@ Milites | Apr 1 2023 14:19 utc | 392

When has a tank ever been a game changer, based solely on it’s technical capabilities?

Panzerkampfwagen III series or T-34 series ?
When first introduced, the Leopard I, the first true MBT, no longer light, medium, heavies, requiring profound design/doctrinal/operational/planning/tactical revisions ?
Otherwise generally concur. Ahem, the phrase used was ‘intentionally mocking’ the endless propaganda narrative that they would.
Actually it’s even worse, the specific numbers are 60 Leopard IIs & ‘over’ 100 Leopard Is. So their referring to Ukie reduced 31 MBT BNs not NATO 48 MBT BNs. So the NATO equivalent of 1 x BN(+) of Leo IIs & 2 x BN of Leo Is. So much for long past NATO standard AFU …
Once actually committed to battle, given SMO accumulated data, good for ~30 days or less of losses, assumptive of 3 x IFV lost for every MBT, ~22 AFV/day. Higher en mass.
Not, a game changer.

Posted by: Outraged | Apr 1 2023 15:02 utc | 403

@ Catilina | Apr 1 2023 15:01 utc | 397
Indeed, never reached series production, and given actual production line runup, extremely questionable. Essentially unsourced gossip, not official, no corroboration. From, Mikhail Polynkov, part of Strelkov’s isolated clique.

Posted by: Outraged | Apr 1 2023 15:11 utc | 405

@ThusspakeZarathustra 395
In how far Orbán is exaggerating is probably in the dark.
There is a little way to go until troops in whatever pseudo-legitimate form will substantiate.
However it is not totally unlikley that EU hysteria is still at the point to “test” it out and “push” with regard to China.
Considerable parts of the Atlantic establishement assume that they can escalate until breaking-point of RU without being punished.
In short, they believe it is all a bluff.
And may be they are right in a very limited sense.
If they believe a new Iron Curtain is in Europe´s interest they might do some foolish thing.
The only sense behind this would be the interruption of Chinese R&B and other initiatives.
The Chinese, they figure, will rather abandon economic ties with Europe than risk nuclear war.
The latest RU geo-political comment on the West being “officially” now hostile to RU makes this scenario a likelhood from the CHinese/RU POV as well. So of course they are prepared for this dumbest of all outcomes, only to be topped by all out war.
I don´t see any other endgame that would make sense.
But I can be totally off of course.
Though something is sure: “our guys” are incompetent, irresponsible, corrupt and nuts.

Posted by: AG | Apr 1 2023 15:14 utc | 407

ThusspakeZarathustra @ 395

Any thoughts on this anyone?

Sounds about right. However WW3 starts it will end with atomic weapons, not necessarily global apocalypse, but very likely. The WW2 generation that ran things from 1945-1991 were equally hawks, often stupid, but not blind walking off a cliff stupid, they stayed away from great power confrontations. At least for every Curtis LeMay there was a JFK.
What’s different was from 1945-1991 the Empire could well afford to stay away from madness, now with everything going down the toilet a once they no longer have that luxury, madness is an option and apparently there’s just Curtis LeMay deciding everything.

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Apr 1 2023 15:19 utc | 409

Paying attention US/NATO ? In particular Poland/the Baltics/Finland/Romania … justified pre-emptive self-defense …
US/NATO/Israel would fully support such a doctrine, Shirley ?

New foreign policy concept allows Russia to hold preventive attacks, says military analyst
Provision 25 on the Russian Foreign Policy Concept states in particular that Russia may use its armed forces to defend or prevent attacks on itself or its allies
MOSCOW, April 1. /TASS/. A new provision in the Russian Foreign Policy Concept regarding the use of the country’s Armed Forces allows to prevent an attack of a possible enemy without waiting for it to strike first, TASS military analyst Viktor Litovkin said.
Provision 25 of the 42-page long document on the Russian Foreign Policy Concept states in particular that Russia may use its armed forces to defend or prevent attacks on itself or its allies.
“If it is obvious that our neighbor or probable enemy is preparing an attack on our country, and this is proven not only by our intelligence, but also by concrete actions on behalf of the enemy, for instance, his strike fists are accumulating on our border, why should we wait until these fists cross the borders of our state and strike at our cities, villages and settlements?” Litovkin said.
According to the military expert, this is exactly what the United States and NATO member states do.
“I believe that we should act like the leading powers and show that Russia is not in second or third place, that it is not waiting to be slapped once and to turn the other cheek later,” Litovkin said.
The new Russian Foreign Policy Concept that President Vladimir Putin endorsed on March 31 states that Russia is a distinct civilization, a bulwark of the Russian World and one of the sovereign centers of global development, which will defend its right for development with all means at its disposal in light of the unfriendly moves by the West.
The document states that Eurasia should become a space of peace, stability, trust and prosperity interconnected by transport corridors, and this is Russia’s flagship project in the 21st century. The new concept has noticeably revised the assessments of the main trends and prospects of the modern world: It’s now going through “revolutionary,” rather than “deep” changes, “elements of crisis phenomena” in the world economy have now turned into a “crisis of economic globalization,” and the escalation of competition has turned into a “hybrid war” that the US and its allies wage on Russia.

Posted by: Outraged | Apr 1 2023 15:27 utc | 411

On the same day that Chinese president Xi met with Russian president Putin and spoke in private for four hours discussing how to enact a peace plan with Ukraine in mind.
“The United Kingdom’s minister of state at the Ministry of Defence, Baroness Annabel Goldie, told the House of Lords that “[a]longside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armour-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium.”
Goldie’s statement came on the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq, in which the West used depleted uranium on the Iraqi population to deleterious effect. ”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/31/china-the-developing-world/
The USA/UK doesn’t want peace between Russia and Ukraine, nor does it want a stabelised middle East, the USA maintains its hegemony via threats and violence, much of what ails the world today can be traced back to Washington’s belligerent foreign policies.

Posted by: Republicofscotland | Apr 1 2023 15:32 utc | 413

” New foreign policy concept allows Russia to hold preventive attacks, says military analyst
Provision 25 on the Russian Foreign Policy Concept states in particular that Russia may use its armed forces to defend or prevent attacks on itself or its allies
Posted by: Outraged | Apr 1 2023 15:27 utc | 406 ”
How very Khazarian of Russia.

Posted by: Deplorable Commissar | Apr 1 2023 15:43 utc | 415

Leopards, Challengers and Abrams Tanks Are Likely to Perform Poorly in Ukraine

German, British and American main battle tanks either already have arrived in Ukraine or will soon be on their way. But these tanks have some well known weaknesses and the Russians are likely ready for them. Worse still, none of them have active defense systems, a critically important way of protecting tanks and tank crews from modern antitank weapons.
.. . .The British, Germans and, especially the US long thought that their main battle tanks, designed in the 1970s and 1980s were good against most threats and did not require reactive (explosive) armor. However, Iraq and Syria changed all that, as many Abrams tanks and Leopard tanks (especially those belonging to the Turkish army) were destroyed by Russian anti-tank weapons fired by ISIS irregulars. If US and German armor could be knocked out with older ammunition using explosively formed penetrators (in the US best known as shaped charge weapons) and not DART ammunition, it was easy to see that Western tanks were at risk. The Russians immediately recognized the vulnerability of Leopard tanks to Russian antitank weapons. . .here

Posted by: Don Bacon | Apr 1 2023 15:51 utc | 417

” Just an observation, but most of the dipsticks who hang around on the interwebs advertising their racial superiority, like this one does, tend to be rather insecure and with limited intellectual and cultural achievements of their own.
Anyone with actual accomplishments to his or her name would, by definition, neither have to brag about these, nor justify his or her own pathetic existence by claiming credit for historical outcomes in which he or she had no part.
Posted by: Lengai | Apr 1 2023 13:08 utc | 382 ”
Impressive, another woke, cultural warrior defending poor India. Maybe you can explain to us why poor India has no funds to provide for something basic for its people, like indoor plumbing, yet has billions to waste on aircraft carriers ? Who does it plan on fighting ? China, Russia, the US or maybe Sri Lanaka ?

Posted by: Deplorable Commissar | Apr 1 2023 16:06 utc | 419

@ Deplorable Commissar 414
It’s not the indoor plumbing , it’s the outdoor plumbing in a country that is mostly flat as a pancake that you have to worry about.

Posted by: Giyane | Apr 1 2023 16:22 utc | 421

US hypersonic failure reveals a glaring weakness
US Air Force scraps ARRW hypersonic weapon after test failure while China and Russia’s superfast missile programs are reportedly on course

The US Air Force (USAF) has canceled its Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) project, the latest blow to America’s floundering hypersonic weapons program as China and Russia develop a crucial strategic advantage.
Last month, The Warzone reported that the USAF plans to scrap the Lockheed Martin ARRW in favor of Raytheon’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) due to a string of ARRW test failures.
The report quotes USAF Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Andrew Hunter, who says that the USAF does not intend to pursue follow-on ARRW procurement. He said the two remaining prototype missiles will be used to gather hypersonic flight data but not lead to further ARRW purchases. . . .here

Posted by: Don Bacon | Apr 1 2023 16:27 utc | 423

Posted by: lex talionis | Apr 1 2023 13:41 utc | 391
Twilight’s Last Gleaming is a classic and there’s Miracle Mile for a lighter take on Armageddon.

Posted by: anon2020 | Apr 1 2023 16:43 utc | 425

@bevin, 255:

…a revival of the pure gospel as preached by Malthus, Ricardo, Mill and Bentham, the ideology of laissez faire capitalism in the era of imperialism and undustrialisation.

Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Bentham, and Smith were definitely not “laissez faire” capitalists.
Ricardo, Mill, Bentham and Smith all argued strongly against laissez faire “capitalism.” It was the French and Austrians who espoused the idea–that’s why we use the french term, rather than an english one.
What we call “Liberalism” was a political movement based on the ideas of Smith and elaborated by Mill and Bentham, all of whom considered the study of economics to be moral theorizing rather than the strictly “how to manage money to gain power for the state while gaining power for ourselves” that we see it today. Smith’s idea of a “liberal” (i.e.: “free”) market was one where anyone could enter and compete freely without interference by other market actors and without interference by the state. Smith spent half of WoN elaborating why state-sanctioned monopolies–and monopolies in general–are bad for everyone involved.
The Liberal political movement, however, was a combination of idealists who espoused this idea of a “free” market and newly-established industrialists who were busily expanding their power in India and abroad by establishing…monopolies, for themselves, and forcing foreign nations like India and China to accept those monopolies. It was the Liberals, for instance, who started the Opium Wars and who destroyed the Indian weaving industry to force Indians to purchase their own, English manufactured textiles.
The Liberal party at home was generally inclined to work in the interests of establishing “free” markets because they knew the price of infrastructure was a prohibitive cost of entry for most people, but the newly formed industrialized bourgeoisie could be allowed to establish factories because the inexorable consolidation that would follow would allow the old money to eventually–over the long-term–re-establish those monopolies to allow their descendants to reassert control and seize power. That’s what we see today.
However, the Liberal program abroad was entirely different: use the power of the British Pound to force foreign nations to conduct their trade using that as a de facto world reserve currency. That allowed British banks and British industry to establish an ever wider array of monopolies in other countries, both manufactories and plantations (such as opium, bananas, or cotton).
“Neo-Liberalism” is simply the reorientation of these foreign policy objectives towards supporting the US as hegemon via the mechanism of “Globalism.”
The historical application of the ideas of Smithian “free trade”–which is literally the opposite of “laissez faire” and clearly calls for State intervention in the economy against monopolistic systems–along with the liberalism of Bentham and Mill–which strongly argued against that other set of monopolies, Rentier exploitation–had really very little to do with what the original ideas were trying to convey and elaborate.
That’s what Marx was trying to point out, by showing that “free trade” capitalism in the Smithian sense would nevertheless inexorably lead to monopolies of production and, by extension, land.
The ideas behind “Laissez Faire” were a rightist response to the English and Scottish attempts to eliminate the rentier class by arguing that liberalism was what we today would call “social engineering” that was always doomed to fail, so nothing should be done at all and we should simply allow markets to function without any state intervention at all. It was a clever way to subvert Smith’s idea of “free markets” by playing on the word “free”–free as in “freedom,” or “free” as in “beer”? Obviously, for right wing elites, a market without government intervention is essentially “free beer” for them, but very expensive beer for the rest of us.

Posted by: Pacifica_Advocate | Apr 1 2023 16:53 utc | 427

AG @ 414

Thats what all this realist-school Bullshit scholarship is about.

Yes, that’s the current logic: no one sane would ever use nuclear weapons. Russia is sane, despite the western propaganda they know Putin et al are extremely pragmatic and sane, therefore we can push them till we defeat them on the field and they surrender. Not sure why such thinking was avoided in 1962 and not now, maybe USA feared the ideological USSR more believing being commies they were in all aspects, including self preservation, not pragmatic and insane.

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Apr 1 2023 17:17 utc | 429

Posted by: Milites | Apr 1 2023 14:19 utc | 397
Throughout SMO, “game changer” has only ever denoted incremental escalation, at most.
This particular species of rah-rah is part of the whole package of lies, implying imminent victory, that have served to keep western publics and politics in the Empire fold.

Posted by: anon2020 | Apr 1 2023 17:30 utc | 431

from The Postil https://www.thepostil.com/ [which I find informative at times …
The true face of this world war is the neo-liberal world order of the plutocrats which sees Russia as standing in the way of ultimate domination of the world, and therefore this liberalism is now in its deadly phase, as Alexander Dugin explains
Liberalism is more Dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism
https://www.thepostil.com/liberalism-is-more-dangerous-than-ukrainian-nazism/
Blind Liberalism
A Comment on Alexander Dugin’s “Liberalism is more Dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism.”
The immanent untruth within liberalism, even at its finest, which is to say classical liberalism, was always its idolization of abstractions, beginning with the unassailable primacy—the fundamental rights—of liberty and property. Ideologies may single out aspects of life to valorize them, but life is ever dependent upon relationships, most of which we simply do not recognize (but take for granted) or fathom tacitly, and hence only vaguely notice. The collision of an abstraction with reality always requires remaking or redefining reality to fit the still certainty of a fixed principle. Hence as liberal societies have evolved over time, the founding principles had to be adjusted to the real relationships and the various conflicts of interests that are built into the division of labour, necessary for economic prosperity and development and the diverse claims made by individuals and groups for the protection and accruement of resources (including recourse to the law and police force) provided by the state.
https://www.thepostil.com/blind-liberalism/
Our Interview with Seymour Hersh
https://www.thepostil.com/our-interview-with-seymour-hersh/
The Terminal Phase of Modernity
Friedrich Nietzsche provided a thorough-going critique of modernity, because he saw that it had veered into a terminal phase. Whether Nietzsche’s analysis is correct or not is not as essential as the direction towards values which transform action that he provided as a method of analysis.
https://www.thepostil.com/the-terminal-phase-of-modernity/
@Pacifica_Advocate | Apr 1 2023 16:53 utc | 427
Keep up the good work. Smith was essentially a moralist.

Posted by: Don Firineach | Apr 1 2023 18:28 utc | 433

@ karlof1 432
‘ Attempts to impose ‘ these words imply deliberate interference with universal human norms. In fact this deliberate interference is designed to create divisions that the interferers can convert into wars, thereby creating opportunities for piracy, rape pillage etc which the accepted universal religious norms are designed to prevent.
Try putting that before the UN in a case against the US for warmongering!

Posted by: Giyane | Apr 1 2023 20:10 utc | 435

@436 – Don’t tell Meester Beeeg.
Look, a squirrel!

Posted by: lex talionis | Apr 1 2023 23:45 utc | 437

Abandonment is a crime too.
If I took a child to the wilderness and left it there, and the child got killed by wolves would you blame wolves or me for his death?
It is appalling that Russia refuses to take responsibility for that tragedy.
Posted by: hopehely | Apr 1 2023 16:34 utc | 424
They were not children, they were not taken, and Russian army was driven out by deadly threat.
Appaling is yet another way to shift the blame from murderers to those who avoided becoming hostages themselves.

Posted by: Arioch | Apr 2 2023 10:28 utc | 439

Posted by: lex talionis | Apr 1 2023 23:45 utc | 437
that’s not a squirrel, it’s a flying squirrel–Chinese school of names

Posted by: pretzelattack | Apr 2 2023 10:42 utc | 441

Maxim Fomin, military blogger, assassinated in St Petersburg.

Posted by: Mike Hampton | Apr 3 2023 2:54 utc | 443