Pelican Pal

Wow, this thread has really derailed lately into a generalised college dorm bull session on world affairs. A lot of opinionating and emoting by the same 15 regulars. Only @Harmon Rabb is trying to post anything remotely factual any more.
...Actually, the Twittersphere in general seems much the same. A lot of scolding and 'on message' broken record slogans, and What Now Must We Do emoting. Fragments of anecdata only,  and analysis (body counts, wreck counts) seem stale and repetitive. Just marching in place, yet things are changing.
 
1. What the hell *is* happening in Poland? I'd love to hear from our Polish comrades who seem strangely silent of late: @Maciej Zwolinski, @Beleg85?
What's the beef with the truckers? Are they just looking for a payoff, or do they actually want to hobble Ukraine's war effort?  Why?
 
2.
@Haiduk, how are things in Kyiv?  Are Zeleban's views on fatigue and disillusionment on point? (I for one don't doubt his sincerity or his goodwill, nor do I believe he's parroting Russian troll farms)
@kraze what are people saying in your corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire?
Angry denunciations of betrayals and foot-dragging by the West aside -- real or imagined -- what are you guys seeing or hearing about going downhill there?
I'm going to suspend posting for a bit myself, since I have far more questions than answers on the macro situation, and no one here seems much interested in the battlefield itself these days.

Goodness, what a rambunctious bunch of folks y'all have been last 24 hours.  Then Steve comes in to save the day w some really good content, thanks much Steve.  
I will go back to my hopium of "if UKR can just kill a few more russians and their fancy gear then ....."

Given the state of the RA last Fall I sincerely doubt that it was able to counter the UA better faster.  By accepting an attrition battle the UA ceded initiative to the RA and played to Russian strengths, not weaknesses.
It comes down to operation stress.  The RA was highly stressed last Fall, evidence in the two operational collapses at Kharkiv and Kherson.  The RA operational system could not sustain itself so it buckled back to a lower energy state that could be sustained.  The UA had several choices to continue to put pressure on that system.  The one they chose was a tactical attritional battle at Bakhmut.  The theory is that if you grind up tactical forces the operational system has to strain to keep replacing them.  [aside:  we also should not discount the fact that at Bakhmut the UA was still conducting deeper strikes against operational targets, but let’s come back to that].  
The problem with Wagner was that it was an ersatz tactical capability.   It was entirely self-contained, “Priggy’s Boys”.  So while the UA was attriting Priggy to dust they were in fact doing two counter-productive things 1) giving breathing room for the RA and 2) eroding a force that could be an internal threat to Putin, as we saw in Jun.  Further the operational stress they were looking for was likely reduced not increased.  The RA/Wagner, did not care about resupply of troops who were going to die anyway.  All they needed was trucks, a few bullets and cannon fodder.  None of those troops got high end support from logistics or C4ISR.
I am a personal fan of direct operational stress, not indirect.  If the UA had kept the initiative and forced the RA to react along an 800 km frontage, they would have induced enormous logistical and C4ISR stress in the RA.  The “simple” act of relocating 10k troops a couple hundred kms, repeatedly, is going to create more operational stress than simply killing them in one concentrated locale.  It exposes nodes and connectors to deep strike.  Causes wear and tear on forces/capability.  And creates opportunity.
The game in this war appears to be to project friction father and faster than your opponent can react.  Based on the human waves lost at Bakhmut it was clear that Wagner and the RA could sustain in Bakhmut.  Now we do need to wait for more facts and analysis to come out.  And I do not want to armchair quarterback the UA as there were likely a lot of other factors we cannot see.  But my sense - fear perhaps - is that Russia pulled Ukraine into a Verdun situation.  Politically there was pressure to make a point.  Externally wave after wave of dying Russians is excellent for the strategic narrative.  Problem was/is western attention is fickle. We all sat back and went “hey look at the UA crushing it”…quickly followed by “holy crap those Russians really want this”….followed by “wait, you mean minefields still work?”  And now heading towards…”hmm,  now where are those exits”.
Now I honestly hope that the RA collapses today.  That the cumulative effects of all that attrition reach a tipping point and we see another collapse.  But if this were a staff college exercise I would tell students “well you now have two choices: winter offensive to create collapse.  Or winter offensive to buy time and space for deeper Ukrainian defences in preparation to freeze this thing in the event we start seeing a weakening of western support….what are we going to do?”

Pet peeve (and not at all aimed at you, or at Kevin, who you were quoting).
I really do not like the pervasive use of the terms "warriors" and "warfighters" that many, mostly in government or the military upper echelons, refer to service members. Statements like "We have to give our warfighters the tools to do their jobs" (which is another thing - sounds like we are talking about carpenters or plumbers).
It's like some macho thing to me. Maybe I'm an old fogie (I guess I am at this point!) Maybe it's just me and I'm the outlier, but it seems much too belligerent for a country that supposedly uses its military for self-protection, and the aid and support of other countries. 
I have no idea if this is common in other countries, but I find it very grating. 
Dave

Ukraine — Victory Is Closer Than You Think - CEPA
More optimistic opinion piece. The author's argument is that Ukraine does not have to advance that much further (10-15Km) in order to interdict Russian GLOC by fires. Again worth a read. 

Interesting how you typed 'it can't be both' as though the statement is generally acknowledged received wisdom.

