chris talpas

Timing of the offensive makes sense in that this was probably the weakest that Ukraine would get. Artillery shortages were widely reported and the Russians could certainly count the volume of artillery fire coming their way.  With the aid now freed up, it was probably now  or never.  Having Kharkiv under bombardment would be a setback for Ukraine and help fuel the doom narrative being fed into media channels.
Interesting that we are seeing lots of activity in destroying air defence installations and airbases & aircraft.   Now when were those F16s supposed to appear?

The other axis member turns up the heat in their backyard:
https://bbc.com/news/articles/cqvv29gpqn1o
The west cannot continue their anemic ramp up of military arms manufacturing.  Things are getting serious.

To me this kind of depends on China.

Umm, Mike's boss is Louisiana's 4th Congressional District. I expect that at least some of those constituents support that message. 

Mike's boss has not approved this message.

A podcast/interview  Phd Harold Brown, head of the CSIS. It is discussing most of the same things we have been. He is of the opinion that we can and must be more aggressive about supporting Ukraine, but mostly agrees that we need to keep the war in a box as The_Capt puts it. He is strongly of the opinion that the West is not scaling up military production with sufficient urgency. Russia, and to a large extent CHINA, have gone to essentially wartime levels of production across the board. We uhm haven't, we really haven't, and it has to be fixed. He discusses the evolving more or less alliance between Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. he China's level of support to Russia for Ukraine is high and rising rapidly. He says U.S. planning needs to start taking account of possible coordinated action between them in a crisis/war.
I would argue that the mess in Gaza is ALREAY evidence of coordinated action between them, but we will put that aside for now.
The whole podcast is worth your time.

Exactly this. To the lay man, nukes are just a weapons system. In reality, they sit within a long thought out and tested set of systems and assumptions that every nuclear power devotes a military and political bureaucracy to. The entire structure is to ensure that nobody, ever, destabilizes the system because destabilization almost certainly leads to use. 
When that system collapses in any country, we are all in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Speaking of he who shall not be named.
G7 warms to plan for Trump-proofing Ukraine aid (Financial Times)
I like the idea, not only should it be done we should be emphasizing that we are using frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine's war effort. Good way for the Ukrainians to know that we have their back and a good way to remind Russia that invading Ukraine was the worst geopolitical decision of the 21st century so far.
Seeing billions of frozen Russian assets going to help Ukraine keep destroying Russian military assets on the battlefield should do that. 🙂

Drones launching drones, to clear a minefield no less...
Looks like a pretty early prototype but good to see the forum stays one step ahead of reality!
 

For those that don't check the BBC news an interesting article on how Ukraine is tackling corruption. 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq55rpqlp31o
Every country is corrupt in someway, what matters is how the leadership and institutions try and stop it from bleeding the country dry.
Funny what excuses some folk come up with to stop supporting Ukraine.  🙄 
Lot's left to do and really a never ending job.
 

Since Prig - perhaps even before his outbursts - but especially following his insurrection, the Kremlin has been gripped with fear about the potential of any top brass in the TOA "going rogue".

I'd suggest the main reason we haven't ever seen large localised downing of arms from the RA rank and file is due to command and control exerted by the leadership in the field (as one would expect). But when we reach a point where these individuals are no longer toeing the line, voicing dissenting views, that's when the dominoes are at most risk of tipping. 

After Prig, the Kremlin is on high alert (with immediate consequences) for any dissenting senior staff. 

Russia Arrests Top Commander Who Slammed Putin's Military (msn.com)
A senior Russian commander who criticized the Russian military and its treatment of soldiers operating in southern Ukraine has been arrested, Russian state media reported on Tuesday.
Major General Ivan Popov, who had headed Russia's 58th Army, was "arrested on suspicion of fraud," Russian state news agency, Tass, reported, citing a law enforcement spokesperson.
Popov was removed from his command of Russian troops in Ukraine's annexed southern Zaporizhzhia region In July 2023 after he criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for failing to provide sufficient support for the country's fighters.
Popov condemned what he called a "lack of counter-battery combat," too few resources to scout for artillery and the "mass deaths" of Russian soldiers.
In a recording published to social media by Russian MP and former military commander Andrei Gurulyov, Popov—appearing to be addressing his troops—said he had "raised a number of other problems" to the top of Russia's military command, and was dismissed by then-Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu.
"The senior chiefs apparently sensed some kind of danger from me," Popov said.

https://mastodon.social/@ChrisO_wiki/112472540071030065
Kind of to be expected that especially members of security / police etc. Are going to the war in Ukraine and dying there. These are missing inside Russia now. 

You want it to make you OJ in the morning too? Human beings do fratricide all the time under those conditions. In fact AI will likely do better because it’s processor is not built on a panicky teenager chassis and when told not to shoot, it will actually follow orders.  If you wanna set the bar that high we may as well outlaw all warfare.
 

