Bil Hardenberger

I think the first video ever that shows how ERA absorbs a hit, allowing the tank to withdraw. Another projectile missed the vehicle. Talk about luck.
Also, a great example why crappy reverse gear in T-types is a disadvantage:
 

Newest LivemapUA update🙂

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

I HATE watching Ukrainians lose a round. The ride on top thing seems to be a combination of how awful Soviet/Russian IFVs are to ride inside, and the risk of land mines thought to be as high or higher than small arms fire. You are of course correct about everything else, and you can learn all of those things playing this game. Smoke use seems to be a small fraction of what doctrine calls for on both sides? Are they just out of smoke grenades? Where not enough smoke grenades built/bought in the first place? Do Russian/Soviet smoke grenades/shells deteriorate in storage faster than actual explosives? I assume Nato stores of Soviet/Russian smoke munitions are low to non existent. Just to reiterate the amount of smoke shells/grenades used in all the video out there seems like a small fraction of what it should be, thoughts?
Edit: I really do think a copy of combat mission professional, and all if Bil's excellent writings on how to play, should be issued to every new lieutenant and senior NCO. It is not without flaws and it won't teach the nuts and bolts of HOW to get a platoon do things right. But it is shockingly good at teaching you what NOT to do, and let you get a bunch bad mistakes worked out with pixel truppen instead of the kind where you have to write letters to their family. Harder to do in an emergency mobilization with a war on, but I stand by the concept. 

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

Looks like they need to break out CMBS, visit my Battle Drill blog and brush up on their basic movement and react to contact drills.   
Bil

For a change Ukrainians showing their incompetence.
some pointers:
tracks are way too close to each other there should be a single track keeping the point so only it gets ambushed there should have been some recon element to notice this in advance  (fails to notice everything, I give that) seems like a split rout/defense. absolutely no control over these forces good example on the challenges of riding on top of the IFV. No cover from small arms fire and absolutely no maneuvering under small arms fire. Also command and control of the infantry squad(s) breaks up completely under fire. In this situation point tanks should pop smoke, notify the company and dismount to closest available "cover" and engage in hasty defense. After this the whole point platoon does hasty defense and the company commander makes a fast decision on what to do. Common options: disengage or push though with the 2. and 3. platoons. And in either case the enemy position receives immediate fire from the battalion mortars.
at least this is how it would go in the Finnish military.

