Ukraine v Russia II

Discussion in 'Politics & Current Events' started by crazypete13, Apr 20, 2022.

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  1. American Brummie

    Jun 19, 2009
    There Be Dragons Here
    Club:
    Birmingham City FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Apparently I'm the only person not allowed to continue talking about this topic, but if I could have my ban on the thing I brought up lifted for a single post...

    It's not about the paper being right-wing or left-wing. The Telegraph, the Times, the Financial Times...I don't care, and nobody else should, when it comes to high-quality reporting.

    I just thought that a soccer blog that is comprised of soccer fans ought to know about the Sun's campaign to smear the soccer fans who died in the Hillsborough disaster, and if they didn't, to briefly catch up, and that we could all -- voluntarily, I might add -- agree to find literally any of the thousands of other reliable media sources out there when talking on this soccer blog.

    Okay I'm back to being the only person not allowed to discuss this on this thread. Carry on.
     
  2. Luckily we in the Netherlands, afaik of course, have nowhere to buy the paper we should not mention. Maybe at the international airport Schiphol, but I don't know for sure.
    So forgive us we happily escaped the wrongdoing of that paper, and as in those days there was no internet media, we blissfully were ignorant of it......It's not that we outside of the UK, especially in Europe, are searching the internet for news articles about that subject.
    Until someone mentioned it in here.
     
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  3. The Jitty Slitter

    The Jitty Slitter Moderator
    Staff Member

    Bayern München
    Germany
    Jul 23, 2004
    Fascist Hellscape
    Club:
    FC Sankt Pauli
    Nat'l Team:
    Belgium
    It's almost as if this libertarian darling is a russian asset - wonder if anyone has looked into his fund raising
     
  4. Shouldnot his bank do a KYC test to see whether his bank transactions violate sanctions?
    I would suggest to the researchers of "Follow the Money" to lay bare the financial links of democracy undermining politicians with autocratic rulers/governments.
     
  5. The Jitty Slitter

    The Jitty Slitter Moderator
    Staff Member

    Bayern München
    Germany
    Jul 23, 2004
    Fascist Hellscape
    Club:
    FC Sankt Pauli
    Nat'l Team:
    Belgium
    One thing that anoraks have discussed is that lots of the analysis was based on the amount of kit russia has - but russia actually didn't fight any major wars in a long time unlike the US
     
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  6. spejic

    spejic Cautionary example

    Mar 1, 1999
    San Rafael, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    That's certainly a big part of it. It's been that way since the Cold War started.

    There's also a knowledge bias. We in the West are allowed to criticize our weapon systems while in Russia the media isn't. So people can get a mixed view of our weapons and a singular view of theirs. And what we think we know of their weapons fits into what we think is bad with ours - their simplicity and ruggedness versus our complexity and fragility. The myth of "NASA uses a thousand dollar pen in space while Cosmonauts use a pencil" is the framework people use to fit all the datapoints into and they get a bad picture out. And I'm sure terrible views of Russia's military somehow being masculine and America's and Europe's being woke are part of this.

    And finally, people have a short memory. Throughout my life Russian weapon systems have done poorly but people soon go back to their emotional impression of those systems until they are disappointed again. I'll call it the Laserpig loop because he explains it in the funniest way although I and many others have noticed this happen for a long time.
     
  7. I'm sure we can obliterate the Rvssian forces with a lower grade of precision granades than the 65000€($?) excalibur rounds that go with those famed howitzers. We really have no need for them. For the price of one of the excaliburs we can buy several a step less sophisticated, but still superior to the Rvssians have in range and precision. So basically we could hit more for the same price.
    But if military are just like other guys, keen on the latest gadgets ....
     
