> Ukraine is gaining some ground, but very slowly. It's basically a stalemate.
Ukraine has been gaining some open fields, while losing major urban areas. Kostyantynivka just fell and Russian troops are securing the high ground overlooking the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk urban conglomerate. Pokrovsk also fell faster than expected, suggesting that Ukraine increasingly lacks the infantry manpower density to defend urban terrain.
> As long as the EU keeps supporting them, I think Ukraine will be better able to maintain the current situation than Russia.
European support doesn't rectify Ukraine's critical vulnerability: manpower...or a lack thereof. Although Euro governments seem like they might start deporting military-age Ukrainian males back to Ukraine so they can be forcibly conscripted....because sending men to their deaths against their will screams "Western liberal values", or something.
> I think a European coalition sending real practical ground and air support would help a lot
Russian analysts have been coming on Western alt-media outlets warning that Russian hardliners are increasingly advocating for striking logistics and military production sites in Europe. HistoryLegends has a good video about how France, one of the more experienced and expeditionary European countries, absolutely struggled to even get a brigade into Romania for an exercise. Europe could definitely send air support.....but do you think European citizens are ready for their cities to eat Oreshniks (at a minimum) as a response?
> I suspect sufficient support could force a breakthrough in southern Ukraine an liberate a very large chunk of land very quickly.
There isn't enough combat engineering vehicles in all of Europe to clear lanes through the Surovikin Line. The Ukrainians already learned this the hard way in summer 2023.
Has it finally fallen? Because Russia has been trying to take it for ages now, against staggering losses, and keeps claiming they control it when it turns out they don't. They do that a lot. Mostly because they desperately want to have good news to report to Putin. They are advancing, but incredibly slowly, and at enormous cost, and Ukraine regularly does take land back.
But you're absolutely right that Ukraine is short on manpower, unlike Russia which seems to have endless reserves of people to send to very rapid deaths. Ukraine is doing a lot to fill their manpower gap with drones, but their lack of manpower is exactly why I think Europe should come to their aid.
Their tactics have settled to extremely-small infantry infiltrations across almost the entire frontline. Warfare has evolved and concentrated mechanized assaults have been abject failures for both sides; it's far too easy to mass fires than it is to mass maneuver forces (see additional commentary (1) at the bottom). Russia's ground strategy is probably the least-risky way for them to keep pressure on the defenders and husband their own resources.
> their lack of manpower is exactly why I think Europe should come to their aid.
(1) Normally I would blame both air forces for lacking the capacity to systemically disrupt the defender at all depths.....but if we look at the Israeli aggression against Lebanon, the Israeli air force has total air dominance and their heavy mechanized forces are still struggling to advance. FPV drones basically quadruple the range of every ATGM team at 10% of the price.
Yes. It depicts how supplies arrive at a port, move via roads to a logistics organization that is brigade-sized, assigned to support a corps. It depicts the subordinate units within that logistics organization (the Army calls these "Sustainment Brigades"). From there supplies go to the corps's subordinate divisions. Within one of those divisions, the supplies go to/between sustainment batalions. From there, supplies go to support battalions and maintenance companies at the division's subordinate brigades. Also, along the top you can see supplies delivered from outside of the AO directly to airfields within a Division Support Area. They can also be moved via air from Corps-level airfields. The icons there depict medium and heavy lift utility helicopters.
>>Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.
Some of us were paying attention as early as the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul, when ISIS was using DJI drones to drop grenades into the turret hatches of Iraqi uparmored Humvees. Others started to notice during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, when Azeri UAV superiority dominated Armenian ground forces. But all of these professionals were like the military officers who observed the Boer Wars, and the Russo-Japanese War, and then wrote in the military journals of their day about how machineguns were gonna change warfare in a very bad way.
Flag officers still slept-walked into the carnage of WW1 trench warfare....shrug. "History doesn't repeat but it rhymes."
