chrisl

Not so fast:
 

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.

Because I'm procrastinating this evening, I decided to plot the artillery impact points from the farmhouse video on to the google maps that @chrislposted above. Red dots are from the initial zoomed in view, orange dots are from after the camera conveniently zooms out just before the first rounds land outside its previous field of view. The purple circle is an area that is clear on the map, but obviously has some degree of ground 'clutter' in the video, but I can't tell what it is. Might well be some vehicles. Green line is 200m in length. 

Random observations:
The first round is a direct hit on the roof of the farmhouse and is possible the brightest explosion. Different kind of round, or just because it's up in the air rather than half-buried in the ground as it explodes?
The center of mass of the red dots seems to be different to the center of mass of the orange dots, which might suggest two different batteries with different central aim points (and the camera apparently knew when to widen its view).
Visually (and from watching the video) it seems like there are more rounds close to roads / treelines / buildings than might be expected by chance given the wide spread of impacts, but you'd have to do some kind of statistical analysis to tell really (and I'm only placing the dots approximately by eyeball, so I might be unintentionally biasing them towards roads etc.)
Here is the purple area ground clutter, before it all starts, and conveniently illuminated by a shell. Can't tell what it is, but for scale the distance between the two tree lines is about 300m, so we are talking (very approximately) vehicle scale stuff here, rather than pebbles or buildings.
 

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.

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 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.

Its why the games are without par.

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 feel that in the case of U.S officials, the U.S wants to warn the Russians against any attacks while they are in the city, lest they accidentally kill them and force the U.S to up the ante in response.

There's another possibility.
It could just be PsyOps with a scary name ("Phoenix Ghost"? Come on...) to promote loitering suicide drone hysteria in Russian troops and maybe draw out their SHORAD systems.

Based on the Russian losses...mobilize what?  So by my count Russia is about half-way to the losses of the Iraqi military during the Gulf War.  Now Russia has reserves of equipment but plenty of doubt as to the condition of those reserves.  Men, well sure but it takes months to create a basic rifleman and years for anything beyond that.  Everyone keeps bringing up "Russian Mobilization" but I am really not sure what that looks like given the serious damage done to their field force, steadily increasing pressure from economic sanctions and the Will of the Russian people.

Yes, that is my sense as well.  The Russian operational trend appears consistently to try and do too much with too little.  Given the "typical" BTG construct:

(Seen these pictures everywhere)
According to the old frontage rules, this outfit could likely cover a 3 km frontage in the old 2 up, one back formation.  The MLRS and I assume UAV support allows it to strike really deeply, it has some flank security and AD so is somewhat self contained (except recon but I will get to that).
So with 16 BTGs, assuming they hold 1/3 in reserve means about 11 BTG up front, which translates to about 33, say 35 kms frontage. A rough eyeball of the Russian start line up there:

Is roughly twice that frontage...at the start line.  That frontage will expand in the advance, not even taking into account attrition.  So either the Russians are using a very different force-to-frontage metric and giving that BTG a 7-10km front which is a lot to ask of 800-1000 pers unless you have got some next-gen ISR and precision lethality.
Which leads me to the next big question?  Where is the Russian recon?  I have been looking around and in all this discussion I have not seen anything on how or where the Russian recon screens are laid down.  There are no dedicated recon units in the BTG (unless I am missing them), I have to assume that the recon is held at formation.  Given the environment that is not a small ask, to screen a 70+km frontage out to 10-20 kms.  This is made worse as the UA method has put eyes with teeth everywhere so you would need detailed/close recon at least out to 4-5km in front of lead BTG elements (the range of the Javelin being 4+km) to even stand a chance.
For historical reference:

So that is a 10-25km frontage for an old MRD, with a recon screen out 50km in front.  That MRD has 9 MRBs and 3 TBs with an entire TR in reserve (so 3 more TBs), for a total of 15 Bn-sized units...for 10-25km.  And there would be another MRD behind it.  To do what the Russians are proposing, in old Soviet terms would require 3-5 full up MRDs, an entire CAA at full strength.
I get frontages have expanded with modern ISR and weaponry (or maybe they haven't on the advance) but this is asking a lot of fresh troops, let alone already mauled ones.  Am I missing something?

