Russia invades Ukraine

[Trappin]

China has not forgotten or forgiven Stalin stiff-arming Mao.

Offensive weapons require lots of training and maintenance. The skilled personnel required to maintain one combat fighter jet? Multiple jets? Replacement parts? Weapons pods? Specialized tools. Look at euro F1 racing team crew numbers. It takes at least thirty fifty people to service and maintain a competitive F1 race car, and no one is shooting at them. And airbases are vulnerable to all sorts of air, sea and land based attacks

The Swedish SAAB built NLaw anti-main tank weapons ruined Russian hopes for a quick end to the land war. Two very large Russian troop transport planes were shot down. Those two planes carried Russia's finest para assault soldiers. They all died. That was during the first few days of the war. One comment upthread noted that Russia sent a lot of untrained kids into battle. It's true. Another interesting feature being Russian military recruited a lot of current and former Chechnya mercenaries and dumped them in the Donbas river basin. They got dead fast - accustomed to picking on unarmed civilians - the Ukrainian militia troops wtfpwnd them. Those Chechnya militia cowards were so used to bossing unarmed civilians they forgot that pissed-off Ukrainian citizen-soldiers might just teach them a end-of-life lesson. This is your Thermopylae. Bravo!

[mvgulik]

...

[Fostik]

Will Russia soon also invade Finland?

Hello

[shubla]

Cruel if numbers from Mariupol are true.

Putin forcing people walk into Ukraine is not sufficient explanation for some rumoured other things.
Such as locking people in cellars for weeks with bodies, trolling them with hand grenades and so on.

[Jalpha]

Controlling soldiers is basically impossible. The type who persist within military forces are basically criminals too intelligent to be imprisoned.

Deploying them is like letting a jailhouse population out to play with regular people.

Nobodies military is any different. It's interesting to see Putin stand up for his soldiers. I hope it doesn't send the wrong message to the soldiers. What choice was he given though.

[BoxingRock]

Controlling soldiers is basically impossible. The type who persist within military forces are basically criminals too intelligent to be imprisoned.

Deploying them is like letting a jailhouse population out to play with regular people.

Nobodies military is any different. It's interesting to see Putin stand up for his soldiers. I hope it doesn't send the wrong message to the soldiers. What choice was he given though.

[VDZ]

Controlling soldiers is basically impossible. The type who persist within military forces are basically criminals too intelligent to be imprisoned.

Deploying them is like letting a jailhouse population out to play with regular people.

Nobodies military is any different. It's interesting to see Putin stand up for his soldiers. I hope it doesn't send the wrong message to the soldiers. What choice was he given though.

I call bullshit on this one. Militaries are complex social structures designed specifically to keep people in line and having them do exactly as commanded from higher up. A military operation cannot succeed unless the soldiers can be controlled sufficiently. Lacking control of your soldiers means your soldiers are not trained adequately (which seems to be the case for Russia). When this results in war crimes, those responsible for keeping the soldiers in check are also held responsible for their behavior, and rightly so. We can train even animals to maul people only on command, surely it can't be too much asked to do the same for soldiers?

Take your toxic Discord shit elsewhere. It was a stupid take but it was entirely on-topic.

[DonVelD]

Take your toxic Discord shit elsewhere. It was a stupid take but it was entirely on-topic.

[Jalpha]

Actually soldiers are controlled by such means as controlling supplies like ammunition and food. This ensures that forces go where they are told instead of wandering off into the conflict to go Rambo and behave as they please.

I want to highlight the issues being uncovered within Australia's special forces once again. What is different in this case to absolve Australias political leadership from responsibility.

Soldiers are actually notoriously difficult to control hence the extreme discipline enforced by military leadership.

I strongly doubt instructions from the top of the Ukrainian conflict could be to disregard international law.

[shubla]

Militaries are complex social structures designed specifically to keep people in line and having them do exactly as commanded from higher up. A military operation cannot succeed unless the soldiers can be controlled sufficiently. Lacking control of your soldiers means your soldiers are not trained adequately

I think its impossible to train your soldiers adequately. The situation that one gets into in some war/conflict is just too much to train for most people.

Routing etc. is quite common, though propaganda is used to seem like it wouldn't. Not sure how common its to plunder.

Even "well trained/commanded" troops aren't really doing perhaps what they should. Fundamentally no one wants to die, so everybody tries to avoid it.
I've heard that its very common in middle east for example some US elite troops to just bounce around do all kinds of useless crap all the time to avoid getting into direct conflict with the enemy. And then people wonder why operations don't seem to produce results.