cyrano01

I am going to assume we are talking modern western equipment here so 3rd Gen stuff.  I mean I am sure there is older stuff in war stocks and parking lots but I doubt this is what the general was talking about.
So that is an Armoured Divisions worth of tanks, with about ten percent of all the M2s in the US inventory and half of the entire US inventory of M777s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M777_howitzer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Fighting_Vehicle
Given the state of the RA, a force that size would definitely do the trick of punching through their defensive lines - assuming engineering support vehicles.  However sourcing it from a single nation is going to be impossible, not even the US (E.g Germany only fields about 266 Leo 2s).  So to do it would mean a mixed fleet from several nations. The logistics issues with this are significant - like Gulf War significant.  I mean keeping 300 MBTs fueled alone is going to be 360,000 litres per day - and these are peacetime numbers.  Considering we are talking intense combat operations that will likely double.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m1-specs.htm
That is anywhere from 37-74 M978 tankers for the tanks alone.  One would need surplus because they are going to take losses and you will need to spread them out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Expanded_Mobility_Tactical_Truck
Given the distances this will drive the requirements up further.
I do not disagree that this force could break the RA - they are pretty beat up and conventional mass of this scale would likely do the trick for deep penetrations.  Going to need to start building it now and count on a year+ before it is ready and one will need an allied coalition levels of logistical support in-country to keep it sustained.
Of course Ukraine would become one of the most powerful militaries in Europe with this level of capability - and that is going to come with a pretty high price tag to keep operable over time, even well after this war is over.
 
 
 

That kind of thing can be a lot harder than it sounds, as we got to see over the past couple years.  It's not just the assembly plant where they put the bang in the bombs, but all of the supply chain that leads to that.  The metal suppliers that provide particular alloys, the chemical suppliers that produce the components of the explosives, their suppliers of precursor materials, etc.  And you're trying to do it in a world that has spent decades tuning everything to be just-in-time, carefully forecasted so there's no slack in anybody's supply chain because it costs money to keep extra material around, or even worse, buy it and have it go to waste.

Russian missiles hit DniproGES hydro power plant today (lloks like one missed and fell in the water)
Overall statistic of the day
76 missiles were launched from frigate "Admiral Makarov" (20 Kalibrs) and aircraft Tu-95, Su-35, Tu-22M3 (Kh-101, Kh-555, Kh-22, Kh-59, Kh-31). 60 were intercepted. 
Additionally Russians launched 27 S-300 missiles in ground attack mode on close frontline areas. Heavy infrastructure damages in Kharkiv. 
In Kyiv subway is stopped. Lack of electricity, no water supply and heating on half of left-bank districts. On right bank situation is better. I now can write from my work on right bank. I hope I will have internet at home

Just to clarify, do we know the Switchblade 600 is available in any meaningful numbers, and will stand up to Russian jamming? At least some versions of the Spike use a fiber optic cable instead a radio link. Pretty sure those are close to fool proof in terms of ECM.

Ah, the Americans are not that bad

May the Almighty curse your mouse hand with a blister…it was an empty threat.  Whole point of this thread and forum it to try and hold onto a sane analysis/assessment and discussion of the war, and that takes all kinds.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion and perspectives…fair point…*grump* - I just got high roaded by LLF no less.

