cyrano01

We have, indeed, been here before. Although the newly developed tanks and nascent air-power certainly helped it was more sophisticated and co-ordianted use of existing assets, infantry and artillery, that underpinned the ability to break into defensive positions in 1917-18. That and the preceding three or four years of grinding attrition to reduce enemy staying power, oh yeah and a blockade to starve the population.

The list is long but distinguished.

Ursula Von Der Leyen? The title of worst German Defence MInister in recent years is one for which the competition is pretty stiff.

There is always the possibility of membership of the Single Market via the EEA or, possibly, as an add-on to EFTA membership as a stepping stone here. This has the downside of being a rule taker, in that the EU standards would have to be complied with but no formal say in their making (cf Norway) but UKR might not see that as a big problem in the great scheme of things right now.

Me too, although it crossed my mind that it might be France...

Very true. there is, as Adam Smith observed of an earlier geo-strategic Charlie Foxtrot, 'a great deal of ruin in a nation.'

Let's hope they are military Operational Analysis/Operational Research bean counters then rather than the treasury/management consulting type who decided that maintaining adequate national stocks of PPE or a domestic production capability was a waste of money prior to the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. The phrase that has always stuck in my mind was the army officer who described military logistics as 'not so much just in time as just in case.'

'...the essential arithmetic is that our young men will have to shoot down their young men at the rate of four to one...' Is the phrase that springs to mind.

Pretty much agreed, Imperial War Museum say something rather similar here, although nothing that hasn't been discussed at greater depth on this thread. If you go the air force route you need to solve for SEAD/DEAD, period. Russia has proved that without that effective capability you have simply wasted a lot of money on an ineffective tool. This in spades, as the oft-repeated quote said, “Air Power is like Poker. A second-best hand is like none at all – it will cost you dough and win you nothing.” Tough to do though, possibly even for the US. Also having the best air force will get you nothing if it isn;t good enough relative to the ground-based air defences.

I was just thinking that the Bakhmut pictures looked more like the Ypres Salient than anywhere else. Is the area especially wet or with a high water table?

So, that was a fascinating paper in its way. I had no idea that experiencing cold injury symptoms in the past could heighten your sensitivity to them and pre-dispose you to being rendered ineffective in the future. Also interesting, although not necessarily that relevant to fighting in Ukraine was the historical table entry for cold casualties in during WW2. Western Europe: British 500; Americans 91,000 Italian campaign, winter 1943–1944: British 102 cold injurycasualties (ratio 1:45);Americans 4,560 (ratio 1:4) I can understand differences in national approach but these are two armies with quite a lot in common yet an order of magnitude difference in Italy and two orders of magnitude in NW Europe? Surely there has to be some sort of data capture or definition mismatch here.

So, the dangers of over-reliance on secondary sources. The allied bombing accuracy figure I used came from an article rather than a primary source and felt a bit low to me. After a bit of hunting around I managed to find where I had stored my copy of the original British bombing survey and looks like the article from which I got the allied bombing accuracy figure either mis-read or misunderstood the data. The graphs for Bomber Command attacks give a bomb density of between 6 and 8 per square mile at the aiming point per 100 bombs dropped. Note these are Bomber Command figures. The USAAF and the tactical air forces of both allies may, or may not, have been more accurate depending on the weather, degree of opposition etc. So if we say 67,0000 tons with 7% within one square mile at the aiming point you need to land 4690 tons. I’ve also found some numbers (thank you Google) which suggest that the French railway system of the inter-war era was about three times as large in terms of mileage as the current Ukrainian one. If we take this as a crude proxy for the number of targets needing to be hit then our necessary tonnage comes down to 1563. Maybe 3126 missile hits. If we stick with about 50% of RUS missiles arriving at the target and going bang successfully that’s 6252 launches. Still do-able but pretty much eating up most of the RUS missile effort. Earlier in the war with UKR defences less effective the numbers may well look much better from a RUS perspective. Of course all this changes if a greater percentage of missiles get through or if my assumptions about target size are too high (as I suspect they are). Still it was only supposed to be a rough thought experiment to gauge the order of magnitude of effort needed to attack a well developed railway system so even with gross errors it feels to me like: (1) The Capt was right to say that the Russians could have severely degraded the UKR railway network. (2) It would have needed them to identify the railway network as a priority target system early on. (3) they would have had to apply decent ISR to identify the key targets within the system (4) It would have required a high proportion of the missile attack capacity to be devoted to railways so they would have had to forsake other targets, reducing their attacks on the civilian population and infrastructure. I’m not convinced that the Russians have shown themselves capable of 2-4 above on a large scale during this conflict.

