Turkey Flips, Boosts NATO Membership For Sweden…And Ukraine

July 11th, 2023

Remember how Turkey was blocking Sweden’s membership in NATO? Well, they’ve now flipped to backing Sweden’s membership.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has agreed to support Sweden’s bid to join Nato, the military alliance’s chief Jens Stoltenberg says.

He said the Turkish leader would forward Sweden’s bid to parliament in Ankara and “ensure ratification”.

Meanwhile, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said: “I am very happy, it is a good day for Sweden.”

Turkey had previously spent months blocking Sweden’s application, accusing it of hosting Kurdish militants.

As one of Nato’s 31 members, Turkey has a veto over any new country joining the group.

Reacting to the news, US President Joe Biden said he welcomed the commitment by President Erdogan to proceed with “swift ratification”.

“I stand ready to work with President Erdogan and Turkey on enhancing defence and deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic area. I look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Kristersson and Sweden as our 32nd Nato ally,” a White House statement said.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock tweeted: “At 32, we’re all safer together.” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Sweden joining would “make us all safer”.

Mr Stoltenberg announced the agreement late on Monday following talks between the Turkish and Swedish leaders in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

The Nato chief described it as a “historic step”, but stressed that a “clear date” could not be given for when Sweden would join the military alliance – as this relied on the Turkish parliament.

Sweden and its eastern neighbour Finland, both long considered as militarily neutral, announced their intention to join Nato in May last year, several months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Finland formally joined in April.

Why the sudden turnaround on Sweden’s membership?

For one thing, they’re getting F-16s out of the deal. For another, Erdogan is pushing for EU membership again, and needs all the friends he can get if he wants to stop Turkey’s disasterous economic slide. Turkey is hemorrhaging foreign currency reserves thanks to Erdogan’s SuperGenius economic move of lowering interest rates to flight inflation, so maybe a promise of closer ties to Europe might staunch the bleeding a little.

It could also be Turkey’s age-old enmity with Russia coming to the fore. Or maybe Russia’s poor performance has finally led Erdogan to conclude that Russia is the “weak horse.”

But it’s not just Sweden: Erdogan also indicated approval for Ukraine joining NATO as well. “‘There is no doubt that Ukraine deserves membership of NATO,’ Erdogan told a joint press conference with the Ukrainian president in Istanbul early on Saturday, adding that the two sides should go back to peace talks.”

Moreover, NATO seems receptive to letting Ukraine join…just not right now.

NATO leaders said on Tuesday that Ukraine should be able to join the military alliance at some point in the future but they stopped short of offering Kyiv an immediate invitation, angering Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The leaders were meeting at a summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius as Ukrainian troops struggled to make significant gains in a counteroffensive against the Russian invasion forces occupying parts of the country.

The leaders said in a declaration: “Ukraine’s future is in NATO”. But they offered no timeline for the process.

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met,” the declaration said, without specifying the conditions Ukraine needs to meet.

I’m sure one of the conditions is “Not having Russia occupying large parts of your country.”

Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression has made the alliance more united than any time since the end of the Cold War. Clearly it’s in every NATO member’s interest to let Russia dash 50 years worth of Russo-Soviet miltech against the rock of Ukraine, so expect members of the alliance to keep feeding Ukraine’s armed forces for the immediate future.

But having a direct military conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia isn’t on anyone member’s preference card, no matter how badly NATO armies would maul their Russian counterparts. So don’t expect NATO membership for Ukraine until the Russo-Ukrainian War concludes.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 6 Comments »

Kentucky Ballistics + Slow Mo Guys + Big Guns = Cool Footage

July 10th, 2023

In a follow-up to both Saturday’s 4 Bore rifle video and high-speed footage of gun destruction, both Kentucky Ballistics and The Slow-Mo Guys are back with another video, this time shooting really big guns.

How big? Up to a .577 Tyrannosaur.

Points of interest:

  • The recoil shockwave of the .577 Tyrannosaur visibly travels through one of the Slow Mo Guys’ back muscles. It really emphasis the felt recoil of that monster.
  • At 82,000 frames a second, you can see a flash of light from bullet impact as it enters the ballistics gel. They talk about naming this “The Kentucky Effect.”
  • The bullet sucks the fireball from the initial shot in, then the collapsing cavitation of the gel reignites the gases.

    • Plus the usual exploding nacho cheese cans

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    Posted in Guns, video | 2 Comments »

    Netherlands: Let The Power Fall

    July 9th, 2023

    The Europhilic, farmer-oppressing, climate cult-believing government of The Netherlands has fallen over immigration policies.

