To replace the previous thread which was vaporized when the Think Tank was being reimagined. The war which 98% of the world believed would be over within weeks, since we were told by Putin that Russia had the most powerful armed forces in the world (and few actually knew what Russia's capabilities were).
At this point, Ukraine has fought back valiantly. NATO partners have finally activated with some assistance, disregarding Putin's verbal threats to use nuclear weapons as he saw fit.
“There’s a lot of really dumb-ass volunteers over here who have no business being in a war.”
“This is my third war I’ve fought in, and this is by far the worst one,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast. “You’re getting fucking smashed with artillery, tanks. Last week I had a plane drop a bomb next to us, like 300 meters away. It’s horrifying shit.”
Once he was there, some of his buddies from the military started messaging him asking for information on how to join up, too. But he ignored messages for months.
“To be honest it was pretty bad so I didn’t want to bring anyone else into it,” he said.
The missions were grueling, Bramlette said. In Iraq or Afghanistan, Bramlette had air support, or supporting ISR, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. “The worst day in Afghanistan and Iraq is a great day in Ukraine,” he said. “Even when we thought it wasn’t, we were always in control of the situation… versus as a commander of a team in Ukraine,” where there are more unknowns.
On reconnaissance missions in Ukraine, you just have to wait until the team members come back, since comms aren’t reliable. “I would always send a reconnaissance element out first… as soon as those guys leave my side, I’m not gonna really hear from them until they’re back within eyesight. And that may be 24 hours later, maybe 48 hours later,” he explained. “If two of them get injured… there’s no helicopter coming to get you… shit can go south really, really frickin’ quickly. And that’s the kind of stuff that is pretty hard.”
