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Action-Bastard posted:People saying Ukraine shouldn't attack targets within Russias borders after what we have all witnessed so far in this war is some bizarre mental gymnastics or maligned ignorance. The generally recognized reason for why this war is continuing is that Putin cannot be seen as weak and his main tactic for avoiding that is just to constantly double down until the other side blinks and backs off. “Don’t want your people killed in a war? Haha, well I’ll just kill more of them then unless you concede” being a case in point. If Ukraine does continue to degrade Russias strategic bomber force you are going to put someone who historically has made decisions based on macho posturing and absolutism into a position where they have to make a decision with only really, really poor outcomes. Maybe Putin will just withdraw his strategic bomber assets from the theater and forgo that tool? Maybe, but gambling on an unpredictable actors behavior is a poor way to win a life or death situation. Edit: I realize I glossed over a foundational assumption on my part here: The Russian use of strategic bombers to launch ‘terror’ cruise missiles into Ukraine is largely ineffectual if not down right counterproductive. Murgos fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 15:20
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Big NYtimes article about the war just came out, did not know Russian conscripts were trying to use Wikipedia to learn their equipment. Non-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...&smid=share-url
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Dec 17, 2022 15:39
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highme posted:Please explain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch_(slang) It may have historical origins as an insult for women, but it's usage has evolved to be more expansive and less specifically insulting towards women. The only people I ever see or hear saying its exclusively about women are people who want to see its usage curbed. It's such a dynamic and commonly used word that claiming it has a single meaning, especially for claiming it has a single meaning and thus must be banned, is misleading imo. Grip it and rip it fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 17:02
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psydude posted:If we're gonna play that game, though, then we should apply the same logic to pussy, which is derived from pusillanimous, and has nothing to do with the slang term for a woman's vagina. I'm overall in favor of reclaiming words rather than the somewhat more futile attempt to bar them, but  Anyways, Ukraine needs to launch a victorious winter offensive so we can get back on topic.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:02
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I want to see some bitchin’ gains out of Ukraine
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Dec 17, 2022 17:03
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Cugel the Clever posted:I'd wager that the vast majority of the population has zero idea about the etymology of the word and absolutely associate it with vaginas, ergo "weak femininity". And yeah, if we're talking driving down gendered insults, I've been perplexed to see "bitch" being discouraged without the same for pussy. I haven't seen pussy used as an insult in a while, tbh.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:29
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I don’t give a good goddamn about the origins of words frequently used for misogynist purposes. It’s like making the argument that the N word is derived from the Latin word for black and therefore is merely descriptive. It ignores a fuckton of context. Move on from this topic now, please.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:41
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psydude posted:The meaning seems to be slowly shifting towards whiney and pusillanimous. I don't think either of those are inherently feminine traits. This is completely false, fyi. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24012
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Dec 17, 2022 17:42
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Russias war on words
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Dec 17, 2022 17:46
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Any updates on what sounded like a frangible Bakhmut front yesterday?
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Dec 17, 2022 18:01
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Lemniscate Blue posted:This is completely false, fyi. Well I learned something new today. Thanks for that.
