https://xcancel.com/ArmchairW/status/1839453350854853047

There’s actually a critical lesson to draw from this and other Ukrainian fiascos, of which the Bakhmut saga and the Zaporozhie Hundred Days come to mind: Ukraine will have ended up losing this war in large part because it consistently tried to fight beyond its means.

The Ukrainians started this war with an enormous army, well in excess of what the Russians could and actually did commit to the fight in 2022. That huge force (the “First Army”) was badly mauled in early 2022, but it was rejuvenated later that year by a combination of ruthless mobilization and massive aid from NATO. This convinced the Russian Stavka to transition to the defensive and consolidate their position in Ukraine, withdrawing troops from more exposed positions in east Kharkov and right-bank Kherson. Any serious assessment of the situation at that point would have been that the Russians had consolidated into a basically impregnable position that the AFU was incapable of breaching (lest we forget in the wake of Russia’s totally unhindered withdrawal from the area, their attempts at reducing the Kherson bridgehead by force in mid-2022 were bloody disasters), and the correct course of action was to start digging in and negotiate a peace treaty in the meantime.

The Ukrainian leadership instead threw a disturbingly large portion of the “Second Army” into Prigozhin’s meatgrinder in Bakhmut and then ordered not one but two large-scale counteroffensives into Zaporozhie and the Bakhmut flanks using the post-Bakhmut remains of the “Second Army” and their NATO-supplied “Third Army.” Those failed with enormous losses, opening the way for Russia to transition back to the offensive in late 2023 and begin systematically rolling Ukraine out of the Donbass. The correct course of action at this point was, again, to find a tenable defensive line and start digging. Zelensky instead ordered a “Hail Mary” offensive in Kursk with the remnants of the “Third Army” and significant elements from a lightly-equipped “Fourth Army,” hoping Russian border defenses were weak despite their having ample warning of Ukrainian designs on the border region (courtesy of several earlier, smaller raids) and plenty of time to prepare. It proceeded to fail with enormous losses - Ukrainian forces breached the border, began to exploit, and ran square into a Russian haymaker counter-punch that stopped them in their tracks. The Ukrainians then reinforced failure, sending massive reinforcements into a death pit in an attempt to keep a sliver of Russian soil under their flag as a middle finger to Putin.

And while this was happening the front in the Donbass started to collapse with Russian troops making large advances and seizing key terrain, in no small part because the AFU’s resources had been systematically redirected to a tertiary operation far to the north. We’ve seen, again and again and again, that when the Ukrainians got resources and generated forces, rather than admitting they are the weaker power here and working to strengthen their positions and conciliate, they instead squandered them on hugely ambitious and equally doomed offensives. In 2023 these offensives were aimed at restoring their pre-2014 borders when Donetsk may as well have been on the Moon for them, while in 2024 their ambitions transitioned to the outright insanity of conquering southwest Russia despite the fact they’d been on the military back foot for the last year. These are the moves of a power setting objectives beyond its means to achieve, and they will probably end up dooming Ukraine as a sovereign state going forward.

https://xcancel.com/maphumanintent/status/1720933055307600231

Fun theoretical exercise I’m currently working on for the @fortisanalysis side of things:

US refineries (total) only store about 40 million gallons of military-grade jet fuel at any given time, or about 36,400 flight hours for an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet launched from an aircraft carrier. For 40 x -18’s per carrier, this is about 910 flight hours. A carrier holds roughly 3 million gallons of fuel for its wing, about 68 flight hours per bird. Now consider that a notional mixed complement of 20 x F-35’s and 20 X F-15EX’s operating out of Kadena AFB would consume about 62,400 gallons per hour combined. Thus, just a single carrier wing and a single AFB wing’s complement of fighters (80 combined) theoretically all operating at once would drink 106,400 gal/hr.

So…

The net stores of military jet fuel immediately available from US refiners above the global contingency supplies managed by the Defense Logistics Agency at any time represents about 375 net flight hours for one carrier and one air wing…less than 16 days of high intensity air operations by far fewer assets than the US would throw into an all-out theater conflict in the Pacific Rim. DLA Energy ended FY2022 with 1.68 billion gallons of on hand inventory of jet fuel to serve the entire DOD combined inventory of 14,000+ aviation assets - cargo, fighter, rotary wing, bombers, drones, tankers, and recon. Which begs the question: How fast would two theaters of conflict burn through all contingency supplies of fuel? And what does DOD do when the well runs dry?

