chrisl

You just described Cheesecake Factory.

You just described Cheesecake Factory.

You just described Cheesecake Factory.

While I don't disagree with the facts here, it does feel like an a-historical retcon to invert cause and effect.
I very much doubt that the Ukrainian high command deliberately allowed those forces to be cut off and isolated in Mariupol, even less with the intent that they'd turn the city into a meat grinder and hold the Rooskies up for three months.
I suspect that the Ukrainian high command was a little distracted by the concurrent knife thrust to Kyiv, and by the time they freed some headspace for other fronts it was too late to get them out of Mariupol. That they then went on to conduct the defence they did is little short of breathtaking, but I don't believe it was a 'gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette' deliberate sacrifice.

Tell me, who, in theory, suffers the most losses - the defender or the attacker? And also who conducts more offensive actions Ukraine or Russia

So now we are talking about the harsh calculus of the game.  From all accounts it looks like the UA has lost about 1/3 to 1/2 of what the RA has lost.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#:~:text=Excluding the Russian and Ukrainian,of the foreign fighter casualties.  I kind of trust the Ukrainian Government numbers, they are not likely exact but Ukraine is still a pretty open society - and currently has a lot of foreign contractors and observers on the ground - trying to hide losses well above those they are publicly declaring is going to be much harder than in Russia.
As to "why doesn't the UA pull back?"  Well I given what happened at Severodonetsk last summer, I do not think this is "not one step back mentality".  I think it is pulling the RA in close and trading attrition towards an advantage.  It is brutal calculus but if the UA can kill 6 Russians for every loss in a local area, it sets them up for follow on offensive operations later, while straining the RA logistical system as it tries to keep up with the losses.  This is what we think we saw at Kharkiv, and Kherson to some extent.
So Bakhmut and its locals look like an attrition strategy in motion.  Now whether or not it can be turned into an offensive strategy is a really excellent question.  I think a really big problem a lot of westerners are having is that the UA is employing an attritional strategy - we have largely abandoned them in our doctrines.  But we could very well be totally wrong-headed here and attritional warfare is back with a vengeance in the 21st century, for a lot of the reasons we have discussed here (e.g. death of mass).
Whatever the UA is doing, it has worked very well so far by any measures.  The question, which we cannot answer, is who breaks first?  Given the shoring of western support and the signals coming out of the political level in Ukraine, my money is still on them.

Yeah, command is hard.
In peacetime - and wartime to a degree - a lot of armies alternate their officers between so called 'command' appointments (platoon commander, company commander, battalion commander ... army commander) and 'staff' appointments (x1, ... x9 in operational units, or really in-the-rear-with-the-gear at a camp or higher HQ). Partly that's to provide well rounded leaders who've had first-hand experience at different aspects of the big green machine, but also to provide mental and emotional relief between command appointments. Oh, and there's also coursing which will routinely take an officer out of the mill for a few weeks or months every year, and by the time you get up to staff college it's a full year. Intellectually hard, to be sure, but you aren't constantly having to deal with Private Ballbags getting drunk every pay and beating up his wife, or Cpl Snooks forgetting to order ammo for range week again.
As you note, there's plenty of examples - there is a fairly robust theory that after Normandy Montgomery was done. He'd been in command on active operations since September 1942 (in addition to his not insignificant involvement in France 1940), so the better part of 2 years, all of it at the forefront of Britain's most significant operations. He'd personally planned and directed ... what ... at least three amphibious invasions, fought Rommel to a standstill then back across about 2000km of dust, then Sicily, and Italy, as well as directing the ground campaign in Normandy. And, of course, his abrasive personality ensured that he was fighting with his own side as much as with the Germans. Anyway, by the end of 1944 he must have been exhausted emotionally and mentally, and I think it shows in the lead up to Market Garden and the drifting operations that followed until the Battle of the Bulge started.
Allenbrook, too, in his diaries talks about the stress of managing Britain's military effort and campaigns, compounded by the additional stress of managing Churchill's whims on a daily basis. He needed to take breaks occasionally and just go off bird watching or fly fishing for a few weeks.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sydney Jary's '18 Platoon' is a good read. To briefly recap: his first posting was to a battalion in Normandy in July as a battle-casualty replacement platoon commander. He held that position - in the same platoon - until about March '45 I think, at which point he was sent off to a staff appointment. Someone (Monty? It's been a while since I read it ... I need to fix that) realised he'd been in that position too long, and had earned/deserved/needed a break.
And that highlights a rather harsh reality of mass-war: combat leaders tend not to last very long - weeks, or maybe months if they're lucky, before they're either killed or wounded - so the mental and emotional exhaustion tends not to become a problem. The conflicts over the last several decades have either been short overall (Gulf 1, Falklands^, Panama, etc) or covered by regular troop rotations, in part to manage this exhaustion. I believe the UN's recommended tour length is no more than 6 months, but that often isn't practical and some militaries opt for 12 month rotations, or longer, and deal with (or ignore) the trauma later back home.
Sooo ... Ukraine. And Russia. I don't know what they're doing. I suspect that casualties and promotion of the survivors, and unit rotations, means that combat commanders aren't having to command combat operations for months at a time. Russia is, of course, regularly scapegoating their own senior commanders, which ... might be good for them from a mental health perspective? The senior commanders of the Ukraine armed forces (and Zelenskyy) will be drawing deep on their reserves of resilience though, even though the war isn't yet a year old.
 
