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What is the most powerful flying bug? This poll is closed. |
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| 🦋 |
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15 | 3.71% |
| 🦇 |
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115 | 28.47% |
| 🪰 |
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12 | 2.97% |
| 🐦 |
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67 | 16.58% |
| dragonfly |
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94 | 23.27% |
| 🦟 |
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14 | 3.47% |
| 🐝 |
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87 | 21.53% |
| Total: | 404 votes | ||
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Upholding the sacred spirit of the Emperor, descendant of the goddess Amaterasu, except its for Charles Windsor. screaming tennoheika banzai and charging a machine gun nest for these guys
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Jul 17, 2023 00:57
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:21 |
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The Americans have broken through. We're out of ammunition. You can hear explosions at the mouth of the cave. You won't bring shame to the nation by becoming a captive. You grasp the pins on two grenades. As you pull them out and clutch them to your stomach, your last thoughts are that Meghan looked loving disgusting in that ghastly dress. Awful woman, a real narcissi-
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Jul 17, 2023 01:07
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"meaning is passing from the world" because most people are not english & have no interest in ancient english myths and because they haven't read a 70 year old series about oxbridge sophomores disguised as knights and their dorm room bullshit sessions
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Jul 17, 2023 18:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:Bad news for tankies .....America literally invaded, conquered, and occupied two different countries in the 21st century...they were pretty high-profile incidents at the time....
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Jul 23, 2023 04:09
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so this is apparently the "main thrust" underway https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1684290119895752705
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Jul 26, 2023 22:06
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The Ukrainian conflict has seen the use of purpose-built munitions on an industrial scale and sustained rocket and artillery barrages by Russia. This increase in firepower has translated to an increased injury burden. Statistics shared by Ukrainian physicians demonstrate that more than 70% of all Ukrainian combat casualties are due to artillery and rocket barrages from Russian forces, which has resulted in significant polytrauma to multiple organ systems. By comparison, in most recent non-NPA conflicts, soldiers who sustained injuries to the thoracic and abdominal cavities could survive if concomitant injuries to extremities and the rest of the body were limited.23 In Ukraine, Russia’s weapons have led to more devastating injuries to a larger number of soldiers in any given attack. In a retrospective analysis of 100 patients treated by Ukrainian military surgeons operating within 5 km of the front line, the average Injury Severity Scores exceeded 36 in victims of such barrage artillery and rocket attacks. Common mechanisms of injury include multiple high-velocity penetrating injuries, barotrauma, and blunt injuries from being thrown during the explosion, and traumatic brain injuries. A single IED or even a chain of IEDs in the GWOT affected fewer patients, in general, and caused less severe injury (to others besides the person who directly triggered the IEDs) than an NPA rocket or artillery barrage, which produce dozens of explosions across a much larger area, leading to simultaneous, multicasualty situations. It is estimated that 5% to 10% of Ukrainian soldiers deployed to the theater of operations will be either wounded or killed in action. During the GWOT, there had been approximately 7,000 deaths and 32,000 wounded in a total of 2 to 3 million deployed US personnel, for a casualty incidence of 1.3% to 2%.Thus, mortality rates in this and future NPA conflicts may be 5 times greater than in the GWOT (although Ukrainian mortality rates are raw estimates based on publicly available information at this time and not adjusted for injury severity, mechanism, etc.). Overall, medical evacuation planning, prolonged field care, and other interventions planned by treating medical personnel will need to anticipate massive polytrauma, significantly more patients at a time, and the resources required for a single patient will be significantly greater. woops
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Jul 26, 2023 22:56
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unironic question, why don't they just dig like five ditches instead of just one
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Jul 27, 2023 23:33
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So if this whole war has been a referendum on NATO/US backed militaries, and the West's ability to back them up in a shooting war, how is Taiwan feeling right now? I can't imagine their military feels more confident against China than Ukraine felt against Russia
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Aug 5, 2023 04:41
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Germany embracing degrowth
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Aug 6, 2023 04:19
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If you're building a military, wouldn't it be better to focus on improving the training/education that all officers at all ranks from all backgrounds receive, instead of making an extremely small group of elite-trained super-officers. Because aren't the officers going to like, die, and need to be replaced
tatankatonk has issued a correction as of 19:18 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 19:16
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Poland and the baltics should be allowed to have a non-Nato-triggering war with Russia just to get it all out of their systems
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Aug 15, 2023 21:46
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Miles Blundell posted:Do they just make dumbass guided stuff only these days? Is it looked down upon to just make a shitload of simple brass shells with HE in them or whatever the standard is? MIC supply chains are hyperfragmented, so there's only a few dedicated facilities for making any particular armament, or a piece of an armament. Also, these are underproducing bc of lack of capital, because none of the militaries involved want to shell out for a big bulk order at once, so the factories make smaller amounts so they're not left holding the bag
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Aug 15, 2023 23:47
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Why is there no entrepreneurial-minded NATO state looking around at the shortages and realizing it can make big bucks as the biggest state producer of artillery shells in the alliance? e: I guess this would be Slovakia claiming they want to go from 19,000 to 100,000
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Aug 15, 2023 23:50
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Frosted Flake posted:There’s another book about how the Second World War was won by the Empire, not the UK, particularly after all of the defeats in the first years of the war. They needed Australia, India, Canada, South Africa and the King’s African Rifles to fight the war. Falaise, Florence, Bologna, the Rhine, Seikpyu, Letse, Imphal and Kohima were Commonwealth victories, not British. What's to understand? They had been building and profiting from empire and race for literally 500 years, they can't pivot on a dime and suddenly accept those people as equals also, what's the book?
