Threaten them with Houchen dredging the Channel
The end?
- Thread starter borolad259
- Start date
Taps nose
Druss_The_Legend
Well-known member
RavsFan
Well-known member
We should offer him all the crabs he can harvest, then give him open access to all the UK’s sexual health clinics.
Welcoming committee is already there. And it will get substantially bigger if moves are made.
Re. Starmer and fishy stuff. I've pinged that article the Grand Fromage. But last time he said "there was absolutely no fishy condition attached to the re-arm finance seal ... which had already been allocated to the UK" ... Starmer just opted out ... and not in a friendly way. Much to the astonishment of our Chief of Staff.
Yes, the EU does want closer ties in other areas, but the deal was not contingent upon that .... according to him, and he wrote the deal.
Starmer, in common with some other EU leaders, may be a little uncomfortable about the increasing fedralist bent within the EU commission ... and that may have had something to do with it.
Jonny_Rondos_Disco_pants
Well-known member
That has been the worry of EU-sceptics since I remember - going back to the 80s. It was always the demon of a 'Federal Europe' taking over our lives and usurping Westminister. As it happens, it seems as though its the most sane solution on the table, at the moment. I never thought it would come to me ever saying that.
What with modern imperialist intentions shown from US, Russia and China, it is safety in numbers, and all that.
El Guapo
Well-known member
To be honest, and without getting into Brexit again, a European federal superstate was why I voted leave because I didn’t think it was viable / workable with such disparate peoples / nations making up Europe. Yet here we are and as you say, may be the best option in current climate. Who knows anymore, it’s all above my pay grade.
(Note, I’ve also gone on record as saying in hindsight I wish I’d voted remain)
I sent my mate the Fishy politico article. He went ballistic. Basically said that the Swedish EU minister was a gobshyte bigging up her own self importance, and talking out of turn as well as inaccurately representing the situation. He said there are some ongoing discussions regarding fishing going on...as there often are ... as well as discussions regarding the D.O. status of British Breakfast sausages ... a thorny issue, with its own committee, which we instigated ourselves and are the driving force behind (this is not a joke). But non of the discussions were linked in any way to the re-arm package or other defence initiatives, like the coalition .... and nor were either of those two things contingent upon sausages or fish concessions. Defence and security are too important for that.
And on the subject of EU bureaucracy, a new missive .... which includes an explanation of the air power situation.
"Working for EU is weird. Very weird even. EU loves to reinvent the wheel, and it is at the heart of it a bureaucracy.
As EU came into fruition some rather sharp-minded bureaucrats sat down and started to build up a European Bureaucracy. To do that they nicked parts from all over Europe, based on what works best, and avoiding what is problematic.
And then they supercharged it. One could even say that to a large respect it is the bureaucracy that is running the show, and not the politicians. They obviously produce two things, Laws and Instruments.
Laws are self-explanatory, Instruments are economic packages directed into specific things, for instance to start an Agency, Program or Fund. A Program is targeting a specific problem but can at times be rather wide ranging.
Let us take ReArm Europe as an example, it is an Instrument creating the Program and directing the money into three Funds (and counting). First we have the 160 Billion Euro Grants Fund, next comes the 800 Billion Euro Interest-free Loans Fund, and last a 63 Billion Euro Arm Ukraine Fund that is a perpetual loan fund repaid by Russian assets that we hold.
And that is where our Politicians walk away. Making policies and routines are up to the Bureaucracy, and that means that the relevant Agency takes over control. And as long as we do not break any Law, or intent of the Instrument, we have quite a bit of leeway over how we disburse the funds.
So, the legal departments take over and checks, so our intent is not going against Laws. If there is a question we shunt it to the EU Court to ponder.
A***** (one of our small group) will be quite familiar with how the “user end” of this works, it is how research grants originally got into existence and got funded. Alongside of the Social Funds the Research and Science Funds used to be the 2 perpetual funds in EU, and now we have the Defence Funds as the third main perpetual funds.
Back when EU decided that it needed a Defence Department it went about it in the usual EUish ways. They created a very civilian style bureaucracy and cobbled together a bunch of semi- independent agencies working with defence and security.
I write semi-independent, in EU only the big master agencies are independent. And EU being EU, it didn’t have a lot of Defence stuff to stick into the new framework. But EU being EU decided that ALL security somehow either sort under it or have to report to it.