^ curiously, the battalions sent to the Falklands each only conducted one deliberate battle - mostly the attacks into the hills around Port Stanley. The exception was 2Para, who got to play down at Goose Green as well as at Stanley. It was noted at the time that they were the first British battalion in decades to have to conduct a deliberate battle while still dealing with the aftermath of a previous one.

So coming back to this part.  What makes this war very different is the whole “paternalistic” part.  In this war the direction has gone the other way.  In almost all of our wars of intervention or proxy we have had to do the pushing and shoring.  We have pushed partners to our tempos and timelines because they have become more about us than the people fighting them.
In Ukraine the entire thing has gone the other way.  Ukraine is leading the dance on this thing. They are the ones pulling us into their tempo and timelines - they are shoring us.  We are not pushing them, we are barely keeping up.  In fact the major concern now is that they may accelerate away from us into escalation. That is fundamentally different than just about every other morass we have been pulled into as we try and solve for humanity in the 20th and 21st century.
So if that has been the trend in this war so far then why cannot we rely on the “conditions that made those possible” going forward?  This is the crux of issue, what has fundamentally changed?  How have the operational conditions changed to the point we should begin to doubt the UAs ability to successfully prosecute this war?  How have the strategic conditions changed to the point our interests in this war are misaligning or shifting?  
This is a free and open forum, moderated to be sure, but anyone can come here and challenge or push back on the main if they so choose.  However, we also try and keep this to evidence-based facts in any assessment.  What a lot of these crisis of faith feel like is random panic attacks as opposed to detailed assessments of the situation.  Now if we start seeing some actual indicators of Ukraine or western resolve beginning to fail or evidence on the battlefield of UA beginning to lose, that would be a point where we could start to try and unpack what is going wrong.  But so far, other than what is clearly an operational pause, I think we are at risk of jumping at shadows.
I think Sun Tzu missed the back end of his little axiom -  “…and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.  But don’t overthink it or psyche yourself the f#ck out in the process…sometimes it is just a damned spoon.”

This is the major legitimate worry...that Trump or someone like him gets into office in 2024. Yes, the Senate will remain on board for helping Ukraine but execution of the policy is entirely up to the White House. If you get a rank isolationist, Russia gets to try and turn this into a frozen conflict. That said, the pressure on any President to hang in there with Ukraine is going to be intense. Don't be surprised if one of the Trumpist alternatives gets in and decides to stick with it.
I would not spend much time considering this war in the same terms as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq for the many reasons that Steve mentioned above. There are no body bags coming home and the cost/benefit analysis is just too dramatically and obviously in America's favor to bear the comparison. This is what Americans call a "good war".

