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Tomn posted:I feel like this might be slightly unfair given how much of Germany's history education focuses on pummeling through the idea that "We did a VERY VERY VERY BAD THING before, NEVER AGAIN." It's unfortunate but understandable how parts of their internal politics might end up oversensitive about anything that might remotely sound like they're inching back towards the Bad Thing, even if everyone else is actually OK with the action in question.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:41
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SmokingFrog0641 posted:And if it was equally on the Americans, why are the challenger 2s from Britain not enough to cover Scholz Because the numbers are completely irrelevant
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Jan 30, 2023 19:44
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VostokProgram posted:They're not fully new, they take tanks from our cold war stockpile and upgrade to modern standards (and remove the DU armor) To be fair, it may actually be faster and easier to just build new tanks. The hull is welded together, and it's unclear how "modular" the insides of the armor plates are. It's very possible that they'll be creating new hulls and are not waiting at all for engines, torsion bars, roadwheels, optics, the main gun, or basically anything other than the hull itself.
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Jan 30, 2023 19:49
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Any recommendations for good sources on Russian vehicular losses that are harder to be dismissed by various parties as propaganda?
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Jan 30, 2023 19:56
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khwarezm posted:Any recommendations for good sources on Russian vehicular losses that are harder to be dismissed by various parties as propaganda? If it's a good source it's already been dismissed as propaganda a hundred times by Russian propaganda. Oryx is as good as it gets in that it has a reasonably high bar for evidence, they show said evidence, and it is responsibly curated for duplicates. It is not a complete listing of losses but rather provides a lowest possible range on losses. Which is also why you'll find a concerted effort to discount or smear it.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:13
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Warbadger posted:If it's a good source it's already been dismissed as propaganda a hundred times by Russian propaganda. Yeah unfortunately it was literally Oryx I mentioned and I was accused of spreading NATO propaganda and that Oryx doesn't distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian hardware and calls it all Russian.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:18
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khwarezm posted:Yeah unfortunately it was literally Oryx I mentioned and I was accused of spreading NATO propaganda and that Oryx doesn't distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian hardware and calls it all Russian. Given that Oryx is getting cited by the likes of WSJ, you’ll unlikely find anything that would be convincing for the same conversation, if you’re seeing them dismissed.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:26
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Mentioned in this article https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nato-urges-south-korea-participation-be006936069bfed0ec4b39491754b333 about Stoltenberg´s visit to Korea:quote:South Korea, a growing arms exporter with a well-equipped, U.S.-backed military, has provided humanitarian aid and other support to Ukraine while joining U.S.-led economic sanctions against Moscow. But it has not directly provided arms to Ukraine, citing a long-standing policy of not supplying weapons to countries actively engaged in conflict. Apparently this kind of "We will sell you weapons, unless you actually use them" is more common than one would think.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:27
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khwarezm posted:Yeah unfortunately it was literally Oryx I mentioned and I was accused of spreading NATO propaganda and that Oryx doesn't distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian hardware and calls it all Russian. Every Oryx entry has a photo or video source attached so people doubting them may go to the source and use the methodology they consider correct.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:32
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khwarezm posted:Yeah unfortunately it was literally Oryx I mentioned and I was accused of spreading NATO propaganda and that Oryx doesn't distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian hardware and calls it all Russian. Sounds like this person is too deep into the "if it says something I don't like it's propaganda" hole and you should just 
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Jan 30, 2023 20:48
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khwarezm posted:Yeah unfortunately it was literally Oryx I mentioned and I was accused of spreading NATO propaganda and that Oryx doesn't distinguish between Ukrainian and Russian hardware and calls it all Russian. The dataset in Oryx is so big, eg for tanks and bmps, that random misattribution is statistically irrelevant at this point already. If 10 totally shattered bmp carcasses are almost unidentifiable and put down as Russian losses it really doesn't seem to matter at this point anyway.
