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Milo and POTUS posted:Didn't someone declare war once while a bunch of their ships were in the enemy's port? Mussolini entered WW2 without issuing a warning to his merchant marine, yeah.
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Mar 15, 2022 18:12
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Swapping your legacy soviet S-300 for a shiny new Patriot battery is a really good deal and worth a little bit of a capabiltiy gap.
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Mar 16, 2022 20:00
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e: wrong thread
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Mar 17, 2022 11:31
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Grand Fromage posted:I'm pretty impressed with the level of "no, gently caress you" that people in Belarus are showing. I'd kill to find out the degree to which Lukashenko is actually quite happy with how this is panning out for him. or if the Belarus security services are actually behind it all
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Mar 20, 2022 18:02
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pmchem posted:have you considered that some wars might have no winners? Contrary to what you've just seen, war is neither glamorous nor fun. There are no winners, only losers. There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: the American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy.
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Mar 23, 2022 13:14
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Stultus Maximus posted:e: Speaking of historical precedent, is there any other example beyond Russia/USSR of an empire not just expanding to extract resources from colonial areas but to use them as "fight them there not here" buffers? Afghanistan (British Empire having a go inbetween Russia's attempts to absorb it as a client state). Technically the attempt wasn't a total failure.
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Mar 24, 2022 00:27
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Alan Smithee posted:wild. Would the US have interest in plane wreckage? Do they even have the latest working SU aircraft in their posession? I'm sure there's all kinds of interesting things you can learn about the state of Russia's metallurgy from doing tests on wreckage, yeah.
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Mar 26, 2022 12:23
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Little bit of a lesson about why you don't try to impress supplies off the people you are occupying.
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Apr 3, 2022 14:51
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Kesper North posted:I swear to god I'm not a tankie, but what if... just what if... the entire threat of Russia was exaggerated just a teeny tiny bit for political and economic reasons to the benefit of Raytheon et al., and we didn't have to be this poo poo-scared of them the whole time because they were always this hollow You should go over to Ukraine and tell them that Russia is a paper tiger and their war isn't such a big deal. e: like Russia is six weeks into launching the largest conventional war seen in Europe in decades, 'hey they probably aren't a real threat to anyone' is not the take.
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Apr 8, 2022 18:20
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The key point is that whenever NATO says to Russia 'okay if you have concerns about forces in Eastern Europe then lets talk about reciprocal restrictions on deployments of land-based missile forces and conduct of snap exercises' then Russia suddenly goes very quiet.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:40
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BIG HEADLINE posted:"Oh right, we forgot we're not China. Our mistake!" The tankie argument gets most obviously flawed when they were flipping effortlessly at the start of the year from 'NATO enlargement is provocative to Russia' to 'Russia moving troops within its own borders is perfectly normal and anyone in the West expressing concern that they're obviously deploying for an offensive war is cynically beating war drums'.
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Apr 15, 2022 18:47
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EasilyConfused posted:I'm pretty sure CSTO is a defensive alliance. There's also a pretty steep drop-off after Belarus in terms of military power. I don't think Tajikistan could do much to move the needle even if they were inclined. It's more a legal cover for Russia to station forces in its client states.
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Apr 16, 2022 01:21
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Defenestrategy posted:I don't get it, do people not check their equipment? If I had to ruck march with a ton of gear I'd check every little bit of it just so I'd have an excuse to not have to march with it or get a replacement if its something I absolutely needed. Imagine a society which from top to bottom runs on the rule of 'take what you can, give nothing back'. As long as you are getting paid, you are totally disinvested in whether whatever you are doing is a success or not. So is everyone around you. You probably sold your thing. If you didn't, the guy who's job is to keep track of the things is probably the one who sold it. Either way, why do you care?
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Apr 17, 2022 21:16
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I really appreciate how Russia's panel TV shows all look like some incredibly weird 80's/90's game show. Yeah it's like they're playing a solo version of Family Fortune but every topic is 'give me your far right manifesto on'
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Apr 20, 2022 22:47
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:It isn't an entirely unfounded concern, because you've essentially described Soviet strategic thinking, which they even encoded into a computer programme called РЯН (R'YAN ) in the 1980s. There's an awful lot of Soviet/Russian leadership thinking wrapped up in the need to believe that Barbarossa was a shock invasion out of nowhere and not the result of Stalin ignoring a decade of Hitler saying 'The Soviet Union is my ultimate enemy and must be destroyed' and the months long German buildup on the Polish border that was fully detected, the spy in Japan saying 'the Germans are definitely going to invade you' etc etc.
