acrashb

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

For me, and likely others who are not 'tuned in', what is an RU Nat?
Google gives me this guy - nAts - VALORANT Esports Wiki (fandom.com) - who, while he may well have been press-ganged into being a drone operator, is not single-handedly holding back the UA at Lyman.
I thought the "RU Nat"s were a movement, political philosophy, loosely-affiliated birds-of-a-feather, but apparently they are much more than that.
Are they:
their own thing, self-sufficient armed forces with it's own chain of command?  If so, who pays and arms them? What is their citizenship? How do they derive legitimacy and/or not get unwanted attention from the Russian security forces? a chunk of the Russian armed forces with command elements staffed - infiltrated? - by people sympathetic to RU Nats (whoever they are) goals?  Again, how do they avoid disappearances and balcony falls? a political party with its own armed forces?  That would be odd, and they don't show in this. If the answer is lengthy and there is some internet reference, happy to have that and I'll read up.
 
They mean this Kiev:

SIDE NOTE 
THE SAGA OF THE LAPTOP, vol. 45.
@Haiduks laptop is still in Poland with my mother-in-law,  who, get this, has the idea in her head that he's a potential Russian agent. 
I sh*t thee not. 
I've told her to drop the idea, her own son has told her and she's talked with Haiduk on the phone! I don't really think she's really serious (I think...). 
Plus she doesn't trust couriers or Polish mail. The idea was she'd get to Przemsyl with the stuff and hand off to a friend or family of Haiduk. 
However She had other ideas, strong and unusual ones, that I learned of from her son in a call at 11pm at night (hes not part of the madness, she just badgered him incessantly). 
She wanted to pass the package to a music band, just before they went to Kyiv for a concert. Now, it's Kozak System, who are known but...eh of all the people that Customs might take a long hard look at,  I'm pretty sure Musicians and their Entourage are near the top of the list. Plus she literally knew no one on the band, and they were leaving that evening. Somehow she got in contact with,  I think, a guitarist (?) and they agreed. Sure, ok, I guess? But not really. Fine, the guitarist (who's name I never learned)  but what if a hanger-on takes a shine to this expensive,  well wrapped packages? I'm sure the Musicians are decent people, but a concert tour is not the way to get a $1700 value package across the damn border! This was all extremely last minute, and untraceable. 
Yet she doesn't trust a signed courier service. 
I love her as family but, lol... Oh man. 
https://giphy.com/gifs/snl-l46CoyPN7mdW3C1Fe
Anyhow, I'm going to take this madness in hand and pay to get the package couriered to a family friend of Haiduk.
*siiiiigggghhhhhhhhh*

Partly under the surface. I remember that's an old Russian trick from ww2.

Spent the day at our 82d Airborne Association Chapter "Rumble" (Annual picnic) . Guest speaker was Marty Schweitzer, from the McCrystal Group, former ADC of the 82d, among (many) various other things. He provided a few thoughts on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He's had apparently a bit of contact with the Russian Army over the years.
His evaluation: 
1. "They are terrible. Really terrible"   (meaning their competence).
2. They have a lot of artillery, always have, and they use it.
3. Their maneuver elements are "absolutely awful" at tactical maneuver ops.
4. If they ever get to where they are going they can't fight well
  -- because --
5. They have nothing resembling western army' professional NCO corps. Their NCOs are NCOs in rank/name only, have almost no authority, are discouraged from exhibiting initiative, and even if they could, are not given the whole picture of the op - objective, assets. In his opinion this more than anything else cripples them. And the UA has quickly learned that by taking out as many officers and HQ units as possible, everything grinds to aa halt.
None of this is any revelation, but another analysis by someone with experience that confirms a lot of what has been seen and said here.
He discussed aa a few other things, but the rest were not really relevant to this discussion. Except maybe one. He spent time on the Joint Chief's staff. He said that when there is a crisis somewhere, the president (any president) has two questions. a) where are the carriers right now?, and b) how soon can the 82d get there if they have to? 
Other than that, it was a day of good camaraderie with a bunch of former paratroopers of all ages and really good food, on a spectacular afternoon.

Dave

why when I was a kid we trudged through nuclear fallout uphill both ways!  AND then we had to hide under our desks!

Kinda comes off like a millennial just 'discovered' that nuclear war is a thing.  Boomers and X'ers grew up with that gun to the head basically since birth - "Climate change? Sure if you want to wait around for a century.  Lemme tell you about how mankind can really kill us all in a weekend, son!" 

Extract from an article (paywalled unfortunately) in the Spectator, based on operational data from the Ukrainian military. The whole article is here:
Article - Why didn't Ukraine fall.
..."However, the operational data reveals that 90 per cent of Ukrainian UAVs flown before July were lost, mainly to electronic warfare. The average life expectancy of a quadcopter was three flights. The average life expectancy of a fixed wing UAV was six flights. Surviving a flight does not mean a successful mission; electronic warfare can disrupt command links, navigation and sensors, which can cause the UAV to fail to fix a target. Contrary to the narrative, Russian EW has been successful on the battlefield. Instead, what has proved decisive is the sheer number of drones that Ukraine has been able to deploy. The most useful UAVs, according to the data, are cheap fixed wing models. This is not because they are difficult to defeat but because they are inefficient to target, flying too high for short-range air defences while being too inexpensive to engage with medium or long-range systems."