It’s reaching a long way back, but there haven’t been too many recent railway bombing campaigns as an adjunct to major ground warfare in developed countries. From a historical perspective the experience of WW2 suggests that while railways are a potentially fruitful target for this sort of strategic air attack they are not necessarily an easy one. The British post-war survey backs up the Capt in identifying maintenance works, stations, yards and other fixed infrastructure as the most productive targets rather than lines or trains directly. I guess this would fit well with weapons that are P-ishGMs. What is noticeable is that to close these targets and keep them closed they had to be attacked and re-attacked pretty regularly. The allies used prodigious numbers of sorties against transport targets in mid 1944. During the run up to D-Day the French railway system alone (so excluding attacks on German railways) received 67,000 tons of bombs. They did pretty much shut down the railway traffic, although more effective against goods/freight movement than one-off military trains. There now follows some really sketchy analysis…totally back of an envelope but I just wanted to get a feel for the orders of magnitude compared with historical cases. (Not something I would have dared to present to the boss back in the day and massively sensitive to wild-guess assumptions, feel free to alter these to taste) Let’s assume a key target area per target of about a square mile, since I happen to have some figures on hand for target areas that size. Let’s also assume that the French railways and Ukrainian railways have about the same depth of alternative routes/facilities that need to be hit– I’ve no basis for this one but it is a starting point. 1944 figures are, very roughly, 1% of bombs dropped land within a square mile of the aiming point, if we assume that pretty much all the Russian fairly precise missiles making it to the target would get within that area then that implies the Russians would need get about 670 tons of warheads through to the railway targets for similar effect. Russian missiles seem to average about 0.5 tons payload per missile so they would need to land about 1340 missiles on railway targets to achieve a comparable effect to the allies in France 78 years ago. Now I have no real idea of the shoot-down rates of incoming missiles or their failure rates for other reasons. Clearly the UKR air defences have got better at bringing down incoming missiles in recent months, and, if they perceived a focus on railway targets, defences at these locations would be stepped up. If we were to assume a success rate per launch of 50% than you might need about 2680 missiles launched. If we assume a success rate of 33.3% then it’s 4020 etc. Adjust to taste based on your desired assumptions about defences, missile performance and the number of targets that need to be struck. (I suspect that there are rather fewer UKR rail targets to be hit but I may be over-generous to the reliability of RUS missiles.) This all sounds do-able but would be a decent proportion of the Russian missiles launched. I think Zelensky claimed they had fired about 3000 from the outbreak of war through to July, not sure of the current figure. This would have needed a decision to prioritise railway targets to be made and followed up with plenty of ‘maintenance of the aim.’ Eschewing the desire for splashy, headline generating terror attacks on Ukrainian cities. I’m not convinced the Russians have shown this degree of focus or clarity especially often. OK back to my tax return for me.

Probably, my understanding was that the R37M was the most recent which they finished testing around 2018 but I may have that wrong (if you have an up to date source on RU AAMs that would be great) https://web.archive.org/web/20180713203827/http://www.janes.com/article/81633/new-russian-long-range-aam-integration-to-expand-to-four-fighter-models

Very interesting. That's a big old missile and I had been under the impression it was mainly designed for use against large, deep, high value targets like Tankers, AWACS (and other ISR assets) et al. The SU-24 and, particularly, the MiG 29 aren't obvious candidates. I guess, if this was the first observed use of these weapons it may be that they were unexpectd and the UKRAF pilots might need further to adjust hteir tactics to be (even) less co-operative targets.