There's some indication from reported ADS-B error signals that GNSS is being degraded over Ukraine, but I'm not convinced that it's Russia doing it.  When the US launched GPS, it was the only global satellite system available and "selective availability" was built in to give the US a military advantage.  A lot of the military turned out to be using consumer GPS in GW 1 and SA got turned off in 2000 partly as a result of that, partly at the request of FAA, and partly because other systems were coming online. There are now 4 GNSS systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou).  Anybody who's capable of launching such systems is also capable of launching systems that will degrade their performance from space by spoofing signals.  
The Soviet Union had a bad relationship with maps, in which virtually all maps were seeded with significant errors to cause confusion in case of invasion.  This bad relationship went on for many decades and was only publicly acknowldged in the late 80s, shortly before the dissolution of the USSR.  According to a friend who spent a bunch fo time there, inaccurate maps predate the USSR for similar reasons.  So it's likely that Russia was going into Ukraine with Soviet era maps, at least for some levels/regions, and they may or may not have recognized the problem with that.  Ukrainians followed what appears to be standard eastern European practice of removing and/or rearranging street signs to aid their attackers. As defenders, Ukraine doesn't really need high quality GNSS - they have people who know the area and their own maps.  So if some space-capable nation with EW satellites decided to inject a few hundred meters of error into the GNSS signals over the region, it would likely make a mess for out of town visitors without completely wrecking aircraft nav safety.  I've been on backroads in the mountains in the US where there might be two fire roads that parallel each other for a while before going to very different places, and even with undegraded GPS it's not hard to get yourself onto the one that climbs an extra 1000 m of elevation before descending into the town with no restaurants instead of the one that descends into your planned lunch stop.
As far as NATO aircraft along the Ukraine border- Rooks and Kings is probably right that they're not doing active EW from the Growlers, but if you watch ADS-B exchange, there are a lot of NATO aircraft loitering in the neighborhood along the Ukraine and Kaliningrad borders.  There are a few types that usually are transmitting who they are: several types of SIGINT plane (various RC-135 versions, E-3, RC-12, Global Hawk drones, others, ), lots of transports going mostly to Poland, and a large number of aerial refueling planes.  Who we don't see at all is who's being refueled, but there are probably a lot of them, given the number of tankers.  To see who's getting refueled you probably have to be in Poland or Romania with a pair of binoculars.

If you want your officers fragged, that looks like a perfect way to achieve this. Honestly, with the level of hostility between the sides at the moment, giving guns to Ukrainian men mixed with your own units sounds mighty stupid to me. 

too many likes can only lead to trouble.  Why back in the day we didn't even HAVE likes. When you wanted to like something you had to go see em, send a letter, or call them... on a rotary dial phone!  You young people today have it so easy.  😎

I own(ed?) CMBO (don't have a CD drive anymore), Got it right after release IIRC. Didn't play much because I sucked. Lurked the boards for years and for some reason created the account and never used it, then drifted away.
Back for this thread.
Periscope down.

Actually at the end of the day we are a wargaming community with deep interest (and some expertise) in the history of warfare.  This is the first peer-on-peer conventional war of the 21st century and likely the most intense since the Iran-Iraq war back in the 80s, so you can understand why it is kind of a big deal.
As to the games, no small amount of effort you see here is to try and figure out how to make CM more realistic, particularly the modern titles.  So let’s call this game design in contact.   
Finally we are about analysis and assessment that cut through a lot of the noise out there, so we have seen a lot of people migrate here because we try and remain unbiased- as far as we can as we stand with Ukraine on this one- and offer a different picture than a lot of mainstream military analysis.  Moreover, we will toot our own horn as we have been noted as out in front of events thanks in large part to information sharing and a robust online debate.
We are also on the internet and get whackies, which have been warned and in some cases banned.  
That all said, do not worry BFC is still in the gaming business but right now they have their eyes on this history in the making.  They (and “we”: check out CMCW while you are in the gift shop!), will be back to making the game series you love shortly but right now the best good we can do is try and keep a clear eye on things and keep each other informed while supporting those of us in the middle of all this.

For over two decades, Steve has found time to mix it up with us grognards. Far from taking away from development, I think it only improves the end product.
Who do you want to make your wargames for you: someone that watches CNN and thinks himself up to date, or someone voraciously doomscrolling and discussing events here?

