Al-Saqr posted:

AMERICA STANDS FOR DEMOCRACY, YOU GOTTA LICK UKRAINES rear end PEOPLE JUST THIS ONCE THIS TIME FOR REAL AMERICA FIGHTS FOR THE GOOD GUYS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1593500020774420481?s=20&t=3zZewrZT9QgPeLL_Es_bgg

Mandoric posted:

Beyond power projection, there was also the questions of supply, regular forces, and the general geopolitical situation; my read of the consensus in Japanese is that while the irredentists have gotten louder about it being insufficient resolve in the face of strategic bombing, the mainstream position remains the well-supported assumption that, while the atomic bombings were harrowing, they were a sideshow to the loss of coal and steel from Manchuria, the loss through commerce raiding of food from Taiwan and Manchuria as well as damage to home infrastructure through conventional bombing, the loss of their primary trained forces in the field, and the loss of any potential peace terms that involved Soviet support as a buffer state, as well as the potential ease of landings in the unprepared north--a Sakhalin-to-Hokkaido sealift could be accomplished in visual range on a clear day, and the only forces in the area to respond to the 100,000-strong Soviet 16th Army were two divisions currently dug in on the Pacific coast, around 200km away.
In particular, the official reaction to Potsdam (before Hiroshima and Nagasaki but well after Tokyo was bombed flat) was delayed pending consultation with the ambassador to Moscow, and while there was still a plurality of the war council in favor of continuing the war as of their meeting the morning of August 9th after Hiroshima and the Soviet declaration of war/before Nagasaki and the loss of the Kwantung Army, Hirohito's chief advisor recorded that he was commanded to "quickly control the [domestic, in the context of a debated proposal for martial law] situation" because of the Soviet entry; further, in his speech to the armed forces on the 17th, Hirohito explicitly stated "Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue the war under the present internal and external conditions would be only to increase needlessly the ravages of war finally to the point of endangering the very foundation of the Empire's existence."

Lostconfused posted:

All war is crime

mlmp08 posted:

Probably not, but that's where the ICRC acknowledges that civilians may end up targeted or in a targeted area without it being a war crime.

Examples:
-A naval headquarters has 500 military members planning wartime operations and commanding forces. They also have 10 civilian janitors and a couple civilian barbers, and civilians who help plan the war, and civilians who help run security of the base. Blowing that up will kill civilians, but the target was the military HQs and it was for a military purpose. ICRC won't call that a war crime.

-A city built a civic bridge with civilian taxpayer money and it's open to public transit. That bridge is now being used to flow in tanks to attack. The defender blows up the bridge to stop the incoming tanks. They blew up a civil piece of infrastructure, but it was for a military purpose and was not a war crime.

-A power plant powers a military radar site directly. The attacking military wants to shut down the radar site, but can't target it effectively, so they blow up the civil power transformers that supply power, and there's risk that it could hit a civilian if they happen to be servicing that area at the time. targets civil infrastructure, but for specific military advantage, likely not a war crime.

Other examples:
Blowing up a dam will flood 1,000 enemy troops and a city of 1 million civilians. War Crime.

Blowing up a power plant will cut power to a company of truck drivers doing routine training, but will also cut power to 1 million civilians and hospitals. Likely war crime.

4,000 civilians are fleeing across a bridge trying to escape conflict, and the estimate is that they'll all be gone in 12 hours. The commander decides to strike immediately anyway to prevent the chance that maybe the enemy might use the bridge, but has no specific intel that this must be done to stop from losing the war. War crime.

Dreylad posted:

Maybe the US is planning on looting the Ukrainian treasury on the way out.

quote:

Historically, the use of the Bomb may seem like the most important discrete event of the war. From the contemporary Japanese perspective, however, it might not have been so easy to distinguish the Bomb from other events. It is, after all, difficult to distinguish a single drop of rain in the midst of a hurricane.

