cyrano01

Hopefully they won't try and ship them through the Dardanelles, that ended badly the last time I seem to recall.

Not really Drug Dealers. A primary purpose was deterring 'snitches' to the British forces.  I personally, deeply vividly remember as a kid watching a news story about a boy in the north, accused by the local IRA of snitching, who had been kneecapped. He was 12. I'll always remember my Dad say "If you think kneecapping children is a legitimate tactic then you have lost all legitimacy".  Which is one reason why the IRA and its spawn remains banned to this day in the Republic- no moral legitimacy.
 The whole drug dealers crap became hollow once it was revealed that the IRA itself had ties to cocaine gangs, and with the Good Friday agreement there was a definite influx of IRA into criminality - as is always with long civil wars, the demobbed fighters had a very specific, and limiting, set of skills. Witness Colombia also.
The longer a war goes on, the more criminality seeps in and starts to corrode the political aspects.

I vaguely recall hearing a WW1 historian of the British Army commenting that the best way to become a brigadier was to be a lieutenant in 1914 and not get killed.  The Russian Army seems to be working on an accelerated promotion scheme.

Well let me start by saying we are all making a lot of assumptions here kinda the biggest hint we are in a disruptive time.  I think you and I are looking at different envisioning of the near-future battlefield and both of us are probably wrong.  However, it is also possible we are both correct, just at different points of time.   To your point above, conventional land warfare combat systems unable to defeat both the ISR and kinetic effects of long range, highly lethal smart unmanned systems is not an assumption it is a fact - one the Russians are living with every long hard day in this war. 
Right now every western (and no doubt eastern) military is having a "huh?" moment.  And they will no doubt suddenly escalate spending in defensive systems to try and re-create a level of symmetry in order to preserve the conventional systems that they have already invested trillions in for defence.  Frankly this is the wrong reason to do this as they should be investing in what will work better in defence but welcome to military procurement strategy.  
Very good point on naval power and an awkward one to be honest.  The last time we had a fleet-v-fleet action outside of a video game was during WW2.  So we really have no idea what that would look like and likely why every modern navy has tried desperately to only face 5 Somalis in a fast boat armed with RPGs as the high water mark of counter-fleet actions.  If a US carrier group were to face off against a Chinese NTG we have no idea how that would actually go down.  Would they be able to "shoot down" with multi-layered systems against hypersonic?  Smart, multi-munitions?  Or simply the weight of missiles one side could put in the air?  Theoretically we want to say "absolutely" because if you think we invest a lot into land systems, all that floating hardware is too "big to fail"; however, the real answer is really, really scary and could quickly include tactical nuclear systems. This is largely why naval power has been relegated to where it can easily establish sea control and project/support operations ashore.
So important here to understand which "surprise" I am talking about; surprise for conventional mass.  Like land based full spectrum area defence, the ability for ISR to reliably detect small dispersed infantry, all armed with said smart unmanned, does not currently exist.  Light Infantry, or in the case of Ukraine - hybrid infantry, with smart weapons are the submarines in our naval analogy.  They have the asymmetric capability to still be able to move and fight without being detected easily.  Conventional mass, down to the tactical level cannot.  Why?  Because with a highly illuminated battlefield trying to hide tons of hot steel and the system to keep it "hot" is impossible to hide...even from satellite.  This fact alone may be turning land warfare on its head at a pretty foundational level. 
And no, we did not have "perfect drone cover" in Afghanistan, not even close.  In fact our COIN experiences underline the above reality as well.  In Afghanistan it was very hard, almost impossible to surprise the TB.  They were asymmetric in their ability to hide amongst the people and we were tied to out big lumbering IED-magnets.  The only time we could effectively surprise them was when we 1) got actionable intelligence from locals and 2) used SOF or something fast and light in the dark, or a drone strike/artillery/air.  Our conventional mass was nearly useless.  So yes, ambushes did happen...they happened to us and the insurgents didn't even need drones to do it, they had unconventional anti-mass.