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Apr 21, 2022 10:37
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McNally posted:lol oh my god that's exactly what happened holy poo poo Said it before, you spend years deliberately shaping a society where nobody gives a poo poo about anything and this is what you end up with.
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Apr 25, 2022 22:27
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The Times report is saying the Ukrainians are confirming that it happened a month ago, so entirely possible those three stories are all referencing the same event.
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Apr 30, 2022 18:05
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psydude posted:Genuinely curious what more people think we should or could be doing. We're getting ready to send rocket artillery; it looks like the former Warsaw Pact countries are on the verge of sending jets; Poland just sent 200 T-72s; the EU is going to sanction Russian oil; Finland and Sweden are about to join NATO; and the US is about to approve another $33bn aid package and is looking at how to expropriate the seized funds of Russian oligarchs. Short of NATO actively getting involved in a shooting war with Russia, what else would you have anyone do? Training programs to get Ukrainian AF worked up on NATO equipment. The stuff we are doing hopefully gets Ukraine to the end of the year. But nobody in the West is making any more T64s or T72s or 152mm shells, once that stuff is gone then it's gone. Even if the war ends this year the Ukranian AF is going to need to start transitioning off that stuff next year to continue to deter Russia. And if the war does go long term then we should be thinking about starting now on the stuff that takes 12 months to learn how to operate and deploy.
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May 1, 2022 10:48
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It's quite funny in parts because they have a gunnery guy there making a show of dispensing spec knowledge wisdom who has somehow managed to both be wrong in every single prediction they've made and also completely misinterpret every event as it is happening and they haven't noticed the pattern.
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May 8, 2022 10:08
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aphid_licker posted:That dude threw me for a bit, I was like well he probably knows what he's talking about and got kinda worried I don't think he's a Walter Mitty, but I do think his file got marked with 'no further promotion' 5-10 years ago and he still hasn't accepted it.
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May 8, 2022 11:11
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A Festivus Miracle posted:World in Conflict was amazing and sadly they just recently killed the official multiplayer online servers forever. It was great but it was a pretty natural evolution from Ground Control 1 and 2 - nothing that groundbreaking about it. Now Ground Control is the game I'd like another sequel to.
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May 9, 2022 07:07
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A.o.D. posted:It was a retreating army, not a surrendering army. We stopped because we were worried about the optics, not because it was an illegal target. That convoy consisted of many stolen vehicles laden with goods looted from Kuwait. It was a good move that permamently wrecked the Republican Guard and Saddam's realistic aspirations to have another go in a few years. e: the slightly dodgy one was the Battle of Rumaila that took place two days after the ceasefire when 24th Infantry decided to delete an armoured division. But on the other hand, gently caress the Republican Guard. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 18:36 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 18:34
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CommieGIR posted:Eh, it was a bunch of retreating, defeated military people. It was a pretty disturbing attack. Its one thing to destroy a column advancing on you, its another to basically kettle and slaughter retreating and non-combative military members. Not really, it was a coherent enemy formation attempting to escape envelopment. The first bombs are dropped on Highway 80 on the same day that the Battle of 73 Easting is taking place. The Iraqi army is halfway through complete disintegration, but halfway is not all of the way and it is still trying to fight.
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May 12, 2022 20:30
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CommieGIR posted:There were better ways, they had already cutoff the head and tail of the column. They were heading towards Basra, not to redeploy inside Kuwait. The main fight was happening in Iraq, not Kuwait.
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May 12, 2022 20:54
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mlmp08 is a grumpy guts but he's right and the extrapolating wildly from single video sources is not bright work.
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May 13, 2022 18:23
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CommieGIR posted:Still waiting for you to explain who is wildly firing SAMs You are really committing to your misreading of their post.
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May 13, 2022 18:36
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Every time a Russian attack collapses Zelensky does one pushup
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May 14, 2022 22:53
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It's a useful metric of 'are the Russians reconsituting out-of-country or are holding back a reserve to commit elsewhere?' though.
