chrisl

Things engineers do when they're bored #247. But I can imagine that once a bunch of former Warsaw Pact countries started joining NATO, there would probably have been some support for adapting NATO weapons to Warsaw Pact a/c.

I've been wondering about that for RU artillery shells lately. It seems like all they can do anymore is flatten a space with arty and then creep in, move a little forward, and repeat. Someone has got to be tracking how much they're using daily, how much they're losing daily, and how much they can make to predict when they'll be incapable of even pretending to advance.

Could be a bow and arrow with a wire to ground...

Try convincing them of that when they're clamped onto your leg.

I've pissed off birds before. They not only bear a grudge, but manage to communicate it to all other members of the same species. Don't piss off birds.

It's something of a war of attrition, but Russia will eventually have a harder time with materiel attrition, since they're being sanctioned and don't have a steady outside supplier of equipment. Given the Russian situation now, if they don't figure out a way to put more, and more effective, troops into the line it sort of will come down to their artillery shell production and transport rate: can they produce shells as fast as they need to use them to flatten Ukraine so that their limited ground force can walk up to the next line? And can Ukraine continue to destroy that ammunition before it gets fired at them and/or stretch out the supply line far enough that Russia doesn't have enough trucks to bring in powder and shells, even if they can manufacture it. Russian is on a backward path technologically - it's not like they've developed some modern manufacturing system for all their war materiel and have been cranking out updated stuff at high rates. They're mostly burning through the enormous supply of old soviet equipment that they were left with, and they don't have the means to replace it. Some of it was even manufactured in Ukraine, and they're going to find maintaining any modern manufacturing equipment that they have harder and harder as this goes on. They can get some help from China, but it doesn't look like they're going to get a lot.

dupe

That's an amazingly low res image. If you scroll a little further down in his feed there are even Planet labs images that show the corner reflectors distinctly, and they're pretty low-res as visible imagery goes. There's commercial SAR that has enough resolution to separate the reflectors from stuff around them. We certainly don't have access to the best available stuff here on a public forum, and the fact that we can sit here and look at images from other systems that show them clearly should tell you that they really aren't fooling anybody, except maybe a few people in the OSINT community for a few minutes.

They might work as bright decoys for radar guided missiles, but I don't think they're concealing anything from anybody. They probably look like a nice set of calibration targets from the sky, and you can't really move them around to make someone think the bridge is somewhere else. There's also no shortage of optical observations going on - they're just another cope cage.

Can any of them field more than a single reinforced company?

Distraction to get NATO to send some equipment to sit in Kosovo that might otherwise be shipped to Ukraine.

Looks like someone at the NYTimes (or maybe DOD and it's just sinking in at the NYT) finally is catching up with this thread. Depending on how much you've looked at the times this month it may be paywalled, so pulling a few quotes:

I don't think it's a problem with computation capability, or even ability to quantify resources. The problem is quantifying victory conditions in a way that you can say "Nation X is 20% of the way to victory", or "If Nation X gains 3 meters of ground tomorrow, they'll be 0.0001% closer to victory". In CM it's relatively straightforward to define degrees of victory because there are concrete goals: low own casualties/high opponent casualties, terrain location gains, number of units moved across a goal to represent a breakthrough, capture of items, etc. And the victory conditions are roughly symmetric, where if Player A has to capture location X, Player B has to deny them that location. In a real war like the Ukraine conflict there are many things easy to quantify (and easy to measure if you know the right people). How many vehicles of each type each army has; how many infantry each has; how many logistics resources are needed (and available) to keep them supplied; how soon will X unit run out of supply if cut off; what manufacturing (or external resupply) capability does each side have, and can it keep up with usage/losses. All that stuff goes into people saying two days after Russia crosses the line "Oh, those guys look like they got far, but they're toast and going to collapse". But at no point can we quantify how much closer or farther from victory that takes either side. We can even estimate when Russia will run out of functioning tanks, or outrun their 152 mm shell manufacturing capability, or run out of planes because there's a part only available from the west that fails after N hours of flight, on average. And more. And we can use it to predict outcomes of movements. But none of it provide a quantitative value for how close Russia is to losing, or Ukraine is to winning, or vice versa. It comes down to non-quantifiable victory conditions and partial victory conditions.