I could probably write a book:
Forcing function - The US and west have been the the worlds hyperpower for at least 30 years.  Any conventional matchups come with so many caveats that only non-state networks have really been dumb enough to take them on in the CT/VEO space.  In fact the last time a nation state fell out of line the Gulf War happened and any great power outside of the US/western sphere took note.  So a revisionist state was trapped between the devil of nuclear warfare they could not win, and the deep blue see of being vastly overpowered in the conventional space.
Our History.  We understood our power early.  While interventions and CT work kept us busy in reality the west has not faced an existential state-based threat since the fall of the USSR.  As such, we let things slide in the famous "peace dividend days".  Everyone was counting mothballed tanks and ships, but we also mothballed the NS architecture capable of waging global scale political warfare.  Sure we kept intelligence and the like but funding went way down as we all figured "well who would mess with us".  It got a major boost after 9/11 but it was built to hunt humans in and amongst other humans, not deal with larger scale nation states.  So our ability to actually conduct counter-subversive and pre-emptive political warfare campaigns has atrophied over the last three decades.
Our reality.  Unlike autocratic societies, we lay our internal social divisions and friction-points out for everyone to see, we celebrate and fund them.  Further we have laws that enshrine freedoms and an open society based on the value of each and every citizen.  We doubled down on all of that after the Cold War ended.  What makes our nations strong a great are also some of our biggest vulnerabilities in this arena - not advocating for anything different here, this is just our reality.  Free press, free enterprise, free academia and freedoms "from and to" are what makes us the most powerful versions of humanity that ever existed; also leaves us very open to asymmetric strategies.
Their reality.  The revisionist power states, like China and Russia, were largely left out, or at least feel like they were left out of the re-writing of the global order.  They understand where they stand in the pecking order, and while it took awhile, they figured out that they 1) did not like it, and 2) had to start moving the needle to change it.  Direct confrontation with the west was impossible, so they went sideways.  They all have long histories in the subversive space, hell one could argue the Chinese invented it.  So they renewed old doctrines that leveraged energy resident within our systems to work for them - classic reflexive control.  This was done with long above-water campaigns of influence as they picked up steam.  Cyber and information space meant that societies became connected, but they also became "seeable" in extremely high resolution.  Like the invention of the microscope, this opened up new observable phenomenon, which we could not see in the Cold War.  States and corporations - often overlapping - went to town on this.  They collected data and developed theories of how humanity worked at micro-social scales that did not exists 30 years ago.  They could map those spaces and that could gauge cause and effect.  We used to sell stuff and collect "likes and subscribes", they, the other lost powers, used it to create "options".  Ones that are very hard to attribute and are aimed at what is both our greatest strengths and vulnerabilities - our open society.  These options were not legal acts of war, responses lay outside of our legalities and policies, and they were designed to hit us where they knew we would never even be able to agree at what happened - classic negative and null decision space.
Russia out front.  Russia has a very long history of playing these games and decided to flex first.  China has always been quietly waiting and watching in the background - stealing IP, buying off politicians and power brokers, colleting information and re-drawing maps.  Russia is not that nuanced, never has been really.  They were far more blunt and began act on their new theories - Gerasimov Doctrine/Russian Hybrid Warfare - whatever.  It was an ability to exercise strategic options outside of what we understood as war or peace.  Russia tried things out in Georgia and Chechnya - learned some hard lessons and then went prime time in 2014 in Ukraine.  No big conventional war, they just undecided Donbass and Crimea, and then made it too hard for us to really decide anything about it.  They pulled off wins in Syria and Africa (that no one really noticed) and kept getting free lunches while we in the west sat back and scratched our heads "how did they do that?"  Seriously, as I have told some senior people, "I am tired of admiring the other team".  China was doing all the same stuff, just much more nuanced and quietly - they called it unrestricted warfare/systems warfare but it basically amounts to the same thing; however, China appears much more adept at leveraging the rules and laws of the international order, while at the same time playing outside of them.
Unprepared and paralysis.  We really were in a kind of strategic shock in the west.  Both Russia and China had worked hard to make sure that they played out internal divisions and that groups in our own societies became indirectly invested (ignorantly in some cases) in their interests.  Our national security and defence architecture was too busy chasing "snakes" and was dislocated in dealing with state-based threats.  In many cases we had no policy or legal frameworks for what these new threat theories could do, and we sure as hell did not have counters/pushbacks.  So while we were basically strategically dislocated both Russia and China made great gains while we dithered and argued with each other - and I do not mean solely in the US.  North America, Europe and Pacific partners, all yelling and divided.  NATO was on the ropes, many nations had grown tired of GWOT, and we saw (are seeing) the rise of nationalism and isolationism.
Russia poops the bed - and modern war is in the wind.  For reasons I still do not understand Russia decides to drop its A-Game and fall back on an open conventional military power approach in Ukraine.  I have never heard a good reason why this is, and why they took this risk but here we are.  So China is sitting back watching, again as all this unfolds and what does it see?  Well first thing is that modern conventional warfare is upside down.  By our old metrics/doctrine Ukraine should have lost this, even in the face of Russian crappiness.  The war was going to be longer and grinding but eventually Ukraine would fold under the weight of a military machine that was an order of magnitude larger by some metrics. And then "boop"!  So what the hell happened? - well personally I think the 3rd offset (out of favor now) actually came into it age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_strategy) in doing so it is re-writing conventional war as we know it.  Russia is running into a brick wall but China is watching and noting it. China was feeling strong, by old metrics it was catching up and rising to challenge the West - particularly when one considers our aversion to sacrifice.  Unless China is a complete idiot, and nothing I have seen suggests they are, then this war completely blew up their pre-war estimates.  Modern warfare just got insanely more lethal and expensive - harder not easier.  And once again western warfare looks like it leaped ahead, this was not the plan.
So What?  Well, despite all the sabre rattling with China over Taiwan, I suspect the Chinese are conducting a serious re-think (they should be).  Everyone in the bar is armed and sizing each other out.  A big guy draped with guns and ammo, looking like Rambo, picked a fight with a little guy who just punched Rambo's teeth in with his own ammo belts. A conventional conflict with China just got less likely, if China has been paying attention and I suspect they have.  The metrics by which China was gauging things just shifted and they are not going to pull "a Russia" blindly.
So, So what?  Well China is likely going to do a few things 1) re-set its conventional military power metrics, likely better than we will - we are going to bask in "well there you go, we win!", 2) Keep to its A-game longer and double down and what has been working - it saw what happened to Russia.  We on the other hand are likely to go back to arguing and losing the bubble, making us even more vulnerable.  That is the biggest unknown and question "how do we re-gain internal integrity in our systems, without breaking them ourselves?"  All the while China and very likely what is left of Russia will work in helping us to break us.  We are likely to see a lot more proxy actions done this way because invading is a dumb idea.  China has a decades head start on us, so we face major challenges getting better in this space - it is the one area that China's options are expanding and ours remain stagnant. 
Cold War, Hot Peace, Tepid Status Quo, it all really ends the same; more political warfare happening where the terrain favours the opponent - we need to get over ourselves and agree that in this area we are all of one mind: create equilibrium and expand options, while compressing our opponents.  And this is not all on the US, which has its own problems, we have seen pressures and threats here in Canada in ways that we do not have any response to other than "togetherness and resilience".  Every western country has a micro-social space, and it is largely lying wide open to direct influence, which in a democracy is incredibly powerful and dangerous.  I strongly suspect that this war will be a watershed moment for whatever comes next - likely a Coldish War but one where the lines are far more blurry and a significant continuing of the trend of the re-emergence of political warfare as a primary theater in pursuing national interests while blunting an opponents.     
Finally, my instincts tell me, "don't think 1960", they are telling me "think 1900".  There are a lot of similarities between now and pre WWI with respect to great power competition/conflict.  Accept now we have nukes and cyberspace - and the history of WWI to learn from.  Regardless, we need to win this war, put Russia back in a box and then everyone sit down and have  a serious conversation on how we let this happen and how we need to close the spaces between us or someone is going to use that: one second to midnight at a time.

