Ukraine: russia has thousands of armor and artillery, help
West: here, take 18 tanks and some arty
Ukraine: russia has hundreds if not thousands of missiles
West: here, take 20 atacms, some scalps and shit
Ukraine: hundreds of aircrafts
West: red lines, brown lines, yellow lines, mostly brown
Also West: but don't attack russian territory and maybe not even crimea and definetly not the puddings bridge
West is sending Ukrainians into gun fight with a knife, 1 arm tied behind back, blindfolded, walking backwards.
This planet is sick, it's not covid or some shit, it's "humanity" and I wish things went mental and I could smoke my last cigaretes, look at the mushroom clouds, world burning around me and smile - got ya, you fucking useless cunts, die, all of you.
I'm as ukrainian don't even know how the west is going to fight a war against russia. Like yeah, the West have more weapons, i get it, but looking on its screaming incompetence in literally everything, i feel like russians can feel free to go and capture whatever they want and they won't face any western resistance. If we look on all this from political point of view, which is also very important part of any war, the West is kinda already losing to russia, without ongoing war NATO vs russia. Half of US congress is controled by russia, russian assets easily run protests in EU without any resistance, blocking ukrainian border, there is pro-russian political parties in literal every western country for some reason... I just like...how? Why? The fuck the West is going to do, if it's already publicly shitting in pants and trying to shift it into some kind of victory? It's really feels like the West is even more paper tiger than russia. In all meanings.
Also the saying that the only thing more dangerous than to be an enemy of USA is to be an ally of the USA - the EU is slowly learning this in the hard way.
Nothing new. In WW2 Germany occupied The Netherlands in 5 days and Begium in 18 days...The thing is most people (including politicians), despite having all the signs, don't believe it could happen to them, until it happens. And then it is too late, and very complicated to fix it :( Also in WW2, the US was the decisive factor, and the US got involved only after Pearl Harbor, 2 years into the war in Europe. Without Pearl Harbor, who knows?
The West is so tired of democracy and freedom which is much harder to live (because you have to think, be responsible, to act, to vote, to be creative, to take décisions yourself, to debate ...) that it prefers Russian domination. A totalitarian leader who tells you want to do and think and lies and desinformation to always find a culprit who is responsable when something does not go right with yourself. --- That is why my biggest wish since February 23rd 2022 is to have Ukraine in the EU and in Nato. To be connected again to reality. Slava Ukraïni. Slava Herojam.
I probably sound nuts, but as an American on the West Coast I'm dreaming of the USA going the way of the USSR so we can break off, join Ukraine and the rest of the world's democracies, and kick the shit out of Putin's orcs once and for all.
Of course, I'm a rural guy, so I don't fear nuclear war. 8 SSBNs and hundreds of warheads parked just up the coast also help.
There is no West and never has been. Just countries that can rely on each other amid fading empires. We're held back by leaders determined to preserve the status quo forever, but that never happens. A reset is coming. There is power in division.
Thesis: "West is sending Ukrainians into gun fight with a knife, 1 arm tied behind back, blindfolded, walking backwards."
Anti-thesis: till mid-2023 both Ukrainians and Westerns said that Ukraine got everything to perform a successful counterattack. From day 1 they say Russians are useless, can't hit a cow in a barn.
These are all political viewpoints, expressing btw the point: we have got not enough and often not things we asked for, but we are ready to kick as s es.
Biden promissed to hit Russia in case Navalny dies (back in 2021), but in reality that’s nothing just words.
Medvedev had promised to hit GB with nuces in case they will pass StormShadows to UA… nothing…
it sounds like manipulation. I think you do not remember how much weapon GSUA asked for counteroffensive? And how much of that was promised? And how much (exactly few) of that was delivered?
Regarding RU - I remember our narrative very well - "We're lucky that they are so dumb". That's all. Things not changed much. They are still dumb (most of them), but they are many :(
Yes, they are questionable. Not more than yours, which state that the retreat from Avdiivka solved the problem of low stock of 155 mm shells. Look them up @ https://lostarmour.info/map_la
Still manipulating? How do you know what sources are mine? And how do you know how credible resources that you do not know? Again made up statements about solving 155 mm problem. Also thank you for credible link without any RU losses. Go on. You or z-headed or troll. Or worse...
