chrisl

The UA probably has more accurate information on the quantity and state of RU forces around them than the Kremlin does.

It seems he already knows the outcome and just wants to rant about it. It really amounted to a long, ranty version of the joke that ends with: Russian mother: "and how are NATO's losses?" Russian son in Special Operation: "They haven't turned up yet."

Schneckenschreck

Others have already poked at the other points reasonably well, but I think you're already wrong here. Miltech favors the one who has it, and right now it's the defenders. When UA counterattacks and RU is defending, it will be the attackers who have it. Russia doesn't have or have any way to get the sensors, electronics, and aerospace assets that are currently helping make the UA defense so effective. RU may have started out with more UAVs, than UA, but a commercial DSLR doesn't give you the same capability as a modern purpose-built set of VNIR sensors, satellite nav, and laser guides if you want to drop rounds directly through the tops of vehicles from 15+ km away. You also need those kinds of sensors and electonics to make things like NLAWs and Javelins as effective as they are. RU also doesn't have the capability to create a broad encrypted comm network anymore - they have essentially no semiconductor industry of their own and China is largely prohibited from giving them anything modern, under penalty of semiconductor fabs moving from Shenzhen to Columbus. RU may be a space power on paper, but they've been unable to exploit their launch capability (propellant in tubes without bombs), largely due to their lack of VLSI. They're basically 40 years behind in sensors and electronics. They have two aging ground imaging satellites that may or may not still work. They have no space based SAR and too little control of the sky to use airborne SAR in the unlikely event they have it. They have their own satellite nav with GLONASS, but can't even equip their own vehicles with RU-made ground stations - they depend on western COTS units. And the west is capable of injecting error into the signals over Russia and Ukraine. The lack of space obs and ELINT capability makes RU largely blind to anything they don't have human eyes on, and the lack of secure comm means that UA both knows what RU is doing and knows what RU knows about what UA is doing. They're really good at putting propellant in tubes with a bomb on the front. But even their high precision stuff isn't all that high precision, and they're likely to have a hard time making more of it as they run out. And Poland might be about to ensure that Ukraine gets HIMARs. I suspect Poland will be in it to the end - they've been there before and every Pole knows that but for NATO membership, they'd probably be next on the list. And while the stuff the US is supplying is more than rounding error in the military budget, it's also all being used for exactly what it was originally designed for. And most of the money isn't going to Ukraine, it's going to Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, Teledyne, etc, and I'm sure they're loving it and would be happy to resupply the US with the very latest to replace the stuff that's being shipped off to the Black Sea and their lobbyists and marketing people are no doubt encouraging long term support of Ukraine.

Shhh. Maybe there will be a bridging equipment expansion pack.

So did the force positions change along the river on each pass? Are you seeing the future and can you get the info to the UA?

If I'm the marketing guy at your local defense contractor, the pitch is that you're already there. The Javelin is quite literally a short dwell time drone with a rocket motor instead of a battery or long duration combustion motor. It's got all the basic features, and the only thing it's missing is duration and connection back to the local ISR mesh, both of which can fit in the existing package. Even the systems you need to create the mesh and for data fusion aren't likely to be difficult to come up with or fit into existing platforms - you can make a mesh with cheap cell phones that don't even need a connection to a cell network, just each other.

The note about part of the government being paralyzed by fear of nuclear escalation makes a lot of sense. Germans older than about 50 grew up expecting their country (whether east or west) to become a nuclear battleground because of the USSR and the US. Even in the US you could see or read analysis in the regular news about how many German towns and of what size would get obliterated by tactical nukes of various yields. And then Chernobyl happened and heightened that anxiety. It was big in the late 80s when I spent some time there shortly after Chernobyl, and that generation (my age and a bit older) is now in power. It even is a major theme in the TV show Dark, where the AKW (nuclear power plant) is at the center of the supernatural happenings. Germany made a deal with the devil (Russia) to be able to continue using fossil fuels while they develop renewables, rather than go full on nuclear like France, and now there's a faction that is still tied to the root nuclear fears that led to that deal.

One thing that could (and should) be done, but apparently isn't, is to integrate the switchblade ground stations with whoever is doing sensor fusion. There are even unarmed versions of switchblades intended for disposable ISR. The 600 version has enough dwell time and range to be meaningful for surveillance, and can then be used to attack any high value targets it sees. And there appear to be plenty of companies developing and marketing UAVs, it's just a matter of getting someone to recognize the need and integrate them. There are no doubt system engineers sitting around at the major defense contractors sketching things up to pitch to the pentagon.

