cyrano01

Bourgeoises )

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/some-russian-commanders-knew-sexual-violence-or-encouraged-it-says-lawyer-2022-11-23/
I don't think we have ever wrapped our heads around how completely different the Russian military is from ANYTHING in the West. It really is run more like the Golden Horde than any recognizably modern institution. Actually, at the peak of its power I suspect the Golden Horde was better run. The Russian military is late stage Golden Horde, right before gunpowder resulted in its defeat by Moscow.
The looting, the rape, and the unending war crimes are not failures. They are the very intentional, or at the very least inevitable, result of the way the whole thing is put together. that very much includes the way it brutalizes its own personnel. Their is a vast scope for more real research on this. In purely operational terms it seems to result in an army that only has a fraction of the capability its order of battle implies to a western analyst. At the same time, since it never really had any unit cohesion, it can stagger on after losses that would shatter a NATO unit. Again it is just so different we can't wrap our heads around it. 

It should be emphasized right away that, most likely, the enemy will attack in two directions, both in the direction of Torskoye - Zarechnoye, and in the direction of Nevskoye and Makeevka ...
It is not for nothing that the enemy command attracts at least 4 BTGRs in the future offensive and accumulates an appropriate reserve to bring it into battle at the next stage of the development of its offensive.
- 59th TR, 254th and 488th MRR of the 144th Motor Rifle Division of the 20th CAA (in general - up to 2 BTGr, but incomplete)
- 33rd and 55th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 41st CAA (up to 1 "consolidated" BTG - hodgepodge, actively understaffed with "chmobiks")
- 3rd and 24th separate brigades of the Special Forces (up to 1 "consolidated" detachment in the amount of 1.5 "battalions")
- and the reserve "component" - the advanced "Reduced" BTGr 76th infantry division, which already moved from the Kherson direction to Svatovsky during November 19-20 ...
In all likelihood, this strike force will be reinforced by at least 1 BTGr from the 106th Airborne Division, which, according to certain information, has already begun to advance from the Luhansk region to the north.
It is obvious that the command of the enemy troops is determined to “radically” solve the problematic issue for itself in the northern part of the Lugansk region by organizing and conducting a fairly large-scale offensive of its troops in the general direction of Liman and Borovaya ... and, if circumstances are successful, “return” to the river. Oskol.
For at least the entire previous week, it was quite actively pulling up quite a lot of “iron” to this direction, in particular, only on November 19-21 it moved the following forces and means to this area:
-from the Lugansk-Schastie region to the north towards Novoaydar, Severodonetsk proceeded - more than 90 units. weapons and military equipment (including at least 16 tanks);
-through Belokurakino towards Svatovo - more than 40 units. weapons and military equipment (12 armored personnel carriers, 8 tanks, 5 Tigr armored combat vehicles, 17 military vehicles, including trucks and special ones);
-through Starobelsk in the direction of Krasnorechenskoye - 15 units. military equipment (five infantry fighting vehicles, tanks each);
-two “fresh” tank companies (19 tanks) passed through Upper Pokrovka in the direction of Novaya Astrakhan, probably from the 59th TR of the 144th Motor Rifle Division of the 20th CAA of the Western Military District.
Also, it is worth taking into account that in the same directions the enemy concentrated at least 5-6 artillery divisions from the 288th ABR, 99th and 147th Guards. self-propelled artillery regiments (from each division).
 
Agree, a fairly significant replenishment of the advanced units of the 18th and 144th motorized rifle divisions, actively operating in the Svatovo region and north of Kreminnaya, with the main types of weapons and military equipment, with the simultaneous transfer of units of at least 2 airborne divisions to the same area, clearly cannot random.
Most likely, in the coming days or in a few days the enemy will clearly try to “turn around” the situation in the Svatovsky direction and in the Kremennaya area by means of a massive offensive.
 