"The main aspect of this battle that I would point out is that this was the first time in a very long time, if ever, that we have seen the UAF commit an entire brigade to combat with a very clear operational objective and that objective was achieved. I’ll get into guestimates about casualties and implications a bit lower, as have others, but what struck me was how bog-standard military and regular army the commitment of 3rd Assault to Avdiivka was. Lots of times one gets the impression the UAF is just so short of resources and planners it’s making ops up as it goes along, this wasn’t the case with the 3rd at Avdiivka.
First, the brigade appears to have gone into combat at near full strength, in good morale, and I monitor enough of their internal chat channels to have been surprised first at their security discipline and second and the absence of griping. Normally, when a UAF unit gets thrown into combat, low level soldiers immediately surface griping about how higher has no idea what they were doing. Not this time. From what I can see, they knew where they were going and what the job was: get 110th Brigade out of a near-encirclement and then retire lines to prepared positions.
They went in near full-strength and aggressively, with the clear goal of creating enough space for the retreat to have a chance. I’ve read reports that the 3rd got beefed up to the equivalent of six or seven battalions, which is a little misleading because since they are a UAF unit skilled at recruiting and finding volunteer funding, they have TOE three infantry battalions, and a “battalion” each of artillery, drones and armor.
The lost a very few POWs and captured POWs. Comms points knew where to go and casualty evacuation appears to have worked. They had been training for urban fighting and the infantry that I saw was armed for that. It seems like they did what they needed to do: extract the remains of the 110th and then facilitate a retreat of about 5 km. to prepared positions on high ground, and it took about five days.
Which is not to paint the UAF’s loss of Avdiivka as military miracle, it was a defeat, zero questions.
My point is, that for close to two years I’ve been watching the UAF like a hawk for cases where I can clearly say a UAF area commander made an operational decision involving an entire brigade, and the UAF gets a result it wanted. Almost always, overwhelmingly, when the UAF has had a battlefield crisis, the response has been to throw bits and pieces of multiple brigades at the problem. This makes defending more sustainable as that means the organizations of multiple brigades feed reinforcements into a fight, but the UAF force is inherently impossible to maneuver, and if casualties go on then doomed to die in place because rotation of pieces of the force is really complicated.
That’s not what happened at Adviivka, and for me it was striking. A single brigade (with attachments) went in, it had a mission, it completed it, and then it went on to its next mission. The military brainiac crowd would call it all a competent commitment of force on an operational level, and in and of itself it’s a respectable achievement. Moving a brigade into combat and then keeping the situation under control isn’t easy in training,it’s hard in a war, it’s harder in a unit commanded by non-career officers and with limited sergeants, and it’s even harder on unfamiliar ground.
That 3rd Assault managed it is mostly a testament to the combat experience of the soldiers and junior leaders, two frigging years a lot of them, but even more, very strong evidence that at least in one Ukrainian brigade there is a functional staff that can plan an operation and then manage its subordinate formations so that the op comes off roughly as planned. If this is a one-off, well, we all know the 3rd recruits around Kyiv and so that’s better-educated soldiers and more volunteer donations. Image attached, it’s from the 3rd, so you can decide for yourself if they’re typical UAF or not.
If it’s not a one-off, then we have just seen the light of a horizon for a time when UAF formations are actually capable of conventional operational maneuver. Again, this is not to deny it was overall a defeat, or to claim really the Ukrainians one. Rather, it is to point to something the UAF did, that a lot of us have been waiting for the better part of two years to see them do.
That being said, there are a lot of brigades in the UAF, this was just one. Off-hand I suspect maybe of the 30 or so combat brigades the UAF fields, maybe 3 or 4, tops, would have probably been able to do what the 3rd just did."
Pobeda village is not fallen completely: 50/50 as of 3 hrs ago. Still contested with certain activities which could have positive outcome. We will see…
Ty again for the update Tom. It’s a treat to read Don’s work and then your posts. Appreciate the truth regarding other western “support”… or laughable attempts to do that.
