The_Capt

So I finally took MFSF up and over this area: The punchline is that there is not a lot of good news for the Russians along this axis, if their goal is Slovyansk. I found three rough options for something BTG size to try and break through that Severski-Donetsk River line and none are optimal but some are definitely better than other. Axis #1 - Swing north and come across as Seredenje as there is a gap between the Oskil River and that soggy mess to the south. Possible crossing points right at Seredenji: It ain't pretty but it is the best of the bunch. Problem here is that once you get to a town called Oleksandrivka : Welcome to the Black Forest, which one would need to bust through to get to a northern approach to Slovyansk. Big problem here is then you are on the Izyum axis on advance = traffic jam. So then we take Axis 2 - The Russian Most Probable: And further up: This would be the land of those three bridges: So Axis #2 is a hellish landscape from a manoeuvre point of view. This would be on the back side of Lyman and it is like this for along way north and south. Worse, it is dominated by high ground pretty to the West and South: Axis 2 will take the least imagination and is basically a frontal - so you know the Russians will pick it. This is a very complex engineering problem and a major choke point where you are going to get hammered the entire way. I suspect that the Russians already took a lot of losses back at the Zarichne/Torske choke point: Here looking east back towards Kreminna. And then there is Axis 3: Still pretty messy looking that way but if you swing a bit further south and east, thing open up a fair bunch: That is looking south. Problem with Axis 3 is that one still has to traverse that wooded soggy bit and I could not find any major bridges. The big advantage of Axis 3 is that it opens way op around the south end of Slovanyanks and you could set up a cut-off and break out further South. The Russian may try a combo of these but the long pole in the tent will be engineering support - shame they lost all that equipment in the opening of this thing. None of these are easy goes, my money is on a Axis 2 & 3 combo as 1 is easier but it really does not lead to anything. Either way, a lot of CM battlefields here, heck there is an entire campaign in this.

Once you have take this beauty on the water, you can only see a shimmering lady gliding across the waters. Only a “she” could hold me that close and get me home safe every time. But hey, you be you, love is all good.

I recall we did the math about 50 or so back and it did not add up. I can't see it have gotten much better. That and Russia is just taking too long, we have HIMARs sighted in theatre FFS. I do not know why the RA did not do a three week recon phase while waiting for the remnants of the Northern front to come round the clock 12-to-4 but whatever. This is a ponderously slow advance, eating up combat power while new capabilities swing into theatre. At this rate Russia will have to shift its strategic end-state (again) to "liberation of the suburbs of Slovyansk", declare victory and install a puppet city alderman and head librarian, and withdraw back to Russia for the victory parade.

Sounds like committing the reserve, if they had 22 BTGs up there, this would be last 4. Or they have already chewed through this and this is coming from higher.

Doesn't really matter, they both fire the same family of munitions. HIMARs carry less ammo but are faster and wheeled, the older M270 us tracked and armored up and carries more ammo. HIMARs has the much newer FCS but apparently the M270 was also retro-fitted. If the US gave them the MGM-140 with it the Russians are truly screwed. These systems are ICM monsters. Basically the UA can hit RA arty well out of c-battery fire range = things just got a LOT worse for the RA, if this is authentic.

M113s are definitely not IFVs; however, IFVs seem right next to tanks and the "blowing up" list. M113s can provide better protected battlefield mobility to support this hybrid-Light thing going on though. More of a modern mounted light infantry approach, in getting these small fast moving ATGM/UAV teams around with protection and better cargo capacity. You are correct that at some point in moving to the offence that the UA is going to need heavy metal with guns though and that will be IFVs. But hey, we started this thing with helmets and vest, thru ATGM/MANPAD, some APCs, and now to arty (HIMARs?!). At this rate Ukraine probably needs to start thinking about where to put the carrier group by end-May.

New Russian War Strategy:

I need to do a MSFS flyover around Lyman, terrain wise that look like and attackers nightmare. I honestly expect the Russian advances to bog down at Slovyanks. They might try a bypass from the northern axis but my money is on the Great Russian Donbas offensive grinding to halt on the outskirts of that town.

Ok, everyone note, this is where Tha Capt and Steve disagree, was bound to happen. First off, show respect for the venerable "lunch-box war" as it has seen more action that just about any other carrier (I know, the BTR, blah blah). She still has legs and can still get some jobs done. I would not take her directly into battle as all those chain guns will cut her up but lets not forget the more elegant features of this grand dame: - Simple, simple, simple. You can literally teach a junior officer to drive one in an afternoon, from experience. - Relatively easy maintenance. Not as easy as wheeled but very simple analog systems onboard that can be done by driver and crew. - Modular. You can literally stick anything on this thing, so it can fulfill a lot of different roles. - Mobile. People would not believe where this thing can go but this little beetle has great battlefield mobility. - Elegance. You can't stop staring at those elegant lines. She is built like a German milk maid...seriously I need a minute. So poo-poo all you want Steve, the M113 is one of the finest vehicles to ever grace the battlefield - to know her is to love her.

