Lawman

Access to the Sea of Azov and the Kirch straight bridge are really the make/break on this offensive. If they can do both and effectively cut off access to Crimea they set themselves up very well for a negotiated settlement where they walk away with gains that would otherwise need to be purchased through force of arms. Laying siege to a city like Sevastopol would take a lot of resources and time and sap it from other fronts. Worse, fighting in a city like Sevastopol would generate a lot of unsustainable casualties both in personnel and vital equipment (IFVs etc). It also never looks good to onlookers and that’s the support base. City battles being measured in months, I doubt they would make that play when the open field war of position/logistic lines is an option. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Immediately makes comments on a Russian backed narrative of how the US/NATO broke a promise and that’s why their actions bear justification. (Not their deliberate attempts to cross into NATO airspace lately). Posts earlier about the Maiden Revolution implying it was a US backed Coup. (First advanced via RT and Sputnik and still present in circles on social media) Makes comments on the other threads about illegal sale of western munitions and corruption. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-62983444.amp congrats, you’re being duped. Finds every open source example (because I doubt you’ve been on SIPR in a decade) of such examples highlighting their origins and advancement on social medie by Russian state actors and cyber brigades as “swallowing the mainstream media narrative.” Yeah dude you’re too smart to be used. You see through the giant Soros group media Cabal of information and understand how we can’t be supporting Nazi weapons manufacturers designing a Covid strain to target ethnic Russians… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You’re not a Russian operative, you’re a useful idiot. Don’t try to oversell your worth. Understanding the difference would be key in knowing how you’re being abused. Remember your self proclaimed “I’m willing to listen,” but really no you aren’t. You’re the same old exploitable population of disinformation and disenfranchised persons they’ve always targeted. In the 60s it was the counter culture movements. In the later decades the racial social movements. Now outside influences don’t really care about end goal as much as distraction. But you’re “too smart” for something like that. I mean those guys at CSIS or other such places, they are just part of the Illuminati machine. Thank god some random guy who saw some shit in Iraq is here to break it all down for us. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It’s not so much government as bureaucracies interwoven paths of authorizations when the current environment is outside the status quo. The military exists to accomplish mission as a challenge. Regular government exists to accomplish day to day normality. Somewhere in the middle of that is these shit shows we keep dealing with. At the operator level of incident everybody is ready, because verbal orders can get stuff done. Step up to a HADR and suddenly as somebody else alluded to, letter agencies and people in positions which hold titles have to be involved so they can be seen as orchestrating the events. What we don’t ever see is those same orchestrating asshats involved when things go south. This being a great example of a whole lot of people at the O5 and below level told to sit on their thumbs to keep them warm, but a state government woefully out of its depth. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

25th CAB had to fight to get what paltry contribution they ended up with into the ordeal. Hawaii after action should be interesting if they ever make the chains of communication public because heads will roll. You had an entire Army CAB at the behests of the division commander literally lay it all at the disposal to the mission and they finally asked for a couple helicopters to pull Bambi bucket missions. People in state leadership potions should be fired. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Oh please we all wait anxiously for you to throw some more Tucker talking points and RT expressed narratives about Covid and Ukraine please. Tell us why Ukraine is really all the fault of the US, and how Covid vaccines will make us all sterile or some other stupidity. We desperately need more of that here. [mention=1535]Helodude[/mention] to the point way back about China and the combined impacts of their economic model’s in sustainability combined with the demographic nightmare, this guy is a little more Doom and Gloom than everybody analyzing the situation, but it’s a very succinct collection of the problems they are facing. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

You and Bashi could just go find a room to stroke each other in and save us all a lot of time. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Hey everybody, the crew of people insisting they are interested in the “middle ground” approach are here to remind of a bunch of reasons we should stop helping the Ukrainians. But remember they want Russia to fail. We just have to wait until we find the flawless pure allied entity to do it for us, because until then we can’t allow our resources to be used for that purpose. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