Then why take the bloody risk?  Ukraine can nibble the RA operational system and have demonstrate it very well against mainstream predictions.  However, you are upscaling linearly on both risk, cost and opportunity.  In order to incremental erode Russias broader strategic capability and capacity to prosecute this war and fundamentally change conditions we are not talking about a few demonstrations with ATACMS.  Back over the summer the UA fired hundreds of HIMARS at RA logistics and effectively crippled them - that wasn’t “nibbling” it was chewing.  That erosion led the RA to the point of full collapse at Kharkiv and a more controlled one at Kherson.  It was erosion of the RA through precise targeting of a critical component.
To do this at the strategic level is much more intensive.  To be effective it would mean hitting Russia across sectors of its military, political and industrial complexes.  The key component missing in your theory is speed.  To conduct corrosive warfare one needs to hit precisely fast.  Faster than your opponent can replace the losses of critical components.  Upscaling means the speed needs to outstrip Russian ability to recover at a strategic level, which means wide scale and heavy strikes on critical components across those sectors.  The UA did not “onsey-twosie” RA logistics at the operational level and the strategic level requirements to do the same are much higher,
Sure he does - seriously this is dangerously obtuse and what I mean about under prescribing.  If Russia was not deterred by NATO at all, as you claim, Russia would at a minimum 1) be hitting support bases in Poland and 2) likely have employed WMDs- they had no problem in Syria.  In fact if there was no NATO deterrence Russia may have led with chemical weapons which was in line with Soviet doctrine.
So this is what this is really about - your personal frustration with the level of western support? And somehow “small amounts of long range missiles” are going to fix this.  So this whole angle is really about making you feel better?  
Ok, well this is where I get off this bus. ATACMS are an escalation as they shift western support to directly targeting Russia inside its own borders.  But apparently you believe NATO holds no deterrence so I am not sure we will ever agree on the deterrence/escalation calculus, regardless.  
Further “small amounts” ATACMS or other weapon systems will largely only serve as demonstrations and strategic harassing fires. Their effectiveness is directly linked to western ISR for target development, validation, prosecution and post-strike assessments, which provision thereof is also an escalation - but we are also not going to agree on that because there is no escalation Russia will respond to according to your position.
Finally, as a citizen of a supporting western nation, I find this continual uninformed western/US bashing insulting and ignorant.  E.g.  we are sending them BMPs because the UA can quickly get them into the fight and keep them into the fight - only a rank amateur would think stuffing Marders  into the UA is easy and west is somehow being lazy for failing to do it.  For example, Marders has 6 dismounts while the BMP has 8 - so the UA can just redesign its squad size over a long weekend while re-aligning it’s logistics system to maintain the things, including a whole new suite of FCS and spare parts…apparently.
The west is sticking its neck way out on this one for a lot of good reasons, and not all of the altruistic; however, they are backstopping Ukraine well above and beyond the call while not dragging us all into WW3.  But people in the cheap seats still want to crap all over us because we did not supply whatever piece of kit pops into their highly uninformed heads.
Ok, I am out…can someone show me where this damned ignore button is?

'...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.

'...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.

Sorry for not being present for some time (had, and actually still have, issues in IRL).
The execution video is an LDPR fake. It's an LDPR-style execution - these morons have no idea how actual Soviet-based militaries carry out any types of executions, so they imitate their own mob-like executions.
Apart from that - due to vastly enhanced UKR anti-drone defenses, actual RU drone operators stopped flying like this in August. But here RU operator literally flying over UKR heads for some time, risking extremely valuable asset, just to watch bunch of unimportant UKR troops doing some unimportant stuff. 
Go home, Ivan, you are too drunk to make believable fakes. 
Bakhmut's situation is gradually deteriorating, but it is far from grave. It's the standard RU bragging that we're all used to hearing.
In the north, after months of battering Yakovlivka village (northeast of Soledar), RU eventually flattened it, and it appears UKR defenders abandoned it. It means the Northen pincer is now sort of free and moving. Except that it does not give RU much - without Soledar, they are still a long way from surrounding Bukhmut.
After loss at the Industrial Zone, RU decided to shift the axis of assault to Pidhorne village on the outskirts of Bukhmut (northern outskirts of Bukhmut, between Bukhmut and Soledar). Important village, but aside from several talkes, I have yet to come across credible information, implying that things are not going well for RU there.
The Southern pincer is the most alarming. There are no significant UKR defenses there, so RU is gradually grinding toward Ivanivka. They're probing Klishiivka, the last settlement before Ivanivka. That's bad, but the first part of the Battle of the Bulge was also bad. Essentially, we are waiting a UKR counter-attack aimed at destroying the Southern pincer. Question is how far UKR will let RU penetrate. 
Bukhmut itself is not in grave danger, and there is no threat of it collapsing (yet). Fighting is taking place at the outer defenses, and it is not yet dangerous.

Ok, time for me to be the bad guy. 
I don't care if "a little bit of pot" for "medicinal use" is normalized in your country. If it is illegal in the country you are visiting you are in the stupid category for possessing it. Especially if that country is one like Russia that will throw you into a hard labor camp for 15 years for your "medicine". You have the choice, you make the choice, you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
There is a huge difference between being kidnapped and arrested. If you didn't break any laws then you were kidnapped. If you did, you were arrested. Saying that these people were kidnapped when they were actually arrested for violating the laws of their host country takes away from those that are actually kidnapped when visiting foreign countries. Words matter. Afterall, there are a whole bunch of foreign nationals held in western prisons for crimes they have committed and they do not fall under the "kidnapped" category. 
I'm all for the US Gov doing everything they can to free it's kidnapped citizens around the world including direct military intervention against terrorist groups that use it as a means to fund themselves. The humanist in me says they should do what they can within reason to secure the release of a pot smoker sentenced to 15 years of hard labor as the punishment doesn't fit the crime to my soft western mentality. More of a human rights or cruel and unusual punishment issue to me.