I haven't seen this GPU mentioned on HN. 24GB DDR6 @ ~$500 USD. Can we finally stop buying used RTX3090s if we wanna run LLMs at home at a reasonable price?
Any Chinese HN members able/willing to benchmark one of these with some open models and share the results?
I kick myself every time I fail to place bets on Polymarket. When I heard her say that, I said to myself:
* "Not Russia, which has nuclear parity and now a massively-experienced (if preoccupied) conventional army? Not China, which dwarfs our production capacity and clearly intends to push us out of the West Pacific? Iran, really? So.....we are definitely going to war with Iran after the election. Kamala will lose the election but it won't matter. She has no independent thoughts in her head....which means The Decision-Makers have already decided what needs to happen, and gave her talking points to that effect." *
Iran has been on the agenda ever since Bush made it part of the Axis of Evil, but I doubt a Harris administration would be doing what Trump is doing right now. Probably not going to war with Iran outright, and at the very least not doing so as recklessly and haphazardly.
I understand the de riguer thought terminating cliche in American political discourse is that both parties and all politicians are the same, equally corrupt, incompetent malicious, mere puppets bought by corporations and controlled by Israel, and therefore elections don't matter.
I'm not denying the Biden administration's complicity in aiding and abetting Israel's genocide or Harris's unwillingness to distance herself from it, both are disgusting, and the Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for their losses. But Donald Trump really has been qualitatively worse in what should be every conceivably relevant metric than everyone else in the field, including other Republicans.
I actually completely agree on all points. #47/DJT2 is uniquely disastrous for the American Empire. I think Kamala is a narcissistic sociopath but DJT is that PLUS a bully with a fragile ego and the most ridiculously overconfident pathological liar I've ever seen in high office.
Hard for me to judge your bubble-ness, as I'm in a different bubble of ....I dunno, a recovered former Wehraboo? Those people who "study WW2" mostly to edge themselves about how militarily successful the Nazis were. I include a large part of the US military officer corps in this category, where quoting dead German generals is normalized. I had a copy of "The Cruel Hunters"[1] before I left high school back in 2001, so of course I know what a totenkopf is, and it's shocking to me that most people don't.
EDIT: And if I had to pick a Nazi symbol I think most people don't recognize, I'd go with the Black Sun.[2]
Same. Thought I had a copy of Uthark [1][2] on my shelf too but alas I seem to have only retained Svartkonst [3] during the tragic downsizing of my library.
>this is perhaps a once in a century opportunity to end the Islamic threat once and for all. If Iran folds, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others will quickly follow and the region will be at peace.
Ukraine has been gaining some open fields, while losing major urban areas. Kostyantynivka just fell and Russian troops are securing the high ground overlooking the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk urban conglomerate. Pokrovsk also fell faster than expected, suggesting that Ukraine increasingly lacks the infantry manpower density to defend urban terrain.
> As long as the EU keeps supporting them, I think Ukraine will be better able to maintain the current situation than Russia.
European support doesn't rectify Ukraine's critical vulnerability: manpower...or a lack thereof. Although Euro governments seem like they might start deporting military-age Ukrainian males back to Ukraine so they can be forcibly conscripted....because sending men to their deaths against their will screams "Western liberal values", or something.
> I think a European coalition sending real practical ground and air support would help a lot
Russian analysts have been coming on Western alt-media outlets warning that Russian hardliners are increasingly advocating for striking logistics and military production sites in Europe. HistoryLegends has a good video about how France, one of the more experienced and expeditionary European countries, absolutely struggled to even get a brigade into Romania for an exercise. Europe could definitely send air support.....but do you think European citizens are ready for their cities to eat Oreshniks (at a minimum) as a response?
> I suspect sufficient support could force a breakthrough in southern Ukraine an liberate a very large chunk of land very quickly.
There isn't enough combat engineering vehicles in all of Europe to clear lanes through the Surovikin Line. The Ukrainians already learned this the hard way in summer 2023.