of course, but that’s an observation with the benefit of hindsight. here’s my total speculation of the event. ua intelligence tries to get the timing of the meeting at the hq so they can launch a missile wave that will make it through s-300/400 defenses, and requests this information from its agents. the agents already have or eventually make contact with low tier officers in the black sea fleet, and over a bottle of vodka find out that salaries are not being paid. so they offer money for realtime notice when the hq meeting convenes. boom! totally believable movie plot.
but it just scratches the surface of dysfunction and depravity in the ru military, and the plot is frankly too simple for a classic tolstoy or gogol. in the novel version of the story, we eventually find out that the admiral himself and all of his peers were offshoring the military budgets to various mistresses in cyprus as a pissing contest among each other, thus enabling their own demise, which eventually barrels the state toward tumultuous times.
op sec is very underrated, and in person meetings are still very much a fixture in orgs with a conservative bend. but maybe? who among us hasn’t pretended to be sick and just zoomed in on mute from home a few times?
Getting closer to winter and seems like lot the Ukraine aid from various places getting more uncertainty (or at least the headlines more pessimistic), makes me wonder where all this is headed.
margarita simonyan of RT opined on social media that it may be necessary to conduct a warning shot of a tactical nuke … somewhere in siberia. to scare the west a bit of what sort of destruction they may face if they continue to supply ukraine.
yeah, it’s not a good plan, but this is where we are.
So how fucked is Ukraine when the US aid inevitably dries up in the coming months as we enter a multi-month shutdown organized by new speaker of the house Gym Jordan?
Hopefully they are not in a position where they cannot defend their ground for
a few months without ongoing arms shipments, long term I guess it’s going to be determined by how much increased support they can get from the EU.
This is the most effective use of the DoD’s budget since the Marshall Plan. Biggest loss of Russian aircraft since WWII for peanuts, all of the fighting oursourced. Ukraine aid is absolutely the last place you would look to cut military spending. Scrap the F35 and just lease Ukraine weapons.
Seriously though. If we were a sane country not operated entirely by defense contractors this war with Russia would result in a 50-60% reduction in the department of defense’s budget.
We could be the worlds dominant super power on 40% of the spend for sure. We would just lose the ability to do much but help people defend themselves from outside invasions… which I think would be a substantial positive thing.
If you do horrible shit internally we turn off your access to international trade. If you invade another country we send military aid which absolutely wrecks you. Seems like plenty of power to me.
Post the collapse of Russia as a major military power are there any places on earth the US has real military needs outside of defending Taiwan? (The SK’s are on the ‘we’ll send you guns’ plan now unless it’s China)
Honestly China is the only country on earth now we should even be seriously worrying about… and I actually really doubt we’ll ever have a real war with China given how interlinked the economies are. Plenty of conflict but no military engagements. Proxy wars definitely, although I think we should be trying to get our enemies into proxy wars rather than engaging in them ourselves.
I’m not talking about an across the board drop in the armed forces branches, obv the Navy takes the smallest cuts.
