[FRIAM] and don’t miss this

[glen]

Ha! Could be fake, but:

Ukrainian S-300s Gain First Ever Kills: Shoot Down Two NATO Aircraft Accidentally Over Romania - Reports
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/ukrainian-s-300s-gain-first-ever-confirmed-kill-shoot-down-two-nato-aircraft-accidentally-over-romania

It's one thing to smuggle in weapons. It's another thing to have people there who know how to operate those weapons.

On 3/16/22 12:16, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Glen writes:
> 
> < NATO rejects the no-fly zone. But my guess is it's not because of some Utilitarian sense of suffering. It's because war is only profitable to a small slice of the industrial world. In some ways, that's a good thing, I guess. It signals that we've moved away from bombs and fire, toward money and "cyber"/info. To Alphabet, Meta, and even Musk Enterprises, people are not only the means of production, but also the product. It's stupid to destroy your merchandise. It's smarter to keep them enslaved. It's akin to our move from broad spectrum [pest|herb]icides toward *targeted* "management". Bombs and fire are too coarse to preserve the status quo. Oligarchs like Musk need the analog for GMOs and viruses ... hearts and minds of the Metaverse denizens. >
> 
> If Russia wants to make claims to administer Ukrainian territory, then NATO can certainly do the same, especially since they are being begged to do so.    A no-fly zone keeps being treated as a term of art.
> It could just be a claim by NATO over some subset of the territory.   Responses to this proposal -- one I heard this morning from Richard Haas -- are dismissive without explanation.  He claimed that Russia's radar systems would have to be taken out.    I don't see why that would be necessary.    It would take the courage to put pilots and vehicles at risk:  Invite Russia to shoot at NATO aircraft.   Then as soon as the Russians attack a NATO security escort or shoot down a plane, punishment can be proportional.   After all, war is politics by other means -- appealing the folks in Russia and in Putin's orbit that the military operation has become too dangerous.   Meanwhile, once there is a territory that is relatively safe, then NATO can move more freely to relocate refugees and to deploy defensive and offensive weapons systems.  In a grinding war, it could make sense to start training Ukrainians on US weapons systems.
> 
> As an extreme example to show the absurdity of these norms, the smuggling-in of weapons could include nuclear warheads.   So, in comparison, some planes flying around are not nearly as escalatory.
> 
> And the media coverage of the military side of this isn't very penetrating.  This morning McFaul said that S-300s were now available to the Ukrainians.   Ok, that's somewhat significant.  No one is asking about surface-to-surface missiles.  Perhaps the administration and the Pentagon (and Zelensky's government) are just keeping the messaging light with the no-fly zone talk so that they have cover to deploy more diverse weapons?   I suspect it is not so Machiavellian, and the plea for a no-fly zone is simply desperation.