cyrano01

It's perfect. We can have fun with its various Iterations,contractions, expansions, alterations, verbability, etc

Tsk - do you zink ve are some 26 letter alphabet peasantz? Ve also have Ä, Ö, Ü und ß to choose from.

Oh we still have the good old german grammatical option to use "zusammengesetzte Substantive", which gives us way more than 26 options and could result in things like this:
Deutsche Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftswirtschaftsprüfungsinspektion
German Danube Steamship Company Economic Audit Inspectorate
🙃

Which is bad enough as it is and Deutsche Bank is among the more evil of the lot.
DB, btw. is the official abbreviation for Deutsche Bahn (German Railway company), which incidentally is state owned and related to Deutsche Bank only in the sense that both are good at burning money...

My model of the current state of play is that we are in an abortive WWI space. Multi-ethnic, archaic imperial state Russia (think Austria Hungary) thought its "unlimited" alliance with China (Kaiser-ine Germany) would allow it to settle scores with Ukraine (Serbia) in a world where a long war/big war hadn't happened in decades and was so unthinkable and ill thought. But this time, the Kaiser balked and the Third Balkan war became a dragged out proxy conflict as everyone else tooled up for something bigger. That's where we are now. Waiting to see which way the balance tips.
 

These SW tools can solve optimization problems w lots of design variables in lots of ways to provide some set of 'good' solutions.  But it's still just a plan.  Aint now SW gonna implement nuthin, someone still has to get truck A to supply point B in the real world.  And the solutions can be very sensitive to the parameters chosen -- chosen by humans.  When I teach some of this stuff to engineers I always tell them to test their sensitivity to their assumptions.  'bound the problem' so they at least know how much danger they are in if any given assumption is off by some appreciable amount.  
Never want to run these tools & say "there's THE answer" unless you are darn sure you've got everything well understood.

She is a full Colonel and already knows the score.  

So here we are coming up a year into this thing and I think it is fair to say that the impact of this war on a global scale has been significant and very likely permanent.  The fact that it came on the heels of a the worst global pandemic since 1918, and that on the heels of the end of the Cold War and 9/11 all speak to one helluva crazy ride...and I suspect we are just getting started. 
So I am seeing the same question, of variations thereof, being asked all over the internet as we come up on the 1st anniversary of this war:  When will this war end?
This is a reasonable and perfectly predictable question.  However, it is really not asking when this war will actually end, it is really asking "when will we go back to normal? The way things were?"
Well the short answer is that this war will likely not end, it will turn into the next one. 
For this war to end, Ukraine and Russia would have to accept a lasting peace between their two nation states - and I am pretty sure that ship has sailed for a few generations at least.  Watching the Ukrainian and Russian political levels, something has dawned on me - they have already figured this out and are waiting patiently for the rest of the world to catch up.
It would be a serious mistake to think that once the killing abates that we can all go back to whatever we were doing before this thing broke out.  Too many fundamentals have been impacted.  The power balance in Europe, the role of Russia and its orientation, some deeper elements of warfare itself.  We are off the cliff here and in freefall, so no point arguing about the upholstery.
We can debate when the RA will fold, or freeze or whatever.  But the reality is that after this conflict a second one between the West and Russia is waiting in the wings.  Or if Russia completely implodes, another major (and very dangerous) conflict there.  And all the while we have the escalating competition between the US and China.  My sense we are at the beginning of a global scale collision, but it will not likely be WW3 (at least not yet), nor will it be a rehash of the Cold War - although it will share elements of it.  No this will more likely be something else entirely, but in so many ways the same.  A Tepid War, a Hot Peace, an Impressionist War with Baroque outbreaks.  This might just be the first war for full control of the human race and building the edifice for what comes next.
Regardless, the violence and dying in Ukraine will end or taper off, and that is not small.  But all war is an irreconcilable collision of human certainty that contains an element of violence, and we are headed for a big one on many levels.  We have horizontal collisions between the people and the state, between people themselves and between states.  The war in Ukraine is a very real and brutal manifestation of things that have been simmering under the surface for years.
So this war will not end, it will morph and evolve.  Everyone needs to get used to that idea because I suspect our grandkids will be still fighting it.  Everyone needs to start thinking about sacrifice - something we are not very good at doing in the west.  I mean we understand it on some level, and some have had to sacrifice everything in the last 30 years.  However, on a broad scale I think we will need to be ready to make a lot more sacrifices in order to keep a voice in what happens next, and Ukraine is just the opening shot.   