Reminder that for the Gulf War’s air campaign, the US had nearly 6 months to prepare, move assets into place, build up whole new infrastructure, etc., right next to Iraq without the Iraqis being able to do much to respond. Westerners love to call back on that campaign to justify their belief that the US/NATO could totally destroy any opponent in just a few weeks with their superior air forces, but completely ignore the logistical realities of actually doing so. And today, with the proliferation of long-range precision munitions, actually managing to build up the concentrations of forces and supplies necessary for large campaigns like this is substantially more difficult - we see this already in Ukraine, with Russian deep strikes doing significant damage, taking out ammunition depots and arms shipments, and wiping out various gatherings of Ukrainian troops and mercenaries.

If Iraq had the ballistic missiles that Yemen wields today, things could have gone very differently back then.

I assume a lot of these patents wouldn’t actually hold up if challenged in court - but I guess you can file them anyway? I’m not familiar with patent law at all, but seeing as there’s literally millions filed, I would assume there really isn’t that much oversight done at the moment of filing… which seems like a great system to have: just let those with the resources to go through the filing process throw shit at the wall, and leave it to anyone brave enough to get dragged into long legal proceedings to challenge them if they’re bullshit.

this (for European patents) says:

grant of patents does not guarantee validity, and revocation is not uncommon. In fact, a large number of patent litigations result in revocation of patents by national courts. Moreover, according to EPO statistics, 70% of opposed patents are revoked or limited during opposition proceedings

And this is for patents that are actually challenged - who knows how many there are for more obscure areas, just sitting around with no-one (wealthy enough) to challenge them? (and I would assume this is even worse for the US)

I wonder if there’s some kind of legal norm thing of “you can’t have references to common swears in an official document!” , or if whoever was writing this just wasn’t paying attention (although maybe it’s some kind of deliberate accent thing, since there’s also dere instead of there? I honestly have no idea where they were going with that particular dialogue, like why pick this specifically to illustrate the concept?)

would “comedy sketch about cancelled TV show host coming back but having to adhere to network guidelines because he’s struggling financially and doesn’t want to be cancelled again” be fine?

That’s basically just a synopsis of the video, I guess. I don’t know how to write those in a nice and compact manner. Maybe just “comedy sketch about cancelled TV host” would be enough?

I assume so. There might be more information on the Chinese side of the internet, what I was able to find from a cursory search is that there isn’t a date announced yet (https://www.163.com/dy/article/JC71EEQ10511B8LM.html)

https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1831176695589618060

Could [the Europeans] reopen the Bab al-Mandeb without US assistance?

After all, right now the Western mission in the Bab al-Mandeb is run by the EU as EUNAVFOR Aspides, so they’re already in charge of the area of operations. Reopening the straits will require ground troops to land and occupy enough currently Houthi-held territory to prevent drone and missile launches at maritime traffic transiting the strait. Can the EU muster the force? Power projection requires amphibious assault ships and aircraft carriers. Four European navies operate these capital ships: the UK, France, Italy and Spain. Between them they have four aircraft carriers worth the name (Cavour, Charles de Gaulle, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince of Wales) and eight amphibious assault ships of note (Giuseppe Garibaldi, Juan Carlos I, Galicia, Castilla, Mistral, Tonnere, Dixmude, Albion, and Bulwark). The Italians additionally operate three very small amphibs of the San Giorgio-class. Many of these ships are in some kind of reduced readiness or maintenance status. Realistically the European Union could deploy on a “surge” basis two carriers (with a weaker combined air wing than a single USN carrier) and a single amphibious group comparable to a USN Amphibious Ready Group. This sealift capability would support landing a brigade-size element in Yemen.

The Europeans also maintain a sizable number of airborne formations (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain all have brigade-plus or -minus elements standing and aren’t faced with fighting Russia on short notice), and can field about 100 heavy transport aircraft, mostly A400s. Based on RAND corporation analysis (link in the first post) it would take approximately 105 C-17 sorties to deliver one US infantry brigade with appropriate enablers for a high-end battle. Yemen will be a high-end battle. Although an A400 can jump about the same number of paratroopers as a C-17, it can carry only about half the cargo. Ergo, something like 150 A400 sorties would be required to deliver one brigade, not to mention ongoing sustainment requirements. As it’s doubtful more than 30 or so aircraft would be (or even could be, I’m not going to try to analyze ramp space in Djibouti) committed to the operation, the EU task force could realistically only jump a single fully-equipped brigade into Yemen alongside the amphibious landing.