  8. The Jitty Slitter

    The Jitty Slitter Moderator
    Staff Member

    Bayern München
    Germany
    Jul 23, 2004
    Fascist Hellscape
    Club:
    FC Sankt Pauli
    Nat'l Team:
    Belgium
    In general the Mail and Sun should never be quoted. Two disgusting publications. It's like citing tucker carlson - an actual white nationalist
     
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  9. The Jitty Slitter

    The Jitty Slitter Moderator
    Staff Member

    Bayern München
    Germany
    Jul 23, 2004
    Fascist Hellscape
    Club:
    FC Sankt Pauli
    Nat'l Team:
    Belgium
    It's not conspiratorial though. Tom Nichols was talking about this. Have to be careful not to go Glenn Greenwald here.
     
  10. The Jitty Slitter

    The Jitty Slitter Moderator
    Staff Member

    Bayern München
    Germany
    Jul 23, 2004
    Fascist Hellscape
    Club:
    FC Sankt Pauli
    Nat'l Team:
    Belgium
    One important thing is there were no high intensity euro wars where this stuff was tested since 1945.

    In the east between '41- 44, stuff evolved very quickly - so Panther (the best tank of the war IMO) emerged. Then MBT was a tech development of that thinking, and it's only 80 years later, we discover 2 men and a jeep can "flip your lid" Tom Clancy Red Storm Rising style

    So if you are defending western europe today with fat new budgets, you are probably buying a metric shit tonne of Panzerhaubitze, drones, dune buggies and 6 gazillion javelins so my dawgs can get all quake team death match in every east german village.

    Meanwhile the other guy is looking forlornly at his 10,000 MBTs in storage
     
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  11. diablodelsol

    diablodelsol Member+

    Jan 10, 2001
    New Jersey


    In retrospect…it’s kind of hard to justify just how wrong the intelligence community was in Ukrainian’s will or ability to fight. They’ve been doing this since 2014. There were over a million Ukrainians that had rotated through active duty tours in Donbas over the last 8 years. All combat veterans.

    The bigger miss was the first overestimation of Russian military competence rather than the assessment of the Ukrainians. And even then…there were a few key battles early that could have gone either way…that if the results were reversed we’d be having a much different conversation right now.
     
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  12. Yoshou

    Yoshou Fan of the CCL Champ

    May 12, 2009
    Seattle
    Club:
    Seattle Sounders
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I’ll also add that Western analysts severely under-estimated the level of corruption in the Russian military. The thinking was that with how paranoid Russia is about foreign invaders and how much they glorify military action that it would be the one area where Russians would not embezzle funds. So having officers lie about how many troops they had in their units so they could collect their salaries, having reserve vehicles stripped clean of everything worth any money, etc, etc was completely ignored.

    They also severely over estimated how successful Russia’s modernization of their military was. Western analysts saw the fancy new hardware Russia was coming out with and then failed to properly account for just how few of that hardware was and, as you said, ignored all of the issues with those fancy new toys. Seeing Russian fighters stand on their tails with their directional jet engines scared Western military analysts, but they didn’t notice the avionics was trash.

    Finally, Western analysts also bought into the WWII myth of just how hardy the Russian soldier was. They saw the extraordinary feats they did to stop the advance, then pushing back of the German military and assumed that applied to the modern Russian soldier.
     
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  13. Yoshou

    Yoshou Fan of the CCL Champ

    May 12, 2009
    Seattle
    Club:
    Seattle Sounders
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    And any country that does this is making a horrible mistake. Don’t get me wrong. The ATGMs are flashy and played a role in stopping Russia’s advances, but the primary work was done by Ukrainian artillery and armor. Seriously, don’t mistake Russia’s piss poor armor only tactics as a condemnation on the MBT. They are still playing a role and Ukraine would be unable to retake their territory back without their tanks and APCs..

    There’s a reason it is called combined arms. Over-focusing on one of those arms is going to lead to ruin for any military force.
     
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  14. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Club:
    CA Boca Juniors
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    Those pictures bring to my memory the way Charlton Heston dealt with the Egyptians at the Red Sea in the movie The Ten Commandments.
     