If this is solely about Russian elites, my perception is that this is a very valid statement. If it's about right leaning elites in North America and many parts of Europe, I think it's painting with a VERY broad brush as my personal experience indicates otherwise.  And much of that work is done quietly without the need to seek attention.  But---I'd rather not take this discussion further into unrelated topics so I will not reply further.
Maybe it's just me, but second guessing or questioning Poland's contribution to Ukraine over the past 12 months would put one on the deep side of a losing argument. But that's just me.
All the talk about the delay in getting weapons and training to Ukraine, shortages of ammunition and questioning whether Ukraine can hold the Russians off until the cavalry arrives late Spring or early Summer, makes me wonder whether the arms and ammunition are already in-country and ready to flatten a Russian advance.  It makes no sense to hear so much discussion about what Ukraine doesn't have, their weaknesses.  
Would Russia be able to accurately detect a large buildup of Ukrainian forces?  Tanks, new airplanes, additional long-range missiles, etc.   Is it possible that Ukraine is simply waiting for Russia to expose themselves by going on the offensive, then unleash holy Hell only on the Russians?  Is it possible to "hide" or conceal a significant amount of new military hardware?

Are we sure he has not been lurking on this forum?  Again, these are not thing one can fix in even a year or two.
“Bergen: Is Russia failing because of failures of intelligence? Failures of its conscripts? Failures of Russian military culture? All the above? 
Petraeus: All of the above and more. The list is long, including poor campaign design; wholly inadequate training (what were they doing for all those months they were deployed on the northern, eastern, and southern borders of Ukraine?); poor command, control, and communications; inadequate discipline (and a culture that condones war crimes and abuse of local populations); poor equipment (exemplified by turrets blowing off of tanks when fires ignite in them); insufficient logistic capabilities; inability to achieve combined arms effects (to employ all ground and air capabilities effectively together); inadequate organizational architecture; lack of a professional noncommissioned officer corps; a top-down command system that does not promote initiative at lower levels and pervasive corruption that undermines every aspect of their military – and the supporting military-industrial complex.”

Homicide is the act of killing a man
Regicide is the act of killing a king
Fratricide is the act of killing a brother (or, more generally, any blue-on-blue)
Matricide is the act of killing your mother
Countryside is the act of killing Piers Morgan

first we insult the morons, now we insult the twits?  Next we'll be trashing the village idiots. this has got to stop.

Result of UKR strike with Tochka-U on the building of school in Nikolske village - 18 km NW from Mariupol. Reportedly Russians had barracks and ammo dump here. Locals say they heard about five explosions and aftr hit two or three paramedic vehicles arrived. Russian social media didn't write almost anytrhing about this, just officially was claimed UKR missiile was shot down. Though, probably no signifiucant damage
  
Also one more known missile attack this night is a hit of MGB of LPR building in Kadiivka (Stakhanov), Luhansk oblast. On local TG write about 2 KIA and 5 WIA.   
PS. Aftermath of Makiivka HIMARS strike. Russian 1444th MRR of Samara oblast was disbanded. One their battalion was almost completely wiped out. Other personnel now is sharing among other regiments. Soldiers of 1444th regiment filmed an appeal to General Staff and Putin in order to save their unit. 

Vuhledar now. The look from southwest. Big black spot across the road is completely ruined miners cottage settlement (also named as "upper dachas"). In upper left corner - Southern-Dombasian mine #1 and nibe worshops across the road - large UKR strongpoints, cobering the town from east.
According to Khodakovskiy, UKR troops conducted unsuccessful attempt to push Russians west from the town and after this hit with HIMARS command point of DPR "Kaskad" battlegroup. One combat officer was killled 

Now, now, we can’t have German bashing day without “America and EU political Yabbida Day” fair and equal air time etc. We just had “Russian apologist/It is all the US/NATOs fault Day” so we are on track in the rotation.

That's not really what he's saying. CM in general is far too ultraviolent to imitate reality. Infantry incinerate everything they see far too quickly, particularly in urban areas.