And on the topic of how badly Russia has lost the "big picture".  On all this let's say that Russia somehow manages to defeat Ukraine.  Not some poncy re-definition but actually take the whole country installs a puppet government and holds victory parade in May '23 [aside: the odds of this happening are so extremely low that we are in "alien virus wipes out UA" type scenarios, but let's just play along].  So what?
- Russia gets Ukraine and all its oil, gas and wheat...all of which are a small fraction of what Russia already has, but it is technically in the plus column.  Of course to access all that you need a functioning Ukraine, so who is paying to re-build all the infrastructure the Russians blew up in order to gain all said cool stuff?
- Russian has demonstrated the exact opposite of what they need to the world.  The great Russian bear nearly bled out taking a single country in its near abroad, leaving destroyed and abandoned equipment and bodies all over the place.  It looks weaker than we thought going in even if Ukraine surrenders right now...that part is done.
- Geopolitically it has made its enemies stronger (see above). If someone told me Sweden and Finland were going to be seriously be moving to join NATO six months ago, I would have laughed them out of the room.  Hell, we heard rumours of this 6 weeks ago and were not really thinking they were serious.  So NATO is bigger, more unified and better funded - really not seeing the master plan here.
- Geopolitically, it makes Russia much weaker.  Those sanctions are not going to be forgotten in a year. In fact I doubt the investigation into the mass war crimes from this war will be over in a year.  You wanna talk stalemate, no western politician is going to even hint at "re-normalization with Russia" for maybe a decade. So that means that Russia has to pivot heavily to people who will trade with them...enter the Chinese.  The Chinese may very well send Russia support but it is a poison pill.  China wants Russian resources...cheap.  And a weakened Russia who can only trade with a narrow market is extremely vulnerable and desperate.  They will have to live with what they can get from China price-wise because they literally have no other options than "leave it in the ground and become a third world nation".  And even if it isn't China, it will be India then who sets the conditions but that gets more complicated. 
- Internally it makes Russia much weaker.  Putin is going to have to spend billions on the wave of resentment and pushback that is likely coming his way from all the Russians that do not buy off on this whole thing, and even if that is only 17 percent that is 24+ million people that are going to be extremely agitated that Putin has to deal with.  Being an autocrat and creating a closed society takes money, ask North Korea.  So all that funding to counter backlash is going away from "other things", but you cannot simply cut all social programs and infrastructure funding, or that percentage goes up.  So what takes the hit?  The Russian military is the most likely candidate.  Everything but internal security will be on shaky ground, while being run by a corrupt administration.
So here I do agree with Steve, Russia has already lost this war.  It is just a matter of determining what that loss looks like.  Worse, Russia has likely already lost its next war and does not even know it yet.

I’ve had pet ducks.  That’s normal behavior for migratory waterfowl.

I’ve had pet ducks.  That’s normal behavior for migratory waterfowl.

I’ve had pet ducks.  That’s normal behavior for migratory waterfowl.

I did some digging on the stinger claim and only found a few things - a 1984 NYTimes article (may be paywalled, I have a sub) that refers to recommendations that a night sight be developed to make them more effective at night, but without explanation.  The best documentation I found was an  FAS document (probably old-ish) describing them and also describing the NV add-on sight.  So it sounds like it's just the lack of a night-vision system for initial acquisition by the operator, which is/was done optically in the visible spectrum (which is obviously more difficult at night), and that it's been corrected in the ~38 years since it was introduced.  I doubt there are any stingers that old being shipped to Ukraine.

