How much spreading Russian talking points pays these days?
Current western position is that they don’t want Russia to win, but also don’t want to provide the level of support that would stop Russia - for example take 1,000 Abram’s tanks out of storage and give them to Ukraine. Obviously this is hypocrisy.
We are on the road to failure, and yet here you are, accusing anyone that point out the obvious of working for the enemy. Deaf to feedback and in denial of reality.
That’s how you get giant failures like Afghanistan and Vietnam.
The political environment is so toxic that anyone who points out any flaw or bad news regarding the NATO strategy is somehow labeled a Putin apologist. It's a horrible state of affairs. You cannot gaslight your own population into a war victory, it's doesn't work like that.
The person who posted the big wall of text that seems plausible superficially said a bunch of really dumb or dishonest things. At best they're disingenuous, they're doing things like averaging advancements per day, in some places lines literally aren't moving and others people are advancing unopposed, averaging some things is fundamentally dishonest or a fundamental misunderstanding. There are other issues with their comment, but these are all the kinds of mistakes and an informed person participating in honest discourse doesn't make.
People arguing in bad faith need to be called out not tolerated.
1. I am incorrectly interpreting the models because I am assuming aggregate/averaged rates of advance across a very large (~1000km) frontage. Or:
2. The models are incorrect if they expect rates of advance averaged across such a large front to produce reliably realistic results.
The task, then, is for me to dig back through the specifics of the models (I've got Dupuy's books and a couple of publications and related DoD-internal wargaming rulesets based on Relative Combat Power Analysis) to see if they articulate the scale at which they break down. I do recall reading that QJM was used to estimate the outcome of Desert Storm and produced surprisingly accurate results for that campaign. Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the model to the current stage of the Ukrainian conflict.
In particular you seem critical of the values I suggested for the "rate of advance" variable. I suspect that even if you dropped that value to 0.1km/day or even 0.....the models would still suggest a highly skewed rate of Ukrainian losses due to the lopsided-balance of fires assets in Russia's favor. The point is to get people to do the math themselves, and to get them thinking about the second and third order effects of a country with 1/3 of its attackers manpower pool losing men at a greater-than-equal rate.
As an aside, it's weird to me that a few paragraphs is derided as a "Wall of Text" but I guess it is to a generation who's baseline of social media engagement is mobile phones and Twitter. I developed my habits of internet discourse on places like bbs.stardestroyer.net in the late 90s: everyone was on a desktop, and everyone was expected to write long-form explanations for their positions, preferably with references.
This is how I write many of my posts on HN, twenty years later.
Not the "foreign agents" part; that's your insinuation of what the parent commenter said. But there's an unusual degree commonality to the talking points and flat-out factually wrong narratives that people continually post about this conflict -- such that some of them (like "Ukraine wanted to negotiate, but...") we literally hear several times a day.
It doesn't matter what sources they are uncritically adopting these garbage narratives from. It's just propaganda, straight up, and quite obviously so.
edit: though largely it is.
So until the West starts helping Ukraine for real instead of giving barely enough for Ukraine not ti collapse, I do not see how what Russia is doing is stupid.