In what world would anybody care about the opinion of a guy who is now trading off his years and experiences of service as currency in order to shill Russian troll farm talking points on a forum full of professional, former, and prospective military aviators. You aren’t continuously challenging the narrative or whatever high minded foolishness you think you’re doing. By making open statements like we backed a Coup you are repeating a Russian approved government backed disinformation campaign while shouting about “doing your own research” or some other nonsense. Those claims literally came out of the GRU playbook starting on RT and Sputnik. And for those that think this isn’t an active move on the chess board by the Russians (but also others) and you don’t have access to the “deep throat intel narrative” well here is open source reporting as such https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-kremlin-targets-veterans Again thank you for rowing the boat, but you may as well go throw your medals over onto the White House lawn in frustration because you are being used, and not by the people you claim we need to stop and examine. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Look we can simply step over to you and others repeated attempts to pass off Russian talking points as viable discussion and then claim “the middle ground,” to your approach. I could really care less if you or the bitter old veterans club experienced real or imagined encounters over there. If you were so afllicted personally by the impact of what you saw first hand, go get some help for it. Don’t pass off your experience as some sort of ruling none of it was worth it, plenty of us who were there or saw worse would have a different opinion that you aren’t speaking to. I was physically in Iraq in the last 5 years. And I and others are physically on the line any future fight against Russia which looks less and less likely every day since we (as a unified block of western nations) allowed and reinforced in Ukraine the means to effectively defend its self. Can you say the same? And yes listening to you shout the names of the fallen as some sort of reinforcement to back away from helping Ukraine when it completely aligns with our foreign policy and security interests is little more than cheerleading a cause on the backs of the dead. You aren’t doing it to somehow honor that memory. And all the while you peddle their (Russia’s) Reddit quality justifications to why they aren’t the aggressor making you a stooge to a Russian Disinformation campaign built to do exactly that. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

No see we can count the total number and frequency of those missions. We can quantify in the long term the cost of that particular conflict in and amongst the world wide collection of historical conflicts. Same was we can do it with ammunition expended, with lives lost wearing other uniforms/flags/civilian clothes, etc. And when we are all done debating whether the cost of a particular venture was justified at the time and you can appeal to the memory of so and so, we can also step out of your anecdotal experience to others for comparison. You can get in a car and drive down what used to be Route Irish today and be safer than you would in a lot of neighborhoods in Detroit/Cleveland/DFW/Baltimore/etc. and while you’re factoring in the human cost of seeing coffins and such, why don’t you go ask somebody who had to SSE a “Rape Room” or other such regime/tool of both the state and the follow on fighters in Iraq. Try and quantify the frustration and risk/reward math from the guys that went and solved the ISIS problem after seeing a Yazidi village literally put to the sword for however many years we watched and did nothing overhead from ISR feeds. See if people on that side of the discussion feel the same apathy toward conflict. That doesn’t minimize the specific cost to family X for the loss of person Y or prevent those people from mourning that loss. Any family touched by death feels that it’s not specific to military service. But it’s laughable to hear you bring up their stories as a warning to the risk of lives in a conflict which hasn’t happened going on 2 years now. This “We’re gonna start WWIII” argument is far older than this conflict. Some around here are old enough to remember it in the actual Cold War. And to make that argument while simultaneously implying that me and a whole lot of others we would be somehow safer from such impending doom if we stopped current efforts of non direct combat opposition to a major geopolitical foe and let them pull up to a NATO border. I’m sure this time they’ll pull out… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You saw dead men loaded on the back of your plane. Oh my god what a unique position to find yourself in. Nobody else who has done such could possibly call you out for your apologetic doublespeak of “let’s avoid conflict” and paint the current one as if we were filling coffins and draping them with US Flags. All while parroting Russian propaganda and talking points to invalidate any positions we have to support the current regime over there. You wanna classify the Maiden revolutions as some sort of US orchestrated overthrow of an elected government is a gross misrepresentation of our actions or the decade+ of that ousted governments actions that led to protests, casualties, and their parliamentary vote. And it’s nothing if not an often repeated piece of Russians disinformation widely put out to somehow justify their military backed invasion of the Donbas and Crimea. Thank you for rowing the boat from whichever position in the canoe you did, but you are far from unique in this room. And I doubt your attempt to feature some poor dead grunt as a reason to adopt strategic foreign policy positions is anything more than the same Cindy Sheehan kind of crap she was doing when her chosen political flavor wasn’t in higher office. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yes it’s impossible to examine historical actions by Russia and ponder whether or not Ukrainian citizens would be “better off” had we (the west) simply cut off any aid or attempt to neuter Russia in response to THEIR naked aggression. No we couldn’t possibly look at the last decade+ of bad decisions with regards to treating them either apologetically when they invaded countries, or seeking ways to back away from any real effective resistance to their actions in Europe/Syria/Etc. maybe make a conscious decision that just going the way we’ve been going has done nothing to head off further aggressions (backing away during Georgia, Crimea, etc). But there would have been no human cost yo simply letting them invade. And Atlantic Resolve would just go away. Some guy that was in GWOT for a hot minute on the internet told us all so. We’ve adopted the “middle ground” position you’ve been demanding yet you and others want to portray such as open military warfare. What we are doing right now is nothing of the sort. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The lesson from hindsight isn’t “well if they’d just” as an appeal to how much smarter we are, it’s to go “that was stupid, they ignored warnings x/y/z,” and then learn and apply it to present situations. Rewarding naked Russian aggression by simply sitting over here and “seeing to our own problems” or whatever BS excuse is offered would be the opposite of that. In <2 years we have gone from posturing NATO to repel a viable conventional military threat from the Suwalki gap, to watching that threat absorb 100-125k casualties, loose 1/3 of its conventional attack helicopters, somewhere between 1500-2500 front line armored vehicles (its pulling BTR-50s out of storage for Christ sake), and empty munition stocks that would be necessary for any engagement with NATO. And it cost us how many lives exactly? But sure we could just see to our own problems and nobody would have died for sure. Nothing would have been gained, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be deploying (again) this year to Poland. And by doing so despite you and others pretending it doesn’t, the Chinese are evaluating a war stock of weapons they get to watch underperform embarrassingly in Ukraine. Now take those same weapons and put yourself in executing the largest amphibious operation since D Day but really, except over 4 times the distance without any of the logistics. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Had the world military powers of the time done the right thing and refused Hitler the Sudetenland, he would have lacked much of the necessary military industrial strength necessary to fight wars. Had they then when given a second bite at the apple actually gone to war as they said they would instead of executing 6mo of, “the phony war,” they’d have engaged a German Army depleted in strength and sapped with casualties and logistical shortcomings, instead they waited and allowed them to consolidate and engage on their terms. They did that because of a populist belief they could/should avoid conflict and aggression at the cost of “those people over there” who aren’t in our foreign interests. In the end that commitment to inaction left them with no choice but to fight an eventually far more bloody/costly war. So when you bring up that one time you pulled a Hero mission up your ramp you are attempting to do the same, particularly when you make some appeal on one hand to maintaining influence and avoiding conflict, and pretend with the other that we aren’t doing exactly that successfully in places like the Ukraine. And it also serves as a bold warning to a Chinese government trying to figure out how to divert from its home front population problems. A war in your own terms is not nearly the attractive idea when it looks like you will lose badly. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

