LongLeftFlank

And especially if Trump wins. The price of those weapons will be charged by the accountants against our 'NATO bill'. Everyone will be happy: Trump has made a deal, Ukraine has the weapons and the balance is the same for us.

I'd say it's because Ukraine got around 200 of Bradleys (more are arriving there as we speak). Compare it to circa 30 Abrams, 30 Leopards 2A6 and 18 Challengers 2. This number allowed for taking some losses and still being able to have some impact on the battlefield.

Secondly, Bradleys are lighter than the third generation Western tanks, so there have been more opportunities for their employment. The IFV's are used in Ukraine mostly for infantry support, often from a pretty close distance, so Bradleys with 25mm cannon are often better suited for this role than tanks, which are optimized for killing other tanks. 

Lastly, the ticker frontal armor of MBT's doesn't matter so much, if they are being hunted by FPV drones or loitering munition's, that hit them from above. 

My anecdotal experience with The Kids™ is actually quite different. Without any education in nukes/deterrence, they tend to assume the most hysterical posture when someone like Putin flexes his ICBMs. I get it. It takes some getting used to when someone keeps talking about putting a gun to your head but the understanding of these things is woefully inadequate. And by The Kids™, I should be clear that pretty much covers everyone under 40...to include a whole lot of journalists in this neck of the woods. 

OK, my answer to the question "what is Putin actually up to?" (which should be read with a massive dose of skepticism, as it involves making a theory of mind of man having massively more information and usually thinking in massively different way than I; i.e., a wild guess)
1. Putin thinks the war will end through Donald Trump becoming the President of the US and successfully implementing his plan to pressure Ukraine politically into armistice on the basis of status quo in early 2025.
2. Therefore, the war has a probable end date in early 2025 which is based  on external political considerations and not dependent on any actions of Ukraine or Russia. All territorial gains must occur in 2024 and on the other hand, the risk of all losses is also limited in time to 2024. Timeline after early 2025 does not matter much - Russia is not worried about NATO or the Ukraine rekindling the conflict at any reasonable time after 2024, and even if its army is generally wrecked, it thinks it will always be beenough to defend the armistice line (even provided that NATO and the UKR muster political will sufficient to even think of restarting the war). 
3. Therefore Russian army is going all in to maximise territorial gains in 2024, particularly in the Donbass area which Russia claims to be its own, but has not conquered it yet. If they are successful in Donbas or if they statemate in Donbass, they may try to do the same thing in the Zaporozhie area. They do not care about the losses, they do not care about the war materiel stocks (they know they won't be attacked) and they do not care that much about their economy either, which they think will somehow limp through the rest of 2024 anyway, and Russians will start rebuilding it in from 2025.
 

Interesting information about western 155 mm shells lethality. Insufficient lethality.

 

Assuming a straight translation, this cri de coeur was written by a starshina (senior NCO), so perhaps born around 1980?
Say what you will about Russia sux, but.... I just can't imagine a US Army master sergeant of similar vintage (high school diploma late 1990s, maybe some college) being able to organise their thoughts in writing in this way.
Compare the late Roman chronicler Ammianus (5th century AD):
The affair caused more joy than fear and educated flatterers immoderately praised the good fortune of the [Emperor Valens], which unexpectedly brought him so many young recruits from the ends of the earth, that by the union of his own and foreign forces he would have an invincible army. In addition, instead of the levy of soldiers, which was contributed annually by each province, there 
would accrue to the treasury a vast amount of gold.
TL:DR  For all its dysfuntions, Russian civ clearly had some things far better to offer to the world than what they are showing now... a country where chess is a spectator sport. Those of us with Russian friends would agree with this, I suspect. (But no doubt foreigners with educated German friends thought some of the same bemused thoughts in 1941)
...I can't even begin to imagine the fury I would feel, were I a Russian, at the cynical throwing away by Putin and his mafiya of an entire generation that includes among the 'meat' many well-educated and motivated people.