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  15. Potowmack

    Potowmack Member+

    Apr 2, 2010
    Washington, DC
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    If the US military had been the ones invading Ukraine, with a similarly sized force, the outcome would have been far worse for the Ukrainians. Similarly, if Russia had invaded Ukraine using sound combined arms tactics, the Russians would have had more success.

    This war is going to lead to new tactics and refinement of existing ones. But I don’t think throwing out the entire war manual is warranted.
     
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  16. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Club:
    CA Boca Juniors
    Nat'l Team:
    Argentina
    I can understand Putin "ignoring" the corruption, but how could he possibly actually ignore the corruption? Could he possibly be so out of touch with reality?
     
  17. Yoshou

    Yoshou Fan of the CCL Champ

    May 12, 2009
    Seattle
    Club:
    Seattle Sounders
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I will say tho, that if I'm a "small" country that is part of a larger security alliance, I am buying a metric ton of ATGMs, drones, artillery units, and an extensive air defense network that is effective against cruise missiles, then saying F it to tanks and fighters. :) Tanks and fighters are extremely expensive and if a country can offload that aspect to another country, the ATGMs, drones, artillery units, and air defenses should be able to buy that small country enough time for their larger allies to roll out the tanks and provide fighter cover.
     
  18. Yoshou

    Yoshou Fan of the CCL Champ

    May 12, 2009
    Seattle
    Club:
    Seattle Sounders
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Yes? TBH, you're only as knowledgeable as the information that is given to you. Putin can't personally be the one doing unit level inspections to ensure that the officers aren't lying about who is actually in the unit. We wouldn't expect the US President to do that, so I'm not sure why we would expect Putin to be doing it.

    That being said, Putin should have realized that the people around him were corrupt and may be lying to him, but, on the other hand, that is why Putin picked them.
     
  19. Dage

    Dage Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 4, 2008
    Berlin
    Club:
    Borussia Mönchengladbach
    Nat'l Team:
    Germany
    You want that battle proved badge on your future top selling systems, don't you? Wouldn't be the US industry if this situation wouldn't hide some extra dollars. Doesn't bother me though, as long as there will be enough shells over there.
     
  20. Potowmack

    Potowmack Member+

    Apr 2, 2010
    Washington, DC
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    An article I read a while back called it the “dictator trap.” Authoritarian regimes are bad at honestly analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. There’s no incentive to give the boss bad news, because there’s a chance he might have you shot. So, yes-men abound, and the dictator is more likely to start a war because he thinks his forces are stronger than they really are. Hilarity ensues.
     
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  21. Dage

    Dage Moderator
    Staff Member

    Jun 4, 2008
    Berlin
    Club:
    Borussia Mönchengladbach
    Nat'l Team:
    Germany
    #1170 Dage, May 13, 2022
    Last edited: May 13, 2022
    What is this nonsense.. Putin is the leading head of the corruption in Russia. It's actually his system to stay in power.

    The guy is a former KGB officer and you tell me the guy is a donut? It wasn't true for Hitler and is definitely not true for Putin is a nice exit strategy for him, though. He can blame others for his own faults, could probably save his ass.
     
  22. song219

    song219 BigSoccer Supporter

    Apr 5, 2004
    La Norte
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    Vanuatu
    Well-run armed forces are only useful when you are fighting a war. The support of the upper portions of the officer corps is politically useful every day. If you think of Russia as a 3rd world country with nukes, it makes more sense.
     
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  23. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Ah, good point. That' was always pretty good although I don't read it any more. It's mainly centred around finance, of course, but it's political coverage was better than the right-wing rags.
     
  24. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    You can't help wondering if we're going to start getting large numbers of them simply surrendering or just dumping their gear and legging it, pretending to be russian speaking locals.
     
  25. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Oh, that is absolutely part of it. You can't expect the pentagon to spend however many billions of dollars on a new gee-whiz plane or tank if the other lot are a joke outfit.
     
  26. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Good to know :)

    :giggle:
     

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