They're certainly less powerful when bunched into tight, easily targeted groups with no ground support. From the the vids we're seeing on SM, it's hard to imagine a more poorly operated campaign.
Totally off topic, got it: Your history on the post-WWI partition of the Middle East is correct … except Iran was not part of that, so not really relevant. I would also argue that if, say, Japan came into Arizona and came to an arrangement with the government to dig a mine for materials we didn’t care about (at the time), build a railroad to move said materials out of the country, build wharfage et al in California for exporting the materials back to Japan, and created a noteworthy number of jobs for local Americans all along the supply route, we would say, sounds more than fair. But then if some later American regime decides, “hey, those are our materials because they came out of our soil, and we’re going to seize control of the mine, railroad, and wharfage as if they weren’t all built with Japanese money,” then the Japanese might have a problem with it and might engage in underhanded methods to undermine the American government that broke faith and stole from them. Just pointing out that this is an essential part of the story that always gets conveniently left out because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
Well, I kind of already addressed it an earlier post, but Mossaddegh did not merely say all of the oil coming out of the ground (that you’re already paying us for) is mine: The wells you’ve dug, the pipelines you’ve built, the ports you’ve improved, and all of the other supporting infrastructure you’ve built is mine. I will compensate you nothing for the decades of investment. If that’s all fair play, then fine. But then why leave out that part of the story? Be proud.
Reminder not everyone in our gov supports Ukraine…. Republican NC Congressman Madison Cawthorn: “Zelenskyy is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
I think it’s more a matter of Russia apparently not having learned any lessons from any remotely modern combat. If you just have large formations of armored vehicles driving around by themselves unprotected (or a tank or two trying to operate alone in an urban environment), they’re a sitting duck for guys or aerial assets with anti-tank missiles. They still have a role as part of a combined arms strategy, but Russia is using them like they don’t know what happened in the Yom Kippur war and paid no attention to how the US waged a counter insurgency fight in the GWOT. That combined with their awful logistics is not a good recipe for tank survivability.
I also can’t imagine tanks doing much of anything without air superiority. They would be sitting ducks for our planes and drones.
Pretty significant losses if true Russians seen ‘massing’ near Kyiv as Ukrainians fortify ‘every street & home’
There is definitely some perverse satisfaction to be derived here, but the loss of 12,000+ lives is a straight up tragedy.
Same thing happened with Chiquita banana in the Eisenhower Administration. Nevertheless, the borders in the ME are artificial and that has led to wars and disputes internally and between countries for many reasons. The fall of the Ottoman Empire was not necessarily been a good thing for the world. But we are getting off topic. The war in Ukraine is not about Colonialism. It is about expansion of the Russian Empire envisioned by Putin. And it is being fought by Russia with a WW2 style attack on cities and civilian populations to break the will of Ukraine to resist by an army with poor tactics that is relying on numbers to win.
Did they not see how we were opposed in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did they learn nothing from Chechnya and Afghanistan and Syria? The Russians seem to be trying to refight the end of WWII when they conquered exhausted nations that had already lost a good percentage of their fighting age population, where they were thought of as liberating people from the Nazi yoke.
Don't know but there's been videos of Ukranians painting over the Russian symbols etc and putting the Ukranian flags on them. They had one where a woman was sitting there in the tank showing others how it worked so they could use them.
It's actually been suggested that the CIA orchestrated coup in Iran in 1953 to save British oil interests was the model for the one in Guatemala a year later to save the interests of United Fruit from nationalization. Interestingly, Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA was previously on the board of United Fruit.
Top Brass of Russian military forces in some disarray? Russia has fired 'about EIGHT' generals for failing to 'complete the task' of taking Ukraine in days, Kyiv official claims - as Putin rages over FSB failures Eight Russian generals sacked over Ukraine invasion failings, Kyiv said today Head of security council said Moscow has changed tactics after early defeats Putin also said to be furious at secret services for misleading him over resistance Moscow expected Ukrainian military to fold, but has met determined fighters
We never learn anything from our failures and repeat them over and over, why would they? We even had the British and Soviet experience if Afghanistan to draw on too.
I first learned about that coup in Iran watching a movie being projected on the Plaza of the Americas outside the UF library.
