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The War in Ukraine

This opinion piece from USNI's Proceedings suggesting the the US Replicator program which is seeking to mass produce low cost, small UAV's like those being used extensively in Ukraine is the wrong approach.


The author suggests that these platforms, while generating some tactical success as part of a combined arms basket of weapons are diverting funding from weapon systems that have the ability to deliver strategic success.

He focuses particularly on the Pacific theatre where he says that the types of UAVs used in Ukraine - where the average engagement range is around 7 miles - makes these types of platforms unsuitable. He does however agree that large volumes of cheap UAV's, USV's and UUV's would be useful by Taiwan should PLA forces actually reach the shorline in an invasion.

He suggests that focusing on producing a mass of higher end weapons like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), heavier kamikaze USVs and XLUUVs equipped with advanced sea mines would be a better solution.

Extrapolating this to Ukraine it might suggest that building up large stocks of Precision Strike Missiles, ground attack cruise missiles, long range AAM's and ASM's would have a greater strategic affect on a war with Russia than masses of the small drones being used currently in Ukraine.
Great notion if the airlift was still taking place with the numbers needed. Hard to build up a large stock of precision strike missiles when you don't have any to begin with. Ukraine is doing what they can with what they have.
 
So would a deployment of the French Foreign Legion to secure the border of Moldova (freeing up troops to go elsewhere) count as "NATO" boots on the ground?

Pretty sure if the FFL did so and Putin got "frisky' that front would be concluded fairly quickly. Garrison troops vs professionals, even if they did decide to release all their ex-Ukrainians back to Ukraine to fight and held back their ex-Russians in France

Given that the Russians are now at step 2 or 3 of their hybrid war playbook (target area puppet government requests Russian 'protection') it might behoove Moldova to request the FFL (or some other foreign power besides Ukraine) to help with "internal security"

Because the signs are that Russia is setting up for sn infowar and distraction event in Transmission to draw western eyes off them and Ukrainian troops away from the N, E, and S fronts.

Foreign troops to secure the Moldova/Ukraine border against Russians is actually a pretty decent idea. Not sure how many Ukrainians it would free up, but it would be some for sure, and it would be a significant and tangible show of Western resolve.
 
Foreign troops to secure the Moldova/Ukraine border against Russians is actually a pretty decent idea. Not sure how many Ukrainians it would free up, but it would be some for sure, and it would be a significant and tangible show of Western resolve.
If you're going to go down this path, I'd argue doing the same thing along the Ukraine/Belarus border from where it joins up with the Polish border all the way east to where highway P28 runs north into Belarus would be a greater benefit to the Ukrainians, along with a much greater risk on 'our side' in doing so.
 
Germany will do whatever it can, so long as it has no effect.

this week Moscow made public a call between Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz, chief of the Luftwaffe, and other senior officers that they had intercepted. Their conversation also alleged the presence of British military personnel on the ground and suggested that if Germany deployed Taurus they could ask British troops to take over the same ground role with their missiles as they supposedly fulfil with Storm Shadow to avoid implicating Germany in the conflict. On top of that Gerhartz said that Berlin would not send all of the Taurus missiles in one batch, but penny packet them to ensure they “won’t change the course of the hostilities”.


FMG.😖

How terrified Berlin must be of Vladimir Putin that they will go to such lengths to avoid any suggestion that they are doing more than the bare minimum in this conflict. Even worse: to actually supply the missiles, if they ever decide to do so, in a way deliberately calculated to minimise their battlefield effect. This faint-heartedness is no doubt accompanied by an eye to financial advantage given that Germany has the greatest commercial interests in Russia of all European countries.

But by all means beat up on the Yankee tax payer.
 
Germany will do whatever it can, so long as it has no effect.




FMG.😖
This of course is all from Russia's release of the contents of the intercepted call. Any chance that they added/modified elements of what they allege was discussed to sow mistrust between Ukraine & Germany and between Germany & NATO? It's unlikely that Germany will release their own copy of the private conversation and even if they did release one that contained important differences the damage is already done.

True or not it's already made you (and likely many Telegraph readers) angry and distrusting of our NATO ally Germany. Who benefits?
 
Putin's Career Rooted in Russia's KGB

By David Hoffman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 30, 2000; Page A1

DRESDEN, Germany – In the gray villa at No. 4 Angelikastrasse here, perched on a hill overlooking the Elbe River, a young major in the Soviet secret police spent the last half of the 1980s recruiting people to spy on the West.

Vladimir Putin looked for East Germans who had a plausible reason to travel abroad, such as professors, journalists, scientists and technicians, for whom there were acceptable "legends," or cover stories.

The legend was often a business trip, during which the agents could covertly link up with other spies permanently stationed in the West. According to German intelligence specialists who described Putin's task, the goal was stealing Western technology or NATO secrets. A newly revealed document shows Putin was trying to recruit agents to be trained in "wireless communications." But for what purpose is not clear.


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Better than Kevin Bacon.
 
Soon the Russians will be in the opposite situation from us - too many sailors and not enough ships - maybe we can work something out with them, let the sailors immigrate to Canada and crew our ships.....
 
Soon the Russians will be in the opposite situation from us - too many sailors and not enough ships - maybe we can work something out with them, let the sailors immigrate to Canada and crew our ships.....
I don't know about that...those guys don't seem to be doing a very good job so far!
 
Foreign troops to secure the Moldova/Ukraine border against Russians is actually a pretty decent idea. Not sure how many Ukrainians it would free up, but it would be some for sure, and it would be a significant and tangible show of Western resolve.
Western troops in south western ukraine would prevent the russian end game Medvedev recently showed a map of. Denying Russia Odessa would greatly anger putin as he wants Odessa.

 
Anyone looking at the map also should understand that Russia has zero interest in stopping there.
They're trying to save all those starving Russians in Kaliningrad... by ensuring a complete landbridge across Eastern Europe via Ukraine, Moldava, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland.

Won't someone think of Konigsberg Kaliningrad?
 
They're trying to save all those starving Russians in Kaliningrad... by ensuring a complete landbridge across Eastern Europe via Ukraine, Moldava, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Poland.

Won't someone think of Konigsberg Kaliningrad?
Yes how clearly selfish of me not to think of them.

Admittedly I have a better idea.
Little green men from NATO have a coup in Kallingrad, Transnitia and Belarus.
Then we move V Corps into Belarus when asked to by the new democratic administration, and have NATO 350km from Moscow…
 
Anyone looking at the map also should understand that Russia has zero interest in stopping there.
There would be alot, alot, of dead Poles they'd have to walk over before they went any further west.
Most Ukrainians have only begun hating Russians over the last 10yrs, Poles have been doing it for the last 500. Its part of who they are.
 
There would be alot, alot, of dead Poles they'd have to walk over before they went any further west.
Most Ukrainians have only begun hating Russians over the last 10yrs, Poles have been doing it for the last 500. Its part of who they are.
Which is why we all should understand that we are at war with Putin’s Russia like it or not.
 
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