Barring military access from Saudi Arabia or Oman, these two European brigades are going to have to hit the dirt and seize a seaport (perhaps the city of Al Hudaydah, shown) to allow conventional shipping to come in and “administratively” deliver what’s going to be a pretty meager follow-on force. That entails a city fight. Even with a seized airport and light reinforcements beyond the initial brigade flowing in by air (alongside much of their logistical requirements!), that’s a tall order - particularly given the Houthis have real anti-access/area-denial capabilities and a reasonably competent army. Two or three European brigades in the Middle East, with a mission to seize a major urban area, relying on sketchy air support and tenuous supply lines, can get into a lot of trouble in 2024. Al Hudaydah, for instance, is a Houthi stronghold with a population of close to three-quarters of a million. A smarter course of action may be to enter in non-Houthi controlled eastern Yemen, establish logistics and attack from the east - but it’ll be much slower to open the straits and oh, by the way, will require those aforementioned logistics to travel around the Horn of Africa because the Bab al-Mandeb will remain closed in the interim. So the indirect approach is fraught with its own, very significant, issues.

Which brings me to the crux of the problem - Yemen is a big country. It’s somewhat larger than Iraq and has about 3/4 the population. The vast majority of that population lives in areas controlled by the Houthis. And, most importantly, the Houthis are very competent fighters. Ergo, even a minimal operation to reopen the Bab al-Mandeb should be expected to be something more on the scale of the 2003 invasion of Iraq than the sort of African bandit-chasing expedition we’ve seen European forces actually perform in recent memory. And the EU doesn’t remotely have the capability to deploy and sustain forces at that level. The force that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 was 200,000-strong - an order of magnitude or more larger than what I’ve described above.

So to answer my starting question: No. Not a chance. In fact it would be a significant operation even for the United States - certainly not something that could be done quickly, easily, or with the commitment of minimal forces.

Not sure, the demos I’ve played are pretty vague about the lore. I think the devs are Polish, so who knows.

“The West, so afraid of strong government, now has no government. Only financial power” has got to be one of my favorite lines,

either he doesn’t see this as a negotiation (in which case he has a middle-school understanding of civics and should get the fuck off his high horse about it)

He doesn’t even understand the most basic facts about the legal system in question - he was going on about “b-but what if it sets a bad precedent”… the EU does not use fucking common law (completely, now that the Brits are out). They don’t give a shit about precedents (well, at least they give less of a shit than a common law system would)!

Yeah, some of these don’t fit so well. Metro isn’t open-world either (at least until Exodus, and I guess that’s more semi-open: still a linear sequence of levels, just with some of them being larger and more open), Tarkov I think had some ambitions for being open-world but that hasn’t happened yet (and probably never will given how that game’s development is going), and I’m not sure how well This War Of Mine fits into what people typically envision as the open-world framework.

A few of these should probably be swapped out with the Witcher 1&2, and maybe Boiling Point as a more obscure entry. Or just the “open-world features” part be removed from the description.

It’s just another symptom of the games industry continuing to seek prestige and mainstream approval by aping existing artforms like film. It’s disappointing, but I guess it’s working out pretty well for them (apparently there’s no greater sign that you’ve “made it” as a work of art than getting a TV show adaption )

a little bit of analysis about Kursk

The only thing I’d want to add to Mikael’s excellent analysis here is that the Russians are actually fighting a much more conventional area defense than we’ve seen in the very static fighting in the Donbass. They’re not trying to stop Ukrainian drives at the screen line like we saw in the Hundred Days, they’re instead diverting them into engagement areas between their front line of screening troops and the main defensive line 5-10km to the rear and destroying them there. Ergo why we’ve seen Ukrainian units just go on these long runs in the last couple days - way past where the front line should be - and then get wiped out in what look like complex ambushes. That’s… actually just how you do a very normal area defense.