All that time at the start of the pandemic watching Dark and Babylon Berlin auf Deutsch mit deutschen untertiteln turned out to be useful. I can follow along with their exchanges fine, but had to do more than a little rewinding to get it down. Seems like an interesting program - that's all just from the short Kiesewetter & Weisband exchange, and they're going on to discuss Poland next. But his statement and position are a lot more complex than the twitter quote.

If someone can point to a german transcript I can probably do it. But I can't type fast enough in german to keep up, and don't have the on-the-fly skillz to just listen in german and spew english out my fingerz. But here's my best shot at paraphrasing: The gist is that Kiesewetter thinks that Scholz and Macron are playing for time and hoping that rather than Ukraine winning, in the sense of Russia being driven out, possibly with regime change or shift of power in Russia, they're hoping that it will lead to a cease fire and withdrawal of Russian troops back behind the borders [I think he referred to January borders]. All that, despite having cover from the Bundestag - he says colleagues in the FDP, the Greens, and the Union [CDU/CSU] are all puzzled. German industry has been prepared to start delivering and could have sent the first units already, and the numbers that they could send can make a difference for Ukraine. He [Scholz] seems to have no empathy for the situation that the Ukrainians are in. Kiesewetter does recognize that Germany does send defensive equipment, and civil supplies, preparation for dealing with war crimes, but not the equipment needed for Ukraine to defeat "this criminal regime". The German guns are both enough quantity to make a difference, and would send a message to other european nations [subtext: France] to do more. "We all push the Chancellor and expect him to use the tailwind that the Bundestag is providing". He says a few times that he has no idea why Scholz is being this way. Weisband replies that she doesn't know any better than anybody else what's inside Scholz's head and can't guess. But she sees Scholz and Macron trying to isolate Germany and France. She thinks that inside Ukraine people just assume those two are trying to isolate their countries (She's a German/Ukrainian dual citizen) Kiesewetter is really harshing on Scholz, and Weisband is more resigned. I'm happy to edit with any corrections that come along.

It didn't start out as a single vehicle... Near the start of the first video there are a couple of light trucks (TIGRs or LMVs?) and two guys are messing around on the hood of one and then go patrolling down the road, (probably looking for the AT team that is going to get the tank later...). But stlll, not a lot of guys on the ground to protect the tank in a low visibility, short range ambush environment.

Did all three crew actually make it out alive? It looks like the commander was upright and half out, watching the road, when they got hit and was the first one out, maybe knocked onto the deck with the hit and then off. It rolled backwards with flames coming out his hatch, then after it stopped, the gunner got out and shortly after we see both hatches open with flames. Then at 0:52 in the second video we see three guys running down the road - so maybe the driver made it, too? Later we see 4 guys standing up, and what looks like a 5th on the ground, so it's possible that #3 earlier was from a different vehicle.

None of the images are displaying for me - I tried two different browsers.

Instead of paratroop drops, pallets of washers and dryers pushed out the back of cargo planes behind Russian lines might get them to just abandon their positions and rush after them like it's a Black Friday sale.

And the steeper/more difficult the terrain, the more it makes sense to just deal with it remotely. I'm in the foothills of a steep mountain range (the San Gabriels in SoCal) that are popular for recreation. Very steep with a mix of scrub and sometimes dense trees. We have multiple rescues every nice weekend. If the lost and injured can't tell rescuers where they are, the traditional way to find them is like an infantry assault - hike groups of people in through all the likely canyons to cover all the trails and fire roads. They still do that, to an extent, but helicopters with FLIR change that significantly. The local agencies have a ton of helicopters, many equipped with FLIR and NV capability, and fly searches. Drones are just the extrapolation of helicopters to something small, fast, and cheap, especially if you don't need to have a rescue/medical crew on board to pluck someone out of the forest and treat them. A bunch of small drones with IR vision is way more useful than a helicopter if all you want to do is turn them into coyote food. The drones become combined ISR/loitering munitions. And if you have even rudimentary ELINT capability (especially if it's on the drones), you can make it even easier to find and eliminate anybody in the high ground. I even have my own simple ELINT - I added an ADS-B antenna to the roof because it requires LOS and the canyons sometimes make it hard to know who's flying around. Now I look at a map in my home office and see who's flying around and guess what they're doing from the pattern instead of going outside with binoculars and hoping to get a glimpse through the limited field of view. A bunch of drones with receivers and their own GPS can buzz around and very accurately locate the source of any RF transmissions that they can pick up. That's not even hard - it's what the "MLAT" mode of ADS-B display already does using a bunch of COTs hardware that costs less than $150/station retail, and all you need is four stations. Again, the wonder of microelectronics (limited availability in Russia), because it depends on cheap drone controllers (which are pretty sophisticated), cheap software defined radio, and cheap GPS chips. Once you have the transmitter location, you can send a missile or drone to eliminate it, no boots required. So even if a defender has the high ground, the attacker can remotely reduce the ability of the defender to coordinate and eliminate individual strong points, negating some of the traditional advantages.