Economist
1843 magazine | Ukraine
How Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank Russia’s flagship
The Moskva was the most advanced vessel in the Black Sea. But the Ukrainians had a secret weapon, reports Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova
July 27th 2023

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, a flotilla of warships from the Russian Black Sea Fleet steamed out of its base in Sevastopol in occupied Crimea towards a small island 120km (75 miles) south of Odessa. This solitary speck of land, known as Snake Island, had strategic value beyond its size. If it were captured, the Russian navy would dominate the west of the Black Sea and threaten Ukraine’s coast. Snake Island housed a radar station and was garrisoned by a few dozen Ukrainian marines and border guards – no match for Russian ships.
Russian jets screamed overhead. A patrol boat began shelling the island, and smaller vessels full of Russian marines approached the jetty. The Ukrainian defenders knew they had little hope of resisting. They were armed only with rifles and a few rocket-propelled grenades. Over the horizon appeared the great shadowing hulk of the Moskva, the Russian flagship, 186 metres long and bristling with missiles. It demanded over the radio that the garrison surrender.
“Snake Island! I, a Russian warship, repeat our offer. Lay down your arms and surrender or you will be bombed. Have you understood? Do you copy?” On a recording of the exchange, one Ukrainian border guard can be heard remarking to another: “Well, that’s it then – or should we reply that they should **** off?” “Might as well,” said the second border guard. The first then uttered the riposte that would become a clarion call of Ukrainian resistance: “Russian warship, go **** yourself!” The Russians stormed the island and all communications with the defenders were lost.
The following day, a medical team set off to the island to retrieve the bodies of the Ukrainian soldiers, all of whom they presumed were dead. As they approached, their rescue vessel was hailed by a Russian ship and ordered to stop. Soon, a dozen members of the Russian special forces boarded their boat and detained those on board. A Russian officer pointed over his shoulder at the dark grey outline of the Moskva in the distance. “Do you see her?” he said. “You see how large she is, how powerful? She can destroy not only Snake Island but all of Ukraine!”
“Do you see her?” he said. “You see how large she is, how powerful? She can destroy not only Snake Island but all of Ukraine!”
Meanwhile the Russian army advanced from Crimea westwards along Ukraine’s southern coast. Everyone expected that the Russian navy would support it with an amphibious landing, either in Mykolaiv, a naval base and shipyard that was now on the front line, or – the great prize – Odessa, which housed the headquarters of the Ukrainian navy. The navy mined possible landing zones. In Odessa volunteers filled sandbags and strung bales of barbed wire to defend the beaches. Russian warships appeared so close that people could see them on the horizon.
In Berdiansk, farther to the east, the Russians had captured a dozen Ukrainian ships. The Ukrainians didn’t want to risk any more falling into the hands of the enemy. With a heavy heart, Oleksiy Neizhpapa, the head of the Ukrainian navy, ordered the scuttling in Mykolaiv harbour of his two largest ships, including his flagship. “This is a difficult decision for any commander,” he told me. The Ukrainian navy was now reduced to around three dozen vessels, mostly patrol and supply boats.
Russian warships manoeuvred close to the coast, seeking to draw fire in order to make the Ukrainians reveal their artillery positions. Then they retreated out of range and targeted Ukrainian defences and command posts with missiles. The Moskva, the largest vessel of the Russian attack force, provided air cover which allowed the other ships to operate unmolested. Commercial shipping was throttled by the presence of Russia’s ships and mines. Ukraine, the fifth-largest exporter of wheat in the world, was unable to transport any grain.
Neizhpapa lost a number of officers and men in those perilous days. Crucially, though, radar installations, which allowed the Ukrainians to identify the position of Russian ships, escaped unharmed. Neizhpapa realised that he had one, untested weapon that might drive the Russian threat away from the coast. “We were counting on this being a factor of surprise for the enemy,” he said. “I was very worried that the enemy would know about it. After all, the enemy had a lot of agents on the territory of Ukraine. I was concerned about keeping it as secret as possible – and then, of course, using it.”
The Moskva, launched in 1983 under the name Slava, was one of three warships in her class to enter service. They were built in Mykolaiv in the last decade of the Soviet Union and designed to sink the ships of us navy carrier strike groups. Its American equivalent has a wider array of weapons but the Slava-class has missiles with a greater range, rendering her potentially more dangerous in a duel. The Soviet navy was proud of the Slava-class ships and sailors vied to serve on them. The cabins were comparatively large and there was a swimming pool in which the crew could decompress during the months at sea.
A messy process of disentangling naval assets began after Ukrainian independence. Russia and Ukraine divided the Soviet Black Sea Fleet between them. Russia got 80% of the ships, Ukraine 20%
The Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which welcomed the Moskva, also employed Neizhpapa’s father, who served as an officer on a rescue vessel. Neizhpapa himself was born in 1975 and grew up in Sevastopol. As a child, he drew pictures of warships and dreamed of becoming a sailor too. The Soviet Union was collapsing as Neizhpapa entered adulthood. He chose to stay in Sevastopol for naval school, rather than go to St Petersburg to study. Neizhpapa means “Don’t-eat-bread” in Cossack dialect. The name identified him as Ukrainian at a time when national identities were re-emerging. Ukraine became independent in 1991, and Neizhpapa was certain where his loyalties lay. “I realised that I did not want to serve Russia,” he said.
During Neizhpapa’s first year at naval school, Russians and Ukrainians studied together, but when the cadets were required to take an oath of allegiance, those who chose Russia left for training in St Petersburg. A messy process of disentangling naval assets also began after Ukrainian independence. Russia and Ukraine divided the Soviet Black Sea Fleet between them. Russia got 80% of the ships, Ukraine 20%. The two countries continued to share naval bases and there were even cases of brothers serving on different sides. Relations between the cohabiting fleets shifted according to the politics of the day, becoming more strained in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange revolution in 2004 and warmer when Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president, came to power in 2010. There were tensions over money – salaries in the Russian navy were much higher – and sometimes with the local authorities. (The Ukrainian police would let off Ukrainians for traffic violations but fine the Russians.)
In 2012 Neizhpapa, by then a captain, was invited on board the Moskva, which had become the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. He remembers the imposing size of the vessel, its foredeck canted upwards to attack. It was armed with 16 huge missile-launchers, as large as aircraft fuselages. The command tower was flanked with the domes, curved dishes and antennae of several radar systems, and the deck swooped towards a helicopter pad overhanging the stern.
When he stepped aboard, Neizhpapa “felt pride and tradition and also a certain power in the cruiser. I would have never guessed that within a couple of years my naval forces would sink it.”
