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Willie Tomg posted:there are specifically two groups in the world who have proven able to stand up to organized armies fielding well-supplied tank columns and without air support You're forgetting some dudes in Lebanon. But yeah, the SDF seems to be rather low on anti-air stuff and unless the coke sheikh dropped them a container ship full of manpads and bonesaws this hasn't changed and the Turks can fly about ithout a care in the world. HorrificExistence posted:Under the most conservative estimates the SDF lost 3 times as many as the TFSA in Afrin. And that was the most fortified part of Rojava. Which is a worse ratio than Israel's loss in Lebanon. Of course, no one in Turkey cares if their mercs die. But really, the Kurds have been pretty hosed since the coup in Turkey. Earlier the Turks and Russians were pretty hostile and the latter kept pushing Assad to not be an rear end about the Kurds. Afterwards they kissed and made up and now its open season.
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Dec 22, 2018 13:56
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etalian posted:The biggest skyscraper in the world is currently being constructed by Bin Laden construction company. I thought they were broke? Giant Saudi Binladin Group to declare bankruptcy to escape crisis posted:On September 2015, a construction crane at the Mosque has tragically collapsed, killing at least 107 people and injuring hundreds.
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Dec 25, 2018 21:02
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Cerebral Bore posted:The French wanted to do an Imperialism and Crooked Hillary wanted to fluff her resume with some war hawk credentials. Also Cameron wanted to play with the big boys and the US never forgives anyone who they fail to murder.
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Apr 10, 2019 10:52
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Addamere posted:The U.S. military is far from invincible, but it is one of the few militaries in the world with combat-experienced troops, commanders, logistics, etc. As far as militaries go, we have one of the better ones. More important than the actual personnel and materiel here is the institutional knowledge and ability to project power. We've got a wonderful track record of winning military conflicts but then having no idea how to govern the areas we conquer and bleeding while occupying foreign soil. So we can expect more of that, only perhaps the military campaign may be lengthened and of course the body count on all sides will be higher because Iran is far more defensible, hardened, and prepared to meet our invasion forces. It would certainly be the riskiest fight the US picked since Vietnam. Actually no, not at all. Vietnam didn't matter except for China and the USSR who ended up close to a shooting war over their win. The US can't just keep lobbing missles over the horizon, because that wouldn't stop Iran from indefinitely closing the straight. For anything further we have to guess at the tech. Are Carriers really as vulnerable to balistic missles as rumor has it? Conversely how useful are the anti missle batteries like Iron Dome? Is stealth tech as garbage as it seems? What about the Russian anti air batteries? Depending on how this shakes out I could see US carrier groups on the ocean floor and the total destruction of Saudi, because they need very big and easy to hit desalination plants to get water to the 30 million people who live in their otherwise useless desert. And a significant part of the people making the country run are resentful foreigners who will certainly not wait around to die for MBS. Even the absolute baseline scenario is the worst oil crisis since the 70ies. I wouldn't put much stock into "Iranian proxies". The Yemen connection is flimsy and mostly serves as an excuse for the Saudis' raging incompetence. Hezbollah is real, but focused on Israel and who cares about Israel at that point? I also don't really see the EU doing anything. European resistance has amounted to grumbling and foot-dragging at the worst and unless they literally nuke Teheran I don't see that changing. Outside of maybe Corbyn's Labour there just is no political force that really could channel wide spread public revulsion into actual outcomes.
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May 16, 2019 13:15
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Forums Terrorist posted:I'm gonna douse some water on the silkworm masturbation by pointing out that immediately post-collapse the russians and us did a wargame where the russians exercised their plans to sink a carrier group, the idea being massive, overwhelming swarms of missiles with a divergence of time on target of 1 minute. that is, the launches are arranged such that the missiles would be coming from all angles and they'd all hit within a minute of each other. in theory, this'd overwhelm the group's defenses and you end up with a bunch of dead boats. unfortunately for the russians, the iranians, and this thread AEGIS is real and strong and not your friend and it can fairly easily deal with missile spam. That's why I said it's a question. We just don't know how this convential war stuff will perform. Not that I really think they will go at it this time. The propaganda just feels weak and the volume is lacking. But then the new guys are pretty dumb and the old guys have been bad at this stuff since the eighties. And then there is the Saudi - Qatar split, so a lot of the think tank and journalism money pulls in different directions now.