Attacks on Sevastapol percolated through to the BBC. It would appear that the Russians are claiming that British Special Forces were involved and it, along with the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, were all part of an evil British plot. Those perfidious Brits, what will they think of next? I wonder if the MoD and SIS realise they are running the world? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63437212

Just a reminder that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logs...or something like that.

The Light Brigade would like a word, Crimea - first time around.

This from the Torygraph, anyone seen anything from other sources to validate or otherwise? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/10/03/nuclear-weapons-convoy-sparks-fears-putin-could-preparing-test/ It's behind a paywall so first paragraphs...thoughts? A Russian convoy transporting equipment for Russia's nuclear weapons programme has sparked fears that Vladimir Putin could be preparing a test to send a “signal to the West”. A train operated by the secretive nuclear division and linked to the 12th main directorate of the Russian ministry of defence was spotted in central Russia over the weekend heading towards the front line in Ukraine. The pro-Russian Telegram channel Rybar shared the footage showing the large freight convoy hauling upgraded armoured personnel carriers and other equipment. Konrad Muzyka, a defence analyst specialising in Ukraine, said the 12th directorate operated a dozen central storage facilities for nuclear weapons. "This is actually a kit belonging to the 12th Main Directorate of the Russian MoD,” The Poland-based analyst said. “The directorate is responsible for nuclear munitions, their storage, maintenance, transport, and issuance to units." Mr Muzyka said it could be a “signalling to the West that Moscow is escalating," in reference to Vladimir Putin's nuclear war warning last week. However, the expert stressed that the video in no way shows "preparations for a nuclear release".

Suspicions of Anglo-Saxon involvement were aroused when the remains of burnt cakes were washed ashore on the coast of Denmark. Amongst other suspects Æthelred is unready for questioning and Edward has already confessed.

Good grief, the sort of thing likely only to be written by someone not at the sharp end of the 144th MRD! I can feel my inner Flashman coming to the fore. On which score, I wonder if the author realises just which army the original thin red line ('thin red streak tipped with a line of steel,' says Mr Pedant) was shooting at?

Careful, if the Russians read this we will be getting an anouncement from Moscow that the Ukrainian advance is an evil British plot involving NATO biological weapos and the notorious mercenary, special forces leaders Siward, Malcolm and Macduff.

Good summary response. FWIW I would only add that you don't actually elect the party, you elect the individual representative of your constituency. Once elected they can, and do, change parties without being re-elected. Similarly, if that MP dies/resigns then there has to be a bye-election for a replacement, the party doesn't get to swap a replacement straight in. Now back to our normal programmes more relevant to the situation in Ukraine!

All very fraught questions. I was thinking about the constitutional questions when I saw this post and it did occur to me that there is no universal rule that says that if a province/state/oblast or whatever has a majority of people in it in favour of secession then that gives it a right to secede. Clearly the situations vary hugely from place to place but there is a danger of coming at this from an anglocentric perspective. The UK has obviously taken the view that Scotland and N. Ireland do have such a choice having either held referenda or legislated for them. Similarly Canada has, by implication, the same view regarding Quebec. The approach of, say, Spain is significantly different when it comes to Catalan independence. There are plenty of constitutions that declare a country to be indivisible, France for example. Even in the UK I suspect that UDI for, say, Yorkshire might get short shrift from HMG. I guess the question comes down to whether the Ukrainians feel that: (a) They can occupy the territory (b) That there will either be no significant partisan/insurgent hostiles or that if there are they can be suppressed. If the answer to both of these is yes then 'welcome back to the Ukraine, your rights as citizens will be protected but secession will not be tolerated.' Not sure it would end well but it might look a runner from Kyiv? Way out of my military history depth here I might add.

I guess that depends on the extent to which the RU air defence environment has been disrupted. Clearly some of it may have been hit by UKR artillery/rockets and maybe some of their missiles went up in the various supply dumps that have been destroyed. The HARMs used by the UKR AF give some chances to shut down the AD sites during an attack but it's nothing like the sort of full spectrum SEAD that we have become accustomed to sseing in air power as practised bu the US. Anyone got any sort of a steer on the curretn state of the RU air defences?