On April 13th 2022, Neizhpapa received information that the Moskva had been located 115km off the coast. The vice admiral is tall and imposing with steel close-cut hair and bright blue eyes that seem to reflect some distant, sunny sea. Mild-mannered but military-correct, he would not be drawn on how the Ukrainians found the Moskva. “I can’t answer your question in much detail, but I can tell you that it was identified specifically by the Ukrainian naval forces,” he said.
It’s difficult to find warships at sea, not least because they are designed to hide. A ship can go quiet – turning off communications equipment so broadcasts cannot be intercepted – or use camouflage to make it difficult to see from above. Satellites can spot a ship only when their orbit passes overhead and most of them cannot penetrate cloud cover. Even when skies are clear, large warships are mere mites of grey on a vast grey ocean.
Most radar is limited to a range of 20-30km. It can transmit and receive electromagnetic pulses from objects only in its direct line of sight. Anything below the horizon remains invisible, in the radar’s so-called shadow. The Moskva remained on the other side of Snake Island, over 100km away.
Neizhpapa and other naval sources were understandably reluctant to furnish details on when and how they found the Moskva. According to their version of the story, low cloud cover that day meant that radar pulses were reflected in such a way that extended their reach far beyond their normal range. “The warship was found by two radar stations on the coast,” an insider told us. “We were so lucky.”
But Chris Carlson, a retired captain in the us navy and one of the designers of the naval-war game, “Harpoon V”, which is used to train armed forces around the world, believes that other methods were employed. “I have a hard time attributing it to just plain old luck,” he told me. He suggested that, even if a coastal radar station managed to ping the Moskva, the information relayed by the echo over such a distance would have been insufficient to identify the ship or target it effectively. Carlson pointed out that in 2021 Ukraine had announced that its advanced over-the-horizon radar system, called the Mineral-U, had completed factory testing. It’s possible that the navy rushed it into active service, even though the Ukrainians – given the need for wartime secrecy – have never admitted that they possess this capability. Neizhpapa said that this was not the first time the Ukrainians had spotted the Moskva and other warships.
The Ukrainians had also deployed Bayraktars – Turkish-made drones that became cult icons in the early months of the war – against the Russian fleet for observation, distraction and attack. It’s possible that a drone may have spotted the Moskva. In private, Western military sources have hinted that the Ukrainians had more help in locating the Moskva than they like to admit. American military sources have confirmed that they were asked to verify Ukraine’s sighting of the Moskva, which they probably did through a maritime-surveillance aircraft. It was clear, however, from the predictable changes of position made by the Moskva, that her crew believed she was invisible.
The Ukrainian navy went into the war with a depleted force. After the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia seized much of the Ukrainian fleet, including 12 of the 17 ships moored in Sevastopol at the time. Training schools, artillery batteries and munition stores were claimed by the Russians. A cohort of Ukrainian naval officers, including three admirals, defected. Neizhpapa, who was at home in Sevastopol, was recalled to Odessa. He made it across the new de-facto border crammed into a car with his wife, two sons, the Ukrainian navy’s head of military communications and all the belongings they could fit. As they crossed to safety, Neizhpapa had a “feeling that I had been in captivity and was free at home”.
The Russians began to modernise their newly strengthened Black Sea Fleet; the Moskva was upgraded and ship-to-ship Vulkan missiles installed. These had a range of over 500km, which allowed them to target cities too. The Ukrainian fleet had been reduced to a handful of ships: one frigate and a few dozen smaller craft. The war in Donbas between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists stagnated into a stalemate and sucked up much of the armed forces’ attention and resources. When Neizhpapa was made commander of the navy in 2020 by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had been elected the previous year, there was no money or time to build new ships. Neizhpapa decided that what he needed most of all were radar systems for surveillance, minefields for coastal defence and long-range missiles, which Ukraine had also lost in Crimea.
The Luch Design Bureau in Kyiv, a state-owned munitions developer since Soviet times, had begun work on the Neptune, a subsonic shore-to-ship missile system, shortly after the loss of Crimea. Based on an old Soviet design, the Neptune would have a range of over 200km. It was ready to be tested around the time Neizhpapa assumed command. A technical expert involved in the design, who didn’t want to be identified, showed me a video on his phone of one of the first live-fire tests. An old rusty tanker had been towed out to sea as a target and a small crowd of engineers and naval officers gathered in a field close to the launcher to await the results. When the news came that the tanker had been successfully hit, they clapped and hugged each other.
Yet the government dragged its feet on funding production and it took an intervention by Zelensky himself for manufacturing to begin. “I was in this meeting,” said the technical expert. “He was intelligent, he understood that we had only three or four [operationally effective] ships in the Ukrainian navy and that it was not enough to protect the coastline.”
Production began in early 2021. The first battery – comprising two command vehicles and four launch vehicles, each able to transport and fire four missiles – had been built in time to join the annual military parade in Kyiv on August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day. That December, Neizhpapa announced that six batteries would be deployed to the southern coast the following spring.
On the morning of February 24th 2022, the technical expert woke to the sound of “shooting everywhere, helicopter attacks everywhere”. Russia had invaded and the Neptune batteries were still parked near Kyiv; they were in jeopardy from seizure by Russian soldiers. The technical expert’s superiors told him to transport the missile systems to the south of the country. It took three days for the launch vehicles to reach the coast. “We were worried because they were very visibly military vehicles,” said the expert. The missiles themselves were sent later, hidden in trucks.
The Neptunes were first fired in March 2022 at Russian landing craft. In April, they probably targeted a Russian frigate called the Admiral Essen – that month she was retired from service for a few weeks, suggesting that the damage sustained was slight – and at smaller ships threatening Mykolaiv. A number of sources suggested the Neptunes were not wholly successful. The system was untested in combat and there were teething problems: with the radar, with parts failing, with the software for identifying targets. The technical expert told us that the missiles had been launched from the west of Odessa at a high altitude, which would have made them more easily detectable by Russian radar. “We don’t know exactly what happened,” he said, “but it seems the missiles were intercepted.” Engineers were dispatched to fix the problems.