In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed. An estimated 1.7 million people were made homeless, 300,000 were killed, and 750,000 were wounded. Sixty-six of these raids were carried out with conventional bombs, two with atomic bombs. The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke. In the midst of this cascade of destruction, it would not be surprising if this or that individual attack failed to make much of an impression — even if it was carried out with a remarkable new type of weapon.

...

In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed?

If Japan’s leaders were going to surrender because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you would expect to find that they cared about the bombing of cities in general, that the city attacks put pressure on them to surrender. But this doesn’t appear to be so. Two days after the bombing of Tokyo, retired Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro expressed a sentiment that was apparently widely held among Japanese high-ranking officials at the time. Shidehara opined that “the people would gradually get used to being bombed daily. In time their unity and resolve would grow stronger.” In a letter to a friend he said it was important for citizens to endure the suffering because “even if hundreds of thousands of noncombatants are killed, injured, or starved, even if millions of buildings are destroyed or burned,” additional time was needed for diplomacy. It is worth remembering that Shidehara was a moderate.

dieselfruit posted:

I was under the impression that Japan generally thought it was better to surrender to the Americans than the soon-to-invade Soviets, and that blaming the a-bombs was more of a post-hoc measure of saving face for a bunch of proud generals - who, by that point, were viewing firebombed cities as the cost of business.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/

Cpt_Obvious posted:

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1593291966917144576

V. Illych L. posted:

the impression that i get is that this electricity attack strategy is basically an economic war strategy. industry requires electricity and modern business requires you to have reliable internet access (and so electricity), and ukraine has not transitioned into anything like a command economy. this means that hitting their export industries is effectively hitting their ability to raise foreign currency, which is again hitting their ability to keep from defaulting on their debts and avoiding a full-blown financial crisis.

i have said before and i will say again that i think that the most probable outcome in which russia outright wins this war is one in which there is a massive ukrainian financial crisis and they cannot in practice pay their troops or import basic civilian goods. this can probably be prevented by the western financial institutions intervening, but then they're also exposing themselves to ever-increasing risk (which these institutions hate and are designed to avoid) at a time where we also see growing unease in the domestic western financial systems. at the end of the day, the institution of last resort would be the US government directly infusing hard currency to keep the wheels turning, but that kind of money is politically much more difficult to spend than another $50b in arms.

commercial power consumption is the first to go, as we are seeing in germany. there's also a terror aspect to this bombing, but i really do think that the economic angle is more important.

Frosted Flake posted:

Germany and Japan were unable to produce essential equipment such as aircraft engines, production supply chains of most military goods were severely disrupted for lack of components and subassemblies, bombing rail lines, roundhouses and yards eventually caused chaos in timetables and eventually the rail nets collapsed, ships were not able to put to sea for lack of fuel, tens of thousands of personnel and huge quantities of resources were diverted to firefighting, air defence and other home front duties.

Bombing did not cause Germany or Japan to surrender, but it was a huge part of victory.

Ukraine inherited vast military industries from the USSR and they are either destroyed or in Russian hands. NATO equipment originates in places that are untouchable, true, but NATO has to make good whatever Ukrainian industry is incapable of producing. By hammering infrastructure and industry, Ukraine becomes entirely reliant on NATO, and NATO needs to provide more aid in total, which may cut into military aid.

Ukrainian rolling stock, substations, locomotives, all of these now need to be replaced. That’s significant, and unlike idle military goods, these aren’t all sitting around in warehouses.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1593291966917144576

Marzzle posted:

you laugh but if america was ever invaded by land you'd be glad the KKK was trained in artillery warfare

Cpt_Obvious posted:

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1593291966917144576

Cpt_Obvious posted:

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1593291966917144576

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

Furtwängler was a guy who made music for the Nazis? What is this.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

Furtwängler was a guy who made music for the Nazis? What is this.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

the one reason i dont fully discount the atomic bombings from the surrender decision is that the best units of the kwantung army had been sent to the mainland prior to the soviet invasion to face the upcoming american one. losing manchuria and the soviets as a diplomatic out was still a gigantic blow but also one the japanese seem to have judged as some degree of an acceptable risk when they stripped down the kwantung

dieselfruit posted:

I was under the impression that Japan generally thought it was better to surrender to the Americans than the soon-to-invade Soviets

BULBASAUR posted:

"the countries we beat wanted to surrender to us and not the other guys because we were actually the good guys!" - most history lessons from around the world

Jazerus posted:

the debate is always (including earlier in the conversation in this thread) whether the terror aspect of it does anything to induce civilians to push for surrender, and therefore whether bombing (or shelling, etc.) aimed at civilian infrastructure and population does anything other than add lines on your war crimes rap sheet

Danann posted:

Ardennes posted:

I can think of plenty of examples where strategic bombing did help weaken a countries’ ability to resist ground offensive, it has always lead to at least some successful occupations.

It honestly depends if it comes with a ground offensive at some point. In the case of Japan, the Soviet Union invading was the final straw but once it occurred there was almost no resistance. In Korea, it didn’t break the will of the population but certainly weakened the ability of North Korea to withstand offensives.

In Vietnam, strategic bombing also didn’t break the will of the population but there was clearly how far in the US was willing to go and eventually it’s will to continue got dragged down.

In Iraq 1/2 it also showed effectiveness.

The question becomes like I said, how far the Russians are willing to go with it and then what their follow up will be.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

https://twitter.com/DenisRogatyuk/status/1593291966917144576

Slavyangrad posted:

@Zastavyii writes about military equipment left on the right bank of the Dnepr river:

So, how much equipment was left on the right bank of the Dnieper River by the Russian Army?

As late as the end of August, Russian Armed Forces units were conducting successful offensives near Nikolaev, covering it from the northeast. But they were soon interrupted by an AFU counteroffensive that began on 29 August in the entire Nikolayev-Krivoy Rog area.

Despite enormous losses by the AFU in manpower and equipment, the Russian command decided on November 9 to abandon the right bank of the Dnieper River and withdraw the Kherson grouping to positions that we had prepared in advance, but which in our opinion were less advantageous.

Ukrainian propaganda began to rave about the "lend-lease from the Russians", which was, in their opinion, mass abandonment of military equipment by the Russians. According to Ukrainian "experts", as a result of the retreat of the Russian Armed Forces from the Kherson region, Soviet T-60 tanks (!) could have fallen into the hands of the AFU and the newest Russian T-90M "Proryv" tanks have already arrived.

At the same time, "military experts" of the enemy claimed on November 11 that "it is too early to speak about the amount of Russian trophy equipment that has reached [them]. Three days later, on November 14, Natalia Gumenyuk, head of the Joint Coordination Press Center of the South Defense and Protection Forces, nevertheless summarized the results of the "lend-lease from the Russians," summarizing that very little equipment had been collected.

Humenyuk attributed this circumstance to the fact that the AFU "methodically destroyed occupier trains," so "there were not as many military trophies as there had been during the counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region. In the end, after very vague and indefinite formulations, the final figure for the trophies and their composition was never made public.

Based on data from open sources, we calculated the trophies of the AFU from November 10 to 13. The main problem was not the search for photo/video evidence of trophy equipment transferred to the AFU, but its location in a particular area. Initially, we excluded the equipment lost by the RF Armed Forces during this period in Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Kharkiv directions.

As a result, data on 47 units of equipment captured by the enemy in the reviewed period was found, and only 22 units of military equipment could be uniquely identified as abandoned in the Nikolaevo-Krivoy Rog (Kherson) sector. The remaining 25 units contained in the aggregators of losses of the RF Armed Forces in the current conflict had no geographical reference.

