chrisl

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.

Because it (almost inevitably) appeared elsewhere:

The only thing I would add about the fight in front of us in the E-SE:
- This is a "race to stalemate" for the Russians, and even possibly for the UA - but I would not be surprised them rolling on an overall strategic objective of "cleanse Russian forces from our land"...and from what we have seen in the North that ain't a crazy idea as of today.  So it will be interesting to see just how "all in" the Russians really are in this.  Putin is "all in while riding a bear shirtless" but your average Russian soldier may have other ideas.
- Russians are in much worse shape now than they were 6 weeks ago.  Nothing worse for moral than losing ground a lot of your people died for.  That and making up for the equipment, materiel and manpower losses is going to pull from way down the list of quality with no time for re-tooling or training.  So while the Russians have mass, even more concentrated now along fewer axis, it is even more brittle than it was in the initial invasion.  
- Russians still have not solved their operational pre-conditions problem.  Air Superiority has become a joke, right along with information or C4ISR.  And the Russians have to try and do logistics having lost over 2xCAA worth of logistical vehicles, while not yet having solved for long range PGMs leg-humping their LOCs to further distraction.
   I was not fully on board the Russian Collapse theory in the opening of this war - they did manage a withdrawal of sorts in the North.  However, time is really not on their side now.  A full Russian invasion force collapse is a lot more likely now that the Russian political level is insistent that they take a broken and battered Army and try to go back on the offensive with it.  And the best they have offered is some glue and tape over the busted parts.  The Ukrainian military machine is no doubt also battered but the rub here is "they won".  Their morale has to be high, and now very sharp with the atrocities uncovered, now that they have pushed the Russians well back in the north.  This means more volunteers, winning commanders, more veterans of success and likely enough western firepower to melt entire Russian formations.
  This will all come down to when Putin can go "Mission Accomplished" before his entire military falls apart...crazy.  If he is smart it will be this weekend but one thing I think we can say with confidence is that Putin and the Russian military machine has been a little short of "smart" in this war.