Archive for the ‘war’ Category

Always Look on the Bright Side of the Ukraine War

Posted: June 26, 2024 by datechguy in war
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I’m not a big fan of continuing the war in Ukraine.

When the potential for the entire country to fall existed and Kiev itself was under threat the necessity of preventing Russia from steamrolling the breadbasket of the area and potentially going beyond said borders in my opinion justified western aid, even to a country as corrupt as Ukraine.

And while others discouraged Ukraine drone strikes in Russia I disagreed. Ukraine & Russia are at war and such strikes are of course legitimate acts of war no matter what the potential for escalation is.

And while a stalemate does weaken the Russian military which isn’t a bad thing the potential for this conflict to go beyond their borders or go nuclear remains and that alone is a good reason to find a peaceful solution before things get worse.

Well they’ve gotten a bit worse:

If these reports are correct that’s an escalation that is not helpful and frankly I think this move by South Korea is foolish as well:

South Korea is now rattling its sabers in response to the news from North Korea. After an emergency meeting of its National Security Council, the non-communist Korea stated it would send arms to Ukraine, something it had previously decided not to do.

I think that’s foolish because if I was in charge of South Korea, I’d welcome this move.

Yes it does give troops of the north experience in actual combat which is a valuable commodity, but I think there are many more positives than negatives here for the south.

  1. Every NK soldier who is sent to Ukraine is a soldier not able to be on the front lines of the DMZ.
  2. Every NK soldier casualty in Ukraine not only bleeds that army but might be a source of demoralization for soldiers told to fight thousands of miles from home.
  3. If NK casualties become high enough it might cause some pushback at home. It’s one thing to lose a son or daughter fighting against the South close to home, it’s quite another to do so in a war 10,000 miles away in a fight that has no relation to their land.

None of this makes this escalation a good thing but as this post suggests one should always look at the bright side of things and anything that weakens the North Korean army or has the solid potential to create dissent at home certainly qualifies as such.

Ukraine: Not My Call, Not Yours Either

Posted: June 15, 2024 by datechguy in in Ukraine, war
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Aboard a Chesapeake Bay steamer, not long after his surrender, the general [Joe Johnston] heard a fellow passenger insisting that the South had been “conquered but not subdued.” Asked in what command he had served, the bellicose young man — one of those stalwarts later classified as “invisible in war and invincible in peace” — replied that, unfortunately, circumstances had made it impossible for him to be in the army. “Well, sir, I was,” Johnston told him. “You may not be subdued, but I am.


― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

I usually don’t engage all that much on twitter anymore as so few people know how to have a spirited argument in a respectful way but once in a while I see something that jumps out at me. Such a thing happened today when someone was going over Putin and his faults.

Now as a person who knows his history and Putin’s KGB background you didn’t have to sell me on his faults even before the war on Ukraine began. It also seemed clear to me with the offensive near Kiev that Putin had more in mind that the Donbas region when he got started and fears of his forces driving beyond the borders were legitimate and even if you thought the threat of such a thing was not legitimate if you are a resident of Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia your fear of such a possibility is certainly legit as the three occupations of those countries by Communist Russia, then Nazi Germany then Communist Russia again are still in living memory.

As we all know the Ukrainians managed to stop the push of Kiev but the Russians had success in the Donbas region likely with the help of the large Russian population there left over from the days that they were part of the both the Soviet & Russian empires, Ukrainian counterattacks which seemed promising faded and the front lines have been fairly static for a bit with the Russians holding Donbas and neither side at the moment getting clear advantages.

The Russians have the advantages of numbers and a much larger population to draw from, the Ukrainians have the advantage of fighting on home turf and a large amount of foreign aid that even subtracting what is being used as graft makes a big difference, but a war of attrition by its very nature favors the side with the larger population plus Russia has the advantage of huge domestic energy supplies and a strong market for such energy if they wish to export to India etc.

Still this is bleeding Putin and thus you have seen some peace offers coming from Russia and the Ukrainians have to this point dismissed them. This is their right. They are the ones who are fighting this war, doing the bleeding and dying and living with all the risks of war which when it affects water and electrical supplies can quickly turn a 21st century lifestyle into a 17th or 18th century lifestyle.

Now all of the rest of us have a right to an opinion on what Ukraine should do, but it seems to me that being 10,000 miles away from the front lines and only risking tax dollars it’s not my place to tell people to go and fight and die. Nor is it the place of others to demand they fight to the last nor degrade those who might decide it’s not worth the cost anymore. The idea that Putin is a bad man and working for his own motives and that Ukraine is better off making a peace deal of some kind is not mutually exclusive.

Now of course the ideal would be Putin going back where he started from but it seems to be that even with weapons and supplies from the west the Ukrainians have neither the manpower nor the skill to force the Russians out of the areas they hold. Furthermore there is always the threat of Russia using tactical nukes if they feel the situation gets out of hand. The genie’s that would let out of bottles would not bode well for anyone.

Still in the end it’s their decision. If they feel it’s worth the hardships of war for months or even years to retake the parts of the country the Russians hold, I respect that. It’s their call not mine. There is a nobility in such a call whatever the result and no matter how it works out nobody should think less of them for doing so. Hey, they might think that Putin will reach the point of exhaustion and withdraw on terms favorable to Ukraine, if they can pull that off they deserve congratulations and admiration.

On the other hand if they eventually decide otherwise, that their people just can’t bear the costs of war anymore I’m certainly not going to critique them as Putin apologists or being on the other side or traitors for reaching the point of war exhaustion that I think a lot of the people online pushing them to keep fighting would have hit long ago. It’s very each to make that call from the safety of a keyboard far away in a comfortable home where your food and electricity supply is not in doubt. If they make a deal, they make a deal and it’s their deal to make.

What would I do? That’s a post for another day.

The Navy finally embraced warfighting

Posted: December 9, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in war
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Well, at least a little anyway.

For the longest time multiple people have raised the alarm about the Chinese Navy developing more ships, more capabilities and especially more missiles. The worry has been the US Navy would get “out-sticked,” as in the range of Chinese missiles would be so great they could hit US ships before those ships could even fire back.

This was true over the past decades because the Navy primarily used the Harpoon anti-ship missile, which has an effective range of 75 miles, and has been in service since 1977. Meanwhile, the Chinese Navy rolled out a nearly matching missile, the C-705, in 2006, and kept rolling out missiles, from the YJ-12 and YJ-18 to now the YJ-21, which claims to be a hypersonic, sea-borne anti-ship missile. During this time, the US sat on its hands and did almost nothing to increase the range of our missiles.

This was made worse by the fact we already HAD a long range missile. The Tomahawk, normally considered a land-strike missile, had a maritime strike version known as the TASM as early as 1990, yet they were all scrapped after the first Gulf War. The TASM had an effective range of around 900 miles, making it far superior to the Harpoon in all things but speed.

Range makes a big difference…if I can shoot first and force an enemy to maneuver to avoid getting hit, I get to call the shots and drive any engagement. While Chinese missiles aren’t known for their quality (just ask the Indonesians, who watched two failed C705 launches from his vessels in 2016), having multiple missiles hurtling towards, even if they aren’t the greatest quality, still puts you in a reactive mode.

Thankfully, this story has a better ending than most. In 2020 the Navy asked Raytheon to re-develop the maritime strike tomahawk. Not surprisingly, since this had been done once before, it rolled out quickly in 2021, and made front page news today.

This proves a much bigger point though: decline is a choice. We never had to give up long range missiles. Even if we would have kept them in low production, we could have easily updated the design over the 90s and 2000s to keep a competitive edge over any adversary. Instead, we pissed away our advantage for years and are now playing catch up. We chose to decline, but thankfully we’re slowly choosing to do otherwise.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Today’s elitist college students are good at standardized tests, but they can’t figure out good and evil

Posted: October 15, 2023 by John Ruberry in education, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, middle east, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics, war
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By John Ruberry

Sherman McCoy, the Yale-educated lead character of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities–and an old money WASP–saw himself as a “Master of the Universe.”

But as the Book of Proverbs says, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”

At America’s elite universities, such as Yale and the rest of the Ivy League, as well as NYU, Stanford, and some others, there are thousands of students who see themselves as Masters of the Universe. In reality, they have the right family connections, and they are very good at taking standardized tests, such as the SAT. Or, instead of being old money types like McCoy, they check the right woke boxes. 

Ryna Workman, who is non-binary (box one), Black (box two), and a leftist (box three), in her (Workman prefers they/them pronouns) role as president of the NYU Student Bar Association president, wrote a hateful anti-Israeli statement about the October 7 attacks that, among other things, said that the Jewish state “bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” Among those murdered were babies. The Nazi’s Einsatzgruppen also indiscriminately killed babies–and many others–during the Holocaust.

People calling their political enemies Nazis is as old as the Nazi movement and almost always it’s an overstated charge–but calling Hamas members Nazis is accurate. 

Fortunately, there has been some pushback. Winston and Strawn, an elite Chicago law firm where Jim Thompson, Illinois’ longest-serving governor–and a Republican–once served as CEO, repealed its job offer to Workman. 

Good.

After former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who had previously served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, decried the dozens of Harvard student groups siding with Hamas over Israel in a statement, some of those organizations retracted their support. 

Summers, on X, said, “In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.” 

These so-called Masters of the Universe are playing with half a deck of cards, one filled with jokers, not the harmless harlequin types, but evil clowns of the Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix ilk. 

In the words that Dan Bongino uses so often, “They are stupid smart people.” These young elitists don’t know the difference between good and evil.

So many of them are the evil Jokers of the Universe.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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