Once the location of the Moskva had been confirmed on April 13th, Neizhpapa ordered two Neptune missiles to be fired at it. The technical expert showed me a video on his phone of what he claimed was the launch of the missiles that day. The launcher truck was parked in a thin line of trees with bare branches. At ignition, the cap of the launching tube, which looks like the lid of a rubbish bin, was dispelled from the barrel and crashed into a field of green spring wheat. A fiery roar and a trail of black smoke followed. Then the second missile was launched.
A fiery roar and a trail of black smoke followed. Then the second missile was launched.
Silence reigned in Neizhpapa’s command centre. The Neptune, which is five metres long, flies at 900km per hour and is designed to skim ten metres above the surface of the sea in order to avoid detection. Neizhpapa watched the clock tick through the six minutes that it was supposed to take to reach the target. For a long time nothing seemed to happen. Then Russian radio channels erupted in chatter. It was apparent that smaller ships were hurrying towards the Moskva. The radio traffic was garbled and panicked. Neizhpapa inferred that the ship had been hit.
It didn’t take long for news to spread. “People started calling me from all over Ukraine,” Neizhpapa said. “There was only one question: ‘Did it sink or not?’ I said, ‘I can’t answer that!’ Hours passed. I was constantly asked the same thing. I joked I wanted to get on a boat myself and go and look. I said, ‘Do you realise that this is a very big ship? Even if it was hit by both missiles, it wouldn’t sink immediately.’”
Some hours later, satellites spotted a large red thermal image in the middle of the sea. Officials from nato phoned Neizhpapa, he recalled, “to say that they saw something burning beautifully”.
The only publicly available film taken of the Moskva after she was hit is three seconds long. The sea is calm, the sky pale grey. The full length of the ship is visible as she lists sharply to one side, thick black smoke billowing from the foredeck. Her life rafts are gone, suggesting that surviving crew members had been evacuated. The camera falls away sharply as a voice is heard saying, in Russian, “What the **** are you doing?”
It’s apparent from the film that the two Neptune missiles struck the Moskva near the foredeck on her port side, just above the waterline. The fire may have been caused by the missiles themselves, or fuel tanks or ammunition magazines in that part of the ship which ignited. We may never know exactly what happened but the attack clearly caused the Moskva to lose power and propulsion. Sometime in the early hours of April 14th she rolled over and sank.
Why had the Moskva, which had capable radar and surface-to-air missiles, failed to detect and intercept the incoming Neptunes? Carlson, the naval expert, has dug into the possible reasons. The ship was in dry dock for repairs several times over the past decade but upgrades to her weapons and operating systems seem to have been delayed or done piecemeal. A readiness report, briefly posted online in early 2022 before being removed from the internet, showed that many systems were broken or not fully functional. “All her major weapons systems had gripes,” said Carlson on a podcast last year. Moreover, the Moskva’s radar and targeting tools were not entirely automated and relied heavily on well-trained operators. But over half the ship’s crew, which numbered 500, were conscripts who served only a year. In consequence, the sailors “had extremely limited training which would be considered woefully insufficient by Western standards,” said Carlson. “The Moskva was not properly prepared to be doing combat operations.” This was yet another example of complacency by the Russian armed forces that has been evident throughout the war. Even so, Carlson was astonished that none of her radars appeared to have spotted the incoming missiles.
Officials from NATO phoned Neizhpapa, he recalled, “to say that they saw something burning beautifully
Once the Neptunes struck, the crew seems, in a panic, to have left watertight doors unsecured. Studying a screenshot of the Moskva on fire, Carlson observed that “you can see smoke coming out of the shutter doors for the torpedo tubes...That tells me that the smoke had a clear path, and if the smoke had a clear path so did water and so [did] flame.”
The Russians have never admitted that Neptune missiles were responsible for sinking the Moskva; they claimed she suffered an accidental fire at sea. But only a few days later, they bombed a Luch Design Bureau facility in Kyiv in apparent retaliation. The Russian authorities have also never been open about the number of casualties, but up to 250 sailors may have died. On November 4th 2022, more than six months after the sinking, a court in Sevastopol declared 17 of the missing dead.
Despite the reports of their heroic deaths, the defenders of Snake Island were in fact alive. They were taken captive and held in prison in Crimea before being transferred to a prison in Belograd, a city near the border with Ukraine. Conditions were brutal. Temperatures fell to -20°C, yet the prisoners were housed in tents for the first few days. Frequently, they were interrogated, beaten and electrocuted. They had no news of the outside world, beyond the names of the cities captured by the Russians, with which the guards taunted them.
One day, the prisoners overheard a news report on the guards’ radio saying that the Moskva “was not floating properly”. The expression puzzled them for a while, before they realised that it was a euphemism for “sunk”. They began to cheer. “The Russians increased our torture,” said one of them, who was later returned in a prisoner exchange, “but this was a great moment of happiness.”
The sinking of the Moskva was a turning point in the war. Neizhpapa said that “our fleet, which was considered non-existent a year ago, is now winning against the larger force, thought to be unbeatable.” nato allies began to take the Ukrainian navy seriously. Ukraine has limited stocks of Neptunes but the Danes and Americans are supplying Harpoon missiles, which are similar to the Neptune but carry a bigger warhead. Previously, Neizhpapa admitted, this kind of weapon and support would have been a “dream”.
Sometime in the early hours of April 14th she rolled over and sank.
Having destroyed the air-defence umbrella that the Moskva provided, the Ukrainian navy was able to harass the Russian navy in the west of the Black Sea with drones and missiles, damaging and sinking supply ships, and destroying air defences and radar stations installed on gas platforms. In June 2022 Ukraine retook Snake Island and the Russian Black Sea Fleet withdrew towards Crimea, leaving the Ukrainian coast safe from amphibious assault. Turkey and the United Nations were able to broker a deal to allow ships into Ukrainian ports to export grain. “Now,” said Neizhpapa, “they keep their ships outside of the range of our cruise missiles” – even state-of-the-art frigates that are armed up to the gunwales.
The Ukrainian coast has been secured. Neizhpapa pointed out an area of 25,000 square kilometres where neither the Russians nor Ukrainians can now operate freely. “There’s a certain kind of status quo that we need to take over,” he said. Neizhpapa maintains that the only way to secure peace in the Black Sea is to throw the Russians out of Crimea. “In imperial times, all of the emperors always said that whoever controls Crimea controls the Black Sea. In Soviet times, they called Crimea the aircraft-carrier that cannot be sunk. Nothing has changed since then.”
I asked Neizhpapa what he missed about his home. He gazed upwards for a moment. “Honestly, I miss the sea near Crimea the most. It’s not the same as here. It’s brighter, more transparent.” 
Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage here. Marta Rodionova has worked as a television journalist and creative producer.
 