My wife teaches at what can roughly be translated as trade school. They have just the opposite experience. The Ukrainians are the more organized and eager of the refugees.

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

Heh, clearly never taught in US or Canada.  Unpleasant, undisciplined and lawyered up.

Max Skinner: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you, personally, to the desert?
... Its clean. I like it because its clean

The point was to illustrate what I said at the end - the versatility of a lightweight 105mm howitzer to move and set up quickly, fire a bunch of rounds quickly, and then scoot somewhere else. The movement doesn't have to be by helicopter. A 105 isn't hard to tow around.
Maybe I should have just said that.
Dave

I seriously hope you are going to write that book.
The prospect of conflict with China scares me. With Russia, well we turned a blind eye towards Russias ambitions but at the same to we overestimated their capabilites. China though... I don't know how you military guys have been perceiving things over the last two decades. In industry but also in science, we have been underestimating China. At the same time we know that they want to be the dominant power by 2049. I, too, think they will learn from this war. And if they finally make a move (for Taiwan, for instance), things will get nasty unless we have somehow learned a few lessons ourselves and made ourselves less dependent on others. I highly doubt there can be sanctions like against Russia. The current energy crisis will hurt us but we will manage somehow. Disruption of trade with China will directly cause our economy to implode. Yes, China is dependent on us, too. But if you think Scholzing is bad... well, you have seen nothing yet, I assure you.
 

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.

When I was in the 82d, one mission we practiced over and over and over was the 2 gun raid, a fast quick hitting mission for a 105mm battery. I was the Fire Direction Officer for our battery as one of my assignments in the Army. Best job in Field Artillery (I may be biased). 

The "raid" was to move 2 guns forward by UH-60 to a position close to the front lines to fire at a lucrative target in the enemy rear. Since a 105mm is relatively short ranged compared to a 155mm, we needed to move up close, get dropped off, lay the two guns, fire the mission, pack up, call our rides and get out of dodge. In a hurry. But it was a quick strike at an important target of opportunity. These guys are firing at a leisurely pace. In a pinch, a 105mm can be fired almost as fast as a mortar. Almost. The gunner in the video is checking his sight on the aiming stakes to make sure the gun hasn't shifted with each round. We'd have a crew of 6 or so too, so the new rounds would come fast. It's cased ammo so loading is very quick, as you can see. Much more effective once we got UH-60s to replace the UH-1H choppers. 2 UH-60s could sling a gun under each with ammo strapped onto its trails, the gun crew, and me and my assistant one of us each in one of the choppers, and the "Smoke" (Chief of the Firing Battery - a SFC, the senior NCO in the battery next to the 1SG). 
As the FDO, I also had to act as XO on the spot and survey the guns while my "Computer"  (E-5 SGT who normally calculates elevation and time), set us up a temporary FDC to calculate from  - just me and him - and then after surveying in the guns run over and finish the calcs and safety check them.  The XO stayed back with the battery of 4 remaining guns, and my FDC team sergeant (a SSG), stayed there to run the full FDC back in battery. A lot of action in a real hurry, we'd be in and out in about 20 minutes after slinging 10-20 rounds per gun out. 
I don't know what these guys are doing but a M102 and this comparable UK howitzer are highly mobile and versatile. The shells don't pack the punch (about 1/3 the weight) but this is what they shine at. 
Note: No one checked the barrel between rounds. Bad form, and potentially extremely dangerous, although a little less so with cased ammo than separate. Need to check there's no obstruction in the tube.
Dave

Steve, thanks.  That was both comprehensive and colourful.

So when Grigb says "RU Nat forces around Lyman" I'll take that to mean elements of the RA that have volunteered, rather than been drafted, and are aligned with the RU Nat commentators we've been hearing from.  One assumes the elements can cluster by asking for transfers to parts of the RA aligned with their views.
 
Strikes me as an internal fifth column, and the most likely contender for post-Putin leadership.  Because they appear to be more organized than the opposition, and that is how you win.  See any number of states in turmoil - or see Lenin.
And on the Russia surviving pool:
As defined by Russia still having an ISO-3166 country code, I'm in the Russia will still be around in ten years camp.  I think it will be greatly diminished, a rump state; the CSTO will be gone or exist only on paper; current restive regions with physical distance from Moscow (leading to command and control issues - shipping and supporting troops to quell disturbances or goods and services to placate a populace and their power brokers becomes expense across distance) will be gone and China encroaching on the areas with ethnic Chinese (Han?) majorities.  I don't think it will devolve into warlord regions, there appear to be power structures in waiting to prevent that.
If you disagree and I'm wrong, look me up in ten years and I'll buy you a beer  or sumfink.