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May 16, 2019 23:50
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I think I'd just buy anti-air missiles. Multi role fighters sound like a scam to me.
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Jul 19, 2019 09:01
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Truga posted:anti-air missiles aren't the universal fix tho. namely, they work well when your enemy is already above you. if your enemy is in range of your AA infrastructure, that same infrastructure is probably also in their range, and now you lost a bunch of infrastructure in exchange for shooting down some airplanes and drones. I mean supposedly the infrastructure is just a truck with a launcher strapped to it.
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Jul 19, 2019 13:17
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Addamere posted:absolutely great at murdering oppressed minorities and rebels I mean what is an airforce for after all?
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Jul 19, 2019 14:23
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Flavahbeast posted:Why doesnt Assad just do an end run around the US and give the SDF a good deal? Its not like the US can keep troops there if the SDF factions aren't on board What would that deal be? The SAA took horrendous losses in the civil war and I'm sure they're not in a generous mood. Especially since the one thing the Kurds would want out of a deal is to not be genocided by the Turks. It's very unclear if the SAA on its own would be enough to deter them, even at full strength. The Russians pushed for lenient terms and some kind of federation early in the conflict, but keeping the US-Turkey rift that gaped open after the coup is probably more important to them now. And one of the key points of contention between the two is the US support for the YPG, so they might be quite happy with the status quo. Conversely keeping the rift open also makes the survival of the SAA more secure. Having said all that there seems to be an implicit deal between the SDF and the SAA. When the US declared that they were leaving they immediately started to hand over territory to Damascus, before the Turks could move. Finally the West is still trying to starve Syria into submission so both Damascus and the YPG are probably economically better served by them staying a leaky neutral territory you can smuggle goods through.
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Jul 22, 2019 09:22
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To be fair they did the same with Georgia.
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Jul 22, 2019 19:02
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Darth Walrus posted:I sort of feel like putting any sort of effort into defending Assad is a bit pointless. He's shown that he can't hold his country together in the face of a climate disaster without massive foreign assistance, and even then he crippled and fractured it in the process. Dude seems like he's going to be one of the early casualties of the coming climate emergency whatever happens - either someone's finally going to get to him in the next few drought wars, or he'll just run out of habitable country to rule. At this points it seems supremely unlikely that he'll become an early casualty of the climate emergency. But what really gets me about glibly blaming the, admittedly, chinless failson for ruining his country is that our guys did it. He didn't flood his own country with weapons and money for every aspiring head-chopper who didn't feel valued in their burger flip jobs. genericnick has issued a correction as of 16:01 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 09:05
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Darth Walrus posted:OK, this is just completely insane. We can't acknowledge that a country is being starved to death by its government because it'll... make us want to kill the refugees? What kind of galaxy-brain bullshit is this? OK, different question: Did the Saudis destroy Bahrain in 2011?
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Aug 22, 2019 16:11
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Darth Walrus posted:Assad is the point-man for global capitalism in Syria, and he's unusually brutal and incompetent even by the standards of that sort of person. Yes, there are higher players influencing his behaviour, but he is also the main agent of the system in his country and we need to acknowledge that. As a comparison, a regional ICE director answers to the US government, but that doesn't excuse them of carrying out brutal atrocities on their own initiative to help the broader, racist goals of the system they serve, and it doesn't mean they're a useful asset in, say, plotting out humane immigration reform. Reminds me of 2003 when Saddam Hussein destroyed his country.