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May 15, 2022 19:04
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zoux posted:Now the Scandanavians have invented a new pre-NATO NATO. Incredible work Vova Ironically Europe has become a Russian doll of NATOs
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May 16, 2022 20:06
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Putin's Russia has generally struck a balance where as long as you don't cross generally understood red lines on challenging the regime and stick your arguments within the right ideological framing then you can have a reasonable debate over policy.
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May 17, 2022 22:07
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CainFortea posted:If you have to couch your arguments in ideaologically acceptable terms at the whim of a dictator you can not really have a reasonable debate. Nah it's not a free and fair debate obviously but it does mean you can have debates along the lines of "look we all agree that the Ukrainian regime is the result of a US coup and unfriendly and bad. Now, what should we do about it?" You can say that policy is ineffective while paying lip service to the motivations behind it being obviously correct. EasilyConfused posted:They moved those red lines a lot at the start of the war though. Oh yeah, whole bunch of Russian security think tanks suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of acceptable dissent when the line moved.
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May 17, 2022 22:51
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One day the Chinese ultranationalists will catch on to just how racist Russia is towards them.
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May 23, 2022 14:23
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:I still can't comprehend the whole "the USA is responsible for all these dead Ukrainians" takes, myself. Some people desperately need to believe that nobody in the world has agency other than the CIA. This both allows them to explain everything that happens as nefarious US interference, and also self-justify a whole range of awful opinions (eg. about what happens to Muslims in Xinjiang) on the basis of 'nobody actually makes decisions anyway'.
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May 24, 2022 19:05
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bulletsponge13 posted:Which strikes me as funny, because Soviet officers often spoke of the ad hoc doctrine and low level initiative in the US military. They viewed it as an asset at the tactical level, and a nightmare at the strategic. Some spoke of how much they despised the lack of doctrinal implementation at below divisional level; that Regimental and Battalion leaders were given leeway to ignore the the written doctrine to accomplish missions. The problem with the Soviet/Russian model is that your strategic plan and all of the assumptions behind it have to be right, or the result is disaster. Under the US model your commanding General can be wrong about literally everything (see: Westmoreland just before Tet) and lower level formations can still recover a bad situation.
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May 25, 2022 20:52
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A.o.D. posted:Didn't Tet cause the Viet Cong to cease to exist as an effective fighting force for years? Yeah nobody came out of Tet particularly happy. The VC were broken by the end of it, the NVA also suffered heavily. The problem for Westmoreland and the US administration is that having said 'there is no way the NVA can launch an offensive in the south of the country' it didn't matter that they technically won the battle, the US public was never again going to believe that they were winning.
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May 25, 2022 21:01
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Dude has the option at any point of shouting to the Russians a
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May 29, 2022 23:11
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The plausible roads to European strategic autonomy from the US are very few, but all of them involve Germany actually taking its defence spending commitments seriously.
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Jun 1, 2022 18:29
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It's hard to overestimate the damage the Iraq war and WMD intelligence that turned out to be nonsense did for transatlantic unity on defence and security issues. Ostpolitik went from being an alternative foreign policy approach among partners to being a twenty year moral high ground with Iraq as a stick to beat the anglo-americans. e: oh yeah and the lesson the US did/should have learnt from both World Wars is that spendid isolation just means that when the war comes to you there will be no friends or allies left. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jun 2, 2022 |
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Jun 2, 2022 18:29
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Clare Daly is... well look, you could retitle every section of her wikipedia page after Early Life as 'Controversies' and nobody would notice anything off with the article.
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Jun 11, 2022 20:25
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psydude posted:Does she just represent a particularly stupid district, or what? It's the EU parliament, it works on constituency PR and low turnout. Every country has fringe career politicians who find a niche constituency and stick to it, there's nothing special going on in Ireland there. Also everyone in Europe has far more recent experience of aggressors trying to stamp out their culture than Ireland has. Ireland today has small neutral country privilege like Switzerland and Austria. e: by which I mean they have no military threats and no reason for 'what about the war in x' to ever be a dominant part of the political conversation. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jun 11, 2022 |
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Jun 11, 2022 22:34
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