Assuming a straight translation, this cri de coeur was written by a starshina (senior NCO), so perhaps born around 1980?
Say what you will about Russia sux, but.... I just can't imagine a US Army master sergeant of similar vintage (high school diploma late 1990s, maybe some college) being able to organise their thoughts in writing in this way.
Compare the late Roman chronicler Ammianus (5th century AD):
The affair caused more joy than fear and educated flatterers immoderately praised the good fortune of the [Emperor Valens], which unexpectedly brought him so many young recruits from the ends of the earth, that by the union of his own and foreign forces he would have an invincible army. In addition, instead of the levy of soldiers, which was contributed annually by each province, there 
would accrue to the treasury a vast amount of gold.
TL:DR  For all its dysfuntions, Russian civ clearly had some things far better to offer to the world than what they are showing now... a country where chess is a spectator sport. Those of us with Russian friends would agree with this, I suspect. (But no doubt foreigners with educated German friends thought some of the same bemused thoughts in 1941)
...I can't even begin to imagine the fury I would feel, were I a Russian, at the cynical throwing away by Putin and his mafiya of an entire generation that includes among the 'meat' many well-educated and motivated people.

Assuming a straight translation, this cri de coeur was written by a starshina (senior NCO), so perhaps born around 1980?
Say what you will about Russia sux, but.... I just can't imagine a US Army master sergeant of similar vintage (high school diploma late 1990s, maybe some college) being able to organise their thoughts in writing in this way.
Compare the late Roman chronicler Ammianus (5th century AD):
The affair caused more joy than fear and educated flatterers immoderately praised the good fortune of the [Emperor Valens], which unexpectedly brought him so many young recruits from the ends of the earth, that by the union of his own and foreign forces he would have an invincible army. In addition, instead of the levy of soldiers, which was contributed annually by each province, there 
would accrue to the treasury a vast amount of gold.
TL:DR  For all its dysfuntions, Russian civ clearly had some things far better to offer to the world than what they are showing now... a country where chess is a spectator sport. Those of us with Russian friends would agree with this, I suspect. (But no doubt foreigners with educated German friends thought some of the same bemused thoughts in 1941)
...I can't even begin to imagine the fury I would feel, were I a Russian, at the cynical throwing away by Putin and his mafiya of an entire generation that includes among the 'meat' many well-educated and motivated people.

Assuming a straight translation, this cri de coeur was written by a starshina (senior NCO), so perhaps born around 1980?
Say what you will about Russia sux, but.... I just can't imagine a US Army master sergeant of similar vintage (high school diploma late 1990s, maybe some college) being able to organise their thoughts in writing in this way.
Compare the late Roman chronicler Ammianus (5th century AD):
The affair caused more joy than fear and educated flatterers immoderately praised the good fortune of the [Emperor Valens], which unexpectedly brought him so many young recruits from the ends of the earth, that by the union of his own and foreign forces he would have an invincible army. In addition, instead of the levy of soldiers, which was contributed annually by each province, there 
would accrue to the treasury a vast amount of gold.
TL:DR  For all its dysfuntions, Russian civ clearly had some things far better to offer to the world than what they are showing now... a country where chess is a spectator sport. Those of us with Russian friends would agree with this, I suspect. (But no doubt foreigners with educated German friends thought some of the same bemused thoughts in 1941)
...I can't even begin to imagine the fury I would feel, were I a Russian, at the cynical throwing away by Putin and his mafiya of an entire generation that includes among the 'meat' many well-educated and motivated people.

