I guess next time we should try and keep in mind how "tough minded" the people getting invaded are? Sometimes things shake out in an improbable way. I would have guessed that the best they could have done is an Afghan style stalemate. I wouldn't have bet that NATO was gonna show the kind of support they have, that includes from the beginning when it really offered a lot of support, just not as much as they would later. It's way more support than it showed the first time or in Georgia or when the Russians have split off the little splinter statelets. Betting on the Ukraine would have been like betting on a boxer cause he's the same race as you. I hoped that it was gonna be a short war that spared as many people as it could, can't believe it went the way it did.
I was so fucking wrong about Ukraine. I like to think I can distinguish myself somewhat by owning how wrong I was and applying the lesson of being really fucking wrong to everything else I hold true. But I'm just a dude with a modem, man. There's plenty of wrong to go 'round on Ukraine. The fact that the CIA got it right is... I mean, that's a new perspective, too. Day before yesterday a blog nobody reads ran an absolutely bugshit photo. Shitty resolution. No source. NOBODY believed it. Then 36 hours later, the Pentagon dropped that shit in 4k. The Ockham's Razor on the situation is the U-2 guys gave their selfie to their favorite blog the day before the Pentagon did because it was fun to do that. Matt Stoller observed that Biden's state of the Union was the first one since 1979 to contain the word "antitrust." I dunno. For the first time in a long, long time I'm starting to feel like maybe the government isn't a total dumpster fire.
Yup, I saw the grainy version on /r/aviation a few days ago and thought "yeah, right". The photo is probably a frame pulled from a vid, to score the frame shadow projected onto the balloon like that. Also shows how well the solar panels' orientation was maintained. Surface normal vector pointed straight towards the plane/sun.
Buddy of mine pointed out that "coming around" in a U-2 is more challenging than most as the difference between "wings come off" and "stall" is about 10 knots. Which means you have about about 2% variation above and below cruise in a straight line... and less than that in a turn, as one wingtip is going more than cruise and the other is going less. I pointed out that a GoPro Hero 4 gives you a 4k image at 120Hz. A U-2 is 63 feet long and cruise speed is 630 ft/sec; there's either about a fifth of a second in which to get that one good shot, or you rip it at 4k and you have a dozen or more shots with 'muricashadow flying proud on that balloon. And that's a GoPro. I can only imagine what purposeful cameras that thing has on it. When Frank Powers got shot down it was taking pictures of the ground with 20cm resolution from that high up.
> Kofman said he believes the analysts did not misread Russian capabilities as much as they underestimated the Ukrainian ones. That's a bluff, Ukrainian army was revamped right after annexation of Crimea happened, they received training from Israeli army, Europe and the USA were eyeing the country's natural resources. The stagnation of the EU is providing enough encouragement in providing military aid, something that the general population is split on. https://www.thelocal.de/20230120/are-germans-really-that-pacifist-anymore War is an extention of politics and all countries are preparing for one. We are all approaching the point where it will either be nationalism or internationalism/resistance/civil wars. I wish best to Iranian revolutionaries, mass insurrection and general strike is a personally preferred alternative to being in denial about a possible thermonuclear WW3. What a clown fiesta this is, the Ukraininan government remains to be the enemy of its people for all the shady corruption, anti-unionism, and taking extreme WTO-dictated Neoliberalism as "standard norm". You can pretend all you want but Yanukovich Ukraine was barely distinguishable from Russia and renaming every second street after Bandera is not an improvement. Everybody's gangsta until the question of military draft comes into play, where the sons of politicians and diplomats display that they can help combat Ukraine's coronavirus by really socially distancing themselves from us, plebs. From fire to flame. No external aid will help fixing internal issues of any government, since every state acts in their self-interest. Experience with Russia should have been a lessen to learn from.