Sooo.. after reading this thread the past few days it appears, to me, that the UA culminated in their counter-attack around Kharkiv a few days ago... I now believe that Kherson was a feint and never had, and still doesn't have, enough combat power to close the sack. They are maintaining the pressure though... but they haven't cracked the Russian line yet, not that I've seen.
Perhaps they are already doing it and that's why it appears like progress has slowed, but I think this is the point for consolidating and reassessing the next area to concentrate on.  These grinding recon ops that we are seeing now are costly and probably aren't giving the Ukrainians much in return, other than fixing the Russians in place, which might be their intent.
Hopefully they are readjusting as we speak and another offense will kick off in the next week or two with another major breakthrough. That is what I suspect anyway.
Bil

Sooo.. after reading this thread the past few days it appears, to me, that the UA culminated in their counter-attack around Kharkiv a few days ago... I now believe that Kherson was a feint and never had, and still doesn't have, enough combat power to close the sack. They are maintaining the pressure though... but they haven't cracked the Russian line yet, not that I've seen.
Perhaps they are already doing it and that's why it appears like progress has slowed, but I think this is the point for consolidating and reassessing the next area to concentrate on.  These grinding recon ops that we are seeing now are costly and probably aren't giving the Ukrainians much in return, other than fixing the Russians in place, which might be their intent.
Hopefully they are readjusting as we speak and another offense will kick off in the next week or two with another major breakthrough. That is what I suspect anyway.
Bil

Well it is optimistic assessment, we can say that.  Kinda sounds like a sales pitch to be honest.  When I hear "cost neutral" or "someone else will pay" I start looking for the magic beans.  There are some significant downsides to this whole thing and some serious risks - a fully fractured Russia is one that has been discussed here a lot.  
None of what is listed here is guaranteed:
- The EU may look to the US to foot a significant portion of the reconstruction bill.  Plus the US is going to want a piece of that anyway - infrastructure equals influence.
- LNG/Energy.  Ok, Europe could also accelerate away from LNG to either renewables or coal, likely both.  Weaning them off cheap Russian LNG does not automatically equate to "buying American" with its shipping cost overhead etc.
- NATO - definitely going to get some momentum, but that is likely going to be a drain as demand goes up and every nation tries to do it as cheaply as possible, leaving hidden expansion costs to, yep the US as usual.
- China.  Don't get me started.  They have been sitting back and reaping intel rewards and LLs this whole war, plus they are likely to get access to the all that Russian cheap LNG, from a strong negotiation position. As we polarize up, the vacuum created by the collapse of the Russian Arms industry is more likely to get picked up by China.