Just to pile on, the military conservatives arguments are getting weaker and weaker.  There is no military on earth that is going to prepare or go to war as they would have in 2021.  We ignored Azerbaijan-Armenia but we cannot ignore Ukraine.  The harsh reality is that our adversaries in all directions are going to work very hard to make sure our next wars are not “ideal”.  Our ability to make war “ideal” is in fact the historical anomaly and frankly it has a single data point - Gulf War.  Every fight we have been in since then has been far less than ideal by adversarial design. Why?  Because they do not want to be Saddam in another freakin Gulf War scenario.
So forget ideal.  That ship has sailed.  We are going to be looking at acceleration of trends and collisions of others.  The flip side of this whole Abrams thing is the Russian experience.  Russia has lost in the order of 3000 MBTs and around 5600 AFVs.  It is not the horrendous losses, it is what they accomplished with them - largely defensive deadlock and limited tactical gains…after three operational collapses.  The lesson here is that battlefield friction has fundamentally changed.  It has changed for everything, not just the precious tank.  Cheap, many and ISR have hunted heavy and expensive into very limited utility - not zero but much more limited than we ever imagined.  This is a large system failure.
We are pretty much at the point where only truly fanatic devotees of the old conventional system are even arguing.  Most modern military complexes are wrestling with how deep this hole is or is not.  We know we are looking at a shift, we are all arguing on how much.

GPS is only one possibility in the 'P' of PGM. Since image recognition has developed in leaps and bounds recently, there is no reason why munitions shouldn't be able to fly by looking out the windows and comparing it with a map. They actually do this already but AFAIK by radar and height data.
That is not wrong but do not forget that China currently just moves back into the slot they took over from the Romans and lost to Britain in the 18th century: the leading industrial nation of the world.
The main difference to then is that the US didn't exist at that time.
It could also just be to enhance the uncertainty for Russia. Storm Shadow covers a lot of Russian soil measured from Ukraine.

Now let’s not suddenly forget the real reason why China has risen to power…western greed.  We exported manufacturing and every other hard/increasingly expensive job to China because they would do it for a fraction of what western workers were demanding nor was governed by pesky workplace safety regulations.  We wanted cheap everything from Tshirts to running shoes to cellphones.  We did not admit China into the WTO until 2001 and by then we were over-invested in China for our lifestyles that no one could slow that train down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_World_Trade_Organization#:~:text=China became a member of,changes to the Chinese economy.
We had started this trend back in the 80s.  There was nothing altruistic or generous about any of this, it really was simply an extension of western benign (and sometimes not) imperial doctrine.  The Western Rules Based order was really designed to keep the West on top. China figured this out and used that system to rise to power.  They did it using Western money, not charitable intent.  China conducted a series of pretty radical economic reforms and the outsourced the industry we downloaded on them to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.  They then reinvested in their own high tech and bolstered it with an historic industrial espionage campaign.
None of this was “western misguided liberalism gone wrong” it was straight up pursuit of profit and reinforcing our own consumer based economies.  By the time we realized the problem in the mid ‘00 it was too late.  No politician, even Trump, could simply “drop China”.  Since then we have seen attempts at a gradual uncoupling but we are still too dependent on Asian manufacturing and industry, the pandemic showed this in spades.  And now we are stuck.  We either keep funding Chinese rise to power or try and roll the clock back to 1960, which we can’t do with current standards of living and economic realities.
None of this was generous or high minded.  Anymore than British rule of India was.  It was a 20th century version of economic colonization, which like a lot of colonization came back around to bite.

Agreed. But of course, while the USMAAG bodycount metrics (e.g. 'the Five O'Clock Follies') were pants for countless reasons, the Viet Cong were indeed being steadily bled white, as everyone from Giap on down admitted after the victory.
I don't know if there's a strict correlation from buckets of blood to territorial losses; we believe that the boundary fortifications built from 2014-2022 are a lot harder to replace once lost, and that seems to make intuitive sense.
...But beyond that, who the hell knows what a square km, or a shattered hamlet, is worth militarily? As @The_Capt noted thousands of pages ago, just how valuable is 'high ground' nowadays in the FPV era?  A nice marshy streambed or wooded balka, otoh, is still tactically useful.