https://www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2023/07/27/how-ukraines-virtually-non-existent-navy-sank-russias-flagship
 

 

What we don't(?) have information on is exactly what kind of loss is being generated by artillery. Is it a irrecoverable loss or is it a vehicle that is beaten up and no one really wants to use it in combat right now? My suspicion is that its the latter. Vehicles that have been damaged in a variety of relatively minor ways that could operate in a fight but that the units wouldn't be excited to use.

More broadly there has been a discounting of the impact artillery has on armor that the fighting in Ukraine has helped to reveal is a sort of bogus. They are fairly complex machines and chucking chunks of metal at a tank isn't good for them. Now tanks are obviously advantaged against artillery, but that has often turned into a "don't use artillery against tanks" which doesn't seem to hold water. Tanks are advantaged against artillery because they (1) cannot be pinned by artillery and (2) each artillery shell has fewer fragments of significant size to cause damage. So armor is able to maneuver away from/through artillery and this ability to avoid fire is key. Infantry and soft skinned vehicles cannot maneuver through artillery so if they are hit they become pinned and have to sustain the barrage. To get tanks to sustain the barrage you either need tanks that are static or the ability for the FO to adjust fire along the vehicles route of movement which is difficult (but apparently getting easier).

 

You've repeatedly bring out this wishy washy "well we don't know" despite.
 
- DoD Mk19 gunnery qualification cards
- video evidence
- the clear discrepancy between vehicle and tripod mounted
- service members pointing out issues with the weapon they used (assuming I'm reading  Boche correctly)
- Combat Mission itself having the weapon be more accurate historically

The fact of the matter is that there is a clear problem with AGLs in CM. Another long running bug that was identified 5 years ago

You've repeatedly bring out this wishy washy "well we don't know" despite.
 
- DoD Mk19 gunnery qualification cards
- video evidence
- the clear discrepancy between vehicle and tripod mounted
- service members pointing out issues with the weapon they used (assuming I'm reading  Boche correctly)
- Combat Mission itself having the weapon be more accurate historically

The fact of the matter is that there is a clear problem with AGLs in CM. Another long running bug that was identified 5 years ago

Your argument falls apart when every vehicle mounted AGL fires like it’s been on a week long bender while every tripod mounted one fires with good accuracy. Like are you seriously arguing that a AGL mounted onto a many thousand lb vehicle is going to be less controllable than a man packed variant deployed on a tripod?
 


You are going to be surprised by this but a RCWS isn't going to result in accuracy that would make a Brown Bess blush.

Did you confirm that the vehicle in question took no direct hits? people have a tendency to fast forward through the turns missing the outcomes of each individual shell. Which is part of why the bug has been with the titles for so long.

this thread with the Capt has the same events. He initially didn’t see an issue because he was fast forwarding through the turn. 
 
 
And here is the original post the revealed the issue. 

What we don't(?) have information on is exactly what kind of loss is being generated by artillery. Is it a irrecoverable loss or is it a vehicle that is beaten up and no one really wants to use it in combat right now? My suspicion is that its the latter. Vehicles that have been damaged in a variety of relatively minor ways that could operate in a fight but that the units wouldn't be excited to use.

More broadly there has been a discounting of the impact artillery has on armor that the fighting in Ukraine has helped to reveal is a sort of bogus. They are fairly complex machines and chucking chunks of metal at a tank isn't good for them. Now tanks are obviously advantaged against artillery, but that has often turned into a "don't use artillery against tanks" which doesn't seem to hold water. Tanks are advantaged against artillery because they (1) cannot be pinned by artillery and (2) each artillery shell has fewer fragments of significant size to cause damage. So armor is able to maneuver away from/through artillery and this ability to avoid fire is key. Infantry and soft skinned vehicles cannot maneuver through artillery so if they are hit they become pinned and have to sustain the barrage. To get tanks to sustain the barrage you either need tanks that are static or the ability for the FO to adjust fire along the vehicles route of movement which is difficult (but apparently getting easier).

