I was hoping the long range atacms would be able to penetrate the air defenses and deliver enough of a payload to at least take it out of service if not leave a gap. I do find it interesting that Russia quit using the rail line to supply fuel and munitions to Crimea and wonder if there isn't some agreement not to blow it up provided they didn't use it to resupply military. Maybe Ukraine wants to leave an exit route to get the Russians out of Crimea??? Media: Russia no longer using Crimean Bridge to supply front lines (kyivindependent.com) Is Russia still using the Crimean Bridge to boost its military in Ukraine? | Euronews
Putin has said Russia is going to set up a buffer zone north of Kharkov near the Russian border. The buffer zone will deter Ukrainian attacks on Belgorod, which is less than 50 miles from Kharkov (I believe). The buffet zone will reportedly be about 6 miles wide. Russia will not try to capture Kharkov imo. .it's not strategically very important
Probably needs to be hit with 1,000 or 2,000-lb pound bombs. Something that the F-16's could probably deliver.
This is already Afghanistan 2.0 for the Russians. We don't need to send in the troops with Russia failing as badly as they have (when Ukraine is properly supplied with weapons and ammo). As long as we keep sending in artillery shells, missiles and other hardware, Russia will almost certainly lose this war. It is going to take longer than we would like, but it will happen. It took a decade for Russia to lose to Afghanistan and implode. I think Ukraine could break Russia in about 5-6 years.
The bear is caged up in its cave. Poses no more threat than a bear at the zoo. The dragon, a myth--an imaginary threat from without, conjured up to explain the ills of dragon cancer. What ails us, is inside us. An auto-immune disease that has turned our own defenses against us... and in our sickened state of delirium, our demented mind repeatedly points to the zoo bear, generates fear and panic over the scary zoo beast...
The historical lesson of Afghanistan vis a viz the USSR is pissed away, if your only take away is that Russia will lose to Ukraine and collapse, as the USSR lost to Afghanistan, and collapsed. Afghanistan was but an instrumentality--a symptom of the illness that killed the USSR--the agent that prompted the Soviet Union to spend itself into ruin. The lesson of the collapse of the USSR, was that you can topple an empire by coaxing it into spending itself into ruin, without ever engaging it directly. China appears to have taken better notes than you--or i must confess, tha *us*--or even our military brass--and has steadily pulled its puppet strings, to recreate the drama of the collapse of the USSR--and updated it for the 21st century. #34,754,422*,^^^,^^^.^^debt *at time of drafting this post. ^^^,^^^.^^ = moving too fast to count U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time Hey, I know....let's spend more! Let's add 1 Trillion to that debt every < 100 days! What could possibly go wrong?
Entirely disagree. First, Ukraine does not have five or six more years. We should all be surprised and grateful that they have held their own this long. Second, the end state desired here is not to weaken, bleed, or humiliate Russia (those are inevitable consequences for Russia, but they are not the goals). The goal is to preserve the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine and the rules-based international order where war is not used as a means for the strong to do whatever they want to the weak. And, yes, that is going to take more international involvement and direct military pressure on Russia. That might mean directly killing some Russians to make a point, but it doesn’t have to. What is absolutely necessary is the message (which Russia is not yet receiving) that there is no scenario in which they will be allowed to win by military means, only varying degrees of how bad they lose. Sad that our smaller allies are waking up to these facts before we are, and again I prescribe Step 1 as throwing Jake Sullivan out on his ass and getting the President someone serious to advise him.
So you think China is a joke, too? Do you recommend more complacency and appeasement when they make their move on Taiwan?
ATACMS are not designed to go taking down bridges. They have a big explosive yield but not a lot of penetrating power. They are for soft, high-value targets discovered in the open, such as aircraft or air-defense systems. You wouldn’t use them against, say, fixed fortifications because they probably wouldn’t do much, and you need to preserve these expensive munitions. A bridge, by necessity of being able to hold up tons and tons of vehicles, is like a giant fortification of steel and concrete. The way to take out a bridge is with precision-guided 2000-lb bombs, delayed fuses, dropped from high altitude, hitting several points across the bridge. No, I don’t think Ukraine should risk that even with F-16s unless we surreptitiously supported with cyber, EW, etc to neutralize Russia’s air defenses. To answer the next question, yes, the U.S. could do it, easily, at very little risk to force or mission. At the beginning of this war, we had a very inflated view of Russia’s integrated air defense system, which we now know to be a joke. And Russia knows that we know, which is why they are terrified of us entering the war even in a limited way.
With Ukrainians ? And regarding your emoji, how on God’s green earth is an ironclad (and getting stronger) Russia-China alliance off-topic ? Because it keeps you up nights ?
Then clarify what you meant. The post I quoted seemed to suggest that the threat from China was as imaginary as the threat from Russia.
I'm sorry your attention span is so short. We covered this already. An "ironclad" alliance is exemplified by the British sending in troops to support the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. China has shown no interest in sending troops to Ukraine. Therefore, the Russia-China alliance is not ironclad. It is not even tin-clad or plastic-clad. It is closer to being a crap-clad alliance. It smells bad, and even a modest rainstorm will erase all memory of it. The fact that it is developing a stronger smell is of no consequence to international affairs.
The threat of China engaging us directly, in hot warfare, is pretty slim. At the very least, it pails in comparison to the suicidal trajectory we are on (imo, at Beijing’s prompting). So you and @chemgator figure we need to save the world from big, bad (LMAO!) Russia (who can't get past more than half the width of Florida, after 2 years of conventional warfare...), and worry about preserving a world order, where countries respect one another's borders... Begs the question though...will that order be preserved, after our economy collapses due to our drunken sailor spending at such a historical pace and scale? (Note-we added 2 billion in debt, in less than 12 hours). We going to be able to police the planet when we're broke?
