PIRATE SUBMARINES IN 3, 2, 1,......

 I see from a news report in a paper just slightly less reliable for news than the New York Times that the United States and Germany have agreed and decided to hand Ukraine a whole bunch of Infantry Fighting Vehicles. I don't know about the Mardar system but I do know that the Bradley's reliably destroyed every form of Russian tank on the Iraqi battlefields in Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. I don't just mean with the TOW missiles but also with the gun system. As I read in the article the fools in charge in the West were reluctant to furnish the Ukraine tanks fearing that Russia/Putin would see that as an escalation. I would suggest that they are way to stupid to be running anything more complex than tricycle.

You can read it for yourself.

"Joe Biden and his German counterpart Olaf Scholz have agreed to send infantry fighting vehicles to help Ukraine fight Russia, a day after France said it would supply its own armoured vehicles to Kyiv in an attempt to create a breakthrough in the 10-month war.

The joint announcement followed a phone call between Biden and Scholz and amounts to a step change in western military support for Ukraine, which has asked for up to 700 armoured vehicles to help force the Russians out.

“The United States intends to supply Ukraine with Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, and Germany intends to provide Ukraine with Marder infantry fighting vehicles,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.

Ukraine has repeatedly said it needs 600 to 700 infantry fighting vehicles plus 300 tanks from from the west in order to give its military a chance of breaking through the increasingly fortified Russian positions along the frontline.

Until now, however, the US and Germany have been wary of supplying Ukraine with Nato-standard armour, because they feared it would be interpreted by Russia as escalatory. But the decision to supply western armoured vehicles is significant, even if both countries stopped short of sending tanks.

Germany will also supply Ukraine with a Patriot air defence system, in addition to one promised by the US last month, the White House added. Both countries will train the Ukrainian military on the Marders and Bradleys, although it it was not immediately clear how many of each would be supplied.

Scholz’s deputy spoke up in support. “This is a good decision,” said Robert Habeck, the German vice-chancellor and economy minister, whose department has to green-light weapons exports.

“Since the start of the war we have continuously expanded our support in coordination with our partners. It is only logical that we also take this step.

“Ukraine has the right to defend itself against the Russian attack, and we have the duty to help her.”

France said on Wednesday it was upping its military aid to Kyiv by supplying an unspecified number of AMX-10 RC light armoured vehicles capable, experts said, of scouting roles and supporting main battle tanks. Hours later Biden hinted the US was considering following with the Bradleys.

Earlier on Thursday, senior German ministers indicated their country’s position was also evolving rapidly. Habeck, on a visit to the Norwegian capital, Oslo, said Germany’s position had never been “static” and that it would be influenced by France and the US’s willingness “to deliver lighter tanks”.

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, made similar comments. “I have pointed out time and time again we work with our partners to see what kind of military support is required by Ukraine,” she said after a meeting with her British counterpart, James Cleverly, in London. Cleverly himself said tanks “might well be” part of the next phase of weapons transfers.

On Wednesday night, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Paris’s decision sent “a clear signal to all our other partners: there is no rational reason why Ukraine has not yet been supplied with western-type tanks”."

I see that the Economic Minister and the Foreign Minister found this to be an excellent idea. I kind of wonder what the various Political/Military Advisors at the various staffs in Europe and Washington thought about this insane idea for widening the war.

I remember reading about the pirate submarines in the Spanish Civil War that were attacking ships heading in to Spanish ports to offload cargoes of weapons and men. Will we see their descendants in the Altantic and the Med? It makes me wonder. There is also no reason to believe that Russian hypersonic missiles won't soon be hitting "training bases" in Germany where this training is going to happen.

I don't know what form the destructor takes but everything I've read about Russian history tells me they’re tenacious and never more so than when the odds are stacked against them. When talking about IFVs going to Ukraine I wonder where the manpower is coming from. I see the media is filled with cheerful reports of thousands of dead Russians but I seldom/never see anything about the state of the Ukrainian forces and history tells me that those who tangle with the Russians generally end up stacked as corpses.

At some point the Russians are going to wake up to the alarms that people have been bleating about for decades and they're going to eliminate every single phone from the ranks because with even decades old RF location technology (never mind the NSA) finding and targeting a mass of obviously Russian cell phones to a single geo location is an invitation for full HIMARS battery attack.  One has to remember that the Russians take time to learn to fight again and unlike our forces they haven't fought anything like a peer since The Great Patriotic War. They didn't do well to start with in Finland nor so well in Poland and yes the German panzer armies creamed them during Barbarossa but then they came back and pulled a Kursk.

I'm afraid that the military Chiefs of Staff pissed away any chance for making any meaningful input in the decision making process long ago and to be honest it isn't just that the ones today are incompetent boobs, its that their predecessors since Obama have been boobs and witless buffoons and nobody takes any of them seriously anymore, especially after the debacle in Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa. They are out of touch, deeply incompetent and too damned stupid and ignorant to know it.

Which is all a great pity since it means that everyone who could or would practice restraint is retired, buried or to junior to overcome the mass of idiocy that runs our military at just about every level above 2 stars.

Me? As I said, waiting for the 'pirate submarines' and for Russia to establish a full Naval Blockade of the Baltic ports supplying NATO and full out embargo any cargoes in or out of Ukraine through the Black Sea.