So I already covered why dispersed small units have an advantage but let's unpack the collective area defence argument for a second.  I am not sure what this would look like to be honest, you seem to be pointing at a sort of land borne B17 formation mutual defence cover concept.  Ok, maybe?  I mean it is not a bad idea and may turn us back to mass being able to better defend than dispersed offence can attack.  However, there are several problems with it.  First, is it possible?  I mean we are not just talking missiles, which are bad enough, but ground based systems can cover a suite from direct fires, to minefields that can get up and walk.  I am not sure how one could build a full defensive suite to counter all that, but let's for argument sake say we can but it is only effective when mass is in formation, like the good old days of the Roman testudo.  Well second, is mobility.  Staying together for collective defence will hamper mobility, already does, but it may mean greater restrictions on formation which is going to cause problems.  Third, LOCs.  You would also need that mass all the way back to along your logistical tail, which now needs to be an iron pipe.  This further restricts mobility and flexibility.  Fourth, Cost.  I am getting the sense that to trick out current APS, all one needs do is tinker with a Javelins software, whereas to do what we are talking about with respect to full collective defence is going to cost an enormous amount of money.  In the end, we might wind up with rigid, slow moving and incredibly expensive mass that in the end minor tweaks to the offensive systems could sidestep.
The current manoeuvre warfare theory states that one can move-to-exploit by outpacing/tempo an opponents ability to cover their vulnerabilities and/or exploit you own.  This assumes that we cannot see the entire battlefield when it comes to conventional mass.  The UA is absolutely making effective use of this principle right now but they are doing it by employing "anti-mass" in combination with mass.  So in the future manoeuvre warfare is still going to be a thing but how we do it will likely change.  We will need anti-mass that can attrit the snow globe to the point of collapse and then we move in with conventional mass to finish...this is pretty much what was seen in the NK War, except the Armenians did not have a snow globe to start with.  Essentially our current understanding of manoeuvre warfare will need to shift under this sort of battlefield, particularly if we adopt the wide and powerful area defence systems you are describing.  Those will need to be defeated in order to create the conditions for manoeuvre; we no longer move to exploit vulnerability, we create vulnerability to move.
Again, for conventional mass.  For unconventional/hybrid/anti-mass they are still very hard to detect even in the open.  Terrain will still matter for mass on mobility; however, less so for fires.  We will no longer really have dominating ground as a conventional land formation would have effective ranges well beyond LOS.  Urban terrain is another excellent example.  It is toxic for conventional mass, while anti-mass can thrive in that space. So this builds on the asymmetry theme.
Finally, I am not saying conventional mass is dead as its ability concentrate force will likely be decisive for years to come.  How we generate and employ that mass is looking more and more like it will undergo major revisions.  Will we see anti-mass in layers out in front of mass in some sort of very intense Recon battle?  What does snow-globe war look like?  What vote will defensive systems cast?  If tactical surprise, let alone operational, is dead for conventional mass, that alone is going to mean re-writing great swaths of land warfare doctrine, and frankly I have no idea how far that rabbit hole goes.
Hey I am glad you appear firm in your convictions.  I have been in this business for over three decades and I am frankly freakin out a bit here, which is inexcusable because the signs have been on the wall for awhile now.  I am sure we will go to immense effort to try and ignore/wish away/justify/ what we are seeing in Ukraine right now but the evidence is mounting to an uncomfortable level here.  The inconvenient truth is that the Russians are fighting our fight.  We still think in terms of Battle Groups and TFs sweeping across the field to create shock and paralysis in an opponent.  It worked in '91 and '03, all that COIN stuff was State Dept's fault.  Russian performance in 2014 just underlined that smart mass was the was to go.  NK, reinforced it, all while we missed some obvious implications. 
So here we are with a war where Russia should be crushing a much smaller - dispersed force and is failing gloriously.  We are falling back in "ya but Russians suck" (which definitely has some truth to it) but everyone in the business has to be asking themselves "ya but what if we had to fight the Ukrainians right now?  We have big fat formations with very vulnerable LOCs as well...huh?"
 