This is unsurprising - existing industry trying to re-sell old technology as a solution to a new reality.  Might stop-gap the issue but likely will cost billions for something that will end up doing little. 
Unmanned systems technology's drive to miniaturize, operate with lower ISR profiles and shift to multi-domain (surface, sub-surface and aerospace) capability is moving too fast for old-gun tech to keep up.  Further, none of this solves for what we have seen repeatedly in this war: omni-C4ISR.  UAS can 1) be layer up from the ground to space, and 2) stand back at range with a decent camera and see all those vehicles in hi-res while they blast away at the sky, and 3) feed it back through an integrated C4ISR network so that PGM indirect fires can position and hammer them in seconds.  That is the issue.  The idea that we can somehow "gun-cleanse" the sky so we can get back to older forms of warfare is a fools errand that the western military industrial complex will waste mountains of taxpayers money upon.
True counter-UAS is not c-UAS at all, it is counter-C4ISR which needs to be an integrated system that is capable of eroding on opponents ability to see, communicate, move and shoot from the kinetic tip all the way back to the human decision making brain-in-the-loop (for now). 

The Old Bailey
Judge - Who's Diana Ross?
QC - Miss Ross is a rhythm and blues chanteuse from the United States M'lud.
Judge - The United States? 
QC - Our former colonies in the Americas M'lud.
Judge - Oh, those ungrateful bounders.

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.
 

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.
 

Yes, good points throughout. Including:
 
“Discussions about the desirability of Ukraine negotiating from a position of strength, while its forces are winning, are based on a mistaken premise.  Ukraine has liberated nearly half the land Russia has seized since renewing its invasion in February 2022—meaning that Russia still has more than half the territory it illegally occupies.  Ukraine has momentum in this conflict, but not yet the upper hand.  Its negotiating position is stronger than it was when Russian forces were advancing on additional critical cities and regions, but not yet strong enough to have created good conditions from which to negotiate.”
AND
“Freezing the conflict where it is now invites renewed Russian invasion sooner and badly undermines Ukraine’s ability to prevail in either a renewed hot war or in the new cold war. 
Allowing Russia to keep some or all the areas it currently holds also condemns millions of Ukrainians to the ongoing Kremlin efforts to Russify them; to identify, torture, and kill people who still give their allegiance to Kyiv; to abduct Ukrainian children and adopt them forcibly into Russian families; and to continue the ethnic cleansing campaign Putin is pursuing to eliminate the Ukrainian national identity everywhere he can.“

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

I agree with this.  Look, we are talking about thousands of pounds of HE being flung around that theatre on nearly an hourly basis.  Although we talk about precision and its effects on the modern battlespace a lot here, the reality is that warfare is still a human activity and as such will be prone to human error in either the manufacture or employment of weapon systems.  
It is tragic that two innocent people in Poland got killed in this strike but people do not need to do a Zapruder Film level of analysis here - a weapon system went way off target (experts are leaning toward a UA GBAD system) and landed where it was not supposed to.  This validates The_Capt's Rule of War #18 - in war things get broke - if you don't want things to get war-broke, don't go to war.  How many incidents of US/western "whoopsies" with long range fires are out there from Afghan weddings to the freakin Chinese embassy on Belgrade?
These are not an international conspiracy or complex disinformation operation - a freakin missile went off course and landed on a farm.  Again, this really sucks for the victims and their families, but this is not a strategic turning point etc.  What this does do is highlight just how dangerous this stupid war is, and how easy it would be for mistakes to lead to uncontrolled escalation. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is a really good way to throw or break a track.  In fact they might have but the video cuts off pretty quick after the hit.