Ok, so I guess it is time for another talk on this.  The main reason there has not been a lot of discussion on the progress of the war itself is because not a lot is happening - or wait, is it?  And being human means we simply cannot accept reality for what it is, we need to start reading meaning and implications at every shadow in the dark.
Nothing is happening because the UA has run out of steam.
Nothing is happening because the RA has rebuilt itself into a lurking monster that can freeze this conflict in place.
Nothing is happening because it is all a [insert boogie-man of you choice] - Belarusian Front re-opening is popular.
Or here is a crazy idea, maybe nothing is really happening because it is the middle of a wet muddy winter.  Or wait a minute, maybe something is happening - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katyasoldak/2023/01/23/monday-january-23-russias-war-on-ukraine-daily-news-and-information-from-ukraine/?sh=72a88a92ba69  but because of unrealistic expectations we think nothing is happening.  
In fact we have become so fixated on questionable criteria of success that the fact that the RA is bleeding out appears to be getting lost in the noise.  https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-5500-russians-killed-last-week-war-defense-ministry-1777316 (that is 1/3 of what they lost in Afghanistan in ten years).
Oh but we all know the mighty Russian bear can generate millions of troops - which it has not - and come crawling out of the snow to retake all of Ukraine and usher in a new era of Russian dominance. 
And then pundits - seriously who are these guys? Say things like "Ukraine can only make progress with a deliberate offensive."  Well no sh#t Sherlock, it is what they have been doing since last Sep.  In fact the only successful defence-only operation was arguably in Phase I when the RA over-reached and collapsed out of the North.  Every major UA success to date has been a period of heavy RA attrition/manipulation followed by deliberate offensive pressure - fast in Kharkiv, slow in Kherson - outcomes the same.
"Oh dear, oh dear, Russia is going to win the war."  Well Piglet, no Russia has already lost this one - we are only negotiating what that looks like here. (The_Capt's all war is negotiation has clearly fallen on deaf ears.) 
"But, but, Russia wins unless we take back every square inch of Ukraine in the next week."  Well, ok by that metric then I guess we have lost this one but that is a terrible metric.  "Russia wins if Ukrainians keep dying" - another bad metric because last I checked this is a war and people are going to die from it for decades - see UXOs and landmines.  "Russia wins if Russia is not a smoking collapsed ruin with Putin hanging upside down from a telephone pole" - ok, seriously?
The worst case right now is that the front does not move an inch.  The conflict is frozen in place, locked in Korean style.  The specter of Russia somehow turning those buckets of Chinese chips into a C4ISR enterprise that can achieve: information superiority; wage a SEAD campaign for the ages and somehow regain air superiority - and invent a CAS/AirLand doctrine while they are at it; then establish the operational pre-conditions they needed on 24 Feb - make Ukraine go dark - literally and information-wise, cripple transportation infra-structure, and paralyze political/military strategic decision making - is f*cking laughable.   I mean if the RA still has those rabbits in its hat I will be absolutely shocked and of course ask the obvious question - "what the hell were they waiting for to pull them out?"
So conflict frozen.  So What?  Russia has already failed on both its made up and real strategic objectives for this war.  The real ones are stuff like:
- Take full control of Ukraine, install puppet government and run the nation like Belarus.
- Shatter the western world through a display of Russian Imperial might and re-assert Russian hegemony.
- Render NATO irrelevant and neutered.  With no doubt a longer term campaign to push them out of the Baltics through subversive means.
- Simply wait for a few months before weak-kneed European resolve collapses and they all start to buy Russian gas again - renormalization, Russian supremacy in its neighborhood, western "rules-based-order" a burning wreck, and sit back and let the autocrat club rule the roost.
Ya so not only did none of that happen, in many instances the exact opposite happened.  So for all you students of history I think I am on pretty safe ground when I declare that this is what losing looks like.  If on the weigh scales of history Russia gets "blasted and shattered Donbas, complete with reconstruction bill", and "Cut off and highly vulnerable Crimea", and "Strategic land bridge to nowhere", I think we can bloody well live with it.  If we cannot and that is what breaks us, then we never deserved to be in charge in the first place.
Russia just burned down its own storefront.  It has isolated itself from it best customers.  Its reputation on the global stage is in shambles, re-normalization is a very far off dream.  It has been militarily crushed - I mean this is 1991 where Saddam drove the coalition into the sea type of thing - by all old metrics of warfare Ukraine should be in an occupied insurgency right now, the reality we are in should not have happened. Russian hard power credibility is a joke.  And it is extremely vulnerable to really weak negotiating conditions. 
Further NATO has not been this unified since the Cold War.  Western defence spending has been re-energized for a decade at least - I mean seriously Vlad, read the f#cking room, we were half-way to debilitating defence cuts in the post-pandemic economy but then you made your "genius" chess move.  Europe is actually agreeing with itself.   The US has finally found something they can agree on, mostly.  And most importantly, I think the West finally woke up from its "New World Order" hangover and realized that one has to actually keep fighting to stay on top.
And finally here is the thing....this entire affair is not over by a long shot.  We have not seen anything that suggests the UA has run out of gas.  We are pushing more and more offensive equipment at the UA, which suggests that they are lining up for another operational offensive.  The RA is still flopping around with leg-humping in the Donbas.  Spending thousands of lives for inches, just like they did last summer.  So before we declare this thing "over" why don't we just buckle in and show something that most people do not get in the least about warfare...steady patience.  Games and movies are terrible at teaching this because they are entertainment.  War is more often a slow and steady grinding business, until it is not.   