Why have the Russians changed tactics? Two reasons. First, in Kursk they - paradoxically - have space to fight. The Donbass is a cramped theater where real estate is at an absolute premium. They’re either backing up into the sea, key lines of communication, or critical urban areas there. There’s actual operational space in rural Kursk. Second and relatedly, the “forward” defense we’re used to seeing in the Donbass will not inflict crippling casualties on an attacker quickly for the simple reason that attacks often fail in the “cone of fire” in no man’s land or even behind the attacker’s front line, allowing defeated units to easily withdraw. In a conventional defense the attacker is defeated in a kill zone behind the screen line and it is far easier to annihilate an attacking force. Ergo why we’re now seeing huge AFU equipment losses, with entire Ukrainian companies burning out behind the ostensible Russian “front.”

Having found themselves in battle with the AFU’s strategic reserves, the Russians now very much intend to use the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo to destroy as much of those reserves as possible. Even if that means scaring some war mappers on the internet.

tbf, apparently Borderlands was mostly filmed before Tár - it was just in development hell for so long that it released years after

advanced warfighters will join the war

damn, they’re sending Ghost Recon in? Tom Clancy’s™ Ghost Recon™© Advanced Warfighter™®?

Russia is now fighting a war of attrition and way better positioned for it than Ukraine but it wasn’t their intention and it took months for them to swallow the fact that it was gonna be necessary (hence the mobilisation only coming months after).

Yes - and now that they have shifted to attrition, why would they be in a hurry to end things?

You wrote in your original comment that “Politically this will have given western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm which is the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later”, but if Russia has accepted the framing of this being an attritional conflict, why would they “[want] to end the war sooner rather than later”? And thus, why would this be “embarassing”, rather than just the plan to attrit Ukraine continuing on? You can’t attrit the enemy if you don’t actually fight them.

like sorry but this is just revisionism of what happened in 2022

I don’t disagree that Russia’s original strategy was maybe naive (although I also disagree with the framing people have of assuming Russia didn’t have, you know, a plan B - to me, the drive towards Kiev was just an opportunistic “if it works, it works” move, with a more conventional attritional plan to fall back on otherwise; there’s also other strategic considerations beyond just taking the capital)- but they’re not fighting according to that strategy anymore, so what is its relevance exactly? Yeah, sure, we can criticize them for taking so long to adapt - but they have adapted. Like, this is the kind of thinking that causes Westerners to think Finland won the Winter War, because the Soviets happened to underperform, even though they actually achieved all of their strategic objectives, and more. Could the Soviets have carried out the campaign better and with less casualties? Maybe, but we can argue about counterfactuals all day long. Did they win? Uh, yes!

western support for Ukraine a shot in the arm

With what equipment, from what factory? The West can talk about support all they want, but the material reality of a crumbling industrial base doesn’t care.

the opposite of what Russia needs if it wants to end the war sooner rather than later

Why are we assuming Russia wants to end the war sooner? Like, I keep seeing people act as it’s some great failure for the war to drag on, but I just don’t get it - the strategic goal Russia has set for itself is demilitarizing Ukraine, and the longer the war drags on, the more equipment is destroyed (and that can’t keep being replenished forever, since Western countries have already given a lot of what they could and their efforts to push the “industrialize” button have amounted to fuck all, while conversely Russia’s military industry is doing very well), and more importantly (and gruesomely, but war is hell for a reason), the more Ukrainians die, ensuring less of a capacity to resist in the future.

The whole “fast war good” is an entirely Western conception, and nothing at all to do with the Soviet/Russian attritional way of war. We have two very good case studies disputing the “fast war good” standpoint - WW2, and the US invasion of Iraq. In WW2, towards the end there were Nazi plans to carry on a guerilla resistance after their defeat, which amounted to very little in reality - because by that point, most of the able-bodied (and sufficiently radicalized) men who could become insurgents were either dead or captured, so there was essentially no-one left to be a brave resistance fighter. In contrast, bandit and partisan groups kept troubling the Soviets in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine until the 50s and early 60s, because there actually was a manpower pool (and Western support) for such groups to draw from.

So, a slow, grueling war certainly isn’t nice to fight, but it ensured the enemy is actually defeated for good (well, that didn’t quite work out in Germany’s case, since a lot of those captured soldiers were captured by the Allies - who proceeded to release them, including many who were on trial for war crimes, and basically re-activate the Wehrmacht under a new name in the name of anti-communism - which I guess shows the war should have been even more grueling, with the Soviets fighting through all of Germany and ensuring such trickery doesn’t happen, but that wasn’t necessarily a viable option).

