War

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
I don't agree with this guy, 500K Russian troops won't be effective against a Ukrainian Blitzkrieg, the lesson of the early part of WW2 when the Germans surrounded and captured as many troops as that, has been lost on the Russians. He is not a military expert and Russia will be in for one Helluva shock this summer, it is not the Soviet Union, and the population is a fraction of what the USSR's was and it was economically self-sufficient.

One other thing, there is NG in Ukraine, enough for Germany and the EU, once the Russians are gone it can be quickly developed for industrial use and is close to Poland and Germany. So, getting the Russians out and more importantly keeping them out is vital to the EUs economic future, which is why Ukraine will be in the EU quicker than NATO. It could eventually lead to and EU army to protect their interests and Ukraine would be part of it.


Peter Zeihan - Russia Is About To Suffer Worst Then You Thought
 
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DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
Breaking Russian military power their economy and society are the only path to liberation and security for both Ukraine and Belarus. So, keep the heat on until their economy and society break down and the empire dissolves. Take their seized money for Ukrainian compensation and future security and let the Chinese take the rest in the east. Break down the power of the national government and the regional governments will assert themselves more and this will lead to dissolution with China's help, greed will be their motivator.
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
Nothing was surplus in the old USSR and things were just passed down and eventually put into storage. They are digging deep now and using everything up, but munitions for these obsolete systems could be an issue. How much will they have left after the Ukrainians are done with them? Their ability to wage war and that is related to the size of their economy and industrial base, and both are smaller than many NATO countries.
How many years will it be before Ukraine's economy is larger than Russia's, especially if they start selling NG and petroleum to the EU?

 
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Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
I don't agree with this guy, 500K Russian troops won't be effective against a Ukrainian Blitzkrieg, the lesson of the early part of WW2 when the Germans surrounded and captured as many troops as that, has been lost on the Russians. He is not a military expert and Russia will be in for one Helluva shock this summer, it is not the Soviet Union, and the population is a fraction of what the USSR's was and it was economically self-sufficient.

One other thing, there is NG in Ukraine, enough for Germany and the EU, once the Russians are gone it can be quickly developed for industrial use and is close to Poland and Germany. So, getting the Russians out and more importantly keeping them out is vital to the EUs economic future, which is why Ukraine will be in the EU quicker than NATO. It could eventually lead to and EU army to protect their interests and Ukraine would be part of it.


Peter Zeihan - Russia Is About To Suffer Worst Then You Thought
yeah, i don't like him either, his predictions seem very short sighted, relying almost solely on cut and dried statistics, with very little consideration for other factors.
 

CCGNZ

Well-Known Member
Nothing was surplus in the old USSR and things were just passed down and eventually put into storage. They are digging deep now and using everything up, but munitions for these obsolete systems could be an issue. How much will they have left after the Ukrainians are done with them? Their ability to wage war and that is related to the size of their economy and industrial base, and both are smaller than many NATO countries.
How many years will it be before Ukraine's economy is larger than Russia's, especially if the start selling NG and petroleum to the EU?

Latest news,Putin to deploy tactical nukes to Belarus,sure to angry Poland.
 

printer

Well-Known Member
Friendship means telling hard truths about the endgame in Ukraine
The handwriting is on the wall. As extensively covered in these pages, the evolution of U.S. domestic politics — as indicated in critical commentary from prominent political figures by no means limited to the right wing of the Republican Party — makes it increasingly clear that President Biden’s policy of robust, largely unconditional military and financial support of Ukraine cannot, and probably should not, be sustained.

To give Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) and other naysayers their due, U.S. officials should never issue “blank checks” in support of any policy, save to counter an existential threat. Resources and risks must always be carefully calibrated in proportion to the genuine national interests at stake.

Despite the foolishly narrow terms in which he has framed the issue, DeSantis is right: The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on its own, is no threat to U.S. national security. It is only when the issue is viewed more broadly, in the context of the continued aggressive Russian adventurism the sacrifice of Ukraine could incentivize — to say nothing of the demonstration effect which Ukraine’s conquest would register in Beijing — that we begin to assess the actual national security stakes involved. Even then, it would be hard to argue that the full defense of every inch of Ukrainian territory is absolutely vital to Western interests.