As for the NYT article, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Biden administration “leaked” wrong numbers as to boost the case for US aid. Again in the wrong way.
I gotta tell you, if you are now just discovering that the New York Times is a shitshow run by idiots who give incompetency a bad name you have been WAY behind. Those tools can (and likely have) get lost in a closet. I need to also point out that the Russians really went about "learning" the secrets of the Bradley the hard way. They could have just sent someone to the local Legion Hall near Fort Benning or Fort Hood (Now Fort Cavasos), buy a round or two of drinks, and ask anyone wearing a Desert Storm Hat if he was on Bradleys. I promise you they would have the whole show down to the vehicle serial number. Of course, then they would get to have the comment "Yep, those were fun, but I hear the later versions are WAY better" added on.
I am more and more appalled by the Western ability (or rather the will) to respond adequately to the real danger of Russian imperialism. Rhetorically, the West understands this, but in practice, comfort is more important... after two years, it should have looked completely different. It is not only a shame, but also a reason to fear some direct conflict in the future (Russia, China, Iran...?)
I constantly point this out to so many people. Equipment pledged does NOT equal equipment on the ground. Not without a significant time factor. Which pisses me off to no end. I keep hearing the US has all of this stuff "ready" to go on "a moments notice" once the funding is approved. And there is sits. All of our leadership in the last six months sucks balls on this situation. Biden for his slow-rolling and piece-mealing (can't make the Russians mad), and then this whole cutting Ukraine out of the defense budget vote and then tying it to the border (which is a real issue here, I'm from Texas, it's real and a big problem, but the money isn't the same pot and I fail to see why other than straight up political Bullshit they are even mentioned in the same breath). The GOP for letting the MAGAs get WAY to powerful for their numbers, and letting them drive this whole train, then after weeks of work dumping it in ONE day thanks to Trump (lots of folks are touchy about this because Trump is showing some of the real BS in the system, he's not elected, but somehow he says he doesn't like it and poof, the guys who are elected drop the bill they worked on for weeks? Yeah, the mask really fell off on that one), and then pushing another bill with the Speaker of the House then saying "No border Stuff? Well, that won't go anywhere" after killing the last one that DID have it all. Honestly, I've had it up past my eyeballs with this bs.
See, this is why I've come to believe that the only solution to the USA is to break up the federal government. Create 5-6 geographically defined regions, most of them built on state groupings that never change their political alignment anymore.
Let each take the Constitution and evolve along its own path. We keep the nuclear deterrent, federal reserve, and right of movement intact in a limited EU-like supra-national government in D.C. Everything else - push it down to a more local level.
West Coast, where I live, has a $5 trillion economy and ability to sustain more than 20% of the present Pentagon budget. Let us focus solely on the Pacific. Texas and the other mid-continental states can have Israel and the Middle East.
Domestically, in each region the partisan balance would immediately reset. No longer would Democrats and Republicans at the local level be pulled into the national level culture wars, feeling forced to split into those two teams because any win by the other side risks total defeat everywhere (in the partisan mindset). On the West Coast we'd have a left party and a centrist one balancing things out, in Texas you'd get a right party and a centrist group.
There's my pointless rant for the day. But you sound like you're in about the same boat as me. At some point, things have gotta shift because nobody is winning the present fight.
A lot would depend on the "how" of that breakup. Essentially, you would want to avoid fighting over specific border regions or infrastructure coveted by both newly forming countries, population transfers and suchlike. I vaguely recall a similar experiment that would have balanced out the northern, Whig-Republican leaning region and the southern one, dominated by Democratic landowners, as they could no longer agree on how to run the whole thing - and then the deal fell apart over the debate of who controls a goddamn fort.
I'm not going to call the Civil War an experiment. That was something else entirely (just so you know my view on it, Sherman rocked). I'm not to the point of saying the US needs to break up a bit, but we certainly are at the point of some serious political realigning needing to happen. A centralist party should in theory be a huge hit, but we just can't get one going. Yet.
Tom, what about the situation in the air? Regardless whether as many as reported Russian jets went down, do you see any improvement in terms of the number of sorties, glided bombs released, etc? I think the speaker of the Ukrainian air defenses commented so, but what is your view ?