 

We’ve certainly seen a lot of vehicles that appear to be M-killed and killed  outright by artillery but that could be anything from the vehicle ceasing to function to the crew saying “nope”. Did artillery kill the vehicle or did the crew have an issue that was exacerbated by arty causing them to abandon the vehicle?
Especially in the context of Ukraine where a lot of dumb artillery seems drone spotted. So it’s clear that someone is watching you and they might be able to better direct dumb fire or bring in PGM for the kill if you sit around.
 
The particular issue with CM being that near misses will only damage tracks. So APS, vehicle sights,ERA,  smoke launchers, turret mounted HMGs, etc… all are invulnerable to fragments. The end result is that artillery does a bad job of doing chip damage that degrades the combat capability of the vehicles. 

also an additional quirk of this is that direct hits on ERA count as near misses.

The war in Ukraina has showed a suprisingly high effectivnes, of artillery against Tanks, IFV´s, and other armored vehicles. Ukraine said erlier, that most of their tanklosses came from artillery. And Russia is very thin on guided shells. And we have seen 100´s of twitter/youtubeclips of artilleryshells detonating close <50ft to AFV´s destroying them. And now even several upparmored M2A2 ODS-SA Bradlys, and a Leo 2A6. Getting missionkilled by artillery, possibly a few total kills. And more to come with probably M-kills/K-kills by arty, of upparmored CV 90´s, Marders, Challenger 2´s, Strv 122´s. And later on of M1A1´s. 
I know BF cant change this in existing games, since every campaign. And every scenario have to be redone, to reflect this. 
What your thoughts? I didn´t want to spam the bigone with this, but a separate thread.

But with 13-46 inch plate, you are only talking about the frontarmour. Artillery don´t care if the wehicle is turned in the direction they are firing from. Most arty kills I´v seen from the war, is from the side. And mostly on BMP/BTR´s. But according to Ukraine soldiers, they lose most of their tanks to artillery to (Now, maybe mines to). And there are lots of weakspots on tanks in the side/back. Particularly on the T-xx tanks.
Take this photo of the side front of an T-72B3  Very thin side armor there. And you se the composite front plate armor inside, and that we know the thicknes of.
 
80 mm on the upper part of the sidearmour of the T-72 hull side. But only 20 mm on the lower part of the side. Thats not even an inch! And thats where the carousel mag is! 

Good lord that is a tough one. So are we talking leadership training?  Sounds like it.  Battlefield leadership and resilience is a big freakin topic.  If I had 15 mins before jumping off the truck and running into it:
- Don’t get pulled too far in.  Combat is pretty wild and it is easy to get pulled too far into a single crisis.  The reality is that is all crisis.  A tactical line leader needs to keep one step back and try and see the system of crisis as it unfolds.  If the leader is pulled in too far they lose the picture they need to sustain in order to give their people the best chances and to keep the pointed at the enemy.
- Don’t get pulled too far back.  Fear and shock is normal but once the initial contact is made leaders cannot suck too far back.  You do that and the troops feel abandoned and you start to lose the ability to get a feel of how the whole machine is holding together.
- Combat is a longer game than people think.  Once the initial actions and shooting start, the drama starts to normalize.  Leaders need to stay on top of that.  Normalize can mean troops get sloppy…they got into combat and did not die…so now what?  Also the need to watch out for sustainment.  Modern western troops were set up for about 20 mins of sustained combat before air or indirect firepower came to the rescue.  The UA guys do not have this, so they might have to settle in and make their ammo last - so back to basics like fire discipline and marksmanship (yep they still matter).
- On Basics - build them in as priority and stick to them. Once the lead starts flying and people start screaming everything else strips away.  You are left with relationships and trust you built up to that point (ie each other) and the basic skills you have beaten into their brains.  Something as simple as IAs and stoppages and simply keeping you weapon in operation can be really hard under fire unless it is beaten into muscle memory.  Have the troops practice the most mundane things, hundreds of times.
- Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.  Be deliberate and as calm as you can be at all times.  Calm like panic is contagious.  If the leader is not freaking out, the troops likely won’t either.  Be deliberate, take the few extra seconds to pull order together.  Get past scared, get past mad and get cold.  You should literally feel cold inside - once you get there it gets a lot easier.  People become systems.  The enemy is a metric.  Really hard to describe this space but you have a mission and everything else, including you are simply means to that end, or a obstacle to remove.
- Build trust and use it.  As a ground force leader your weapon is the unit.  It is only as good as you kept it before the shooting started.  In combat let it do its job and try hard to stay out of people’s way.  There is an art to knowing when to step in and when not too.
- Leadership is nothing like the movies or even the BS fed in basic. It starts with whipping the troops in training while driving them in front of you, then it shifts to walking with them under fire - lean on each other.  In the back end you will be out in front pulling, sometimes begging and pleading to get them across the finish line.  Again quiet calm is the norm.  Then when you do yell or swear everyone really pays attention because it is so much out of character.
- Establish depth and redundancy…everywhere.  Everyone has a 2 IC, 3 IC and then last man standing.  I cannot describe how fast the famous “chain of command” can fall apart.  So build it deep.  Also leave room for informal leaders, they will emerge.
- Don’t be a hero, your people do not need one.  Some guys go in looking for that hero moment but that often only gets people killed.  A hero gets in and gets the job done while keeping as many of his people alive as he can.  Take opportunities if the come but don’t lean too far forward at the expense of peoples lives.
- Little things matter so much.  A joke, a quiet word a little luxury and a small sacrifice.  For some troops when they get ragged these little things make all the difference and can sustain them.
- Finally, and this is the hardest one, do not forget that you and your people are ammunition. Your job is to spend them on problems. Worse, your job is to convince them that it is worth it.  Once the war is over you are going to be living with this fact for the rest of you life.  You only get to put that one down at the end.  You will spend those years writing reference letters for jobs they are applying for, checking in on the survivors and people left behind, and re-living every decision you made.  Just accept that and move on but never forget the weight of this thing, that is your end.
Beyond that, resilience is a lot about understanding what is happening to you.  If you can name it, you take its power away.  You need to be really self aware and do self checks,  Cannot stress the importance of the lead NCO and officer team in this.  You and your troop or company NCO need to really be able to gauge where each other are at as a check and balance system.  And none of it makes sense.  You might get into three firefights and are fine, then once fourth you freeze up.  Why you froze up could be anything in the human soup.  You need to understand it is happening and hand off as quickly as possible.  Then get over it because it may never happen again.  If it happens a lot or all the time - you are not a coward, you are simply too evolved for this business.  Time to get pulled off the line and go do an important job somewhere else.  Perhaps you are a brilliant staff officer or analyst that can save hundreds of lives.  Everyone will break eventually (well anyone who is not a complete psychopath) it is a matter of when, not if…even you.