Wow, hard to believe that was only 40 days ago.  I would caveat that this is a descriptive theory, not a prescriptive one.  Descriptive theories assist in orientation and allow us to better understand "what we are seeing", while prescriptive ones offer "rules for successful execution" and offer some predictive qualities (e.g. Clausewitzian attacking centers of gravity).  I have never really bought off on prescriptive military theory to be honest as it either has to be so broad as to be nearly inapplicable (see Clausewitz), or it is narrow and misses large pieces of the picture.  Descriptive theories provide a better observation reference but are not designed to predict or prescribe, we are left to figure that out on our own.
So 40 days later and what have we seen?  Well obviously both sides have been communicating across multiple mediums and in many ways.  Violence is the most obvious but we can see there are many forms of communication beyond violence in this war, narratives for example.  Even the atrocities committed by the Russian forces is a form of communication, one that I think the world has heard and understood very clearly; this will not be a clean war, because clean wars do not exist.  I think we forgot that fighting in far flung parts of the world but this one is hammering it home very clearly.  
What is interesting is the negotiation.  This is more than between the parties engaged in the war.  It is between a party and itself, and the reality it perceives in front of it; we negotiate with the future in war, an extremely uncertain future.  In the last 40 days the level of negotiation by all parties has been fascinating. 
We have watch the Russians have to renegotiate their entire envisioned end-state as the northern operational axis have collapsed.  We have watched the Russian political level negotiate with its own people by building a pretty weak argument resting on a ever increasing lattice work of falsehoods and lies.  Putin had better hope that Stalin was right about the size of the lie because even though the "first casualty of war..." and all that, the reality is that there is constant negotiation between the political and the people (Clausewitz nailed that one) but it is a highly bounded one.  As has been mentioned, culture plays no small part in framing that ongoing negotiation; however, in Russia's case the framework of lies keeps getting larger and larger, it is  matter of time before a counter-narrative starts gaining traction, much like it did during the Soviet-Afghan War.  So while Putin has had to re-negotiate his reality, he now has to try and re-negotiate that reality with an entire nation as more and more Russian soldiers "go missing" or come home in boxes.  Again, descriptive theory but where I come from this is not a particularly strong strategic position, particularly when you might need to mobilize your nation in order to pull off a weak draw by this point.
The Ukrainian negotiations have been no less startling.  I think there was a level of shock in those first four days and I would not be surprised if the Ukrainian government had a much more open position to ending this thing.  Now they have completely re-negotiated their reality and envisioned end-state:
From ISW: "Ukraine will not resume negotiations with Russia until Ukrainian and guarantor state negotiators finalize meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine. Russian atrocities in Ukraine and Kremlin efforts to falsely blame Ukraine for these atrocities have reduced the willingness of the Ukrainian government and society to reach a peace agreement less than total Russian defeat"
This is not the negotiation position of warring party that is worried about losing that certainty I spoke of initially, in fact it has been reinforced.  Further, the Ukrainian government is not negotiating with its people from a position of weakness, it is one of extreme strength.  The Ukrainian people are galvanized more now, than they were back on Feb 28th.  They have sacrificed thousands and now the Russian atrocities are coming to better light they know that they are "all in" for the next decade if need be.  Further, based on what I have seen on social media, this resistance has taken root at a cultural level and I cannot describe how powerful (and dangerous for the Russians) that is.  The fact that killing Russians is being elevated to a near religious calling that will likely be taught to grandchildren is about as bad as it can get for an invader, trust me we found that out the hard way in Afghanistan.  
So what?  Well the communication will continue, now in context of re-negotiated end-states.  Negotiation is continuous and is constantly in contact with the other four elements.  What I am looking for are more signals of what that negotiation looks like.  I will say that it is never simple, it has twists and turns the longer this thing carries on.  Signals of negotiation on all levels, the texture and nature of those negotiations, what influences negotiation?  These are all things I will be tracking.
Finally on sacrifice.  Both sides have sacrificed and will continue to do so, the real question of Will comes down to "how much?"  Here Ukraine clearly has got miles of depth before they will accept "too much", particularly as more civilian massacres turn up; what is the point of "tapping out" when they are going to kill you anyway?  The Russians nearly the opposite position: "how close to the edge are they?"  I do not believe for a second that Russia has signed up for a total war but they really close to an unintended one.  The level of sacrifice to win it could soar to the hundreds of thousands as this rate, is Russia willing to pay that blood price?  The economic damage and diplomatic damage are heading to total but it will take months for them to see that in full, let alone believe it.  But the continued bleeding for a few meters of dirt in Ukraine, all projected across social media and on the internet forever is a growing cost that I am not sure the Russian government can negotiate its way out of.
Finally the West.  Well we also have to come to terms with the future and it is not the one we thought it was going to be.  We continue to communicate through proxy means, and negotiate militarily through proxy, while directly through economic and diplomacy means; however, we still are not "getting it":
https://www.reuters.com/world/un-vote-suspending-russia-human-rights-council-over-ukraine-2022-04-07/
These mechanism matter to us, not Russia or other powers like China that want to re-write the rules.  This is a laughable gesture by a creaking global order that has its head so far up its own...well you get the idea.  I have said it before, this war is terrible and costly, they all are and I don't want to downplay that, but it is the beginning of an era of "power being power" we are entering into, a Season of Mars (not Venus) that has been a long time coming.  That is bigger than this war, it has implications for the next ones.  This elevates this whole thing beyond "a local border disagreement" -as some have posited- and towards a strategic "black swan" or shock.  The implications span from the tactical through to the geopolitical, that kind of thing is rare.