chrisl

They just showed a patch of blue sky, but weather underground says mostly cloudy with an 82% chance of rain.

So do those 11,000 troops get loaded on trains at the end of the day and sent to Ukraine?

The distances are quite reasonable, but the eye in the sky is going to be watching you every inch of the way. If I'm UA, I'm going to take advantage of Russia's poor transportation, clear channel comms, and need to keep all the conscripts bunched up for orders, combined with satellite intel, and do my best to keep new/refreshed units from getting anywhere near the front lines. A BTG worth of men marching up a road is just asking for a line of airbursts to obliterate a bunch of them and scatter the rest. Do that a few times and Russia will start having a hard time getting anybody to do anything besides desert at the first opportunity.

So if they don't have enough vehicles, how do they get everybody to the front lines? Train to the nearest railhead and then march them in? Right after UA got a bunch of new longer range, very accurate artillery and appears to have gotten some VT fuzes with it? Are they taking "drown you in the blood of Russian soldiers" from many pages earlier in this thread literally?

The conscripts would be better off selling their vintage M-Ns to collectors and using the money to buy plane tickets to the west.

Same location, different attack. The farmhouse that was the target of the round that was subject to the precision vs. dumb luck discussion is behind the second "bump" in the band of forest. You can see it in the lower right of the most recent video at about 0:19 and it's a) visibly had some HE go through the roof and b) no longer smoking. If you compare the scraped up/"fully developed" regions in the two videos plus google earth satellite view, the "parking lot" was much smaller in the video of the first MLRS barrage that got the EW guy and now it extends all the way between the two bands of forest and encompasses the spot where the house got hit. The house is also clearly visible on the left side of "part 1" of the same video at 0:06. It looks like it's actually a pair of adjacent houses that each have a close-on outbuilding or addition, and one of the houses took the direct hit.

Based on a lot of the video I've seen it should be a first & third-person shooter where the player cruises around in a drone-view and has the option to call in various types of scenario dependent artillery, or do a first-person attack by firing on-board rockets or dropping on-board bombs. You can also place and move ATGM teams. In larger scenarios you get to tab around for the view from different drones and loitering munitions and ATGM teams. The other player gets to drive along roads or, if they want cover, into mud that immobilizes their vehicles, but never sees anything to shoot, and gets to fire rockets and artillery at scenario defined targets.

Maybe Putin's cunning plan was to reunite Russian empire, but with the capital in Kyiv?

Have to get a reasonable measure of the area, but probably comparably low for a direct hit. A few comments though: 1) That barrage looked like it was entirely airbursts, and if you scroll through slowly, there's a burst at 0:05 above the unit that explodes on the ground very shortly before the big explosion. So it wasn't likely a direct hit from a round, but from one of the fragments from that round, which spread over a much larger area than a single round. So the chances are that most of the vehicles got hit with shrapnel, and that one got hit with a piece with enough energy in the right place to set of a secondary explosion. 2) There's selection bias in the videos that get posted - a bunch of rounds blowing up without dramatic results is less likely to get posted (i.e. how many rounds a day are they firing and how many of those bangs get posted on twitter) 3) I think that's the first time I've seen a barrage of airbursts from either side.

Even if they're called up, what will they arm them with? Do they even have enough rifles? Did Russia secretly do a big buy-back of Mosin Nagants at Big 5 fifteen years ago and that's why you can't get them cheap anymore? What vehicles will they ride in? On paper Russia has 10,000 tanks in reserve, but given that many of the tanks went into Ukraine had egg cartons for reactive armor, and the active duty trucks had bad tires, how long would it take to piece together 1000 more functioning tanks. Probably none of which will have modernised electronics. Same with BMPs and BTRs - how many of the reserve could be put into running order? General Motors isn't going to dump a bunch of trucks on them. So even if Putin declares it is a war and "fully mobilizes", how much of that reserve could they actually arm and how long would it take?

None of these guys have ever seen google satellite view or thought about where it comes from.

I suspect part of the answer to the "20 BTGs" in the Donetsk section is in the note on the lower left - UKR says Russia has 78 functional BTGs, the US says 93. and "Missing BTG were placed in the Donetsk direction". So there could be as few as 5 BTGs in that area. Which would be a ginormous hole for Russia if it's really that few. A possible way to resolve the difference is to assume that BTGs aren't being combined up to full strength, so if we take the ratio of the two estimates as a first guess, they might be getting combined up to 83% strength. Is it right that that would leave each BTG with effectively either one reinforced infantry company or two understrength infantry companies? And the BTGs are supposed to attack as independent units?

Looks like a different bridge: single columns in the intact picture and double columns in the collapsed picture.

It tracks hot spots worldwide. https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@13.7,0.0,3z You can even select what bands you're interested in. I normally use it to keep track of forest fires in CA and OR.

You know and understand all that. I know and understand all that. What I don't get is why the Russians don't seem to have picked up on it. And it's not just the drones. There are a lot of spaceborne systems making it easier to decide where to send the drones - coverage is way better than people realize. And various aircraft monitoring much of Ukraine and the BS from just outside the border and able to locate and identify RF transmissions with high accuracy, and do radar (and maybe lidar) maps at impressively low levels.

Every time I see these videos, I think of Wrath of Khan, when Spock says "His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking". It's as if Russian troops (and the officers, really), have no concept that they could be observed from the air and have single munitions from drones or whole artillery barrages dropped on them. And it happens over, and over, and over. There have been a few pics of Russians trying to camouflage their vehicles, but they still leave an awful lot of them just parked in plain view.