Hollywood mythology, which has not done the profession of arms many favours in my opinion.  Espionage does not equal immediate death sentence, at least not in the west since the late 40s - in fact they would be smarter to try and turn any captures so they can penetrate sabotage networks.
They are normally assigned the label of “unlawful or unprivileged” combatant but that needs to be established by a process as well.  And then as unlawful combatants they do not fall under the Geneva Conventions Article 3 but do for Article 4, which entitles them to a fair criminal trial.  They should be prosecutable under Ukrainian law, especially is a war measures act is in place. However, cutting them deals and sending them home is more likely to get more saboteurs to surrender than summary executions.
If we shot everyone dressed in civies trying to kill us in Afghanistan there would have bloody executions on live stream nearly daily…which would have went over fantastically I am sure.  No, Ukraine will likely arrest and prosecute the really bad ones and use the rest for PoW exchanges.
For those interested wiki is not a bad place to start and I know the Geneva Conventions are online in multiple places as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_combatant
 
 

Well guys, at last I got this!  Symbolically in the day of Kherson liberation ) 
Thank you @Kinophile for this initiative and enough "family diplomacy" in resolving of sudden obstacle on "last mile" 😀
Thank you @Battlefront.com - Steve, your "bribe" ) will be worked out ))))
Thank you all, who donated anonymously
Thank you, all other, who just have been reading and support our country - first two months were some nervous and psychologically hard, so this my 24/7 "marathone" here was giving me some emotional relief. 
 

So about 1.5:1 on terrain their opponent had been holding for nearly half a year before the major offensive.  No doubt they achieved much higher ratios locally, but that is still pretty impressive.  Very interested to see what the casualty ratios per side were, and the ammo expenditures. 

{Apologizing for a very long post up front - proceed at your own risk}
Ok now we are getting somewhere.  There is ample evidence that in 2014 the RA surprised the world in that it did not actually suck, there is your citation above and then from the references I posted:
"The Ukraine conflict has been described as “World War I with technology.”11 One aspect that stands out in the Ukraine conflict is the Russian employment of indirect fires. Combining separatist and regular BTGs, Russia has effectively degraded Ukrainian military forces with long range artillery and rocket fire. Russia’s preferred concept of operations has been to keep its fires units at a safe distance, while relying on drones, counter-battery radars, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to target over the horizon.12 The observed combination of increased range and precision tracks with a general trend noted worldwide, particularly with multiple rocket launchers. As a result, Russia has on numerous occasions successfully blunted Ukrainian operations while avoiding significant casualties. Ukraine, on the other hand, is estimated to have suffered 80% of its casualties from artillery fire.13 The increased lethality has required fewer rounds, yet Russia has also demonstrated that it retains the ability to mass large volumes of fires when necessary."
"A defining feature of Russian fires has been their speed. Ukrainian units report that once a
Russian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is spotted they may receive artillery strikes within
minutes."
https://nsiteam.com/social/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NS-D-10367-Learning-Lessons-from-Ukraine-Conflict-Final.pdf

 

These by Karber - there is no grey area here and plenty more which we could fill pages with.  Yes, the Russian proxy forces did suck but these were not Russian "hybrids" by any stretch, it was not until summer '14 thru winter '15 that RA conventional forces got fully in the game, and even then highly constrained because - denial.  Once those conventional forces got into the game they appeared to largely dominate the battlespace and a series of major reversals on the UA ensued.  
This surprised the hell out of everyone - I was in FD at the time - because exactly as you note "Russia has been sucking" at conventional war since the end of the Cold War, from Chechnya thru Georgia.  Suddenly this yokel military was doing things that we could not do, particularly with integration of tactical fires.  But...and it is a big "but" (tee hee) even Karber saw some holes that point to the fact that all was not sunshine and roses on the RA side:

Ah ha!  To my old eye this speaks to 1) lack of PGM integration and 2) a rigid system that can deliver very fast but lacks agility to switch on the fly.  So what?  Well in the intervening 8 years the UA adapted to highly dispersed and more mobile warfare.  There is a lot more out there on how in 2014 the Russian's did not suck tactically and even hints they got their act together operationally - but nowhere near enough for 2022.  Finally the results also speak for themselves as the outcome of the war was clearly a Russian win - even with only gaining half of the Donbas, the Russian failure was translating a tactical win to a strategic one.  In fact it appears that Putin simply "post-truthed" the entire thing and called it a strategic win, when it was not.   We could fill a lot more forum space on this but in the end Ukraine was not cowed and subserviently accepting Russian dominance, they pivoted heavily to the west - we started our training missions there then - and conducted major military reforms exactly because they had suffered battlefield defeats.  It is on Putin and Russia for 1) giving Ukraine the breathing room and 2) convincing themselves of their own superiority.  Both factors led directly to the debacle of this war.  In fact Putin likely set in motion the very reasons for this war - a westward facing Ukraine looking seriously at NATO.
So rather than playing "Russia Sucks" and "No It Doesn't - UA rulez" because it is frankly going to get us nowhere lets have a conversation on what the real issue is in the early assessment of this war and why it went largely wrong.  I offer it had nothing to do with "Russia Sucks" or "Russia Rulz" and everything to do with two key factors in the analysis - context and scaling, the pitfalls of effective military assessment. (that is right folks, the deep truths are very often the least sexy).
So the primary issue with pre-war assessments - and I am talking for both the west and Russia - as far as I can can tell is that they took the tactical performance of the RA in 2014 1) out of context, 2) failed to properly understand the challenges of scaling and 3) applied very poor alignment of that scaling.
So what is The_Capt talking about?
Well context is the first daemon people did not slay.  Karber glanced off it and many cautioned against directly translating the phenomenon of 2014 over to this war but it looks like everyone did it to some extent anyway. 
In other work we studied global pandemics for various reasons, the fact we were in one being the primary, and we found that pandemics are not unlike wars when looking at macro and micro social constructs.  It causes similar tensions, vertical and horizontal, and reaches deeply into human psyche.  But that is not my point here, the major conclusion was that pandemics are like wars in that each has commonality between events but also is each unique in its context.  There will only ever be one COVID-19 pandemic.  In ten years COVID could take a twist to the left and do its gig, but the context will be very different.  Primarily, it would occur in a post-COVID 19 world.  The trick in pandemics and wars is being able to identify what is a trend and what is an isolated phenomenon, and how we do this is through careful analysis of context.  
So the 2014 war was very small by the standards of this one.  Russian involvement at the strategic level had major issues - one of which I just explained up there.  Russia demonstrated acumen in strategic subversive warfare - and frankly I have read and heard plenty that we probably over estimated this as well - however, they had no strategic follow through and displayed a lot of poor assumptions and biases both going into and out of 2014.  It was no strategic masterpiece and we should have expected a strategic mess in this war as this was a visible trend from way back to Chechnya.  Further it was made unfixable largely due to political interference.
Next, there were signals that at the operational level the RA was still operating under an old ruleset.  My take away from Steve's posted citations was likely problems with the RA logistical system and the lack of operational enablers.  The Russian issues with operational level of warfare were not really that evident but there were plenty of indications that all was not perfect either.
Tactically, we have already discussed at length but here is where context left the building.  Ok, so 4000 RA conventional troops summer '14, which is what? about 3 BTGs? - managed to score some pretty impressive points against a military that was clearly not prepared for what they brought.  But this does not immediately translate to the entire RA, nor does it mean the RA could do this at a different scale.  Assessing tactical success or failure without context is nearly useless - we learned that in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the hard way.  Further onto the real punchline - tactical success or failure without full understanding of scaling is not useless, it is dangerous as hell.