Casualties of all kinds. I don't think Ukraine has 500 aircraft in total.
 
Ukraine is rightly asking for F-16s now, and has been for a few months, as they appear to be looking towards their defense in a post-war environment. At least I suspect that by the time Ukraine could field F-16s the fighting will largely be over unless the war drags on for another 16 months. Retrofitting their existing Soviet stock to support western weaponry seems to be the battlefield expedient choice. But they did ask for A-10s the month after the invasion began and that timeline would probably give them enough time to have those flyable now.  So really we're looking at post-war sustainable choice and a crisis unsustainable one. 
There is a difference between the vehicle being lost at a high rate and the vehicle being suicidal. Sherman tank losses were high, for example, but being a crewmen in one was anything but suicidal. So you need to look past equipment losses into crew losses.

While I do think the A-10 has developed a cult of personality around it. I'm not sure I would describe the A-10s as a death trap. Looking here and Desert Storm saw 20 A-10 casualties with 6 being lost and 14 being damaged. That is significantly more than any other airframe but as far as I can find only two pilots were actually killed in combat with 3 being captured.

So while there are 20 airframe losses effective pilot losses amount to 25% of that. For any U.S. flown ship that is significant but Ukraine clearly is willing/must suffer higher loss rates. So, assuming they had the logistics tail (a very big assumption), flying a bunch of A-10s wouldn't necessarily be the worst even if airframe losses were high.
 
Edit: The whole argument about Ukraine getting them is effectively moot since well.... they aren't getting any.

I think the issue is the United States government was created at a time when coalitions were geographical and interests were not consistent within those coalitions. The framers assumed these coalitions/parties would never be coherent enough to threaten the political process. For the next couple centuries this held true and the activities of government were held together by tradition and common courtesy.
Next, the executive branch started strong due to the failure of the Articles of Confederation and became stronger whenever there was a threat such as the Civil War or the World Wars. The framers figured that any president who overstepped would be checked by the other two branches.
The problem is the two political parties have coalesced into coherent and ideologically driven coalitions that transcend the traditional checks and balances. A Republican legislature would never check a Republican president nor would a Democrat justice check a Democrat legislature. This is why Donald Trump was openly selling pardons for two million a pop.
We are reaching the end game of democracy in the United States. With the judicial branch firmly controlled by naked partisans all the Republicans need is a president in the white house and a greater than 50% majority in the house and senate and the chains come off. If you thought the president has sweeping powers now, wait for 2024.

@Grey_Fox
 
My overall point here is that contextually Ukraine is in a much different situation and has been shown repeatedly far more willing(and forced) to accept risks and losses that no Western military has since Vietnam.

Your point seems to be that if losses are incurred then it can't be done which we've seen over the last year isn't true. No western military would have sustained the casualties taken by Ukraine to liberate a geographic area the size of Kherson it would be mind boggling, but Ukraine is in a position where it must take risks and losses. So applying experience from Coalition forces in wars of choice doesn't map neatly to the Ukrainian context.

I recall some time ago seeing a pie chart of documented attempted terrorist acts in the US since 9-11. Al Qaeda wannabes came in a distant second from the primary malefactors. Left wing organizations made up the tiniest sliver of the pie. Terrorist 'immigrant groups' didn't even make the chart due to round-off error. In some (most) circumstances 'both-sides-ism' just doesn't wash.

I decided to expand on my tests a little bit. I was slightly less scientific in terms of methodology this time around but I think the results are still fairly effective and overall a bit more widely applicable. I decided to take four vehicles with CITV systems from black sea. Besides the M1A2 this includes the M2A3, T-90AM, and T-84 Oplot. For this, I wanted to see whether or not turret down was possible with other vehicles. The vehicles would move up a reverse slope, spot the targets, and then reverse back down till they lost the spots.
Assuming that turret down is possible on these vehicles they should still have full contacts or at the very least partial contacts that do not degrade once they are unable to engage the targets with their main weaponry. The target is just a typical BTR-82 platoon in a column about 400-500 meters away. This example below is what things looked like after a ceasefire, so everything is visible. Additionally, If turret down is not possible, what is the determining factor as to when a vehicle is in LOS of a target? Is it following a height map with different predefined heights shared between multiple vehicles, or does each vehicle have its own point of origin for LOS?

Now if the LOS system for each vehicle was predetermined on a specific height table, that means each vehicle has a LOS height that is based on that table (Short, Tall, Very Tall Vehicles). This means that following the height map the T-84 and T-90AM should have the same LOS height origin (either short or tall). The Bradley is known to be able to see over objects the M1 was unable to, so we know this has to have a taller LOS point than any of the other vehicles (Very Tall, or possibly Tall if the M1A2 is short). The M1A2, on the other hand, will either be in its own category or follow the same height as the T-90AM and T-84 for drawing LOS to targets (Either Tall or Short if it shares the same height as the T-90 and T-84).
If the LOS system is instead linked to a specific point on each vehicle, then that means that there will be a lot more minor fluctuations in terms of being able to draw LOS and spot targets, it may even be possible to discern differences between the T-90AM and T-84. It will also mean that any cut-off point for LOS will likely be linked to a physical feature on the vehicle which should theoretically be identifiable. At least in theory.
So what do the results show?

