That’s a lot like how other NATO countries operate as well. But my impression was that the American national guard units were professional full-time units, is that not the case?

Out Norwegian equivalent (the Home Guard) consists of civilians (i.e. people with normal jobs) that train a number of times a year, some of which have their equipment at home so that they’re ready to deploy on short notice. They have some coordinated training with the army, and are intended to function as a kind of “local force” in their region, with in-depth knowledge about local conditions that the ordinary army doesn’t have.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I believe the peace time professional militaries of most democratic European countries would be dwarfed by the number of people those countries would be able to mobilise in a war time situation.

In the case of Norway, we have a standing army of some 20-30 k soldiers, with a reserve (i.e. peace time civilians with ordinary jobs that have pre-set places to meet up in the case of a conflict) of some 50-70 k soldiers. If shit hits the fan, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get another 100-200 k to volunteer (at the peak of the cold war I believe we had standing army + reserve of some 500 k). The issue is that we are nowhere close to being able to equip that many soldiers.

That’s just Norway, one of the smallest populations in Europe, and we would likely be able to field 100 k + soldiers within a week or two, with another 100 k following up in the next months, given that we have the equipment for it.

Call me naive, but I honestly believe that people in democratic countries would be willing to enlist if there is a real threat of an autocratic regime invading at taking over. Given that we have sufficient numbers of well trained soldiers to hold out the initial weeks/months and train those mobilised, and sufficient equipment to give the mobilised, I hope that we would be able to put a solid force on its feet relatively quickly.

Also, just the sheer population of Europe (≈ 450 million in the EU) is so much larger that e.g. Russia (≈ 150 million) that we should collectively be able to field several million soldiers as long as we have enough equipment for it, and enough trained personell to train the mobilised. So I definitely think it’s reasonable to focus on building equipment stockpiles in peace time, rather than having huge standing armies.

At some point it looks like the road will become so congested that it becomes an issue in itself. I’ve heard that the Russians deploy very few recovery vehicles, so blowing up a couple more tanks on that road could actually cause a problem for them. With the (very delayed) mud season coming they can’t go off road to get around either.

That’s not even mentioning the morale hit it must be to constantly be driving through absolutely wrecked convoys like this on the way to the line.

Keep it up Ukraine! And get your ass moving on more supplies Europe!

I used Iran as an example because they specifically have a religious leadership that uses exactly the Quran to justify their laws.

There are plenty of non-Muslim Iranians that have burned Qurans in anti-regime protests, specifically to separate the religious regime (symbolised by the Quran in that context) from the country and its culture as a whole. That is: They are specifically protesting the religious regime, and therefore don’t burn the flag, which they don’t associate with the regime.

I would elaborate a bit more, and I think you have a good analogy with “burning a cross in a black family’s yard”.

Just like burning a cross to protest the church is different from burning it in someone’s yard to threaten them, burning a Quran in the context of protesting against (for example) the Iranian regime is different from burning the same Quran while simultaneously encouraging violence towards Muslims.

If my understanding is correct he isn’t being punished for the Quran burning alone. It’s what he’s been saying while also burning the Quran.

A more similar example would be burning a flag while saying something along the lines of “All immigrants from X country are terrible people and we should use all possible means to force them out of the country”, with a strong “won’t someone rid me of this troublesome priest” connotation.

Essentially, burning a symbol would be ok in an isolated sense. Inciting hatred and violence, and using the burning of symbols to aid you in delivering that message is not.

That’s just not how they’re using drones. They have specialised drone units, as well as drone operators that are attached to ordinary infantry units. If every guy in your unit is operating a drone, you’re ridiculously vulnerable to people advancing on your position, if only because a drone, while being accurate, has a stupidly low “rate of fire”. See my other comment on suppressing an enemy.

If a couple dozen soldiers with or without armoured vehicles are advancing on your position, you need a certain rate of fire to keep them pinned down to prevent them from advancing. One drone hitting that group every 30 seconds does far less of a job in that regard than a single MG sending out bursts every two seconds. Of course, once you’ve pinned down the advancing enemy, drones are great, but you can’t get away from small arms being essential in combat situations where distances are < 400 m, which is a lot of them.