    The Dutch government collapsed on Friday after failing to reach a deal on restricting immigration, which will trigger new elections in the fall.

    The crisis was triggered by a push by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party to limit the flow of illegal immigrants to the Netherlands, which two of his four-party government coalition refused to support.

    “It’s no secret that the coalition partners have differing opinions about immigration policy. Today we unfortunately have to conclude that those differences have become insurmountable. Therefore I will tender the resignation of the entire cabinet to the king,” Mr. Rutte said in a televised news conference.

    Tensions came to a head this week, when Mr. Rutte demanded support for a proposal to limit entrance of children of war refugees who are already in the Netherlands and to make families wait at least two years before they can be united.

    This latest proposal went too far for the small Christian Union and liberal D66, causing a stalemate.

    Mr. Rutte’s coalition will stay on as a caretaker government until a new administration is formed after new elections, a process which in the fractured Dutch political landscape usually takes months.

    News agency ANP, citing the national elections committee, said elections would not be held before mid-November.

    Two parties poised to take advantage of Rutte’s coalition falling: The pro-farmer BBB Party, and Geert Wilders libertarian/anti-Islamist PVV.

    Opposition parties in the Netherlands were pleased with the fall of the Rutte IV Cabinet. BBB frontwoman Caroline van der Plas tweeted a photo of herself smiling asking others to show the face they made when they heard the news.

    “Goodbye Rutte, Kaag and the rest!” writes PVV leader Geert Wilders. He said he has requested a parliamentary debate.

    PvdD leader Esther Ouwehand hopes for “the definitive end of the Rutte era.” She said, “Unprecedented that the prime minister created a new crisis in an attempt to save his own skin.”

    Rutte’s government is the one that tried to seize land from farmers to prevent them from farming as part of their global warming/anti-meat/land seizure agenda. That government deserved to fall. Actually, what it deserved was having angry farmers armed with torches and hay rakes track members down in the streets and thrash them within an inch of their lives, but the Dutch haven’t been much in the revolution business since 1648.

    From this remove, it would be nice if the elections could pave the way for a BBB/PVV Euroskeptic coalition focused on property rights, abandoning insane climate change mandates, restricting Islamist immigration, and protecting free markets and free speech. But European politics seldom proceeds along such (to us) logical lines.

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    Posted in Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Regulation | 5 Comments »

    4 Bore Rifle vs. Body Armor

    July 8th, 2023

    4 Bore is an obsolete black-powder rifle with a (roughly) 1 inch barrel used for hunting big game in Africa. Scott at Kentucky Ballistics got a modern version of that and decided to test it against body armor. Consider this as the latest in the “BattleSwarm features videos of absurdly large rifle calibers for your viewing pleasure.”

    Though it has a 2,150 grain bullet producing over 200 pounds of felt recoil, the round is too flat and slow to actually penetrate the body armor, but it packs so much force that it just drags most of the body armor into the chest cavity. The zombie torsos do not fare well.

    Thanks to Dave Hardy for bringing the video to my attention.

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    Posted in Guns, video | 4 Comments »

    Low-Calorie LinkSwarm Substitute

    July 7th, 2023

    This week’s been a bear…

    …and I’ve just run out of time to do a decent LinkSwarm. Instead, in honor of police finding Hunter Biden’s cocaine unexplained cocaine of unknown origin at the White House, here’s a video of Norm MacDonald doing cocaine jokes, followed by a mini-LinkSwarm.

  • Russian ammo dump blows up real good.
  • Peter Zeihan: Scottish independence is a suicide pact.
  • RedHat is trying to paywall open source code. Penny wise and pound foolish.
  • “DC Police Say They May Never Discover Who Left Bag Of Cocaine Labeled ‘Property Of H. Biden’ At White House.”
  • Protip for professional sports teams: Don’t hold Dog Night and Fireworks Night on the same night.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, video | 3 Comments »

    The Battle of Juba: When China Got Its Ass Kicked

    July 6th, 2023

    Peacekeeping missions in Africa have a way of humbling proud nations, like America in Mogadishu or Ireland in Jadotville. But while American and irish troops actually acquitted themselves well in their respective engagements, the same can’t be said for Chinese troops in the Battle of Juba, in South Sudan, in July of 2016.

    The short summary is that two sides in the civil war had set up bases on either side of a UN refugee camp, and when fighting broke out, woefully unprepared Chinese peacekeeping troops got their asses kicked.