Apparently the regional government thinks that the bridge was sabotaged: AP report It could be that someone heard the noise when it fell and thought it was an explosion, but I tend to agree with the comments so far that it looks more like bad engineering and neglect, without any real indications of pyrotechnics. Maybe somebody used a couple of $50 bottle jacks from Harbor Freight to push the bridge off its pier.

A very desperate amateur who probably should have at least bought a copy of CMBS and played a few dozen games against people who wouldn't lose to keep from getting fired (or shot).

I found a twitter post last night that geolocated the maybe-precision artillery attack. The image from google is the approximate area of the barrage, with the building marked with a pin. 30 rounds fired completely randomly into the area would have about a half percent chance of hitting the building. But the right area to use is the error circle for a single gun. I don't have a lot of artillery documentation and I'm lazy, so I just looked up the performance of a NATO 155 shell. Wikipedia says that unguided it has a 50% error circle of 267 m. When I scaled off the image capture, it conveniently turned out to be about 1 m/px, so the building looks to be about 6x24 m, and the chances of scoring a direct hit somewhere on the building after 30 shots are about 2%, assuming uniform distribution within the CEP. That was first shot, dead center. The Excalibur page gives a 4 m CEP, giving about a 55% chance of hitting the building with one round, again assuming uniform distribution of error within the CEP. Advertised performance of the M1156 PGK is only slightly worse. So if someone had given me a few hundred precision guided shells along with a few tens of thousands unguided and I knew where the head of EW for the Russian forces was, I'd certainly load one up and hide the fact that I had it with a nice barrage over the area. If I had multiple varieties, I'd use the best one on the building and some slightly less good ones to make sure I hit the parking lot and maybe the end of the woods where a defensive position might be.

The aircraft situation over Romania/Black Sea doesn't look that unusual. Right now I see two Rivet Joints and three tankers. Pretty typical to have that many tankers, and you never see who they're fueling - I never see them coincide with the larger ELINT/SIGINT/ATC aircraft - presumably there are a bunch of other NATO aircraft cruising around without transmitting ADS-B. I've had a window open with ADS-BExchange over Eastern Europe through most of this. The only thing unusual right now is that there are two Rivet Joints instead of one plus some other ELINT/SIGINT aircraft. Usually there are some BE-20 Guardrails over Latvia or Lithuania, and an E3, with one cruising the Romania/Moldova border and one the east border of Poland. GlobalHawks over the Black Sea are less common than at the start, but that pattern wasn't that unusual. I tend to suspect that more is going on if I don't see them all - they're perfectly capable of turning off the transmitters and they leave them on to let Russia know they're being watched. When there are a lot of tankers and no other planes transmitting is when it's suspicious.

The first one might have been a smart munition to get that on target before there was going to be smoke from the rest that might interfere with a targeting laser. But the rest weren't wildly off target - look at the next three: two of them hit what look like a secondary encampment and the woods where you'd put your forces covering the road. And much of the rest of the barrage went into lines of trees on both sides of the road, with relatively few just hitting the open fields (and nicely distributed in the fields). Like somebody thought about the pattern. I wish all my CM barrages could be that accurate.

Getting lists of names and birthdates has got to be pretty easy, given the huge numbers of hacks of PII that happen. China has all that plus background check information (including TS/SCI investigations) with copies of fingerprints for anyone who applied for a job or clearance in the US gov't from when it went online up to about 2015 (except for a few agencies that don't use the common system). A few minutes with a hacked PII list and your favorite scripting language and you can randomly pull people with birthdates in a reasonable range to be ex-mil and still young enough to fight. So it's unlikely that it took a lot of effort if Russia is still managing to pay any of their hackers enough to spend an hour on it. But you're right that there's no obvious purpose behind it, and it's almost as easy for people who would need to know to be able to check that it's nonsense.

How many of the bridges in Izyum are still intact? It looks like there are/were only three to start, and a small bridge to the southeast at Yaremivka that RA may control at their edge. Is UA drawing a bunch of RA forces across the river and then able to cut off their supply lines at the bridges, either by dropping the bridges or by denying them with drone-directed arty? They could potentially render a bunch of the reformed and apparently reinforced BTGs ineffective pretty quickly if they trap them south of the river. That would reduce the forces available to defend Donbas when it's time for a UA offensive.

And sometimes even the first (and only) vendor can barely make the material or product. I'm dealing with that right now on a couple of non-defense projects at companies that do a lot of defense work for similar things. If the primary company can barely manufacture it, it's going to be nearly impossible to second source, and that gets exacerbated by them treating what little they can do repeatably as the keys to the universe, which it is for them. At best you can try to get them to set up an additional production setup somewhere away from the first facility, with no guarantee of success. And if the wrong person retires or dies, then you sometimes lose part of the process with them. For something like stingers, I'd suspect the hardest part is getting an IR detector as crummy as whatever they use. The original design predates personal computers by a few decades. It's been updated a few times since then, but IR (and non IR) sensors have changed a *lot* since the last update. Even if they can't get more of whatever the computer is, it's probably possible to put in an overpowered FPGA or microcontroller and run a simulator of the chip it's supposed to have (assuming you can get any FPGAs or microcontrollers at all right now), but they also have to somehow work in some kind of modern IR sensor or get someone to dedicate some equipment to making the old ones and tweak things accordingly.

I looked up a few, and most of them use short enough wavelengths for tracking that they can, at least in principle, target smallish drones, but that depends on first acquiring them with a search radar. The search radars look like they're usually longer wavelength, though some of them (e.g. Dutch version of Gepard in X band) are short enough that they could detect the engine on even a very small drone. But that's just based on the resolution. I'd be surprised if any of the smaller drones reflected enough signal for the search radars to find them reliably, especially if even minor attempts at stealthifying them were made.