing our track record of expressing combat power at distance to our own will, not at fighting a war. Go read a history book focused on the first series of months/year of any of those “take the gloves off” wars. I’d suggest Dr Shawn Faulkners lecture on WWI 1917, or when it comes out Jon Parshall’s book on 1942. WWI was us buying a place at the peace table through sacrifice. WWII was literally us letting the other team score for the entirety of the first half with little to show for it while we got our feet under us and learned the vital lessons that led to all those 1944 victories. If you don’t think we will do a lot of that in the next one I’ve got news for you. We have a hard enough time getting commanders to actively digest the lessons learned in Ukraine without playing the “well we’ve always done it this way,” card. Does anybody honestly believe we could in an era of social media and instant access survive something akin to 1942. One battle of Savo Island or those first years of B17 raids worth of casualties. Do you think likewise we could just carpet bomb a city to attack a port or bomb to rubble a co-use airport. What do you think our societal demand for leadership heads or stopping the war would be? Would it be more distracting to a political class seeking only to remain in leadership than say actively prosecuting a war? We haven’t had a no holds barred full gloves off war because we haven’t had an existential crises for our own survival to accompany it. Even with one by 1945 Americans were largely over the war, and Japan was seeking that for a negotiated peace to drag it to 46. It’s one of the reasons the Navy wasn’t allowed to seek their preferred option of blockade and starve. Even in modern coin it’s bred into us to maximize the CDE discussion to applying force. Anybody that wants to see that contrast go watch a Ranger Raid and then compare it to a raid run by the SAS or Grom. One group is executing call outs, the other is “knocking” with a Gustav. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

We aren’t good at war, everybody else has just been gawd awfully terrible at it. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Or…. And this is just the ground force centric guy on a website full of Air Power people… Taking territory offensively in a conventional war is far more difficult and casualty producing than our two successful one-sided shit kickings in Iraq made it seem… You guys realize we barely made it to Baghdad in 03? Not due to casualties or the Iraqi Army, due to logistical strain and lines of supply vs speed of advance. In some ways the massive sand storm saved us because it allowed some downtime to perform ground maintenance. Most of our tracked vehicles were well beyond the time before overhaul on them when they got there. It’s part of the reason we took a few days doing thunder runs to the airport. If Saddam had pulled himself back to Mosul we physically wouldn’t have had the ass to get up there. Ukraine is the size of Texas, and unlike Texas it’s full of mine fields, water crossings, and a half dozen drones per square mile tied to a massive network of fires assets looking for a vulnerable ground force on the March with engineer support to get through said mine fields. Oh also Russia just pulled the bulk of its modern Naval forces in Sevastopol back into Russian home waters because they can’t defend/preserve that combat power. No big deal right? Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

We had a cyber war guy brief a theory paper on “non kinetic disruptive attrition.” Essentially, you don’t even have to kill us to hurt our combat capability. Anybody above the rank of major just have those warehouses full of hackers and bots start running up credit cards in their name, issue police reports or swat people, start emailing their wife the “it’s his baby and I want my money” or nudes from some girl in whatever city your last TDY was… that type stuff… basically everything you see when the hacker wrecks the life of somebody in a movie. Do that simultaneously to all the leadership out there, then while that’s going on do something akin to Russia when they went into Crimea. With the amount of information the government already handed them through our own stupidity plus the amount of social media we already put out on ourselves, it wouldn’t be hard to severely hobble the command channels with issues that result in delayed action. For those of us that remember the Ashley Madison hack and the shit show that ensued when peoples wives started googling names… now do it with the benefit of AI. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A large portion of the AvFID mission set was handed off to USASOAC and then kind of passed down to the SFAB to own. The problem isn’t that there is no concern at the Strategy level to build partner capability. SFAB exists entirely because of an understanding of that (and not just to teach Afghans how to do jumping jacks). The problem is there is already not enough personnel within Army Aviation to pull for taskings, or to assess and maintain in the SFAB/SOC side. We’ve got a Major who just went over to SFAB to start doing this, only reason was because he was allowed to is he is medically hard down. His flying days are done. Same is true for the senior warrant population. If you can even find them at the rate we are all scrambling for the exits or dropping papers. Compo 1 (the big regular Army) doesn’t care because from its view this is a staff as available when the active CABs are all fighting to get 65-70% manning. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You don’t have to go back that far to make your point either. Things got more and a bit excitable in Syria from about 2014 and on. Trading rounds, knocking down aircraft, and actively killing Russians has happened so recently you can YouTube it. Somehow with all of that we are all still here. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

