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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 25th, 2022

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  • The biggest issue is that the French army, much like any other western army, has no experience in fighting peers. The only two countries in the world which have that are Russia and Ukraine. French officers themselves admitted that the russian army is not the main (arguably only) reference when it comes to peer-to-peer combat operations.

    French troops would not fare any better than the élite, nato-equipped ukrainian brigades that smashed their heads against the Surovikin line.

    I will say this tho - i never thought i would live to see german tanks burn on russian soil again, and i am sort of excited to see the french being beaten out of russia again


  • i mean this is like the americans entering vietnam. You expect to fight a ragtag militia, and instead you find a competent fighting force forged in generations upon generations of hardship.

    I’m no longer a soldier but if i were, Gaza is literally the last place i would want to enter. Urban hellscape, the bombings created makeshift shelters everywhere, and you have an enemy who’s been preparing to fight you for decades and has a literal network of underground tunnels. There is literally no way to win this, the only way is to flatten the place from the air. Which is what israel is doing.





  • “designed for a direct confrontation with the USSR” is vague, it tricks you into missing the point. Those tanks were created when the main fear was that the USSR would try to steamroll all of western europe, because it objectively had the means to do so. Thus, Leopards were designed with a more defensive role in mind - one example of this is the lower reliance on autoloaders. Those tanks were thought to be fighting near home, where the benefits of having one extra crew member (the loader) far outweighted the downsides (the tank needs to be bigger and heavier to name one).

    Russian tanks on the other hand make ample use of autoloaders. Russia also designed tanks that were meant to be fighting at home, but their thought process was different - Autoloaders allows for smaller tanks, which means more armor for less overall weight and better firerate.

    But now, both those types of tanks are fighting on the offensive. In that condition an autoloader is a big advantage, and so is being smaller and lighter. Which means that Russian tanks are comparatively faring better than NATO vehicles.

    This is just one of the many aspects that make western tanks perform worse than expected, i’m sure others can mention more. Just to name another issue for them, NATO always assumed that they would have air superiority while fighting - and in Ukraine they don’t.




  • I think this is the case because the west isn’t used to fighting an enemy that can match their might.

    Think Iraq. Why bother with a narrative? There is a certainty of victory, no damage will come to the west, and iraqi media sure as hell isn’t reaching our audiences. So just make up an excuse, invade, and let people forget it until the next current thing.

    But russia? It can fight back, it has political and economic leverage, it forces europe to suffer economically, it can inflict losses and shatter the image of nato equipment being unbeatable.

    So the media has to scramble to find reasons why we should keep fighting the russians, because our collective subconscious knows that fighting russia is a bad idea in general. The result of this scrambling is a lot of contrasting narratives that keep contradicting each other. Specially because russia itself has the power to counter western narratives and highlight the falsehoods.

    Remember Soledar for example? “the situation is difficult but we are holding” until russians started posting selfies from inside the town and it became clear that the UAF had been routed from there days ago.

    Or also when they kept claiming that reddit truesim that “attackers suffer 7 times more casualties” during the battle of Bakhmut an excuse to support the “we are grinding them down by losing” narrative. Now ukraine is attacking and people are asking “wait a second, we were told attackers take 7 times more losses, how is ukraine affording this?”

    In short, much like they are not used to fighting competent enemies on the ground, they are not used to fighting competent enemies in the media/internet arena. The result is a clusterfuck of lies covered by other lies as soon as they get found out.