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The Russian propaganda outlet RT.com released a transcript Friday of senior German military officers discussing the deployment of the German Taurus stealth cruise missile to Ukraine.
Luftwaffe commander Ingo Gerhartz led the 38-minute call that took place on February 19 involved. Other participants were the German Air Force Head of the Operations and Training Section, Frank Graefe, a Luftwaffe Space Command Air Operations Center staff member, Stefan Fenske, and another staff from the center identified only by the surname Frostedte. The call was intercepted because General Gaefe, who was attending the biennial Singapore Airshow (sounds a lot like "hiking the Appalachian Trail"), participated in the discussion using an unsecured hotel telephone line. //
Divulging sensitive operational details in a call recorded by the SVR has caused a lot of problems for Scholz and Germany.
Germany's lack of seriousness in manning its armed forces and now in the way that it handles highly classified details is showing more and more EU nations that it can't look to Germany for competent leadership. The call, which apparently revealed Scholz's thinking on the subject of the Taurus missile that he hadn't shared with allies, foreign or domestic, has given his already flaccid credibility a body blow. This has caused France's Emanuel Macron to make a stab at wresting the leadership of the EU and European NATO from Germany. The tenor of the leaked conversation was one of lukewarm enthusiasm for assisting Ukraine with a strong shot of defeatism.
The long-term impact of the leaked conversation remains unclear. While it's unlikely to lead to an immediate shift in German policy, it has undoubtedly raised the stakes in the ongoing debate about military aid to Ukraine. The damage to diplomatic trust is very real, and the increased pressure from allies creates a complex situation for Scholz. Scholz's approval rate is roughly half that of Joe Biden (17%), and his coalition allies see self-preservation in jumping ship. However, Germany's constitution virtually guarantees that Scholz's government will continue to move zombie-like for the next two years when Germany's power and influence are sorely needed.
What is crystal clear is that this intelligence coup by the SVR has had a significant impact in dividing the pro-Ukraine coalition.
At Zelensky and Mitsotakis' joint meeting, Zelensky commented on the missile attack.
“They have either lost their minds, or they don’t have complete control over what their terrorist army is doing.”
Indeed, lobbing a ballistic missile into a city where a foreign head of government is visiting is the height of recklessness or indiscipline but totally on brand for the Russian Army.
Russia claims it was engaging in “a high-precision missile strike on a hangar in the industrial port area of Odesa where preparations were being made for the combat use of unmanned boats of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” Precision, I suppose, is entirely in the eye of the beholder. //
olinka2022
5 hours ago
The last of the Mohicans still covering Ukraine
streiff olinka2022
5 hours ago
I'll be covering it until the last Russian is dead and composted.
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the relationship between the citizens of the USSR and the government in this way.
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country. //
As I've said many times, a stalemate tends to help Putin because his only strategy is to convince the West to accept defeat in Ukraine. It doesn't matter how many men Russia has available for conscription; Russia's ability to arm, train, and supply troops is limited, as is its ability to get them to the right place on the front at the right time with the right equipment. Ukraine's strategy is to continue to convince the West that it has the will to win. When you throw in Zelensky's relief of a popular commander-in-chief, you have a political imperative to chalk up a win somewhere.
On the whole, I don't think anyone predicted two years ago that the war would enter into a third year. I think most believed that Zelensky and his government would catch the first thing smoking (yes, Walsh, I owe you a beer for copyright infringement) for Zurich, and the Russians would easily carve up the country. I know I did. Since then, we've learned a lot. The big takeaway is that John McCain was right. Russia is a gas station with nukes. Its military is crap, and the command structure utterly corrupt. We've seen drones become a dominant weapon, even to the extent of driving Russia's Black Sea Fleet out of Sevastopol. We've seen that Western weapons and command and control methods are essential to winning battles. We've even seen that it takes a plausible threat to motivate Western countries to up their defense spending, not bullying and bluster. //
RoINTEL
@RoINTEL
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The German Minister of Defense, Boris Pistorius, warned, on Saturday, in a speech held at the Security Conference in Munich, that European countries and the #NATO alliance must prepare for a decades-long conflict with #Russia.
9:45 PM · Feb 17, 2024 //
The Russians are again claiming the aircraft were lost to friendly fire because Russian stupidity is a more palatable explanation than Ukrainian prowess.
In the words of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
U.S. defense aid to Ukraine is not only bolstering the defense of a friendly nation but also creating jobs for American workers and revitalizing the defense manufacturing base that has been in a death spiral since 1992. According to an exhaustive meta-analysis of Ukraine defense spending in the Washington Post, well over 90 percent of the military-related aid provided to Ukraine is spent domestically. The spending has resulted in the opening of new production lines, increased operations at existing facilities, and thousands of direct and indirect jobs created. //
The end of the Soviet Union resulted in a bacchanalia of Department of Defense cuts. Not only were the military services offered up as Bill Clinton's "Peace Dividend," but a round of "cost savings" under the Base Realignment and Closure Program savaged facilities that had little peacetime use but would be critical in wartime. One of the major targets was government-owned, government-operated (GOGO) and government-owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) factories that built munitions and military hardware. Even those facilities that survived found themselves deprived of money for modernization and partially mothballed. The ammunition plants operate very much like they did during World War II. //
But this automated capability isn’t available for the nuances of mixing explosives or filling shells, Brig. Gen. Gavin Gardner, commander of Joint Munitions Command, told Defense News on a tour of the ammunition plant’s production line for the Mark 82, a 500-pound bomb used by the Air Force. Operators still manually mix explosives — like tritonal, which is 80% TNT and 20% aluminum powder — using steam heated kettles, then adding it to the weapon mostly by hand.
That last sentence needs to be read carefully. The number of people alive who know how to steam-sweat tritonal and pour it into shell casings is in the low double digits. The number of those who are not Social Security recipients is a fraction of the total. With few facilities and limited production lines, providing a career path that would encourage someone to train for that job is very difficult. //
Another underlying problem is that the machine tool component of the defense industrial base is so decrepit that when we went to expand production of 155mm shells, we found we did not have the machine tools to build equipment for new production lines. //
As we've seen from the Israel-Hamas War, it is impossible for any friendly nation to defend itself without our assistance. Just three weeks into the war, Israel was making emergency calls for ammunition and equipment. What the Ukraine War is showing us is that we cannot help Taiwan provide a credible defense against China. Worse, we don't have the capacity to provide the United States military with the ammunition or equipment they would need to prevail should we end up in a shooting war with China.
If America’s foes quote critics of Biden, does it mean they’re wrong and their arguments can be dismissed? NR’s Jim Geraghty thinks so. //
Geraghty says if he ever wrote something that was quoted by Russian state media, he’d want to take a shower. Well then suds up, pal. Since 2018, Geraghty has been quoted at least five times by the state-run Russian television news network RT (here, here, here, here, and here) on topics ranging from intel leaks during the Afghanistan withdrawal, to social media censorship, to “Blade Runner” as an instruction manual for tyranny.
Not that Geraghty is special in this regard. RT is constantly talking about what NR writers have said, even on Ukraine. Here’s an RT post from June quoting Michael Brendan Dougherty, one of the few Ukraine war skeptics at NR, about low morale in the Ukrainian armed forces possibly causing problems in the planned counteroffensive (which never really materialized, so maybe Dougherty was on to something there). It seems RT has quoted or amplified National Review’s criticism of Biden and the Democrats hundreds if not thousands of times over the years, which is probably also true of every right-of-center publication that has been critical of the Obama and Biden administrations.
Do you know what that proves? Absolutely nothing. And only the most craven, dishonest hack would claim otherwise.