Agreed. But of course, while the USMAAG bodycount metrics (e.g. 'the Five O'Clock Follies') were pants for countless reasons, the Viet Cong were indeed being steadily bled white, as everyone from Giap on down admitted after the victory.
I don't know if there's a strict correlation from buckets of blood to territorial losses; we believe that the boundary fortifications built from 2014-2022 are a lot harder to replace once lost, and that seems to make intuitive sense.
...But beyond that, who the hell knows what a square km, or a shattered hamlet, is worth militarily? As @The_Capt noted thousands of pages ago, just how valuable is 'high ground' nowadays in the FPV era?  A nice marshy streambed or wooded balka, otoh, is still tactically useful.

Harry Potter couldn't save this. Is this considered an attack on western culture.
And why Russians did hit it?
 

Maybe we'll see some kamikaze peacocks before too long?
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-zoo-sent-soldiers-peacocks-hoping-inspire-them-in-ukraine-2024-5
 
EDIT: realised that you need to sign up to read some articles on BI, text of the article below
 

FancyCat, edited for concision:
A drawn-out war is bad for Ukraine. We don't know what might bring Russia to ceasefire negotiations. The best way to bring them to the table is to fight to win the war. Russia will keep the war going if it is to their advantage. The west is not fighting to win, Russia is taking advantage of Western lack of commitment. Russia is using Western fears of Russian collapse and nuclear war to it's advantage, actively promoting such a narrative for it's benefit rather than because it is a realistic one. Russia seems to be pursuing maximal goals.  The west must signal that these cannot be achieved. Why should the west make concessions as Russia does not.  Russia does not offer a negotiation, rather demands surrender, disarmament and fomalisation of annexed land  
The_Capt, edited for concision:
Preamble: You are ignoring reality. The best becomes the enemy of the good. We have a phrase for that in Army.
The Russian regime might collapse. This would be a risk. You think the only way to win is for the Russia to collapse. Russia doesn't need to collapse for there to be peace. You think Ukraine must have total victory and anything else is defeat.  This is holding you back. (6.1) WW3 would be bad, Ukraine is not worth that.  War is costly.  We can simultaniously support Ukrainian resistance and pull back to a new iron curtain behind which could sit a well funded NATO. (6.2) Maximal goals are not the only form of victory. We are looking at a ceasefire scenario with half of Ukraine in Russian hands. (6.3) We must fight to achieve a better negotiating position, this might require Russia to collapse. (6.4) Your argument helps the enemy, by making the war unwinnable, and might encourage people to give up support if it does not achieve total vicory.  This is what Russia wants.  
I feel simply summarising the main points of the exchange as I have here should suffice as a critique.  It took me an hour or so.

This totally makes sense, because L39 barrels are all but obsolete. The first tier standard going forward is going to guns that shoot 45 or 50 kilometers with more or less normal ammunition, and double that with the fancy stuff. L52 barrels are just one of the things that are absolutely required to make that happen.
I am not saying they are useless in Ukraine BTW, I am saying all of the vehicles in the general class of L39 barreled SPGs are a rapidly wasting asset, and most of the ones that exist anywhere n NATO ought to be on the way to Ukraine. The manufacturing rate for newer systems obviously needs to go WAY up.

Ok, let’s think about this for a minute.  Anyone who has played CM knows that a tank needs to do three things to be effective - move, target and shoot.  These giant sheds basically erode all three of those.  They can still move but I am pretty sure with some serious impacts as drivers situational awareness is worse and the fact they have a giant metal box on their tank is going to impact mobility.  Targeting must be a joke.  They cannot swing the gun sights and can only see a narrow window out the front. Situation awareness in that garden shed must be the worst. They are likely blasting nearly blind.  And finally shooting.  What sort of gunnery are they accomplishing with a giant box over top them?  They cannot move the turret more than a few degrees to the front, so they have basically become a mobile field gun….in a big metal box.
What these sorts of developments tell us is that the RA is more afraid of drones than they are of anything else, to the point that they are willing to drastically reduce the effectiveness of armor.  The fact they have to put garden sheds on their tanks is already a tactical victory.  It demonstrates just how far things have gone. They do not “work” beyond keeping whatever these vehicles have become alive for a few more minutes and raising the number of FPVs it takes to kill them. 