It goes back to the business principle of "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it" (or the engineering version "if you can't measure it, you can't control it"). The problem that people too often run into without realizing it is grabbing something that they can measure and managing/controlling around that without regard for whether it's even a proxy for the thing you're trying to control, let alone the thing you're trying to control. I see it happen plenty of times in engineering situations where people should know better. Counting bodies is much more quantifiable than evaluating success in the implementation of political/social objectives and evaluators of progress (who aren't necessarily the military, they may be politicians or the press) often fall back on that at the expense of viewing strategic goals. A big part of why this thread has been so interesting is that there's a lot of inspection into the quantitative strategic impact of low level tactical events. Popular press might say "Russia is pasting region X of Ukraine with artillery for days", while the analysis here will look at whether Russia can continue that for long enough to meaningfully take objectives, and what objectives might be achievable with the estimated long term resources. edit: And there are all sorts of tools sold in the engineering and business world for "quantitatively" evaluating customer goals or selection of systems when there are multiple stakeholders who all have different goals/metrics/things they care about. As quantitative tools they're all 100% garbage because they're readily gameable by anybody who's ever played games. But they aren't actually useless - the value comes in making people consciously game them to get the result they want so they have to think about what criteria they actually care about. But they're ultimately qualitative, not quantitative.

Well, since nobody else went there, I'm finding it impossible to avoid going and posting the first thing that came to mind when I read that:

Putin's Pocket?

They're currently functioning exactly as designed - not a single NATO member is coming across the border to help in Ukraine. They're sending lots of stuff, but Ukraine is on their own for troops. The way Russia's other neighbors have stepped up, there's a non-zero chance there would be more belligerents signed onto defending Ukraine if Russia didn't have a nuclear arsenal. And Russia is being very, very careful to no drop any shrapnel on NATO members, despite all the posturing.

Exporting 8m tons of coal would make a lot of West Virginia miners happy. Coal use (and mining to supply it) has been in decline in the US and it's been slow going converting coal mining regions to other economics.

This is publicly available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_of_the_Soviet_Union We also have substantially better remote sensing capability for detecting tests now than we did 30 years ago.

Again - if you're pushing that big button, your arsenal has already failed to work properly and you've already lost, no matter how much damage you might do to whoever is on the receiving end. The arsenal only works as long as whoever it might be pointed at thinks that it could explode. Right now it's working for Russia, because NATO is being very cautious about giving Ukraine weapons that can reach into Russia. As Ukraine continues to demonstrate that it will reliably only target military targets (which could include things like rail yards and fuel depots) within Russia, and only to the extent that they affect logistics into Ukraine, you can expect to see NATO donating longer range stuff. Putin can saber rattle, but he can't push the button for multiple reasons. And he can't really even escalate by firing one on the test range because of the risk that it fails and renders his arsenal useless.