The shift in the U.S. political zeitgeist has surely not gone unnoticed in Kyiv, but neither should it be ignored by the Biden administration. Now is the time for the administration to engage in some hard critical thinking, followed by tough talk in Kyiv, in NATO capitals, and yes, in Moscow.
Although the stakes I dealt with were decidedly lower, the current situation puts me in mind of a mission I undertook 20 years ago in northern Iraq, just three months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion.

CIA’s robust pre-invasion intelligence campaign, which depended upon Iraqi Kurdish support for teams operating at considerable peril within the country, was at risk. Fearful that U.S. threats of war with Saddam might be nothing more than a bluff that would leave them vulnerable to vicious reprisals, Kurdish leaders were weighing whether to cut a new deal with Baghdad of the sort they had negotiated in the past, which would have worked heavily against our interests.

At the same time, the U.S. was actively trying to convince a reluctant Turkish government to allow the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to transit Turkey and invade Iraq from the north (while the main force moved up from Kuwait). Though the likelihood of Turkish permission was low, all anticipated that the price for Turkish cooperation, if it came, would be a U.S. agreement to allow Turkish forces to accompany the division into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, where the Turks would have their own agenda.

Despite the fact that the Iraqi Kurds were fierce, avowed enemies of the Turks, no one in the George W. Bush administration thought to take them into confidence. That fell to CIA, and therefore, to me.

After providing Kurdish leaders the assurances they sought, I came to the bad news: If the Turks allowed the 4th Infantry Division to pass, they would insist on sending troops to accompany it. And if the Turks agreed, in effect, to join the U.S.-led coalition, the U.S. could not say no.
Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani responded with expected truculence, saying his troops would shoot any Turkish troops that cross the border. I looked at him with feigned impassivity. “No,” I said evenly. “You won’t.”
I explained that Turkish troops, if it came to that, would not be transiting the border alone. “They will be with us,” I said. And if Kurdish Peshmerga forces engaged them, they would be considered defenders of Saddam by U.S. forces, and treated accordingly.

Though he was clearly unhappy, the rest of the conversation with Masoud was far more agreeable and constructive. That was only possible because Masoud knew throughout that he was dealing with a friend, one who had come not to threaten, but to do him the courtesy of telling him the unvarnished truth about a situation neither of us could avoid.

The time is fast approaching when a senior representative of the Biden administration will need to begin a similarly tough, realistic — and empathetic — dialogue with Zelensky. Biden is surely seen as a great friend in Kyiv. But his ability to deliver on his implicit and explicit promises of support for Ukraine “for as long as it takes” is likely to be curtailed in the near future. That’s something he can’t help. Now would be the time to begin to disabuse Zelensky of the notion that he can count on unqualified U.S. and Western support for war aims that he sets unilaterally.

Specifically, Zelensky must be pushed in the direction of a negotiated solution, likely to include territorial concessions on Crimea and the Donbas. That would be admittedly unpalatable, to say the least. In a just world, it would be a non-starter. But in an American political environment that is increasingly focused on core U.S. interests, which include the maintenance of Ukraine as a bulwark again further Russian encroachment on Europe, it must also be acknowledged that not all of Ukraine is necessary to meet that goal. The offset, and the concomitant to a policy focused on European security, would be the extension to Ukraine of a far more explicit and permanent NATO security arrangement, probably ending in full NATO membership and Article 5 security guarantees.

The latter, of course, will surely be unacceptable to Russia. But in the end, Putin will have to accept that these are the wages of sin, the inevitable result of a disastrous miscalculation. He cannot expect that NATO will maintain something like the status quo ante in terms of its expansion, when he has gone so far as demonstrating that the possible eventuality which NATO’s post-cold-war continuation was designed to forestall is, in fact, not a hypothetical but a clear and present danger. His alternative will be to risk utter, humiliating defeat.

The U.S. point to him could be reinforced by an agreement to provide Ukraine with advanced American fighter aircraft. The agreement would be purely symbolic for some time to come, as such aircraft cannot be immediately absorbed by a Ukrainian air force lacking the necessary training and logistics. But the short-term political symbolism and the long-term threat to Putin’s strategy of attrition could be telling.

