JonS

The Baltic Air Patrol is an excellent example of just exactly how hard this kind of staring is, and it "only" consists of a dozen or so aircraft.

Personally, I didn't think the guns were too tight to begin with. There are trade-offs with everything, obviously, and with a gun position you want it to be as dispersed as possible, and no more. Arguing for wider dispersion is the counter-battery threat, which itself varies by enemy, operational situation, tactical situation, and terrain. In general, the Ukrainians seem to have been following an active CB policy (ie, going after Russian artillery assets whenever they get a chance) over the last ... year? But it is unlikely that policy is consistent across the entire front, due to a lack of ammo, deception measures, and lack of sufficient CB C2 infrastructure everywhere. But as a rule of thumb, I expect the Russians would probably want to be more dispersed than perhaps their doctrine would suggest. Arguing against wider dispersion are a bunch of factors. Local defence - I'm not sure how porous the front is, or how often Ukrainian raiding parties are hitting battery positions, but a small tight position is MUCH easier to defend against a ground threat that a dispersed position. Fire mission command and control - in my experience, each section (2 guns) is managed by a junior officer, and he has to keep shuttling between his guns to ensure they are doing the right things in the right way (bearing and elevation is correct, correct ammo, charge and fuse, etc). If the position becomes too dispersed, either those firing checks have to be reduced or overlooked (with consequent increase in risk), or the pace of fire missions drastically reduced. That's on top of the points @BlackMoria made about limited wire and/or radios. A lot of this can be mitigated with fancy-pants new kit, but these are D-30s. I doubt they are very fancy-pants, and I expect they are using methods and equipment that a gunner from the 1980s would feel intimately familiar with. Terrain - @BlackMoria has noted that this clearing is quite small, which is true, but FWIW to my eye it doesn't appear to be too small for the number of guns being employed*. It's really hard to eyeball, but it looks to be at least 50m between guns, which is a pretty standard dispersion. Also, the entire clearing isn't available for use due to cresting issues with the surrounding trees - get too close to the trees at the front edge of the clearing and you can't safely depress the barrels enough to engage targets - you'd be firing rounds through the trees just in front of you and, um, that's a really bad idea. That's also why you can't just hide your guns in the forest to begin with. Edit to add: Terrain part 2 - we can't see the wider area around this position. It could concievably be that this is the only, or one of the few, practical positions for this battery to be. Aside from out in the desert, the battlespace rapidly gets clogged up by all the things you want to be there - ammo and logistics dumps, engineer stores dumps, artillery areas, medical areas, helicopter landing zones, reserve fighting positions, staging areas for units moving forwards and backwards, maintenance area, routes for stuff moving forwards, backwards, and sideways, etc. Given that this area also seems to be heavily wooded and sparsely tracked**, there just mightn't be any other good spots for the guns to be, and the battlespace managers at the higher HQ haven't given this battery commander enough ground to be able to disperse they way he might want to. Interestingly, there seems to be only three guns in this battery. I wonder where the fourth is? I'm guessing it is out of action - either broken, or perhaps destroyed in a previous CB engagement - although it could jut be tucked away somewhere out of sight. Also, the CB mission as shown seemed focused on the guns themselves, which is fair enough because that's what the unaided eye (or drone cam) can see. But somewhere, not too far away - probably within 100m of the centre gun - is a command post. It's a shame they couldn't identify and target that either instead of one of the guns, or in addition to all of the guns. There is probably also an echelon park nearby - probably not more than 200-500m from the command post - with a bunch of trucks and mechanics and technical equipment and other paraphernalia. Replacing a couple of guns is hard. Replacing a couple of guns AND all that other junk, along with the training of the specialists you find there, is really hard. * although, I suppose you could argue that it really was too small, given that all three guns seem to have been taken out. On the other hand, the Ukrainians seemed to be adjusting between the three guns as if they were three point targets. At that point it wouldn't have mattered if the guns were twice, thrice, or ten times as far apart - once the enemy gunners have the intel and time to accurately adjust between your positions you're screwed, regardless of dispersion. It doesn't matter whether that's a battery of guns or a dug in platoon. ** artillery units need access to good routes - ammo is heavy, and in a sustained battle an artillery unit needs a LOT of trucks coming and going to keep it fed.

I mean ... South Korea has been a fabulous success story by practically any measure. I'm not sure how forced mass population relocation in order to make a few Americans feel better about themselves could improve on that? Wait: were you looking for an improvement on history, or just something "very different"? If it's the latter, then sure; forced mass population relocation would change things.

That's true almost by definition, since the Russians are not going to he in the middle of their own minefields. Anyone who thought otherwise is deeply deluding themselves.

Lol. Way to make it all about you: Kill more people, plz, so I may avoid imagined humiliation.

you'd have to hit the mine directly with a submunition to get an effect, at which point you're probably seeding the minefiled with more UXO that the number of mines cleared.

That's ... one take on it.

Interesting. I'd heard they *really* liked the Light Gun, but not *that* much.

We're more of a breed - arms so long your knuckles drag on the ground isnt a common evolutionary advantage.

Well, all good things can be used in bad ways, sure. All men have a penis, but we aren't all rapists, for example. Ethnicity also isn't a binary - a person can legitimately be multiple things at once. I'm a Wellingtonian (which comes with a different set of assumptions than being either a Mainlander or an Aucklander, although neither of those distinctions probably mean much outside the country), and a Kiwi (similar but different to Australian), and sort-of British (somewhat similar but also very different to American), and sort-of European (different to Asian or African). None of them completely describe me, but all of them provide some degree of insight, depending on the audience. Theres nothing inherently racist about any of those categories, even though of course Wellingtonians are naturally superior to Aucklanders.