Absolutely true.  In the western military experience - with very few isolated exceptions - the last time we were anywhere near something like this was the Balkans, and there are damned few of us left who recall that one.  And there we were largely on the sidelines but combat did reach these levels of exchange but nowhere near as pervasive.
To really get back to this level of conventional intensity would have to be Korea, I don’t think even Vietnam this level of parity in combat.  This is why all the GOs and definitely the YouTube SOF-bros have very little real world experience to draw upon. Add to this warfare is changing under our feet as this thing unfolds.  Every war is the same, but every war is very different.

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 definitely see AirPower facing a similar situation where this war has some lessons learned that need to be paid some serious attention. It looks like the helicopter is in about the same position as the vehicle when it comes to survivability near the FEBA. The longer range more lethal manpads pretty much spell the end of the tree top level CAS. The conventional air war will have to move up to a minimum ceiling around 20,000+feet for the planes to mitigate risk. 
It seems to be a common thread across almost all platforms that the lethal ranges are dramatically increasing. The new SIG rifle with Vortex optics is supposed to allow the regular foot soldier to reliably engage targets at 800m. Javelin type ATGMs that fire and forget on targets out to 4km. Manpads with 20,000 ft ceilings. Indirect fires at 80+km. If both sides have these sorts of ranges with good ISR the FEBA is now 100+km wide? It is hard to wrap my mind around that big of a battlespace.
I think that AirPower probably has an advantage when referring to packaging lethal energy, if you have an air force. The ground based systems have definitely acted like a poor man's air force and do have advantages. A country probably needs to make a choice between fielding a large and capable air force or don't bother and focus on air space denial and ground based long range PGM fires. 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. If you can solve for that and gain air superiority your air based platforms have the advantage of being based out of indirect fire range and can haul a lot of packaged lethal energy PGMs. 
Probably the most economical route for future is light and land based. How the problem is approached and solved will probably depend a lot on the budget the solvers have to work with.

That is the big question.  If the UA was fully upgunned they could theoretically corrode the Russians much faster.  To the point everything would look like Kharkiv.  However, in a more symmetrical conflict both sides will likely disperse and deny.  Offence will become “being seen” and engaged by PGM at very long ranges - someone coined the phrase “manoeuvre by fire”.  As both sides use long range fires to corrode their opponent faster/better they will also do everything to slow/prevent their own corrosion.   The end result will likely be a protracted corrosion fight until someone’s ISR bubble collapses, logistics fail and/or they run out of deep strike systems…then things will move fast.  Maybe?
This condition will continue until some form of multi-spectral stealth is developed. Nanotechnology is another avenue I would keep eye on.
As to AirPower, I am really not sure where that is going to go.  Right now the UA is delivering equivalent AirPower effects without the need for airplanes.  If they had ATACMS or the new even longer range missiles en masse they would extend that ersatz AirPower to strategic depths.  I honestly think AirPower will become predominantly unmanned - manned crews will likely fall back to airborne C2  - but I also do not know how much air breathing flying platforms will be employed.  No place to hide in the sky at some point.  I do not think AirPower is going away, I am just not sure how it will be packaged and distributed.
What is really interesting is that this really is about packaging lethal energy, or perhaps energy density is a better term.  
 

Well, on the one hand, they are:
* available
* fairly easy to learn/train
* fairly simple to integrate into a fire control system, because there is a manual interface between CP and gun
* M1 105mm is plentiful and cheap
* 105mm provides a nice bridge over the last 100m of an assault for fireplanning
* the M101 is a very robust gun.
* the L5 is very easy to move (including /inside/ an M113 Gavin). Both guns will be fairly easy to tow anywhere, and for the L5 the tractor can be as small as a landrover. The L5 could, for example, be readily pushed forward into cross-river bridgeheads or over to the Kinburn peninsular.
On the other hand:
* These guns are OLD - the M101 was bought into service at the same time as the 25-pr. Mere age isn't strictly a problem, but barrel life is likely to be limited, spare parts hard to come by, and the L5s are likely to be very 'sloppy' and dubiously accurate and precise due to wear in all the various and many joints. It was optimised for mobility at the expense of durability, meaning sustained heavy fire is really not its thing. Bits falling off in the middle of a fire mission is not off the table.
* Bringing these guns into and out of action is a slow process. They probably do not have LINAPS or the like, and will therefore rely on olde-schule manual survey with a theodolite to establish location and orientation.
* their range isn't much further than a well thrown stone, opening these batterys up to CB. Their slowness into and out of action exacerbates this.
Any guns is better than no guns, but I'd be mildly surprised if any of these are still in action 6 months from now.