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Aug 16, 2023 02:55
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fizzy posted:Good news for the credibility of those who claim that the Guardian article titled "Bribes and hiding at home: the Ukrainian men trying to avoid conscription" says that many would gladly fight if called upon - The article does support their assertion. Less than one week of training? Jesus christ that's probably less than like last-ditch civilian militias outside of Moscow in 1941
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Aug 16, 2023 02:57
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Why is the lack of immediate success for the Ukrainian offensive seen as a massive failure. In kherson they spent months slowly grinding down the Russian front line and rear supply lines until the Russians had to pull out. They are doing the same thing here as well. There are credible reports that the Russians aren't rotating their front line companys. Every day we see supply depots and logistic locations being blown up far behind the line. This slow and methodical push has already been shown to work retaking the largest city that Russia had controlled. I don't think it's insane to think it could work again. The kharkiv push was an outlier in this war but also proved that the Ukrainians can exploit holes when they find them.
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Aug 18, 2023 17:07
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With regards to the offensive, it might be worth keeping some perspective in mind - at the beginning of the war, the general opinion was that Ukraine was doomed to total defeat and occupation and eternal guerrilla war. Afterwards, it became clear that Ukraine could keep from total occupation but it seemed like it was doomed to being slowly ground down as Russia conducted slow but steady advances over time - whether Russia could keep it up indefinitely was unknown but it didn't seem like there was any trend possible but downwards. The fact that Ukraine is in a position to conduct any offensives at all is a hell of an upgrade from the prognosis early on, and demonstrates that the contest is a lot more even than anyone would have believed early on. It's going to take a fair bit more trying, and possibly some more failed offensives before we can safely claim that nothing will change forevermore I think.
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Aug 18, 2023 23:16
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Who is Lazerpig?
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Aug 20, 2023 19:24
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Frosted Flake posted:Actually, if you want to play a "Choose Your Own Adventure" for adults, El Alamein 1942: Battleground General by Smith gets into the problems of deciding to reinforce success or failure in a set piece battle. Since El Alamein is the apogee of the art form, and extremely well studied too, it's not a bad example to see how the problems played out and how they might have gone differently. I gave it a go and smashed Rommel on the first try 
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Aug 23, 2023 00:05
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People are saying that Ukraine simply has to wait until next year and try again in another offensive, like an army is just a seasonal plant that regrows or an rpg power with a cooldown timer
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Aug 23, 2023 04:32
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the typical NATO brigade is what, 5,000 soldiers? So basically if all those formations listed were at full theoretical strength it'd be something like 60,000 troops, an entire army corps? Just to capture one village that's not even on the other side of the main Russian line? trying to keep up the illusion of brigade-level units when its really a bunch of random platoons thrown together reminds me of the wehrmacht eastern front thing where as their offensive campaigns wore on and divisions were attrited into tiny battalions they'd start making smaller and smaller Kampfgruppe of 30 tanks and 1,000 guys, then 15 tanks and 600 guys, then 3 tanks and 100 guys,
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Aug 24, 2023 19:08
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Der Spiegel just published a huge article saying that the Germans are internally convinced Ukraine blew up Nordstream https://www.spiegel.de/internationa...94-942d4a665778 quote:Officially, politicians and the Office of the Federal Prosecutor are still holding back with any conclusions. Currently, it is not possible to say "this was state-controlled by Ukraine," Federal Prosecutor Otte says. "As far as that is concerned, the investigation is ongoing, much of it still undercover."
