Rokossovski

Magnificent video. Hey, there's still a road span fine. Sounds like a great evacuation route....
 

Happy birthday Vlad. 😉

Rail bridge or road?  Ideally they hit the rail first and leave one road lane open for a while.

Wow, they not only hit 2 spans but seem to have immolated a fuel/POL train crossing one!  14 flammable cars, that ain't going out soon.  This is a WTC melts structural steel kind of fire.
Hold my beer!
 

Happy Birthday Vlad, Lukashenko is gonna be pissed that all he got you was a tractor.

Watch the whole thing. If I was Russian I would be looking to follow those two guys across the Bering straight. With or without a boat. "Crowd funding and local authorities are going to save the Russian army". I did NOT make that up. It is about half way through.

I concur and it is also refreshing to see the resuming of the role as a unifying force behind NATO and successfully clearing possible roadblocks to see the possible addition of two new members.

Perhaps in politics and war not everything is always quite so simple. Trump’s signal of withdrawal and other such past precedents were certainly not universally applauded as wise strategy. But there it was, handed to an incoming President with a clock of a few months ticking away. One should never forget that management focus in any organization, large or small is a scarce resource. Among the various scenarios bandied about, a not unreasonable one is a mixture of a bad hand deprioritized and handed to the quick and dirty “it’s going to be a mess but you guys are stuck with it” C or D or worse team. Because a storm is coming, NATO is in shambles, we have a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands, and an economy that is once again teetering (except for the stock market!). The military is worn by decades in a no-win not a war again nation building futile exercise. And Europe is a greater strategic and national interest than that Graveyard of Empires. So that’s our immediate priority focus overseas. Tough decisions, never guaranteed to be right until the dust settles. Pretty clear the new USA Admin was repairing European relations and sharing intelligence well ahead of the storm of the century in Europe. And it looks as if Afghanistan was viewed as a write off - just as the in the previous Administration. It is an ugly ugly world. We end up grabbing our Bright Moments when and how we can.  
 
I must say how good and pleasant it is to see the USA unequivocally backing the good guys.
 
 

It was done because there was an existing agreement with the Afghan gov't.  It was not actually Biden's plan, it was Trump's.  That is not an intended criticism.  Getting out of Afghanistan was always going to be a mess whether it was implemented by a republican or democratic leadership.

Biden was criticised heavily for the sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, end of August 2021, last year. It could have been done better, agreed, but the theory I have is that the US had very early intel that the Russians were going to invade Ukraine. In the US book this was home turf, as compared to Afghanistan, and the US didn't want to be "deployed" in 2 conflicts at the same time. Hence the immediate pull out in Afghanistan. Biden never said why it was done, but then he wouldn't. 

Wonder if that will be true for CMBS2 as well - modification to Tac AI behavior if casualty rate is too high.
Along with
modified Acquire command to include alcohol, porcelain objects, and appliances (think about the Mission Objective possibilities); new Skill settings for TD, Separs, Conscripts, and Russian conscripts (these conscripts go to -11) Not to mention equipment and vehicles too numerous to list.

German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach reacting to philosopher Richard David Precht who continually demands negotiations to end the war (this time by NATO members vowing to veto Ukrainian NATO membership):
" Let's be honest: What is the point of genuflecting to Putin now? We are at war with Putin and not his psychotherapists. We must continue to consistently pursue victory in the form of the liberation of Ukraine. It does not matter whether Putin's psyche can cope with it."
EDIT: I do think we should take Putin's psyche into account. It would be remiss not to. What I find remarkable, though, is that a member of the German government publicly says we are at war.

"During Vladimir Putin's annexation speech, in Luhansk, Ukraine, September 30, 2022. AP"
*They don't seem very numerous for people who voted more than 90% to join Russia.

pretty raw stuff
https://ukrainevolunteer297689472.wordpress.com/2022/09/30/its-a-slaughter/
blog post from here
 

As a Canadian, I feel the same way about the US.  🙂 

Our old comrade @Bigduke6, last checked in here from Donbass 😬 in 2016 (hoping he is well and he didn't get conscripted!), made a similar observation on Hitler years ago....
Repeatedly, German general staff estimates of the difficulty of a prospective war turn out to be overestimated. Poland, France, Low Countries, the Balkans, Norway; each time the operations are getting hung on a thread, and paying off with jackpot victories. The victory comes faster and with less blood than the generals expect. Conclusion: The military advisers are too conservative; in fact the Wehrmacht is more capable than they give it credit.
Those conservative Wehrmacht generals were conservative because they were professionals who had their Clausewitz drilled into them and knew war is friction and no plan survives contact with the enemy. But they did not call the shots, and the predictable result of amateur overconfidence was overreach. Hitler doubled up until he lost. There was nothing random about him hitting a wall eventually, he'd have gone right on doubling up.
 

