quote:

Originally posted by mesabi:
I think if we deployed OUR Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to take command of combat operations anywhere, we'd be as fucked-up as the Russians have been.

^^^TRUTH, Right there!

quote:

Originally posted by nhracecraft:

quote:

Originally posted by mesabi:
I think if we deployed OUR Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to take command of combat operations anywhere, we'd be as fucked-up as the Russians have been.

^^^TRUTH, Right there!

Maybe, but we'd look FABULOUS!

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
It’s clear Biden belongs in a nursing home and not the White House.

Truly, if it were me or you, or really just anybody, who has a family member or friend that we did not get into proper care, we’d be quickly charged with, arrested for, and punished for Elder abuse.

Whoever is actually in effective charge in the White House behind the scenes should be charged with Elder Abuse and punished.

Of course this will never happen.

Shame Shame on the democrats, the mass media, and more.
.

An opinion piece from The Wall Street Journal.
===========================

Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo
It seems unthinkable, but American leaders’ failure to think about it heightens the risk it will happen.

Sometimes a thing keeps nagging around your brain and though you’ve said it before you have to say it again. We factor in but do not sufficiently appreciate the real possibility of nuclear-weapon use by Russia in Ukraine. This is the key and crucial historic possibility in the drama, and it really could come to pass.

And once it starts, it doesn’t stop. Once the taboo that has held since 1945 is broken, it’s broken. The door has been pushed open and we step through to the new age. We don’t want to step into that age.

The war is in its third month. Diplomatic solutions are less likely than ever; war crimes and atrocities have hardened the Ukrainians, and in any case they’re winning and the world is on their side. British intelligence this week reported Russia has lost around 15,000 troops, 2,000 armored vehicles and 60 aircraft. The ground invasion force has lost an estimated 25% of its combat strength. Russia is grinding through a disaster.

We aren’t worried enough about Russian nuclear use in part because we imagine such a thing as huge missiles with huge warheads launched from another continent and speeding through space. We think: That won’t happen! It has never happened! But the more likely use would be not of big strategic nuclear weapons but smaller tactical ones on the battlefield. Such weapons have a shorter range and carry lower-yield warheads. America and Russia have rough parity in the number of strategic nuclear weapons, but Russia has an estimated 10 times as many tactical nuclear weapons as the U.S. and delivery systems that range from artillery shells to aircraft.

Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?

To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians— that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.

Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “ lightning fast.” He said: “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”

He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.

There are signs the Russians are deliberately creating a historical paper trail, as if to say they warned us. On Monday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the risk of nuclear conflict is “serious” and “should not be underestimated.” Earlier, Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, sent a formal diplomatic note to the U.S. saying it was inflaming the conflict. The Washing-ton Post got a copy. It said shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”

The U.S. at the same time has become rhetorically bolder. This month President Biden referred to Mr. Putin as a war criminal. In March Mr. Biden called for regime change; the White House walked it back. This week Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters the U.S. aim in Ukraine: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things it’s done in Ukraine.” The original American aim was to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. Has the U.S. strategy changed, or has its officials’ talk simply become looser? What larger strategic vision is the administration acting on? In my experience with American diplomats, they are aware of but don’t always grasp the full implications of their opponents’ histories. Mr. Putin was a KGB spy who in 1991 saw the Soviet system in which he’d risen crash all around him. He called the fall of the Soviet Union a catastrophe because it left his country weakened, humiliated and stripped of dominance and hegemony in Eastern Europe. He is a walking, talking cauldron of resentments, which he deploys for maximum manipulation. He isn’t secretive about his grievances. In his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference he accused the U.S. of arrogance, hypocrisy and having created a “unipolar world” with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision making,” headed by “one master, one sovereign.” As for NATO, “we have the right to ask: Against whom is this expansion intended?”

Antagonism to the West has been the central intellectual organizing principle of his life. America is an object of his life’s obsession.

So let me make an argument for my anxieties: For this man, Russia can’t lose to the West. Ukraine isn’t the Mideast, a side show; it is the main event. I read him as someone who will do anything not to lose.

In October he will turn 70, and whatever his physical and mental health his life is in its fourth act. I am dubious that he will accept the idea that the signal fact of its end will be his defeat by the West. He can’t, his psychology will not allow it.

It seems to me he has become more careless, operating with a different historical consciousness. He launched a world-historic military invasion that, whatever his geostrategic aims, was shambolic—fully aggressive and confident, yet not realistically thought through. His army wasn’t up to the task. It seemed thrown together, almost haphazard, certainly not professional.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, often notes that Mr. Putin has killed all the institutions in his country, sucked the strength, independence and respectability from them, as dictators do. They take out power centers that might threaten them but might also warn them of weaknesses in their own governments. All dictatorships are ultimately self-weakening in that way. But this means Mr. Putin has no collective leadership in Russia. It’s all him. And he’s Vladimir Putin.

When I look at him I see a new nihilistic edge, not the calculating and somewhat reptilian person of the past.

People who have known Mr. Putin have told me I am wrong in my concern about his potential nuclear use in that he knows if he makes one move with such a weapon, Moscow will in turn be reduced to a smoking ruin. But I am reading Mr. Putin as someone who’s grown bored of that threat, who believes he can more than match it, who maybe doesn’t even believe it anymore. In any case the Americans would not respond disproportionately.

No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking: It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.

But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.

For the administration’s leaders this should be front of mind every day. They should return to the admirable terseness of the early days of the invasion. They should wake up every day thinking: What can we do to lower the odds?

Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.

By Peggy Noonan

LINK

I am not a Peggy Noonan fan, but I agree w her report above.

In looking at pictures of Putin now, one sees a different person than previously.
And this invasion has been a catastrophe for Russia for all the world to watch.

I am surprised that tactical nukes have not been used against Ukraine yet. And we keep poking the bear. I received way more info than I wanted on nuke warfare during my time in SAC. My takeaway then and now is that if a full nuke exchange between Russia and the US takes place, no one will "win".
There is a website where you can pick a city, pick your nuke and set it off and gauge the results. Its called Nukemap. Try it.
Problem:
It only allows for you to see a single strike, not multiples.

^^ Yoop, I live a few miles east of Ft Hood. I assume we won’t make it. Either the initial radiation or fallout will get us.

When I grew up in I Tampa, we lived about ten miles north of macdill AFB, we didn’t expect to survive that either.

I imagine if we start swapping nukes with the reds, it won’t matter where you boonker is….not much will survive with all the radiation everywhere.

Nukes are not magic. IF Putin is stupid enough to use even 1 of them, the entire world will turn against Russia.

If Putin can't win with his current forces, nukes won't do him much good. Besides, the fallout will come back down on Russia. It would be a lose/lose scenario for Russia.

Good Explanation of Why NATO is in Ukraine

NATO is much in the news lately, due to the war in Ukraine. As Sweden and Finland signal that they’re about to join...



https://thenewamerican.com/video/natal

I think the Chinese wouldn’t just sit back and let Putin go nuclear here as it would quickly get out of hand and ruin their plans to take over the world someday. There’s really no point in world domination or conquest if it’s all a smoking, radiative ruin.

Come on gentlemen, Peggy Noonan is a clown. She's proven that time and again with her 'take' on things. I can't tell you for certain what Putin will or won't do in Ukraine, but I am pretty confident Peggy can't either. And her pouring out darkness and personal fears on the pages of the WSJ doesn't change that dynamic. The only thing of any real value in her 'piece' was the last sentence and even then, only half of it...."Think more, talk less".

And don't forget, US messaging right now is being prepared and delivered by retards like Jake Sullivan, who in one breath told reporters Friday the 'only' solution to the Ukraine war was a diplomatic one, followed up immediately thereafter with his statement that the US was sending X number of Howitzers and additional weaponry to the Ukrainians and would continue to send them anything they 'needed'. Again, as Peggy noted, think it, plan it, and do it, but keep your damn mouth shut about it. I fear this US administration every bit as much, if not more, than I fear what Putin might do or not do. Putin might indeed be unstable, but this administration, right down to the chiefs of staff in charge, are utterly incompetent.

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:... IF Putin is stupid enough to use even 1 of them, the entire world will turn against Russia. ...

Agreed.

The greater concern is that once the "first use of a tactical nuke" Opens Pandora's Box (that was rightfully shut and locked) closed since the ending of WWII, the taboo will be broken.

This may lead the several states that have them to see them less of a deterrent or even "bargaining leverage" and fear "use them or lose them" as the world powers may well see to want to disarm, or raise talk of "first strike against those who cannot be trusted with them".

This becomes a congested freeway at the point of foggy weather and rapid freezing, all sorts of ways to go sideways, and not much anyone can do when it turns to crap.

We gonna be in a "Reservoir Dogs", "Free Fire", "The Departed" sort of situation.

Mexicans don't even have nukes...

I agree the nuke scenario is hopefully unlikely. I will throw out two more nuke related items and then shut up on nuke use:
1- New Russian Submarine Belgorod, last reported undergoing sea trials.
2- Russian Poseidon torpedo. Reported carried by the Belgorod. Possibly.
Providing the Russians can actually put the sub into service!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: YooperSigs,

Russia's 'Dead Hand' Is a Soviet-Built Nuclear Doomsday Device

https://www.military.com/histo...doomsday-device.html

A lot of great technology was developed during the Cold War. Things like GPS, the internet and microchips were all developed as part of the arms-race tech boom. Unfortunately, so was the Novichok nerve agent, the world's largest nuclear weapon and Russia's doomsday device, just to name a few.

You read that right. Like something out of one of the worst James Bond movies, the Soviet Union developed a world-ending mechanism that would launch all of its nuclear weapons without any command from an actual human.

Russia currently has an estimated 1,600 deployed tactical nuclear weapons, with another 2,400 strategic nuclear weapons tied to intercontinental ballistic missiles. This makes Russia the largest nuclear power in the world. All of these weapons are tied into the Perimeter, an automatic nuclear weapons control system.

In a crisis that might mean a first strike from the United States, high-ranking government officials or military commanders could activate the Perimeter. Perimeter would guarantee that the Soviet Union (and now, Russia) could respond even if its entire armed forces were wiped out.

Once switched on, the Perimeter system can launch the entire Russian nuclear arsenal in response to a nuclear attack. It was part of the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, a means of deterring nuclear attacks by ensuring the side who initiated a first strike also would be annihilated.

Called "Dead Hand" in the West, the theory is that a command and control system measures communications on military frequencies, radiation levels, air pressure, heat and short-term seismic disturbances. If the measurement points to a nuclear attack, the Perimeter begins a sequence that would end in the firing of all ICBMs in the Soviet (now, Russian) arsenal.

Perimeter would launch a command rocket, tipped with a radio warhead that transmits launch orders to Russian nuclear silos, even with the presence of radio jamming. The rocket would fly across the entire length of the country. After a number of test launches to prove the viability of such a command rocket, the Perimeter system went online in 1985.

The Soviet Union never confirmed that such a system ever existed, but Russian Strategic Missile Forces Gen. Sergey Karakaev confirmed it to a Russian newspaper in 2011, saying the U.S. could be destroyed in 30 minutes. Russian state media outlets suggest the system was upgraded to include radar early warning systems and Russia's new hypersonic missiles.

In the United States, similar technologies were developed. Seismic and radiation sensors are used to monitor parts of the U.S. and the world for nuclear explosions and other activity, but the U.S. military never created an automatic trigger for its arsenal. Instead, it ensured that American humans with the ability and authority to launch a second strike would survive a first strike.

Since the Perimeter is reportedly still active, the danger of an automatic, computer-generated nuclear strike still exists. Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has put Russia's nuclear weapons on high alert, he might have taken Russia's doomsday device on notice as well.

quote:

Originally posted by wishfull thinker:

quote:

Originally posted by nhracecraft:

quote:

Originally posted by mesabi:
I think if we deployed OUR Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to take command of combat operations anywhere, we'd be as fucked-up as the Russians have been.

^^^TRUTH, Right there!

Maybe, but we'd look FABULOUS!

Yeah, and the best Chinese food in town would be at the Officers' Mess.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:... IF Putin is stupid enough to use even 1 of them, the entire world will turn against Russia. ...

Agreed.

The greater concern is that once the "first use of a tactical nuke" Opens Pandora's Box (that was rightfully shut and locked) closed since the ending of WWII, the taboo will be broken.

Thus, for better or worse, the logical response is to react dramatically and immediately. It'll take the world's focused opposition in no uncertain terms to stuff that mess back into the bottle.

quote:

Mexicans don't even have nukes...

Never forget: the cartels have astronomical budgets, never-ending enemies, unlimited supplies of cocaine for their personal use and the propensity for mind-boggling displays of paranoiac grandiosity that one would expect to go with all that.

ok, it's Ukraine. Is this true ? Not sure

https://twitter.com/MrKovalenk.../1520757617437683713

Yesterday's #Ukraine attack on the Rus. HQ in #Izium was designed to liquidate the high-value target - chief of Gen. Staff of RAF Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov. The Kremlin sent him to get a victory for the May 9 parade. Gerasimov was close to the blast but wounded.

Yesterday, at the moment of the #Ukraine attack more than 40 high-ranked Russian military officers gathered in the HQs in #Izium. Reportedly, up to 20 of them are confirmed killed incl. Gen. Andrey Simonov, a commander of electronic warfare forces of the West district.

Gen. Gerasymov suffered a minor shrapnel wound to his right shin without breaking a bone. Source: former minister of Internal Affairs of #Ukraine Arsen Avakov via his sources.

"66-year-old Gerasimov received a shrapnel wound in the upper third of the right leg without a bone fracture. The chip was removed"

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

another version:

https://nypost.com/2022/05/01/...-trip-to-front-line/

Russia’s top general went on a secret mission to the war’s front late last week to try to shore up his flailing troops — and Ukraine attempted to take him out with a rocket but missed, a report said Sunday.

Gen. Valery Gerasimov — chief of staff of Russia’s forces and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s righthand military man — embarked on the highly unusual and risky journey to the town of Izium to try to “change the course” of what has been a lackluster offensive, the New York Times said, citing who it described as a senior Ukrainian official and a US official with knowledge of the situation.

The US official said Gerasimov had been in the region for a “couple days” when Ukrainian forces caught wind of his visit and launched an attack Saturday evening on a local school that had been taken over by Russian forces and which the general had been hunkered down in earlier in the day, the Times said.

By the time of the Ukrainian attack, the general had already left to return to Russia, the outlet said.

Still, around 200 Russian troops were killed — possibly including Russian Maj. Gen. Andrei Simonov, who commanded the forces in the town, the Times said.

Sounds like several awards/medals are due.

Yeah, let's put 40 high ranking officers all in the same place so they can be targeted easily.

For years, we've been told that Russia is a "near peer." Who still believes that?

For that matter, we shouldn't fear the Chinese or the North Koreans. The NKs have a lot of medals on their chest but outside of those who actually fought in the Korean War, no one else has any experience in war. They can't even manage to feed their own people or power their country.

China? Unless they fought the Nationalists, in WWII, Korean War or Vietnam; they don't have war experience and those who did are just too damn old to be any threat. How many Chinese citizens are truly happy with their own country? They should be starting a revolution against their oppressive government who screens the internet, has a 2 child policy, and bans free speech.

We have a generation of Americans who grew up on war. We have a GRF (Global Response Force) that no one can match, we can project our power overseas quickly, we have the logistical and maintenance support needed to sustain operations far from home.

Ukraine Now Admits ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ Was ‘Essential’ Propaganda to Boost Morale.

https://thenationalpulse.com/2...nda-to-boost-morale/

The ‘Ghost of Kiev’ or ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ was one of the most oft-repeated stories in the early part of Russia’s war with Ukraine. Western media outlets, television anchors, politicians, and Ukraine flag-in-bio-bros unsparingly littered social media outlets with tales of a secret, super-pilot who was knocking dozens of Russian jets out of the sky.

At the time, anti-war skeptics suspected the tales were pure propaganda or “disinformation”, only to be ruthlessly dismissed as “Putinistas” or similar in the early days of the conflict.

Now, as claims that the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ is dead, Ukraine’s own government as well as military social media accounts and historians are accepting that he never really existed.

“The ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend, whose figure was created by Ukrainians!” the nation’s military’s Telegram account announced this week.

“The #GhostOfKyiv is alive, it embodies the collective spirit of the highly qualified pilots of the Tactical Aviation Brigade who are successfully defending #Kyiv and the region,” the Air Force added on Twitter.

Ukrainian military historian Mikhail Zhirohov told the BBC the Ghost of Kiev story was simply “propaganda for raising morale”.

“It’s essential to have this propaganda, because our armed forces are smaller, and many think we can’t be equal to them [the Russians]. We need this in wartime,” he admitted.

The news follows the announcement of the death of Major Stepan Tarabalka, 29.

Tarabalkan was killed in combat on 13 March and honoured with a Hero of Ukraine medal posthumously. Some maintain that Tarabalka was the actual Ghost of Kiev, and that the new claims that he never existed are in fact a way to keep morale up in the face of one a significant loss. Nonetheless, the Ukrainian Air Force now denying that anyone downed up to 40 Russian planes would certainly be a bizarre and disrespectful move if indeed Tarabalka came anywhere close to the legends associated with him.