As I recall it, the USMC got rid of it's long range guns because i) like tanks, they're of little use on small islands, But mostly because ii) they'd have tomahawk et al to deal with bvr naval threats. So, basically; Guns = nice Guns + missiles = wait, what am I supposed to do with all this crap now? Missiles = niiiiice (Specific to USMC/western pacific conops)

The fun(?) bit is, regardless of what eventuates, you can both say you were right. Insurgency occurs: Capt sez "told ya", while Steve sez "'unlikely' is not 'impossible'. This is one of the outcomes I said were possible." Insurgency does not occur: Steve sez "told ya. You were jumping at shadows" while Capt sez "conditions weren't met because Ukraine took the right countermeasures when they reoccupied." When the predictions are probabilistic, but the outcomes are binary, everybody gets to say they won. (See also: 538's prediction of the 2016 election)

The COIN end of the spectrum is very different to the conventional, and competence at one end does not map to competence at the other. The US military, for example, is rather good at one end of it, and rather **** at the other, as it very publicly demonstrated in the first two decades of this century. (And the rest of NATO didn't perform very differently, before we start in on that)

The COIN end of the spectrum is very different to the conventional. The US military, for example, is rather good at one end of it, and rather **** at the other, as it very publicly demonstrated in the first two decades of this century. (And the rest of NATO didn't perform very differently, before we start in on that)

FTFY

Roosevelt directed his unconditional surrender demand at all three Axis powers in Jan '43, then promptly ignored it 9 months later when Italy surrendered, then it was ignored again 2 years after that when Japan surrendered. Unconditional surrender was never a pristine rose that was utterly inviolate.

Yeah, fair enough. Any analogy can be made to fail if you really want it to, and I accept that the Russians are not in an existential fight in the way the Germans were in 44/45. The point of making the analogy with is that morale is a weird thing; sometimes brittle but it can also be absurdly resilient on both an individual and national level, and sitting around waiting for morale to break probably isn't a great plan. Take the Argentinians in the Falklands for another example; they didn't fight well, but they did fight, right up to the point where the paras were walking into Stanley.

Simply swap "Russian" for "German" (in 1944/45) and this entire thing remains true. They didn't fold then.

So, which is it: Russia sux therefore Ukraine doesn't need much help to kick the rotten door in, or Russia has a competent and professional military force which will require the entire civilised world fighting in a giant coalition to overcome. Because it can't be both, and you can't take one preposition but apply the other deduction to it.

Amusing. Last year people in this thread were saying exactly the same thing "lol, silly Russians. The Ukrainians will blow past that in a day." And yet, 11 months later, here we are. I assume that even the Russians are professional enough to recognise that ditches across open paddocks aren't the only element of a defence line they are going to need. The funny thing about ditches under tree cover is that they're not very photogenic. The tricky aspect of photographic analysis is interpreting what you can't see from the things you can. The Luftwaffe radar installation at Bruneval, for instance, was first identified because of long grass of all things. The Germans had ringed the site with barbed wire because they were worried about a ground attack or raid, or randos wandered up and having a butchers. The problem with barbed wire is that it's really hard to mow the grass in and around it, so over the course of six months or so a distinctive ring of tall grass sprouted up in the middle of an otherwise nondescript paddock in front of the manor house. "Now why would that happen" the British photo interpreters asked themselves, and working from there - and combining their suspicions with other intelligence threads - realised that they'd found a Würzburg , which led to Op BITING. IIRC, a similar process was used to delimit the boundaries a number of the minefields in Normandy before D-Day. Interpreting what you can't see based on what you can is also one of the reasons so much effort is put into studying enemy doctrine. So, putting all that together, and relating it to 2023: we can see ditches. Great, in themselves they're no great shakes. But based on doctrine and experience over the last 6-12 months, what else should the Ukrainians expect on and around these new positions. Ditches which are in the middle of open paddocks and perpendicular to the expected axis of advance are probably pretty dumb. The only thing dumber than that would be to assume that ditches in the middle of open paddocks perpendicular to the expected axis of advance are the only things the Russians are building.

Also true in Commonwealth-style armies. I think the point is that unless something has gone very wrong, a major wouldn't expect to be commanding a battalion or a brigade.

It's one example of one person in one place. As another example, could I be persuaded to enlist in a war (ie, the question that bloody map was supposedly answering) against; Australia. Lol. No. Canadia. No, eh. UK. Not likely old chap. France/Spain/BeNeLux/Germany. Nope USA. Probably Scandinavia. Lol - I'd probably help *them* China. Yep Russia. Yep Indonesia. Lol. Yep. Ukraine. Probably. Ukraine are the good guys, in this war, at this time. And I support them in this war. But there remain a lot of issues with Ukraine, and I like to think I'd resist being forced to carry a Ukrainian passport.

No, as he has explained several times, he cares which system he lives under. The differences between the Netherlands, Germany, France and Denmark in that part of Europe are negligible, and life under any of them would be about the same. Would it be worth going to war with any of those other three for the "honour" of a slightly different passport? No. And if Russia were a modern secular welfare state with a functional democracy and rule of law then life while holding a Russian passport would also be about the same, and also not worth a war.

Right, what I mean is that there is an awful lot more Roman history after the Republican period ended, and almost all the defending of Rome (writ large) occurred in that latter period. I'll give you the Punic Wars in the Republican period, but were they defensive?