1. Meanwhile the Germans pulled an amazing stunt.
   It appears they got their hands on some old USSR artillery gear back when the two Germanys merged. Since they didn’t need it, they sold it to Finland, who sold it to Estonia. Estonia, having a good understanding of Russian imperialism, wanted to ship that stuff to Ukraine. Germany said “NEIN”.
   Their excuse is a whopper: since Nazi Germany invaded Ukraine, they don’t want Ukraine to have those weapons. WTFO? We invaded the country back then so we want to make it easier for others to invade it too. Yeah, right, that’s logical. Did the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact get reinstated while we weren’t looking?

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   1. Germany’s biggest fear is Russia cutting off their energy. If you think our political class is owned by China, their political class was born and raised by the Soviets. Therefore, they do not want anything in the Ukraine traceable to them.

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      1. In addition, one of the top (retired) socialist party politicians has been a Russian agent for many years now, actively pushing the pipelines etc. It seems likely that he has a lot of influence now that his fellow socialists are running the show.
         As for energy, of course they chose that path deliberately, closing down nukes etc. for no sane reason.

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         1. Germany is RIGHT NOW cutting it’s energy off 😀
            The pipeline is ready and our new green ministers don’t want to use it because natural gas is bad for the environment, mkay.

            It’s fucking bonkers over here.

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   2. Don’t say we didn’t “need it” – our military-industrial complex did not want it -.-
      Rheinmetall or Krauss-Maffey can’t sell overpriced shit that has been in development for literal decades if the Bundeswehr just uses NVA-stock.

      I know quite a few soldiers who served in the NVA that are pretty pissed that some equipment did not get used in the Bundeswehr. The NVA had fucking HIND gunships and 30 years later the Bundeswehr has a helicopter without a chin cannon that crashes when it’s dusty, killing the pilots.

      The NVA had MIG-29s and the Bundeswehr retired it’s F4 Phantoms only a few years back.

      I worked in defense (ammunition for small arms) I heard first hand reports how in 1989/90 people from west German Companies went to East Germany and destroyed documentation on the few products that could harm them.

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2. Originally it was military-industrial-congressional complex but was changed because politics.

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3. To put the blame where the blame is due- the development cycle for advanced weaponry is a bit longer than a single year, and can stretch into decades.
   If we don’t have those weapons now, it’s most likely not because of Bad Touch Biden.
   My blame money is on the Obama admin, and probably the Bushies as well.

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   1. It doesn’t help at all that the typical high-level program manager / defense program bureaucrat has, typically, 2 to 3 year stints running their programs. The Chief of Naval Research (an Admiral heading towards retirement, usually) typically serves for 2 years, for instance.

      Guess what that does to programs – like, say, directed energy (high-power lasers, particle beam, etc) – that are really hard and need 5-10 years to get past the initial stages.

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4. I had predicted foreign troops on American soil by the 2024 election, but I was assuming that they were going to be invited as election monitoring peacekeepers.

   That’s still possible but now there’s a nonzero chance of a red dawn.

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5. I wouldn’t say the West is panicking, but the West is PANICKING! Cue the Kevin Bacon “Animal House” parade scene.

   The US is suddenly shipping lethal military aid again to Ukraine, after Biden stopped it. Britain and a few other NATO Countries are air shipping every spare Anti-Tank weapon they can find (and probably a few they can’t spare too).

   France and Germany are going to re-enact next week Neville Chamberlain and the French Premier’s “Peace in Our Time Agreement” where they not only gave up the Sudetenland, but all of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

   Panic.

6. Bigger threat than Russian hypersonic missiles is their ability to completely deny our use of the EM spectrum (e.g. no radio communications, GPS, etc.). They also have years of experience in that region of detecting and targeting radio communications for artillery and rocket strikes.

   Whereas our military has spent the better part of two decades using GPS and radios fighting enemies incapable of call in their own air support or artillery.

   You also don’t need to be a credentialed military historian to know fighting Russians on their home turf in winter tends to lead to poor outcomes. Then again, some people in our government thought we could conquer Afghanistan, so there’s that.

   1. Deny the EM spectrum — how? What parts of it, in what parts of the world? The claim as you stated it is way too broad to be credible.
      I’ll grant that the Russians have some experience in jamming, for example they were notorious doing shortwave jamming back in the old cold war. But while that was annoying and at times limiting it certainly did not outright deny access even to the specific broadcasts targeted, let alone to more than a microscopic fraction of the shortwave bands, never mind the “EM spectrum”.
      I don’t see that anyone, certainly not the Russians, even have the ability to knock out amateur radio generally, let alone the broader communication community.

      1. Perhaps “denial” carries imprecise implications, although it is more abbreviated than ” if you transmit, then a Russian version of a Hellfire will be coming your way, very soon, to wreck your day”.

         Which assumes (a) that their DF abilities are, indeed, *that* good, and, (b) that their targeting abilities are also *that* good, as well as (c) that they are able to get all those pieces moving on concert, in real time.

         Which likely equals inability to use radio to coordinate activities, which likely would make close air support a problem. Among others, I suppose.

         1. That’s a possible theory, but if so it’s really easy to defeat such a tactic. All you need is a pile of decoy transmitters. Transmit random bits (indistinguishable from encrypted real data) and watch the bad guys waste a $1mil missile on a $100 radio. Repeat until they are out of ammo.

7. Tell me again why ANYONE in the US should give a shit about what happens in Ukraine? Not our monkeys, not our circus. maybe if the US minded it s own fucking business we would not be in this mess.

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   1. I can think of one reason: Taiwan. If we let Ukraine be conquered, that encourages the Chinese communists to try to conquer Taiwan. And THAT would be a global disaster.

8. three letters: e m p. we’ll be deaf dumb blind and lost. toss in cyber on the home front, we’re toast if they want it to be so. hypersonic weapons? don’t be silly. we’ve had that and much more since b4 twenty idiots rammed into the twin towers. but we are lazy, still need commo to get it into the action. i would say let europe handle it but they let their military go so they’ll go nuclear quicker than potato-head joe.

   1. I keep seeing contradictory articles about EMP. Some say that it’s not significantly different from lightning surges, which are straightforward to protect against (and every cell and broadcast site does so as a matter of course).
      Even if it does turn out to be real, I have comms that don’t care. Good old vacuum tube technology… 🙂

9. and putin says thank you for all those nifty anti-tank missiles you sent for him to capture. when he invades, more like infiltrates, he’ll have lunch in donetsk and dinner in kiev the same day. no, really he’ll stop at the dneiper river, but you get the idea.

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