Ukraine: The straw that broke the camel's blyat

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Internet VFW > Ukraine: The straw that broke the camel's blyat

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Budzilla posted:

I would ask the GBS/DnD China thread thread but I think this would be a more appropriate place to ask. How does this war effect the Chinese military? A lot of their equipment is based on Soviet and Russian technology, would they be looking at this conflict and be thinking "holy poo poo we have to make our own equipment to be on parity with NATO standard". Or will they blame training/logisitcs etc..?

The TFR Cold War thread periodically features Chinachat with some posters who do high-level china-watching for the DoD. Short answer is that China's "holy poo poo" moment was Gulf War 1, and they're probably looking at the current war as validation of a lot of the decisions they've made since then, but it's very difficult to tell what long-term lessons they might take away - partly because of a lack of transparency but also because the dust hasn't settled yet. The biggest question there right now is What Does This Mean For Taiwan, and I don't think that's answerable until we have a more complete picture of what this means for Ukraine and Russia.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2022 17:18

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:59

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

A.o.D. posted:

It sure looked like a U-turn to me.

Video is deceiving. What it looks like to me is, the camera is at 10 or 11 o'clock relative to the missile's travel; that is, the missile is approaching the camera at an angle, rather than traveling perpendicular across its field of view. The missile then suffers a failure that causes it to deflect down and to the left from its original travel, eventually impacting the ground somewhere between the point of origin and the camera. The failure could be a guidance failure but I assume a mechanical failure of one of the fins or something is also a possibility.

The missile only appears to return to the point of origin because we can't see depth in a video very well. In reality, it moves away from and returns to the line between the camera and launcher, but doesn't ever turn around and start getting closer to the launcher itself.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2022 15:51

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Deteriorata posted:

The point of sanctions is to limit Russia's ability to arm itself and prosecute the war against Ukraine. Anything else is a side effect.

I disagree. The purpose of the threat of sanctions was to deter the invasion. That wasn't achieved so the sanctions must be applied to maintain credibility of the threat in the future (in the minds of the foreign policy apparatus of the relevant countries - I don't want to start an argument about the effectiveness of sanctions/western credibility.) Limiting Russia's ability to wage war is the side effect, and the sanctions would be applied regardless of their effectiveness for that purpose.

carrionman posted:

This may be the thread for it, if not please point me in the right direction.

What is the main goal of sanctions? So far I've seen them referred to as:

- useful as a threat, because targeting the wallets of businesses and their owners makes them put pressure on leaders to not start anything (in relation to China)

- used to reduce money into a hostile economy, limiting the scope of what they can get up to. (North Korea, Iran)

- making life hard for members of the targeted country in the hopes they'll blame their leadership and undergo a regime change (Cuba)

- they're a feel good move that's easy to sell, ruins the lives of the average person in the country, while leaving the power structures and political elite nearly untouched as they have the money and contacts to bypass them (North Korea, Russia)

And I realise I know nothing more about them than they're basically a boycott at a national level.
Are there any good beginners guides people here would reccomend about their goals and how effective they are?

A better question might be: Why select sanctions as a threat/response? That's relatively easy to answer: sanctions are less costly than a military response, which makes them more palatable to a domestic political audience and more credible as a threat, but they're still perceived as punishing enough to have a chance to deter, or to impact the enemy's ability to wage war over time.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2022 19:38

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Uncle Enzo posted:

Heh you see, an honest assessment of the skills of the trainees so deficiencies can be addressed is actually bad news. It's ok to have piss poor soldiers, just lie about their level of training! No one will know the difference!

document�s fake dude

it�s written on the form the us army uses for administrative counseling of junior enlisted soldiers

# ¿ Sep 5, 2022 19:53

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Hyrax Attack! posted:

Kinda wonder if Russia post war is gonna have an economy based only around resource extraction, with so much in demand tech talent leaving at the start of the war and probably many fence sitters making their way out post-mobilization. They already had awful demographics, gonna be even worse with so much youth not wanting to return.

this is all they had before the war and they�ll be drat lucky to keep much of it. a big chunk of their o&g operations were being handled by western firms who are going to be incredibly shy about making any more big capital investments, while their domestic labor pool is getting tossed into the meat grinder.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2022 03:40

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Grip it and rip it posted:

3/5s of the military appear to come from households that earn less than 66k a year. Poverty may have been overstating it but it's certainly not made up of individuals from affluent families. That's not even to say that these individuals were earning that much - only that they resided in neighborhoods where that was the median income threshold.

60% of the military coming from the poorer half of households is like the mildest conceivable over representation. I�m frankly shocked it�s not more, but I expect the median military household does rather better than the median household overall so that�s maybe skewing things.