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Dec 17, 2022 19:27
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slurm posted:I never understood how to reconcile the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing with the bright promise of nuclear war. Is it simply the efficiency and scale that make it effective when the same "tonnage" of conventional explosives are universally worthless? If you could do all the strategic bombing we did in WW2 in an hour all at once over the course of a 6 hour period it would be a hell of a lot more effective than the actual scenario where it was spread out over the course of years. If you bomb one or a dozen factories in one night then they can just send equipment/experts/manpower to get stuff running again. If you bomb the poo poo out of every factory at once then there's not really any spare experts, equipment, and manpower to spare to get stuff running quickly again. Everyone is too busy being dead or pulling their dead kids out of a pile of rubble. Nuclear weapons are also a LOT more effective/accurate than WW2 bombing. If 50 B-17s missed by a couple hundred yards then you probably have to clean up some broken glass, if a nuke misses by a thousand yards then your whole factory and everyone inside is loving gone, and it took a way less effort on an operational level. Also it's really not that strategic bombing was worthless, I think very few people would claim it had no effect at all. It's just that if the effort and resources put into strategic bombing were instead poured into direct combat forces then it probably would have had a greater effect than what we got out of strategic bombing. The enemy had to put significant resources into air defense and damage control, but the typical assessment is that it was less effective than if we'd made other things instead of heavy bombers. And even then it's kind of hard to quantify all of that completely. It's clear strategic bombing completely failed to live up to the idea that it would cripple the enemy entirely, but it's pretty hard to definitively say how much more effective another strategy would have been without being omniscient. It definitely had an effect, it just didn't live up to the hype so to speak.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:00
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my kinda ape posted:Also it's really not that strategic bombing was worthless, I think very few people would claim it had no effect at all. It's just that if the effort and resources put into strategic bombing were instead poured into direct combat forces then it probably would have had a greater effect than what we got out of strategic bombing. The enemy had to put significant resources into air defense and damage control, but the typical assessment is that it was less effective than if we'd made other things instead of heavy bombers. And even then it's kind of hard to quantify all of that completely. That’s a good take, I believe one of the biggest benefits of allied strategic bombing was diverting massive numbers of Luftwaffe and 88 cannons away from critical battles in the East, especially as the Luftwaffe got shredded in the West and this helped give the Allies air superiority for the landings. I’m trying to recall stuff from books, but I think that the actual bombing by itself was not a good use of resources but late war when they started hitting critically low supplies of fuel it was far more effective. And I’ve read summaries that agree it would have been a much better use of planes to have them designed to hit German front line defenses rather than cities.
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Dec 17, 2022 21:38
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Just think about much much building a single flaktower around berlin costs compared to anything else that could have been made
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Dec 17, 2022 22:07
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Didn't strategic bombing severely cripple Japan's petroleum production and hamper their abilities to project power towards the end of the war?
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Dec 17, 2022 22:17
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my kinda ape posted:Also it's really not that strategic bombing was worthless, I think very few people would claim it had no effect at all. It's just that if the effort and resources put into strategic bombing were instead poured into direct combat forces then it probably would have had a greater effect than what we got out of strategic bombing. The enemy had to put significant resources into air defense and damage control, but the typical assessment is that it was less effective than if we'd made other things instead of heavy bombers. And even then it's kind of hard to quantify all of that completely. It's clear strategic bombing completely failed to live up to the idea that it would cripple the enemy entirely, but it's pretty hard to definitively say how much more effective another strategy would have been without being omniscient. It definitely had an effect, it just didn't live up to the hype so to speak. What would have been the alternative way of turning those resources into a problem for the Nazis, earlier D-Day?
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Dec 17, 2022 22:29
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psydude posted:Didn't strategic bombing severely cripple Japan's petroleum production and hamper their abilities to project power towards the end of the war? Sustained submarine action against merchant shipping (and later, bombers dropping sea mines) had as much if not more effect. Pumping and refining oil doesn't do much good if you can't get it where it's needed.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:39
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psydude posted:Didn't strategic bombing severely cripple Japan's petroleum production and hamper their abilities to project power towards the end of the war? The American submarine campaign gets credit for that. They'd managed to do what the Germans attempted in WWII and almost succeeded at in WWI against Britain. The bombing didn't hurt, but it was the submarine interdiction that choked off raw materials and food to the home islands, and made moving reinforcements around a dicey proposition even with escorts.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:41
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aphid_licker posted:What would have been the alternative way of turning those resources into a problem for the Nazis, earlier D-Day? Most straightforward answer is probably more attack/support aircraft. Heavier tactical bombing vs strategic bombing. I am personally not really all that critical of strategic bombing. And I am not an expert on this by any means I have read maybe a moderate amount on the subject at best.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:46
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psydude posted:Didn't strategic bombing severely cripple Japan's petroleum production and hamper their abilities to project power towards the end of the war? No to the first, it was already crippled by submarines. Strategic bombing was very effective in general against Japan because of the nature of the country--high winds, wooden construction, terrible civil defense infrastructure, zero leadership or coordination between civilian and military leaders etc. Firebombing in Europe had mixed results, but in Japan it was uniformly, hideously destructive.
