FresnoJoe Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Graduated to Heaven Followers: 207 Topic Count: 60 Topics Per Day: 0.01 Content Count: 8,651 Content Per Day: 1.17 Reputation: 5,761 Days Won: 4 Joined: 01/31/2004 Status: Offline Birthday: 03/04/1943 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Praying For The Salvation Of Folk Working And Dying In This Crucible Of Death Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OldSchool2 Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Royal Member Followers: 7 Topic Count: 701 Topics Per Day: 0.13 Content Count: 7,511 Content Per Day: 1.34 Reputation: 1,759 Days Won: 0 Joined: 01/16/2009 Status: Offline Birthday: 02/18/1955 Share Posted February 25, 2016 4 minutes ago, other one said: and if we keep going he may be bombing us. Putin has already "reminded" Obama not to forget that "Russia is a nuclear power." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thereselittleflower Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Royal Member Followers: 6 Topic Count: 58 Topics Per Day: 0.02 Content Count: 5,457 Content Per Day: 1.68 Reputation: 4,220 Days Won: 37 Joined: 07/01/2015 Status: Offline Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 And we are doing the tango with China over those islands too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve_S Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Servant Followers: 25 Topic Count: 275 Topics Per Day: 0.05 Content Count: 5,208 Content Per Day: 0.99 Reputation: 1,893 Days Won: 0 Joined: 01/02/2010 Status: Offline Share Posted February 25, 2016 I'm a bit skeptical of this story. Moscow hasn't commented on it and in doing several news searches all I can see is that terrorists are saying that they killed dozens of generals. Firstly, it's unlikely that *dozens* of generals would even be standing in the same spot in Syria. Generals are incredibly high ranked military officers and there are comparatively few in any given military. Even with an entire infantry or armored division on the ground in any given area there would generally only be a handful of generals in the area, sometimes only one or two. It is not uncommon for entire military bases to only be commanded by a Colonel. The only way this is reasonable is if every single general in the country of Syria were standing in that one spot at that one time and on top of this there was some sort of group of generals not stationed in Syria who were visiting, and then these guys all met in the same spot in an area that terrorists seemingly had easy access to. This seems incredibly unlikely. I'm not saying a car bomb didn't happen or that generals weren't killed, or even that dozens of generals were not killed, just that it seems like a long shot at the very, very best. The reason I say this is that during the entire vietnam war, 8 years, about a dozen flag officers were killed (generals and one admiral, i believe), in korea it was one. Throughout all of world war II, which was a total war (when there were actually hundreds of flag officers in harms way at any given time), the US lost less than 30 to combat. If you look at the history of it a few of these are things like accidents in vehicles near or on a battlefield. Mainly, though, this would be the sort of fodder that would give putin all the cover he needed domestically to go scorched earth in syria and the fact that russia has not mentioned it or made a big deal of it, in and of itself, makes it highly unlikely in my mind. What is likely to have occurred is that the terrorists were able to pull off a car bombing on a base and made an assumption that there were high ranking military officers there, and maybe there were, saw some ambulances leaving (this is literally one of the things i read in a news story that they gave as evidence) and assumed that "dozens of generals" had died. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve_S Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Servant Followers: 25 Topic Count: 275 Topics Per Day: 0.05 Content Count: 5,208 Content Per Day: 0.99 Reputation: 1,893 Days Won: 0 Joined: 01/02/2010 Status: Offline Share Posted February 25, 2016 55 minutes ago, thereselittleflower said: And we are doing the tango with China over those islands too. As naive as this may sound, china does not concern me at all. Their record in conflict in the 20th century is pretty weak. The last full on conflict they participated in was against japan (a country that is dwarfed by them both geographically and populationally) and they would've likely found themselves conquered completely if not for intervention by the US (through an oil embargo) and the ensuing attack on pearl harbor by the Japanese in retaliation for that. I realize that an opinion on this sort of thing may sound contrived, but national character matters in things such as war and you can see a pattern emerge historically with countries in things such as this. Can countries change? Absolutely. Do I think china has changed much? Not really. Their idea is to out population their enemies. They view their soldiers purely as cannon fodder and have massive very poorly trained militia types in reserve for this. Their regular military still has a lot of hardware that is vietnam era. For instance, they still rely on what is basically a mig-21 for some of their air defense capacity (they call it a J-7). It was built on license from Russia and the air frame technology is almost 60 years old. The newest fighters that they have in large numbers are basically SU-27 type aircraft, but when russia sells them the technology to put on the air frame (radars, fire control systems and such) it is always older generation stuff. They have been pretty unsucessful at fielding modern domestically developed fighers thus far. That is a big deal (a really big deal). These are just examples of some of the issues they would have in facing a modern western military. In other words, probably 3 or 4 F-22 squadrons could attain air superiority over the entire country of china, that is how disparate the technology is. Russia, is a different story. They look similarly weak on paper, but putin is smart, and has dumped a high percentage of his cash into special forces and tech development over the past ten years. In other words, they are not there yet, but they are a whole, whole lot closer than most people believe or are willing to admit. They do not have a functional modern military yet, but they have the foundations of one in place and are working very judiciously towards building atop that foundation. I think syria is largely a test bed for this in the mind of putin. If you have actually watched some of the video coming out of syria from russian strikes, they are using precision munitions and doing so with pretty good effect. Also, on the national character front that I mentioned earlier, these are a people who stone cold stopped a bliztkrieg from a superior military and, in spite of their poor political leadership (stalin was a terrible war time leader), in spite of their technological disadvantage, turned it around. They were down to 6 square blocks in stalingrad, city blocks. Had they lost at stalingrad it is highly likely that they would've at least been forced into massive retreat into the eastern part of their country. They would've lost their biggest supply of petroleum and most of their breadbasket. It would've been a catastrophic blow. They fought back from this and marched on berlin. This is not a country that it would be wise to war against (this is not to mention their thousands of nukes). The US has a very prolific military record as well and I'm not opining that the US would lose, simply that whoever won, it would be quite pyrrhic, as there would not be much left of either side. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thereselittleflower Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Royal Member Followers: 6 Topic Count: 58 Topics Per Day: 0.02 Content Count: 5,457 Content Per Day: 1.68 Reputation: 4,220 Days Won: 37 Joined: 07/01/2015 Status: Offline Author Share Posted February 25, 2016 4 minutes ago, Steve_S said: As naive as this may sound, china does not concern me at all. Their record in conflict in the 20th century is pretty weak. The last full on conflict they participated in was against japan (a country that is dwarfed by them both geographically and populationally) and they would've likely found themselves conquered completely if not for intervention by the US (through an oil embargo) and the ensuing attack on pearl harbor by the Japanese in retaliation for that. I realize that an opinion on this sort of thing may sound contrived, but national character matters in things such as war and you can see a pattern emerge historically with countries in things such as this. Can countries change? Absolutely. Do I think china has changed much? Not really. Their idea is to out population their enemies. They view their soldiers purely as cannon fodder and have massive very poorly trained militia types in reserve for this. Their regular military still has a lot of hardware that is vietnam era. For instance, they still rely on what is basically a mig-21 for some of their air defense capacity (they call it a J-7). It was built on license from Russia and the air frame technology is almost 60 years old. The newest fighters that they have in large numbers are basically SU-27 type aircraft, but when russia sells them the technology to put on the air frame (radars, fire control systems and such) it is always older generation stuff. They have been pretty unsucessful at fielding modern domestically developed fighers thus far. That is a big deal (a really big deal). These are just examples of some of the issues they would have in facing a modern western military. In other words, probably 3 or 4 F-22 squadrons could attain air superiority over the entire country of china, that is how disparate the technology is. Russia, is a different story. They look similarly weak on paper, but putin is smart, and has dumped a high percentage of his cash into special forces and tech development over the past ten years. In other words, they are not there yet, but they are a whole, whole lot closer than most people believe or are willing to admit. They do not have a functional modern military yet, but they have the foundations of one in place and are working very judiciously towards building atop that foundation. I think syria is largely a test bed for this in the mind of putin. If you have actually watched some of the video coming out of syria from russian strikes, they are using precision munitions and doing so with pretty good effect. Also, on the national character front that I mentioned earlier, these are a people who stone cold stopped a bliztkrieg from a superior military and, in spite of their poor political leadership (stalin was a terrible war time leader), in spite of their technological disadvantage, turned it around. They were down to 6 square blocks in stalingrad, city blocks. Had they lost at stalingrad it is highly likely that they would've at least been forced into massive retreat into the eastern part of their country. They would've lost their biggest supply of petroleum and most of their breadbasket. It would've been a catastrophic blow. They fought back from this and marched on berlin. This is not a country that it would be wise to war against (this is not to mention their thousands of nukes). The US has a very prolific military record as well and I'm not opining that the US would lose, simply that whoever won, it would be quite pyrrhic, as there would not be much left of either side. That's interesting that you would bring that up. I had never really studied what happened in Russia when the Nazi's invaded. I literally just watched a documentary on it detailing what happened. It was quite impressive what Hitler did and what all was involved in turning it around at Stalingrad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve_S Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Servant Followers: 25 Topic Count: 275 Topics Per Day: 0.05 Content Count: 5,208 Content Per Day: 0.99 Reputation: 1,893 Days Won: 0 Joined: 01/02/2010 Status: Offline Share Posted February 25, 2016 21 minutes ago, thereselittleflower said: That's interesting that you would bring that up. I had never really studied what happened in Russia when the Nazi's invaded. I literally just watched a documentary on it detailing what happened. It was quite impressive what Hitler did and what all was involved in turning it around at Stalingrad. Russia has a history of fighting lazily in minor conflicts, but in major ones, when sovereignty is on the line, they have a "if you want to win you have to kill every one of us, and we are not going to lay down for you to do it" sort of mentality. They are fiercely nationalistic in that way. This is one reason you see failures in US policy toward them under obama, in my opinion. I think the administration (not just obama, but large swaths of US politicians, particularly democrats, but some republicans) think that the same thing trends that are visible in the US population on matters of foreign affairs are also present in the russian population, when they are largely not. One sure fire way to get the russian people to coalesce behind putin which would allow him to do *anything he wants* is for the president of the united states along with european powers, etc., to talk about how russia is marginalizing itself and self segregating itself from the international community. This is probably *exactly* what putin wants them to say. Look at his approval rating in both domestic polls and some done by foreign organizations in russia over the time period since the conflict in ukraine began in earnest. They have skyrocketed. They have not cratered because of syria, either. Attempting to isolate russia and assuming that we can wait out putin's popularity is pointless, we are going to be waiting a very long time indeed. The reasonable thing to do is to recognize the reality of the situation, which is that russia is a world power and are going to exert influence on their borders (ukraine) and on behalf of their more distant allies (syria). That is how the world works. Whether or not it is fair or ideal is not very relevant. There are only three options you have in the face of such things, Accepting it as reality and letting it play out, responding when you can and in a way that causes the least damage overall. Attempting to diplomatically negate it, basically, by offering them more than what they are going to get in taking the actions that you don't want them to take. This is not very likely, as putin wants Ukraine because it's on his border and has a large industrial base and a bunch of people, two things that he thinks would benefit russia greatly, and he is probably right. As far as syria, this could be negotiated to be sure, but it would have to be done in such a way as it leaves assad in power or puts someone else in power like him, who is friendly to russia and allows them to retain their influence there, or russia is given something else that they want, somewhere else, like nato ousting the baltic states so that putin can take them as well, something along those lines. I'm not advocating this, just saying that russia leaving syria alone would not be free and he would probably make the cost so high that we would not be willing to pay it. The third option would be war. I was in full out cringe mode when I was seeing republicans in debates pressing for a "no fly zone" over syria at the end of last year. Russia would violate it, we would attack their aircraft, then they would fight back, and we'd probably be at war. Is that worth syria? Seriously? The assumption is that russia woul back down. I am 99 percent certain that they would do just the opposite (again, the national character thing). They will back down at times in situations of their own creation, like the cuban missile crisis for instance. It is highly unlikely that putin would back down in the face of a US president telling him that he is not allowed to do something in some country in which the US simply wants to be able to influence the outcome of a civil war. They would violate a no fly zone immediately and brazenly, and probably with cameras running so they could show their population how the US killed russian pilots who were not being aggressive towards them and over a foreign country that russia has signed treaties with and who the US has no treaties with. As much as I am a fan of cruz and not a fan of trump, trump implying that going to war with russia over syria is nuts while all of the other candidates took hawkish positions over it, gave me pause, because he was right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Thallasa Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 3 hours