chrisl

Kherson as-is is more of a resource sink for Russia than for Ukraine. Everybody currently enclosed is going to end up dead or as a prisoner, and it's just a matter of them deciding which they'd rather be, and when. In the meantime, Russia has to keep using up supply-chain capability trying (or at least pretending) to support the units penned up there. Once they're gone, all that capability can go back to supplying what's left of their Donbas positions. So in some ways it's preferable to let Kherson stew a bit longer, running out the resources that are stockpiled there and using up supply capability (and bridging equipment) to keep supplies moving. So for now, I'd leave them as a logistics problem for Russia rather than turning them into a logistics problem for Ukraine. But it's also something of a humanitarian and political question, because there are a bunch of civilians in there, too, and it would be preferable to liberate them quickly.

So if the UA indeed has a third full division that it's holding back, can/will they take advantage of current Russian disorganization and start a drive towards Melitopol/Mariupol to cut the "land bridge"? Or do they have to go through the mythical 3rd Army Corps to do that?

If it's bigger than a bicycle and it's sitting around for an hour (maybe less), it will be seen by an opponent with SAR and EO space capability.

Vlad is asking the professionals for advice on how to surrender?

It's probably already on its way to Maryland.

And as long as there's a fair possibility of political collapse, it's going to be better to wait for the new regime, because there's no reason to believe they'd honor agreements of the old one. Particularly in the case of Russia.

I've been seeing some tweets (not yet verified) that Russian lines are collapsing faster than the panicked Ukrainian forces can keep up with them.

Since Russia seems once again to be the largest supplier of arms to the UA, stopping those arms deliveries from RU could be a starting point...

I've been thinking about this for a while from the technology side and what you really have to do is ask what the tank does for you and how to replace it, like you did here. And then reframe the question in those terms. I think the real question is "What's the future of direct fire for ground forces?" The "ground forces" part is important because we've already seen direct fire disappear in the Navy (WW II was the transition), and in the Air Force, where if you see the enemy plane visually before it's smoking on the ground you probably effed up somewhere. It hasn't happened on the ground because, as I think you pointed out, war always comes down to a guy in a hole in the ground with a gun. Somebody has to actually take and hold areas, and it's that guy and his friends. Tanks are just a way to bring fire against that guy in the hole, because until recently, indirect fire was imprecise enough that clever guys can make their holes in the ground fancy enough that when the "boom" stops they can come back out with their guns to defend the hole against the other guys who want to sit in them. But modern tech is at a point where we can almost identify all the holes with remote sensors (air and space) and send each hole its own targeted munition. Tanks are/were a way to bring up HE for addressing harder defenses and masses of guys, mobile MG pillboxes for addressing moving masses of guys, and AP sources for addressing the tanks that are there to do the same things to your guys. But it's also a big heavy target with a very demanding logistical tail, and you have to protect the tail as effectively as the tank or you just have big monument to build a park around when it breaks down or runs out of fuel. And now every squad (in some armies) is carrying a missile that can destroy that tank from the horizon just by pointing in the general direction and pushing a button. A swarm of loitering munitions with long dwell time can supply the targeted HE on-demand. Or a MLRS with PGMs if you need a lot of bang a little slower. Drones are at a point where they can knock on the door of a bunker like a land shark and wait til you open the door before blowing up. A swarm of lightly armored UGV with swappable modules can provide a lot of the other services: MG without a head that has to be kept down. CIWS for defending against the other guy's loitering munitions Rocket launcher for close (a 100 m up to a few km over the horizon) fire against various targets, including residual tanks Rescue vehicle to get the guys in the hole out to medical care quickly Contribute to the Borg spotting network, because it can have eyes in every direction at all times.

If a lot of Kofman's MIA in your link were vaporized in their vehicles, that would be close to 2:1. American Civil war total was ~1:1.3 (more KIA than WIA), but a lot of those were non-combat deaths due to disease, which is probably not killing too many Russians.