Also just lol at this forum going �yeah but 66k doesn�t go as far as you think!!!� in a thread about Ukraine of all things. It�s news_article_about_yuppie_budgeting.txt in a global context

# ¿ Oct 10, 2022 14:22

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Godholio posted:

To impose our will on other nations.

And that logic isn't entirely false.

While a fair few Okinawans might be willing to rise up and through the americans out, I somehow don�t think a crate of Russian arms is going to be the inducement that makes them actually do it

# ¿ Oct 16, 2022 13:51

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Diarrhea Elemental posted:

So it'd take the Ukrainians what, like a month to get THAADs shooting down airframes? Just going off their track record.

thaad is hit-to-kill, with no warhead, and its normal target set is non-maneuvering ballistic missiles at the edge of space, so it�d be amazing if it could even theoretically kill low-flying tactical aircraft

# ¿ Feb 16, 2023 17:48

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

shame on an IGA posted:

so you make the fixed-wing target match that intercept geometry by launching at a low angle from the bottom of a mineshaft?

then just trick Ivan into flying down the mineshaft at several machs and you�re in business

# ¿ Feb 17, 2023 11:35

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:

I feel like in the end China won't directly engage like this other than bluster. I expect the people at the top are acutely aware that their economy is very vulnerable to sanctions regimes. They import tremendous amounts of raw materials to fuel their export economy, along with massive amounts of food. i think that they have a lot of the same social contact that Russia had (We'll let you have a comfortable middle class, just don't ask what the government is doing) along the lines of we'll uplift you out of poverty and provide jobs in the export sector as long as you obey. If something happens and those jobs collapse, it's going to be bad times. Their buddy Putin can't in any shape or form make up for the loss of Western business.

I have very strong doubts that the Chinese leadership are intimidated much by sanctions. More likely they�re staying out because there�s nothing to be gained backing the obvious loser.

e: always refresh

hypnophant fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Feb 28, 2023

# ¿ Feb 28, 2023 05:24

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Kei Technical posted:

I keep seeing professionalism brought up in this context and have no idea what it means. The Russian military pilots are very much at work and doing things that are expected of them - how is this unprofessional behavior?

Professionalism in this context means the same as it means in all contexts; that you act in accordance with the norms of the profession in which you are engaged, i.e. aviation. It�s not so much a strict set of rules as the idea that best practices arise out of the conditions of the activity itself.

Most importantly professionalism sometimes requires that you tell your bosses to gently caress off if they tell you to do something unsafe or unethical. Good examples are an engineer refusing to stamp a change he believes is unsafe, or lawyer advising that a certain action the client wants to take is illegal; professionals don�t always do the right thing, but the standards of professionalism require they do.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2023 13:50

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Nuclear Tourist posted:

I'm waiting for the Russians to strap AT mines to dogs that they've trained to run in under tanks like they did in WW2.

lolling at the idea that the russians can train dogs right now

# ¿ Mar 17, 2023 01:25

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

being able to ship them flat pack seems like a very worthwhile advantage

# ¿ Mar 21, 2023 17:30

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

bulletsponge13 posted:

I got a Turtle Thump- a gentle bash to the top of my helmet when I hesitated slightly. It's so drat hard to remember to get down, because your inner child is throwing a pine Coe that finally explodes.

i hucked that thing as hard as i could, then got my head down so fast i didn�t even see how far it went

# ¿ Apr 4, 2023 03:08

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

A.o.D. posted:

It was based on percentage of throws that made it into the target area. When I went through the course to get expert 100% of your throws had to land in the target area on the first try.

I (army) did what mlmp described - throw from foxhole, throw into mortar pit, throw from prone, cook off two seconds and throw into bunker, etc. Importantly, we used training dummy grenade bodies instead of live grenades for that range. It�s a separate day from live grenades and unlike the live grenades, you don�t actually have to pass it to pass basic.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2023 14:02

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

i never dream about being in the army, but i still have the occasional dream where i�m driving the ambulance or working on a call. Not that surprising maybe since my enlistment was about as blessed as can be, but i vividly remember a few ems calls from over a decade ago

# ¿ Apr 6, 2023 04:44

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Dandywalken posted:

Know whats really weird? Hes firing a gold/yellow band. Isnt that a training round?

given that there�s an explosion at the other end, no probably not. especially since the trainer at4 fires a 9mm round.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2023 01:08

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Lord Awkward posted:

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I know little to nothing about any of this: will electronics burn out under an EMP even if they're turned off at the time?

yes. an emp works by inducing current in a circuit, which happens regardless of whether the circuit is currently energized, and does damage because the voltage and/or amperage of the induced current is much higher than what the circuit was designed for

standard.deviant posted:

i think you�ll find that this would subject the ground to blast wave effects within 30 minutes or so

30 minutes or less or the next one�s free

# ¿ Apr 26, 2023 16:28

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

rwm is already running the headline �putin survives assassination attempt� so it�s def a false flag