No… If Auburn had won out against Georgia it would be the catalyst to “see the SEC is so deep with talent and that’s why they all deserve to be ranked!” And then people would forget how badly across the conference they’ve done this year and we’d be back to putting a 2 loss Bama or LSU in front of a 1 or 0 loss Penn State/USC/etc Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That’s a pretty significant misunderstanding of what 4 of those forms actually do, but ok… 3. (personnel action) is used administratively for literally any change in your records (senior wings, change of unit within guidon, school application). Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I think you guys are overthinking the real reasons Ol’Billy wants to do this… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A whole lot of rotary wing guys…. Understandably, that’s where we live. We’d probably feel the same way about being inverted. I wonder how many advanced FMS autopilots we could have bought with 100 million dollars…. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

https://www.france24.com/en/video/20230717-ukrainians-kidnapped-to-russia-france-24-meets-children-brought-back-home Forget borders. I’m having a hard time imagining something more motivating than stealing your children. Wild Animal instinct would demand that’s not ok, much less the idea of a rules based order of National Sovereignty. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

We were going off post in Not ERBIL without force pro. Contrast that with being there only a few years earlier when we were issuing grenades to people who would normally never get them and briefing the “if they (PMF) come across the Amber zone…” COA. I know some of the group probably never used route Irish before, but we used to not be able to move personnel in between the Embassy/Airport/Taji over certain ranks without using an AMR. We also couldn’t fly down what used to be Tampa due to PR concerns.. Saying we “surrendered” Iraq to Iranian influence or anything else like it is just way off base of the current political struggle for dominance in that country. It’s not 2008-2013 anymore. It may have surprised a lot of people, but Sadr is not the puppet a lot of people were expecting him to be. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/iraq-iran-shiites/ But back to the original point you guys keep ignoring. Why were the Ukrainians so willing to defend themselves against the hopeless cause of the Russian Juggernaut? Do you think they were convinced of an IOU? That’s surprising considering how little in heavy weapons and equipment they started this war with. Or maybe just maybe they had some reason to evaluate the risk to action/inaction vs outcomes and invested themselves in the one that is the best bad option. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Tell me you haven’t been to Iraq in the last 5 years without just saying it. Sadr not immediately kicking us out of that country and bulldozing our ramps in Erbil is proof the Iranians have far less influence than they wanted over there. Again, do you think given historic examples of what happens with Russification the Ukrainians aren’t fully aware and willingly fighting this war? They didn’t start this fight with HIMARS and Leo IIs. They begged for more so they could stand up and fight a country that enjoyed a safe mobilization area 80 km from their capital and was supposed to have bulldozed them in a week. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Go read some history on Soviet era Russification efforts in places like the Baltic states or Ukraine. It might be pretty informative as to why a nation is willing to risk so much for a dire outcome vs take what they know in eventuality will be a pretty dire outcome. Also read up on what a mismatch Finland was and apply that to the current situation. The reason Finland was willing to still accept violence as the outcome (and they didn’t see it going so lopsided at the time) was because they could look next door at what happened to their neighbors who submitted to the big bully’s advances. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They “had their say” at the ballot box. We are a representative democracy specifically to avoid the sways of the populist mob which does act in ignorance. Does John Q Public have a firm understanding of why you need X number of aircraft on a flight line or ships in dock to make effective combat power? How about assault weapon bans? You can pick any number of loud polarizing topics that general public ignorance wants in a given space of immediate time. A good chunk of the public has isolationist desires to walk away from NATO. Hypothetically: Should we let the mob slow down or loudly call to stop the process of mobilizing and responding to direct aggression to an Article 5 member? You know just a recheck by show of hands on policy they were happy to live with when it was convenient for the last 70 years? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yes because we have no historical examples of proxy wars with an opposing “great power” that led to not-a-nuclear-exchange… Jesus Christ we are giving them munitions to fight a war they aren’t the aggressors in. When we start flying strike sorties out of Spang to blunt Russian logistics or putting regular Army troops on the ground in Kiev maybe you have substantiated examples and a point to make. Until then vague warnings about WWIII is just grand standing to make a point in an argument. Given the anecdotal evidence it seems that is entirely politically aligned and not actually based on some form of strategic analysis of the facts. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Im not sure if I could be less impressed with the weight of fire for its guns…. M3P was a bandaid fix because the M2s were literally falling apart and the GAU wasn’t really giving the range necessary to justify its ammo consumption. Yeah it’s a .50 just like the M2, but it barely out ranges a 7.62 and it was putting some level of throw weight on an aircraft that was never intended to be armed in the first place, so something better than nothing. It’s a defensive suppression system masquerading as an offensive piece of firepower and it would have been a bigger gun if the overgrown news helicopter it was designed to support could have held it. Don’t limit yourselves. You are going into a fight with less throw weight than a WWII/Korea era aircraft, in a profile that forces you to live in a wez you lack the redundant Survivability to successfully negotiate when compared to those older aircraft. Sexy < Stand-off/survivable. I’m curious how many majors were gonna lose flying these profiles before we relearn something we knew with the A-1 Skyraider. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