Russia is suffering from a lack of infantry, as well as poor infantry training (never dismount). But I don't think that would help protect their armor against Ukraine with current equipment. NLAW has a 1 km range, and Javelin and Stugna P can hit at 5 km, which is the horizon for a 6 foot tall person. All three of those are "If you can see just a little bit of it you will hit it, and if you can hit it you will kill it" weapons. So the infantry have to be well ahead of the armor if you can count on every enemy squad having a couple NLAWs, or maybe a Javelin with multiple rounds. Russia is missing the G part of most of their ATMs, so Ukraine is in a much better position for using vehicles in closer support to their infantry.

I suspect the 50K is accurate, and the number that's being overestimated is the WIA:KIA ratio. Russia has demonstrated absolutely crap logistics for the past 6 months. Do you believe that they somehow have managed to maintain high levels of battlefield medical support? They aren't drafting doctors from St. Pete and Moscow, or we'd hear about it on Twitter and Telegram, and anything they fly is into contested airspace. I don't think I've seen a single image of a helicopter with a red cross on it, or any mention of mobile hospitals. It's plausible that the WIA:KIA rates are closer to 2:1 or even 1:1 for much of the action. So they could have a total of 100K casualties that remove men from combat, with half of them KIA because the medical response is so poor that injuries that shouldn't be terminal are.

Not just light infantry. A light infantry force far smaller than the mass of invasion forces that they destroyed. Like orders of magnitude smaller for the famous convoy.

Once you're dealing with rockets that will kill any vehicle on the first hit, be it a tank or a Humvee, you're better off with the vehicle that's harder to hit - smaller, faster, and more maneuverable. Or just cheaper and available in larger quantities, because the armor doesn't matter anymore. RPGs are relatively short range and their operators can be suppressed with MG fire. And does the RA have any ATGMs that are fire and forget and don't require an operator to maintain eyes on the target? I see three wire guided (Fagot, Konkurs, Metis) and one beam rider (Kornet). And are they present in any kind of quantity? It's unlikely every squad is carrying a couple. I think we've been watching that for about 6 months now. When you can call in indirect fire accurate enough to hit a tank or a door in a minute or two, do you need the thing with the tube to drive up close? Especially if you actually are concerned about ATGMs. Didn't we just see that yesterday? There were tanks in that, but it was a combined arms breakthrough and IFVs might have been a reasonable substitute. There's an asymmetry in the ATGM supply (Ukraine has lots, Russia not so much), so Ukraine was able to go with vehicles. If you have rocket support that can relight all the butts in an ashtray (and the ammo dump around it) at 70 km, do you really need a lot of tubes? You feel a lot less bad when the robot gets blown up, and that does matter. And the crew training costs you more and takes you longer to replace than the robot. I'm going to have recovery robots that follow behind and tow the busted ones back for repair and reload the empty ones. How do you ensure the security and stability of comm for a tank or a squad across hundreds of km? How do we fly drones all over the world from our comfy chairs with a big-gulp holder in CONUS? It's harder on the ground, but far from impossible, especially if you throw a little autonomy into the UGV.

Might have been a trap...

Burning Man just ended - they could probably hire a bunch of burners to set up a small city to house, feed, and contain them.

Already trying to compete for typo of the week...

That's probably the best typo we're going to see all week, and at current levels of activity there are going to be some good ones.

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.

I tried to like this post, but I'm out.

But with what? Pointy sticks?

Does Russia actually get any more turns to attack? They were out of juice 2 months ago and haven't managed to really recover any capability. The best they can do is dig in is probably dig in wherever they are and try to conserve resources. There may not be much more arty coming - even if they can get manufacturing up to speed, they have to store it far away and truck it in in smallish lots to avoid having it all blown up before it gets to the tubes. They're not likely to get a big resupply of newly trained men - it's getting progressively harder to recruit and they're not going to mobilize. Tanks? They could get some more refurbed ones out of storage, and maybe get some new ones manufactured, but all the modern bells and whistles probably depend on imports that they can't get. If they want to have something to show to the nutter in Moscow it's going to have to be lies made with CGI and powerpoint.

NY article was kinda short and doesn't say anything we didn't already know "Vlad is surrounded by yes men who let him miscalculate very badly. Russia forgot how to do war. They're screwed for a long time, both militarily and economically"

Maybe they just got care packages from home and someone dropped a cigarette butt.

They can be included in the next NATO airlift. Maybe package one with every ATGM.