No they shredded his logistics system, C4ISR and cause him to implode at an operational level at least twice.
The density you would have to lay AP mines to get the effect you want would likely get more people killed than you would in fact inflict on the enemy.  They did an experiment back when I was at CFSME and laid a standard NATO AP strip in a training minefield.  They then had two entire courses run back and forth a half a dozen times over the minefield man abreast.  It created 2 casualties.  So the density you would have to lay these at would 1) stress the logistical system, 2) expose troops while putting them in place even given RA ISR and 3) not likely work like you want as the first 2-3 guys would get hit and then the rest would just charge over their bodies.
Mines are not some magic sticky carpet we can stick out there like mouse traps.  Just think about a company sized position, so 500m across because this is dense fighting.  So that is 500 sq meters in a single line, so if you want high density you are probably talking 4 mines per square meter, that is one mine in a 1/4 meter box.  That is 2000 AP mines to deny a strip 1 m deep.  Want to make that strip 10ms and we are talking 20000 mines.  100ms, so the stopping power your are looking for, 200000 AP mines....for 500m.  Oh, and then in a month or two you have to counter-attack over the same minefield...whoops.
It would be far better to use area command detonated systems which are already outside the Ottawa Convention. 
Political cost - I have noticed a trend here to "poo-poo" inconvenient political realities on both sides of this war.  Russian supporters or fearers wave away Putin's real political pressures and hazards that limit his actions (e.g. mobilization).  Doing it on behalf of the UA is not any better.  The UA might get away with it, but lets take Canada for a second...peace loving maple syrup slurping socialists that we are.  So we are in a minority government situation right now with the far left NDP actually holding the Liberals in power.  So consider for a moment what they are going to do with the sudden wide employment of AP mines by the UA as we send Ukraine billions of dollars in military aid in a post-pandemic economic crunch....I will let you mull it over.
The moral here, is that within politics risk is not simple nor straight forward - it is also highly connected.  So while you may wish to dismiss the issue, I am pretty sure the Ukrainians have not.  They have not given notice to withdraw from the convention, nor have we seen any evidence of violations...and they are fighting for their lives.
So 1) they will not do what you want, and 2) the risks are very real and frankly not worth it given point #1.  You want to make Russians die in numbers, how about just keep doing what they are doing because it seems to be working.  

What is stark here is the level of RA operational level assets being lost.  Stuff like satellite comms, EW, engineering and CPs.  That stuff is supposed to be well in the back most of the time.  Either they got unlucky pulling this stuff forward (and why anyone would need to push a sat comms veh forward is beyond me), or the deep strike game is still playing out.  Lotta guns on the RA side too.
The UA lost a few trucks and maintenance workshop (which actually hurts a lot) but the rest is F ech stuff which is supposed to get broke.

Thus, if in December 2022 (during a calmer period of this life) 3,500 Ukrainian soldiers were lost in the battle for Bakhmut. Can we assume that by February 2023, when the nature of the fighting became much more fierce than in December, we lost three times more people - about 10,000 soldiers, that is, about 3 mechanized brigades? Something is definitely not right here. If this were true, we would simply drown in the panic messages of our soldiers from the front.

In support of @JonS and @The_Capt 's posts on the subject. The build up of stress over time on troops in combat during WW2 is discussed by John Ellis in his book 'The Sharp End'. He quotes a 1946 paper by Lt. Col' Appel and Cpt' Beebe (US Army) in the Journal of the American Medical Assoc.  as saying that any soldier surviving that long would break down after 200-240 combat days. It seems the British used 400 days but this was reflective of different rotation practises and probably amounted to much the same thing.
Ellis goes on to suggest that, for trained troops peak effectiveness was reached after about three weeks of combat with gradual deterioration setting in after six. Rotation can delay or even restore this process a bit but it takes a long time out of the line. I guess the message is that experienced troops fight better and smarter until they don't any more. There is a rather chilling quote from a British 7th Hussarsa officer dating to 1941 saying that '...the actual business of fighting is easy enough. You go in, you come out, you go in again and you keep doing it until they break you or you are dead.'
Unlike some here I have never had to lead people in anything more hostile than a cricket match or even been shot at, I am pleased to say, so I have no personal experience to draw on. That said, it seems to me that the this sort of thing is more likely to be a problem for the UKA as their individual soldier is likely to have a longer lifespan than the Russians. Maybe the rotation of key formations out of the line give as much benefit in terms of psychiatric recovery as they do re-training on Western equipment.
 