So the part where I specifically said “this is not about the death of the tank” didn’t stick?  Unfortunately we cannot even try to have a conversation on this without someone making it about that; this tells me that something is up and everyone knows it.
According to US congress: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/R44968.pdf
Light forces are:
“Light IBCTs are primarily foot-mobile forces. Light IBCTs can move by foot, vehicle, or air (either air landed or by helicopter). While IBCTs have light- and medium-wheeled vehicles for transport, there are not enough vehicles to transport all or even a significant portion of the IBCT’s infantry assets in a single movement.”
So basically infantry with limited transport that is designed to carry the to the fight but not into the fight.  They lack organic heavy armour as well.
Based on this post: 
 
It looks like the UA is employing Light/Med in a hybrid similar to what was tried and abandoned in the 80s.
Right now I am not sure how the tanks played a role in this offensive.  We have a bunch of possible reports:
-Initial shell cracking and then Light has been pushing out doing the exploit.
-In support, Light infiltrates and attrits, heavy is called up to finish off hard points.
-I have seen one map where it looks like heavy is handling the shoulders while lighter stuff does the breakthrough/breakout.
-What is happening/going to happen at Kherson?  The dynamic on that op is different.  I suspect the RA are going to collapse there too but the road to that collapse is quite different than what we saw in Kharkiv - or is it?
I think it is safe to say at this point there was not a lot of heavy in this last push.  We are not seeing a lot of heavy formations or units in play here, at least not one would expect for a frontage coming up on 100kms on some maps.  Now why that is could be because the UA knew they did not need them as this part of the RA line was already weak.  Or they didn’t have them and took a risk.  It does look like the UA just pulled off a historic offensive that retook 3000 sq kms with a pretty modest force that was mostly wheeled and light in nature.  We know heavy was in the game but not how we normally think about it.
 We also know that the RA has put up almost zero heavy response as a c-attack.  Is that because the HIMAR campaign hit RA logistics so hard that they are out of gas?  Is losing 1-2k MBTs making RA nervous to pull out armor? - we had reports they were using them as direct fire sniping but no heavy formation responses.  In fact RA heavy has not been in this fight since Mar as things devolved into an infantry arty war in the Donbas.  Does the combination of hi resolution ISR, deep strike and modern ATGM nulled RA armor?
Dunno.  This could be an isolated phenomenon on this single operation but one can see some trends, the main one being that UA use of mass does not conform to our thinking on it, in defence or offence and neither does the RA’s.  For example, the role of Light forces is normally to project rapidly to a key operational objective, and then have medium/heavy link up.  Not be the primary force capability in a breakout - reason being is that Light cannot survive the heavy enemy c-attack…until now, I guess.  Nor is Light supposed to be doing the heavy lifting in defence, it can hold but lacks the organic heavy combat power to c-attack.  We have seen exactly this in this war, why?  Because the UA does not have enough heavy capability.  So rather than giving up, they simply wrote a new doctrine…and it is working….so far…in these cases.
 However, war is not over yet and we do not have all the facts.  So fewer tanks in play does not mean the “death of the tank” nor does a few photos or 45sec snippets of them point to a shining renormalization.  
At this point I think heavy military mass is in trouble and will be forced to evolve.  It is in trouble because 1) it is becoming impossible to hide on the modern ISR battlefield, 2) it is logistically too vulnerable, the RA has demonstrated that for about 6 months and 3) Given the enhancements in range, precision and lethality of smaller, lighter and cheaper weapons systems/capability the use of heavy mass as the primary vehicle for annihilation-dislocation or attrition based warfare is going to need a rethink.  We have not even seen what unmanned can fully do, nor what current or near-next gen weapon systems can do (remember almost everything we gave the UA is last-gen).  And we haven’t even gotten into force generation, projection and management savings going lighter may provide.
So we will see.  The trends towards smaller, lighter, smarter and more deadly capability integrated with ubiquitous ISR are changing warfare.  Up until this week I was concerned that we may have entered a WW1 era of Defensive primacy, and the jury is still out, but the events of this week show that offence is still very real - we might just need to rethink the conditions by which it happens.
I will say that the “precision-mass” debate is pretty much been definitively answered, that ship has sailed.  As has the “UAVs are a fad” narrative.  I guess the next question will be how that precision is protected, projected and positioned on the next battlefield?
 

Maybe but the West was a bit busy at the time. Taking on the USSR and Nazi Germany simultaneously might have been a bit tricky.

🤣🤣😂
 

Anonymous ant-Putin (grain of salt) RU Highlander (from Kavkaz) reports:
 

Couldn't choose better 48h to go (mostly) offline. Let's get started with a bit of humor:

Reports coming in from all over the globe that sunflowers are standing significantly taller and shining much brighter today.  Evidence from my yard verifies.  Wonder what this means?

That really does not check out.  If they were existing pipelines, then Ukraine built them before the war and they know exactly where they are.  If they were built over the last six months during the occupation, even a small pipeline construction is going to be highly visible - gotta clear cut lines, lay down support, lay pipe, cross rivers, add stations etc.  With western ISR they would have watched them build the thing in real time…and know exactly where it is and could have already blown them .
No way they can support 25k troops on the defence effectively by tac aviation lift.  Medivac, troop lift and basics like food maybe but the heavier natures of supply like POL, ammo, spare parts, field defence stores, forget about it.