re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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The numbers don’t lie. Chinese couples would have to average 4.1 kids to break even. They are having less than 1 per.

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USA has the same issue , although not that bad. However our immigration keeps our population class and Distribution healthy. China will have to open up their borders some . China’s middle class will not want to wipe the arse of their 90+ year old parents. Need immigrants for that.

Eta

Tin foil hat time

China will release another virus to try and kill off their old people . Go watch “One Child Nation”. Those Chinese are Godless people. They don’t value life at all.

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It sounds like the biggest difference in losses right now is artillery/MLRS. Russian milblogger stated that russia is losing 4:1 ratio since just before the offensive started

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Poland gave Ukraine some of their modified aircraft retro-fitted to support HARM missiles used to take out radar sites and anti-air. This might have something to do with Russian lack of counter battery radar.

HIMARS were killing Russian command and supply so the Russians moved them further behind the lines. Now Ukraine has longer range missiles in response.

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It also lays bare how big of a mistake Putin made I’m not ordering a general mobilization at the start of the war. Putin should have studied the history of his own countr

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Structurally, it was never possible. THere's a reason why they *still* haven't made a true general mobilization. It makes what's left of the Russian economy so non-functional that it almost ceases to be a modern society, particularly in the field of medicine.

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Zeihan

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Its a mixed bag. He has to do things that would fit in fine with a buzzfeed type headline, to get views, and he points out some very fundamental flaws that are pretty inescapable-- but he also tends towards all or nothing thinking, and refuses to acknowlege that people will continue sub-optimal situations to compensate for some shortcomings, even when the long term results of doing so are sub optimal.


Someone mentioned the average Chinese being 35-- its 38 and a half essentially by official Chinese government numbers, but we know how good those really are. Americans are actually on average a bit younger than the Chinese, and we hear no end of the hand wringing about the problems of our aging society.

They probably did get a bit youger with COVID, as the official death total there for it and any associated illness or secondary effect is an absolute joke-- lifelong malnutrition is a strong secondary health risk, not to mention the respiratory problems of living with the worst air pollution on the planet. The only things we can really say with super confidence on the Chinese population is that its significantly under the official number.

Taiwanese evaluations of the Chinese are pretty smart, because they have to be for a sound national survival strategy; they pay attention to things like the number of early infancy vaccines being sold to and administered by the Chinese government being essentially flat, while officially the rate should have grown-- the Chinese mandate a TB vaccine in particular within 24 hours of childbirth by law-- and we're not talking about European style mandates. We're talking hard labor sentence mandates. Yet the Chinese have only purchased, made, or administered enough to innoculate about half their claimed birth rate-- an adult 'dose' usually covers about 1.2 child vaccines, but to cover the named birth rate, they would have to had more than doubled it-- somewhere between 2.5 and 3 per dose.

The math of the government on population has been funky for a very long time, too. The unofficial data suggests that Nigeria and Pakistan should have higher birth rates than China, in raw total numbers by sometime this year-- a remarkable feat for a country with supposedly 1.4 billion people-- it'd still be remarkable if there were only 600 million Chinese.

It also doesn't help the Strong China argument that the steepest declines are in the ethnic Han populations, either. Yeah, there are still a lot of Chinese folks, but they have a lot of the same problems faced by the Japanese in the 90s-- except on a much larger scale, with less development, less social cohesion, and a more authoritarian state. Its not a recipe for success.

So yeah, Zeihan lives in a land of hyperbole, but it doesn't mean he's wrong over the aggregate about a lot of things.

Washington Post:

The biggest obstacle to Ukraine’s counteroffensive? Minefields.

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ZAPORIZHZHIA REGION, Ukraine — In a painstakingly slow process that has come to define the speed of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, small groups of sappers on the front lines are crawling across minefields — sometimes literally on their stomachs — to detonate Russia’s defenses and clear a path for troops to advance.

The long buildup to the counteroffensive, which began about a month ago across multiple segments of the battlefield in the country’s east and south, gave the Russians time to prepare, soldiers said. Areas between 3 and 10 miles deep in front of the Russians’ main strongholds have been densely mined with antitank and antipersonnel mines and trip wires. These defenses have been successful in stalling the Ukrainian advance, they said.

As a result, Kyiv’s forces have changed strategy, Ukrainian military personnel said. Rather than try to break through with the infantry fighting vehicles and battle tanks that Western allies provided to aid Ukraine in this counteroffensive, units are moving forward, slowly, on foot.

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A soldier prepares to remove an anti-tank mine.

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“We need special equipment, we need special remote mine-clearance equipment,” Zaluzhny said, adding that Ukraine is using U.S.-provided M58 Mine Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC) systems but that “they are also being destroyed, yes. There’s nothing wrong with that. It takes a lot of them.”

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Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov and Zaluzhny told The Post that they have informed their Western counterparts that they urgently need more mine-clearing systems, such as Bangalore torpedo explosive charges. Ukraine has held back some of the brigades and Western weapons prepared for the counteroffensive as it attempts to penetrate the minefields.

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U.S. officials said that they have provided Ukraine with nearly every type of equipment it requested ahead of the counteroffensive. Officials cautioned that it is not always possible to provide the quantities Ukraine asks for, but said that with the MICLIC systems specifically, Washington is working to soon provide more of not only the system, but also the charges it uses to detonate a long row of mines.

The officials added that the U.S. decision to provide Ukraine with controversial cluster munitions will give Kyiv fire superiority for the first time in this conflict, allowing the Ukrainians the proper time and space to use the engineering equipment they already have.

Ukrainian military personnel on the ground also described hesitation to use the larger, more advanced demining equipment. Because, in the Ukrainians’ opinion, there are so few of the mine-clearing systems, they have become an easier target for Russian forces, which have prioritized striking them.

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Because the Russians have drones in the sky on the lookout for any mine-clearance systems to target with artillery and missiles, the Ukrainians are trying for now to save the few they do have by doing the job manually. Sapper units — sometimes a group of just four people — will often wait for twilight to clear paths, as they are too visible in the daylight and can be seen through night-vision devices in the dark.

Walking with a metal detector is unrealistic, sappers said, because they are too visible. So they crawl, relying on their vision to spot mines.

“It slows us down a lot, because the work of a sapper, it needs time and tranquility,” said Lt. Col. Mykola Moroz, the commander of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade’s engineering and sapper battalion. “It’s not possible to do our work in these circumstances.”

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“It slows us down a lot, because the work of a sapper, it needs time and tranquility,” said Lt. Col. Mykola Moroz, the commander of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade’s engineering and sapper battalion. “It’s not possible to do our work in these circumstances.”

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The problem with that slow of a process is that the Russians can lay mines faster than they can be cleared.

Innovation is needed and the Ukrainians have been very innovative in this war.

Perhaps, the cluster bombs can help clear a lot of mines quickly adding to conventional explosive clearing.

Perhaps something similar to Vietnam era Daisy Cutters put on remote controlled vehicles could clear a lot of area. Ammonium nitrate, fuel oil and aluminum powder are all readily available and Ukraine has been quite inventive with their use or remote control drones.

Old vehicles of many kinds could work, or maybe this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVTOMdWLkr4

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This is one area I don’t actually think was a blunder by Putin - at least in terms of his own self preservation. I think Putin knows he would not survive a general mobilization after his blitzkrieg to Kiev and attempt to create a Vichy Ukraine failed.

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Perhaps he would not survive. But, after the failure of the initial attack to land a knockout blow, he should have foreseen the war would then become a slogging match, and as it turned out, a virtual stalemate. It’s a war of attrition at this point. And in a war of attrition, numbers are the deciding factor.

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What is the general consensus here about Zeihan? I was not familiar until I listened to him on Rogan the other day. I hadn’t really heard much before about China being a ticking time bomb and such.

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He gets oil and gas wrong all the time, from type of production through end uses. I buy his demographics take and his labor pool take. The dude said that alumina ore was imported from Ireland to Russia. There must be a punchline in that joke.

Edit: Much of his views are straight out of Stratfor which was incubated in Baton Rouge but not liberal enough a city to be attractive to academic researchers, so moved to Austin over a decade ago. Zeihan left Stratfor about the same time that it moved to Austin.

