acrashb

I'm your huckleberry. 

...OK, I lied.
Where are we going?????
Planet Ten!!!!
When are we going?????
Real soon!!!!
 
....BFC forum is where-a you wear your hat!

Given the amount of data that has to be processed I would say it is impossible.  For the ground war alone - this is a Theater Intelligence Cell's job.  That will be a lot of people working in specialist areas - eg current battle, future plans, order-of-battle etc to feed the grown-up who's going to make sense of it and then brief it to the guy who's going to make the decisions.
I am that guy in Afghanistan - On average I read 500 individual reports a day and it takes me about three and a half hours to make sense of them all.  About an hour or so to write up the individual incidents of interest and about 45 minutes to 90 minutes to find and plot where they took place.  About 20 incidents is a busy day for me.  Databasing the incidents takes about 20 minutes.  On top of that it takes me about an hour and a half to write slightly more in-depth pieces for my daily summary.  In-depth collation or in-depth reading?  Forget it ... not enough time in the day.  This is small beer compared to the amount of reporting that's coming out of Ukraine.

And we can all say it together: "Russian defensive options spaces are....collapsing! Ukrainian options spaces are expanding" just as God, nature and billions of dollars of western weapons intended.

Out of likes, so +1 on that - funny and true.  If RA actually does try mass use of helos for resupply, the plentiful manpads will once again show up in videos.
PS: so we can add Dune analogies to the LOTR ones?  Does that make Zelensky into Paul Atreides?

Heh, that is probably the hardest thing for any military person top learn once they hit the strategic/political level - doing nothing.  It grates against the grain but sometime you just have to wait for Y and Z to emerge, no forcing it.
Of course ending this war quickly is the plan - weapons planning and all that, we are seeing brilliant demonstration from Ukraine right now.  I was speaking about "what to do about that rascal Russia" once this war is over.  This war:
- Needs to end with a hard unambiguous Ukrainian win, which by extension the West will also win.
- Be followed up by a Marshal Plan level of reconstruction in Ukraine.
- Result in a functional Russian state that 1) we can deal with like a sane-ish person (we have managed crazy), and 2) Gets back in line.  Obviously neither of those two include poor old Vlad but he bought the ticket, he and his cronies take the ride.
And our God Money will save us!  Here is the problem with that particular spin - there are people out there that hate us more than they love money.  Trust me, I have met them.  And 6000 loose nukes is very bad...as in very very bad.  Because even if only a few squeak out of our "nuke for bucks" plan the entire game changes.  Best case is that people of the former Russia use them on each other, then we only have to deal with the fallout.  Worst case, someone uses them to trigger an article 5 against another nuclear power and then we can all save our mighty dollars for toilet paper.  In the middle are a whole bunch of revenge scenarios against places like Kyviv, Western Europe and North America if whoever gets them has legs.
Nope. nope. nope. If it does start to happen we might actually see western intervention into Russia to try and grab them.  

We've done it before. (not crowdsourced of course, government funded) Look up "Megatons to Megawatts" for some interesting reading. It's a little known fact that for 20 years, HALF of all US electricity production from nuclear energy (So about 10% of total) used to be Soviet/Russian nuclear warheads decommissioned due to arms control treaties. The project was a solution to the maintenance of security over thousands of nuclear warheads to prevent diversion of the SMN (special nuclear material). Through various processes it was downblended into harmless (from a "go boom" standpoint) useable fuel for regular nuclear power plants in the US. Thousands of warheads. What better way to make use of old warheads than keeping the heat and lights on. Beats burying them somewhere.

Dave

The Ukranians are fighting with what they have available at the moment.
As I understand it, the discussion of death of tank is not about "tanks are so useless we're going to say no to free tanks" but about "when equipping / upgrading new formation, would I rather have 1 abrams or 2 himars for the same money" or even better "is it better to have 20 abrams or 10 abrams 20 himars"?