Iraq, on the other hand, demonstrates the other extreme - an incredibly rapid and bloodless (for the invaders, anyway) war, one which Western military commentators insist perfectly illustrates the superiority of NATO doctrine over the Soviet one. This narrative works, of course, only if you pretend history ends with the fall of Baghdad, and completely ignore the years of brutal counter-insurgency that followed. Now, could these things that happened after one another, perhaps be… connected? Could it be that the Coalition’s rapid victory, in fact completely failed to “demilitarize” Iraq - and that, combined with the later mismanagement by the occupying administration, ensured an insurgency that had a large pool of resources and disgruntled men to draw from?

If Russia had won the war quickly, with most of the Ukrainian neo-nazi paramilitaries still intact instead of rotting in trenches across the country, they’d have had a brutal insurgency on their hands - one which Western countries would have a great time supporting. Instead, they now get to watch Ukraine feed its population and millions of dollars worth of Western equipment into the meat grinder. It’s a brutal outlook, yes, but it’s clearly militarily effective, if morally dubious.

the cool thing about this one is it was apparently recorded live - not for any particularly good reason, but just because the sole programmer (and later co-founder of Interplay, Rebecca Heineman) had to make the entire port in 10 weeks and didn’t have the time to write the appropriate music driver for the 3DO, but luckily the 3DO happens to have a CD drive

https://xcancel.com/pawelwargan/status/1813851497781764474

a twitter thread about the Polish political concept of “Intermarium”

At the start of the 20th century, future Polish dictator Józef Piłsudski declared that Poland would set itself “the political goal of destroying the Russian state into its component parts”. Writing to Japan’s Foreign Ministry in the hope of winning support for Polish independence during the Russo-Japanese war, he insisted that Russia’s destruction would secure "not only the fulfilment of our Fatherland’s cultural aspirations for an independent existence, but also a guarantee of this existence”. Years later, reeling from world war and bracing against the stirrings of revolution unleashed in October 1917, Piłsudski’s anti-Tsarism turned into a sweeping anti-communism. In his vision, a weakened Germany and fragmented Soviet Union could make way for a new bloc connecting the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas — the Intermarium.

The new Soviet republics teemed with frustrated elites. Thwarted in their aspirations for bourgeois state-building by the emergence of an internationalist worker state, many went into exile. Through Piłsudski’s efforts, they converged in a movement that became known as the Promethean League. The League, as US anti-communist ideologue Timothy Snyder described it, was an “anti-communist international, designed to destroy the Soviet Union and to create independent states from its republics”. In 1926, Piłsudski seized power in a coup d’etat. Now, with the backing of the Polish state, the Prometheans would build institutions to bring their vision to life — from the Institute of the East in Warsaw and journals in Helsinki and Paris to university scholarships from Harbin to Cairo. Piłsudski believed that “[w]ithout an independent Ukraine, there cannot be an independent Poland.” And the exploitation of nationalism in Soviet Ukraine became a key pivot in the Promethean grand strategy.

The club fight from Ong Bak is great, all the flying elbows and knees make muay thai/boran such an interesting martial art to watch, just look at this. Same movie has an amazing chase scene too.

Another Tony Jaa movie, The Protector, has one of the most impressive one-take scenes ever - a fighting climb up a tower through several floors of opponents. The choreography is a bit simpler and slower than some of Jaa’s other stuff since obviously the physical strain of having to do this after climbing several flights of stairs impacts what you can do, but it’s still amazing.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has an instance of a kind of action scene I wish there was more of - where it’s several minutes of planning and people maneuvering into place, only to explode into just a few seconds of actual violence. Another amazing scene is the helicopter sequence from the 2nd season, I love how maneuverable the tachikomas are shown to be, gotta be one of my favorite sci-fi vehicle/mech designs. The music and sound design’s also great here.

Patlabor 2’s jet interception scene isn’t exactly an action scene per se, but it’s genuinely one of the tensest things I’ve watched, just on the edge of my seat watching a fucking air traffic control screen (not sure what the proper term is for that) and listening to people talking about ETAs and coordinates

The Good, The Bad, The Weird is an amazing South Korean action movie, basically a cowboy movie but in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. One of the final action scenes is this big cavalry chase through the desert set to a remix of Santa Esmeralda’s version of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, just an absolute banger . The guy riding against and right through a Japanese cavalry formation with his lever-action is just

Waterloo and War and Peace, just for the sheer spectacle of the Soviet government being like “sure, you can have an entire infantry division to basically reenact an actual battle of the era, we’ll even train them in Napoleonic-era drill!”