The NY Tass article was a hoot! I told them on their Tips line that an army can’t do an organized withdrawal without artillery shells, and like, where are the videos of “hundreds or thousands” of POWs?! I’m almost ready to stop my online NYT subscription!
On the subject of pledges, whatever happened to those F16s? Weren’t they supposed to be delivered by now? (I remember you didn’t think they would have much effect.)
Never mind - I searched the web and responses ranged from “we have a delivery date but don’t want to publicize it for security reasons” to “sometime this year”. Prior estimate was end of 2023.
I read somewhere by May this year some Ukrainian pilots will be graduating. I also heard on twitter some infrastructure for storing and operating the F16s has been completed in Ukraine and Ukraine should be prepared to have them any time "soon".
Regarding American journalism... these are the same people - from Fox to MSNBC - who daily mock Hailey for not just quitting now. There is precious little memory and less investigation.
Cancelled my subscription to the "New Orc Times" on account of their pro Kremlin bias, clearly stated in my feedback.
Thank you for the update. Lets ignore western idiocy and lies so you dont get a hearth attack. Looking forward to that analysis on air power.
Ukraine: russia has thousands of armor and artillery, help
West: here, take 18 tanks and some arty
Ukraine: russia has hundreds if not thousands of missiles
West: here, take 20 atacms, some scalps and shit
Ukraine: hundreds of aircrafts
West: red lines, brown lines, yellow lines, mostly brown
Also West: but don't attack russian territory and maybe not even crimea and definetly not the puddings bridge
West is sending Ukrainians into gun fight with a knife, 1 arm tied behind back, blindfolded, walking backwards.
This planet is sick, it's not covid or some shit, it's "humanity" and I wish things went mental and I could smoke my last cigaretes, look at the mushroom clouds, world burning around me and smile - got ya, you fucking useless cunts, die, all of you.
I'm as ukrainian don't even know how the west is going to fight a war against russia. Like yeah, the West have more weapons, i get it, but looking on its screaming incompetence in literally everything, i feel like russians can feel free to go and capture whatever they want and they won't face any western resistance. If we look on all this from political point of view, which is also very important part of any war, the West is kinda already losing to russia, without ongoing war NATO vs russia. Half of US congress is controled by russia, russian assets easily run protests in EU without any resistance, blocking ukrainian border, there is pro-russian political parties in literal every western country for some reason... I just like...how? Why? The fuck the West is going to do, if it's already publicly shitting in pants and trying to shift it into some kind of victory? It's really feels like the West is even more paper tiger than russia. In all meanings.
The old tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig
Also the saying that the only thing more dangerous than to be an enemy of USA is to be an ally of the USA - the EU is slowly learning this in the hard way.
Nothing new. In WW2 Germany occupied The Netherlands in 5 days and Begium in 18 days...The thing is most people (including politicians), despite having all the signs, don't believe it could happen to them, until it happens. And then it is too late, and very complicated to fix it :( Also in WW2, the US was the decisive factor, and the US got involved only after Pearl Harbor, 2 years into the war in Europe. Without Pearl Harbor, who knows?
The West is so tired of democracy and freedom which is much harder to live (because you have to think, be responsible, to act, to vote, to be creative, to take décisions yourself, to debate ...) that it prefers Russian domination. A totalitarian leader who tells you want to do and think and lies and desinformation to always find a culprit who is responsable when something does not go right with yourself. --- That is why my biggest wish since February 23rd 2022 is to have Ukraine in the EU and in Nato. To be connected again to reality. Slava Ukraïni. Slava Herojam.
....gosh... this with 'you have to think, be responsible, to act, to vote, to be creative... that's all so truth for democracy... it almost hurts.
I probably sound nuts, but as an American on the West Coast I'm dreaming of the USA going the way of the USSR so we can break off, join Ukraine and the rest of the world's democracies, and kick the shit out of Putin's orcs once and for all.
Of course, I'm a rural guy, so I don't fear nuclear war. 8 SSBNs and hundreds of warheads parked just up the coast also help.
There is no West and never has been. Just countries that can rely on each other amid fading empires. We're held back by leaders determined to preserve the status quo forever, but that never happens. A reset is coming. There is power in division.