So that is simply not true.
Now that part is true.
No, doesn’t really track.  Country went from zero to sixty in the 8 years after it lost a large chunk of Donbas and Crimea.  In fact where the lines on the map are finally drawn really are not critically linked to either security or economic recovery at this point in the war.
Seriously, you are painting this entire thing into a pretty bleak (and maximalist) corner with this line of thinking.  I would have hoped nearly 2000 pages of in depth discussion and counter-points would have done something but apparently we are still at “it is all about the map!”
So what are we going to do if Ukraine retakes all it wonderful land - filled with people who actively supported Russia by the way - and magically Russia does not cease to exist, nor does it recognize an end to the conflict?  A new more nationalist Russia with some other nut job in charge - they have more in the back- who refuses to accept the lot of the “poor downtrodden true-Russians in occupied Crimea and Donbas”?  Based on your absolutist criteria we basically have to win WW3 in order to fully secure Ukraine…pointe finale!
And here is why what you are pitching is such a bad idea.  If we ain’t absolutely winning…we are losing!  Like war is some sort of digital experience like being pregnant.  Based on your underlying strategic requirements as outlined by this narrative, the only way Ukraine and the West can win is through the complete destruction of Russia.  This is not only a terrible idea, it is a dangerous oversimplification of the situation.
I am glad to see we are still on schedule for our monthly “crisis of faith” because the war is not meeting these highly unrealistic goals and timelines.  Based on these metrics we may just have to accept the loss then, I think over on the MacGregor channel they are already talking about pushing Ukraine into negotiations.
Why don’t we just stick with the “a secure western facing free and sovereign Ukraine with a functioning democracy while well supported in economic recovery”.  And work backwards from that?  A lot of scenarios between here and there, and I am pretty sure the grown ups are working through them all.  
Strategy is not a choice between Good and Bad, it is a choice between Bad and Worse.  We are living Bad right now.  We are all looking for something other than Worse.

Russia has about 3 times the Ukraine's fighting age population. So 3:1 in losses means that proportionally, they are losing the same quantum of fighting power, and anything below that ratio means that the Ukraine's doing worse in terms of attrition.

Do we actually know that Russia can effectively mobilize, arm and train more personnel than Ukraine? 
I have some significant doubts on that score. The Soviet system is dead and gone and the Russian military industrial complex is reportedly short some 400,000 workers already. How is Russia going to generate force to levels that will make a war winning difference relative to the quantity and quality of Ukrainian personnel/equipment when it can't mobilize without cutting into production and it can't raise production without stifling mobilization? .

I still think Russia committing its better troops to grinding offensive action in the Donbas is a win for Ukraine. The Russians simply do not have a training pipeline to replace those guys. Virtually every piece of equipment Russia loses is replaced by something older or less capable, or both.  To this point almost every single data point indicates that the AFU General staff has a coherent plan. I am not letting go of that assumption because the Russians gained a few kilometers of in the Donbas by literally crawling over a carpet of their own dead.
That doesn't mean Ukraine doesn't need every every shell, missile, drone, artillery piece, and AFV that can physically be shipped to them. It does mean they will win if we keep shipping stuff to them like we mean it. And for an extra bonus the guy who planned the original fiasco back in March is back in charge. If you put that in a bad novel they would make you take it out.

They certainly are more effective for area targets and much cheaper. Think counterbattery - wherever a drone finds a MSTA gun, there are likely 5 more. Fire DPICM all around it and you are likely to bag more than the one spotted. Or just shoot around the place where the CB radar shows outgoing fire without giving them time to relocate.
Or for moving targets. GPS-guided rounds are not particularly reliable hitters against those. But shoot a some DPICM with overlapping sheafs all around the moving column and wait for Oryx to cry in frustration.
GMLRS with DPICM used to be called "Grid square removers", not without reason.

I think it's not so much symbolic as just not revealing the true amount.
The West has an interest in sending as many tanks as possible, but being as quiet about it as possible too, to avoid the shock effect. The thing the west is interested in is the actual effect they will have on the battlefield.
It would be a propaganda win for Putin if the West came out and said "Right, so we are sending 400 tanks to Ukraine tomorrow". Great for the narrative to the Russian people that it's a war against Nato aggression.
At the same time, much of the western public is not interested in a big dramatic escalation, either. 400 tanks to Ukraine to fight Russia? That sounds a lot like WW3. But sending a few tanks is ok...
So we will start seeing western tanks begin to pop up in videos from Ukraine, but there might be more of them out there than the official shipments would suggest. And it's difficult for the average person to sit and count tanks on youtube videos.