Even in WWII, most soldiers didn’t usually see the enemy they were firing at with small arms. Even if your sentiment that small arms combat is a negligible part of modern warfare was correct (which it isn’t), this comment would still be wrong.

Yes, most casualties are not caused by small arms but by artillery. That doesn’t means small arms are useless, they just fill a completely different role.

When fighting with small arms, the major goal is fire superiority, which essentially means firing more bullets in the general direction of your enemy than what they fire back. You will generally be firing at either known enemy locations (“A guy is in that building, let’s shoot at the building.”) or suspected enemy locations (“There might be a guy behind that bush”). This prevents the enemy from popping out and shooting at you so you can manoeuvre on them and use grenades or call in artillery or mortar fire. Sometimes you will hit people as well, because you are shooting at places it’s likely that they are (the guy in the building eventually gets hit if enough people shoot enough shots at the building). Very rarely will you see an exposed person that you shoot and observably hit.

I knew it was just a matter of time before we would see something like this, with pretty much everyone having though something along the lines of “why don’t they get a drone with a net to take out other drones?”. But HOLY SHIT we’re actually seeing air-to-air combat between drones now! I can only wonder how long it will be before we start seeing bomber / recon drones with escorting fighter drones being attacked by enemy fighter drones equipped specifically for that task.

Wow, you really must be an actual idiot. I’m honestly kind of impressed.

Well if you need something to work with Fortran…

The whitespace doesn’t bother me at all, but holy hell! Any time I’m trying to understand a Python program/library that’s anything above a couple thousand lines of code, I instantly feel a burning hate for dynamic typing.

I love Python for scripting- in large part because of dynamic typing. IMO it’s just not a language made for building large infrastructures.

Sorry, but I honestly don’t get it. I I were to point out the crown jewel of open source, it’s gcc. gcc is the backbone and survival condition for so much modern industry that it’s not even remotely funny.

Take away gcc, and the world will likely burn for a substantial amount of time until people start making in-house or proprietary alternatives.

Being a phd. myself, I would say it seems likely that the person in question wasn’t aware of the research/sweeps that had been done, and was searching through literature with the express purpose of finding out what kind of work had been done on the subject, when they came across this data.

The way I usually find out about a research campaign is by reading articles from said campaign. It’s very rare that I’ll need to reach out to the authors to ask for more data than what is available in their publications.

If there’s any American reading this: Please vote. The world needs you and all your friends to vote. I’m begging you, please get out and vote.

I didn’t say that. I’m pointing out that we spent shitloads of money that could have gone to out own schools and healthcare, and a dozens of young soldiers lives (I’m not American), and we were clearly told by both the local population and a bunch of other countries to fuck off.

So yes. I’ll say it. Fuck em. We don’t owe them shit. We came down there, suppressed the Taliban, built s schools and hospitals, and secured elections, and when we left, the Afghan army, which we had trained and supplied, folded immediately.

We can’t be held responsible for them not revolting against a suppressive regime. We gave them all the tools to keep the taliban out, but they chose to fold. That’s on them.

It’s tragic, but that’s how it is. If they’re not willing to fight for their own rights, they won’t get to enjoy them.

I’ve heard this explanation before as well, that essentially nobody felt any loyalty to the national government. You could kind of tell why when the whole government just evacuated the country when the west left.

Are you suggesting that a new coalition goes back to Afghanistan to throw out the Taliban again? Remember how popular that was last time?

It just doesn’t stop baffling me how quickly the Afghan army folded to these people and accepted this as their future… just tragic all around

I’ve been wondering for a while: What is preventing a bunch of not-drowning-in-corruption countries from just not recognising FIFA any more, saying they’re sick of the blatant corruption, and starting their own international association? I would think you could get a lot of the major football nations to support something like that, because it looks like it’s mostly Quatar, Saudi-Arabia and the likes which benefit from the current system…