This means that an insane amount of disparate agencies at a minimum have to report to the master agency, or in many cases, are sorted directly under it with me as titular and very confused head.
I’m grunting and walking on my knuckles, I’m good at blowing stuff up, but I do not know a lot about for instance infrastructure beyond making it collapse as efficiently as a bomb can do it.
So, to not go insane I grouped those agencies into two groups, those that I am assumed to run, and those that report, and then I divided that up into groups, and sub-commanded those out. If I need to know something I get it from the bullet point reports and can ask more.
Now I’m done with the pre-amble. Yesterday this bureaucratic madness plonked out a spectacular result that I can actually talk about.
One of the agencies that are under the security umbrella is Waterworks. In EU water is a human right, so the security of it is important. Late evening yesterday I got a push-notice in regards of a 5-sigma oddity event.
In human words, something so odd that it basically will happen once throughout human existence. I get all 3-sigma notices and upwards. In human rationale a 5 is almost certainly an act of war or a direct attack by forces nefarious.
It began with the waterworks in Jönköping in Sweden blowing out, with a stupendous amount of water gushing out on the streets, and half the city ending up without water. Normal water leaks happen a few times a year in Sweden, but total mainline blowouts are more rare, about once in every five years or so.
When such a thing happens, there is a Regional Crisis Management Team taking charge, especially in a large City. And then national agencies get involved to send any additional resources needed.
And that is all sent upstream and end up at Waterworks. At his point it was not a big concern for the watch officer there, unless a country asks for help it is just noted down in the statistics, and Sweden doesn’t require any assistance in these things.
And then a few hours later exactly the same thing happened in Karlskoga at a watermains taking out the water in the entire city. This elevated it from a rare, but probably natural thing, into a very rare statistical anomaly.
At this point the watch Engineer, let us call her Giles Deleuze, started to frantically look into both occurrences. What she found sent her calling Ops, and they smacked the red button. What engineer Deleuze had found was that both suffered from exactly the same problem, a support pump that had backpressured the system so that the main had ruptured.
One pump doing it is weird but can theoretically happen roughly once every blue moon. Two? Not really possible. That is how the CinC got woken up by me cheerfully informing him that someone had nefariously attacked him and that I had dispatched a team of experts.
And since I believe that being bright should be punished, Deleuze all of a sudden found herself in the ****-end of Sweden with a bunch of other specialist engineers after a receiving an order from so far upon high that she probably didn’t know it existed. I did though write in a recommendation for a pay-rise and a promotion. With my punishments comes rewards.
I bet you didn’t realise that I watch over your waterpipes while you sleep. Jokes aside, I am starting to believe that this hyper-bureaucratization might be our greatest strength in this war. And also, that it is not politicians that do the actual acting.
If there’s a security threat many responses would not even involve me, but instead be automatic downstream, unless it is super-weird and interesting, then I take a personal shine to it.
The Sigma part? Well, that was me, I had to come up with a name for a 5-step threat ladder, and I got thinking about L***** (a mutual acquaintance of our group) endlessly talking about the sigma-scale. And it loosely translates into it obviously, but a 5-sigma is when the probability is so high that either the Universe will end before it happens again, or we got attacked somehow. It works, and it makes me smile.
Ukrainian Air Power
What has made this war so bizarre is that it has not relied upon air power to any greater degree. Ukraine was not able to do it for natural reasons, their air force was to small and outdated to make any big difference, but Russia supposedly was expected to be able to do it.
As the war began the pecking order in the world was generally seen as US First, then came Russia, China as third (presumably) and the Nordic Air Force at a comfortable fourth (or third), and the rest of the world that could be eaten for breakfast by the four.
A friend of mine who is a Swedish Air Force General always claimed though that the Nordics would be able to stop Russia dead in the tracks, but I truly never believed this assertion, nor did anyone outside of the Nordic Air Force.
As the war started it rapidly became painfully clear that the Russian air force was not all that it was hyped up to be, and that it was woefully underprepared for the war. Their pilots lacked flight hours to such a degree that they were rather chubby.
And chubby pilots can’t withstand high-G combat manoeuvres, hence why they tend to fly in straight lines and make gentle turns.
It also turned out that their aircraft was not all they had been made out to be. Especially their most modern aircraft turned out to be mainly Potemkin villages with wings. Also, the expected 500 combat ready aircraft, turned out to be not as factual as expected.
Even taking this into account, Russia should have been able to literally blow the Ukrainian air force out of the sky within days, just on shear numbers. But as we know this never happened. Why?