Chernozem in Bakhmut area some other from chermozem in, for example, central Ukriane. By texture it belongs to light-clay type of chornozem soils, so more heavy and more sticky if wet, than in central Ukriane. Usually chermnozem is easy to dig in, but on Donbas, especially in it south-eastern part under chernozem soil is more thin and under it lays very hard ground of Ukrainian Crystal Shield. So you can't dig in from surface with a shovel more than to waist-deep or even in some places to knee-deep without a hack, special sapper HE charges, trench-digging machine or excavator.
During Debaltsevo battle UKR troops were deployed in mostly poor fortified positions, which they can dig with shovels and battalion PZM vehicles (if they were available). Sector C Command didn't care about establishing of heavy fortified positions - on whole salient there was a single engineer excavator! 

This is pretty accurate; however, I would place logistics as the first concern . Individual training, equipment and discipline are very important in cold weather - I once had a solider get trench foot in 3 days because he slept with his boots on, the medics were flabbergasted.  I reamed out this Sgt because making sure troops did it right was his job.
Logistics are the critical path because the best trained and equipped troops are still going to time expire much faster in these conditions compared to summer.  People basically become like batteries, you need to continuously switch them out.  Continuous troop/unit rotations - slower on defence, faster on offence - are required in order to rest and refit more often.  This is a significant logistical (“sustainment” is the formal term) challenge in the area of force management.  Not just physically rotating troops but getting them back to warm/dry, replacing clothing and equipment, and medical.  Given the ranges and ISR dynamic - for the RA this is very bad news as troops will need to be rotated well back, like out of HIMARs range.  The UA will need to worry about artillery ranges.
The next big challenge is C2/operational integrity.  Continuously rotating units means that you are continuously re-integrating them in and out of operations - this is really why operations tend to slow down.  So a unit is pulled out to warm up/refit for a few days and then will likely be put in somewhere else on the line and have to be reintroduced to that area.  It takes time for troops to get to know what is going on, getting to know who they are facing, pattern of life etc.  
Or you could leave units in place but then they are only ever at 50% strength because half the unit is back warming up - you then need to double unit densities to sustain force levels.  This makes unit reintegration much easier but really takes away formation flexibility and agility because you only have half your force effective at a given time.  You could try 1/3 rotations, but those come at an attrition cost as the 2/3rd on the line stay in place longer.
So the real friction points in cold weather are logistics, C2 and capacity.  In reality one can think of the battlefield as a set of negative environmental pressures on a human-based organization trying to get something done.  Cold weather is a major multiplier of those pressures.  Comparing the two sides and I also suspect the UA has advantage, they have demonstrated much better logistics and C2; however, they are likely hurting in capacity.  RA has capacity (technically) but it’s C2 and logistics have been shown as very poor.  Once the RA capacity starts to fail, their whole system collapses - we have seen it three times now.
The question really is - how much can the UA influence and exploit the RA system failures while under a negative environmental pressure as well?

Donbas ground in many places very tough to dig in. Probably because of this it slower absorbs the water and continous rains cause such "basins" in trenches. Also in Bakhmut area UKR positions are in more lower land than Russians

Left - WWI photos, right - Bakhmut, present days

 

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, 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.
 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3750324/
This is an article about cold related injuries on the British side in the Falklands campaign. I worked in the ski business for over decade, and my standing joke is that I froze to death for a living, so I have paid a fair bit of attention to this issue for a long time. To complement the the above study on the British side in the Falklands, I also went to truly fascinating talk once by the U.S. Amies senior cold weather researcher. Quite a lot of his EXTREMELY unpleasant slideshow was from soldiers on the Argentinian side. They did not have the SOP, leadership, and gear to prevent rampant trench foot among other unpleasantness. I am assuming that both the Ukrainian winter environment, and the mobiks situation is at least as bad. Now if I was on the Ukrainian General Staff I would spend a fair bit of resources and energy checking that assumption, but in the absence of the ability to understand Russian radio intercepts without translation software, and deploy recon teams, I think it a pretty good assumption. It obviously needs to be checked against more data as it becomes available.
 
I looked for some actual data on the Argentinian side, and I couldn't find any with a few minutes googling.

So sorry for you & your fellow citizens.  Ongoing war crime.  Makes my blood boil and I'm not even there.  I hope Putin pays for this with his life, and soon.

In Irpen, the situation is easier. Yesterday there was no electricity for about 5 hours, after which there was electricity all night (I worked all night). Today the electricity was only two hours, and now after 21.00 again appeared. Fortunately, I have autonomous heating and I am independent from city boiler houses.