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Aug 22, 2019 19:00
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Darth Walrus posted:You really can't tell the difference between an invasion and an uprising after a five-year drought? Have you been keeping up with the news from Syria, like, at all? The CIA Syria program was the biggest since the Mujahideen and all major regional powers were supporting the insurgents but sure nothing of that would have happened if not for Assad personally.
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Aug 22, 2019 19:26
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Darth Walrus posted:I mean, 'biggest since the mujaheddin' isn't a great argument, given that that war was also a result of a ruthless, torture-happy colonial subordinate government loving up spectacularly (and in a remarkably similar way - the DRA's land seizures basically accomplished the same thing as the Assad family's privatisation). The mujaheddin were also quite good at ensuring they remained in charge of their war effort by killing or absorbing foreign-backed forces - they were vicious, raping bastards, but they were authentically Afghan and commanded authentic popular support (until they, y'know, won and the Taliban presented an enticing counteroffer of less paedophilia and banditry). Seems like the torture-happy subordinate government also had quite some legitimacy since it stuck around for years after the Russians buggered off and cut off all funding. Which is all beside the point since the USSR was a legit military power and the SAA...was not at the best of times. And even then they were trained for fighting Israel in the Golan. It's quite possible that they would have collapsed without Iranian support and they certainly wouldn't have been able to take back most of the country as swiftly as they did without Russian air strikes, but they did. Don't you think that tells us something about the popular support of the rebel militias?
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Aug 22, 2019 20:17
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Darth Walrus posted:Eh, the DRA mostly stuck around by frantically attempting to compromise with the victorious mujaheddin (they literally rewrote their entire constitution after the Russian retreat), only for it to eventually fail miserably because Najibullah had literally been the nation's chief torturer for half a decade and nobody had forgotten. He only lasted a year after the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of his Russian funding, mostly out of inertia. Four pinocchios then. And yet the SAA is still here. What does that tell us? Maybe that the rebels didn't have solid popular support?
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Aug 22, 2019 21:04
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:sounds like bullshit I wouldn't be so sure. They're in a pretty desperate place and the Turks did interfere with the Saudi plan to crush Qatar. The details do seem fishi. Israel hardly needs Saudi money to bomb poo poo with drones.
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Aug 29, 2019 21:02
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I have no idea what the Kurds are thinking, but if you were in their shoes...would you be sure that the SAA would die for you? Even if you don't fear reprisals from Assad, you still need the broken remnants of the SAA to be willing to face the Turkish army.
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Aug 30, 2019 18:47
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Darth Walrus posted:You'd expect some of 'em around the source of half your country's money, though. It's not entirely clear to me that you wouldn't do more damage to your refineries with missed flak projectiles than the drones could do on their own.
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Sep 15, 2019 16:16
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Addamere posted:Hacking combat drones should be as egregious a violation of the Geneva Conventions as mind controlling a human. Peter Watts wrote a short story about an autonomous combat drone that notices that everytime it gets direct orders all its good boy indicators flash red.
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Sep 15, 2019 17:52
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Addamere posted:What's it called? Found it: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf
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Sep 15, 2019 18:25
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CODChimera posted:what even happens when you pull the trigger on one of those things? A flag labeled Bang! pops out.
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Sep 16, 2019 09:34
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Just had to google how many brigades the smallish European countries like Austria and Belgium have and apparently it's about two each. Lol.
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Sep 29, 2019 01:26
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Hedenius posted:Saudi Arabia has literal billions of dollars of top of the line military equipment from the US. Judging from videos of Houthi soldiers at least half of them can’t even afford shoes. How the gently caress are they winning this war? Saudi infantry is very bad op.
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Sep 29, 2019 14:48
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU6bDNOIlmw thinking about that remainder
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Sep 30, 2019 20:25
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Feldegast42 posted:Lol we all joke about it but there's actually a real possibility that the Sauds have nukes now, thanks to Kushner Excited to have the Houtis carry off all the Saudi's nukes.