We’ve been “continuously engaged” in conflicts since the end of the 2nd World War. To pretend that conflict is or hasn’t been an ever present part of human existence the entire time it’s been around is just bold faced ignorance bought from a position of insulated relaxation of not having to see the sausage get made. Somehow those little brush fire wars didn’t devolve into the end of civilization or industrialized warfare on a global scale. Again, the person I’m responding to has repeatedly over and over suggested that it’s not our place or responsibility to do anything about an autocratic land-grab via direct open conflict in Europe. Peace in our time so to speak. Yeah we’ve seen how that plays out before. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yes, being isolationist in our foreign policy and allowing autocrats to take what they want is exactly how you prevent a World War… Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That’s happened to the Army every year it’s offered. They budget for about 1/3 the available population in the hopes of forcing guys to commit early and not wait until they are in a combat zone to file for it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I feel like there is a real lesson to be learned from the cartel drone subs out there. Expendable resupply vehicle that would force somebody to burn a lot of effort to find it or use it to build a wider intel picture. That seems like the perfect way to augment resupply of guys doing their best impression of the coast watchers where airdrop or other methods might show too much of your hand. But before somebody goes over the top with capabilities this like so many other things doesn’t need to be overbuilt. Stay with something that isn’t intended for the hard threat mission like the SDV, just something that will boat it’s way to your friendlies without shouting to the world a trail of breadcrumbs. Maybe something small enough it could be hand rolled off the back of a small amphibious ramp equipped logistics platform… dropped far enough from an island chain to swim without giving away their position or to just stash its self and wait. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