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Jan 30, 2023 20:57
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Charlotte Hornets posted:The dataset in Oryx is so big, eg for tanks and bmps, that random misattribution is statistically irrelevant at this point already. It's also all completely public, you can look at every single loss if you want to. Someone accusing them of systemic misattribution has either just read Russian propaganda and believed it without question or is intentionally lying. If they can literally check with their own eyes and don't bother, they're not very interested in whether the accusations are true or not, just that they confirm their world view.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:01
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TheRat posted:Personally I think Germany not wanting to look like a main military force in Europe is a pretty good, historical reason. I don't see any reason to blame Germany more than the US for the delay. Germany is a country, not a person. People who happened to run the country of Germany did some horrible poo poo ~80 years ago and a bunch of other people running other countries stepped up to stop them. Those people are all dead. Now different people who happen to run the country of Russia are doing some horrible poo poo and the people who happen to run the country of Germany now aren't doing everything they can to stop them because they're worried about looking like those other dead people from 80 years ago. Sure, you could make the argument that politics doesn't always make sense and the fact that these people - who have nothing to do with Hitler or Nazis - are just being extremely cautious to avoid being associated with them. But that's cold comfort when people are dying and the moral imperative should be to put humanity in front of politics. Ynglaur posted:To be fair, it may actually be faster and easier to just build new tanks. The hull is welded together, and it's unclear how "modular" the insides of the armor plates are. It's very possible that they'll be creating new hulls and are not waiting at all for engines, torsion bars, roadwheels, optics, the main gun, or basically anything other than the hull itself. I have zero evidence for this, but given that "Super secret squirrel DU armor" is used so freely by the government as an excuse, my skepticism leads me to think it's a red herring / codeword to avoid talking about the actual secret stuff they don't want to mention. KillHour fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 30, 2023 21:12
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https://www.bfmtv.com/international...2301300184.html Macron presser. Of the notable, he says that he doesn’t see “anything prohibited” in providing combat aircraft to Ukraine [on an unspecified timeline]. A few default caveats, like “don’t use these to bomb Russia”, but it seems like this is going to be another Scholz versus the world, whenever the conversation takes a serious turn for it.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:23
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Who cares about Scholz' opinion on aircraft? Germany needed to give the OK on all Leo 2 donations, but they don't have any say over F-16/Typhoon/Gripen/Rafale/etc.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:43
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spankmeister posted:Who cares about Scholz' opinion on aircraft? Germany needed to give the OK on all Leo 2 donations, but they don't have any say over F-16/Typhoon/Gripen/Rafale/etc. F-16 probably not, but if Europlanes use German parts then that still could be a problem. I’m not saying they do, as I don’t know that, but it that would not a particularly surprising scenario.
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Jan 30, 2023 21:59
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Quixzlizx posted:So it's ethically OK for "pacifists" to build up a profitable MIC that exports military equipment throughout Europe, but not OK to donate that same military equipment from that same MIC to a democratic country being invaded and genocided? Hey, nobody said anything about ethics, just optics. I'm just noting the political reality that Germany has a bit of a kneejerk reaction to military adventures in the popular consciousness because of their history, and any politician who wants to change that needs to confront the political costs of attempting to change minds, in a way that the US or France or what-have-you doesn't have to quite as much, and that adds in some constraints on action that, say, Biden doesn't have to worry about as much. That's of course leaving aside the fact that Scholz himself doesn't exactly seem to be the most enthusiastic world leader in favor of aid to begin with, which would make him even less willing to run political risks for the sake of pushing aid through. Again, not to say that Germany is justified in withholding aid, just noting that the political playing field is just plain different and what looks like a political slam-dunk in the US can look deeply contentious in Germany.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:04
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Tomn posted:Hey, nobody said anything about ethics, just optics. I'm just noting the political reality that Germany has a bit of a kneejerk reaction to military adventures in the popular consciousness because of their history, and any politician who wants to change that needs to confront the political costs of attempting to change minds, in a way that the US or France or what-have-you doesn't have to quite as much, and that adds in some constraints on action that, say, Biden doesn't have to worry about as much. That's of course leaving aside the fact that Scholz himself doesn't exactly seem to be the most enthusiastic world leader in favor of aid to begin with, which would make him even less willing to run political risks for the sake of pushing aid through. My post also applies to optics. They shouldn't be manufacturing tanks (for export) in the first place if this is a genuine quandary for them. Quixzlizx fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jan 30, 2023 |