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Dec 17, 2022 23:38
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I don't think this has been posted in thread yet. Wavell Room posted a fascinating article on the current state and usage of tactics by Wagner in the battle for Bakhmut. The Battle for Bakhmut – Wagner Trench Warfare Tactics - Wavell Room.com Quoting from the r/CredibleDefense subreddit thread because they summed it up well. quote:This is an extremely fascinating article about the tactics of Wagner attacks on entrenched Ukrainian positions, translated from a Ukrainian journalist. Some main points On a sidenote for those that might be interested, the article introduced me to Military Land to add to the pile of OSINT war maps. Most are probably familiar with Live UA Map but others include Deep State Map & UA War Data.
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Dec 18, 2022 00:13
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The thing about strategic bombing is that to my understanding, its effectiveness is still hotly debated in the academic field to this day. The immediate post-war analysis tended to be highly critical, but more recent analyses have started to push back against that. In particular, Adam Tooze in Wages of Destruction, one of the seminal modern studies of the Nazi war economy, makes the argument that strategic bombing of the Ruhr caused catastrophic industrial damage that crippled much of the rest of the Nazi industrial economy, since much of it depended on inputs from the Ruhr. However, since the Allies couldn't accurately judge how much impact they were having they switched targets after a while to bombing Berlin instead, which Tooze feels was a mistake since it allowed the Ruhr to recover, and later campaigns focused on supporting Normandy. It was only later in the war that strategic bombing went back to hitting industry en masse again, and Tooze argues that it DID have an immediate and measurable impact on industrial production. So strategic industrial bombing may indeed be worthwhile - for that matter, Russia HAS in fact knee-capped the Ukrainian defense industry as far as we know with cruise missile strikes, and while the Ukrainians can still keep up some level of military industrial production the focus has been on repair and refurbishing facilities, with their ability to actually produce new tanks and artillery and such appears pretty much crippled. Western support has helped make up for that shortfall, as has Ukrainian offshoring of production to other countries, but I think it'd be hard to argue that Ukraine wouldn't have had an easier time if their MIC hadn't been bombed to hell and gone early in the war. On the other hand, strategic terror bombing to break the civilian will to resist very much doesn't seem to work very well at all, certainly not on a national level. That was one of the main arguments put forward for strategic bombing prior to the war and it extremely did not pan out, and I think contributed to the backlash against it because it turns out that bombing people out of house and home was of questionable military value and caused a great deal of pointless civilian suffering, which led to people looking for arguments that strategic bombing wasn't worth doing at all and thus poking holes in the effectiveness of industrial bombing as well where they could. In the modern age there might be a new wrinkle to this in how critical the electric grid is to both civilian and military functioning in a way that wasn't true in WW2, but I suspect that when all's said and done bombing civilians is still going to turn out to be something that ultimately contributes only in a very minor way to victory if at all.
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Dec 18, 2022 01:38
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Gabrielite posted:On a sidenote for those that might be interested, the article introduced me to Military Land to add to the pile of OSINT war maps. Most are probably familiar with Live UA Map but others include Deep State Map & UA War Data. I really like Military Land's narrative format, thanks for sharing.
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Dec 18, 2022 02:26
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Tomn posted:In particular, Adam Tooze in Wages of Destruction, one of the seminal modern studies of the Nazi war economy This is a very good book and I also recommend it! https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Destruction-Making-Breaking-Economy/dp/0143113208
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Dec 18, 2022 03:44
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The more precisely your intel can identify key strategic industry locations and the more precisely you can obliterate them the more effective strategic bombing is. WWII heavy bombers often weren't anywhere near as effective as they could have been because their bombs and their intel were often inaccurate. Pretty much anything with a long logistics trail is a prime target. Modern day you're looking at places with silicon chip fabs, massive hydraulic presses, or high precision CNC, etc. Specialized equipment with years of lead time in peacetime. Those are things vital to maintaining a high-tech wartime economy and near impossible to replace on short notice. The cross pollination of many logistics supply lines that its entirely possible that in a major war none of that will ever be able to be replaced. Ukraine is lucky that the US will likely invest heavily in rebuilding their industrial base after the war.
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Dec 18, 2022 04:04
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Hydraulic press channel: JDAM edition
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Dec 18, 2022 05:13
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Will it float show but instead it's Will it explode
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Dec 18, 2022 05:22
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ded posted:Will it float show but instead it's Will it explode now all i can think is WILL IT BLEND?!!