Not really sure what the issue is to be honest.  Neither the US nor Ukraine are signed on to the Dublin/Olso Convention.  DPICM are not outlawed at the CCW.
https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVI-6&chapter=26&clang=_en
 
So beyond some dirty looks from some western allies, and some noises from NGOs (but they all have to be remembering the Amnesty International fiasco), I am not sure what the real risk is in this context.  RoW are going to be a concern but Ukraine has a century long RoW problem right now, not sure if modern western DPICM are going to be the major issue compared to the Russian created nightmare, while their usage could make a real difference.
Definitely a possible political downside but as this war has progressed and Russia keeps lowering the bar, Ukraine employing these weapon systems deliberately and carefully (eg recording, transparency etc) seems manageable.
 

If true, I´m interested to learn how long the Orcs can sustain that. About 9/2022 was the date when the Mobiks were starting to show up, if I´m not mistaken.
 
Russia's losses in Ukraine - official data (minfin.com.ua)

Melitopol is a shorter drive and would achieve the same effect. Even if you didn't capture the city outright, you would still cut the Russians in two with fire control. Then you just need to reduce the pocket.

Withholding cluster munitions is not the right thing, but an irrational taboo, completely inadequate in this situation. The reason why US stopped using them was that the bomblets had 2% dud rate instead of the 1% dud rate, which is the accepted threshold for the US military from the UXO hazard point of view. Obviously this is based on concerns typical for the wars that the US is engaged in, counterinsurgencies in countries not fully capable to clean up their territory from failed munitions, where the hostilities are taking place next to civilian life. Ukraine is a country in Europe, waging a full scale war on its own land, which is already full of all kinds of unexploded bombs and shells, Russians cluster munitions included. Some DPICM bomblets (which probably have a dud rate much lower than the Russian ones) will not add to the UXO hazard in any appreciable way. Let it be the Ukrainians’ decision.
The same goes for the AP mines, which the Ukrainian soil is already riddled with because Russians plant them by the ton.

For the life of me I can’t figure out who this is.  I mean we all know who the caustic Kiwi gunner is…

Nah, I took a break mate, please do carry on.
Anyway, it's been 40 pages of tankstankstanks.  The cranky Yukon intel guy and the outright caustic Kiwi gunner have it right.
Kill all the trucks you can, as fast as you can, as deeply behind the enemy front as you can.
Let's see how Ivan handles REALLY soldiering in 19th century conditions. Without horses....

I think this misses Russian reinforcements we heard about being pulled from other districts to replace losses.  With a total force reaching 1M pers, I have to believe they backstopped the losses to some extent, hence the logic to go with their entry force numbers of about 200k.  Of course we know that some units were way understrength.
I mean we could go with a range of say 150-250 troop per km on average, and then much higher in areas of main effort/thinner in quiet areas.  Overall point being is that the line is onion skin thin in places and with every wasted attack getting worse...this jives with the UA strategy of sticking in place and grinding it out with the RA in locales of otherwise low operational value. 
As to ISR, the UA is hooked into the largest and best ISR architecture our species has ever produced, while I expect Russian ISR, which was not "advanced" at the start of this, but not zero either, has been severely beat up.  On Oryx for example it is showing a spectrum of ISR and EW equipment and over "225 Command Posts and Communications" (that is just crazy).  So the ability for the RA to "see", understand what it is "seeing" and then communicating that understanding has been mauled up pretty badly, and this is stuff you cannot mass produce.
So what?  Well RA is getting blinder, dumber and slower.  Which means it cannot react as quickly as it did at the outset of this war.  Its OODA loop is stretching and as such it has to invest human capital along the line to hold it, as opposed to manoeuvre units that can react and cover off greater frontage with fewer troops.  The UA does not need the same troop density to cover off the same ground because they can see RA massing and moving well back and have the ability to manoeuvre and fire in response.   Gotta be honest, crunching these numbers and the current UA strategy of "hold and kill" is making a lot of sense.    

That sounds high. The advertised force before we found out that a lot of the BTGs were significantly understrength was 200K.  The real numbers could have been 150K, or even as low as 125K, which would provide a lot of explanation how they got too strung out to support themselves and got spanked.  Take from that 90K casualties (assuming KIA+non-returning WIA), add your 150K from the mobilization and keep the rest of the math the same and it could be as low as 130-ish/km.  Probably concentrated at least slightly higher near rail junctions and tapering lower as the difficulty of supply to a location increases.  Russia doesn't have the same kind of ISR that Ukraine does, so Ukraine probably has a pretty good idea of Russian force distribution provided by western supporters, while Russia's view of Ukraine is a little more spotty, and probably provided by aircraft and drone flyovers locally.

I think you just described the last 30 years of western military intervention.