To be honest the simplest answer to most of these points has been staring us in the face this entire war - precision indirect fires.  I have seen no heavy assaults on RA strong points but we have seen a near endless stream of precision strikes on everything.
If a hybrid light infantry force meets a strong point - one that ISR somehow missed - the answer so far seems “call in Excalibur”.  If indirect is becoming so precise, why drag a bunch of heavy metal along?  Add to this indirect fire ranges are getting really long.  Steve makes a good counter-factual analogy, here is a pro-factual; what if the UA had 400 HIMARs systems?  Each light Bn had a battery on call…do I need to bring steel to strongpoint now?

New rule for the next 24 hours: if we're going to make battle comparisons they have to be from LOTR.

Back to the "Is the tank dead?" question.
My answer is "No, but it depends on who has the tank and who they're fighting" and goes back to a post I made in May regarding whether modern military technology favors the defense.  Modern military tech favors the side that has it.  
If you have a bunch of tanks and you're facing an opponent who has at/over the horizon "if you can detect it it's dead" ATGM capability, the tank is effectively dead - you have to basically have infantry go through the hard way and clear everything (and really *everything*) to the range of the defender's ATGMs.
If you have tanks and all your opponent has is LOS RPGs, you can use your tanks more or less the same way you'd have used them in CMBO - combined arms infantry support role, and tank on tank in some environments.  Especially if your tanks have both modern sighting/shooting capability and modern RA and APS to defend from RPG fire and the occasional ATGM.
We've gotten to watch this in Ukraine.  On Feb 24 it was an almost symmetric technology situation: Russia and Ukraine were both equipped almost identically with old Warsaw Pact stuff and its descendants, with a big dose of modern ATGM and drone technology on the Ukraine side (some of which is Ukrainian - I saw some good ads for the Stugna-P).  Russia started with bad tactics and assumptions and was stopped quickly by a lot of 1 shot/1 kill ATGM activity, with virtually every UA squad carrying multiple modern ATGMs. Plus TB-2s with IR guided ATGMs.
Now things are turned around and Ukraine is on the attack.  Something that has stood out to me is that the Ukrainians are  still willing to ride in on top of their armor and race in on wheeled vehicles after the events of the last 6 months.  I take that to mean that while on paper Russia has ATGMs at least superficially similar to the Stugna P, in practice they're not widely distributed - certainly nothing like the proliferation of Stugna/NLAW/Javelin in the hands of the UA.  So when the UA put a dozen tanks on the front, along with a bunch of mounted infantry, they could actually execute combined arms attacks because they had confidence that they wouldn't lose all the tanks (and their riders) in the first 20 seconds.  They still have to deal with RPGs, but if they're unguided they're low accuracy at longer ranges and have to be fired from ranges where light arms/MGs can suppress the operators.
This war is really showing the relevance of asymmetries in capabilities.  It started out as close to a modern symmetric war as you could have: two former Warsaw Pact countries with essentially the same equipment and training, and really that was the situation in 2014.  Mass won in 2014.  Ukraine started breaking the symmetry in 2014 by getting western training to modernize the way they fight. They managed to contain the Donbas action and use it as a way to improve the training and experience in their of their active and reserve military.  Russia didn't.  
Fast forward to 2022, and we saw the improved strategic and tactical capabilities of Ukraine at the start, combined with the added asymmetry of 3 ATGMs for every tank in the RA, and gigabytes of ISR.  Ukrainian forces disappeared into fog and started melting the initial Russian attack.  We never really saw a lot of massed Ukrainians, but they hit the Kyiv/Kharkiv front hard enough that Russia was forced to withdraw.  And from there the asymmetries have grown - western governments developed confidence that Ukraine could win and started pouring in resources for both immediate use and long term development - material, training, ISR.  And sanctioning Russia, so the RA has become more and more desperate for equipment, falling back on older and older stuff, expanding the asymmetry in the other direction as Russian capability deteriorates.
So the tank is fine if your opponent doesn't have a bunch of modern ATGMs, and hosed if it does. So if it's UK/Sweden vs. the US, the tank is dead.  But the same is true for just about anything - does a particular capability create an asymmetric advantage?  It all depends on who is facing who.
 