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Dec 18, 2022 05:32
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RFC2324 posted:now all i can think is WILL IT BLEND?!! I want this, but with Tungsten HIMARS.
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Dec 18, 2022 05:55
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Gabrielite posted:Quoting from the r/CredibleDefense subreddit thread because they summed it up well. Running a battle with constant radio corrections from the rear seems like a great way to get HIMARS’d or HARM’d.
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Dec 18, 2022 21:01
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GD_American posted:Running a battle with constant radio corrections from the rear seems like a great way to get HIMARS’d or HARM’d. Man imagine if there were anti radiation missiles sensitive enough to seek in on drone controllers or handheld radios. A nightmare of EMCON.
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Dec 18, 2022 21:58
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Tomn posted:On the other hand, strategic terror bombing to break the civilian will to resist very much doesn't seem to work very well at all, certainly not on a national level. That was one of the main arguments put forward for strategic bombing prior to the war and it extremely did not pan out, and I think contributed to the backlash against it because it turns out that bombing people out of house and home was of questionable military value and caused a great deal of pointless civilian suffering, which led to people looking for arguments that strategic bombing wasn't worth doing at all and thus poking holes in the effectiveness of industrial bombing as well where they could. In the modern age there might be a new wrinkle to this in how critical the electric grid is to both civilian and military functioning in a way that wasn't true in WW2, but I suspect that when all's said and done bombing civilians is still going to turn out to be something that ultimately contributes only in a very minor way to victory if at all. I specifically recall that on that note, one of the things that strategic bombing has the unintentional side effect of is soldifying people's will to resist. Bombs don't discriminate based on class boundaries or race, they kill errrrrybody. Which goes a long way toward making everyone feel equal. We're all equally getting bombed, after all. I would argue that a lot of the damage being done to Ukraine's MIC is meaningless when they were already transitioning toward an arms environment more in line with NATO standards. Sure, they can't manufacture a lot of the material already in use, but when the US's MIC is happy to shower near-modern equipment on you (because they're getting a fat cut of that pork), Russia is simply never going to be able to compete. Similarly, they can simply shuttle damaged equipment over the border into Romania and Poland, and use their MIC's to refurbish and repair equipment. Russia has absolutely no hope of beating the Ukranians by destroying the Ukrainian ability to create arms - you simply aren't ever going to beat a nation if another nation with the biggest economy on the planet and the biggest in history is happily willing to supply it. The only real hope Russia has, I think longterm is trying to get the Republicans into power in the US, and in that particular case, they've been way less successful than they hoped in this midterm. Even in the house, there are newer Republican delegates willing to break ranks to join Democrats on selling arms to Ukraine.
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Dec 18, 2022 22:37
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I'd also point out that a lot of the stuff that Russia has done to reduce the pain caused by sanctions isn't going to work indefinitely, and while India and China are happy to buy Russian goods and oil, they're going to use the fact that they're the only suppliers to squeeze Russia on other consumer-grade items.
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Dec 18, 2022 22:40
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how do you even pronounce Rosgvardia Ros-guh-vardia like g in graphics or Ros-juh-vardia like the j in graphics
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Dec 19, 2022 08:42
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Hard 'G'.
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Dec 19, 2022 09:26
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Alan Smithee posted:how do you even pronounce Rosgvardia The first one, but it's not a guh so much as a g'. Really, it's pronounced exactly the way it's written.
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Dec 19, 2022 09:27
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Alan Smithee posted:how do you even pronounce Rosgvardia "Ros" - like the Friends character "Gvar" - like GWAR but with a V instead of a W "Diya" - like diva, but with a Y instead of a V.
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Dec 19, 2022 12:04
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I'm learning Russian right now and it's actually starting to be easier to read the Cyrillic rather than the latin translation. But a reasonable assumption is that 90% of consonants you want to pronounce as hard as you possibly can, and then there's a dozen kinds of soft 'y'.
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Dec 19, 2022 13:02
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I think this classic from Blackadder now applies to Putin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZT-wVnFn60
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Dec 19, 2022 18:06
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Pentagon confirmed that Ukraine is getting patriots.
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Dec 21, 2022 16:00
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