Lifting of these restrictions, while in themselves eggregious examples of political stupidity and well deserving to be scrapped ASAP, is not going to help much. The Ukraine is now waging a very conventional war (possibly paradigm-shattering drones excepted, but we are not there yet) with a very big country capable of sustaining a big army. It will not create a strategic bombing campaign via drones and ATACMS able to destroy Russian warmaking capability. This is an expensive way to wage war, and UKR will not get the funding for this. 
What they need is very simple, but they need a lot of it with guaranteed delivery without limitation in time. Artillery munitions (they cannot manufacture locally); SAM munitions;  funding for drone production, better still outsourcing the production itself to  the sanctuary countries (PL, Romania; in the future maybe Slovakia again); SPGs; HIMARS or equivalents; long- and mid-range SAM's; ECM/ECCM land-based equipment; ATACMS; some tanks, in numbers to replace losses; IFVs, in higher numbers than tanks; APCs more than tanks and IFVs; some ATGMs; small arms munitions; trucks and logistic vehicles; finally (and I have been convinced of this by the recent Russian successes with glide bombs) some fighter aircraft, with the understanding that they will all be shot down at some point. Also, the UKR need to have their stuff in order and find a way of mobilising soldiers for war, Zelenski's chances for reelection be damned.
The only theory of victory in this war that I can see is exactly the same as could be formulated in every conventional war  with a very big country capable of sustaining a big army, provided that the war has not been resolved via a France 1940 type offensive or a Nomonhan 1939 type counteroffensive in the first months: invest all resources you can and try to hang on in the war longer than the other guy, while always keeping an eye out for a potential technical paradigm shattering solution (Project Manhattan) or a potential opportunity to asymmetrically hamstring his economy (ref. bombing of ball bearing and synthetic fuel factories 1944).
Or, as the Duke of Wellington put it: "Hard pounding this, gentlemen. Let's see who pounds the longest"

Guess precision took a hit...ugh. hey, great, a lesson for the future. Can we please just get 3rd party ammo sourced worldwide to Ukraine now? (I will assume with U.S aid unblocked this will resume, but a pox on certain European countries for insisting on EU based manufacturing at the expense of Ukraine.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116957/witnesses/HHRG-118-AS35-Wstate-PattD-20240313.pdf
 

Two economics snapshots that tell interesting stories:
1. RU piped gas to EU and LNG exports have surged. While you're hitting the O&G infra, and you have all those Sea Babies lying around....
2. EU has 'grown a pair', and is looking at slapping tariffs of up to 50% on BYD EVs, to stop their auto sector going the way of their solar and wind industry (and so many others) in the face of subsidised Chinese dumping of, well, every goddam' thing...
There is of course much wailing and gnashing of teeth among Green apostles who view China-subsidised (and coal powered) everything as the saviour of the planet.

Two economics snapshots that tell interesting stories:
1. RU piped gas to EU and LNG exports have surged. While you're hitting the O&G infra, and you have all those Sea Babies lying around....
2. EU has 'grown a pair', and is looking at slapping tariffs of up to 50% on BYD EVs, to stop their auto sector going the way of their solar and wind industry (and so many others) in the face of subsidised Chinese dumping of, well, every goddam' thing...
There is of course much wailing and gnashing of teeth among Green apostles who view China-subsidised (and coal powered) everything as the saviour of the planet.

Sushko is not to be relied on.
Also, Shoigu is no political lightweight, and I wouldn't assume the siloviki can throw him under the bus even if they wished to. I doubt Prigozhin was ever his creature; the guy simply got high on himself and went rogue when Wagner was reined in.
I posted some bio on Shoigu a couple thousand pages ago. Like Putin, he was a handpicked protege of Yeltsin in the late 90s. His family background/ training is in O&G construction (with the accompanying huge self enrichment opps), more than military. He had his own political party, briefly, before throwing in with United Russia. He's NOT an army careerist, in fact Putin likes him for that very reason.