One thing this thread has taught me is that we need both, macro and micro analysis and assessment. Keeping a macro-only view misses important details "at the CM level" that when spread across the battlespace have macro effects (e.g. effect of UA tactical actions on friction). Keeping a micro-only view leads to what we used to call "scope eye" and/or over-magnification of CM level phenomenon that do not scale up well and can also lead to erroneous conclusions. Example, I am seeing a lot of "Russians are Advancing with new momentum!!" all over mainstream media. This phase of the war seems more intense, likely because it is largely "happening" on a smaller scale and we are seeing it happen more closely. I have no doubt there is some very intense combat occurring, maybe even the most intense of the war but that does not immediately lead to the macro implications floating around the info-sphere. This war started on 24 Feb and by 9 Mar, so about 14 days in and the Russian invasion was roughly looking like this: This one is from Al Jazeera, but there a lot out there. If you look at the long axis of advances: Kyiv - approx 100kms Sumy - approx 250km Kherson - approx 200km And a lot of heavy fighting across the entire country. We knew from a micro-level view that something was going on because we had very wide sample data streaming in from all over the place. From this we were able to make some pretty accurate deductions and conclusions about this war, well ahead of mainstream. So we are about 12 days into the current Great Russian Offensive and it looks about like this: Plus some back and forth north of Kherson and stuff spontaneously blowing up in Russia. So those "new momentum" advances, that look very intense at a CM scale, are about 20-30kms...in 12 days. That is an average of about 2.5km per day (the range of a Javelin). At the current rate of advance the Russians should be able to "snap shut" that Ukrainian Falaise Gap in about 40 days. This is assuming that our analysis of the actual Russian force strengths in those axis were way off. A the current burn rate of 0.5-1 BTG per day, the Russian Donbas liberation force of 75 BTG should be hitting 10% eroded about now, and another 40 days it will be down another 20 BTGs, so over a third of its force, worse at the coal face units on those axis of advance. This is assuming that the battlefield remains linear, the UA is getting more and better equipment and has time to throw more units in, while we know Russia is acting like it is licking the bottom of the jar. Conversely Ukrainian defence could buckle but Russian logistics are still a limiting factor here, so I would not expect a massive "bagging" of Ukrainian forces as they will have time to pull back, or like they did in the North around the Sumy axis, simply fight surrounded. So here micro can be misleading and macro needs to offset - the exact opposite of where we were in early March.

An NCO’s ground view is something to take seriously in my experience. They view from trench level but you can’t find a more honest assessment if you tried. Well my friend, my assessment is that Ukraine is going to win this war on its terms unless a major strategic shift happens. Beyond relatively light forces breaking my reality (again) in this phase of the war, I am noting a real change in political tone in the west. Both US Sec State and Def are framing this war differently, as in the end-state is a severely beaten Russia, as in broken for a decade or two. In my experience political signalling like that only happens when military assessments are all showing the same thing; politicians are skittish creatures (even appointees). Based on the numbers about a Divisions worth of western artillery is on the way with a lot of ammo. These are not dumb lobbing systems either, we are talking digital integrated ones. I am sure trainers will come with them, even into Western Ukraine. The West is going to owe Ukraine more than few solids after this one, and it is definitely in our interest to keep Ukraine westward facing. My honest advice is to Holdfast, your turn will come.

Holy crap, so two months is the timeline, which means the assessment is they have the depth to do it. And they are holding off the RA with "light motorized infantry"?! Almost parity?! This should be entirely lopsided in favour of the RA if one just looks at the quantitative matchup. I mean I get this is a hard slog but how are light motorized infantry able to do the heavy lifting here? Especially if the Russian's have actually started to do EW and making areas go dark.

This "Easter Offensive" is like watching an old dog eat soup right now. Slurping and slopping, gum smacking and messy as hell but not much else. I do not think the Russian executed a recon-phase so this is "probe-as-you-go" and it is costing them dearly as the probing is being done by the same units that are supposed to be attacking. Russia has not fundamentally fixed their problem of operational pre-conditions - information superiority being a big one, nor have they demonstrated any level of sophistication in this attack that would suggest some sort of overall operational design beyond "go forward and try and take some ground". This is tactical piecemeal and largely unsynchronized. The Russian's reportedly do have indirect fire advantage and have employed mass fires in some cases but it is again unsynchronized beyond some tactical pulses. I am still waiting for some sort of shoe to drop (at this point a freakin sock would be a major surprise) but this is the slowest and most fumbling "mass operational offensive" I think the world has seen since the Austro-Hungarian Empire tried to invade Serbia in 1914. I guess the question is "is Russia just waiting for its moment, or is this it?" The longer this takes the less likely there is a bold stroke under the hood here as it is costing the better part of a BTG daily burn rate just to do this "leg-humping" exercise. Now we have deep strikes of some sort into Russia and some weird signals coming out of the Transnistria, while Russia continues symbolic lobbing of a diminishing stock of cruise missiles into Ukraine. I honestly expect Russia to announce that this entire thing was a "spoiling operation" to allow them to dig in for the defence of LNR/DNR. All the while a western arsenal of epic proportions is being pushed into Ukraine, which at this rate will be a greater military power than Russia by the end of May.