Currently, drone employment seems very largely to have been in the reconnaisance/spotting role, and the direct ground attack/bombing role, rather like the stringbags of 1914 and early '15. While the reconnaissance data and effectiveness of the ground attacks has been worlds advanced from WW1, we have yet to experience the "Fokker scourge" and advent of specialised, effective and widely-employed anti-drone drones. There are a few "suicide" types out there, but actual scout/fighters seem rare. Will this change, soon, given the lessons that the UA are teaching? What are the issues stopping the deployment of such security/intel-denial assets into the battlespace currently and going forward?

The other important point is that modelling in general (thinking in terms of scientific modelling as a whole, rather than anything military specific) is often not about "predicting the future" in the sense that most people think of it. More often, i is about seeing how outcomes change with changing assumptions and input conditions.
You might find that parameter A barely matters at all - you can change it by a factor of 10 and it makes 1% difference to the outcome. So for parameter  A, don't waste too much time trying to evaluate it precisely. While parameter B might have a large effect on the outcome for relatively small changes, which means that your prediction is only as good as your ability to measure B accurately (and tells you that you need to know all of its interactions very precisely). 
So often it isn't about predicting the future, it is about determining which the critical parameters are in your model, and what information you therefore need to be able to find out in order to make any kind of relevant prediction at all. It is about identifying the critical factors and understanding how they interact with each other.
We've all seen factors in this war that probably wasn't in many military models before, or were only just starting to be appreciated. The willingness of Russian troops to abandon important equipment. The ability of light infantry with modern ATGMs to be able to hit high value targets. The use of drones in reconnaisance, fire control and as weapon systems. Crowd-sourcing intelligence from a friendly population. Modelling can (hopefully) be used to figure out how important each of these are and how they interact with each other.

I think there's also a political component to what the MoD puts out. The goal right now is to rally countries to put as much diplomatic pressure on Russia as possible, and so they are not interested in saying "The Russian Army is pretty much beaten at this point".

I know they can achieve short flight times by launching close to the coast, but I always saw nuclear submarines as second strike weapons meant to guarantee destruction of an attacker even if that attacker conducted a first strike without warning.

Also, this time out, there are plenty of anti-Russian neutrals happy to supply arms and equipment to Ukraine whereas potential supporters of Finland had other things going on in 1939-40, global demand for weaponry being rather high at the time!

Also, this time out, there are plenty of anti-Russian neutrals happy to supply arms and equipment to Ukraine whereas potential supporters of Finland had other things going on in 1939-40, global demand for weaponry being rather high at the time!

@kraze - five medals isn't 'that many medals' however ...

And I never shot anybody ... just got shot at a bit and blown up once.

I don't know the answer to the whole question but if we go back to the Soviet era regimental artillery battalions and divisional artillery regiments.  Each battalion essentially had one truck allocated per firing system plus a couple spare.
2S1 Battalion had 6 x 2S1 and 6 x trucks (Ural-375) in each battery for a total of 18 x 2S1 and 18 x trucks.  There were another two on top of that for a total of 20 trucks (not counting small trucks like Gaz-66s, maintenance and POL trucks).
2S3 Battalion figures are the same 6 x 2S3 per battery and 6 x trucks for that same total of 18 x 2S3 and 18 x trucks plus two 'spare.'
BM21 Battalion figures are 6 x BM-21 per battery and 6 x trucks (bored yet  ) 18 x BM-21 in the battalion and (slight difference here) 36 x trucks in the battalion.  The extra 18 trucks, which is suspiciously similar to the number of launchers sit in the service battery, which the gun/howitzer battalions didn't have.
Taking a divisional artillery regiment alone then of 2 x 2S3 battalions and 1 x BM-21 battalion you are looking at 72 x trucks allocated for ammunition resupply.
For simplicity I have not counted the 36 trucks in the Regimental MT company because I don't know whether they would have been allocated to ammunition  resupply or not.
Now I have no idea how much 122mm or 152mm a Ural-375 can carry but there will be a gunner out there who can give some sort of answer.  I would hazard a minimum of two reloads and of course each 2S1 and 2S3 would have had a turret load of some description.  I think I'm on safer ground by saying that you'd get one BM-21 reload only on a Ural-375 and that seems to explain the presence of the service battery in that battalion to provide a second reload plus of course those that are already in the tube. 
Of course this is not the Soviet Army any more but the principle will be the same at the divisional level and below so one gun = 1 truck and 1 rocket launcher = two trucks for the big bangy bullety whizzbangy carrying malarkey.
 