So scaling can go up or down, and the major failure in understanding this war from a lot of the experts was the assumptions on scaling the RA in both directions.  First there was taking the tactical performance in 2014 and upscaling it.  It was a huge leap, and frankly pretty amateur for the pay grades of some of these experts, to take the observed RA tactical "wows" and upscale them through the operational level to the strategic. The level of complexity and investment to make those "wows" happen on a larger scope and scale, let alone synchronize them is a challenge for the US military who is spending the most on military capability in the history of our species (ok, and before the Prussian, Mongol and Spartan lovers jump in...per capita exceptions accepted...gawd, I hate all you so much).  It was an enormous leap of logic to think that Russia would walk out of phonebooth as a super-military able to do something the US and western allies would think twice about - the upscaling challenges were (and are) frankly humbling.
Now because chaos rules in this universe, it is a bit less of a leap to say badness upscales, I will give you that; however, it is also a risky venture.  Less so for outcomes but it masks a whole lot of the macro-issues, which frankly if Russia ever did solve for, we should be concerned because by definition it will mean they understand their weakness and can learn from them.
So at the beginning of this war, we had a lot of experts who had spent 8 years upscaling 2014 and then failed to down-scale when the war actually happened...seriously?!  A whole lot of wargames and operational research showed the RA in Kyiv in less than a week.  Wargames in the Baltics showed the same Russian blitzkriegs.  So, ok, lets forget that Russian superiority at the strategic and operational level was in doubt even from 2014, failure to downscale and actually test the Russian "wows" against what they were going to be facing at the tactical level (and we had a very good idea what the UA was capable of at the tactical level - we had been training with them for years).  In the business we call this macro-masking, which is where macro calculus fails to take into account micro-phenomenon across a broad range of samples. 
For example, if all the experts had loaded pre-war scenarios into CMBS they would have seen that battlefield friction had gone up significantly.  So if your dice rolls at the operational level say "the RA will advance in three days", well test out that advance across a range of tactical vignettes and lo and behold it did not go so well because it turns out that global ISR advantage, plus smart-ATGMs, plus PGM against what the RA could bring to the party pointed squarely to rethinking those stupid operational dice tables. 
So what?  Well over here in CM land we were looking for other things than those at the macro-table.  The (very expensive) experts with lot of letters behind their names were watching the big red lines on the country map because that is how they played their games.  We were looking at a lot of abandoned Russian equipment - and I mean a lot of very valuable equipment.  We were seeing a steady stream of hi res UAS video coming out of Ukraine on a daily basis when we should not be seeing anything.  We saw RA combined arms fall apart, right along with their logistics as demonstrated by F ech vehicles out of gas and burning re-fuelers.  It did not take a major leap at this altitude to know there was really loud dangerous sounds coming out of the RA engine room, while mainstream was waiting for Kyiv to fall.  However, we also understood upscaling as well.  The effect of the tactical mess spread along most operational axis was consistent - as was the complete lack of operational integration.  Targeting, air support, logistics and the list goes on - the RA was fighting 5-6 separate 2014s, not a coherent and integrated joint operation designed to collapse Ukrainian option spaces.  
So, so what?  Well sitting around and patting ourselves on the back is about as helpful as circle-jerking does for procreation. I think we have established we were, and still are to some extent ahead of the curve - no point dancing a jig on that one.  What we need to do is fully understand what is happening on the ground on this war, what is a trend and what is isolated context.  I am not really interested in what I think I know, I am interested in what I know I do not know.  For example, the old Capt has gone on about mass...at length.  Well if the utility of military mass has shifted, even slightly, the repercussions are profound - one need only study WW1 and WW2 to see why.  Do the principles of war even still apply?  Is conventional manoeuvre warfare still a thing? Is the tank dead? What the hell just happened?  
The point of a highly distributed collective "brain" as we have developed here on this little forum is to try and understand the events better - to inform and create cognitive advantage.  So this is not about sitting around and feeling good watching RA soldier have a bad last day, nor self-validation or promoting/reinforcing echo-chamber; it is about collective learning about war through what is happening in this one...and what better place to do that than a bunch of computer wargamers with far too much time on their hands? 
  
 
 

My guess? No-one wants to have to order the pull out only to find out afterwards he is the one this defeat is being pinned on. So we get this song and dance where everyone is shown to be on the same page.