Thesis: "West is sending Ukrainians into gun fight with a knife, 1 arm tied behind back, blindfolded, walking backwards."
Anti-thesis: till mid-2023 both Ukrainians and Westerns said that Ukraine got everything to perform a successful counterattack. From day 1 they say Russians are useless, can't hit a cow in a barn.
Synthesis: truth is the first victim of war
Any firm proofs Ukrainian officials saying: we have all necessary for counter? There was PRBS wave aiming to raise the spirit, maybe you meant this?
First: https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-counteroffensive-russia-war-oleksiy-danilov-interview-6e8e4fec0916bf10a9bcd642374103f9
Then: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/zelenskiy-says-ukraine-ready-launch-counteroffensive-2023-06-03/
versus the Evil West:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/pentagon-documents-ukraine-war-assessment/index.html
These are all political viewpoints, expressing btw the point: we have got not enough and often not things we asked for, but we are ready to kick as s es.
Biden promissed to hit Russia in case Navalny dies (back in 2021), but in reality that’s nothing just words.
Medvedev had promised to hit GB with nuces in case they will pass StormShadows to UA… nothing…
it sounds like manipulation. I think you do not remember how much weapon GSUA asked for counteroffensive? And how much of that was promised? And how much (exactly few) of that was delivered?
Regarding RU - I remember our narrative very well - "We're lucky that they are so dumb". That's all. Things not changed much. They are still dumb (most of them), but they are many :(
So you say Zelenskiy and Zaluzhnyi betrayed Ukraine, starting the counteroffensive while being not ready?
continue manipulating? making up my statements and tring to force me to answer them? are you troll?
"Mind: that’s at the times the ZSU remains critically short on artillery ammunition…"
The Russians told that what they accomplished around Krynky was destroying a lot of arty - especially SPGs.
I'm sure you have seen the HIMARS launchers sent back to repair.
Exact amount is 2. Which is perfect result for 1,5years of their exploitation
what HIMARS has to do with spg and krynky?
Artillery battles + I am sure you have heard about the last strike on Russian bunched up troops @ the Aleshkinsky Sands National Park
"The russians told that..." - Your sources are at least questionable. Do you have any reasonable proofs, or just came here to spread RU fantasies?
Yes, they are questionable. Not more than yours, which state that the retreat from Avdiivka solved the problem of low stock of 155 mm shells. Look them up @ https://lostarmour.info/map_la
Still manipulating? How do you know what sources are mine? And how do you know how credible resources that you do not know? Again made up statements about solving 155 mm problem. Also thank you for credible link without any RU losses. Go on. You or z-headed or troll. Or worse...
Stefan Korshak makes an interesting analysis of the last few days in Avdiivka:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/ktcqhM6zrydC1yWS/
"The main aspect of this battle that I would point out is that this was the first time in a very long time, if ever, that we have seen the UAF commit an entire brigade to combat with a very clear operational objective and that objective was achieved. I’ll get into guestimates about casualties and implications a bit lower, as have others, but what struck me was how bog-standard military and regular army the commitment of 3rd Assault to Avdiivka was. Lots of times one gets the impression the UAF is just so short of resources and planners it’s making ops up as it goes along, this wasn’t the case with the 3rd at Avdiivka.
First, the brigade appears to have gone into combat at near full strength, in good morale, and I monitor enough of their internal chat channels to have been surprised first at their security discipline and second and the absence of griping. Normally, when a UAF unit gets thrown into combat, low level soldiers immediately surface griping about how higher has no idea what they were doing. Not this time. From what I can see, they knew where they were going and what the job was: get 110th Brigade out of a near-encirclement and then retire lines to prepared positions.
They went in near full-strength and aggressively, with the clear goal of creating enough space for the retreat to have a chance. I’ve read reports that the 3rd got beefed up to the equivalent of six or seven battalions, which is a little misleading because since they are a UAF unit skilled at recruiting and finding volunteer funding, they have TOE three infantry battalions, and a “battalion” each of artillery, drones and armor.