His hyperbole is the hip slick and cool delivery type. He has zero understanding of minerals extraction and manufacturing. I take all of those opinions with a grain of salt.

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And in a war of attrition, numbers are the deciding factor.

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Ability to supply those numbers matters moar

Defense One:

US paying contractor to quietly supply Bulgarian 155mm shells to Ukraine

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For months, Bulgaria’s pro-Russian president fought to keep his country from joining an EU effort to make 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine. He appeared to lose that battle in June, when the country’s pro-Ukraine defense minister declared that the NATO ally would “not exclude” the possibility that domestic firms would produce the ammunition.

But according to Army and U.S. contracting documents, Bulgaria has been providing 155mm shells to Ukraine all along—through the United States, with deliveries scheduled through next year.

The hitherto unreported deal sheds light on how the United States has procured the coveted munition, how Bulgaria is delicately balancing its foreign policy, and how some small companies have unseated major defense giants amid the stresses of the Ukraine war.

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The contract announcement (along with a correction issued later) said the two firms would compete for smaller orders under the $522 million cap through 2027. But information posted to the Federal Procurement Data System shows that the bulk of the money—$402 million—has already been allocated to Global Military Products.

It also indicates where the shells are coming from: Bulgaria.

The award stands in contrast to the declarations of Bulgarian politicians, particularly Russian-leaning President Rumen Radev, who said in March that Bulgaria would never supply the round.


Even Bulgarian officials sympathetic to Ukraine noted that their largely Soviet-equipped army has no stocks of the NATO-designed ammunition and said that their country has only “experimental production” capabilities.

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The U.S. contracting documents, however, imply the existence of major 155mm production capabilities in Bulgaria, experts said.

“Manufactured in Bulgaria is the most straightforward explanation here,” said Greg Sanders, deputy director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at think-tank CSIS.

Others concurred, such as Matthew George, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and Jerry McGinn, a former senior career official in the Defense Department’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy who is now the executive director of the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University.

The $402 million contract could buy as many as 800,000 155mm shells at $500 apiece, though George cautioned that shipping, packaging, and other services would likely drive the per-unit cost higher.

The Bulgarian embassy did not provide comment to Defense One.

Defense One contacted two companies identified by Bulgarian officials as having the experimental capability to make 155mm shells. The first, VMZ, said that it did not have the ability to make the ammunition. The second, Transmobile, did not respond to repeated emails. Both VMZ and Transmobile advertise 155mm shells on their websites.

Defense One also contacted Global Military Products CEO Marc Morales, who declined to comment.

The Army's choice of Global Military Products illustrates how the war in Ukraine has reshaped the defense industry, with smaller companies now finding they can successfully compete with defense industry giants amid a global hunger for arms and ammunition.

Founded in 2013, the Florida-based company is not a natural player in the market for NATO-designed artillery shells—unlike Northrop Grumman, the defense-industry behemoth that shares the Jan. 30 contract, which already makes 155mm-related equipment.

Global Military Products got its start by buying Soviet-designed weapons from Bulgaria and other countries for Special Operations Command and “likely” supplying them to Syrian rebels, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The Pentagon paid the company about $34 million a year from 2016 to 2021, according to USAspending, a government-run contract-tracking website. Last year, the company’s U.S. government-related revenues rose dramatically, to $323 million, according to USASpending.

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Global Military Products’ ties may even run to the top of Ukraine’s military hierarchy. On April 1, 2022, shortly after Ukraine beat back Russia’s assault on Kyiv, the company’s LinkedIn page posted a screenshot of what they said was a WhatsApp conversation with Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

In the post, the company tagged Marc Morales and Global Military Products marketing coordinator Lyubov Tavzel. Both are smiling widely in pro-Ukrainian t-shirts as they hold Soviet-made weapons.

“Marc Morales,” the person sending the photo wrote in Cyrillic underneath the photo.

Zaluzhniy responded in the international language of texts: Ukrainian flags and emojis of flexing biceps.

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Edit: Much of his views are straight out of Stratfor which was incubated in Baton Rouge but not liberal enough a city to be attractive to academic researchers, so moved to Austin over a decade ago.

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More like Red Stick is such a big shithole that the nicer parts of the city are trying to break off.