Would be nice to see one less Kalibr carrying ship of the BSF, if confirmed to be true.
https://w.wiki/A85M     
wikipedia article on this ship class
 

One has to ask out of each artillery shell, or direct fire round for that matter, how many effectively reach a target either?  Warfare is a highly inefficient business.  We waste millions of rounds of ordinance all the time. 20% pk is actually very high compared to say small arms.  Not as high as reports of the Javelins (80-90%) but given the low costs of the systems 1 in 5 is frighteningly effective for something that hasn’t even been designed or produced with milspec.
But the article is very good and on point as to the foundation of a mass precision complex - the new arms race.  Full, or near full autonomy is a must to sidestep EW shielding.  This will mean drones will need to get smarter. Light, cheap processing power is not the problem, algorithms likely will be the competitive space.
The videos of drones with MGs is also interesting.  Someone is going to put a 40mm GL barrel or two in one of those in about 15 secs and now we have HE/HEAT standoff out to 1000+ m.  Now put fins on that 40mm with a laser designator seeker and things could get interesting really quickly.  We have seen all sorts of really expensive counters to FPVs being pushed but it is important to remember that the UAS/UGV side of the equation has barely even gotten warmed up.  Most of the FPVs in Ukraine are civilian make being repurposed.  We have not really seen the results of real investment by military industry in this field.  We are going to, which will drive costs up of course, but capabilities that survive a lot longer and do a lot more are going to happen.  A UAS with a Javelin or Spike missile.  A Wild Weasel UAS with anti-radiation missiles. Fuel air or aluminum powder based explosive drones.
The mass precision complex is coming because mass precision beats everything,

Combo drone attacks; one can very well imagine how these work against an APS: Attack from two directions at once with two drones each, first drones deploys a cloud of chaff/aluminum powder, second drone punches through. 
 

Ukrainian morale and recruitment are bad because no one wants to sign up for a war they suspect their side might be losing. The Ukrainians feel that way in large part because the MAGAT faction in the U.S. managed to screw up the aid flow for months. What is needed now is strong enough statement of western support to convince the Ukrainians we are not just stringing them along. And in return the Ukrainians need to mobilize several hundred thousand people. 
The fastest way convince the Ukrainians we mean it is to put people on the ground in the support roles that takes a decades training to be good at. Contract/NATO aircraft maintainers are the most obvious case but there are a lot of similar technical jobs that the crash six week course just doesn't work for. If we really want to make a splash we need to go from strongly discouraging former F-16 pilots from volunteering for Ukraine, to strongly encouraging it.
Everybody assumed that the the Russians would be the tiniest bit rational about throwing good money and lives after bad. We were wrong, we all need to take a deep breath and stay in the fight.

The head of the foreign intelligence service tells a popular TV channel that his country is running out of military reserves😆. I hope you understand that this message does not mean that Ukraine is really running out of reserves. This is more of a message to the allies - it’s very difficult for us now, we need more help. Budanov is a media person, but don't expect him to tell you the real state of the Ukrainian armed forces

And we are back to why it is not "ok" for fighting aged males to be hanging out in other countries while Russia mauls their home nation.  Regardless, we will have to see how this develops.  What is odd is not only how the Kharkiv thing has gone off, but why there?  A major urban center is not a place to try for a break out,  There is a lot of open country side on this extremely long frontage, so why move there.  Obvious answer is to freak out the Ukrainians and force them to push resources to respond.  Straight up war-by-terror, threaten large civilian populations, get a reaction that forces resource reallocation.
So my next thought is "to what end?"  If the RA can actually pull the UA back enough they might get an operational collapse they can exploit.  But what does that look like?  The RA has not demonstrated any acumen on operational level manoeuvre since Feb '22, and "acumen" is a gross overcompliment based on how that went.  Since then they have collapsed, harassed, denied, and made minor tactical gains.  So we really do not know if they can really exploit what they are doing here.
But let's not drink the copium too deeply. This is strategic/operational shaping by the RA. The fact that they still have the initiative and are able to do this is not good news.  Now shaping is not an immediate sign of success - ask Lee at Gettysburg - but it definitely demonstrates that the Russians are still in this thing.  The UA needs to remobilize and quickly.  They have ISR but it appears to be watching the RA walk forward.  They need capability at this point to counter.
No matter how one spins it, this proxy war just took a weird turn.  So here I agree with FancyCat - West needs to stop playing grab @ss and get back into this game or things could get very bad, very quickly.