Better aim and they would have blown some fish out onto the shore so they could at least get some lunch from it.

High ground will slightly ease some of Russia's operational weaknesses because they have extremely limited satellite capability and their drone capability seems to be limited to mostly observation. So a little elevation might help them see a little farther. But you're probably right that it no longer offers much advantage if your opponent isn't coming at you on the ground. And it may create some disadvantage if it has limited supply routes that your opponent can attack. Given the tactics that the UA has been using, they aren't likely to be charging battalions of troops up the hill at Russian strong points, anyway.

So it's getting to be impossible to guess how many actual live humans Russia has anywhere. A brigade ls likely to be just one BTG A BTG is likely to be at 50% of TOE and its actual fighting force might be a single company. Even a "full strength" BTG is probably only 80% and composed of guys who just met, have never trained together, and may have minimal training. And a company might be as few as a dozen guys. So in the worst case, there will be a brigade on the map and it will be a dozen guys in real life. Normally, I think the Russians would value this level of confusion because it would mean that it's impossible for the UA to guess force strengths. But in this case, I suspect that NATO ISR that's being fed to Ukraine is better than Russian C3I, and Ukraine may actually have better information on actual strength of Russian forces than Moscow does.

I think you underestimate the value of the smaller, "weaker", countries that are helping, especially including yours. Russia's immediate neighbors may not have the economic strength or as much materiel to offer, but they're all helping enormously to keep Russia isolated and with enough implicit border threat (whether real or imagined) that it can't just pull absolutely every last man, vehicle, and airplane and put them in Ukraine. Not to mention the ability to provide safe staging and training areas for incoming equipment.

Squad Leader. I found the CMBO demo all those years ago when I was looking to see if Avalon Hill had tried to make a computer version of SL. CM is the spiritual descendant of the Squad Leader series. I still have the original and three "gamettes" (pre ASL) in a closet.

He's looked for a while like he was on steriods. My mom was on prednisone for the last few years of her life and it caused noticeable mood and temperament swings as her levels went up and down. If she'd had the resources, there were probably a few mornings when she would have invaded Ukraine.

China is much closer to becoming a peer space power. They have much more electronics capability, even if they don't control all the knowledge. They're the only country besides the US that has successfully landed on Mars, and they did it in a rather dramatic fashion - they skipped all the orbiters, stationary landers, and small rovers and just went straight to a full up combined orbiter+lander+big rover mission, and did it the first time out. They aren't quite caught up, but they've been launching a lot and improving their capability rapidly. On the bright side, if there were to be a conflict that probably makes them much less likely to just go shattering things into space debris because they'll have just as much to lose from an uncontrolled debris field. They're more likely to develop capability to disable specific satellites without making a mess and would be able to develop the capability for it. Russia had very little to lose by basically exploding a frag grenade in space - a few old satellites that might already be junk anyway. And it's already a mess up there and getting worse - Starlink is just getting started and they're already producing a ton of near misses all the time (link). There are various proposals to try to collect some of the garbage, but I don't think anybody has really come up with a good technology or plan yet. But with the cost to launch a swarm of cubesats to LEO, I can imagine that even if it becomes an even higher collision risk environment, short lifetime ISR cubesat swarms could become a thing. Just launch a bunch, knowing they'll all be dead in a few months.

That's way shallower for way longer than I expected from the overhead pics. Does it also drop off a bit as it gets muckier? I suppose there are (or were) some Russian tankers who know the answer to that...

Found this site (link) that has all the stuff you have to prep to do a crossing deeper than 1.3 m but less than 1.8 m, so you can keep the hatch open and don't need snorkels. There's a lot of stuff to do, and if they weren't well trained might have all missed the same thing or had the same thing fail (exhaust valves letting water in?)