The 22 units of captured Russian military equipment left behind during the retreat from the right bank of the Dnieper River include:

🔹 tanks - 7
🔹 ARMOURED PERSONNEL CARRIERS - 7
🔹 artillery - 5
🔹 vehicles - 1
🔹 helicopters - 2

Most of the captured tanks (4/7) were T-62 of different modifications (T-62M, T-62MV, T-62 of the 1967 model). The MBMs include BRDM-2, BMP-1/2, BMD-2, Typhoon-K, and R-149MA1. Artillery assets lost include: Grad MLRS, Gvozdika SAU, 122mm D-30 and 152mm Msta-B howitzers, and 152mm Hyacinth-B towed gun.

A Ural-4320 vehicle was included in the seized vehicles. Colleagues have already written about the lost Mi-9 helicopter in great detail. The Mi-24 was also taken over by the AFU in a state of disrepair. Thus, we can say that the information about the seizure of a huge number of modern Russian armaments during the retreat from Kherson is false.

The only modern piece of military equipment seized by the enemy during the retreat of Russian troops to the left bank of the Dnieper River is the MRAP Typhoon-K. Other military equipment left behind by the Russian Armed Forces was produced in the 60s-80s of the last century and cannot be called modern in any way. Moreover, judging by the published images, the overwhelming majority of the equipment is either in a damaged or malfunctioning state.

(continued in the next post)

Slavyangrad posted:

(continued from previous post)

Summarizing the above, it can be argued that the statement of the Russian Defense Ministry about the total evacuation of even faulty military equipment, if not completely true, is very close to it in the scale of the entire Kherson grouping ("over 30 thousand Russian servicemen, about 5 thousand units of weapons and military equipment").

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LostArmour posted:

Lancet statistics:

Some Facts.

- Videos of the strikes began to be actively published since October 13, in the last month 10 times more videos were published than in the whole SWO (65 vs. 6)
- Howitzers were the best target, with only 5 of the 17 surviving (some may have sustained serious damage). 12 M777 howitzers were the Lancet target.
- The armor of the tanks withstands the Lancet blow, not a single unit is clearly destroyed.
- Lancet efficiency is kept at 60% (even slightly higher, if you consider that in several videos 1 Lancet destroyed 2 vehicles)
https://airtable.com/shr9hMsI13vhK3WlY

https://lostarmour.info/svo

quote:

According to SPIEGEL information, planning errors in the ordering of spare parts are increasingly jeopardizing the operational readiness of German self-propelled howitzers in Ukraine. Following the delivery of a total of 14 self-propelled howitzers 2000, the German Ministry of Defense had failed to order extensive spare parts packages in time to regularly maintain the weapon systems and thus keep them operational.

In the meantime, a large part of the artillery systems supplied by Germany is in need of repair due to intensive deployment on the front lines in eastern Ukraine. According to Bundeswehr sources, the Ukrainians are currently firing around 300 shells a day, which is causing considerable wear and tear on the weapon systems. 
.
Six German howitzers were recently brought to Lithuania for technical overhaul. However, since the necessary spare parts for the howitzers were not available either from the industry or from the Bundeswehr, the technicians had to cannibalize one of the howitzers and leave it in Lithuania for the time being.

The lack of spare parts does not come as a surprise. In late summer, the Bundeswehr's procurement office had already unsuccessfully urged the ministry to order extensive spare parts packages for the howitzers and the Mars II multiple rocket launchers, since the special material had long delivery times. So far, however, no corresponding instruction has come from the so-called Special Staff Ukraine.

The lack of spare parts is now also paralyzing the so-called repair hub that Germany plans to set up in Slovakia by mid-December to repair weapons delivered there.

Morbus posted:

The problem is: then what? Occupations by an under-manned ground force, against an uncooperative population, have almost always (always?) ended in failure--irrespective of any support by strategic bombing.

Danann posted:

In other news:
German wunderwaffen still a bit broke and unreliable.

Danann posted:

Majorian posted:

Look, they can't have been wrong about the missile supplies dwindling, there has to be another explanation for it. North Korea and Iran must be supplying them, or I dunno maybe ISIS is back, shut up!