Ok, I am tired of this snipey little game going on here.  This is not about the facts anymore, this is simply about disagreeing because you clearly do not like the conclusions I have come to but lack the motivation to actually go do the research to come up with your theories.  I am posting all sorts of references and you have backed up your well informed opinion with a YouTube video.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-07-10

“DARPA’s Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program recently conducted the first successful live-fire tests demonstrating in-flight guidance of .50-caliber bullets. This video shows EXACTO rounds maneuvering in flight to hit targets that are offset from where the sniper rifle is aimed. EXACTO’s specially designed ammunition and real-time optical guidance system help track and direct projectiles to their targets by compensating for weather, wind, target movement and other factors that could impede successful hits.”
This round is specifically being designed to be fire and forget (the part of offset from where the rifle is aimed- which was also mentioned int that wiki article) and is still 1) in development and 2) likely classified to an extent.
This right here is the problem and you clearly will not come off your position - big loud and expensive is what you want. Fine go lobby your political representative and demand they go that way.  That company of 11 x 30mm guns will cost in the order of 90-95 million (3xSkyranger and 9 x Boxers) for the hardware alone - that buys us “not perfect but better than nothing”.
Now let’s just extrapolate what that company is going to come under on the modern battlefield.  First off the ISR elephant - size and heat signatures, 11 x 30ton vehicles are going to be very  visible well out by a multi-layered ISR suite from ground to space.  Then to compound this, an opponent will be pushing long range UAS and loitering munitions such as Spike LR and Switchblade 600 out to 40kms+ based on these ISR detections.  Many of these will have levels of autonomy that sidestep EW, but there will be significant enemy attrition on that first wave - let’s say 33 long range systems at a cost of 10k each = approx $330k spent by the enemy so far.  
This Boxer company will be under assault at these ranges.  It will likely use APS and these guns to defend itself.  This will add to its ISR signature significantly as firing off a bunch of heavy calibre round is want to do.  But let’s be really optimistic and say that the company is 100% successful and suffers zero loses under this first assault as UAS and loitering come out of the trees (sounds like a good assumption in warfare).
But our stalwart little-company-that-could is now most definitely found and fixed for tracking.  It keeps rolling and the loitering and drone attacks continue, let’s add two more waves to bring the sum total investment by the enemy on this company at around $1m.  After almost 100 strikes it really begs belief that there won’t be losses but this Boxer company are big boys and designed to take losses…they keep on going after 2 hits.  
And then they hit artillery ranges.
The guns are definitely still a thing.  Smart rounds, submunitions and well aimed dumb rounds are going to start falling on our little company at long ranges…think 15-20kms.  These won’t be barrages because they don’t need to, but PGM strikes (and note we are discounting long range rocket systems because an infantry company is not large enough a target…maybe).  At this point things are not going to go well - remember those loitering and UAS are still coming while artillery is dropping.  Skyranger space guns or even cheaper AA is doing nothing for artillery so losses will stack up.  Costs to the enemy will go up, but even if they spend 10m on artillery ammo (which is a lot but let’s roll in overhead) they are at around 11 million and half that company is very likely gone by this point.
But that company keeps going, now down to 6 fancy 30mm guns.  Once they get within 5kms of the front ATGMs and smart mines start to kick in.  UAS drop mines or mines with legs start to position - and they have time to because we have seen this company coming for quite some time now.  ATGMs are top down, standoff son-of-Javelin so they need fewer but costs do go up.  But even at an additional $4m the enemy is at a $15m total investment to defeat a $90m dollar friendly capability.  At this point that company is pretty much stopped cold.  Being extremely generous, the company is no longer effective kms from the ranges those guns and infantry can be effective in a direct fire role.
“Well send in a Bn!” That makes it worse. Bigger is not better, it is worse.  Higher signature, more targets, more assets to try and defend.  Now before the cheap seats weigh in on “ well this is simplistic…ahem ahem.”  Well yes it is, reality is likely worse.  The problem is that countering that cheap layered defensive combination of ISR and systems is 1) impossible with today’s tech and 2) extremely expensive. To defeat the UAS (with the system you propose) we need all those big guns.  We need fancy armor.  We need EW.  We need counter-battery.  We need air superiority, which is nigh impossible.  And our opponent can take a lot of losses on cheap distributed systems before we can regain freedom of action and have any hope of that infantry company making it to the 1-2000 meter mark where it can start doing its job.
”We will have our own UAS bubble”, yes we will.  And if we do it right we can push it onto an enemy and erode their entire defence.  We can manoeuvre our own offensive system of ISR, fires and unmanned like a lethal cloud on the battlefield.  Finding our opponent is much harder - as we saw four guys in a basement with a dozen FPVs are much harder to find than a Boxer company.  But we can do it.  Of course at the point our corrosive lethal cloud can find and eliminate those four guys along with the half dozen guns and ATGM teams, along with the swarms of incoming enemy UAS…I have to ask…what do I need with a $90 million dollar Boxer company?  I can do mop up and seize terrain with much lighter, cheaper faster forces if I have built the winning offensive cloud/bubble system.
Or we could go with “hey it is better than nothing” and pretend that’s good enough.

A wargame simulated a 2nd Trump presidency. It concluded NATO would collapse.
https://www.businessinsider.com/a-wargame-simulated-a-2nd-trump-presidency-it-found-nato-would-collapse-2024-5
 
 

There is nothing necessarily preventing you from providing updates while it is out.  Drone swarms could certainly have scouting drones creating a sensor mesh.  
Another potentially significant change to urban warfare would be that no longer one would need to level whole buildings to eliminate defenders, thus giving your side the advantage that cover provides vs. rubble when you take that position.