That is not to suggest for a moment that the U.S. should engage in negotiating Ukraine’s future. Kyiv is not Kabul, and cannot be treated as such. Ukraine will make its own sovereign decisions regarding war aims. But Zelensky will need to understand, given his near-abject dependence on Western support, that there will be limits on the aspirations the West will support, and therefore on what he can legitimately hope to achieve.

A nation once seen as hopelessly corrupt and tied only tenuously to Western values, Ukraine has become an international symbol of freedom, democracy and principled resistance to aggression. Anyone involved in dealing with Ukraine on behalf of the U.S. cannot be unmoved by that. But politics and geography are real. Neither Ukraine nor we can help that it shares a long border with a large, powerful and paranoid neighbor. Ukraine’s friends and supporters have interests that will eventually overshadow their affections, and their resources are finite.

Just as I was called upon to do in northern Iraq 20 years ago, that is the message which can and must be conveyed by a true friend in Kyiv.
Robert Grenier served for 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, ending his career as director of the CIA CounterTerrorism Center, responsible for all CIA counter-terror operations around the globe. He is the author of “88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary.”

Food for thought.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
Friendship means telling hard truths about the endgame in Ukraine
The handwriting is on the wall. As extensively covered in these pages, the evolution of U.S. domestic politics — as indicated in critical commentary from prominent political figures by no means limited to the right wing of the Republican Party — makes it increasingly clear that President Biden’s policy of robust, largely unconditional military and financial support of Ukraine cannot, and probably should not, be sustained.

To give Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) and other naysayers their due, U.S. officials should never issue “blank checks” in support of any policy, save to counter an existential threat. Resources and risks must always be carefully calibrated in proportion to the genuine national interests at stake.

Despite the foolishly narrow terms in which he has framed the issue, DeSantis is right: The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on its own, is no threat to U.S. national security. It is only when the issue is viewed more broadly, in the context of the continued aggressive Russian adventurism the sacrifice of Ukraine could incentivize — to say nothing of the demonstration effect which Ukraine’s conquest would register in Beijing — that we begin to assess the actual national security stakes involved. Even then, it would be hard to argue that the full defense of every inch of Ukrainian territory is absolutely vital to Western interests.

The shift in the U.S. political zeitgeist has surely not gone unnoticed in Kyiv, but neither should it be ignored by the Biden administration. Now is the time for the administration to engage in some hard critical thinking, followed by tough talk in Kyiv, in NATO capitals, and yes, in Moscow.
Although the stakes I dealt with were decidedly lower, the current situation puts me in mind of a mission I undertook 20 years ago in northern Iraq, just three months before the March 2003 U.S. invasion.

CIA’s robust pre-invasion intelligence campaign, which depended upon Iraqi Kurdish support for teams operating at considerable peril within the country, was at risk. Fearful that U.S. threats of war with Saddam might be nothing more than a bluff that would leave them vulnerable to vicious reprisals, Kurdish leaders were weighing whether to cut a new deal with Baghdad of the sort they had negotiated in the past, which would have worked heavily against our interests.

At the same time, the U.S. was actively trying to convince a reluctant Turkish government to allow the U.S. 4th Infantry Division to transit Turkey and invade Iraq from the north (while the main force moved up from Kuwait). Though the likelihood of Turkish permission was low, all anticipated that the price for Turkish cooperation, if it came, would be a U.S. agreement to allow Turkish forces to accompany the division into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, where the Turks would have their own agenda.

Despite the fact that the Iraqi Kurds were fierce, avowed enemies of the Turks, no one in the George W. Bush administration thought to take them into confidence. That fell to CIA, and therefore, to me.

After providing Kurdish leaders the assurances they sought, I came to the bad news: If the Turks allowed the 4th Infantry Division to pass, they would insist on sending troops to accompany it. And if the Turks agreed, in effect, to join the U.S.-led coalition, the U.S. could not say no.
Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani responded with expected truculence, saying his troops would shoot any Turkish troops that cross the border. I looked at him with feigned impassivity. “No,” I said evenly. “You won’t.”
I explained that Turkish troops, if it came to that, would not be transiting the border alone. “They will be with us,” I said. And if Kurdish Peshmerga forces engaged them, they would be considered defenders of Saddam by U.S. forces, and treated accordingly.