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Aug 26, 2023 00:58
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lmao good lord And something else would soon prove to be extremely challenging for investigators: When the saboteurs showed up at the Mola shack to check in for their rental of the Andromeda, they apparently presented a Romanian passport. It had been issued to a certain Stefan Marcu, as official documents indicate. But who was he? Did he have anything to do with the attack? Marcu opens the steel gate to his property wearing shorts and flipflops. It is the middle of July, a hot day in Goianul Nou, a village in Moldova just north of the capital of Chiᶊinǎu. The Ukrainian border isn't even 50 kilometers from here. Ştefan Marcu is a sturdily built man with a deep tan and a black moustache, an engineer with his own company. A team from DER SPIEGEL and ZDF along with reporters from the investigative networks Rise Moldova and OCCRP managed to track him down. The two-story home where he lives with his family is the most attractive one on their street. Marcu stares down at the note the reporters show him, bearing the number 055227683. He recognizes it immediately. He says he is a citizen of Moldova, but that the number belonged to his old Romanian passport, which expired the previous October. The last time he used the passport, he says, was in 2019 for a vacation in Romania and then, a couple months after that, for a trip to Bulgaria. He says he has no idea how his name got mixed up in the pipeline story. It's the first time he's heard about it, he insists. Aside from the reporters, nobody else has asked him about it, he says, no police officers and no intelligence agents. After he received his new passport, he says, the woman at the office invalidated his old one. "When I got home, I burned it. I threw it in the oven," Marcu says. But the data from his passport, officials believe, seems to have been used to produce another document, a falsified passport that was then used to charter the Andromeda. Complete with a new photo. The photo, though, is not of Ştefan Marcu, the 60-year-old from Moldova, but of a young man in his mid-20s with a penetrating gaze and military haircut. The man in the photo is very likely Valeri K. from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. He apparently serves in the 93rd Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian army.
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Aug 26, 2023 01:07
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Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:the last independent german intelligence agency was the stasi There's clearly some disagreement at the top level over backing Ukraine, because the investigation's big breakthrough was fed to them: "Early in the investigation, it seemed that such a breakthrough would never come. The few leads the detectives had all turned up nothing of substance, and they had no clear indications of who the perpetrators might be. But then, a few weeks after the attack, intelligence was passed to the BKA indicating that a sailboat was involved."
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Aug 26, 2023 01:15
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oh my god Perhaps the attack could have been prevented in the first place. It didn't come as a complete surprise, after all. It had been announced several months beforehand, in detail. But the warning wasn't taken seriously enough in the right places. An encrypted, strictly confidential dispatch from an allied intelligence agency was received by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND – Germany's foreign intelligence agency) in June 2022. Such dispatches are hardly an anomaly, but this one contained a clear warning. It was from the Netherlands' military intelligence agency, which goes by the initials MIVD and is well known for its expertise in Russian cyberwarfare techniques. On this occasion, though, the agency's alarming information seemed to have come from a human asset in Kyiv. The Dutch also informed the CIA – which, just to be on the safe side, also forwarded it onward to the Germans. The confidential dispatch sketched out an attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. The plan called for six commando soldiers from the Ukraine, concealed with fake identities, to charter a boat, dive down to the bottom of the Baltic Sea with specialized equipment and blow up the pipes. According to the information, the men were under the command of Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had apparently not been informed of the plan. The attack was apparently planned to take place during the NATO exercise Baltops on the Baltic Sea. The content of the secret dispatch was originally reported on by the Washington Post in early June. The BND forwarded the warning to the Chancellery, but at German government headquarters, it was deemed irrelevant. After all, it only arrived at the Chancellery after the NATO maneuver had come to an end, and nothing had happened. That is why nobody sounded the alarm, says one of the few people who learned of the warning when it arrived. Most German security officials believed the information contained in the dispatch was inaccurate. As a result, no protective measures were introduced, no further investigations were undertaken and no preparations were made to potentially prevent an attack at a later point in time. The Federal Police, the German Navy and the antiterrorism centers never even learned of the warning. Nor did the German agency responsible for the oversight of Nord Stream.
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Aug 26, 2023 01:21
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Oh, so the German government has known about this for a long time and covered it up lol. I guess Ukraine really is getting hung out to dry A Ukrainian commando carried out an attack on Germany's critical infrastructure? Officials at the Chancellery in Berlin have been discussing intensively for months how to deal with the sensitive findings of the investigation. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also been debating possible consequences with his closest advisers. Of course, there aren't many options available to them. A change of course in foreign policy or the idea of confronting Kyiv with the findings seems unthinkable. The situation changed in March, when the New York Times, Germany's Die Zeit and Berlin-based public broadcaster RBB first reported on the evidence pointing to Ukraine. A little bit later, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper also published its own investigative report. Soon after, Jens Plötner, an adviser to the chancellor, openly addressed the articles in a phone call with Andriy Yermak, one of President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy's closest confidants. The answer was clear: Yermak apparently assured the Germans that the Ukrainian government had not been involved in the plot and that no one from the security apparatus knew who was behind it. Few in Berlin want to think right now about what action should be taken if the involvement of Ukrainian state agencies is proven. On the one hand, Germany couldn't simply brush off such a serious crime. But suspending support for Ukraine in its war against Russia also wouldn't be an option. "Everyone is shying away from the question of consequences," says one member of parliament with a party that is a member of the German government coalition. The fact that politicians who normally might at least speak off the record are remaining silent and simply ignoring inquiries is an indicator of just how delicate the situation is. Inquiries about the situation regarding the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline - in ministries, at party headquarters and in parliamentary offices - as to how it is being discussed within the parties or whether the government is already thinking through scenarios for the eventuality that the Ukrainian leadership knew about the operation, go nowhere. "No," says Irene Mihalic, the first parliamentary secretary of the Green Party, there was almost no discussion about the issue before the summer legislative recess. She says her party will wait for the outcome of the investigations, and that anything else would be pure speculation. In fact, the information available to members of parliament in this case is also extremely thin. On the one hand, the federal public prosecutor naturally provides only scant information about ongoing investigations. More importantly, the federal government is keeping all the findings under wraps. Even most members of Scholz's cabinet as well as the deputies in the Parliamentary Control Committee, which is tasked with oversight of the work of the intelligence services, don't know much more than what is publicly reported about the attack. [...] But the perception among investigators is that the will to solve the case is not particularly pronounced in the capital. Politically, it is easier to live with what happened if it remains unclear who is behind the attacks. The process is not being hindered, but neither is there much support from the overarching government ministries. Meanwhile, it is clear to career-oriented ministry officials that there is no glory to be had with this case. If only because the culprits will likely never have to answer for their actions in Germany. Even if they could be identified, it's very unlikely they would be extradited. So Berlin is looking away, and that is definitely being registered in agencies where staff is constantly in short supply and procedures have to be prioritized. All of which leads to the investigation falling down the priority list.
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Aug 26, 2023 01:28
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German Greens: we will support Ukraine no matter what the voters say, and no matter how many times Ukraine carries out terrorist attacks against the voters
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Aug 26, 2023 01:33
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Frosted Flake posted:Why the gently caress would they say this happened during the exercise where we know traffic was restricted, and warships, maritime patrol aircraft (say, Norwegian ones) and helicopters were continuously active? The warning said it would happen during the exercises. But it didn't happen during the exercises, so they wrote off the warning. Then the pipeline blew up, after the exercises.
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Aug 26, 2023 02:19
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BearsBearsBears posted:Any details on the specialized equipment? I'm very curious on how these six guy managed to pack so many explosives, sets of scuba gear, and a hyperbaric chamber onto a rental yacht. I'm also interested in the type of stealth technology they used to infiltrate one of the most surveilled areas of the ocean during a NATO military exercise. The "specialized equipment" was from the earlier warning. What the reporters have been able to confirm is that the chartered sailboat sailed from Rostock, then made its way to a much more isolated marina in a different location, where it would have been trivial to load equipment onto the ship without being spotted by onlookers. Then, the ship sailed to the pipeline. The Germans found traces of explosive on the ship, so they must have dove in teams and planted the explosives around the pipes. Dive experts that the reporters spoke to confirmed that the pipeline could be found with a simple sonar device brought onto the ship, and that the divers could have planted the bombs in a few hours of work (actually planting the bombs would have taken 20 minutes, but they would have to stop at predetermined depths for hours to account for decompression). tatankatonk has issued a correction as of 02:49 on Aug 26, 2023 |
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Aug 26, 2023 02:42
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NATO navies weren't stopping chartered sailboats in the area of the pipeline and searching them lol. The coverup/abetting seems to be not actually passing on the information of the warning to the german navy or the agency responsible for pipeline security, which could have started to do exactly that.
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Aug 26, 2023 03:00
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not even saying that I don't think the US had a part in it but lol that the reaction to confirmation of ukraine attacking germany and the german government conspiring to cover it up is "ok but its not the specific events and timeline that I believe in. what are they hiding"
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Aug 26, 2023 03:33
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sum posted:Did you miss the part that the Ukrainian sabotage allegedly occurred during BALTOPS no, BALTOPS was in June. a charter crew using a fake Romanian passport but with a photo belonging to a Ukranian soldier, with the payment arranged by a company registered in Poland whose only employee is a woman with no tourism experience living in Ukraine and using a Ukranian mobile phone number, sailed out on the yacht on september 6th. the pipeline blew up on september 26th
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Aug 26, 2023 03:45
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I think people are getting the respective theories mixed up. Seymour Hersh says that the US planted timed explosives in June 2022 (during BALTOPS), which blew up in September 2022. The German investigators say that the Ukranians were supposedly planning on doing something during BALTOPS (this information was not passed on by NATO intelligence to the actual German Navy/pipeline agency), but ultimately ended up planting explosives sometime after September 6th.
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Aug 26, 2023 03:48
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Frosted Flake posted:If attacked by Ukraine, without the Yanks, explain the strategic calculus and why Tornadoes weren’t going to Downtown Lwow and Kiev like it’s 1999. well, respectfully, its probably that an entire government that is 1) personally, deeply psychologically invested in the narrative that Ukraine are the good guys 2) publicly staked to the position that Ukraine are the good guys worthy of political and military support is not going to spin on a dime and say Ukraine should be punished let alone attacked? I feel like the past couple years have totally exposed the idea of Europe as an independent foreign policy pole as a myth, and shown that European leaders are completely willing to suborn themselves to American interests even at the expense of their own people and sovereignty. The Germans sitting on this is protecting the US interest in the sense that they are willing to absorb damages to themselves in the name of the "Western" project
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Aug 26, 2023 06:15
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Frosted Flake posted:That's at odds with "damaged the nation on a massive scale through direct military action". I mean, it's at odds to you and me, but there's no actual rule that people have to regard the world through some kind of coherent heuristic, even if their actions add up to being part of a coherent sytem. people have enough room in their head to hold contradictory ideas and there's no reason to think they ever have to resolve them. People like Baerbock aren't going to go oh my god what have I done, and people like scholz aren't going to be like oh my god I need to change everything about my politics, they'll just adjust the facts of the situation in their head until it can be accomodated. of course, they can always be actually punished for this by losing to AfD, just like how liberal MIC bureaucrats run into the brick wall of not being able to make enough artillery shells for a war. but until the next election it'll be The Ukranians didn't do this, and if they did do it you can't prove it, and if you can prove it we can't do anything about it because of our strategic commitments, and if you say our strategic commitments are wrong it's because you love putler, etc. quote:Which brings me back to, we'd be talking about Bush Did 9/11 levels of (charitably) willful blindness, without any of the upsides (for them, finance or the nation, I suppose in that order). Yeah, pretty much. What was the upside of 9/11, or Brexit, or the Vietnam War
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Aug 26, 2023 06:40
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StashAugustine posted:lmao peep the reviews on that one You start very excited about probably learning something new about thelis fighter ace. Then you realize: An absolute misleading title. It spends more than a third of the book discussing and cursing the Nazis rise to power and government, criticizing his first biographers and trying to make you feel guilt (a sort if criminal collaborationist) for admiring german veterans. A sorry try to convince the reader in why you should not praise german combatants and their memorabilia. A sort of personal hate...
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Aug 27, 2023 01:49
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Frosted Flake posted:I know the whole point is that Martin is being edgy and subverting chivalric tropes but it feels gratuitous and that he's getting in the way of his own writing at this point. Yes, but how would burn dog man fight big zombie man, then?
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Aug 27, 2023 18:23
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Just curious how people saying that the Ukraine breakthrough is coming any day now account for: 1) They haven't actually broken through the first line 2) They've been on the offensive for three months, suffering casualties and degradation the entire time 3) They've already committed their operational reserve/exploitation units in the armored/air assault brigades 4) Russians still have their operational reserves available to plug gaps 5) Ukraine still has artillery inferiority 6) Ukraine's manpower problems are bad enough that they're conscripting randos from off the street and sending them into battle after a week of training Like, even if you're optimistic about Ukraine's chances, how do you look at all that and think that Ukraine can just maintain an offensive indefinitely. What mobile forces would they even use to exploit a breakthrough?
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Aug 27, 2023 22:50
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Actually what even are the examples in modern history of a smaller, poorer nation defeating a richer, stronger, and bigger nation in a prolonged conventional war
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Aug 27, 2023 23:00
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 03:21 |
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sum posted:I was just reading a RUSI report that projected Russian shell expenditures to be 19 million by the end of 2023. Those guys must be really stupid! (I'll need to read the whole thing when I can steal time from my boss. Hilariously it's entitled "MEATGRINDER" but it looks well researched). woah wait what  Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.
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Aug 28, 2023 05:58
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