JonS

"near-peer" would tend to imply that, yes. If you can deal a crushing defeat easily, can they really be said to be 'near-peer'?

Bork bork bork!

Even if "all" they did was 'have a big impact on morale' that would still be huge. Demoralised troops surrender. Demoralised units collapse.

Weirdly, it wasn't. NZ drew down its ground forces in the Pacific in order to sustain The Div in Italy. Plus of course the massive commitment to the RAF in Britain (across all the Commands). I'm not sure where the weight of the Navy was - that might've been the Pacific. Despite the way MacArthur screwed them over, I think the Aussies played the long game much better there.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/welsh-tidy-mouse-tidying-for-fun-scientists-builth-wells?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It's part of my morning routine with coffee. Don't forget the mouseovers.

Tank explosion grogs /rolleyes (Tank explosion connoisseurs?) You remind me of this https://xkcd.com/2535

Yeah, but Steve - it took them no time at all to decide that it would be more profitable to use H2O instead of CH3CH2OH, and rather than having endless meetings over whether to use Perrier, or Fiji, or Voss, they just hyper efficiently went with tapwater. So, once again, autocracies and dictatorships for the win! Checkmate, libruls!

Do you think that was mere coincidence? Also, so what? War isn't like competitive ballroom dancing - you dont get extra points for style and panache.

This is fabulously wrong headed. "Somehow", those effete slow liberal democracies managed to win WWII, Korea, Cold War, Gulf War, etc against those superlative and efficient autocracies and dictatorships.

Wait till you hear about pricing differences for airline seats!!

Probably not legally, but I doubt they'd start messing with international trade without at least a heads up. Wouldn't they likely need support from Western enablers (ships, aircraft, basing) anywhere outside the Black Sea? It's usually a bit tricky to load a duffle of C4 and firearms onto a Lufthansa flight.

Wouldn't they be in favour of this development?

Curiously, though, AIUI Russia has ended 2023 occupying several hundred more square kilometres than they did at the start. Which is a terrible ROI. But still - they went forward in 2023, not backward.

So, coming at this from an artillery perspective, it's apparent that 'mass' means different things to different people. A lot of folks think of mass as something like the Old Guard forming up in columns trying to smash through the heights behind La Haye Sainte in the early evening of 18 June 1815 (which failed), or the tanks of VIII Corps trying to smash past Caen on 18 July 1944 (which kinda sorta worked). Which, sure, that is mass. But that kind of raw and naive mass has been increasingly unreliable for centuries. The inexorable trend over the centuries has been for units to fight more and more dispersed - the current concentrations in the Ukraine would have been unthinkably thin in 1943. As time has passed soldiers and their kit at the front line became more dispersed while at the same time firepower and other effects are becoming more concentrated - or massed - in both time and space. This trend is very obvious with artillery once indirect fire became the norm. The fire from of dozens and eventually hundreds of guns spread out over dozens or hundreds of square kilometres could be massed into a single area at about the same time, first winning WWI and then critically influencing the way WWII was fought. Note that this isn't strictly a function of range - the Paris gun had an absurdly long range, but didn't really affect the course of WWI. That said, increasing range definitely drove dispersion. The ultimate (so far) development of massing effects is PGM (incl ATGM). In some ways that sort of seems counter intuitive - how can less guns/rounds = more mass? - but it really isn't. The effect you want can now be concentrated, or massed, at exactly where you want (to within a metre or two), exactly when you want it (to within a few seconds). On a graph over time you get two crossing lines; massing of manpower and equipment is falling fast, while massing of effects is rising about as fast. tl;dr: you should be skeptical of massed manpower and equipment. It's been dying for a long time. No pun intended.

Nah. "We" have gotten a lot of stuff right (sooner or later. Literally; sooner than some, or later than some), and I'm serious about the wisdom of the crowd. But we shouldn't dislocate a shoulder patting ourselves on the back. We also don't have anything riding on our deductions. That alone means we can be more certain in our proclamations than perhaps is justified. Analysis from incomplete and contradictory information is hard, yo.

So, two things here: 1) we - the collective we - don't have any skin in this game. If we get it right; yay us. If we get it wrong; oh well, no harm, no foul.^ We can happily look back and say "see - we were right" while ignoring all the times we were wrong, and we also don't have to make meaningful decisions while peering forward into the murky future. 2) There have been a LOT of assertions and opinions and statements of 'fact' in this thread. I'm pretty sure if you went back and tallied them all up then the overall strike rate would look about as good as War On The Rocks. There definitely is a 'wisdom of the crowds' thing working in our favour here, but that masks a lot of outliers and outlandish stuff needed to get to that point. To give a spectacular example: We said; "lol, silly Russians. Why are they bothering to dig in?" ^ Some individuals in this thread obviously do have a LOT of skin in this.