That’s a narrative constructed to ignore the previous past of Russia during Stalin’s expansion of the Soviet Union and blame NATO as an aggressor. It ignores how countries in places like the Baltics became Soviet satellites (or why Russia was fighting a war in Finland before fighting the Nazis). The Russians aggressively annexed those nations under the guise of protecting the smaller nations against the European great powers. Once done it immediately moved to a policy of Russification something plainly evident as still policy in Ukraine with things like changing the spelling of a Nations capital (we all grew up recognizing it as Kiev until they gained independence) along with a host of brutal actions against the native populations. Russian authority’s in Putins group don’t view things like Latvia as some aggressive preemption by NATO to invade them, they view it as it and other nations maneuvering away from some perverse “rightful position” as vassals to the greater Russian motherland. This whole “view it from their perspective,” is fine. But let’s not pretend they base that perspective on reality. It’s like asking a Japanese citizen today about why we dropped the bomb. They’ll have a lot to talk about, but somehow things like Nanking or Saipan propaganda causing mass civilian suicide isn’t going to be part of the discussion. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Man it’s weird how the media isn’t going out of its way to point out how diverse the Republican debate stage was… Odd *sarcasm* Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

No it’s restating that the level of exploitation far exceeds what most O5/6s who probably don’t operate in an intelligence domain is tracking. And if they’ve been training against a REDFOR model that wasn’t body armor/cyber domain/night vision capable/etc than they’ve been ignoring directives for training that have been in place since ~2016. Talk to the guys in NGIC or MSIC for actual details on that world. Even in the mundane sections of the mundane areas like logistics and sustainment we are getting to see some really good and likewise really bad ways to conduct a ground war. I would equate this to watching the Israelis take some of our top end stuff into fights with the Arabs using the other sides stuff and getting to watch and record results. How much do you think that kind of information paid off later when we had to go fight the same equipment? We’ve got injects in our division warfighter that are being driven off stuff that surprised us over there, so we get to rehearse instead of see it live for the first time. There is as of a day ago what would potentially be a strategic weapons delivery platform in a war against NATO that is a pile of ash, along with several of its friends. If Russia is intent on having this war with Ukraine (because they aren’t doing it for any other reason), even if they were to eventually win it, we would be far better suited to bleed them white than let them roll over the Ukrainians. They (Ukraine) can still very much lose this war. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I’ve got a lot of bad news for you about those low dollar items and the frequency of their loss during that hard fought years of GWOT. Not even just maliciously stealing our stuff. It was disturbingly common to listen to the team lead in the back and one of his other guys discussing why a KSK walked up the ramp sans NVGs. Dude didn’t sell them, he had just taken them off while he sat in an OP (pulling security in the dark IE napping) because they were uncomfortable and never bothered to pick them back up. And now that kit is in some goat herder that makes 40 dollars a month’s back yard. I’m not saying the risk isn’t there, but the one sided nature of this conflict in what we are getting and validating is pretty legit. And a nice change of pace given us showing off our playbook for all to see. There is stuff we regarded as world ending equipment that we have learned more about in the last 6 months than the proceeding decade simply because it also got left in a field with some farmers after the lines collapsed or it broke down. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The direct foreign exploitation of intel was worth 10 billion alone. We are getting a brigade/division worth of casualty prevention in any future conflict based solely off knowing their playbook, dissecting equipment, and seeing the shortcomings of a lot of our own. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Only this time there’s a 1/5 chance it DOESN’T involve them rolling into an Article 5 country. Quick let’s predict the Russian justification for invading Moldova. I’m gonna guess Secret NATO nuclear weapons stocks. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I found this guys stuff as well. This was an interesting one from a stand point of developing tactics literally from nothing in an information deficit on knowing what capes the other side really had. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-a-russian-disinformation-campaign-in-ukraine-in-2014/2017/12/25/f55b0408-e71d-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html An example of the Russian backed BS perspective you’ve been repeating on this very site. Despite all the cited examples of exactly what was being done in the wake of that situation, you’ll probably still act like the Russians were giving us some insight into “what was really going on” while alluding that WAPO writing what I linked is part of some greater propaganda and protection effort by the liberal backed media or some other nonsense. Again, you’re clueless, and what’s worse your willful of it to achieve your political goal. Nobody is fighting you with Ukrainian disinformation, they are telling you you’re an adult sitting in the kiddie pool of “facts” trying to tell us all its unusually warm and that’s some sort of thing caused by our government while the rest of us try to warn you it’s actually just full of piss. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk