Ex Machina
Super Anarchist
Those would pierce armour ! And you have the added bonus of some kindling afterwards to fire up the samovar
Ukraine and Only Ukraine. If it isn't about Ukraine then fuck off
- Thread starter d'ranger
- Start date
LeoV
Super Anarchist
For the ones with a 3d printer.
cults3d.com
Missiles Launcher Pen & Pencil holder
New idea of a desktop pen & Pencil holder as missiles launcher 3D model for your office or desktop. 4 parts as the following : 1. Launcher_ part1 ( partitioned ) 2. Launcher_ part1 ( Unpartitioned ) 3. Vehicle_part2 4. Turntable_part3 Files format : STL Please leave your comment / need for...
cults3d.com
Keith
Super Anarchist
Olsonist
Disgusting Liberal Elitist
We have a quite a few Fakebertarians around here who have the pash for Tulsi.
@Pertinacious Tom (of course), Jizz, Meat, Dog (duh), Joker, BeSafe, ...
@Pertinacious Tom (of course), Jizz, Meat, Dog (duh), Joker, BeSafe, ...
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Steam Flyer
Sophisticated Yet Humble
I actually was interested in Tulsi as a candidate for a while, but the more I learned about her, the more her whackoe past seemed like a really bad place to have come from. And she kept bringing in odd non-sequiturs... probably dog-whistles to the Libertarians that I didn't recognize.
Now she's a liar-for-hire, apparently working for Russia. Kind of a shame she didn't get a gig on Fox News but they prefer blondes.
Olsonist
Disgusting Liberal Elitist
I'm skeptical of candidates I've never heard of before. I was skeptical of Bill Clinton (governor of exactly where?) and of Obama. Clearly they overcame that skepticism and very quickly. When I first heard of Gabbard she was running for President. I was skeptical and wondered on what basis was she running, what had she done? Well, it was easy to go from skepticism to outright derision when the usual Fakebertarians began singing her praises.
Keith
Super Anarchist
Plus, he was on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Bristol-Cruiser
Super Anarchist
And of course all those women on Fox are natural blondes. I have a theory that blonde hair dye causes an IQ decrease of 27 points on average. Waiting for funding for a study, spending time working out safety protocols.
Fah Kiew Tu
Curmudgeon, First Rank
FTFY.
Oh and BTW, on a sample size of 1 regular poster on this forum, one could hypothesise that the use of red hair dye decreased IQ by much more than 27 points...
FKT
Knut Grotzki
Anarchist
Keith
Super Anarchist
Gotta love those secondary explosions. The more the better.
Why Kyiv’s ‘thousand bee sting’ strategy is costing Russia dearly
If you want to understand the Ukrainian way of war, you could do worse than to pick up, as I recently did, a 1954 book called “Strategy” by the influential British military thinker Basil Liddell Hart. Having been gassed during the 1916 Battle of the Somme, where much of his battalion was wiped out, Captain Liddell Hart had developed a burning hatred of brutish generals who led their men to slaughter in frontal and futile attacks on the enemy. He called this the “direct approach,” and he attributed it to the great nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who held that “only a great battle can produce a major decision.”
Rejecting Clausewitz, Liddell Hart embraced the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote, “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” In tracts that he began publishing in the late 1920s, Liddell Hart surveyed thousands of years of military history to argue that the key to victory was to strike where least expected, dislocating the enemy psychologically and materially and making possible a relatively bloodless victory. He cited examples ranging from Hannibal’s march across the Alps to Sherman’s march across Georgia to demonstrate “the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach.”
Many historians have critiqued Liddell Hart for twisting history to make every conflict fit his argument. It’s true that no single theory can possibly explain all military outcomes over thousands of years. Yet Liddell Hart’s thinking seems quite applicable to the war in Ukraine. The Russians have pursued a brutal, unthinking direct approach that hearkens back to World War I, while the Ukrainians have outsmarted them with the indirect approach that Liddell Hart claimed was the hallmark of “Great Captains.”
The war began on Feb. 24, when the Russians mounted an armored and air assault on Kyiv. Remember the 40-mile Russian column headed for the Ukrainian capital? Rather than counterattack with their own tanks, the Ukrainians used hand-held missiles such as the Javelin to carry out pinprick strikes, targeting trucks carrying supplies in particular. Before long the column ran out of fuel and food, and the Russians were forced to pull back. Kyiv was saved. This was the indirect approach par excellence.
The Russians regrouped in mid-April using overwhelming artillery fire to clear their path in Luhansk province just as World War I generals did. That offensive forced the Ukrainians to stage a fighting withdrawal in early July from Lysychansk, the last major city they had held in Luhansk. But they inflicted such heavy casualties on the attackers that the Russian offensive has stalled without having secured the whole of the Donbas region.
Since then, Ukraine has been using U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to take out Russian command posts and ammunition dumps far behind the front lines. This strategy has impeded the flow of shells to Russian batteries and greatly slowed the bombardment of Ukrainian positions.
On Aug. 9, a Russian air base in occupied Crimea was rocked by at least six explosions that destroyed or heavily damaged at least eight warplanes. Then on Tuesday another blast hit a large Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Ukrainian officials did not comment in public but privately told reporters that both blasts were the work of their special forces.
Now, the Ukrainians are using the indirect approach to squeeze the Russian garrison in Kherson, the largest Ukrainian city under enemy occupation. Rather than mounting a direct assault, which would result in heavy casualties, the Ukrainians have been using the HIMARS and other systems to target the bridges across the Dnieper River that deliver supplies to the Russian forces in Kherson. The Ukrainians claim to have damaged all four bridges, leaving the Russian troops in danger of being stranded.
Ukrainian officials said Russian commanders have already evacuated to the east bank of the Dnieper, and some analysts predict the entire force may be forced to pull out of Kherson due to lack of supplies or risk of being captured. A similar Ukrainian strategy of interdicting logistics previously forced the Russians to evacuate Snake Island, a strategic chokepoint in the Black Sea.
“We do not have the resources to litter the territory with bodies and shells, as Russia does,” said Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov. “Therefore, it is necessary to change tactics, to fight in a different way.” Another Ukrainian official told the Wall Street Journal they are inflicting “a thousand bee stings.”
Australian retired major general Mick Ryan has written that the Ukrainians are pursuing a strategy of “corrosion” that seeks to erode “the Russian physical, moral and intellectual capacity to fight.” Another name for this strategy, as Ryan notes, is “the indirect approach” championed by Basil Liddell Hart.
The problem is that it can be hard to achieve a decisive result with indirect attacks. Sooner or later, if the Ukrainians want to liberate their land, they will have to attack and drive the Russians out. But they are being savvy in doing everything possible to weaken the invaders before that happens.
If you want to understand the Ukrainian way of war, you could do worse than to pick up, as I recently did, a 1954 book called “Strategy” by the influential British military thinker Basil Liddell Hart. Having been gassed during the 1916 Battle of the Somme, where much of his battalion was wiped out, Captain Liddell Hart had developed a burning hatred of brutish generals who led their men to slaughter in frontal and futile attacks on the enemy. He called this the “direct approach,” and he attributed it to the great nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who held that “only a great battle can produce a major decision.”
Rejecting Clausewitz, Liddell Hart embraced the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote, “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” In tracts that he began publishing in the late 1920s, Liddell Hart surveyed thousands of years of military history to argue that the key to victory was to strike where least expected, dislocating the enemy psychologically and materially and making possible a relatively bloodless victory. He cited examples ranging from Hannibal’s march across the Alps to Sherman’s march across Georgia to demonstrate “the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach.”
Many historians have critiqued Liddell Hart for twisting history to make every conflict fit his argument. It’s true that no single theory can possibly explain all military outcomes over thousands of years. Yet Liddell Hart’s thinking seems quite applicable to the war in Ukraine. The Russians have pursued a brutal, unthinking direct approach that hearkens back to World War I, while the Ukrainians have outsmarted them with the indirect approach that Liddell Hart claimed was the hallmark of “Great Captains.”
The war began on Feb. 24, when the Russians mounted an armored and air assault on Kyiv. Remember the 40-mile Russian column headed for the Ukrainian capital? Rather than counterattack with their own tanks, the Ukrainians used hand-held missiles such as the Javelin to carry out pinprick strikes, targeting trucks carrying supplies in particular. Before long the column ran out of fuel and food, and the Russians were forced to pull back. Kyiv was saved. This was the indirect approach par excellence.
The Russians regrouped in mid-April using overwhelming artillery fire to clear their path in Luhansk province just as World War I generals did. That offensive forced the Ukrainians to stage a fighting withdrawal in early July from Lysychansk, the last major city they had held in Luhansk. But they inflicted such heavy casualties on the attackers that the Russian offensive has stalled without having secured the whole of the Donbas region.
Since then, Ukraine has been using U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to take out Russian command posts and ammunition dumps far behind the front lines. This strategy has impeded the flow of shells to Russian batteries and greatly slowed the bombardment of Ukrainian positions.
On Aug. 9, a Russian air base in occupied Crimea was rocked by at least six explosions that destroyed or heavily damaged at least eight warplanes. Then on Tuesday another blast hit a large Russian ammunition depot in Crimea. Ukrainian officials did not comment in public but privately told reporters that both blasts were the work of their special forces.
Now, the Ukrainians are using the indirect approach to squeeze the Russian garrison in Kherson, the largest Ukrainian city under enemy occupation. Rather than mounting a direct assault, which would result in heavy casualties, the Ukrainians have been using the HIMARS and other systems to target the bridges across the Dnieper River that deliver supplies to the Russian forces in Kherson. The Ukrainians claim to have damaged all four bridges, leaving the Russian troops in danger of being stranded.
Ukrainian officials said Russian commanders have already evacuated to the east bank of the Dnieper, and some analysts predict the entire force may be forced to pull out of Kherson due to lack of supplies or risk of being captured. A similar Ukrainian strategy of interdicting logistics previously forced the Russians to evacuate Snake Island, a strategic chokepoint in the Black Sea.
“We do not have the resources to litter the territory with bodies and shells, as Russia does,” said Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov. “Therefore, it is necessary to change tactics, to fight in a different way.” Another Ukrainian official told the Wall Street Journal they are inflicting “a thousand bee stings.”
Australian retired major general Mick Ryan has written that the Ukrainians are pursuing a strategy of “corrosion” that seeks to erode “the Russian physical, moral and intellectual capacity to fight.” Another name for this strategy, as Ryan notes, is “the indirect approach” championed by Basil Liddell Hart.
The problem is that it can be hard to achieve a decisive result with indirect attacks. Sooner or later, if the Ukrainians want to liberate their land, they will have to attack and drive the Russians out. But they are being savvy in doing everything possible to weaken the invaders before that happens.
Westerners are sponsoring slogans written on bombs aimed at Russians
At a military position near the front line, members of a Ukrainian military unit snickered as a soldier with tattooed arms scrawled a phallic symbol on an artillery shell designed for an M777 howitzer cannon.
At a separate position, a Ukrainian soldier loaded a shell that read “Hello from Texas” into a medium-range cannon. Seconds before it fired with a loud boom, the operator announced “from Texas” in a gleeful Slavic accent.
The emergence of slogans and symbols emblazoned on U.S.-made artillery — originally a creative outlet for Ukrainian soldiers serving in the country’s east — has become a growing and lucrative fundraising tactic for Ukrainians in the nearly seven-month war.
Local crowdfunding websites have raised tens of thousands of dollars for the war effort since Russia invaded on Feb. 24. They offer people anywhere in the world the chance to commission a message on a growing menu of bombs and missiles before they are fired at advancing Russian forces.
The most prominent crowdfunding group — Sign My Rocket — started by selling messages on Soviet-made 82mm caliber mortar rounds for $30 each. But eventually co-founder Anton Sokolenko realized if it sold messages on more powerful weapons, benefactors from the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, Switzerland and elsewhere would pay even more.
“We got bigger and bigger shells,” Sokolenko said in an interview from his home in Cherkasy, a city in central Ukraine. “Ninety-five percent of the orders are in English and most are from the United States.”
Sokolenko’s organization has now moved beyond mortar shells and is selling inscriptions on antitank mines, bomb-laden drones, VOG 17 hand grenades, 220mm rockets, 2S7 Pion heavy artillery and scores of other explosives. He says it has raised more than $150,000 for the Ukrainian military and facilitated scores of messages including “From NATO with Love,” “London Says Hi” and “Remember the Alamo.”
The group recently branded a Buk surface-to-air missile with the message “Not for Use on Malaysian Airlines” — a reference to the downing of a commercial airliner in 2014 by pro-Russian separatists armed with the same missile system, which killed 298 people.
The fundraising effort is not officially sanctioned by the Ukrainian military. Sokolenko’s organization relies on his informal connections to Ukrainian military units in the field. The proceeds go toward buying equipment for Ukraine’s military units, including camouflaged vehicles and auto parts.
After a donation is collected, a Ukrainian soldier scrawls the requested message on the munition and takes a picture of it. The picture is then sent to the donor.
“I’ve already donated $3,000,” said Colin Smith, a director at an e-commerce company in Dallas who has dedicated artillery shells to friends and relatives for birthdays, anniversaries and a job promotion.
Smith first discovered Sign My Rocket on a Reddit page earlier this year. He recently gave his wife a picture of an artillery shell for their anniversary, inscribed with their initials and wedding date: “C & Y. Est. 2021.”
“She loved it,” he said, “though she’s now kind of tired of me telling her about the war.”
The most expensive item on the website is the naming rights to a Russian-made T-72 tank for $3,000 — a topic of contention in the Smith household.
“I’m trying to get my family to go in on the tank,” said Smith, “but my wife said I’ve already spent too much.”
Ukrainians are far from alone in using bombs as a canvas for political or nationalist expression. European and U.S. soldiers have written messages on artillery in every conflict since at least the First World War. After a Russian attack in April that killed more than 50 people at a train station in Kramatorsk, a missile fragment was found wedged into the ground bearing the handwritten message: “For the Children.” But the selling of customized messages as a fundraising tool is a novel innovation.
The success of Sokolenko’s efforts has already prompted the creation of other crowdfunding sites.
The website RevengeFor, launched three weeks ago by a Kyiv native and IT worker Nazar Gulyk, appeals to foreigners with historical grievances against Moscow who would like to support Ukrainians as their proxy.
“What’s your reason for wishing to take revenge on Russia?” says a group fundraising video displaying the image of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin and current Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Ukraine is already avenging everyone on the battlefield! Avenging you and avenging the suffering of your people too!”
In just three weeks, the group says it has raised $52,000 from an array of donors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Britain, Poland, Hong Kong, Belgium, Georgia, Czech Republic and Norway. The group sends its proceeds to Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian charity that has equipped troops with military vehicles and surveillance tools.
Gulyk says he is in negotiations with his military contacts for his most ambitious offering yet: naming rights on a munition for a U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, the weapon widely credited with slowing Russia’s military advance in the East and South.
“It’s our next milestone,” he said. “We want to make that more expensive: $10,000 or more.”
Another Ukrainian crowdfunding website, Drones for Ukraine Fund, raises money by selling parts of downed Russian aircraft.
U.S. officials are aware of the effort but say the unauthorized defacement of U.S. weapons does not rank among their most pressing concerns in a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people, increased food and energy prices and shaken European security policy to its core.
Ukrainian soldiers involved in marking up the weapons are reluctant to comment about the process given the unofficial nature of the effort. One soldier who has written on several weapons for “Sign My Rocket” described his experience on condition of anonymity to avoid punishment from his superiors.
“ I didn’t believe that it was real,” he said, recalling when the group first approached him.
It was only when the group donated used cars and spare tires to his military unit with the proceeds from the inscriptions that he believed the operation was legitimate, he said.
He said the project existed outside the oversight of commanding officers. “The superiors turn a blind eye,” he said.
When asked if senior military leaders were aware of the effort, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Armed Forces declined to comment.
Many of the inscriptions include profanities directed at Putin or Russian troops that are unfit for print.
One foreign diplomat in Kyiv said the scene of Ukrainian forces drawing ever more irreverent slogans on munitions recalled the 19th century oil painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.” In the painting, Cossacks from what is now modern day Ukraine huddled around a table writing out a letter of ever more offensive insults toward the Ottoman sultan who sought their allegiance.
“The tradition of resistance is strong,” said Yaroslav Hrytsak, a Ukrainian historian and professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
He said “humor” and “obscenities” have long typified Ukraine’s response to foreign occupation.
“It could be a rough kind of humor,” he said.
Mark_K
Super Anarchist
The historians were right about Linell Hart. I cringe when people place Clausewitz opposed to Sun Tsu. Sun may not have even existed, and is really a collection of assertions, "chop suey strategy", and anyone who quotes that stuff is revealed a naif. Clausewitz, on the other hand, explains his thinking. Unfortunately his writing style is terribly dense and only one in a thousand who quote him have ever actually read the whole book. The vast majority who have were forced to do so...
Yet the point they make in that article, despite the awful foundation, is correct.
Sol Rosenberg
Girthy Member
Good. More please.
LeoV
Super Anarchist
What did Clausewitz of Sun Tzu say about terror actions, Russia keeps shelling Kharkiv. hitting civilian flats...
And then being surprised that Russia phobia is growing in the EU. Ban visa's and declare terror state. If they want to be like North Korea, fine... or stop whining and stop the terror acts.
And then being surprised that Russia phobia is growing in the EU. Ban visa's and declare terror state. If they want to be like North Korea, fine... or stop whining and stop the terror acts.