Though he was clearly unhappy, the rest of the conversation with Masoud was far more agreeable and constructive. That was only possible because Masoud knew throughout that he was dealing with a friend, one who had come not to threaten, but to do him the courtesy of telling him the unvarnished truth about a situation neither of us could avoid.

The time is fast approaching when a senior representative of the Biden administration will need to begin a similarly tough, realistic — and empathetic — dialogue with Zelensky. Biden is surely seen as a great friend in Kyiv. But his ability to deliver on his implicit and explicit promises of support for Ukraine “for as long as it takes” is likely to be curtailed in the near future. That’s something he can’t help. Now would be the time to begin to disabuse Zelensky of the notion that he can count on unqualified U.S. and Western support for war aims that he sets unilaterally.

Specifically, Zelensky must be pushed in the direction of a negotiated solution, likely to include territorial concessions on Crimea and the Donbas. That would be admittedly unpalatable, to say the least. In a just world, it would be a non-starter. But in an American political environment that is increasingly focused on core U.S. interests, which include the maintenance of Ukraine as a bulwark again further Russian encroachment on Europe, it must also be acknowledged that not all of Ukraine is necessary to meet that goal. The offset, and the concomitant to a policy focused on European security, would be the extension to Ukraine of a far more explicit and permanent NATO security arrangement, probably ending in full NATO membership and Article 5 security guarantees.

The latter, of course, will surely be unacceptable to Russia. But in the end, Putin will have to accept that these are the wages of sin, the inevitable result of a disastrous miscalculation. He cannot expect that NATO will maintain something like the status quo ante in terms of its expansion, when he has gone so far as demonstrating that the possible eventuality which NATO’s post-cold-war continuation was designed to forestall is, in fact, not a hypothetical but a clear and present danger. His alternative will be to risk utter, humiliating defeat.

The U.S. point to him could be reinforced by an agreement to provide Ukraine with advanced American fighter aircraft. The agreement would be purely symbolic for some time to come, as such aircraft cannot be immediately absorbed by a Ukrainian air force lacking the necessary training and logistics. But the short-term political symbolism and the long-term threat to Putin’s strategy of attrition could be telling.

That is not to suggest for a moment that the U.S. should engage in negotiating Ukraine’s future. Kyiv is not Kabul, and cannot be treated as such. Ukraine will make its own sovereign decisions regarding war aims. But Zelensky will need to understand, given his near-abject dependence on Western support, that there will be limits on the aspirations the West will support, and therefore on what he can legitimately hope to achieve.

A nation once seen as hopelessly corrupt and tied only tenuously to Western values, Ukraine has become an international symbol of freedom, democracy and principled resistance to aggression. Anyone involved in dealing with Ukraine on behalf of the U.S. cannot be unmoved by that. But politics and geography are real. Neither Ukraine nor we can help that it shares a long border with a large, powerful and paranoid neighbor. Ukraine’s friends and supporters have interests that will eventually overshadow their affections, and their resources are finite.

Just as I was called upon to do in northern Iraq 20 years ago, that is the message which can and must be conveyed by a true friend in Kyiv.
Robert Grenier served for 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, ending his career as director of the CIA CounterTerrorism Center, responsible for all CIA counter-terror operations around the globe. He is the author of “88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary.”

Food for thought.
The architect of US policy that led to Putin's invasion of Ukraine has spoken.

Ignore him.
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
Friendship means telling hard truths about the endgame in Ukraine
The handwriting is on the wall. As extensively covered in these pages, the evolution of U.S. domestic politics — as indicated in critical commentary from prominent political figures by no means limited to the right wing of the Republican Party — makes it increasingly clear that President Biden’s policy of robust, largely unconditional military and financial support of Ukraine cannot, and probably should not, be sustained.

To give Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) and other naysayers their due, U.S. officials should never issue “blank checks” in support of any policy, save to counter an existential threat. Resources and risks must always be carefully calibrated in proportion to the genuine national interests at stake.