Seriously, does anyone in that club look like they are going to cozy up to US arms imports?  India is the swing state; however, this war has rattled them energy wise as well.  I am not sure where Indian-Western relationships are going to go after this war.  This has been a major disruption.
 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/business/russia-oil-china-india-ukraine-war.html
https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/04/indian-foreign-policy-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/
We can probably count on India continuing to backstop Russia as a minimum, they will just get everything cheaper from here on out.
I mean I get the thrust here - it is pushback against the political narrative of "Ukraine is costing too much and it is X's fault, etc etc".   Ukraine is going to cost everyone in the west, most definitely but that is not the issue.  The issue is that the cost of "not doing" was much higher than the "cost of doing" in this case.  The cost of not doing were a complete destabilization of the western rules based international order, which underpin a significant amount of US global power base.  In short the whole damn scheme falls apart if a revisionist power can employ conventional warfare to re-draw the map in freaking Europe.  That is way to complicated and nuanced for the average voter - in any country - so we have to go with these sorts of polarized assessments, I get that.  However, I am also very nervous around over-subscribing to narratives that do not account for the downsides and risk.

Some other weapon slang (usually common for UKR and RUS): 
- Dashka (was heard in this video) - hypocrism form of female name Darya - DShK HMG
- Kalashmat - combined "Kalashnikov"+"avtomat" (SMG), but also similar to the Russian word "koloshmatit' " - jargon, which means "to inflict many punches, to beat up" - AK-rifle 
- bekha - jargon name of BMW car -  BMP 
- Kabanchyk ("little boar") - 120 mm or 122 mm shell
- mishka - hypocrism from Russian "medved' "(bear) - tank. I don't know why
- motolyha  - combined from "motor" and consonant jargon word "kolymaha" (eng."rattletrap") - MTLB
- Grach ("rook") - Su-25 
- Sushka - any Su-aircraft
- Krokodil - Mi-24
- Sapog  ("hight boot") - SPG-9  

Great, they will be well positioned to run a nasty insurgency.
It is not about tactical level capability - it won't matter if the "RU Nats" get laser guns at this point.  The Russians have failed at creating, projecting and employing a functioning operational military system.  The symptoms of this are:
- In Phase I - got bogged down and eventually collapsed on operation offence, frankly their best shot at actually winning this thing.  Noted shortfalls were logistics and ISR - e.g. the Russians had lobbed 2000 "precision" cruise missile systems by end March I believe, yet Ukraine still had 1) functioning transportation infrastructure and 2) functioning information structure.  That, and all the abandoned vehicles, this tell me that the entire system left of effect (remember this?)

Is not coherent, nor did it work.
- In Phase II, they abandoned manoeuvre and dislocation entirely, likely because they had too, and devolved back to literal WW1 levels of dumb-mass attrition...and it did not work.  The UA was hurt in some units/sectors, but freakin obviously not anywhere enough to weaken their operational system. The Russians decided to waste their remaining, and dwindling, supply of Deep Strike on terror strikes - likely a combination of incoherent doctrine,  dis-jointed C2 and crappy ISR.  Again operational offence = fail - they never reached their operational objectives in the Donbas after significant costs.
- In Phase III, we get to the real fun stuff.  First, I do not want to diminish the UA's accomplishments - not one bit, conducting a complex double operation 500+kms apart is really hard to do for any military, let alone one that basically had to mobilize to this level in 6 months. 
However, what is clear to me is that once again Russian ISR is crap - they could not see where the UA forces (Division apparently) were massing and last I checked even light vehicles need gas.  Second the Russian logistical system has been hammered so badly it probably can't tell which way is up right now - Oryx shows almost 200 engineering vehicles and 1549(!) lost logistical vehicles (a number that is freakishly high, but we know is lowballed as most strikes occurred well back from the front).  Just for reference an entire Soviet MRD had about 2000 logistical vehicles (count them:https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm100-2-3.pdf).  So the RA has nearly lost an entire MR Divisions worth of logistics vehicles  - that we know about, and we also know their current BTG orgs are very light on log vehicles to begin with.  This does not count ammo dumps and whatever else got HIMARed. 
Then the RA got bounced between both ends of its ridonkulous frontage like a dirty tennis ball, getting smack at both ends and in the middle for good measure.  And then fell inward like a rotten garden shed and lost 3000 sq kms on what looks like at least 100+km frontage -  Russian operational defence = fail.
So at this point I do not care if the RA hires the freakin Sardaukar - if they cannot rebuild an entire operational military system en par with the UA's, they are done.     