Don't oversell AP landmines here. Having been in minefields and witnessed some of the carnage you describe personally - and a lot of years as a combat engineer, I think I can play the "expert" card here.
AP landmines were always designed to harass and attrit - both physically and psychologically.  The only ones that were approaching lethality level to be decisive are area systems like claymore or bounding mines (especially when in daisy chain...nasty).  So their utility in warfare is not zero but it is also 1) upside down and 2) backwards:
Upside down - like most engineer obstacles you are trading work for time.  A LOT of work up front to buy a few seconds minutes later.  Making those minutes second count is what all arms defence is all about.  AP mine as part of that overall system is a very junior player in the modern age.  The vast majority of AP mines simply are never detonated.  They do support force multiplication but pale in comparison to AT systems.  Main reason is that mechanized made modern warfare - we will see how long that lasts - so kill the vehicle and a modern army is back to WW1.  AP mines were there to make clearance of those AT mines difficult and to kill engineers.  In some conditions they were still used for final defence, but in order to really have an effect you have to employ a very high density.  Go read on the Falklands War accounts of the final attacks on the Two Sisters.  The Brits hit minefields on the assault, took hits and just kept on going.  So as the modern era progressed the amount of effort to put out enough density in AP became entirely secondary to the AT problem.  Back in training, before the Ottawa Convention, we would plan for a lone single strip in a massive AT minefield that was frankly an enormous pain in the a@@ and did basically nothing.  We did employ them for nuisance minefields but these were last on the priority list of engineer works.  AT, AT and AT was always the priority. 
So the value of AP outside of very narrow circumstances really began to drop to the point that when the landmine ban came up, we kind looked at it and went "meh".  We still retain the command detonated point defence systems, like Claymores, so the ability really mess people up is still there.  And boobytraps/anti-handling devices exist in a grey area so if we need to deny critical systems in a withdrawal scenario we still could.  The old AP mines - "toe poopers" - really kind became old-school extra work that we really did not miss.
Backwards - The other problem with the old dumb AP mines was the fact that they killed/injured more people after the war than they did in the war itself.  This drove the costs of these systems way outside the battlefield gains.  Cambodia was really the eye opener, and then the Balkans, Afghanistan etc.  We saw that the post-war impact was like GDP-level harming - the cost of removing these weapons, especially if they records are lost or never made, was orders of magnitude of the weapon system itself.  So from a military strategic perspective these were literally cutting off the nose to spite the face.  They were never going to be decisive on the battlefield, and the post-war costs were enormous as we were seeing large swaths of agriculture, tourism and development areas were totally denied for at least a century unless a nation in post-war recovery could spend millions on clearances that would take years. 
So frankly, AP mines do not make warfare economic sense.  They may feel good but Ukraine sticking its neck out on this one is not worth it.  They will kill a few more Russians, but not enough to balance the blowback or post-war impacts.  The RA has demonstrated a stunning ability to feed people into this thing, so they are simply going to ignore any AP minefields, accept the casualties and move on.
DPICM is fundamentally a very different problem.  The issue here is the "peace community" really functions by fund raising and to do that they need "wins".  The AP Convention was a big win, so they were searching for a high profile follow up - enter Lebanon 2006.  Israel in a bafflingly bad military operation - it basically killed the credibility of their famous design approach - decided to start lobbing old stockpiles DPICM at hybrid forces who were fighting from within communities...what could possibli go wrong?  Well the whole thing blew up in their, and our, faces...literally.  Old stockpiled DPICMs had embarrassing dud rates - although, reality check; those dud rates do not even come close to the numbers of AP mines employed in older conflicts.  More modern DPICM systems are seeing lower dud rates than the HE being tossed around the battlefield today...but if it looks like a landmine and can generate crowd funding like a landmine...
 So the Anti-Cluster munition thing was born.  We in military circles knew that it would really go nowhere because DPICM has far more battlefield utility and in many circumstances it could be decisive.  So they bolted together a convention but there are holes one can drive a truck through and all the major players simply refused to sign off - although the US made some hand over heart promises.  So what?  Well DPICM essentially takes HE and distribute it widely and more efficiently.  When shaped charge rounds are employed the lethality goes up as well - plenty of studies out there, and we read a lot of them for CMCW.  So unlike AP which is a nuisance to an attacking combined arms unit, DPICM can kill it.  For Ukraine, and the US, the employment of DPICM is entirely legal, even if it makes some people queasy.  Neither nation signed the thing in Oslo and can legally employ the weapon systems in accordance with the Geneva CCW.  Modern DPICM have extremely low dud rates as they are built to be self-neutralizing - we are talking 95% and above, far higher than standard HE.  Now as PGM enters the battlefield en masse, my bet is that DPICM will also go the way of AP mines.  If we need to kill 10 attacking vehicles, we fire 10 PGM systems.  DPICM cost/benefit will very likely shift- along with a lot of systems - after this war and into the future.  So the entire thing may become moot, but we are not there yet.
So DPICM will have political costs, but I think they are mitigatable and are outweighed by critical battlefield utility.  AP mines, no; DPICM, yes. 
 