    Takeaways:

  • “Both sides fielded artillery and tank units. Chinese peacekeepers, of course, had neither.”
  • “Heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the Chinese soldiers couldn’t have asked for worse battlefield conditions.”
  • “The United Nations Camp perimeter was lightly protected by Hesco barriers, which are filled with sand instead of concrete walls.”
  • “The guard towers were wooden shacks instead of concrete pillboxes. They had no bullet resistant glass or reinforced sandbags, no concrete mortar protection zones that you would typically want on a base like this. The entrance gate was a flimsy metal fence instead of a heavy metal block gate. The main defense was barbed wire fences.”
  • “This place was not set up to prevent a heavy assault.”
  • Then the two forces started attack each other.
  • “The government army forces and the rebel forces rampaged through the city. They did not observe any rules of engagement, attacking hospitals and non-combatants.”
  • Some 1,400 rebel troops “looted shops, hospitals and aid stations.”
  • “Both sides were shooting at each other through the refugee camp.”
  • “Wooden UN guard towers came under heavy machine gun fire. This forced the Chinese peacekeepers to leave and take cover.”
  • “Hundreds of bullets rockets and artillery [shells] peppered the perimeter. The Chinese U.N forces retreated deeper into the compound and clustered around the few armored personnel carriers they had. This is when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade struck their APC. It killed two Chinese soldiers and wounded six others.”
  • “Enemy militiamen then looted one of the aid warehouses. They stole $30 million worth of United Nations goods. This was enough food to feed over 200,000 people for a month in the famine stricken nation.”
  • “Chinese-led UN peacekeepers were pinned down inside the compound, and unable to effectively return fire with the weapons and vehicles they had at their disposal. They were unable to prevent militia forces on the streets from going house to house hunting people down and committing
    unspeakable acts just outside the camp.”

  • Some individual Chinese forces did better, rallying and retrieving the weapons they had abandoned, and preventing forces from storming the center of the compound.
  • 272 confirmed casualties day one, 20 of which were under Chinese protection.
  • Reports said “UN leadership had directly ordered Chinese and Ethiopian battalions to leave the base and act as a quick response force They were supposed to go out, leave the gate, and set up a perimeter, but they refused to go.”
  • “Major General Patrick Cameron, in charge of the United Nations investigation, wrote a damning report on the Chinese soldiers…he cites an overall lack of leadership preparedness and international integration.”
  • “In the past four decades, Chinese soldiers have had basically zero combat experience, so it’s interesting to see that one of the major findings from the report is that they’re very risk-adverse. They don’t have the experience of what it takes to put your life on the line.”
  • Chinese retort that UN weapons and equipment suck. That’s probably true as well.
  • Chinese soldiers didn’t even know the rules of engagement.
  • “Orders were flat out ignored by Chinese soldiers because they came from a different source than they were used to. They weren’t flexible.”
  • “There was also evidence of a lack of basic medical training and Hazevac procedures” among the Chinese soldiers.
  • The two deaths made Chinese soldiers even more risk adverse.

    • Supposedly China implemented reforms after the dismal showing, but throughout history, China’s military has looked remarkably ineffective in fighting against theoretically smaller foes.

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    Posted in Military, video | 13 Comments »

    Bodycam Footage of Cop Taking Down Active Shooter

    July 5th, 2023

    I may be late to this party, since the story broke several days ago, but I think this video is worth covering to highlight all the things the Allen PD officer (whose name, as far as I can tell, hasn’t been released yet) did right.

  • He instructed others to get to safety before moving to engage the shooter.
  • He paused to get a better weapon out of his car and take a moment to assess the situation.
  • He maintained constant communication with the dispatcher to let other officers know where he was all the time to reduce the possibility of friendly fire.
  • He constantly moved toward the sound of gunfire to engage the target.
  • He maintained solid trigger discipline throughout running to contact.
  • He engaged the shooter from behind cover, and continued controlled fire until putting him down.

    • As far as things to be improved on, he did slow noticeably while moving toward contact, so maybe better cardio is in order. But I’m hardly one to cast aspersions here…

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    Posted in Crime, Texas, video | 10 Comments »

    Happy Independence Day!

    July 4th, 2023

    Don’t think anyone is in the mood for any intellectual heavy lifting today, so here’s a fireworks livestream:

    Don’t ask me how they’re doing live nighttime fireworks during the middle of the day.