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Sep 30, 2019 21:13
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Darkman Fanpage posted:no. but they could easily get them thanks to their relationship with pakistan. they basically helped to fund the pakistani nuke program. they need only ask and i'm sure pakistan would be happy to sell them a couple and ship them over. I mean the idea was that they also could easily get infantry from Pakistan. Yet here we are.
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Sep 30, 2019 23:11
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Where does Qatar fit in to the Yemen conflict? They're pretty obviously not part of the Coalition I'm pretty sure the pro Saudi puppet government started out as Qatari proxies, before MBS tried to stomp them.
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Oct 2, 2019 01:27
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TrilliontonNixon posted:Only real hope at this point is that they manage to pull a Houthi and gently caress up the Turks. Problem is the Turkish military is actually competent. More competent than the Saudi "our child soldiers don't need shoes" Arabien army at least.
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Oct 7, 2019 09:32
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Feldegast42 posted:Yeah its really possible that American troops get caught in the crossfire and then the real shitshow begins Israel did that and nothing happened.
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Oct 8, 2019 00:25
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So who is now actually running Iraq? Al Sadr seems to have the largest party, but there are a lot of them. And the president is ex PUK? And the prime minister Iran aligned religious Shia ex-marxist?
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Oct 8, 2019 13:46
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https://twitter.com/amnesty/status/1181917034751369218 A lot of sides in the Warshaw ghetto
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Oct 9, 2019 18:57
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At last we know who the true victims are.
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Oct 10, 2019 10:13
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Fat Lowtax posted:
Yeah, he did the big peace process thing because a lot of Kurds were super conservative, but then there was Syria and the KPP aligned parties got super popular and blew up his majority. He's still mad about it.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:03
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gh0stpinballa posted:i'm struggling to understand how the syrian government not helping the SDF makes any sense here. turkey are just gonna be allowed to roll in then add all those newly freed jihadis to their proxy ranks? and surely the risk then is that other sleeper cells elsewhere see this as weakness on the state's part and take the opportunity to jump start the fighting again. The Syrian army at this point is held together by spit and shoestrings. The Turks would roll over them if Russia isn't willing to back them to the hilt.
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Oct 10, 2019 20:42
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Conspiratiorist posted:Turkey can barely handle the SDF while maintaining acceptable losses, they're not looking to also take on Assad and the IRGC. They absolutely won't go to Damascus. If they wanted to they could have done it years ago and all of NATO would have cheered.
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Oct 10, 2019 21:14
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I mean as far as I can see the AKP's motivation here is that they are 1) mad that their great plan of a permanent majority with conservative Kurds blew up in their face 2) stirring up nationalist favour to paper over internal dissent and policy failures 3) get rid of the refugees.
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Oct 10, 2019 21:50
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Spergin Morlock posted:necessity is the mother of invention Remember that at every level of botched reform they'd say they'd fix it once it became necessary. Now look at the euro.
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Oct 12, 2019 14:28
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Atrocious Joe posted:
You paint an unduely optimistic picture of the Kurd's options here. Comitting to be an airstrip does nothing for them. CrazyLoon posted:I'm guessing they're still holding out hope that US commanders decide to just go along with them, cuz of how often Trump eventually changed his mind after a few weeks. But yea, I don't think there is a point to delay too long on this when you have jihadi assholes executing your people on the highways and releasing ISIS bastards from the prisons as well. Can't hurt to try. It is not clear to me that the Syrian army could move to assist them without starting a shooting war with the US, nor whether they have the stomach and ability to take on Turkey. Russia's position is a bit ambiguous here. They still would like to pick Turkey out of NATO, which is worth more for them than the integrity of Syria. genericnick has issued a correction as of 19:12 on Oct 12, 2019 |
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Oct 12, 2019 19:06
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I honestly feel nothing short of the US actually nuking a country will blow up NATO.
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Oct 12, 2019 19:52
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