Above You see the M1A2 we have used previously. When testing this I drove the vehicles up so they saw the BTR platoon, then I backed them up slowly until they lost the spots. Here the spots for the M1A2 was lost just as the main gun was unable to draw LOS to the vehicles anymore, despite the turret sensors, commander, and 50 cal being able to clearly look over the slope.


Now the M2A3, Unsurprisingly as the tallest vehicle the M2A3 is the farthest back on the slope when it lost the spots, placing it within its own category assuming a height map. What is interesting though is that it also lost the spots the moment the 25mm was unable to draw LOS to the vehicles, even though the CITV system, GPS, and TOW are still visible and still capable of engaging the target in real life.

Now things are starting to get weird, Now we are looking at the T-84. This lost the spots it had before it was able to even have the gun barrel hidden by the terrain! Despite having partial LOS on the terrain according to the target order, it lost the solid contacts on the BTRs and they never came back. I'll talk in more detail on this in a moment but I'll just finish up the results first.

Finally, the 90AM. This was able to back up and lose the spots just after the gun barrel had lost direct LOS to the targets, the CITV, and maybe the GPS, could theoretically see the targets in real life as well. It was noticeably further back than the T-84 but it was still short of the M1A2 and M2A3. So this is also within its own category.

So for the most obvious conclusion and most widely applicable.
Turret Down does not seem to be an applicable tactic with any of the above vehicles, they will be unable to draw LOS and spot targets unless they are able to engage them at the very least. Possibly even more. While I didn't include any pictures, I tried this with commanders both turned out and buttoned up and the results were virtually identical. My suspicion is that this may ring true for most if not every vehicle in CM, but I'll get to the why of that in a moment.
But what about the way that LOS is able to be drawn? is it a predetermined height shared between multiple vehicles, or is it specific to each vehicle? While I am unable to be entirely conclusive, the evidence seems to favour the vehicle LOS points are unique to each vehicle rather than pulled from a height map with three distinct choices.With three out of four vehicles losing LOS the moment the main gun disappears behind the slope and never returning. The only exception was the T-84, which for some reason lost the spots on target prior to being fully out of LOS.
Realistically the reason that the T-84 is so different from the T-90AM is within all likelihood a bug. Although it offers interesting implications as to why its happened, it could have happened with either model. If it is the height table, the T-84 may have been given an even shorter height on accident, like kneeling height for instance. Alternatively, the height map for the T-90 and M1A2 is the same and I just didn't notice how close the vehicles were together in the test. If it's following a unique LOS point for each vehicle then that would mean the origin point for LOS on the T-84 is significantly misplaced resulting in the difference. 
I think I will redo these tests with a bit more care into how far exactly each vehicle backs up till they lose LOS, and add a couple more vehicle types to increase confidence. But from casual observation, it seems more likely to me that the LOS of many vehicles will be tied to the main gun in some fashion, and the main gun alone, rather than a height map or other physical points on the vehicle (sensors and optics, turned out crew, periscopes, etc). This is also an explanation as to why turret down failed to function for any of the above vehicles as well.
There are probably exceptions to this if it was the case, vehicles like the BRDM-2 ATGM carriers definitely do not trace LOS from the ATGM tubes, they need to have some of the hull exposed to be able to see and engage targets. Other systems like the Wirbelwind with multiple barrels, and even bow machine guns on ww2 tanks will likely have their own specific quirks as well. That will only be answered through more testing though. I am also curious about Cold War as well, the M60 is quite tall compared to most other tanks in the series, and the M901 and M150 offer some unique opportunities to test as well, which I or someone else can touch on in the future.

Additionally, @Brille, if it wouldn't be too much trouble could you let me know what vehicles you used which had turret down work with them that would be great, thank you!

@Grey_Fox
 
My overall point here is that contextually Ukraine is in a much different situation and has been shown repeatedly far more willing(and forced) to accept risks and losses that no Western military has since Vietnam.

Your point seems to be that if losses are incurred then it can't be done which we've seen over the last year isn't true. No western military would have sustained the casualties taken by Ukraine to liberate a geographic area the size of Kherson it would be mind boggling, but Ukraine is in a position where it must take risks and losses. So applying experience from Coalition forces in wars of choice doesn't map neatly to the Ukrainian context.

Yes but this was fundamentally an expeditionary war of choice. B52s etc existed as alternatives.  Ukraine will never have such assets.
The Russian Army is and always will be vehicle centric force and the A10 is absolutely not a flying grad launcher. I certainly don't think its a God Of War or anything, but it's robust, adaptable and NATO ready.  I'm very certain the Ukrainian air force would find new and surprising ways to both Maximize its potential and add new tricks.
Coupled with a very robust AD system and capable ground forces,  I think it can add a very heavy punch at specific points. Yes some will get nailed, so what. Even if a bunch get nailed,  so what. The hole us made,  the reserves are done. Can you imagine what A10s would have done to that ridiculous convoy at the start of the War? 
The USAF doesn't want them because it's building into a 5th-6th gen force to counter China, which is 5th-ish.
Meanwhile Ukraine is at best 3rd-4th,  and so is its opponent. Cripes,  we're sending them Leo 1s and Scorpions,  for goodness sake. 
I think UKR is about to bend over the Russian in-theater AA/AD network and keep their face in the dirt for a good while. Once the Russians break in Ukraine,  that's when A10s would really amplify and enable ground ops. 
But this is all moot,  anyway. It's too late in the year for them to have effect.