The lost a very few POWs and captured POWs. Comms points knew where to go and casualty evacuation appears to have worked. They had been training for urban fighting and the infantry that I saw was armed for that. It seems like they did what they needed to do: extract the remains of the 110th and then facilitate a retreat of about 5 km. to prepared positions on high ground, and it took about five days.
Which is not to paint the UAF’s loss of Avdiivka as military miracle, it was a defeat, zero questions.
My point is, that for close to two years I’ve been watching the UAF like a hawk for cases where I can clearly say a UAF area commander made an operational decision involving an entire brigade, and the UAF gets a result it wanted. Almost always, overwhelmingly, when the UAF has had a battlefield crisis, the response has been to throw bits and pieces of multiple brigades at the problem. This makes defending more sustainable as that means the organizations of multiple brigades feed reinforcements into a fight, but the UAF force is inherently impossible to maneuver, and if casualties go on then doomed to die in place because rotation of pieces of the force is really complicated.
That’s not what happened at Adviivka, and for me it was striking. A single brigade (with attachments) went in, it had a mission, it completed it, and then it went on to its next mission. The military brainiac crowd would call it all a competent commitment of force on an operational level, and in and of itself it’s a respectable achievement. Moving a brigade into combat and then keeping the situation under control isn’t easy in training,it’s hard in a war, it’s harder in a unit commanded by non-career officers and with limited sergeants, and it’s even harder on unfamiliar ground.
That 3rd Assault managed it is mostly a testament to the combat experience of the soldiers and junior leaders, two frigging years a lot of them, but even more, very strong evidence that at least in one Ukrainian brigade there is a functional staff that can plan an operation and then manage its subordinate formations so that the op comes off roughly as planned. If this is a one-off, well, we all know the 3rd recruits around Kyiv and so that’s better-educated soldiers and more volunteer donations. Image attached, it’s from the 3rd, so you can decide for yourself if they’re typical UAF or not.
If it’s not a one-off, then we have just seen the light of a horizon for a time when UAF formations are actually capable of conventional operational maneuver. Again, this is not to deny it was overall a defeat, or to claim really the Ukrainians one. Rather, it is to point to something the UAF did, that a lot of us have been waiting for the better part of two years to see them do.
That being said, there are a lot of brigades in the UAF, this was just one. Off-hand I suspect maybe of the 30 or so combat brigades the UAF fields, maybe 3 or 4, tops, would have probably been able to do what the 3rd just did."
Let's hope that the rest of the UAF will rise to that level of quality, or even higher...
Thanks Tom.
The situation around Novomikhailovka seems to be currently the most critical. (after the fall of Pobeda)
Pobeda village is not fallen completely: 50/50 as of 3 hrs ago. Still contested with certain activities which could have positive outcome. We will see…
Ty again for the update Tom. It’s a treat to read Don’s work and then your posts. Appreciate the truth regarding other western “support”… or laughable attempts to do that.
As for the NYT article, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Biden administration “leaked” wrong numbers as to boost the case for US aid. Again in the wrong way.
I gotta tell you, if you are now just discovering that the New York Times is a shitshow run by idiots who give incompetency a bad name you have been WAY behind. Those tools can (and likely have) get lost in a closet. I need to also point out that the Russians really went about "learning" the secrets of the Bradley the hard way. They could have just sent someone to the local Legion Hall near Fort Benning or Fort Hood (Now Fort Cavasos), buy a round or two of drinks, and ask anyone wearing a Desert Storm Hat if he was on Bradleys. I promise you they would have the whole show down to the vehicle serial number. Of course, then they would get to have the comment "Yep, those were fun, but I hear the later versions are WAY better" added on.
I am more and more appalled by the Western ability (or rather the will) to respond adequately to the real danger of Russian imperialism. Rhetorically, the West understands this, but in practice, comfort is more important... after two years, it should have looked completely different. It is not only a shame, but also a reason to fear some direct conflict in the future (Russia, China, Iran...?)