I am not really sure why anyone believes that "mobilization" is some sort of magic spell that will solve this war for Russia....on either side of this equation.  We have covered this before but a review may be in order.
Key here is the term "peer-conflict".  That means a relative symmetry between military capability and architectures to the point that numbers start to matter in determining outcome.  In this situation theoretically the side with the higher force ratios will have a better chance of winning.  At this point this conflict is nowhere near a level of qualitative parity.
Beyond the morale issues, which are legion, a loose measure of military quality is DETO - Doctrine, Equipment, Training and Organization.  (Before anyone weighs in, yes there are about a half dozen national variations on this that take into account everything from policy to infrastructure, but lets keep it simple).
So, yes, Russia has a big scary population base - we are probably talking 30+ million fighting age males, assuming you could tap even 10 percent of that - excess and fit-ish - that is 3+ million troops Russia could throw at this war.  Assuming mass conscription doesn't trigger a major political upheaval; the first problem is you have to turn those 3+ million civilians into combat capable military formations - something the Russian have demonstrated problems with before the war. 
Second major problem is that one has to turn them into military fighting formations of the same or better quality than the UA.  And remember the UA is already force generating and will continue to do so long after this war is over...because Russia.  So Russia has to go from zero to hero faster than the UA are already doing.  Now before someone spouts of "mass has a quality all its own" - a truism which has died an ignoble death in this conflict - in modern warfare one still needs relative parity for quantity to matter.  I welcome any nation to try low quality human wave attacks on the modern battlefield.  In fact the UA is demonstrating the exact opposite right now - high quality empowered small is kicking dumb-large to death.  So now in order to mobilize Russia needs to meet a bar it did not have on 23 Feb, let alone in time to get out in front of things now.
Third major problem, Russia does not even have the essential skillsets to create a peer military.  And I am talking everywhere.  For example, in order to create an ISR architecture on par with the West they need an entire military ISR complex that does not exist anywhere near that level.  It took the US decades - dating back to AirLand Battle (hey go check out CMCW while you are at it!) - to construct the ISR architecture they are pumping into Ukraine right now.  Further Ukraine has a home grown system they 1) have training and technical support for from the west, 2) have a 6 month head start, and 3) are not living under crippling sanctions.  Some Iranian drones do not make an ISR architecture, it is what you plug those drones into.
So Russia can "mobilize" all it wants; however, it will be mobilizing a Cold War era military, one worse than it had before this war.  They will be nowhere near DETO parity with the UA for maybe a couple decades.  With their new drones they can watch all those columns of T55s, driven by conscripts with a months training, supported by a rickety logistics corp get hammered by HIMARs and next-gen drone swarms.  
I will give the Russians points for stubborn, they have that in spades.  This war is clearly at the "cut your losses" point.  The RA has left as much hardware on the battlefield as the Iraqi Army did in the Gulf War - when you are in that league, get out!  Mobilization will not save them, this is not 1941, it is 1905.

Kind of off topic, but I do have one major gripe.  The F'n Russians have ruined military fiction for me.  Now every time I look at a book depicting a Russian advance all I can think of is... "yeah no way.  Too much fantasy, maybe I'll go back and just read the Silmarillion".  sigh

And this is why fully autonomous is going to happen.  EW kills the link back to operator, if the operator is onboard AI EW does not work as well.  EMP is a lot of energy to put out, and we shield everything against it based on CBRN-E doctrine.
I honestly think the solution to UAS, is other UAS.

UAV swarm at the US National Training Center:
https://twitter.com/NTCLead6
Good to see that the training regime is evolving.

Total meltdown (yet still likely carefully managed):