The Glade 4.0

This will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.

Russia= "GTFO we got this"; US = "LOL no"

You can read the rest; just the important part below:



Well, now we've managed to create a military alliance between Assad, Iran, and Russia, but we've also got the Russians basically taking over the situation and Putin standing in front of the entire UN saying (in these words) "Do you realize what you have done?"

And he's not even wrong. If the Russians want to go spend their money bombing ISIS shitlords, I suggest we let them have at it for a while. Putin is not wrong; ISIS is worse than Assad and there is no realistic good third option; the Kurds certainly aren't going to be able to effectively govern anywhere outside Kurdistan. When faced with 2 bad options, go with the less bad one.

Our vacation from Russia is over, and we have mismanaged this situation well enough that we have now put Vladimir Putin in the driver's seat politically - and managed to give him the moral authority to go with it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We have been so successful over the history of the country that we now believe ourselves to be incapable of failure. A major disaster can only help us.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

There's something to be said for this, although it's the West in general not just us - though make no mistake, we've been leading the parade of idiocy.

The question is, will the disaster be with Russia, or will Putin save us from the disaster by being the only one willing to firmly take the situation in hand?

I never thought I would see the day when Putin is the one talking sense, and Donald Trump is the one putting forth to sensible solution of "fine, let the Russians have at it, if they want." Then again, I really shouldn't be surprised. Putin is all about the realpolitik and he's chosen his moment wisely - and he understands who he is dealing with, both in the West and in ISIS far better than we or ISIS understand him.

The present situation however could result in that disaster at any moment. Having jet fighters , drones, and helicopters in the same airspace without proper coordination and deconfliction is an accident waiting to happen, either due to collision or... misunderstanding. This entire situation has the potential to get out of control before anyone on either side can react, and that is if we had the best of people managing relations, which we assuredly do not.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Let Russia nonstop bomb the crap out of the ISIL folk for a yeR or so.. Once they' depleted their fuel, ammo, and plane inventories ask them if they want another shot at Afghanistan. It will be nice to have another cop on the World Police beat.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I'm actually not sure how we could have handled it differently. Well, we could have not invaded Iraq in the first place, but that ship sailed a long time ago. After Iraq there was no political will for troops on the ground in Syria or Afghanistan.

Yeah, so Russians started the airstrikes, in Homs. Not against ISIS.

We could have, but of all the objections to the Iraq invasion "well, ISIS eventually appeared so obviously it was a mistake" is one of the weakest.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm fine with that. Tie them up fighting each other and let the Russians expend resources.



While it's true that they likely did hit non-ISIS targets, that doesn't preclude them from having also hit ISIS or mean they won't... and at this point, I really don't care. The anti-Assad rebels were never going to win against either Assad or ISIS anyhow.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And I just rewatched The Hunt for Red October last month.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Fred Thompson has wise words for the ages.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Does it make anyone else uncomfortable that slaughter on a large scale back in 2001 (IE in lieu of any ground troops, nuking the crap out of Afghanistan, and using that as an example to Saddam, Qaddafi, and Assad) looks like it might have actually been the best option?

You know what they say about hindsight

Sent from my SM-G360V using Tapatalk

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Muslim extremists are not friends to Russia.

This is more on their doorstep than ours, let them go Russian nuts over it.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I said years ago we should have done this, or at least planned to do it if Bin Laden weren't handed over in 96 hours or less. Afghanistan is an odd problem to target though int hat there isn't much worth targeting. I would have just gone for whatever powerplants and large substations they did have on the justification that the percentage of the population that did have electricity was almost certainly the same as the people in power and they don't require groundbursts to destroy.

If they want to live in the 7th century, we should be more than willing to accommodate them. The only part that makes me uncomfortable with it is that the world is so conditioned to think that the use of nuclear weapons is some magical wall that can only be crossed in one direction that it might have touched off something else. The use of nuclear weapons is a red line, but there is no abstract reason that it can't be limited - the practical reason is that the shitty policies of the 1960s got us into the "one flies, they all fly" mentality ever since.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

For once, I actually agree with you. If the Russians want to spend their time, money and effort on it, by all means let them.

The Russians have had plenty of their own problems with Islamism; the Chechnya situation started out as simply an ethnic group that wanted to be self-governing and also just happened to be Islamic turned into a hotbed of extremism when jihadis, looking for work after the Soviets left Afghanistan, showed up to fight on the Chechen side. Bosnia almost turned into the same thing except that the Bosnians basically sent the jihadists packing saying gtfo.

But this gets better:

Read with caution

I sincerely hope this is FOX sensationalism, because even if it is, that's bad enough. The article suspiciously does not quote any particular "senior defense official as actually saying "we are contemplating engaging Russian jets in air to air combat over their bombing of anti-Assad non-ISIS rebels.

However, even if it's not true, the danger is now out there. Its not like the Russians don't know what U.S. media is reporting. It is presently mid-afternoon in Syria. What do you think is going on in the minds of Russian pilots at the bases they are using? What briefings are they getting from their intelligence people and what ROE and instructions are going to some 25-year-old Captain about to get into his Su-30?

What is going through his mind when his ESM tells him a NATO fighter is detecting him with radar and is within AIM-120 range?

What do you think is going through the mind of his American counterpart?

This isn't something DE is being dramatic about - this is actually going through the minds of young men (and women, probably) on the other side of the globe right now, and that Russian pilot is not some ill-trained Iraqi or Libyan flying some outdated, barely maintained hunk of **** like our previous opponents. Failure to respect the Russians' abilities would be a serious error of hubris because I guarantee you the Russians are respectful of our capabilities.

Our leaders are (allegedly) publicly contemplating engaging in armed confrontation with Russia over which group of shitlords will get to rule Syria, and we've picked the weakest group of shitlords to back. Elmo, this is essentially the plot from your favorite movie, except it will not end with 4 or 5 MiGs shot down and a party on board the nearest aircraft carrier.

Obama is so committed to his strategy of dropping some bombs and talking aobut what to do and training a few dozen assholes to go shoot at ISIS that he is willing to risk armed confrontation with Russia over it rather than back down - and he is doing it with a Russian leader that is far more ruthless and politically adept than he is.

He has mismanaged the situation so that now what is going to happen rests on the self-control of young men or women flying hundreds of miles per hour and trying to process what their radar and electronics are telling them knowing that if they are wrong they face death in a fireball - or being shot down over a bunch of people that have a good chance of barbecuing them in a cage. And for that Russian pilot, I don't know how good the Russians are at CSAR, so looking at that possibility - I'd want to make damn sure its the other guy getting the cage barbeque. If it is a female pilot, what do you think she is thinking about if she contemplates being shot down where ISIS may get their hands on her?

This confrontation, that may happen within hours if more realistic heads cannot prevail, is what we've been told for 20 years was never going to happen. And it's in the hands of an administration that had it's intelligence reports massaged to tell it what it wanted to hear.

This will get out of control and may already be there.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah I saw that report today as well and I headdesked.

Russia is literally giving us a get out of jail free card for one place in the region. If we play the exit right they might take the albatros from us in other areas there under the same banner.

Please, thank you, have fun with that.


But no. The neocon warhawks have lived through times where US was unstoppable even if it's just in their minds and Klancy novels they have on their bookshelves. Our 1960's airframes are better than their 1960's airframes with far worse maintence. Wooptie do. Air superiority try air monopoly to the point where I'm sure some of them honestly think a war can be won with remote pilots alone and if it dares take actual aircraft then the only concern is how the media might spin the devastation wrought on the enemy. Russia is not the Iraqi air force. They are not using 50 year old russian or 30 year old US technology - they are using todays and have a nuclear arsenal backing it up.

The sad thing is there are those in the government right now who would only agree with the President if he tried to push for an aggressive stance because they think we would actually be losing something to Russia - yeah a geopolitical shithole that costs millions a day to wade in. Clinton and Bush dead same in this regard, Pataki to.