There are two reasons, one is doctrinal, and the other seems to be personal. Russian pilots are risk-averse to the point of cowardice, if they discover that there is a risk that they will be shot down, they back down, even if pressing on would lead to rapid victory.
This to the point that Russian pilots refuse to fly dangerous missions, bordering on actual mutiny at times. A problem that the Ukrainian side most definitely did not have.
Instead, Russian pilots did standoff missions, preferably using longer ranged missiles. Well, until they mostly ran out of those. Then they refused to fly until Russia had developed glide-bombs with longer range.
And as Western Air Defence Systems arrived, the chance to achieve air superiority disappeared forever for Russia. For a couple of years Russia had the theoretical chance of using their air force to take out said air defence systems, but they opted to not do that.
And here we come to the doctrinal part. We always assumed that Russia would use their air force like we do, as a main offensive weapon, and as a main protective weapon. As it turned out Russia instead had a doctrine that treated the air force as artillery with wings.
This means that it is just tactically to bombard frontlines infront of advancing troops, and to bomb strongholds into submission, something that we saw in the opening stages, and intermittently during the war as and when the pilots actually flew these missions at all.
From a technical and airplane/pilot availability perspective Russia should be able to perform up towards 500 tactical attack-strikes on ground targets each day. In reality they get out 10 to 20 on a good day in areas with less-than-ideal air defence coverage.
Instead, they concentrate on standoff terror-missiling at residential buildings, hospitals, and other targets that lack both tactical and strategic value. Same as they use a lot of artillery on similar things.
What we see very little of is strategic usage of the air force of Russia. And with that I mean concerted campaigns to take out road-bridges, railroads, production facilities, energy infrastructure, etcetera.
Now you are probably shouting at me that Russia indeed are missiling energy-infrastructure, and you are correct. They have done that, but not at all at the level they should have to be able to win the war.
Let me attack things from a different angle. If Russia had taken those thousands of missiles used on civilian targets like playgrounds, bus stops, public toilets, hospitals and civilian housing, things would look very different.
There wouldn’t be a bridge left standing, not a sub-station would remain, no air-defence would remain, no railroads would function, and the industrial output of Ukraine would be at the bronze- age. All this was within their grasp.
Instead, Russia attempted to conserve all of their air power, and to concentrate on pure terror- bombings. And terror-bombings are historically not effective.
A country at war must by necessity go all in, otherwise they will lose the war. Weirdly Russia did this with all other equipment, and all other soldiers and officers, but not the air force. The lack of strategic thinking has though been prevalent across all branches of their offensive forces.
And here is my point, if the Russian air force had fought as hard and fast as their meatwaves do, Russia would have achieved air superiority within days, and after that they could have bombed Ukraine into snot.
And even after they lost that opportunity they could have strategically bombed Ukraine into submission. But due to cowardice, doctrinal folly, and corruption, they never did this. Thank you very much.
Now, let us look at Ukraine, the air force-wise poor country-bumpkin cousin. Due to lack of equipment, missiles, pilots, etcetera, they never had the possibility to gain air dominance, and even more so air superiority.
They did put up one hell of a good fight and almost got wiped out completely for it. It did though trigger the Russian cowardice, so well worth it since Russia pulled back on doing air sorties over Ukraine itself.
What remained after this was not enough to do more than a few spectacular air raids against the Russian navy, and some air policing. Over time they got a more MIG-29s and some improvements was made to their SU-planes so they could be used to attack ground targets with Western missiles and glide bombs.
Quite as that was, it did not constitute air power, nor an air force able to perform concerted action with army units on the offensive. This had me worried about if Ukraine could transform itself into an air power as more and more Western aircraft arrived.
Now for an Interlude.
The 120 Concept
Seeing that the F-16 and other comparable aircraft was out-performing the Russian on average aircrafts, I asked myself: How much would it take to achieve air superiority over Russia and to gain the ability to perform strategic and tactical strike-missions?
So, I asked the airboys to do some mathematical legwork on the subject. And after some mathematic grunting they came back with an answer.
It would take 120 of a combination of F-16s, Gripens, Mirage/Rafale and Typhoons to do the job. This made our collective jaws drop. At any point in time, Europe can muster 1 200 aircraft in the air.
We had all assumed that the F-16s provided was a nice addition to Ukraine, but not nearly able to make a huge difference. Instead, we found ourselves on the brink of providing enough for Ukraine to win the air war permanently.
So, we quietly started to get more pilots trained and sort out more airplanes and airplane types. We also started to make certain that the combat power would be possible to sustain at that level, even if losses was incurred.
Obviously this takes time, but we had a foundation already in place to build on, so the work takes less time than the initial project took. That being said, we are not there yet, far from. But our work is starting to bear fruits.
Ukrainian Air Power part II
In the beginning Ukraine used their few F-16s in air policing missions only. Then after a while they started using them as missile-hunters increasing air defence posture. Then as the numbers grew they started to lob missiles from well inside Ukraine. Then a few glide-bombs was chucked against Russian strongholds. Incremental baby steps.
As we told Ukraine about the 120 Concept they took one stunned look at things and then sprang into action with a new strategic plan. Something that Saddam could have told the Russians all about.
All Ukrainian generals had studied the air campaigns that Schwarzkopf had used upon Iraq, and they had drooled over it, and then sobbed over it not working for them since they lacked the air power to do it.
In other words, they started to take out the Russian air defences with gusto. Ukraine had always done that, but with the purpose of giving their drones and missiles better traction. But the urgency was not the same, after all drones and missiles does not come with expensive and hard to replace pilots and aircraft.
This is why Ukraine all of sudden started to destroy 10 times as many air defence launchers, radars, control-centres and EW-installations as they had the month before. At times a single launcher was targeted by up to 100 drones in one go to overwhelm everything and break through.
Entire regions of the frontline, occupied territories, and even parts of Russia itself, all of a sudden became entirely unprotected. And Ukraine flipped the page in the Iraq book, Hammer Time.
Having a large aerial bomb go off near you is a very emotional experience of life-changing nature. 500kg or more of brisance and shrapnel going off changes things like landscapes and peoples motivation and existential status.
This is why nothing can replace air power. Drones are nice and good, same goes for artillery. But you can drone a bunker to Kingdom come and it will mostly not work if the bunker is well-built, and even artillery might require hundreds of direct hits to eradicate it. One hunk-of-a-bomb and said bunker is turned into gravel.
Use bomb capsules and you get 100s of sub-munitions to shred advancing units. Nothing says big baddaboom like an aerial bomb.
First Ukraine started to do air sorties with more and bigger glide-bombs against the frontlines, and now they could use simpler glide-bombs than the advanced Western ones. Basically, they stuck wings and rudimentary controls on Soviet iron-bombs.
Then they started flying air sorties into occupied territories dropping even more bombs and launching missiles that could strike deeper against more air defence things lurking far behind the lines.
Then air sorties ventured out deep into Bryansk, Bilhorod and Kursk using glide bombs, and also Russian aircraft got chased away with a missile up the wazoo. Russian air force? They whimpered and withdrew.
Yesterday Ukraine started to use non-glide bombs, just some rudimentary aiming system slapped on them, but otherwise basic big stupid iron-bombs. And those started to drop directly on the frontlines and nearby logistics and reserves.
Seems like we once again didn’t grasp how spineless the Russian air force is. Some 250 fighter jets are refusing to fight against a much smaller number of Ukrainian jets ******* on them with bomb and taking chances that would put them into harms way if Russia actually showed up.
And here is my point, Russian air force will probably not return. And as Ukrainian aircraft numbers slowly crawl up to the 120 point, they will be able to fly up to 240 bombing missions per day, while at the same time do air policing, at least if they have two pilots per aircraft and they hotseat them.
That 500 big baddabooms per 24 hours, dropping down on all sorts of interesting things. That is one 500kg bomb per kilometre of frontline per 48 hours. And that is enough to change things permanently given a bit of time.
Conclusion
This is why I always stated that the Ukraine War is a bad example of how the war of the future will look, and why I push back hard on anyone telling me to prepare for a similar war in Europe.
We are an air power, we could have taken out the Russian air defence in 30 days, and then unleashed 5 000 strikes on target per day until Russia fell apart. Imagine 5 000 strategic or tactical targets destroyed each day. That is all bridges gone 300km deep from EU borders, all gone within 24 hours, just as one example.
This is why Russia will not attack us, and why I laugh when people gasp that Russia can defeat us when they attack in 3 years. Before Russia could even ponder attacking us they need to come up with a way to remove our air power.