China is facing a demographic collapse which in the next 3-5 years will hollow out its “cheap labor” model. They can’t fix that, even if they wanted to it would require a massive effort that simply getting rid of the 1 child rule doesn’t meet. That will have a world wide impact as it takes full effect over the next two decades. That’s because it’s not just about their population decreasing, it is simultaneously aging so it’s an exponential curve not a linear one. Right now the people to fix the problem are all approaching 30, in a few years your big bubble of population will be too old to viably produce more than they are numbers wise let alone raise a minimum of 3 kids. China’s cost to manufacture is now 5-6 times what it was in the last 20 years. Which is why anybody smart has been pushing to decouple from China which has put its self in as a middle man on supply chain refinement not finished manufacturing. That is fine in an export based economy so long as the music keeps going. And no kidding we would drop a turd in the punch bowl to fight a war, the fact of it is while it would screw up our economy and trigger a lot of heartache and supply chain issues, it would completely destroy the system theirs is built on. They use their economy to keep people employed first and foremost. That keeps them from questioning the system while party centralized banking options are limited to government control which finances their whole economic loan system. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

China is effectively 4 countries. While the North and Central China have held power the idea that China is this massive united population is a false impression/oversimplification. North China is the China culture we associate as Americans when we think of China as an opponent, but they are about to go through a disaster to their economy and debt/savings structure that will make the Great Depression look mild by comparison. And their A2AD structure works both ways, so having this collection of countries that hate you as an immediate barrier island chain able to interdict your entire coast lines importation of sea going vessels is bad for their economic model. Especially when their economy is the largest importer of pretty much ever raw material/oil/food stuffs on the planet. We don’t even need it to go kinetic to ruin them. If you did what the world did to Russia with sanctions and market exclusion you would hobble their economy, cause upwards of 35-40% unemployment overnight and completely upend their ability to just issue state backed credit models to keep their economy churning. It would be a death sentence for their current unification and basically send them back to the 30s. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

The ground effect airfoil systems are essentially a higher speed version of hydrofoil/hovercraft type designs. They have specific niche areas where they work effectively to do rapid light transfers but they are extremely limited in any sort of dynamic open water environment. Start adding up distances and unpredictable weather patterns. There is a reason outside a very few areas you don’t see high-speed hydrofoils and even when you do, they are an augmentation to the existing heavy conventional sealift (good example the Greek isles). The real fear for the Caspian Sea monster and other ground effect systems wasn’t their ability to rapidly put a mass of troops and equipment, it was because they were effectively a warship’s worth of cruise missile platform that could rapidly move and maneuver from a relatively safe sanctuary to a firing position against a land or sea based target and then run away before presenting a viable target. Same with things like of the same era like the OSA missile boats. A swarm of them would present a real dilemma for a fleet forcing them to exercise stand off and render themselves ineffective. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

While I get the joke, go get the NGIC briefing on Ukraine and focus on the logistics and sustainment sides of it. (The non sexy stuff people ignore). We have hard number data now on just how much of a force multiplier a single forklift or K loader is because we are watching a peer military do without it. When I think of just how many pallets of stuff moved on Ramps at Bagram or Taji for a war where sustainment of ammunition wasn’t really a concern. Now imagine the same scenario without the automation and organized work gangs of 18-23 year olds who don’t want to be there and are poorly supervised. That is gonna be a major make/break point beyond simply having enough ready munitions in stock (the current shiny thing of focus). Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Anybody that questions palletized ramp offload vs other options, go compare a Sherpa/Osprey/47 onload and offload of cargo to a C-12 or Dornier. Not pax’s and luggage I mean pallets of commo and tough boxes they need to do a job at a location. A single forklift can do the work in minutes that takes at least an hour because no only do you have people shuffling up a set of stairs with a yeti cooler of crap at a time, they can’t just turn around and back out. Also compare them as jump platforms or airdrop cargo because let’s face it that’s gonna be a big part of your customer option. Unless you can get a pallet sized sliding door on the side we shouldn’t even entertain the idea of a logistics platform that can only be loaded by hand. If it can’t be loaded up with a 10-15K fork loader it’s going to cost time and sortie rate as we unpalletized stuff that was delivered by big ramp aircraft to stick it in this and take it to a location only accessible by seaplane that then has to be unloaded again. If it’s being unloaded in a zodiac, try putting one of those through the door of the previous listed planes. Let alone carry the motor of it without accidentally dropping it down the stairs. And a rear ramp gives you an option to simply low pass and push floating supply pallets to be recovered to the beach by the receiving group. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Look everybody can agree the PBY is a classic design that has beautiful lines, but even in the time it was flying it was nowhere near the best flying boat available, just the most iconic. There have been a host of designs since then more suitable to tasks/mission sets we are now taking about. Not to mention a lot of understanding about aerodynamics or structural engineering for such designs. If this is first and foremost a logistics platform, using a sea borne scout plane as the base of design is a horridly bad idea. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk