Ah. Well, I would say that unless they are compared to the US alone that France and the UK actually are very capable with regard to force projection overseas. At least compared to most other countries. Obviously the US is number one in that. I do agree that other nations have contributed to NATO. I would say that many NATO members have militaries that are designed to be complimentary to NATO, and that is a good thing. I have a habit of replying to my own posts by accident, please just ignore that
Way back when Bradleys were first being introduced they were described as battlefield taxis. Yes, mounted with a TOW they can defeat a tank, but slugging it out with tanks is not what they were meant to do.
An analogy would be a WWII destroyer vs. a battleship. Yes, being armed with torpedoes a DD can sink a BB but it it gets in a one on one engagement with one, something’s gone terribly wrong.
It looks to me like it starts with a yellow color, changing to orange then bright red then dark red at the tip. More like a flame than Russian colors.
And now I see you said Rasta, not Russian. I must need to get my glasses checked 
.
Definitely a flame job.
And all of them are frakking useless for fighting in urban areas. There a 19 year old with a RPG is King.
If used in the right way, tanks can have an important role in urban combat.
If your SPG positioned several km behind the line of contact is threatened by a kid with an RPG, you have problems that go beyond the urban setting of the fighting.
Like being stupid enough to let your artillery get close enough without sufficient security forces around!
ISTR that the Stryker has been the most successful armored vehicle for urban environments, if for no other reason than it is much quieter than a tracked vehicle.
There’s a reason why, in a lot of non-armored-vehicle games, the character who can withstand tremendous amounts of punishment to protect their teammates is called the “tank”. A tank’s main gun is certainly impressive, but its defining feature is being able to survive everything that’s thrown at it.
Or at least, that’s supposed to be its defining feature. When farm tractors are defeating your tanks, that’s a sign that you don’t know how to tank.
I have a friend in the Nederlands who is making some side money by installing heat pumps in homes because word got around that he had done it himself for his own home. Only makes sense with this war on. I imagine that many people are finding ways around using gas this winter.
Oops, not breaking news. Sorry.
Well, in a way it is, since one factor in this conflict is how Europe will face getting through the winter with Russia withholding gas supplies, whether the populations’ resolve to continue supporting Ukraine will weaken under such pressure. That people are finding ways to work around this is good not just for the immediate conflict but also long term as a way to diminish Russia’s power via its control of a natural resource. Wars are fought on home fronts as well as battle lines.
It’s also a good long-term option to help against climate change, so long as the electric grid is slowly switched over to non-fossil fuel sources.
Increased prices and smartmeters show how much you are spending each day. These are powerful incentives to find ways of reducing energy consumption. This reduces the scale of the problem from the consumption side.
Generation is another problem. It has been solved by reversing pipelines, adding LPG terminal capacity as fast as possible, delaying the scheduled de-commissioning of fossil fuel power stations and making use of interconnectors between national grids for electricity and the increased use of international gas pipelines and increasing to output from existing gas fields and filling all available storage. There is still a lot of work to be done over the next years. This kind of infrastructure normally takes years to change. It has been a remarkable effort.
These short term emergency measures and the mild European winter seem to have done the trick. They will feed into a longer term strategy to completely remove the European dependency on Russia as a reliable source of Oil and Gas. It will accelerate the move towards renewables which have the advantage of being locally generated with no risk of some mad dictator switching off the tap.
Russia had better start finding alternative customers for their Oil and Gas and find ways of moving it around the world. All the big pipelines and their huge capacity went from Russia to Europe. The capacity to move gas through LPG tankers or other gas pipelines is far less. Building more capacity will be slow, expensive and take many years.
Putin has killed the goose that lays golden eggs and destroyed any trust in Russia as a reliable trading partner. He will lose the economic war and eventually run out of money. Modern warfare of this kind is extremely expensive and the stocks of weapons are rapidly depleted.
It would be interesting to see an economic projection: how long before Russia runs out of money and missiles?
I saw a TLDR video this morning that explained how the price caps the G7 imposed on Russian oil has to the surprise of many actually put a dent in Russian oil revenues.
Ukraine’s interior minister died in a helicopter crash just outside Kyiv.
I’m sure they’ll investigate the heck out of that crash. I know I would.
Yeah, like who takes their kids to school by helicopter in a war zone? Even if it wasn’t shot down its still a not a smart move as military aircraft can be of questionable shape during wartime.
I think the kids were on the ground. They died when the helicopter landed on them.