No, there is only one single scenario where the Russian war on Ukraine would be a good example to emulate. And that is if we end up in a war where we do not have immediate air superiority. "
You might guess what he's alluding to, but I won't copy it in here ... as he has a solution which he wouldn't want Hogsbreath to know about.
And on the subject of EU bureaucracy, a new missive .... which includes an explanation of the air power situation.
"Working for EU is weird. Very weird even. EU loves to reinvent the wheel, and it is at the heart of it a bureaucracy.
As EU came into fruition some rather sharp-minded bureaucrats sat down and started to build up a European Bureaucracy. To do that they nicked parts from all over Europe, based on what works best, and avoiding what is problematic.
And then they supercharged it. One could even say that to a large respect it is the bureaucracy that is running the show, and not the politicians. They obviously produce two things, Laws and Instruments.
Laws are self-explanatory, Instruments are economic packages directed into specific things, for instance to start an Agency, Program or Fund. A Program is targeting a specific problem but can at times be rather wide ranging.
Let us take ReArm Europe as an example, it is an Instrument creating the Program and directing the money into three Funds (and counting). First we have the 160 Billion Euro Grants Fund, next comes the 800 Billion Euro Interest-free Loans Fund, and last a 63 Billion Euro Arm Ukraine Fund that is a perpetual loan fund repaid by Russian assets that we hold.
And that is where our Politicians walk away. Making policies and routines are up to the Bureaucracy, and that means that the relevant Agency takes over control. And as long as we do not break any Law, or intent of the Instrument, we have quite a bit of leeway over how we disburse the funds.
So, the legal departments take over and checks, so our intent is not going against Laws. If there is a question we shunt it to the EU Court to ponder.
A***** (one of our small group) will be quite familiar with how the “user end” of this works, it is how research grants originally got into existence and got funded. Alongside of the Social Funds the Research and Science Funds used to be the 2 perpetual funds in EU, and now we have the Defence Funds as the third main perpetual funds.
Back when EU decided that it needed a Defence Department it went about it in the usual EUish ways. They created a very civilian style bureaucracy and cobbled together a bunch of semi- independent agencies working with defence and security.
I write semi-independent, in EU only the big master agencies are independent. And EU being EU, it didn’t have a lot of Defence stuff to stick into the new framework. But EU being EU decided that ALL security somehow either sort under it or have to report to it.
This means that an insane amount of disparate agencies at a minimum have to report to the master agency, or in many cases, are sorted directly under it with me as titular and very confused head.
I’m grunting and walking on my knuckles, I’m good at blowing stuff up, but I do not know a lot about for instance infrastructure beyond making it collapse as efficiently as a bomb can do it.
So, to not go insane I grouped those agencies into two groups, those that I am assumed to run, and those that report, and then I divided that up into groups, and sub-commanded those out. If I need to know something I get it from the bullet point reports and can ask more.
Now I’m done with the pre-amble. Yesterday this bureaucratic madness plonked out a spectacular result that I can actually talk about.
One of the agencies that are under the security umbrella is Waterworks. In EU water is a human right, so the security of it is important. Late evening yesterday I got a push-notice in regards of a 5-sigma oddity event.
In human words, something so odd that it basically will happen once throughout human existence. I get all 3-sigma notices and upwards. In human rationale a 5 is almost certainly an act of war or a direct attack by forces nefarious.
It began with the waterworks in Jönköping in Sweden blowing out, with a stupendous amount of water gushing out on the streets, and half the city ending up without water. Normal water leaks happen a few times a year in Sweden, but total mainline blowouts are more rare, about once in every five years or so.
When such a thing happens, there is a Regional Crisis Management Team taking charge, especially in a large City. And then national agencies get involved to send any additional resources needed.
And that is all sent upstream and end up at Waterworks. At his point it was not a big concern for the watch officer there, unless a country asks for help it is just noted down in the statistics, and Sweden doesn’t require any assistance in these things.
And then a few hours later exactly the same thing happened in Karlskoga at a watermains taking out the water in the entire city. This elevated it from a rare, but probably natural thing, into a very rare statistical anomaly.
At this point the watch Engineer, let us call her Giles Deleuze, started to frantically look into both occurrences. What she found sent her calling Ops, and they smacked the red button. What engineer Deleuze had found was that both suffered from exactly the same problem, a support pump that had backpressured the system so that the main had ruptured.
One pump doing it is weird but can theoretically happen roughly once every blue moon. Two? Not really possible. That is how the CinC got woken up by me cheerfully informing him that someone had nefariously attacked him and that I had dispatched a team of experts.
And since I believe that being bright should be punished, Deleuze all of a sudden found herself in the ****-end of Sweden with a bunch of other specialist engineers after a receiving an order from so far upon high that she probably didn’t know it existed. I did though write in a recommendation for a pay-rise and a promotion. With my punishments comes rewards.
I bet you didn’t realise that I watch over your waterpipes while you sleep. Jokes aside, I am starting to believe that this hyper-bureaucratization might be our greatest strength in this war. And also, that it is not politicians that do the actual acting.
If there’s a security threat many responses would not even involve me, but instead be automatic downstream, unless it is super-weird and interesting, then I take a personal shine to it.
The Sigma part? Well, that was me, I had to come up with a name for a 5-step threat ladder, and I got thinking about L***** (a mutual acquaintance of our group) endlessly talking about the sigma-scale. And it loosely translates into it obviously, but a 5-sigma is when the probability is so high that either the Universe will end before it happens again, or we got attacked somehow. It works, and it makes me smile.
Ukrainian Air Power
What has made this war so bizarre is that it has not relied upon air power to any greater degree. Ukraine was not able to do it for natural reasons, their air force was to small and outdated to make any big difference, but Russia supposedly was expected to be able to do it.
As the war began the pecking order in the world was generally seen as US First, then came Russia, China as third (presumably) and the Nordic Air Force at a comfortable fourth (or third), and the rest of the world that could be eaten for breakfast by the four.
A friend of mine who is a Swedish Air Force General always claimed though that the Nordics would be able to stop Russia dead in the tracks, but I truly never believed this assertion, nor did anyone outside of the Nordic Air Force.
As the war started it rapidly became painfully clear that the Russian air force was not all that it was hyped up to be, and that it was woefully underprepared for the war. Their pilots lacked flight hours to such a degree that they were rather chubby.
And chubby pilots can’t withstand high-G combat manoeuvres, hence why they tend to fly in straight lines and make gentle turns.
It also turned out that their aircraft was not all they had been made out to be. Especially their most modern aircraft turned out to be mainly Potemkin villages with wings. Also, the expected 500 combat ready aircraft, turned out to be not as factual as expected.
Even taking this into account, Russia should have been able to literally blow the Ukrainian air force out of the sky within days, just on shear numbers. But as we know this never happened. Why?
There are two reasons, one is doctrinal, and the other seems to be personal. Russian pilots are risk-averse to the point of cowardice, if they discover that there is a risk that they will be shot down, they back down, even if pressing on would lead to rapid victory.
This to the point that Russian pilots refuse to fly dangerous missions, bordering on actual mutiny at times. A problem that the Ukrainian side most definitely did not have.
Instead, Russian pilots did standoff missions, preferably using longer ranged missiles. Well, until they mostly ran out of those. Then they refused to fly until Russia had developed glide-bombs with longer range.
And as Western Air Defence Systems arrived, the chance to achieve air superiority disappeared forever for Russia. For a couple of years Russia had the theoretical chance of using their air force to take out said air defence systems, but they opted to not do that.
And here we come to the doctrinal part. We always assumed that Russia would use their air force like we do, as a main offensive weapon, and as a main protective weapon. As it turned out Russia instead had a doctrine that treated the air force as artillery with wings.
This means that it is just tactically to bombard frontlines infront of advancing troops, and to bomb strongholds into submission, something that we saw in the opening stages, and intermittently during the war as and when the pilots actually flew these missions at all.
From a technical and airplane/pilot availability perspective Russia should be able to perform up towards 500 tactical attack-strikes on ground targets each day. In reality they get out 10 to 20 on a good day in areas with less-than-ideal air defence coverage.
Instead, they concentrate on standoff terror-missiling at residential buildings, hospitals, and other targets that lack both tactical and strategic value. Same as they use a lot of artillery on similar things.
What we see very little of is strategic usage of the air force of Russia. And with that I mean concerted campaigns to take out road-bridges, railroads, production facilities, energy infrastructure, etcetera.
Now you are probably shouting at me that Russia indeed are missiling energy-infrastructure, and you are correct. They have done that, but not at all at the level they should have to be able to win the war.
Let me attack things from a different angle. If Russia had taken those thousands of missiles used on civilian targets like playgrounds, bus stops, public toilets, hospitals and civilian housing, things would look very different.
There wouldn’t be a bridge left standing, not a sub-station would remain, no air-defence would remain, no railroads would function, and the industrial output of Ukraine would be at the bronze- age. All this was within their grasp.
Instead, Russia attempted to conserve all of their air power, and to concentrate on pure terror- bombings. And terror-bombings are historically not effective.
A country at war must by necessity go all in, otherwise they will lose the war. Weirdly Russia did this with all other equipment, and all other soldiers and officers, but not the air force. The lack of strategic thinking has though been prevalent across all branches of their offensive forces.
And here is my point, if the Russian air force had fought as hard and fast as their meatwaves do, Russia would have achieved air superiority within days, and after that they could have bombed Ukraine into snot.
And even after they lost that opportunity they could have strategically bombed Ukraine into submission. But due to cowardice, doctrinal folly, and corruption, they never did this. Thank you very much.
Now, let us look at Ukraine, the air force-wise poor country-bumpkin cousin. Due to lack of equipment, missiles, pilots, etcetera, they never had the possibility to gain air dominance, and even more so air superiority.
They did put up one hell of a good fight and almost got wiped out completely for it. It did though trigger the Russian cowardice, so well worth it since Russia pulled back on doing air sorties over Ukraine itself.
What remained after this was not enough to do more than a few spectacular air raids against the Russian navy, and some air policing. Over time they got a more MIG-29s and some improvements was made to their SU-planes so they could be used to attack ground targets with Western missiles and glide bombs.
Quite as that was, it did not constitute air power, nor an air force able to perform concerted action with army units on the offensive. This had me worried about if Ukraine could transform itself into an air power as more and more Western aircraft arrived.
Now for an Interlude.
The 120 Concept
Seeing that the F-16 and other comparable aircraft was out-performing the Russian on average aircrafts, I asked myself: How much would it take to achieve air superiority over Russia and to gain the ability to perform strategic and tactical strike-missions?
So, I asked the airboys to do some mathematical legwork on the subject. And after some mathematic grunting they came back with an answer.
It would take 120 of a combination of F-16s, Gripens, Mirage/Rafale and Typhoons to do the job. This made our collective jaws drop. At any point in time, Europe can muster 1 200 aircraft in the air.
We had all assumed that the F-16s provided was a nice addition to Ukraine, but not nearly able to make a huge difference. Instead, we found ourselves on the brink of providing enough for Ukraine to win the air war permanently.
So, we quietly started to get more pilots trained and sort out more airplanes and airplane types. We also started to make certain that the combat power would be possible to sustain at that level, even if losses was incurred.
Obviously this takes time, but we had a foundation already in place to build on, so the work takes less time than the initial project took. That being said, we are not there yet, far from. But our work is starting to bear fruits.
Ukrainian Air Power part II
In the beginning Ukraine used their few F-16s in air policing missions only. Then after a while they started using them as missile-hunters increasing air defence posture. Then as the numbers grew they started to lob missiles from well inside Ukraine. Then a few glide-bombs was chucked against Russian strongholds. Incremental baby steps.
As we told Ukraine about the 120 Concept they took one stunned look at things and then sprang into action with a new strategic plan. Something that Saddam could have told the Russians all about.
All Ukrainian generals had studied the air campaigns that Schwarzkopf had used upon Iraq, and they had drooled over it, and then sobbed over it not working for them since they lacked the air power to do it.
In other words, they started to take out the Russian air defences with gusto. Ukraine had always done that, but with the purpose of giving their drones and missiles better traction. But the urgency was not the same, after all drones and missiles does not come with expensive and hard to replace pilots and aircraft.
This is why Ukraine all of sudden started to destroy 10 times as many air defence launchers, radars, control-centres and EW-installations as they had the month before. At times a single launcher was targeted by up to 100 drones in one go to overwhelm everything and break through.
Entire regions of the frontline, occupied territories, and even parts of Russia itself, all of a sudden became entirely unprotected. And Ukraine flipped the page in the Iraq book, Hammer Time.
Having a large aerial bomb go off near you is a very emotional experience of life-changing nature. 500kg or more of brisance and shrapnel going off changes things like landscapes and peoples motivation and existential status.
This is why nothing can replace air power. Drones are nice and good, same goes for artillery. But you can drone a bunker to Kingdom come and it will mostly not work if the bunker is well-built, and even artillery might require hundreds of direct hits to eradicate it. One hunk-of-a-bomb and said bunker is turned into gravel.
