Cannon Fodder
The furious mothers of Russian soldiers have accused the Kremlin of deploying their sons as "cannon fodder" in President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, according to footage that purportedly shows a heated confrontation with a regional governor.
Cannon Fodder
"We were all deceived, all deceived. They were sent there as cannon fodder. They are young. They were unprepared," one woman said, according to the footage that was shared online as early as March 5, according to analysis by RFE/RL.
Another unpopular measure would be the deployment of conscripts. Around 74 per cent of survey respondents opposed this. Such deployments occurred sporadically at the beginning of the war, but the Russian government ended them in consideration of morale 'on the home front'. Of course, the regime did not end repressive measures to force conscripts to sign a 'contract', as the obligation to be a regular or professional soldier is called in Russia. Mobilisation now gives officials yet another way of obliging conscripts to go to war. The mobilisation, which is legal, must follow directly after the end of military service. That way, new cannon fodder can be obtained without Putin having to break his personal promise that conscripts would not be used in Ukraine.
While there is an element of joyful wordplay involved in the title, ultimately analogies are useful in life, law, and literature because of their power to help us see something from a new angle. Cannon fodder is a political expression. It reveals and criticizes how some group is being treated, usually by the government or the military, and details the losses that mistreatment entails. The implication is that avoidable injuries and deaths are not being avoided, or are even being purposely inflicted, to serve some other end or supposedly greater good.
In calling historical women political theorists canon fodder, I am also using the phrase as part of a political critique. The works of these thinkers have been deemed by the gatekeepers of the canon as dispensable, relatively worthless, despite the fact that the texts have often not even been read by them, much less seriously studied, and that the standards used to mark them as inferior are, as I show in the following chapter, both questionable and inconsistently applied. All sides seem to come together in this: antifeminism provides rare common ground between socialist, liberal, and conservative political theorists, between individualists and communitarians, statists and anarchists. Women in general and women political thinkers in particular are, variously, ignored, underestimated, plagiarized, and ridiculed. They are canon fodder: attacked from all sides, their ideas are silenced, their protest punished, and their visions erased or mocked, for the sake of maintaining the beauty and purity of a canon that has no interest in the pleasure of their company. Their often nontraditional personal lives get the attention their ideas deserve, and are unimaginatively and disingenuously used against them, while every flaw in their work is considered potentially fatal, giving them responsibility for their own demise.
This Trophy from Icy Peak asks you to destroy six of the destructable ice objects with the local cannons. There are ten of them in the Reignited version of the level, so you have leeway if you accidentally use the TNT Crates on them. The two types of ice objects are ice walls that block the way forward, and ice crystals that clog up Whirlwinds.
The third ice object is an ice crystal that's located behind the second cannon in the level at the third frozen lake, with the fourth object being an ice wall you have to shoot down to clear a tunnel. You can also shoot the ice wall at the end of that tunnel to get one of the optional TNT Crate ice objects, and the ice wall to the left of the tunnel that hides the Sealed Chest.
The seventh ice object is at the third cannon in the level just after the fourth frozen lake. It's an ice wall blocking the cave to the Challenge Portal where you can help Nancy the ice skater. The eigth ice object is the ice wall to the right of the previous one that can be destroyed with one of the many TNT Crates. The ninth is the ice crystal located directly behind the third cannon.
\u2018Cannon fodder\u2019 is an updated version of \u2018food for powder\u2019 for the nineteenth century, when it was first used. It gained currency during the First World War to convey the likely fate of recruits with expendable lives, destined to die in futile offensives or in defence of exposed positions. It is the term now most applied to the hapless Russians pushed forward into the hazardous fight in Ukraine. As soon as Vladimir Putin announced a \u2018partial\u2019 mobilisation on 21 September, the hashtag #cannonfodder began trending on twitter, with images of tearful goodbyes, new draftees who were senselessly drunk, others examining Kalashnikovs riddled with woodworm, and yet more having shouting matches with officers trying to boss them about. Graffiti in St Petersburg chided those in Moscow who failed to protest a war in which they must now fight: \u2018To start with you were indifferent to politics and now you're cannon fodder\u2019. Francis Scarr notes that the term translates into Russian as \u2018cannon meat\u2019. Ukrainians speak of the \u2018meat grinder\u2019. The terms seem appropriate because these men have been called up to stop the rot in Ukraine, yet are so poorly prepared and equipped that they will simply add to the casualty numbers. But can they still make a difference to the course of the war? Or is it more likely that they will add to Russia\u2019s front-line troubles?
There are circumstances when sheer numbers can overwhelm an otherwise superior opponent. A comment attributed to Stalin in connection with the Soviet war against the Nazis, is that \u2018quantity has a quality all its own.\u2019 We can think of the Chinese in Korea in 1950 or Iranian \u2018human wave\u2019 tactics against Iraq in the 1980s, although in both these case the tactic eventually declined in effectiveness. Against prepared defensive positions backed by artillery such attacks invite carnage and \u2018cannon fodder\u2019 becomes an appropriate term. But used defensively they might complicate Ukrainian plans and make it harder to take places where Russians are already well dug in. At the same time they will also need supplying. As the Argentines discovered in 1982 and the Iraqis in 1991 pushing extra men into an area of operations to demonstrate numerical superiority can also create severe logistical headaches.
