God only knows what the accounting systems at the Department of Defense alone look like.
Western narratives love doing this, remember how Trump is supposed to be the single most retarded and incompetent preseident in history, struggling to understand even basic concepts, while simultanously also being an Evil mastermind that was *this* close to destroying America and cause WWIII
Most NATO instructors were for basic and advanced infantry tactics, medical advice, and high level "thinking ". Stuff like "How to do an AAR", how to motivate subordinates by NOT stealing their pay or beating them, etc.
Sorta, although prewar the US and Ukrainian Armies published training videos and it was a lot of remedial and semi advanced stuff. Thinks like squad tactics, room clearing, basic maneuvers, things like evacuating a tank/APC, and that stuff. 99% of Western military combat experience was policing actions in the 3rd world against motorized infantry at best.
The Iran Iraq war is very similar too.
The Bundeswehr is planning to create 3 Brigades of so called "mittlere Kräfte" which will be fully equipped by armored cars and wheel based self propelled guns. So it has gotten beyond the think tanks. The argument is that these formations could be quickly deployed in the baltics, but I don't think they will be useful for anything more than tripwire duty. However since they are largely replacing unarmored trucks and old M117 with Boxers it is still an overall gain for the army. But I still think it would be a lot smarter to add another fully equipped tank divisions instead of 3 medium brigades.
This sort of reality is why I highlight wargamers and bureaucrats. A lot of this stems from the paper idea that you can craft a battleplan and force composition that leads to victory with no casualties on your side. The bureaucrats love it, and the wargamers play by their system rules and according to them, the armor of X vehicle can survive Y strike or mine hit, so its fine. Then you go into a real fight and you find the shrapnel lodges into stuff and jams mechanism, and shatters important external equipment. The mines didn't penetrate the body but did snap the drive system, and the crew bailed out into a minefield. Suddenly your perfect strategy just killed a vehicle crew.
This is up there with the Nazis losing their trench to a beaver. Also this was hilarious and I haven't seen it posted here yet.
Finally, Elon invented something that is actually practical for daily life.
See the excellent documentary Down Periscope (1996) to see this in action.
I am a luddite, please explain what I am looking at.
It's a Starlink antenna being used as a table. https://www.starlink.com/specifications
I think that to this day, Leopards have been getting wrecked just as fast as Bradleys. The AMX-10 isn't designed for a Ukraine style battlefield, its meant for desert warfare with extremely long visibility, almost to the horizon, its a niche vehicle that only works in the niche combat the French employ it in. Though the Stryker itself was a failure, and the cannon variant wasn't even viable, it is what the future of "Armored vehicle" is going to look like, some IFV with a turret that is interchangeable and can shrug off small arms fire. The moment any vehicle gets attacked by artillery or ATGM they're going to get fucked, either a mobility kill or a full destruction, this has been true since WW2 when the Stuka was ripping apart French tanks or taken to a new level with the American forces were flipping Tiger tanks during/post D-day invasion by dropping 1000lbs bombs right next to them.
Its amazing how this fable persists, the fucking Marine General was given huge leeway for his bullshit, effectively getting equivalent vision and technology with no drawbacks. Bicycle messengers that would teleport from Cairo to Tehran in seconds, thus being impervious to signal interception but also getting real time communications with no drawbacks. Boats would follow around the carrier task forces and also have assholes on speedboats traveling via instant teleportation to the nearest port where they would meet said teleporting bicycle messengers.
That was the movie where they wanted to see if a rickety old diesel submarine can evade detection right? That was a good movie.
Yeah, that's the one. It's dumb but it's incredibly funny.
At this point I'm just going off of memory for a bunch of the details as to why it was fucked, all of the articles and exposure on what really went down is from the old internet of the early-mid 2000s. Van Riper still hangs around in the Marine community, he writes under the pen name Marinus for The Maneuverist, and he doesn't exactly buy into the "Omg Ukraine is gonna win at any moment!" stuff wrote does an explainer about the run on Kiev in the beginning of the war, I attached the pdf of his writing from Aug 2022. He also rants a lot about the idiotic "littoral" force the US Marines are being pivoted to, effectively creating the situation Ukrainian forces are in for absolutely zero reason, dropping armor for vague wunderwaffen that will probably never get developed. Van Riper is something akin to half lolcow, half competent, he is surrounded by complete fucking retards in the Pentagon so he gets a big head on his shoulders that makes him act erratic.