You can think that, but there's not much to support it. Your second to last sentence shows a confusion that's also common in most press reports. Delivery systems and warheads are distinct from each other. If the warheads don't go "boom" the delivery systems don't matter. Russia hasn't done a nuclear test that went "boom" since 1990. They talk a lot, but the impression I get is that it's all powerpoint. The latest wunderweapon is this hypersonic missile. Without a warhead it's just a kinetic energy weapon. It's also a non-trivial thing to do. Russia is good at rockets - they've managed to maintain a very reliable launch program for 30 years post-USSR and have some of the most reliable launch vehicles you can get. I have no doubt that they can make something go hypersonic. The hard part is controlling it as a maneuver vehicle in the atmosphere, and there's no evidence that they've been able to do that. We've spent the last 5 months looking at their "precision" guidance capability, their "advances" in armor and APS, their AD radar systems, etc, and there's not much there. Given that they haven't done a test that went "boom" since 1990, it's a pretty good bet that they haven't developed anything new in the warhead department. They could possibly have developed a new fission bomb in the ~10 kT range - that's not that hard to do and they have a lot of materials laying around, but that stuff is also tracked (and leaves tracks) and I can't find anything indicating that there's anything new. This congressional report from 2022 notes a lot of delivery system development, but given the actual resources available to Russia to do that, it's probably a lot of powerpoint and staged demos. And delivery systems don't mean much if the warheads don't go "boom". Warheads take a lot of maintenance. The US spends ~$20B/year on "stockpile stewardship", which translates in real terms into "how do we make sure the bombs will explode without actually exploding one". That's about 1/3 of the total Russian military budget. You can make the argument that US engineers cost proportionally more, but it's a weak one. The US doesn't have anywhere near the level of corruption in the political and military budgets that Russia has, and has a lot of controls to make sure they're actually getting what they're paying for. And the bright Russian scientists and engineers can come to the US and make US engineer and scientist salaries. And even with all that, the US nuclear weapons development program nearly died about 20 years ago due to lack of interest from scientists and engineers not being interested in working on it (there was an NYT article or series on it that I haven't been able to find). Russia faces much worse problems in getting the technical people necessary to maintain their weapons systems and keeping them trained and making sure they're actually doing the work. You're correct that "it is a deadly serious national security asset that demands strict monitoring", but I suspect most of the monitoring is coming from the outside through arms control agreements (and maybe a bit of espionage), which do nothing to make sure the bombs will work, just that there aren't more than there are supposed to be and that the material is accounted for. The corruption within Russia is pervasive enough that unless you can show me something concrete, it's likely at least as bad in the nuke maintenance department as it is with the truck tires. At least someone is going to see if the truck tires go flat in the lot. And as has already been pointed out (more by other posters) - a nuclear arsenal only works if it's not going "boom" outside of tests. Actually pushing a button to launch nukes in anger is an indication that your nuclear strategy failed, because you'll stop existing less than 60 minutes later, along with your country in any meaningful sense. If Putin wanted to make a real nuclear threat, he'd set one off on a test range. But he'd also want to be really, really sure that it went off, because if it doesn't, the threat fizzles as fast as the bomb does.

And it's worth keeping in mind the punch line to the joke that's been going around where the Russian soldier is listing to his GF or mom, depending on the version, all the losses the RA has suffered. When asked about NATO's losses: "Oh, NATO haven't even turned up yet". Putin really, really wants to avoid a direct conflict with NATO, especially now that he's gotten a taste. And as far as whether Russian nukes will work or not, there are probably a bunch of analysts looking at things that The_Capt would describe as "what you don't see", like the price and availability of Helium-3 in Russia and how much power is going down the lines of whatever processing facilities who can give you a pretty good estimate of the status of the Russian nuclear arsenal. Maybe even better than the Russians can. Keep in mind that all those weapons were built in the Soviet years and the west went on a hiring binge from the former USSR in the early 90s. There were physics departments adding more Russians than the Detroit Red Wings. It cost them a couple generations of scientists and engineers - the ones who designed and built all that stuff and wanted out (and could share the details with the west) and the next generation who were in school or freshly out and came to the west. So they lost the people with the knowledge and the people they were supposed to pass it to.

If they don't respond they'd be facing a first strike anyway. Non-response is an invitation to escalation.

you quoted me while my computer was having a fit and hit submit while it was freezing on me.

Russia has a limited ability to escalate after they've used a nuke. Could they use more of them? Sure. Would it be a good idea? Not at all - it would turn most Russia into radioactive glass. We've already seen the asymmetry in the quality of equipment from Russia - do you think the nuclear situation is any different? Nuclear weapons require maintenance, and there's orders of magnitude difference in the amount of money the US puts into making sure they'll work compared to what Russia spends. And Russia has to deal with the corruption, lazyness, and brain drain factors on top of that. Why would anybody responsible for going into a radiation environment to maintain Russian nukes bother, when they fully expect that they'll never be used? Much easier to check the boxes and take the money. And the US wouldn't necessarily have to respond with nukes - the response could be an overwhelming conventional strike on key Russian resources, including nuclear facilities and Putin's dacha. Or eliminate the Russian air force? There's a bunch of NATO stuff flying around on the Russian border - you can see the refueling tankers on ADSBExchange all the time, but you don't see the things that are being refueled.