    This is a more eclectic livestream, with parades and such:

    And here’s that famous San Diego fireworks shot where they accidentally set off everything at once.

    Happy Independence day, everyone!

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    Posted in unions, video | No Comments »

    Why Does Will Hurd Think He’s Running For President?

    July 3rd, 2023

    In one of those periodic, inexplicable outbreaks of a U.S. Representative deciding that he needs to run for President, former Texas Congressman Will Hurd has announced he’s running for President.

    Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd announced Thursday that he’s throwing his hat in the ring for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

    Hurd, who was first elected to his congressional seat in 2014 and did not run for reelection in 2020, now enters the crowded presidential field of 13 other candidates as a major underdog.

    The former congressman has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump and said last month that a race between President Joe Biden and Trump would be a “rematch from hell.”

    “Someone like me, right, a dark horse candidate, can pull this off,” Hurd, 45, told “CBS Mornings” Thursday. “One, you can’t be afraid of Donald Trump. Too many of these candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump. But we also have to articulate a different vision.”

    In a video announcing his candidacy, Hurd listed illegal immigration and inflation as chief among his motivations to run.

    “Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, still out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video.

    The big question, of course, is “why?”

    2020 saw no shortage of former or current House members running for President. Names like “Joe Sestak,” “John Delaney,” “Seth Moulton,” and “Tim Ryan,” were introduced to the voting public and promptly forgotten, garnering neither fame nor delegates. Eric Swalwell made no impression on the race, and promptly returned to being known for irritating people and screwing Chinese spies. Former three-term Texas congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was already famous for raising a lot of money by not being Ted Cruz, losing to Ted Cruz, and then raising a lot of money to run for President, only to drop out before the first votes were cast. Objectively the most successful was Tulsi Gabbard, who earned two whole delegates by being photogenic, moderately heterodox, and the candidate not named “Biden” or “Sanders” to stay in the race longest. The “heterodox” part would cause her to leave the party that openly loathed her.

    The three-term Texas congressman bit would make O’Rourke the obvious point of comparison for Hurd’s run, but there are two problems. The first is that Hurd objectively pulled off a more difficult feat than O’Rourke in winning three very tight races in TX-23, the only true 2012-2020 swing-district in Texas. By contrast, O’Rourke was running in a safe Democratic district backed up by scads of in-law money. The second is that Hurd doesn’t have the huge, high-profile, big money race to draw on a network of contributors like O’Rourke had. I also suspect that he’ll get an order of magnitude less fawning glossy magazine profiles than O’Rourke got, assuming he gets any. (He may get a few, as he’s just the sort of soft, no-hope Republican the national media loves to pump up.)

    Hurd was a squishy three-term congressmen from a squishy swing district, and in terms of accomplishments, that’s not chicken feed. It’s an open question whether a more conservative Republican could have captured and held the seat at the time (though Hurd was a border control squish, and Texas Hispanics have very much taken a hard right turn on the issue since, so, maybe). But that a national political figure does not one make.

    So that brings us back to the central question: Why is Will Hurd deluding himself into running for President? He seems to be running as the Trump Derangement Syndrome candidate (the Liz Cheney Lane, if you will), and that’s good for, oh, maybe 2% of the Republican base (and 50% of “conservative” D.C. pundits). That’s the land of has-beens and never-beens like John Kasich and Evan McMullin. Looking at the current 2024 field, there’s no-shortage of “Not Trump” candidates. I see Hurd possibly doing better than Vivek Ramaswamy (running in the Andrew Yang Outsider With Ideas Slot), and running about even with Miami mayor Francis Saurez for the “Who?” slot. And at this point, being an unknown, he’s less loathed than Chris Christie. He’s not even doing as well as Doug Burgum, and no one’s heard of him.

    Worse still for his essentially non-existent chances, he probably won’t be in the initial debates, as he refuses to sign a pledge to support the nominee. (There’s that TDS again.)

    As I’ve written before, there is practically zero appetite for squishy moderates in the Republican primary, and less than that for someone running on the “I Hate Trump” platform. Hurd’s chances essentially amount to “Maybe if everyone else gets hit by a bus.”

    My suspicion is that Hurd has been recruited to run by the same sort of left-leaning special interests that fund things like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project to generate soundbites for an MSM that will inflate his campaign’s profile solely to go “Look! Republicans hate Trump too!”

    Then there’s this little tidbit: “Before his career in politics, Hurd was an undercover CIA officer working in counterterrorism.”