 

It may be worse than what can be reasonably considered as acceptable for a defensive battle like this, though.
The way it seems to me, defensive battles become riskier and lead to increasing numbers of casualties for the defender over time, basically as prepared defenses, fortifications, etc. degrade and get progressively more shot up and therefore less effective.
Also, with deteriorating overall situation, individual positions probably get overrun more often (leading to high casualties), necessitating local counter-attacks, which is also riskier. In addition, the attacker has superiority in indirect fires (pretty much an established fact for Bakhmut), making *any* kind of movement riskier, i.e., especially these localized withdrawals and counterattacks.
The following are pretty much my own amateur conclusions and may well be off, but to me it seems the biggest mistake, so to speak, a defender can make is to stick in the fight for too long, fighting for too long to cling to or even recapture shot up positions, ruining the "exchange ratio" over time and messing up the attrition calculus, likely due to sunk-cost-fallacy. There are some harrowing descriptions in Storms of Steel from the Battle of the Somme that particularly stuck with me, of command sending company upon company into some totally untenable and destroyed position just to be smashed, either en route or on top of the previous occupants. Any resemblance of an effective defense from that point had long become impossible, as trenches had been smashed up, fields of fire altered by artillery terraforming, etc.
And this does not even include any form of operational collapse of defensive, as the enemy begins to bypass remaining strong points, as we may start to see in the near future or are already starting to see around Bakhmut.
EDIT: According to Wikipedia, casualty ratio for the entire Battle of the Somme was about 1.4:1, which seems pretty bad for a defensive battle and I'd wager that ratio much more favorable when the battle began in July and got progressively worse, as reserves were fed into counter-attacks and shot up positions

I don't think the fighter/bomber is any deader than the tank (and probably less), but it's subject to the same kind of conditions as the future of tanks.  The biggest is that it depends on asymmetry of technology and doctrine.  The jets and aerodynamics are pretty mature all around, but attack aircraft are part of a system, just like tanks are part of a system.  NATO/US don't just send fancy fighter/bombers off on their own - there are a ton of support systems, starting with the satellite ISR, then GlobalHawlks, and the various B707 based radar and command systems. E-3 for airborne monitoring and traffic control, the E-8 JSTARS to monitor things on the ground, EA-18s for SEAD, and so on.  They're all part of an interconnected system that makes it possible to reach out and touch someone with as little risk as possible to the guys driving them around.  Just like you can't just load up a bunch of M1 tanks on trains and ship them into Ukraine and expect them to be effective, you can't just drop off a bunch of F-35s (or F-15s, F-16s, or FA-18s, Typhoons, etc) without all the stuff that helps them do the things they do.  But if you have that whole set of toys and the doctrine to suppress the defenses around a volume of space, you can then use that space to deliver very high precision pain.

Yeah, but isn't it nearly always the case that the UK has to offer Ukraine the western weapons it has available to it in order to  provide a demonstration/pathway/example that other western nations can follow in getting Ukraine more suitable weapons?

Yes, and the oppoosite effect with some British formations who in Normandy who had just enough survivors of Italy / N Africa to give them a reputation for being 'sticky' in attack even if competent in defence. I vaguely recall reading that US formmations that saw first combat in Normandy started to see the same symptoms around the end of 1944 but couldn't be sure where I saw this.
@The_Capt's point about corporate expertise and staffwork is also a good one as it can accumulate amongst the the staff officers and higher commanders who are possibly a bit less likely to be killed as often. Assuming you can persuade them not to lead from the front too much (cf the BEF's problems with this in 1915-16).