I constantly point this out to so many people. Equipment pledged does NOT equal equipment on the ground. Not without a significant time factor. Which pisses me off to no end. I keep hearing the US has all of this stuff "ready" to go on "a moments notice" once the funding is approved. And there is sits. All of our leadership in the last six months sucks balls on this situation. Biden for his slow-rolling and piece-mealing (can't make the Russians mad), and then this whole cutting Ukraine out of the defense budget vote and then tying it to the border (which is a real issue here, I'm from Texas, it's real and a big problem, but the money isn't the same pot and I fail to see why other than straight up political Bullshit they are even mentioned in the same breath). The GOP for letting the MAGAs get WAY to powerful for their numbers, and letting them drive this whole train, then after weeks of work dumping it in ONE day thanks to Trump (lots of folks are touchy about this because Trump is showing some of the real BS in the system, he's not elected, but somehow he says he doesn't like it and poof, the guys who are elected drop the bill they worked on for weeks? Yeah, the mask really fell off on that one), and then pushing another bill with the Speaker of the House then saying "No border Stuff? Well, that won't go anywhere" after killing the last one that DID have it all. Honestly, I've had it up past my eyeballs with this bs.
See, this is why I've come to believe that the only solution to the USA is to break up the federal government. Create 5-6 geographically defined regions, most of them built on state groupings that never change their political alignment anymore.
Let each take the Constitution and evolve along its own path. We keep the nuclear deterrent, federal reserve, and right of movement intact in a limited EU-like supra-national government in D.C. Everything else - push it down to a more local level.
West Coast, where I live, has a $5 trillion economy and ability to sustain more than 20% of the present Pentagon budget. Let us focus solely on the Pacific. Texas and the other mid-continental states can have Israel and the Middle East.
Domestically, in each region the partisan balance would immediately reset. No longer would Democrats and Republicans at the local level be pulled into the national level culture wars, feeling forced to split into those two teams because any win by the other side risks total defeat everywhere (in the partisan mindset). On the West Coast we'd have a left party and a centrist one balancing things out, in Texas you'd get a right party and a centrist group.
There's my pointless rant for the day. But you sound like you're in about the same boat as me. At some point, things have gotta shift because nobody is winning the present fight.
A lot would depend on the "how" of that breakup. Essentially, you would want to avoid fighting over specific border regions or infrastructure coveted by both newly forming countries, population transfers and suchlike. I vaguely recall a similar experiment that would have balanced out the northern, Whig-Republican leaning region and the southern one, dominated by Democratic landowners, as they could no longer agree on how to run the whole thing - and then the deal fell apart over the debate of who controls a goddamn fort.
I'm not going to call the Civil War an experiment. That was something else entirely (just so you know my view on it, Sherman rocked). I'm not to the point of saying the US needs to break up a bit, but we certainly are at the point of some serious political realigning needing to happen. A centralist party should in theory be a huge hit, but we just can't get one going. Yet.
Tom, what about the situation in the air? Regardless whether as many as reported Russian jets went down, do you see any improvement in terms of the number of sorties, glided bombs released, etc? I think the speaker of the Ukrainian air defenses commented so, but what is your view ?
The NY Tass article was a hoot! I told them on their Tips line that an army can’t do an organized withdrawal without artillery shells, and like, where are the videos of “hundreds or thousands” of POWs?! I’m almost ready to stop my online NYT subscription!
On the subject of pledges, whatever happened to those F16s? Weren’t they supposed to be delivered by now? (I remember you didn’t think they would have much effect.)
Never mind - I searched the web and responses ranged from “we have a delivery date but don’t want to publicize it for security reasons” to “sometime this year”. Prior estimate was end of 2023.
I read somewhere by May this year some Ukrainian pilots will be graduating. I also heard on twitter some infrastructure for storing and operating the F16s has been completed in Ukraine and Ukraine should be prepared to have them any time "soon".
Delivery is one thing. Training pilots and support personnel is quite another...
They were talking about all of these things together when they said “delivery”. Like they won’t “deliver” the planes until everything is in place.
And we still don't know what kind of weapons these F-16 will carry, and in what quantities...
An airframe without weapons is useless.
Thanks for another good report Tom, I always look forward to yours and Don's reports have a good day
Regarding American journalism... these are the same people - from Fox to MSNBC - who daily mock Hailey for not just quitting now. There is precious little memory and less investigation.