I need some **** scotch.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Islamism must be defeated, but it cannot easily be stopped by force of arms. Some nutjobs with Qur'ans will always show up to decapitate innocent children. To defeat them, it must be done by demoralization. This requires the political will to be utterly ruthless and intentionally attack their civilian support structure. We don't have that in the west. Russia probably does. Let them have at it.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yes, because those tactics served them so well in Afghanistan.

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

That isn't what Russia attempted to do in Afghanistan, and she's describing a strategy, not a tactic.

Furthermore, Syria is not Afghanistan despite being populated by muslims who like to wear robes, have beards and talk in a language we think sounds scary. Syria is not Afghanistan either socially or geographically. ISIS is not the mujaheddin; ISIS is fighting to control territory like a regular army.

The Russian mistake in Afghanistan was to try to use mechanized operational procedures against an enemy that fought from the mountains as irregulars. ISIS is not that enemy and cannot adopt those tactics nor does Syria really lend itself to that, and Assad is not the Afghan communist government of 1979.

Finally, the Russians are more than capable of absorbing their tactical mistakes in Afghanistan and improving upon them - and even if things do not go well for them, that's fine too. One of the best ways to keep Russia under control is to let them get absorbed in a quagmire, draining their financial resources and discrediting Putin and co. at home.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Say what you want about the Russians, they do build them pretty:

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

OK, I'll call it a strategy, in fact, a "scorched earth" strategy. Military History Online calls it a tactic, but, no matter. My point is that that's how we (well, the Soviets, and then us) ended up in an even worse situation in Afghanistan:



Or, from Encyclopedia Brittanica Online:

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

That's great and all, but the fact remains that they describe the strategy - the overall approach - used by the Soviets. This may be confusing because in military operations there are three levels - strategic level (generally the national/coalition level approach), operational (generally the theater level down to divisional level) and the tactical (Brigade level and below). However, there's no word for what the operational level does that's equivalent to "strategy" or "tactics". Therefore, we refer to the "strategy" of the theater commander - i.e. his overall plan for how he will execute the campaign, which is different from tactics, which is what subordinates at the levels most directly in contact with the enemy use as the "how" of carrying out the mission they are assigned.

The Soviet national strategy at that time (1979) was one of supporting and maintaining friendly foreign communist/socialist governments and generally similar ones in client states. Hence they invaded Afghanistan to prop up the communist government. Their operational strategy was one of the "scorched earth" you describe; the tactics they used were those of mechanized warfare. Their failures were due to failures at all three levels - the Soviet government couldn't fathom that someone would actually fight to be liberated from Communism; the "scorched earth" policy was implemented in such a clumsy way that the Afghans had no alternative but to fight back or starve, and mechanized tactics were inappropriate to fighting an insurgency in the mountains.

Syria is not really the same situation. It potentially could be if ISIS weren't there with the Russians backing the government and us backing the rebels, but even then it is not the mountains, and the rebels are fighting to hold territory against Assad. Furthermore, ISIS is a thing - and there basically is no dealing with or pacifying ISIS areas, and ISIS is also fighting as a more or less conventional military force. Therefore, the idea of destroying ISIS's ability to continue the war is entirely valid.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That depends. Is Monte still around?

No?

Then probably not.

War is messy. There is no moral high ground. Looking for one is only going to get a bunch of your guys shot while you're looking instead of paying attention to the people shooting.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

OK, **** semantics. Do you think it's a good idea to slaughter civilians in the hope of demoralizing the enemy and robbing them of their will to fight? When has this ever worked, other than Japan in 1945, with nuclear weapons?

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

It doesn't make me uncomfortable. It did fourteen years ago, but new data has come to light in that time. Let's face it, there are seven billion people on Earth and it's getting harder and harder to feed everyone. I'm finding it very difficult to justify tolerating jihadists these days. Putin has proposed a solution, and I'm not seeing a compelling counterargument to his plan.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.