    There was a time that would have been considered a plus in Republican politics. That was before the Russiagate hoax and Hunter Biden’s laptop (among many others) showed how the deep was willing to meddle in domestic politics. Now it’s a giant red flag.

    Expect Will Hurd’s run to be every bit as successful as Tim Ryan or Seth Moulton’s attempts.

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    Posted in Border Control, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 4 Comments »

    Ukrainian Soldiers Love Bradleys

    July 2nd, 2023

    Although a lot of attention has been lavished on Ukrainian Forces getting Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and Abrams main battle tanks, we’ve also sent them 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Many of those have been involved in the Zaporizhzhia counter-offensive, and early reports had several being destroyed in early fighting (though crews reportedly escaped). How do Ukrainian crews like the Bradley compared to the Soviet BMP series IFVs they were using before?

    They love them.

    As Ukrainian forces continue their counteroffensive against Russia, some soldiers say an American-supplied vehicle is making a key difference in their advances, and more importantly, saving lives.

    The U.S. has provided has provided Ukrainian forces with Bradley Fighting Vehicles as part of aid packages since the beginning of the year and they have been heavily used in the counteroffensive Ukraine that launched in early June.

    Two Ukrainian soldiers from the 47th brigade, Serhiy and Andriy, told ABC News that they and their crew wouldn’t be alive today if Bradley didn’t protect them from a battle early on in the counteroffensive where they were struck by mines, high caliber guns and attack drones.

    “We were hit multiple times,” Andriy, who drove one Bradley, said. “Thanks to it, I am standing here now. If we were using some Soviet armored personnel carrier we would all probably be dead after the first hit. It’s a perfect vehicle.”

    The Bradleys are armed with a 25mm automatic cannon, a 7.62mm machine gun, and a TOW missile system that can hit armored targets more than two miles away.

    While a Bradley is way undergunned compared to a modern MBT, remember that Bradleys killed T-72s with TOW missiles in the Battle of 73 Easting, even though that’s not the tasked it’s designed for. And while the Bradley’s 25mm autocannon can’t defeat Soviet/Russian tank armor thicknesses with any but lucky shots, consensus is that the tungsten or depleted uranium rounds can penetrate any Russian vehicle below a MBT.

    Andriy and Serhiy’s brigade was part of one of the first major assaults using significant amounts of Western-supplied armored, launched against heavily fortified Russian lines in the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine at the start of June.

    As they advanced towards the Russian positions, protected by dense minefields, the Ukrainian troops came almost immediately under heavy fire. The vehicle behind Andriy was struck by an attack drone, killing his unit’s commander.

    Andriy’s Bradley was then hit first by a 120mm mortar. Two 150mm shells then struck both sides of the vehicle, he told ABC.

    “Almost all of my guys were concussed, and they were really disoriented,” he said. But the squad inside bailed out and managed to safely escape back to cover.

    Crew survivability seems to be one of the biggest advantages Bradleys have over their Russian BMP counterparts, as covered in this video:

  • “Bradley’s armor has multiple times saved lives of Ukrainian infantry. If we had used BMP during current military operation, our brigade would not be here.”
  • “Foreign military equipment has very strong armor and it really helps us. Thank God, when our vehicles get hit, personnel doesn’t get destroyed.”
  • “Bradley’s armor has multiple times saved lives of Ukrainian infantry during our operations. I personally once hit an anti-tank mine and it was a direct hit of a cumulative projectile to the tower. So it hit the sighting devices and shuttered triplexes and only driver suffered concussion all the rest of the crew and landing were OK.” “Landing” means “landing party,” i.e. the infantry troops carried to deploy and fight away from the vehicle.
  • “Many times Bradley vehicles hit anti-tank mines and only track and roller were damaged. Nevertheless, crew and landing were OK and carried out with their task.”
  • “If I was to compare Bradley to Soviet examples of vehicles, such as BMP or BTR, they have much lower level of protection. If we had used BMP during current military operation, our brigade would not be here. Considering the level of mine threat, every time BMP would hit the mine, it would result in minus personnel. People would be left disabled or dead. In our case, it means that the vehicle cannot operate for a few days.”
  • “It got hit, we get it, send it for repair, and in 3-4 days it is ready to carry out further tasks. When the vehicle gets hit, personnel doesn’t stop and continues to carry out the task.”

    • U.S./NATO doctrine has always placed a much higher value on crew survivability than Soviet/Russian doctrine. Ukrainians crewing Bradleys are keenly grateful for that difference.

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    Posted in Military, video | 12 Comments »

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