Help me Jebus!  Does this look like a refueling point to anyone?  Could explain the clustering...damn...ouch.  I mean the Russians earned every hit they are taking but this one is just cringe worthy. 

Yes, the de-nazification of Germany could only happen because 1) Germany was utterly defeated all the way to Berlin, and 2) Germany was occupied by troops that literally could force locals out to take a look at the camps.
Neither of these things are set to happen in the current war.
I'm worried that this war might end more like WW1.. an economically devastated and empoverished nation free to brew up new "stab in the back" legends and elect even worse leaders than before.

TU-95 has a ceiling over 13000m. Starstreak gets half as high and Stinger half as high as Starstreak. It's the S-300s that the Ukrainians still have operational that will do for high altitude bombing runs.
Sure arty can do it, and more efficiently. If you can get the shells forward to the artillery, and if you have the fuel available for their SP chassis or prime movers to displace after that first volley to avoid UKR counterbattery fire. Planes have the advantage of being able to depart from untouchable bases potentially just full of stockpiles of bombs and fuel. And they aren't.
Did the Russians just mothball all their standard Bears, and lean on the cruise missile launch platform specialist airframes they converted? Or is it simply that the environment doesn't permit mass bombing raids? And why can't the Russians make the environment permit, at least outside MANPAD territory?

Unfortunately for the "dragoons are mounted infantry" argument, by that time, the British Army Dragoon regiments were all cavalry, not mounted infantry. According to wikipedia, most of the dragoon regiments had converted to hussars or lancers, and the remaining Drgoon Guard regiments were actually heavy cavalry, though earlier usage had cavalry redesignated as dragoons, since dragoons were paid less...

Get back in your cave, J2 troll!!  The Comd and "his chosen" determine the enemy CoG; the J2, while scuttling around chasing their 20 sided dice, provide advice...most of which is promptly ignored.  Remember your station!!
Seriously, my assessment of the Russian CoG is it ability to move and sustain mass at what they think the UKR Strategic CoG is, Kyiv, which is odd as I disagree with that assessment, the UKR Strategic CoG is likely support from the West, along with sustaining the will to fight, neither really depend on Kyiv remaining in UKR hands.  That "mass" includes fires but also manpower if they are dumb enough to try and take Kyiv the old fashion way. 
Regardless, that elevates operational logistics and mobility (particularly bridging - as there seem to be belts of irrigation canals NW of Kyiv) to the top of the joint targeting list to my mind (I will leave it to you "qualified targeteers" to work out on what Kafka-esque list-system it goes on).  Artillery is going to be right up there as well but I would focus on the trucks and bridges needed to keep pushing "boom-boom" to those tubes, then hit the tubes.  I too would put CPs and command infra a bit further down the list, mainly because killing the current -and I will be kind- "Russian system" might lead to better Russian C2 and they appear to be on the side of the Ukrainians right now.  Lets not create Darwinian pressure to promote more talented junior people (I am only half joking here, CPs are going to die if they are found).  I would also prioritize Russian ISR though, particularly tactical unmanned systems.
Regardless, Russians abandoning these systems for the Ukrainian tractor brigade, makes zero sense.    