There is a notable context to his remarks as well, and I find it wrong precisely because it is being used to stop aid to Ukraine, as the article notes, the entire context of this is him defending the lack of further weapons to Ukraine, justifying it as "Germany needs to uphold its NATO and EU defense obligations when Russia looks at Europe again" and "Ukraine's ability to end the war militarily is impossible", in that sense, his underplaying of the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives, his overplaying of Russian ability to open additional fronts are just excuses to provide political cover to those in Germany reluctant to anger Putin and wishing to conduct rapprochement sooner. 
This is the main theater of war, Ukraine, not Poland or the Baltics or Finland, smash Russia by providing Ukraine with weapons and NATO and the EU are safe in the future. Allow Ukraine to militarily win the war and you prevent a grinding, long term conflict that turns Ukraine into a basketcase for Europe to hold.
This is just bull**** designed to let Ukraine falter, Germany to loudly decry the stalemate and call for Minsk III and then the gas can flow again. 
 

Western support is a big reason why Ukraine is winning. But the biggest reason is probably Russian incompetence coupled with good Ukrainian strategic and operational decisions. The absence of western support likely would have resulting in Ukrainian defeat by now, but all the western support in the world wouldn't have helped if the Ukrainians didn't use it effectively.
edit: A phrase I'm becoming increasingly fond of is "necessary but not sufficient". Western weapons were likely necessary but not sufficient for Ukrainian victory. Russian incompetence was likely necessary but not sufficient for Ukrainian victory. And Ukrainian competence was likely necessary but not sufficient for Ukrainian victory. All three of those conditions together were likely required for victory. An absence of any one of those likely would have resulted in defeat.

Only thing I would add beyond the solid replies so far is that Ukraine has a significant - some may say decisive - ISR advantage.  This means that RUAF aircraft are being spotted likely as they are rolling out the hanger doors, or in some cases as they are being prepped.  The multi-layer defence of the UA combined with better C4ISR means the UA can position point defence well ahead of RUAF sorties.
Clearly this is working as has been noted the RUAF is basically doing stand off attacks and almost zero CAS.  There were rumours that the RUAF had been effective in blunting UA offensives but no one ever had any proof of this, nor do the events of the last week and half support the idea. 
My guess is that we have a situation of air parity thru denial right now so both air forces have largely been held back or used in standoff attack roles. Kind of a "if it flies, it dies" parity.  The Western and UA answer is HIMARs and deep strike systems that are basically acting in the role of airpower at increasing ranges.  Russia does not have the same thing, its missiles are largely focused on terror attacks which are more often than not decoupled from operational or tactical objectives. 

What is our timeline? 
I will happily predict the current Russian state will not fall apart in any substantial way for the next 10 years.

That was an absolutely epic movie that truly deserves a sequel. Russia is working on the scenario as we speak

Canister has an effective range of, maybe, 2-300 metres. The 30mm cannon has an effective range of 2-4,000 metres.
You could, presumably, design a 30mm canister round with a prox or time or distance fuze, at an extravagant development time and cost, and production cost. Plus the weapon will need to be modified to allow for fuzing at a rate of 2-3 rounds per second.
With either a basic shotgun-style canister round or a whizzy fuzed round, you now have a specialist round for a specialist purpose. How many of the 450-odd rounds carried in the vehicle are this specialist round, where are they carried, and how does the crew access them quickly when required.
Canister has negligible armour penetration. 30mm will readily penetrate whatever a helicopter can still fly with.
A radar requires power.
A radar is fiddly, fragile, and readily prone to battle damage.
A radar requires additional internal wiring, plus display and controls inside the limited turret space.
Who operates the radar? Who now does their role? How much of their training year is allocated to training for this role? What other role(s) gets less training?
Radars are emitters, making the BMPs even easier to find.
 
All of that is solvable with aenough time, money, and manpower, but what is the opportunity cost? And that still leaves you with the question of which vehicles are conducting the IFV role while the BMPs are off pretending to be SPAA?

For me, and likely others who are not 'tuned in', what is an RU Nat?
Google gives me this guy - nAts - VALORANT Esports Wiki (fandom.com) - who, while he may well have been press-ganged into being a drone operator, is not single-handedly holding back the UA at Lyman.
I thought the "RU Nat"s were a movement, political philosophy, loosely-affiliated birds-of-a-feather, but apparently they are much more than that.
Are they:
their own thing, self-sufficient armed forces with it's own chain of command?  If so, who pays and arms them? What is their citizenship? How do they derive legitimacy and/or not get unwanted attention from the Russian security forces? a chunk of the Russian armed forces with command elements staffed - infiltrated? - by people sympathetic to RU Nats (whoever they are) goals?  Again, how do they avoid disappearances and balcony falls? a political party with its own armed forces?  That would be odd, and they don't show in this. If the answer is lengthy and there is some internet reference, happy to have that and I'll read up.
 
They mean this Kiev:

What? Please kindly provide details?