ago, Steve_S said: Russia has a history of fighting lazily in minor conflicts, but in major ones, when sovereignty is on the line, they have a "if you want to win you have to kill every one of us, and we are not going to lay down for you to do it" sort of mentality. They are fiercely nationalistic in that way. This is one reason you see failures in US policy toward them under obama, in my opinion. I think the administration (not just obama, but large swaths of US politicians, particularly democrats, but some republicans) think that the same thing trends that are visible in the US population on matters of foreign affairs are also present in the russian population, when they are largely not. One sure fire way to get the russian people to coalesce behind putin which would allow him to do *anything he wants* is for the president of the united states along with european powers, etc., to talk about how russia is marginalizing itself and self segregating itself from the international community. This is probably *exactly* what putin wants them to say. Look at his approval rating in both domestic polls and some done by foreign organizations in russia over the time period since the conflict in ukraine began in earnest. They have skyrocketed. They have not cratered because of syria, either. Attempting to isolate russia and assuming that we can wait out putin's popularity is pointless, we are going to be waiting a very long time indeed. The reasonable thing to do is to recognize the reality of the situation, which is that russia is a world power and are going to exert influence on their borders (ukraine) and on behalf of their more distant allies (syria). That is how the world works. Whether or not it is fair or ideal is not very relevant. There are only three options you have in the face of such things, Accepting it as reality and letting it play out, responding when you can and in a way that causes the least damage overall. Attempting to diplomatically negate it, basically, by offering them more than what they are going to get in taking the actions that you don't want them to take. This is not very likely, as putin wants Ukraine because it's on his border and has a large industrial base and a bunch of people, two things that he thinks would benefit russia greatly, and he is probably right. As far as syria, this could be negotiated to be sure, but it would have to be done in such a way as it leaves assad in power or puts someone else in power like him, who is friendly to russia and allows them to retain their influence there, or russia is given something else that they want, somewhere else, like nato ousting the baltic states so that putin can take them as well, something along those lines. I'm not advocating this, just saying that russia leaving syria alone would not be free and he would probably make the cost so high that we would not be willing to pay it. The third option would be war. I was in full out cringe mode when I was seeing republicans in debates pressing for a "no fly zone" over syria at the end of last year. Russia would violate it, we would attack their aircraft, then they would fight back, and we'd probably be at war. Is that worth syria? Seriously? The assumption is that russia woul back down. I am 99 percent certain that they would do just the opposite (again, the national character thing). They will back down at times in situations of their own creation, like the cuban missile crisis for instance. It is highly unlikely that putin would back down in the face of a US president telling him that he is not allowed to do something in some country in which the US simply wants to be able to influence the outcome of a civil war. They would violate a no fly zone immediately and brazenly, and probably with cameras running so they could show their population how the US killed russian pilots who were not being aggressive towards them and over a foreign country that russia has signed treaties with and who the US has no treaties with. As much as I am a fan of cruz and not a fan of trump, trump implying that going to war with russia over syria is nuts while all of the other candidates took hawkish positions over it, gave me pause, because he was right. This a very interesting and important subject, and I appreciate your work on it ,but Trump went Up greatly in my estimation, on knowing he is against go to war on Syria , and Cruz is , well I won't say , but is really a nobody , and certaily not a statesman . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ezra Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Royal Member Followers: 16 Topic Count: 134 Topics Per Day: 0.04 Content Count: 8,142 Content Per Day: 2.33 Reputation: 6,612 Days Won: 20 Joined: 11/02/2014 Status: Offline Share Posted February 25, 2016 21 hours ago, hmbld said: Didn't Russia just agree to a cease-fire? I wonder if this will change the cease-fire plans. Russia's cease fires are generally shams. Why don't people wake up and see the Russian bear for what it is? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ezra Posted February 25, 2016 Group: Royal Member Followers: 16 Topic Count: 134 Topics Per Day: 0.04 Content Count: 8,142 Content Per Day: 2.33 Reputation: 6,612 Days Won: 20 Joined: 11/02/2014 Status: Offline Share Posted February 25, 2016 21 hours ago, other one said: I think we can look for some serious death and destruction... cease fire or not. Kerry was pushing for the cease fire pretty hard. Kerry has always been clueless. Why he has not been fired already is a mystery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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