Use bomb capsules and you get 100s of sub-munitions to shred advancing units. Nothing says big baddaboom like an aerial bomb.
First Ukraine started to do air sorties with more and bigger glide-bombs against the frontlines, and now they could use simpler glide-bombs than the advanced Western ones. Basically, they stuck wings and rudimentary controls on Soviet iron-bombs.
Then they started flying air sorties into occupied territories dropping even more bombs and launching missiles that could strike deeper against more air defence things lurking far behind the lines.
Then air sorties ventured out deep into Bryansk, Bilhorod and Kursk using glide bombs, and also Russian aircraft got chased away with a missile up the wazoo. Russian air force? They whimpered and withdrew.
Yesterday Ukraine started to use non-glide bombs, just some rudimentary aiming system slapped on them, but otherwise basic big stupid iron-bombs. And those started to drop directly on the frontlines and nearby logistics and reserves.
Seems like we once again didn’t grasp how spineless the Russian air force is. Some 250 fighter jets are refusing to fight against a much smaller number of Ukrainian jets ******* on them with bomb and taking chances that would put them into harms way if Russia actually showed up.
And here is my point, Russian air force will probably not return. And as Ukrainian aircraft numbers slowly crawl up to the 120 point, they will be able to fly up to 240 bombing missions per day, while at the same time do air policing, at least if they have two pilots per aircraft and they hotseat them.
That 500 big baddabooms per 24 hours, dropping down on all sorts of interesting things. That is one 500kg bomb per kilometre of frontline per 48 hours. And that is enough to change things permanently given a bit of time.
Conclusion
This is why I always stated that the Ukraine War is a bad example of how the war of the future will look, and why I push back hard on anyone telling me to prepare for a similar war in Europe.
We are an air power, we could have taken out the Russian air defence in 30 days, and then unleashed 5 000 strikes on target per day until Russia fell apart. Imagine 5 000 strategic or tactical targets destroyed each day. That is all bridges gone 300km deep from EU borders, all gone within 24 hours, just as one example.
This is why Russia will not attack us, and why I laugh when people gasp that Russia can defeat us when they attack in 3 years. Before Russia could even ponder attacking us they need to come up with a way to remove our air power.
No, there is only one single scenario where the Russian war on Ukraine would be a good example to emulate. And that is if we end up in a war where we do not have immediate air superiority. "
You might guess what he's alluding to, but I won't copy it in here ... as he has a solution which he wouldn't want Hogsbreath to know about.
Subbuteo_171
Well-known member
I reckon he would find many crabs amongst Trump’s cabinet.
Scrote
Well-known member
'What the IT expert texted back:'
Really? My mate the 'IT Expert'?
More nutjob conspiracy theories to muddy the water and give them a place to hide in. Obfuscation is not what is needed. The more of these crazy, unsubstantiated stories are thrown out there, the more difficult it is for the truth to be clear and easy to find.
These stories play into the hands of the real conspirators.
sanddancer57
Member
Radical left
Corrupt DOJ
Biden /,Democrats
Hatred of Musk
Insert your Trump bingo response below
HarryVegas
Well-known member
Nasty journalists
Ingleby_Flash
Well-known member
Read most of the stuff on here, and elsewhere, but as a sentence this made me chuckle
“ Having a large aerial bomb go off near you is a very emotional experience of life-changing nature. 500kg or more of brisance and shrapnel going off changes things like landscapes and peoples motivation and existential status”
“ Having a large aerial bomb go off near you is a very emotional experience of life-changing nature. 500kg or more of brisance and shrapnel going off changes things like landscapes and peoples motivation and existential status”
Those top secret air strike chat messages in full...
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So, Mr and Mrs Vance's trip to Greenland may not be panning out the way they'd hoped. Because the Danes have sent 100 police and Grand Fromage has arranged for some testy border force workers to be temporarily located there, all accommodation in Nuuk is booked out. So it would appear that they are now going to fly in to Space Base Pituffick. Handy for all local amenities and entertainment.
I do hope this is true. When Grand Fromage went there a few weeks ago, he said it was grim.
I do hope this is true. When Grand Fromage went there a few weeks ago, he said it was grim.
festa5
Well-known member
They should search their social media for any criticism of the Danish government/EU and if there is any (surely not) detain them without charge for 48 hours before sending them back.
I'm sure they wouldn't expect any less.