The Russian forces involved largely come from the private Wagner group, under the direction of one of Putin\u2019s fixers, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who seems at times to be waging his own independent campaign. According to one account Wagner is using \u2018prison inmates from the separatist regions who were drafted into service\u2019, to push forward \u2018with little support\u2019 to \u2018face Ukrainian guns like \u201Ccannon fodder\u201D\u2019. Unsurprisingly many surrender. The Russians show no interesting in trading captured Ukrainian forces to get them back: \u2018the one-time Russian prisoners, now Ukrainian prisoners, are seen as deserters.\u2019
We know that the infection rate for doctors working in this pandemic is high; in Lombardy it is 20%. We will be exposed to an extraordinary viral load. How is it that healthcare workers in China and the rest of East Asia are equipped with hazmat suits and respirators, while the government of one of the richest countries in the world cannot even issue us basic masks? We are not being treated with the dignity and care due to frontline workers. Instead, it feels like we are being treated as cannon fodder.
The term Cannon Fodder itself originated in the endless assaults of the World War I Western Front, where there were no operational breakthroughs past the enemy's trench defenses and every battle consisted entirely of the hard-fought 'assault' phase (assault, breakthrough, exploitation). In this context of these huge battles in which trenches weren't taken faster than they could be dugnote the real problem was with the artillery cover. Friendly artillery would blow the shit out of the defenses, which the infantry would then swarm and defend against enemy counter-attacks. But all artillery pieces have limited range, leaving the infantry vulnerable to bombardments from enemy artillery. To keep advancing you'd need to move the city block's worth of artillery forward... together with an actual mountain of ammunition and horse fodder and human-food... through the area you just blew the shit out of... faster than the enemy could use trains to just dump all their stuff where it was needed. In practice this was very, very tricky to pull off even if you had all the horses and supplies you needed and organised them perfectly. The Entente never really managed it, with all operations before 1918 having to stop advancing eventually due to unsustainable horse-deaths (from exhaustion) , the infantrymen were said to be nothing more than fodder (a term usually used to describe horse feed) for the artillery. However, its French equivalent chair à canon (cannon meat) was used a hundred years earlier by Chateaubriand, this being a reference to artillery's fearsome killing power and pivotal role on the pre-rifle battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. A similar term from times when artillery pieces were so expensive, rare, and heavy they were used almost exclusively for sieges and ships ("food for powder") dates back to the 16th century at least; it is used by Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.
Fan Works Androgyninja's A Drop of Poison: After Sakura manages a Curb Stomp Cushion during a sparring session with Sasuke, he declares that civilian-born shinobi like her are nothing more than glorified cannon fodder. This serves as a major Cynicism Catalyst, as Sakura becomes convinced that the majority of Konoha's shinobi look down upon the civilian-born in this fashion and sets out to prove her worth by becoming a Master Poisoner. She's also particularly worried that Kakashi agrees with Sasuke's assessment of her, convinced that she can't count on him to do anything to assist her if she gets into trouble on missions. Kakashi being a Sink or Swim Mentor who presents himself as laid-back and unbothered hardly helps, particularly when he refuses to step in while Sasuke is insulting or berating her further.
In The Legend of Total Drama Island, Chris uses this term for the contestants whom he had expected to be eliminated early in the game. Subverted when Chris notes with mixed feelings that the "cannon fodder" is turning out to be more capable than he expected, for which he blames the profilers for not doing their jobs.
This is referenced by name in Oh God, Not Again! by the Sorting Hat. He was describing the Gryffindors.
Star Wars vs Warhammer 40K: The Confederacy's Battle Droids are what you get when a bunch of merchants decide they want an army of Killer Robots for as cheap as possible. Budget cuts in Artificial Intelligence, armor plating, and redundant systems have made the standard B1s far inferior to their Clone Trooper or Imperial Guard counterparts, never mind the elite troopers like Jedi or Space Marines. Their only virtues are sheer numbers and the ease with which they can be replaced.
The Weaver Option: Taylor creates entire Penal Legions filled with corrupt nobles and officials so she doesn't really care too much if they die by the thousands as her vanguard.
The rulers of Commorragh, faced with a completely unexpected invasion by the Imperium, conscripts millions of commoners and sends them into battle equipped with gear meant for lightning fast raids rather than actual combat. As a result they are easily slaughtered, though this does slow the Imperial advance.
Taylor uses her own version against the ruler of Commorragh by stealing control of their hordes of mega-insects and -arachnids. She can then throw them in waves against the defenders, forcing them to expend their limited stores of superweapons without risking any Imperial troops.
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