Wait. Are you not the guy who's spent the last 20 months shrilly demanding that the west "SEND SOMETHING ANYTHING NOW YESTERDAY!"? Are you not the guy who has demanded that people follow your lead by "writing your representative NOW!"? Are you not the guy who dismissed people pointing out that equipment integration is a difficult and slow process by handwaving that the "Ukrainians are smart - they'll figure it out!"? If you are not that guy, I refer you to the matter of Cox v. Cleveland Stadium Corp (1974).

It could be meaningful though, as part of trend analysis. Is the proportion of US (and Western generally) parts increasing or decreasing? Based on this graphic; no idea. But that would be interesting to know, no? Over what period were these parts counted - is it across the whole war, or just Feb and Mar 2022, or Nov and Dec 2023? Based on this graphic; no idea. But that would be interesting to know, no? What is the total number of drones that these parts were counted from, and do we know the types/models of drones? If we know the types, was interpolation used to derive the counts (ie, "we never found the hyperdrive coupler from the Khinzal Mk.IIa that landed on Odessa at 2359hrs on the 29th of Feb, but we know those drones always have one and that bit comes from China, so we counted one to them."), or did they literally only count the parts they could find and which had explicit 'Made With Pride in [country]' marks stamped into them? Based on this graphic; no idea. But that would be interesting to know, no? We know (or at least "know") what goes into the various standard drones the Russians are using, and there are pretty accurate tallies around of the numbers and types of drones fired at Ukraine, on a daily basis. Breaking that down by national supplier of parts on a daily basis, into a graph that looked something like this ... ... would be an interesting and actually useful way of assessing the effectiveness and impact of embargoes as it applies to drones. But as it stands, and as @Butschi noted, that graphic is actually rather meaningless. Edit: to amplify something else @Butschi said - the counts themselves are kind of meaningless too. The US supplied 2,007 of the 3,000 parts found. I mean, that sounds pretty bad. But was that 2,000 pop rivets and 7 self-tapping screws? Based on this graphic; no idea. But that would be interesting to know, no? Similarly, China only supplied 112 parts, which doesn't sound a lot ... unless that was that 66 engines and 46 guidance motherboards. Was it? Based on this graphic; no idea. But that would be interesting to know, no?

ahem

@Bulletpoint Different objectives, different motivations. The West wants rule of law, free trade, and predictability. You know, all the things that allow rich folks to become richer. And, weirdly, that's one of the few things that rich folks are ready to see "their" taxes spent on. They'd still prefer it was your taxes being spent on it, but at a pinch they're prepared to grudgingly chip in a few pieces of silver. Uh, where was I? Oh, right; rule of law, free trade, predictability. Both the existence of Ukraine as a prosperous and independent country, and the outcome of the war in Ukraine are important for those things. Therefore those things are worth investing in by giving Ukraine literal tons of free stuff now in order to reap the global trade payoff later. China seems happy to use Russia as a cat's paw to mess with those things, and maybe thereby gain some maneuver space in the Pacific. But I doubt they care about Russia, or the outcome of the war, per se. Russia is failing and falling - it has been for a while, and the last couple of years has accelerated that. China might as well cash in while they still can. Sell their stuff at high prices, buy Russian stuff at low prices, while figuring out WTF they're going to do about Siberia if/when Russia disintegrates.

... oooor Russia is fueling the Chinese economy. We (this board, not you and I) have had this discussion before - you should not assume that an increase in $value maps 1:1 to an increase in volume delivered. Russia right now has very few suppliers worth a damn (oooh yaaay. Russia can import ... something? ... from ... Tanganyika? Cooool.). The few that it does has - primarily China - can set whatever prices they like. I doubt that China is straight-up gifting billions upon billions of dollars in civil and military aid to Russia in the way the West is for Ukraine.

Noooo, not really.

Well, to be extra fair, if you're referring to the Budapest Memorandum, no part of that sentence is accurate.

Interesting that you see this as a opportunity, rather than a problem. You know that old saying, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail"? Well, what's (almost) the only tool Putin has left? This is one of those cases where being 90% correct about someone's intentions isn't even close to good enough.