Just as I was called upon to do in northern Iraq 20 years ago, that is the message which can and must be conveyed by a true friend in Kyiv.
Robert Grenier served for 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, ending his career as director of the CIA CounterTerrorism Center, responsible for all CIA counter-terror operations around the globe. He is the author of “88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary.”

Food for thought.
As I said, kick them out of Ukraine and destroy the rail bridges leading into it well inside Russia. The Russian military is utterly dependent on the rails and cannot operate far from their railheads. Crimea is important for control of the Black Sea, Ukrainian security and future European energy resources. As for financing things, there is all that seized Russian money, crimes against humanity and war crimes that will be used to take it, then there is Ukrainian oil and gas.

Ukraine is no longer hopelessly corrupt; the war and Zelenskiy have rid the country of much of it as a byproduct and much came from Russia and Ukrainian oligarchs who were allied with them. Europe is all in on this war and Germany is staking its industrial energy future on it I figure and now that their ducks are lined up, they want the war over ASAP or at least the Russians removed from the energy producing sections.

The war might not end soon, but much of it won't be on mainland Ukraine by fall and the Russians are heavily dependent on their rail network and that can be easily crippled around Ukraine, with the right arms. They might have long borders with Russia, but have a close look on google earth, there are not that many invasion points and what would Russia invade with, no mass tank army that's for sure, all their tanks will be gone when this war is over. Besides with their rail bridges destroyed inside their borders, they couldn't get forces close enough and supplied on the half dozen viable routes into Ukraine.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
As I said, kick them out of Ukraine and destroy the rail bridges leading into it well inside Russia. The Russian military is utterly dependent on the rails and cannot operate far from their railheads. Crimea is important for control of the Black Sea, Ukrainian security and future European energy resources. As for financing things, there is all that seized Russian money, crimes against humanity and war crimes that will be used to take it, then there is Ukrainian oil and gas.

Ukraine is no longer hopelessly corrupt; the war and Zelenskiy have rid the country of much of it as a byproduct and much came from Russia and Ukrainian oligarchs who were allied with them. Europe is all in on this war and Germany is staking its industrial energy future on it I figure and now that their ducks are lined up, they want the war over ASAP or at least the Russians removed from the energy producing sections.

The war might not end soon, but much of it won't be on mainland Ukraine by fall and the Russians are heavily dependent on their rail network and that can be easily crippled around Ukraine, with the right arms. They might have long borders with Russia, but have a close look on google earth, there are not that many invasion points and what would Russia invade with, no mass tank army that's for sure, all their tanks will be gone when this war is over. Besides with their rail bridges destroyed inside their borders, they couldn't get forces close enough and supplied on the half dozen viable routes into Ukraine.
They can rebuild. I heard reports that Russia has capacity to build 22 tanks per month. At that rate, they could rebuild their fleet to the 3300 that they had at the start the war within 22 years. ;-)
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
These get the Ukrainian troops inside the Russian artillery fast along with the tanks, just the thing for a Blitzkrieg. US soldiers would have done ok in a Russian artillery storm. Uncle same has lots of these and the basic platform can be modified for many different roles and are largely considered obsolete by America. America is also replacing 12,000 heavy military trucks over the next few years and some of the old ones will no doubt end up in Ukraine and other Russian neighbors.

 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
They can rebuild. I heard reports that Russia has capacity to build 22 tanks per month. At that rate, they could rebuild their fleet to the 3300 that they had at the start the war within 22 years. ;-)
Maybe steel hulls, but not the goodies that go inside and make them deadly in all conditions. Ukraine will end up using Leopards and perhaps M1s, vastly superior to anything the Russians could field even when not under sanctions. They had an economy smaller than Italy's before the war and it was largely energy based with little domestic industrial or technical capacity. Their education system has been a shambles and the old Soviet era engineers and scientists are largely gone. Corruption permeates the kleptocracy from top to bottom and is most evident in the performance of their army.
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
They can rebuild. I heard reports that Russia has capacity to build 22 tanks per month. At that rate, they could rebuild their fleet to the 3300 that they had at the start the war within 22 years. ;-)
Give them a choice, rebuild their rail bridges or build largely useless tanks, the same resources would be required for both, steel and welders.
 
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