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The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

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Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#681

Post by caycep »

idiotsecant wrote: post #555
mschuster91 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they just want everyone to think that way That's the thing with religious or ideologically driven dictators. They're nutjobs, not beholden to reality in their decisionmaking but to whatever their ideology prescribes - and thus are prone to making decisions that seem to (or end up being) utterly stupid / irrational. With Yugoslavia, it was Tito's idea to force all the various countries into one common ethnicity. Wit…

It's wildly naive to think that dictators are 'nutjobs'. They are, without exception, shrewd political operators. You don't get to be dictator and stay dictator without a certain skill set, and part of that is having a good sense of which actions get you a bigger bank account and which ones end with your head on a stick. They might be wrong like any human, but they aren't cartoon villains.

maybe not nut jobs, but I think the argument that the inherent structure that they put in place to maintain power is poor at optimizing human capital and expertise, such that they will aways make lousier decisions because they are surrounded by yes men

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#682

Post by marcus_holmes »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #478
marcus_holmes wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs". Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light…

You realize Russia has drones too, right? And also artillery shell manufacturing capacity 2x the west? And they continue to bombard Ukraine?

Russia is not using their drones in the same way that Ukraine is.

Russia cannot get conventional artillery close enough to use it properly, and Ukraine is keeping personnel away from the front line so they're hard to spot and harder to hit.

Russia is bombarding Ukraine's population centres with long-range cruise missiles. This is the failed Blitz strategy that Britain goaded Germany into during WW2 - get the enemy mad enough to bomb population centres, and not military or economic assets (Germany had almost achieved air superiority by bombing British airfields). Ukraine is leaving the population centres alone and focusing on economic and military production facilities.

Russia is losing this war. And has been for over a year.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#683

Post by marcus_holmes »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #496
marcus_holmes wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs". Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light…

Russia could end the war instantly with a few nukes if it wanted to. I don't get it why it hasn't done that yet. Pride?

Because the point of the war was part of the plan to reform the Soviet Union under Russia/Putin.

The idea was to spend a few days, a couple weeks at most, taking Kyiv and the major cities, and then absorb Ukraine into a greater Russian state.

If they have to nuke Ukraine to make them do that, then that's not going to work. Absorbing a radioactive hellhole, with all the problems that will bring, isn't the plan.

Of course, the plan has gone badly wrong, and pretty much everything has gone the opposite to the way Putin wanted it do, so he could still nuke Ukraine just out of petty spite.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#684

Post by marcus_holmes »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #481
marcus_holmes wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is working so well against Iran, right? Oh wait, no, the other thing.

Hilarious. You realize the US could nuke and flatten Iran tomorrow, right? Do you imagine that Trump was trying to conquer Iran and just couldn't do it with all the American military power? There is no scenario that Iran wins a war with the USA. They were trying to overthrow the regime, for the second time in a year, and failed.

Iran has already won the war. There is no scenario that the USA comes out of this situation in a better place than it was before the war started.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#685

Post by jojobas »

nerdyadventurer wrote: post #594
jojobas wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian goals are vastly different from US'. US has no intent to incorporate Iran or fight out for each and every mountain village. US goals might not be easily achievable either but for completely different reasons. Iran is also unlikely to get 10% of the logistical support Ukraine has.

US may not take Iran under them, but they will grip the Iran's economy by controlling their oil and gas resources. It is what US doing in Irque, all oil sales going through bank of New York, they not only take cuts from sales but also make threats like we would not send dollars if you did not do this and that. US involvement in the Middle East has ruined those countries. It is not a just middle east where ever they i…

Ruined countries: UAE Oman Bahrein Iraq (post 2003)

Not ruined countries: Iraq (pre-2003) Yemen

lol

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#686

Post by lazide »

eszed wrote: post #677
lazide wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole thing was a war of ‘yes men’ telling the big bad what he wanted to hear, even though it was insane. Also Iran.

Absolutely. On the other hand, Russia's previous conquests / adventures (Chechnya; Georgia, 2008; Ukraine, 2014) were shrugged at by the west. It's wasn't insane to expect that taking over the rest of Ukraine, if quickly successful , would have been treated likewise. I'm cynical enough to think it probably would have been. The "yes men" told Putin the military was able to do it. Probably they even thought it was, bec…

The US was publicly announcing Russia’s troop movements literally weeks in advance. it was pure delusion to think blitzkreig would actually have worked.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#687

Post by streetfighter64 »

Fizz43 wrote: post #588
streetfighter64 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military industrial complex is a "narrative"? If anything the public does not understand it enough. But please, do scrutinize it. What is the goal of all of the USAs wars in the middle east, if not to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of shareholders of weapons companies? The latest one for example, in Iran, is clearly just because Trump can profit off of it, and because Israel wants to destroy all of their…

Just to be clear what your position is. You believe that US is getting involved in wars particularly the middle east because US government wants to give money directly to military contractors or it wants to boost the value of these weapons companies to benefit the people who invested.

If they just wrote the owners of the weapons companies a check directly, the public wouldn't like that as much as the "patriotic" "war on terror". But of course there's also other reasons such as religious fundamentalism (christian zionism) that influence it.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#688

Post by esseph »

squidbeak wrote: post #563
ericmay wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s wrong. The US and UK airlifted anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles among other things to Ukraine while telling the world Russia was about to invade (which Europeans refused to believe). You may be confusing European support and their lack of it (remember the famous time Germany just sent 45,000 old helmets?) with how the United States and United Kingdom helped. For example this was published in April 2022. So…

There were no airlifts into Ukraine, arms had to cross the border as they have since. The supplies were in small quantities up to the invasion. They were an important help to Ukraine, but you are overstating how crucial they were - as if stingers and NLAWs did the fighting, or as if Ukraine didn't have its Soviet legacy or homegrown systems like Stugna-P which had a much more decisive impact those early months. Weste…

~6 days after the invasion around 19k anti-tank weapons had been pulled from multiple bases in the region and driven in from Poland and Romania.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#689

Post by skolos »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #648
squidbeak wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mistaken. A significant portion of Ukraine's manufacturing now happens abroad, out of Russia's reach. Meanwhile, a large part of its domestic production is decentralized and widely distributed. (You can easily find snobbish and pejorative comments by Rheinmetall's CEO about this.) Nuclear weapon use would lead to no meaningful military success, but it would immediately alienate the superpower Russia depends on…

Maybe I'm dumb, but what good are they then if you cannot use them to annihilate your enemy?

deterrent - no one starts war with a country that has nukes

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#690

Post by lenerdenator »

protocolture wrote: post #357
lenerdenator wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the goal of the US/Iran war? It varies. Which is the problem. I can think of a few: 1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent. 2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their…

>1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. Every time someone hits them, they learn that they wouldnt be hit if only they had a nuclear weapon.

If that's their takeaway, then we should probably keep up the pressure.
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