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Jan 30, 2023 22:06
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Ynglaur posted:Don't let the news organizations overplay this. "some battlefield success lately" amounts to losing several thousand--and maybe several tens of thousands--of mobilized recruits to move a notional front line about a kilometer or two to occupy a small town north of a small city (Bakhmut). It's not a breakthrough, in that the Ukrainian lines are not breached, and it's not a sudden or unexpected change. two little notes here, first that russia is not using just mobiks or prisoners, they've been using a bit of everything in and around bakhmut, which is a big part of what makes it so costly for both sides. re the last sentence, yeah 1000%. there's a popular sense a lot of times that whoever has momentum will continue to have momentum and just nothing could be further from the truth. especially as these things draw out and you start having attritive factors compounding with the other side getting their poo poo increasingly together. Practically wars are both sides constantly putting out 500 critical fires and there's never any guarantee of success, indeed as this war in particular has shown. Desire to not get blown up (or conversely to be in a leadership position while losing a war) is one helluva motivator to improve and you routinely see militaries do more reform and growth in a year of war than they would over decades otherwise. imo one of the big things that Ukraine and Ukraine's backers have done an overall very good job of is anticipating the fires that they're going to have to put out in a few months time.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:44
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KillHour posted:I have zero evidence for this, but given that "Super secret squirrel DU armor" is used so freely by the government as an excuse, my skepticism leads me to think it's a red herring / codeword to avoid talking about the actual secret stuff they don't want to mention. I mean, there are other secret things on newer-model Abrams the US probably doesn't want spread around, but the most difficult of them to manage is still the armor.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:45
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Ynglaur posted:Eh...maybe? The only other super-secret stuff would be the fire control computer, the optics, communications, and maybe navigation. All of those things are modular and can be swapped out without too much trouble. The optics would probably be the trickiest, of those things. I guess what I mean is even if the current domestic armor had no depleted uranium in it at all and it was instead some super secret carbon fiber impregnated ceramic or some poo poo, they would still go around calling it DU armor.
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Jan 30, 2023 22:53
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Looks like UA has 2 years to wrap this war up or risk losing. https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1619809716464656387 I mean, coked up Jr aside there's nothing he's saying we didn't already know. I think.
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Jan 30, 2023 23:28
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cinci zoo sniper posted:I’m not dying, lol. Not dying today. 
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Jan 30, 2023 23:36
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khwarezm posted:Any recommendations for good sources on Russian vehicular losses that are harder to be dismissed by various parties as propaganda? not that this will convince anyone screeching about how Oryx is nato propaganda, but I've gone through entire categories on there to check for duplicates and found basically nothing obviously duplicated. It's genuinely as good of a list as any out there and I'd highly recommend anyone doubting it to actually go through the categories to find all the obvious duplicates if they're convinced that they're padding it out. as an aside, it was within 10% of the lostarmour (russian version of oryx basically... that largely did not count russian tank losses, at least last time i looked at it) count of ukrainian losses when I last checked
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Jan 30, 2023 23:53
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Lostarmor is only a good source as a forum where people either in Russian military or connected to it cant stop leaking info.
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Jan 30, 2023 23:59
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Quixzlizx posted:My post also applies to optics. They shouldn't be manufacturing tanks (for export) in the first place if this is a genuine quandary for them. The problem isn't ethical quandaries, the problem is "What is more likely to cause voters to sit up and take notice?" I suspect that "Let's invest in industries that will create jobs and improve the economy (by making weapons of war during a time of widespread peace when they'll probably never be used)" is a lot easier to slide under the radar than "Let's start sending tanks into an active war zone."