Yes you brainwashed NATO imperialist fool ... 😉 I'll let that one stand for the sake of harmony but the targeting issue that you raise is certainly one that merits discussion.
Starting simplistically and I know I'm preaching to the converted so this is for the wider caucus - targeting, when done properly, should attack the centre of gravity which doctrinally is the thing from which the enemy derives strength.  It can be targeted directly or indirectly by stripping away key capabilities.  Personally I dislike the methodologies used to analyze this that are found in many Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace pamphlets and Military Decision Making Process pamphlets so my analysis is not according to the accepted templates but informed by the fact that I am a qualified targeteer.
Taking our contested 😉 AVLB as an example, it is only going to be candidate for the HPTL, JPTL if the enemy needs to cross a gap or lots of gaps to get from where they are to where they need to go.  This then set me thinking as to what the HPTL/JPTL for the Ukrainians might look like now for the battles around Kiev.  This 'operational pause' which seems to be marked by the Russians stonking the city leads me to an HPTL with artillery at the top, followed by fuel associated logistics then artillery associated logistics with HQs bringing up the rear.  Mind you I'm not dying in a ditch over it, the logs could actually be right at the top.  Going back to centres of gravity and key capabilities, it seems that the Russians are now favouring the employment of artillery in order to shape the subsequent assault by manoeuvre assets on the city by attrition.  By stripping away the guns and their ammunition you are denying that shape effect.  By attacking fuel-related logistics you limit the freedom of action of the manoeuvre assets and cause general headaches all round for the whole force and by targeting HQs you are disrupting the ability of the Russians to come up with a 'Plan B' as well as all the other coordination stuff that goes on in HQs - albeit this has been fairly lacking to date without too much outside interference ... hence why I put HQs further down the list.

Never used to be - in the Soviet era - tank laid bridges were regimental assets so I would see it as a brigade asset these days.

Excessive casualties at the tactical level, grandiose operational planning but limited actual gains, no strategic endgame... is that the ghost of Ludendorff looming over the Russian General Staff like it's 1918?

I've been thinking a bit about what the conditions would be for the sanctions to be lifted. Its an interesting conundrum really, because they've clearly bitten hard. And by the time this situation is resolved, the damage will have been done to the west. In the first case, if Russia never leave Ukraine, if it achieves its objectives and installs a puppet, if the Iron Curtain goes back up I could see the sanctions never coming off. But if Russia makes peace and withdraws, I'm not so sure. Even in a Putin/post-Putin world, I think many in Washington would say 'keep going till Russia becomes a democracy.' But weve seen with Iran that doesn't really work. You cant sanction a country into democracy. Even if the US administration was up for sanctions-till-democracy, I dont think Europe and especially Germany would go along with it. Without an immediate threat I think the neo-NATO backslapping weve seen recently will fade away. Without a war going, Sanctions will last a year, max, IMO. By then countries and businesses will have wormed the substance out of them. 
IMO there is a very real chance here that the US is going to have to accept a Putin-dominated or post-Putin dictator dominated Russia for the foreseeable future. That is, much of systemic causes for the Anglo-Russian rivalry arn't going to go away. 

No one expects the Spanish Instalanza.

Everyone said war with Russia was inevitable during the Cold War too. I spent 10 years as an Army officer during the 70s-80s. We pretty much expected that we'd never grow old.
Yet I just turned 65 and retired. War with Russia never happened, despite numerous proxy wars and some (many?) close calls.
This is in no way to minimize Ukraine's plight at the moment, but I think the inevitability and doom predictions are not a new thing. 
I'm not in any way an expert, (give me a target list and I can blow it up, but grand strategy, international relations is above my pay grade) but I believe the aid being provided coupled with the sanctions Russia is coming under will do the job, without increasing the possibility of US/NATO forces coming into direct conflict with Russian forces. That's the thing that during the Cold War, both sides went to lengths to avoid. 
Dave

Definitely this. You pay a price for strategic resilience and governments/taxpayers have not been willing to pay it.  Large scale movmenet towards gas to reduce carbon levels from coal fired power stations and a total unwillingness to invest in nuclear (France excepted), Germany is in a particualr bind due to the closure of their nuclear plants. Meanwhile in the UK we have  governments that simply hate ever having to do anything or spend money, so long term resilience or strategic thought are totally out of the question. This applies to health services, military, transport, energy, the lot.

Definitely this. You pay a price for strategic resilience and governments/taxpayers have not been willing to pay it.  Large scale movmenet towards gas to reduce carbon levels from coal fired power stations and a total unwillingness to invest in nuclear (France excepted), Germany is in a particualr bind due to the closure of their nuclear plants. Meanwhile in the UK we have  governments that simply hate ever having to do anything or spend money, so long term resilience or strategic thought are totally out of the question. This applies to health services, military, transport, energy, the lot.