In the first article about Abrams tanks, someone mentioned they can go 500 km or miles… forgot. But later someone mentioned miles: 300 of them. One can easily envision an afternoon excursion almost 100 miles deep into Russian territory and spend an hour (another 100m fuel) shooting up… a military stagion depot, any airport w/ a military target. Smoehow – almost regrettably – the Ukraine military refrain from the same uncivilized carnage the Russian inflict on civilians. The Russians will not be constrained until they feel the loss, when a sizable segement of the population is killed. This will, of course, be the 500,000 currently (Feb,23) being recruited or trained.
We would be most disapointed if currently there are not Ukraine pilots training on F-16s. Why F16s ???? In the big picture they are the equivalent of the Leopard2 tank: made in numbers by an ally & sold widely to many other countries & in reasonable quantities to support maintenance programs. The latter being friendy enough to Western interests & democratic ideals to qualify to buy them. Some of them will band together and form an alliance of sorts and insist that the US also take part, just like Germany reserved last OK for the tanks.
NOTE: In the tank deal, the US threw in something “new”. That is, with this behemoths burning aviation fuel in a damn jet engine to get enough power to take them to a dragstrip, this represents a sort of “icing on the cake”. Now in reference to F16s, a small addition of some A10s would be superb in the coming narrative. The US has developed more advanced models recently & more than few of the “older” models would be a good addition.
The Ukrainians don’t even have to go to Russia, a forbidding landscape for vast swaths, to kill attacking Russians. The Russians are making themselves available, literally for slaughter, locally – all 500K of them!!
OUR …. VISION
To end this war we refer to Peter Zeihan, who says Russians have only accepted defeat when a vast, ie V A S T, number of casualties were inflicted on them. Let it be! The Russians/Putin have started a war & put us all in commercial difficulty, but a clear understanding among the modern world – with devastating problems so much more important than a war-criminal, gangster, neurotic 19th century dictator – that if that – mass death – is necessary for this tragic, senseless war to end, so be it!
Putin .. hubris … a tragic figure on the world stage: Putin has amassed a financial fortune, so much as to be a fanatic king of all the oligarchs. But Putin is a ganster, a severe lack of morality seems to run with dictators. He saw himself among the world’s most powerful leaders, a kingmaker. Gangsters self-justify their immoral life by believing that everyone else is a gangster. Anyway, something has occurred to us…
Referring to and justa-phrasing Peter Zeihan, who states that both Putin & Xi have very much isolated themselves. We would say more crudely pretty much like mob bosses can’t trust anybody.
Well, does this mean that the communication between these two is the mainstay of the daily entertainment schedules of these two dictators? More on that later…