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Jan 30, 2023 23:59
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fatherboxx posted:Lostarmor is only a good source as a forum where people either in Russian military or connected to it cant stop leaking info. yeah lol, it was funny when they were screaming about how the oryx list was false but their count of ukrainian losses was only 5-10% more than Oryx Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 00:47
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Tomn posted:The problem isn't ethical quandaries, the problem is "What is more likely to cause voters to sit up and take notice?" I suspect that "Let's invest in industries that will create jobs and improve the economy (by making weapons of war during a time of widespread peace when they'll probably never be used)" is a lot easier to slide under the radar than "Let's start sending tanks into an active war zone." They've been used a whole loving lot in Africa and Asia. They can get hosed.
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Jan 31, 2023 00:47
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Tomn posted:The problem isn't ethical quandaries, the problem is "What is more likely to cause voters to sit up and take notice?" I suspect that "Let's invest in industries that will create jobs and improve the economy (by making weapons of war during a time of widespread peace when they'll probably never be used)" is a lot easier to slide under the radar than "Let's start sending tanks into an active war zone." Given what I thought was overwhelming support for Ukraine in the general German public, apparently, a sizable minority are against sending tanks. This actually surprised me when I dug up the numbers. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/28/europe/germany-mood-leopard-ukraine-intl/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/scholzs-caution-over-tanks-for-ukraine-echoed-on-berlin-streets quote:The clearest divide was political. A high proportion of supporters of Germany’s left-leaning Green Party – 61% – approved the delivery. The result was less clear among Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), with just 49% in favor. Overall support in Germany for generic "support" Ukraine question is still solid though with more than 2 to 1 favoring the generic support question https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/12/EP_Autumn_2022__EB042EP_presentation_en.pdf
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Jan 31, 2023 01:38
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MikeC posted:Overall support in Germany for generic "support" Ukraine question is still solid though with more than 2 to 1 favoring the generic support question So it's like thoughts and prayers in the US for mass shooting victims?
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Jan 31, 2023 03:12
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Nah in practice German support for Ukraine has absolutely been forthcoming, it's just under the tiresome specter of Scholtz being a stick in the mud about it as much as possible.
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Jan 31, 2023 03:31
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-f16s-biden-says-today-us-wont-provide/ Biden is shutting down the F-16 chat, for now at least. Not too surprising, but also unlikely the last we’ve heard of it.
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Jan 31, 2023 03:37
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Ironically by saying no (if indeed that's the question he thought he was hearing) he's guaranteed that we're going to hear about f16s for the next year as Ukraine will just take that as a signal that they need to make their case.
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Jan 31, 2023 03:42
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cinci zoo sniper posted:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-f16s-biden-says-today-us-wont-provide/ Biden is shutting down the F-16 chat, for now at least. Not too surprising, but also unlikely the last we’ve heard of it.
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Jan 31, 2023 03:47
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Also there's a big difference between "remark Biden tosses off at the press pool while sauntering off of Marine One" and "official White House statement of policy."
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Jan 31, 2023 03:55
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Cicero posted:There's a good chance Erdogan gets dumped this year, so it's possible to just wait. Do not expect them to vote out Erdogan despite insane inflation
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Jan 31, 2023 05:19
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Do not expect them to vote out Erdogan despite insane inflation Do not expect Erdogan to leave office either way
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Jan 31, 2023 05:24
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Do not expect them to vote out Erdogan despite insane inflation
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Jan 31, 2023 06:09
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Morrow posted:Do not expect Erdogan to leave office either way I don't know how likely it is, but If he loses the election and fails at a coup attempt I think rule of threes says he has to move to Florida.
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Jan 31, 2023 06:19
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cross-posting:ronya posted:https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/202301/t20230130_11016450.html I'm not sure if the rep was just caught off-guard. The first Ukraine question in the press conference was not answered this way. Officially, the message is to allude to (but not explicitly indicate) NATO enlargement re: "the long-term accumulation and continuous evolution of deep-seated security imbalance in Europe" http://un.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/hyyfy/202301/t20230114_11007359.htm Compare pre-invasion: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjb_663304/zwjg_665342/zwbd_665378/202202/t20220218_10643212.html https://twitter.com/theChinaDude/status/1620300442348707841 ahead of APEC 2023 (hosted in the US) where Xi is also likely to personally attend ronya fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 07:23
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