And that would be why we built this little chapel in the middle of all this, to try and navigate as true as course as we can. So far I gotta say our record is not bad...once we got past the whole Ukrainian Bio Black Sites/the CIA can hear me through my fillings, unpleasantness.

I would not be surprised in the least if the cafeteria at UA HQ looks like the bar scene from Casablanca.

Especially when the comms link is pushed thru a US satellite...hypothetically. Wiki says range is 4000kms, which means with comms link ups the thing could hit Murmansk and return. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_TB2 Doesn't matter though because the Russians have shot them all down...twice.

I am not sure that was airburst. If anyone who has been in combat can tell you, fast flying metal does some crazy sh@t and the human body is a weird bag of water. I had an outer cordon security contractor take an AK round, right dead center of mass and he had no vest. The bullet passed straight through and basically hit nothing. Apparently there is an AK-sized hole in our guts that misses ribs, lungs, arteries and organs, and this round found it. The guy was back up and on the line in a day - showing off the bandages. Couple weeks later he stepped on a landmine and got his foot, left hand and and eye blown out. War makes that kinda sense at the front end.

Pete, Looks like some sort of HE demo gun config. One theory is that they are lobbing high angle so the line charge "plomps" into a pile and then just becomes a big bomb, that does match the video. Or they are trying for a linear breach and wound up with a partial detonation, either way this is not what this kit was designed for but they have an alleged history of doing this in Syria (not fully on with the source). https://medium.com/war-is-boring/assads-new-brutal-mine-clearing-tank-spotted-on-the-front-line-893967d17710

LOL! FFS, sure, I am a Ukrainian covert operative doing black bag jobs in Russia but I am definitely going to have my swastika flag and picture of Uncle Adolf with me at all times. What part of subtlety did they not teach at Russian internal security school?

Wiki says 90m for length, which does not make much sense as tac minefields are normally min 200m in the west. Maybe they are lobbing it in, I can see a line but that might be the detonator line. Apparently they did the same thing in Syria, as some sort of demo-gun.

So that is a fail, btw. I am pretty sure that is supposed to be a line charge and it looks like it only partially detonated. That would because the thing was never designed for urban areas and a high-angle kink in the hose is going to cause a "blow off disconnect". Unless of course this all just "let's lob things that kinda go boom time".

So this is a really good question that link back to all the discussion on the "future of conventional mass" we had I-do-not-know-how-many-pages-back, but it was a lot. This conversation often gets hijacked, or starts with the "what about the tank?" Regardless something odd has been happening to mass this entire war, particularly Russian mass. Ukrainian defence has been able, thanks to C4ISR and deep strike - no small amount unmanned - appears to be able to project friction along the entire operational system of Russian mass. Which is unfortunate as the Russians appear to be able to create their own quite well; however, compounded by UA ability to hit all the way back to the SLOC nodes with this level of precision and regularity appears to have created an ersatz air-superiority situation [note: not actual Ukrainian air-superiority by the definitions that we understand but the effect is kind of the same]. So as you note correctly, Russian mass does not seem to work. Now how much is Russian poor management of their forces and how much directly due to Ukrainian defence is unknown and will likely have to wait for a post-war analysis. The other question is, "what about the UA?" Are they under the same constraints? Again, unknown.

I probably should have been more clear, my bad. All militaries have to negotiate with their political level to a greater or lesser extent. We shine it up and call it “military advice to policy” but it is really negotiating their political needs with military strategic ones. What is weird in the Russian dynamic is the risk to that “ability to negotiate”. Especially to the point that is becomes a CoG consideration. Most militaries have it built into a national legal framework but in autocracies the reality of a political amateur essentially “taking over” and making the military negotiation position null and void is somewhat unique -and even then it is not often done, see Stalin. In this case the Russian military is being forced to fight-for-success or that bargaining position may simply be take away. And if Putin as CinC means that, then it has already happened.

So by my math the Russians are quickly coming up on about half of what the Iraqis lost in Gulf War ‘91 and their force was much larger than the Russian one at about 650k. The online experts can talk about new recruits and parks of T62s all day, no modern military can sustain these losses for long. At some point the entire system just buckles under its own weight.

This is what they have been doing in the defence but I think you are right, they are going to hit the operational length along several points, then likely pick one where they figure they can get the biggest bang. Off the top of my head, cutting that strategic corridor between Crimea and Donbas looks like a promising gain. Also, for the bolder operational types, a river crossing East of Kherson and a sweep around the back of the city would also be bold but risky as hell as you could wound up cut off. The real question is how to crumble the whole Russian position in a sector. It looks like they tried near Kharkiv but it looks like it faltered. Or maybe they don’t do bold and simply give the RA a death by a thousand cuts everywhere.