# ¿ May 3, 2023 16:02

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/09/russia-ukraine-chernobyl-disaster/675083/

you would think the russians, of all people, would have known that occupying chernobyl would pose a radiological challenge even if the invasion went completely as planned, but apparently they felt no need to prepare in any way

quote:

Last year�s Russian occupation provided the Chornobyl State Enterprise personnel with new shared points of reference. On March 9, at 11:22 a.m., the plant went into full-blackout mode because of the shelling of the electric grid in the Kyiv region. If electricity were not quickly restored, the staff would not be able to monitor the developments inside the ruins of reactor No. 4, where a chain reaction leading to a nuclear explosion remains a possibility; nor could they cool the disposed nuclear fuel contained in Chornobyl�s storage facility.

A full blackout at a nuclear plant is a scenario that haunts scientists� dreams. Ironically, the fatal 1986 accident in Chornobyl happened during a botched safety test aimed at dealing with exactly this: an emergency shutdown of the reactor in case of full blackout�the sort caused, for example, by a military attack. In 2022, Chornobyl relied on diesel generators for backup. These generators had enough fuel to keep the systems running for 14 hours. What would happen after that was anyone�s guess.

Heyko abruptly summoned the Russian commanders to his office. The Russian invasion of the Kyiv region was about to produce another planetary-scale disaster, he told them. To avoid it, he needed just one thing from the Russians: diesel fuel. Lots of it.

The commanders agreed. The task of managing diesel-fuel supply fell to one of the plant�s engineers, Valeriy Semenov, the de facto head of security at the occupied facility. According to Heyko�s calculations, Chornobyl required about 30 tons of fuel every day. For three nights, convoys of military fuel trucks carrying the required amount of diesel arrived at the station. Soon, the disgruntled Russian commanders showed up in Heyko�s office to tell him that his decommissioned nuclear plant had consumed half the fuel intended for their front line near Kyiv.

quote:

When Popov arrived at the plant, it teemed with Soviet-era military vehicles, just as it had after the disaster in 1986. And just as then, young soldiers openly ignored all norms of radiation safety. Men rested on the contaminated ground and consumed their rations in the open air, where eating significantly increased the risk of radiation poisoning. But there was a crucial difference. In 1986, Popov recalled, whatever the Soviet army�s blunders, it was performing a task to stop a meltdown that would have made much of Eurasia uninhabitable. What was the Russian army doing in Chornobyl now?

The 2022 occupation, three weeks old at this point, had the macabre air of a cyberpunk fantasy. The Russian commanders had largely ignored Valentyn Heyko�s security briefing. They hadn�t even shared its content with their immediate subordinates�so Serhiy Dedyukhin, the physical-security engineer at the plant, understood when a high-ranking Russian officer asked him: �I see there�s a nuclear-waste-storage area at the plant. Is it true we�re not supposed to dig in there?�

quote:

By the end of March, the plant personnel became convinced that the Russians were preparing for battle at the disaster site. The soldiers built barricades out of sandbags they filled with radioactive sand they�d dug from right around the plant. Firing points were erected on top of the plant�s buildings. Several old, dysfunctional military vehicles appeared on the plant�s territory, apparently to be used as dummies at military checkpoints. The staff immediately recognized these vehicles: They were the ones used to eliminate the fallout of the 1986 disaster, and since then had been installed in an open-air museum in town. The vehicles were so highly contaminated that museum visitors were not allowed within a dozen meters of them. Now they were sitting in the middle of the nuclear plant, with uninformed soldiers manning checkpoints right next to them.

Soon rumors reached the staff that the Russians were digging trenches in the Red Forest, the most contaminated part of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. This woodland, adjacent to the plant, had suffered such heavy radioactive fallout in the summer of 1986 that its pine trees turned red. The poisoned trees were cut down and buried under the very ground where the Russians now started to dig.

How was this even possible? Valentyn Heyko had an inkling after speaking with Andrey Frolenkov, one of the Russian commanders. The takeover of the Chornobyl plant had gone so smoothly, Frolenkov boasted, because the facility had an identical twin in Russia. The Russian military had apparently used this doppelg�nger, the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, to plan and rehearse the Chornobyl takeover�including the siting of defensive trenches around the plant.

The Kursk nuclear station is indeed similar to Chornobyl in every respect but one: Its territory is not radioactively contaminated.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2023 18:37

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 10:59

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

GD_American posted:

Back before he was a gropey Senator and was just a probably-gropey comedy writer, Al Franken specifically had a bit about a unit full of Republican chickenhawks being sent on a mission. It obviously did not go ell.

almost all of the allegations against franken were from his time as a comedian, many of them specifically from USO tours

# ¿ Apr 11, 2024 16:29

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Internet VFW > Ukraine: The straw that broke the camel's blyat