@The_Capt
The writing of UKR soldier in TG

Translation:
Kiss hands of the motor-infantry and tankers. They are builders of this breakthrough: they are beat in defense and seized crucial points, they supressed attempts of the enemy to organize itself on new lines, they drove out the enemy over the horyzon and left on their way the pile of of burned enemy armor together with bantlings. The news feed couldn't  keep up with them, in their success believed nobody, funny "analysts" considered that the flag near Buhaivka couldn't be raised already on the third day, that ours can't wet own legs in Oskil so quicly. They can. The peple of steel, which crush enemy skulls with tracks.

Maybe tanks alone won't win the war for you. But I don't think you'll win the war without tanks.

There seems to be a recurring pattern of people who live safely thousands of kilometers away from Russia telling people who live right next to it how they should feel and what they should do about Russians. People who have no personal experience and aren't (and never will be threatened) in any way chastising people who had to live with Russian terror for generations.
Their "just give Russians another chance" is other people's "our children born this year will face next war Russia starts as teenagers and adults". Sacrificing yourself for your humanist values is fine, but asking other people to sacrifice themselves (and their safety, their lives, their children's lives) for your values, while cushily living far away is very much not fine. It is easy to be a saint in Paradise, but don't put the same standard on those living in Hell.
And moreover, where were all these defenders of human rights when Bucha happened? Where will they be once we see more crimes against humanity in liberated territories? Why is it they always care more about protecting the bullies from vengeance than protecting the bullied from the bullies?
Because it almost feels like I'm hearing some people of the West (not necessarily in this thread, that's why am not quoting anyone) say "let's give Russians few more second changes and it's fine if they murder and rape and torture few hundred thousand Eastern Europeans while getting it right" and it is completely rotten attitude, opposite of being humane as it claims.

Site I go to published this today in summary of latest in the war:
"And really, this offensive is truly possible to all those Territorial Defense Force units stuck in trenches up and down the front for the past six months, getting slammed daily, oftentimes feeling abandoned. Their impossible heroism allowed Ukraines regular army units and 300,000 reserves to prepare in the country’s west, while Western allies equipped and trained them in proper war fighting techniques."
While we're feeling good about progress it's good to remember who's months of suffering and deaths made this possible. 
 

...Ukraine on a LEASH tied to...ugly, lazy wording

Please let his next broadcast be from the chow line of a POW camp.
Edit: Would he technically be a POW? Or could they just accidentally leave him in handcuffs in room full of AZOV widows.

ahh wasn't it mentioned here recently that the real sneaky Russian plan was to overwhelm UA resources with PoWs?

In the midst of jubilance due to the apparent success of the UA offensive, someone has, as of yesterday, posted names / info purportedly of the Wagner group's in-theatre troops:
https://sarahashtoncirillo.substack.com/p/update-monsters-wagner-mercenary
It passes a virus scan on my computer.  Thought someone here might have a use for it.
 
As for the rest of this thread:

 

In the midst of jubilance due to the apparent success of the UA offensive, someone has, as of yesterday, posted names / info purportedly of the Wagner group's in-theatre troops:
https://sarahashtoncirillo.substack.com/p/update-monsters-wagner-mercenary
It passes a virus scan on my computer.  Thought someone here might have a use for it.
 
As for the rest of this thread:

 

- Not standardized, but bigger than a MOAB and smaller than Hiroshima.
- No. One tactical nuke will have no impact whatsoever (other than to piss everyone off). Nukes are big, but not that big.
- Yes, if they use enough of them.
- Yes, if they use enough of them.
A couple points to consider
1. Using enough tactical nukes to make a difference on the battlefield will use up a chunk of their stock, which they might prefer to keep in reserve for that upcoming war with NATO that they're so paranoid about.
2. The rest of the world has a nuclear taboo to enforce, and I expect Russia knows it. If they use even a single tactical nuke, the West has to respond in some way that severely punishes Russia for breaking the nuclear taboo (probably not with a nuclear response though, unless Russian nukes hit NATO territory).

I just realized that these stupid orcs knocked down an ent! He'll be mighty angry when he gets up...

I’m with you on this. If you’re not in the trenches, I don’t think you have the same right to shed basic respect for humanity. When you’re half way round the world looking at this through twitter scopes, not personally implicated in this, I feel we actually have a responsibility not to drop decent values. 

That does presuppose the existence or possession of said values, which isn’t evident or granted of course.